Iris
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
It is London in the 1950s and early 60s. The gambling clubs, private dining rooms, corrupt politicians and gangsters who run Mayfair as well as the East End had never had it so good . . .
Iris wasn't quite a call girl . . . she never took any money for that. But she didn't mind accepting a white fiver for the cab fare back to the dismal family flat, or little gifts, or champagne in heady and glamorous restaurants. She was living very dangerously, trading in ignorance and beauty - though not without a certain street savvy.
But then she was plunged, with repugnant violence, into a world of seedy manipulation existing beneath the surface of London society. And innocence and ignorance suddenly become outdated luxuries . . .
Acute social observation combines with a tender story of love and innocence in Jean Marsh's powerful novel.
'A delightful London-in-the-Fifties novel' Tim Rice, Daily Telegraph
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Upstairs, Downstairs creator Marsh compassionately depicts a stark postwar London through the eyes of 17-year-old "tart" Iris Winston, who shares with her pre-Beatles motherland a dangerous blend of innocence, na vet and a kind of willful refusal to see things for what they are. Iris convinces herself she isn't really a prostitute, though she regularly accepts cab fare, dinner and small gifts in exchange for providing predatory men with sexual favors, as when she talks dirty to an MP over lunch. Her lifestyle, insouciant but rife with danger and humiliations, centers on hip clubs and expensive restaurants, in stark contrast to the gloomy family flat she returns to every night. The virginal, childlike Iris seems oblivious to what others think of her, but in one afternoon, everything changes. Five upper-class men with whom she had been sharing a midday drink take her to an apartment and gang-rape her. Iris keeps this brutal awakening secret as she continues to live party to party and pound to pound, wary of the city's underworld but finding a dubious security among gay friends and Mafia families. Marsh's measured plot takes a sharp turn when Iris becomes a stand-in for a famous actress and marries Peter, a sympathetic restaurateur. Thirteen years later, in 1965, their marriage is on the rocks. Peter leaves for New York while Iris runs their restaurant/club, where she encounters Michael, the brother of one of her rapists. Though Iris can trust Michael, the secret surfaces and she uses her organized crime connections to protect her reputation. The two disparate parts of Marsh's story are held together only tenuously, however, and elements meant to link the two, such as the London-New York mob subplots, seem contrived. Actress and novelist Marsh does, however, paint an affecting portrait of Iris's loss of innocence, backgrounded by sharp and vivid societal detail.
