Saturday, 21 September 2019

A Surfeit of Lampreys


This was one of my favourites before, and even now I’m more aware of how spoilt the ‘charming’ Lamprey family are I do still like them. The way they talk about their less attractive relations would be obnoxious if they were talking to a stranger, but within the family it doesn’t seem so bad. They are extravagant (cabs and food are somewhat lavish) and the father is clearly hopeless at earning and investments, but given that his brother’s money isn’t really his in the sense of having been earned - but family money, which he has through virtue of being the eldest son - you can see why the Lamprey’s might expect him to help out a bit. (He could, in my opinion, at the very least put his nephews and nieces through a good school and let his brother live in the family house in London, since he’s not using it himself.)

Also, and this is a point I don’t think I fully registered when I read Marsh’s books the first time, all these earlier ones are written during the Great Depression, when even qualified people struggled to get work and even previously healthy businesses went bust.

The story itself is downright strange, with gothic overtones and the outsider point of view of young Roberta Grey, whose parents have recently died and who has come over from New Zealand to ‘the old country’ and her old friends, the Lampreys, who lived in New Zealand for a spell to save money.
Part of the fun is seeing London through her eyes, all the way from the boat coming in at Tilbury, to taking the tube. The murder is horribly believable.

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