"Harriet Said" by Beryl Bainbridge

 A loss of innocence story. The thirteen year old narrator and her fourteen year old best friend, the manipulative Harriet, are newly pubescent and full of hormones and ignorance, doing whatever they can to meet men. In particular, the narrator targets an old married man.

The story is set in Formby, a coastal town, in the aftermath of the second world war. It's the summer holidays and beautiful weather. The weather, the landscape, the growing of fruit, and a funfair are all used to describe sex without describing sex; it is a masterclass in innuendo:

• "I stared at the poppies by the fence, the stiff hairy stems that wavered when the flowers burst. In bud they stood fierce and firm; once wanton in the sun they flowered and grew weak." (Ch 6)
• "Never again ... to sit in the garden peacefully waiting for the apples to ripen and summer to bloom." (Ch 6)
• "The stuffy green of the tomato plants, the bursting splitting red of the fruit" (Ch 6)
• "Small gusts of wind eddied down the field; the air was filled wit sharp intakes of breath; children and girls screamed uniformly, clinging to the striped poles of roundabouts, spinning round and round on painted horses." (Ch 7)
• "He went on all fours up the face of the dune, his hands reaching out to grasp wildly at the tufts of grass that grew in the sand ... the mouth of the world opened and the rough tongue of the sea licked the shore and tried to suck us down into the depths." (Ch 14

Other selected quotes:

• "'Never remember', he bade me. 'It's too boring'." (Ch 3)
• "You see it in the summer always when men open their shirts, and they're grey underneath." (Ch 5)
• "We both tried very hard to give our parents love, and security, but they were too demanding." (Ch 5)
• "I tried to think what innocence meant and failed." (Ch 6)
• "Adolescent tremblings, swerves of nerves gone gold. The pain of the moment, the awful uncontrolled joy; that was innocence." (Ch 6)
• "Orange girls and soldier boys pairing off slowly to drift to the far end of the field and struggle under the hedges filled with blackberries." (Ch 7)
• "Smearing mouths together in the rain." (Ch 7)
• "The scene on the couch had shown the unimaginable to be pitiful; a function as empty of dignity and significance as brushing one's teeth." (Ch 9)

A beautifully written book. It is like an impressionist painting. No form is ever clearly delineated, nothing is ever fully explained, so that you get the feeling of the atmosphere, and the mystery adds to the experience. Even the narrator is unnamed. The story is carried by the descriptions of tangential details, a bit like seeing things out of the corner of your eyes, which parallels the narrator who never quite understands what is happening. 

May 2022; 152 pages

Beryl Bainbridge is author of a number of novels, those reviewed in this blog have links.

• A Weekend with Claude (1967)
• Another Part of the Wood (1968, revised 1979)
• Harriet Said... (1972)
• The Dressmaker (1973) – shortlisted for Booker Prize
• The Bottle Factory Outing (1974) – shortlisted for Booker Prize, won the Guardian Fiction Prize
• Sweet William (1975)
• A Quiet Life (1976)
• Injury Time (1977) - winner, Whitbread Prize
• Young Adolf (1978)
• Another Part of the Wood (revised edn) (1979)
• Winter Garden (1980)
• Watson's Apology (1984)
• Filthy Lucre (1986)
• An Awfully Big Adventure (1989) – shortlisted for Booker Prize
• The Birthday Boys (1991)
• Every Man for Himself (1996) – shortlisted for Booker Prize, winner of the Whitbread Prize
• Master Georgie (1998) – shortlisted for Booker Prize
• According to Queeney (2001)
• The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress (2011)

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

"Angels of Destruction" by Keith Donohue

In the middle of a bitterly cold winter, beautifully described, a nine-year-old girl appears to a widow. Is the girl really the old lady's grand-daughter, or is she a  runaway, a con artist or a lunatic, or is she actually an angel? And how will her arrival change what happened ten years ago, when the widow's daughter ran away with a boyfriend to join a terrorist group called the Angels of Destruction? 

There are parallels are motifs running through this clever story. It flits around the margins of otherworldiness, so you never see the monsters full on (when they can start looking silly), and there are always questions left in your mind.

The book is told in three parts, the middle taking us back ten years, with a present-day epilogue, in the past tense, from a multi-character PoV.

 Selected quotes:

• "Winter blew right through her." (1.1)
• "The wind blew against his face and through his hair, for the stranger carried winter in his coattails." (1.5)
• "The few other shoppers ... shuffled in a daze from bin to bin, and Margaret read in every face some suffering or disappointment, their hopes and dreams marked down, 40 percent off." (1.9)
• "The lonesome, like the mad, know one another on sight." (1.10)
• "The depth of his emptiness scared her." (1. 29)
• "She saw his unabashed hope, his bright smile. A smile that said the world will one day crush such a boy, but not today." (1.30)
• "We live more in our bodies than they do. Boys give them up as young men, discarding the body to live inside their minds. But girls and their bodies become women and live in the same skin." (2.4)
• "Game of life, indeed. It is no game, let me tell you, but a jigsaw that you can never finish. Always a couple of pieces missing, or one that fits in nowhere, and the cover to the box is gone, so you've no picture to offer a clue as to what it's supposed to look like." (2.14)
• "Kids may not know a lot about life - but don't say the young don't know about love. It's the only thing they do know." (2.18)
• "An order of bullets stood in the French fry holsters." (3.11)
• "You sit in a spot and don't realize that everything you left is changing too, and you think that maybe someday you'll get the chance, but then it's too late." (3.13)
• "All of us seek forgiveness." (3.15)

Also by Keith Donohue and reviewed in this blog:

• The Stolen Child

May 2022; 347 pages

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

I had to look up Ecclesiastes chapter 7 verse 4, which is referenced in part two of the book, so I thought I would help the reader. It says: "The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure." (New International Version).

"Full Moon" by P G Wodehouse

 Another Blandings story: more young lovers and old fools (one might almost think he drew his inspiration from the Commedia dell'Arte), more indomitable aunts and, of course, more imposters. The plot, with its twists and highly improbable turns, is that of a classic farce. The silliness is rescued by its very over-the-top unlikelihood and by the sheer beauty of the comedic writing.

Selected quotes:

• "He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat." (1.1)
• "A slow, pleasant voice, like clotted cream made audible." (1.3)
• "Lord Emsworth ... always took a little time to collect his hands and feet when about to potter from a given spot." (8.2)
• "the Aunt, the whole Aunt, and nothing but the Aunt." (9.1)

Other P G Wodehouse books reviewed on this blog may be found here.

May 2022; 261 pages

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

"The Commedia dell'Arte" by Giacomo Oreglia

A classic book about the influential renaissance drama form, although sometimes strange in form: there are a lot of lists of characteristics and some verbatim quotes from dramas. Nevertheless, as an introduction to a hugely important part of the history of drama, this book is a valuable introduction.

I knew, vaguely, that Cd'A was linked to pantomime and to Punch & Judy but there are echoes of Cd'A in both Shakespeare (one given scenario seems to echo aspects of the Tempest, Falstaff echoes the Captain, Polonius and Gratiano echo the Doctor, sometimes called Doctor Graziano, Shylock is a type of Pantalone) and Moliere: “Moliere himself modelled his acting on the great Scaramouche and felt the lash of the French critics precisely because his stage technique was foreign. Moliere’s early plays were adaptations of Commedia plays.” (from the Introduction by Evert Sprinchorn) The plot of Don Juan also seems to have been developed by Cd'A.

The most interesting part of the book, for me, was the descriptions of the character traits. The biggest disappointment was the sketchy treatment of Scaramouche and the near invisibility of Columbine; both these characters seem to have been late inventions but I was expecting more about them.  Nor did I learn why Bergamo seemed to be of such crucial importance: so many of the early characters appear to have originated there.

Despite its imperfections, it was an important and easy-to-read introduction to Harlequin and his colleagues.

Selected quotes:

• “What the film, the comic strip, the TV situation comedy, and burlesque (in the American sense) have been to the twentieth century, the Commedia dell’Arte was to the Renaissance - entertainment for both high-brow and low-brow, comprising tried and tested situations endlessly varied, always undemanding intellectually, often raunchy and vulgar, and, at its best, vigorous and spirited as only popular art can be.” (from the Introduction by Evert Sprinchorn)
• “Each troupe consisted of a constellation of characters who remained the same regardless of the plot they found themselves embroiled in. Think of the Marx Brothers.” (from the Introduction by Evert Sprinchorn)
• “The plots given in the scenarios may be comic, tragi-comic and occasionally comic-pastoral. They are developed by the use of the most varied devices: disguises, identifications, misunderstandings, kidnappings, shipwrecks, spells and magic. The central theme is always the love of young people, the jealousies and rivalries of the old ones and the intrigues of the zanni”  (Ch 3)
• “When you tell lies, tell big ones. Lies, steaks and meat balls must be big or not at all.” (Ch 5)
• “In the shops of the great even smoke is sold by weight” (Ch 5)
• “On a heavily made up old woman. Madam, your house does not need painting, it needs pointing.” (Ch 5)
• “On one who says there is no dishonour in his family. It must be that his house is not a very old one.” (Ch 5)
• “To one who tells you to go to the devil. Sir, I do not go to places where there are no return tickets.” (Ch 5)
• “This night is as long, as cold and as obscure as a composition by a bad poet.” (Ch 5)

May 2022; 147 pages

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

"Demons are forever" by Morton R Leader

A book about four lads and three ladettes set in the pubs of Northampton. 

The men are as shallow as they come, motivated principally by the chance of having sex. The girls are little deeper. As the relationships develop, we begin to understand more. Of the girls: Jill has a gambling problem, Jo is scarred by the unsolved murder of her twin, and Kaz has been having an affair with a married man she works with. The boys also have issues: Paul is terrified that if he loses control he might be violent, Ian is a control freak, and Oliver is into women's underwear and rather fancies his girlfriend's young daughter while at the same time being furiously horrified at the thought of 'kiddy fiddlers'.

It is a portrait of a section of society whose life revolves around birds and booze. I was reminded of, for example, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe; there are too few books nowadays that deal with this version of real life. It is a brave endeavour, because the thoughts of the characters would not at all be acceptable to more politically-correct readers: "he smiled thinking they could be out one night and he would know what Ian’s skinny bint had on under her jeans, that amused him." (Ch 12). Stuff like this can be challenging to read, but I knew characters such as these when, in my youth and before the time of the story, I drank in the pubs in Northampton. appreciated the author's raw honesty.

If the context of drinking beer in the midlands reminded me of Sillitoe, the stream-of-consciousness approach to the prose reminded me of Ulysses by James Joyce (with Dublin becoming Northampton). The author simulates the often-incoherent nature of though with sentences and paragraphs where the end has little relation to the start. To give a not-atypical example: "Oliver decided to have a shower after he had been to the toilet, better warn Billing he thought as he double flushed the toilet, laughing at the local joke. As he washed his body he thought of Jill downstairs, what was she buying?  She had a cracking body, he rethought should he have offered to get some for Cassy. This thought made him start to get erect, what was he doing? Downstairs was the fittest bird he had ever been with and here he was cracking one out in her shower. Too late he came before the guilt had kicked in, never mind they never had sex on a Wednesday anyway, he convinced himself." In a single paragraph we move from excretion to cleansing to masturbation whilst tangentially touching on Jill (who is downstairs gambling with Olver's money) and Cassy (Jill's daughter, whom Oliver fancies). Another example in which only a single sentence is used, is: "The balls on this guy, she couldn’t believe it, I mean she obviously missed him, they had been seeing each other for years but the cheek of him, one Sunday not at his beck and call and he sulked off, in all fairness that wasn’t like him, he was usually charming, wait what was she thinking, stop sticking up for him." 

I think this was an interesting attempt to reconstruct the thought processes of the characters and the author's use of the vernacular was faultless. But Joyce concentrated on only three main characters in a much longer book and even Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, in which the inner dialogues play a sort of tag, hopping from one head into another, has only a very few principals. This author attempted to get inside the thoughts of seven characters; I'm not sure this was wholly successful.

It was also interesting that, although we effectively resolved one storyline, rather brutally, and mostly sorted out what was happening between Oliver and Jill, the Ian-Kaz story was left wide open. 

Selected quotes:

• "you knew you were getting old when your gusset was now bigger than your knickers used to be!" (Ch 2)
• "The car was way too big for her driving talent, so she struggled to park" (Ch 2)

May 2022

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

"Travelling in a Strange Land" by David Park

 This was wonderful. A father travels from Northern Ireland and drives across a snow-bound Scotland and Northern England to pick up his son, ill and stranded, for Christmas. On the way, the father must navigate the painful memories surrounding his other son. The story is heart-wrenching and, told drip by drip, it keeps you guessing, and hoping, and dreading, and praying, until the end. And there are passages of description, fresh and original and deadly with their pinpoint accuracy, that are among the best that I have ever read. (He is particularly up-to-date in his references to modern technology such as drones and satnav.)

Selected quotes (page references from the Bloomsbury paperback edition 2018)

• "I look behind me but hear only the wind as it seethes through the trees, smoking spindrift and making the whole world shiver." (2)
• "the skittering night tracks of some creature in a confused pursuit of food." (3) Predictive pathetic fallacy.
• "When I open the car door, the lock grinds in a semi-frozen complaint." (4)
• "There have been days recently when I've thought I'm not much more than some little pinhole hoping for the world's image to finally form into permanence." (5)
• "She's wearing it over her pyjamas and the pink bottoms froth over the top of her boots." (7) Froth!
• "All the normal sounds of student life collapsed into silence as if the falls of snow have smothered them and in their place only the building's assertion of ownership, with its inexplicable stretches and strains, of the snow pressing down on the roof. Pressing down like the cold weight of loneliness." (17)
• "A son so full of shit that it leaches to the surface of his skin and finds expression in pitted blemishes like some piece of bruised fruit." (38) Anger, and love, and breadcrumbs within the most incredible image.
• "I've started to wonder if there's always a truth that is given to us so we never discover other, more inconvenient ones." (38)
• "Washed up in the wake of our history your story doesn't even belong to you any more - someone else can claim ownership of it, make it part of theirs." (39)
• "a particular shape of tree that looks like it's wearing a wind-shivered wedding dress." (40) Wow!
• "It's one of the paradoxes of parenting that most of the time things work best when space is offered." (41)
• "There are things I haven't told her and which I think I can't without risking everything I want and need." (57)
• "The women swarm together in a tight phalanx of smiles" (59)
• "Most of the weddings I get to see ... seem steeped in some sugary concoction of candyfloss and tinsel and look as if they might combust at the first spark of reality." (59)
• "A theme park with a tourist shop and fifty-seven varieties of shortbread and kilted kitsch." (60)
• "Things are more complicated than choosing between what I think is right and what I don't know is wrong." (60)
• "He takes just long enough to answer his phone to allow me to torture myself with a flail of dark imaginings" (82) !!!!
• "Mary becomes the heroine, the holy object of veneration, and Joseph fades into the shadows forever." (102)
• "She never ran out of patience and you can't ask more than that from a teacher." (110)
• "the feel of an A&E department with its plastic chairs, bruised surfaces with a preponderance of black scuff marks from trainers, and posters that exhort us to report various crimes such as domestic abuse and remind us of a range of civic responsibilities." (114)
• "a mirrored couple who are equally badly overweight and wearing matching grey tracksuits where even the stains seem synchronised." (115)
• "the city itself is a palimpsest." (136)
• "all of us are frightened because as we stand at the graveside we encounter full face the shuddering dominion of death." (149)
• "Young men and women sleeping in the city's crevices." (161)
• "I press delete and let him go." (162)

Probably the best book I have read this year.

May 2022; 165 pages

Other books by Irish authors reviewed in this blog can be found here.

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

"The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" by Anne Bronte

The following review incorporates comments from my Eastbourne Central U3A group.

This story, written in early Victorian times, is about a woman trapped in a marriage to an alcoholic and womaniser and the 'nice boy' who wants to marry her not knowing she is already married: these are the days before easy divorce and before the Married Women's Property Act so that all the wife's property, including her son, are deemed to be the property of the man. The book stirred up controversy in its time for its no-holds-barred (for its time) portrayal of dissolute wickedness. The husband of the heroine indulges in verbal and physical abuse of his wife, he offers her sexual services to his friends, he indulges in coercive control; for her the final straw comes when he encourages their son to sweat and rink alcohol. Unlike the high Gothic extravaganza of Wuthering Heights and the ultra-romantic Jane Eyre of Anne's sisters, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, this book's realism and lack of sensationalism has led to it being overlooked. To modern sensibilities its narrative pretences, its length, and its moralising make it a sometimes difficult read. Nevertheless, there is plenty to enjoy.

Anne Bronte chose a story-within-a-story format for TWH. The frame narrative purports to be a letter written by Gilbert Markham to ‘Halford’, inside the frame are journal entries by Helen Huntingdon. But neither works properly: both letters and diary entries are long and too well conceived; there are neither digressions nor irrelevant details as there would be in genuine letters and journals. And the diary entries are so selective; huge periods being missing (including her marriage and the conception and birth of little Arthur!)

Pre-Victorian novelists commonly used letters and diary entries, though the fashion had been for more straightforward narratives for many years prior to TWH. The big advantage of these formats is that the narrator (and therefore the reader) does not know what is going to happen next. This maintains suspense (theoretically the narrator could even die, which is not possible with a traditional past-tense narrative). But Markham’s letters are clearly written some time after the events in question, so this advantage is thrown away in the case of the frame narrative.

The other advantage to the author in this structure is that she is able to use two different narrators, and to some extent this works although the ‘voices’ of the narrators don’t seem particularly different. AB should be able to show Gilbert learning to become less impetuous ... but he doesn’t; his character at the end of his reckless rush to the wedding at the end of the book is much the same as it has been throughout the book. Helen, on the other hand, does change from a headstrong and impulsive girl (while she is being courted) to a rather censorious and scripture-quoting wife who is so obsessed with conforming to social canons of respectable behaviour that she won’t even unbend enough to propose to Gilbert at the end (she will only drop some rather coded hints).

Despite the story-in-a-story structure, the fundamentals of the pacing conform to the classic four-part plot with major turning points at the quarter-marks:

• The 25% mark just follows Gilbert’s attack on Lawrence and just precedes the start of Helen’s diary.
• The 50% mark is when Helen realises that her marriage is a bad one
• The 75% mark is when Arthur reads Helen’s diary and demands from her the keys, effectively imprisoning her.
• Helen’s diary ends at the 80% mark.

The book seemed overlong to modern eyes. One of my fellow U3A members admitted wishing, during a prolonged death-bed scene, that 'he would just get it over with'. For me, the most artificially protracted part of the story for me was at the end with the narrator throwing endless obstacles into their own way of achieving marital happiness. 

The difference in expectations between women and men in upper class Victorian society is blatant in this novel. Most of the men are portrayed as impetuous, proud, and aggressive, many are also dissolute, hard-drinking and womanising. This has been described as what we would now call 'toxic masculinity'. The proffered ideal of womanhood is puritanical: the maintenance of one’s reputation is all-important. And it is respectability that seems to matter. Helen must have known that her husband was womanising when he was away from home; it was only when the affair was taking place under her nose that she gets upset.

There were times when the Bible quotes meant the ‘novel’ was more like a tract. It was suggested in the group that this reflected Victorian sensibility but it was written in 1848, only 11 years after Victoria's accession, and is mostly set in the 1820s so it is actually late-Georgian. In some ways it therefore reflects the change from the dissolution of Regency bucks to the later Victorian primness. Or is this telling us that the days of moral respectability began earlier than the name 'Victorian' suggests? The rise of Methodism was in the mid-1700s. Our group considered suggestions that the fundamental theology was  post-Calvinistic and this would have been connected with Methodism, furthermore the naming of the villain 'Huntingdon' might be linked to the Countess of Huntingdon, an important Calvinistic Methodist of the mid-1700s. Wesley condemned alcohol abuse in 1743 but the Temperance movement in the UK didn't really get started till 1829. The Band of Hope, which made its members swear to total abstinence and attempted to educate children away from drinking alcohol (what would they have made of Helen putting poison into little Arthur's wine as a form of aversion therapy?) was founded in 1847, so TWH caught the zeitgeist there!

Although Christian doctrine always has to have the last word, AB did include other points of view:

• “You choose rather to leave us miserable, and you coolly tell me it is the will of God that we should remain so. You may call this religion, but I call it wild fanaticism.” (Ch 37) Said by a frustrated Mr Hargrave
• “To regret the exchange of earthly pleasures for the joys of Heaven, is as if the grovelling caterpillar should lament that it must one day quit the nibbled leaf to soar aloft and flutter through the air, roving at will from flower to flower, sipping sweet honey from their cups of basking on their sunny petals. If those little creatures knew how great a change awaited them, no doubt they would regret it.” (Ch 45) Said by Helen Huntingdon
• “It’s an act of Christian charity, whereby you hope to gain a higher seat in Heaven for yourself, and scoop a deeper pit in Hell for me.” (Ch 47) Spoken by a magnificently bitter Arthur Huntingdon

Was it the first feminist novel? The debate ranged around what was meant by 'feminist'. It was decided that a book narrated by a woman but written by a man couldn't count. It was proposed that if a book with a strong female protagonist was 'feminist' this would include the novels of Jane Austen and these romantic comedies, no matter how well written, didn't seem very 'feminist'. But it was thought probably, given the large numbers of female novelists at work pre- and post-Austen, that there must be earlier feminist novels. 'Mary: A fiction' by Mary Wollstonecraft  was proposed but the only person in the group who had read it couldn't remember the details so we couldn't decide.

This topic was also debated in a BBC In Our Time programme broadcast in 2021 in which  it was agreed that is embodied the feminist concerns of the day but it might not be the first.

Certainly TWH seemed to be pushing a feminist agenda, although in her Preface to the Second Edition, AB states: “I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read.”

Despite atrocious reviews, which criticised the novel's 'coarseness' and said it was unfit to be read by ladies and girls, the first edition was sold out in six weeks.

Selected Quotes:

• “She was barely civil to them, and evidently better pleased to say ‘goodbye’ than ‘how do you do’.” (Ch 1)
• “When a lady does consent to listen to an argument against her own opinions, she is always predetermined to withstand it - to listen only with her bodily ears, keeping the mental organs resolutely closed against the strongest reasoning.” (Ch 3) And not only ladies!
• “If abstinence be an evil ... no one will deny that excess is a greater.” (Ch4) Compare this with the view of Dickens, reported as "The widespread assertion that drunkenness was the cause of many evils rather than a result of already existing ones angered him, as if eradicating a symptom in any way dealt with the disease." in the biography by Fred Kaplan
• “I was wearied to death with small-talk - nothing wears me out like that. I cannot imagine how they can go on as they do.” (Ch 9)
• “I almost wish I were not a painter ... instead of delivering myself up to the full enjoyment of them [the effects of nature], I am always troubling my head about how I can produce the same effect upon canvas.” (Ch 9) It's a common trope. But in my experience, dissecting and critiquing a novel, even just reviewing it with more than 'I liked it' or 'I hated it', invariably leads one to a deeper appreciation of the book. Once I had learned a little about how jazz is structured, I enjoyed it more. So I disagree with the sentiment.
• “A light wind swept over the corn; and all nature laughed in the sunshine.” (Ch 15)
• “Beauty is that quality which, next to money, is generally the most attractive to the worst kinds of men, and, therefore, it is liked [sic] to entail a great deal of trouble on the possessor.” (Ch 16)
• “By the bright azure of the sky, and by the warm and brilliant lights, and deep, long shadows, I had endeavoured to convey the idea of a sunny morning.” (Ch 18)
• “Spring just opening into summer - morning just approaching noon - girlhood just ripening into womanhood - and hope just verging on fruition.” (Ch 18) Lots of pathetic fallacy here!
• “The media-via, ni-jamais-ni-toujours plan - not to kill himself like a fool and not to abstain like a ninny - in a word, to enjoy himself like a rational creature.” (Ch 22)

Something I learned: A ‘clod-hopper’ was originally one who walked across a ploughed field.

May 2022; 383 pages

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

"The Hell-Fire Clubs" by Evelyn Lord

 If, like me, you thought that the Hell-Fire club was a group of dissolute noblemen having satanic orgies in caves below West Wycombe in the middle of the eighteenth century, this brilliant history will open your eyes to the whole gamut of groups of young men (and occasionally women) who met together to drink, have fun, fornicate and, sometimes, be violent. The Damned Crew and the Mohocks were hooligans who terrorised London streets. The Ballers "danced naked with prostitutes" (Ch 1). The Beefsteaks ... ate steak. The Demoniacs told one another rude stories. And the Beggar's Benison, whose initiation rite involved masturbation, read pornographic books. 

This is a fascinating account of bad behaviour during the Enlightenment. Some very respectable men used their positions of wealth and privilege to enjoy themselves ("By day the club members might be courtiers, Members of Parliament and respectable members of the community. By night they broke social rules to experience forbidden pleasure.”;Introduction), no matter what the consequences were for the rest of society. And they got away with it. This is a story which resonated to our own times.

And some of the characters (Earl of Rochester, Duke of Wharton, Sir Francis Dashwood etc) were spectacularly wicked.

It even includes the perplexing mystery of how a club of roues in East Fife could read a book that wasn't published for another ten years ...

Selected quotes:

• “The Enlightenment ... was also an age when pleasure was seen as a right for everyone.” (Introduction)
• “The Enlightenment was also the Age of Experience, and the hell-fire clubs ... were out to grab experience by the neck" (Introduction)
• “The Damned Crew ... would meet together on nights, and vow amongst themselves to kill the next man they met whosoever.” (Ch 1)
• “He and his companions provoked a riot by standing naked on the balcony of the aptly named Cock Tavern in Bow Street, throwing bottles, into which they had pissed, on to the crowd below.” (Ch 1)
• “They acted in an anti-social way because in restored England they knew they could, and they knew from personal experience that social and religious certainties could be swept away.” (Ch 1)
• “Many liberties were spurred on by the belief that death truly was the end.” (Ch 1)
• “The members of reformation societies believed sin to be the result of a struggle between God and the Devil that the Devil had won ... The societies had no qualms about private vice as long as it did not impinge on the lives of others.” (Ch 1)
• “A gang of young gentlemen made random attacks on passers-by, beat up the watch and insulted the constables. Good men feared to go out at night, but neither were they safe behind locked doors as the Mohocks smashed windows, pulled door-bells and assaulted the servants who answered them.” (Ch 2)
• “a low room that's stunk like a drunkard's morning breath.” (Ch 3)
• “British writers on the continent show that they were likely to seek out their countrymen wherever they went, whereas Continental visitors to Britain interacted freely with the native population and joined in social events, soaking up the culture of the coffee-house and the tavern.” (Ch 4)
• “Soaping your own beard could be a euphemism for masturbation.” (Ch 5)
• “David Hume ... believed that society must channel human nature into constructive directions through laws and customs.” (Ch 8)
• “it was recognised by the authorities that the tavern was the place where a workman could go to sit in the warmth with his fellows after a hard day’s labour, a place where the merchant could meet his peers and discuss business, and where gentlemen could gather over a bowl of wine and discuss the affairs of the day.” (Ch 9)

May 2022; 214 pages

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

Also read The Secret History of the Hell-Fire Clubs by Geoffrey Ashe

"Angels" by Peter Stanford

Stanford traces the origins of our modern idea of angels, from their origin in Zoroastrian and Egyptian religion, through their developments in the Old Testament and, subsequently, in Christian and Moslem thought, and later through the Kabbalah, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Despite the thoroughness of the survey, my interest hardly ever waned, and the book ended up strewn with marker-stickers. A fascinating study of a bizarre aspect of mainstream religious thought.

Selected quotes:

“My mother had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis just before she found she was pregnant with me. By the time I could walk, she couldn't.” (Prelude)
“Both Homer and Hesiod also refer to daimons, lesser deities, somewhere between humans and the gods, who act as benign guiding spirits, and sometimes have wings or winged sandals, though often they cannot be seen at all.” (Ch 1)
“one of the things that united them [the sages of the Axial Age] was impatience with the doctrinal codes, rules, prescriptions and carefully plotted hierarchies that we nowadays tend to associate with organised religion.” (Ch 1) 
“The bodhisattvas of Buddhism , guides to meaningful spiritual life, mythical, awesome in power, radiance and wisdom, but simultaneously as ordinary as your next-door neighbour.” (Ch 1)
“Later, what were purported to be relics of the Archangel Michael ... became popular. Since officially angels did not have tangible bodies, it was in purely theological terms a strange outbreak of piety.” (Ch 7)

May 2022; 305 pages

Also by Peter Stanford and recommended by this blog:

• Judas

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

"The Saboteur" by Simon Conway

 A shoot-em-up video game of a book, The Saboteur gets its excitement from the number of characters killed and its verisimilitude from its precise descriptions of military hardware, ranks and tactics. Most of the minor characters are given potted biographies to serve as justification for their highly-simplistic motivations. There were too many characters for me to be certain I knew which was which; frankly, I didn't care. Few of them were any more than one-dimensional.

It was a little like a superhero film. The protagonist, Jude, was too wonderful to be believable. If he didn't have actual superpowers, he had extraordinary abilities. "He runs through a training sequence in Pencah Silat, the ancient martial art that he studied as a young man in the Indonesian archipelago" (Ch 12). Of course he does. It's a typical cliche from the genre. 

It is possible that highly trained commandos may have many of his strengths; the author has been in the army and may know people such as Jude. You might even argue that the world needs men such as Jude who never panics and who can act rationally and lethally in the face of great personal danger, despite sustaining huge levels of accumulated physical and psychological damage. But such people don't make interesting and complex characters that I want to read about. They don't make heroes. Humans make heroes and this protagonist is an automaton. 

To double down, the antagonist is a classic supervillain from the same sort of film. He, too, is apparently undestroyable and utterly one-dimensional.

If the characters are cliched, so is the plot. The whole thing was utterly simplistic and predictable. 

It was a page-turner but only because I was desperate to get to the end so I could read something more interesting.

One sentence I didn't understand refers to the acting Prime Minister: "Given the calumny the country faces, can he really be said to be running anything?"  Calumny means 'false accusation'. Does the author mean 'calamity'?

Selected quotes:

• "Artillery fire so thick it froths the air." (Ch 1)
• "Every death is ludicrous, if you think about it." (Ch 15) No one, but no one cares deeply about any of the scores of deaths (usually of anonymous people) in this book. 
• "The three holders of the Great Offices of State: the Chancellor, the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary, a trio generally regarded as lacking the skills needed to cope with the complexities they face, bouncing from gimmick to cock-up in an unfocused panic about the consequences." (Ch 17) Of course the politicians are made to appear like self-important and corrupt buffoons: this author leaves no cliche unused.
• "She's tired of explaining that men do things because of money. Money and sex. It's time they worked it out for themselves." (Ch 19) Another cliche.
• "She had once told him that he would be her soul mate if only his soul was a different shape." (Ch 20)
• "The enemy of your enemy may also be your enemy." (Ch 57)

Boring.

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

"Britannia Obscura" by Joanne Parker

This book aims to 'map' hidden Britain in five categories: caves, megalithic monuments, canals, ley lines, and air routes. It's very eclectic and its approach to each chapter is very anecdotal but it works as a sort of charming whimsy.

Selected quotes:

• “There is a different map of Britain for every person who has ever lived in the country ... representations of lives lived - with beloved homes at their centres, elongated stretches of land where travel had been slow or difficult, and vast empty spaces where imagination faltered or trips ended.” (Introduction)
• “Maps often lie at the heart of group identities and loyalties.” (Introduction)
• “Helvellyn ... broke off from the West Highlands, floated down the west coast of Britain, and eventually crashed into Cumbria.” (Introduction)
• “It's not to everyone's taste. but it's remote, wild and challenging, with some incredible views and rewards ... somewhere where you can challenge your endurance, experience isolation, and feel what it's really like to be ten hours of hard exercise from the nearest phone reception.” (Ch 1)
• “Stone circles are, for many, portals into an alternative reality. ‘They create gateways ... they can be seen just as a church can be seen - as a doorway to the other’.” (Ch 2)
• “In the mid-nineteenth century, when bad traffic was at its height, the city [Birmingham] was veined like a Stilton with 160 miles of canal, and even today, with just two-thirds of those waterways still navigable, Birmingham has more canals than Venice.” (Ch 3)
• “Some ley hunters will tell you ... that the ley system is a means of transmitting thoughts - a ‘telepathic telephone service’.” (Ch 4)
• “Leys may be compared to the hidden knowledge of a secret tradition. Freely available to those in the know. Totally invisible to those who aren’t.” (Ch 4)
• “Some of your oldest friends will assume that somewhere down the ley line you have lost your marbles.” (Ch 4)
• “The majority of the energy lines on the dowser’s map of Britain are neither straight nor static. Some wind like snakes. Others vibrate to and fro like guitar strings.” (Ch 4)
• “One of those splendid Scottish mornings when the clear sky looks as if it has been freshly scoured.” (Ch 5)

May 2022; 157 pages

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

"The Promise" by Damon Galgut

Winner of the 2021 Booker Prize. For other winners of the Booker see here.

The Swarts are a white South African farming family, clinging on to their way of life through the political changes marking the end of apartheid and the birth of the new majority-rule  country. At the start of the book the mother of the family dies; on her deathbed she makes her husband promise to gift to the maidservant the house in which she (the servant) lives with her son. The refusal to honour this promise seems to act as a curse. 

The parallels with the decline of the nation are obvious. Swarts?

This beautifully written book is told through multiple interior monologues (though the thoughts are usually fairly well-formed and there seemed to be more tell than show; the author-in-character sometimes speaks directly to the reader), head-hopping in a 'PoV tag' sort of way that reminded me of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. 

Selected quotes:

The page numbers refer to the Chatto & Windus 2021 hardback edition.

• "Some of the other girls say Miss Starkey is a lesbian, but it's hard to imagine her doing anything sexy with anyone. Or maybe she did once and has been permanently disgusted ever since." (p 3)
• "Tannie Marina is always baking things and trying to feed them to people. Her sister Astrid says it's so she doesn't have to be fat alone." (p 5)
• "She is prone to paranoid fears like these, suspecting sometimes that her mind can be secretly read by people around her, or that life is an elaborate performance in which everybody else is acting and she alone is not." (p 24)
• "No need to dwell on the image of the old woman with her knickers around her ankles and her finger up her fundament, at such moments she feels very far from God. " (p 46)
• "You don't think about sex, you suffer it. A scratchy, hungry thing going on in the basement." (p 54)
• "It is not always possible to please two white people simultaneously." (p 66)
• "Survival isn't instructive, just demeaning." (p 94)
• "Oh, yes. When you've claimed a man's gun, you claim the man too. Law of the frontier. Oh, balls, Anton, who scripts these thoughts for you?" (p 145)
• "Not every chance is an opportunity. Sometimes a chance is just a waste of time." (p 157)
• "When white people fight, her mother declares without a scrap of rational evidence, it is always over property!" (p 252)
• "No love left, only kindness, which is maybe stronger. More durable, anyhow." (p 257)
• "Fornication rates all over the country rise dramatically on the night of Zuma's resignation." (p 271)
• "She has been harbouring a secret hope that her husband's life work might just turn out to be a masterpiece. Who knows, even better than Wilbur Smith. Imagine!" (p 279)
• "And when the storm finally passes, in the small hours, it leaves a dripping calmness behind it. Snails unfurl themselves in the undergrowth and push forth, little galleons on a dark green sea, trailing their little silver wakes. From the soil, musky pheromonal odours twine up like tendrils on the air." (p 291)

April 2022; 293 pages

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