Lives of Despair in E. George Novels

I'm currently reading Elizabeth George's mystery With No One as Witness. George is a good writer; in fact, her mastery of dialect elevates her above a genre writer. I can see the characters even as I read because I hear their voices, all varied with different cadences and slang terms.

Though I have seen the BBC Inspector Lynley series, I hadn't read one of George's books until now. In fact, I downloaded this one on my Kindle out of curiosity. I wanted to see how close to the novels the series was. I would say that my being able to envision the BBC characters probably helps when I'm reading, but I wouldn't want to detract from her ability.

What really strikes me and what her fully drawn characters, even bit characters--especially some of the bit characters--make me see is the kind of despair that too many people live in today. Her pregnant teenage girls reared by crackhead mothers and her teenage boys who sell themselves on the street live lives of anything but quiet desperation. Quite the opposite, their desperation is palpable, the very thought that children could actually go through what these characters do enough to disturb my dreams.

As I read the novel, I am reminded of a book I bought my nephew when he was majoring in Criminal Justice: Life at the Bottom, written by Theodore Dalrymple, a prison psychiatrist who used to treat the poor in a slum hospital and a prison. Dalrymple tells about a young mother who sold her five-year-old daughter for drugs, about the young women who have children by different men and who always have a man of some kind, not because the women necessarily want to live that way but because in their neighborhood, a woman with an abusive boyfriend is still safer than a woman with no boyfriend. 

George captures the hopelessness of these people's lives well. I wish I could believe that those lives are merely figments of Ms. George's imagination, yet having read Dalrymple, I know that, while the particular circumstances may spring from her imagination, the reality of lives lived in despair in the urban jungles we've created are not: survival of the fittest eats its young.