"Uncertainty" by David Lindley

This is the best account of the history of the development of quantum physics that I have read. 

The story of how Heisenberg came up with his uncertainty principle, charting the demise of determinism in physics, from the prehistory of Brownian motion, through the first stirrings of radioactivity and quantum physics by Becquerel and Rutherford and Planck and Einstein, through the Bohr model of the atom to the alternative versions of quantum mechanics proposed by Heisenberg and Schrodinger. Having taught physics for 34 years, I was familiar with the concepts and much of this history but this book (written by an old house mate of mine from student days) is a hugely lucid account of how a remarkably small group of people constructed some revolutionary and philosophically difficult theories. It clearly shows their contributions and explores the human side of their interactions, as well as giving due credit to some of the other key players with whose names we are less familiar today, such as Eastbourne's own Frederick Soddy, de Broglie, Born and Bohm, Compton and Pauli and Sommerfield. It also shows what a ridiculous own goal Hitler scored when he expelled key 'non-Aryan' scientists, hugely impoverishing German science; an own goal the Brexiteers seem determined to want to repeat.

Selected quotes:

• "Dead particles of dust clearly couldn't move of their own volition, nor was any external influence pushing them around. Yet move they all too plainly did. ... Faced with this impossible dilemma, science took the prudent course and ignored Brownian motion for decades." (Ch 1) Brown's book about this is mentioned in Middlemarch!
• "Because he developed in Munich a lifelong habit of staying out late at bars and cafes, Pauli generally missed morning lectures." (Ch 6)
• "Heisenberg had ... depicted the electron's physical presence as a combination of things it might be doing, rather than some specific indication of where it was." (Ch 11)
• "In his crazed desire to promote Aryan culture and safeguard Germany from noxious foreign influences, Hitler succeeded in the space of just a few years in destroying Germany's preeminent position in physics." (Ch 14)
• "Schools of science, as of art or music, rarely stay for long in one place." (Ch 15)
• "Spengler's method is to lay out reams of detail and weighty quantities of obscure facts, and then, as the reader's head begins to nod, to leap adroitly to grand assertions about what it all must mean." (Ch 15) I have noticed a similar technique with writers in the earth-mysteries genre such as von Daniken: they 'leap adroitly to grand assertions about what it all means' having puzzled the reader with perplexing mysteries; I call this the 'wow-thus' argument. But it's not much different in philosophy; some philosophers spend 90% of their books using detailed and sometimes nit-picking scrutiny to demolish each system of their opponents undermining all of the reader's previous beliefs, until the reader is desperate for some sort of ground on which to stand, at which point they rush out their own, virtually unexamined, grand system. 
• "Uncertainty did not erupt capriciously in the mid-1920s. It had been welling up for a decade or more already by then, forcing itself upon the reluctant consciousness of scientists." (Ch 15)
• "In the rise of uncertainty in Germany ... there's an irreducible element of contingency ... In this respect scientific history is like history in general." (Ch 15)
• "For most philosophers, though, loosey-goosey won't do." (Ch 17)

This is the best account of the history of quantum physics I have read. It is one of the books on which Benjamin Labatut based his misleading collection of fictionalised biographies 'When we cease to understand the world'. Readers interested in this topic would be well advised to read Philip Ball's Beyond Weird which provides an update into the concepts which is as understandable as I have ever found a book about this difficult topic. 

Other books on Science and Scientists which are reviewed in this blog may be found on this page.

November 2022; 222 pages

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

"Enduring Love" by Ian McEwan

Shortlisted for the 1997 Whitbread Novel Award.

 A science journalist gets caught up in a tragic accident and comes to believe he is being stalked by one of the others involved. This has a destabilising effect on his rationalist understanding of the world and on his relationship, leading to violence and madness.

This is a typical McEwan novel: there is an inciting incident which leads to an avalanche of consequences. It is told in the past tense with a well-educated, upper-middle-class first person narrator; this lends a certain distance so it is not, perhaps, as absorbing as it might otherwise have been. Nevertheless, it is packed full of incident and, although everything that happens seems inevitable in retrospect, it is full of surprises which I think is the mark of a great narrative. There's a lot of suspense. Scenes are carefully described so that you know something momentous is about to happen, but not exactly what. There is also the question for a large part of the book whether the stalker is real or is imagined by the narrator as a consequence of the trauma stemming from the initial accident.

All of these things make for a very educated but very exciting novel.

McEwan at the top of his form.

Selected quotes:

• "All that sincerity would permit me were the facts, and they seemed miraculous enough to me: a beautiful woman loved and wanted to be loved by a large, clumsy, balding fellow who could hardly believe his luck." (Ch 1) This seemed appropriate to me and my wife; certainly when I read it out to her she thought it very funny. Later on we have this reprised: "how did such an oversized average-looking lump like myself land the pale beauty?" (Ch 12)
• "Co-operation - the basis of our earliest hunting successes, the force behind our evolving capacity for language, the glue of our social cohesion." (Ch 1)
• "He must be living inside a hard-on." (Ch 5)
• "He was the hero, and it was the weak who had sent him to his death. Or, we were the survivors and he was the miscalculating dolt." (Ch 6)
• "She was looking at me in a new way now and was moving through the conversation with the caution of a bomb disposal expert." (Ch 6)
• "I can spin a decent narrative out of the stumblings, back-trackings and random successes that lie behind most scientific breakthroughs." (Ch 8)
• "Even a trashy movie can make you cry." (Ch 12)
• "Adults when I was small ... seemed a grey crew to me, too fond of sitting down, too accustomed to have nothing to look forward to." (Ch 14)
• "Too much was made in  pop psychology, and too much expected, of talking things through. Conflicts, like living organisms, had a natural lifespan. The trick was to know when to let them die. At the wrong moment, words could act like so many fibrillating jolts." (Ch 17)
• "He still wore his moustache American frontier-style with the hairs, now whitened at the ends, curling over his upper lip, almost into his mouth. Was it flinty manhood women tasted, kissing a set-up like that, or yesterday's vindaloo?" (Ch 21)
• "It's a big deal when you point a gun at someone. Basically you're giving them permission to kill you." (Ch 22)

Ian McEwan's novels:

• The Cement Garden (1978)
• The Comfort of Strangers (1981)
• The Child in Time (1987)
• The Innocent (1990)
• Black Dogs (1992)
• Enduring Love (1997)
• Amsterdam (1998)
• Atonement (2001)
• Saturday (2005)
• On Chesil Beach (2007)
• Solar (2010)
• Sweet Tooth (2012)
• The Children Act (2014)
• Nutshell (2016)
• Machines Like Me (2019)
• The Cockroach (2019) (novella)
• Lessons (2022)

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

Rather appropriately, the next book I am about to read is written by an ex-physics researcher turned science journalist. I wonder if he feels the same way about his profession as McEwan's protagonist?

"The Dracula Secrets" by Neil R Storey

 This book is subtitled "Jack the Ripper and the darkest sources of Bram Stoker".

It's a strange mixture of biography of Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, from his early days at Trinity College Dublin to his long employment as the Actor Manager for Henry Irving and the London Lyceum Theatre. It touches on Stoker's friend, the author Hall Caine, who was hugely popular, rivalling Dickens, in late Victorian England and to whom Dracula is dedicated. It then details the career of quack American 'doctor' Francis Tumblety, who was a great friend (and possibly homosexual lover) of Hall Caine. Finally, we learn about the Whitechapel murders committed by Jack the Ripper.

The author's thesis is that Tumblety was the Ripper and that he confided in Hall Caine, this then becoming known by Stoker. The evidence for this is that Tumblety was suspected by the Met (but that he broke bail and fled to America) and that there were persistent rumours about Tumblety. This is supported by the fact that Hall Caine wrote a story in which an American confessed to a murder and the fact the the Special (Irish) Branch of Scotland Yard were interested in Tumblety who may have had associations with the Fenians, an Irish revolutionary group (some Scotland Yard detectives thought the Ripper crimes to be the work of a secret society). But a lot of the evidence is given as conjecture and insinuation:

• Tumblety "had a seeming mania for the company of young men" (Ch 9) so therefore he must have been homosexual. His feelings toward women was said to be violently denunciatory (Ch 10). 
• Bram Stoker died of a condition associated with syphilis and his wife (by whom he had only one son early in the marriage) didn't appear to suffer from the condition (Ch 10) which implies that he was homosexual. This is reinforced by the fact that Stoker's wife's only previous boyfriend had been Oscar Wilde (Ch 9)
• Tumblety sent telegrams from Piccadilly which was known to be a place where homosexual men picked up rent boys AND is a place where Jonathan Harker spots the Count in Dracula. (Ch 9)
• Tumblety was arrested in New York in June 1889 for soliciting young lads. (Ch 9)
• Two "imitation rings" were found in his effects after Tumblety died ... and two brass rings were taken from the body of Annie Chapman, a Ripper victim. (Ch 10)
• In Dracula, the count stores coffins in an address of Chicksands Street ... which is in Whitechapel (Ch 9)
• "Could this have been the voice of a murderer?" (Ch 9)
• "Could Caine's story have been influenced by an American doctor?" (Ch 9)
• "A man who had almost certainly been his homosexual lover" (Ch 9)
• "Is it possible that Caine and Tumblety could have met during the period of the Ripper crimes?" (Ch 9)

Some of the evidence contradicts itself, and this seems ignored by the author. For example, he quotes a letter from Chief Inspector Littlechild who headed Special Branch during the Ripper murders who says that Tumblety was a person of interest but "he was not known as a sadist (which the murderer unquestionably was)" (Ch 8) He quotes testimony at length from a man who claimed Tumblety had a collection of the pickled insides of women and later admits that the writer was "a perjurer and a fabricator of stories ... but ... her was not a pathological liar" (Ch 10). Another testimony claims that Tumblety recruited a young man as an amanuensis "as he personally was most illiterate" and later says that Tumblety sent many letters to this young man (Ch 9); he can't have been illiterate and a prolific letter-writer. 

To sum up, there is more rhetoric than evidence presented. 

• Nevertheless, there is a lot of fascinating information, especially for the ghoulish: 
• After Dante Gabriel Rossetti's model, muse and wife Elizabeth Siddal died he buried with her some love poems; he later regretted this and had her disinterred so he could publish them. His agent "conniver and blackmailer" Charles Augustus Howell oversaw the disinterment and, after Rosetti's own death, was found with his throat slit and a ten shilling coin in his mouth "a final payment for a slanderer". (Ch 9)
• Caine was a great friend of Rossetti and was with him at his death in Westcliff on Sea.
• Dracula was originally set in Styria in south-eastern Austria which was also where Le Fanu's Carmilla was set. (Ch 9)
• Stoker and his wife and son were the models for a cartoon by George du Maurier who wrote Trilby in 1894 which starred Svengali, the evil mesmerist. (Ch 9)
• In 1885 a Russian ship, the Dimitry, ran aground at Whitby; this was presumably the model for the 'Demeter from Valna' which carried Dracula to land (in the shape of a black dog) at Whitby. (Ch 9)
• Bram Stoker admired Christine Nilsson, a swedish operatic soprano; "it has been suggested Gaston Leroux based his character Christine Daae in Phantom of the Opera (1910) on her". (Ch 9)
• Pre-Vampire literature includes the German poem Lenore, about a horse ride with Death, and Irish legends of the Dearg-dul (red blood sucker) (Ch 1) not to mention the work of Sheridan Le Fanu (Ch 2)
• Stoker knew Oscar Wilde at Trinity College (Ch 2)

Much of interest, but the author fails to make his case.

November 2022; 252 pages

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

"Impress of the Seventh Surge" by Jessica Mae Stover

My sort of novel. It would be wrong to give a plot summary because a large part of the fun of the novel is working out what is going on; I got it about three-quarters of the way through and the triumph of enlightenment was more than worth the earlier puzzlement. 

I also thoroughly enjoyed the stream of consciousness style. Here's an early example:  "think of a place where you feel a sense of calm waving grass bumblebee pale breakfast sun violet bubble tent motionless focused calm calm pepper fountains focused calm breathed focused spitting fountains of pepper spray hazing horizontal smoke choking clinging red-capped waves maskless faces spreading white teeth white hands over steel barricades cheap hoodies patched body armor under pastel fresco canopy window glass under boots crunching hunting through marble halls lawn gallows hanging easy as fairground dunk tanks white dome through orange noose swaying live stream crowd crush air horn". What a wonderful paragraph! The 'sense of calm' is so swiftly replaced by threat and horror.

This makes it sound like hard work. But it is very short (it took me about an hour and a half to read the whole thing) and it gets a lot easier quite quickly. And you can feel the quality in the writing. This isn't just science fiction, this is fine literary fiction. 

Selected quotes:

• "Hey, Shan! Your inhaler came, but I’m going to keep it.⁠— —⁠What, why?⁠— —⁠Because you take my breath away.⁠—"
• "This is the way the world ends, delivery on demand."
• "Sound of chimes, descending. Abandons device on kitchen table. Black blank glass islanded by scrubbed wood. Gloves up, cuts up boxes, cardboard gaping, driveway dust puffing underfoot. Mows yard. Sun dipping. Anger sweating. Mallets one stake in ground, then another. Every hit echoing off hammered hills. Two poles, cables slant."
• "The sotto back-and-forth of birdie meeting strings, soft pings, counting score, pushing doom to margins, disappearing it into grass and blowing it away until it’s eaten by sunset."
• "You can try not to forget all the injustices, the ones we’re going to be powerless to stop, I’m sure a lot of people will try to remember, but memory’s written on the wind: it fades."
• "Lungs fused to ribs like a steak well done."

A great read: high-quality literary fiction.

November 2022

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

The Greatest Gift" by Philip Van Doren Stern

 The short story on which the film It's a Wonderful Life was based.

It's cute, it's feel-good. The protagonist is contemplating suicide because he feels unimportant when a mysterious stranger shows him how much his being alive has changed the lives of others for the best. It's the classic tale of community in small-town America. It's very gentle. There are no grand sweeping passions (I understand that in the film, which I haven't yet seen, there is rather more at stake) and I found it difficult to understand why this ordinary bloke should be contemplating suicide when there was no great tragedy in his life. But I mustn't judge.

But I found the story as a whole rather insipid and pedestrian. Perhaps that's the point.

Selected quotes:

• “I’m stuck here in this mudhole for life, doing the same dull work day after day. Other men are leading exciting lives, but ... I never did anything really useful or interesting, and it looks as if I never will. I might just as well be dead."
• "The place you grew up in was the one spot on earth where you could really feel at home."
• "You had the greatest gift of all conferred upon you—the gift of life, of being a part of this world and taking a part in it."

November 2022, 64 pages (in the print edition, I'm told; I read it on kindle and it seemed shorter than that). 

I've now watched the film 'It's a Wonderful Life' and a stage version of the radio play based on the film. These are both so much better! For a start, they introduce many extra characters, including a bona fide villain. Perhaps more importantly, the suicide scene with which the novella opens is left until the last quarter of the film; the first three-quarters being a slow explanation of the protagonist and his strengths and weaknesses, and the battle between him and the antagonist (clearly inspired by Scrooge from A Christmas Carol), and, quite late on, the actual incident which drives him to the brink of suicide. By making clear this back-story, it adds to the credibility.

The film, despite sometimes lapsing into sentimental schmaltz, had a strong storyline and the central performance of James Stewart, a fascinating mix of hesitation and leaping-before looking, was perfect.

It was also instructive to watch the radio play which I saw staged at the  Grove Theatre Eastbourne on 3rd December 2022 which showed how you can translate a film with a cast of at least fifty not including the extras into a stage show of five performers and a sound effects man and still create a work of art which has its own identity and can be judged as strong as the film. 

They are both miles better than this book.

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

"Troy" by Stephen Fry

This retelling of the story of the Trojan War is a sequel to Fry's Mythos and Heroes, both of which I adored.  It preserves Fry's inimitable style of making his characters thoroughly modern yet telling the story traditionally. There are some delicious moments of humour. 

But the first third of the book, in which Fry attempts to make sense of a hugely complex back story, is very difficult. Only occasionally does a character come to life. As soon as we reach the final year of the war, and the Homeric story and beyond, the story becomes vivid and absorbing. Homer, of course, could assume that his listeners understood the back story; Fry can't. But I did wonder whether the origins of Paris, cast away on the hillside, and the birth of Helen from an egg hatched by her mother who had coupled with Zeus in the form of a swan, and the origins of the House of Atreides would have been better done as footnotes as the action was progressing. Either that, or do it like George Martin and turn the story into a whole series of books.

Nevertheless, Fry's erudition is displayed as is his enormous wit.

Selected quotes: (page references from the Penguin paperback edition)

• "They say a fool and his gold are soon parted, but they ought to say too that those who refuse ever to be parted from gold are the greatest fools of all." (p 11)
• "The moment when flowers and fruits are at their fullest and ripest is the moment that precedes their fall, their decay, their rot, their death." (p 44)
• "As Luck would have it - Luck? No, Faith, Providence, Destiny ... Doom, perhaps, but not Luck, certainly not Luck." (p 53)
• "Antenor was a seasoned courtier. Courtiers do not survive long enough to be seasoned unless they maintain an efficient network of spies and informers." (p 166)

November 2022; 352 pages

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

"When we cease to understand the world" by Benjamin Labatut

 Fictionalised biographies of twentieth century scientists and mathematicians including Wilhelm Scheele, Fritz Haber (responsible both for making poison gas used in World War I and artificial fertiliser used to feed an ever-expanding population), Karl Schwarschild, Werner Heisenberg, Louis de Broglie, and Erwin Schrodinger, and mathematicians Alexander Grothendieck and Shinichi Mochikuzi. These are people who have made incredible discoveries, many of which are immensely difficult for ordinary people (and, in some cases, for top mathematicians and scientists) to comprehend. The theme of the book seems to be that such discoveries require geniuses who are more or less mad, sometimes before or during the making of their discoveries, sometimes afterwards. Some of the biographies include intimate details, such as the masturbatory habits of Schrodinger, which don't normally find their way into conventional biographies. It is only in the acknowledgements that I discovered "This is a work of fiction based on real events. The quantity of fiction grows throughout the book." At this point, the growing sense of unease I had felt as I read towards the end made sense. 

The author's thesis is, I think, that science is fundamentally bad. Scientists are either mad or evil and sometimes both. Scheele and Haber made poisons, and Haber is also to blame for facilitating over-population (without Haber more people would have starved to death so that the world's population would be smaller which might be an acceptable end but the means, for those who starve, might not be so acceptable), I'm not defending Haber, who seems to have felt no moral compunction about making poison gases, but I'm not sure you can extrapolate from one bad man to blame the whole of science, which is really just a disciplined harnessing of man's innate curiosity.  

If science doesn't harm others, the author seems to be saying, it harms the scientists, and the stories of Grothendieck and Heisenberg and Schrodinger are employed as examples. They are mad, or they become mad. But if the biographies have been fictionalised, then the evidence for the author's claims is corrupt and untrustworthy. It's bad data. The thesis is flawed. 

This is a beautifully written book but in the end he is trying to prove the trope of the mad scientist by using intellectual dishonesty.

Shorlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021

November 2022; 188 pages

Added on 27th November

The more I think about it, the angrier I become. By using the trope of the mad scientist - the cliche that genius tips into madness - Labatut implies that advances in science should be resisted lest they make us all mad. But the way he does this is fundamentally intellectually dishonest. He starts with chemists making poisons, and here his book is, more or less, factual biography. But then he moves into the realm of quantum physics and adds increasing amounts of fiction to blacken the characters of Heisenberg and Schrodinger and to caricature them as lunatics. It is only in the acknowledgements at the end that he tells you that the later parts of the book are mostly fiction.

I have no argument about using fiction to tell truths - I write novels - but it seems to me that you should be upfront about this, not seduce your reader into believing that the shocking details you recount are genuine biography.

If a scientist were to falsify his evidence in order to prove his theory he would be condemned. If the only way that Labatut can prove his thesis is by resorting to this kind of trickery, that suggests to me that his thesis is wrong.

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

"The Twyford Code" by Janice Hallett

 The book mostly consists of transcripts of recordings made by dyslexic ex-con Steve as he tries to solve the mystery of what happened to his remedial English teacher after he gave her a book by out-of-fashion children's author Edith Twyford. Steve's quest to crack a secret code he believes to be hidden in the book, is aided by his childhood friends from the same class and librarian Lucy.

It's an uneasy hybrid of the Da Vinci Code with Enid Blyton and for most of the story I was aware of gaping holes in the narrative - How could such a fundamentally simple code be successfully hidden from anyone? Who on earth ever published such tortured prose in the first place? Where did all the deus ex machinas who repeatedly rescue Steve from moments of peril come from? - and the fact that these are neatly resolved by the final twist did not make it easier to suspend my disbelief and enjoy the earlier part of the story. In the final analysis, this book is more a puzzle solving exercise than a novel and, to be honest, I couldn't be bothered to grapple with it.

Selected quotes:

• "Never been in a bookshop before, have I? Second-hand books. Smells like an old person's house. Shelves stacked to the ceiling. Accident waiting to happen." (Audio file 37)
• "When  you get what you want, you lose what you have." (Audio file 148)

November 2022; 388 pages

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

"The Patrician" by John Galsworthy

 Miltoun is the son of a Lord (also a cabinet minister in a Tory government) whose attempt to get himself elected to the House of Commons might be threatened by his association with a woman who might be divorced. His sister Barbara, a delightfully carefree young lady, is pursued by the very eligible Lord Harbinger but tempted by Mr Courtier, a writer and political radical. As the elder members of the family rally around to fight these twin threats to their privileges, the story evolves into a class-based Romeo and Juliet for both protagonists. Will the younger generation prove independent or will the pressures of the establishment overwhelm love's young dream (and get rid of the lower orders)?

Written in 1910 (the political battle is between the blue Conservatives and the yellow Liberals; there is no hint of a Labour candidate although there is the brief appearance of a rabble of Socialists) and thus with no conception of the tidal waves of change that will sweep the country in the wake of the First World War, this is very much a period piece. The style of writing (it is by the author most famous for the Forsyte Saga, for which he won the Nobel Prize) is Trollopian. Galsworthy's contemporary H G Wells writes much more lively prose. The first part of the book, in which the various dilemmas are outlined, and in which there is a fair amount of action, made for quite quick reading but I got very bogged down in Part Two during which the moral sensibilities of Miltoun were played out in creakingly slow detail.

I suppose it is a strength of the book that in the end I couldn't decide whether the author was attacking the aristocratic caste, who were so wrapped up in their privileges that they couldn't see any other possibility but their own endless rule, or whether he believed that, as one of them puts it, the country needs leading and can only be led by someone whose has been bred and brought up to be a leader.

The book is dedicated to the intellectual Gilbert Murray who married the daughter of the Earl of Carlisle and, I imagine, is the model for Mr Courtier.

• Selected quotes:
• "There was apparent about all his movements that particular unconsciousness of his surroundings which comes to those who live a great deal in the public eye, have the material machinery of existence placed exactly to their hands, and never need to consider what others think of them." (Ch 1)
• "It was for him - as for the lilies in the great glass house - impossible to see with the eyes, or feel with the feelings of a flower of the garden outside." (Ch 3)
• "The inherited assurance of one whose prestige had never been questioned; who ... had indeed lost the power of perceiving that her prestige ever could be questioned." (Ch 3)
• "Inspired by ideas, but always the same ideas." (Ch 3)
• "A mind which had ever instinctively rejected that inner knowledge of herself or of the selves of others, produced by those foolish practices of introspection, contemplation, and understanding, so deleterious to authority." (Ch 3)
• "The war would save us ... We should get the lead again as a nation, and Democracy would be put back fifty years." (Ch 3)
• "If people hadn't pasts, they wouldn't have futures." (Ch 8)
• "He meditated deeply on a London, an England, different from this flatulent hurly-burly, this omnium gatherum, this great discordant symphony of sharps and flats." (Ch 10)
• "The preservation of our position as a class depends on our observing certain decencies." (Ch 11)
• "High on the wall ... reigned the bronze death-mask of a famous Apache chief, cast from a plaster taken of the face by a professor of Yale College, who had declared it to be a perfect specimen of the vanished race." (Ch 16)
• "Not specially dandified in his usual dress, Bertie Caradoc would almost sooner have died that disgrace a horse." (Ch 18)

November 2022; 352 pages

Books written by other Nobel Laureates and 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

"Cocaine Nights" by J G Ballard

Shortlisted for the 1996 Whitbread Novel Award.

 Part mystery thriller and part novel of ideas, this book starts with the narrator travelling to the Costa del Sol to try to rescue his brother who has been charged with (and pleaded guilty to) arson leading to five deaths. As he probes into what happened, he discovers that the expatriate community in which his brother lived , unlike the others along the coast which are full of people watching television and taking tranquillisers ("Brain-death disguised as a hundred miles of white cement"; Ch 4), is vibrant with theatre groups and tai chi classes and sculpture workshops and ... and at night the staid and mostly retired residents indulge in sex, including amateur prostitution and making pornographic videos, and drugs and partying. The theory sold to him is that it is transgression that provides the spice that keeps people living a fulfilled life; artistic creation needs rule-breaking to thrive (this is the centuries of peace in Switzerland and all it has produced is the cuckoo clock theory). 

In many ways this is a typical Ballard: a small modern community of well-of middle-class people appears boring on the surface but underneath there are sinful roots. This theme is reworked in Millennium People, in High-Rise, and particularly in The Unlimited Dream Company. It is a compelling vision but it is the quality of the writing that always impresses.

Selected quotes:

• "Behind me a handsome Spanish woman sat at the wheel of an open-topped Mercedes, remaking her lipstick over a strong mouth designed for any activity other than eating." (Ch 1)
• "Near Sotogrande the golf courses began to multiply like the symptoms of a hypertrophied grassland cancer." (Ch 1)
• "Funerals celebrate another frontier crossing, in many ways the most formal and protracted of all." (Ch 5)
• "The retirement pueblos lay by the motorway, embalmed in a dream of the sun from which they would never awake." (Ch 6)
• "The white facades of the villas and apartment houses were like blocks of time that had crystallized beside the road." (Ch 6)
• "Here on the Costa del Sol nothing would ever happen again, and the people of the pueblos were already the ghosts of themselves." (Ch 6)
• "Cloaks of moonlight lay over the furniture like dust-sheets." (Ch 6)
• "Death had arrived at the Hollingers and decided to stay, settling her skirts over the shadowy pathways." (Ch 9)
• "Above my head sounded the leathery flutter of canvas." (Ch 15)
• "The residents of the Costasol complex, like those of the retirement pueblos along the coast, had retreated to their shaded lounges, their bunkers with a view, needing only that part of the external world that was distilled from the sky by their satellite dishes." (Ch 19)
• "You've seen the future and it doesn't work or play." (Ch 19)
• "The Costa del Sol is the longest afternoon in the world, and they've decided to sleep through it." (Ch 19)
• "We're building prisons all over the world and calling them luxury condos." (Ch 19)
• "One obsessive with a PC and a printer, turning out a residents' association newsletter, is worth more than a dozen novelists or boutique operators. It isn't shopping, or the arts, that makes a community but that duty that we all owe to each other as neighbours." (Ch 22)
• "People need to stop thinking about their own bodies and start thinking about other people's." (Ch 22)

I live in an 'independent living' retirement apartment block in Eastbourne. Some of us stay all day on their own inside their apartments. Others have coffee and cake and small talk with the other residents in the owners' lounge. Most only access the outside world through the television, although many walk for exercise. I am one of the few (there are others) who goes to the local theatre or other cultural events and tries to keep my mind exercised. Cocaine Nights certainly rang a few bells with, although so far as I know there is no drug-taking nor sexual deviance practised in our community.

Wonderful writing. November 2022; 329 pages

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