Book Impressions - Julia's Room

Julia's Room is the story of a young reporter in Fleet Street during the sixties. The tale wraps around a young lady (the aforementioned Julia) and does a good job of portraying the  murkiness of the job.

I enjoyed the story, the writing is good, although I was a little perplexed by the ending.  It was very abrupt and left me with the feeling that I had missed something. Still, the journey was good, so it's a minor complaint. 

A recommended read.

It was the late sixties: everyone my age seemed to be becoming a pop star or an actor: they were all getting famous, leading interesting lives, making loads of money and, most importantly, getting tons of sex. I was scoring low on most of these happiness tests and zero when it came to the sex. I was tone deaf, sang like a dog and couldn't act but I had a feeling that I could write. So, after giving up my safe, well paid position, I did the round of the employment agencies and started on a long succession of temporary, dead end jobs which gave me plenty of time in the evenings to read novels and delude myself that I could write one of my own. And that's how, in 1970, after a year of these boring jobs I came to fetch up at The Sunday Globe as a messenger cum office boy…..

Julia's Room is a novella - 32,000 words. It tells the story of Alan, a young reporter working in London's Fleet Street. He thinks he has three great ideas for the weekly story conference but then, in the editor's absence, Ray Dressler is put in charge. In the course of the day Alan is humiliated by a colleague and shocked by the revelations of a stranger in a pub. By the day's end he will never feel the same about his fellow journalists or Julia again.

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