"The Bullet that Missed" by Richard Osman

This is the third novel in the Thursday Murder Club series and follows The Thursday Murder Club and The Man Who Died Twice. The usual gang is here (with the addition of Joyce's dog, Alan) but now the dangers need to be ramped up. So Elizabeth has to be abducted and threatened with death while both Bogdan, Ron and Joyce are also in danger. The police officers Donna and Chris are relegated to an even more minor role than before. But why should our amateur sleuths need them? Ron can elucidate details simply by chatting to a man he has never met before. This is lazy sleuthing. But we don't need plot. We have (superficial) characters and we have a lot of short sentences and some wit. Maybe the whiff of unreality has become a smog. Maybe disbelief is now too heavy to be suspended. This is the third in a record-breaking series and it will sell at least as well as the others simply on the author's name. But I don't think I'll be reading any more.

Selected quotes:

• "What was he thinking? That was the one question she knew not to ask a man. They were almost always thinking nothing at all, so were thrown by the question, and felt compelled to make something up." (Ch 4)
• "Everyone wants to feel special but nobody wants to feel different." (Ch 4)
• "He eats so much broccoli he can spell it without looking it up." (Ch 7)
• "Very few things are so important you would risk your life for them, but all sorts of things are important enough to risk somebody else's life." (Ch 12)
• "How often do you walk down a new road with an old lover?" (Ch 14)
• "Spies are like dogs. They cannot stand a closed door." (Ch 31)
• "Ron prays for his torture to end. Are the gentle sounds of the rainforest ever going to stop?" (Ch 40)
• "He doesn't say much, but sometimes that can be a relief, can't it? With some men you spend most of your time just nodding in agreement." (Ch 88)

Light comedy, little suspense. January 2023; 408 pages

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

"After the death of Don Juan" by Sylvia Townsend Warner

 As per the opera, Don Juan was dragged down to Hell by devils whilst hosting a dinner for the statue of the father, whom he had killed, of Dona Ana. But the only witness to this was his valet, Leporello. So Ana, newly wed to Don Ottavio, travels to Tenorio to 'break the news' to Don Juan's dad, Don Saturno. While she is there, the peasants agitate for the irrigation Don Saturno has long promised, hoping that the death of his libertine son will stop Don Saturno haemorrhaging money. But is Don Juan actually dead?

This playful little novel has some delightful moments. It hops from one narrator to another while almost always staying the third person past tense; it lacks chapters and sometimes obvious breaks which sometimes made it difficult to know which character was actually speaking. In addition there is a huge cast list: Dona Ana's party numbers at least four and the nobility and servants at Don Saturno's residence is another four or five and then there are the schoolmaster and the miller and the miller's daughter and the village priest and the sacristan and at least a dozen peasants with speaking parts. In this it resembled a grand opera with many voices and it was appropriately brilliant in the ensembles. But in a novel I think this lack of focus makes it more difficult to fully bring out the characters; as a result the characterisations seemed superficial. And when one considers that the author's intent was to provide a commentary on the Spanish Civil War (the book was published in 1938, during that conflict), I suspect that there was too much for what, at 236 pages, is a slender novel. Nevertheless, I felt it was considerably more nuanced than Lolly Willowes, the author's debut, and there is a lot of amusing incident. And the pacing is spot-on: there is a very important turning-point almost ;precisely at the 75% mark.

Selected quotes: (page references are to the Penguin edition)

• "That is how it goes. One begets, one loves, one takes pride in, one gives, one pampers, one is made a fool of, one is bled ... and in the end indulgence defeats the motive of love, and the darling exasperating phoenix of a son dwindles into a habit, and the wound is a dry scar that tickles in rainy weather." (p 58)
• "One would suppose ... that if flame and evils ascended to the first floor, someone in the room below would notice them passing." (p 75)
• "Your grandchildren ornament your roof like young fig-trees." (p 99)
• "The last blow fastens the nail." (p 143)
• "A robber's life is painful enough. To be out in all weathers, night after night to watch with an empty stomach on the mountains, to have the chief part of the world against one - there is not much difference, that I can see, between being a poor robber and being a poor man." (p 146)
• "Were there no ghosts in the family of San Bolso, in the family of Quebrada de Roxas, not a headless man nor a nun of gigantic size among them? How paltry! How deplorable! There could be little credit or satisfaction in serving such ungarnished families." (p 150)
• "Where the herb grows there is an ass to eat it." (p 150)
• "A man whose stupidity, even if you cuckolded him, would rob the act of any reality, for you cannot balance a pair of horns upon a perfectly empty head." (p 155)
• "Dona Pliar, if you will allow me to say so, you have kept your heart too long. It is no good to you now." (p 157)
• "Vulgarity ... is a fleeting perfume, and a few decades can dull our nostrils to it." (p 165)
• "It seemed madness to end a life of twelve years between six in the evening and midnight." (p 195)
• "The loaf comes out as the oven wills." (p 195)
• "The life of a man has its shape, as a tree has its shape. One grows up, one learns a livelihood, one marries a woman and begets children. As one grows older one grows tired and in the end one dies. That is the pattern of the life of man." (p 195)

January 2023; 236 pages

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

"The Magic Toyshop" by Angela Carter

 The story is narrated by fifteen-year-old Melanie who, after the death of her parents - for which she blames herself, irrationally - goes with her little brother and her baby sister to live in suburban London with her over-bearing and miserly uncle, a toymaker, his wife, who is dumb, and her brothers, filthy Finn (the archetypal bad boy, rebellious but attractive) and fiddler Francie. It's a coming-of-age story in strange surroundings, perhaps reflecting Carter's own upbringing (having been born in Eastbourne she spent her childhood in South Yorkshire before moving to the Streatham/ Clapham area of South London for her teenage years), perhaps satirising children's novels such as The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett or the Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken. 

It's a classic 'take a bunch of strange characters and see what happens' story; this makes for compelling reading. But what puts this book into a class of its own is the stunning descriptions. Chapter One, in which Melanie gets locked out of the house in the garden at night, was eye-openingly wonderful, with lines such as: "Melanie let herself into the night and it snuffed out her daytime self at once, between two of its dark fingers." 

Carter likes playing with reality. Finn and Melanie go to a park in South London where there are the remnants of "the National Exposition of 1852 ... this vast Gothic castle ... made of papier-mache" which burned down; presumably a distorted reference to the Crystal Palace of the 1851 Exhibition which was moved to South London and subsequently burned down.

It's also perfectly paced, with key insights coming at the 25%, 50% and 75% marks.

Selected quotes:

• Brilliant descriptions:
• "The curl of his wrist was a chord of music, perfect, resolved." (Ch 2)
• "Privet hedges drooped with the weary strain of keeping in green leaf at the turn of the year when all the other trees had thrown down their leaves in surrender." (Ch 5)
• "Her carved eyeballs stared back at them with the uncanny blindness of statues, who always seem to be perceiving another dimension, where everything is statues." (Ch 5)
• Funny moments and insights:
• "He walked with a faintly discernible nautical roll but nobody ever noticed." (Ch 1) (though obviously someone - the author? the narrator? - did)
• "She examined the wedding dress more closely. It seemed a strange way to dress up just in order to lose your virginity." (Ch 1)
• "Melanie had never seen a dog belch before. It was a day of firsts." (Ch 5)
• Other moments:
• "Melanie thought of death as a room like a cellar, in which one was locked up and no light at all." (Ch 1)
• "'Look at me!' she said to the apple tree as it fattened its placid fruit in the country silence of the night. 'Look at me!' she cried passionately to the pumpkin moon, as it smiled, jovial and round-faced as a child's idea of itself." (Ch 1)
• "All this was taking place in an empty space at the end of the world." (Ch 4)
• "She watched Uncle Philip empty four green-banded cups of tea and thought of the liquid turning slowly to urine through his kidneys; it seemed like alchemy, he could transmute liquids from one thing to another." (Ch 8)
• "She splashed the shreds of the absurd night out of her eyes with cold water." (Ch 9)
• "Flocks of brown-feathered perhapses flapped ragged, witless wings against the windows." (Ch 9)

This was recommended by the author of the last book that I read (The Reading List). I have read Angela Carter books before and this is my favourite; previously I have found that the surrealism gets in the way of the story but in this book the descriptions make the story hyper-realistic while at the same time retaining that hint of strangeness.

Angela Carter is recommended by Lorna Sage, author of the brilliant biography Bad Blood, as "the boldest of English women writers". 

I think I loved it for the frequency with which I came across a perfectly-crafted sentence and thought 'I wish I'd written that'.

January 2023; 200 pages

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

Books by Angela Carter that I have read and reviewed in this blog:

• The Bloody Chamber, a brilliant collection of short stories in which fairy tales are brought up to date and given a horrid, and often feminist, twist
• The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman: a very sixties psychedelic romp, perhaps too surreal for me
• Heroes and Villains: a post-holocaust fantasy
• The Passion of New Eve: obsessed with mirrors and sex changes and dominatrices
• Wise Children: the reminiscences of one of a pair of show-biz twins; multiple references to twins and Shakespeare
• The Magic Toyshop: a beautifully written coming of age story

"The Reading List" by Sara Nisha Adams

 The book follows the fortunes of Aleisha, a teenager reluctantly working at a library and living with her brother Aidan and their agoraphobic and depressed mother Leilah, and Mukesh Patel, a retired man, recently widowed, newly living alone, about whom his three daughters are concerned. The narrative hops from one of these to another, sometimes including other, minor characters, each PoV designated at the top of the chapter (There's also a small amount of time-hopping, just to keep the reader on their toes). Each of the characters is reading the books on a reading list which mysteriously crops up, a list of books intended to help people cope with life. 

I really appreciated the fact that this book is written about ordinary working class people with everyday problems. So many books nowadays are either fantastic (speculative fiction, both fantasy and sci fi) or crime-based or revolve around middle-class characters; protagonists never seem to have to worry about earning a living or cleaning the house or going to the shops. Okay, Mukesh is retired and Aleisha's job doesn't chain her body and soul as my employments always have done, but at least it's a start.

However, I thought the motif of the reading list was over-contrived. There seemed to be moments when the book chosen was entirely apposite, and really shaped the story, and other times when the connections seemed only tangential. I found this made the plot feel artificial and formulaic. I wasn't invested properly in the story until at least half-way through.

Even the theme (that reading fiction helps you with the challenges in your life) seemed to be contrived so that people who like reading books would feel affirmed and therefore more positive about the book.

Although the two principal protagonists are three-dimensional, most of the other characters seemed rather flat. They were bit parts, who had their lines. Even Aidan, with all the enigmatic foreshadowing, seemed empty and unreal. This meant the question of why he did what he did, a crucial question for the last quarter of the book, was scarcely explored.

Nevertheless, I cried several times after the very significant twist at the 75% mark and I have to honour a book that can pack an emotional punch like that.

Some of the bits with Mukesh are really quite funny.

Strangely, one of the books that the author acknowledges as her own personal reading list, The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter, is the one I am about to start reading. (I've now read it. It's very different but I much preferred it.)

Selected quotes:

• "no one’s trying to be someone they’re not in a library." (Ch 2)
• "But from Mukesh’s own experience, he knew that a warning, no matter how stark, was never a comfort; it was only the slow drip of fear through all the good and all the bad times." (Ch 3)
• "He wished more than anything that – rather than suffering creaking joints and ailing eyesight – he’d started losing his hearing first. In his family, where each of his daughters liked to talk a thousand decibels louder than the average human, that would have been particularly useful." (Ch 5)
• "this book wasn’t just for him, it was for everyone. All these people who had taken it out before him, people who would take it out after him. They might have read it on a beach, on the train, on the bus, in the park, in their living room. On the toilet? He hoped not!" (Ch 9)
• "Mukesh nodded meaning ‘absolutely not’." (Ch 12)
• "Her fingers clutched the palm of her right hand, the thumb pushing in as hard as it could. She was checking if she still had the ability to feel, to understand the world around her. Hoping, praying, that this was just a dream." (Ch 32)
• "‘Hey, I’m Harishbhai’s son,’ Harishbhai’s son said. ... ‘Harishbhai’s son,’ Mukesh said, wondering if the boy had a name, but appreciating Harishbhai’s clear and strong sense of branding." (Ch 37)

Entertaining but forgettable. January 2023

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

"Another Country" by James Baldwin

 Greenwich Village, New York ("that city which the people from heaven had made their home." - 3.2), late 1950s. Rufus is a black jazz drummer in a love-hate relationship on a downward spiral with a white girl from Georgia. Other characters include Rufus's sister Ida who wants to be a singer Vivaldo, a wannabe novelist of Italian extraction, Richard, an older novelist and his wife Cass, and Eric a gay actor with a French boyfriend. These artists live a bohemian life but at the bottom of it all they yearn for love; but love involves another person and that creates problematic power dynamics, especially when there is the complication of race.

A deeply troubling analysis of inner city life and the problems involved when a boy meets a girl (or a boy). Baldwin's other books include Giovanni's Room, a masterful treatment of repressed homosexuality, Go Tell it on the Mountain, about a young black street preacher, and If Beale Street Could Talk, a superb novel about racism. This novel seems to encompass all three. His characters leap off the page in their brutal glory. His settings both shape and resonate for the characters.  This is writing at its best. 

Wikipedia says that in Baldwin's writing "Themes of masculinity, sexuality, race, and class intertwine to create intricate narratives." That certainly describes this classic novel.

Colm Toibin, writing in the Introduction to this Penguin Classic edition, calls Another Country "the essential American drama of the century in which characters desperately seek to escape from the parody of themselves which has been constructed for them." 

Selected quotes:

Fantastic descriptions:

• "The wind nibbled delightedly at him through his summer slacks." (1.1)
• "The music was loud and empty ... and it was being hurled at the crowd like a malediction." (1.1)
• "Bloodless people cannot be made to bleed." (1.1)
• "Silence rang its mighty gongs in the room behind her." (2.4)
• "He came through the doors behind a great cloud of windy, rainy, broad-beamed ladies; and they formed, before him, a large, loud, rocking wall, as they shook their umbrellas and themselves and repeated to each other, in their triumphant voices, how awful the weather was." (3.1)
• "The rain had ceased, in the blue-black sky a few stars were scattered, and the wind roughly jostled the clouds along." (3.1)

Tremendous insights:

• "They were the prey that was no longer hunted, though they were scarcely aware of this condition and could not bear to leave the place where they had first been spoiled." (1.1)
• "In any of the world's cities, on a winter night, a boy can be bought for the price of a beer and the promise of warm blankets." (1.1)
• "We've all been up the same streets. There aren't a hell of a lot of streets." (1.1)
• "A lot of people say that a man who takes his own life oughtn't to be buried in holy ground. ... All I know, God made every bit of ground I ever walked on and everything God made is holy." (1.2)
• "If the world wasn't so full of dead folks maybe those of us that's trying to live wouldn't have to suffer so bad." (1.2)
• "The best that he ever managed in bed, so far, had been the maximum of relief with the minimum of hostility." (1.3)
• "Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any." (1.3)
• "Only time might help, time which surrendered all secrets but only on the inexorable condition, as far as he could tell, that the secret could no longer be used." (2.1)
• "The trouble with a secret life it that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters." (2.1)
• "He had the tendency of all wildly disorganised people to suppose that the lives of others were tamer and less sensual and more cerebral than his own." (2.3)
• "You want to find out what's happening, baby, all you got to do is pay your dues!" (2.3)
• "All policemen were bright enough to know who they were working for and they were not working, anywhere in the world, for the powerless." (2.3)
• "It was a city without oases, run entirely, insofar, at least, as human perception could tell, for money." (2.4)
• "Wouldn't you hate all white people if they kept you in prison here? ... Kept you here, and stunted you and starved you, and made you watch your mother and father and sister and lover and brother and son and daughter die or go mad or go under, before your very eyes? And not in a hurry, like from one day to the next, but, every day, every day, for years, for generations? Shit. They keep you here because you're black, while they go jerking themselves off with all the jazz about the land of the free." (2.4)
• "It was the boy who led - indisputably - and the girl who followed; but it also came, more profoundly, from the fact that the girl was, in no sense, appalled by the boy and did not for an instant hesitate to answer his rudest quiver with her own." (2.4)

Wonderful writing. January 2023; 425 pages

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

"Lolly Willowes" by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Laura Willowes is a single lady in the early years of the twentieth century. She grows up in the countryside with her family and then, after her parents are dead, she goes to live with her elder brother and his wife in London. For twenty years she is the poor relative, the maiden aunt, looking after her nieces, resisting any attempt to marry her off. Then she decides to move to a little village in the Cotswolds and begins a second career as a witch.

So what starts as a Jane Austen-style comedy of manners suddenly lurches into fantasy. Although, as one of my U3A reading group pointed out, one can read all the strange events, even the encounter with the devil, as real world occurrences happening to a woman whose imagination has perhaps run away with her. 

The writing is elegant and witty and beautiful; it reminded me of the work of Jane Austen and E M Forster. It was STW's debut novel and published in 1926 and I was a little surprised that it contained no trace of the great modernist novels that were being published around that time, such as Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915), Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce or even Mrs Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf. Apart from the plot twist of witchcraft (which is carefully foreshadowed, even in the first half of the book which deals with her repressed upper middle class life), it was very conventional. But the prose, as is shown time and again in the selected quotes, is wonderful. 

I was less enamoured of the propaganda aspect of the novel. It is this that has earned the author the acclaim of being a (proto) feminist. But it seemed to me that she is very unreflective. At one point she criticises a character thus: "He seemed to consider himself briefed by his Creator to turn into ridicule the opinions of those who disagreed with him, and to attribute dishonesty, idiocy, or a base motive to everyone who supported a better case than he.” But this is exactly what the author herself does. Virtually all the characters, women as well as men, apart from the protagonist, are weighed and found wanting. 

But the main character herself could be considered to be a self-centred parasite. In the first part of the book she is given bed and board with her brother's family and feels repressed and taken-for-granted when she is expected to contribute to the household by looking after her nieces. She longs for independence and, eventually, she goes off to the countryside where she has her bed and board provided by a lower class landlady in exchange for her modest private income. In other words, she seeks all the benefits of the world without wishing to incur any of the obligations. She contributes nothing. And it is the other characters who are held up to ridicule!

Similarly, the author repeatedly extols the virtues of the countryside and denigrates London. But hers is a very romantic version of the countryside. Her protagonist takes long walks in the country but never (except briefly and temporarily when she works with hens, a little like the way women during the first world war were briefly and temporarily employed, as the author herself was, in munitions factories) gets involved in it. She produces nothing. She never even gets muddy.

I understand the author became a communist. Recently I read The Patrician (published in 1911) by John Galsworthy, the author who wrote Forsyte Saga, and he was able to see and present arguments both for and against the establishment: I couldn't decide which side of the fence he was on until over half way through.  (though I think in the end he is fundamentally conservative). In Lolly Willowes I can discern not even a glimmer of class consciousness. 

I suppose the issue that I have isn't with this book, because I think it is beautifully written and an interesting story and I am keen to read other books by this author. But some people seem to like or dislike a book because of what it says rather than how it says it. That shouldn't be a basis for judgement. 

Selected Quotes:

• “She thought of the street lamps, so impartial, so imperturbable in their stately diminuendos, and felt herself abashed before their scrutiny. Each in turn would hand her on, her and her shadow, as she walked the unfathomed streets and squares ... complying with the sealed orders of the future.” (part one)
• “Finding their well-chosen wood and well-chosen wine improved with keeping, they believed that the same law applied to well-chosen ways. Moderation, civil speaking, leisure of the mind and a handsome simplicity were canons of behaviour imposed upon them by the example of their ancestors.” (part one)
• “One of her earliest pleasures had been to go with Everard to the brewery and look into the great vats while he, holding her firmly with his left hand, with his right plunged a long stick through the clotted froth.” (part one)
• “He observed gloomily that daughters could be very expensive now that so much fuss was being made about the education of women.” (part one)
• “She had thought that sorrow would be her companion for many years, and had planned for its entertainment. Now it visited her like sudden snowstorms, a hastening darkness across the sky, a transient whiteness and rigour cast upon her.” (part one)
• “Time went faster than the embroidery did. She had actually a sensation that she was stitching herself into a piece of embroidery with a good deal of background.” (part one)
• “Laura, opening the third drawer of the large mahogany wardrobe, had commented upon the beautiful orderliness with which Caroline's body linen was arranged therein. ‘We have our example’, said Caroline. ‘The grave-clothes were folded in the tomb’.” (part one)
• “The law had done a great deal to spoil Henry. It had changed his natural sturdy stupidity into a browbeating indifference to other people's point of view. He seemed to consider himself briefed by his Creator to turn into ridicule the opinions of those who disagreed with him, and to attribute dishonesty, idiocy, or a base motive to everyone who supported a better case than he.” (part one)
• “A kind of pity for the unused virgin beside her spread through Caroline's thoughts ... she felt emotionally plumper than Laura. it was well to be loved, to be necessary to other people.” (part one)
• “She compared herself to the ripening acorn that feels through windless autumnal days and nights the increasing pull of the earth below.” (part two)
• “ the recumbent autumnal graces of the countryside.” (part two)
• “Even Henry and Caroline ... were half hidden under their accumulations - accumulations of prosperity, authority, daily experience. They were carpeted with experience.” (part two)
• “It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions.” (part two)
• “She had no thoughts; her mind was swept as clean and empty as the heavens.” (part two)
• “So had Adam been the noblest work of nature, when he walked out among the beasts, sole overseer of the garden, intact, with all his ribs about him, his equilibrium as yet untroubled by Eve.” (part two)
• “This new year was changing her whole conception of spring. She had thought of it as a denial of winter, a green Spear that thrust through a tyrant's rusty armour. Now she saw it as something filial, gently unlacing the helm of the old warrior and comforting his rough cheek.” (part two)
• “The cult of the summer months was a piece of cockney obtuseness.” (part two)
• “He liked it because he was in possession.” (part three)
• “The first hour was well enough, but after that came increasing listlessness and boredom; the effort, when one danced again with the same partner, not to say the same things, combined with the obligation to say something rather like them.” (part three)
• “Not one of the monuments and tinkering of man could impose on the Satanic mind. The Vatican and the Crystal Palace, and all the neat human nest-boxes in Rows, Balham and Fulham and the Cromwell Road ... they went flop like card-houses ... Wolves howled through the streets of Paris, the foxes played in the throne room of Schonbrunn, and in the basement at Apsley Terrace the mammoth slowly revolved, trampling out its lair.” (part three)
• “Women have such vivid imaginations, and lead such dull lives. Their pleasure in life is so soon over; they are so dependent on others, and their dependence so soon becomes a nuisance.” (part three)
• “Sin and Grace, and God ... and St Paul. All men's things, like politics, or mathematics.” (part three)
• “One doesn't become a witch to run round being harmful, or to run round being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick.” (part three)
• “I encourage you to talk, not that I may know all your thoughts, but that you may.” (part three)

There were many beautifully written passages. I'm keen to read more by this author. In fact, I've just finished After the Death of Don Juan.

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

"The Other Path" by Jon Neal

A private investigator is hired by an unknown client to investigate a suspicious death in a remote and (at the time of the death) completely cut-off village on the South Downs. 

This murder mystery conforms perfectly to the genre. It's bang up to date (one of the characters has been bereaved in the Covid-19 pandemic) and yet it is classic: there are only eight possible suspects and many of them have secret back-stories that give them motives. The author is very good at offering tantalising hints and the plotting works so that the final solution is the only possible answer and yet a surprise: both the final twists caught me out, and the penultimate twist was brilliant. This makes it a thoroughly satisfying read. 

The story is told in the past tense, and in a multi-person third person PoV, but is principally narrated by the investigator. There are suggestions that this main character might be developed.

The book, like most whodunnits, is primarily driven by the plot. The pacing is fast (the major turning points at exactly the right moments) and the writing economical. Despite this, the characters drawn are convincing (particularly the relationships between Joyce and Bridget, and between Ursula and Quentin) and the setting clearly drawn. These aspects make this novel one of the better in its genre.

Selected quotes:

• "A community trapped in its very own snow globe." (Ch 1)
• "So much today could be purchased on credit. It made it difficult to differentiate between those who were truly well off and those whose lives were a facade built on debt." (Ch 5)
• "Other people's opinions can be so loud." (Ch 9)
• "Stanley reflected that crimes are often the consequence of love rather than hate." (Ch 18)
• "Funny, she thought, how lying to someone made one self-conscious. It felt as if she'd slipped into somebody else's skin, acutely aware of the way she spoke and the manner in which she moved." (Ch 19)
• "Identities and dreams can be fluid. Things can shift and change based on circumstance. The various seasons of life ... could see a person playing very different roles." (Ch 21)
• "Never in her career had she sat waiting for the elusive muse to arrive. That was the way of amateurs. No, to have written all those books upon the bookshelf required self-discipline." (Ch 23)

January 2023; 210 pages

Jon Neal has also written a charming little novel called A Twin Room. 

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

"The Burgundians" by Bart Van Loo

This is a big book, over 500 pages. It tells the story of the Burgundians, from their beginning on Bornholm Island in the Baltic as a Germanic tribe who invaded the Roman Empire and fought Atilla the Hun (as commemorated in the Nibelungenlied) to their days of glory during the Hundred Years War when the Dukes of Burgundy (who now also owned large tracts of the Flanders) acted as power brokers between the French and the English. It's a huge canvas on which the author paints ... but he does it by focusing his attention very much on the period between 1369 to 1467. The more than 900 years before then receives about 50 pages, this century receives 300 pages and the ten years after receives 70 pages. This corresponds, I suspect, with the available material but it nevertheless presents a strangely lop-sided feeling. The first section seems to be written for the general reader and the second for the specialist ... and yet this section is presented with a less objective, almost playful air, in which the author repeatedly speculates eg about whether John the Fearless was at all worried when he walked across the bridge to his doom.

Nevertheless, there is plenty here of interest, whether it is minutely recounted assassinations or carefully described feasts. There are battles, there are rebellions, there are lots and lots and lots of executions, and there is even some literary history. There's also quite a lot of etymological explanation for words such as 'knight', 'Fleming' and even 'mustard'; I adore a good etymology.

And there are some unforgettable characters (mostly bloodthirsty tyrants) including a King who thought he was made of glass.

Selected quotes:

• “The Celts had been living in Gaul since time immemorial. The Romans regarded them as rather hot-tempered, macho people and mockingly called them Galli (roosters)” (1.1)
• “In around 1300 ... the first mechanical clocks soon graced the bell towers in all the major cities ... because peasants, labourers and burghers often made mistakes in counting the strokes and weren't sure whether it was roughly nine or ten o’clock, it soon became fashionable to ring four preliminary chimes. This forerunner of the carillon was called a ‘quadrillon’ in French (literally a foursome).” (2.3)
• “The megalomania in Sluis rolled in in waves.” (2.5)
• “For a long time, Catholicism had been mainly the business of priests and monks, but over the course of the fourteenth century it found its way into the hearts of ordinary people, and on a grand scale. Itinerant preachers managed to move great crowds with their gripping and spectacular stories.” (2.6)
• “While the Burgundian Crusade may have been born of Christian and propagandistic ambition, once it had been set in motion the whole enterprise quickly turned into an extravagant display of valour. Bravado proved to be more important than tactics and reconnaissance. Swaggering trumped pragmatism. This exaggerated Cult of heroism had led to one disaster after another ... without bringing about a change in mentality. ... overconfidence remained persistently fashionable.” (2.7)
• “When Orleans and his retinue passed through the Barbette gate on 23 November, a handful of masked men leapt out of the shadows. One of them cried, ‘Kill him! Kill him!’ and struck Orleans with his axe. It wasn't enough to knock Louis from his mule. Indeed, he still had enough strength to call them to account by shouting, ‘I am the Duke of Orleans!’ as if he was sure the brigands would quickly change their minds. Their answer prove just the opposite: ‘He's the one we're looking for!’ After a second blow he fell from his mount. The thirty-five-year-old duke scrambled to his knees and cried, ‘Who is that? Who is doing that?’ They responded by bludgeoning him with sticks and axes and chopping off his clenched left hand.” (2.8)
• “History, great glutton that it is, could hardly get enough to satisfy its hunger in those days.” (2.10)
• “The winter that followed was especially severe. The Seine froze solid. Food provisions vanished. In their despair, gangs of wandering children sought one last spark of warmth in the piles of manure that lay in the streets. There was no bread, no grain, no firewood. People died of cold, of hunger. Wolves invaded Paris and dined on the dead.” (2.10)
• “While the sea and the great rivers kept proving themselves enemies to be feared, a final evolution was taking place: that of the transformation of farmland into pasturage. Pastures do much better on peaty soil, which is not an ideal substrate for cereal crops. The resulting lack of bread made famine a real possibility, but the cows that soon began grazing there triggered a boom in dairy production. This led to a rise in cheese making, which required a great deal of salt. Clever entrepreneurs ... began specialising in the digging of salt-laden peat, from which they extracted salt by means of drying and burning. Cattle breeding required less manpower but the workers who are now available quickly found employment ... in the fishing industry or in merchant shipping. ... The hostile sea had grown into a source of economic prosperity.” (2.11)
• “The more languages you speak, the more human you are.” (5)

I can't imagine there's anything left to be said about this subject. January 2023; 515 pages

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

"Alexander Pope: A Literary Life" by Felicity Rosslyn

Alexander Pope was a hugely successful poet, the second most quoted author after Shakespeare (“A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing."; “For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread”; “To Err is Humane; to Forgive, Divine”.) Despite a humble background and a childhood disease which left him a hunchbacked dwarf, rarely in good health, he became a leading member of London's literary society in a world where one's pedigree was hugely important. His translations of Homer and his witty satires earned him a fortune. And yet today he seems overlooked. There a few biographies; this one was originally published in 1990.

The current edition, from Odyssey Press, was poorly presented and had all the appearance of being independently published, with minimal care, perhaps from a PhD thesis.

I was a little disappointed that Rosslyn quoted so much from Pope's work. I had hoped to understand more about the interaction between Pope's life and his work. But where she analyses what Pope did, Rosslyn is very good. She shows that he viewed the poetry of Homer and the classical Roman poets as the pinnacle of achievement and suggests that he sought to emulate them (even to the extent of 'improving' Shakespeare by “regularising the scansion, improving the punctuation, and dividing the scenes.” (Ch 4). His forensic analysis of classical poetry enabled him to craft elegant and witty verses: “It was Pope who uncovered the real secret of epic ‘machinery’: the gods must both be involved in, and detached from, the world of men - detached by force of their immortality, but involved by their identification with human greatness.” (Ch 2) As Pope himself said: “True Ease in Writing comes from Art not Chance,/ As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.”

The problem is that this can produce the appearance of manufactured verse. Pope's work consists almost entirely of end-stopped heroic couplets which, for all its polished perfection, becomes tedious. It may be great for satire and to express insightful maxims but it seems desperately unsuitable for conveying emotion. It feels over-controlled and lacks passion.

I suspect that Pope, a sickly child and disabled adult, without family connections, who needed to make his living through his pen, living in a Georgian world where life was precarious, in unpoliced cities or in rural areas always vulnerable to crop failure and famine, where life could be snuffed out in a few days through an infection, needed and longed for the suggestion of security found in order and elegance and harmony. This biography might have been better had I not been lieft to infer this for myself.

Pope's poetry:

• “Some judge of Authors’ Names, not Works, and then/ Nor praise nor blame the Writings, but the Men.”
• “Some praise at Morning what they blame at Night;/ But always think the last Opinion right.”
• “We think our Fathers Fools, so wise we grow;/ Our wiser Sons, no doubt, will think us so.”

Selected quotes:

• “Pope’s Pastorals, then, are exquisitely musical celebrations of the lives of shepherds, whose pious, candid minds have never been touched by the anxiety of ringworm.” (Ch 1)
• “What the hero earns by action, the contemporary heroine must earn by inaction, under the most tempting possible circumstances. She must withhold herself from all the opportunities presented by the bills and masquerades at which her beauty is placed on show, and resist not only the tempter without, but the tempter within.” (Ch 2)
• “The passionate desire of suffering to articulate its pain.” (Ch 2)
• “It was Homer who peopled western literature with its stock characters, its eloquent heroes, vulnerable old men, loyal servants, flirts, and faithful or unfaithful wives; and gave it its major themes: the conflict between love and duty, war and peace, innocence and knowledge, meaning and meaninglessness.” (Ch 3)
• “The body is poignant proof that man is not a god, after the spirit, the proof that neither is he an animal, has fled.” (Ch 3)
• “Dignity in in language and station fetter Pope’s imagination as they never fettered Shakespeare’s.” (Ch 4)
• “Truths (however shining) do not automatically make poetry, and generalisations (however central) do not reach the mind save through closely-related particulars.” (Ch 5)
• “The philosopher only puts his salt on the tail of a disappearing argument.” (Ch 5)
• “The strength of the Romantic backlash against him is a tribute to how deeply his works did penetrate the eighteenth-century mind, leaving a younger generation no way to find its own voice save by wholesale repudiation.” (Conclusion)
• “Keats thought the end-stopped heroic couplet puerile.” (Appendix)

January 2023; 160 pages

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

"The Quiet American" by Graham Greene

It starts with the death of Pyle, the 'quiet' American attached, with 'special' duties, to the American Embassy in Vietnam (the book is set during the first stage of the Vietnamese war of independence, shortly after the end of the Second World War, when the Vietminh were fighting against the returning colonial rulers, the French, who were receiving  covert military assistance from the Americans). Pyle is innocent in the sense of ignorant, new to the country, his head filled with theories about freedom and the need to resist communism. The narrator is Fowler, a cynical, war-weary British journalist, who sees his role as that of the objective reporter, who feels it is wrong to get involved in the conflicts of others, but who has become involved with a Vietnamese girl called Phuong. There is a love triangle. And when Fowler sees the consequences of Pyle's innocent involvement, Fowler, from whatever motivation, has to become involved.

The backdrop is the horrors of war.

The story is perfectly constructed. It's not a long novel and one has the feeling that every word counts. The juxtaposition of the morally flawed Fowler against the 'good' Pyle and the truly innocent Phuong is perfect. There's even a French policeman who has all the characteristics of Porfiry Petrovich, the wonderful investigator in Crime and Punishment (or, to some extent, Nikov in my novel The Kids of God). Step by step, Fowler explains how Pyle came to his death, and at the same time we understand the pressures on Fowler that forced him to do the things he did.

And there's also some stunning descriptions, such as this one: 

"He would have to learn for himself the real background that held you as a smell does: the gold of the rice-fields under a flat late sun: the fishers' fragile cranes hovering over the fields like mosquitoes: the cups of tea on an old abbot's platform, with his bed and his commercial calendars, his buckets and broken cups and the junk of a lifetime washed up around his chair: the mollusc hats of the girls repairing the road where a mine had burst: the gold and the young green and the bright dresses of the south, and in the north the deep browns and the black clothes and the circle of enemy mountains and the drone of planes." (1.2.1)

It is a beautifully written book. Many people see it as Greene's masterpiece, though I would argue for The Power and the Glory. 

Selected quotes:

• "'Phuong', I said - which means Phoenix, but nothing nowadays is fabulous and nothing rises from its ashes." (1.1) Fowler's disillusion is established from the start.
• "An unmistakable young and unused face flung at us like a dart." (1.1) Innocence can be a weapon in this spot-on metaphor
• "God save us always ... from the innocent and the good." (1.1)
• "There is nothing picturesque in treachery and distrust." (1.1)
• "They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and silly and he got involved." (1.2.2)
• "Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever." (1.3.2)
• "The canal was full of bodies. I am reminded now of an Irish stew containing too much meat." (1.4.1)
• "We didn't want to be reminded of how little we counted, how quickly, simply and anonymously death came." (1.4.1)
• "So much of the war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn't seem worth starting even a train of thought." (1.4.1)
• "The possession of a body tonight seemed a very small thing - perhaps that day I had seen too many bodies which belonged to no one, not even to themselves." (1.4.1)
• "He had in his hand the infinite riches of respectability." (1.4.2)
• "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused." (1.4.2)
• "A Chinese of extreme emaciation came into the room. He seemed to take up no room at all: he was like the piece of grease-proof paper that divides the biscuits in a tin." (2.3.2)
• "What distant ancestors had given me this stupid conscience? Surely they were free of it when they raped and killed in their palaeolithic world." (2.3.3)
• "Loneliness lay in my bed and I took loneliness into my arms at night." (3.1.2)

Greene is a superb writer. I must have read almost all of his novels, many of them many years ago. Those reviewed in this blog include:

• Stamboul Train
• The Ministry of Fear
• The Man Within
• A Gun for Sale

January 2023; 180 pages

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