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The Five Towns #11

The Roll-Call

arnold bennett

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Enoch Arnold Bennett (May 27, 1867-March 27, 1931). He was born in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, one of six towns in the area known as the Potteries where many of his novels were set.

232 pages, Paperback

First published October 31,2005
Series
The Five Towns

This edition

Format
232 pages, Paperback
Published
October 31, 2005 by Echo Library
ISBN
9781846376689
ASIN
1846376688
Language
English

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About the author

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arnold bennett

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Enoch Arnold Bennett was an English author, best known as a novelist, who wrote prolifically. Between the 1890s and the 1930s he completed 34 novels, seven volumes of short stories, 13 plays (some in collaboration with other writers), and a daily journal totalling more than a million words. He wrote articles and stories for more than 100 newspapers and periodicals, worked in and briefly ran the Ministry of Information during the First World War, and wrote for the cinema in the 1920s. Sales of his books were substantial, and he was the most financially successful British author of his day.
Born into a modest but upwardly mobile family in Hanley, in the Staffordshire Potteries, Bennett was intended by his father, a solicitor, to follow him into the legal profession. Bennett worked for his father before moving to another law firm in London as a clerk at the age of 21. He became assistant editor and then editor of a women's magazine before becoming a full-time author in 1900. Always a devotee of French culture in general and French literature in particular, he moved to Paris in 1903; there the relaxed milieu helped him overcome his intense shyness, particularly with women. He spent ten years in France, marrying a Frenchwoman in 1907. In 1912 he moved back to England. He and his wife separated in 1921, and he spent the last years of his life with a new partner, an English actress. He died in 1931 of typhoid fever, having unwisely drunk tap-water in France.
Many of Bennett's novels and short stories are set in a fictionalised version of the Staffordshire Potteries, which he called The Five Towns. He strongly believed that literature should be accessible to ordinary people and he deplored literary cliques and élites. His books appealed to a wide public and sold in large numbers. For this reason, and for his adherence to realism, writers and supporters of the modernist school, notably Virginia Woolf, belittled him, and his fiction became neglected after his death. During his lifetime his journalistic "self-help" books sold in substantial numbers, and he was also a playwright; he did less well in the theatre than with novels but achieved two considerable successes with Milestones (1912) and The Great Adventure (1913).
Studies by Margaret Drabble (1974), John Carey (1992), and others have led to a re-evaluation of Bennett's work. The finest of his novels, including Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives' Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910) and Riceyman Steps (1923), are now widely recognised as major works.

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Community Reviews

Rating(4.2 / 5.0, 9 votes)
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9 reviews All reviews
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KeedKiro
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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A fitting sequel to one of my favourite sequences of novels. George is a bit more complex (and sympathetic) than some of the 'spoilt young man' commentary you see knocking about the place. There's a good dash of brash Denny from The Card about him as well as doubt and shiftlessness worked out in love, work, family and, finally, a new purpose, the horrors of which are kept offstage but in the reader's mind.
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xL4n1x
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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My least favorite of Arnold Bennett’s books. I dearly love all the rest; perhaps it was the way it ended that I didn’t love.
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songangel
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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George Cannon is a callow trainee architect with social climbing ambitions. He falls for the pretty and modest Marguerite, then the more ambitious Lois.

Bennett's male leads are a smug, self-regarding shower of grasping provincials with just enough insecurities to keep you interested in them. At least they are honest about their ambitions:

'He perceived the limitations of the world in which Marguerite lived. It was a world too small and too austere for him. He required the spaciousness and the splendor of the new world in which Irene Wheeler and the Ingram's lived - yea, that it was a world that excited the sardonic in him.'

The sardonic, yes; but also the slavish. On the flip side of that, Cannon's view of a couple less successful than himself, could just as well be a description of Bennet's view on everyone: 'While condescending to them, he somehow envied them.'

This is second book of Bennett's I've read recently. I preferred the previous one, The Pretty Lady. That was set during WWI, and the war looms large at the end of this novel too.

The protagonist of that other novel was too old for active service, but this is not the case with Cannon. Playing tennis and helping his wife decide on the best tea-gown simply won't do when he is young enough to enlist.

So by the end of the book he is thirty-three and in the army, still callow, still full of himself, still difficult to care too much about.
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onigirimiya
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Descriptions, including those of the character's thoughts and observations, are superb.
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Lego_Leviathan
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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- I saw 'The Roll-call', a novel by Bennett, listed on Gutenberg's offerings. I thought I had read the best of Bennett (my most favourite of all writers!), and never having come across any mention of 'The Roll-call', I did not expect too much of it. And now I am in 7th heaven reading it! I think it's better than any other novel, and I'm only a quarter of the way through it... so touching, and so hilarious!
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cosme7
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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After These Twain I was ready to give up on the Clayhangers. I'd become completely immersed in the first book and went in search of the second with a sense of need. Number three could have been absorbing but perhaps caught me in the wrong frame of mind. I'd gone through enough hardships with them and was ready for something more uplifting. I persevered and eventually found it in The Roll Call. It isn't as good as either Clayhanger or Hilda Lessways but it is deserving of being the end of the sequence. It took time though. George Cannon has little to engage the reader in the early chapters. In fact he's a rather unpleasant young man. And here lies the trick. By the end of the novel I was rooting for him in all of his endeavours. And I'll be damned if I can identify the point where I left off disliking him and started to care. He certainly doesn't shed all of his dislikability!

Bennett is a skilful commentator on the times. His books give a vivid picture of life in Stoke and London from the mid nineteenth century up until the First World War. In the books we see huge changes in industry, in outlook and in social conditions. We have a strong female character...though not so strong that she can survive on her own. We even have a token suffragette in The Roll Call as a minor character's disappearance from the novel is explained by her growing devotion to the cause. (Not until she has been painted as being rather extreme and a bit odd.)

In short, I wouldn't rely on Bennett for my understanding of life in late Victorian and Edwardian England but he certainly colours my viewpoint. I would however suggest that it is high time for a revival of interest. He's far too good a novelist to have become so neglected. His omelettes get more mentions in the media than his novels and, though very tasty omelettes, they aren't a patch on his prose. As a series it isn't as good as The Forsyte Saga in documenting social and economic changes through the fortunes of a single family but if you read nothing else than Clayhanger, Forsyte and (perhaps) A Dance to the Music of Time, you will have a fair to moderate sense of a century of being in England.
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AlexLuczak
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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A worthy sequel to The Clayhanger Trilogy..although it can be read as a stand alone novel. I wish it had pursued George a bit further into his life and wonder if this was ever a possibility. A masterly description at the end of the discomfort of the soldiers, as good as any I have read in other novels of the period..and still in England!
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BansheeGoose
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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The Roll Call is an extension to the Clayhanger series and follows a period in the life of George Clayhanger, or George Cannon as he prefers to be known, Edwin Clayhanger being his stepfather. We are concerned here with the period around the turn of the twentieth century and the lead up to World War One. So there is something of the historical novel which coupled with his characteristically imaginative style of storytelling makes this a good read.
The book closes with George having volunteered for the army and having obtained a commission as an officer due to his profession as an architect and also to his social contacts. This episode is of interest because it provides an alternative, (if relatively brief), narrative to most war fiction. It concerns Georges experiences in contemplating joining the army and then the dramatic change he experiences once part of the war machine. The book closes while George is still in England.
For me personally, I was also interested in George`s work as an architect, as I also worked in the architectural business. Arnold Bennett clearly has some knowledge of the profession.
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