"Autumn" by Ali Smith

Elisabeth Demand sits by the bedside of dying Daniel Gluck, her centenarian neighbour, reading to him and reflecting on her friendship with him. It is the months after the Brexit referendum, someone is putting electrified fences up to enclose common land, and Elisabeth is battling her way to the front of the queue in the downsized Post Office to renew her passport only to be confronted with questions about her identity. Her own identity has been stolen. This is a collage of episodes. Elisabeth did her dissertation on Britain's only female Pop Artist, the now-forgotten Pauline Boty, who painted a lost portrait of Christine Keeler and had an uncredited part in Alfie. An advertisement for a supermarket uses music written by her friend Daniel, music which is now trending on social media; Gluck also wrote lyrics for a song a Barbra (Streisand?) sung in concert but never recorded. Elisabeth's mum appears on an episode of a TV show in which amateurs comb junk shops looking for treasures. It is as if our lives are made from disposable ephemera and who we are is made of glimpses.

Another fascinating and thought-provoking work from one of Britain's most original contemporary writers. The novelist as collage painter?

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017.

Other works by this brilliant and repeatedly original author that I have read and reviewed in this blog include:

• The Accidental: a holidaying family is gatecrashed by a young woman
• There but for the: a set of stories linked by a man who, at a dinner party, locks himself into one of the upstairs rooms of his host and refuses to come out
• How to Be Both which has two halves which can be read in either order (and some copies of the book are printed one way and some the other): one half has a teenage girl trying to cope with the death of her mother; the other half is the exuberant reflections of a renaissance artist who was a woman pretending to be a man.
• Artful which is both a ghost story and a meditation on art
• Winter, another collage type work which weaves the story of a Christmas Carol with Cymbeline and the Nativity and reflects on Britain following the Brexit referendum.

Selected quotes:

• "Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?"
• "Don't just sit there like an unstrung puppet."
• "Crying came out of her like weather."
• "Like entering what you think is going to be history and finding endless sad fragility."
• "The symphony of the sold and the discarded. The symphony of all the lives that had these things in them once. The symphony of worth and worthlessness."
• "I like nakedness. I mean who doesn't to be honest? I'm a person. I'm an intelligent nakedness."

January 2019

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

"The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver

A bigoted American Baptist hellfire preacher takes his wife and four daughters to a mission station in the Congo. He starts by insulting the villagers because, at the feast thrown to welcome him, he objects to the bare breasts of the women. He compounds his mistakes by failing to understand that his great project of river baptism seems to the Congolese an attempt to lure their children down to the crocodile infested river, by his failure to understand that he can't transplant American agriculture to African soil, and is symbolised by his battle against a poisonwood tree; he tries to wrench it from the soil and it responds by living up to its name.

The story is told principally through the testimonies of the four girls:

• Rachel, the eldest, is a beautiful blonde fifteen year old who dreams of boys and repeatedly uses delightful malapropisms: "All I need is to go back home with some dread disease. Sweet sixteen and never been kissed is bad enough, but to be Thyroid Mary on top of it?". 
• Leah, the eldest brunette twin, is a highly intelligent girl who becomes firm friends with the orphaned schoolteacher who secretly organises for Congo's independence. 
• Adah her twin was brain-damaged at birth; she hardly ever speaks and is a convinced but silent atheist; she likes to write words backwards and loves palindromes. 
• Ruth-May is the baby of the family and understands things from the perspective of a young child.

The father is a man who believes passionately that God rewards virtue. He has a crippled daughter, Adah, who never speaks. When he only had a wife and three daughters he used to complain about the noise: "One Too Many Sopranos in Church". This makes Adah think  "Our Father probably interpreted Broca's aphasia  as God's Christmas bonus to one of His worthier employees." He himself has a tragic story: he was the only survivor of a US army unit that got trapped by the Japanese in the Filipino jungles. Survivor guilt means he cannot quit the Congo jungle, even though every other white person is fleeing and the civil war approaches. In the afterstory, some of his daughters are also trapped in Africa.

The plot proceeds from the difficulties of living in back-woods Africa through to the hostility of the villagers. Then Congo becomes independent and the new Prime Minister is swiftly ousted in a CIA-backed coup. There follows a civil war in which it becomes positively dangerous to be white.

The word epic is overused but this is an epic. The experiences of a single family act as a metaphor to the effect of colonialisation on Africa.

There are many metaphors within the text:

• Methuselah, the old African Grey parrot left behind by the previous, Roman Catholic missionary, who 'went native'. When Our Father, unable to cope with a parrot who uses bad language, releases the bird from its cage, he flies off but is still reliant on the family for food. "Now he has a world. What can he possibly do with it? He has no muscle tone in his wings. They are atrophied, probably beyond hope of recovery." He is a metaphor for Africa, enslaved and then set loose, with its wings atrophied, unable to fly, forever dependent on others for its survival.
• Adah, the crippled twin (and twins themselves are a source of provocation in a land where twins are exposed at birth), who is unable or unwilling to speak, who loves to say things and see things backwards. She is 'cured' of her crippledness when she is made to learn to walk all over again, from crawling. A metaphor for how to uncripple Africa?
• Rachel with her repeated malapropisms, is a metaphor for how the family repeatedly says or does the wrong thing. And so many of the African words are wrong. Our Father finishes his sermons by exulting that 'Tata Jesus is bangala', a word which, depending on the intonation, can mean several things including 'poisonwood'; the Minister tells his flock that Jesus is a tree that hurts.
• Our Father himself, the hellfire preacher, is a metaphor for the clumsy understanding of his country: "The United States has now become the husband of Zaire's economy, and not a very nice one. Exploitative and condescending, in the name of steering her clear of the moral decline inevitable to her nature." 

Selected quotes:
Book One: Genesis

• "First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees." These are the second and third lines; the final Book is entitled The Eyes in the Trees.
• "The very first bite slowly grew to a powerful burn on my tongue."
• "I believe in God with all my might, but have been thinking lately that most of the details seem pretty much beneath His dignity." Leah on menstruation.
• Rachel on the assorted rags which the Africans wear: "The attitude towards clothing seems to be: if you have it, why not wear it?"
• "That razor strop burns so bad, after you go to bed your legs still feel stripedy like a zebra horse."
• "Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes ... It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes." Our Father's attitude to his girl's education.
• "If God had amused himself inventing the lilies of the field, he surely knocked His own socks off with the African parasites."

Book Two: The Revelation

• "He was hardly a father except in the vocational sense, as a potter with clay to be molded."
• "Last week he spoke for an hour on the nonviolent road to independence. The crowd loved it so much they rioted and killed twelve people."
• "Anatole, the schoolteacher, is twenty-four years of age, with all his fingers still on, both hands and both feet, and that is the local idea of a top-throb dreamboat."
• "Anatole gave her compliments left and right, which tells you right there he was either a polite young man or mentally cracked."
• "Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness."
• "If your brother is going to steal your hen, save your honor and give it to him first."
• "He just stood there brewing like a coffeepot. Only with a coffeepot you know exactly what's going to come out of it."
• "Waiting for a child to die is not an occasion for writing a poem here ... it isn't a long enough wait."

Book Three: The Judges

• "In hard times everyone's eyes get better or at least good enough."
• "The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you the best."
• "The wolf was not actually at the door but perhaps merely salivating at the edge of your yard."
• "Watching my father, I've seen how you can't learn anything when you're trying to look like the smartest person in the room."
• "Children should never have to die ... But if they never did, children would not be so precious ... Also if everyone lived to be old, then old age would not be such a treasure."

Book Five: Exodus

• "Sometimes you just have to save your neck and work out the details later."
• "Preventatives for old age are rampant here."
• "Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining?"
• "When push comes to shove, a mother takes care of her children from the bottom up."
• "That's the principal trick of Congolese cooking: rubbing two leaves together to give colour and taste to another day's translucent, nutritionally blank ball of manioc."
• "Rice and soy meal help when we can get them, to balance our amino acids and keep our muscle tissue from digesting itself in the process known picturesquely as kwashiorkor."
• "After that happy-ever-after wedding, they never tell you the rest of the story. Even if you get to marry the prince,you still wake up in the morning with your mouth tasting like drain cleaner and your hair all flat on one side."
• "the rearview mirror is always twenty-twenty."
• "A marital record distinguished for quantity if not quality."
• "The cranky indoor plumbing constantly grumbled at us like God to Noah, threatening the deluge."

Book Six: Song of the Three Children

• "I have a little sign in every room telling guests that are expected to complain at the office between the hours of nine and eleven A.M. daily."
• "Sometimes life doesn't give you all that many chances at being good."

Book seven: The Eyes in the Trees

• "A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotting tree stumps, sucking life out of death."
• "Being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger."

This is the sequel to Heart of Darkness. Although, at the end, it becomes a little preachy and the Leah-Rachel dichotomy becomes a catechism with obvious answers, this book probably taught me more about the tragedy of Africa than any other. Rachel, of all people (and without being aware of it) says "things fall apart" and thus the book plays homage to the classic of African literature, Things Fall Apart. But this is a classic in the literature of apology for colonialisation.

January 2019.

This book was a runner-up for the 1999 Pulitzer prize for fiction and short-listed for the 1999 Women's Prize for Fiction

Kingsolver also wrote The Lacuna, about another shameful episode in America's recent past and Demon Copperhead about a lad growing up in trailer trash West Virginia, in the middle of the opioid addiction epidemic. 

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

"Love Over Scotland" by Alexander McCall Smith

The third in the Scotland Street series of novels that includes:

• 44 Scotland Street
• Espresso Tales
• Love Over Scotland
• The World According to Bertie
• The Unbearable Lightness of Scones

One of the difficulties when you are publishing a series of novels such as this, with a large cast of recurring characters, must be how you ensure that the books are different. This book opens with Pat fancying a boy called Wolf ... but another in the series also opens with Pat fancying a boy. Bertie plays the saxophone and battles with his mother; the family car has gone missing again. Matthew years for Pat, again. Angus takes Cyril for a walk, again. For the first third of this book I had an uncomfortable feeling of deja vu; I believed I had already read the book. Perhaps this is a strength in that it attests to the strength of the familiar characters as in a TV soap opera. Perhaps this is also why authors are forced to resort to ever more extreme plot lines.

Alexander McCall Smith gently muses over the lives of his characters inhabiting the most genteel part of Edinburgh.

The strength of the books for me lies in the astute observations that he makes. Many of these things have been said many times before ... but they are worth saying:

• “Artists were allowed to look, he thought - no artist could really be considered a voyeur. Looking was what an artist was trained to do, and if an artist did not look, then he would not see.” (C 4)
• “He knew that his life was an adjunct life, lived in the shadow of his master.” (C 7)
• “Smells were like a palimpsest: odour laid upon odour, smells that could be peeled off to reveal the whiff below.” (C 7)
• “The unmerited dislike of others made one think less of oneself. We are enlarged by the love of others; we are diminished by their dislike.” (C 14)
• “The people with the strong, brave exteriors are just as weak and vulnerable as the rest of us.” (C 17)
• “People fell in love with those who belonged to others. It happened all the time in fiction, and presumably in real life, too.” (C 24)
• “How many lonely women the length and breadth of Britain found Radio Four a very satisfactory substitute for a man? And Radio Four could so easily be turned off, just like that, whereas men ...” (C 29)
• “His eyes were fixed on the floor, hoping to locate the geological flaw which would swallow him up and save him from his current embarrassment. But of course there was none; at no time is the earth more firm than when we wish that it were not.” (C 39)
• “Such circumstances as these, she thought, remind us of just what we are: salt and water, for the most part.” (C 47)
• "This knowledge that Angus was not with him, made the world as dark and cold as if the sun had dropped out of the sky." (C 51)
• "He wanted to hit Larch, but he understood that principle which everybody, but particularly politicians and statesmen, understand very well: you only ever hit weaker people." (C 54)
• "The light thrown out by the Tilley lamp was soft and forgiving, a light that did not fight with the darkness but nudged it aside gently, just for a few feet, and then allowed it back." (C 56)
• "Although we are most secure - in one sense - in our own homes, we are also at our most vulnerable, for the social persona, the one we carry out with us into the world, cannot be worn at ho,e all the time." (C 80)
• "Gracious acceptance is an art - an art which most of us never bother to cultivate." (C 112)

January 2019

"Don Carlos" by Friedrich Schiller

Schiller was the best-selling author of The Robbers (1781). This play was first performed in 1787. He thus comes towards the end of the romantic Sturm und Drang movement epitomised by his friend  Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and towards the beginning of melodrama. It is also wonderfully Gothic and includes the (albeit fake) ghost of a monk wandering through the palace cellars on the stroke of midnight and the common Gothic trope of demonising Roman Catholicism as later followed by The Monk (Lewis, 1796).

Don Carlos is a historical play written in blank verse and thus with a huge nod to Shakespeare. Schiller includes rather more detailed stage directions that Shakespeare and clearly believes that whenever one has a change of characters this means one should have a new scene (Act 4 has 24 such scenes) but I guess most modern productions would regard many of these scenelets as run-ins to proper scenes.

I saw the LAMDA production of Don Carlos at the matinee on Saturday 9th Feb 2019 in the Carne Studio theatre. This production highlighted the unstable emotional behaviour of Don Carlos, played as a hysterical neurotic by James Esler, who flung himself across the stage in a very physical performance, and his father King Philip, a paranoid gang leader who raged and collapsed and who could trust no one. This was a superb performance by Colm Gleeson. Supporting characters who impressed were Ivan Du Pontavice as a very correct militarist Duke of Alba, Branden Cook as an utterly cynical Domingo, Chloe McClay as etiquette-bound Olivarez and Olivia Le Andersen as the vengeful and regretful Princess Eboli. The adaptation really brought out the family feud at the heart of the story and managed to keep going through the bits in which Schiller expounds his political theories. It also turned Schiller's stop-start scening into a more contemporary flow. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Don Carlos is loosely based on Spanish history. Crown Prince Carlos, heir to Philip II of Spain, was mentally unstable and died after six months imprisonment by his father. But this was 20 years before the Spanish Armada, a historical fact mentioned in Schiller's play.

This play starts with a problem Before Philip II married the current Queen of Spain he had betrothed this French princess to his son Carlos. They had fallen in love. But then Philip was widowed and decided on a young bride and he himself married the Queen. So Carlos is now in the position of being in love with his stepmother. There are potential homages to Hamlet here (Don Carlos has just returned from studying abroad) and the incest based Jacobean tragedies such as 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. 

His best mate Rodrigues, Marquis of Posa, wants to help Don Carlos in his quasi-incestuous pursuit of love but at the same time he wants to protect the Netherlands, currently in revolt against the Spanish Empire, from the scorched earth policy promised by the Duke of Alva whom Philip wants to send to Flanders as the new Governor. Instead Rod Posa wants Don Carlos to become governor so that the two of them can initiate a far-sighted rule guaranteeing individual liberties and freedom of worship. Very German Enlightenment!

However their ambitions are under attack from the sinister Domingo, confessor to Philip, and the Duke (or in one wonderful misprint in my edition, the Dude) of Alva (described by Posa as "bigotry’s relentless tool").

Also the Princess Eboli has the hots for young Don Carlos. She provides a mysterious letter and a key to let him into her apartments whither he goes under the impression that the letter and key come from his step-mum. This leads to an awkward moments when she discovers that he does not in fact love him and she decides to have her revenge by exposing the dreadful secret and potentially incestuous affair to the king.

The King is an interesting study. He has been told his wife is being unfaithful, it is hinted that his latest daughter is a bastard. But he does not know what to believe and this is the problem of being a king: people lie to you for their advantage:

“I thirst for truth. To reach its tranquil spring,
Through the dark heaps of thick surrounding error,
Is not the lot of kings.”

In the end Don Carlos is brought down not so much by the multiplicity of scheming that is going on at the Spanish court as by a plot of fiendish complexity.

There are some wonderfully romantic/ melodramatic/ gothic moments:

“Like hell's grim furies, dreams of dreadful shape
Pursue me still. My better genius strives
With the fell projects of a dark despair.
My wildered subtle spirit crawls through maze
On maze of sophistries, until at length
It gains a yawning precipice's brink.”

There are some beautifully political points. 

When the villainous Princess Eboli looks forward to going to Madrid she is told there will be an auto da fe but she says that's OK because “‘Tis only heretics they burn”.

The Queen points out that a new monarch can do anything he wants:

“make bonfires of the laws
His father left ...
Drag from his tomb, in the Escurial,
The sacred corpse of his departed sire,
Make it a public spectacle, and scatter
Forth to the winds his desecrated dust.
And then, at last, to fill the measure up
...
“End all by wedding with his mother.”

“Terror alone can tie rebellion’s hands:
Humanity were madness.”

“Far easier is the task
To make a monarch than a monarchy.”

“The monarch’s crown is bright with sparkling gems,
But no eye sees the wounds that purchased them.”

“He reverences the people! And is this
A man to be our king?"

“Thou speakest like a dreamer. This high office

Demands a man - and not a stripling’s arm.”

And there are other great quotes:

“Carlos is not one to yield to must
Where he hath power to will! ...
...
I look on naught as lost - except the dead.”

“In future, let this puppet-play of rank
Be banished from our friendship”

“Whose eye is dry was ne’er of woman born!”

“I am not wicked, father; ardent blood
Is all my failing;—all my crime is youth;—
Wicked I am not—no, in truth, not wicked;—
Though many an impulse wild assails my heart,
Yet is it still untainted.”

“Love is the only treasure on the face
Of this wide earth that knows no purchaser
Besides itself—love has no price but love.
It is the costly gem, beyond all price,
Which I must freely give away, or—bury
For ever unenjoyed”


“There are such things as double-edged swords
And untrue friends,—I fear them both.
'Tis hard to judge among mankind, but still more hard
To know them thoroughly.”

“How poor, how beggarly, thou hast become,
Since all thy love has centred in thyself!”


“Naught but the vilest falsehood!
I'll swear 'tis false! Yet what's believed by all,
Groundless and unconfirmed although it be,
Works its effect, as sure as truth itself.”

“A virtuous name
Is, after all, my liege, the only prize
Which queens and peasants' wives contest together.”

“I ne'er could stoop
To be the chisel where I fain would be—
The sculptor's self.”

“You would plant
For all eternity, and yet the seeds
You sow around you are the seeds of death!”

“He who would be of service to mankind
Must first endeavour to resemble them.”

"All virtue

Is spotless till it’s tried.”

"I have created in my Carlos' soul,
A paradise for millions! Oh, my dream
Was lovely!”


“Oh, bid him realize the dream,
The glowing vision which our friendship painted,
Of a new-perfect realm! And let him lay
The first hand on the rude, unshapened stone.
Whether he fail or prosper—all alike—
Let him commence the work. 

...
Tell him, in manhood, he must still revere
The dreams of early youth, nor ope the heart
Of heaven's all-tender flower to canker-worms
Of boasted reason,—nor be led astray
When, by the wisdom of the dust, he hears
Enthusiasm, heavenly-born, blasphemed.”

“Oh! it hath cost thee much; full well I know
How thy kind heart with bitter anguish bled
As thy hands decked the victim for the altar.”

“This fine-toned lyre broke in your iron hand,
And you could do no more than murder him.”

“I'm nothing now
But a forsaken, old, defenceless man!”

There are some surprisingly modern attitudes and some great writing here. Although I am not surprised that the main influence of this work has been in Opera (which loves a good melodrama) there are some astute character portraits and the some excellent lines.

January 2019

Other books by German authors reviewed in this blog.

Other plays that are reviewed in this blog

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

"The Unbearable Lightness of Scones" by Alexander McCall Smith

This is the fifth book in a series following the lives of characters living in and around 44 Scotland Street. It follows 44 Scotland Street, Espresso Tales, Love Over Scotland, and The World According to Bertie. In this installment:

• Bertie and Tofu join the cubs, despite being too young, but bossy Olive who claims to be Bertie's girlfriend joins too.
• Matthew, art gallery owner, and Elspeth who used to be Bertie's teacher get married and go on a honeymoon.
• Lard O'Connell, Glasgow gangster, has a 'Reaburn' portrait of Rabbie Burns
• Narcissistic Bruce splits up from his rich girlfriend and is spotted by a photographer as a potential model
• Big Lou's boyfriend gets involved with a the Jacobite Pretender
• Domenica steals a teacup
• Cyril, dog belonging to portrait painter Angus Lordie, fathers six puppies and desires Matthew's ankles.

All of this allows gentle reflections on life. McCall Smith's Edinburgh is so genteel it makes Jane Austen's world look sinister.

Some quotes:

• "While I'm eating lunch, people like me in Shanghai or Bombay are working - such were the implications of globalisation, that paraquat of simple security." (C 6)
• "The moral energy, the disapproval, that had fuelled Scotland's earlier bouts of over-enthusiastic religious intolerance were still with us, as they were with any society. It ... was present now in the desire to prevent people from doing anything risky or thinking unapproved thoughts. ... All that moral outrage, that self-righteousness, that urge to lecture and disapprove - it's all still there." (C 6)
• "The real secret in a still life, he thought, is to give the painting the sense of suppressed energy, if expectation, as if somebody were about to come into the room, to render the still life living" (C 6)
• "He was not sure why his mother had asked him to sit like a good boy; how exactly did a good boy sit, he wondered, and, perhaps more puzzlingly, how did a bad boy sit?"(C 9)
• "And we shouldn't deceive ourselves, Bruce thought; every single one of us makes compromises for money." (C 13)
• "Coffee, in all its forms, looks murky, and gives little comfort to one who seeks to see something in it." (C 15)
• "The barricades in this life ... are often in the wrong place." (C 20)
• "That [the nose] gives life to the face, because the nose has energy and direction. Whatever the subject's eyes may be doing ... the nose has business of its own." (C 30)
• "The architect who had designed these offices was of the school that did not believe in walls, except where utterly necessary to prevent the ceiling from falling down." (C 76)
• "Angus decided not to argue: Domenica had made up her mind, and he would be the loser in any argument. Women always win, he thought. They just always win." (C 77)

January 2019; 328 pages

"Antony and Cleopatra" by William Shakespeare

I saw this play at the National Theatre in the matinee performance on Saturday 19th January 2019. Ralph Fiennes made an excellent Antony by Sophie Okonedo was simply stunning as Cleopatra.

James Shapiro (2015) in 1606 William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear points out that despite having virtually invented the soliloquy and having used it to great effect in Macbeth, the preceding play, Shakespeare has hardly any soliloquies in Antony and Cleopatra.

James Shapiro (2015) in 1606 William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear states that Shakespeare's "account of Cleopatra is suffused with paradox and hyperbole”. The example that he gives is from Act 2 Scene 2 in which Enobarbus says that Cleopatra "makes hungry Where she most satisfies". But there are many other examples too. 

Sophie Okonedo's portrayal of Cleopatra was of someone whose behaviour depended on fickle whim. She is demanding. She wants to know how much Antony loves her and he replies: "There's beggary in the love that can be reckon'd.” This was a wonderful portrait of a woman who is passionate and headstrong, governed by her desires.

For Antony his life in Egypt is the dream but he is repeatedly called back to reality. Antony is also able to dissociate his two lives. Thus, for him, his marriage to Octavia is purely something political whereas Octavia is furious when, as she is attempting to broker peace between Antony and Octavius, Antony runs back to Cleopatra. In the end though Antony has very little choice in the matter. As he says, in explanation of his retreat from the battle of Actium when Cleopatra's fleet disengaged and ran away and Antony followed: "My heart was to thy rudder tied by the strings".

Neither of the two protagonists is good at listening.  The play opens with Antony repeatedly refusing to listen to urgent news from home. Shortly after, still in the first act,  there is a scene in which Antony is trying to tell Cleopatra that he must return to Rome because his wife Fulvia has died but Cleopatra, assuming he is going to tell her that Fulvia has called him home, won't let him get a word in edgeways. Later there was a hilariously comic scene in which a messenger (it was played by Eros in the NT production) tries to tell her that Antony has married Octavia. “I do not like 'But yet,' it does allay/ The good precedence; fie upon 'But yet'!/ 'But yet' is as a gaoler to bring forth/ Some monstrous malefactor.” she tells him and when he finally plucks up the courage to say the words she tries to kill him (in the NT production this entailed her chasing him into the swimming pool and him floudering in it getting wetter and wetter). This demonstrates an earlier comment by Enobarbus when he says that women ‘die’ when they hear bad news: “Cleopatra, catching but the least noise of this, dies instantly; I have seen her die twenty times upon far poorer moment ... she hath such a celerity in dying.” (which comment, of course, foreshadows her suicide). And this refusal to listen comes to the climax when Antony repeatedly refuses the advice of his generals to fight Octavius on land rather than at sea. They are appalled:

“Your ships are not well mann'd;
Your mariners are muleters, reapers, people
Ingross'd by swift impress; in Caesar's fleet
Are those that often have 'gainst Pompey fought:
Their ships are yare; yours, heavy”

They aren't the only ones who won't listen to advice. When the triumvirs (Antony, Octavius and Lepidus) are on board Pompey's ship getting drunk, Pompey is advised to cut the cable, put to sea and cut their throats but he refuses because of his honour. This, of course, dooms him in the end.

The construction of the play is interesting. There are many foreshadowings of snakes and serpents (including the crocodile which a drunken Lepidus asks about). The play has the difficult task of trying to chronicle some complicated history. Thus, although the battle of Actium, regarded by some historians as one of the pivotal encounters of world history, is more or less at the very centre of the play, there are more battles after it which gives the feel that Actium was not that important after all. And this second battle has to be divided into two days; on the first Antony believes that he has won. So the narrative is muddled as it leads to the lovers' doom.

In the end they have to die. Antony requests his servant Eros to kill him but Eros turns the sword upon himself: this led to a gasp across the auditorim in the NT production. Then Antony botches the job of suicide, lingering until he is taken to Cleopatra and hoisted to the top of the monument where she is hiding. There she is taken alive, being tricked by the one man that Antony told her she could trust, and she has to smuggle in a snake in a basket of figs so that she too can kill herself. All a bit Romeo and Juliet in the end.

Selected quotes:

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies;”

“Give me some music; music, moody food
Of us that trade in love.”

“The breaking of so great a thing should make
A greater crack: the round world
Should have shook lions into civil streets,
And citizens to their dens: the death of Antony
Is not a single doom; in the name lay
A moiety of the world.”

“Sir, I will eat no meat, I'll not drink, sir;
If idle talk will once be necessary,
I'll not sleep neither: this mortal house I'll ruin,
Do Caesar what he can. Know, sir, that I
Will not wait pinion'd at your master's court;
Nor once be chastised with the sober eye
Of dull Octavia. Shall they hoist me up
And show me to the shouting varletry
Of censuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt
Be gentle grave unto me! rather on Nilus' mud
Lay me stark naked, and let the water-flies
Blow me into abhorring! rather make
My country's high pyramides my gibbet,
And hang me up in chains!”

January 2018

Other plays by Shakespeare that are 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 Hate U Give" by Angie Thomas

American black teenager Starr lives in the inner city where drive-by shootings, gang warfare and drug-dealing is rife but goes to a posh school in the suburbs. She is the only witness when her oldest friend Khalil is shot by the police. Should she speak up when raising one's head above the parapet might put her and her family in danger?

The structure of this book is unusual. There are many classic elements. For example, Starr's relationship with her rich white boyfriend is disrupted by the polarisation of her community into black and white. Normally classic plot points such as this are not resolved, one way or the other, until the very end of the book. But in this story there are a number of resolutions by the end of part one which is about two-thirds of the way through the book. This does introduce a degree of tension as one realises that this story is straying from convention and that therefore what might happen in the remaining third of the book might surprise.

The book is also enlivened by the entangled relationships between the members of the black community. Starr's father went to jail for the local drug baron with whose wife he had previously had a child, Starr's half-brother Seven. Starr's father is now a reformed character, a Christian and local store owner whilst still being a militant Black Panther, and there is tension between him and his son's stepfather. Starr's mother's brother, who acted as surrogate father for Starr whilst her real father was in jail, is a cop. This enables the author to extract maximum conflict from relatively few characters.

There are a couple of moments when it gets a bit preachy. Daddy puts Starr through a catechism in Chapter 10 to investigate the reasons for drug dealing in black neighbourhoods. Hailey seems to be a character developed so that the author can develop arguments about racism. But if Victor Hugo can spend page after page of Les Miserables lecturing about the Battle of Waterloo, or the iniquity of monasticism, I guess any author is entitled to disrupt their story with a page or two of preaching.

But the real beauty of this book is the freshness of the prose:

• “There are just some places where it's not enough to be me. Either version of me.” (C 1)
• “Guys in their freshest kicks and sagging pants grind so close to girls they just about need condoms.” (C 1)
• “Spring in Garden Heights doesn't always bring love, but it promises babies in the winter.” (C 1)
• “He always has ]the party] on the Friday of spring break because you need Saturday to recover and Sunday to repent.” (C 1)
• “She's the perfect height for modelling ... but a little thicker than those toothpicks on the runway.” (C 1)
• “Hoedom is universal.” (C 1)
• “that's more difficult than buying retro Jordans on release day.” (C 1)
• “He wipes his nose like he always does before a lie.” (C 1)
• “He couldn't carry a tune if it came in a box.” (C 3)
• “How could he sell the very stuff that took his momma from him? Did he realise that he was taking someone somebody else's momma from them?” (C 4)
• “Did he realise that if he does become a hashtag, some people will only see him as a drug dealer?” (C 4)
• “Khalil matters to us, not the stuff he did. Forget everybody else.” (C 4)
• “Good-byes hurt the most when the other person’s already gone.” (C 4)
• “I left his house pissed and horny, the absolute worst way to leave.” (C 5)
• “Sometimes you can do everything right and things will still go wrong. They key is to never stop doing right.” (C 9)
• “If babies can count as humans when they’re little, veggies can count as veggies when they’re little.” (C 12)
• “Brave peoples’ legs don’t shake. Brave people don’t feel like puking. Brave people sure don’t have to remind themselves how to breathe ... If bravery is a medical condition, everybody’s misdiagnosed me.” (C 16)
• "I didn't know a dead person could be charged in his own murder" (C 16)

A very enjoyable read.

"Milk" by Mark Kurlansky

Another food-themed book following Kurlansky's phenomenal Salt and Cod. As with Cod, I found the endless recipes rather tedious; the interest in the book lies with the fascinating stories that he tells.

Our drinking of milk is abnormal:

• “Lactose intolerance is the natural condition of all mammals. Humans are the only mammals that consume milk past weaning, apparently in defiance of a basic rule of nature. ... As most babies get older, a gene cuts off the production of lactase and they can no longer consume milk. But something went wrong with Europeans - as well as Middle Easterners, North Africans, and people from the Indian subcontinent. They lack the gene and so continue to produce lactase and consume milk into adulthood.” (C 1)

Kurlansky moves from here to consider the history of milk:

• “The Sumerian culture ... was among the first to milk domesticated animals.” (C 1)
• “ Archaeological finds suggest that humans have been herding animals for ten thousand years, and they must have been living close to them for at least that long because animal pathogens started mutating into animal human diseases such as smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis ten thousand years ago. Was it then that milking started?” (C 1)
• “Records dating back to the beginnings of civilizations reveal that even back then there were many formulas and medicines for ‘failed’ mothers.” (C 2)

He then considers milk products such as yoghurt, butter and cheese

• In Persian “there is an expression for mind your own business ... that translates into go beat your own yoghurt.”(C 2)
• “The solid cheese that remains after the whey is removed can then be preserved through brining to produce a cheese like the Greek feta, which is one of the oldest cheeses in the world.” (C 3)
• “More sophisticated variations of cheese were developed in Europe, where damp, cool cellars were available for aging.” (C 3)
• “Like the Greeks, the Romans made rennet from figs. They also made it from artichokes.” (C 3)
• “French butter makes better pastry the American butter because it contains more fat and less water.”  (C 4)
• “When the Romans first came to the Dutch lands in 57 BCE, according to Julius Caesar, they found a cheese-eating people.” (C 7)
• “Roquefort-sur-Soulzon has fewer than two hundred inhabitants ... only cheese that matures in the natural caves under the village ... can be called Roquefort. ... the circulation of air and the humidity trapped in the rocks creates a unique mold-growing environment.” (C 18)

He particularly considers milk and milk products in India where cows have been sacred for millennia and China which has very little dairy tradition.

• “Krishna is said to have originally been a cowherd. He also goes by the names Govinda and Gopala which literally mean ‘friend and protector of cows’.”(C 17)

Finally he considers aspects of the modern debates over milk: hormones, GMO and organic:

• “GMO grains, less expensive than non-GMO grains as well as insect-resistant, have literally saved the struggling family farm.” (C 20)
• Organic dairy farms must “refuse antibiotics to a cow with an infection” (C 20)
• “You could not feed the world organically.” (C 20)

Other fascinating facts

• “Christians in the Middle Ages thought that milk was blood that had turned white when it travelled to the breast, which is why milk was banned on meatless holy days.” (C 1)
• ”Young whales have to build a layer of fat quickly in order to survive, and so whale milk is 34.8 per cent fat, as opposed to human milk, which is only 4.5 per cent fat.” (C 1)
• “Before sugar cane and beet sugar became ubiquitous, honey was the number one sweet available. Milk was a close second, though, which is why the two are often grouped together. ... In the Old Testament, there are twenty references to milk and honey.” (C 1)
• “The last aurochs died in a seventeenth-century Poland.” (C 1)
• "the left breast ... was thought to contain the best milk because it was closest to the heart.” (C 2)
• “Many animals, especially cats, are great yoghurt lovers.”
• “Animals lactate in the spring and summer, the worst possible time in the hot climate of the Middle East.” (C 2)
• In early Christian communions, “the sip that represented the blood of Christ was often taken from a goblet of milk.”
• “The Turks also had iced fruit beverages, which they called sorbet. Persians called it sharbate” (C 9)
• “At the end of the eighteenth century, a Dublin hospital had a 99.6 percent infant mortality rate.” (C 10)
• “In the sixteenth century ... the Dutch, through the use of carotene, developed the first orange carrot. Previously, carrots were either pale yellow or purple.” (C 17)
• “The word ‘punch’ is derived from the Sanskrit for ‘five’, so called because it had five ingredients.” (C 17)
• “Desi is a Sanskrit word that denotes native to the subcontinent.” (C 17)
• “Italy does not have indigenous buffalo - they were brought in Roman times, probably as draft animals.” (C 17)
• “Cows are the leading source of hamburger meat in America.” (C 19)
• “The milking parlor of choice is a rotary milker ... In most milking parlors, cows grow restless, stamp their feet, and defecate, but this is not so on their rotating trip, which they thoroughly enjoy. When they get back to the starting point and have to step off, they clearly show their disappointment at leaving.” (C 19)
• “A dairy cow burps and farts between 300 and 400 pounds of methane gas every day. And that figure does not include the roughly equal amount that emanates from her manure.” (C 19)

As with his other books, Milk is interesting in its own right, but the little sidefacts make it fascinating.

January 2019. Thank you Lucy for buying me this book for Christmas.

"Richard II" by William Shakespeare

Henry Bolingbroke accuses Norfolk of treason; the two men decide to joust it out but just before they do King Richard II exiles them both. Then, when Bolingbroke's dad John of Gaunt Duke of Lancaster dies, Richard disinherits the exiled Bolingbroke to raise revenue for his Irish war. This causes Bolingbroke to invade while Richard is fighting in Ireland. Returning, Richard finds himself without armies and has to abdicate in favour of Henry.

The beauty of the play is in the way it depicts Richard's torn and troubled mind as he is forced to give up being a King.

The plot (spoiler alert)

The play opens with a dispute between Bolingbroke (son of John of Gaunt, who is the richest man in the land and the king's elderly uncle) and Thomas Mowbray. Bolingbroke accuses Mowbray of being responsible for the murder of the Duke of Gloucester (another uncle of the King) who was in Mowbray's custody when killed. (There is an unstated suspicion that King Richard has sent the murderers and Mowbray connived at this, but no-one dare state this aloud.) Because Bolingbroke and Mowbray cannot resolve their dispute, Richard orders them to fight it out, but at the last moment calls off the joust and exiles them both: Mowbray for life (rather unjustly, but then he is a potential blackmail source the king wants silencing) and Bolingbroke for ten, no, on second thoughts, six years. 

While Bolingbroke is abroad his dad, John of Gaunt, dies and Richard confiscates his possessions to pay for the war in Ireland, to which Richard then goes. This is a direct challenge to the principle of inheritance, so Bolingbroke illegally returns from exile, claiming to be doing so to defend his rights. But in the ensuing civil war, which Bolingbroke wins, Richard is captured and persuaded/ forced to abdicate in favour of Bolingbroke who becomes King Henry IV.

The themes that the play explores are:

• Rights of inheritance (Richard denies Bolingbroke his inheritance which results in Bolingbroke denying Richard his)
• Divine Right of Kings against the need for a ruler to rule justly and according to the accustomed law
• The Wheel of Fortune (Richard falls, Bolingbroke rises)

Historical context of the play

Famously, this play was commissioned to be performed by followers of the Earl of Essex shortly before Essex staged a 'rebellion' against Elizabeth I. 

Sources for the play

Shakespeare used, as he often did, The Chronicles of England (1587) by Holinshed as his principal source. Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II (1590?), which also dealt with the forced abdication of a weak king who was later murdered, is another likely source. 

The style of the poetry
In the first Act the lines show a significant lack of enjambments and caesurae. There are also more rhyming couplets than usual. So, for example, in Act 1, Scene 1, when Henry Bolingbroke accuses Thomas Mowbray of treachery he says:
Thou art a traitor and a miscreant
Too good to be so and too bad to live,
Since the more fair and crystal is the sky,
The uglier seem the clouds that in it fly.
Once more, the more to aggravate the note,
With a foul traitor's name stuff I thy throat;
And wish, so please my sovereign, ere I move,
What my tongue speaks my right drawn sword may prove.

Every line end-punctuated, almost no punctuation within the lines, and the last six lines paired with rhyme, even muddling up the 'natural' order of the words in order to achieve the rhyme. All of the lines are strong endings too and most are pretty standard iambic pentameters although this is altered a little with, for example, weightier and 'with a foul'.

John of Gaunt's patriotic speech at the start of Act Two is similar:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, 

Almost every line in here stands separate, its own little strong ended iambic pentameter (with the noticeable exception of the'Nature for herself Against infection)

Contrast this to Richard's speeches while he is losing his crown and, perhaps, his sanity:

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd:

Several caesura. But the only enjambement is the line that runs on with an 'And' and that is a very weak run on.

And in this example the caesurae are used to provide a call and response style but again there is only a single enjambment:
What must the king do now? must he submit?
The king shall do it: must he be deposed
The king shall be contented: must he lose
The name of king? o' God's name, let it go: 

But even as he resigns the throne the tyranny of the single line continues:
Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be;
Therefore no no, for I resign to thee.
Now mark me, how I will undo myself;
I give this heavy weight from off my head
And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand,
The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;
With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With mine own hands I give away my crown,
With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,
With mine own breath release all duty's rites:
All pomp and majesty I do forswear;

My manors, rents, revenues I forego;
My acts, decrees, and statutes I deny:
God pardon all oaths that are broke to me! 

It seems to me that as Shakespeare learned his craft, in later plays, there are many more enjambements. For example:

“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

Enjambements here in at least lines 2-3, 6-7. 7-8, 8 -9, 11-12, 13-14, 18-19, 20-21, 24-25, 26-27; nearly half the lines!

Edward II by Kit Marlowe as a source:

My fundamental assumption is that Shakespeare was a genius, but not a lone genius. He thrived in the competitive world of Elizabethan drama and one of his characteristics was to adapt (and substantially improve) the works of others. For example, there is evidence for a play about King Lear (King Leir, perhaps written by Thomas Kyd and performed in 1594) before Shakespeare’s and for an ur-Hamlet (also perhaps by Thomas Kyd and written somewhere around 1587). When contemporary playwright Robert Greene attacked Shakespeare in 1592 he referred to this ‘upstart crow’ as a Johannes factotum (Jack of all trades) which at the time probably meant that he adapted the works of others. And Richard II is relatively early in Shakespeare’s career, when he is known principally for comedies and the Henry VI series, and Christopher Marlowe was an established and respected playwright of the time.

Both Shakespeare and Marlowe came from similar backgrounds (son of a glover, son of a shoemaker) but Marlowe went to university. Shakespeare may well have envied him and even, in the early days, modelled himself on Marlowe. Christopher Marlowe was a trail-blazer in the Elizabethan theatre. His Tamburlaine (c1587 - 1588) is thought to be the first Elizabethan play to be written in blank verse. He may have collaborated with Shakespeare on the Henry VI trilogy. He was certainly an established and, with Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus, an acclaimed and popular playwright while Shakespeare was still learning his craft. Shakespeare seems to have admired him and probably referred to Marlowe (after Marlowe’s death) as “Dead Shepherd [this might refer to Marlowe’s poem, the Passionate Shepherd], now I find thy saw of might, 'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?'” in As You Like It (3.5.80-81); this is a quote from Marlowe’s unfinished poem ‘Hero and Leander’ (1593).

Just as the deposition of Richard II was preceded by the deposition of his great-grandfather Edward II, so Shakespeare’s play Richard II was preceded by Edward II by Christopher Marlowe. Edward II was performed (possibly for the first time) in 1592 at the Theatre by the Earl of Pembroke’s Men starring Richard Burbage (Shakespeare’s leading man; Shakespeare may also have been part of this company; in 1593 a financially disastrous tour by the company included both Edward II and Shakespeare’s Henry VI part 3.) The first quarto edition of Edward II was issued in 1594. Therefore Edward II was a play with which Shakespeare could have been intimately familiar when he penned Richard II in 1595. 

When considering writing his next play, Shakespeare may have been persuaded by the historical parallels between Edward II and Richard II which would enable him to write a play similar to Edward II (with a similar hope of box office success) while writing something original. These historical parallels include:

• The king is extravagant, loses wars, and has favourites (in each case three: Gaveston and the elder and younger Spencers; Bushy, Bagot and Green)

• The leader of the rebellion has, at the start, a legitimate grievance. He returns from abroad and defeats the king’s forces. 

• The king is dethroned, imprisoned and murdered.

There are differences, the principal being: 

• Marlowe’s subtext (though to be quite honest, Marlowe is so blatant it can hardly be described as a subtext) accusing Edward II of homosexuality which is only hinted at in Richard II when in 3.1.12 - 13 Bolingbroke says that Bushy and Green have “Made a divorce between his queen and him, Broke the possession of a royal bed”; “Since no historical warrant for such a claim exists, Shakespeare almost certainly borrowed the idea from Marlowe’s play” (Arden 2002, 163)

• In Edward II the queen is one who attacks the king; in Richard II she supports the king

• In Edward II there is regime change without dynastic change which doesn’t happen in Richard II (although it sort of does; Bolingbroke is the next in line given that Richard II has no children)

• The fact that at the end of Edward II the usurper is held to account, and executed; while in Richard II the usurper becomes king.

An obvious difference is that Shakespeare’s play is much better focused than Marlowe’s. Marlowe writes about the whole of Edward II’s reign (so we start with the rise and fall of Gaveston and, after G’s death, we get the new favourites, the Spencers. Shakespeare only deals with the last two years of Richard II’s reign. This greater focus results in less confusion, greater clarity and more intensity: Shakespeare may have repeatedly used material from other playwrights but he was brilliant at improving them.

Not only that, but there are also similarities in the script which suggest Shakespeare borrowed lines from Marlowe. In the Elizabethan drama there was very limited copyright (which, it has been suggested, is one reason why the drama was so vibrant, by analogy with the modern fashion industry where ‘borrowing’ is rife forcing designers to produce new designs at least yearly). Here are some ‘echoes’:

• In both plays, the King desires the death of an enemy (coincidentally, the Duke of Lancaster);
• Both plays like "wanton" (or "lascivious") music and Italian fashions;
• The principal complaints of the Lords seems to be that 'base' men have risen through royal preferment;
• Both kings sit upon the ground at a key moment of the play, symbolising they are no long 'highnesses';
• The Phaeton myth (the son of the god of the sun who drove his dad';s chariot and, through his incompetence, wrecked the earth, having to be cast down by Jupiter) is used in both plays.

Other quotes:

• "Landlord of England art thou now, not king:"
• "The commons hath he pill'd with grievous taxes, 
• And quite lost their hearts"
• "But time will not permit: all is uneven, 
• And every thing is left at six and seven."
• "I'll give my jewels for a set of beads,
  
• My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,
• My gay apparel for an almsman's gown,
• My figured goblets for a dish of wood,
• My sceptre for a palmer's walking staff,
• My subjects for a pair of carved saints
• And my large kingdom for a little grave,
• A little little grave, an obscure grave"
• "Give me the glass, and therein will I read.
  
• No deeper wrinkles yet? hath sorrow struck
• So many blows upon this face of mine"
• "I have been studying how I may compare
  
• This prison where I live unto the world:
• And for because the world is populous
• And here is not a creature but myself,
• I cannot do it"
• In rage deaf as the sea, hasty as fire.
• “High-stomach'd are they both, and full of ire,
  
• In rage deaf as the sea, hasty as fire.” (1.1)
• The uglier seem the clouds that in it fly.
• “Since the more fair and crystal is the sky,
  
• The uglier seem the clouds that in it fly.” (1.1)
• “My oil-dried lamp and time-bewasted light
  
• Shall be extinct with age and endless night;
• My inch of taper will be burnt and done,” (1.3)
• “There is no virtue like necessity.” (1.3)
• “For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite
  
• The man that mocks at it and sets it light.” (1.3)
• “O, who can hold a fire in his hand
  
• By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
• Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
• By bare imagination of a feast?
• Or wallow naked in December snow
• By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?” (1.3)
• “Lascivious metres, to whose venom sound
  
• The open ear of youth doth always listen;” (2.1)
• “Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short;” (2.1)
• “Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;” (3.2)
• “For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
  
• And tell sad stories of the death of kings;” (3.2)
• “Thus play I in one person many people,
  
• And none contented” (5.5)
• “how sour sweet music is,
  
• When time is broke and no proportion kept!” (5.5)
• “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;” (5.5)

January 2019

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

"Friends, Lovers, Chocolate" by Alexander McCall Smith

This is the second book in the series starting with, and named after, The Sunday Philosophy Club starring philosopher and amateur sleuth Isabel Dalhousie. Like the 44 Scotland Street books, Dalhousie lives in Edinburgh which is depicted as a genteel village, everyone being middle class and educated and knowing one another. Not exactly Train-Spotting or Rebus!

In this book Dalhousie muses on life while meandering through it. She rather fancies her niece's ex-boyfriend who, unfortunately, still has the hots for the niece. There is the possibility of a dalliance with a handsome Italian. And she tries to solve the mystery of whether the memory of a heart transplant patient might be a 'cellular memory' of the killer of the heart donor.

It is remarkable how McCall Smith can weave a page-turning tale from such gentle observation of not-very-exciting gentlefolks. But he can.

There are one or two acute observations and there are lots of philosophical insights:

• "the stone was flaking slightly, and a patch had fallen off here and there, like a ripened scab, exposing fresh skin below." (C 1)
• "we must be judgemental ... when there is something to be judged." (C 1)
• "The bundle of urges and wants that went with being a physical being ... were at the bottom of most disputes between people." (C 3)
• "We were all as bad as one another, but at some point we had to overlook that fact, or at least not make too much of it. History ... could so quickly become a matter of mutual accusation and recrimination." (C 5)
• "Weather was a test of attitude ... Nice people ... were nice about the weather; nasty people were nasty about it." (C 8)
• "She could think of nothing worse that sitting for hours under an umbrella, an open invitation to sandflies, looking out to sea." (C 8)
• "Narcissism was no longer considered a vice. That was what the whole cult of celebrity was about ... we feted these people and fed their vanity." (C 9)
• "If we lived in a global village, then the boundaries of our responsibility were greatly extended. The people dying of poverty, the sick, the dispossessed, were our neighbours even if they were far away." (C 9)
• "Should one let people express their gratitude properly, even if one is embarrassed or reluctant to do so? There is an art in accepting a present, and indeed there is sometimes an obligation to let others give." (C 9)
• "She did not approve of promiscuity, which she thought made a mockery of our duty to cherish and respect others; an emotional fast food, really, which one would not wish on anybody. But at the same time one should not starve oneself." (C 11)
• "To be loved by the unlovable was not something that most people could cope with." (C 13)
• "'It's a Sisyphean labour for me. I push a rock up a hill and then it rolls down again'. 'Everyone's job is like that ... I wash things and they become dirty and need washing again'." (C 16)
• "Equality was dull, and goodness was dull too ... Peace was dull; conflict and violence were exciting."(C 16)
• "If one followed the well-ordered life one would start each day with the writing of one's letters of apology." (C 21)
•  "Sometimes the trips not taken are better than those one actually takes." (C 21)
• "Resolution. Musicians know all about that, don't they. Pieces of music seek resolution, have to end on a particular note, or it sounds all wrong. The same applies to our lives." (C 23)

AMS has also written:

• 44 Scotland Street
• Espresso Tales
• The World According to Bertie

January 2019