"Behind the Scenes at the Museum" by Kate Atkinson

 

A wide-ranging family saga, alternating family history with the bildungsroman of a girl growing up above a pet shop in "one of the ancient streets that cower beneath the looming dominance of York Minster" (Ch 1).

The main thrust of the novel is narrated by Ruby in the present tense and describes her childhood (it starts at the moment of her conception in what is presumably a deliberate reference to Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, an author cited two pages later) into adulthood within a dysfunctional family consisting of father George who has repeated affairs, mother Bunty who is eternally fed-up and particularly dislikes Ruby, clever but disaffected eldest sister Patricia, and permanently angry and violent elder sister Gillian. The extensions of the family - uncles and aunts and cousins and in-laws - are equally eccentric. 

And so we embark on a roller-coaster ride from tragedy to comedy and back again. Ruby, as a little girl and the youngest of the family, never quite understands what's going on, particularly about the family secret that is dripped into the narrative. She's always one step behind and wondering why (she wonders about so many things, for example: "Why weren't we designed so that we can close our ears ...?  Is there some way that I could accelerate my evolution and develop earlids?"; Ch 9)

There are moments of hilarity. My favourites were the Scottish holiday from hell featuring two couples and an adultery, and a nightmarish wedding on the day that England won the FIFA Men's World Cup.

The main narrative is interleaved with what are called footnotes (although they range from a page or two to chapter length) told in the omniscient past tense. These are episodes in the family history. If you encounter Tristram Shandy at the start, I guess you must expect digression. I presume this added material is designed to show that even the behaviours of Ruby's family have genetic roots: the common themes seem to be adultery, disappearance and death and the fundamental uselessness of most of the menfolk. However, I found these excursions distracted me from the main narrative.

They weren't necessary. Ruby is a delightful character with a strong voice and an always-entertaining family. In the end I wasn't sure if I had finished a comic novel or a family saga (back to Sterne) but I was certain that I had enjoyed myself.

Selected quotes:

• "Given free choice from the catalogue offered by the empire of dreams on her first night as my mother, Bunty has chosen dustbins." (Ch 1)
• "Bunty feels there's something indulgent about parks, something wasteful - holes in existence filled with nothing but air and light and birds." (Ch 1)
• "Bunty's attitude to pain, or indeed, emotion of any kind,is to behave as if it sprang from a personality disorder." (Ch 1)
• "She likes the word 'acquaintance'. It sounds posh and doesn't have all the time-consuming consequences of friendship." (Ch 1)
• "Her eyebrows have risen so far they seem to be hovering above her head." (Ch 6)
• "Monsieur Armand mumbled something to the effect that she would only be able to sell her body if her lips were sewn together." (Fn 9)
• "Patricia ... is sitting by the bedside with a kind of stunned look on her face as if the last thing she was expecting from a death-bed was death itself." (Ch 13)
• "Sandra has put on a lot of weight in the intervening years and is throwing most of it about." (Ch 13)

The book won the 1995 Whitbread Debut Novel Award

January 2025; 382 pages

• Originally published by Doubleday in 1995
• My Black Swan paperback was issued in 1996

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"More Women than Men" by Ivy Compton-Burnett

This classic ICB novel, focused on the staff of a girls' school, repeatedly overturns expectations.

ICB's novels are mostly about the downfall of a domestic tyrant. Typically, they are dialogue-heavy and that dialogue is extremely formal. Despite the precision of the language, it can be hard to decode exactly what is being said; nevertheless one gets an appreciation of the characters. The plot is unstructured and sometimes seems contrived.

MWTM more or less conforms to type. Josephine Napier is owner and headmistress of a girls' school and, although everything she does is out of solicitude for her staff, she is a benevolent despot. This extends to her family sphere where she rules her ineffectual husband and her informally adopted son, Gabriel, her brother Jonathan's child. Meanwhile the elderly and impecunious Jonathan lives nearby with, and on, his "intimate", the much younger Felix, a delicate and unemployed young man who becomes drawing-master at Josephine's school. Josephine's old friend Mrs Gifford (who knew Josephine's husband before their marriage) turns up with her daughter Ruth, successfully seeking employment at the school. Marriages and deaths ensue.

This plot is very much 'one thing happens after another', a bit like real life, rather than the narrative designed by God or fate to punish baddies and reward goodies. Instead, the plot seems designed to pose challenges for the characters; conveniently these challenges occur at exactly the right times. This absence of a 'proper' plot is a reason why some (including Natalie Sarraute,author of Tropismes) see ICB's work as a precursor to the 'nouveau roman' movement in France.

The heavy reliance on formal dialogue undermines the verisimilitude of the novel, reminding me of the alienation techniques practised by Bertolt Brecht in his plays. ICB's characters say what they are thinking, in perfectly formed and very grammatical sentences. Despite the formality, it is remarkable how this gives a full and rounded portrait of those characters, at least the major ones. 

I'm not sure if MWTM is full of ambiguity or whether I just failed to understand some of the sometimes tortuous but always apparently precise sentences. Possibly I am interpreting the hints in the light of more modern thinking. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there are repeated hints about same-sex relationships, for example between Miss Luke and Miss Rosetti, which is described by Miss Chattaway as "a wonderful case of devotion" (Ch 1) and between Felix and Jonathan, upon whose knee he sits in chapter 2. However, the subsequent behaviour of these characters does not conform to these initial assumptions. ICB seems to be saying that human beings are more complicated creatures than we allow, that sexuality is not binary but can shift according to circumstance.

The novel has some typical ICB moments of comedy when one of her characters questions a saying used by another. For example, when Simon used the phrase "his work would not keep the wolf from the door", Gabriel wonders aloud: "The wolf is always represented as at such close quarters ... Why may he not lurk at the outer gate?" (Ch 5)

Selected quotes:

• “Things like poverty and old age and death are shameful. We cannot help them; but that is the humiliation. To accept conditions that would not be your choice must be a disgrace.” (Ch 1)
• “I cannot imagine any useful and self-respecting person of either sex wishing to belong to the other.” (Ch 3)
• “A leopard does not change its spots, or change his feeling that spots are rather a credit.” (Ch 4)
• “I am sure your clothes are admirable. I cannot imagine you without them - without your own kind of them, I mean.” (Ch 13)

January 2025; 231 pages

• First published in 1933
• My paperback edition issued by Allison & Busby in 1983

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

An Ivy Compton-Burnett bibliography with links to those works reviewed in this blog:

• Dolores (1911)
• Pastors and Masters (1925)
• Brothers and Sisters (1929)
• Men and Wives (1931)
• More Women Than Men (1933)
• A House and Its Head (1935)
• Daughters and Sons (1937)
• A Family and a Fortune (1939)
• Parents and Children (1941)
• Elders and Betters (1944)
• Manservant and Maidservant (1947)
• Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949)
• Darkness and Day (1951)
• The Present and the Past (1953)
• Mother and Son (1955)
• A Father and His Fate (1957)
• A Heritage and Its History (1959)
• The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)
• A God and His Gifts (1963)
• The Last and the First (posthumous, 1971)

Ivy by Hilary Spurling is a biography of ICB

"Orbital" by Samantha Harvey

This may be the most most luxuriantly descriptive book I have ever read.

It chronicles twenty-four hours (16 orbits) in the life of four astronauts and two cosmonauts living on a decrepit space station as another spaceship wings its way towards a moon  landing and a super-typhoon destroys Pacific islands. They go about their extraordinary ordinary lives while gazing down on their home planet below, witnessing sixteen sunsets and sixteen nightfalls. This out-of-this-world perspective enables both extravagantly gorgeous prose and some thought-provoking asides.

Winner of the 2024 Booker Prize. 

Magnificent.

Selected quotes:

• “Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.” (Orbit minus 1)
• “A hand-span away beyond a skin of metal the universe unfolds in simple eternities.” (Orbit minus 1)
• “Is the subject art itself (which is a set of Illusions and tricks and artifices within life), or life itself (which is a set of Illusions and tricks and artifices within a consciousness that is trying to understand life through perceptions and dreams and art)?” (Orbit 1, ascending)
• “All beings are living in life-support machines commonly called bodies and all of these will fail eventually.” (Orbit 3, ascending)
• “Maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism, because we didn't ask to be alive, we didn't ask to inherit an earth to look after, and we didn't ask to be so completely unjustly darkly alone.” (Orbit 4, ascending)
• “It's easier to have nothing much to lose than to keep losing something.” (Orbit 4,descending)
• “The sun's particle clouds billow, flares explode and whip earthward in eight minutes flat, energy pulses, explodes, a great ball of fusion and fury.” (Orbit 10)
• “That's what we're doing when we come into space, asserting our species by extending its territory” (Orbit 11)
• “She's living inside the working of a clock and it’s grinding time through her bones.” (Orbit 11)
• “Time moves on with its usual nihilism, mows us all down, jaw-droppingly insensate to our preference for living.” (Orbit 13)
• “They see someone's dog washed down the street in two metres of soupy thing-thronged water, and the dog’s someone following promptly after it.” (Orbit 14, ascending) Thing-thronged? Thing-thronged!

December 2024; 136 pages

First published by Jonathan Cape in 2023

My Vintage paperback edition was issued in 2024.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Hercule Poirot's Silent Night" by Sophie Hannah

 Fanfiction that is even better than the original. An Amazon #1 best-seller.

I have the utmost respect for Agatha Christie. I think I have read all her whodunnits. Her genius lay in the creation of a puzzle and the masterful misdirection she employs even as she provides the reader with clear clues to the solution of the mystery. I analysed this in my review of The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side. But, despite creating Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, her characters tend to be stereotypical puppets whose strings she pulls. Their psychology tends to be simplistic. 

Sophie Hannah's 'continuation novel', a murder mystery featuring Poirot (authorised by Christie's heirs), has deeper and more sinister psychology, more complex characters, and a more compelling setting. Christie can do comedy but Hannah's yokel policeman (Inspector Mackle) is laugh out loud (no subtle characterisation here!). pPoirot is a little more foreign. Catchpool, the narrating sidekick, is a perfect successor to Captain Hastings, the first Watson to Poirot's Holmes. And Catchpool's mother managed to be both ridiculous and yet utterly real (she reminded me of my own mother) and the way she set the scene with a completely convoluted narrative was a masterclass in writing (it reminded me of Lord Peter's mother in the Wimsey detective novels of Dorothy Sayers, starting with Whose Body?

Poirot and his faithful companion Catchpool reluctantly travel to a mansion on a crumbling cliff to investigate the unsolved murder of a patient in a local hospital whose death mysteriously threatens another dying man. Can they solve the case before Christmas or will they be forced to undergo the festivities in a fractured family whose cook produces inedible food?

I'm definitely going to use Catchpool's 'Now That It's Here' theory in non-Christmas-tree contexts. 

And if I guessed the solution to the mystery almost from the very start, so what? This was a hugely enjoyable read and I look forward to reading more by this talented author.

Selected quotes:

These include some original descriptions, such as the one about the house by the road, some interesting reflections on life, such as those about grief, and injustice, and some delightful cliches made original.

• “I was growing ever more reluctant to leave London. Life and vitality seemed to stop, or at least to struggle for breath, when one strayed too far outside that great city.” (Ch 1)
• “The wind in Norfolk ... was severe enough to blow a man off his feet. It struck me as likely that, having once done battle with it, I would forever think of its London counterpart as an amateur.” (Ch 3)
• “He spoke in an inelegant manner; one had the sense that a struggle between words and teeth was taking place, with no clear winner emerging.” (Ch 3)
• “It is possible to grieve before a death, you know. I have seen several of my about-to-be-widowed friends do precisely that. The grief comes first, and at the most inconvenient time, while there is still serious illness and a rapid demise to contend with, and the back-breaking drudgery that accompanies all of that. The death, when it finally arrives, can be a relief.” (Ch 3)
• “Duluth Cottage lived sociably at the edge of the road, looking as eager to meet passers-by as a house could, in an arrangement that raised the question of whether an inexpertly-steered motorcar ... might one day make an accidental appearance in its sitting room.” (Ch 15)
• “Like her house, she was wide but not tall.” (Ch 15)
• “A too-large mouth that made Poirot think of a duck and not at all of kissing.” (Ch 15)
• “The worst part of any terrible thing, always, is the dread one feels in advance.Anything that has already happened, however ghastly, can be recovered from, or at least incorporated somehow.” (Ch 16)
• “Life is never easy. ... There are different kinds of difficult, and one must choose between them.” (Ch 16)
• “Poirot’s face was a picture. It made me think of a goldfish that had fallen out of its bowl and could not understand why there was suddenly no water for it to breathe.” (Ch 19) I love the way she takes a cliche and drills it down to its origins and then expands it to make it sound original and more alive.
• “We imagine it is the injustice that stings, but the worst pain is caused, always, by the idea that things should be fair, when they never have been and never will be.” (Ch 19)
• “Does it not strike you as horribly, awfully unfair ... that something as morally irrelevant as biological accident - the hereditary physical traits one is born with, that one has done nothing to earn - should be of such consequence? If spirit, courage or faith counted for anything, if creativity or determination had any bearing on what becomes of a person, Arnold would live forever and I would waste away into nothingness.” (Ch 19)
• “It is hard to describe how I feel whenever Poirot walks into a room I am in. It is the mental equivalent of light being transformed into colour by a diamond's fluorescence.” (Ch 21)
• “Whatever you most wish to keep hidden, steal yourself for the ordeal ahead, and then tell it to the whole world. At once you will be free.” (Ch 36)

December 2024; 360 pages

First published by Harper Collins in 2023

My paperback edition 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky

 

Earth wrecked, the last hope of the human race is to find a new planet but the one they've terraformed is dominated by enormous spiders.

The narrative alternates between an account of how the spiders develop a civilization and the experiences of classicist Holsten Mason in the intervals that he is awoken from suspended animation to assist with the operation of the ark-style spaceship Gilgamesh as it seeks a habitable planet for the last survivors of the human race. 

The world building is first class. He shows us step by step how the spiders evolve (with the help of a nanovirus designed to speed evolution though it only seems to work on invertebrates) and how they develop technological capabilities (mostly by enslaving ants). Themes include technological developments, a large dose of religion, and there is even reverse feminism as the male spiders struggle to be recognised as more than mates and fodder. The Gilgamesh becomes increasingly dilapidated as the centuries pass by and battles develop between the key officers who have different strategies for the accomplishment of the mission objectives.

But it didn't work for me. The spider narrative felt like a documentary. There was a lot of telling rather than showing, the author's voice repeatedly intruded. It was difficult to empathise with any of the spider characters because after a few chapters we jumped forward a few generations to a new set of characters and the device of giving them the same names failed to provide sufficient continuity, at least for me. The Holsten Mason narrative was better because his character and the characters of those he interacted with were continuous so I could develop some degree of rapport.

The spider narrative was written in the present tense with an omniscient point of view and the Holsten narrative, told through his eyes although in the third person, in the past tense.

It was driven by parallel and interleaved plots which connected, disconnected and them came together at the climax. There were plenty of incidents.

The characterisation may be thin but this is epic sci-fi and will appeal to those who like thrillers and intricate world-building

Selected quotes:

• “Guyen was a thin, small-framed man, with a nose and mouth that both seemed to have been salvaged from a far broader face.” (2.1)
• “You know what a good lesson of history? You're screwed if you can't pay the army.” (3.3)
• “All recorded history had been a progress over a desert of broken bones.” (4.1)
• “The spiders are a curious species, and those who are drawn to the temple are the most curious of all. It was inevitable that the hot-house flower of heresy would end up nurtured by those very guardians of the orthodox.” (4.2)
• “She hunts, she wrestles, she climbs, she mates; traditional pursuits and perhaps a little old-fashioned. She prefers to think of them as timeless.” (6.1)
• “Her face was written over in that universal language of hardship and care.” (6.5)
• “For a second Holsten was looking into the stress-fractures and botch-job repairs that made up Karst’s overstrained soul.” (7.1)
• “Alpash led him to a console, still acting as though Holsten and Karst and the rest were heroes of legend brought to life, but turning out to be somewhat disappointing in the flesh.” (7.1)

December 2024; 600 pages

Published in 2015 by Tor

My paperback edition was published in 2016 by Pan

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"A Moveable Feast" by Ernest Hemingway

The classic manual on how to be a writer living in Paris.

In the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway moved to Paris with his first wife, Hadley, and baby son, gave up journalism and tried to eke out a living writing short stories. This memoir, based on notebooks he had stored in the basement of the Ritz hotel in trunks made for him by Louis Vuitton, describes his life surrounded by other writers and how he learned to write. 

If, like me, you want to be a writer, this is fascinating stuff. But it's also a roll-call of literary celebrities from James Joyce (author of Dubliners, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake) to F Scott Fitzgerald (author of The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, and The Last Tycoon), Ford Madox Ford (author of The Good Soldier and the Parade's End tetralogy), Ezra Pound (a major influence on The Waste Land by T S Eliot) and Gertrude Stein among others. 

It is particularly funny about FMF: not only did Hemingway think him smelly and dishevelled: “I always avoided looking at Ford when I could and I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room.” (Ford Madox Ford and The Devil's Disciple). FMF also made inaccurate statements, sometimes lying, sometimes contradicting himself, but always insisted that what he was saying was correct. An example is when he misidentifies Aleister Crowley as Hilaire Belloc.

FSF is more tragicomic: he is ridiculous but doomed to die young having failed to fulfil his immense promise: “His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he only remembered when it had been effortless.” (Scott Fitzgerald)

Through it all, Hemingway is learning to write:

• “I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next.” (Miss Stein Instructs)
• “But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made ... and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know’.” (Miss Stein Instructs)
• “I was learning something from the painting of Cezanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them.” (Miss Stein Instructs)
• “She had also discovered many truths about rhythms and the uses of words in repetition that were valid and valuable.” (Miss Stein Instructs)
• “You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen your story and make people feel something more than they understood.” (Hunger Was Good Discipline)
• He regards Ezra Pound as “the man who believed in the mot juste- the one and only correct word to use - the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives.” (Evan Shipman at the Lilas)
• Re Dostoevsky: “How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?” (Evan Shipman at the Lilas)
• “I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all my facility and try to make instead of describe.” (Scott Fitzgerald)

He's obviously serious about his writing. At one stage he talks about terza riruce. I had to look this up. It is a rhyme scheme derived from terza rima, the form Dante used in his Divine Comedy, which uses triplets and rhymes aba bcb cdc ded ... etc. Terza riruce was originally just terza rima used for comedic or scatological purposes but it evolved into a distinct form: aba dab ado, ‘o’; being an anti-rhyme using vowels and consonants unconnected with others in the sequence. Hemingway obviously knows all this but wears his learning so lightly that he merely mentions the word.

The selected quotes show how the Hemingway style excels: 

Selected quotes:

• “She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin.” (A Good Cafe on the Place St-Michel)
• “The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.” (The False Spring)
• “All the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry.” (Hunger Was Good Discipline)
• “In those days many people went to the cafes ... to be seen publicly and in a way such places anticipated the columnists as the daily substitutes for immortality.” (Ford Madox Ford and The Devil's Disciple)
• “It was a very Corsican wine and you could dilute it by half with water and still receive its message.” (With Pascin At The Dome)
• “Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.” (Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit.)
• “The whores in Kansas City, who were marked for death and practically everything else, always wished to swallow semen as a sovereign remedy against the con[sumption].” (The Man Who Was Marked For Death)
• “For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.” (An Agent of Evil)
• “The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.” (Scott Fitzgerald)

Other Perspectives:

I recently read Mrs Hemingway by Naomi Wood which chronicles each of Ernest's four wives. The first, Hadley, is the one to whom he was married at the time of AMF. He left her following an adulterous affair with, and subsequent marriage to, Hadley's best friend Fife; Ernest regrets this betrayal towards the end of AMF, saying: “All things truly wicked start from an innocence.” (There Is Never Any End To Paris). There is no doubt that he was a selfish husband and probably an unpleasant man. There are a lot of writers in this blog who were seriously flawed human beings; I am of the opinion that their works should be judged in isolation from their lives. 

Hemingway won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature

December 2024; 182 pages

First published (posthumously) in 1964

My paperback edition published by Vintage in 2000

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Ashenden" by W Somerset Maugham

 

Subtitled "Or the British Agent" this prototype spy novel is based on the real-life experiences of the author during the First World War when he worked for British Intelligence, mostly based in Switzerland. Much of his work involved living in hotels while collating reports; there is very little shooting and sex. Instead, there are character studies of the inhabitants of the shady world of espionage, from the flamboyant but ruthless Hairless Mexican to a traitor with an in-depth knowledge of botany, himself betrayed by his love for his wife. These are real people rather than the insubstantial silhouettes that populate most spy stories. They can feel fear. They can be manipulated by their need for money to sustain their lifestyles. They have flaws (Ashenden himself doesn't seem to be flawed but he is more of an observer than a participant). This collection of stories is distinguished by the enormous empathy between the narrator and the often pathetic characters struggling in the webs woven by the puppet-masters, to mix a metaphor.

Beautifully written.

One of the less sympathetic characters makes racist comments.

Selected quotes:

• “If you do well you'll get no thanks and if you get into trouble you'll get no help.” (Ch 1: R)
• “A scudding rain, just turning into sleet. swept the deck in angry gusts, like a nagging woman who cannot leave a subject alone.” (Ch 2: A Domiciliary Visit)
• “It was as unsatisfactory as those modern novels that give you a number of unrelated episodes and expect you by piecing them together to construct in your mind a connected narrative.” (Ch 2: A Domiciliary Visit)
• “Nothing is so foolish as to ascribe profundity to what on the surface is merely in it; it is a pitfall into which many an ingenuous reviewer has fallen headlong.” (Ch 2: A Domiciliary Visit)
• “Confidence, that is all you need. if you never fear a rebuff you will never have one.” (Ch 4: The Hairless Mexican) The secret of chatting up women successfully according to the eponymous hero of this chapter.
• “I am a patriot and I love my country. ... “We could no longer put up with the misrule from which we were suffering. All the lucrative posts were given to other people, we were being made to pay taxes as though we were tradesmen.” (Ch 5: The Dark Woman) A delightfully ironic version of patriotism.
• “Ashenden was in the habit of asserting that he was never bored. it was one of his notions that only such persons were as had no resources in themselves and it was but the stupid that depended on the outside world for their amusement.” (Ch 7: A Trip to Paris)
• “It must be confessed that for the small fry like himself to be a member of the secret service was not as adventurous an affair as the public thought.” (Ch 7: A Trip to Paris)
• “She seemed to have a sneaking fondness for naval officers. I couldn't exactly blame her for that, they are attractive.” (Ch 7: A Trip to Paris)
• “The shy and eager lad, so impatient for life ( which he saw not in the present of his adolescence but only in the future of his manhood).” (Ch 10: The Traitor)
• “The small grey-green eyes ... were quick and shifty, but when the mind behind them was seized by an unexpected notion they were suddenly still.” (Ch 10: The Traitor)
• “Ashenden admired goodness, but he was not outraged by wickedness ... When he liked people it was not because he was blind to their faults.” (Ch 10: The Traitor)
• “Mr Harrington was a talker. He talked as though it were a natural function of the human being, automatically, as men breathe or digest their food; he talked not because he had something to say, but because he could not help himself.” (Ch 14: A Chance Acquaintance)
• “Any fool can waste money, but when you waste time you waste what is priceless.” (Ch 14: A Chance Acquaintance)
• “They went out into the street. There was hardly anybody to be seen. They walked along. The trams were not running and the silence in the great city was uncanny. The shops were closed. It was quite startling when a motor car dashed by at breakneck speed. The people they passed looked frightened and downcast. When they had to go through a main thoroughfare they hastened their steps. A lot of people were there and they stood about irresolutely as though they did not know what to do next. Reservists in their shabby grey were walking down the middle of the roadway in little bunches. They did not speak. They looked like sheep looking for their shepherd.” (Ch 16: Mr Harrington’s Washing) A wonderful description of a city in the middle of a revolution; desolation in the heart of civilization. Notice the short sentences, the absolute lack of melodrama, the simplicity. It is impossible to read without knowing that this is an eye-witness description.

W Somerset Maugham also wrote (reviewed in this blog):

• Of Human Bondage
• The Moon and Sixpence
• Cakes and Ale

December 2024, 304 pages

First published in March 1928 by Heinemann

My copy is the April 1928 reprint of that edition.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Season of the Swamp" by Yuri Herrera

 

Mid-19th century southern US society analysed from an outsider's viewpoint.

In 1853, exiled Mexican politician Benito Juarez arrived in New Orleans where he stayed for eighteen months, supporting himself by rolling cigars. This period is scarcely mentioned in his autobiography. This novel fills in the blanks, suggesting that his political education was shaped by witnessing the effects of slavery.

The narrative is in the third person part tense but seen from the perspective of the protagonist who is himself never named but referred to by the pronoun 'he'. Those who enforce the law are also unnamed and metonymically represented as ‘badges’, presumably in order to deny them personality.

There is plenty of incident in this book and some nicely drawn characters although the protagonist seems rather shadowy. There are some wonderful moments of prose.

Herrera's other novels have received a number of awards.

Selected quotes:

• “A drunk, wakening to the horrific news that he was no longer drunk, looked their way with the clear intention of asking for alms, but quickly changed his mind.” (Ch 1)
• “A thin balding man wrapped in a coat meant for bigger bones.” (Ch 1)
• “It sounded like French, but kind of bettered somehow, as if it had been unhitched from the dictionary and gone for a stroll.” (Ch 1)
• “Endless untroubled oaks just oaking around, as if, hands in pockets, they were merely watching folks go by.” (Ch 1)
• “An official document ... unlike a living paper is a tombstone, an impossibly thin grave etched in haughty grammar and a language spoken by no one.” (Ch 3)
• “Inheritance does nothing but perpetuate the number of people who are unproductive.” (Ch 3)
• “Don't believe all that nonsense about a few bad apples spoiling the good. Good apples are only good for show; the product you sell, those’re the bad ones.” (Ch 3)
• “It was as if the others had astigmatism: since everything was blurry, they decided to shoot at whatever was in front of them.” (Ch 3)
• “Could there be any place more interesting than the one where all the chaff gets tossed? That's where new things ferment, where people learn to innovate, even if those who did the tossing refuse to see it.” (Ch 4)
• “Oppressed and drunk is oppressed and docile.” (Ch 6)

December 2024; 163 pages

First published in Spanish in 2022

My edition was the 2024 &OtherStories translation by Lisa Dillman

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Vegetarian" by Han Kang

Winner of the 2016 International Booker Prize by the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature.

A bizarre dream persuades Yeong-Hye to become a vegan, alienating family and friends. After a dreadful family dinner-party, she attempts suicide and is taken to a mental hospital. On her release, her brother-in-law, a video artist becomes obsessed with her and, once again, things spiral out of control.

This short book is divided into three parts. The first is narrated by  Yeong-Hye's husband, an executive working long hours for promotion, whose main concern is how his wife's idiosyncracies will be perceived, and how they will affect him. The second part is narrated by the brother-in-law as he seeks to defuse his obsession with Yeong-Hye's birthmark by creating a piece of art; inevitably he goes too far. Yeong-Hye's sister, the owner of a successful shop, narrates the final part as she struggles to understand what has happened to the family. In this final part the narrative is fragmented and jumps around in time, as if to symbolise the confusion of mental illness. The story is told in the past tense throughout.

There are some remarkable and original descriptions, some of which I have included in the Selected Quotes below.

An eloquent exploration of individuality in a conformist society.

Selected quotes:

• “The loneliness of this cruel season began to make itself felt, seeping from the black opening of the ventilation fan above the bath, leaching out of the white tiles covering the floor and walls.” (1: The Vegetarian)
• “Her lips stained with blood like clumsily applied lipstick.” (1: The Vegetarian)
• “She watches the streaks of rain lashing the windows, with the untouched steadiness unique to those accustomed to solitude.” (3: Flaming Trees)
• “There is something battened down about the woods in this torrential rain, like a huge animal suppressing a roar.” (3: Flaming Trees)
• “The road gradually narrows and becomes winding, bringing the wet body of the woods undulating nearer.” (3: Flaming Trees)
• “His silence had the heavy mass of rock and the tenacious resistance of rubber.” (3: Flaming Trees)
• “The old bark on its lower part is dark as a drenched evening.” (3: Flaming Trees)
• “She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.” (3: Flaming Trees)

December 2024; 183 pages

Originally published as three separate novellas starting in 2000 and then assembled into a single novel in 2007 in South Korea.

My edition was translated by Deborah Smith and published by Granta in the UK in 2018

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman" by E W Hornung

Classic crime capers in which the protagonist is a debonair villain.

Hornung was the brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and this is a collection of short stories, originally published in magazines, which twists the basic format of crime stories told by the slightly stupid sidekick so that the hero, instead of being the detective, becomes the criminal. 

There's a long tradition in English literature of romanticising thieves, from Robin Hood and Dick Turpin to Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild, Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe and Macheath in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. The brilliant cricketer, ex-public school, sophisticated man-about-town character of Raffles is surely a progenitor of Psmith in the P G Wodehouse novels (starting with Mike and Psmith) and Lord Peter Wimsey in the novels by Dorothy L Sayers that start with Whose Body?

These stories are light-hearted pieces in which crime is portrayed as a bit of an adventure and the worst moral consequence of theft and even murder is nothing compared with the disgrace of failing to pay one's gambling debts. Nevertheless, the stories have an authentic ring achieved partly by careful research (how to break into a house using a diamond, brown paper and treacle) and by the author's effortless ability to recreate dialogue full of expressions used by Victorians in both the upper and the criminal classes.

Great fun.

Selected quotes:

• "I know a man when he gets his tongue between his teeth." (The Return Match)
• "I wrote neither well enough nor ill enough for success." (The Gift of the Emperor)
• "Raffles entirely disagreed with me. He shook his head over my conventional view. Human nature was a board of chequers; why not reconcile oneself to alternate black and white? Why desire to be all one thing or all the other, like our forefathers on the stage or in the old-fashioned fiction? For his part, he enjoyed himself on all squares of the board." (The Gift of the Emperor)

December 2024; 140 pages

First published in 1899

I read the 2003 Penguin Classics edition

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God