Orwell and the Wonga Question

Andy Croft's 1948 is still picking up reviews. Here's the latest, in London Grip: http://londongrip.co.uk/2012/06/poetry-review-summer-2012-croft/. The reviewer is generally positive, but comments that Andy too frequently steps back to comment on his work within the text. Other reviewers have also admired the work but suggested these authorial asides were best avoided. Indeed, that's about a summary of the reviews. I congratulate the author for the admiration, I blame the publisher for leaving in too many of the asides. But reviewer Thomas Ovans also says "I cannot help reflecting that Orwell’s precise writing style would surely never have found room for so graceless and ugly a word as “wonga” – even for the sake of a rhyme". Aha. Off to my Orwell... The only problem is that dipping into Orwell takes time as dipping in takes an afternoon. There's always this wonderful collection of Orwell quotes for the time-challenged (a phrase Orwell would also have found graceless) - http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/3706.George_Orwell. But one good quote might answer Thomas - "A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?”
Sadly, Wonga does the trick. Just don't borrow money from them.

What the papers say

February was an interesting month for Five Leaves in the press. Yes we made the crime reviews in the Hull Daily Mail (thank you Nick Quantrill) but I hope Nick and the entire Hull population won't be upset if I class the full page in the current Times Literary Supplement as being more of a winner. The page, by Roz Caveney, was about our Roland Camberton books, especially Scamp. Unfortunately not online, the review spots a lot in his books that made us want to publish them after sixty years of unavailability, pointing out that "Scamp feels more interesting than it perhaps did on publication". Alone this looks like damning with faint praise, which is not the tone of the article. She ends saying "Like Scamp, Rain on the Pavements belongs to a tradition of London fiction which is partly journalistic; its consolations are not plot and character, but observation and vivid recall." Our New London Editions have been covered well in Hackney Citizen and Camberton again in Jewish Renaissance.

At the other end of the country, Zoe Wicomb hit the Sunday Herald with The One that Got Away while J. David Simons had a perfectly formed and good review for his The Liberation of Celia Kahn in the Herald guide. David's book is getting coverage in book blogs including Vulpes Libris, while the Jewish Telegraph gave a big spread to the Glasgow book launch. Our Crime Express series is starting to get coverage on specialist crime blogs, with http://www.spinetinglermag.com/ writer "Nerd of Noir" taking a big liking to Graven Image by Charlie Williams and California by noirista (a word borrowed from Mike Ripley) Ray Banks. John Lucas wouldn't know an e-zine or a blog if it came up and hit him but was very pleased by the print out of Michael Bartholemew-Biggs' review of Things to Say in London Grip, which has reached 27 issues but was new to me. B-B's review is on http://www.londongrip.com/LondonGrip/Poetry_review_Bartholomew-Biggs.html. More conventionally, by Lucas standards, the great Jim Burns reviewed the same book in the current Ambit. Parochially I was pleased to see a review of Ray Gosling's Personal Copy in The Nottinghamshire Historian. Because of that other business with Ray his book has not had as much attention as it deserves so it was nice of Denys Ridgeway to ignore that other business remarking that "His memoirs really do capture the mood of the younger generation [of the 1960s], how they lived and behaved."