[Bell 01] • The Bell-Boy
- Authors
- Hamilton-Paterson, James
- Publisher
- Faber & Faber
- ISBN
- 9780571317547
- Date
- 1990-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
- Size
- 0.87 MB
- Lang
- en
*The Bell-Boy* was James Hamilton-Paterson's third novel, first published in 1990.
'Somewhere on my tropical travels I encountered a rickety hotel on whose roof an ancient servant lived in a converted hen coop. This gave me the idea for a young bell-boy, Laki, who is up from the provinces and lives on top of his hotel in the holy city of Malomba. He moonlights as a shrewd guide for foreign visitors, his latest clients being a hippie English family who are in Malomba for psychic surgery. Their mutual exploitation leads to both farce and minor tragedy.' James Hamilton-Paterson
'A brilliant religious satire with elements of E.F. Benson and Evelyn Waugh... Few books since E.M. Forster's *A Passage to India *(whose formal perfection this novel shares) have conveyed more intensely the allure (and the revulsion) the East holds for Westerners.' *New York Times*