I am bereft at bedtime, having had the five-volume Lampitt Papers as my bedtime treat for some weeks.
The series of novels is told in the first person by a character who loses his parents to a bomb in world war two and goes to live with his father's brother, Uncle Roy, who is a vicar, but whose real religion is the family of his very dear friend Sargie Lampitt.
The books conjure up an earlier England. They contain many perceptive insights about love, writing, infatuation, unquenchable low-level grief, the desire for success, the forms of English snobbery, Catholicism and the mystery of existence, among many other things. The volumes are packed with entertaining, vivid characters and reaching the end of the series I found it a wrench to have to leave them all.
Instead of sharing every well-turned description and enlightening aperçu I found in the series of novels, which would make an idiotically long blogpost, I will limit myself to quoting just one passage - a conversation between Sargie Lampitt and his niece about a misconceived trip Sargie made to Venice with his brother; it makes me laugh a lot:
"You should have stayed at one of the grand ones like the Gritti." Anne spoke with the authority of one who had written undergraduate essays on Titian, Tintoretto, Ruskin.
"Gritti! That's the place. God Almighty! My room overlooked this dreary sludge of water..."
"The Grand Canal", said Anne
"I hate looking at water from a bedroom" '
To sum up, if you want a roman fleuve evocative of middle-class English life and the literary world of London from the 1960s to the 1990s (with a murder mystery thrown in), you will enjoy the richly imagined world of The Lampitt Papers. My only caveat would be the pages devoted to the poetry of a character called Rice Robey, most of which I skipped.
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