Down And Out In England And Italy

Alberto Prunetti Scribe £12.99 ★★

Is Alberto Prunetti the heir to Orwell? He’d like us to think so, with a quote from the author of Down And Out In Paris And London at the top of every chapter and a title that echoes one of the most readable memoirs of the 20th Century.

In doing so, he sets the bar too high. Orwell was the model narrator, never getting in the way of what he observed, immaculately sketching life in run-down English doss houses and revealing a hellish existence below stairs in Paris’s ‘Hotel X’. Prunetti – a very sweary, grizzled old Italian Lefty – too often centres the story on himself.

In fairness, the cast of characters around him is often superbly drawn and clearly influenced by

Orwell, including John Silver, the piratical head chef in the Italian restaurant where Prunetti finds his first job, in Bristol. An old seadog who’s worked all over the world, Silver can’t help switching between languages mid-sentence, swearing in all of them. ‘Necesito a **** ing day off, capeesh?’ Since the author confesses ‘I spoke like Google Translate’, there’s the odd moment of comedy here.

But Prunetti does ramble on and state the bleeding obvious. ‘This is an immigrant pizza chef’s stream of consciousness,’ he announces, after what was very obviously just that. He then lapses into descriptions so surreal – often about Margaret Thatcher (left) – that it’s like entering a Corbynista fever dream. There is surely a great memoir to be written on life in the modern ‘precariat’ – among the Amazon and Deliveroo workers who keep so many of us pampered and wellfed – by the heir to Orwell. I’m not convinced this is it.