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The Bloater: The brilliantly original rediscovered classic comedy of manners

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As for me, I stubbornly refuse to re-dream the good times. I'm able to put up with the present only Her first two novels, Opium Fogs (1963) and Emir (1963), were praised for their evocative images of the metropolis, and are best regarded as companion pieces to the Baudelaire- and Rimbaud-influenced Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms (1963), Tonks’s first poetry collection, in which she adorns bohemian sixties London with exotic Oriental imagery inspired by her travels. (Tonks and her husband, an engineer-turned-financier named Michael Lightband, whom she wed in 1948, spent the early years of their marriage in India and Pakistan, where Tonks contracted first typhoid and then polio. The latter left her right, writing hand withered—so she taught herself to use her left instead.) Tonks was interested in capturing what she once so fragrantly described as “the flavour beneath the flagstones.” Her poems are full of dirty mattresses and stained dressing gowns, foggy, grimy city streets and badly lit grotty rooms in boarding houses, and her novels are pretty piquant too. “I do see that he is large and that washing takes time, I do see that he spends most of his life travelling, or appearing in a professional capacity,” says Min of the Bloater. “Even so, it’s monstrous of him.” But on the other hand she's a horrible, horrible person. And she's fatphobic, the whole book is in fact.

There's very little by way of plot. Min is married to the inconsequential George and is attracted to two more interesting men. The dynamic between Min and the men is very traditional. The men woo and Min seems obliged to resist. What does she really want? The novel's structure makes it hard to know what Min thinks or feels about anything. All the characters, especially Min, say a lot but it’s often contradictory chatter or inconsequential conversation. As the book went on I found it increasingly tedious.Almost as soon as she died in 2014 The Guardian published a selection of her poetry along with the obituary.

After publishing two seedily glittering books of verse in the 1960s, Rosemary Tonks – who died this year- renounced literature. This exciting collection restores to us a unique oeuvre which evokes the ‘sofas, fugs and cinemas’ of post-war London, as though the French poet Baudeliare had written in a Soho greasy spoon.’– Jeremy Noel-Tod, Sunday Times

They know' he says, with the primitive vigour of a secret Bible-reader escaping from an age of psychoanalysis."

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