The Clothes on Their Backs
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By Linda Grant
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In a red brick mansion block off the Marylebone Road, a sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents, surrounded by well-to-do neighbours living mysterious, enthralling lives. Then one morning a glamorous uncle appears, dressed in a mohair suit, a diamond watch on his wrist and a girl in a leopard-skin pill-box hat on his arm. But why is this man so violently unwelcome in her parents’ home? The young Vivien begins to push against the constraints of home and escapes to university. But a shocking event soon sends her back to her parents’ home and to her uncle Sandor, only recently released from prison. Volunteering to help him write his life-story, she learns about the concealed past and the stark choices faced by those intent on survival. As history reveals itself, so too does the London of the 1970s and Vivien comes to understand how the clothes we wear define us. I
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St Just Monday Morning Reading Group 27th May 2019.
The clothes on their backs. Linda Grant.
The reading group found this book an easy read, but a little disappointing. Most of us had formed the idea that the author was going to write about the way that clothes define people or create a persona, and though this concept appears in the last line of the book, we felt it was insufficiently dealt with in the main narrative. Also various readers thought the plot was too obviously contrived, and its planning too obvious.
Aspects that we thought did come over well in the book were the representation of Peter Rachman, (as being the character Sandor in the narrative) - this was an interesting portrayal of the man as from his own point of view; the description of Vivien's immigrant parents, frightened to go out of their house or live their lives to the full; the relationship between Vivien's father and his brother; and the picture that is drawn of National Front activity in London in the 1960s. We also talked about whether Vivien or Sandor was the victim in their relationship, and decided that at first, Vivien was the victim (an inexperienced girl with a corrupt, exploitative uncle), but later in the story, Sandor is seen as the victim (a man irretrievably damaged by his war experiences and thrown into a life of crime in order to survive).
The period and the location of this book were familiar to some readers, and we spent some time discussing London in the 1960s, and cultural offerings that we remembered from our childhoods.
