The author, signed only as 'H.F.', is the main character with few other names given. His genius is to construct a gripping novel filled with detail, statistics, gossip, hearsay and half-remembered stories that is totally convincing.Ī good journalist, he resists the temptation to sensationalise events realising that the story is itself sensational enough. After the mortality bills, his primary sources were the many contemporaneous accounts produced in the fifty years, or so, afterwards. But the book reads best as an historical novel that mingles fact and fiction, as Defoe was barely five years old at the time of the events. Defoe collected these bills, and other plague ephemera, which must account for the great amount of detail he brings to the text. The recurring use of weekly mortality bills to chart the spread and speed of the disease in each parish, adds to the administrative feel and gives the book an underlying authority. The journal style is simple and immediate and reads like an audit for the Lord Mayor’s office at times. Louis-Ferdinand Celine: Guignol's Band I & II John Sommerfield: Trouble in Porter Street Pamela Hansford Johnson: This Bed Thy Centre
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