"Death at a Shetland Festival" by Marsali Taylor

 When a famous folk musician is stabbed at a folk festival, supersleuth Cass Lynch and Gavin her policeman boyfriend are in the audience. Is the death connected with the diary Cass has found and with the lochside death of a young girl, both of which happened many years ago, when the murder victim was on the island?

This is the twelfth in the Shetland Mysteries starring Cass and Gavin and Cat and Kitten (and now Julie, Kitten's kitten). There is perhaps less sailing this time but the book is still full of the wonder of Shetland. The major change is that we, the reader, get to read extracts from the diary which Cass, full of concern for privacy, doesn't. This means that the reader is a step ahead of Cass and the police; it meant that I worked out whodunnit before they did (for almost the first time in the series). I think I enjoyed it even more because I could spot the tiny clues that Cass didn't spot until later. But I don't read the Shetland Mysteries books in order to solve the crime; they are much better than the run of the mill murder mysteries because I have grown to know the characters and I want to see them develop and I adore the setting and the storytelling is simply superb.

I loved the concept of the gorilla video too. It opens up realms of uncertainty in a murder-mystery. I've seen it before and I reacted just as Cass did.

As usual there are some beautiful descriptions and a nail-biting climax. Another page-turner from Ms Taylor.

Selected quotes:

• "A snake's wedding of black cables." (Ch 1)
• "She leaned back in her chair as if her bones wouldn't hold her upright." (Ch 3)
• "Kitten greeted me on the doorstep with a flourish of her pale-tipped tail, then bounded off into the garden. I wasn't sure whether she was supremely confident that Cat wouldn't let anyone kidnap their baby, or whether she was getting bored with motherhood and rather hoped someone would." (Ch 10)
• "You'd still take Gavin and him for twins, but from some eighteenth-century morality tale: the twin who'd embraced virtue, all glowing health ... and the twin who'd embraced vice, with dark pouches under his eyes and dragged-down corners to his mouth." (Ch 12)
• "The grass in the ponies' field was soft green, sprinkled with daisies, and the first yellow marsh marigolds fringed the chuckling burn." (Ch 17)
• "The bright spring greens and yellows  beyond our sit-ootery window were muted, and the trees loomed insubstantial in a sea of white." (Ch 21)

Many thanks to the author for providing me with a signed copy of this book!

February 2025; 316 pages

Published as a paperback in 2024 by Headline Accent

This is the twelfth novel in a crime fiction series that gets better and better. The books, in order, with alternative names, are:

• Death on a Shetland Longship
• The Trowie Mound Murders (Buried in a Shetland Tomb)
• A Handful of Ash (The Shetland Night Killings)
• The Body in the Bracken (Grave of a Shetland Sailor)
• Ghosts of the Vikings (The Shetland Poisonings)
• Death in Shetland Waters
• Death on a Shetland Isle
• Death from a Shetland Cliff
• The Shetland Sea Murders
• A Shetland Winter Mystery
• Death in a Shetland Lane
• Death at a Shetland Festival

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

"The Way of All Flesh" by Samuel Butler

 

The book that exposed of the myth of the Victorian happy family.

Published posthumously in 1903 and closely based on his own experiences, Butler's hero is a young lad whose parents are determined not to 'spare the rod and spoil the child'. The clergyman father (who was himself bullied into becoming a vicar) is obsessed with controlling every aspect of his son's life; the mother is an expert in emotional blackmail. Young Ernest is unhappy at home, unhappy at school, unhappy in his chosen profession and unhappy in marriage. 

It is narrated by Mr Overton, a sort of fairy godfather who is very much the author himself but older, observing the vicissitudes of his young self, which means that Butler is author, narrator and protagonist, which mostly works.

The plot is somewhat slow to get going in that we must first learn how Ernest's great-grandfather was a humble but happy carpenter; he and his wife were childless until late in life and consequently spoiled their son (Ernest's grandfather) who was swiftly taken up by a childless uncle and brought up to become his heir in his publishing business. He was focused on the business rather than his family and “When a man is very fond of his money it is not easy for him at all times to be very fond of his children also.” (Ch 5) Discovering the problem that a child have a mind of his (or her) own (the eternal problem of God giving mankind free will and no doubt swiftly regretting it, hence the Flood), “He thrashed his boys two or three times a week and some weeks of good deal oftener, but in those days fathers were always thrashing their boys.” (Ch 5). So Theobald, Ernest's father, grew up to become a clergyman, despite not really wanting to, became married without really realising what he was getting himself into, and replicated his father's behaviour with Ernest his eldest son in particular. 

It feels as if what should be a bildungsroman centred on Ernest has had an extensive prologue, as if Butler isn't quite sure where to start or on whom to focus. 

The end of the novel, in which a number of things are swiftly resolved in order to get us to the happy ending so beloved of the English novel (and that's not really a spoiler because there are authorial digressions in which the 'Mr Overton' discusses with Ernest whether to include certain evidence about his upbringing so we know that he at least survives). 

The only real tension is provided by the fact that Ernest has been left a substantial inheritance but isn't allowed to know this until he reaches 28 without becoming bankrupt and there are times in his chequered career when bankruptcy seems a strong possibility.

The characters tend to be a little one-dimensional. Theobald the father is fundamentally a control freak who uses money as both a carrot and a stick to keep Ernest obedient. Christina, Ernest's mother, is a dab hand at emotional blackmail and can extract any secret from Ernest. Ernest's brother and sister are little more than ciphers. Miss Pontifex, Ernest's aunt, is temporarily a fairy godmother, Mr Overton is a rather more distant god (perhaps he sees himself as the Duke in Measure for Measure, setting the game going and then watching to see what happens). Ernest himself is an innocent dupe of almost everyone.

But we're not reading this book for its characters or its sometimes over-constructed plot. It's talent lies in the cynical way in which Butler tilts at almost every Victorian shibboleth. For example: “I think the Church catechism has a great deal to do with the unhappy relations which commonly even now exist between parents and children. That work was written too exclusively from the parental point of view; the person who composed it did not get a few children to come in and help him ... nor should I say it was the work of one who liked children ... The general impression it leaves ... is that ... the mere fact of being young at all has something with it that savours more or less distinctly of the nature of sin.” (Ch 7) Not only is he taking aim at the 'family' as a sacred cow, in particular the idea (which we still have) that the young should kowtow to the old, but he is doing that by attacking Christianity. He continues with attacks on marriage (“I know many old men and women who are reputed moral, but who are living with partners whom they have long since ceased to love.”; Ch 9), education (“Never learn anything until you find you have been made uncomfortable for a good long while by not knowing it.”; Ch 31) high culture and truth but he returns time and again to parenthood. There's even a moment when Theobald considers Ernest's death: “Then his thoughts turned to Egypt and the tenth plague. It seemed to him that if the little Egyptians had been anything like Ernest, the plague must have been something very like a blessing in disguise. If the Israelites were to come to England now he should be greatly tempted not to let them go.” (Ch 29) In the Exodus, when the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, God sent a series of plagues to harm the Egyptians and to persuade them to release the Egyptians. The tenth plague was when God sent his angels to murder the eldest child in every Egyptian house. The angel passed over the houses of the Israelites because each Israeli household had killed a lamb or a young goat and daubed its blood on their door-frame as a sign to the murdering angel. This is the meaning of Passover: that God kills kids.

This can be funny, it is certainly refreshing.

Selected quotes:

• “We must judge men not so much by what they do, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do.” (Ch 1)
• “In those days children's brains were not overtasked as they are now; perhaps it was for this very reason that the boy showed an avidity to learn.” (Ch 2)
• “Some poets always begin to get groggy about the knees after running for seven or eight lines.” (Ch 4)
• “He was too religious to consider Fortune a deity at all; he took whatever she gave and never thanked her, being firmly convinced that whatever he got to his own advantage was of his own getting. and so it was, after Fortune had made him able to get it.” (Ch 5)
• “He who does not consider himself fortunate is unfortunate.” (Ch 5)
• “It is far safer to know too little than too much. People will condemn the one, though they will resent being called upon to exert themselves to follow the other.” (Ch 5)
• “Young people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.” (Ch 6)
• “To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised season - delightful if it happens to be a favoured one, but in practice very rarely favoured and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruit.” (Ch 6)
• “He feared the dark scowl which would come over his father's face upon the slightest opposition.” (Ch 7)
• “Tennyson has said that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, but he has wisely refrained from saying whether they are good things or bad things.” (Ch 8)
• “Papas and mammas sometimes ask young men whether their intentions are honourable towards their daughters. I think young men might occasionally ask papas and mamas with their intentions are honourable before they accept invitations to houses where there are still unmarried daughters.” (Ch 9)
• “Theobald was not the ideal she had dreamed of when reading Byron upstairs with her sisters, but he was an actual within the bounds of possibility, and, after all, not a bad actual as actuals went.” (Ch 11)
• “All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.” (Ch 19)
• “We forget that every clergyman with a living or curacy is as much a paid advocate as the barrister who is trying to persuade a jury to acquit a prisoner. We should listen to him with the same suspense of judgment, the same full consideration of the arguments of the opposing counsel, as a judge does when he is trying a case.” (Ch 26)
• “If I was a light of literature at all it was of the very lightest kind.” (Ch 27)
• “Truth might be heroic, but it was not within the range of practical domestic policies.” (Ch 39)
• “I believe, that if the truth were known, it would be found that even the valiant Saint Michael himself tried hard to shirk from his famous combat with the dragon: he pretended not to see all sorts of misconduct on the dragon's part; shut his eyes to the eating up of I do not know how many hundreds of men, women and children who he had promised to protect; allowed himself to be publicly insulted a dozen times over without resenting it; and in the end when even an angel could stand it no longer he shilly-shallied and temporised an unconscionable time before he would fix the day and hour for the encounter.” (Ch 40)
• “Life is like a fugue, everything must grow out of the subject and there must be nothing new.” (Ch 46)
• “He saw plainly enough that, whatever else might be true, the story that Christ had died, come to life again, and been carried from Earth through clouds into the heavens could not now be accepted by unbiassed people.” (Ch 64)
• “Even Euclid, who has laid himself as little open to the charge of credulity as any writer who ever lived ... has no demonstrable first premise.” (Ch 65)
• “There are orphanages ... for children who have lost their parents - oh! why, why, are there no harbours of refuge for grown men who have not yet lost to them.” (Ch 67)
• “Surely if people are born rich or handsome they have a right to their good fortune.” (Ch 68)
• “Now her object was not to try and keep sober, but to get gin without her husband's finding out.” (Ch 74)
• “There is nothing an old bachelor likes better than to find a married man who wishes he had not got married.” (Ch 75)

February 2025; 430 pages

First published 1903

My Penguin paperback edition was issued in 1966

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

"Heartburn" by Nora Ephron

A roman a clef in which the author turns the break-up of her marriage into light comedy.

It's narrated in the first person and the past tense. The author disguises herself as a food writer but the husband/ villain is rather more thinly disguised as a Washington reporter (in reality he was Carl Bernstein, one of the investigative reporters who exposed the Watergate scandal). The novel was adapted into a film.

It is frenetically fast-paced and full of quips, like the romantic comedy movies Ephron wrote, directed and produced. It reminded me of an American sitcom. I didn't find it particularly amusing.

It starts with a great hook: “The reason I was hardly in a position to date on first learning that my second husband had taken a lover was that I was seven months pregnant.” (Ch 1) I should immediately have sympathised with the main character. But I couldn't. She didn't seem heart-broken, in fact even that hook itself is written as part of a joke. This should be a major tragedy in her life and she is wise-cracking. Perhaps her relentless humour is a defence strategy but it worked in the sense that I never had any sense that there was a vulnerable human underneath the robotic comedy. 

It helps that there are no financial pressures: she leaves her husband and takes her two-year-old son and heavily pregnant self to New York by air; here she squats in her father's apartment. The kid is never an inconvenience; she does what she wants and always finds a maid to take care of it. In New York she is held up at gunpoint but even this is scarcely traumatic. The book skated along on wisecracks and trivialities and never challenged my emotions at all. 

She describes a typical dinner-party conversation thus: “Then we would move on to the important matters. Should they paint their living room peach? Should they strip down their dining table? Should they buy a videotape recorder? Should they re-cover the couch?” (Ch 7) I suppose most life is fundamentally trivial and this contributed to the novel's verisimilitude. But basically I didn't care. It's not as if her trivialities are everyday trivialities, cocooned as she is in her privileged world as a best-selling cookery writer married to a heavily-syndicated journalist. There are no ordinary people in her social circle, even her therapy group has a famous actress in it. 

If you like lightweight froth (and it shouldn't be lightweight froth, it's about a marriage breaking up), this is the book for you.

Selected quotes:

• “My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone would do it for you.” (Ch 2)
• “If pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters.” (Ch 4)
• “There's a real problem in dragging a group into a book: you have to introduce six new characters ... who are never going to be mentioned again in any essential way but who nonetheless have to be sketched in.” (Ch 4)
• “That's what marriage is ... after a certain point it's just patch, patch, patch.” (Ch 4)
• “It's true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own.” (Ch 7)
• “You know how old you have to be before you stop wanting to fuck strangers? ... Dead, that's how old.” (Ch 8)
• “When you have a baby you set off an explosion in your marriage ... all the power struggles of the marriage have a new playing field.” (Ch 11)

February 2025; 179 pages

First published in 1983 (by Heinemann in the UK)

My Virago paperback edition was issued in 2018

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

"Ravensgill" by William Mayne

Two families, related but divided by something that happened nearly fifty years ago. Can a new generation heal the wounds? First they have to solve the half-forgotten mystery.

Bob lives on Ravensgill farm with his brother Dick and his eccentric and bad-tempered grandmother (when we first meet her she is painting the curtains which is rather different from drawing them). Judith lives in another valley (there are hints of both Romeo and Juliet and Lorna Doone). A policeman's death arouses memories but the old generation won't talk to the kids. “Is it always right to find things out, to let things be remembered?” (Ch 9) But Bob starts to investigate and arouses buried resentments. Tension rises and tempers flare to the point of murderous violence.

It is a beautifully written novel, hugely evocative of the Yorkshire (England) countryside and the farming way of life. Mayne's plot is simple, what drives the story is the reader's desire to solve the mystery, tantalised by the ambiguities built into the dialogue, and the carefully constructed characters, full of very real complexities, driven by very human emotions of pride and jealousy, and curiosity.

Just as important is the setting. There is beauty in the landscape but it can turn dangerous at a heartbeat. There's a sense that something's not quite right, of otherness, and this is fostered by sentences that are lyrical but strangely shaped. For example:

• “Dick was unable to know what to do. Speech was ready in him, but there was nothing to say. Help was willing in him, but he did not know what to help.” (Ch 5)
• “There was a little feminine gossip from the hens ... In the sheath of sycamore trees at the end of the yard the insects held mart and bazaar. Way down the gill the water gently clattered. Round about the still sky full clouds formed and hung.” (Ch 6)

The story is as carefully and perfectly painted as Poussin's painting above but the shepherds are looking at a tombstone on which cryptic words are carved.

Selected quotes:

• “During breakfast the mist had melted. Already the walls of the house and of the farm buildings were sending back warmth. A small different mist was coming off the meadows, where the sun was drying the grass. The little mist was from the dew, rising a foot and then turning to invisible vapour.” (Ch 1)
• “She was a gentle cow, but silly, and could get lost when it was impossible to get lost. she was one of the more senior members of the herd, but she had never got very high in rank, and the others pushed her about.” (Ch 2)
• “The stars were not very much there to be known that night, because there was a high haze obscuring them.But they found The Plough, and Grandma discovered that the Pole Star was a long way out of position, and seemed to think it was the County Council's fault.” (Ch 3)
• “He always hoped that one day he would come in happy off the hill, and be allowed to stay happy. But always it happened that Grandma had some bitterness that made his joys of place and person shrink away again.” (Ch 4)
• “Dick and Tot walked down the lane together, deep in a conversation of silence.” (Ch 5)
• “Now he was frightened. When he thought he was blind he had been terrified, but blindness does not mean death. It is not a symptom of the end of life. The world is still with you in blindness; and all you have to do is feel for it in other ways than with your eyes.” (Ch 5)
• “He was spiting fate, giving himself up to it before it could do as it wanted, because fate takes you against your will. He thought he would swing with fate's direction, and perhaps be released out of pity.” (Ch 5)
• “The bus homewards ... had to wait at pubs on the way for customers to pour the last of the ale down their throats before they wallowed across and climbed aboard.” (Ch 14)

February 2025; 174 pages

Published in 1970 by Hamish Hamilton, my copy is the 1971 reprint.

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

"Self-Help" by Edward Docx

A woman dies in post-Soviet, gangster-run St Petersburg and her unacknowledged son, a divinely talented pianist, needs to contact her heirs in London to persuade them to continue paying his fees to study at the Conservatoire.

This novel, entitled Pravda outside the UK, is a book of cities, almost always in dreadful weather. Arkady lives in St Petersburg, Isabella his half-sister lives in New York, Gabriel, her twin brother, is a journalist in London. Their father Nicholas lives in Paris. The London scenes are informed by the inevitable Dickens and the Russian scenes by Dostoevsky (the scene in Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov stands on a bridge is mentioned twice). As for Paris, there seem to be echoes from Zola's The Masterpiece: just like the hero of that novel, Nicholas is a painter who despairs of ever producing truly good work (“The fact that he was a profoundly mediocre painter might not have bothered him at all except ... that every time he closed his eyes, he could see quite clearly what it was that he wanted to achieve. ... The artist's vision without the accompanying artistry: a curse of the gods if ever there was one.”; Ch 20) and lives on the Ile St-Louis. 

The children, Isabella and Gabriel, are thrown into psychological crisis by the death of their mother. “When a parent passes away, the family demons do not retreat, but rise from their sarcophagi instead.” (Ch 19)

The keeper of the secrets is their father, the man who controlled them throughout their childhood and emotionally and physically abused them when they were young. The man they hate. Nicholas is a towering figure, a truth teller who understands himself at the deepest level. “What interested him most of all in life was trying to understand the exact shape and weight of other people's inner selves, the architecture of their spirit.” (Ch 20) He is the villain of the piece but he is the most beautifully written character of the book, “a selfish cowardly bullying bastard and a charming intelligent thoughtful man at the same time.” (Ch 43)

But the other main characters - Isabella, Gabriel who has become outwardly a clone of his father, a faithless lover and a man capable of extraordinarily eloquent invective, Arkady and his protector, Henry the heroin addict - are all wonderfully written. The book is written with each chapter from the perspective of one or more of these characters, but always in the third person and the past tense.

For me, the most impressive feature of this book was the brilliance of the description. Time and again, Docx summarised a whole scene with a few words, often using language creatively or coining neologisms to do so, in phrases such as:

• “The road into town was as Stalin-soaked in the monochrome of tyranny as the centre of the city was bright and colourful with the light of eighteenth-century autocracy.” (Ch 1)
• “The cars were moving freely - the battered Czech wrecks and tattered Russian rust-crates, the sleek German saloons and the tinted American SUVs, overtaking, undertaking, switching lanes in a fat salsa of metal and gasoline.” (Ch 1)
• “His heart was pestling itself mad against the mortar of the present.” (Ch 1)
• “His slight scrappiness, his hassled hair, his loose shirt, his jeans, his battered boots, they somehow told against him; where before there had been a casual confidence dressing down, she now saw anguish dressing up. His manner no longer said, ‘I don't care to manage any better - take it or leave it,’ but instead, ‘This is the best I can manage.’” (Ch 16)
• “The pavement had turned into a thickening medley of slush and mottled grey ice. Pedestrians squelching, sliding, sloshing along. Hard to believe that from the moment the snow left heaven until the moment it touched the Earth, it was virgin white.” (Ch 30)
• “The roots of his teeth felt like a jagged line of glass splinters in his gums.” (Ch 30): Cold turkey.
• “The Sunday sky as raw and pale as fear-sickened flesh waiting at the whipping post.” (Ch 40)
• “Notre-Dame like some mighty queen termite, belly-stranded in the middle of the river by the sheer volume of her pregnancy.” (Ch 51)

Other selected quotes:

• “The head distrusts the heart. The heart ignores the head. The balls want to carry on regardless. It's a total and utter mess. Chaos.” (Ch 5)
• “Honesty ... is it not the most monstrous piece of excrement that mankind has ever come up with? Human nature, consciousness itself, is famously indefinable, mysterious, mobile, responsive - is gloriously less constant, this intrinsic than the imagining of rocks, trees, sheep. That's the whole point.” (Ch 5)
• “Alessandro enjoyed flattery more than anything else in the world and could tease it out of quick-drying cement if he applied himself.” (Ch 5)
• “In art we are in conversation with ourselves across the generations ... This is the lodestar of our humanity, the rest is chasing food and money.” (Ch 7)
• “He went on, the narrow angle of dead ahead all that he permitted himself.” (Ch 11)
• “The worst storm since the last one. skies of bitumen and creosote. there could no longer be any doubt about it: the planet was finally becoming angry - the wildest beast of them all goaded, poked, insulted once to offer.” (Ch 19) This was written in 2007 and now seems prophetic!
• “One day they may just about persuade you to believe that business is the engine and money the fuel ... but whatever they say, you can be absolutely certain that neither is the journey and neither is the view.” (Ch 19)
• “Our falsities are more eloquent than our truths.” (Ch 20)
• “Yet another avaricious, harrowingly insecure, narcissistic little claw-wielder who had recently about-turned into a guru of well-being and life-balance. How did any of these people expect to be taken seriously?” (Ch 22)
• “Even her own blood cells loathed her.” (Ch 22)
• “Creativity is a massive and serious lifetime’s endeavour to further humankind's fundamental understanding of itself.” (Ch 22)
• “Someone swore at a bottle of ketchup, which they could not bully into dispensing its chemical treasures.” (Ch 25)
• “Power may not corrupt every time, but it always isolates.” (Ch 25)
• “What they say - in fact what almost anybody says - is most often what they need to hear themselves say. Not what they really mean. We are all forever in the business of persuading ourselves.” (Ch 27)
• “Another day, here on Earth. Another day of attrition, murder, beauty and birth. Another day of six billion soloists at full lung, all hoping for some miracle of harmony.” (Ch 37)
• “All through the city, her brother's words stalked her. sinister clowns or blithe assassins she could not tell.” (Ch 43)
• “Now that it came right down to it, life turned out to be mostly about not flinching. Keeping going.” (Ch 45)
• “Strange that being human was never enough on its own. That the need went further. The need to belong. To belong to one tribe or the other ... which is where the trouble began. Why could we not be content with species-pride, the staggering good fortune of belonging to humanity itself?” (Ch 51)

Trivia:

• “The fifty filthy shades of grey were all gone, unimaginable, and instead the sky was uniform and blue.” (Ch 52) Is this where E L James found the title for her novel Fifty Shades of Grey, published 4 years after Self-Help?
• Early in the book, Arkady plays a brilliant jazz concert . He is described as feeling his way early on, so he can learn the piano and adjust his fingers to its inadequacies. Was this based on the legendary 1975 Koln Concert in which jazz pianist Keith Jarrett was forced to perform on a dodgy rehearsal grand and "was forced to adapt his playing for a shonky instrument" according to the Guardian?

This powerful novel was long-listed for the 2007 Booker and won the 2007 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.

Docx has also written:

• The Calligrapher
• The Devil's Garden
• Let Go My Hand

February 2025; 523 pages

First published in the UK in 2007 by Picador

My Picador paperback was issued in 2008.

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

"Christ on a Bike" by Orla Owen

A ingenious and fast-paced Faustian story with one of the most exciting and colourful baddies I have met in a long time.

Life seems to have passed Cerys by. Unpartnered, childless, she rents a flat in London and works. Out of the blue she inherits a huge modern house on the Welsh coast and an income for life. But it comes with conditions rigidly enforced by her benefactors. Can money buy Cerys happiness? Or is a sinister fate planned for her?

This is an intriguing exploration of the destabilising effects of sudden wealth and the corrosive consequences of jealousy and disappointed expectations. There's also an interesting religious dimension to what is to some extent the Book of Job backwards (Job loses everything, Cerys gains everything, but both are puppets manipulated by higher powers). 

There was a certain amount of inevitability to the plot even while not all questions were answered: some details were carefully blurred - what happens to Mfanwy? - which made things seem more real, less of a story. But the character of Cerys is beautifully complex as she struggles with temptation and if her sister, Seren, is a slightly over-the-top villain, she is made real because every one of her reasons for villainy (jealousy, disappointment, exhaustion) are exactly what each of us experiences on a daily basis. Which is scary in itself.

It is written in the past tense and the third person omniscient though principally from the perspective of Cerys and, sometimes, Seren, both of whom have extensive internal monologues, usually delivered in long paragraphs giving a frenetic feeling.

A clever concept well executed.

Selected quotes: 

• “Nausea rose which she swallowed down, so well-practiced at keeping things just about under control.” (Ch 1)
• “Who knew where life would take her? Nowhere. That's where.” (Ch 4)
• “What if Thomas had ... done a deal with the devil to get a load of money and in order to not go to hell when he died, someone had to pray for him, absolve him of his sins? Along she'd come. ... If that was true, it meant the devil now owned her soul and the man following her on the bicycle, he was there to make sure she didn't run off.” (Ch 13)
• “The stars knew where Cerys was. They'd watched the earth longer than man had lived on it.” (Ch 27)
• “Christ looked scathingly at Seren. ... How dare he? Look at all the bad things his dad had done, even if his son was a goodie. None of them were absolute angels.” (Ch 29)
• “What sort of world would it be if a person was rewarded for being greedy, nasty, rotten? What would humanity evolve into if one was seemingly rewarded for such behavior, if that was hailed as the way to get on in the world?” (Ch 32) Delightful irony!
• “He was Welsh, therefore he was waterproof.” (Ch 33)

February 2025; 249 pages

Published as a Bluemoose Books paperback in 2024

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

"The Past" by Tessa Hadley

 The stand-out of this novel for me were the remarkable descriptions of the countryside which were beautifully written and so lush and gorgeous as to be almost but never quite over the top.

It doesn't have a conventional plot as such but it is one of those books that assembles a cast of characters and then chronicles how the relationships between them develop. It's told in the past tense throughout, in the third person, from the perspective of each of the characters, head-hopping with abandon. 

Three adult sisters and their brother meet at the isolated rural rectory that belonged to their dead grandparents for a final holiday before deciding whether or not to sell it. Added to the mix are the younger sister's two children, 9 and 6, the brother's third wife, Pilar, an exotic Argentinian whom none of the others have yet met, the brother's 16 year old daughter and Kasim, the university student son of the middle daughter's ex-boyfriend (was it symbolic that both of the outsiders to the family had roots from other continents?). Sexual attractions inevitably add fuel to the simmering tensions. Sandwiched between two sections detailing this scenario is a section exploring how the siblings' now-dead mother came to the rectory after separating from her husband. 

Just like in life, many of the problems and challenges that arise go unresolved.

There are times when the characters recognise how thoroughly steeped in the perspectives of the English middle class they are and there are times when I wondered whether the author realised just how deep this went. Grandad Grantham is a vicar who also writes poetry. Harriet has a 1st class degree in Classics from Oxford; she used to be a bit of a revolutionary and now works for good causes. Alice wanted to be a teacher and is now mostly a waitress. Pilar is a lawyer. Roland is a university lecturer and film critic. Their father paints, albeit badly. Not a window cleaner or delivery driver in sight.

But the descriptions are wonderful. There are extended pieces such as: “After the woods with their equivocal shade, the strong sunlight was startling when the path opened onto this gap; a red kite ambled in the sky above, small birds scuffled in the undergrowth, too hot to sing, and a pigeon broke out from the trees with a wooden clatter of wing beats. a stream around the field, bisecting it, conversing urgently with itself, its cleft bitten disproportionately deep into the stony ground and marked against the fields rough grass by the tangle of brambles that grew luxuriantly all along it, profuse as fur, still showing a few late white flowers limp like damp tissue, and heavy with berries too sour and green to pick yet, humming with flies.” (1.2) I searched in vain for the word 'plashy' But there are also short descriptions, which are both original and perfectly encapsulate the image or the mood, such as:

• “The jostling of water in the stream that ran at the bottom of the garden, a tickle of tiny movements in the hedgerows and grasses.” (1.1) I loved 'tickle'!
• “Arranging her long skirt carefully so that only her patent leather shoes poked out, two upright black exclamations, from under its hem.” (1.1)
• “The waterfall ... at this time of year wasn't much more than a swell of liquid in a sodden long fall of emerald moss.” (1.1)
• “She'd found a damp-spotted lace tablecloth that smelled of its cupboard.” (1.1)
• “Darkness ... as dense as a hand clapped over her face.” (2.1)
• “The owl she often saw passing, hanging from his outstretched wings.” (2.3) 'Hanging'! Yes!

Other selected quotes:

• “It was impossible to believe that she ended at the limits of her skin.” (1.1)
• “A painter. Not a very good one. Women in landscapes that are sort of dreamscapes: part Van Gogh, part album cover.” (1.3)
• “Alice protested that this was eating your cake and stopping anyone else eating theirs.” (1.4)
• “Because she was the vicar's daughter, she learned to lie from an early age, not caring much if anyone believed her.” (2.1)
• “To the unmarried, it seems that a couple must be intimately, perpetually exposed to each other - but actually, that wasn't bearable. In order for love to survive, you had to close yourself off to a certain extent.” (2.2)
• “She knew from her own experience what a great labour it was, binding up again all the mess of self, which in your extremity you had unbound.” (3.3)

A delightful exploration of typical (middle-class) family life enhanced by wonderful descriptions of the English countryside.

February 2025; 362 pages

First published by Jonathan Cape in 2015

My large-print paperback Isis edition issued in 2016

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

"The Buddha in the Attic" by Julie Otsuka

This remarkable book dispenses with the norms of writing in order to express the experiences of a community.

It starts with a boat-full of Japanese women heading to the USA to marry the husbands as selected by the matchmakers. It describes their disillusioned dreams as they follow the full immigrant experience, working as agricultural labourers and domestic servants, working their way up to self-employment. And babies, lots of babies. And tragedy, a lot of that too. And then, as most of them reach prosperity, the aftermath of Pearl Harbour sees the whole community interned as enemy aliens and transported to labour camps.

I knew something about the Japanese-American experience having read, years ago, Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. But 'The Buddha ...' is told in a completely different way. There are no individual character arcs. History happens but there is little in the way of a conventional plot. Instead the experiences of the women are listed in sentence after sentence, creating a powerful chanting effect. Here are two examples: 

• “Some of us on the boat were from Kyoto, and were delicate and fair, and had lived our entire lives in darkened rooms at the back of the house. Some of us were from Nara, and prayed to our ancestors three times a day, and swore could still hear the temple bells ringing. Some of us were farmers' daughters from Yamaguchi with thick wrists and broad shoulders who had never gone to bed after nine. Some of us were from a small mountain hamlet in the Yamanashi and had only recently seen our first train. Some of us were from Tokyo, and had seen everything, and spoke beautiful Japanese, and did not mix much with any of the others. Many more of us were from Kagoshima ...” (Come, Japanese!)
• “Home was a bit of straw in John Lyman's barn alongside his prize horses and cows. Home was a corner of the washhouse in Stockton's Cannery Ranch. Home was a bunk in a rusty boxcar in Lompoc. Home was an old chicken coop in Willows that the Chinese had lived in before us. Home was a flea-ridden mattress in a corner of a packing shed in Dixon. Home was a bit of hay atop three apple crates beneath an apple tree in Fred Stadelman’s apple orchard ...” (Whites)

The whole book is like this. It is mesmerisingly effective.

Nouveau roman? Certainly it reminded me of Natalie Sarraute's Tropismes. But whereas that book feels like an impressionist painting, whose message lies in the creation of an ambience, this is a collage of fragments with the punch of pop art.

Selected quotes:

• “In our dreams she would always be three and as she was when we last saw her: a tiny figure in a dark red kimono squatting at the edge of a puddle, utterly entranced by the sight of a dead floating bee.” (Come, Japanese!)
• “They gave us new names. They called us Helen and Lily. They called us Margaret. They called us Pearl.” (Whites) As ‘Whites’ might suggest, three of these four names refer directly to skin colour: lilies and pearls are white and Margaret is a name derived from the Latin word for pearl.
• “We threw out their cheese by mistake. ‘I thought it was rotten,’ we tried to explain. ‘That's how it's supposed to smell,’ we were told.” (Whites)

It was a New York Times bestseller but don't let that put you off (some truly dreadful books have achieved the same accolade)

It was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and won the 2012 Pen Faulkner Award. 

January 2025; 129 pages

First published in the US by Knopf in 2011

My paperback edition issued in the UK by Penguin in 2013

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

"Adam's Breed" by Radclyffe Hall

 

A bildungsroman about a member of the Italian immigrant community in London. Winner of the 1926 James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Gian-Luca is a lonely little boy. His father is unknown, his mother died in childbirth as a result of which his grandmother, though she helps raise him, cannot show him affection. Technically English, he is sent to an English school but the boys there see him as Italian. He loves reading but he can't write. He isn't a member of the Catholic church and can't believe in God. After school he works as a waiter so he is an observer of but not a participant in high society. This is the story of someone who feels himself to be an outsider.

I swiftly developed a strong bond of empathy for Gian-Luca, suffering in his trials, always afraid of what might happen to him in the future. Many of the other characters were also beautifully brought to life: Teresa his grandmother, hollowed by grief, driven and determined; Fabio his compliant grandfather; the wonderful Mario whose hopes always exceed his abilities, boastful even when humiliated - “Mario bragged from self-abasement; Mario had long ago realised himself, and he lied from the humidity of failure.”; 1.11); the butcher Rocco who always misunderstands; and Maddalena who loves GL as a wife and maternally even though GL can never quite love her back.

This is also a fascinating portrait of an immigrant community employed in the way such communities often are: as shopkeepers and restaurateurs. There is poverty, there are tribulations, but there is support from the other members of the community. In the end, there is mutual love, respect and understanding.

It is peppered with Italian words which add a further layer of verisimilitude to what already seems hugely realistic. Congratulations to the publishers, Renard Press, for including full translations as end-notes (footnotes would have been even better, avoiding the need for two bookmarks and flicking back and forth).

It was written in 1926, a time when the novel was rapidly evolving (for example: James Joyce's Ulysses was published in 1922, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway in 1925, and Pastors and Masters by Ivy Compton-Burnett in 1925) but stylistically it dates back to the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. It reminded me of New Grub Street by George Gissing and the H G Wells social novels such as Kipps and The History of Mr Polly. But is is not nearly as heavy-going as some of that style of book can be; it is beautifully written and I kept turning the pages to learn more about poor Gian-Luca. 

And in book 3 chapter 2 a brilliant twist that I never saw coming at all.

The author gives the recipe for success in Book One, Chapter 13: “There are three very vital things: quality, variety and originality ... A dinner should have, like a book or a picture, good workmanship, plenty of light and shade, and above all that individual touch, that original central idea.” (1.13) On these criteria this novel is very much a hit. 

Further congratulations to the publisher from running the chapter numbers at the top of each page which is so much more useful than just being repeatedly told of the title of the book.

Selected quotes:

• “His natal village had consisted of one street, whose chief characteristic was a smell.” (1.4)
• “He was very much a Latin - he kept two distinct Gian-Lucas: one for beauty, one for business; and so far they had never collided.” (1.9)
• “It is said that in each man there lurks the hunter: the hunter of money, the hunter of lions, the hunter of fame, the hunter of women.” (1.13)
• “In the spite of his success he would feel so very lonely, so very much in need of being loved.” (2.2)
• “The spring is perhaps the time of all others when the lonely most realise their loneliness.” (2.3)
• “She was piously shrewd and shrewdly pious; she gave, as a rule, that she might receive.” (2.3)
• “Sisto had so many sins to confess that he needed the church very badly; indeed, he used it as a spiritual lifebuoy to keep his soul from total immersion.” (3.7)
• “He was seeing the hideous struggle for existence, with its cruelty, its meanness and its lusts.” (3.12)

Radclyffe Hall's stepfather was from Dalmatia so she must have known something about immigrant communities. Her mother made it clear that she was an unwanted child. Adam's Breed was a critical and commercial success but it was overshadowed by the scandal surrounding Hall's next novel, The Well of Loneliness, a novel about lesbian love, which was banned in the UK as obscene.

First published in the UK in 1926 by Cassell

My edition issued by Renard Press in 2024

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