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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A wonderful novel - and not out of print!,
By Anne Latitudes (Paris, France) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Vicious Circle (Paperback)
As this was the novel that got me hooked on Amanda Craig, I must tell other amazon.com readers that it isn't out of print - it just lacks a US publisher. You can buy it through amazon.co.uk.A Vicious Circle is a wonderful, rich, wise novel that is a satire on the literary world (of London)and also the kind of big book that US writers are used to. Like Bonfire of the Vanities, it links the world of the rich with that of the poor and dispossessed. Mary is a poor young Irish waitress at the Slough Club, a venue for media and publishing types. For years, she has been keeping her boyfriend Mark, an ambitious political journalist, through her earnings, and hopes he will marry her. When the story begins, she is in a taxi with another journalist, Ivo Sponge, who has always fancied her, going to a book party for a rich half-Lebanese newspaper heiress, Amelia de Monde.(If you remember Robert Maxwell,you may guess why the novel created such a scandal in Britain it was nearly not published.) What Mary doesn't know is that Mark, a thorough slimeball and creep, has been two-timing her with Amelia, and Amelia is about to get him to marry her because she is pregnant. The heartbroken Mary attempts to kill herself, but is found in time by her friend, the gay novelist Adam. While she is in hospital, she meets Tom Viner, a doctor, and Ivo Sponge tells her that she can have her revenge on her ex if she, too, becomes a journalist - and book reviewer. The price for this is that Mary has to become a monster and betray her principles and her friend Adam. If that were the whole plot, you might think it was just about the literary world, but alongside this revenge story is the life and struggles of Grace, a single mother living in a slum with her son Billy. She seems to be cut off from the world of these people, but not only does she eventually come to clean for Amelia but she is in fact related to them. What is so great about the book is partly the story, which is as rich and complex as a novel by Charles Dickens, but also the jokes, the style and the way all the characters are so alive. I felt I knew them all, and my belief never wavered. Craig carries on some characters from book to book, so that Georgina Hunter and her husband appear as central to In a Dark Wood, and Ivo Sponge is reappearing in Love in Idleness. She is an amazing writer, and a refreshing contrast to all the historical novels coming out of the UK. I think she's far better than Zadie Smith, just hasn't had the hype. Try this! You won't be disappointed.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Superb Satire,
By
This review is from: Vicious Circle (Paperback)
A modern-day reworking of George Gissing's New Grub Street, Amanda Craig's A Vicious Circle suffers the same fate as its inspiration: Both novels are far more famous in Britain than in the United States. Since A Vicious Circle is fairly recent (1996) and satirizes a milieu unique to London, one could argue that its place is in the British canon alone. American publishers seem to have drawn this conclusion, as only Craig's more recent work has found an American publisher. This is a shame, because American readers are in a position to derive far deeper pleasure from Craig's novel than her readers in Britain. When this deft satire of the London literary world was first published, it was promoted and devoured as a roman-a-clef that pointed fingers at some extremely well-known figures. However, the British readers who snickered knowingly in the 1990s are unlikely to return to the novel (who reads The Bonfire of the Vanities today?). Americans, on the other hand, who can understand what Craig is up to but are not necessarily able to pick Robert Maxwell out of a lineup, are far more likely to enjoy the novel's less obviously timely aspects: the quiet humor; the Dickensian interconnections between social classes; the recognizable anguish of the sick and sick-at-heart.
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