"Star of the Morning" by Kirsten Ellis

 This is a biography of Lady Hester Stanhope. Not only was she an amazing woman but also she knew everybody there was to know in the Regency worlds of England and Lebanon. She was born into power and privilege, her father being an Earl and her grandfather being Pitt the Elder; after her uncle Pitt the Younger died she was granted a government pension of £1,200 (worth over £120,000 today). But she was also born a woman in a patriarchy where she couldn't even vote (although having lovers was very much less of a problem than it became in the more puritanical Victorian days; Hester had a number). She must have been very intrepid to travel abroad as she did into the Ottoman Empire which, despite its nominal unity, seemed to be composed of endlessly conflicting warlords and bandits. She suffered shipwreck and plague and was regularly exposed to risk (although we should realise that England pre-sanitation wasn't a very healthy place and life, especially for child-bearing women, was frequently cut short; furthermore, Hester didn't exactly travel solo but with guns and a retinue of servants including her own private doctor and she always ensured she had a male companion).

The book is brilliantly paced. Her early life in England fills the first quarter of the book, Egypt the second and Lebanon the third and fourth which are divided almost equally between her political machinations in the third quarter and her decline into religious madness in the fourth.

She went on a treasure hunt after finding a "curious manuscript" (the treasure chest turned out to be empty but she found a wonderful statue ... which she had smashed to pieces so she would leave no trace of her excavations). She was party to a plot to liberate Napoleon from exile in St Helena using a submarine. She described using a bezoar (a 'serpent stone') in an attempt to cure the plague and preparing Mandragora to be used as an aphrodisiac. She visited the city of Palmyra, the desert city of Queen Zenobia, later immortalised as Semiramis. She joined in with mystic rites in some of the sects whose beliefs fused Christianity, Judaism, Islam and more ancient tribal religions. She could have inspired the plot for a whole series of novels.

The only problem with this book was that I kept wanting to find out more about the other characters in the stellar cast list:

•  She acted as hostess for the unmarried Prime Minister Pitt the Younger, living with him in 10 Downing Street when he was PM and Walmer Castle when he wasn't.
• Her father was an Earl, notorious for siding with the French revolutionaries. He became an eccentric inventor. Family life must have been difficult and all the kids had to escape when they got older (on one occasion using knotted sheets from their bedroom window), Hester's sister by eloping with the local apothecary. 
• Her brother, who became an heir, tried to adopt (perhaps because he fancied him) Kaspar Hauser, the 'wild boy' who may have been the heir to the Duke of Baden; he was granted guardianship; there are suggestions that he might have sought to send the boy abroad into Hester's custody and he was later accused of involvement in Kaspar's assassination./
• Horne Tooke, a radical politician who spent time in the Tower accused of seditious treason
• Richard Brothers, a crazed millennial prophet, who predicted that Hester would ride into Jerusalem as 'Queen of the Jews' in a sort of apocalyptic end-of-days scenario
• Lord Byron, the poet, whom she met (with his Greek boyfriend) in Greece which he was trying to liberate

Among the men who were or might have been her lovers were

• Sir John Moore, who died during the Peninsular campaign and is nowadays best remembered for a poem about his funeral
• The Earl of Camelford, whose Scarlet Pimpernel type activities included an attempt to assassinate Napoleon
• General Miranda, a South American revolutionary who liberated Venezuela with Bolivar
• Michael Bruce, grandson of an explorer, who, after Hester, went on to smuggle a Bonapartist out of a France ruled by a restored (and vindictive) Bourbon government and spent time in a French jail for this
• John Lewis Burckhardt, the man who rediscovered Petra
• Vincent Boutin, archaologist and probably Napoleonic spy
• Almaz, her Arab gardener

This is a well-written biography about an amazing woman. Why is it out of print?????

April 2023; 394 pages

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

"Monday Morning" by Patrick Hamilton

 Eighteen-year-old Anthony is a complete innocent (he doesn't even know how to dance at the start) living in a private hotel in Kensington and dreaming about the wonderful things he will do with his life. He intends to start writing a novel on Monday morning. He falls in love with a young girl also staying at the hotel and writes poetry and love letters but she doesn't really seem to be in love with him. He tries for journalist jobs on national papers but his utter lack of experience always results in a recommendation (studiously ignored) to start with the provincials. An acquaintance with an actor lands him a job as an assistant stage manager but he doesn't even know what a prop is; nevertheless he gets a small part as an actor and goes with the company on tour. He avoids prostitutes and travels to Paris. 

It's quite funny in places and an amiable narrative of an inexperienced and utterly gauche lad trying to fall in love. 

Selected quotes:

• "He had a one-reading acquaintance with a few of the best-known works of the best-known authors of today" (Ch 1)
• "It transpired later (indeed it never failed to transpire sooner or later) that the first Braynes settled in Sussex somewhere about 1600." (Ch 7)
• "Twilight may turn London to purple beauty but never Sheffield." (Ch 8)
• "In the dark, feeble hours of the morning Anthony pulled himself to pieces, and that done conscientiously erected something of himself more handsome and sturdy than he had ever erected. Though he decided not to employ that erection until he had returned from Paris." (Ch 13) I had to read this twice. Not exactly subtle. 

April 2023; 252 pages

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

"The Plains of Cement" by Patrick Hamilton

 This book is part of the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky. It is about Ella, the barmaid who works with Bob the waiter at The Midnight Bell public house; Bob's story is told in The Midnight Bell.

Ella is being courted by an elderly customer, Mr Eccles. Ella doesn't love him but she is considering marriage because he says he is comfortably off. He woos her (there is a great deal of comedy in this), taking her to the theatre, and soon, because she can't but be polite, so that she never has the opportunity for telling him how she feels, or even asking him a direct question about his intentions, he assumes that they are engaged. Soon they are eight weeks away from marriage and Ella is desperately seeking escape routes.

Hamilton is great at dialogue. He replicates perfectly the patterns of everyday speech and shows how the inherent flaws in interpersonal communication can lead to assumptions and misunderstandings. There are moments in this book that are really very funny; it is the only Hamilton novel I have read so far (four) that contains humour.

Selected quotes:

• "She was neither startlingly attractive, not startlingly ugly. She could attract no attention at first sight; she could therefore never hope to attract much attention." (Ch 1)
• "There is a great deal of the tomb in a bedroom; all passions, delights, schemings, ambitions, triumphs, must be taken back at night to these caves of cold arbitration." (Ch 5)
• "As an old man he was barely responsible for his rage. Old men were known and allowed to be irritable and to go into rages about nothing. ... Because they were old there was not extracted from them the same duties of self-control towards their fellow-beings as there was from others." (Ch 6)
• "He had an extraordinary way of even opening a door as though he was slamming it." (Ch 14)
• "It was Sunday. By ten o'clock Ella was busy at her tasks in the bar, wondering what it was, breathing in the air, which made it so overwhelmingly, all-permeatingly Sunday - so that she would have known it was Sunday if all the almanacal evidence in the world had spoken to the contrary." (Ch 21)
• "Sunday sunshine served to intensify rather than remove her depression of spirits ... making her think of God - a subject which she could still not get the hang of and which always dejected her." (Ch 21)
• "He had lost much of his self-consciousness, and talked less about her and more about herself - his likes and dislikes, his approvals and disapprovals - rather with an air of giving her a Short Course in himself for her present convenience and future reference." (Ch 21)
• "The innumerable, irrelevant, base, rebellious, unscrupulous, egoistic thoughts and impulses springing up on all sides from her subconscious mind." (Ch 23)
• "In addition to Lying Down, and Taking it Easy, and being Helped, there was a vitally important sentimental rule that people in these circumstances should, periodically and with great ostentation, be Left." (Ch 23)
• "Sometimes she wished she could give up thinking altogether." (Ch 23)
• "It seemed ... that the gods had at last convicted human nature of its crimes and thrown them all into a vast cold dungeon away from the light of day forever." (Ch 27)

Hamilton is so good at drilling down into the minutiae of human interaction and showing how far our behaviour is from our internal life. 

April 2023; 184 pages

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

"Small Things Like These" by Claire Keegan

 This short novel (shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize) is set in a small Irish town suffering economic depression where the Catholic Church is very much in charge. It is written in the third-person past tense but seen through the eyes of the hero-protagonist, Billy Furlong, the owner of a fuel merchants and father of five girls. He's a nice bloke in a happy marriage, a kind boss with a loyal workforce, and in the run-up to Christmas he delivers coal and logs around the town, extending credit where needed, and giving a little fuel to those who can't afford any. When he is asked about his employment of foreigners, he replies "Hasn't everyone to be born somewhere" and this is not followed by a question mark (Ch 5). 

But he discovers that the local convent is mistreating the girls who, having had a baby out of wedlock, and having been 'rescued' by the nuns, are being forced to work for their board and lodgings. Billy himself is illegitimate but was fortunate enough to be brought up in the local big house where his mum was a servant, treated almost as one of the family, so the plight of these unmarried mothers touches him. He is warned not to get involved by his wife, who believes that charity should begin at home, and by the local villages, who point out the power of the church in their small society. Christmas approaches and Billy's conscience struggles with his self-interest.

The book is beautifully told in  exquisite prose. At times, there is the feeling that you are in a modern myth, as you encounter characters like the old man slashing thistles at the side of the road who answers Billy's "Would you mind telling me where this road will take me?" with "This road will take you wherever you want to go, son." (Ch 4) A sense of foreboding, a growing sense of menace, creeps up on the reader. I was torn between wanting to savour the moment and wanting to rush to the end to find out what would happen. 

A miniature masterpiece.

Selected quotes:

• "Keep the enemy close, the bad dog with you and the good dog will not bite." (Ch 7)
• "The snow was building so that the footprints of people who had gone before and after him in both directions stood out plainly and not so plainly, too, on the footpath." (Ch 7)
• "Was there any point in being alive without helping one another?" (Ch 7)

April 2023; 111 pages

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

"The Siege of Pleasure" by Patrick Hamilton

 Part of the Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky trilogy, this little novel explores how Jenny, the antagonist in The Midnight Bell, became a prostitute. 

Patrick Hamilton has been compared to Dickens, presumably because his novels are set in the pubs and among the poor people of London but Hamilton's characters are much less exaggerated and believably real. Hamilton was also a playwright and his descriptions of settings are like the descriptions of a set on stage, with the scenery and the props and the entrances and exits. There are many moments of authorial voice but much of this book is narrated through the eyes of Jenny, as she struggles with temptation. 

Selected quotes:

• "Paradoxically, at no time of life is existence so intensely physical as in old age.  ... It is not with beauty and seemly abstractions, but with pills and digestive expedients, that the superannuated await release in death." (Ch 1)
• "They were seen as hideous old women without past or future, and it was imagined that they were this because they had somehow decided to be so." (Ch 1)
• "In fairness to his waistcoat, which would otherwise have shared his supper, it was necessary to tie a large napkin around the Doctor's neck." (Ch 1)
• "To make people good it is advisable not to tell them to be good, but to tell them that they are good." (Ch 1)

April 2023; 114 pages

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

"Mr Norris Changes trains" by Christopher Isherwood

 One of Isherwood's classic 'Berlin' novels ... but rather different from much of his work in that, although still told in the first person, the narrator is not 'Christopher'; however he is still principally an observer and, despite his different name, recognisably the author.

The narrator observes the action, tolerating and accepting the various characters, none of whom are upstanding moral citizens. For most of the book it is a bit of a mystery how Mr Norris makes money but it is clearly through immoral and probably illegal means; he is an intriguing mixture of camp and nervousness. He enjoys being dominated and whipped by Anni, whose 'protector' is Otto. The severely monocled but "fishy" Baron 'Kuno' van Pregnitz has a predilection for young men; at one point the narrator goes on holiday with him and the suggestion is that they share a bedroom. They become involved in the struggles of the communist party against the growing power of the Nazis. 

I think what makes this book so good is the the way the author explores the complexity of the main characters and the empathy he shows. There is no judgement. This extends to the poverty-stricken environment. We're in a world in which anything goes and people do what they can to survive. The reader is seduced by the seediness of the society. And, of course, you keep reading because you too, like the narrator, want to understand exactly how Mr Norris makes his living. 

Selected quotes:

• "An unpleasant thought seemed to tease him like a wasp; he moved his head slightly to avoid it." (Ch 1)
• "Anni's beauty is only sin-deep." (Ch 3)
• "I was as hurt as a spinster who has been deserted by her cat." (Ch 8)
• "Like most people who still contrived to earn a living in those bankrupt days, she was a woman of numerous occupations." (Ch 8)
• "And morning after morning, all over the immense, damp, dreary town and the packing-case colonies of huts in the suburb allotments, young men were waking up to another workless empty day to be spent as best they could contrive; selling boot-laces, begging, playing draughts in the hall of the Labour Exchange, hanging about urinals, opening the doors of cars, helping with crates in the markets, gossiping, laughing, stealing, overhearing racing tips, sharing stumps of cigarette-ends picked up in the gutter, singing folk-songs for groschen in courtyards and between stations in the carriages of the Underground Railway." (Ch 8)
• "His voice stopped like a gramophone from which the needle has been lifted." (Ch 11)
• "I tried to look Arthur in the eyes. But no, this time-honoured process didn't work. Here were no windows to the soul. They were merely part of his face, light-blue jellies, like naked shell-fish in the crevices of a rock." (Ch 12)
• "My throat had gone dry. I tried to clear it and made an absurdly loud, grating sound." (Ch 14)
• "I think you'll find that the soft ones object to being cheated even more than the others." (Ch 14)
• "Remorse is not for the elderly. When it comes to them, it is not purging or uplifting, but merely degrading and wretched, like a bladder disease." (Ch 15)

April 2023; 191 pages

Other novels by Christopher Isherwood reviewed in this blog:

• Goodbye to Berlin: a sort of companion to this book, which introduces the fabulous Sally Bowles
• Prater Violet

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

"Snakes and Ladders" by Morton R Leader

 A window cleaner and his brother become burglars at night. One of their victims teams up with a wannabe psychopath to track the burglars down. Her Russian oligarch father instructs his henchman to go after them. They all converge on a mysterious abandoned manor house at which point the whole story turns very dark indeed.

This action-packed short novel is a real page-turner.

Selected quotes:

• "Julian wondered how he had been manipulated into a plan to follow the thieves with Kira one night. The answer was obvious, she was sleeping with him; empty balls equal an empty head." (Ch 6)
• “'Seven hundred so far, another five on top when it’s finished.'   Danny tutted. Thirteen hundred quid." (Ch 9) I thought Danny's failure with arithmetic was a clever way of exploring his character.
• "Diseases such as monkey-pox, myxomatosis, SARS and bubonic plague were all man-made; when would the people in white coats think enough was enough?" (Ch 23) Not the claim of one of the characters but a  somewhat controversial authorial intervention. I hadn't realised that the conspiracy theorists attributed even bubonic plague, a disease dating back at least to the fourteenth century, to "people in white coats". I understand from the author that this is a reference to a song by the rock band New Model Army.

Morton R Leader has written a number of books including the very different Demons Are Forever. I enjoy the way this author weaves stories from the lives of very ordinary men and women, rather than the middle and upper classes who dominate so much of literature. 

April 2023

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

"South Riding" by Winifred Holtby

My heart sank when I approached this book. It's big, it's about local government in Yorkshire in the 1930s, and it has a cast list stretching to five pages.

But I enjoyed it. And it won the James Tait Black memorial prize in 1936.

It's an ensemble novel with several protagonists whose stories, told from their perspective by an omniscient narrator in the past tense (so stylistically a very conventional 'Victorian English' novel) interweave. There is Sarah Burton, the new headmistress of the local girls' school, who is determined to shake things up. There is Alderman Mrs Beddows the wise old woman who has seen it all before and who sympathises with the plights of her fellow humans. There is Councillor Carne, a conservative farmer, who married the daughter of a Lord and whose punishment is impending bankruptcy. There is Lydia, a clever girl who dreams of university but who is doomed to look after her little brothers and sisters in the railway carriage in a field in which they squat. There is Alderman Snaith, the lonely rich man who plots and schemes and pulls the strings. There is Huggins the councillor and Methodist minister whose sexual adventures leave him open to blackmail and whose money-making schemes make him corruptible. There is Lily Sawdon, dying of cancer, unable to tell her husband. These are the flawed materials through which, somehow, the county must find a way out of the harsh economic depression towards a promising future.

It has been called a 'blatant socialist tract' and some characters, especially at the end, are given speeches which call for progress, for change, even for revolution. But the minutely detailed descriptions of some of the poverty endured by the poor members of this society, some of whom have been disabled through their service in the trenches during the First World War, put these things in context. This is the England of the essays of Orwell, of The Road to Wigan Pier, an England of deprivation and social injustice. This is the world of Love on the Dole, and of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, an England of cocktails for some and misery for many. Furthermore, the arguments are balanced. Carne, the face of the old Squirearchy, is a hugely sympathetic character. The new housing estate is built through the machinations of Snaith whose intentions are a fine blend of self-interest and altruism. Huggins, forever preaching of God, is hugely flawed. There is, at the end, a final showdown between Sarah Burton and Mrs Beddows in which the idealistic headteacher, in despair and racked with guilt, has things put in perspective by the old lady: none of us are perfect but we all have a part to play, but remember to cherish not just the glittering successes but also those who will always fail in the race of life. This is a superbly balanced novel, full of empathy. But yes. It breaks with what it calls "The Shakespearean tradition of finding the lower classes funny, whatever tragedy touched the kings and nobles, outraged his humanity." (5.6) And thank goodness. There aren't enough stories written from the perspective of a working man.

There are a number of characters who embody alternative positions. For example:

• Snaith is depicted as sterile and rational and calculating, a sort of Apollonian Satan; he is the chief adversary of Huggins the womaniser
• Huggins himself is the man of god who is at war with his own earthy lusts
• Modernisers such as Sarah Burton are against the forces of conservatism such as Carne and Mrs Beddows
• The generosity of Mrs Beddows conflicts with the parsimony of her husband
• Snaith wants to build: he is the force of the town against carne the traditional famer, the voice of the country

Is this a feminist book? In many ways it is anti-male. Male characters are either evil or feckless. Thus, Snaith is a manipulator, Huggins is a hypocrite whose one attempt to make money by fraud is a failure, moreover he can't keep his trousers on, nor can the virtually unemployable Mr Holly who literally kills his wife by foisting yet another pregnancy on her, Carne is sliding into bankruptcy, as is his extravagant younger brother, Mr Mitchell can't make any money from his job. Mr Beddows is a skinflint, and Tom Sawdon drinks heavily as his wife wastes away from cancer and his pub heads for failure. On the other hand, the female characters are either talented (Sarah and Lydia) or long-suffering (Mrs Beddows, Lily Sawdon, Mrs Holly). Madame Hubbard's dancing school keeps the Hubbards afloat as her husband's drapery shop fails. The only negative female characters are Agnes Sigglesthwaite, the keen scientist who can't hack it as a teacher, and Mrs Carne, the flighty wife who goes mad.

But is it feminist? Although, in the final pages, it imagines a world in which married women won't have to give up their jobs, it has spent most of the novel is apparently passive acceptance of this fact. When Mrs Holly dies there is no suggestion that Mr Holly might care for his children: the caregiver must be Lydia, in the first instance, and then the widowed Mrs Brimsley. Mrs Beddows can carve a joint better than her husband and she knows it but she lets him carve because, as she says' "I prefer to see a cock crow on his own dunghill." (5.2)

Furthermore, Holtby is very prepared to emphasise the physical beauty or otherwise of her female characters (although you could argue that she is seeing them through the eyes of male characters, and that she also emphasises the physical beauty of Mr Carne).

One of the main themes of this novel is the love that Sarah Burton feels for Mr Carne. This seems to come straight from the pages of Jane Eyre. Sarah is, like Jane, a strong-minded (some might say stubborn) intelligent woman whose profession is education; she teaches Carne's wayward daughter. Carne is a local landowner of great physical beauty, just like Mr Rochester, with a mad wife who has been locked away (though in a nursing home rather than the attic). In their second (though effectively the first) encounter he is on a horse and Sarah explicitly thinks of "the memory of Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester". The climax of the affair is an aborted night of passion, resembling the aborted wedding in the Bronte novel. It is only the ending of the two stories that differs.

A Spanish proverb is much quoted, in the dedication and several times throughout the book. "'Take what you want,' said God. 'Take it - and pay for it'." This is what Sarah says to the senior girls at her school (3.6) But when Sarah quotes this to Mrs Beddows (4.2) this lady's response is "But who pays?" This is repeated again at the end of chapter 4.2 (more or less exactly half way through the book) with the subtle change that instead of God saying 'take and pay. this is now Sarah saying it (and Mrs Beddows asking, again, 'who pays?'. And, in the Epilogue, Sarah remembers what Mrs Beddows asked and realises: "And suddenly she felt that she had found the answer. We all pay, she thought; we all take; we are members one of another. We cannot escape this partnership. This is what it means — to belong to a community; this is what it means, to be a people."

I think that what lifts this novel above others is the compassion and empathy shown by the author to all her characters, even when they are improvident or foolish or downright wicked. This feeling permeates the text. For example, when Sarah meets her arch-enemy Carne and helps him with a difficult calving (a necessary prelude to falling in love with him) she sees the portrait of his wife and has an epiphany; "She had thought of Carne's story as an entertaining and rather cruel fable of snobbery punished by its own achievement. She realised now that it was something more." (3.6)

It also knows the lives of its characters from the inside. Here is a description of Lydia's days of drudgery:"Quarter to five, wake father. Put on the kettle, get his breakfast, the cocoa, the margarine, r the bread. Tidy the living-room; go and wake the children; get their break- fast. (Why isn’t there no bacon? Lyddie, can’t we have treacle?) See them off to school; look after Lennie and baby; tidy the bedroom, peel the potatoes, get the dinner ready, feed the hens, the pig — if they could keep one; give the children their dinner when they came home from school, noisy and ravenous. Lennie still needed his food shovelling in with a spoon; he was a slow eater; the baby would want a bottle. Wash up the dinner things; then do the shopping, pushing the pram along the dull road into Maythorpe; get the tea ready, the children are coming shouting across the fields; Daisy has fallen and cut her knee; Gertie is sick again. Bert back. Lyd, what’s for tea, old girl? Bacon cake? I’m sick of bacon cake. Can’t we have sausages? Washing the children. The heavy shallow tubs, the tepid water. Where’s the flannel gone? Don’t let Lennie eat the soap now! The tap stood up two feet from the ground on a twisted pipe twenty yards from the door. The slops were thrown out on to the ground behind the caravans and railway coaches. Rough weeds grew there; darnel and dock and nettle soaked up the dingy water, drinking grossly. Broken pots splashed in it. Rimlets of mud seeped down from it. The rusting tubs were heavy. Lydia’s strong arms ached from lifting, carrying, coping with the clamorous, wriggling children." (4.1)

Selected quotes:

• "Like most of her generation and locality, Elsie was trilingual. She talked B.B.C. English to her employer, Cinema American to her companions, and Yorkshire dialect to old milkmen like Eli Dickson." (1.1)
• "The Mitchells, a young couple from Kingsport, had married on hope and found small substance for it." (1.3)
• "She sympathised with his reverence for the aristocracy. She herself set great store by breeding. She, was far from 44 thinking Jack good as his master and explained failure in plebeian upstarts by saying with suave contempt: 'Well, what can you expect? Wasn’t bred to power.' " (1.4)
• "Some people ... are so full of the milk of human kindness that it slops over and messes everything." (1.4)
• "Pretty little painted sluts minced on high tilted heels off to the pictures or dogs or dirt-track race-course." (1.5)
• "Sixteen of them, there were — all plain as cod-Ssh, and thirteen out of the sixteen wearing spectacles. Adenoids, curvature of the spine, anaemia and acne afflicted them — no, they were not afflicted; they simpered like beauty queens and patted soiled puffs against their pinched pink noses, quite complacent." (1.6)
• "It occurred to Sarah that the songs about drunken home-comers and bullying wives which she had found so gross dealt after all with commonplaces in the lives of these young singers. Was it not perhaps more wholesome to be taught to laugh at them ... Jokes about ripe cheese and personal hygiene — (“Take your feet off the table, Father, and give the cheese a chance!”), about child-birth and deformity and deafness — were not these perhaps necessary armaments for defence in. a world besieged by poverty, ugliness, squalor and misfortune?" (1.7)
• "She knew that the dead are most needed, not when they are mourned, but in a world robbed of their stabilising presence." (1.7)
• "Fear is a fire which burns without consuming." (2.2)
• "White bedstraw sprinkled the grass like fallen powder. A field of rye grass brushed lightly by the wind wore the bloom of half-ripe peach." (5.2)
• "The one commodity with which he was prepared to be completely generous was his unasked opinion." (5.2)
• “Sacrifices? Champagne lunch? Two shillings for car park, half a crown for the grand stand? Don’t talk to me of sacrifices. Do you know what we did yesterday? Cut down one chap’s benefit from thirty-three and three- pence — for man, wife and five children, mark you — to ten shillings — because he had a disability pension of two pounds a week. He lost his leg in the war." (5.2)
• "These rumours of Hitler’s Nazi movement in Germany? There swam before her tired mind the memory of that summer holiday in the Black Forest, of tables outside a vine- wreathed inn, and Ernst, lean, brown and eager, in the khaki shirt and shorts worn by hundreds of young Communists — drinking her health in beer after a long strenuous walk. Ernst, who wanted peace and comradeship and a mystical unity of like-minded youth — Ernst whose mother had been a Jewess . . . Ernst, who had disappeared, and who had, some said, been beaten to death at the Dachan concentration camp. These things happened to one’s friends." (5.3)
• "As an estate agent Arthur Thomas Drew did business round about Kiplington jn a small way, but he did moral censorship in quite a large one. He was on the Kiplington Watch Committee, and he watched indeed." (5.4)
• "his lean rapacious wife, trained like a greyhound for the vigorous athletics of social climbing" (5.5)
• "committees to cut down the meagre grants by which society staved off the scandal of coroner’s verdicts: Death from malnutrition" (5.6)
• "cake cut in bits no bigger than a tit’s arse-hole" (6.5)
• "It was Christmas Eve. Once she had really thought that the angels came and, singing, announced the birth of the Son of God. As if any birth could be a matter for rejoicing!" (7.2)
• "And I? thought Snaith. Between Came who lived by instinct and Astell who lived by an idea, he felt that he was nothing— -a stream of water, cold, metallic, barren, without colour or form, moving along its self-chosen channel till the sand sucked it up and it disappeared. Unfecund, flavourless, formless — a direction — a flow — a nothing.’ Here lieth one whose life was lived as water. It has evaporated; it no longer exists." (8.1)
• "He was showing off with the splendid self-assurance following three whiskies" (8.2)
• "The strongest things in life are without triumph. The costliest things you buy are those for which you can’t even pay yourself." (8.6)

April 2023; 448 pages

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Midnight Bell" by Patrick Hamilton

 Bob, an ex-sailor who now earns his living as a waiter in a London pub, meets Jenny, a prostitute, and falls in love, although she scorns him, fails to show up for appointments, and takes the money he offers without ever giving anything in return. 

Fundamentally, this is the same plot (even to the extent of referencing Maidenhead) as in Hangover Square, a later Patrick Hamilton book, although the outcomes are different (perhaps because the personality of the protagonist is different).

The setting feels authentic and the major characters are three-dimensional and vivid. I found myself telling Bob not to be such a sucker while at the same time understanding the dreadful inevitability of his trajectory so, while not empathising with him, I was treating him as though he were real. Surely that is the hallmark of great writing.

Selected quotes:

• "the feeling ... which the unthinkingly upright citizen cannot help experiencing when face to face with the delinquent ... which is partly curiosity and partly disgust." (Ch 6)
• "Providence has arranged that we may sometimes get what we want but never want what we get." (Ch 9)
• "Having, like most of us, a congenitally decimal mind, he always enjoyed his money most when the sum was exactly divisible by ten." (Ch 9)
• "Bob had been to sea, and his behaviour had been neither eccentric nor snobbish in foreign ports" (Ch 9) It is a very euphemistic way of saying that he had availed himself of the bars and brothels. I love the way that authors had to use euphemisms in those days.
• "He wore an expensive, shapely grey overcoat - rather too shapely; and he had large, handsome features - rather too large and handsome. His eyes were fine and blue. His voice was rich, deep, patrician - authentically beautiful. With all this there was an elusive shabbiness and meretriciousness about the man. In a word - an actor." (Ch 14)
• "God did not strike Prunella dead. (He never does this.) So Bob supposed she was speaking the truth. It also occurred to him that God, by diverse methods, had probably stricken Prunella enough already." (Ch 40)
• "The awful belligerence of the poor was to be heard." (Ch 42)
• "'Cooshay avec ma sirswar!' said Jenny. 'That's French! ... It means 'Where are you goin', deary?' 'No,' said Bob, 'not literally'." (Ch 43) I first heard the phrase 'voulez vous coucher avec moi, ce soir' on 'Lady Marmalade' the 1974 hit for LaBelle. I hadn't realised it was extant so much earlier! The Midnight Bell was published in 1929.
• "The glazed blue eyes of a carefree kleptomaniac." (Ch 44)

This book is the first in a trilogy called Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky. It is followed by The Siege of Pleasure, and The Plains of Cement.

April 2023; 221 pages

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

"The Madness of King George III" by Alan Bennett

I saw the Madness of King George III by Alan Bennett at the Grove Theatre on Saturday 15th April; it was directed by Orion Powell.

It was enjoyable but somehow it never quite worked. The suspension of disbelief never quite happened. They were actors on a stage reciting lines throughout.

Why?

King George III suffered from some sort of breakdown which prevented him from effectively ruling three times during his reign. The first attack was in 1788. In those days the King appointed the prime minister and was essential to the business of government. If the King was incapacitated, the Prince of Wales would take over as Regent and the government would change. But, given the power of the King, how could the Crown Prince take over? Did Parliament have the power to choose who was King? This illness therefore precipitated a constitutional crisis. 

To a large extent, this is a play of ideas. Bennett is trying to explain to an audience presumably not well versed in the complexities of Georgian politics that the government run by Prime Minister Pitt the Younger is dependent on the continuing health of the King, in particular on his ability to confirm appointments and so ‘bribe’ MPs and those who control parliamentary seats. When madness rendered the King incapable of doing this, the opposition demanded that the Crown Prince became Regent; there was every likelihood that if this happened the King would never recover (or at least be deemed to recover) because the Prince Regent would not want to cede power back to his dad.

So it's about power and this story is mirrored by the story of who controls the King. At the start of the play no-one can sit in his presence, or talk directly to him, or look at him, but once he has become the patient he is blistered, strait-jacketed and gagged without his permission.

These are complicated ideas and I doubt I would have understood them without having read the playscript beforehand (and the author's introduction). 

And the fact that the play is about ideas makes it harder for the actors to develop characters and therefore harder for them to emotionally connect with the audience.

Bennett makes this more difficult. Because he wants to show the King before, during and after his illness, he has to extend the timescale. I would have started in media res, with the King already ill, with the new-fangled treatment by outsider Dr Willis battling with the old-fashioned remedies of the establishment quacks, with Pitt and Fox at loggerheads over whether there should or shouldn't be a regency, with the Prince of Wales arguing with his mother as to what is the best thing for his father.

I would also have drastically cut the cast. In the Bennett version the King has five attendants (three pages and two ensigns). I would have had two (you need two in a play so they can conflict with one another, otherwise it is a lot of should-I-shouldn't-I soliloquies). There are three members of the government and three members of the opposition; again, only two are needed (in fact, if the Prince of Wales counts as the opposition, you'd only need one other, especially if the Lord Chancellor who flipflops can be counted in both camps). There are three establishment quack doctors, only one is needed (although this might have lost the humour of the preposterous quackery). The Duke of York was no more than sidekick and foil to the Prince of Wales.

What good would this have done? It would have meant that the audience would have needed to spend less time wondering who was who and more time getting involved with each character. It would have meant that each actor would have had more lines and therefore more time to develop the characterisation of the role. 

As it was, this play was mostly actors delivering lines.

Of course, this would be a tremendous simplification of a complex history ... but Bennett's play has already done this. 

It might be argued that this is a historical drama so Bennett has to stick with the historicity. Except he didn't. One of the pages of the King is called Fortnum and there are a couple of lines, designed to elicit laughs, about Fortnum leaving the palace to start a grocery business in Piccadilly. But the real Fortnum left the court of Queen Anne in 1707, 71 years and three monarchs before the action of this play. His grandson was an attendant of George III's Queen but his service started in 1761, still 27 years before this play started. So Bennett is being ahistorical here. Like Shakespeare was with his histories. Drama don't need to stick to the truth.

Who am I to think that I can rewrite a play that is perennially popular? But why is it popular. Is it because Alan Bennett already has a name for writing great theatre? Or is it because it is about royalty and the typical British theatre audience loves royalty (and the typical British actor loves all that dressing up). 

I don't think this is a well-written play and I think that my feelings about the performance at the Grove exposed the play's flaws.

The script contains extensive stage directions, prescribing how scenes are to be changed and even the music to be played. Most of these were ignored by the Grove company, who otherwise followed the script to the letter.

Selected quotes:

• "He is not himself. So how can they restore him to his proper self, not knowing what that self is?" 
• "Our saviour went about healing the sick." "Yes, but he had not £700 a year for it, eh?"
• "I am the King of England." "No, sir. You are the patient."
• "I have always been myself even when I was ill. Only now I seem myself. That's the important thing. I have remembered how to seem." 
• "Did we ever forget ourselves utterly, because if we did forget ourselves I would like to remember." 
• "No life is without regrets. Yet none is without consolations."

I think Bennett was trying to distil a very complicated story into too short a space of time. The need for a large cast meant that characters could not afford to be complex. Contrast this with one of his Talking Heads monologues in which a single character is given fifteen minutes. I suppose there must be a place for dramas with a large cast and a lot of action but I prefer one with a fiercer focus.

April 2023

This review was written by the author of

Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Age of Innocence" by Edith Wharton

Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, this novel was written in 1920 but is set in New York in the 1870s in the upper echelons of society (described as "rich and idle and ornamental"; Ch 11). It is a world of balls and opera evenings, a world of a tight-knit group of rich families, and a world where respectability is everything. Men are allowed to break the rules with impunity providing that the affair is hidden and the scandal is suppressed. 

The hero, Newland Archer, has had his fling, an affair with a married lady. Now he is engaged to May, a girl whom he assumes is not only virginal but utterly innocent. But on the night that their engagement is announced he meets May's cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, who married a Polish nobleman, was mistreated, and fled the marriage. She faces ostracism from the NY social circle because she refuses to go back to her husband. Newland, who harbours vague notions of gender equality, falls in love with Ellen. Will he flout convention and run off with her? Or will he knuckle down to do his duty to his fiancee and his family?

I find it difficult to understand why this novel enabled Wharton to become the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (although the three judges actually awarded the prize to Sinclair Lewis for Main Street but were overturned by the supervising board). Perhaps at the time it was written, The Age of Innocence was a ground-breaking book but I found it little more than a rather conventional romance. There are implied criticisms of the hypocrisy embodied in the double standards allowing men to have (discreet) mistresses and expecting women to be pure, but at the end of the day the book explores the dilemma of the male protagonist and the feelings of and consequences for his would-be paramour are only glimpsed from her reactions to him. It would be interesting to have the book rewritten from Ellen's point of view.

It's and easy read and quite fun. It's well-paced, with major turning points at the 50% and 75% mark; although it rather surprisingly skipped about thirty years to provide a sort of epilogue in the last few chapters. There are some astute observations in it but few of the characters progress beyond the caricature stage. The period is rather clunkily set by referring to the latest novels (eg The Marble Faun, Middlemarch, Dickens and Thackeray and Ouida and Bulwer) and quoting poems from, eg Tennyson, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and recent inventions such as the telephone "this new dodge for talking along a wire" (Ch 15) and the "fascinating new game of lawn tennis" (Ch 20)

In a 2015 lecture entitled The Novel & Psychology and available on the Gresham College website, Professor Belinda Jack says that this novel is more than just social satire but social satire inextricably entangled with psychology. "For Wharton, characters are not separable one from another. Identity is rather a function of multiple relationships and not simply with other ‘characters’.”

Selected quotes:

• "Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the 'new people' whom New York was beginning to dread" (Ch 1)
• "An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences." (Ch 1)
• "Let the young man have his way, my dear; don't wait till the bubble's off the wine." (Ch 4)
• "'He - eventually - married her.' There were volumes of innuendo in the way the 'eventually' was spaced, and each syllable given its due stress." (Ch 5)
• "It was against all the rules of their code that the mother and son should ever allude to what was uppermost in their thoughts." (Ch 5)
• "What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a 'decent' fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?" (Ch 6)
• "He saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other." (Ch 6)
• "In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs." (Ch 6)
• "She had a sense of humour (chiefly proved by her laughing at HIS jokes)" (Ch 6)
• "As was always the case with legal associations of old standing in New York, all the partners named on the office letter-head were dead; and Mr Letterblair, for example, was, professionally speaking, his own grandson." (Ch 11)
• "Medora Manson, in her prosperous days, had inaugurated a 'literary salon'; but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it." (Ch 12)
• "Everything about her shimmered and glimmered softly, as if her dress had been woven out of candle-beams." (Ch 18)
• "Watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a favourite sport of the angels; but I believe even they don't think people happier in hell." (Ch 21)
• "In the rotation of crops there was a recognised season for wild oats; but they were not to be sown more than once." (Ch 31)
• "The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else." (Ch 34)

April 2023; 502 pages (mine was a large print edition)

On 23rd April (Shakespeare's birthday!) 2023 I watched the 1995 Martin Scorcese film. It starred Daniel Day-Lewis as Newland, Michelle Pfeiffer as the Countess Olenska and Winona Ryland as May. It's a surprisingly old-fashioned film: the opening credits felt like a 1950s or even 1930s film. The screenplay, involving a lot of voice-over narration (also a 1950s feel), was surprisingly faithful (appropriately for a story about never quite being unfaithful) to the original book. As a film it was perfectly placed, with the big turning point (he loves her but he is marrying someone else) almost exactly at the 50% mark.

TAOI was rated 45th by Robert McCrum on The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time.

 

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