"Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides

Cal Stephanides is a hermaphrodite living in Detroit. Because of a misdiagnosis at birth he has been brought up as a girl but puberty reveals the truth. This book, a cross between an epic family saga and the Great American Novel, traces her family from its roots in Greek Turkey, through emigration to Detroit, and in so doing explains the genetic abnormality. It then poses the terrible question: what to do about it.

So it starts off as a historical novel, explaining how the narrator's father's parents, Lefty and Desdemona, are brother and sister, fleeing the Turkish destruction of Smyrna, getting married on board ship and settling in Detroit with the narrator's other grandparents, Jimmy, a bootlegger, and Aunt Sourmelina, a lesbian ("Lina was one of those women that named the island after."; Book Two: Henry Ford's English Language Melting Point. Lefty and Desdemona's son, Milton, marries Tessa, the daughter of Jimmy and Sourmelina. They have a son, Chapter Eleven (whose name is never explained but is presumably to do with bankruptcy) and Calliope. 

About half-way through, the book metamorphoses into a bildungsroman (a novel about growing up) and we start to follow the trials and troubles of Calliope and 'she' enters puberty and grows towards manhood. 

It is a huge canvas. On the one hand the author is writing about the experience of intersex and transsexual people; on the other hand there is a great deal of social commentary and the author is clearly using the experiences of the family to explore the development of modern America. Eugenides has said that because he was writing about something so far removed from his own experience he had to ground it in as much reality as possible and therefore mined the true stories of his family (including where they grew up, on Middlesex Road in Detroit.

The characterisation of Lefty, the grandfather, and Milton, the father, is brilliant. The acute observation of the behavioural differences between man and woman, and the using of these traits and habits to build a whole person, is superb. The historical moments, which include Henry Ford's attempts to ensure morality in his workers, the birth of the Nation of Islam, and the 1967 Detroit race riots, are fascinating.

Selected Quotes:

• "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." (Book One: The Silver Spoon; first lines)
• "Desdemona became what she'd remain for the rest of her life: a sick person imprisoned in a healthy body." (Book One: Matchmaking)
• "Desdemona had no idea what was happening. She didn't envision her insides as a vast computer code, all 1s and 0s, an infinity of sequences, any one of which might contain a bug." (Book One: Matchmaking)
• "He felt a mad jealousy towards his infant son ... who had muscled his own father aside in Desdemona's affections by a seemingly divine subterfuge, a god taking the form of a piglet in order to suckle at a woman's breast." (Book Two: Marriage on Ice)
• "Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting line-up?" (Book Two: Clarinet Serenade)
• "Chapter Eleven was geeky, nerdy. His body was a stalk supporting the tulip of his brain." (Book Three: The Mediterranean Diet)
• "There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich." (Book Three: The Wolverette)
• "Sandbox sex. It starts in the teens and lasts until twenty or twenty-one. It's all about learning to share. It's about sharing your toys." (Book Three: The Gun on the Wall) I'm not sure about this one. I would have run the last two sentences together, to avoid the repetition: It's all about learning to share your toys.
• "Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye." (Book Four: The Last Stop)

An epic. Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The Virgin Suicides, the debut novel of Jeffrey Eugenides, is also reviewed in this blog.

February 2023; 529 pages

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

"A Month in the Country" by J L Carr

Tom Birkin, the protagonist-narrator is a twitching survivor of the First World War who travels to North Yorkshire to restore a mediaeval wall painting of the Last Judgement in a church, sleeping in the bell-tower. He is welcomed by the villagers, especially the local station-master and his daughter. He falls in love with the vicar's wife. Another outsider, less welcomed, is an archaeologist, another war veteran, who is digging for a missing ancestral grave and living in a tented-over pit in the ground. 

Gently, every gently, the novel explores the ways in which society changes and has changed. The great art work that Birkin slowly uncovers, can only be properly interpreted if you realise that the people in those days thought differently; at the same time this is a chronicle of a forgotten time of horse and cart, church and chapel, and the timeless routines of the countryside. But there are changes coming. Birkin is losing his belief in religion, despite attending chapel and helping with its Sunday School. The masterpiece he is restoring shows sinners falling into Hell, but he cannot imagine a hell worse than the one he has endured in the trenches; he cannot equate the polite prayers in chapel with his prayers when under bombardment.  And there are the changing attitudes to sex, exemplified in Birkin's own on-off marriage, and in his passion for another man's wife (and in what we learn about the archaeologist); although sex, as such, is a constant in the life of the countryside: "in the country everything had to have a sexual overtone, if it wasn't someone else's wife, it was little girls, boys, or, worse still, animals." (p 22)

The whole story is, like L P Hartley's The Go-Between, told as the reminiscence of the narrator as a much older man, which allows foreshadowing and perspective, and lends the nostalgic narrative the gentle hues of a watercolour.

Selected quotes: (page references refer to the 2000 Penguin Modern Classics edition)

• "Long after he must have become used to my face-twitch, he still talked to someone behind my left shoulder." (p 4)
• "Like all people who give in too easily, he began to grub up a few restrictive clauses to recover face." (p 5)
• "It was the idea of an independent man, a proud spirit, being shut up like an animal in a military prison and having to put up with the ghastly crew who always seemed to grope their way in to run these places - that's what appalled me." (p 70)

February 2023; 85 pages

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1980.

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

"Treacle Walker" by Alan Garner

Joe, a young lad with a Lazy Eye, who lives alone in a house, encounters Treacle Walker, a rag and bone man, and trades a pyjama jacket and the shoulder blade of a lamb for an almost empty pot of ointment and a donkey stone. Treacle and the objects usher Joe into a strange world where a body in a bog comes alive (Thin Amren) and cartoon characters 

The prose is more like poetry; every word is precisely placed. There is use of repetition, like in poetry, especially mythic and folkloric epics. But the dialogue is sharp and often witty. Joe, the young boy, never indulges in very modern words but uses slang and lots of dialect words; Treacle and Thin Amren use some very strange and often old-fashioned words. There is an incomplete glossary below. 

The book is also full of allusions, from the epigraph ("Time is Ignorance", Carlo Ravelli) to Jung, to alchemy, to Great Expectations, to Shakespeare to the Mabinogion, to ... In this sense it is like a very short Finnegan's Wake. Unpicking these allusions is, I think, the key to understanding the book. So I have tried to research some of them, and explain them below. Obviously this involves spoilers.

Treacle Walker

Treacle Walker is a rag and bone man who literally accepts a rag (Joe’s pyjama jacket) and a bone (lamb shoulder blade) in return for a pot of ointment and a ‘donkey stone’.

Alan Garner says: "Treacle Walker, real name Walter Helliwell, was a tramp who claimed to heal all things but jealousy'. He was born at the beginning of the twentieth century, near Huddersfield. Not much else is known about him."

'Treacle' used to mean medicine in the middle ages. Treacle wells (there is one in Lewis Carroll which was based on a real well near Oxford) are wells where the water is supposed to having healing properties. Therefore, as well as being a rag and bone man, Treacle Walker is an itinerant medicine man. 

Later in the book he is also described (by Thin Amren) as a psychopomp, which is a spirit who guides the souls of the dead on their journey, and so one presumes that Treacle Walker is saying the death is the cure for all ills. In the final chapter, Joe asks Treacle "Am I dead?" and he replies "I will not say you are dead. Rather, in this world you have changed your life, and are got into another place."

In chapter XI, Treacle tells Joe that his home is “the Country of the Summer Stars” which is what Taliesin, the legendary Welsh bard, says in the Mabinogion.

Glamourie

The jar that Joe selects from the chest on Treacle’s cart contains traces of a green violet (which matches the colour of Treacle Walker’s eyes) ointment which is presumably sold as some sort of quack medicine cure-all; it is this, when touched (painfully) to Joe’s good eye, that enables him to see things that aren’t there. Thin Amren calls this ‘glamourie’; glamour is a word that derives from an archaic usage meaning a charm on the eyes to make them see other than what is there. In the first scene in the marsh Joe can see Thin Amren with his 'good' eye (which has the ointment in) but not with his lazy eye.

Noony or the Bonacon
‘Noony’ is Joe's name for the steam train that goes down the track at noon. It makes its appearance at the very start of the book (and two paragraphs of description in chapter one are repeated word for word in chapter three as if there is a new beginning, so that in chapter three Joe, awaking, thinks he might have dreamt the two previous chapters before discovering that the lamb's shoulder blade from his 'museum' has been replaced by the ointment pot and the donkey stone.

Bonacon is the name that Treacle Walker gives to the steam train. A bonacon was a mediaeval monster who attacked enemies with its deadly farts (according to A Brief History of Farting).

In chapter XI, Treacle Walker subjects Joe to a catechism regarding this train, which he uses to point out that (a) the train travels in a straight line rather than his cart which “runs by crinkum-crankums, crooks and straights” and (b) “Whither and whence the Bonacon? Where does it go to? Where is it come from? ... How does it return? ... Does it run nidgetwise [this means ‘like an idiot], as the sun?” Joe says he uses ‘Noony’ to tell the time: “When Noony comes I know its now” and Treacle questions “How can there be Now? ... For at the very moment you have Now, it flees. It is gone. It is, on the instant, Then. ... You, you know the moment and tell the time. But that is the doings, not the travel; not the wonder, not the sight.” 

So the train is somehow symbolic of time. 

Time and the Whirligig

The Noony/Bunacon as symbolic of time also links to Thin Amren’s image of the eddy in the brook, the Whirligig: “Do you see yon whirligig of water there? Thin Amren pointed to an eddy below an alder root by the bridge. He doesn’t move. But water, she goes by. Then what’s whirligig? ... Then what is brook? ... And brook was here yesterday ... And she’ll be here tomorrow. Whirligig stays. Though he’s not the same water. Then what is yesterday? What today? What tomorrow?” (IX) Later, Thin Amren describes Joe as the Whirligig, as if a person is somehow a thing that persists as time moves past it.

The epigraph at the start of the book is "Time is ignorance" a quote from Physicist Carlo Rovelli (who wrote Seven Brief Lessons in Physics)

The Donkey Stone
In history, a donkey stone was made from pulverised stone, cement, bleach powder and water. They were used to polish steps, they gave a non-slip finish. They were often given out by rag and bone men in exchange for old clothes etc.

Joe’s donkey stone is inscribed with a stylised carving that seems to resemble the White Horse of Uffington. Treacle Walker advises Joe to polish his doorstep with the donkey stone; this has the result of making it impossible for anyone to enter without being invited in (Joe frequently invites Treacle Walker in). Later, Joe will discover that the donkey stone has the ability to carry him through a mirror into an alternative (mirror image) universe.

The Latin that Joe 'reads' at the ophthalmologist

This inscription is translated by Treacle as “This stone is small, of little price; spurned by fools, more honoured by the wise.” It seems at first that this refers to the donkey stone but Treacle Walker has already referred to the jar of ointment as “it is small ... of little price”, so there is an ambiguity here.

The Latin phrase comes from the Rosarium Philosophorium, a sixteenth century alchemical treatise, and refers to the Philosopher’s Stone, an object which could supposedly effect the transformation of base metals to gold and, perhaps, confer immortality and/or eternal youth.

The Latin phrase is carved onto a cube of rock which Carl Jung set by a lakeside near the village of Bollingen in Switzerland. Other inscriptions on the stone read:

• (In Greek) “Time is a child — playing like a child — playing a board game — the kingdom of the child. This is Telesphoros, who roams through the dark regions of this cosmos and glows like a star out of the depths. He points the way to the gates of the sun and to the land of dreams.” The first sentence comes from Heraclitus and the last quotes the Odyssey (24.12) and refers to Hermes as a psychopomp leading the souls of the dead suitors away. There is a discussion of time in Treacle Walker, and Treacle Walker himself is described as a psychopomp.
• “I am an orphan, alone; nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons” These statements are, apparently, taken from works on alchemy. Many of these could apply to Joe.

Thin Amren

Thin Amren is a man who is buried in a marsh. Presumably he is based on Lindow Man, the prehistoric body found well-preserved in a marsh near Garner's home near Wilmslow in Cheshire. When Joe, lured by the noise of a cuckoo (which is both the noise he made when he blew into Treacle Walker’s bone flute and a bird commonly associated with psychopomps), gets lost in the marsh, partly because he takes his eye patch off and so uses his ‘good’ eye (the one that has been touched by the ointment so that it can see what is not there) to try to locate landmarks, he wakes Thin Amren up. He can only see Thin Amren with the ‘good’ eye. It is Thin Amren who describes it as Joe’s ‘glamourie’ and also tells Joe that Treacle Walker is a psychopomp.

The cuckoo
A cuckoo associated with psychopomps. In the mediaeval English song 'Sumer is icumen in' there is a refrain of 'Lhude sing cuccu'. One of the lines in this song is 'bucke uerteþ' where the word 'verteth' means 'farteth'; perhaps the farting buck is is bonacon!

Joe through the looking glass

There are hints that there are two Joes, perhaps body and soul, perhaps live Joe and dead Joe:

• In chapter VII, Joe has been “playing marbles against himself ... sometimes he let the other Joe win”.
• In chapter XII he goes for a walk and when he returns he finds, in the chimney room Treacle sitting with another Joe. In chapter XIII, they both scream and, to the soundtrack of cuckoos, Treacle makes sure they do not meet: “Do not touch. Do not speak. Do not look in the eyes.”
• In chapter XIV, Joe uses the donkey stone to go through the mirror into another world, where everything is, predictably, reversed. He goes into yet another mirror, and another, and another ... chasing the characters who have escaped from the cartoons in the comic.

Other allusions
“Every why has its wherefore” is from the Comedy of Errors (has in the original is hath)
At the end, as he is returning to his bog, Thin Amren says to Joe, “what larks”. This is a quote from Great Expectations (another book where a man rises from a marsh); Joe Gargery says it to Pip, the protagonist-narrator.
At the end (chapter XVIII) Joe asks Treacle what Treacle wants for himself. No-one has ever asked that of Treacle but he replies: “To hear no more the beat of Time. To have no morrow and no yesterday. To be free of years. ... Oblivion. Home.” So Joe takes Treacle’s place as the rag and bone man.

An incomplete glossary

• Amblyopic = having an eye problem that does not have an obvious cause
• Bonacon = a mythical beast with a deadly fart. In Chapter XI, Treacle describes the noonday train as ‘Bonacon’
• Carnaptious = bad-tempered and argumentative
• Catalectic = of a line in poetry, lacking a syllable in the last foot
• Clout = cloth
• Coptank. A copintank is a type of sixteenth-century high hat in the shape of a sugar loaf. Hermes, a psychopomp from Greek myth, wears a winged helmet.
• Corr Bolg = a ‘crane’ bag, an old Irish bag from myth. In chapter XIII, Treacle takes items from his Corr Bolg. In chapter XVIII, Thin Amren asks Joe is Treacle (whom he describes as a bad-tempered ‘coptank’ has snatched (Joe) in his Corr Bolg, suggesting that Joe’s soul has now been taken by Treacle who is guiding it into the underworld.
• Furibund = frantic, frenzied
• Glamourie = glamour is a word that derives from an archaic usage meaning a charm on the eyes to make them see other than what is there. In chapter VI, Thin Amren says that Joe has the glamourie in the eye that has been touched by the ointment.
• Glim = eye
• Hurlothrumbo. In chapter II, Treacle describes the winter as hurlothrumbo and the night as lomberhomock. These seem to be nonsense words. Hurlothrumbo is an eighteenth-century Cheshire nonsense play, Lomberhomock is a character in it.
• Macaronics = poems that contain words of more than one language
• Mirligoes = dizziness or giddiness
• Mools = soft crumbly earth or mould, or earth from a grave
• Nidget = fool, as in ‘an eejit’: In chapter I, Treacle describes the sun as “the craven nidget who flees the dark and will not come back till morning”; in chapter XI he says that that sun travels across the sky ‘nidgetwise’, in the manner of an idiot.
• Nominees = a Yorkshire dialect word for ‘children’s chants’
• Nookshotten = a nook is a recess but nookshotten is a dialect word meaning, apparently, jutting out at all sort of angles
• Pickthank = a sycophant
• Psychopomp = one who guides the souls of the dead through the afterlife
• Scapulimancer: In chapter I, when he receives from Joe the lamb’s shoulder blade, Treacle calls Joe a scapulimancer, who is someone who foretells the future from the pattern of cracks on a burning shoulder blade.
• Shufti = a quick look
• Stramash = fuss, noise
• Tarradiddle = pretentious nonsense

Selected quotes

• “A wind threw the door onto him, shoving him against the stack. And night spilled in. Snow stung his face. He forced the door against the wind and the latch clanged shut. He clung to the chimney post. But night was in the room, a sheet of darkness, flapping from wall to wall. It changed shape, swirling, flowing. It dropped to the ground and ruckled over the floor bricks; then up to the joists and beams of the ceiling; hung, fell, humped. It shrieked, reared against the chimney opening, but did not enter. It surged through the house by cracks and gaps in the timbers, out under the eaves. There was a whispering silence; and on the floor snow melted to tears.” (I)
• “It was a tune with wings, trampling things, tightened strings, boggarts and bogles and brags on their feet; the man in the oak, sickness and fever, that set in long, lasting sleep the whole great world with the sweetness of sound the bone did not play.” (II, repeated in XIII)
• “Unfound bones sing louder” (II)
• “It was a blue-grey day; no use to anyone.” (VII)
• “I have been through Hickety, Pickety, France and High Spain ... by criknkum-crankums, crooks and straights. And I am at your pear, with my ears in my hat, my back in my coat, and two squat kickering tattery shoes full of roadwayish water.” (VIII)
• "Why the gawk of a throttled earwig?” (IX)
• “I’d not trust that one’s arse with a fart.” (IX)
• “I’m weary. Weary of dreaming, Whirligig. I’m a shadow in a bottle with the weight of it.” (XVIII)
• “If you won’t dream ... I can’t be. Ever. At all. But if you dream, I can.” (XVIII)

References

http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/the-critic-and-the-clue-tracking-alan-garners-treacle-walker/

Other novels by Alan Garner which have been reviewed in this blog:

• The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, its sequel The Moon of Gomrath, and the distinctively different concluding part to the 'trilogy', Boneland.
• Elidor, a Narnia-style children's fantasy
• The utterly brilliant Owl Service (aimed at young adults)
• Red Shift, also aimed at young adults and perhaps the darkest of Garner's novels. A line in Elidor - "The legend says that there was once a ploughboy in Elidor: an idiot, given to fits. But in his fit he spoke clearly, and was thought to prophesy." (C 6) - seems to be a link with one of the characters in Red Shift.
• The definitively adult Thursbitch

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

This book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022

"Titus Groan" by Mervyn Peake

An heir, Titus,is born to Lord Supulchrave, the seventy-sixth Earl of Groan, in the castle of Gormenghast, a place in which every day is governed by tradition and ritual. An ambitious, ruthless and clever seventeen-year-old scullion, Steerpike, leaves his place in the kitchen determined to disrupt and destroy so that he can gain power. Despite the title of the book, it is Steerpike who is the protagonist-villain, who encapsualtes “The hatred of the young for the authority vested in age.” (The Un-Earthing of Barquentine)

It is difficult to find parallels for this work. It has been described as Gothic but I think this is on account of the setting (a castle) and the consequent feeling of claustrophobia. Classic Gothic literature involves the present being haunted by the past and in many ways this novel is its inversion: the present, in the shape of Steerpike, is destroying the present-as-shaped-by-the-past. It has been described as fantasy but there is no magic and very little in the way of supernatural happenings. There is a strong feeling of Lewis Carroll about it (among Peake's most critically acclaimed illustrations were those for Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and The Hunting of the Snark) and the characters are classic Dickensian grotesques. The creation of such a complete world is reminiscent of science fiction (and Peake's novella about Titus was published together with science fiction stories by William Golding and John Wyndham). 

It is a masterpiece of description. Peake's day job was as an artist and he describes things so that they can be seen. A member of my U3A group who read this book said that Peake often describes a scene in detail and then homes in upon the character in the scene who will carry that part of the story; this is a little like the way a camera sometimes zooms in upon a character in an establishing shot. The descriptions are detailed and rich and wonderful (and they reminded me, again, of Dickens, but they're better). “This is the most painterly form of literature imaginable" although it is true, in the beginning, before the story gets going properly, that the book seems "to move from set tableau to set tableau, more like a series of paintings than like a fluid narrative” (reference here) But I think it is because of these descriptions that Peake convinces us, reading a story about an impossible place, to suspend our disbelief. Anthony Burgess, writing in the introduction to the Penguin edition,  says “It is difficult, in post-war English writing, to get away with big, rhetorical gestures. Peake manages it because, with him, grandiloquence never means diffuseness; there is no musical emptiness in the most romantic of his descriptions; he is always exact.” It is that precision of description that creates verisimilitude, even while you know that what is being described is unreal. (Kafka achieves the same in a very different fashion, by being utterly matter-of-fact about the madness he is describing.)

Written during the second world war, I imagine that the writer, a talented artist and illustrator with a taste for the grotesque, would have seen how Hitler had come from obscurity to smash traditional Germany; he might have seen the battle between the old and the new reflected in the Spanish Civil War, in the consequences of an overthrown Empire in the China where he grew up, in social changes in England following the First World War, and in the impact of Futurism and Vorticism in art. 

It is followed by the sequels Gormenghast, which is perhaps even better, and Titus Alone, which is rather different (perhaps because it was being written while Peake, still in his forties, was struggling with early onset dementia). A fourth novel, written by Maeve Gilmore, Peake's widow, based on the notes he left, has recently been published.

Selected quotes:

Some of those brilliant descriptions:

• “The Tower of Flints ... patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven.” (The Hall of Bright Carvings)
• “Like a vast spider suspended by a metal chord, a candelabrum presided over the room ... long stalactites of wax lowered their pale spilths drip by drip.” (Tallow and Birdseed)
• “Where the dust was like pollen and lay softly on all things.” (Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap)
• “Seven clouds like a group of naked cherubs or sucking-pigs, floated their plump pink bodies across a sea of slate.” (Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap)
• “To her right was an enormous crumbling organ. Its pipes were broken and the keyboard shattered. Across its front the labour of a decade of grey spiders had woven their webs into a shawl of lace.” (The Attic)
• “The moon slid inexorably into its zenith, the shadows shrivelling to the feet of all that cast them, and as Rantel approached the hollow at the hem of the Twisted Woods he was treading in a pool of his own midnight.” (Knives in the Moon)
• “His Lordship is dressed in black. His knees are drawn up almost to his chin. His long, fine white hands are curled slightly inwards as they hang over his knees, between which, and his supported chun, the wrists are wedged. But it is the eyes that strike a chill to the centre of those who watch, for they have become circular. The smile which plated across his lips ... is gone forever. His mouth is entirely expressionless.” (Early One Morning)
• “The first descent of the rain ... is falling from they sky in long upright and seemingly motionless lines of rosy silver that stand rigidly upon the ground as though there were a million harp strings strung vertically between the solids of earth and sky.” (A Bloody Cheekbone)
• “Summer was on the roofs of Gormenghast. It lay inert, like a sick thing. Its limbs spread. It took the shape of what it smothered. The masonry sweated and was horribly silent.” (In Preparation for Violence)
• “Rolls of lard-coloured fat filled in the space between the chin and the clavicles.” (Blood at Midnight)

There are also some very funny moments:

• “In the dimness he flung his arms apart so that the buttons of his tunic were torn away, one of them whizzing across the room and stunning a cockroach on the opposite wall.” (Swelter)
• “As this was the first joke she had made for over a year, she tried to smile, but her facial muscles had become, through long neglect, unusable.” (The Room of Roots)
• “Seeing an Earl as an owl on a mantelpiece, and having part of one’s face removed by a cat, both on the same morning, can temporarily undermine the self-control of any man.” (The Twins Again)
• “The navel, that pivot for a draughtsman’s eye, that relic whose potentiality appears to have been appreciated only by the dead Swelter, who saw in it a reliable salt-cellar, when that gentleman decided upon eggs for his breakfast.” (Barquentine and Steerpike)
• “The Doctor showed about as much sign of having a pair of hips as an ell set upon its end, while Irma ... had ... a pair of hips capable of balancing upon their osseous shelves enough bric-a-brac to clutter up a kleptomaniac’s cupboard.” (By Gormenghast Lake)

Other selected quotes:

• “Their sole passion was directed, once their days of love had guttered, on the production of this wooden sculpture” (The Hall of Bright Carvings)
• “The air between them was turgid with contempt and jealousy.” (The Hall of Bright Carvings)
• “He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.” (The Great Kitchen)
• “The attacked the bungs as though unweaned.” (The Great Kitchen)
• “He was lost in a labyrinth of stone corridors, lit here and there by candles sunk in their own wax.” (The Stone Lanes)
• “Even the bed was at an angle, slanting away from the wall and crying out to be pushed back flush against the wallpaper.” (Tallow and Birdseed)
• “To have asked him of his feelings for his hereditary home would have been like asking a man what his feelings were towards his own hand or his own throat.” (Sepulchrave)
• “Her dressing became interrupted between the addition of each garment by dance movements of her own invention.” (Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap)
• “She appeared rather to inhabit, than to wear her clothes.” (Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap)
• “It was as though she enjoyed the artist telling her something quite fresh and new. Something she had never thought of before.” (The Attic)
• “She [Fuschia] said, dear, that she’d burn down the whole place, burn down Gormenghast when she was the ruler and she’d live on her own, and I said she was wicked, and she said that everyone was - everyone and everything except rivers, clouds, and some rabbits.” (Keda)
• “The Countess never entered it, preferring those parts of the castle where the lights and the shadows were on the move.” (First Blood)
• “The negative dignity of the room threw him out in relief as a positive scarecrow.” (First Blood)
• “I, as part of my work here, deliver the new generation to the old - the sinless to the sinful, ha, ha, ha, the stainless to the tarnished - oh dear me, the white to the black, the healthy to the diseased.” (Assemblage)
• “‘It’s power we want,’ lady Clarice repeated. ... ‘Yes, that’s what we want’, echoed Cora, ‘lots of power. Then we could make people do things’.” (Assemblage)
• “He knelt on the windowsill and then, turning around, slowly raised himself to his feet and stood outside the window, the hollow twilight at his shoulder-blades.” (Means of Escape)
• “He only knew that his throat was parched and beneath his belt a tiger was clawing in his stomach.” (A Body by the Window)
• “He was not the artist. He was the exact imitation of one.” (Soap for Greasepaint)
• “Prunesquallor and his sister both felt a certain delight in making the acquaintance of a young gentleman with brains, however twisted those brains might be.” (A Gift of the Gab)
• “Steerpike’s gallantry had for a moment taken the chill off her heart.” (A Gift of the Gab)
• “His face remained like a mask, but deep down in his stomach he grinned.” (A Gift of the Gab)
• “Gormenghast. The long, notched outline of her home. It was now his background. ... He stood against it, an intruder, imposing himself so vividly, so solidly, against her world, his head overtopping the loftiest of its towers.” (The Grotto)
• “He was holding her; she was in his arms; in his power.” (The Grotto)
• “‘Equality’, said Steerpike, ‘is the thing. It is the only true and central premise from which constructive ideas can radiate freely and be operated without prejudice. Absolute equality of status. Equality of wealth. Equality of power.” (The Sun Goes Down Again)
• “‘There should be no rich, no poor, no strong, no weak,’ said Steerpike, methodically pulling the legs off the stag-beetle, one by one, as he spoke. ‘Equality is the great thing. Equality is everything’.” (The Sun Goes Down Again)
• “But don’t you think it’s wrong if some people have nothing to eat and others have so much they throw most of it away? Don’t you think it’s wrong if some people have to work all their lives for a little money to exist while others never do any work and live in luxury?” (The Sun Goes Down Again)
• “To wear rich and becoming apparel no doubt engenders a sense of well-being in the wearer, but to be draped, as was Sourdust, in a sacrosanct habit of crimson rags is to be a world above such considerations as the price and fit of clothes and to experience a sense of propriety that no wealth could buy.” (The Burning)
• “The long shelves surrounded them, tier upon tier, circumscribing their world with a wall of other worlds imprisoned yet breathing among the network of a million commas, semi-colons, full stops, hyphens and every other sort of printed symbol.” (The Burning)
• “The old man would be complete, if not homogenous. He would not be headless, and his funeral would be no slipshod, bury-as-you-please affair.” (Sourdust is Buried)
• “Why must one try and be respectful to old people when they aren’t considerate?” (Sourdust is Buried)
• “‘I am not your father’, he replied. ... ‘I am the death-owl’.” (Half Light)
• “There are great pearls upon his forehead, and in each pearl is the reflection of a candle flame.” (A Change of Colour)
• “Five claws rip out a crimson wedge from his cheek immediately below the right eye.” (A Bloody Cheekbone)
• “You will be as fit as the most expensive of fiddles.” (A Bloody Cheekbone)
• “What use are books to anyone whose days are like a rook’s nest with every twig a duty?” (The Reveries: Reverie of Gertrude the Countess of Gormenghast)
• “He now moved his bulk across the earth as silently as the passing of a cloud through the dusk.” (Here and There)
• “A few feet above his head a spider scrawled itself across the ceiling.” (Presage)
• “The most disgusting sound - as of some kind of low animal with gastric trouble. Mr Swelter was laughing.” (Blood at Midnight)
• “Something was changing - changing in a world where change was crime.” (Blood at Midnight)
• “You don’t matter. You’re not going to be anything.” (The Earling)
• “What were problems for if not to be solved.” (The Earling)

Wonderful. February 2023; 506 pages

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

"House of Names" by Colm Toibin

 Loosely based on the Oresteiad and told from the perspectives of Clytemnestra and her daughter Electra in the first person and Orestes in the third person. 

This summary of the plot contains spoilers: Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, in order to get fair winds so he can sail off to war. His wife Clytemnestra, Iphigenia's mother, can't forgive this. So, she starts a relationship with Aegisthus, a rival claimant for the throne, and, when Agamemnon returns, Clytemnestra murders him. She and Aegisthus begin a reign of tyranny, kidnapping the children of leading citizens in order to ensure their compliance. Clytemnestra's son Orestes is also sent away with these boys but he and another boy Leander escape with Mitros, a very sick boy. They find refuge at the house of an old woman. After some years, the old woman and Mitros die and Orestes and Leander return home. Leander joins the rebels while Orestes, still ignorant of who killed his father, resumes his place at the palace. But, when he discovers what really happened, he kills his mother. The rebels capture the palace.

I just didn't understand why Toibin used the characters and much of the story from an incredibly well-known myth and then introduced such significant differences. If you want to rewrite the story, change the names. Otherwise you run the risk of readers like me becoming distracted by the discrepancies. And they're not little tweaks. I can just about accept the truncation of the war from ten years to three, although this means that it doesn't really give time for Orestes to grow up. But the fundamental is in the character of Orestes, here portrayed as young, naive and rather wimpy (despite committing several murders). In the original he is faced with a stark choice: he has to fulfil his duty of avenging his father's death but the only way he can do this is by matricide. And the aftermath is that he is driven mad by guilt and that it is only after he has been tried and shown mercy that he can resume his kingly duties (becoming a rather unpleasant warlord). None of that is in here. So Toibin has taken away the fundamental dramatic and psychological crux of the story to produce this emasculated, rationalised version. So why keep the names?

Of course it is beautifully written. It's Toibin. He's good. 

Selected quotes:

• "I know as no one else knows that the gods ... care about human desires and antics in the same way that I care about the leaves of a tree." (Clytemnestra, 1)
• "Leander and Orestes possessed a set of references that were like a private language; in the old woman's house, the discussion of weather or food of farm animals had evolved into a sort of mild banter with many comments exchanged on each other's failings and incapacities." (Orestes 1) I like this quote but it appears after the sojourn with the old woman almost as an afterthought: this 'banter' has not been shown before; I think it should have been.

February 2023; 262 pages

Other books by Colm Toibin reviewed in this blog:

• The Testament of Mary
• Brooklyn

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

"A World Away: A Memoir of Mervyn Peake" by Maeve Gilmore

 Gilmore was the widow of Peake, the author of Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and other books, who was also a poet, a painter and a very talented illustrator. 

As a biography, this doesn't really work. I was trying to use it as a source to write a potted biography of Peake's life and the lack of dates made this book difficult to use; we don't even know when he was born; it starts with Gilmore's first sight of him when they were together at Art School, she as pupil, he as teacher. 

But if we don't get the facts we get a lot of the feelings. Their life together was one of artistic poverty in London flats (in those days it was cheap to rent in London!) and remote rural cottages (and on Sark). They were financially impoverished but they knew Dylan Thomas and Graham Greene and Laurence Olivier and Anthony Quinn. They brought up their family and created.

And then Mervyn starts suffering from a brain disease, perhaps Parkinson's, perhaps early-onset dementia (aged 46). Treatment includes a spell in a mental hospital, with ECT, and brain surgery. Clearly, an illustrator can't have shaking hands. Clearly, a writer needs to be able to remember things. And so, in desperate sadness, the author records the slow decline of her brilliant husband.

Selected quotes:

• “When one is unsure everyone else seems perfectly at ease” (8)
• “How could one know what love was, before living it? How could one know what life was, before loving it?” (20)
• “We saw a great deal more of England than we should have done if he or I had been more of a map reader.” (111)
• “I have played too much around the edge of madness.” (122)

February 2023; 142 pages

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

"The New York Trilogy" by Paul Auster

 This book contains three novellas. They are connected.

City of Glass

Quinn, who writes mystery novels under the pen name William Wilson starring a private eye called max Work, receives a series of late night phone calls asking for help from "Paul Auster ... of the Auster Detective Agency". 

The first couple of chapters, in which the identity issues of the protagonist are discussed in short, matter-of-fact sentences, felt very Kafkaesque. The  research into the Tower of babel was very reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges, as is the thesis about whether a child brought up without language will speak the language of God. A doppelganger makes an early appearance. 

The middle of the story seems to be the relatively straightforward story about a 'detective' following a man whose seemingly random wanderings through New York might have a pattern ... or has that been imposed from outside? Then, towards the end, the themes of identity, and the Kafkaesque and Borgesian atmospheres return before the enigmatic ending. 

There's also a link with Don Quixote, about which the author Auster is writing (a piece querying the authorship of Don Quixote).

Ghosts

All the characters have colour names.  Private investigator Blue (trained by Brown) is hired by White to watch Black, which he does, for months ... But all is not as it seems.

The Locked Room

A hack writer's best-friend-growing-up disappears, leaving three novels and other works. The novelist's wife commissions the hack writer to get them published. They're successful. The hack writer begins to prepare a biography; this task becomes a quest to find the missing man.

The three books explore identity. The plots are light-years away from standard PI-genre plots. There's a lot of confusion. It's very Kafka and some Borges but I'm not sure how much I understood it.

Selected quotes:

"Remembered things, he knew, had a tendency to subvert the things remembered." (City of Glass 2)

"It seemed to Quinn that Stillman's body had not been used for a long time ... so that motion had become a conscious process ... all flow and spontaneity had been lost." (City of Glass 2)

"I am Peter Stillman. I say that of my own free will. Yes. That is not my real name. No." (City of Glass 2)

"It is merely a blank stare, signifying thought rather than seeing, a look that makes things invisible, that does not let them in." (Ghosts 1)

"What I had done so far amounted to a mere fraction of nothing at all. It was so much dust, and the slightest wind would blow it away." (The Locked Room 1)

"Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them ... experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them." (The Locked Room 2)

"Every life is inexplicable." (The Locked Room 5)

"That's what you finally learn from life: how strange it is. You can't keep up with what happens. You can't even imagine it." (The Locked Room 6)

An original but very strange book, beautifully written. 

February 2023; 314 pages

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

The Guardian calls NYT "one of the few books you can buy in airport bookshops about the annihilation of identity in the urban world."

"The Last Simple" by Ray Sullivan

 This remarkable book lampoons novels, especially of the Da Vinci Code type. The characters are all aware that they are in a work of fiction and that what happens to them will have to conform to the requirements of the genre (including only being able to perform normal bodily functions if they happen not to be in the next chapter); being written out is tantamount to murder and they all hope to be in the sequel. 

There is a plot of sorts and it is suitably ridiculous. Lord Bartholomew has been kidnapped by the evil Cardinal Ringaringaroses (whose henchman is Al Bino) in order to fulfil the Cardinal's plans for world domination which will inevitably involve a sixty second countdown towards the end. Bradford, a Professor of Simpology, is recruited to save the world.

But the joy of this book lies in the almost non-stop jokes. Every possible metaphor is taken literally. Every possible bit of word-play is wrung from the text. There must be at least one joke on every page. To give just a few examples:

• "‘A mystery?’ repeated Bradford, thrown momentarily by the starting of a new chapter.  Deep down, he hadn’t finished with the last one." (Ch 3)
• "‘I think the chapter’s going to end soo" (Ch 10)
• "Then another idea struck him, cutting him just above the eye" (Ch 13)
• "Kylie felt her heart sink, a rare hereditary condition caused by inbreeding in popular fiction." (Ch 14)
• "Lady Bartholomew poured scorn over the drawing, making the ink run a little." (Ch 20)
• "The assembled group nodded sagely, except for Belsen who chose a different herb to nod." (Ch 32)
• "‘Lucas Brightwater?’ asked Bradford, his eyebrows knitting together.  One was working on the sleeves, the other on the body." (Ch 32)

It's quite exhausting for the reader to keep up. It is also fantastic. It's like Tristram Shandy has been crossed with Monty Python with help from Milton Jones, the result being hilarious, surreal and extraordinary.

Selected quotes:

• "it wasn’t her fault that people didn’t read his stories in the right order, but it irked him that he had to explain his background every bloody time he had an adventure." (Ch 6)
• "In a fair world he wouldn’t be the lead in a third-rate parody but would instead be the lead in a Dan Brown story – the only problem was that he didn’t know if he’d have to dumb up or down for that role if and when it happened." (Ch 6)
• "This place must be costing a fortune,’ he said, looking around at the magnificent architecture, marred by the steel pipes. ‘Only if you describe it fully,’" (Ch 7)
• "What you have is a pretty strong jaw, not a pretty, strong jaw." (Ch 7) 
• "‘You’re going to speak to your daughter in a few moments,’ he declared, his eyes spilling evil.  Pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket, he wiped the evil up" (Ch 10)
• "Deep down, Bradford wanted to be an original character, not some amalgam stereotype." (Ch 15)
• "studying the hand with a puzzled look on her face while hoping nobody would ask her to suggest where else a puzzled look could reside." (Ch 31)
• "Bradford realised he was approaching novel fatigue, the syndrome where characters realise they’ve been active for days and nights without sleep.  It happened in practically every story and was never accounted for adequately." (Ch 34)

It's like Wodehouse on speed. Bizarre but brilliant. February 2023.

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

"Man in the Bath" by Kit Derrick

A University administrator, Dr David Dunn, decides to record his rambling thoughts using a webcam and post them on the internet. Despite (or because of) their provocative and sometimes misogynist content, 'Man in the Bath' goes viral and becomes an internet sensation. Dr Dunn becomes addicted to his own site and starts to lose focus at work. Then the site promotes a quasi-religious community ... and Dr Dunn realises he has lost control of the message.

I was terribly afraid after the first few chapters that this book was little more than a pretext for the author to rant. But, having finished, I am content that those rants which are chronicled are in character: Dr Dunn is intellectually arrogant and fundamentally sexist; he reminded me of the protagonist in Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. He is also, of course, the protagonist in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, the doctor who creates the monster that he then finds abhorrent and struggles to control. You could also see it, especially given the religious rants, as a metaphor for the life of Jesus.

It was a great idea for a novel and the writing was good (my only quibble was a couple of times when 'who' was used when I thought Dr Dunn would have used 'whom'). It's perfectly paced with the major turning-point coming at the halfway mark. I read the whole thing on a long train journey (points failure again!) in a single day and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was really hooked well before the last few chapters and the ending was perfect.

Selected quotes:

• "Sometimes life is easier if you don’t reveal your greater knowledge and wisdom. Other people don’t like knowing that they’re thicker than you are. Which means hiding your own intelligence." (Ch 1)
• "the daily ritual of brushing, washing, and emptying" (Ch 4)
• "Basically, he’s just a dick with a chip on his shoulder." (Ch 8)

Recommended. February 2023.

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