A Vision of Loveliness

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The mirrored room was packed with what looked like hundreds of women straightening seams, fixing straps, re-gluing eyelashes – like the emergency ward in a dolls’ hospital. We walked unhurriedly, bundled up against an ominous nip in the air – greeting bikers and walkers both human and canine.

Our long afternoon shadows from the southern slanted sun preceded us to where the car was parked just beyond a bridge pylon splattered in muddy swallow nests. Small-minded, suburban England also forms the backdrop for Grant Gillespie's The Cuckoo Boy – although this time the setting is contemporary.But where The Cuckoo Boy is a savage indictment of hypocrisy and forced social convention, Deloume Road is a more delicate meditation on the cyclical nature of history, and the strength of communities. This she does and strikes up a friendship with the bag’s owner, Suzy, who is a part time model and who looks remarkably like Jane herself. While glamour is prevalent to the story, none of the situations in the story are very appealing by the realistic descriptions Levene gives of the underbelly of 60’s London. What follows is an entertaining and dark story of girls about town living on next to nothing in borrowed flats and trying to get as many meals paid for by other people as possible – bearing in mind that they have to eat very little to maintain their svelte figures.

In no time, she is a polished, preening 1950s Wag-equivalent (or, as some might more indelicately put it, a high-class tart).

But I guess the story isn’t really about that, it’s about Jane and how she got to that point, how she “climbed” that social ladder and used the people around her to get exactly what she wants. Evokes the period around 1960 in London very well - felt like Colin McInnes and Jake Arnott except very much a woman eyes view. But add them together and they can make the difference between rich and poor, married of single, happy ever after and a miserable broken home. Initially their lives seem unconnected – a Ukrainian butcher who struggles both with English and his eyesight, an ageing Native American artist, a pregnant Korean widow, and a mentally disabled young boy. Oh my, the vines, bushes, trees, and even prairie grasses are food for the soul in fleeting moments of golden evening gloaming.

Having very much enjoyed this author’s book ‘Ghastly Business’ I decided to try ‘A Vision of Loveliness’. Blurb - Jane James knows that she must have been born to better things than a dingy bedroom in her Aunt Doreen's house in Norbury and evenings spent eating gala pie and Heinz tinned potato salad in their 'sitting-cum-dining room'. Suzy takes Jane under her wing, and Jane becomes Janey, a near carbon-copy of her new best friend and a delighted adventurer in an easy, sleazy, sixties West-End world of part-time modelling and full-time man-trapping. Gerard Deloume, who first settled here in the late 1890s, was drawn to the "space and freedom" it offered – "a place where the Lord's voice still echoed from His Creation". In the breezy sunshine, all our senses were alive among the golden cottonwoods and willows as we meandered along the trail!

Fittingly, the quiet human drama that unfolds is intimately connected to the lush rural scenery, where trucks rumbling past sound like "a bull pawing at dirt, snorting before the gate opens". A darkly comic novel that reveals the seedy underbelly of London in the 1960s, rich with period detail, we follow a young woman, Jane ‘Janey’ James’ rise through the social ranks of her peculiar world. Picked this up for my daughter - it sounded good on the back blurb but apparently is a rip off of Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood. Jane, now Janey, has been practicing for this life, knows what she wants and is unapologetic in getting it. I like that it doesn't try and sugar coat the truth - it lets the audience reach those conclusions on their own.