Sunday 30 December 2012

"The unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry" by Rachel Joyce



Longlisted for the 2012 Booker Prize

Wow! This was a powerful novel. I cried.

Harold Fry is trapped in a loveless marriage with wife Maureen; only son David no longer lives with them. A letter arrives from an old colleague, Queenie Hennessy. She is dying of cancer in Berwick on Tweed. Harold writes a brief reply and walks to the letter box to post it. But he keeps going. He decides to walk, in his yachting shoes, from his home in Devon to Berwick.

On the route he thinks about his marriage and why it went wrong, of the debt he owes to Queenie, of his mother who walked out on him and his alcoholic father, and of his failed relationship with his son. And his abandoned wife thinks her thoughts too.

I related so very well to the early descriptions of walking. Every year I go for a walk, on my own. I have walked along the Thames, from Oxford to Cambridge, from St Paul's to Canterbury, along the Lea Valley, and along the South Coast from Brighton to Folkestone. I understood when Harold felt that walking was so much more intense than driving; when you walk you are a part of the landscape rather than travelling through the landscape. I empathised with the feeling of embarrassment at being the only person in the guest house on their own. And how I winced with every blister!

But I also wanted so much to understand what had gone wrong with Harold's life. What happened to alienate him from his son? Why had he drifted apart from his wife? And why did he owe Queenie such a debt? These puzzles had me racing through the book when I wanted to talk, step by step.

Will he make it? And if he does, how will he ever go back to being 'normal'? And will Queenie die?

Terrific human drama. Possibly the best book I have read this year. Superb! December 2012; 296 pages


This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God


It has subsequently been pointed out to me by another reader that the book loses a little in  the middle part when Harold is joined by a motley collection of hippies and other supporters who publicise and try to take over the purpose of the 'pilgrimage'. This reader suggested that the narrative lost its way at this point (although, like Harold, it found its way again later). I agree that a little momentum was lost here although I understand the point of trying to show how publicity can warp purpose. Perhaps the story would have been better had it been a little leaner and had this sub-plot been excised. Let the readers decide!



"Shopping, seduction and Mr Selfridge" by Lindy Woodhead

I haven't read a book about retailing since, I think, 1967 when I read "My Store of memories" by Rowan Bentall which was published to coincide with the centenary of Bentall's in Kingston Upon Thames.

This book was brilliant.

It starts by describing the retail environment of nineteenth century Chicago where Harry Gordon Selfridge cut his teeth working for 25 years at department store Marshall Field. I was particularly interested by the boom that accompanied the 1893 World Fair, which I have also read about in "The Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson which intertwines the story of the World Fair with that of the serial killer H. H. Holmes and is well worth a read. I loved the names that Woodhead dropped, people Selfridge knew: Levi Leiter whose daughter Mary married Lord Curzon, Florenz Ziegfield whose son founded the eponymous Follies, skyscraper architect Louis Sullivan, and the father of body-building Eugen Sandow.

Selfridge gets tired of working for other people; he tries retirement and then moves to London to found his own store. His showbiz ways trump the more established retailers (such as Harrods, which began in Stepney of all places!) But as he becomes more successful he becomes increasingly distracted by life outside retailing. He becomes besotted with aeroplanes, exhibiting Bleriot's channel-hopping machine the day after the channel was hopped. He gambles, heavily. And he pursues a string of mistresses, combining passions in the heavily gambling Dolly Sisters. His life becomes connected with aristocracy and politicians and writers especially Arnold Bennett. He seduces Syrie, wife of pharmaceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome, before they both lose her to Somerset Maugham.

Then, as the Second World War starts, he is forced to give up his shop to pay his enormous debts. He becomes a shadow, an old man who takes a bus from his Putney flat to Oxford Street to shuffle past the windows he made famous.

A true tale of triumph to tragedy. Fabulous! December 2012; 261 pages

This is the book that inspired the ITV series Mr Selfridge which is returning for a second series early in 2014.

Tuesday 25 December 2012

"Everything is illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer

This very strange book starts with a miracle and ends with a suicide, swaps narrator and jumps back and forwards in time. The author appears as 'the hero' in sections narrated by another person.

The modern part is mostly narrated in hilariously broken English  by Ukrainian Alexander aka Sasha the son of Alexander aka Father the son of Alexander aka Grandfather. It tells of the journey of 'the hero', Jonathan Safran Foer, who is seeking his Augustine, the woman who saved his Ukranian grandfather. JSF is accompanied by translator Sasha, their driver who is Shasha's blind grandfather and Sammy Davis Junior, Juniro the seeing eye labrador bitch. They are searching for Trachimbrod, sometimes called Sofiowka after the mad masturbating squire, the shtetl where Augustine lived but which was obliterated by the Nazis.

And the story goes back to the day when Trachim B's waggon overturned in the Brod river and the only person who was saved was a newborn baby girl who was named Brod and became the ancestor of JSF. The tale tells of her childhood with disgraced usurer Yankel and her tempestuous marriage to the Kolker and it jumps to JSF's grandfather who had a withered arm and, as a result, from the age of ten, a string of affairs with widows and virgins and in one case a virgin widow.

The plot hinges on what Alex's gradnfather did in the war.

Confusion, fantasy and family history intertwine in this novel. At times it is hilarious, at times sad. Both JSF and Alex send their narratives to one another and discuss whether they are true or not.

We are beguiled with truths, half-truths and non-truths in this book about humanity and deception. "Everything is illuminated" means 'everything is made clear' which, in the end, it isn't. I'm not sure whether it is a good book or a great book but it is remarkable for its inventiveness.

December 2012; 276 pages

Saturday 15 December 2012

"Commander" by Stephen Taylor

This is the biography of "Britain's greatest frigate captain" Sir Edward Pellew. Rising from an ordinary seaman with a particular acrobatic ability in the tops, Pellew's early naval career matched that of his near-contemporary Nelson. Following service fighting Americans in their War of Independence he became captain of a frigate, the Indefatigable, and trained both ship and men to become the most successful prize-winning ship of the time. His later career as captain of a Ship of the Line and later as Rear-Admiral and then Commander-in-Chief in the Indian Ocean kept him away from Trafalgar and led to anti-climax. However, his last fight against the slavers of Algiers restored his reputation.

This is Hornblower stuff. A number of Pellew's exploits (rescuing men from a sinking ship in surf and landing marines at Quiberon Bay) seem to have inspired C. S. Forester. Yet the facts are as compelling as the reading and Taylor has created a brilliant page-turner which encapsulates this brilliant but flawed exponent of the Age of Sail.

Thrilling and fascinating. December 2012; 310 pages

Thursday 13 December 2012

"Forty years catching smugglers" by Malcolm Nelson

Nelson has been a customs officer for (nearly) forty years from Rummager to Assistant Collector and this autobiography is based on the fifty or so talks every year he gives about his career. The oral flavour is preserved intact. It rambles.  The writing is poor both grammatically and stylistically. It has not been proof read.

I struggled to the end because it does have some interest. I guess we are all fascinated by smugglers and I have a tangential interest in his self-promoting stories of management as well. But I would have been embarrassed to write it.

Other memoirs reviewed in this blog include (in order of how much I enjoyed them, favourites first):
  • Memoir of the Bobotes: by Joyce Cary: a brilliantly written memoir of the author's time as a medical officer during the Balkan Wars (pre World War I): the writer became a novelist and his craft shows; full of humour and keen observation
  • My Family and Other Animals (and the sequels) by Gerald Durrell: Beautiful descriptions and hilarious accounts of an eccentric family living on the Greek Island of Corfu between WWI and WWII
  • A Pattern of Islands by Arthur Grimble: a well-written, frequently humourous account of Pacific paradise
  • Bus Stop Symi by William Travis: the account of three years spent on the remote and at the time unspoilt Greek island of Symi: well-written, charming and amusing
  • Surprised by Joy by C S Lewis: an account of the famous author's life, mostly from the perspective of his Christianity: beautifully written
  • A Death in the Family by Karl-Ove Knausgard: the first volume of a series in which the author, in the guise of writing novels, portrays real people with real names: the writing is brilliant
  • Beautiful People by Simon Doonan: The story of a young gay man: well-written with moments of marvellous humour
  • Teacher Man by Frank McCourt: the third volume in the series that started with Angela's Ashes
  • The Politics of Washing: Real Life in Venice by Polly Coles: a reasonably well-written account of a year spent living in Venice
  • A Detail on the Burma Front by Winifred Beaumont: a nurse's story from one of the theatres of World War II: more compassion and humour: reasonably well-written
  • Life in exotic islands:
  • Whatever Happened to Margo: Margaret Durrell's account of running a boarding house in Bournemouth: sometimes muddled but often funny
  • Rabbit Stew and a Penny or Two by Maggie Smith-Bendell: an interesting and reasonably well-written account of a Romani Gypsy childhood
  • Not for the faint-hearted by John Stevens: the autobiography of a senior police officer; probably best for those most interested in this sort of story
  • Forty Years Catching Smugglers by Malcolm Nelson: the memoirs of a senior customs officer; probably best for those most interested in this sort of story

Saturday 8 December 2012

"The Summer Book" by Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson is the lady who also wrote the Moomin series of children's books. This was for adults.

Sophia is a young girl who lives in the summer with her father (who is a very shadowy characters who works at his desk and fishes from his boat) and her grandmother who has problems with her balance. Her mother is dead. She roams the island, swimming and playing and talking with grandmother. Because she is a little girl she does not understand everything, she is frightened of things like sleeping alone in a tent, she is petulant and shouts at her grandmother. Her grandmother is wise, although she too can be petulant and selfish.

This is a beautifully written book about growing up with nature and about the relationship between members of the same family.

Lyrical and thought-provoking. The foreword is by Esther Freud who wrote that other wonderful tale about a child's relationship with her mother: Hideous Kinky.


Sunday 25 November 2012

"Miss Garnet's Angel" by Salley Vickers

Julia Garnet is a virginal school-marm who lives with her friend (but emphatically not lesbian lover) Harriet in a flat in Ealing. Then Harriet dies two days after their joint retirement and Julia rents an apartment in Venice for six months. Here the cautious, waspish, Julia comes face to face with beauty, passion and religion and the winter of Venice warms her wintry heart.

This charming tale of a barren old prude coming to terms with loneliness and barrenness is told with simplicity and elegance. Miss Garnet is so out of place in this modern, sensuous world and nowhere more so than in Venice, yet she is the rock of sense round which the other characters in all their foibles and weaknesses whirl; to whom they cling. Yet she is not a saint. Looking back on her empty life she realises that she has been spiteful, and damaged, and scared; that she has retreated from life and that this is a sort of sin.

Miss Garnet's unfolding is paralleled by a retelling of the Apocryphal Book of Tobit, in which Tobit's son Tobias travels with a spotty dog and the Angel Raphael to win a bride.

We learn a lot about Venice and about the Zoroastrians.

Delightful. November 2012; 335 pages

August 2016: This is one of those books that stay in your mind. Vickers has also written
The Cleaner of Chartres
Mr Golightly's Holiday which is simply superb!

Wednesday 21 November 2012

"The sense of an ending" by Julian Barnes

My sister hated this Booker 2011 prize winner. It beat Jamrach's Menagerie and Pigeon English; I would probably have awarded the prize to the last.

A recently retired man looks back on his youth with imperfect memory. In particular he remembers the University girlfriend who teased him, whom he dumped, who got involved with his best friend from school. His memories have been jogged by a recent legacy. But is he more sinned against than sinning or is the ex-girlfriend right when she says that he never 'got' it?

Short, very readable and well-crafted. The only problem with this book was that I'm not sure whether I 'got' it even at the end. Perhaps I didn't think the sin so terrible that it merited even a small book and the humdrum, even with well honed prose and carefully measured wit, rarely captivates.

November 2012; 150 pages

Julian Barnes also wrote England, England. I wouldn't bother.


This review was written by

the author of Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Sunday 18 November 2012

"The Bloody Chamber" by Angela Carter

This is a collection of short stories ranging from 2 pages long to 42 pages long. The stories are, in essence, a retelling of fairy tales: Bluebeard, Dracula, Beauty and the Beast, Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots etc.

They are transformed by the author's sensuous and luxuriant prose and by a powerful eroticism. Puss in Boots is told from the cat's point of view and imbued with the physicality of a feline. The title piece, the Bloody Chamber, reconstructs Bluebeard and describes with delight the mingled pleasure and disgust as the heroine surrenders her maidenhead to her new husband. The Lady of the House of Love is a vampiress who lures young men into her bed, simultaneously seducing and murdering them.

The theme of this book is the interplay between erotic sex and carnal death and Carter's beautiful gems of stories celebrate the animal in mankind.

Wonderful words. November 2012; 149 pages



This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God


Books by Angela Carter that I have read and reviewed in this blog:


"Fault Line" by Robert Goddard

Another typical Goddard in a genre that is showing signs of aging. The main protagonist, male and disillusioned with life, is obliged to investigate events that took place a long time ago. The story jumps backwards and forwards in time as the elements of the mystery slowly knit together.

As usual, thoroughly readable, marred this time by the fact that the villain was obvious from the first pages. Unlike most Goddards there were very few double crosses and rarely was I wrong footed. Not all the mysteries were cleared up and one sub-plot was more or less entirely separate from the main body. In the final denouement the motives of the villain were still obscure and the only surprise twist at the end was the happy ending.

Not a classic Goddard but I still read it in just over a day.November 2012; 509 pages

Saturday 17 November 2012

"Pure" by Andrew Miller



Winner of the 2011 Costa Book Award.

Jean-Baptiste, a young engineer, is commanded by a minister at the Palace of Versailles to oversee the destruction of the ancient cemetery of Les Innocents next to Les Halles in only-just-pre-revolutionary Paris. All around the area is a strange miasma. There are reports of weird sightings. Things go bump in the night. Many of those living in the locality are hostile to the project.

He meets many strange characters. He is billeted with the Monnards and their mad daughter. Armand is the organist in the derelict graveyard church; he has revolutionary friends. Jeanne is the virginal granddaughter of the sexton. The priest in the church is a recluse, blinded by the Chinese whilst doing missionary work. Heloise is the local whore; she loves reading.

J-B recruits his best friend and a troop of miners, one of whom is a mystery man, and they begin to excavate the bones.

A very strange book, a comedy of manners set amidst corpses.

November 2012; 342 pages



This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Sunday 4 November 2012

"Bring up the bodies" by Hilary Mantel

This sequel to Wolf Hall continues the story of Thomas Cromwell, Master Secretary to the government of Henry VIII. This episode deals with the  downfall of Anne Boleyn.

Part of the magic is the way the story is told in the present tense and from the point of view of Cromwell (although continually referring to him as 'he'). Indirect speech is mingled with quoted speech so that one is never quite sure what Cromwell is thinking and what he is saying; this supports the essential secrecy of the central protagonist. The attraction of this man is that he is so modern. Faced with a world of nobles, chivalry and jousts, he organises and manages. In sweeping away the monasteries he places the monarchy on a sound financial footing; he understands trade and banking. Throwaway lines show that he is the man to begin baptismal records, he extends the justice system to Wales, he doesn't use torture (although his interrogations scarcely suit modern sensibilities and the trials over which he presides are show trials), he seeks to place the parish priests on a proper footing, and he tries to bring in a Keynesian law to give public work to the unemployed.

This book doesn't have the immense power of Wolf Hall but it is a very readable sequel. It won the 2012 Booker, beating The Lighthouse by Alison Moore and Narcopolis by Jeff Thayil. It was shortlisted for the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction. It also won the 2012 Costa Book Awards.


This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Sunday 14 October 2012

"Atomised" by Michel Houellebecq

This is an overtly philosophical French novel. Michel is a molecular biologist who lives in France and later moves to Ireland (much like the author, Michel). Michel has no relationships with other people except perhaps for the friendship he once had with his childhood friend; he lives alone and does not seem to need sex. In contrast his half brother Bruno is obsessed with sex, seeking as many joyless couplings as possible.
I suppose Michel and Bruno represent the soul and the body in a modern version of classic Cartesian dualism.

It is a long time (over thirty years) since I read Sartre's Roads to Freedom trilogy and I am not sure if I remember it rightly but it seemed to me that Sartre's existentialism was told in a much more believable novel, with a human face, than this cold, impersonal, almost nihilistic book. But perhaps that was the point. Perhaps Houellebecq is trying to show us that we are all isolated individuals gtrapped within our own identities and unable to relate to anyone else in any way that is in the least bit meaningful. But it makes for  sterile and inhuman story.

And if you feel that stories should be about humans and their relationships and that you should be able to suspend disbelief as you relate to at least one of the characters you will, like me, find this novel challenging. There was no-one you could like. The best moments were when the priapic Bruno tries ever more desperately to get laid in a New Age hippy camp while simultaneously trying to avoid the contingent clap trap. But in the end he was unbelievable. And the end of the book, with its swift execution of almost all the major characters amid despair and loneliness degenerated into humourless farce. Finally we descend into a science fiction philosophy and discover that the book is written in the future.
Depressing. October 2012; 379 pages

"Will in the world" by Stephen Greenblatt

Greenblatt never even entertains the idea that the author of the Shakespeare plays might be someone other than the son of a glover from Stratford. He traces the evidence of the Stratford Shakespeare's life, adds a healthy dose of supposition, and relates this biography to the literary output. Was Shakespeare a closet Catholic or a closet homosexual? Was this why he left virtually no documentary evidence of his life excpet the plays? Was he a loner, tight with money to the point of miserliness? What happened between the marriage in Stratford and his appearance as an actor in London? And what were his relations with his wife?

 This was an excellent read and so well-written that it kept me picking it up and it was hard to put down. In that respect it was like Greenblatt's The Swerve (which I liked slightly better). But 1599 by James Shapiro is so much more convincing when it relates specific incidents in the life of Shakespeare and his company to features of the plays (eg when Will Kempe the clown who has created the massively popular role of Falstaff leaves the company Shakespeare writes Falstaff out of Henry V despite having promised at the end of Henry IV that Falstaff will be back; later clown parts are more subtle because the clown is new). Will in the world was slightly disappointing in the links it didn't make. But a single volume life of the greatest playwright in the world is no mean feat.

Get it. Read it. October 2012; 390 pages

Other books about Shakespeare reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.



This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God




Tuesday 2 October 2012

"Glyndebourne"

I wouldn't normally read a book about an opera house but the publishers were suggesting we might write a book about our school and this was the sample they offered us.

The first chapter explained how Glyndebourne was conceived. A very rich man was owner of a stately home and fell in love with an opera singer; the Glyndebourne Festival was a sort of extravagant am dram. The book managed to combine a tone of reverence with smugness; this seems to perfectly suit opera afficionadoes.

The first chapter was slightly interesting although I wanted to know more about the source of the wealth. I suppose I am a philistine.

The later chapters degenerated into long lists of operas staged and performers involved: In 1957 Svengali's Don Giuseppe was performed; ingenue Janet Sodastream was a memorable soprano; the set design was conceived by Charley Farley. That sort of thing. To someone like myslef who doesn't know his Figaro from his Barber of Seville the author might as well have been listing subatomic particles. The book became virtually unreadable.

Thank goodness it was short: 65 pages; October 2012

Wednesday 26 September 2012

"The hundred year old man who climbed out of a window and disappeared" by Jones Jonasson

100 year old Allan runs away from his nursing home. Theft and murder ensue. He meets new friends. Parallel to this picaresque adventure we are told the equally picaresque story of Allan's life, involving world travel, Truman, Churchill, Stalin, Mao and de Gaulle and explaining Allan's pivotal if unacknowledged role in many of the major events of the twentieth century.

The century (and Allan's life) start in 1905. I don't think it is coincidence that this is when Albert Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity. Indeed, Einstein's dim half-brother and the atom bomb are both central to Allan's tale.

So in some ways this novel is a satirical view of the events of the twentieth century. In other ways it seems to be an ironic version of Voltaire's Candide. Whilst Candide features violent (apparent) death and resurrection,   The hundred year old man features violent death and (apparent) resurrection. Where Lisbon is destroyed in Candide, Vladivostok is destroyed in The hundred year old man. Both describe near-impossible events in mundane, matter-of-fact prose. In Candide the motto of Dr Pangloss is 'All is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds'; this is Voltaire's most sarcastic irony as he piles disaster on disaster. Allan's motto is 'Things are what they are, and whatever will be will be' which enables Allan to endure castration, repeated incarceration and several death penalties with Panglossian sang froid.

But although this book is equally entertaining it does not have the philosophical depth which makes Candide great literature.


Friday 21 September 2012

"1000 things to do in London for under £10" by Time Out Guides

Not just the obvious things: museums and the cheaper types of entertainment such as poetry reading. This guide also has the eclectic from walking across the bridges to playing chess in Holland Park to posing nude as a life model to riding the buses to watching non-league football to playing fives to eating ice cream to ringing church bells....
Imaginative and inspirational. September 2012; 309 pages.

Wednesday 19 September 2012

"The making of modern Britain" by Andrew Marr

Brilliant. Andrew Marr charts the influences that have made us what we are by recounting weird and bizarre incidents.

He starts by explaining that in pre-WW1 Britain it was so easy to buy guns that when in the Tottenham Outrage of 1904 the unarmed police were chasing armed anarchists they borrowed guns from passers by. In the 1930s Oswald Mosley seeks funding for his fascists from the Jewish owners of Marks and Spencer. When his Blackshirts get political uniforms banned the Greenshirts (the political wing of the folk-dancing tendency) march carrying their green shirts aloft on coat hangers. Sculptor Eric Gill (famed for Ariel at the BBC and Gill Sans) enjoyed all sorts of sex including homosexuality, incest and bestiality. Earl Marshall Haig's 1928 funeral was attended by more people than Princess Diana's.

At every turn Marr amuses and then upends your prejudices about this fascinating era. Brilliant. September 2012; 429 pages.

"The child in time" by Ian McEwan

The typical McEwan tale begins with some earth-shattering event; the novel is then devoted to chronicling the  consequences that ripple out from this. In the same way, the hero's daughter (writer of children's fiction Stephen Lewis) is stolen from a supermarket. McEwan charts the bereavement of the young parents as it destroys their relationship and their lives.

But for once McEwan has sub-plots. Why has successful Charles Darke, Stephen's publisher and best friend, suddenly left a promising ministerial career? What is the point of the subcommittee of the Official Commission on Childcare on which Stephen sits?And how did Stephen see into the past when he looked through a pub window to see his parents thirty years ago?

The book, set in a dystopian near future, attempts to portray childhood from a number of perspectives and plays with the perception of time. An adult acting like a schoolboy climbs a tree. School is an exercise in pointless regimentation. The Official Commission hears crackpot views about learning to read. Stephen buys toys for his missing child's birthday. Thelma, wife and maybe mother figure to Charles Darke, tries to explain to Stephen a modern Physics perspective on time.

I struggled to find a unifying sense to all this. Was it a retelling of the Faust legend, seen from outside the bedevilled doctor? Charles Darke (is there a clue in his name?) acquires riches, then power, then seemingly everlasting youth. Or is there a theme of everything sliding from organisation into chaos (the entropic direction for the arrow of time)? The loss of his daughter drives Stephen from a stable life to a whisky soaked squalor. There are licensed beggars on the streets. The weather is becoming worse, floods succeeding droughts. Stephen drives from gridlocked London to a forested countryside; gates are hidden by tangles of jungle. On one journey a lorry crashes. But just when things seem to have utterly disintegrated, order slowly returns. The spat at the Olympics nearly develops into nuclear war but doesn't and the Olympics continue. The lorry driver emerges from his wrecked vehicle more or less unhurt. Stephen begins to study classical Arabic and tennis as his life gets back on track.Is this another theme? Although entropy seems to increase there are localised areas in which order prevails? And death is followed by birth.

I was confused by the plot but the prose is luscious. 

Nominated for the 1987 Whitbread Novel Award.

September 2012; 220 pages

Other books by McEwan that are reviewed in this blog include:



This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Wednesday 5 September 2012

"The good soldier" by Ford Madox Ford

There are spoilers throughout this review

The narration and the unreliable narrator.
This book is famed for being told by an unreliable narrator. The narration rambles in a strikingly non-linear fashion. Many events are prefigured and sometimes he refers back to something he mentioned previously but then at such a tangential allusion that it becomes easy to miss. The narrator admits this, and defends it: “I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze. ... I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real.” (4.1) He depicts himself as sitting by the fire, telling the story. But this allows him to create confusion.

Ambiguities, contradictions and double entendres:
The prose is full of wonderful ambiguities and double entendres.

There is the leit-motif of 'heart': Florence and Edward (and Uncle John) all have 'weak hearts'; actually the only character who does indeed have heart disease is Maisie Maidan. Meanwhile John says that he and Leonora are "both of the same profession ... of keeping heart patients alive.” (1.5); they are the enablers who allow Florence and Edward to have an affair. Later, John asks: Who in this world knows anything of any other heart—or of his own?” (3.4)

There are contradictions. Sometimes, the narrator corrects himself. For example, in part two chapter one he tells us that he “unintentionally misled you when I said that Florence was never out of my sight. ... When I come to think of it she was out of my sight most of the time.” At other times, the reader must find the contradiction for themselves. For example, "poor, dear Florence" (1.1) becomes "I hate Florence. I hate Florence with such a hatred that I would not spare her an eternity of loneliness." (1.6) He describes Nancy as epitomised by contradictions: “She was exceedingly grotesque and at times extraordinarily beautiful. ... at times she seemed as old as the hills, at times not much more than sixteen. At one moment she would be talking of the lives of the saints and at the next she would be tumbling all over the lawn with the St Bernard puppy. She could ride to hounds like a Maenad and she could sit for hours perfectly still ... She was, in short, a miracle of patience who could be almost miraculously impatient.” (3.2)

There are ironies: they said he was a good soldier. ... all good soldiers are sentimentalists - all good soldiers of that type. Their profession, for one thing, is full of the big words, courage, loyalty, honesty, constancy.” (1.3) This is vicious irony: Edward might have been courageous but he was scarcely loyal to his wife, nor even to Maisie or Florence, and he was anything but constant. Honest is problematic too.

There are double entendres: "At that time the Captain was quite evidently enjoying being educated by Florence. She used to do it about three or four times a week under the approving eyes of Leonora and myself. It wasn't, you understand, systematic. It came in bursts." (1.4)

The unreliability of the narrator is emphasised by his tendency to use superlatives The first sentence is: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” Five pages on, he says “That struck me as the most amazing thing I had ever heard.” In Chapter 1.5 he says “Those words gave me the greatest relief that I have ever had in my life.” This tendency to exaggerate and over-dramatise could be interpreted as shallowness ... or as mendacity.

The characters:
Given a chronically unreliable narrator, it is difficult to have any certainty about the characters. We only know what John tells us, and what we infer from the gaps in his narrative. 

Florence Dowell, nee Hurlbird, is the only coherent character. She's a villain. She's an American who was taken by her Uncle John on a world tour which had to be terminated when she was discovered coming out of the bedroom of Uncle John's companion, Jimmy. She marries John as a way to get him to take her back to Europe and Jimmy. From the very first night of the wedding she feigns sickness and he is told by her and her complaisant doctors that she has a weak heart and sex might kill her; as a result she sleeps alone behind a locked bedroom door and their marriage is never consummated. John's bitter retrospective consolation is that she can't achieve her goal of living the the family estate in England because he won't let her weak heart brave the turbulence of the English channel. But she has an affair with Jimmy and, after she tires of him, she starts sleeping with Edward. Then, one dreadful night, she discovers that Edward intends to transfer his affections to Nancy and also she realises that John knows about her affair with Jimmy. That night she is found dead of prussic acid poisoning. 

What we know of Florence comes mainly from her actions, not her words. Much of what her husband knows comes to him (so he says) from later discussions with Edward (in a confession made shortly before his death) and Leonora (in a conversation after Edward's funeral). Florence is deceptive and controlling. She is willing to feign a heart condition to get her way, and to commit suicide if she doesn't. She values her ancestors, her goal being to live in the ancestral home in England, but hates her immediate family. She is both powerful and manipulative, but ultimately she is thwarted in her every desire; perhaps this is cause for pity.

Leonora Ashburnham nee Powys is a Roman Catholic from a large family. Her marriage with Edward was more or less arranged because the Powys needed to reduce their expenses by reducing the number of unmarried daughters living at home. She quickly realises that Edward is unfaithful and that his infidelities are expensive. She tolerates the adulteries but takes the reins of the family finances. In many ways she is a very controlling woman. After Edward's death, she makes a 'normal' marriage with a local squire and has a child.

Edward Ashburnham, the 'good' soldier of the title, is the narrator's opposite. The narrator seems to admire him: "Am I no better than a eunuch or is the proper man ... a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbour's womankind?" (1.1); Edward being the 'proper' man. The narrator repeatedly excuses Edward's infidelities, characterising them as "desires ... madnesses" (1.5) over which Edward himself has no control: “Perhaps he could not bear to see a woman and not give her the comfort of his physical attractions.” (2.1) He can't help being a babe magnet: “that chap, coming into a room, snapped up the gaze of every woman in it, as dexterously as a conjurer pockets billiard balls.” (1.3) He doesn't love Leonora, his wife, "because she was never mournful; what really made him feel good in life was to comfort somebody who would be darkly and mysteriously mournful.” (3.3) Even the first scandalous contact with a nurse-maid in a railway carriage is, according to John reporting the words of Edward: "he assured me that he felt at least quite half-fatherly when he put his arm around her waist and kissed her." (3.3)

It's possible. I once knew a man who had numerous infidelities and he really liked helping needy women.

But Edward, apart from his weakness with women, is a decent chap: "It is impossible of me to think of Edward Ashburnham as anything but straight, upright and honourable. ... his innumerable acts of kindness, of his efficiency, of his unspiteful tongue. He was such a fine fellow.” (3.1) 

John Dowling, the narrator, is an American of independent means. He comes across as puritanical to the point of sexlessness. He tells us that he has spent his life as "just a male sick nurse." (1.6), "a nurse-attendant" (4.5). He portrays himself as innocent and naive to the point of stupidity, as a result he repeatedly puts himself in the position of the victim. He seems to lack agency; things are done to him; he is merely an (often bewildered) observer. Nevertheless, at the hotel in the spa he reads the “police reports that each guest was expected to sign upon taking a room.” (1.3) which seems a bit stalkerish. He is also curiously passionless. 

He repeatedly reacts puritanically, while excusing Edward's excesses:
  • When Leonora tells him that she once considered having an affair with a young man when they had to drive 11 miles in a carriage and JD , he reflects: "I don't know; I don't know; was that last remark of hers the remark of a harlot, or is it what every decent woman, county family or not county family, thinks at the bottom of her heart? Or thinks all the time for the matter of that? Who knows?” (1.1)
  • "Fellows come in and tell the most extraordinarily gross stories ... And yet they'd be offended if you suggested that they weren't the sort of person you could trust your wife alone with. ... if they so delight in the narration, how is it possible that they can be offended—and properly offended—at the suggestion that they might make attempts upon your wife's honour?" (1.1)
  • "I never had the beginnings of a trace of what is called the sex instinct towards her." (1.3)
Nancy 'the girl' is “Leonora's only friend's only child, and Leonora was her guardian" (2.1) since her mother is said to have committed suicide (2.1) or, alternatively, have become a prostitute (neither turns out to be true; in 4.4 we learn that she is living with a 'protector'). Once Nancy becomes a woman, Edward falls in love with her and this precipitates his break up with Florence and, somewhat later, Nancy being sent back to her father and going mad.

The four adult characters are neatly summarised in a scene when the Dowlings first meet the Ashburnhams at the spa hotel (part one, chapter three): Florence and Leonora come into the room together and decide that they shall all four share the same table. “And then Florence said: "And so the whole round table is begun." Again Edward Ashburnham gurgled slightly in his throat; but Leonora shivered a little, as if a goose had walked over her grave. And I was passing her the nickel-silver basket of rolls.”
  • Florence sets things going
  • Edward responds
  • Leonora sees what is happening
  • John hasn’t a clue.
Death comes at the end:
Structurally, FMF went in for powerful endings:
  • Part One ends with the death of Maisie, one of Edward's affairs. Leonora seeks Maisie but finds her in her room, dead. Not suicide. Her heart gave out. Edward “imagined that the death had been the most natural thing in the world. He soon got over it. Indeed, it was the one affair of his about which he never felt much remorse.” (p 57)
  • Part Two ends when Florence, realising her infidelities are at last to be exposed and fearing that Captain A is moving on to yet another women, is found lying dead on her bed, "a little phial that rightly should have contained nitrate of amyl [heart medicine], in her right hand" (p 76)
  • Edward's suicide, though much foreshadowed, occurs right at the very end of the book.
Does John kill Florence ... and Edward? An alternative reading of the text.
Florence dies on 4th August 1913. The details of that night are told in part two, chapter two. She has gone out, sent by Leonora to "chaperone" Edward and Nancy. Meanwhile, John has a conversation with a newly arrived guest at the spa hotel, a man called Bagshawe, from Ludlow Manor, near Ledbury, in lounge with JD. Suddenly John sees Florence running to the hotel. She enters lounge, sees JD and Bagshawe, and runs upstairs. Bagshawe recognises her as “Florry Hurlbird” and says “The last time I saw that girl she was coming out of the bedroom of a young man called Jimmy at five o'clock in the morning. In my house at Ledbury.

There is then a gap in the narrative.

A long time afterwards I pulled myself out of the lounge and went up to Florence's room. She had not locked the door—for the first time of our married life. She was lying, quite respectably arranged, unlike Mrs Maidan, on her bed. She had a little phial that rightly should have contained nitrate of amyl, in her right hand.

He concludes that she has killed herself because (a) she has discovered that Edward intends to transfer his affections to Nancy and (b) because she realises that Bagshawe will have let the cat out of the bag about her and Jimmy.

Immediately afterwards, he says (according to Leonora) or Leonora suggests (according to him) that he might marry Nancy. He claims that this bizarre reaction is due to shock.

Edward claims that he didn't realise that Edward and Florence were having an affair until Leonora tells him, ten days after Edward's funeral. But can he really have been so naively ignorant? Leonora, he asserts, then goes on to say: "I think it was stupid of Florence to commit suicide" to which he replies “Did Florence commit suicide? I didn't know." He comments “It had never entered my head. You may think that I had been singularly lacking in suspiciousness; you may consider me even to have been an imbecile.” He claims that he assumed that the running she had done had brought on the long-promised heart attack. “Even Edward ... thought that she had dropped dead of heart disease. ... the only people who ever knew that Florence had committed suicide were Leonora, the Grand Duke, the head of the police and the hotel-keeper.” (3.1)

An alternative explanation is that Edward, having discovered (a) that Florence only married him so that she could have her affair with Jimmy and (b) realising, given that she can run, that the weak heart must be a pretence, adopted so she could deny him sex, has become angry. During the "long time afterwards" he has gone up to Florence's room and killed her with poison. He then "respectably arranged" her and left her to be 'discovered'. 

Edward's 'suicide' (his throat is cut) comes the morning after he has spent the night confessing to John about his love for Nancy. The next morning, John and he are together, and Edward produces a penknife, tells John to take a message to Leonora and says "So long, old man, I must have a bit of a rest, you know" (4.6) John then leaves him alone and afterwards he is found dead. But that's according to John. I think that he might have been so angered by Edward professing love to Nancy, who John wanted to marry after Florence's death, that he murdered Edward.

When I advanced this theory at my reading group, no-one expected it. It enables a radical re-reading of the text. It may be nonsense. But the unreliability of the narrator means that it is not possible to say that John is innocent of murder. This text is as wonderfully ambiguous as that written by Henry James (a friend of Ford Madox Ford): The Turn of the Screw

Selected quotes:
  • I know nothing—nothing in the world—of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone—horribly alone.” (1.1)
  • Am I no better than a eunuch or is the proper man—the man with the right to existence—a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbour's womankind?” (1.1) I just adore the two 'neigh's.
  • I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all a darkness.” (1.1)
  • Good people, be they ever so diverse in creed, do not threaten each other.” (1.6)
  • God knows what they wanted with a winter garden in an hotel that is only open from May till October.” (1.6)
  • I guess it is vanity that makes most of us keep straight, if we do keep straight, in this world.” (3.1)
  • Florence was a personality of paper ... she represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies and with emotions only as a bank-note represents a certain quantity of gold.” (3.1)
  • We were chattering away about the morality of lotteries. And then, suddenly, there came from the arcades behind us the overtones of her father's unmistakable voice ... A tall, fair, stiffly upright man of fifty, he was walking away with an Italian baron who had had much to do with the Belgian Congo. They must have been talking about the proper treatment of natives natives, for I heard him say: ‘Oh, hang humanity!’" (3.2) Another hint of Heart of Darkness and a beautifully judged piece of irony.
  • it is the scourge of atrocious but probably just destiny that no grief comes by itself” (3.3) = “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions” (Hamlet 4.5)
  • a dollar can be extremely desirable if you don't happen to possess one” (3.4)
  • I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze.” (4.1)
  • She saw life as a perpetual sex-battle between husbands who desire to be unfaithful to their wives, and wives who desire to recapture their husbands in the end.” (4.1)
  • she so despised Florence that she would have preferred it to be a parlour-maid. There are very decent parlour-maids.” (4.1)
  • When people were married there was an end of loving.” (4.3)

Complicated! But exceptional. 
 
August 2012; 179 pages; reread February 2024.

The author:

He was a brave soldier in the First World War, being injured in a gas attack. Hemingway said he was scruffy and smelly. He was promiscuous and particularly nasty when he ditched his lovers (especially Jean Rhys, who wrote Wide Sargasso Sea). But as a magazine publisher he discovered and promoted DH Lawrence, Hemingway (and Jean Rhys) as well as publishing Thomas Hardy, Henry James, John Galsworthy, HG Wells and Joseph Conrad. 

The Good Soldier was written in 1913 and published in 1915. Its original title was The Saddest Story; this was changed at the request of the publishers but the Good Soldier was an ironic suggestion by FMF. The book was a best-seller. It is still regarded as a classic, described as the best French novel written in English and listed by the BBC as 13th in the top 100 novels written by UK authors of all time.

FMF also wrote the Parade's End tetralogy:


This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Saturday 1 September 2012

"Outrage" by Arnaldur Indridason

Elinborg is a typical Reykjavik lady detective. With one failed marriage behind her she lives with her partner, Teddi, and their three children (eldest, a boy, is on the internet all the time and suffering teenage angst, youngest, a girl, is very gifted) whom she hardly ever sees because she works too hard. She has written a cook book.

 Every detail of her life is told to us in the stark prose of this latest exponent of Scandinavian noire.

In fact Indridason doesn't believe in the 'show, don't tell' principle of fiction. His prose is simple, flat and sterile. I have no idea what Elinborg looked like because the author doesn't really do description. The victim dresses in "black jeans, white shirt and a comfortable jacket"; neither description nor character are allowed to get in the way of the plot.

Compared to this book, Agatha Christie's characters are living, breathing and multi-dimensional.

It is a pleasant enough yarn. It rattles on. There is not the sense of clues being carefully dropped into the prose, each revelation is expected as it comes.

I was most interested in this book because I have been to both Reykjavik and Akranes but I think I might write with more local flavour having known Iceland for a whole five days.

Potboiler. September 2012; 386 pages

Friday 31 August 2012

"Cod" by Mark Kurlansky

Since I had previously read Kurlansky's 'Salt' and found it a fascinating discussion of history from the perspective of a commodity I was very keen to read 'Cod'. It is much the same. He explains how Cod was important in the discovery of America, suggesting that the Basque fishing fleet were off Newfoundland long before Columbus or Cabot, and played a crucial part in the War of Independence. He also details how overfishing has led to the closure of the Grand Banks.

Cod is not (at least to my life) as important as Salt and inevitably the book is more limited because of this. And I was not at all interested in the endless recipes although I understand that this is a food book (and it did inspire me to choose Bacalaho when I encountered it by chance in a little Eastbourne cafe principally devoted to burgers and omelettes but run by a Portuguese couple who were delighted that someone ordered their national dish even though I couldn't finish it).

What I really disliked was his perpetual use of 'off of' when a fishing boat was 'off of' Iceland or 'off of' Newfoundland etc. Surely one can say 'off' Cape Breton.

This was an enjoyable book but Salt is better!

August 2012; 276 pages

Thursday 30 August 2012

"In the springtime of the year" by Susan Hill

Don't read this book on the train! Whilst it might be acceptable (just) to laugh in public, it is embarrassing to weep.

Ruth's husband of less than a year, Ben, has been killed by a tree falling on him. This book charts the progress of her grief, and the utterly individual griefs of his father, mother, sister and brother, and how his death affects the tight knit farming community. It charts the progress of the rural year, it details rural poverty, and it is suffused throughout by spirituality and the rituals of the church.

It is brilliant. It is harrowing. I found my eyes leaking water at moments unbearably, poignantly mundane. This is bereavement vividly and remorselessly chronicled.

Gut-wrenchingly perfect.

August 2012; 254 pages.

Wednesday 29 August 2012

"Heroes and Villains" by Angela Carter.

This was my introduction to Carter's work. She writes fantasy novels. This is set after a 'war' (presumably a nuclear holocaust). (June 2015: I now discover that I have already read her Wise Children which is rather different!)

 Marianne lives in a 'white tower' with her father who is one of the Professor's of an agricultural community closely guarded by soldiers. From time to time they are raided by the Barbarians: as a child she watches from her window as her brother is killed. But she finds the safe community stifling and she runs into the surrounding forest with a beautiful Barbarian boy. She joins his tribe which is dominated by a renegade professor turned shaman.

Carter's style mirrors the mythic themes. Moments of lush, gorgeous description is interrupted by arid, sterile dialogue which in turn gives way to sensuous eroticism reflecting the professorial enclosed villages in the barbarian countryside, perhaps echoing a view of stilted civilization and fertile nature. Marianne tries to understand the new world in which she finds herself in philosophical and sociological terms but in the end she is controlled by passion. She, her barbarian boyfriend and the mad guru indulge in a weird power play in which each tries to outwit and kill the other. Throughout, the reader is challenged when characters respond strangely. Thus conversations are rarely dialogues but rather each character states their position (or doesn't because everyone seems to speak in riddles). And the responses of characters to rape, death and betrayal seem intensely unhuman. Finally Jewel  the Barbarian, butcher, warrior, gravedigger and leader, tattooed with temptation, is so educated for a barbarian, sometimes so mundane, but other times so mysterious and so contradictory.

I wondered if he was Mick Jagger as seen by Marianne (Faithful).

Such a strange book; sometimes so unfullfilling and sometimes so profound.

Weird and upsetting at every level. August 2012; 164 pages



This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God


Books by Angela Carter that I have read and reviewed in this blog: