"Never Laura" by Ewgeniya Lyras

An extraordinarily creative and original cyberpunk novel set in a dystopian world of artificial intelligence, human enhancement and hallucinogenic drugs.

Following the loss of both her parents during a suicide pandemic and her subsequent rape by a priest, trust-funded Laura spends her time in nightclubs drinking, taking drugs and having sex, usually with women. Then she takes a 'soul flight' and wakes up with bionic bits. This is a world in which IT implants are as common as piercings, allowing people to achieve all sorts of things, from making phone calls to controlling their surface appearance. This is a world in which many jobs are controlled by robots or by cyborgs. This is a world of hallucination and consequent epistemological and ontological fluidity, in which neuroscientists are working to free one's soul from one's body.

There were moments when I was reminded of Dhalgren, the classic of speculative fiction by Samuel R Delaney, of the work of Angela Carter and especially of the novels of William Burroughs such as The Wild Boys, Naked Lunch, and The Soft Machine. 

But it's a work of two halves. In the first seventeen chapters, leading to just past the 50% mark, the reader is immersed in a nightmarish world in which reality is hardly ever what it seems. The second half jumps back to before the beginning, using a far more conventional narrative form to provide the back story, to contextualise and explain the first part, and to lead us to a resolution. This is an interesting design, reminding me of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, an attempt to offer alternative perspectives on the same story, something I myself am attempting with my next novel. I'm not sure that it worked.

Equally, there were some wonderfully original phrases (see the selected quotes) but there were moments when these came perilously close to tipping over into rococo absurdity: “Battered strings of my dim energy floated between planets like rotten debris of algae in the ocean.” (Ch 17)

Nevertheless, this fascinating book offers the sort of experimental fiction that is all too rare today.   

Selected quotes:

• “Black night primed the canvas of the city and neon lights painted the portrait of its drunken soul.” (Ch 1)
• “Coming back to a sober brain is never a sweet experience.” (Ch 5)
• “His expression greased with satisfaction.” (Ch 9)
• “People convolved into sculptures of orgies, digging out unforeseen desires from the wrinkles of each others’ minds.” (Ch 10)
• “An awkward, bony guy, too smart to be talkative.” (Ch 14) My wife, who is far from laconic, was not impressed when I quoted this to her.
• “The drug-sodden air flogged the anxiety from Rick's bones.” (Ch 15)
• “Their three silhouettes shared every border, every curve and cavity.” (Ch 15)
• “It's OK to embrace pleasure. It's OK to have desires. Otherwise what’s the purpose of flesh?” (Ch 15)
• “My soul was a magical sucker on the tentacle of a giant cosmic octopus.” (Ch 15)
• “The white light of her supernova accompanied her final breath, and the blinding outburst swallowed the last bits of her before shooting the bullets of her energy through my celestial body, pervading me with her life.” (Ch 17)
• “My groin was moaning like a cat in spring.” (Ch 18) !!!

September 2025; 309 pages

Published by Hay Press in 2023

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

"On Beauty" by Zadie Smith

One may as well begin by acknowledging that although the plot is based on Howard's End by E M Forster, Zadie Smith has written a novel that not only translates the action to American academic life but spectacularly transcends her original.

The bare bones of the story are there. It starts with the line: “One may as well begin with Jerome's e-mails to his father” (Kipps and Belsey: 1) Jerome Belsey, going to stay with the Kipps family (whose right-wing patriarch is at academic war with Jerome's dad, Howard) falls in love with Victoria Kipps, daughter of the family. Howard pays a visit and spectacularly causes embarrassment. But his wife Kiki Belsey forms a friendship with Mrs Kipps, an ethereal woman very much in the mould of the original. This friendship prompts Mrs K to scribble a hand-written unwitnessed codicil to her will, leaving the family's most valuable painting to Kiki, a donation the Kippses hush up and burn.

Leonard Bast appears to, in the figure of cool and gorgeous hip hip artist Carl, with whom Zora Belsey, Howard's daughter falls in love and whom her poetry class at college patronise (in both senses). 

I guess the sixteen year old Levi Belsey is supposed to mirror Tibby in Howards End but Tibby is academic and so vague as to be translucent while Levi fizzes with life and hooks up with some Haitians in an attempt at revolutionary socialism with all the misguided zeal of his youth. 

Victoria's equivalent disappears to Africa for most of the Forster book but Victoria makes a huge impression on the text by sleeping not just with Jerome but also with his father and with Carl. So the plot element of the man whose secret affair becomes known is still there but with the 'wrong' family.

But why worry about the correspondences? The characters in this book are wonderfully and anarchically real, taking the plot by the scruff of its neck and forcing it into the shape they want.

Of all the characters it is Howard who experiences the most 'only connection' when he has a series of epiphanies in the middle of the book.

• At Mrs K's funeral “a man in front of Howard checking his watch as if the end of the world (for so it was for Carlene Kipps) was a mere inconvenience in his busy day, even though this fellow too would live to see the end of his world, as would Howard, as do tens of thousands of people every day, few of whom, in their lifetimes, are ever able to truly believe in the oblivion to which they are dispatched.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 2) which is too much for Howard and he has to run out of the church.
• Then he finds himself in a London street with all the variety of people there. “We scum, we happy scum! From people like these he had come. To people like these he would always belong.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 3)
• He then finds himself in a pub watching football on the television. “Soon he was cheering and complaining with the rest.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 4)

But it is Levi who articulates it, in a scene interpolated into the three scenes of Howard's: “Sometimes it's like you just meet someone and you just know that you're totally connected, and that this person is, like, your brother - or your sister.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 4)

And the beauty? There is a poem entitled 'On Beauty' and there are many discussions of aesthetics. There are questions such as whether hip-hop is 'proper' poetry (the poets try to make Carl write a sonnet). Zora is transfixed by Carl's physical beauty. Howard gives lectures debunking Rembrandt and is told by Victoria (who becomes one of his students) that there comes a point when he should stop discussing tomatoes and just say 'I like tomatoes'. 

But the analysis deadens a book which, otherwise, is brimming with life, driven by some unforgettable characters. 

And it can be very funny:

• “She lived through footnotes. ... so intent was she upon reading the guidebook to Sacre-Coeur that she walked directly into an altar, cutting her forehead open.” (Kipps and Belsey: 7)
• “Whenever Howard saw an opportunity to take the moral high ground he pretty much catapulted himself towards it.” (Kipps and Belsey: 9)
• “When confronted with people she knew to be religious she began to blaspheme wildly.” (Kipps and Belsey: 12)
• “Jack’s two PhDs, in Lydia's mind, made up for all the times he tipped coffee into his own filing cabinet.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 2)
• “Zora's silent sulks were always oppressive, and as belligerent as if she was screaming at you from the top of her lungs.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 6)
• “Somehow if you ordered the cheesecake as an afterthought it had fewer calories in it.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 6)
• “These shoes took stairs in only one direction.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 11)

Selected quotes:

• “It's very cool to be able to pray without someone in your family coming into the room and (a) passing wind (b) shouting (c) analysing the ‘phoney metaphysics’ of prayer (d) singing loudly (e) laughing.” (Kipps and Belsey: 1)
• “When you are guilty, all you can ask for is a deferral of the judgment.” (Kipps and Belsey: 2)
• “The windows retain their mottled green glass, spreading a dreamy pasture on the floorboards whenever strong light passes through them.” (Kipps and Belsey: 3)
• “He thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies.” (Kipps and Belsey: 5)
• “Levi treasured the urban the same way previous generations worshiped the pastoral.” (Kipps and Belsey: 8) And why not?
• “Faced with the smallest slight to himself or his character, and, in particular, his clothes, Levi would argue for justice for as long as he had breath in his body, even when - especially when - he was in the wrong.” (Kipps and Belsey: 9)
• “Summer left Wellington abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent the leaves to the ground all at once.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 1)
• “Bottom line? I'm not a big talker. I don't express shit well when I talk. I write better than I speak. ... Talkin’? I hit my own finger. Every time.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 1)
• “She too had spent much time in universities. She understood the power of the inappropriate.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 3)
• “‘I don't ask myself what did I live for,’ said Carlene strongly. ‘ that is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.’” (The Anatomy Lesson: 4)
• “Levi was still only sixteen, living with his parents in the middle class suburb of Wellington, and therefore not really a viable stand-in father for her three small children.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 5)
• “Situationists transform the urban landscape.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 5)
• “This concern with beauty as a physical actuality in the world ... that’s clearly imprisoning and it infantilizes ... but it's true.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 6)
• “Try walking down the street with fifteen Haitians if you want to see people get uncomfortable.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 6)
• “And now the practical hats of the Kippses were put on. The women in the room were not offered hats and instinctively sat back in their chairs.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 1)
• “Opportunity ... is a right - but it is not a gift. Rights are earned.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 8)
• “She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 9)
• “Inside Levi's room the smell of boy, of socks and sperm, was strong.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 12)

September 2025; 443 pages

First published by Hamish Hamilton in 2005

My Penguin paperback edition issued in 2006

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

"Autobiography of Red" by Anne Carson

 This is described as a modern epic poem although I could see little that was distinctively poetic about it apart from the fact that it is written in alternately long and short lines and that punctuation is no guide as to when these lines will end. Some of these lines use words in an interesting and original way but it is mostly narrative. 

It is a bildungsroman, chronicling the childhood and young adulthood of Geryon. He is described as a monster, as red, and as having wings. I presume that these features are a way of symbolising the fact that he is different. Nevertheless, he goes to school, albeit reluctantly. He is bullied by his elder brother who also, it is implied, sexually abuses him. As a young gay man he begins an affair with Herakles, a very confident, manly man who treats him as a sex object. Later, he goes  to Latin America and studies; he also takes photographs. By chance he re-encounters Herakles who now has a Indian American boyfriend called Ancash (which means Blue in a South American Indian language although the reader is never told this). Herakles wants Geryon and Ancash. The relationship ends in tears.

It is a charming and sensitive portrait of a young gay man.

Selected quotes:

• “It was a typical tango song and she had the throat full of needles you need to sing it.” (31)
• “The hour of six pm flowed through the hotel like a wave. Lamps snapped on and white bedspreads sprang forward.” (32)
• “Herakles’ gaze on him was like a gold tongue. Magma rising.” (33)
• “Herakles liked to make love early in the morning like a sleepy bear taking the lid off a jar of honey.” (34)

September 2025; 147 pages

First published in Canada by Alfred A Knopf in 1998

My Penguin Vintage Classics paperback edition was issued in 2024

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

"A View of the Harbour" by Elizabeth Taylor

 A novel dissecting the relationships between the members of a community, a stiff-upper-lip English version of Trindadian Miguel Street by V S Naipaul, Welsh Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas or Californian Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. It is framed by the characters observing one another, often through windows, which are framed. But their observations are inevitably flawed, like Bertram, the retired naval officer and would-be painter, whose paintings never measure up to the vision he had in the first place. 

The heart of the plot is a secret love affair. Beth Cazabon, an author, lives with her husband Robert, the local doctor, and her two children, Prudence, a strange and troubled teenager, a five-year-old Stevie. Next-door-neighbour Tory (Victoria) Foyle, a divorcee, is her best friend ... but she is also conducting a secret affair with Robert. Mrs Bracey, who owns the local shop, is paralysed and spends all day in bed looking out of the window, and bullying her daughter Millie who runs the shop and cares for her; the other daughter Ivy works at the pub. Bertram Hemingway, newly retired from the Royal navy and living on half-pay, flirts with Lily, widowed owner of the waxworks, and Tory; he also sits with Mrs Bracey. 

Prudence discovers the affair between her father and Tory.

In terms of plot, the tension is provided by this affair and the question as to whether Beth will learn of it. But presiding over the village from her bed is paralysed Mrs Bracey a monumentally self-centred woman. She's more than just selfish, though she is very selfish. She doesn't exactly take the place of God, although she acts as judge, dealing retribution without mercy: “Mrs Bracey sat in judgment. Guilt she saw, treachery and deceit and self-indulgence. She did not see, as God might be expected to, their sensations of shame and horror.” (Ch 13) She isn't just solipsistic, although she believes that when she dies the world will end: “When I die it dies also, and then it might never have been.” (Ch 16) She actually thinks that God, like Maisie, is her servant: “Mrs Bracey ... had always been aware of the concentration of God upon her, an omnipotent God, vaguely, and yet, over small matters, still at her beck and call. When she wished Him to give her His attention she opened a little shutter in her soul ... He would receive her orders and listen to her explanations (taking them at face value), but at the same time could be excluded from any shameful thoughts ... When she shut God away she did not imagine Him turning his thoughts to any others of His flock. It was rather like giving a maid the afternoon off, except that she imagined Him mooning about, idle, restless, waiting.” (Ch 15) What a woman!

I think my favourite bit-part was the librarian who personally reads and censors the books in his care: “Murder he allowed; but not fornication. Childbirth (especially if the character died of it, but not pregnancy. Love might be supposed to be consummated as long as no one had any pleasure out of it.” (Ch 2)

My favourite funny moment is in chapter 14 when Lily thinks that a brothel is a soup-kitchen, presumably because it contains broth. 

The whole thing is wonderfully character-driven. I enjoyed the fact that it avoids the class bias that so many books of that time display. 

The prose is third person omniscient and in the past tense. It is quite 'proper' and one imagines Ms Taylor spoke BBC English. It is carefully constructed with little fat.

Selected quotes:

• “Two days in this place and the tide creeps up, begins to wash against me, and I perceive dimly that there is no peace in life ... not until it is done with me for ever.” (Ch 1)
• “The young imagine insults, magnify them, with great effort overcome them, or retaliate. A waste of emotion Bertram thought, forgetting how much emotion there is to spare.” (Ch 2)
• “Smells of stew crept round the kitchen.” (Ch 2)
• “I dreamt I was at her funeral and when we were in the church I suddenly noticed that the coffin lid was moving up and down very slightly.” (Ch 4)
• “Writers are ruined people. As a person, you're done for. Everywhere you go, all you see and do, you are working up into something unreal, something to go on to paper.” (Ch 5)
• “Mrs Bracey lent back with her face turned to the clock, but her eyes shut, for a watched clock never moves, she had long ago decided.” (Ch 5)
• “Odd means someone who is left over when the rest are divided into pairs.” (Ch 6)
• “Little boys have a peculiar smell, too, as if they have been clutching pennies in their hot hands all day.” (Ch 8)
• “As soon as he stepped outside, tiredness and depression dropped over him like a damp cloak.” (Ch 9)
• “She was weary of all the mothers of her acquaintance claiming sensitive and highly-strung children, no matter how phlegmatic, even bovine, they might be.” (Ch 10)
• “Everything was round the wrong way. In the days when she had been a little girl, the horrors were in the story books ... and the outside world was cosy: now, the horrors were real, and, to compensate, the child's imagination must be soothed and cosseted with innocent bread-and-milk.” (Ch 12) Written in 1947 and perhaps even more relevant today with all the trigger warnings.
• “The sunlight filled the room as if it were wine in a glass, flashed on the knives and forks, showed up the smeary windows.” (Ch 14)
• “There is no need to look smug and knowing - like the Mona Lisa - or - or a lavatory-attendant.” (Ch 16) What a brilliant juxtaposition! And how knowing lavatory attendants must be!

Elizabeth Taylor also wrote Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. 

September 2025; 304 pages

First published in 1947 by Peter Davies Ltd

My paperback edition was issued by Virago in 2006

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

"Still Lives" by Reshma Ruia

Madame Bovary in Manchester. Emma Bovary becomes PK Malik, an Indian businessman in Manchester, whose business is struggling. Seeking an escape from his disappointing family life, seduced by glamour, he begins an affair with the wife of his most successful rival. Inevitably he finds himself living far beyond his means. All of his dreams are disappointed. 

This story of ordinary people is firmly rooted in reality, underscored by the matter-of-fact chapter titles, eg "A Football Match", "Tough Times", "A Pair of Red Shoes". This everyday style reminded me of the 'kitchen sink' novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe and The Lowlife by Alexander Baron. So many novels nowadays seem to harness escapism that it is refreshing to discover that authors can still find drama in the ordinary.

It is narrated in the present tense (although there are a couple of moments when it seems that PK is looking back on the story) by PK the protagonist. Many of the chapters end with letters written by Geeta, PK's wife.

The ring of truth about this novel is substantiated by the relentlessness of the trap that is tightening around the hero. The reader hopes that this remorseless author will find a happy ending but fears that PK's story can only end in tragedy.

The Set up of the Plot

 Prakash Kant 'PK' Malik left India and settled in Manchester where he became successful in the rag trade. A wannabe fashion designer, he was one of the pioneers of cheap fashion: taking haute couture, changing it slightly, and marketing it to the masses. But when the novel opens, his business in struggling. The competition is personified by Cedric Solomon. At the same time, his wife Geeta is growing fat and their only son Amar, born after a number of miscarriages, has special needs and is entering adolescence. Spending mushrooms in the absence of love, putting intolerable pressure on PK's finances. He seeks escape and begins an affair with Cedric's wife, Esther. I particularly enjoyed the irony when the clothes designer first seeks happiness by getting naked with his lover.

Selected quotes:

• “Anybody can be happy - there is no skill in that. what is important is to become a someone.” (Ch 17)
• “All love stories are accidents ... A crazy lurch in the dark, and if we're lucky someone steps out to catch us, to break our fall.” (Ch 18)

September 2025; 309 pages

Published by Renard Press in 2022

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

"A Brief History of Seven Killings" by Marlon James

Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize.

It's not brief. And there are far more than seven killings. In fact the seven killings referred to in the title (which is also the title of the magazine articles written by fictional journalist Alex Pierce) refer to one massacre which takes place in one chapter of the fourth part of this epic.

It is written from multiple viewpoints. The five parts (each introduced by the ghost of the first man to be murdered) are divided into shorter chapters, each being narrated in the first person perspective by a character. There are a lot of characters and many of them have individual voices, although they mostly divide into Jamaican gangster speak, Jamaican posh speak, and US speak. 

This use of language is one of the key characteristics of the novel, creating a vivid and direct connection to the reader. The Jamaican gangsters use patois mixed with Rastafarian words and a considerable amount of swearing; there are some limitations to this vocabulary (the almost ubiquitous use of the word "pussyhole" as an epithet for someone you don't like) which slightly undermines the suggestion that some of the gangsters are intelligent autodidacts. 

The raw freshness of this novel is created largely from the shock tactics of using this unexpurgated language as well as the repeated cold-blooded killing and the misogyny. 

It is a vivid portrayal of the emptiness of the gangster's life. These young men have to kill or be killed; their life expectancy is short; they have to be harder than their fellows in order to progress up the hierarchy and improve their chances of survival. As Demus, a young recruit says, he tried to kill the Singer not because he didn't like the Singer but to impress his fellow gang-members.

There's a lot of murder. One character has qualms (about killing the wrong person, an innocent kid). As the book progresses, the killing becomes more and more extreme, perhaps to show that the violence became worse once it was exported from its roots in the Jamaican ghetto, although that sounds racist. I think a more likely reason is that the author had to make the killing worse and worse (beheadings, burnings alive etc) in order to keep shocking the reader.

Given that the focus of the book is on criminal gangsters of whom only one is female, this misogyny is perhaps not surprising. Almost all of the men see women purely in terms of sex objects (or, occasionally, as brood mares). There are only two female narrators, one who has only a few pages and the other who reappears throughout the book although her name changes. Otherwise, the novel is dominated by the make perspective. In fact one might argue that gay men (there are two major characters, both killers, who are gay) have a larger say in the narrative than women.

In Aspects of the Novel, E M Forster writes “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.” This is a long book, nearly 700 pages in my paperback version. I actually think it should have been two or three books. The first two sections, dealing with the shooting of Bob Marley (he is only twice mentioned by name, once as 'Marley' {Original Rockers: Alex Pierce #1} and another time as 'Bob' - elsewhere he is always called 'the Singer' in his Jamaica home, would stand alone as a tightly structured novel. The next three sections drag out the aftermath, moving to the USA, following the characters who were involved, either as culprits or witnesses, and explaining how, by getting involved in drug dealing, Jamaican gang warfare led to an explosion in drug abuse in New York. I found these parts increasingly heavy going, I was reading just to get to the end, I did want to know what happened to the characters involved but I wouldn't have minded if their fates had been left a mystery. The fresh use of Jamaican patois had become routine, something to be admired because of the author's ability to long it out. The shock value of the swearing, the misogyny and the killings was blunted. The book was, for me, in the end, too long.

In the long run, and the run was long, I found this novel an impressive achievement but I didn't derive much enjoyment from reading it.

Selected quotes: 

• “If it no go so it go near so.” (epigraph) = If it didn’t happen just like that, it more or less did.
• “Living people wait and see because they fool themselves that they have time. Dead people see and wait.” (Sir Arthur George Jennings)
• “If change ever going to come then we will have to wait and see, but all we can do down here in the Eight Lanes is see and wait.” (Original Rockers: Bam-Bam #1)
• “People so poor they can't even afford shame.” (Original Rockers: Bam-Bam #1)
• “Every time you reach the edge, the edge move ahead of you like a shadow until the whole world is a ghetto.” (Original Rockers: Bam-Bam #1)
• “The sun is jumping ship and evening's coming.” (Original Rockers: Barry DiFlorio)
• "What does it mean when the conscience of America airbrushes pussy for a living?"  (Original Rockers: Barry DiFlorio) Referring to the fact that Penthouse, a soft porn magazine, combined its pictures with investigative reporting, particularly unveiling US government scandals.
• “Things hard and getting more and more crucial by the day when a nursery worker have to skin out onstage.” (Original Rockers: Josey Wales)
• “Only when we come to Revelation that we take stock of Genesis.” (Ambush in the Night: Papa-Lo #2)
• “She gave me that I-expected-just-a-little-more-from-you look that she either inherited or studied from Mummy.” (Ambush in the Night: Nina Burgess #2)
• “Soldier don't act like we is crime and them is order, soldier act like we is enemy and this is war.” (Ambush in the Night: Papa-Lo #3)
• “I wouldn't befriend him if he was all that could stop me from being buttfucked raw by Satan and his ten big-dicked demons.”
• “Guess what, for all its shit, communism is more socially progressive than us.” (Shadow Dancin’: Barry DiFlorio)
• “As small as America's dick is, those limeys will stretch across the Atlantic to suck it.” (Shadow Dancin’: Barry DiFlorio)
• “The sun running away before we get to the bay. It don't have what it take to witness when man get dark.” (Shadow Dancin’: Papa-Lo)
• “I'll bet anybody that my nothing is bigger than their nothing any day of the week.” (White Lines / Kids in America: Dorcas Palmer # 1)
• “Is that them call fatalism? I don't know, brethren, that word seem more connected to fatal than it connected to fate.” ((White Lines / Kids in America: Tristan Phillips #5)

August 2025; 686 pages

First published by Oneworld in 2014

My paperback edition issued in 2015

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

"The Spire" by William Golding

 A Dean in the Middle Ages is inspired by a vision to add a spire to his cathedral. Opposition includes the master builder he hires to supervise the work. Will his monomaniacal determination win the day or will his dreams come crashing down? 

The wikipedia page on this novel has a detailed account of the plot (with spoilers), the characters and the symbolism.

For me, the best thing about the book is the carefully constructed gappy stream of consciousness narration (all from Dean Jocelin's perspective) which is a masterclass in how to hook and beguile the reader into piecing together what is going on from the sometimes disjointed clues. 

The key turning points are at the one-third mark and the two-thirds mark.

Captain Ahab meets Leopold Bloom?

Selected quotes

• “The most solid thing was the light. It smashed through the rows of windows in the south aisle, so that they exploded with colour, it slanted before him from right to left in an exact formation, ... Everywhere, fine dust gave these rods and trunks of light the importance of a dimension.” (Ch 1)
• “He had a tariff of knees. He knew how they should be after this length of kneeling or that.” (Ch 1)
• “Once more, the windows were coming together. the Saint’s life still burned in them with blue and red and green; but the spark and shatter of the sun had shifted.” (Ch 1)
• “The master builder often looked at things without seeing them; and then again, he would look at a thing as if he could see nothing else.” (Ch 2)
• “When the rain drizzled, then time was a drizzle, slow and to be endured.” (Ch 3)
• “When the wind came, it ... cuffed the air this way and that.” (Ch 3)
• “A workman fell through the hole above the crossways, and left a scream scored all the way down the air which was so thick it seemed to keep the scream as something mercilessly engraved there.” (Ch 3)
• “A midday without sun and therefore blasphemously without hope.” (Ch 3)
• “Some of the gargoyles seemed diseased, as they yelled their soundless blasphemies and derisions into the wind, yet made no more noise than death in another country.” (Ch 4) “no more noise than death in another country.”: what a phrase!
• “He was helpless ... as a girl herding too many geese.” (Ch 4) A nice mediaeval simile.
• “There comes a point when a vision’s no more than a child’s playing let’s pretend.” (Ch 4)
• “The earth is a huddle of noseless men grinning upward, there are gallows everywhere, the blood of childbirth never ceases to flow, nor sweat in the furrow, the brothels are down there and drunk men lie in the gutter. There is no good thing in all this circle but the great house, the ark, the refuge, a ship to contain all these people and now fitted with a mast.” (Ch 5) Earlier in the book, the cathedral is compared to a man lying on his back which makes the spire an erect penis.
• “There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.” (Ch 10)
• “Life itself is a rickety building.” (Ch 10)
• “His thoughts went trotting away like a horse unharnessed from the cart.” (Ch 11)

William Golding was a Booker prize winner (1980) and the 1983 Nobel Laureate. He wrote poetry, drama and these novels:

• Lord of the Flies (1954)
• The Inheritors (1955)
• Pincher Martin (1956)
• Free Fall (1959)
• The Spire (1964)
• The Pyramid (1967)
• Darkness Visible (1979) (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize)
• To the Ends of the Earth (trilogy)
• Rites of Passage (1980) (Booker Prize winner)
• Close Quarters (1987)
• Fire Down Below (1989)
• The Paper Men (1984)
• The Double Tongue (posthumous publication 1995)

My copy has a delightful cover by John Piper, an artist who designed a large opus of ecclesiastical work, including stained glass windows.

August 2025; 223 pages

Published by Faber and Faber in 1964

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

"Pilgrimage 1: Pointed Roofs" by Dorothy Richardson

This little novel, the first of a novel sequence of 12 further volumes, has a place in literary history as the first novel in English to be described as 'stream of consciousness' in a review by May Sinclair (author of Uncanny Stories) in the Egoist in April 1918. It is a fictionalised (not autofiction because the name of the narrator is changed) version of Richardson's 1891 experience as a 17-year-old student teacher at a finishing school in Hanover in Germany. The rest of the novel sequence closely follows the events of Richardson's life.

It wasn't what I would describe as 'stream of consciousness'. Although the narration is entirely from the perspective of protagonist Miriam Henderson, it seemed more of an interior monologue. There were moments when the prose departed from standard grammatical structure or when we experienced raw sensory impressions or when memories interrupted the conscious thought, but most of the time Miriam's thought processes were quite orderly and the narration normal. I suppose that it was a first attempt at SoC, but it showed how quickly the technique advanced: Ulysses by James Joyce began serial publication just 5 years after Pointed Roofs and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway was published ten years after PR. But certainly PR is written from a perspective inside the skin of its narrator and there are certainly elements of SoC.

Unfortunately, the events described in the book are really rather mundane. I suppose that a day in the life of an insurance salesman, or the hour-by-hour account of a lady planning a dinner party are also mundane but perhaps they are forgivable because of their tight time-frame, while PR's time period is months. 

It does evoke a feeling of the claustrophobia of an all-girls finishing school with its strained relationships. Towards the end there is a thunderstorm to which most of the schoolgirls (and the head teacher) react with hysteria. The headteacher is also liable to sudden storms and is memorably condemnatory when she discovers that the girls have been talking about boys which is impure! Although up till that point the attitude towards this sort of thing seemed to be relaxed.

The portraits of the headteacher Fraulein Pfaff and the informal Head Girl, confident Australian Gertrude, were well-developed. Otherwise there were probably too many characters for me to understand any of them in depth.

Selected quotes:

• “Lilla, with her black hair and the specks of bright amber in the brown of her eyes.” (1.1) I loved that detailed study of eye colour. Eyes are something the narrator repeatedly notices.
• “The polished floor was uncarpeted save for an archipelago of mats and rugs.” (3.4)
• “Perhaps that was how it was with the English. They knew, but they did not dare.” (3.8)

August 2025; 146 pages

First published in the UK by Duckworth in 1915

My paperback version was issued by Zinc Read in 2023.

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

"Ethan Frome" by Edith Wharton

This tiny little novel feels a bit like a miniature Wuthering Heights, without the ghosts and the romantic hero. It is set on an isolated farm in a wintry New England, as bleak and occasionally beautiful as the Yorkshire moors. The eponymous hero is trapped with a demanding invalid wife and becomes obsessed with the vivacious poor relation who lives with them. Will Ethan get a second chance at happiness? 

It's a classic novel of despair. The emotions are intensified by the claustrophobic settings and the fact that the inarticulate protagonist cannot voice his desires. And it has a stupendous twist at the end. 

It’s a story in a story. The unnamed, first-person narrator of the frame confesses to constructing “this vision of his story”. The main narrative is written in the third-person from Ethan's perspective; his is the only interior monologue we have access to.

One of the one-star reviews on goodreads describes the characters as shallow. It's a valid point. There are three main characters:

• Ethan is a classic tragic hero. Aristotle, in his Poetics insists that a tragedy must evoke both pity and fear which means that the reader must, to some extent, empathise with the tragic hero and I could certainly put myself in Ethan's place. Schreiber in chapter 8 of his Introduction to Literary Criticism, asserts that the hero must “contribute to his own downfall” but only by making a mistake of judgement rather than being morally unsound. This is also true, at least if you accept the contemporary morality in which divorce was possible. Ethan’s tragic flaw is that he has glimpsed a better world, so like Adam and Eve after they had tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge, he cannot remain content on his unproductive farm and in his loveless marriage. Aristotle would have approved of what he called peripeteia and we would call the twist at the end: it meets his criteria of both being unexpected and yet inevitable. 
• But if Ethan is an interesting and complex character, Zeena is as flat as they come, a stereotyped old shrew. Beautifully written but one dimensional. A classic villain in the sense that most plots are driven by the baddie's nefarious schemes. Whether you believe or not in Zeena's character arc is up to you. I accept that it is plausible. Nevertheless, Zeena is a car with only two gears: fast forward and reverse.
• Mattie is even more sketchily drawn. She's the love interest, pretty and vivacious and, for some reason, head over heels in love with Ethan, despite the fact that when we first see her she is flirting with Dennis Eady (but she can't have any interest in him because that would represent an escape route and she has to be trapped).

As for the central symbolism of the pickle dish, even the Guardian describes that as overly portentous. It was a wedding present for Zeena, ergo a symbol of her marriage. But she hid it away and never used it as if to symbolise her refusal to enter fully into her marriage (I presume that Ethan and her don’t have sex which is why they have no kids). It is broken (by the cat) immediately after Ethan and Mattie touch hands while eating together while Zeena is away from home, symbolising how their adultery (in their hearts if not in actuality) shatters the Frome marriage. There’s even a hint of ‘while the cat’s away the mice will play’!

There are some moments of stunning description, the plot is an absolute classic and the despair of Ethan's marriage is wonderfully portrayed. But I would have preferred more time spent on the characters.

Selected quotes

• “The storms of February had pitched their white tents about the devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to their support.” (Prologue)
• “The Frome farm was always ‘bout as bare’s a milkpan when the cat's been round.” (Prologue)
• “His father got a kick, out haying, and went soft in the brain, and gave away money like Bible texts afore he died.” (Prologue)
• “In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.” (Ch 1)
• “His father's death ... had put a premature end to Ethan's studies; but though they had not gone far enough to be of much practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.” (Ch 1)
• “‘We never got away - how should you?’ seemed to be written on every headstone.” (Ch 2)
• “His dread was so strong that, man-like, he sought to postpone certainty.” (Ch 2) Not sure about the 'man-like'. Unless it means 'human-like'. 

Wharton also wrote The Age of Innocence

August 2025; 181 pages

First published by Charles Scribner's Sons in the USA in 1911

My Penguin paperback was issued in 1987

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

Potted plot: spoiler alert

Ethan wanted to go to college and learn stuff but his father’s illness brought him back to manage the farm. After his father died, his mum became ill and he brought in Zenobia to help nurse her; subsequently he married her. But the marriage was a disaster. Zeena took the ‘invalid’ route forever complaining that she is ill. So they bring Mattie, a poor relation of Zeena’s, to help around the house for her board and lodging. Ethan, disappointed in marriage, falls in love with Mattie and she with him (although the love is unconsummated and inarticulate). Zeenie, suspecting this liaison, announces she is now so ill that they will have to bring in a hired girl to replace Mattie. Ethan has to take Mattie to the station but instead they decide to go skiing, making a suicide pact to deliberately steer into a tree to kill themselves. But they only injure themselves, Mattie being permanently crippled. They return to the farm where Zeena resumes the role of carer, no longer having time to invent her own illnesses. Ethan lives with these two women in a loveless, mostly silent and resentful, triangle of resentment.