"Around the World in Eighty Days" by Jules Verne

 I was inspired to re-read this after watching the first episode of the recent BBC adaptation which utterly changed the story. 

When I first read this book, as a kid, I loved it. Fundamentally, it is a race against time. Phileas Fogg, an English gentleman of fixed habits who is almost catatonic in his reserve, bets that he can travel around the world in eighty days and sets off with his newly hired manservant Passepartout, whose role in the novel is to provide comedy and to do stupid things which will cause delays. On the journey Mr Fogg acquires a tail, a detective called Fix (never Mr Fix!) who believes Mr Fogg is a bank-robber and follows him in the hope that he will land in an English territory where an arrest warrant might be served. During the journey, the travellers rescue a lady from the clutches of murderous savages who becomes the love interest. But the excitement is provided mainly when missed connections require the improvisation of unorthodox means of travel. 

There is also quite a lot of 'travel writing', describing the scenery and customs of foreign lands. For example:

• "Mocha, surrounded by its ruined walls whereon date-trees were growing, was sighted, and on the mountains beyond were espied vast coffee-fields. Passepartout was ravished to behold this celebrated place, and thought that, with its circular walls and dismantled fort, it looked like an immense coffee-cup and saucer." (Ch 9)

The fundamental problem to a modern reader (or a BBC scriptwriter) is that the book was written at the height of the British Empire and the indigenous peoples visited are invariably described in blatantly racist terms:

• "They first passed through the “black town,” with its narrow streets, its miserable, dirty huts, and squalid population; then through the “European town,” which presented a relief in its bright brick mansions, shaded by coconut-trees and bristling with masts, where, although it was early morning, elegantly dressed horsemen and handsome equipages were passing back and forth." (Ch 15)
• "the Indians were in the act of plunging themselves into the drunkenness caused by liquid opium mingled with hemp" (Ch 13) Later Passepartout visits an opium den.

 In addition, the only female character is essentially passive. 

When you add the fact that a large part of the excitement requires that the reader/ viewer realises that in Victorian days steamships and locomotives were cutting edge travel, it makes me wonder why they bothered to adapt this book; why not simply take the premise of a race around the world and write your own tale?

But the first episode added a shoot-out in which Passepartout's brother was trying to assassinate the French president. I suppose the BBC believe that the average viewer is unable to be gripped by the fundamentally simple tensions set up by Jules Verne. They must think that we have degenerated to now be in need of such dumbed-down entertainment.

Selected quotes:

• "Passports are only good for annoying honest folks, and aiding in the flight of rogues." (Ch 7)
• "the days were shorter by four minutes for each degree gone over, Passepartout obstinately refused to alter his watch, which he kept at London time. It was an innocent delusion which could harm no one." (Ch 11) Brilliant foreshadowing; of course the 'inaccuracy' of Passepartout's watch is the key to the twist at the end.

Unusually for Jules Verne, this isn't scifi. It was a classic in its time and it is still a good read but it reveals racist and sexist attitudes that were typical of its time but make uncomfortable reading today.

December 2021

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

"At Night All Blood Is Black" by David Diop

 A Senegalese soldier fighting for the French in the trenches of World War One witnesses the death of his best friend, his "more-than-brother". His terrible revenge tips him over the edge into a madness so extreme that it stands out even in the organised madness of the trenches.

Written in the first person and immersed in the protagonist's perspective, this beautifully written short novel makes use of repeated phrases (such as "more-than-brother", "la terre a personne, 'no-man's-land', as the captain says", and "God's truth") which make the simple narrative into a sort of epic poem.

It is structured with short chapters. There is a major turning point half-way through the novel so that this novel, despite seeming to ramble, is carefully structured.

The author's surname is Diop, which is also the name of the murdered friend, which resonates with the clever (and significant) twist at the end.

Selected quotes:

• "My stench is the stench of death. Death has the stench of the inside of the body turned outside its sacred vessel. In the open air, the inside of the body of any human being or animal becomes corrupted. From the richest man to the poorest, from the most beautiful woman to the ugliest, from the most feral animal to the most harmless, from the most powerful to the weakest." (Ch 3)
• "The rumour spread. It spread, and as it spread it shed its clothes and, eventually, its shame. Well dressed at the beginning, well appointed at the beginning, well outfitted, well medaled, the brazen rumour ended up with her legs spread, her ass in the air." (Ch 6)
• "I had left the door of my mind open to the thoughts of others, which I mistook for my own." (Ch 8)
• "Here, there isn't any real sun. There's only a cold sun that doesn't dry anything. Mud remains mud. Blood never dries." (Ch 10)
• "That's war: it's when God lags behind the music of men, when he can't untangle the threads of so many fates at the same time." (Ch 12)
• "In war, when you have a problem with one of your soldiers, you get the enemy to kill him. It's more practical." (Ch 13)
• "You have to promise me that when you get back you'll stop mutilating the enemy, understood? You will content yourself with killing them, not mutilating them. The civilities of war forbid it." (Ch 13)
• "The captain is a devourer of souls. He showers war with presents, he spoils her with countless soldiers' lives. The captain is a devourer of souls." (Ch 13)
• "Mademoiselle Francois returned my smile right away and her gaze lingered on the middle of my body." (Ch 15)
• "Until a man is dead, he is not yet done being created." (Ch 16)
• "He was as old as the immutable landscape, she was young like the changing sky." (Ch 16)
• "God's truth, my body had experienced all sorts of great joys before Fary. I had felt its power in back-to-back wrestling matches. I had pushed it to the edges of its resistance in long races on the beach after swimming across the river. I had sprayed it with seawater beneath a sun as hot as hell, I had quenched it with cold water drawn from the deep wells of Gandiol after swinging a daba in my father's and Sire Diop's fields for hours and hours. God's truth, my body had known the pleasures of reaching the limits of its power, but never had anything been as powerful as Fary's warm, soft, and moist interior." (Ch 18)
• "My father is a soldier of everyday life who only lived to protect his wives and his children from hunger." (Ch 19)
• "If the hidden story hides too well beneath the well-known story, it stays invisible. The hidden story has to be there without being there, it has to let itself be guessed at, the way a tight saffron-yellow dress lets the beautiful figure of a young girl be guessed at." (Ch 25)

A worthy winner of the 2021 International Booker Prize.

December 2021; 145 pages

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

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

Other winners of the International Booker Prize can be found here. 

Other books about the First World War reviewed in this blog include

• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
• The Ice-Cream War by William Boyd
• Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah

"Metazoa" by Peter Godfrey-Smith

 Subtitled "Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness" this book, by the author of the brilliant Other Minds, asserts that consciousness is a characteristic of most animal thinking. 

His evidence is his extensive and detailed studies of marine life from sponges and corals to shrimps, fishes and octopuses. All living things, he suggests, sense and use what they sense to modify their actions: “Sensing has its raison d’etre in the control of action.” (Ch 3). Thus bacteria can move towards preferred chemicals, plants sense gravity and grow their roots downwards, animals detect food and move towards it etc. 

Most multicellular animals, he tells us can “modulate the interpretation of sensory information by the animal’s registration of what it is presently doing. ... If an animal does do this, it is now sensing the world in a way that tracks the divide between self and other.” (Ch 4) This is also the prime thesis of Andy Clark’s Surfing Uncertainty; that our consciousness is created by a repeated ‘error correction’ between what we expect to happen and what we sense happening; that dreams are experienced as unreal because they are only our uncorrected expectations.

This has led to the concept of self: “Subjectivity involves feelings and seemings; agency is doing and initiating. All living things (or all living things composed of cells) exhibit something like subjectivity and agency, but these features take a different form in the animal case.” (Ch 5)

It can also be very funny, for example in this description of an octopus fight: “Females quite often throw at males who are pestering them. On one occasion, a video shows a female octopus throwing debris repeatedly at one particular male over a period of a few hours. About half of these throws hit him, and others missed only because the male ducked or was belowdecks. Toward the end, the male who had been on the receiving end seemed to be getting used to these assaults; he began to duck quite early as the thrower began loading up, and the final broadsides went (mostly) over his head.” (Ch 6)

Selected quotes

• “A puzzle in front of us seems to resist the usual methods. What we should do in response is build knowledge around it, expecting that as we do this, the puzzle will transform and disappear.” (Ch 1) 
• “A human gut holds our food. In addition, our guts contain countless living bacteria, from which we benefit as long as things stay in balance. This kind of collaboration is extremely common in animals.” (Ch 2) This understanding of an individual human as some sort of ecosystem put me in mind of Turtles All the Way Down by John Green in which the heroine reflects, in chapter one: "Humans are approximately 50 per cent microbial, meaning that about half of the cells that make you up are not you at all. ... If half the cells inside of you are not you, doesn't that challenge the whole notion of me as a singular pronoun, let alone as the author of my fate."
• “This is the arthropod way of evolving: when in doubt, add some legs.” (Ch 4)
• “As evolution proceeded, animals became a new kind of intersection point, or nexus, in the world’s networks of causal pathways. When an animal picks up information of various kinds through the sense, it becomes a point at which lines converge. When it is an initiator of action, it becomes a point from which casual lines diverge.” (Ch 5)
• “An ongoing feature of philosophy is its generation of wildly exaggerated theories. ... This is a pathology of the field.” (Ch 5)
• “A lot of octopus conflict looks like ... a giant pillow fight, between pillows.” (Ch 6)

A thought-provoking book. It is sometimes a little heavy-going but some of the descriptions of marine fauna are wonderful.

December 2021; 281 pages

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

"The Midnight Library" by Matt Haig

 In despair, after a life filled with failure and regrets, Nora Seed decides to kill herself. But she finds herself in the Midnight Library, whose shelves are filled with all the books of all the possible lives she could have lived had she made different decisions. Taking down some of those books, she starts to explore her alternative futures. Will she discover happiness before her time runs out?

Written in a very straightforward style, this book reminded me of The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho or The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom and I suspect that if you like these books you will love The Midnight Library. In many ways it is more philosophy than novel, a fable, and mostly I don't like that sort of book, preferring the message of a story to be buried deeply within the story, but this one is much less preachy than most.

It is almost picaresque in its episodic plot and one of the difficulties of this sort of book is that most of the characters are briefly glimpsed and it is therefore difficult to develop them. In this book, even the main character shows little development in her core character, the development being fundamentally to do with her attitude to and philosophy of life. 

The fundamental simplicity makes it read like a children's book but aspects of the content suggest that it is very much aimed at adults: perhaps its core market is young adults and adolescents.

It is beautifully written with clear and elegant prose. There is a clear structure and the moments when Nora experiences epiphanies and revelations occur are almost perfectly at the 25%, 50%, and 75% marks, so it conforms to the archetypal four-part structure.

An unexpected pleasure when I started this book was that it name checks Bedford, the English town in which I lived and worked for over thirty years. It starts in a real school in the town and names actual places (as well as fictional ones). But in many ways it is hugely unfair to Bedford, described at one point as a  "conveyor belt of despair" (p 12). It ignores almost entirely the huge multi-ethnic population which gives the town a special and vibrant character; although Nora's heritage includes Italian and Irish, both key constituencies in the town, and one minor character has a South Asian name, the huge Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indian populations are more or less ignored, not to mention the substantial Afro-Caribbean, black African and Eastern European communities. One of the other distinctive features of Bedford is that almost half of the places for secondary pupils are in private schools. These features make Bedford much more complex an environment than the rather monochrome backdrop of this book. Perhaps Nora should have explored all her different lives within the town.

Selected quotes:

• "'Cheer up, love, it might never happen,' someone said. Nothing ever did, she thought to herself. That was the whole problem." (p 18)
• "It was a familiar feeling. The feeling of being incomplete in just about every sense. An unfinished jigsaw of a person. Incomplete living and incomplete dying." (p 29)
• "She wondered if her parents had ever been in love or if they had got married because marriage was something you did at the appropriate time with the nearest available person. A game where you grabbed the first person you could find when the music stopped." (p 36)
• "Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing." (p 53)
• "I'm not useful to anyone. I was bad at work. I have disappointed everyone. I am a waste of a carbon footprint, to be honest." (p 62)
• "Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines." (p 84)
• "Are there any other lives at all or is it just the furnishings that change?" (p 114)
• "To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live." (p 134)
• "Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty." (p 137)
• "From as far back as she could remember, she'd had the sense that she wasn't enough." (p 143)
• "Never trust someone who is willingly rude to low-paid service staff." (p 204)
• "Undoing regrets was really a way of making dreams come true." (p 211)
• "Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you." (p 215)
• "It was safe to surmise the little-known realities of the multiverse probably weren't yet incorporated within the care plans of the National Health Service." (p 275)
• "There may be a bass drum of despair but there were other instruments at her disposal too. And they could play at the same time." (p 285)

A feel-good 'uplit' book which won the 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction

December 2021; 288 pages

Also by Matt Haig, reviewed in this blog:

• The Humans

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

"The Martian" by Andy Weir

 During a terrible storm, astronaut Mark Watney is apparently killed and abandoned by his crewmates as they scramble to escape from Mars. When he recovers consciousness, he discovers he is all alone in a wasteland with no way to communicate with the rest of the universe. However, he has the habitat and provisions left behind after the mission was aborted. He has breathable air and drinkable water, shelter, and food for 400 days. 

Much of this novel is told through the logs of the protagonist, a modern day Robinson Crusoe. After the first quarter, some of the story is told in the third person, describing events back on Earth. The present tense prevents the reader from knowing whether the narrator survives, allowing the tension to continue untilo almost the very last page. 

Refreshingly, there is no villain. The antagonist is the planet itself, as Watney struggles to survive. The excitement is provided by marvelling at his ingenuity as he contrives solutions to the problems he faces; another reminder of Robinson Crusoe.

Typically of much American fiction, there is an incredible level of detail. Each challenge and each 'fix' is carefully explained. This adds enormous verisimilitude and the feeling that the author has done meticulous research (but it also got a bit boring, so I skim read some of these bits). The overall impression is that all of this could really happen; it is almost a science fiction documentary. 

It is a very different sort of novel but it really works.

The character of Watney is that of an irrepressible joker; this irreverence provides a necessary lighter contrast the technical details and the terror of the challenge facing him. Possibly, it is the only sort of character that could credibly survive even a few days of isolation and hopelessness.

Selective quotes:

• "If I make any mistakes, there'll be nothing left but the 'Mark Watney Memorial Crater'" (4. Sol 32)
• "If you asked every engineer at NASA what the worst scenario for the Hab was, they'd all answer 'fire'. If you asked them what the outcome would be, they'd answer 'death by fire'." (4. Sol 32)
• "No plan survives first contact with implementation" (5. Sol 40)
• "'Do you believe in God, Venkat'? Mitch asked. 'Sure, lots of 'em', Venkat said. 'I'm Hindu'." (15)
• "I started the day with some nothin' tea. Nothin' tea is easy to make. First, get some hot water, then add nothin'." (24. Sol 501)
• "Every human being has a basic instinct to help each other our. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it's true." (26. Mission Day 687)

Brilliantly written, page-turning stuff.

December 2021, 369 pages

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

"The Tangled Lands" by Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias S Buckell

This isn't a novel but four novellas, two written by Bacigalupi and two by Buckell, loosely linked, set in the city of Khaim and the neighbouring lands.

In Khaim, magic comes with a cost: it makes poisonous bramble grow, one prick from which can send a human into a coma from which hardly anyone recovers. But it is hard to stop using magic when someone you love is very ill and the only cure is a magical one. Everyone has an excuse to use a little bit of magic ... but the cumulative effect of all these little individual actions is the loss of land to the bramble, the loss of cities, the loss of empire. So the rulers of Khaim have decreed that anyone caught casting spells will be executed. 

In the first story an poverty-stricken alchemist finds a way of destroying bramble but the authorities want to use his invention for their own ends. In the second the daughter (and stand-in) of a public executioner loses her sons to raiders from Paikan so she embarks on a quest to find them. In the third a boy and his sister, rich children fallen on hard times, are working as peasants collecting bramble seeds when she is pricked; he can't afford to keep her alive so should he cut her throat? In the fourth a blacksmith's daughter has to make a suit of armour for a corrupt nobleman.

There is a clear allegorical meaning to the novel. Magic, I think, represents science: we all individually have good reasons for wanting scientific progress - it makes us healthier, wealthier, and more comfortable - but our inability to cut down on things like cars have led to global warming which threatens the world. Responses might include a police state and Draconian punishments for polluters (magic has a sulphurous smell) with exceptions for those at the top of society who won't abide by the rules they set for everyone else. "Every spell maker has a reasonable excuse. If we grant individual mercies, we commit collective suicide." (1.6) Alternatively, in Paikan, the response has been religious: the magic-denying 'the Way'. This, with its pilgrimage, and its fanatical jihadists (and even the name of the city, which so resembles Pakistan) seems to be a metaphor for an Islamic solution.

But if the allegories are thinly disguised, and the characters rather too obviously either good or bad, the world-building is brilliant. Bacigalupi provides baroque, gloriously over-the-top, descriptions: "A month later, as the muddy rags of cruel spring snow turned to the sweet stink of warming earth ..." (1.3) And the action never ceases: in each story the protagonist gets themselves into an impossible situation from which they can only extricate themselves with some form of sacrifice.

Selected quotes:

• "They ... starved themselves so that their ribs were like the hulls of half-finished ships." (2.4)
• "Your inability to run your business effectively is not my problem." (4.1)

A fascinating concept provides the backdrop to four very readable stories. 

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

I noted coincidental similarities with my forthcoming novel Don Petro de la Hoz:

• The excecutioness returns to consciousness and travels in a merchant's wagon
• The steep-streeted city
• The Paikans

But DP has no magic and, I hope, more complex characters.

"Beneath the world, a sea" by Chris Beckett

 The Submundo Delta is  surrounded by a Zone of Forgetfulness; no-one can ever remember the things they did in here, giving people the opportunity to be their hidden selves and act out their repressed desires. Ben, a goody-goody policeman, travels through the Zone to the Delta to persuade the humans living in the delta (descendants of Victorian colonists) to stop killing the duendes, a mysterious humanoid life form who are able to telepathically enter into people's thoughts. "While the forest opened her up and made her less wary and more open to emotions in general, duende contact exposed the childish neediness which lay behind so many of them, leaving her with a sense of herself as clumsy and blundering and unformed." (14)

So the book is fundamentally about how people cope when their darkest thoughts become manifest to them.

It is superbly well-written. The world building is convincing; the characters are three dimensional. The reader enters into this forest in which the dangers come from within your own head. The plot dances with madness and the irrationality of the solutions we impose in order to keep ourselves from going mad. It is a brilliant piece of fiction which makes you think about the fundamentals of personality.

The pacing is a perfect match for the four-part plot structure, with major turning points coming at the 25%, 50%, and 75% points.

Selected quotes:

• "Something inside of him was keeping up a constant din of meaningless babble, and bad puns that reduced words to empty sounds, and mocking challenges to every apparently genuine thought or feeling, each one of which was immediately contradicted, peeled away, rendered meaningless." (5)
• "He had met so many people like him in his police work, people who called themselves anarchists, lived in squats or housing cooperatives, claimed benefits, switched promiscuously from one sexual relationship to the next, and thought that just because they'd abdicated all responsibility for anything whatsoever that happened in the world, they were somehow morally superior to those like him who were actually trying to keep the wheels of the world turning." (6)
• "The Greeks had a word for it. Alethia. Unforgetting. Truth isn't something out there, in other words. It's something we already possess but have temporarily forgotten." (6)
• "They were bright, highly educated people ... used to being much sharper and better-informed than anyone they met from outside their circle, and no doubt frequently frustrated, as clever people are, by the stubborn ignorance and resistance to logic of most of the human race." (6)
• "It was apparently necessary to be constantly measuring oneself against others, worrying whether one was good enough or doing one's best, and at the same time ensuring at all times that the standard that one was using to make these judgements was the right one, and not in itself revealingly old-fashioned or low-brow or vulgar." (9)
• "These people tended to come from backgrounds ... where you are rewarded from an early age for retreating from the world into a book" (10)
• "In London or New York, you or I could spend whole days sharing the streets with thousands of people we don't know, so naturally we have a set of rules and principles that allow us to get by as autonomous individuals surrounded by anonymous strangers." (11)
• "To be free of all worry and guilt that came from having a past and a future!" (11)
• "Pheromones. Shiny eyes, Giggly excitement. Ugh! What a desperate business it all was. How repulsive even. Damp mucus membranes. Bags of bones and skin and guts, pressing clumsily together in search of - what? What could one sack of guts, half-filled with shit, hope to find in another, except more guts, more shit?" (11)
• "Of course life could be lonely ... but she should know by now ... that those exciting and ridiculously hopeful feelings were basically a trick played by biology, which saw an opportunity for reproduction looming, and duly turned on a tap to flood your bloodstream with a drug not unrelated to heroin to dampen down your critical faculties and accomplish the formation of a couple. As soon as you reached that longed-for peak, the descent began almost at once ... back to a place where, as before, you were essentially alone again, except that, if you'd not been careful, you were now shackled to another person." (14)
• "The same basic architecture was present in every human and group of humans, so that the differences between individuals and groups were presumably the result of different circumstances and different histories rather than of some people just stubbornly or wilfully being wrong." (14)
• "He would be such hard work, as people always were when they were too contained and bottled up to really know themselves." (14)
• "Things slowly connected together, like isolated spikes sticking up out of a lake that revealed themselves to be the branches of a single enormous tree, when the water was drained away." (18)
• "Jael watched his face intently, like a falcon in a sky watching the movements of small creatures below it with a cold, clear-sighted and entirely self-interested gaze." (18)
• "The merging of himself with the world around him was no longer soothing in the way it had been then because he knew it would soon be beyond his reach." (18)
• "A human being's future self is really another, separate person from who they are now. The only thing that's special about this other, particular person is that they're someone who one day you'll actually have to be. And that's the beginning of responsibility." (19)
• "I'll tell you something about being super-intelligent: it's a drag. I figure things out at once that other people spend a whole happy evening discussing. I know what people are going to say before they open their mouths. I watch people cheerfully mangling logic and have to bite my tongue while others applaud therm and tell them how wise they are." (22)
• "Being smart means you get to look at the fractals at a higher magnification than everyone else." (22)
• "Fuck knows what someone like you does with all the needs an d wants you've had to suppress ... but I suppose they're in there somewhere, shackled in some dark cell, screaming, and rattling the bars, and slowly going mad." (22)
• "What was Ben Ronson anyway? He imagined a kind of web which linked up objects out there in the world with memories and nodes of feeling in long branching chains. At any particular moment almost all of this web was in darkness, and if he had a self at all, it was a kind of spotlight that swept back and forth through these hundreds of millions of branching chains, searching for some kind of meaning, some kind of sense that he was connected to something he wanted." (22)
• "If I survive this ... I will do something new. Why otherwise would I need more life than I've already had?" (25)
• "I'm the Ben that always exists when no one is watching him, not even Ben himself." (28)

Utterly readable. A page-turned. Brilliant.

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

"The Folly on the Hill" by Richard Hayden

 Ellie moves from London to a house in the country at Mow Cop. On the hill near her house is a strange-shaped Folly. As she settles down in a new school, making new friends, she is recruited by the 'Council', a mysterious group of villagers who talk about keys and a lock and the need to protect the world from strange forces.

The pacing of the plot was perfectly in line with the four-part model of narrative with major turning points at the 25%, 50% and 75% marks.

A novel dealing with strange happenings needs to ground itself in normality in order to add verisimilitude. This novel does this by juxtaposing Ellie's everyday life with the weird members of the Council and the subsequent dreams and peculiar weather. A particular strength of this part of the narrative was the way in which Ellie and her family mocked the members of the Council behind their back. One of my favourite lines was "Can we talk about something other than the crazy guy telling me I need to save the world? I have enough trouble with maths homework never mind that as well.” (C 11). The difficulty is that then 'normal' characters have to be able to make the transition from the normal world to the other world; in character terms they have to transition from robust scepticism to open-mouthed gullibility. The weirdness has to be so impressive that the reader has to become sufficiently convinced that they are prepared to suspend their disbelief. I felt this wasn't quite achieved.

The text is written, mostly, in long sentences; this gave a feel of fluency. But sometimes the sentences are fragmented and jumbled up. For example:  "Covered in shadow of the trees but with a clear pale face, it is always hard to tell in photos, but Ellie was sure that the figure was staring at the group." (C 3). Each clause appears to have a separate structure. It is an interesting attempt to mimic consciousness, combining the reality of a muddle of competing thoughts with the appearance of a flowing stream.

Selected quotes

• "The sun always set with a grim finish to the day at this time of year, winter. As if it too could not wait for the longer summer days to arrive." (C 1)
• "She caught a glimpse of the folly on the hill, set against a dark grey sky. The sort of grey that seemed to suck the colour and life out of the world as if it was pure darkness." (C 10)
• "It’s as though the sky opens up above that hill and weather just falls through the gap.” (C 10)
• “'What kind of storm can crack stone?' she asked. Nobody said a word." (C 10)
• "clouds of purple smoke, thick and wispy that moved as she looked at them. The same way steam moves above a freshly brewed cup of tea." (C 11)
• "The air in the room seemed to solidify, as if that moment in time was locked forever." (C 14)
• "Ellie smiled, or at least she thought she did. It was not clear to her if she still had a face at this point." (C 18)

I look forward to reading the sequel.

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

"The Road to Middlemarch" by Rebecca Mead

 Subtitled "My Life with George Eliot" this book is part personal memoir, part literary biography, and part literary analysis of Middlemarch and George Eliot's other works. It is structured so that the chapter headings correspond to the names of the Books in Middlemarch.

I have read Middlemarch and found it heavy going but this book has inspired me to read it again.

It's very readable and shows considerable insight into the book. It does the usual thing of trying to equate characters with people (was the then Rector of Lincoln College Oxford whom  the model for Casaubon whom Eliot knew?: he had married late and unhappily to a much younger wife, his most ambitious book was never completed and he wrote a book about Renaissance scholar Isaac Casaubon) and fictional places with real places (was Middlemarch based on Coventry where Eliot lived for a while?: it had new hospitals and a new railway station at the right time).

It notes one or two inconsistencies (mistakes?) in the text:

• It treats Dorothea's being an orphan with scant regard and is vague about when they died, saying it was when Dorothea and her younger sister were “about twelve years old" though they can’t both have been.
• It points out that “For all Dorothea's purported longing to be learned she doesn't take much effort to educate herself, even though she has access to her uncle's no doubt well-stocked library.” (C 1)

But it is particularly interesting when Mead makes observations pertaining to the craft of the novelist:

• She sees Middlemarch as Eliot’s “ ingenious revision of the marriage plot. What might happen if, if instead of ending with a wedding, a novel were to begin with one.” (C 1)
• “Middlemarch offers what George Eliot calls ... ‘the home epic’ - the momentous, ordinary journey travelled by most of us who have not even thought of aspiring to sainthood.” (C 1)
• Eliot is unwilling "to let one sentence stand for many” (C 2)
• “Eliot’s hold on dialogue is often slack.” (C 2)
• “The explicit intrusion of a narrator’s voice in Eliot's fiction can strike the contemporary ear as old-fashioned.” but Leslie “ Stephen suggests that Eliot's use of the magisterial authorial interjection is one of the things that make her novels suitable for grown up people. ... By directly addressing us, Eliot draws us deeper inside her panorama. ... We are granted a wider perspective, and a greater insight, then is available to their neighbours down in the world of Middlemarch.” (C 2)
• “It is central to Elliot's novelistic intention that the reader understand the unfolding of events from the perspectives of multiple characters.” (C 5)
• “Strange coincidences do occur in real life as well as in novels, but it is in the plot concerning Raffles and Bulstrode that a reader sees most clearly the machinery of the novelist at work.” (C 7)

It was interesting to me at any rate, having lived in Bedford for nearly thirty years, that when Eliot (as Marian Evans) worked as a journalist on the Westminster Review, living over the shop at 142 Strand, London, a colleague and fellow-resident was William Hale White who would go on to become the similarly pseudonymous (but rather less celebrate) novelist Mark Rutherford.

The character of Casaubon is, I presume, named after the scholar Isaac Casaubon who knew James I and is credited with, among other things, dating the esoteric magical writings known as the Corpus Hermeticum, previously thought to date to the time of Moses, to the third or fourth century of the Common Era, as noted by Ross King in his novel Ex-Libris, set at a time roughly contemporary with Casaubon. 

Selected quotes:

• “A book that had once seemed to be all about the hopes and desires of youth now seemed to offer a melancholy dissection of the resignations that attend middle age, the parts untrodden and the choices unmade.” (Prelude)
• “Novels are places in which authors explore their own subjectivity.” (Prelude)
• “When I first left England as a young woman, I didn't consider that there would be a finite, and unknowable, number of times I would return. Eventually, though, each goodbye came to be freighted with the possibility that it might be the last.” (Prelude)
• “Once, when given the assignment of writing an essay about God, she [Eliot] sat down and drew a picture of a large, watchful eye.” (C 1)
• “Visiting the former homes of famous writers tends to be a compromised and often unsatisfying endeavour; by contrast with a painter’s studio, the nature of literary creativity is not easily suggested by the sight of creation.” (C 1)
• “Being absolutely sure that one is right is part of growing up, up.and so is realizing, years later, that's the truth might be more nuanced.” (C 2)
• “Only a child believes a grown-up has stopped growing.” (C 2)
• “the always-present threat of futility that looms over any scholarly endeavour.” (C 5)
• “To ... intellectuals of the early part of the twentieth century, Eliot was part of a bygone era that was the better for being gone.” (C 7)

This is a well-written, easily readable yet authoritative, introduction to the work of George Eliot, especially what is regarded as her masterpiece, Middlemarch

George Eliot wrote the following books, reviewed on this blog:

• The Mill on the Floss

December 2021; 278 pages

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

"The Last Gift" by Abdulrazak Gurnah

An elegiac portrait of a foundation-less family written by the 2021 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

The book opens with Abbas having some sort of seizure and being cared for by his wife, Maryam. As his illness progresses we learn about his early life growing up in Africa and how he comes to be living in Norwich; we learn of Maryam's life, born a foundling, and we also find out about the lives of their now-geown-up children Hanna and Jamal. And we start to discover answers to the two great mysteries: why Abbas left Africa and why Maryam fled from her Vijay and Ferooz.

The book is written in the third-person, head-hopping between the PoV of the four members of the family. There are times when it seems to meander, with long paragraphs, but this is life in all its messiness, not neatly tied up like a novel, and its purpose is to make you understand this family.

But it is structured. The big revelation from Abbas comes almost exactly at the half-way mark.

Selected quotes:

• "The longer he lived, the nearer his childhood drew to him, and it seemed less and less like a distant fantasy of someone else's life." (C 1)
• "That was the thing about growing old together, you shuffled and made space and learned to be comfortable with each other, if you were lucky." (C 1)
• "Is this what parents do, she wondered, study their children as they turn into men and women they learn to grow cautious of?" (C 1)
• "Ba's silences were sometimes dark and his solitariness has a feeling of menace, as if he had gone somewhere where it would not be pleasant to meet him." (C 1)
• "Allah karim, he said is any of their neighbours asked to borrow money for some emergency. God is generous. Ask him for a loan, not me." (C 1)
• "Perhaps it was like that for many people, ducking and weaving through life, wincing as glancing blows landed now and then and putting up a ragged rearguard against a strengthening adversary." (C 1)
• "How their teachers loved that deep submissive silence. But they could not make that silence endure. They could not quite keep the children in check. Something always happened, some small insurrection, irrepressible laughter, an undaunted boy whose cheek could not be suppressed." (C 1)
• "For millions of people, moving is a moment of ruin and failure, a defeat that is no longer avoidable, a desperate flight, going from bad to worse, from home to homelessness, from citizen to refugee, from living a tolerable or even contented life to vile horror." (C 2)
• "Perhaps that was what happened to everyone, and they all learned to swallow what hurt they felt as their children tired of them." (C 2)
• "The paintwork was peeling and its beams and bannisters leaned slightly from age and fatigue. Its dereliction was malign, watchful, accusing." (C 2)
• "There was a library, with hundreds of books he could take home to read if he wished. It was like all his schooling until then had taken place in a small room, a small empty shut-away room. Then someone had opened the door and he found out that the room was a tiny cell in a huge building." (C 2)
• "She thought that in times of trouble Beverley would be a denouncer." (C 3)
• "Who did it belong to, the flat cap? To the working man or to the landed gentry? He had seen pictures of it on both their heads." (C 3)
• "There were people who just knew how to do that, just take what they wanted, or at least take what they could." (C 4)
• "I am still here, like a tiresome guest in my own life." (C 5)
• "Madness is a cataclysm, an act of nature whose meaning is explicable only to itself, because it serves neither human nor divine purpose." (C 5)

A very readable book with moments of wisdom as Gurnah reflects on rootlessness and family life in beautiful and elegant prose.

December 2021; 279 pages

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

Books by Nobel Laureates reviewed in this blog:

Abdulrazak Gumah (2021)

The Last Gift
Gravel Heart 
Afterlives

Kazuo Ishiguro (2017)

Klara and the Sun

The Buried Giant

When We Were Orphans

Patrick Modiano (2014)

In the Cafe of Lost Youth

The Black Notebook

Alice Munro (2013)

The View from Castle Rock

Herta Muller (2009)

The Passport

Doris Lessing (2007)

The Golden Notebook

The Fifth Child

Ben, in the World

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1992)

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Saul Bellow (1976)

The Victim

Heinrich Boll (1972)

The Train was on Time

Samuel Beckett (1969)

The Expelled; The Calmative;, The End & First Love

Waiting for Godot

John Steinbeck (1962)

Of Mice and Men

Cannery Row

Albert Camus (1957)

The Plague

The Outsider

The Myth of Sisyphus

The Fall

William Faulkner (1949)

Sanctuary

As I Lay Dying

Andre Gide (1947)

The Immoralist

Strait is the Gate

The Vatican Cellars

Hermann Hesse (1946)

Steppenwolf

Demian

Thomas Mann (1929)

Death in Venice

"Something Fresh" by P G Wodehouse

 First published in the US in 1915 (there is a remark about motion pictures which clearly refers to those of the silent variety), this is the first of the Blandings Castle saga starring the absent-minded Earl of Emsworth.

The full eccentricity of the characters is not yet fully developed and several of the key characters of the later books are missing, for example Lord Emsworth's sister Constance and his pig the Empress of Blandings. Whereas the later books are delightful for the utter absurdity of their plots and give pleasure as one gazes at the absurdities of the English aristocracy, this book remains fundamentally plot-driven and determined to progress the two love stories at is heart. 

Nevertheless, there are flashes of the Wodehouse to come,

• One of his techniques is to take a metaphor and show that, if taken literally, it is absurd. For example:
• "Larsen's Exercises are the last word in exercises. ... They enable you, if you persevere, to fell oxen, if desired, with a single blow." (1.1) Notice how PGW uses subordinate phrases to interrupt the flow of the sentence so as to wring out the maximum humour.
• "The wolf was glued to the door like a postage stamp" (3.6)
• In general PGW delays punch lines. For example: "Your Senior Conservative, when at lunch, has little leisure for observing anything not immediately on the table in front of him. To attract attention in the dining-room of the Senior Conservative Club between the hours of one and two-thirty, you have to be a mutton-chop, not an earl." (3.1) The second sentence could have omitted everything between 'attention' and 'you' but by adding the extra words PGW keeps one waiting for the pay-off and also adds colour.

There are connections with other books by PGW:

• Mike went to a school "at Emsworth" in Mike
• One of the characters is Algernon Wooster ... is he any relation to Bertie Wooster of the Jeeves books?
• "One of the Georges - I forget which - once said that a certain number of hours' sleep each night - I cannot recall at the moment how many - made a man something, which for the time being has slipped my memory." (7.2) Again, the humour is aided by the subordinate clauses. This is almost identical to a sentence in Mike: “One of the Georges,” said Psmith, “I forget which, once said that a certain number of hours’ sleep a day—I cannot recall for the moment how many—made a man something, which for the time being has slipped my memory." Recycling?

PGW always wrote strong female characters and there are hints that he was perhaps ahead of his time (still debating women's suffrage)  in his understanding of the need for women to have equality with men:

• "You look on woman as a weak creature to be shielded and petted. We aren't anything of the sort. We're terrors. We're as hard as nails. We're awful creatures." (6.2)
• "Woman is invading Man's sphere more successfully every day, but there are still certain fields in which Man may consider that he is rightfully entitled to a monopoly, and the purloining of scarabs in the watches of the night is surely one of them." (9.3)

Other selected quotes:

• "Beggars approached the task of trying to persuade perfect strangers to bear the burden of their maintenance." (1.1)
• "Collecting, as Mr Peters did it, resembles the drink habit. It begins as an amusement, and ends as an obsession." (3.2)
• "There is every kind of restaurant in London, from the restaurant which makes you fancy you are in Paris to the restaurant which makes you wish you were." (3.3)
• "The heroine was having a perfectly rotten time, kidnapped and imprisoned every few minutes." (3.5)
• "In the profession of living by one's wits in a large city the first principle of offence and defence is to sum people up at first sight." (3.6)
• "It is the saddest sight in the world, that of the crowd collected by a 'Wanted' advertisement. They are so palpably not wanted by any one for any purpose whatsoever; yet every time they gather together with a sort of hopeful hopelessness." (4.1)
• "Among the compensations of advancing age is a wholesome pessimism, which, while it takes the fine edge off whatever triumphs may come to us, has the admirable effect of preventing Fate from working off on us any of the gold bricks, coins with strings attached, an unhatched chickens at which Ardent Youth snatches with such enthusiasm." (6.1)
• "In most English country towns, if the public-houses do not actually outnumber the inhabitants, they all do an excellent trade. It is only when they are two to one that hard times hit them and set the innkeepers blming the Government."(7.2)
• "Baxter felt like a man taking his first ride in an express elevator who has outstripped his vital organs by several floors and sees no immediate prospect of their ever catching up with him again." (8.4)
• "I'm like one of the old 'bus horses who could go on for ever if people got off without making them stop. It's the having to get the 'bus moving again that wears one out." (10.5)
• "Life is nothing but a mutual aid association." (10.5)

This is not yet classic PGW but we are moving towards perfection and this is already funnier than most comic novels.

The sequel to this book is Leave it to Psmith

Other books by PGW reviewed in this blog can be found here:

December 2021; 260 pages

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