"Graven with Diamonds" by Nicola Shulman

 

A biography of Thomas Wyatt, twice sent to the Tower by Henry VIII and the man who introduced the sonnet to England. Winner of the 2011 Writer's Guild Award as best non-Fiction book.

Subtitled: The many lives of Thomas Wyatt: Poet, Lover, Statesman, and Spy in the Court of Henry VIII.

He must have been a remarkable man and his life is well-told by this very readable biography. A nice feature is the use of his poetry to explain what he might have been thinking as he took part in some of the momentous events of Henry VIII's reign, including the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn - was Wyatt one of her lovers or did he betray those who might have been?

She writes very well (“This was a time of immense change, when medieval values mingled with those of the inpouring Renaissance humanism in varying degrees of emulsification.”; Ch 1) and explains the historical contexts clearly, usually - but not always - explaining any archaic words.

I'd have liked more about the poetry: he was the first to use Italian forms such as the "eight-line strambotto and terza rima, as well as the Petrachan sonnet" (Ch 5) But I can't really complain because Shulman is quite explicit that her work is focused on the man, not the history of poetic techniques.

I was left wanting to know more about the poetry and some of the minor but fascinating characters in Wyatt's drama.

Selected quotes:

• “Kent was a turbulent region, sensitively located between London and continental Europe.” (Ch 1)
• “C S Lewis’s sense of humour is arguably his own weak point. There is only one joke in the Narnia books.” (Ch 1) What is it? I feel I should have been told!
• “Baldly put, Skelton believed that old texts and deep matters could be best understood through studying the commentaries of wise men, accumulated over centuries; Erasmus and Mountjoy respected these mediations as much as a picture conservator respects crude overpainting and yellow varnish on some fresh, delicate panel.” (Ch 2)
• “Wyatt has invoked the possibility of unconditional love and with that, he exits the Middle Ages. He leaves behind the medieval lover, that industrious model of masculinity who must always be doing something ... He becomes an inward man whose feedings towards women are not expressed by a series of prescribed, public actions but communed in tunnels of intimacy, from heart to open heart.” (Ch 9)
• “This was of interest ... for reasons beyond prurient curiosity: the arrested men were all in possession of extensive lands and offices, now about to come up for redistribution under the treason laws.” (Ch 12)
• “Descriptions of diplomatic heroism rose in inverse relation to diplomatic successes, as Henry's legates, whose missions were often doomed to failure through no fault of their own, pressed for the introduction of an effort grade as well as one for achievement.” (Ch 19)

May 2025, 355 pages
First published in the UK by Short Books in 2011
My Steerforth Press paperback was the first US edition and was issued in 2013

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

"Under Milk Wood" by Dylan Thomas

“To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.”

This is a play for voices, first performed on the radio with the mellifluous Richard Burton supplying the narration. It was written by Dylan Thomas who, as you can see in the quote above, had a way with words.

The story is set over a single day in the Welsh seaside town of Llareggyb - famously, Thomas originally used the name Llareggub because it was ‘bugger all’ backwards, but was persuaded to modify it.

It starts at night, with the inhabitants of the town asleep and dreaming. Typically, they dream of sex. Miss Price, for example, dreams of “her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samsonsyrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass'd and barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving hotwaterbottled body.” Sex pervades the play, portrayed, not in a romantic air-brushed light but as an everyday, matter-of-fact, warts-and-all, embodied coupling and conjugating.

Death is also present in dreams. Captain Cat dreams of drowned shipmates. Mrs Ogden-Pritchard is with both her husbands, Mr Ogden and Mr Pritchard, in her dreams.

The dawn arrives and the inhabitants wake and go about their daily lives. Willy Nilly postman delivers letters. Polly Garter scrubs a floor. Sinbad Sailors opens the pub. The children go to school. The listener follows, hopping from character to character. From time to time the narrator interrupts with a set piece, marking the hours of the day like a prayer:

• “There's the clip clop of horses on the sunhoneyed cobbles of the humming streets, hammering of horse- shoes, gobble quack and cackle, tomtit twitter from the bird-ounced boughs, braying on Donkey Down. Bread is baking, pigs are grunting, chop goes the butcher, milk-churns bell, tills ring, sheep cough, dogs shout, saws sing. Oh, the Spring whinny and morning moo from the clog dancing farms, the gulls' gab and rabble on the boat-bobbing river and sea and the cockles bubbling in the sand, scamper of sanderlings, curlew cry, crow caw, pigeon coo, clock strike, bull bellow, and the ragged gabble of the beargarden school as the women scratch and babble in Mrs Organ Morgan's general shop where everything is sold: custard, buckets, henna, rat-traps, shrimp-nets, sugar, stamps, confetti, paraffin, hatchets, whistles.”
• “The sunny slow lulling afternoon yawns and moons through the dozy town. The sea lolls, laps and idles in, with fishes sleeping in its lap. The meadows still as Sunday, the shut-eye tasselled bulls, the goat-and-daisy dingles, nap happy and lazy. The dumb duck-ponds snooze. Clouds sag and pillow on Llaregyb Hill. Pigs grunt in a wet wallow-bath, and smile as they snort and dream. They dream of the acorned swill of the world, the rooting for pig-fruit, the bagpipe dugs of the mother sow, the squeal and snuffle of yesses of the women pigs in rut. They mud-bask and snout in the pig-loving sun; their tails curl; they rollick and slobber and snore to deep, smug, after-swill sleep. Donkeys angelically drowse on Donkey Down.”

Many of the characters have wonderful names: PC Attila Rees. Polly Garter the good-time girl, Organ Morgan who likes to play his organ at night, Nogood Boyo, Lord Cut-Glass, Willy Nilly postman, Captain Tom Cat, Farmer Utah Watkins from Salt Lake Farm.

I was reminded of Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, another study of the inhabitants of a town. Both authors have a remarkable facility with words. They make their characters come alive. And, crucially, they show life in all its aspects, with empathy, without judgement. As Thomas says: “We are not wholly bad or good/ Who live our lives under Milk Wood.”

Selected quotes:

• “And before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes.”
• “A bit of stone with seaweed spread/ Where gulls come to be lonely.”
• “Mrs Dai Bread Two, gypsied to kill in a silky scarlet petticoat above my knees, dirty pretty knees, see my body through my petticoat brown as a berry, high-heel shoes with one heel missing, tortoiseshell comb in my bright black slinky hair, nothing else at all but a dab of scent, lolling gaudy at the doorway, tell your fortune in the tea-leaves, scowling at the sunshine, lighting up my pipe.”
• “I know what you're thinking, you poor little milky creature. You're thinking, you're no better than you should be, Polly, and that's good enough for me.”
• “From Beynon Butchers in Coronation Street, the smell of fried liver sidles out with onions on its breath.”
• “She feels his goatbeard tickle her in the middle of the world like a tuft of wiry fire, and she turns in a terror of delight away from his whips and whiskery conflagration.”
• “Mrs Pugh smiles. An icicle forms in the cold air of the dining-vault.” Not dining room! Vault. Connotations of a crypt.
• “The only sea I saw/ Was the seesaw sea/ With you riding on it./ Lie down, lie easy./ Let me shipwreck in your thighs.”
• “They make, in front of their looking-glasses, haughty or come-hithering faces for the young men in the street outside, at the lamplit leaning corners, who wait in the all-at-once wind to wolve and whistle.”

May 2025

Originally published in 1954

I read my 2025 Renard Press paperback edition while listening to the BBC Sounds original recording of the radio play version from 1954.

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

"Gliff" by Ali Smith

Gulliver in the land of the Houyhnhnms?

Two children, Briar and Rose, say goodbye to their mother and return home in the campervan with Leif. But someone has painted a red line around their home so they have to spend the night parked in a supermarket car park. But they wake up to find a red line around their campervan. Leif takes them to an abandoned house, gives them food and money and then leaves. And this is the start of a scary adventure in a dystopian world where even smart-watch wearing children can be Designated Data Collectors and those who are Unverified must hide in the shadows. 

And there is a grey horse in a field.

Ali Smith has total control over this narrative, rationing information in driblets. The reader tries to make sense of it and, like a child, pieces together the clues. There is horror but you never see the monsters full-on and that makes them even more terrifying. Especially since the worst thing comes from what is inside each one of us.

Her characterisations are also drawn with a few brief brush strokes and yet they are real people and I was utterly unprepared for the revelatory twist on page 214.

A dystopian masterpiece from a writer at the very top of her game.

Selected quotes:

• “It was like they all had their backs to me, even the ones facing me.” (Horse p7)
• “If you could take these boards up and look at what had ended up down there in that under-the-boards space it’d look like just dirt and grime. But you'd not just have DNA galore, you'd have the actual matter of what was left of those people and their times. This was a completely different sort of matter, the kind people say doesn't matter when they talk about what history is.” (Horse p 34)
• “The grey horse's bones were close to its skin all over it ... It moved with laidback strength and with a real weightiness though it wasn't weighty at all, it was as spare as a bare tree.” (Horse p 47)
• “You are bullying me with words longer than the length of my life, she said.” (Horse p 49)
• “We can't solve it. But we can still salve it.” (Horse p 52)
• “The horse was lightning white, all electricity. The lion was calm, dark, massive-pawed, dripping surreptitiousness. The horse, dismayed. The lion, shifty.” (Horse p 111)
• “All the people living here, including the feral children, were right now unverifiables. They were largely unverifiable because of words. One person here had been unverified for saying out loud that a war was a war when it wasn't permitted to call it a war. Another had found herself declared unverifiable for writing online that the killing of many people by another people was a genocide. Another had been unverified for defaming the oil conglomerates by saying they were directly responsible for climate catastrophe. Another had been unverified for speaking at a protest about people's right to protest.” (Power p 162)
• “Was a horse more lost to the world, because of no words, or was the horse more found - or even founded - in the world because of no words? Were we in our worded world the ones who were truly deluded about where and what we believed about all the things we had words for?” (Power p 162)
• “I heard her voice in my head ... Bri. Don't be stupid. Why do you think they call it a net? Why do you think they call it a web?” (Power p 172)
• “Like there was such a thing as a family of words, one that stretched across different languages or touching on each other, hitting or striking each other, acting on each other, influencing each other, agreeing with each other or throwing each other out, disturbing each other, doing all of these things at once.” (Power p178)
• “Why are you such a walking question mark? she said to me. You even walk like a question mark would walk if it was a person.” (Power p 193)
• “The voids are where you learn what power does and what the word void can mean.” (Lines p 222)

Imagine that your nightmares survived the dawn and became everyday reality.

May 2025; 274 pages

Published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK in 2024

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

"The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu" by Joshua Hammer

The story of a massive smuggling operation to save mediaeval manuscripts from jihaidists.

There are two hooks. The first is that title. There seems to be a spate of books recently with the title The #name of a profession of #name of a place, such as The Bookseller of Kabul and The Beekeeper of Aleppo. Normally they leave me unmoved but when I saw this title, I knew I had to read the book. The second hook is the prologue which recounts the most dramatic incident recounted in the book, the sort of prologue that seems to be obligatory for this sort of book.

Duly hooked, I then moved into a five chapter section that recounts how Abdel Kader Haidara, our hero, became a librarian after inheriting his fathers collection of manuscripts. Timbuktu, where Haidara lived, had been one of the jewels of Islamic scholarship in the middle-ages and was home to about 400,000 manuscripts, some single pages, some books, which - because of trouble over the last few hundred years involving colonial rule and regular attempts by the local Tuaregs to gain independence - were mostly scattered in family collections and hidden in cellars and store rooms and caches in the desert. Haidara became recruited by the Ahmed Baba Institute to search out manuscripts and persuade their owners to lend, donate or sell them to a central library where they could be properly preserved (the dry desert conditions meant the manuscripts were unlikely to rot but termites were a huge problem) and archived. He also set up his own family library.

The second section of the book (another four chapters) considers the provenance of the fundamentalist jihadi Islamists who were to capture Timbuktu in April 2012. Here we are introduced to several of the main jihadi leaders.

Then we come to the meat of the book. Haidara realised that Islamists are likely to destroy many of the manuscripts because, besides Islamic teachings, many of them refer to secular matters, including history, medicine, astrology, magic and love poetry. So he started to smuggle them out of the now 45 libraries and back into hiding places with trusted residents. Then he realised that even this is insufficiently secure and organised a covert operation to move them by river to the Malian held city in the south.

Finally we learn of the defeat of the Islamists and the return of music and tourism. 

It's presented as a stirring adventure story, goodies versus baddies, with no attempt to consider alternative viewpoints. As such, it exceeds expectations. It is exciting. There is ever-present danger. There are moments when you wonder why any back-packing tourist would dream of exploring the frequently-god-forsaken corner of the earth, braving not just discomfort and disease but the threat of kidnap and murder. For those of us who like sitting comfortably at home, it's armchair excitement.

It also made me ask whether any work of art or cultural artefact is worth the price of a human life. But I suppose these things endure, testifying to the human spirit long after we temporary humans have turned to windblown dust.

Selected quotes: 

• “A Sudanese proverb from the time declared that ‘Salt comes from the north, gold from the south, and silver from the country of the white men, but the word of God and the treasures of wisdom are only to be found in Timbuctoo’” (Ch 2)
• “Timbuktu grew from a collection of tents and mud-and-wattle houses along the riverbank into a crossroads of the world and a collision point of two cultures - bringing together desert and river traffic in continuous and mutually enriching exchanges.” (Ch 2)
• “In 1995, the town had no newspapers, one radio station, and two phone lines.” (Ch 5)
• “We were sitting on carpets ... The salon was decorated with Tuareg swords and dusty family photographs, and a gas-operated ‘cooling machine’ stirred up the stultifying air, rattling as we talked.” (Ch 11)
• “The knife-edge summit of the giant dune, its surface intricately scalloped by the constant wind.” (Ch 11)
• “The forty-five libraries served as repositories for a total of 377,000 manuscripts.” (Ch 12)
• “The worship of saints and the construction of shrines had spread through much of the Islamic world following the death of the Prophet Muhammad ... It was not until the eighteenth century, when Muhammad Abd al Wahhab ... began his campaign of religious purification, that such rights and practices began to be seen as heretical.” (Ch 13)
• “The streets outside the noisy and squalid, a jumble of shabby concrete-block buildings and exhaust-spewing motorbikes.” (Ch 14)
• “Haidara kept a cell phone on each ear ... receiving reports from his couriers every few minutes: the sweat acted as an adhesive, gluing the device's to his ears.” (Ch 16)

May 2025; 242 pages

First published by Simon & Schuster in New York, USA in 2016

My Simon & Schuster paperback edition was issued in 2016

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

"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" by Muriel Spark

This delightful short novel sparked the classic film starring Maggie Smith. 

Miss Brodie is a spinster teacher at an Edinburgh girls' school in the 1930s. She has selected a small group of girls to hothouse; she attempts to indoctrinate them with the idea that culture, art and style are more important than practical subjects like arithmetic; she repeatedly praises Mussolini and other European fascists. She frequently sees 'her girls' outside school, including at the house of one of the teachers with whom she is having an affair. This unconventional approach to education puts her into conflict with the school establishment but they haven't any hard evidence to use against her. Miss Brodie's influence extends to attempting to manipulate the sex-lives of the girls as they reach maturity. Eventually one of them betrays her. 

Perhaps like a good teacher, this very short novel uses repetition. It has a recursive structure and repeatedly jumps between different times. For example, it starts by introducing the 'Brodie set', the six girls, at the age of sixteen before jumping back to when they were ten and being taught by Miss Brodie. Details about their adults lives are interposed: we know how Mary dies before the end of chapter one. This non-chronological narrative helps focus on the question of who betrayed Miss Brodie and on what grounds. It reminded me of the conversational narrative of The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford but this book employs an omniscient narrator telling the tale in the third person past tense so they can't be unreliable ... can they?

The ‘Brodie Bunch’ consist of six girls. They taught my Miss Jean Brodie for just two years, when they are ten and eleven, and her influence stays with them and shapes their characters.

The six girls are introduced in the first chapter. The three most important are Mary, the plump girl who isn't very clever and who always gets the blame; Rose who, we are repeatedly told, is or will become famous for sex; and Sandy, who has a strong interior monologue and is always telling herself stories in which she features as the heroic sidekick of a romantic hero from a novel. 

A theme of this book is Miss Brodie's belief: “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.” (Ch 1) [This is a modification of something claimed about Jesuit education; one of the other themes is religion and the tension in Scotland between Calvinism and Roman Catholicism.] On the other hand, as Scottish poet Rabbie Burns said: "The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!"

Another theme is that sexual desire inevitably disrupts the development of adolescents, particularly when it is bottled up as it is in the context of a single-sex school. It's also important (and potentially destructive) for spinsters and during the nineteen-thirties there were a lot of women left high and dry after their potential or actual partners had been killed during the First World War.

Selected quotes:
Pronouncements of Miss Jean Brodie:

• “I am putting old heads on your young shoulders ... and all my pupils are the crème de la crème.”  (Ch 1)
• “These years are still the years of my prime. It is important to recognise the years of one's prime, always remember that.” (Ch 1)
• “You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full.” (Ch 1)
• “There must needs be a leaven in the lump.” (Ch 5)

Others

• “Mary Macgegor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman, who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire.” (Ch 1)
• “Sandy was never bored, but she had to lead a double life of her own in order never to be bored.” (Ch 2)
• “Mona Lisa in her prime smiled in steady composure even though she had just come from the dentist and her lower jaw was swollen.” (Ch 2) She does indeed look like that!
• “She was not out of place amongst her own kind, the vigorous daughters of dead or enfeebled merchants, of ministers of religion, University professors, doctors, big warehouse owners of the past, or the owners of fisheries who had endowed these daughters with shrewd wits, high-coloured cheeks, constitutions like horses, logical educations, hearty spirits and private means. ... They went to lectures, tried living on honey and nuts, took lessons in German and then went walking in Germany; they bought caravans and went off with them into the hills among the lochs; they played the guitar, they supported all the new little theatre companies; they took lodgings in the slums and, distributing pots of paint, taught their neighbors the arts of simple interior decoration; they preached the inventions of Marie Stopes; they attended the meetings of the Oxford group and put spiritualism to their hawk-eyed test.” (Ch 3)
• “The school-mistresses were of a still more orderly type, earning their keep, living with aged parents and taking walks on the hills and holidays at North Berwick.” (Ch 3)
• “Those of Miss Brodie's kind were great talkers and feminists and, like most feminists, talked to men as man-to-man.” (Ch 3)
• “She turned to the blackboard and rubbed out with her duster the long division sum she always kept on the blackboard in case of intrusions from outside during any arithmetic periods when Miss Brodie should happen not to be teaching arithmetic.” (Ch 3)
• “Miss Brodie sat shrivelled and betrayed in her long preserved dark musquash coat. She had been retired before time. She said, ‘ I am past my prime’.” (Ch 3)
• “Miss Brodie was easily the equal of both sisters together, she was the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle and they were the squares on the other two sides.” (Ch 4)
• “There was a wonderful sunset across the distant sky, reflected in the sea, streaked with blood and puffed with avenging purple and gold as if the end of the world had come without intruding on every-day life.” (Ch 4)
• Calvinism, in the opinion of one of the characters, is the "belief that God had planned for practically everybody before they were born a nasty surprise when they died.” (Ch 5)
• “Miss Brodie ... had elected herself to grace in so particular way and with more exotic suicidal enchantment than if she had simply taken to drink like other spinsters who couldn't stand it anymore.” (Ch 5)
• “It was plain that Miss Brodie wanted Rose with her instinct to start preparing to be Teddy Lloyd’s lover, and Sandy with her insight to act as Informant on the affair. It was to this end that Rose and Sandy had been chosen as the crème de la crème. There was a whiff of sulphur about the idea.” (Ch 5)

I did the maths problem mention in chapter four. It seems to me that the two questions are the same. "c.g." stands for centre of gravity (now called centre of mass) which is the place you would have to hold the ladder to keep it horizontal. By taking moments you can calculate that you would need to support the ladder 4.5 feet from the bucket.

It's an entertaining novel and an easy read yet it manages to explore in depth the characters of Miss Brodie and Sandy. Deservedly a classic.

It was chosen by Time magazine as one of the best 100 English novels since Time began (1923)

Other Muriel Spark novels reviewed in this blog:

• Memento Mori (1959)
• The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
• A Far Cry from Kensington (1988)

May 2025; 128 pages
Originally published in 1961 by the New Yorker in the USA and by Macmillan in the UK
My Penguin paperback edition was issued in 2000

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

"White Nights" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

An incredibly lonely young man meets a manipulative woman in a story filled with ambiguities, contradictions and half-turhs.

 A short story rather than a novel; nevertheless I regard it worthy of a blog entry in its own right. It is Dostoevsky after all. And absolutely jam-packed with interest.

It is subtitled: “A sentimental story from the diary of a dreamer.”

Plot with spoilers.

The unnamed narrator is a very lonely man, so lonely that he talks to houses. His awkward manners have driven away any friends he might have had. He regards the people he sees every day on the street as his friends, although he can never summon up the courage to talk to them. As a result, “They, of course, do not know me, but I know them.” Even his emotions are controlled by others: if the people he ‘knows’ are smiling he feels happy etc. 

But in this season of 'white nights' (June 11th to July 2nd when there is twilight at midnight because St Petersburg is so close to the Arctic Circle) people are starting to go off to their summer estates so he's missing even these familiar faces and he feels lonelier still.

So lonely that he even anthopomorphises the houses he passes in the street. He imagines one “cute rosy-pink” (and feminine) being painted yellow [which was the colour of lunatic asylums] thus being defiled by barbarians. Is this some sort of rape fantasy; does it imply a patriarchal assumption that a ‘used’ woman is defiled? There's something creepy about his loneliness.

He's also, by his own account, inexperienced with women. “I am a complete stranger to women. ... I am twenty-six and I have never seen any one” though he later qualifies this by saying that he has met two or three landladies [I presume they are lower class so they don’t count; I wasn't sure whether he is a virgin because in those days sex with prostitutes didn't necessarily count]. 

He encounters a girl weeping on the embankment. He passes by, unable to speak, until a drunk chases her and he runs after then to save her from being insulted. The ice broken, he walks her home and begs to meet again the following night. He's so lonely he has fallen in love at once - he tells her “I shall be dreaming of you all night, a whole week, a whole year.” This behaviour might today be seen as a bit stalkerish.

The second night, she asks to know his 'history'. He grows alarmed: "Who has told you I have a history? I have no history. ... I have lived ... keeping myself to myself, that is, utterly alone.” He then goes into a long speech which reveals almost nothing of his 'history' (he doesn't even tell her his name). Instead, he calls himself “a type ... an original ... an absurd person ... a dreamer” and this initiates a long speech full of passion and long paragraphs that reminded me of the character of the Underground Man in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. 

She then tells him her 'history'; she too has a highly-restricted social life being (literally) pinned to the skirt of her grandmother in the evenings. Nevertheless she has got a boyfriend who has promised to marry her when he gets back from a year making money in Moscow. However, the year is over and he hasn't returned. The narrator suggests she writes a letter but she already has and she asks him to deliver it which sounds a bit manipulative to me.

By the fourth night when the boyfriend still hasn't shown up she decides to dump him and the narrator professes his love for her and she accepts. They make plans to marry. But as they return to her home, the ex-boyfriend turns up and she goes back to him.

The next day, alone again with his landlady, he imagines growing old, a lonely man. 

Style

The opening line is: “It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader.” The concept is that these are extracts from a diary, but right from the start, Dostoevsky directly addresses the reader in the character of the narrator.

Ambiguity is built into the dialogue through the repeated use of ellipses. This reminded me of how the dialogues in The Turn of the Screw by Henry James frequently used this device to enable to Governess to make assumptions about the motivations of the other characters.

Unreliability is also an integral part of the story. For example, on the third night the narrator tells us “she has not come” when he arrives at their rendezvous and then, after meeting her, "she arrived a whole hour before I did.” Much of what Nastenka says is either manifestly untrue (she can't always be pinned to her grandmother since she is able to meet the narrator on the embankment four nights in a row) or self-contradictory. 

And there's a lot that isn't said. The narrator never tells us his name and gives us very little of his history. Nastenka refuses to specify the "pranks" that got her into trouble when she was fifteen.

Characters:
The narrator-protagonist is unnamed. He calls himself a dreamer. He is socially awkward, interacting so badly with those who try to befriend him that he drives them away. As a result he is lonely. He is too shy to initiate conversations and when chance in the shape of an alpha male who tries to assault a weeping young girl leads to an encounter, he almost instantly and rather creepily falls in love with her. He is passionate and unrestrained and self-obsessed and emotionally crippled and perhaps unreliable and lying to us. 

Nastenka, the young girl. At first sight she is also emotionally crippled, being (literally) pinned to her blind grandmother's dress. Nevertheless, she has rebelled. When she was fifteen she “got into mischief; what I did I won't tell you; it's enough to say that it wasn't very important.” As a result, she has been effectively imprisoned at home. But this can't be true because she has no problem meeting the narrator on four consecutive nights. She's a liar. She's also a manipulator. When the narrator urges her to write a letter to her boyfriend, it appears she has already written one which she wants him to deliver. She teases him along - even when they are waiting to together to meet her ex on the 3rd night, she takes the narrator's hand because, she tells him, she wants her boyfriend to see how fond she and the narrator are of one another; when, also on the 3rd night, they decide that the ex isn't coming she tells the narrator: “We shall always be together shan’t we?” and he thinks “Oh, Nastenka, Nastenka! If only you knew how lonely I am now!” - and when on the fourth night he finally confesses his love for her she acts surprised but she is clearly pretending: “I knew you loved me long ago, only I always thought that you simply liked me very much.” In the end, when she decides that she has been dumped by her ex, she almost immediately settles for second-best in the form of the narrator ... and then dumps him with alacrity when the ex turns up. She still wants to string him along, telling him in a letter he receives on the morning after the fourth night: “You have forgiven me, haven’t you? You love me as before? ... You will like him, won’t you?” Talk about eating your cake and still wanting to have it! I reckon the narrator has had a lucky escape.

Nastenka's grandmother is blind and has hitherto strictly controlled Nastenka, She was concerned that the lodger with whom Nastenka does fall in love is "youngish" and "pleasant-looking" (according to Nastenka). Nevertheless, towards the end of the story she is looking for a new lodger and she seeks an eligible young man because she wants to get Nastenka married off. 

Matrona, the narrator's landlady, is described as “always thoughtful and depressed” in the Second Night and she isn’t bothered about the spiders’ webs in his room, but by the last section (Morning) she has cleaned the place so that, as she says, “you can have a wedding here”. She seems to mimic the narrator, starting as a dreamer and later becoming actively involved. At then end, when he imagines growing old, it is her he sees. 

Cultural references:
During the narrator's long impassioned speech during the second night, he lists a number of things of which he dreams:

• “Friendship with Hoffmann”. I presume this is E T A Hoffmann, a leading romantic writer in the 19th century, whose stories formed the basis for Offenbach’s opera ‘Tales from Hoffmann’, and one of whose short stories inspired Tchaikobsky’s Nutcracker suite
• “St Bartholomew’s Night” Does this refer to the St Bartholomew's day massacre in France?
• “Diana Vernon” who is a character in Walter Scott’s Rob Roy
• “Playing the hero at the taking of Kazan by Ivan Vassilyevich” Ivan Vassilyevich is the tsar better known as Ivan IV 'the Terrible'. He besieged and captured Kazan in 1552, massacring the mainly Tatar population and putting an end to the Khanate of Kazan which was incorporated into the Russian Empire.
• “Clara Mowbray” is the heroine of another Waverley novel by Sir Walter Scott, this one called St Ronan’s Well.
• “Effie Deans” is yet another Scott heroine, this time from The Heart of Midlothian. At the start of the novel she is in prison for child murder. After her half-sister Jeanie walks all the way to London to secure a royal pardon for her, Effie flees with her lover. Years later she visits Jeanie as ‘Lady Staunton’ and explains to Jeanie “I am a liar of fifteen years standing”. Is she the model of another mendacious woman?
• “The council of prelates and Huss before them”. Jan Hus, a Czech theologian and proto-Protestant, was convicted of heresy at a church council which he attended after being given a safe-conduct; he was burnt at the stake.
• “The rising of the dead in ‘Robert the Devil’”. This is a chorus from act 3 of the opera Robert le diable by Meyerbeer
• “Minna and Brenda” are characters in ‘The Pirate’ by - guess! - Walter Scott
• “The battle of Berezina” was an action of 1812 in which the Russians failed to destroy the retreating French under Napoleon as they crossed the river of Berezina. 
• “Danton” is, I presume, the French revolutionary
• “Cleopatra ei suoi amante” is Cleopatra and her lover. Another doomed love affair.
• “A little house in Kolomna”. Kolomna is the name of the district in St Petersburg where Dostoevsky lived for a while.

Nastenka also has read the entire oeuvre of Sir Walter Scott (her favourite is Ivanhoe). She has also read Pushkin. Her granny refuses to let her read French novels.

The lodger-boyfriend takes her and granny to the opera, starting with The Barber of Seville by Rossini. This involves a woman (Rosina) who is kept secluded by her guardian (because he wants her dowry, does Nastenka's granny have a financial motive to her holding on to Nastenka?). Count Almavira wants to marry Rosina and to gain access to her disguises himself as first a poor student, then a drunken soldier and then a singing teacher. Rosina at one moment agrees to marry her guardian but is later persuaded to marry the Count, so another example of a flip-flopping woman. The 'Barber' himself is Figaro (Mozart's opera, the Marriage of Figaro, is based on the sequel which was regarded as subversive to the point of seditious when it was written). 

Questions I still haven't answered:

1. Why is the narrator anonymous? (And ‘the lodger’)
2. Is the narrator reliable? To what extent can we trust what he says?
3. Is Nastenka manipulating him? He tells her to write a letter to the lodger ... and she already has it written!
4. In the first part, is NP really a rather sinister stalker?
5. Does NP actually post the letter to the lodger? He offers to be an intermediary but is this so that he can keep the lovers apart?

Selected quotes:

• “In these corners ... quite a different life is lived, quite unlike the life that is surging round us, but such as perhaps exists in some unknown realm, not among us in our serious, over-serious, time. Well, that life is a mixture of something purely fantastic, fervently ideal, with something ... dingily prosaic and ordinary, not to say incredibly vulgar.” (2nd night)
• “The dreamer ... is not a human being, but a creature of an intermediate sort. For the most part he settles in some inaccessible corner, as though hiding from the light of day; once he slips into his corner, he grows to it like a snail. ... Why do you suppose he is so fun of his four walls, which are invariably painted green, grimy, dismal and reeking unpardonably of tobacco smoke? Why is it that when this absurd gentleman is visited by one of his few acquaintances (and he ends by getting rid of all his friends), why does this absurd person meet him with such embarrassment, changing countenance and overcome with confusion, as though he had only just committed some crime within his four walls?” (2nd night)
• “He cannot himself remember what he was dreaming. But a vague sensation faintly stirs his heart and sets it aching, some new desire temptingly tickles and excites his fancy, and imperceptibly evokes a swarm of fresh phantoms. Stillness reigns in the little room; imagination is fostered by solitude and idleness; it is faintly smouldering, faintly simmering, like the water with which old Matrona is making her coffee.” (2nd night)
• “Today was a gloomy, rainy day without a glimmer of sunlight, like the old age before me.” (3rd night)
• "Why is it that even the best of men always seem to hide something from other people?” (3rd night)
• “My God, how it has all ended! What it has all ended in!” (4th night)
• “I saw myself just as I was now, fifteen years hence, older, in the same room, just as solitary.” (Morning)
• “My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man’s life?” (Morning)

Novels by Dostoevsky reviewed in this blog:

• The Brothers Karamazov
• The Double
• Notes from Underground

Originally published in Russian in 1848

I read a translation into English, part of 'Greatest Short Stories of Dostoevsky' published by Fingerprint in paperback in 2025

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

"TIME / LIFE" by Catherine Mayer

 

An exploration of love in the face of loss.

Dory Silver, a journalist whose partner Morgen, a musician, is seriously, perhaps terminally, ill, is on stage to interview tech billionaire Elo Ó hAllmhuráin (pronounced O’Halloran) when he takes her into the future in his time machine to prove to her that time travel is possible. Unfortunately things go wrong. Stuck in the future, Dory remembers her life while trying to find a way to escape back to the past. 

It's a lot more than a homage to The Time Machine by H G Wells. It has a clever plot, alternating past and future, with a number of twists. 

There are elements of autofiction. The subtitle is "A Memoir by Dory Silver" and in the afterword, 'A Note from Catherine Mayer', the author continues the pretence that the narrative was sent to her by email. There are real people thoughout the plot eg Hayflick of the Hayflick limit (a maximum number of cell divisions enforcing a maximum human life span), Kurzweil the futurologist, and David Bowie. Both fictional Dory and real-life author Mayer have worked for TIME magazine. In particular there are a number of references to Andy Gill, late musician and member of the Gang of Four and Mayer's partner in real life, perhaps a prototype for the character of Morgen. All these things add verisimilitude (which is something a time travel narrative needs). 

There are a lot of moments where Mayer subtly plays with time. For example, it is suggested that Morgen has Covid even though he developed the disease before it emerged in China: time travel or coincidence? Dory, remembering her anonymity at university, thinks  “Ignorance and curiosity are the true comfort of strangers.” (part 1: 00:00) Dory in the future recalls this statement and thinks it is a quote but can’t remember who said it. Another little hint that the time of one's life can be convoluted.

Here are some more quotes from the text referring to time (and there are many more):

• “Every hour is happy hour. A smattering of customers, seated at the bar, abstracted and solitary, belied that message.” (part 1: 00:00)
• “Every slither of Life becomes memory ... Every memory dissolves. This too shall pass.” (part 1: 01:00)
• “The butterflies had quit the tree to flit in a haze of dandelion clocks.” (part 1: 02:00)
• “Nostalgia rarely survives close inspection. Zoom in on any period and it resolves into pixels, the good, the bad, the banal, the beautiful, all mixed together, as if in varying proportions.” (part 1: 03:00)

But where the book really takes off is in its exploration of the love between hard-bitten journalist Dory and the possibly dying Morgen. Love in the face of loss. It is tender, it is tragic, it is everyday. 

Characters

• As a largely autobiographical narrator-protagonist, the character of Dory Silver is very well developed. 
• Given that Morgen, Dory's partner, spends most of the time ill in bed, it must have been difficult to develop their character, but they nevertheless come across as three dimensional and real. I presume this is because they are based on Andy Gill, although they exist without pronouns and there's a hint that this might not be a cis relationship given that Dory states: “Our biologies may have ruled out natural conception, but nature can be circumvented.” (Part 2: 08:00). 
• The other main character, Elo the tech billionaire, a tech billionaire who has developed phones and tablets, computer games (one is called Morlocks, presumably in homage to The Time Machine), and a social media site called Fleet which fosters extremist views, transcends the initial satire to become considerably more complex and interesting. 

Selected quotes:

•  “Expecting, people call her condition. though she has glowered rather than glowed through these last long months, she takes no comfort in their expiration.” (part 1: 00:00)
• “In the few seconds it took to remove it, decipher the inscription, intimacy kit, and drop it back in its tray, the refrigerator charged her room.” (part 1: 00:00)
• “Hunger shook Dory awake in the morning, tapped her on the shoulder before she finished breakfast and lodged petitions every few minutes for the rest of the day.” (part 1: 05:00)
• “Cities tend to offer more and better insights into civilizations than rural areas.” (part 1: 05:00)
• “You eat what you are.” (Part 2: 08:00)
• “Unstructured time is the agar jelly in which ideas grow, no matter how dangerous these might prove.” (Part 2: 09:00) aka The devil makes work for idle hands.
• “Popular culture might depict cuckolds as avenging furies, but it's their unfaithful partners who behave as if they've been wronged.” (Part 2: 10:00)
• “She had assumed Elo to be criminally reckless in the way of many tycoons, their products and services faulty, their data -gathering dangerous, their contributions to climate change oversized, their wealth obscene.” (Part 2: 10:00)
• “Hatred is a virus that leaps from one host to another.” (Part 2: 10:00)

This debut novel is more than a remarkably intelligent contribution to the genre of time travel; it is also a eloquent and moving love letter to those lost through the pandemic.

May 2025; 213 pages

My pre-publication edition was issued by Renard Press in 2025

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

"James" by Percival Everett

 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain retold from the point of view of runaway slave Jim. Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.

It seems that retelling classic stories is in vogue. I enjoyed Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys which took the character of Bertha Rochester nee Mason from Jane Eyre and used the change of perspective as a feminist critique. I adored Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead which relocated David Copperfield to Appalachia. She developed a much stronger voice for her protagonist than Dickens had for his and the theme of drug addiction gave her novel urgency. 

Similarly, Everett's theme is the despicable crime against humanity that is slavery and the associated denial of human dignity to people of African ancestry. His strategy for highlighting this is to make James and his fellow slaves far more articulate than their stereotypes as found, for example, in Twain's novel. They use the slave patois as a disguise so the white folks don't realise that the slaves are intelligent; this would scare the whites, endangering the slaves. As James says: “Safe movement through the world dependent on mastery of language, fluency.” (1.2) 

It's a clever trick. But it seems to be Everett's only trick, apart from the change in perspective from Huck to James. After a while, he seemed to be repeating the same joke in case the reader hadn't cottoned on earlier. Otherwise this is a straightforward novel. Inevitably, given that Twain's original was a picaresque, this one has to be loosely structured which made it feel disorganised. This made some of the resolutions feel coincidental and contrived. 

The most interesting part, for me, revolved around Huck's changing relationship with James and how his experiences matured him, leading him to the statement “‘I don't like white folks,’ he said. ‘And I is one.’” (1.5) while still leaving his behaviour warped by the deep-seated subconscious attitudes he had developed through his childhood.

It was an easy read and an entertaining one but somehow it always stayed, for me, as a shadow of Huckleberry Finn rather then blossoming into a work of literature in its own right. 

I suspect that the reason I was underwhelmed by a book that others rate so highly is that this is a book that relies for its power on what it says (a perceptive condemnation of slavery and racism) but was less innovative than I had been led to expect in how it said it.

Selected quotes:

• “Those boys couldn't sneak up on a blind and deaf man while a band was playing.” (1.1)
• “Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.” (1.2)
• “If’n ya gots to hab a rule to tells ya wha’s good, if’n ya gots to hab good ‘splained to ya, den ya cain’t be good. If’n ya need sum kinds God to tells ya right from wrong, den you won’t never know.” (1.12)
• “Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ‘em.” (1.21)
• “Even in hell, were there such a place, one would know where the fires were just a little cooler, where the rocks were just a little less jagged.” (3.5)

May 2025; 303 pages

First published in 2024 in the USA by Doubleday

My paperback edition issued in the UK in 2025 by Picador

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