cover image Vast Memory of Love CL

Vast Memory of Love CL

Malcolm Bosse. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), $22.95 (482pp) ISBN 978-0-395-62943-7

Although, amazingly, he has not enjoyed a bestseller since The Warlord (1984), Bosse remains one of the most intriguingly versatile and skillful storytellers around. After the sweeping futuristic vision of Mister Touch , he has retreated to 18th-century London for his latest novel. Apart from an unimaginative title, the book is a triumph of inventive, ultra-vivid reconstruction. The sights and sounds of a city that spawned both filth and fashion, both the basest criminality and the loftiest moral purpose, have surely never been more dashingly evoked, and by way of a pell-mell narrative Bosse has convincingly woven fiction out of some very actual lives. Central to that narrative are two such historical figures: the Earl of Sandwich--cynical, snobbish, petty and sexually obsessed with impoverished young women; and Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones and many other splendid novels, shown here in his role as a stern but large-hearted magistrate who helped create the London police force from his Bow Street Runners. The plot is driven by Sandwich's membership in a group of fatuous noblemen who combine blasphemy and whoring at a made-over abbey (based on the very real Hellfire Club), and his procuring of female victims through a dastardly assistant. The leading actors in it include Bet Canning, a ruined but devious maiden; Ned, an upstanding country lad (not unlike Tom Jones) who turns to a life of crime; Ned's Sandwich's, or Ned's? change `his' to `Ned's' if latter/note change. db lovely mistress, Clare; and, of course, Fielding. Bosse renders the Fielding character through a first-person pastiche of the great novelist's own style which is at once brilliantly comic and sentimentally touching. Few contemporary writers `authors writing' is redundant can produce the narrative drive of Bosse's best workbooks, not author himself, have narrative drive , and the twists and turns of his story here--always in perfect period character, yet delivered in swift, smooth modern prose--are likely to keep contemporary readers as enthralled by this book as Fielding's readers were by his novels 250 years ago. It is difficult to see how this book could fail to reach a large audience; even people who do not normally take to historical fiction will relish it. (Sept.) .