"The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro

 

This novel by the winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature won the 1989 Booker and adapted into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, nominated for eight Oscars including best picture.

It is written in the form of reminiscences by a butler, Mr Stevens, who used to work for Lord Darlington at Darlington Hall. As he remembers his life as a servant and his tangential observations of secret negotiations between the British and Nazi German governments, the reader realises the sacrifices he has made in order to serve and the minimal reward he has gained. 

He is seeking to define what makes a great butler. He never claims that he himself is a great butler but his long service at the top of his profession suggests he might have been, although service has cost him and now he is beginning to make mistakes as age and exhaustion catch up with him. Given that his savings are small and that his home has always been in the great houses of his employers, one fears for his future if he ever has to retire. 

In order to serve his employers he has repressed all sense of personality and personal relationships, to the extent of missing the death of his own father upstairs because he had duties downstairs and, for the same reason but on another occasion, failing to condole with a bereaved colleague. He could come across as pyschopathically cold and unemotional but one senses that he has feelings, he just suppresses them.

The style is as a diary written a few days before and during a road trip that he makes to see an old colleague; therefore in the first person and incorporating both present and past tense. We learn both the details of the road trip (visiting beauty spots, drinking tea, running out of fuel etc) and his memories. It doesn't quite ring true because many of the conversations are reported verbatim, even those from many years before. Although he is prepared to lie to people he meets, and there is one occasion when he corrects something he said earlier, the narration seems fairly reliable - it is nothing like the frequently self-contradictory and self-serving narration of, for example, The Good Solider by Ford Madox Ford.

It wasn't difficult to read, although the narrator, Stevens, is somewhat long-winded and formal, and although his anecdotes sometimes ramble. It wasn't exactly a page-turner but I was never bored. It managed to make me feel gently sorry for the opportunities this dry old stick had missed and the sense that his life had been wasted in serving outdated employers in a vanishing world.

Selected quotes:

• "The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost ... They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstances tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when, and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone. It is, as I say, a matter of 'dignity'." (Day One - Evening: last page)
• "I would myself much prefer to wait on just one diner, even if he were a total stranger. It is when there are two diners present, even when one of them is one's own employer, that one finds it most difficult to achieve that balance between attentiveness and the illusion of absence that is essential to good waiting." (Day Two - Morning)
• "We were ... an idealistic generation for whom the question was not simply one of how well one practised one's skills, but to what end one did so; each of us harboured the desire to make our own small contribution to the creation of a better world." (Day Two - Afternoon)
• "One has had the privilege of practising one's profession at the very fulcrum of great affairs." (Day Three - Morning)
• "There is, after all, a real limit to how much ordinary people can learn and know, and to demand that each and every one of them contribute 'strong opinions' to the great debates of the nation cannot, surely, be wise." (Day Three - Evening)
• "His lordship ... chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. ... I trusted in his lordship's wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?" (Day Six - Evening)
• "The evening's the best part of the day. You've dome your day's work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it." (Day Six - Evening)
• "Surely it is enough that the likes of you and me at least try to make a small contribution count for something true and worthy." (Day Six - Evening)

I suppose that the book resonated with me because I have retired after 33 years working as a public servant, a school teacher in state comprehensive schools. All those years and what for? Very few of the kids I taught ever made it through to become outstanding exponents of what I taught, Physics, though one or two have made a name in other fields. The obvious successes are balanced by those who ended up committing suicide, or in prison. Probably my influence helped shape lives in some small ways but it is almost impossible to discern, and if it had not been for my guidance and support they would have found other hands to help them, or they would have succeeded by themselves. So I do wonder whether it was worth while and whether I could not have had a more fulfilling and successful life if I had taken another path. Now I am trying to write novels and they are heroically unsuccessful: self-published and rarely purchased. I fear dying with regrets. I think I know how Stevens must feel.

Other books by Sir Kazuo Ishiguro reviewed in thius blog include:

• The Buried Giant
• The Unconsoled
• Never Let Me Go
• Klara and the Sun
• When We Were Orphans

March 2025; 258 pages

Published by Faber and Faber in 1989

My paperback edition was issued in 2011.

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

"Crossing Over" by Ann Morgan

 An old lady struggling with vascular dementia encounters an economic migrant sleeping in the barn of her old farm house. She mistakes him for someone from years ago when she was confronted with a 'Whistle Down the Wind' situation.

It is written in the present tense from the alternating points of view of old Edie, formidable and furiously combative to prevent the neighbours learning her secrets, and young Jonah. Both narratives include flashbacks to fascinating back stories: Edie remembers the second world war and 'Michael', a previous uninvited guest; Jonah the famine in Malawi that forced him to travel to England.  

The dementia aspect of the story reminded me of Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey but here it is shown within her sometimes chaotic interior monologue in which she repeats herself, confuses chronology, sometimes thinking she is a little girl again, sometimes living in the past, and searches for words or substitutes other words for them, such as "internet" for "innocent". Edie's chapter headings are muddled and the numbers grow increasingly chaotic as she deteriorates ( asimilar device is used in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog  in the Night-time in which the narration is by a young lad with Asperger Syndrome and the chapter headings are prime numbers). I think this way of showing Edie's confusion worked very well.

The migrant hiding indoors while just outside is a building site full of potential betrayers reminded me at first of my scenario for my novel The Kids of God except that the consequences of discovery are less serious. Jonah's chapter headings get more ordered with time, as he copes better and better with the confusing culture-clash of English life (not to mention the necessary subterfuge in which he is forced to become Edith's carer). To start with his has many difficulties, from confusing consonantal sounds (he thinks Edie is called 'ET') and his bewilderment when shopping to being completely at sea when confronted with English idioms such as "they don't let the grass grow"- I loved the idea that Jonah thinks the word "wireless" in Edie's diary is anachronistically modern. I wasn't sure if Jonah rang quite true, given that he had spent two years journeying from Malawi including traversing the Libyan civil war and crossing at least two European countries before reaching England; I would have thought he had learned more on this odyssey. The refugee journey was, I think, better told in The Bee Keeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri.

A perfectly paced story which kept you guessing until the last few pages with a clever and unusual narration.

Selected quotes:

• "The night sky is peaceful, the stars glistening, but that means nothing. He has seen beauty birth ugliness too many times to be taken in." (Unnumbered prologue) I live that phrase "beauty birth ugliness"!
• "He is too knotted with need to care." (Unnumbered prologue)
• "Fluttering in the rafters flaps into stillness." (Unnumbered prologue)
• "The cupboards not stuffed with cuttings and letters are crammed with stacks of painted boxes, porcelain pots and glass jars ... many of them empty, as though the main business of the house is to store pockets of air." ('Two' - the 2nd Two)
• "He cries long and loud ... for the being forced to look his fellow beings in the face and make over and over the same unforgivable choice: my survival matters more than yours." ('One' - the 2nd One)
• "The sighing business of darkness, that first sweet, searing time." ('Beep')
• "So they are gone then. ... Reduced to nothing. Burnt up like maize shoots under the sun. Leaving the landscape of his heart bare." ('13')
• "She has unpacked life to the bottom of the box and knows there is nothing there." ('Many')

March 2025; 266 pages

Published by Renard Press in 2023.

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

"A Spot of Bother" by Mark Haddon

A dysfunctional family prepares for what looks like a catastrophic wedding in this work of comic brilliance.

George has discovered what looks like cancer on a patch of skin; he is terrified of dying. His wife, Jean, is having an affair with an ex-colleague of George's. His adult son Jamie has just been dumped by his boyfriend. George's daughter, Katie, wants to marry Ray (or does she?), but the rest of the family don't like him. Jacob, Katie's son, is a challenging infant.

The past tense third person narrative hops between the four principal adults. The plot is driven principally by George, whose response to retirement and mortality is a series of bizarre actions. It seems that hypochondria, paranoia and depression are fertile grounds for comedy and that's before he experiences the side effects of mixing medication. But the fearsomely belligerent Katie was another wonderful character, not to mention the extremes of parenting demanded by Jacob. 

I hardly ever laugh out loud but I did with this book, more than once.

It's a big book at 503 pages but it is divided into 144 chapters so I found it quick reading.

Selected quotes:

• “That was the weekend, of course, when Gareth burned the frog. How strange, looking back, that the course of an entire life should be spelled out so clearly in five minutes during one August afternoon.” (Ch 2)
• “George could do the bluff repartee about cars and sport if pressed. But it was like being a sheep in the nativity play. No amount of applause was going to make the job seem dignified.” (Ch 4)
• “Jamie wondered, sometimes, if Tony had been a dog in a previous life and not quite made the transition properly. The appetite. The energy. The lack of social graces. The obsession with smells.” (Ch 12)
• “His own preferred exits were rapid and decisive. Others might want time to bury the hatchet with estranged children and tell their wives where the stopcock was. Personally, he wanted the lights to go out with no warning and the minimum attendant mess. Dying was bad enough without having to make it easier for everyone else.” (Ch 24)
• “He was going to die. ... With blinding clarity he realized that everyone was frolicking in a summer meadow surrounded by a dark and impenetrable forest, waiting for that grim day on which they were dragged into the dark beyond the trees and individually butchered.” (Ch 24)
• “When his bus arrived he was packed into a confined space with thirty unwashed people and shaken vigorously for twenty-five minutes.” (Ch 46)
• “‘Mum said you weren't feeling very well.’ She couldn't work out where to put herself. Sitting on the bed was too intimate, standing was too medical and using the armchair would mean touching his discarded vest.” (Ch 49)
• “Which was how young people took over the world. All that fiddling with new technology. You woke up one day and realised your own skills were laughable. Woodwork. Mental arithmetic.” (Ch 51)
• “Maybe old people always fooled themselves, pretending that the world was going to hell in a handcart because it was easier than admitting they were being left behind, that the future was pulling away from the beach.”
• “The tape ended and the screen was filled with white noise.” (Ch 51)
• “It occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. the other part was not giving a toss about what other people thought.” (Ch 111)
• “As a gesture of goodwill, it being their wedding, she decided to admit that he was right. Not out loud, obviously, but by not answering back.” (Ch 142)

March 2025; 503 pages

First published in 2006 by Jonathan Cape

My paperback Vintage edition was issued in 2007.

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

"The Lowlife" by Alexander Baron

Harryboy Boas lives (mostly) by gambling. But when he makes promises he can't keep, he gets involved with people who want to hurt him.

This book took a long time to get going. The first three-quarters of the book is scene setting. It is set in the East End of London during the early 1960s when a row of slum houses under threat of demolition cost £200 each, when polio was rife and you could legally make money on the stock exchange through insider trading. Harryboy lives in a bedsit, a single room in a house with shared cooking facilities and a shared bathroom; downstairs is a mother, father and pre-school child. 

The period and setting reminded me of a couple of slim novels by Wolf Mankowitz: Make Me an Offer and A Kid for Two Farthings.

We take a long time to explore how Harryboy lives, following him from dog track to horse racing, from eating in cheap restaurants to sleeping with expensive whores. We also explore the other characters, in particular the family downstairs, a downtrodden father, a house-proud and ambitious mother and their son, a manipulative child who seems to prefer Harryboy to his own father. 

There is some cleverly written dialogue. Harryboy is a Jew and the speech patterns of his sister and brother-in-law and landlord are rendered by reversing sentence sequence as in: "A good wife I marry ... Can good ever come to a man without trouble? ... From me you got the tip ... A discussion now we're having about religion." (Ch 1) This gives a very distinctive voice.

This level of detail mean that the story is built very slowly, brick by brick, and if you're looking for a shallow thriller you'll probably find this book boring. But I was fascinated by it. It is written so beautifully and the characters are so real.

Selected quotes:

• “We are carried to the grave on a stream of dead days and nights. we lived them and forget them.” (Ch 1)
• “I wouldn't put a dog in that basement, and I hate dogs.” (Ch 3)
• “I gobbled books like peanuts. How I didn't wear my eyes away I don't know. But a lowlife is a lowlife. I was losing money on the cards at fourteen, and going with my pals to shilling whores.” (Ch 6)
• “Among the uneducated (which frankly is what you would call the general population where I live) the serious reader is a lonely person.” (Ch 8)
• “I made the old excuse of sinners that I do know harm to anyone but myself. this is never true, as I was to find out.” (Ch 8)
• “She was so determined to make this flat into a preview of the little suburban home of her dreams, that she had turned herself into a kind of domestic machine, which I could hear on the go from morning till night.” (Ch 9)
• “Crying is a fine art with kids. They look at you, judge how much is needed, then start the performance. Sobs, pathetic whimpers, heartrending shrieks, pitiful moans, all these are let loose till you feel as guilty and miserable as if you've done murder. Then you give way and in an instant the tears have stopped, the child is victorious.” (Ch 9)
• “The chain of lights, the unearthly floodlit green of the turf, the stir of people, the soft excited hub out of which rises the characteristic noise of the track - a yapping tumult from the bookies’ stands - it all goes on like a pageant.” (Ch 10)
• “God? Excuse me, I don't know this gentleman. He looks after people? If this is his job he must be the biggest messer in creation.” (Ch 10)
• “Man is a killer. I learned that in the war. It is all nuts about conscience. In Normandy I was with a bunch of steady, ordinary boys from respectable homes, craftsmen, clerks, ordinary boys, and they killed men like killing rabbits. Years after, I went to a reunion, and over pints of beer I heard quiet, ordinary fellows, a greengrocer, or waiter, a shipping clerk, chuckle with contentment and pride over their memories of this killing or that killing.” (Ch 20)
• “You can forget a million children. You cannot forget one child.” (Ch 22)

March 2025; 167 pages
First published in the UK by William Collins in 1963
My paperback edition was issued in 2010 by the Black Spring Press

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

"Dad" by William Wharton

 

When your parents get old and need help, family tensions and secrets are exposed.

Jacky, a painter living in Paris, returns home to 1977 California to care for his father after his mother has had a heart attack. Then his father gets cancer and has a mental breakdown. Sudden onset dementia or worse? And when his ferocious mother returns home, how can anyone cope with her? To add to the mix, Jacky's son, Billy, has quit university and turns up on the doorstep. 

The narrative is told from the first-person present-tense PoV of the two sons: mostly Jacky and occasionally Billy. The narrative flips between the pair of them driving across the USA (in a road trip that reminded me hugely of the one in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) and Jacky's experience with his ailing parents. From time to time a third voice breaks in, in italics; we learn later whose voice this is.

The plot reminded me of that puzzle (referenced in the text) in which you have to transport a fox, a chicken and a pile of grain across a river in a boat that will only take two of the items. First the mother was in hospital and then the father, then he was in a care home, then she ... Add to this swirling confusion the repeated gut-wrenching hammer blows of heart attack, dementia, cancer etc in which almost everything that could go wrong did and there was no way you could stop reading even though the going was sometimes gruelling. There's a graphic description of a terrible road traffic accident at one stage which summarised my impression of the book to that point: I didn't want to rubberneck and yet I couldn't look away. There was also a puzzle aspect to the plot: just trying to work out the relationships between the characters and the main narrator's back story was an incentive to keep reading. So I turned pages and read this big book in four days.

The main characters are thoroughly drawn:

• Jacky is a superman, perhaps a little too good to be true, a sort of Marty Stu. He is good at every aspect of keeping a household going from domestic chores to DiY. In addition to this he has a PhD (I wasn't quite sure in what but it seems to be medicine related) but now supports his family living in Paris with a second home in the French countryside by painting pictures. This was one aspect that didn't quite ring true: he just didn't seem to view the world in the way that painters do. There were moments when he thought, for example: “There's something special about painting landscape in the cold when it isn't snowing. The colors are toned down, muted, and the forms are much more visible.” (Ch 2) But these felt like add-ons rather than integral to his personality. At one point he thinks: “He's probably seeing forms, shapes, colors and movements in an original, personal sense, the way an artist tries to see and never can.” (Ch 10) But I thought that Jacky, as an artist, should see everything in terms of form, shape and colour, as does the artist protagonist in My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok and as I have tried to do with the protagonist-narrator in my novel Bally and Bro. 
• His father is a working man, brilliant with his hands, who is easily intimidated and has become a carpet for others to walk on; nevertheless he retains deep mental reserves of compassion and understanding and strategies to cope with the bullying behaviour of his wife. 
• Mother is a fascinating character - “the Lady Macbeth of Colby Lane” (Ch 20) - whose default strategy is attack and whose weapons include passive aggressive emotional blackmail - “first, recrimination, doubt I'd come; second, self-pity.” (Ch 2) - and straightforward aggression. 
• Billy, the grandson and university drop-out is trying to understand the complexities of life while retaining sufficient independence to chart his own way forward. 
• Other characters, including Jacky's presumably long-suffering wife Vron who stays in Paris and from whom we never hear, are less complex, but I don't think I could have coped, as a reader, had they not been.

The book ends with a terrifying summary of what to expect as one grows old: “Maybe it's time for me to start learning how to be old. ... Somehow, I've got to get myself ready to accept being weak, in pain, mentally debilitated, forgetful, less sensitive, less aware, inflexible, intolerant ... I need to absorb, without resentment, the hurt when my grown grandchildren feel violated by my most cherished values, while their ideas, in turn, will violate me. I must get ready for the deaths of lifelong friends, relatives, the frequency increasing with time. I must also live with those who survive who will be boring, uninteresting. ... I'll become a bore to others, a drag in conversation, repeat myself, be slow at comprehension, quick at misunderstanding, have lapses in conceptual sequence.” (Ch 23)

An emotionally hard read, but a compelling one.

Selected quotes:

• “You're old when most people would rather have you dead.” (Ch 1)
• “It's weird seeing this counterfeit world inundated with thick, caking, beige mud, cracking in the sun like a Christmas tree in a trash can, tinsel still sparkling.” (Ch 1)
• “It's well past noon. Lead-heavy sun is forcing itself hard into the tops of our heads.” (Ch 1)
• “In any competitive-comparative society there are hundreds of losers for every winner.” (Ch 4)
• “It's not fair. you do what you're supposed to do when you're young, Then they change the rules.” (Ch 6)
• “There's something about being with a woman, knowing mutual pleasure, sharing the most natural part of being alive.” (Ch 8)
• “Mother ... doesn't actually invent so much as she grabs onto rag-tail ends of things and elaborates them into personal fantasies.” (Ch 12)
• “There's something tenuous about being male, nothing in line, all so zigzag.” (Ch 12)
• “He must’ve paid a fortune for them. That's the way he is, tight as a witch's cunt; then bango, big-shot spender.” (Ch 13)
• “America is clots of people, joined by gigantic straight highways.” (Ch 13)
• “Most men are scared, so they’re scared for their sons.” (Ch 20)

Trigger warnings: There is in-character use of racist and anti-semitic language, and in-character misogyny.

March 2025; 442 pages

First publishing in the USA by Knopf in 1981

My Penguin paperback edition issued in 1982

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

"Cranford" by Mrs Gaskell

 

An 'episodic' novel (constructed from linked short stories which were originally published in a series in Household Words, the magazine edited by Dickens; Mrs G made sure she plugged the editor's Pickwick Papers - perhaps her archetype: another episodic comic novel - and his Christmas Carol). 

It's very gentle, making a Jane Austen novel seem rugged around the edges. Cranford is a small town whose population consists almost entirely of gentlefolk, almost all of whom are women (and most of those seem to be unmarried). There is a great emphasis on propriety: little breaches of etiquette will be gossipped about for weeks and might lead to social exclusion. Nevertheless, right from the start, there are those who through ignorance or carelessness flout the rules of civilised behaviour from motives of kindness, generosity and great-heartedness and the narrator (anonymous almost to the end) recognises that this makes the perpetrator of these social sins a better person.

The ladies are mostly caricatures, drawn with nothing like the gothic  exuberance of Dickens but nevertheless subtly ridiculous. For example, Miss Matty has a horror of men and green tea; a couple of burglaries in the neighbourhood sends the entire flock of human hens into a frenzy of clucking; the perfomance of a conjuror is both exciting and scary. Nevertheless, despite the comedy, the author always has empathy for her creations: these are people, sometimes silly but fundamentally good. And when there is need, the community comes together as best it can to help.

Cranford is a microcosm of a hugely conservative society threatened by change. A railway is being built (against the nimby wishes of the ladies). Literature is changing from the Augustan elegance of Dr Johnson's Rasselas to the boisterous popularism of The Pickwick Papers. A bank fails, destroying the (unearned) income of one of the characters and reducing her to poverty and the shocking necessity of earning her living.

It is a soft book, suffused with kindness, carefully told. 

Selected quotes:

• In Cranford “economy was always ‘elegant’, and money spending always ‘vulgar and ostentatious’; a sort of sour grapism which made us very peaceful and satisfied.” (Ch 1)
• “We were none of us musical, though Miss Jenkins beat time, out of time, by way of appearing to be so.” (Ch 1)
• “Correspondence ... bears much the same relation to personal intercourse that the books of dried plants ... do to the living and fresh flowers in the lanes and meadows.” (Ch 3)
• “I have often noticed that almost every one has his own individual small economies - careful habits of saving fractions of pennies in some one peculiar direction - any disturbance of which annoys him more than spending shillings or pounds on some real extravagance.” (Ch 5)
• “Men will be men. every mother's son of them wishes to be considered Samson and Solomon rolled into one - too strong ever to be beaten or discomfited - too wise ever to be outwitted. If you will notice, they have always foreseen events, though they never tell one for one’s warning before the events happen. My father was a man, and I know the sex pretty well.” (Ch 10)
• “The old story, you know, of ladies always saying, ‘When I marry’, and gentlemen, ‘If I marry’.” (Ch 11)
• “My father once made us ... keep a diary, in two columns; on one side we were to put down in the morning what we thought would be the course and events of the coming day, and at night we were to put down on the other side what really had happened. It would be to some people rather a sad way of telling their lives.” (Ch 11)
• “At this charitable committee, every lady took the subject uppermost in her mind, and talked about it to her own great contentment, but not much to the advancement of the subject they had met to discuss.” (Ch 12)
• “Mr Hoggins ... creaked up the middle aisle at church in a bran-new pair of top boots ... the boots he had worn till now were the identical pair in which he first set out on his rounds in Cranford twenty-five years ago; only they had been new-pieced, high and low, top and bottom, heel and sole, black leather and brown leather, more times than any one could tell.” (Ch 12) The Ship of Theseus otherwise known as Trigger’s Broom!
• “I'll not listen to reason ... Reason always means what some one else has got to say.” (Ch 14)

March 2025; 290 pages

First published in 1853 after serialisation in the magazine Household Words

My hardback edition with illustrations by Hugh Thompson and a preface by Anne Thackeray Ritchie was issued in 1892 by Thomas Y Crowell of New York and Boston, USA

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

"The Wager" by David Grann

 

A gripping true story of shipwreck and its aftermath set during the 1740s.

In 1740 a squadron of eight Royal Navy ships led by Commodore George Anson set off to attack Spanish shipping during the War of Jenkin's Ear. The plan was to cross the Atlantic, go round Cape Horn into the Pacific, and capture the Spanish treasure ship somewhere near the Philippines. Almost immediately, disease (including scurvy) began to deplete the crew. The seas at Cape Horn were atrocious: two ships turned back. HMS Wager, captained by David Cheap, rounded the Horn but turned north to early and was wrecked off the coast of Chile. The survivors were stuck on a island and began to starve. They began to split into factions. One group, under the command of the gunner, built a boat and sailed through the Straits of Magellan to the coast of Brazil from where they eventually made it back to England. The captain and some officers were rescued by native Americans and some of them also returned, even later, to England. Once back home, accusations of mutiny and counter-accusations of murder were made and best-selling books published to justify points of view.

The rest of Anson's expedition were eventually reduced to a single ship with a skeleton crew; nevertheless, they successfully captured the Spanish treasure galleon and completed the circumnavigation of the globe to return home.

This is not so much a tale of derring do and heroic survival against all odds as a chronicle of what can happen when men are in extremis: there is mutiny and murder, theft of supplies, tyranny and rebellion. It's like a real-life version of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Above all there is death, repeated death, usually from sickness. The ship had a complement of 120 men when it left England; ten returned (of Anson's command, 188 out of 1854 survived). As with Grann's previous history also set in South America, The Lost City of Z, I wondered why anyone who had any choice would embark on a voyage when death from drowning, exposure, disease, starvation and enemy action were all more likely than survival. 

One of the naval officers was the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron who refers to his grand-dad's exploits in his poetry. In his subsequent career (yes, he went back to sea!) he achieved notoriety as a  commander who always seemed to attract dreadful storms and received the nickname 'Foul Weather Jack'. 

It's a ripping yarn. The history is thoroughly researched and well-explained; the well-written story keeps you reading to the end. I read it in two days.

There was one error I noted. When discussing naval slang, the author repeats the oft-repeated assertion that the phrase 'piping hot' derives from the fact that a pipe was sounded to call the crew to meals. This seems unlikely given that Chaucer uses the phrase in Canterbury Tales, published in the 14th Century, two centuries before Henry VIII founded the Royal Navy. 

Selected quotes:

• "A diplomat later quipped that Anson was so unknowing about the world that he'd been 'round it, but never in it'." (Ch 1)
• "When ailing seamen were shielded belowdecks from the adverse elements outside, they were said to be 'under the weather'" (Ch 3)
• "To keep warm they [the Native American Kawesqar who wore almost no clothing despite the chilly climate] oiled their skin with insulating seal blubber." (Ch 11)

Also by David Grann:

• The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

Links to my reviews of other travel and exploration books may be found by clicking here.

March 2025; 257 pages

• First published in 2023 in the US by Doubleday
• My Simon and Schuster paperback edition was issued in the UK in 2024

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

"Booth" by Karen Joy Fowler

 This is the story of the Booth family leading up to the assassination, by John Wilkes Booth, of US President Abraham Lincoln. It is history in the sense that all the major events actually happened, but in the way that it is told, with added family conversations, it has been turned into historical fiction.

The head of the family was the Shakespearean actor Junius Booth, an Englishman whose grandmother had been a relative of the English radical politician John Wilkes and who had competed with Edmund Kean on the London stage before becoming the foremost actor of his generation in the US. He acted primarily in Shakespearean roles (as rewritten by Colly Cibber) and his large American family was technically illegitimate because their parents had not married, or had married bigamously. His sons included Edwin Booth, who became another star actor, famous for his portrayal of Hamlet, and youngest son Joe who was a doctor. But the family is most known for actor John Wilkes Booth who shot Lincoln during the performance of a play at a Washington theatre days after the US Civil war had been won by the government troops and the rebellion by the South had been crushed.

JWB believed that Lincoln had monarchical ambitions.

The book is shot through with historical irony. Almost the first page is adorned as an epigram with a quote from Lincoln: “Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.” The deep divisions in American society were then over the question of slavery, nowadays the dividing lines may be more nuanced but they are still there. There is one moment in which a riot takes place during which a policeman is killed ... and all those brought to court are acquitted. But the fundamental question that the book seems to ask is whether the upbringing of JWB was responsible for what he did and given that each of the Booth children grows up in a different way I think the answer must be know.

The style of the book is interesting in that the PoV is sometimes omniscient as the author chronicles historical events but when she tells us of what happened in the family (also historical but in rather more detailed close up) she chooses the perspective of one of the siblings of JWN, normally his eldest sister Rosalie, his famous actor-brother Edwin, or his other surviving sister Asia. 

It is a well-written, mostly straightforward narrative and I read it quickly, wanting to reach the assassination which occurs very close to the end.

It's also interesting in the way it considers and dissects the different styles of acting.

Selected quotes:

• “The house wakes up when Father is in it, the threads that connect the family tightening like violin strings until they buzz.” (2: Edwin, i)
• “The way Rosalie sees it, pretty much everyone in London was abandoning their wives to run away with their sweethearts around the time that Father met Mother. It seems to have been quite the fad. Sodom and Gomorrah with tea.” (2: Edwin, viii)
• “In a grand tradition reaching back through the centuries, he insists that war was forced upon him by unprovoked aggression. He seizes huge swaths of the West as recompense.” (2: Lincoln and the Whigs at Sprigg’s)
• “‘Have you ever noticed,’ Rosalie asks, ‘that the coloreds are always singing of the coming glory and the Irish are always singing of the glory lost?’” (3: Asia: vii)
• “Streetlights have been installed all over the city and that soft glow now drifts in the windows at night, dimming the stars, and puddling on the floors.” (start of Book 4)
• “No acting is great which pleases only a single class ... the gods of the gallery are as good critics as the blues of the boxes.” (4: Edwin: xii)
• “The war will intensify the growing preference for suppressed over expressed emotion, especially when the suppression comes with evident (though delicately played) struggle.” (4: Edwin: xii)
• “Naturalism can go too far. No one wants to pay for a performance of everyday life, scenes from the supper table. Her ideal is an elevated naturalism. Lines with cadence, not overpowered by the delivery, but allowed to echo in their own intrinsic power. Scenes and situations with weight and moral significance. Gorgeous tragedy. Art that inspires. Art that feels like art.” (4: Edwin: xii)
• “Fechter builds his characters visually from a myriad of physical moments ... Edwin builds his characters through motive and emotion.” (5: Edwin: 1)

Karen Joy Fowler also wrote We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Booth was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize

March 2025; 464 pages

First published in 2022 in the US by G P Putnam's Sons

My UK paperback edition issued in 2022 by Serpent's Tail

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

Absolutely and Forever" by Rose Tremain

 

I read this delightful book in two sittings on a single day.

Marianne, 15, falls utterly in love with Simon, 18, losing her virginity in his Morris Minor. But when he fails his Oxford entrance he goes off to Paris leaving Marianne to repair a broken heart, a process which begins in the King's Road of Swinging London. Can she find love again and forget Simon? Or will she win him back?

It's a simple and delightful story with so much verisimilitude that it seems like biography. The characters, even those who are on first sight caricatures, have their complex depths revealed with understanding and sympathy. Some of the descriptions (see the quotes below) are beautifully original jewels, managing to capture pages of meaning in a single sentence.

A tender portrayal of enduring love and the damage that it can do. And if you like horses, good or bad, there are horses throughout, including a very metaphorical story at the end.

Selected quotes:

• "I forced myself to picture ... scruffy young Will Shakespeare getting hammered on sack in a riverside tavern and falling into the Avon." (I)
• "I'll tell you what I mean. Your mother and I have decided we are going to have to take very serious steps if you don't knuckle down. I could not be more clear about this. I hope you understand me." (I)
• "Merlin the stallion always won the race against Mirabelle because that's what male people and animals do: they always win." (I) I'm not sure that this is born out by the lives of the men around Marianne.
• "Their faces were mainly very pale and thin, with eyes rimmed with kohl. They wore tiny little slanty boxes for skirts and ... soft white leather boots. In these shining boots, they tripped along, with their candy-pink lips open and smiling, admiring their own reflections in the windows of the new shops, from which surged the kind of music that nobody had ever heard before." (II)
• "The guys sauntering up and down the King's Road were sometimes with the girls but more often on their own, like lone gazelles." (II)
• "I ... stared at the skin of my face, which ... had broken out into spots and now looked like some kind of lumpy grey soup insufficiently blended in Mummy's Kenwood mixer." (II)
• "I began wishing that phone boxes weren't phone boxes at all but convenient little euthanasia booths where you pressed button A and a lovely lethal gas scented with privet flowers overcame you, and that was that." (II)
• "Julius had parked a little black 2CV with one of its rear wheels up on the kerb. In this attitude, the car reminded me of a dog, lifting its leg to piss." (II) Somehow this says all you need to know about Julius.
• "In my life with Hugo, I felt, all the time, that I was doing the best I could, but now I knew for sure that mt 'best' resembled the antics of a stricken kind of creature, like a sick grey parrot in a cage." (IV)
• "Pity for him began to grow inside me; a little potato sprout of pity I'd never felt for him before." (V)

February 2025; 181 pages

First published by Chatto & Windus in 2023

My Vintage paperback edition was issued in 2024.

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