The Fly by Richard Chopping (.PDF)
File Size: 13.1 MB
The Fly by Richard Chopping
Requirements: .PDF reader, 13.1 MB
Overview: The eye of the fly falls both on low and high. It misses little of what goes on in the office which is the scene of Mr. Chopping’s scarifying first novel. Nor does the author, as might be expected from a painter who has designed the last seven jackets for the James Bond novels of lan Fleming.
Dr. Booker is head of the office, but it is the caretaker, Mrs. Macklin, malignant and formidable, who has the power to disrupt the lively but insecure personalities who make up the staff. She and her fearsome brood of children—Jennifer (11), Leslie (8), and baby Brenda—with their friend Wendy (14), whose comment on all she meets is simply “shit ‘em’. It is the children we meet first, with Jennifer waving a used condom on a twig in front of the staff as they arrive.
There are the Misses Lynch, sisters inseparable (‘they live together, work together, sleep together, even visit the ladies’ lavatory together’) ; Miss Jeacock, the far from attractive spinster whom shy Mr. Gender beholds through rose-coloured spectacles; the young O’Flattery, a dashing (comparatively) bachelor whose feelings for Miss Jeacock are cruder and more to the point than those of his rival. These three Miss Peacock and her lovers, provide which sets fire to Mrs. Macklin’s evil impulses. Scenes, comic, macabre, and sordid, abound. There is love in a lavatory, death in an office incinerator, a secret diary, a teetotaller who gets drunk, a pet tortoise grossly misfed. There is, in fact, a composite, perhaps Breughel-like, picture of humanity at its most pitiful, steered to disaster by the lust and egoism of the caretaker who pulls the strings.
And the fly, harbinger of tragedy ? “Its mission complete, it left the office in search of new lives to spy on.” And the reader? Will suffer shock and admiration in about equal proportions. And the author? Has revealed an astonishing talent unlike any other among contemporary novelists.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
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