"Dickens: A Biography! by Fred Kaplan

 Much of what I already knew about Dickens (his father was a financial disaster, he was traumatised by being taken from school and sent to work in a factory with lower class children, he was an instantly successful novelist, he worked hard and wrote copiously, he loved amateur theatricals, he rejected his wife of twenty years and ten children in favour of a young actress) is repeated in this biography. It is all part of the myth. It must be difficult to write a Life of Dickens without repeating the same old stuff. 

What surprised me was the emphasis on the spare-time activities of the novelist. Kaplan gives us chapter and verse of his holidays, his friendships, his business arrangements, his amateur theatricals etc. There is much less about the activity that dominated his life: his writing.

The book is far more interested in the later works. For example, there is no plot summary of Nickleby or Martin Chuzzelwit but more than three pages are devoted to the plot of Great Expectations. Not only is this manifestly unfair, but I would argue that the first two books are far less well known that the last, so Kaplan seems to be telling the reader what the reader already knows.

I suppose that Kaplan's biographer's instinct seeks to uncover the links between reality and fiction. For the later books, say from Bleak House onwards, Kaplan explains where the theme comes from (eg Hard Times which is about the conditions of the industrial revolution is inspired by a strike in Preston) and the model for many of the characters (Leigh Hunt for Horace Skimpole in Bleak House) but it would appear that the earlier books (Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby) were spontaneously generated. 

What interests me, as an author, is how Dickens honed his craft. Kaplan tells us: "In the novels that were to follow [David Copperfield] ... he was to use autobiographical tonalities for more subjective portraiture and psychological dramatization than in his earlier work." (7.3) He also reveals that , in the run up to writing Little Dorrit, "Dickens had begun to jot down ideas for stories and character sketches and lists of titles and names for characters in a small notebook ... He had never before kept a working notebook." (10.2) But, again, these considersations are dwarfed by discussion of Dickens travelling in Paris.

As for specifically technique-based discussion, all I could find was that Kaplan talks about the use of dual narrators (omniscient and first person) in Bleak House (but doesn't tell us how or why Dickens chose that difficult technique) and that "Collins' major objection to Dickens' fiction ... was that he did not tell his audience enough. For Collins, the art of fiction demanded a series of self-conscious signposts directing the reader toward an unraveling of a well-constructed plot. For Dickens, plot revelations needed to rise organically from the interaction of characters in a narrative pattern in which suggestion and symbol appealed to the reader's intuition." (12.3). 

Perhaps I was hoping for too much. Perhaps biography can't deliver a connection between an author's life and the development of his craft; perhaps this link is too subtle to leave traces. But there were moments in this biography when I wondered whether writing was part of what Dickens did.

As for the person, he certainly emerges as a rather unpleasant man. His vindictiveness when he ditched his wife was horrid: he ditched his long-standing publishers, his partners in a magazine, to their great cost, when they refused to print a self-serving statement about his marriage in Punch, the humorous magazine, which they owned, on the grounds that it wasn't humour. He was determined to squash the rumours that he was separating from his faithful wife to have an affair with a much younger woman because he was fearful that allegations of impropriety would damage the Dickens 'family values' brand. He demanded his children (except for his eldest son) stayed with him and never saw their mother. His daughter, Kate, is reprted in this biography as saying: "My father was like a madman when my mother left home ... The affair brought out all that was worst - all that was weakest in him. He did not care a damn what happened to any of us." (11.3)

He was hugely money-motivated. He took on far more work than a normal person could cope with because he was desperate for money. He couldn't resist the lure of reading tours, although he was advised against them as they made him very ill and perhaps shortened his life, because of the huge incomes they generated even when he was already hugely rich. I suppose he was haunted by the memories of his debt-ridden childhood.

He was ashamed of his sons. "Having been born to neither wealth nor title, his sons, Dickens assumed, should go out, as he had, into the world, and make their fortune. ... Whatever the mixture of motives, after 1858 he promoted their early departure, even when it pained him to see them leave." (12.1) It is not unusual that self-made men take the attitude that 'if I can make it, everyone can' without realising that their success is due to the fact that they are highly unusual (or very lucky). It is a paradox that an author who championed the weak and the poor never recognised this fact about himself.

Selected Quotes:

• "From early on, he developed a performance personality, encouraged to believe that applause was approval." (1.3)
• "He cared more for his work than for her." (3.2)
• "The distortion of logic, reason, ethics, and the Bible by defenders of slavery seemed not only self-serving but also self-destructive." (5.3)
• "Individualism, in the marketplace, in politics. and now on the frontier, seemed to him anticommunal, intolerably lonely, brazenly selfish, inherently materialistic, and threateningly brutal." (3.5)
• "Having struggled out of the blacking factory to be a gentleman of the sort that America did not encourage, he identified with the upper middle class's assumption of aristocratic personal values and liberal middle-class politics." (3.5)
• "The widespread assertion that drunkenness was the cause of many evils rather than a result of already existing ones angered him, as if eradication a symptom in any way dealt with the disease." (6.4)
• "He thought 'total abstinence' nonsense, an attempt by the weak-willed to make the temperate suffer for their inability to drink moderately." (7.3)

There are many things about this biography that make it fascinating but the obsession with Dickens as a man rather than as a writer makes it flawed and unbalanced.

Other biographies of Dickens reviewed in this blog:

• 'Dickens' by Peter Ackroyd
• 'Charles Dickens: A Life' by Claire Tomalin

October 2021; 556 pages

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

"Afterlives" by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Afterlives (published 2020) is the latest novel by Abdulrazak Gumah who on 7th October 2021 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Zanzibar, in Tanzania, Gumah has lived most of his life in Canterbury, Kent, England. I moved away from Canterbury the day before Gumah won his Novel Prize! And I never met him. 

It took me a while to get into this book. It is written in a conventional third person past tense with an omniscient narrator and the narrative distance varies from extreme overview shot (there are individual paragraphs which detail years of warfare, as if they are the establishing shot in a film, taken from a long way off) to in head thoughts (for Hamza and Afiya, at least) but it never gets close enough to the thoughts of the characters to be stream of consciousness so the overall effect is a little bit stand-offish. This is particularly the case in the first few chapters and the last chapter which deal mostly with peripheral characters; the core narrative of the love story between Hamza and Afiya is restricted to the centre of the book. There were parts which read like a narrative history. This distant narration reminded me of other African writers such as Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, and No Longer at Ease). 

I think this was why I took a while to enjoy the book; once it arrived at a more conventionally 'western-novel-style' narrative I began to enjoy exploring the character of Hamza and, through him, began to appreciate the complexities of the other characters, Khalifa in particular who is a great grumpy old man with a heart of gold and his shrewish wife Bi Asha. 

In some ways, Afterlives resembled a memoir more than a novel. What, in conventional novel terms, is one to make of the demonic possession of Ilyas, unless it is to provide a motivation for his researches in the final chapter, or to suggest that native African explanations of 'voices in the head' have as much validity as Western-style psychology? 

It was a coincidence that I had read An Ice Cream War by William Boyd less than a month before this book: both of these novels deal with the fighting between the Germans and the British in East Africa during World War One although their perspectives (Afterlives purely African; Ice Cream purely British) are diametrically opposite. 

Another brilliant book about the African experience in the First World War (though this time in the trenches of the Western Front) is At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop.

Selected quotes:

• "‘No, you’re adding too much salt,’ Hamza said in exaggerated disbelief." (C 5)
• "European volunteers who thought killing was an adventure and were happy to be at the service of the great machinery of conquest and empire." (C 5)
• "In his exhaustion he sometimes reached a stage when he was unafraid, without bravado, without posturing, detached from the moment and open to whatever might happen to him." (C 5)
• "The Oberleutnant was furious and the other Germans joined him in his rage at the indiscipline of the carriers, as if they really believed that the ragged troop they beat and despised and overworked owed them loyalty." (C 7)
• "The morning was warming up but not yet hot and the crowds were still good-natured in their jostling and shoving. Carts barged their way through pedestrians, their drivers calling out in warning, bicycle bells tinkled and cyclists snaked a passage through the press of bodies. Two elderly matrons shuffled on unconcernedly and the crowd parted around them as if they were rocks in the middle of a stream." (C 8)
• "The worst mistakes he made in his earlier life in this town had been the result of his fear of humiliation." (C 9)
• "These thoughts filled him with sorrow, which he thought was the inescapable fate of man." (C 9)
• "Their disagreements sometimes ended in an exchange of tiny imperceptible smiles as if they had seen through each other’s performances." (C 9)
• "He puts great faith in the truth, though that sounds more pompous than I meant it to. Perhaps it would be better to say he has faith in frankness, openness, something like that, without noise or show" (C 10)
• "Poor Ilyas, his life was attended with difficulties yet he lived under a kind of illusion that nothing bad could ever happen to him on this earth. The reality was that he was always on the point of stumbling." (C 11)
• "Good fortune is never permanent. You cannot always be sure how long the good moments will last or when they will come again. Life is full of regrets, and you have to recognise the good moments." (C 12)
• "She talked almost constantly while she was with Bi Asha, even ventriloquising some replies to the questions she addressed to her." (C 13)
• "So what we can know for sure, Ilyas told his parents, is that someone loved Uncle Ilyas enough to follow him to certain death in a concentration camp in order to keep him company." (C 15; last lines)

Books by Nobel Laureates reviewed in this blog:

Abdulrazak Gurnah (2021)

Afterlives
The Last Gift
Gravel Heart 

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

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

October 2021

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

"The First Men in the Moon" by H G Wells

 The narrator, Mr Bedford, is in Lympne on the south Kent coast where he meets Cavor, an inventor, who makes Cavorite, a material which is opaque to gravity. Together they fashion a sphere which can harness Cavorite to travel to the moon. Bedford, a failed businessman, wants to prospect for minerals and perhaps develop financially viable colonies. Cavor aims at purely scientific exploration. They get to the moon and have adventures among the moon's inhabitants.

The book is carefully structured in four parts. They land on the moon on page 42 , almost exactly at the 25% mark; the turning point in their adventures is at 50% and splashdown is almost precisely at 75%. Presumably, the fact that this book was written to be serialised in the Strand magazine (starting in 1900 and ending in 1901, thus spanning the turn of the century and the change from Victorian to Edwardian Britain) assisted this structuring.

Science fiction books of necessity involve a certain amount of 'world-building', a careful (and hopefully consistent) description of an imaginary world. This short novel has huge amounts of world-building and, while this may be enjoyed by many scifi fans, I found this tedious. Despite the beautifully antagonistic pair of characters (and this is essentially a two-hander, containing only two important characters) I felt the character development which drives most modern novels was seriously lacking. This limited my enjoyment.

In many ways this was a repeat of The Time Machine, which was the novel that gave Wells his early success. An explorer in an alien land meets creatures with a strange social system and has adventures underground. But while TTM was a carefully constructed social commentary, TFMITM relies more on the element of straightforward adventure. In my opinion, this makes the narrative less interesting.

Selected quotes:

• "He had seen fit to clothe his extraordinary mind in a cricket cap, an overcoat and cycling knickerbockers and stockings. Why he did so I do not know, for he never cycled and he never played cricket." (C 1)
• "It was clear their were drawbacks to Mr Cavor's society I had not foreseen. The absent-mindedness that had just escaped depopulating the terrestrial globe, might at any moment result in some other grace inconvenience." (C 2)
• "It's this accursed Science ... It's the very Devil. The mediaeval priests and persecutors were right and the Moderns are all wrong. You tamper with it - and it offers you gifts. And directly you take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way." (C 13)
• "I had the moral advantage of a mad bull in the street." (C 17)
• "It dawned upon me up there in the moon as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made simply to go about being safe and comfortable and well-fed and amused." (C 19)
• "To drug the worker one does not want and toss him aside is surely far better than to expel him from his factory to wander starving in the streets." (C 24)

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

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

Biographies of H G Wells reviewed in this blog:

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

October 2021; 176 pages

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

"Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" by Alan Sillitoe

Hugely authentic, a voice from the working-class with a distinct flavour of D H Lawrence, this debut novel was published in 1958 and was an immediate success.

We first meet Arthur Seaton (who describes himself thus: "I'm a bloody billygoat trying to screw the world, and no wonder I am, because it's trying to do the same to me." C 15) when he falls down a set of stairs in the pub, having won a drinking competition. Contesting is what Arthur does best: he sleeps with the wives of other men, he shouts and fights like any barnyard rooster, he drinks to put other men under the table. He's even good at his job, earning £14 per week on piece work, making machine components on a lathe. Since he gives his mam £3 per week for bed and board, he has plenty left for his fancy teddy-boy clothes, his drinking, and his fast women.

Written in dialect, Sillitoe gives us a portrait, warts'n'all of a working class lad in Nottingham. It is bursting with verisimilitude. Sillitoe tells us in the introduction that it was originally a series of short stories and this is evident in the final novel. The hero progresses through a year in a series of episodes in which he is transformed from billygoat into hooked fish, as all young studs mature. It is a classic 'coming of age' tale with the exception that the hero starts out macho and ends up domesticated, a sort of reverse of the Hobbit. But the power of the story does not lie in its plot. Sillitoe has created a character in Arthur Seaton who is firmly rooted in the working-class culture of 1950s Nottingham; he encapsulates its mores, its assumptions, its prejudices and its way of life. But never is that class spoken down to. Seaton is an articulate young man, full of mature reflections about himself, and the world, and his part in it. In some ways he is the classic outsider, able to look upon the world and consider it. Yet at the same time he is thoroughly a part of it. For this, and for the lashings of realism, this book is a classic.

Selected quotes:

• "For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week." (C 1)
• "He was laughing to himself as he rolled down the stairs, at the dull bumping going on behind his head and along his spine, as if it were happening miles away, like a vibration on another part of the earth's surface, and he an earthquake-machine on which it was faintly recorded." (C 1) I love the way he uses Seaton-like words like 'earthquake-machine' rather than 'seismometer'; Seaton is incredibly intelligent and articulate but he has his own vocabulary.
• "From her constant use of the word apologise it seemed as if she had either just learned its meaning ... or as if she had first learned to say it by spelling it out with coloured bricks at school forty years ago." (C 1)
• "You got fair wages if you worked your backbone to a string of conkers on piece-work." (C 2) What a description of the spine!
• "The on'y thing the army cures you on ... is never to join the army again. They're dead good at that." (C 2)
• "He wanted all her troubles for himself at that moment. It was easy. He had only to take them and, having no use for them, throw them away." (C 3)
• "Rain and sunshine, rain and sunshine, with a blue sky now on the following Sunday, and full clouds drifting like an aerial continent of milk-white mountains above the summit of Castle Rock." (C 5)
• "Arthur stood up and hit him, putting into his fist all the bursting irritation of the past few weeks." (C 6)
• "I was on the dole eighteen months ago ... We all had a struggle to keep alive and now they want to call us up ... Do yer think I'm going to fight for them bastards, do yer?" (C 9)
• "Nobody's satisfied wi' what they've got, if you ask me. There'd be summat wrong with the world if they was." (C 10)
• "Stars hid like snipers, taking aim now and again when clouds gave them a loophole." (C 12)
• "When he stopped looking at the wall he lay back to sleep, and awoke after violent yet unrememberable dreams to see the grinning frantic face of the cheap mantlepiece clock telling him that only two minutes had gone by." (C 13) 'Unrememberable' is another Seaton word.
• "Life was like that, he thought, you floated down on a parachute, like the blokes in that Arnhem picture, pulling strings this way and that so that you could put out your hand to each something you wanted, until one day you hit the bottom without knowing it, like a bubble bursting when it touches something solid, and you were dead." (C 13)
• "He sat by the canal fishing on a Sunday morning in spring, at an elbow where alders dipped over the water like old men on their last legs, pushed by young sturdy oaks from behind." (C 16) A beautiful description of a scene and utterly metaphorical. Seaton has been a roaring boy trying to upturn the old order. Yet, as we shall soon see, he is also on the cusp of joining the old.
• "For himself, his own catch had been made, and he would have to wrestle with it for the rest of his life. Whenever you caught a fish, the fish caught you, in a way of speaking, and it was the same with whatever else you caught, like the measles or a woman.  ... As soon as you were born you were captured by fresh air that you screamed against the minute you came out. Then you were roped in by a factory, had a machine slung around your neck, and then you were hooked up the arse by a wife. ... Without knowing what you were doing you had chewed off more than you could bite and had to stick with the same piece of bait for the rest of your life." (C 16) Another Seatonism: 'in a way of speaking' rather than the normal 'in a manner of speaking'.
• "He looked into its glass-grey eye, at the brown pupil whose fear expressed all the life that it had yet lived, and all its fear of the death that now threatened it." (C 16)

Also by Alan Sillitoe:

• The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner: a brilliant short-story
• Raw Material: a memoir in which he mentions his grandfather the blacksmith, also referenced in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning as Seaton's grandfather.
• and many other books

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

"A Cigarette Maker's Romance" by F Marion Crawford

 This short novel by an American writer was published in 1890. It is Dickensian in style: it is told in the third person past tense by an omniscient narrator whose authorial voice frequently intrudes; the prose is quite florid and the plot quite melodramatic; and the characters are mostly stereotypes (the poor but honest working girl, the aristocrat fallen on hard times with a strict code of honour, the shrewish wife, the loyal but brutish peasant). It is even Dickensian in its fundamentally working-class setting: the characters make cigarettes (by hand) in a 'manufactory'; they live in poorly furnished rooms; they eat in cheap cafes; they wear shabby clothes; they are habitues of the pawnbrokers. 

The author was the nephew of Julia Ward Howe, the poet who wrote The Battle Hymn of the Republic (the 'Grapes of Wrath' song). He wrote this novel while living in Sant'Agnello near Sorrento in Italy, where he spent most of his life (there is a street named after him). His 1897 novel Corleone was the first major fictional treatment of the Mafia. 

In 1913 A Cigarette Maker's Romance became a silent film made by Hepworth Studios in Walton-on-Thames, England.

I enjoyed the story. The ornate prose and rococo dialogue is of its time, as are the characters. But the plot was well constructed and perfectly placed and one is kept guessing to the very end about whether the Count is really a Count or just a fantasising lunatic. I loved the fact that it was set so firmly in real life, despite the aristocratic pretensions of the main character. It was easy to read. 

Selected quotes

• "Our furious chariot races round the goals of fame" (C 1)
• "We are in the world and, before we know it, we are on one of the paths which we must traverse in our few score years between birth and death." (C 1)
• "Christian's wife, his larger if not his better half." (C 1)
• "There are poor men who can wear a coat as a red Indian will ride a mustang which a white man has left for dead." (C 1)
• "We say at home that 'strange earth dries without wind'. A foreign land will make old bones of a man without the help of years." (C 2)
• "The fundamental question of upper society, 'Whence art thou?' ... the inquiry which rises first to the lips of the man of action, 'Whither goest thou?'" (C 3)
• "In Munich the strength of fiery spirits is drowned in oceans of mild beer, a liquid of which the head will stand more than the waist-band" (C 4)
• "The worst that can be said of the poorer public-houses in Munich, is that they are frequented by the poorer people, and that as the customers bring less money than elsewhere, there is less drinking in proportion, and a greater demand for large quantities of very filling food at very low rates." (C 4)
• "The poor old woman from the country, who had been supping in the corner, had got her basket on her knees, holding its handle tightly in one hand and with the other grasping her half-finished glass of beer, in terror lest some accident should cause the precious liquid to be spilled, but not calm enough to put it in a place of safety by the simple process of swallowing." (C 4)

I would happily read another novel by this author.

October 2021

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

"An Ice Cream War" by William Boyd

 Two English brothers from the upper-classes, and an American, get caught up in a side-show of the First World War, the fighting between German and British East Africa. Of course the warring powers are both colonialists and both societies are alien invaders of African lands. But the overall message of this book is that human beings are tossed and turned by the tides of history. From the very start, one of the minor characters is described as shoulderless: "From the back, his silhouette resembled a pawn in a game of chess." (2.2) As Felix realises: "it was futile to expect that life could in some way be controlled. But surely everyone had some vestigial power to influence things at his disposal?" (4.3) And as Temple reflects in the Epilogue: "Life doesn’t run on railway tracks. It doesn’t always go the way you expect." 

The blurb describes this as a black comedy. It certainly had overtones of Evelyn Waugh's comic novels (eg the appallingly racist and unfunny Black Mischief) and, like them, I did not find it very funny. Bizarre things happen, certainly, but at best I found them mildly amusing. Mea culpa perhaps. As I have said before in this blog, I don't get comic novels. I don't do surreal, either. The only thing I laughed at was the ludicrous conversations between Felix and Gilzean, who spoke broad, and broadly incomprehensible, Scots. I don't normally like untranslated foreign language in a novel but this was meant to puzzle, so it fitted.

It certainly doesn't have the biting anti-war anger and savage surreal humour of Joseph Heller's Catch 22. It was much more subdued. Perhaps the names were significant: Felix was lucky and Charis had charm but I'm not sure how angelic Gabriel was.

So I treated it more or less as a normal novel.

It is told in the third person and the past tense from a multi-person perspective, head-hopping chapter by chapter. This enabled the reader to get into the head of the principal characters, mostly Felix, Charis, Gabriel, Liesl and Temple. Some of these characters are killed off before the end of the novel and none of them truly develop as characters in the conventional way of novels because fundamentally what happens to them occurs through the promptings of fate or some joker god, and in despite of their characters. This gives the book a strange un-novel-like feel. Heroes are supposed to be masters of their own fate. This lot aren't. It resembled, for me, The Iliad, another war nook in which the heroes are the playthings of the gods.

I'm not sure how much I enjoyed it. I found it quite heavy going at the start. I suppose one felt sorry for the gauche Felix and the innocent lovers Gabriel and Charis and I suppose all the characters were made harder by their experiences of war. Towards the end I was quite interested. But I never really invested emotionally in any character so the horror was not as horrific as it might otherwise have been. 

Selected quotes:

• "Wheech-Browning suddenly leapt four feet sideways leaving the two flies circling aimlessly in the space he had occupied a second before. It took them a moment to find him again." (2.1)
• "He was the sort of man, Temple often thought, whose weakness was a kind of challenge: it made you want to punch him in the chest, just to prove you weren’t affected by it." (2.2)
• "There was a delicate spattering sound as bits of expressed brain hit the leaves of the bushes behind the man." (2.6)
• "Gabriel thought maps should be banned. They gave the world an order and reasonableness which it didn’t possess." (2.6)
• "Nothing in his education or training had prepared him for the utter randomness and total contingency of events." (2.6)
• "The British. He shook his head in a mixture of rage and admiration. A general who was an alcoholic, an army resembling the tribes of Babel, and everyone milling around on this arid plain without the slightest idea of what they were meant to be doing." (2.12)
• "Over to the right were temporary hangars, little more than canvas awnings, that provided some shade for the two frail biplanes – BE2 Cs – which at the moment constituted the presence of the Royal Flying Corps in East Africa." (2.12)
• "There was no breeze and the air was clinging and felt over-used, as if, Felix said, it was composed of exhalations only. All the people of the world breathing out at once." (2.13)
• "A magnificent pale Bathsheba, heavy-breasted and full-thighed, glistening palely in the lamplight as the buckets of water were tipped over her, while he looked on, captivated, an impotent David in the shadows outside." (2.15)
• "It was curious, he thought, how the touch of your own hand on your genitals was so reassuring." (2.15)
• "The sense of his own responsibility, so successfully evaded for so many months, hit him with full force." (2.17)
• "The man had a poor, crude-looking face, as if it were an early prototype whose features hadn’t yet been properly refined. It was utterly expressionless, as if this too were a faculty reserved for later, more sophisticated models." (3.1)
• "There was also something thoroughgoing and uncompromising about African rain. It came down with real force, each drop weighty and loaded with full wetting potential, drumming down at speed as if falling from a prodigious height." (3.1)
• "His ludicrous ‘quest’ had fizzled out in the mud of Kibongo, his high ideals and passionate aspirations replaced by grumbles about the damp and endless speculation about what to eat." (3.2)
• "What kind of a war was this? he demanded angrily to himself. No enemy in sight, your men slowly being starved to death, guarding a huddle of grass huts in the middle of a sodden jungle?" (3.2)
• "He was full of retrospective wisdom, twenty-twenty vision as far as his hindsight was concerned." (4.3)

October 2021

This novel was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1982.

Also by this author: Waiting for Sunshine and Trio

Also set during the world war one fighting in East Africa: by Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gonfur

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

"Coronation Everest" by Jan Morris

Jan Morris (when he was James) was the Times Correspondent assigned to the 1952 Commonwealth Everest Expedition led by James Hunt which succeeded in being the first to conquer Everest, placing Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay on the top of the world. Morris managed to get the news to England (in the days before ubiquitous communications he used runners to take coded dispatches to the nearest radio transmitting station) just in time for the Coronation of Elizabeth Windsor as Queen of the UK.

What makes this book stand out is the quality of the prose. When Morris describes the mountain or the Sherpas or Nepal or anything he writes simply yet clearly and always uses the perfect word so that the images he conjures up are crystal clear. And he is original too. The classic mountaineer's biography might emphasize the perils and the hardships but Morris tells you of his discomforts and his difficulties so the reader is left in no doubt that the climb is arduous and that many aspects are thoroughly unpleasant. He is refreshingly realistic about the people he encounters too, and their customs and their foibles, and the disgusting food and drink he samples. This is no wonder-eyed traveller's tale but real life in all its shabby glory.

Selected quotes

• "He believed wholeheartedly in living off the country, and was an authority on chang, the glutinous substance used by the Nepalese for beer, and on rakhsi, the methylated spirits with which they foster the wild illusion that they are drinking gin." (C 3)
• "The valley of Katmandu was full of splendid medieval monuments, but there was nowhere quite so remarkable as Bhatgaon, which lies about twelve miles to the east of the capital. It was a town of dark and glowering appearance, instinct with the spirit of the Middle Ages. Its streets were narrow and tortuous, and in them you might well expect to meet the funeral procession of a plague, or mingle with branded slaves, or come across some defiant heretic blazing at the stake." (C 3)
• "While I had always admired Mallory’s famous reason for wanting to climb Everest, I was convinced that it would still be there next week." (C 5)
• "Here and there the valley was dotted with the statuesque figures of the yaks, who seemed to enjoy standing all alone in the wilderness gazing into eternity." (C 5)
• "As a doer of duty he seemed to me invincible; whatever job he was given, the building of a chicken coop or the translation of an Aramaic testament, he would first clothe the task in garments of unapproachable significance, and then proceed to complete it." (C 5)
• "Mallory said it was like a prodigious fang excrescent from the jaw of the earth; so sulky and brooding did it look that morning that I thought it must have a toothache. Great mountains surrounded it on every side, but it looked recognizably the greatest (and nastiest) of them all." (C 5)
• "The icefall of Everest rises two thousand feet or more and is about two miles long. It is an indescribable mess of confused ice-blocks, some as big as houses, some fantastically fashioned, like minarets, obelisks, or the stone figures on Easter Island." (C 6)
• "Sweet thick tea follows, tasting faintly of methylated spirits and strongly of the melted snow which provided the water – a taste, I used to think, desperately compounded of winds and desolation, for a raindrop frozen on the slopes of Everest must be a lonely sort of thing." (C 6)
• "Privacy was an abstract totally beyond their conception, and anyone might walk freely into anyone else’s house." (C 7)
• "During the Abyssinian War the Christian Science Monitor was presented by its correspondent in Ethiopia with a bill for two slaves." (C 8)
• "I do not normally behave in this autocratic way, except at the breakfast table." (C 8)
• "Who could have supposed that I would ever find myself in quite so historically romantic a situation, dashing down the flanks of the greatest of mountains to deliver a message for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II? It was all perfectly – oops, steady, nasty slippery bit! – all perfectly ridiculous." (C 11)

A splendidly original take on heroism.

Other books by James/Jan Morris reviewed in this blog:

• Venice
• Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

October 2011

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

"Front page murder" by Peter Bartram

 The third (and last?) in the 'Crampton of the Chronicle' series, which started with Headline Murder and continued with Stop Press Murder.

It's coming close to Christmas 1963 and Colin Crampton, crime correspondent of the Brighton Evening Chronicle, is investigating the soundness of the conviction of Archie Flowerdew for the murder of a fellow seaside postcard artist. But Archie is due to be hanged on Christmas Eve, which imposes a deadline more serious than those of the newsroom. 

There is the usual selection of delightfully barmy characters, the usual sprinkling of witty observations , and the usual mixture of conundrums and thrills; this is a most enjoyable and page-turning murder mystery. 

Selected quotes

• "Barry was one of life’s worriers. Give him a million quid and he’d fret about what to spend it on." (C 1)
• "Her feet were shod in a pair of shoes that were so sensible they could’ve taken part in the Brains Trust." (C 6)
• "When it comes to an opportunity to trash a rival newspaper, dog not only eats dog, but it also licks its lips hoping for a second bite." (C 10)
• "Her voice was confident but her gaze slid off to the left as she spoke. It’s the sign that gives away the inexperienced liar." (C 11)
• "She had a look on her face like she’d been locked in the lavatory for a couple of hours – and didn’t even want to go." (C 14)
• "When it came to hell fires, Burke could stoke for Satan." (C 14)
• "the fish-and-chip end of Fleet Street." (C 21)
• "great minds think differently. It’s dim minds that think alike." (C 24)

October 2021

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

"Stop Press Murder" by Peter Bartram

The second in the 'Crampton of the Chronicle' series which started with Headline Murder and is continued with Front Page Murder. 

Set in 1963, Colin Crampton, crime correspondent for the Brighton Chronicle,investigates the connections between the murder of the nightwatchman on the Palace Pier and the theft of a pornographic film from a What the Butler Saw machine, also on the pier. He discovers a film actress from the silent era (when nearby Shoreham-by-Sea had a heyday as an alternative to Hollywood) and her twin sister who married into the local aristocracy. As always, a host of wonderful characters enliven the proceedings including the staff of the Cuttings Library, a priceless butler, a chinless wonder and his equestrian daughter, and a port-filled Professor with trained poodles. All this is further lightened with a good helping of wisecracks and a not-too-challenging puzzle. Good fun.

 Selected quotes:

• "One of the few ’tecs I trusted in the town. The rest of them spent more time looking for the main chance than for clues. Put it this way: if they were drinking in the same pub you wouldn’t leave your loose change on the bar." (C 1)
• "It was a pub which punters looking for a friendly pint and a tasty snack had learnt to avoid." (C 7)
• "I needed some cooking fat so asked Mr Hodges, quite politely, ‘Do you keep dripping?’” (C 13)
• "Where is that stiff upper lip?” Fanny managed a thin smile. “Above the quivering lower one,” she said." (C 16)
• "Pinker was the kind of man who would have more skeletons than the Bear Road cemetery." (C 19)
• “The fellow was a bit weak up top. Couple of candles in the chandelier had burnt out years ago, from what I’ve heard.” (C 25)
• “That’s the trouble with good deeds ... Cads and bounders get the benefit.” (C 25)

October 2021

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

"Pegasus to Paradise" by Michael Tappenden

 A fictionalised memoir of the author's parents. Ted Tappenden was the radio operator who sent the 'Ham and Jam' message reporting the capture of the bridges outside Caen in the 'Pegasus' operation, the first in the allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day. Like many men after the war, he suffered from his memories. Florrie, his wife, was a feisty individual who probably suffered from bipolar syndrome. Much of the book is taken up with the strains imposed on the marriage by these two psychologically damaged individuals.

The trouble with memoirs is that they deal with what happened and struggle to conform to the conventions of a novel; for example, the pacing may be uneven and the cast of characters may become unwieldy.  But in this book the author has selected incidents which enable the characters to develop in all their real-life complexity. There are some wonderfully detailed descriptions - a strength of the author - which both add depth and advance the story. And, of course, there is incredible verisimilitude.

All of human life seems to be here. Not only is there the thrilling wartime exploits of Ted but also the frustrations of peacetime. Florrie gets involved in cub scouts, in charity concerts and in an allotment. There is the difficulty of communication between two people even when they are deeply in love. There is a wedding and a funeral, and the slow, sad decline into old age that those of us who do not die too early must face. All is told with love and respect. And, often, humour.

It reminded me of Patrick Gale's Notes From an Exhibition.

Selected quotes:

• "She had fled with her family from the poverty and hopelessness of County Cork for the poverty and possibilities of the East End of London." (C 1)
• "The brown ribbon of road that struggled upwards and sped downwards." (C 1)
• "Pitch-black pain from somewhere so deep, poured out of him." (C 4)
• "in the mirror, she could still see Scarlett O’Hara. Unfortunately, Cyril frankly didn’t seem to give a damn." (C 6)
• "Challenge strode there defiant, knuckle-dustered and dangerous. A swaggering sip of things to come, saturated in a crazy palette of colour like a degenerate peacock." (C 6)
• "It was that time when the day had slowed down its urgency and yawned and stretched before being covered by night." (C 8)
• "Even more alarming was the knowledge that the centre forward was known to have the unusual ability of being able to kick the ball in the direction that he intended." (C 9)
• "Not being normal was such bloody hard work." (C 10)
• "At the window, the spider moved quickly from the shadowy corner to the centre of its web and started to bind a hapless fly." (C 10)
• "‘Come on now Patrick Kellagher. Get down on yer knees an tank God dat you’re still on yer feet.’" (C 10)
• "The stage so full of drama now seemed very empty. Just shadows where the players had been; applause, an uncertain echo." (C 10)
• "Now she looked around her garden. Where were her gleaming jewels? Her wonder? Who had switched off the blazing light and crunched her world into a small, terraced back garden?" (C 11)
• "The mad confusion of plants and hotchpotch collection of figures before her, she had wanted to represent a sanctuary; a place of freedom and choice. Now, she saw they were none of those things. Now, in horror, she saw a heaving mass of tormented vegetation: some strong, some weak; some throttling; some suffocating silently, and some pale with approaching death, but all struggling for survival." (C 11)
• "In front of the plants, stood her figures: plastic, cement and plaster, mute, staring, imprisoned. She had ignored their ugliness, their kitsch-ness, their garish coats and their shocking disfigurements, and had offered them a refuge. But she hadn’t understood, she’d been selfish. They had stood there mutely, frozen by ice, faded by the sun, displaying their disabilities for all to see, to be mocked and scoffed at, to suffer everlasting pain, just to satisfy Florrie. And why did they all seem to have Ted’s face?" (C 11)
• "It was like standing in front of a fridge full of tears." (C 11)
• "Stiff upper lips were notoriously difficult to treat." (C 12)
• "The old people applauded slowly, as if it was an effort. As if they were now running out of applause, running out of everything." (C 13)
• "Maybe he carried the Bible just in case there really was a God. But he’d seen no sign of him." (C 14)
• "The odour of old people hung in the air." (C 17)
• "A number of elderly people sat slumped in plump armchairs that almost enveloped them. They might have been small children sitting on adult’s chairs, except that a small child would be bursting full of tomorrow, and these people were in danger of disappearing forever down the gap between the seat and the back." (C 18)
• "It was a silent drive to the cemetery. Inside the car, the air was thick with thoughts that even the open window could not whisk away." (C 19)

A beautifully written family saga.

Michael Tappenden has also written A Long Dark Rainbow.

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