Word: peckham
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bewitched eyes and at "the alarming bones of his hands" and suffers a nervous breakdown. Mr. Druce himself, suspecting that Dougal is a police informer in alliance with Merle Coverdale, kills his mistress by stabbing her nine times with a corkscrew. Dougal at about that time flees Peckham Rye for Africa, where he makes a living selling portable tape recorders to witch doctors...
...BALLAD OF PECKHAM RYE (160 pp.) -Muriel Spark-Lippincott...
...removed the horns. When he looks at people, he is "like a succubus whose mouth is its eyes." In the short span of this hilarious novel, Douglas the Devil coaxes into mortal sin not only Humphrey Place but most of the first citizens in the South London district of Peckham...
...been compared to Evelyn Waugh, but the comparison is inexact: she is, in fact, a kind of welfare state Jane Austen, a novelist in whose hands the commonplace becomes mysteriously implausible, the routine eerily irrational. Unlike the scheming septuagenarians of her earlier novel, Memento Mori, the inhabitants of Peckham Rye are so determinedly average that they lack even the capacity to sin grandly. When Mr. Vincent Druce, the managing director of a small textile firm, visits his secretary, Miss Merle Coverdale, to make love to her in the evening, their activity is as carefully calculated as the time-motion studies...
...Dougal's victims nor the reader ever discovers precisely what is deviling them. It is Novelist Spark's triumph that it never seems to matter. When Dougal is accused of being "unnatural," he replies: "All human beings who breathe are a bit unnatural." On every page of Peckham Rye, the author demonstrates that notion with high comic brilliance and a strabismic...