Private Views

Description

Who is Katya Lowell and what is the secret of her life? A seemingly cool painter of unnerving images in 1970s London, she comes to the attention of Charlie Marsden, an aristocrat who works at an old merchant bank in the City. Why does this beautiful, enigmatic woman choose to spend time with outsiders such as former secret agent Harry Groves and suburban multi-millionaire Jarvis Green? Private Views is a portrait gallery of smart society. The novel's dialogue fills the reader's ears with the voices of the drama critic Benedict Bligh, magazine columnist Tamsin Fiarfax, Charlie's bisexual auctioneer flatmate Marcus Steele, gentleman cook Theo Plant and his thriller-writing brother Ferdy, and Charlie and his sister Camilla. Like a threatened species, they prefer not to look at the cunning predators and their low-life sidekicks who are taking control of old England. A love story, at once superbly romantic and full of dark erotic corners, it implicates us in a plot with space in it for our imagination to savour the ambiguous connection between life and art. Charlie Marsden has to come to terms with a woman he cannot help but love but who can never quite be his. Frederic Raphael's new novel is the portrait of a vanishing generation. -- from back cover.

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