"Sins of the fathers" by James Pope-Hennessey

A history of the slave trade with rather more vivid description than most.

If the title were not clear enough, the first chapter makes the author's position plain, describing slavery as "that vast complex of international crime by which, in four centuries, a total of fifteen million men, women and children of African blood were delivered into transatlantic slavery, under conditions so hideous that another nine million are estimated to have died during crossing.” (C 1) This is not academic history. This is the position of the prosecution. Swiftly he dismisses the economic argument: that the British transatlantic slave trade came into being because of the labour requirements of the agriculture being developed in the New World and ended because the sugar islands were no longer so important to the British economy. He also denounces the position that the slave trade was a marginal activity: "a trade in which so many Europeans and Africans indulged for centuries cannot have been run exclusively by money-maniacs and pocket sadists." (C 1) In essence the purpose of this book is to know who to blame.

But I found the moral analysis of the blame too narrow and naive. I propose that slavery is wrong and that the transatlantic slave-trade was a particularly nasty form of slavery involving other great moral wrongs such as kidnapping, false imprisonment, torture, mutilation and murder. But from this I would go on to say that, with the exception of the slaves who were victims, all the participants in the slave trade bear some moral guilt. Pope-Hennesey seems to disagree. He excuses the Africans who kidnapped the slaves in the first place and then sold them to the slave-trade captains. He quotes an ex-slave as saying ‘If there were no buyers there would be no sellers’ and comments "that is the crux of the matter, and the final word that can be said on African ‘guilt’.”(C 10.1) Such a point of view is also used to excuse prostitutes, redefining them as 'sex workers' and instead to attach moral blame to their clients. But if this is then extended to the drug industry we are presumably blaming the addicts and excusing the dealers. It seems to me that the African slavers may be less guilty than the slave captains and the plantation owners but they cannot be entirely excused.

Similarly, Pope-Hennesey acknowledges the existence of slavery among the Anglo-Saxons (abolished in England by the Normans although the serfdom with which it was replaced was not much better) and endemic in some African societies but seems to consider these as innocent variants. Whilst I agree that the transatlantic slave-trade offered extreme horrors and extreme immoralities I don't think one can consider any form of slavery as morally acceptable. Furthermore, Pope-Hennesey does not mention the slave trade that existed during the middle ages in the Indian Ocean, possibly involving up to twenty-two million slaves, and the more than one million Europeans captured by Barbary pirates between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. If we start believing that slavery was a one-off moral horror it may make us complacent when we need to be morally alert to any erosion of the freedom of individuals.

This aside, Pope-Hennessey has provided some wonderful descriptions of horrors and many fascinating facts:
“Just as the colour black was, for most Europeans, connected with night, witches and the Powers of Darkness, so, to many Africans, white was often of the colour of devils, and the semaring of the face with white clay was calculated to inspire terror.” (C 3.4)
Many of the plants associated with Africa (eg maize, yams, and coconut palms) were in fact plants from the New World or the Indian Ocean imported during this period. This was partly because the slave traders built gardens around their forts: “To have strange and inadequate, often repulsive, food added to the other health hazards of a lethal climate was asking too much." (C 4.1)
The reason it took so long for the Europeans to find West Africa was that “mariners would not venture beyond Cape Bojador, for fear that they and their ships would plunge over the edge of the world-platform into oblivion.” (C 4.2) I’m not sure this is true. The accepted view was that the world was round (and sailors were always prepared to sail beyond the horizon) but that the temperatures as you progressed south became too hot for wooden ships and humans to bear.
The word ‘fetish’ derives from the Portuguese ‘fetiços’, images; the word ‘ju-ju’ is from the French word ‘joux’, toys (C 5.2)
“You might buy a parcel of youths and girls in the market at Bridgetown, Barbados, or Charleston, Carolina, but you could never really be sure what exact quantity of hatred, hostility and magic you were carting back to the slave-barracks of your comfortable Palladian home.” (C 5.2)
The Oba of Benin was “so heavily sheathed in polished gold that when he rose to his feet he had to be propped up by two slaves, who likewise operated his arms for him when he wished to gesticulate.” (C 5.3)
Portugal retained their fort at Whydah until it was annexed by Dahomey in 1961. “The Portuguese representative at Whydahr burned his motor-car in front of the fort as a protest, whereupon Dahomey issued a celebration postage-stamp showing the charred wreckage of the Citroen.” (C 5.3 fn)
Slaves were branded by their owners: SPG denoted slaves of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (C 6.1)
“To work on ships which often were merely floating coffins - the ships taking slaves to Rio de Janeiro were in fact called tumbeiros from the Portuguese for tomb - was at once brutalizing and nauseous.” (C 7.1)
“The primitive, rickety basis of gracious living in the West Indian Islands required a cohort of house-slaves” (C8.3)
“The first line of defence for any vanquished or occupied nation, as for any camp of war-prisoners, is calculated cunning and deceit.” (C 8.4)
The African concept of style was influenced by the slave-trading ships:
“the upper floor of any two-storied Efik house is still called a ‘dek’.” (C 12.2)
“King Pepple would sometimes sport a pair of scarlet leather boots which seemed too small for him and which caused him to topple over when he was drunk.” (C 13.3)
“Negro proverbs” include “‘If you knock de nose de eye cry’ ... ‘as de ole crow fly, so de young one do too’.” (C 13.1)
Slave girls were inevitably raped. Some slave traders “were thought to have literally worn themselves away copulating in the night dews on the coast.” (C 13.3)

December 2018; 280 pages

"The Merry Wives of Windsor" by William Shakespeare

Not so much a comedy as a farce with a couple of interlocking plots.

Sir John Falstaff wishes to seduce either Mistress (Mrs) Page or Mistress Ford but they compare the love letters they have been sent and decide to trick him. Each time he meets Mistress Ford her husband happens to turn up and the cowardly Sir John has to escape in some humiliating way.

Slender, and Doctor Caius, and Fenton all want to marry Anne Page. Page, Anne's father, wants her to marry Slender, and Mistress Page favours the Doctor.

I saw an RSC production of this play at the Barbican Theatre on 22nd December 2018 (matinee). It starred David Troughton as Sir John Falstaff; he was excellent in the part. I saw him last year as an excellent Gloucester in King Lear. He was joined by a host of wonderful talents. Charlotte Josephine had a lovely cameo as Bardolph; I saw her last month as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. Katy Brittain made a hilarious Hostess of the Garter Inn although most of her comedy was physcial as I found it sometimes difficult to follow her quick-fire delivery. Josh Finan was a brilliant Nym (he had also been great as Benvolio in R&J). Mistresses Ford and Page were played as a couple of Essex girls (Merry Wives of Dagenham perhaps?) and were brilliant in their roles; Rebecca Lacey as Mistress Page was a dead ringer for Sybil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers. Nima Taleghani was a great Robin. This was an adaptation that ditched some of Shakespeare's untranslatable word play in favour of some wonderful physical comedy and some great updates: in particular the laundry basket became a wheelie bin. I had gone to the theatre expecting little from a play that is not one of Shakespeare's best and was bowled over by the adaptation. It extended to all the little business and small parts being brought to life. For example, when Ford disguised himself as Brook (Vince Leigh was great) he became a Russian, complete with an 'I love Putin' suitcase sticker and a theme song whenever he arrived. The Welshman got the audience to sing a line from Bread of Heaven. And the lads who were assigned to dispose of the wheelie bin discussed the job in an Eastern European language before agreeing to do it. Oh my goodness, this was an exceptional day at the theatre.

The play itself isn't so easy. There are too many characters. It was difficult to see why one needs Justice Shallow or Dr Hugh Evans or why Slender needs a servant. The first thing that Falstaff does is to get rid of Bardolph, Pistol and Nym but that could have been done (if needed) in a speech rather than having yet more actors on the stage. The plots are more or less done one by one: thus, the mix-up over where the duel is to be held happens first and then there is the main business with the three humiliations of Falstaff and then the matter of Anne Page's marriage is tacked on to the end. In the RSC production it was noticeable that the character of Fenton is kept almost completely separate from the other characters.

Shakespeare also throws in a scene in which the schoolteacher/ parson quizzes one of his pupils (sensibly cut by the RSC) and a reference to counterfeit Germans and a Duke which I don't really understand.

But hey, it is Shakespeare. There are some great lines:

• “If I be drunk, I'll be drunk with those that have the fear of God, and not with drunken knaves.”
• “I will marry her, sir, at your request; but if there be no great love in the beginning, yet heaven may decrease it upon better acquaintance, when we are married and have more occasion to know one another; I hope upon familiarity will grow more contempt.”
• “I do mean to make love to Ford's wife; I spy entertainment in her; she discourses, she carves, she gives the leer of invitation”
• “She did so course o'er my exteriors with such a greedy intention that the appetite of her eye did seem to scorch me up like a burning-glass.”
• “O, what a world of vile ill-favor'd faults
• Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a-year!”
• “You may know by my size that I have a kind of alacrity in sinking ... my belly's as cold as if I had swallowed snowballs”
• “Mistress Ford! I have had ford enough; I was thrown into the ford; I have my belly full of ford.”
• “O powerful love! that, in some respects, makes a beast a man, in some other, a man a beast. ... When gods have hot backs, what shall poor men do?”

December 2018;

Other Shakespeare plays reviewed in this blog may be found here.

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

"The Sunday Philosophy Club" by Alexander McCall Smith

Set in the same genteel and refined Edinburgh as the 44 Scotland Street stories (including Espresso tales and The world according to Bertie), Isabel Dalhousie is a gentlewoman with her own house and a housekeeper. Following a failed marriage and childless, she edits a philosophical review; otherwise she is a lady of leisure. At a night out listening to the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra she witnesses a young man fall from the Gods to his death in the Stalls. Or was he pushed? The stage is set for a gentle exploration of applied ethics, in particular whether and when one should tell a lie.

There is just enough plot to keep the pages turning but the main delight of this book lies in the intriguing insights of Ms Dalhousie. Here are just some of them:

• “She always felt inhibited from any act suggesting a lack of concentration or, worse still, of seriousness.” (C 1)
• “Something terrible happened and people began to shake. It was the reminder that frightened them; the reminder of just how close to the edge we are in life, always, at every moment.” (C 1)
• “You loved another, and this made you so vulnerable; just an inch or so too close to the edge and your world would change.” (C 2)
• “You had to be aware of human weakness, of course, because it simply was, but to revel in it seems to her to be voyeurism.” (C 2)
• “Do past wrongs seem less wrong to us simply because they are less vivid?” (C 3)
• “Why, she wondered, should anyone actually want a hunk, when nonhunks were so much more interesting?” (C 4)
• “Only the very immature and the very stupid are impressed by the depraved.” (C 5)
• “Respectability was such an effort though, and there were bars and clubs where people might go and behave as they really wanted to behave, but did not dare so publicly.” (C 5)
• “How arid it must be to be a man; how constrained; what a whole world of emotion, and sympathy, they must lack; like living in a desert.” (C 7)
• “I have bags of failings. Same as anybody else. Bags.” (C 13)
• “Good manners depended on paying moral attention to others; it required one to treat them with complete seriousness, to understand their feelings and their needs. Some people, the selfish, had no inclination to do this ... They were impatient with those who they thought did not count: the old, the inarticulate, the disadvantaged.” (C 14)
• “She was turned into a different station from most people and the tuning dial was broken.” (C 14)
• “Camus was right: the ultimate philosophical question was suicide. If there was no truth, then there was no meaning, and our life was Sisyphean. And if life was Sisyphean, thenn what point in continuing with it?” (C 17)
• “The gulls were considered a pest in the neighbourhood - large, mewing birds that swooped down on those who came too close to their nesting places - but we humans built too, and left cement and stones and litter, and were as aggressively territorial.” (C 21)
• “Why was it wrong to drop litter? Was it purely an aesthetic objection, based on the notion that the superficial pollution of the environment was unattractive? Or was the aesthetic impact linked to some notion of the distress which others felt in the face of litter? If that was the case, then we might even have a duty to look attractive to others, in order to minimise their distress.” (C 21)
• “In a world of need, it was wrong to be anything other than thin. Until everybody was in a position to consume a surfeit of calories, then nobody should carry extra weight. The fat with therefore not entitled to be what they were .” (C 21)
• “People give themselves away every five seconds. Watch the movement of eyes. It says absolutely everything you need to know.” (C 23)

Some challenging ideas!

I also very much enjoyed the next book in this series: Friends, Lovers, Chocolate.

December 2018; 281 pages

"Two middle-aged ladies in Andalusia" by Penelope Chetwode

Nowadays a tale of someone's holiday might be broadcast if the someone was a celebrity and TV schedules needed filling. In 1961 it seems that John Betjeman's wife counted as a celebrity and that therefore she could have her travelogue published.

She is one of the middle-aged ladies, the other being her horse. She embarks on a riding tour in the rugged mountains of Andalusia north of Granada. Her passions are the countryside, which must be beautiful, and the Catholic church: she attends at least one Mass every day. Almost every page was filled with her approval of Catholicism. She hates the Spanish communists because they gutted churches and she approvingly quotes a Franco fan (because Franco allegedly "never took a big decision without spending the night in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament" (Nov 27). She believes that the poor Spanish children she sees are happier and will be happier than the mass-educated relatively less poor English children back home: "Will our girls make such efficient and therefore contented wives and mothers as their Spanish counterparts who to-day can not only read and write ... but have a good knowledge of Christian doctrine and can sew and wash and iron quite beautifully?" (Dec 1). The modern world, in her eyes, is bad and the old ways almost inevitably better and decidedly more beautiful. All in all this book suggests a tremendous sense of complacent entitlement; she is almost the epitome of the benevolent (in their own minds) and patronising feudal lord.

The book is chiefly interesting for its depiction of rural life in Franco's Spain:

• "He was a day labourer: yesterday no man had hired him but to-day somebody had." (Nov 6)
• "When you are still in the elementary stages of learning a language your only hope is to talk yourself, to prevent people talking to you, as they are sure to introduce tenses with which you are not yet familiar." (Nov 8)
• "Two huge pigs ... nosed me so lovingly, so trustingly, and soon their great intestines would be lying in heaps in the kitchen waiting to be filled with pudding mixture" (Nov 20)
• "An oddly assorted mixed grill with little bits of tough steak, lumps of pork fat, three fired fresh sardines, a grilled thrush and some chips, all on the same plate." (Nov 20)

December 2018; 153 pages

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

Links to other books on travel, exploration and explorers, reviewed in this blog can be found here.

"Love and Mr Lewisham" by H G Wells

We first encounter Mr Lewisham as a teacher in a second-rate school. He has plans. He will learn and pass his degree and then he will become rich and famous. But he falls in love and this disrupts his ambitions. The passages after his marriage in which he and his new wife struggle to make ends meet, resulting in bitterness and marital rows, and the blighting of his dreams, are beautifully written. The culmination of their discord is a chapter which is as exciting as anything written nowadays. And the reflections on life, bitter and tender, were spot-on.

In chapter twenty-three, about two-thirds of the way through, some of HG's socialist theories are voiced ... but cleverly HG puts them into the mouth of a rogue and a bounder. HG is particularly good at interspersing the theory with half-comments and actions from the listener. Equally he is brilliant at noticing the hesitations and indecisions which signal a dilemma when a character is approaching a decision. He is capable of describing great emotions without resorting to melodrama simply be using the observation of little details to underline the essential everyday ordinariness of his hero. Great writing!

H G Wells is famous for his science fiction novels but this novel demonstrates how good he was at writing about life.

Some great quotes:

• “An unusual sense of the greyness of a teacher's life, of the greyness indeed of the life of all studious souls came, and went in his mind ... He heard the familiar mingled noises of the playground drifting in on him through the open schoolroom door.” (C 1)
• “There are no such things as spirits, mediums were humbugs, and he was here to prove that sole remaining Gospel.” (C 11) 
• “Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society ...Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry.” (C 23) 
• “There's truths you have to grow into.” (C 23)
• “What is clothing? The concealment of essential facts.” (C 23)
• “On the earth somewhere poor devils are toiling to get in meat and corn and wine. He is clothed in the lives of bent and thwarted weavers, his way is lit by phossy jaw, he eats from lead glazed crockery - all his ways are paved with the lives of men.” (C 23)
• “What a mess we have made of things! was his new motif. What a mess!” (C 27)
• “It is almost as if Life had played me a trick - promised so much - given so little!” (C 32)
• “Two pieces fell outside the basket. He stooped, picked them up, and put them carefully with their fellows.” (C 32; last lines)

Other novels by H G Wells reviewed in this blog include:

• The War of the Worlds
• The Time Machine
• Tono-Bungay
• Love and Mr Lewisham
• The History of Mr Polly
• Kipps
• The First Men in the Moon

Biographies of H G Wells reviewed in this blog:

• H G Wells by Lovat Dickson
• H G: The History of Mr Wells by Michael Foot

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

"The Essex Serpent" by Sarah Perry

As recently widowed Cora Seaborne and her strange son Francis travel to Essex, strange things begin to happen around the Blackwater. But despite the quasi-Gothic aura (as well as the monster, possibly a survivor from prehistoric times, we encounter a Fata Morgana and noctilucent clouds, and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are in the recent past), this is fundamentally a love story. Luke the poor surgeon is in love with Cora but she is in love with married vicar Will who loves both her and his wife. Meanwhile Spencer, Luke's bosom buddy, is in love with Martha but she fancies Edward.

The first few pages are written in the present tense but the bulk of the book is in the past tense. Except in the letters between the characters that interleave the chapters, the perspective is third person, often from an omniscient PoV but frequently writing from the PoV of one of the characters.

The setting

Not only is it set in (late) Victorian times, it has the feeling of a Victorian novel. The start (after the 'hook' of the brief prologue) reminded me of the start of Bleak House. Compare:

• “One o’clock on a dreary day and the time ball dropped at the Greenwich Observatory ... Skippers marked the time and tide ... a freight of iron was bound for Whitechapel foundry, where bells tolled fifty against the anvil as if time was running out. Time was being served behind the walls of Newgate jail, and wasted by philosophers in cafes on the Strand; it was lost by those who wished the past were present, and loathed by those who wished the present past.” (January 1)
• “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.” (Second paragraph of chapter one of Bleak House. The first paragraph mentions mud several times and even a Megalosaurus. It can't be a coincidence.)

On the other hand, the Blackwater coastline seems to mirror the Kent coastal marshes at the start of Great Expectations, when Pip meets the monstrous Magwitch in the mist.

But if there is a Dickensian feel to the descriptions and the setting, the major characters are less eccentric than the caricatured grotesques of Dickens. 

The main characters are:

• Cora, a keen collector of fossils, a woman who is full of life, instantly loved, the centre of attention, whose motto is “I’m always thirsty - for everything.” (March 3) She was the victim of an abusive relationship with her first husband but it doesn't seem to have cowed her spirits at all.
• Will, the vicar, torn between two loves, and torn between the old and the new, and between science and superstition. His dogmatic dismissal of the idea of the Serpent as nonsense makes it seem that he is on the side of progress but in fact his rejection is instinctive rather than rational, just like his rejection of hypnosis and a surgical intervention for his wife’s disease. Despite the books in his library, he fears change, represented by the Londoners who come to visit, and seeks sanctuary in the village, even though the villagers are almost pagan in their superstitious beliefs. 
• Luke, the hugely talented surgeon, filled with hubris: “Though he knew how pride precedes a fall, it seemed so novel to have any distance to tumble he willingly faced the risk.” (May 4). He would seem to be the classic tragic hero except in so far as his fate is not poetic justice.
• Francis, Cora's strange son, like his hero Sherlock Holmes in so many ways.
• Stella: Will's wife: whose disease progressively worsens. One of the members of my reading group thought she was quite manipulative.

 The major characters are ambitious. Luke wants to be a pioneering surgeon, Cora a famous fossil-hunter, and Martha wants to start the socialist revolution with better housing for the poor. But, as Charles (already at the top of his tree) complacently says: “She’ll grow out of hope, as everyone eventually does.” (September 1)

Is this an issue-driven novel?

But one member of my book group thought that the characters had been created for a purpose (as are all characters in novels, but the art of the author is to make the reader believe otherwise). I think perhaps the problem was that this is an issue-driven book. I felt that Perry's primary purpose was to address issues of:

• Progress versus traditionalism, in particular the clash between Cora’s science and Will’s religion but also the clash between Luke’s pioneering surgery and the traditionalists
• Feminism: Martha and Cora are independently-minded ‘liberated’ females; Stella is a wife; Cora roams the countryside, Stella stays at home (though she rather rules her household).
• Domestic abuse:Cora’s husband, dead at the start of the book
• Autism/ Asperger’s syndrome: Francis
• Social conditions: Martha’s drive to improve housing for the poor

This was overtly in the context of Victorian England but there was a definite feel that these issues were being considered through a modern lens. This meant that the characters felt a bit like puppets, manipulated by their author (as are all characters in novels but the secret is not to let the reader see the strings).

This feeling extended to the treatment of class in the novel. It seems clear that the author (again, perhaps, from a modern perspective) is endorsing Martha's frustration with the idea that poor people should only be entitled to decent housing if they lead morally upright lives (while the rich can be as debauched as they please). But the subtext of the novel seems to suggest that the author is rather more on the side of the rich. Luke and Martha may be examples of upward social mobility but they are both reliant on the patronage of rich friends. The focus of the book is on characters who have the money and leisure to travel, to collect, and the education to speculate. Most of the working class characters are decorative (the superstitious villagers, the legless beggar, the stabbed clerk). There is a distinctly feudal feel to the structure of society.

The indications in the text tell us that the bulk of the story is set in 1892.

Selected quotes:

There are some wonderful metaphors:

• "He wants to feel the wind's edge strop itself sharp on his skin" (New Year's Eve)
• "Memory unfurled like smoke from a blown candle" (January 1)
• "He took his Sunday duties as seriously as if he'd taken instruction at the burning bush." (March 2)

Other great quotes:

• “He thinks he sees - is certain he sees - the slow movement of something vast, hunched, grimly covered over with rough and lapping scales; then it is gone.” (New Year’s Eve)
• “What was built on deceit, however kindly done, would not withstand the first blow.” (Jan 3)
• “Martha turned the pages of a magazine, and watched Francis silently threading feathers from gulls and crows through the weave of Spencer's coat until he looked like an angel dismayed by its fall.” (March 1)
• “She had no hymn book but the fury of folk songs setting English suffering to English melody.” (March 1)
• "Sometimes I think we must be walking on shoals of bodies without realising it and all the earth's a graveyard." (March 1)
• "A diamond which broke the light and threw it against the wall." (March 2)
• “But tomorrow there will be another theory, and another; one will be discredited and the other praised; they'll fall from fashion and be resurrected a decade later with added footnotes and a new edition. Everything is changing ... and much of it for the better: but what use is it to try and stand on quicksand?” (March 2)
• “The wings, Cora conceded, laughing. were a little sinister, looking as if a bat had mated forcibly with a sparrow.” (March 3)
• “He reserves the blood from his Sunday chicken and goes out that night to paint the lintel of every door in Aldwinter, that God's judgment might pass over them. There's a downpour before sunrise and no one's any the wiser.” (May 1)
• “He discovers Parliament’s habit of making policies benevolently enough, then covering its eyes and shaking hands with industry.” (May 1)
• “‘Sin?” said Will, so startled that he stumbled, and put out a hand as if expecting to encounter the pulpit door.” (May 2)
• “Always a clever child, with a habit of reading her father's library with particular attention to books placed furthest out of reach.” (May 3)
• “Is a dreadful liar bad at lying, or good at it?” (May 4)
• “I always thought that was the great benefit of being religious: get the guilt over and done with, and move on to another sin.” (May 5)
• “One might as well do good as do anything at all.” (June 1)
• “What had once been grand houses were divided meanly into many small apartments, let at prices out of all proportion to what wages it was possible to earn. ... Less than a mile away, just beyond the City griffins, the landlords and their lawyers, their tailors and their bankers and their chefs, knew only what was totted in the columns of their ledgers.” (August 1) Plus ca change ...
• "The fear of the crowd came then to Will, with the taste of a copper penny placed on his tongue" (September 3) (the same metaphor is used later)
• "It was simply an animal, as they all were; and was dead, as they all would be." (September 3)
• "To live at all is to be bruised." (September 3)
• "If you want to insist on your faith  you ought at least to concede it's a strange business and very little to do with well-ironed cassocks and the order of service." (September 5)
• “If love were an archer someone had put out its eyes, and it went stumbling about, blindly letting loose its arrows, never meeting its mark.” (September 6)
• "There's enthusiasm in Parliament, but what counts for enthusiasm in the Commons would look very like laziness elsewhere." (September 10)
• “The downspin of a sycamore key.” (November 1)

Shortlisted for the 2016 Costa Award and winner of both the 2016 Waterstones Book of the Year and the 2017 Fiction Book of the Year in the British Book Awards. 

December 2018 & January 2024; 417 pages

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

"The Unspeakable Skipton" by Pamela Hansford Johnson

Hansford Johnson was a prolific novelist who wrote 27 novels between 1935 and 1981 as well as collaborating on two detective novels, writing eight plays and a book of poetry, translating Anouilh, and writing a memoir, a work of sociology and several critical works. She was a friend of Dylan Thomas and her second husband was C P Snow.

The Unspeakable Skipton is about a dirt-poor novelist living in Bruges. He relies on an allowance from a cousin and from the occasional cheque from his publisher. He resents both of these and writes vitriolic letters of abuse which causes them, unsurprisingly, to cut him off. Otherwise he makes a living by ripping off tourists. He is a pimp and a fraud.

This is a great story and a wonderful character study of the artist as an obsessive and it has some woderful characters. But what really excited me were the magnificent descriptions:

• “The sun has begun to set ... in a moment the quay would shine like a square opal in all the marvellous colours known to man and, better yet, with marvelous colours to which no man had yet fitted a name.” (C 1)
• “A miraculous evening. The sky broke like an egg into full sunset and the water caught fire.” (C 1)
• "The swans glimmered in the rustic dust like washing left out all night.” (C 2)
• “She went into her usual jelly-dance of silent laughter” (C 2)
• “It was Sunday morning and all the bells were rocking the bright sky about, boxing its ears with their glorious hands.” (C 4)
• “Tantrums of rain burst across the Grand’ Place, wild winds, stiffened by the sea, scolded the café blinds and slapped the skirts of the women over their legs.” (C 5)
• “The trees had been lichened with frost.” (C 7)
• “A side street looking like a crack in the wall between two tattered hotels.” (C 10)
• “He subsided into his own bulk as a pig does when it sits down.” (C 11)

With writing as good as this, one wonders why Hansford Johnson never because as well known as some of her contemporaries.

• Other great lines:
• “It was disgusting to have the naked toes rubbing together, the sweat rolling between into grey crumbs.” (C 1)
• “There was nothing except smell to indicate the various income levels through which he passed, since the whole staircase was shabby; but the first floor smelled of dust and biscuits, the second of stewing steak and cheese and the first of ether and flowers.” (C 2)
• “Unlike his fat friend, he looked not made for pleasure, but for disillusionments of an amusing nature.” (C 3)
• “He walked slowly across the square, feeling their eyes, like four pairs of prongs, upon his retreating form.” (C 3)
• “His thoughts running round like mice on a treadmill.” (C 4)
• “To work on this book was perhaps the greatest pleasure Daniel had ever known. When he did so he was not a man but a god, improving not only upon a beautiful earthly creation, but upon a creation already divine.” (C 4)
• “He was joyful, knowing genius in himself, burning tall and steady as a candle flame on a windless night.” (C 4)
• “The Flemish masters introduce, behind the figure of the Madonna, perhaps through a small window, little scenes of domestic life.” (C 6)
• “Doubt stirred like a centipede, one foot and then another: slowly.” (C 8)
• “You can't accuse Duncan of not respecting women ... he has respected at least four since we came here.” (C 19)
• “If my friend Flavio had any sense he would relax and let himself go to seed; because really there is nothing so young as seed.” (C 22)
• “In the old days, before God had settled upon a policy of temperateness and detachment, lightning would have wriggled from His hand to strike the blasphemer down.” (C 23)
• “Not that I am accusing you ... of being dirty minded. Where no mind exists, it Is impossible for there to be either dirt or cleanliness.”(C 24)
• “He despised Dante, a little, for his lack of enterprise in leaving so many of the less-advertised sins unaccounted for.” (C 27)

December 2018'196 pages

"The Camden Town Murder Mystery" by David Barrat

An exhaustive account of the murder of a prostitute, Emily Dimmock, in Camden Town in 1906. It seems unlikely that the author has left an stone unturned. Nevertheless, he cannot conclusively name the culprit. The most likely suspect seems to have been Robert Wood, a young man who had been seen consorting with Emily and whose postcard arranging a rendezvous with Emily on the night she was killed was found in her flat. Wood's subsequent behaviour was to lie repeatedly and to attempt to manufacture an alibi. However, amid much public celebration, Wood was acquitted at his trial. No one else was ever charged.

This book is an incredibly full account of every detail surrounding the murder, including that Camden Town was named a former Attorney General who lived at Camden Place in Chislehurst, that Emily once worked as a chamber maid at the Swan Hotel in Bedford, that one of the witnesses at the trial was an extraordinarily dodgy character who specialised in arson insurance claims when living in New Zealand and who dies in Australia as the result of an explosion whilst setting up another arson-based insurance fraud. Lots of really interesting stuff. Unfortunately the author's habit of chasing down every alley and revealing every detail left me reeling. It was difficult enough given that Emily associated with many dodgy men (she worked as a prostitute) and so there was a plethora of suspects but I found it very difficult to see any sort of Wood for the multiplicity of trees.

December 2018; 313 pages (of small print)

"Torch" by Cheryl Strayed

In the first chapter a woman is told that she has incurable cancer; she will be dead within the year. The next two chapters in which she attempts to tell her kids, who are reacting like kids react to their mother, the teenage adolescent boy with surly anger and the college student girl with the expectation that all this will just be her mother manipulating her, are truly hard to read because you know how awful these utterly normal kids will feel when they realise that their mum is not for ever. Brilliantly realistic.

And then she dies and it continues, chapter after chapter, as these three bereaved people, husband/ step-father, daughter and son, muddle through mistake after mistake on their tragic journey through grief to acceptance. Life needs to be lived and if they haven't forgotten her they have to move on, mostly by fucking other people in a instinctive if primitive response to replace death with birth.

Chapter after chapter was so hard to read. Everything was so mundane, so everyday, so utterly in your face brutally real, and I had to go on, like Bruce and Claire and Joshua, because you have to go on to find out what they next day brings, even though you dread what it might reveal. Even though you are shouting at the character 'don't do that' you know they will and they are the better person for it.

Here is a moment in which reality intrudes into authorness. Joshua is being asked by a counsellor how he feels: “He felt sleepy and hungry and he yearned for a cigarette, but he thought it unwise to mention any of those things.” (C 15) This book so ups reality!

Unbelievably good.

A few, a sparse selection, of the wonderful moments:

• “She ached. As if her spine were a zipper and someone had come up behind her and unzipped it and pushed his hands into her organs and squeezed, as if they were butter or dough, or grapes to be smashed for wine.” (C 1)
• “junk mail, addressed to him in computer-generated cursive handwriting, a trick disguised as something real.” (C 4)
• “The three of them had the same hair. Not blond, not brown, but something in between: the faded yellow of grass where an animal had slept.” (C 5)
• “she had to weed the garden that she’d planted.” (C 5)
• “Slowly, stingily, she forgave them without their knowing about it.” (C 5)
• “It was the exact size of the hole in the solar eclipse paper plate, a pin of light through which the entire sun could radiate, so bright it would blind you if you looked.” (C 5)
• “She saw her parents in their most distilled form, being precisely who they’d always been. The people who sent her garbage in the mail. The people who made her cry each Sunday. The people who would gladly give their lives to save hers.” (C 5)
• “She felt numb and stuffed and fuzzy, weightless and yet weighted. As if her veins had been filled with wet feathers.” (C 5)
• “He’d been bullied, throughout his childhood and adolescence, to tell her whether she was fat, whether she should get highlights in her hair, whether her butt seemed hideously large, or her thighs too squat. Whatever he said, she never believed him or took his advice; she simply presented the same questions to him all over again the next time.” (C 6)
• “‘It isn’t that I am against faith,’ she said warily. ‘I’m against the thinking that says that humans are shameful and bad’.” (C 7)
• “He wondered if it were possible to add up all the people he’d thanked over the course of his entire life, whether that sum would be equal to the number of people he thanked on the one day that his wife’s body was to be sealed in a wooden box, shoved into an incinerator, and burned, at an extremely high temperature, to ashes.” (C 8)
• “He thought of his mother, of parts of her he had never thought about before, of her lungs and her brain, her heart and her hands.” (C 10)
• “She couldn’t see David anymore in the light that she’d seen him before, and she didn’t know whether this new way of seeing him had been distorted by her grief or unveiled by it. Whether her life with him was fraudulent or the best thing she had."
• "She came to see that her grief did not have an end, or if it did, she would not be delivered there. Grief was not a road or a river or a sea but a world, and she would have to live there now.” (C 11)
• “Claire wondered about her youth. This was it, she supposed, and it seemed that it would go on and on and on. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. It was like walking across a desert without a hat.” (C 11)
• “he would stop loving her. Of course he would. How easy it was not to love her.” (C 11)
• “He’d heard it already, all around town, without actually having to hear the words. So soon, so soon, like an inane bird swooping over his head, calling to him everywhere he went.” (C 15)
• “He wanted to promise her something, to say that things would go back to the way they were, or that they would be different than they had become, but he loved her too much to lie and needed her too little to make it true.” (C 15)
• “each night he would allow himself to cry, but only for thirty seconds.” (C 16)
• “She was suddenly giddy with the foreignness of being here, which collided with an almost surreal familiarity.” (C 17)

December 2018;

By the author of Wild, a travel book about hiking the mountains of California and Oregon.

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

"Don't let go" by Harlan Coben

Written in the present tense, this thriller has a no-holds-barred cop-investigator solving a crime that seems to link to the death of his twin brother fifteen years earlier. The tension builds up to the half-way point when the whodunnit element starts to give way to thriller writing. There's plenty of raw violence involved. And of course, there are always several twists at the end.

But Coben is the king of the one-liners:

• "Daisy wore a clingy black dress with a neckline so deep it could tutor philosophy." First line of the book! Great start.
• "She could feel the eyes of the male patrons crawling down her bare legs like earthworms." Still on the first page.
• "The mark peered into the class of whiskey in front of him as though he were a gypsy with a crystal ball." We're on the second page now. The image is easily available.
• "Money can't buy you happiness ... but if you handle it right, money buys you freedom and time, and those are a lot more tangible than happiness." (C 7) Not sure you can describe either freedom or time as tangible but you get the idea
• "The food is 'farm to table', though when you order eggs, I'm not sure what other route they'd go." (C 7)
• "This is one of the moments when words would be like an appendix - superfluous or harmful." (C 9)
• "I can't unring that bell." (C 14)

December 2018; 347 pages

Other Coben books reviewed in this blog:

• Gone for Good: my favourite so far
• Hold Tight

"The Great Divorce" by C S Lewis

This is a thought-provoking book on how to be a good Christian written in a very readable and entertaining manner. It is written by the great C S Lewis who also write:

Works of Science Fiction (or as he might have called it scientifiction) which are Christian allegories:

• Out of the Silent Planet
• Perelandra
• That Hideous Strength

The Narnia books for children (which are also Christian allegories):

• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
• Prince Caspian
• The Magician's Nephew
• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
• The Horse and His Boy
• The Silver Chair
• The Last Battle

Mediaeval literary criticism (the day job):

• The Discarded Image

CSL imagines a bus trip from the dreary and lonely town of Hell through the sky into Heaven. And he imagines all the excuses the inhabitants of Hell make either not to get on the bus in the first place or to return to Hell after their journey.

His thesis is that in order to enter and stay in Heaven you have got to relinquish your self-centredness. As he says in the Preface: “You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys”

Some people use excuses not to get on the bus:

• “A moment later two young people ... also left us arm in arm. They were both so trousered, slender, giggly and falsetto that I could be sure of the sex of neither, but it was clear that each for the moment preferred the other to the chance of a place in the bus.”
• Others don’t like the company on the bus.
• Some don’t think there will be room for them.

The newcomers in Heaven are Ghosts. They are greeted by the more substantial Angels who try to persuade them to stay. The Ghosts who can’t be persuaded include:

• Those who insist on their rights and don’t want Charity.
• Those who insist on their own opinions if they feel justified in them. 
• Those who think that their lives would be improved if the Management changed the system: “What would you say if you went to a hotel where the eggs were all bad; and when you complained to the Boss, instead of apologising and changing his dairyman, he just told you that if you tried you’d get to like the bad eggs in time?”
• Those who are too ashamed to be seen in the company of angels.
• Artists who are too in love with Art: “If you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you'll never learn to see the country"
• Mothers who love too fiercely.
• Those who try to make others sorry for them and use this to manipulate others: “Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom by pity.”

The problem is that this means it is very hard to get into Heaven and CSL is worried by this: “If these Solid People were as benevolent as I had heard one of two of them claim to be, they might have done something to help the inhabitants of the Town - something more than meeting them on the plain ... How if this whole trip were allowed the Ghosts merely to mock them?” One answer offered is that “The sane would do no good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.” Another is that the great spirits of the blessed are just too large to squeeze into the narrow and cramped confines of Hell. I'm not sure that either truly address the question.

To enter Heaven CSL says we have to lose our self-centredness:

• “The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven’. ... There is always something they prefer to joy ... Achilles’ wrath and Coriolanus’ grandeur, Revenge and Injured Merit and Self-Respect and Tragic Greatness and Proper Pride.”
• “Did ye never know a collector of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them?”
• “No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.” 
• “There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels. It's not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels."
• “The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.”
• “What we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved.” 

Other great aphorisms include:

• “To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.” with the answer “If that were true, and known to be true, how could anyone travel hopefully? There would be nothing to hope for"
• "Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.”
• “Jesus ... was a comparatively young man when he died. He would have outgrown some of his earlier views, you know, if he’d lived. As he might have done, with a little more tact and patience.”
• "Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light.”

But one of the best things about a C S Lewis book are the brilliant descriptions:

• “Time seemed to have paused on that dismal moment when only a few shops have lit up and it is not yet dark enough for their windows to look cheering.”
• “My attention was caught by my fellow passengers ... Now that they were in the light, they were transparent ... They were in fact ghosts: man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air.”
• “One gets glimpses, even in our country, of that which is ageless - heavy thought in the face of an infant, and frolic childhood in that of a very old man.”
• “The bus was full of light. It was cruel light. I shrank from the faces and forms by which I was surrounded. They were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities but of impossibilities, some gaunt, some bloated, some glaring with idiotic ferocity, some drowned beyond recovery in dreams; but all, in one way or another, distorted and faded. One had a feeling that they might fall to pieces at any moment if the light grew much stronger. Then - there was a mirror on the end wall of the bus - I caught sight of my own.” 
• “If a corpse already liquid with decay had arisen from the coffin, smeared its gums with lipstick, and attempted a flirtation, the result could not have been more appalling.”

Biographies about C S Lewis reviewed in this blog include:

• C S Lewis: A Biography
• Jack: C S Lewis and his times

November 2018; 118 pages

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

"A Question of Blood" by Ian Rankin

Detective Inspector John Rebus is in hospital with a pair of has a pair of bandaged hands when his sidekick Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke tells him that a criminal with whom Rebus had been seen drinking the night before has been burned to death and that two schoolboys have been shot to death in the common room of their public school. These cases both look open and closed: Rebus was on the scene and has scalded (or were they burned) hands; and there is an ex-SAS soldier gunman with the two dead boys who shot himself. But as Rebus and Clarke seek for the gunman's motive, as usual, all is never quite as it seems in the world of Edinburgh crime.

Another classic outing for one of the better detective series.

In fact there is a moment when Rankin transcends his genre. John Rebus goes to Alan Renshaw, the bereaved parent of one of the boys in the school shooting, who happens to be his cousin. He finds him in the loft, playing with his dead son's discarded racing car track. The two men play with the kit for a while until reminiscence gives way to anger. This scene provides one of the very best  portraits of the grief of a bereaved parent that I have read.

The many bits of business possible for a character with heavily bandaged hands is a master-class for novelists. Lighting a cigarette and lifting a glass to his mouth (favourite occupations for Rebus) offer original descriptions; wearing gloves elicits 'fascist' comments; Rebus needs Clarke to drive for him.

Rankin is also particularly good at providing a new twist on sayings. Many of these are too diffuse to quote but they offer an original way of viewing the character.

• "Patience: the one thing he had no time for." (C 1)
• "The woman was not cooking with a full set of saucepans." (C 13)
• "The kettle's trailing the pot one-nil at half-time." (C 14)

Other interesting quotes:

• "Inside, the flat was musty. There was a fug which could have been bottled as eau de Bachelor." (C 3)
• "What was he watching for? Because it satisfied the voyeur in him? He'd always enjoyed surveillances for the same reason: glimpses into secret lives." (C 16)

Other Inspector Rebus books reviewed in this blog include:

• A Question of Blood
• The Naming of the Dead
• Strip Jack
• Tooth and Nail: Rebus in London: poor stuff
• Standing in Another Man's Grave
• In a House of Lies

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

November 2018; 440 pages

"Ulysses Found" by Ernle Bradford

Based on a lifetime of sailing the Mediterranean in a small boat, this book locates the places in Homer's Odyssey. Homer often gives precise sailing instructions and detailed descriptions of harbours (the exception is the clearly mythical voyage to the land of the dead) and Bradford uses these to trace the voyage. Sometimes Bradford agrees with classical sources (almost everyone locates Scylla and Charybdis in the Messina strait between Sicily and Italy) and sometimes he disagrees but in every case he has excellent reasons for his identification. Of course, this all assumes that Homer was working with a sailor or sailors or at least with their log books, even when, as Bradford admits, citing the lack of any encounters with other voyagers in the Odyssey, the Greeks of Homer's time never adventured into the Western Mediterranean.

This is a brilliant, fascinating, well argued and convincing book and the meat of the argument is perfectly spiced with anecdotes about the author's own adventures.

The route that Bradford suggests makes sense both in terms of directions, times and likely speeds, and the descriptions of land. In short, Bradford suggests Ulysses travelled north from Troy to raid the Thracian coast near Mount Ismaro. He was then driven by a storm to the Island of Djerba off the Libyan coast, the Land of the Lotus Eaters. He then travelled north to the land of the Cyclopes in SE Sicily, north to Ustica (the Island of Aeoleus) and again north to Bonifacio on southern Corsica, the Land of the Laestrygonians. He then travelled east to Circe's island (actually a headland) on the Italian coast north of Naples. After Circe he travelled west through the r (to the Land of the Dead) and then back to Circe. Leaving her again he went via the Isles of the Sirens (just south of the Sorrento peninsula) through the Messian straits (Scylla and Charybdis) to Taormina in Sicily where grazed the Cattle of the Sun. He spent years on Calypsos island (Malta) before finally travelling home via Corfu (the Land of the Phaeacians).

I've created a series of maps for this which can be found here


Fascinating bits:

• Odysseus means ‘son of wrath’. But Ulysses derives from Olysseus which comes from O Lukos, ‘the wolf’
• When young U is wounded in the thigh by a boar in a hunting accident. “This wounding in the thigh seems to equate him with a number of eastern gods, Tammuz, Adonis, and Cretan Zeus, all of whom were wounded and killed by a boar. These stories all stem from a Phoenician source.” 
• “The rudder, as we know it today, was a north European invention, and probably originated in the Baltic. This axled, hinged rudder was still considered something of a modern invention when used in the caravels of Henry the Navigator in the early 15th century. It was unknown in the classical world.”
• Odyssey ca C12 BC: “ the Cretan, or Minoan, seapower had collapsed before invaders from the north ... the Phoenicians had not yet founded their colonies on the North African coast.”
• Polyphemus has ‘eyebrows’ in the Odyssey: “It is not till later times that he becomes monophthalmic.”
• “Garlic itself has long been associated with magical properties ... s late as the 14th century ... we find that garlic was reputed to neutralize the lodestone, thus putting the magnetic compass out of action.”
• “Comparatively few rivers of any size flow into the Mediterranean, and it loses by evaporation two-thirds more than it receives from its rivers. This steady loss is made good by an inflow of water from the Atlantic.” This will allow U to drift back to the Med after visiting the ‘land of the dead’.
• “The two mountains which face each other across the Strait were called ‘The Pillars of Melkarth’ by the Phoenicians. They took their name from the twin pillars of the great temple of Melkarth in the city of Tyre. ... Melkarth was not only a sea god in Phoenician mythology, he was also Lord of the Underworld, and it was between the pillars of the Strait of Gibraltar that he was believed to dwell.” which is why C sent U to Gibraltar to go into the Underworld.
• “Baltic Amber was being imported overland into prehistoric Greece centuries before the Homeric period.”
• “It was the Phoenicians who first gave the island its name, Maleth or Malet - the Shelter, Haven, or Hiding Place ... the word ‘Calypso’ in Greek means ‘hidden’ or ‘hider’, and the Homeric words for Calypso’s isle, Neesos Kalupsous, can best be translated in English as ‘The Island of the Hiding Place’.”
• “The Maltese archipelago was inhabited many centuries before the basin of the Mediterranean was flooded.”

Great quotes

• “I do not think that anything is lost by attempting to find a skeleton - however magnificent the cupboard that hides it.”
• “Ulysses was the shopkeeper with his thumb on the scales, and an eye for the girls, handy with a knife in a dark alley, and at the same time in some strange fashion or other, capable of honesty - or was it of great consistency? - over most of the major issues.” 
• “When men return from war it is their record as fighting men which usually determines their immediate position in society. Inevitably within a short time the standards of judgement change, so that often the war hero turns out to be a peace-time failure.”
• “In Trapani I have felt history as heavy as a plush curtain. ... One's own life is seen as no more than a minute drop of resin oozing from the trunk of some giant tree.”
• “Places are little in themselves, you must earn them by your voyage.”

A wonderful voyage.

November 2018; 221 pages