Deborah Holmes
speaker
128 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 4 Jun
Deborah Holmes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He's going to get a prosthetic leg.
He's going to get some way of supporting himself.
It's all fine.
And he did his duty.
And the story basically takes that mindset apart.
And there's one disaster after another that happens to this poor man.
So the story from the actual sort of true story that it's based on was of an invalid who gets back from the war and is given a licence to play a barrel organ on the street to earn money.
And that's what happens in the novel as well.
But then the barrel organ owner is confronted with someone who thinks that they are just pretending to be an invalid, that they are playing the system.
And an argument ensues and the police are involved and the barrel organ licence gets taken away immediately.
And that happens in the novel as well.
And then he loses his wife, loses his family, loses his source of income and by the end of the novel is left railing at God and at Providence.
And from the beginning of the novel where he's quite happy to fit in with the existing order.
to the end of the novel where he's saying, I want to go to hell.
But a typical Roth, we have this sort of scene that seems to be taking place in the afterlife.
But the last that we hear about the war invalid is he wasn't sure whether he was in heaven or hell.
But the rebellion itself is the point of the novel, this realisation that actually maybe it wasn't enough to do your duty or it wasn't, the government doesn't actually know what it's doing.
Maybe the war was senseless.
Yes, although it's very difficult to pin down how he does it.
It's quite often been said that he writes simply, but that's deceptively simple somehow.
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