Virago £17.99 (293pp) £16.29 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897

The Clothes on Their Backs, by Linda Grant

The slum landlord settles his accounts

Reviewed by Michael Arditti

Friday, 15 February 2008

Share
Close
- Digg
- del.icio.us
- Facebook
- Reddit
- Google
- Stumble Upon
- Fark
- Newsvine
Print
Email

Visiting a prostitute can produce unexpected benefits. Ervin Kovacs, a young Jewish jeweller, is set up with a "girl" by his brother Sandor, a pimp in late 1930s Budapest. So frightened is he that his fianc�e Berta will find out the truth that Ervin leaves with her for London, thereby escaping the Nazi invasion. Sandor is less fortunate, being pressed into service as a slave labourer.

It is characteristic of Linda Grant's richly imagined novel that Ervin and Berta's escape should be inadvertent. In London they rent a flat off the Edgware Road in a building peopled by eccentrics, and spend their lives seeking to be invisible. As their only child Vivien declares, "My parents had brought me up to be a mouse."

The Marylebone mansion block may be prime Anita Brookner territory, but Vivien is determined to break out. After a tragically short marriage to Alexander, a vicar's son who chooses this short dark girl to enrich his rarefied Anglo-Saxon blood, she resolves to track down her uncle Sandor, who left Hungary for England in 1956. Like his brother, from whom he remains estranged, he did so for personal rather than political reasons.

Sandor, whom Grant acknowledges to be inspired by Peter Rachman, has set himself up as a racketeering landlord and enjoyed great prosperity. By 1977, however, when Vivien meets him, he has just been released from 14 years in prison and his empire is reduced to three modest properties in Camden Town. By a none-too-subtle subterfuge, Vivien becomes her uncle's amanuensis, transcribing his memoirs and, in the process, learning the family history that her parents have concealed.

Vivien and Sandor's relationship lies at the heart of the novel. Vivien, who has been conventionally schooled, is forced to confront her own morality. "I knew that I was going to meet a monster, a true beast. The crimes spoke for themselves, but the beast was housed in the body of a man in early old age."

Like Peter Flannery, whose 1989 play Singer features a similar fictionalised portrait of Rachman, Grant explores how far Sandor's wartime experiences might explain his post-war excesses. Sandor is true to his own code, claiming for example that he showed sensitivity by ensuring that the thugs he used to terrorise his West Indian tenants were black.

Sandor asserts that his crimes were negligible compared to those of the people who sent his grandparents "up the chimney". He insists that he was unique in the colour-prejudiced 1950s and 1960s in renting flats to Caribbeans and that "The rooms I rented would have been a palace to me during the war". Just when the holes in his argument threaten to become gaping, his girlfriend Eunice, the black manageress of a West End shop, points out that the world which the immigrants had left was primitive. From her privileged racial perspective, she maintains that Sandor has done them "a service".

Grant bravely explores – and exposes – such unfashionable viewpoints. Her novel is at once a beautifully detailed character study, a poignant family history and a richly evocative portrait of the late 1970s. The book's sole significant flaw is its failure to establish its extensive clothing imagery as the overarching metaphor for which it strives. Attempting a career as a literary journalist, Vivien summons "all the cruelty of the first-time reviewer trying to make her mark". This long-term reviewer has mellowed, for it is a joy to welcome such a vibrant and thought-provoking book.

Michael Arditti's novel 'A Sea Change' is published by Maia Press