public betrayal in this novel. No other American novel gives as clear a report of normal state university life in the usual administrative procedures of departmental espionage, blackmail, subordination, and assorted shenanigans.
Like A New Life, Colin Wilson’s Adrift in Soho opens no new literary panoramas. This is the novel as journalism, the guided tour of an area rather than the inner light of an experience. It focuses around a young English literary bum, the socialist economy counterpart of those dregs that people George Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris. Wilson’s young first-person narrator is bored but never agonized. What distinguishes him as an accurate news photo is his lack of both pride and place. He wanders up to the London slums in a vague literary bent, with a tiny inheritance, but he burns to produce no epic nor right any wrong. Rather he is bored at working in a factory and as a navvy. The book has the amoral and social attitudes of people without past or future. Illicit sex, marijuana and fraud are merely part of the boredom, along with painting and poetry. At least there is none of the phony Angry Young Man here. Instead we get the picture London has offered since World War II, a source of neither great suffering nor great joy, a world barren as a gutter.
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