Resumo de No Love For Johnnie - Wilfred Fienburgh

I came to this nearly 50 year old book of fiction as the author was involved in my mother and my lives in the 1950s. I do not recall him - I was just 18 months old then. So this is a personal project. No Love For Johnnie is ostensibly about heartless politics with a"hero" whois selfish and power hungry. Johnnie Roderick BYRNE, like the author Fienburgh at the time he wrote the book, was a Member of the British Parliament. Mr Fienburgh's fellow MPs did not seem to appreciate such honesty about MPs. Even though Fienburgh died in a car accident before the book was published, the late MP for North Islington, London has been seemingly consigned to the backwaters of history. Fellow MPS and the Establishment missed the point of his book completely in my view. Research suggest some of those criticised knew the books second, covert purpose. I will not mention certain names at this stage. Although most are dead it is still being researched and may just be chance. However the overt point was towards the end of the book and showed politics how I believe Mr Fienburgh wanted it to be, rather than how it was. The narrative of the book leads up to the following speech made to Johnnie Byrne by the fictional Prime Minister, Reginald Stevens just before he gives Johnnie his small calibre job. Stevens tells Johnnie Byrne about the President Of The Board Of Trade who has just exited his office "He's has gone away to die. He is going home to his garden in the north. Oh blast it, he's going to lay out new borders for spring and he'll never see them grow. About four times in a lifetime, Byrne, one meets a good man. And he was one. He was just good. I never heard him say a malicious word about anyone. A really good man in politics stands out like a mountain peak. It's not that there are fewer good men here than elsewhere. In this place we are a pretty fair microcosm of society, but the good man stands out. I suppose we are measured in our private attitude by our public utterances. We preach a high morality, but we are ordinary blokes after all. So to the cynical and the experienced we fail to live by our words. Then there comes one who does. Quietly, without ostentation, his whole life is a mirror of his precepts. And that makes him greater by comparison with the rest of us." I believe that Wilfred Fienburgh's colleagues only saw someone telling it like it was, albeit in a fictional form and didn't like it. Truth from a politician? Whatever next? But was "Wilf" Fienburgh wrong? Those who have followed British politics Profumo, Thorpe et al would say a resounding NO. The story shows Johnnie Byrne going through life and making choices based on expediency - how to get the most for the least effort on his part. It shows youthful fumbling love, cowardice in warfare and self interest throughout and unlike a normal morality tale, Mr Byrne doesn't fully fail in his aims. But what he settles for leaves the reader wondering what it was all for? It is worth remembering too the book may have had another purpose and that was as a critical tool. Mr Fienburgh was a wordsmith par excellence and if the book is looked at by anyone who loves crosswords, particularly anagrams you benefit from a whole separate story. Page 1 of the book has the line "I am body-sick and mind-sick of the whole bloody business" This is a perfect anagram of "My book. Coded business. Find lass with a boy. Him locked in". A few pages on the line - "Sally, Martha, Greta, come on now". That can be turned into"Molly Morgan ? we reattach a son". Odd then. My own mother was called Molly Morgan by the way. And so it goes on - a few of the many recorded below. From book title onwards No Love for Johnnie = No One Vile for John, OHMS Ministry of Labour Appointments Bureau = Unprintable History about so prim famous men,Timothy Maxwell= Tax me with Molly, Raleigh Dawlish-Raynard = Her lad hid ? girl's ran away,, Old Thomas Elsworthy = Molly who's hated, rots, Reginald Stevens = Devil ranges nest, Reginald Fuller = Regard life null, Ronald Sewell = A loner dwells, Corporal West = Sow. Alter crop, Miss Rogers of Warren Street = News! Forget a Mistress Error, Charlie Drake= Reach dark lie, Charles Young = Curley Go Ashen, Frederick Nicholl = Lock in child, refer. Earnley (the town Byrne is MP for) = Learn ye, Sheikh of Masran = Has forsaken him, Old Arthur Westley = Wealth ruled story, Silver gilt this chain is. It won't rust in a thousand years = Author's history is within - a cunning varlet's details sit, Captain Bloody Jones = Joy and poetical snob. The above ARE only anagrams (with dozens more too) and perhaps mean absolutely nothing. But enjoy the book - whatever way you choose to look at it.

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