Customer Reviews

The Vast Memory of Love

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This book has disappeared and it is one of the great historical fictions with terrific characters, great plot and tremendous depth. I found this book at the library and I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking for a book that has it all. It will draw you in and move you. A great writer.

A sweeping epic of 18th-century London, Bosse's "The Vast Memory of Love" travels from the decadent corruption of the titled to the crime and misery of the slums.

On first coming to London, country boy Ned Carleton is hired as footman to Lord Sandwich, a stroke of financial luck he doesn't fully appreciate until he's lost it. Cast out for insolence when he refuses to admit to a theft he didn't commit, Ned soon loses the use of his hand in an act of failed heroism. Unable to land the most menial job or even to be impressed as a sailor because of his infirmity, Ned rejects the principles of his upbringing and turns to a life of petty crime rather than starve.

Getting to this point, Bosse immerses the reader in a foul stew of the senses -- the stench of disease, vomit and unwashed bodies, the taste of poisonous gin, the itch of lice, the calculation in every passersby's opportunistic glance, the degradation and desperation of poverty.

Meanwhile Lord Sandwich continues his dual passion for blashemous pageantry and fornication. His confederate and pimp, an ex-chimney sweep, makes a small but crucial error in judgment over a briefly rebellious girl which leads to involvement with the magistrate and author Henry Fielding.

Fielding, beset with gout and the arsenic he takes to cure it, is also looking for Ned, now the famous Dog Cull who robs gentlemen with the aid of a sheep dog. And Ned nurses a deep hatred for Lord Sandwich.

Bosse skillfully weaves the narratives of aristocaratic, middle class and underclass life, bringing them together with logic and a minimum of coincidence. Ned's story, the central narrative, is riveting, Lord Sandwich's is decadent and Fielding's is lackluster. Fielding's journal, preoccupied with pain, guilt, money troubles and principle, comes as an interruption to the bump and flow of a story teeming with life.

But these sections only emphasize the narrative drive of the whole -- a story rich in historic detail and and drama but ever mindful that dignity is a luxury reserved for people of means.