London Fictions |
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Chapters 5-10 and 13-14 show him as a trainee lawyer and an unencumbered bachelor engaged in an active social life, including two casual flirtations with young women (chapters 5-10). He then enjoys an extended tour to France, Italy and mostly Greece, and starts an affair with an older woman (chapters 11-12). Finally, after a summer’s day in London in 1914 (chapter 13), he emerges as an early victim of the First World War, his mother and a friend left to clear his room - the room of the title (chapter 14).
Jacob’s biography is not a straightforward chronology, but is presented in short episodes in often abrupt succession, with a narrator’s voice intervening, and some arresting imagery (the underground is ‘hollow drains lined with yellow light’). |