The novel uses T. S. Eliot's poem "Little Gidding" from Four Quartets as a starting point. The time is 1941 and London is experiencing The Blitz. Iris, a young civil servant, has volunteered to be an aircraft spotter on a building in Russell Square. Another spotter is Eliot himself, as the building is the headquarters of the publishing house, Faber & Faber. Late one night the pair witness the crash of a British Wellington bomber, and Eliot goes on to write his poem utilising this incident. At the initial public reading of the poem, Jim, the pilot of the crashed aircraft, happens to be in the audience and recognises his accident being depicted in the poem.
Notes
Epigraph:
Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist...
– "Bishop Blougram's Apology", Robert Browning.
Reviews
Andrew Reimer in The Sydney Morning Herald noted that the book is a "highly accomplished novel...eloquent and assured."[4]
Andrew Fuhrmann in The Sydney Review of Books states: "So clear and careful is the prose in A World of Other People that it produces a kind of dreamy dollhouse effect, a toy theatre, a meticulously reconstructed model London with a T.S. Eliot doll at its centre, ventriloquially recognisable, albeit speaking in squeaks and stammers. There is also a sense of stillness, a sense of intimacy: a kind of prosaic equivalent to the Quartets and their air of a closed or self-contained world.[5]
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