Chapel Street (First Edition)

Assorted individuals--from sensual Gabriella, in love with Marek, to passionately musical Marek, to hulking and brooding Skim, to married but still looking Julia--search for love and more between the walls of Mrs. Gorse's Georgian boarding house.

Outwardly proud and even magnificent, a Georgian house on an affluent London street rots from within; this oddly breezy British novel peeks inside as the inhabitants struggle with timeless paradoxes of love, destiny, friendship and mortality. Mrs. Gorse, the aged landlady, handpicks various boarders and, as she slips into senility, makes them the audience for her frequent railings against stupidity, youth and, especially, sexual vitality. Indeed, each of the members of her household is somehow undone by these very "failings." North, who won the 1990 Somerset Maugham Award for The Automatic Man , wittily and intelligently brings to life figures like Santay, a weary paraplegic suffering from unrequited love and a dependence on tranquilizers; and Skim, a burly, cynical set-builder transformed first by friendship and music, and again by his romantic misadventures. But despite North's obvious craftsmanship, at times his playfulness and his use of the house to link these characters--both literally and metaphorically--make his focus seem arbitrary. Roaming these decaying halls, the reader may glimpse a character's travails, but never closely, never for long and never with the appreciation that the novel's flashes of insight appear to promise.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An ambitious novel from British writer North (209 Thriller Road, 1980), winner of the 1990 Somerset Maugham Award for fiction, takes the formulaic theme of disparate characters arbitrarily gathered together and turns it into a dark metaphor for our times. Set in a London boardinghouse, whose splendid Georgian exterior is merely a facade for an interior as damaged and dilapidated as its inhabitants, the novel takes place in the dying days of the year. This timing is deliberate, since the story requires both the darkness and cold--both of the heart and the season. Owned by the aging Mrs. Gorse, whom Time has left ``with a lack of gravity, the going away of all horizons,'' the house is a refuge and way station for troubled souls. There is Santay, proud and sensitive, who, confined to a wheelchair because of an accident, must depend on the kindness of others. Marek, the foreign student, lives for music and has a gift for friendship, but both his talent and friends seem to be betraying him. Gabriella, the young Italian who cleans the house in exchange for a room, is frightened of sex but nonetheless has affairs with Marek and Skim, the brooding technician who in turn yearns for Julia, Santay's friend. Over a Christmas as bleak as any of Dickens's darker imaginings, the house and its inhabitants fall apart. More than entropy has set in as wood rots, electricity fails, and characters go mad, disappear, or commit suicide. Chapel Street, like death, turns out to be just another ``black hole--Time's lair'' where the inhabitants had been all ``dead souls'' whether ``they were escaped, or trapped, or waiting.'' Like Martin Amis, to whom he has been compared, North sees Britain as already in the midst of some Anglian G”tterd„mmerung, bereft of hope and redemption. Ultimately the unrelieved gloom is too contrived and schematic. Talented, but flawed. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.