"Laughs and Tears Galore!" by Heather and Tony Flood

This is an easy-to-read anthology full of feel-good entertainment.

Most of the poems are either rhyming couplets or quatrains with an ABCB rhyme scheme; they typically utilise fairly free scansion. I would relish seeing the poets explore alternative forms. The subjects of the poems are mainstream, rarely challenging perceived wisdoms, and frequently, sometimes explicitly, point up a moral. My favourite poem is Heather Flood’s ‘If you let it’, whose title is also the final line of each of the three four-line stanzas; its cleverness rests on the move from negativity to positivity for the final verse. But my favourite line is from Heather’s Star Dust: “Scantily clad reason treads softly the day, with pathways uneven” which provokes a fascinating image.

The short stories frequently carry a clever twist at the end. Several of Tony's stories refer to immoral behaviour, sometimes of a sexual nature, including ‘Never take anything for granted’ which relies on a clever double meaning and made me laugh aloud. Several of Heather’s stories revolve around death and the afterlife. I particularly enjoyed ‘Heaven or Hell?’

This link should take you to the Amazon page to buy the book:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/LAUGHS-TEARS-GALORE-Stories-twists/dp/B09VG3SHC7

March 2020

"Adam Bede" by George Eliot

Adam Bede was the best-seller that made George Eliot’s name ... and enabled her to admit she was Marion Evans. I suspect that its success was due to it being so authentically set in an English rural village, the accurate use of dialect, and the incredibly true-to life characters. It was written in a world in which Dickens was pre-eminent, but his exaggerated characters are caricatures compared with those in Adam Bede which feel like portraits of real people (except perhaps for the woman-hating schoolmaster).

Following the lead of Eliot’s beloved Walter Scott, this is a historical novel. It is set in the time between the Napoleonic French troops quitting Egypt (about 1800) and the Treaty of Paris (about 1802); it references these events as well as Nelson, Arkwright’s mills and the recent publication of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ (first published in 1798):

• “We must have something beside Gospel i’ this world. Look at the canals an’ th’ aqueducs, an’ th’ coal-pit engines, and Arkwright’s mills there at Cromford: a man must learn summat beside Gospel to make them things, I reckon.” (C 1) Right from the start, the context is given, and quite naturally.
• “I know you are fond of queer wizard-like stories. It’s a volume of poems, ‘Lyrical Ballads’: most of them seem to be twaddling stuff; but the first is in a different style - ‘The Ancient Mariner’ is the title. I can hardly make head or tail of it as a story, but it’s a strange, stroking thing.” (C 5)
• “The news that ‘Bony’ was come back from Egypt was comparatively insipid, and the repulse of the French in Italy was nothing to Mrs Poyser’s repulse of the old Squire.” (C 33)

The structure is conventional for Victorian novels of the time. Originally published in three volumes, each of two ‘Books’, it takes a long time building up the situation before coming to the meat of the story which revolves around Hetty, a very pretty young farm girl with dreams above her ‘station’, who catches the eye of the Squire’s grandson and heir, a man rich enough to be a rogue, and also the worthy goody-goody Adam Bede, a jobbing carpenter with ambition. The main characters are mostly good, although Adam learns to be less strict about what is right and what is wrong; the only characters who are given moral dilemmas are those who are tempted and fall.

But there are some glorious characters among the lesser parts. Mrs Poyser the farmer’s wife has a marvellous line in garrulous invective - “Mrs Poyser, once launched into conversation, always sailed along without any check from her preliminary awe of the gentry. The confidence she felt in her own powers of exposition was a motive force that overcame all resistance.” - which leads her to give even the Squire a tongue-lashing, and some brilliant lines:

• “As for farming, it’s putting money into your pocket wi’ your right hand and fetching it out wi’ your left. As far as I can see, it’s raising victual for other folks, and just getting a mouthful for yourself.” (C 6)
• “It’s like as if you’d been cooking a feast and had got the smell of it for your pains.” (C 6)
• “it’s no use filling your pocket full of money if you’ve got a hole in the corner.” (C 9)
• “She might as well dress herself fine to sit back’ards on a donkey.” (C 9)
• “You’re about as near the right language as a pig’s squeaking is like a tune played on a key-bugle.” (C 32)

Adam’s mum is a little less comic, but she also has some great lines:

• “When one end o’ th’ bridge tumbles down, where’s th’ use o’ th’ other stannin’?” (C 10)
• “he could no more ha’ done wi’out me nor one side o’ the scissars can do wi’out th’ other” (C 10)
• “men ne’er know whether the floor’s clean or cat-licked.” (C 12)
• “what’s liking got to do wi’t? It’s choice o’ mislikings is all I’n got i’ this world.” (C 12)
• “he knowsna as I put salt in’s broth, but he’d miss it pretty quick if it warna there.” (C 51)
• “Thee think’st thy mother knows nought, but she war alive afore thee wast born.” (C 51)

It's a big book and the first third is, perhaps, a little slow: Eliot takes her time building up the situation. But once it gets going it is a reasonably quick read. Although the plot is really rather predictable to modern eyes, and the goody-goodies are perhaps a little too perfect, there is bags of verisimiltude and some great comedy.

Other great selected quotes:

• “If a man does bits o’ jobs out o’ working hours - builds an over for ‘s wife to save her from going to the bakehouse, or scratch at his bit o’ garden and makes two potatoes grow instead o’ one, he’s doing more good, and he’s just as near to God, as if he was running after some preacher and a-praying and a-groaning.” (C 1): The Victorian virtues of God, but self-help first.
• “Thee’t like they dog Gyp - thee bark’st at me sometimes, but thee allays lick’st my hand after.” (C 1)
• “A little sunny-haired girl between three and four, who, seated on a high chair at the end of the ironing-table, was arduously clutching the handle of a miniature iron with her tiny fat fist, and ironing rags with an assiduity that required her to put her little red tongue out as far as anatomy would allow.” (C 6): I recently wrote to the New Scientist asking why one sticks one's tongue out when trying to concentrate and the answer seems to be that it is because of overload in the same part of the brain which is responsible for both language and fine manual movements (perhaps because language was originally gesture-based) and that it is more prevalent in children before they have been socialised out of sticking their tongue out ... so Eliot seems bang in line with modern science!
• “It isn’t for men to make channels for God’s Spirit, as they make channels for the water-courses, and say, “Flow here, but flow not there.” (C 7)
• “one might as well go and lecture the trees for growing in their own shape.’ (C 7)
• “Young souls, in such pleasant delirium as hers, are as unsympathetic as butterflies sipping nectar; they are isolated from all appeals by a barrier of dreams” (C 9)
• “Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.” (C 11)
• “he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind – impetuous, warm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian.” (C 12) A bit like, in interviews, you are supposed to cast your weaknesses in a positive light.
• “young unfurrowed souls roll to meet each other like two velvet peaches that touch softly and are at rest” (C 12)
• “We’ve all had our turn at bein’ young, I reckon, be’t good luck or ill.” (C 14)
• “even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth” (C 17)
• “Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds” (C 29)
• “it seems as if them as aren’t wanted here are th’ only folks as aren’t wanted i’ th’ other world.” (C 32)
• “he was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow. Now that’s an Æsop’s fable3 in a sentence.” (C 33)
• "In young, childish, ignorant souls there is constantly this blind trust in some unshapen chance: it is as hard to a boy or girl to believe that a great wretchedness will actually befall them, as to believe that they will die.” (C 35)
• “you can’t isolate yourself, and say that the evil which is in you shall not spread. Men’s lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe: evil spreads as necessarily as disease.” (C 46)
• “she’ll no more go on in her new ways without you, than a dog ’ull stand on its hindlegs when there’s nobody looking.” (C 49)
• “It’s allays the way wi’ them meekfaced people; you may’s well pelt a bag o’ feathers as talk to ’em.” (C 49)
• “How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections?” (C 51)
• “I aren’t like a bird-clapper, forced to make a rattle when the wind blows on me. I can keep my own counsel when there’s no good i’ speaking.” (C 52)
• “she makes one feel safer when she’s i’ the house; for she’s like the driven snow: anybody might sin for two as had her at their elbow.’ (C 52)
• “It’s your dead chicks take the longest hatchin’.” (C 53)

A long read, but it repays the investment.

March 2022; 516 pages

Other books by George Eliot include:

• The Mill on the Floss
• Middlemarch
• Silas Marner

Books about George Eliot reviewed in this blog include:

• George Eliot: A Life by Rosemary Ashton
• The Road to Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

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

"Pubis Angelical" by Manuel Puig

 I usually enjoy experimental fiction but I found this novel a real slog. 

It interweaves three stories. One is of 'the most beautiful woman in the world'; at the start she is kept prisoner by her ultra-rich husband; later her narrative seems to echo the story of film actress Hedy Lamarr (whose real life was rather more interesting). This narrative later gives way to a narrative set in a future of totalitarianism and climate change following a young sex-worker who closely resembles 'the most beautiful woman in the world'. The stories are interwoven with a frame narrative about an Argentinian women being treated in hospital for a tumour: the other two stories appear to be dreamed by her under the influence of the drugs she is taking. All three stories revolve around the way that women are manipulated by men.

I found the science fiction part of the story rather silly. It is very difficult to create convincing scifi.

The frame narrative was mostly rendered in dialogue, presented as a play script. This suffered from two problems. Firstly, the dialogue veered between realistically meandering about nothing and unrealistically presenting statements from philosophy of politics or ethics. Secondly, because there was no interruption for 'stage directions' (in most novels dialogue includes breaks for action; in plays the actors often provide these) it was rather bald. 

I struggled to enjoy this novel. March 2022; 236 pages

Selected quotes:

• "The classes stay separate on their own." (1.4)
• "A wealthy person can buy whatever he wants, a person, the police, even a judge." (1.5)
• "He who gets angry first wins." (2.13)

Puig is famous for having written Kiss of the Spider Woman. He has also written

• Betrayal by Rita Hayworth
• Blood of Requited Love
• The Buenos Aires Affair
• Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages
• Heartbreak Tango

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

"The Rebel Angels" by Robertson Davies

 A group of academics in a Canadian university squabble over missing manuscripts, philosophy, and a half-gypsy research student.

The blurb says this novel is "a glittering extravaganza of wit, scatology, saturnalia, mysticism and erudite vaudeville". I thought it was quite pedestrian.

Selected quotes:

• "He seemed to me to have more conscience than is good for any man." (NA2.1)
• "Those who can get beyond the fashionable learning of their day are few." (NA2.2)
• "One begins with no knowledge except that what one is doing is probably wrong." (NA2.3)
• "Religion and humour, two realms in which humour seems to be wholly out of place" (NA2.3)
• "His idea of compassion was allowing every indefensible statement to pass unchallenged." 
• (SP3.1)
• "Bowel movement is a real creation" (NA3.3)
• "It is not tactful in these days to ask about the wives of one's friends too particularly, in case they are wives no longer." (NA3.3)
• "I must be modern: I live now. But like everybody else ... I live in a muddle of eras, and some of my ideas belong to today, and some to an ancient past, and some to periods of time that seem more relevant to my parents than to me." (SP4.1)
• "An ageing romantic is hardly to be distinguished from an ageing Tory." (SP4.1)
• "The gods themselves struggle vainly with stupidity." (NA4.2) This is a quote from Schiller; it also comes into The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing.
• "Intelligent societies have always preserved their wise men in institutions of one kind or another, where their chief business is to be wise, to conserve the fruits of wisdom and to add to them if they can." (NA4.2)
• "Who will smooth the pillow when you lie at the hour of death?" (NA4.3)
• "What is the root of man? ... the deepest root of all, the tap-root, is that child he once was." (SP5.1)
• "How much more complicated life is than the attainment of a PhD would lead one to believe." (SP5.4)
• "the Rebel Angels ... were real angels, Samahazai and Azazel, and they betrayed the secrets of Heaven to King Solomon, and God threw them out of Heaven ... they came to earth and taught tongues, and healing and laws and hygiene ... and they were often special successes with 'the daughters of men'." (NA5.5)
• "She led a dog's life, and it made her disagreeable, which she mistook for being strong."  (NA5.6)
• "The word glamour has been so battered and smeared that almost everybody has forgotten that it means magic and enchantment." (SP6.3)
• "It was one of those houses stiff with Good Taste." (SP6.5)
• "I have had too much experience of life to attempt to tell a really rich person anything. They are as bad as the young; they know it all." (NA6.1)
• "To marry, he said, was to take a hand in a dangerous game where the stakes are the highest - a fuller life or a life diminished and confined. It was a game for adult players." (NA6.2)
• "De mortuis nil nisi hokum" (NA6.3) The standard quote is de mortuis nil nisi bonum which mean {speak) nothing but good about the dead.

March 2022; 332 pages

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

 

"Dancing with the Octopus" by Debora Harding

The true story of how, as a fourteen year old girl living in Nebraska, Harding was kidnapped at knifepoint from a church parking lot, raped and left to die in a cattle yard during a severe snowstorm. The book describes Harding's later battle with PTSD, a struggle which is exacerbated by the abusive behaviour of her mother.

And, in the end, the mother's psychological abuse and mental cruelty seem to be worse than the horrific ordeal Harding endured. The kidnap and rape was by a stranger and lasted for a few horrifying hours, the mother's abuse was repeated again and again for years.

A gripping true story, told in tiny snippets, with a backwards and forwards chronology, and the minute attention to detail characteristic of American reportage.

Selected quotes:

• "When Dad was home Mom was as different as a blackbird is to a vampire. Both have wings, but one sucks your blood." (p 25)
• "I'd been having night terrors all the way back to adolescence ... My unconscious strategy for dealing wiht them was to avoid sleep altogether." (p 33)
• "Mom claimed that she was of the 'School of Tough Love', like it was a parenting association that charged membership fees." (p 37)
• "The harder I tried to formulate a coherent thought, the more it eluded me. ... I felt nothing. An emotional lens closed, yet I became acutely aware of any sensory impression." (p 39)
• "These pieces were distinctly layered, as if I could separate one sensation from the other and tape them at different speeds." (p 40) 
• "Every word spoken rang with volume but no meaning." (p 40)
• "The world had gone completely flat" (p 40)
• "I was experiencing sudden paralysis, after which I would collapse. ... I appeared to others to be unconscious whilst being horrifyingly aware that I wasn't. ... I have no way of communicating. After a few minutes, when I feel control coming back, my limbs twitch, my jaw clenches, and if I fight it, the convulsing gets worse. Afterward I am utterly exhausted. ... I felt before these episodes ... emotional detachment, a sense of distance, and maybe fear." (p 90)
•  "Mom said Vivian left him [her husband] because he was cheating on her, which was an act of pure selfishness. Plenty of wives were dealing with cheating husbands in the 1950s, so they took antidepressants." (p 100)
• "These fits of paralysis had similarities to the lucid dream state of night terrors. Instead of being trapped in a dream - terrified and awake, yet clinically asleep - the situation was reversed. I appeared to be unconscious, asleep, even though I was awake and fully aware of my surroundings." (p 113)
• "It made me feel anxious yet affirmed, the way a horrid truth does when it feels right." (p 129)
• "I heard my mother tell whomever was on the other end of the phone that I no longer lived there." (p 162)
• "Charles slept the death of the angels that night." (p 205)
• "I was fifteen minutes late arriving home. Mom was standing at the door, furious. It woulod seem I had been grossly insensitive by worrying her." (p 209)
• "Trying to emotionally connect with Mom for any of us was like trying to fix a broken cup with a glue stick." (p 234)

March 2022; 359 pages

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

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll

The classic children's novel, first published in 1865. Lured by a White Rabbit, Alice falls down a rabbit hole and arrives in Wonderland where she meets a variety of strange characters including a hookah-smoking caterpillar, the Mad Hatter and the (also mad) March Hare, the slowly vanishing Cheshire cat, the mournful Mock Turtle and the bloodthirsty Queen of Hearts.

My U3A group (Eastbourne Central) discussed whether the story represents the transition to adulthood. Certainly the size changes reminded us of adolescence, during which some parts of the body grow faster than others, and some changes are more difficult to accommodate, sometimes leading to clumsiness. There was the suggestion that Alice learns defiance and this is a sign of maturing. But on the whole, although we could see the argument that Wonderland represents the bizarre and confusing, sometimes cruel and inhospitable, world of adults, with all its inconsistencies, as seen from the perspective of a child, it was not clear that Alice was successfully making the transition to adulthood. Perhaps this is part of the wish fulfilment of the author: it was pointed out to the group that Lewis Carroll found it difficult to remain friends with children after they had grown up.

Indeed, AiW doesn’t seem to be a conventional story at all. Although there is the real world to wonderland transition, similar to the liminal experience of many ‘Hero’s Journey’ type stories, and while one could regard Alice’s experiences as tests or trials, Alice as hero has no companions (except the incidental Cheshire cat) and learns nothing; the episodes are almost stand alone and the novel format is most like a picaresque.

It could be argued that Alice is repeatedly trying to make sense of the world but discovering that, although it has rules, these rules are always, in the end, subverted. Thus the Mad Hatter’s tea party has its own logic but when Alice asks what happens when they reach the end and all the dishes are dirty, the subject is swiftly changed. Similarly, Alice tries hard to make sense of the Croquet game played with hedgehogs and flamingos. This reminded some of us of a child repeatedly asking ‘why?’ only to be told, in the end, ‘because I say so’.

Given that LC was an academic mathematician, he must have encountered the strange and confusing world of non-Euclidean geometry. Riemann published his variant of this in 1854, eleven years before the publication of Alice, although there had been attacks on Euclid’s fifth postulate almost since he published it, including one by Omar Khayyam (of Rubaiyyat fame). Riemann’s geometries include one which works for the surface of a sphere, whilst Euclidean geometry works for a flat surface (so, for example, whereas the internal angles of Euclid’s triangles always add up to 180o they don’t in Riemann’s triangles). Perhaps Wonderland was LC’s reaction to the discovery that Euclid, the gold standard of learning for two millenia, was not necessarily the last word in maths.

What is clear is that AiW was written as a satire. It lampoons the current fashion for ‘improving’ verse for children (Robert Southey’s Father William and Isaac Watt’s Busy Bee) and it caricatures a large number of people known to LC. The nonsense tradition had already been established (Edward Lear’s limericks first appeared in 1846, nineteen years before Alice).

There was some criticism of the prose. Certainly, much of the writing appears to be staid, although this might be typical of Victorian children’s books; AiW only really comes alive in the dialogues. I suggested that the stodgy prose might be necessary when writing nonsense or fantastic prose, comparing AiW’s everyday approach to a weird world to the opening lines of Kafka’s Metamorphosis: “One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.”

We were given some personal biographical details about the author, although it was pointed out that much in his biography has been contested. AiW was, it seems, first shown to Henry Kingsley, a novelist and the brother of Charles Kingsley, a more famous novelist whose novel of magical realism, ‘The Water Babies’, in which the child hero is transported to a magical place underwater, was first published as a serial between 1862 and 1863, thus appearing shortly before AiW. On a local note, Henry Kingsley retired with his wife to Cuckfield.

Selected quotes:

• "'What is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'" (Ch 1) This quote has stayed with me since I first read the book as a child.
• "I'll stay down here! It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying 'Come up again, dear!' I shall only look up and say 'Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else."(Ch 1)
• "Alice had been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the general conclusion, that wherever you go to on the English coast you find a number of bathing machines in the sea, some children digging in the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging houses, and behind them a railway station." (Ch 2)
• "Speak roughly to your little boy/ And beat him when he sneezes:/ He only does it to annoy,/ Because he knows it teases." (Ch 6) This also I remember from a child.
• "'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?' 'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat. ''I don't much care where -' said Alice. 'Then it doesn't matter which way you go'" (Ch 6)
• "'Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on. 'I do,' Alice hastily replied: 'at least - at least I mean what I say - that's the same thing, you know.' 'Not the same thing a bit!' said the Hatter." (Ch 7)

March 2022

Nominated by Robert McCrum as 18th in the Guardian's 100 best novels of all time.

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

"Holding" by Graham Norton

A murder mystery set in a small village in Ireland, a place full of lonely people with unfulfilled destinies. Whose are the bones that are discovered when a new housing estate is being built? How do they relate to a love triangle from thirty years ago? Is the local policeman capable of investigating?

Despite the overwhelming sadness surrounding most of the characters, I felt that this was an attempt at a comedy murder mystery. The characters were stereotypical : the fat policeman, the alcoholic housewife, the cheating husband, a whole chorus-line of unfulfilled spinsters etc and although there were attempts to give them more dimensions, the fact that these too were from the stock of the genre failed to make any of them come alive for me. 

The story was told in the past tense from the multiple perspective of several of the main characters.

TV adaptation

I have been watching the ITV adaptation of Holding. Whereas the theme of the book seems to be chastity and regret, in the adaptation sex is rampant. The three Ross sisters at the centre of the novel are spinsters who regret their never-been-touched status. In the adaptation they are all having sex and the middle sister is having a lesbian affair with the mother of the young lad who is shagging the younger sister (who looks too young to have been in love with a man who died twenty years ago). One of the investigating policemen is also gay, in a reversal of his sexuality in the book. The purpose of this policeman and the completely new character of the young lad seems to be to add some male eye candy to the programme. The back story of the housekeeper in the Garda barracks has been gratuitously changed and the tenure of the main character dramatically shortened from fifteen years to just over three. There are performances in a village fete (actors love showing off; I suspect this was added as padding for their enjoyment; it certainly didn't enhance mine) which also isn't in the book. The dramatic final was similar to but not the same as the book's ending; I suppose I was grateful that at least the murderer was not changed. This has to be one of the loosest adaptations ever made, reminding me of the film version of Live and Let Die which shares its title and the character of James Bond but almost nothing else with the Ian Fleming book of the same name.

Selected quotes:

• "It was widely accepted by the residents of Duneen that, should a crime be committed and Sergeant Collins managed to apprehend the culprit, it would be very unlikely that the arrest had involved a pursuit on foot. People liked him well enough, and there was no name-calling as such, but it was still quite unsettling for the village that their safety depended on a man who broke into a sweat walking up for communion." (1.1; opening lines)
• "Time didn’t pass in Duneen; it seeped away." (1.1)
• "Some marriages combust, others die, and some just lie down like a wounded animal, defeated." (1.2)
• "like an animal spraying its scent she had covered every available surface with much-dusted china figurines and small glass ornaments." (1.3)
• "Was it really possible that she could have wasted so much of her own life out of a demented sort of politeness?" (1.8)
• "Life had taught them well. Feelings were to be feared, pain was to be avoided at all cost, and if that meant not experiencing joy, then so be it." (1.11)
• "He had managed to get through decades of adulthood without emotional attachment," (1.13)
• "such a powerful performance of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ that it sounded like more of a threat than a promise." (1.13)
• "it gave the smokers an air of respectability rather than standing huddled against the wall like some very unappetising prostitutes." (2.1)
• "The brief flurry and excitement of his love triangle had soon flatlined." (2.1)
• "A funeral was always going to be more important than the person who was being buried." (2.14)

March 2022

A competently written example of the genre. For murder mystery with a light touch I would recommend: 

• Headline Murder, Stop Press Murder, and Front Page Murder by Peter Bartram
• The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
• The Cinderella Killer and A Decent Interval by Simon Brett and others of the Charles Paris series

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

"If Beale Street Could Talk" by James Baldwin

This superb short novel is a searing indictment of white America in the 1970s (and it may not be a whole lot better now) seen from the perspective of a black family living in New York. The narrator, Tish, is pregnant with her first child; her lover and long-time friend Fonny, a sculptor, is in jail, on remand, not yet convicted. They are trying to raise the money for a lawyer. In one of the most brilliant scenes I have ever read, Tish tells Fonny's church-going mother and sisters, and his drunkard of a father, about the baby. The narrative, told in first-person with an intriguing mixture of past and present tense, jumps backwards and forwards in time as Trish recounts the events that led up to Fonny's arrest and the family's efforts to get him acquitted. The tension builds to an almost excruciating climax as the baby develops in her womb towards its birthday.

The power of this novel lies in its characters. Although the city as a whole is cast as the villain, most of the individuals are shown as good guys struggling to survive, often in ways that bring them into conflict with others (Fonny's mother, Senor Alvarez, Mrs Rogers), but often in ways that mean they give help generously and selflessly (Jaime, Levy). 

Told in uncompromising language, and this is an outstanding story written by a novelist at the very pinnacle of the writer's art.

Selected quotes:

• "New York must be the ugliest and the dirtiest city in the world. It must have the ugliest buildings and the nastiest people. It's got to have the worst cops. If any place is worse, it's got to be so close to hell that you can smell the people frying. And, come to think of it, that's exactly the smell of New York in the summertime." (p 8)
• "Some men wash their cars, on Sundays, more carefully than they wash their foreskins." (p 18)
• "I don't think America is God's gift to anybody - if it is God's days have got to be numbered." (p 24)
• "That God these people say they serve ... has got a very nasty sense of humour." (p 24)
• "It was the hour when darkness begins, when the sounds of the night begin." (p 30)
• "The death that was waiting to overtake the children of our age ... took many forms, though ... the death itself was very simple and the cause was simple, too: as simple as a plague: the kids had been told that they weren't worth shit and everything they saw around them proved it. They struggled, they struggled, but they fell, like flies, and they congregated on the garbage heap of their lives, like flies." (p 32)
• "Between the mother's prayers, which were like curses, and the sisters' tears, which were like orgasms, Fonny didn't stand a chance." (p 33) The power of this line is the choice of oxymoronic similes, to disrupt your thoughts, and to make you think.
• "He had found his centre, inside him: and it showed. He wasn't anybody's nigger. And that's a crime, in this fucking free country." (p 33)
• "Although I cannot say that your beauty rest did you a hell of a lot of good, I do admire the way you persevere." (p 36)
• "These days, of course, everybody knows everything, that's why so many people, especially most white people, are lost." (p 40)
• "Blessed be the next fruit of thy womb. I hope it turns out to be uterine cancer." (p 64)
• "He looked as though he wanted to knock Fonny down, he looked as though he wanted to take him in his arms." (p 76) Another powerful oxymoron expressing the complexity of human emotion.
• "A fool never says he's a fool." (p 104)
• "Something almost as hard to catch as a whisper in a crowded place, as light and as definite as a spider's web, strikes below my ribs, stunning and astonishing my heart." (p 106)
• "The baby, turning for the first time in its incredible veil of water, announces its presence and claims me." (p 106)
• "People make you pay for the way you look, which is also the way you think you look, and what time writes in a human face is the record of that collision." (p 108)
• "The rind of regret" (p 131) What a stunning description.
• "The blue sky above, and the bright sun, the blue sea, here, the garbage dump, there. It takes a moment to realize that the garbage dump is the favella. Houses are built on it - dwellings; some on stilts, as though attempting to rise above the dung-heap. Some have corrugated metal roofs. Some have windows. All have children." (p 142)
• "The righteous must be able to locate the damned." (p 168): The excuse for prison!

Not only does this little story pack an incredible emotional punch (and the ending of the book is different from that of the film; otherwise the film adaptation is very loyal) but the characters are beautifully drawn and their struggles to thrive given their circumstances are epic.

March 2022; 173 pages

Also by this author:

• Giovanni's Room: another classic, this time about a love between two men
• Go Tell It On the Mountain
• Another Country

This book reminded me of the poems collected in Poor by Caleb Femi, about the plight of young black boys living in London 

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

"The Thursday Murder Club" by Richard Osman

A group of old folk living in a retirement village set up a club to solve old murders ... then a murder takes place on their doorstep. Using the skills they have developed over a variety of interesting careers, they team up with a pair of unlikely detectives (police procedural this isn't) to find out whodunnit. 

Although I found the solution somewhat confusing and less than convincing, I adored the characters and the dialogues. Osman has a real gift for writing scenes in which the interruptions to the story are as much fun as the story itself: a sort of Tristram Shandy or Road Kill but much more controlled so that the diversions don't actually take over the story.

The chapters are extremely short, on average less than three pages each, which enhances the readability.

It's written from the third person perspective of a number of characters (I counted eleven plus at least one chapter of omniscient narration), in the present tense (and from Joyce's diary in the past tense) so there is a carefully controlled head-hopping. I have argued in the past that having so many characters makes it difficult to create complex three-dimensional characters and Osman doesn't really try to do this. Perhaps the most interesting characters are Joyce who uses her diary to address the reader directly (using 'you' and asking questions) and Chris, the policeman with a weight problem. The other characters are 'Mary Sue's', too-good-to-be-true, such as Bogdan, a builder who can turn his hand at anything (and plays brilliant chess), and Elizabeth, the ex-spy who can use her contacts to find out anything at any time. Even Joyce whose only superpowers are negotiating skills and being underestimated, has a daughter who is a financial genius. I live in a retirement complex and, believe me, the other inmates are very ordinary. 

Classic murder mysteries of the old school are very clear about right and wrong. Classic spy stories such as those by le Carre have an overwhelming atmosphere of moral ambiguity. This book treads a middle line. From the start , the reader is enlisted on the side of the (amateur and professional) detectives; this distinction is reinforced by making the baddies very bad indeed. So bad that they deserve to die; so bad that their killers are portrayed as having done something that is fundamentally decent. Meanwhile the goodies employ a lot of shortcuts to get at the truth ... but presumably the end is held to justify the means. Furthermore, a surprising number of the more minor characters perform actions that are both criminal and immoral but they get away with it because they are lovable rogues. It's an interesting message.

Characterisation is achieved by plucking at stereotypes. Ibrahim is an ex-psychiatrist quite a long way down the autistic spectrum, precise and pernickety and into IT (one wonders how he empathised with many of his ex-patients). Ron is the combative ex-trades union leader. Ian Ventham is an utterly despicable businessman. These are neo-Dickensian caricatures, as flat as they come. And, like Dickens, Osman mostly gets away with it using humour. There are some genuinely funny moments and it is because the reader is enjoying themselves that they are prepared to suspend their disbelief for the duration of the ride.

But fundamentally this is an utterly implausible whimsy. 

There are moments when Osman snatches at verisimilitude, such as the description of the location of the retirement village which is very precise and Joyce's repeated references, in her diary, to real TV shows, whereby Osman taps into the shared present-day British cultural heritage.

But the Guardian hits the nail on the head when it describes the book as 'pure escapism'.

Nevertheless, it is enjoyable, structured as well as the best murder mysteries, and very easy to read.

Selected quotes

• "For over a hundred years the convent was a hushed building, filled with the dry bustle of habits and the quiet certainty of prayers offered and answered." (Ch 3)
• "The residents like to use the chapel. This is where the ghosts are, where the habits still bustle and where the whispers have sunk into the stone." (Ch 3) I was interested to see that Osman chose to use the words 'bustle' and 'habits' together on two consecutive pages.
• "Reading police files in the certain knowledge that the police are lying to you is surprisingly effective." (Ch 4)
• "After a certain age, you can pretty much do whatever you fancy. No one tells you off, except for your doctors and your children." (Ch 4)
• "I would never have therapy, because who wants to unravel all that knitting?" (Ch 4)
• "Many years ago, everybody here would wake early because there was a lot to do and only so many hours in the day. Now they wake early because there is a lot to do and only so many days left." (Ch 11)
• "Everyone calms down through me. Quiet, sensible, Joyce. There is no more shouting and the problem is fixed, more often than not in a way that advantages me. Which is something no one ever seems to notice." (Ch 20)
• "You always know when it's your first time, don't you? But you rarely know when it's your final time." (Ch 23) I have come across the same sentiment recently in another book.
• "In life you have to learn to count the good days. You have to tuck them in your pocket and carry them around with you." (Ch 23) 
• "No kneeling for him these days, arthritis and Catholicism being an uneasy mix." (Ch 30)
• "People without a sense of humour will never forgive you for being funny." (Ch 49)
• "She taps a page of her notepad with her pen, like a conductor giving notice to her orchestra." (Ch 58)
• "If he opened his window he could hear the sea, but couldn't see it. Didn't that just sum it up?" (Ch 78)
• "This house and me have grown old together. Roof coming off ... Things creak that didn't use to creak. Dodgy plumbing." (Ch 91)
• "I can keep my secrets to myself, right up until the time that someone asks me about them." (Ch 98)
• "You can have too much choice in this world. And when everyone has too much choice, it is also much harder to get chosen. And we all want to be chosen." (Ch 103)

March 2022, rewritten Nov 2023; 377 pages

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

"Mimic" by Daniel Cole

 A serial killer is on the loose in London, recreating famous sculptures using the sometimes restructured bodies of his victims.

A disturbingly original, if slightly absurd, premise is followed by a chain of near misses and strange coincidences that make it difficult for me to suspend my disbelief. And there is very little mystery about whodunnit. But the novel is more than rescued by a trio of wonderfully ridiculous policemen, creating an almost Keystone Cops flavour about the pursuit. I adored Detective Winter, who gets drunk and eats fast food.

Selected quotes

• "And so, the old man returned home to find Death slumbering in his chair, having come for him at last. But, thought the old man, is Death not merely another foe? A foe both weary and alone?" (Prologue; first lines)
• "'To be fair, the physique is a little different to yours,' Winter interjected, evidently still a little tipsy. 'You're a bit softer around the ... everything'." (Ch 5)
• "Winter removed his notebook and took a seat on the floor beside him, gazing up at the stained coffee tiles: 'How did anyone manage to spill coffee up there?' he asked. 'Boss threw it at someone he didn't like'. 'Who?' 'Me'." (Ch 9)
• "'It regards Henry's ... sexual orientation''Rita looked blank-er. 'What? Like which way up he did it?'" (Ch 17)
• "The Wet Dog would have been a more apt name for the dank little establishment on the banks of the canal, the musk originating from damp shoes, complemented by stale beer and the resident Doberman by the fireplace." (Ch 17)
• "People are shallow, simple creatures, and beauty no more than a tool to exploit that fundamental flaw - to fit in with a specific group, to project a deceptive impression of oneself, to attract a viable mate." (Ch 24)

Absurd and not in the least realistic ... but frequently hilarious and three of the most original detectives I think I have ever read. March 2022; 346 pages

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

"George Eliot: A Life" by Rosemary Ashton

An interesting and comprehensive biography of one of the great English novelists of the Victorian era. She wrote, among other things, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, the last often regarded as the greatest novel by an English writer. Her forte was the realistic depiction of ordinary people.

Marian Evans probably used a pen-name because of the scandal of her private life: she lived in unmarried bliss with George Henry Lewes, himself married to a woman and supporting a number of children fathered by the lover of that lady. In those (even more sexist) days, whilst Lewes as a man could enter society, Evans would have been shunned. It was not until the phenomenal of her first novel, Adam Bede, that she allowed her true identity to become known.

It was particularly interesting in explaining her religious views: she was extremely religious in her young days before becoming agnostic. We would probably describe her as humanist today.

She believed in show don't tell. She had “a view of fiction which takes it for granted that literature should have a morally beneficial effect, be utile as well as dulce, but which requires that the message be subservient to the medium.” (Ch 6) In her words: “We don’t want a man with a wand, going about the gallery and haranguing us. Art is art and tells its own story.” (Ch 6) 

Furthermore, she objected to poetic justice on moral grounds. If we have the knowledge or the expectation of reward for being good, or for doing our duty, she argued, than we are doing good from self-interested motives.On the other hand, “though the plots in her novels are complex and open to different possibilities, the endings are, like any other writer’s, single.” (Ch 6) “Either Maggie lives or she dies. ,,, It is difficult for the author to avoid seeming to reward of punish characters by choosing a particular ending for them. It was a dilemma faced by all nineteenth-century novelists (many twentieth-century novels get found it by ending in flux, as it were).” (Ch 6)

She liked eg Goethe precisely because he was tolerant of human weakness and showed his characters with both bad traits and good. “In novels by writers such as Goethe ... good and evil are not so easy to distinguish as in much fiction. ... Not that Goethe does not preach ... He does, but he lets his characters be, airing his principles generally... George Eliot’s would be a different way. For her the organic unity of purpose and practice was important. ... Her belief in a kind of determinism by which character carries its own consequences, or Nemesis, leads her in effect often to punish such characters by withholding happiness from them while seeing and sympathizing with the mitigating circumstances of their cases.” (Ch 6)

She was politically conservative (despite her radicalism in morality): “She accepted the slow pace of psychological and social change, understanding and even cherishing her characters’ clinging to traditional beliefs and customs in the face of sometimes rapid political and industrial progress. ... though her conservatism was, of course, in tension with her personal history of rebellion against convention in the matter of religious belief and her defiance - albeit reluctant - of society’s expectations about ... the relations between men and women.” (Ch 6)

Selected quotes:

• “Her protagonists struggle against limiting social conditions, the stifling effect of the practical rule that ‘sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them’.” (Introduction)
• “All her novels ... trace the fate of individuals caught up in a process of change, sometimes momentous change, which finds them in some way out of step with their immediate surroundings.” (Introduction)
• “All ages ... embrace change. Discoveries are made, inventions patented, laws passed. Wars change boundaries, travel opens up trade routes ...” (Introduction)
• “A man (or woman) who breaks the code of, say, monogamy, may be conformist in other ways, such as voting and church-going.” (Introduction)
• “Her religious views required her to distrust imaginative literature, particularly fiction, as frivolous and even dangerous, being a form of lying.” (Ch 1)
• “I think him wrong, as every man must be in working out in detail an idea which has general truth, but is only one element in a perfect theory, not a perfect theory in itself.” (letter of George Eliot, March 1846) (Ch 2)
• “While science teaches us that we are profoundly ignorant of causes and realities it becomes us not to dogmatise upon what we cannot know.” (Ch 3)
• “In such novels the heroine is typically an heiress with a lord, a clergyman, and a poet vying for her love. She is a paragon ... ‘the ideal woman in feelings, faculties, and flounces’, she nevertheless marries the wrong man, but he soon dies, requesting his wife to marry the man she loves” (Ch 6) 
• “It is quite reasonable to suppose that a simple beauty might be self-centred and uncaring of others.” (Ch 8)
• “Greek tragedy inspired the symbolic, tragic structure of the novel, its ironic twists of plot, its compelling use of coincidence” (Ch 9)
• “Marian even knelt to be blessed by the Pope, remembering ... ‘what Pius VII said to the soldier - that he would never be the worse for the blessing of an old man’.” (Ch 9)
• “There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.” (Ch 11)
• “Inevitably the honeymoon put strains on two people who had comfortably filled the roles of aunt and nephew to one another, of genius and admirer, of teacher and pupil. ... He jumped from their hotel room into the Grand Canal.” (Ch 14)

This biography is worthy and very comprehensive, although for an interaction with the novels themselves, I preferred The Road to Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead.

March 2022; 382 pages

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