"Seagulls and Seances" by Robin Drown

One of the joys of reading independently-published books is that from time to time you stumble across nuggets of untamed creativity which might have been stifled by the traditional publishing model. This is such a book. It has a bizarre cast of characters, including a seagull called Mum, but the key characters felt real. It has a plot which was conventional enough to keep me reading while making occasional forays into the surreal, such as when the chronological sequence of the narrative was disrupted shortly before an appearance of some otherwise unexplained time-travellers. It has some great descriptions (such as "Claire cleared her throat and put on her ‘telephone’ voice. 'Who is it?' She had got the pitch wrong and ended up sounding like the Queen after a puff of helium" (Week One Day Three). It has a delightful way of taking figures of speech literally (such as "Claire had been smoking since she was fifteen, with occasional breaks for sleep and Christmas dinner."; Week One Day Four). And there is a lot of humour. But above all, holding the madness together, it is well written.

Unclassifiable. The author references Douglas Adams, which I can see, and Kazuo Ishiguro, which I can't. I was reminded of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien, and less well known offerings such as Road Kill - The Duchess of Frisian Tun by Pete Adams and The Last Simple by Ray Sullivan.

The plot? Talented management executive Claire travels to the seaside town of Reymouth to care for a dog and a seagull after her father is hospitalised. She reconnects with friends (Daisy and love interest Damien) she met on long summer holidays when she was a child. But strange things happen. Is the house haunted? Or is someone trying to kill her?

Selected Quotes:

• "When Claire returned to Reymouth, she always felt herself crash into her childhood, like it was a spectre at the end of the rollercoaster. Her modern-day form - 28 years old and nearly tall enough for it - was dragged back into the past, back outside ramshackle doughnut stalls, wandering lost through clattering and blaring amusement arcades, and in the back of the hot, stuffy family car, racing raindrops." (Week One Day One)
• "Daisy gasped again, inhaling all of the oxygen in the high street and setting off a nearby car alarm.” (Week One Day Two)
• "Money was peacock feathers. If Claire wanted a pretty display, she knew bigger peacocks that Damien." (Week One Day Three)
• “He doesn’t date a seagull. He’s married to one.” (Week One Day Three)
• "She was enjoying her time with Damien too much to be bothered by Daisy and her rabbiting. Interrupting her date to talk to her would have been like turning off the Moon landing to watch a Malcolm in the Middle repeat on the other side." (Week One Day Three)
• "Claire was struggling to stay awake. Each word sounded like it had run a marathon through dream town just to get out of her head." (Week One Day Four)
• "Claire rolled her eyes. She wished she had not, because she spotted a damp patch on the ceiling and now that was the most intriguing thing in the room." (Week One Day Four)
• "Actually, smoking was Claire’s one weakness, and that was if she was limited to one. At last count, which had taken place at 2 o’clock in the morning of her last birthday, she had at least fifteen weaknesses, and smoking was three of them." (Week One Day Four)
• "The seagull, which was sitting on the armchair, gave her a glance so quick it could only have been measured by NASA’s hi-tech bird head recording instruments." (Week One Day Four)
• "Daisy was singing some pop hit that Claire only vaguely recognised. She had heard it in a McDonald’s or, if someone asked, a Costa." (Week One Day Four)
• "The labradoodle was sniffing things he must have fully sniffed hundreds of times before. Sometimes, an immediate threat to his pack – like a car door closing somewhere down the street or a leaf moving awkwardly – would cause him to freeze. Once he had ascertained that he had eliminated the threat by doing nothing at all, he would continue with his strange game of running and stopping." (Week One Day Five)
• "The church was empty. Aside from God, of course, who somehow managed to announce His presence to one and all, but also hide in the corner and spy." (Week One Day Seven)
• "Wine, gin, whisky, absinthe. All the food groups." (Week One Day Seven)
• "She thought back to what Daisy had said. Something, something listening to people. Pay attention or whatever. She shrugged off the rest of her words and sipped from her wine glass." (Week Two Day Two)
• "Daisy! You look nice. You’ve d…” Dyed your roots. No, done your roots. No… “…one your hair different. Are you meeting someone?” (Week Two Day Two)
• "Sounds like… too much pressure. I’ll stick to being a sidekick. Better hours.” (Week Two The Last Day Part Four)
• "They might be serving an evil, underground god, but we still have an NHS budget.” (Week Two The Last Day Part Four)

Not just weird, not just delightful, but well-written too. Enormous fun. There is a sequel which I hope to read soon: Pigeons and Pagans.

May 2023

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

"Doctor Oadwin" by Iain C M Gray

A human is abducted by aliens but, when they attempt to eat his soul, he turns the tables on them. Following an apprenticeship with a guru who seems to be a cross between the master in 'Karate Kid' and Yoda from 'Star Wars', the human becomes Doctor Oadwin, preying on evil people across the ages, made immortal by eating souls (you have to inhale them as they leave the dying body through the eyes, apparently). He recruits an evil nurse who reminds him of his mother as sidekick and together they champion the good by, er, killing the wicked.

If you like aliens and cannibalistic psychopaths, with some stomach-churning fight scenes, you'll love this short novel. It was narrated (3rd person omniscient, past tense) with an energy that kept the story crackling along and both the black-and-white (mostly black) characterisations and the amorality seemed appropriate to a story in which the title character is clearly criminally insane.

Selected quotes:

• "Pain growled out from his empty stomach and darted around his torso like a plague of burning cockroaches." (Ch 2)
• "Oadwins hormonal turmoil had been turned into an emotional hurricane that threatened to destabilise his fragile sanity completely." (Ch 4)
• "The soul tasted like heaven; tingles traversed his body from the tip of his nose to the ends of his toes. His eyes sparkled and his mind seemed to expand, exponentially." (Ch 6)
• "The ghosts of his past wailed their pitiful poems of misery and hate in his mind" (Ch 8)
• "fear creeping over her flesh like a slimy eel" (Ch 10)
• "The soul tasted like rainbows and iron, electricity tingled through her bones and danced through her flesh. Fresh mint seemed to flow through her mind" (Ch 13)
• "Cognitive dissonance was the price she paid for her immortality." (Ch 16)

May 2023

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

"The Grass is Singing" by Doris Lessing

 The debut novel of a Nobel Laureate.

Between the ages of 6 and 30, Doris lived in Zimbabwe, which was then called Southern Rhodesia and was a country ruled by white colonists, mostly ex-English, who farmed; she was brought up on exactly the only-just-paying-its-way farm that is described in the book. A hallmark of the book is its immersion in the life: it is ultra-realist and she paints word pictures that make the reader feel very much inside the scene described.

The story opens with a newspaper cutting detailing the murder of Mary, and the arrest of the 'houseboy' Moses. Peter, Mary's husband has gone mad. The bulk of the novel is therefore not so much a whodunnit as a whydunnit. 

The plot is that lower middle class Mary (only surviving child of a mother and an alcoholic father) spends her young adult life as a very efficient office girl, enjoying an active social life and being taken out by men. But she begins to feel that something is missing and so, after a very short courtship, and despite the fact that she has, it seems, zero interest in sex, marries Peter, a struggling farmer on an isolated farm. The loneliness and boredom she experiences are tangible. She is also very bad at managing the native staff, tending to be a disciplinarian, while her husband cuts them some slack. Things go from bad to worse. Peter, despite having lots of good ideas, is unable to make the farm pay. (The neighbour, who is rich, has made his money by utterly degrading the soil system; his farm is now almost entirely infertile.) 

It is beautifully written with so much detail and verisimilitude. But at the end I was unsatisfied. I couldn't understand what made Peter mad. Throughout the book he has met his trials with stoicism and fortitude. The murder of his wife didn't seem big enough to tip him over the edge. Nor did I understand why Moses (so named, I assume, because the Moses in the Bible kills a cruel overseer of the oppressed Israelites during the sojourn in Egypt) killed Mary. He must have known she was leaving the farm the next day. Why did he suddenly snap? So, although the setting was brilliant, I was unable to suspend my disbelief in terms of the psychology of the characters.

The portrayal of the black 'natives' may offend modern sensibilities but for its time this would have been an indictment of the racism endemic in Zimbabwe then.

Mary makes an abortive attempt to run away exactly half way through the novel which suggests good pacing although I felt that the interminable but inevitable break down of the marriage made the novel drag slightly in the second half. 

Selected quotes:

• "It was the tradition to face punishment, and really there was something rather fine about it. Remarks like these are forgiven from native commissioners, who have to study languages, customs, and so on; although it is not done to say things natives do are 'fine'." (Ch 1)
• "'White civilization' ... will never, never admit that a white person, and most particularly, a white woman, can have a human relationship, whether for good or evil, with a black person." (Ch 1)
• "Loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship." (Ch 5)
• "He had become accustomed to the double solitude that any marriage, even a bad one, becomes." (Ch 7)
• "A poverty that allows a tiny margin for spending, but which is shadowed always by a weight of debt that nags like a conscience, is worse than starvation itself." (Ch 7)
• "When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid) his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip." (Ch 8)
• "He was obeying the dictate of the first law of white South Africa, which is: 'Thou shalt not let your fellow whites sink lower than a certain point; because if you do, the nigger will see he is as good as you are." (Ch 10)
• "Charlie was fighting to prevent another recruit to the growing army pf poor whites, who seem to respectable white people so much more shocking (though not pathetic, for they are despised and hated for their betrayal of white standards, rather than pitied) than all the millions of black people who are crowded into the slums or on to the dwindling land reserves of their own country." (Ch 10)
• "She said suddenly, 'They said I was not like that, not like that, not like that.' It was like a gramophone that had got stuck at one point." (Ch 10)
• "Time taking on the attributes of space, she stood balanced in mid-air." (Ch 11)

Wonderful descriptions.

Other novels reviewed in this blog written by Lessing, who won the Nobel Prize in 2007:

• Her breakthrough, feminist novel: The Golden Notebook
• The Fifth Child and its sequel Ben, in the World
• The Good Terrorist

May 2023; 206 pages

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

"Zorba the Greek" by Nikos Kazantzakis

Alexis Zorba is a Greek man in his sixties who works for the narrator who is developing a lignite mine on the shore in Crete. The narrator is bookish and studying the Buddha while Zorba is a wine-swilling, souvlaki-eating, widow-bedding rascal. Other characters are peripheral to this fundamental matching of the Apollonian with the Dionysian.

There's not much of a plot. There are a pair of widows, one of whom becomes Zorba's mistress for a time. The other becomes involved in the principal tragedy. Mineshafts get dug and Zorba plans and constructs a way of transporting the coal. Not much of a plot, and yet it is perfectly paced with the key turning points coming almost exactly on the 25%, 50% and 75% marks. But the plot really isn't the point. Instead, this mismatched pair debate life and death, and love; they drink, they eat, and they dance.

And it's magic.

As well as the author, I would like to applaud the translator of my version who was Carl Wildman.

Warning: Seen through modern eyes, this book, and Zorba himself, are hugely misogynistic. Women are regarded as mysterious other beings who want above all else to be tupped by a man. They are very much relegated to the status of objects. 

Selected quotes:

• "'This world's a life-sentence,' said a man with a moustache who had picked up his philosophy from the Karagiozis theatre. 'Yes, a life-sentence. Be damned to it.'" (Ch 1)
• "His face was furrowed, weather-beaten, like worm-eaten wood." (Ch 1)
• "The sea, autumn mildness, islands bathed in light, fine rain spreading a diaphanous veil over the immortal nakedness of Greece. Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean Sea." (Ch 2)
• "Many are the joys of this world - women, fruit, ideas. But to cleave that sea in the gentle autumnal season, murmuring the name of each islet, is to my mind the joy most apt to transport the heart of man into paradise. Nowhere else can one pass so easily and serenely from reality to dream. The frontiers dwindle, and from the masts of the most ancient ships spring branches and fruits. It is as if here in Greece necessity is the mother of miracles." (Ch 2)
• "What sort of madness comes over us to make us throw ourselves on another man, when he's done nothing to us, and bite him, cut his nose off, tear his ear out, run him through the guts - and all the time, calling on the Almighty to help us! Does it mean we want the Almighty to go and cut off noses and ears and rip people up?" (Ch 2)
• "How does a plant sprout and grow into a flower on manure and muck? Say to yourself, Zorba, that the manure and muck is man and the flower liberty." (Ch 2)
• "A youth, sunburnt and bare-foot, appeared .at the water's edge singing love-songs. Maybe he understood the pain they expressed, for his voice had begun to grow hoarse, like that of a cockerel." (Ch 3)
• "For hundreds of years, Dante's verses have been sung in the poet's country. And just as love songs prepare boys and girls for love, so the ardent Florentine verses prepared Italian youths for the day of deliverance." (Ch 3)
• "one day I had gone to a little village. An old grandfather of ninety was busy planting an almond tree. "What, grandad!" I exclaimed. "Planting an almond tree?" And he, bent as he was, turned round and said: "My son, I carry on as if I should never die." I replied: "And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute." Which of us was right, boss?'" (Ch 3)
• "'It's the old birds who make the best stew,' he said, licking his lips." (Ch 3)
• "Things we are accustomed to, and which we pass by indifferently, suddenly rise up in front of Zorba like fearful enigmas." (Ch 4)
• "I believe in Zorba because he's the only being I have in my power, the only one I know. All the rest are ghosts. I see with these eyes, I hear with these ears, I digest with these guts. All the rest are ghosts, I tell you. When I die, everything'll die. The whole Zorbatic world will go to the bottom!" (Ch 4) Wonderfully solipsistic!
• "I at last realised that eating was a spiritual function and that meat, bread and wine were the raw materials from which the mind is made." (Ch 6)
• "The crow ... used to walk respectably, properly -well, like a crow. But one day he got it into his head to try and strut about like a pigeon. And from that time on the poor fellow couldn't for the life of him recall his own way of walking. He was all mixed up, don't you see? He just hobbled about.'" (Ch 6)
• "But I do declare, the older I get the wilder I become! Don't let any one tell me old age steadies a man! Nor that when he sees death coming he stretches out his neck and says: Cut off my head, please, so that I can go to heaven! The longer I live, the more I rebel. I'm not going to give in; I want to conquer the world!" (Ch 6) That's just how I feel! Liberated by retirement and a pension from drudgery, but acutely aware of the clock ticking, I want to live, live, live!
• "We were deeply aware, each of us in our own way, that we were two ephemeral little insects, clinging tightly to the terrestrial bark, that we had found a convenient corner near the sea, behind some bamboos, planks and empty petrol-cans, where we hung together" (Ch 7)
• "Every village has its simpleton, and if one does not exist they invent one to pass the time." (Ch 8)
• "haven't I come out of a sewer, like everyone else? ... from a mother's innards." (Ch 8)
• "'Life is trouble,' Zorba continued. 'Death, no. To live - do you know what that means? To undo your belt and look for trouble!'" (Ch 8)
• "My life had got on the wrong track, and my contact with men had become now a mere soliloquy." (Ch 8)
• "You can knock for ever on a deaf man's door!" (Ch 8)
• "I think of God as being exactly like me. Only bigger, stronger, crazier. And immortal, into the bargain." (Ch 9)
• "Tell me what you do with what you eat and I will tell you who you are!" (Ch 10)
• "Every one follows his own bent. Man is like a tree. You've never quarrelled with a fig tree because it doesn't bear cherries, have you?" (Ch 10)
• "Don't go picking things over with a needle! ... If you take a magnifying-glass and look at your drinking water - an engineer told me this, one day - you'll see, he said, the water's full of little worms you couldn't see with your naked eye. You'll see the worms and you won't drink. You won't drink and you'll curl up with thirst. Smash your glass, boss, and the little worms'll vanish and you can drink and be refreshed!" (Ch 10)
• "Man's heart is a ditch full of blood." (Ch 10)
• "Seeing as how I have no time-limit clause in my contract with life, I let the brakes off when I get to the most dangerous slopes. The life of man is a road with steep rises and dips. All sensible people use their brakes. But - and this is where, boss, maybe I show what I'm made of -1 did away with my brakes altogether a long time ago, because I'm not at all scared of a jolt." (Ch 13)
• "Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all, in my view, is not to have one." (Ch 13)
• "Time had taken on a new savour in Zorba's company. It was no longer an arithmetical succession of events without, nor an insoluble philosophical problem within. It was warm sand, finely sieved, and I felt it running gently through my fingers." (Ch 13)
• "don't listen to the old. If the world did heed them, it would rush headlong to its destruction." (Ch 14)
• "A bit of earth that was hungry ... and laughed ... and kissed. A lump of mud that wept human tears." (Ch 23)
• "But what of revolt? The proud quixotic reaction of mankind to conquer Necessity and make external laws of the soul, to deny all that is and create a new world according to the laws of one's heart, which are contrary to the inhuman law of nature." (Ch 24)
• "Does our unquenchable desire for immortality spring, not from the fact that we are immortal, but from the fact that during the short span of our life we are in the service of something immortal?" (Ch 24)
• "I've stopped thinking all the time of what happened yesterday. And stopped asking myself what's going to happen tomorrow." (Ch 24)
• "Luck is blind, they say. It can't see where it's going and keeps running into people ... and the people it knocks into we call lucky!" (Ch 25)
• "Sometimes the earth becomes transparent and we see our ultimate ruler, the grub, working night and day in his underground workshops. But we quickly turn our eyes away, because man can endure everything except the sight of that small white maggot." (Ch 25)

Sheer literary magic.

May 2023; 315 pages

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

"Tom Jones" by Henry Fielding

Squire Allworthy is surprised when a baby boy appears in his bed. Having made enquiries which point to the mother as one Jenny Jones, a servant girl, the good squire decides to bring Tom up in his own household. Tom grows up, with the Squire's nephew, Blifil, a nasty boy, and falls in love with Sophy, daughter of the neighbouring Squire Western (although Tom, being a young man, has amours with other ladies too). But Sophy is engaged to marry Blifil so that the two neighbouring estates can be joined and Tom is sent away. Sophy, who very much hates the idea of marrying Blifil, runs away to London and Tom, after various adventures, particularly in Upton, follows her. But even in London the course of true love never runs smoothly. Will our tomcat of a hero gain his true love? Will the mystery of his parentage be solved? Will Sophy be forced by her father to marry for money? Will she forgive Tom's infidelities? All this and more will be resolved over the course of eighteen books (800 pages of quite small print in my edition).

It's a classic, rated as number 5 in the Guardian's top 100 novels of all time. Why?

It's quite funny, there was even one moment when I laughed aloud, and Squire Western, obsessed with hunting ("Mr Western grew every day fonder and fonder of Sophia, insomuch that his beloved dogs themselves almost gave place to her in his affections"; 4.13) and with a sometimes variable Zummerzet accent, is a brilliant comic character. But Fielding writes as such length! Each of the eighteen books is introduced by a chapter which comments on what is to come without in any way being part of the plot; these chapters are eminently skippable. And Fielding is so prolix that even when there is action the relentless flow of words was putting me to sleep. The plot itself twists and turns and I sometimes lost track of the characters but at least there is a plot which is more than you can say of Tristram Shandy (although Jones doesn't have that wonderful surreality of Shandy).

It is interesting as a social document. It reinforces the notion that Englsnd was class-ridden with a wastrel aristocracy who either hunted their landed estates or fought duels if they were young men about town; the purpose of the lower classes is to serve them. It mentions "the toasts of the Kit-Cat" club and Hogarth (describing people as being like a certain character) and "Dr. Donne" and Pope and Garrick playing Hamlet and "the famous author of Hurlothrumbo"). It was written only four years after the 1745 Jacobite rebellion in which Bonnie Prince Charlie and his troops invaded England from Scotland, reaching as far south as Derby before turning back, and there are references to this, as when Tom volunteers to join soldiers going to fight the rebels, and when Sophy is mistaken for Bonnie Prince Cahrlie's mistress. Politically, it must have been very daring, since Squire Western is a Jacobite, drinking toasts to "the King over the Water" (7.4) and regularly excoriating Hanoverians.

One of the lovely things about this book is that it explores all the weaknesses of human character in such a tolerant and, indeed, compassionate way. Georgian society may have been class-ridden and hugely sexist, riddled with extremes of poverty and wealth, and plagued by criminality, but (perhaps like today) if a young fellow is good-looking he can charm the pants of others and get away with all sorts of roguishness.

There are lots of great moments but it was hard work.

TV adaptation

I've now watched the 2023 ITV adaptation. Of course there are alterations to the plot. It's a very long novel; how can it be adapted into four hours (minus at least forty minutes for titles and adverts) of television? There are aspects of the novel (for example, the fact that it is set at the time of the Jacobite rising and that the Hanoverians are neither a secure nor a generally popular dynasty) that one couldn't expect modern audiences to understand. 

But more problematically, Tom Jones doesn't accord with modern sensibilities. Although Sophia casts off the subjugation expected of women, nevertheless its toleration of Tom's misdeeds is fundamentally misogynistic. As though to compensate, Sophia was changed from being the daughter of Squire Western to being his grand-daughter, begotten by his son upon a slave woman in their West Indian plantations. I suspect that this was done solely to enable the casting of a person of colour in a high status role but I would have preferred colour-blind casting to avoid an unnecessary change of plot; they didn't actually make any political capital out of the idea that the wealth of the society was based upon the exploitation of black slaves (which wouldn't be the case in the novel since there is no suggestion that either Squire Allworthy or Squire Western make their money from anything other than their farming of their Somerset estates). 

Other aspects if the plot were changed, most importantly the fact that Squire Western's sister didn't die early but survived until the end. This meant that Blifil couldn't be as villainous as he is in the novel and it also begged the question as to why Mrs Blifil didn't intervene when Squire Western exiled Tom. This plot alteration baffled me.

Selected quotes:

• "One of the maxims which the devil, in a late visit upon earth, left to his disciples, is, when once you are got up, to kick the stool from under you. In plain English, when you have made your fortune by the good offices of a friend, you are advised to discard him as soon as you can." (1.13)
• "a news-paper, which consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not." (2.1)
• "he looked on a woman as on an animal of domestic use, of somewhat higher consideration than a cat" (2.7)
• "Here [among the servants] are prudes and coquettes. Here are dressing and ogling, falsehood, envy, malice, scandal; in short, everything which is common to the most splendid assembly, or politest circle." (4.7)
• "He was a good-natured worthy man; but chiefly remarkable for his great taciturnity at table, though his mouth was never shut at it. In short, he had one of the best appetites in the world." (4.10)
• "Wisdom ... teaches us to extend a simple maxim universally known and followed even in the lowest life ... And this is, not to buy at too dear a price." (6.3)
• "He then bespattered the youth with abundance of that language which passes between country gentlemen who embrace opposite sides of the question; with frequent applications to him to salute that part which is generally introduced into all controversies that arise among the lower orders of the English gentry at horse-races, cock-matches, and other public places. Allusions to this part are likewise often made for the sake of the jest. And here, I believe, the wit is generally misunderstood. In reality, it lies in desiring another to kiss your a— for having just before threatened to kick his; for I have observed very accurately, that no one ever desires you to kick that which belongs to himself, nor offers to kiss this part in another." (6.9) This was when I laughed aloud. It seems so modern: kiss my arse (or ass as Americans say)!
• "'To be sure,' said the squire, 'I am always in the wrong.' 'Brother,' answered the lady, 'you are not in the wrong, unless when you meddle with matters beyond your knowledge'." (6.14)
• "When the centinel first saw our heroe approach, his hair began gently to lift up his grenadier cap; and in the same instant his knees fell to blows with each other." (7.14)
• "Our modern authors of comedy have fallen almost universally into the error here hinted at; their heroes generally are notorious rogues, and their heroines abandoned jades, during the first four acts; but in the fifth, the former become very worthy gentlemen, and the latter women of virtue and discretion: nor is the writer often so kind as to give himself the least trouble to reconcile or account for this monstrous change and incongruity. There is, indeed, no other reason to be assigned for it, than because the play is drawing to a conclusion" (8.1)
• “First, from two lovely blue eyes, whose bright orbs flashed lightning at their discharge, flew forth two pointed ogles; but, happily for our heroe, hit only a vast piece of beef which he was then conveying into his plate, and harmless spent their force." (9.5) Don't bother making eyes at a man while he's eating.
• "now on some hollow tree the owl, shrill chorister of the night, hoots forth notes which might charm the ears of some modern connoisseurs in music" (10.2)
• "he was one of those compositions which nature makes up in too great a hurry, and forgets to put any brains into their head." (10.6)
• "the slander of a book is, in truth, the slander of the author: for, as no one can call another bastard, without calling the mother a whore, so neither can any one give the names of sad stuff, horrid nonsense, &c., to a book, without calling the author a blockhead; which, though in a moral sense it is a preferable appellation to that of villain, is perhaps rather more injurious to his worldly interest." (11.1)
• "If she be not a woman of very great quality, sell me for a fool; and, I believe, those who buy me will have a bad bargain." (11.2)
• "Jones now declared that they must certainly have lost their way; but this the guide insisted upon was impossible; a word which, in common conversation, is often used to signify not only improbable, but often what is really very likely, and, sometimes, what hath certainly happened; an hyperbolical violence like that which is so frequently offered to the words infinite and eternal; by the former of which it is usual to express a distance of half a yard, and by the latter, a duration of five minutes." (12.11)

May 2023; 798 pages

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

"Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad

This classic short novel was rated by Robert McCrum 32nd in The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time.

In the darkest days of colonial Africa, a sailor travels down a river to collect a bring back to civilisation from the heart of the heart-shaped continent, an ivory trader who has gone 'native'. This is a classic tale of warped human values and the savagery that lurks within each human's soul.

Heart of Darkness is a frame narrative, that is to say, it is a story told by an (unnamed) narrator about a story told by a (named) narrator. This device adds a layer of distance between the reader and the story (in the case of HoD this distance intensified by the fact that there are only two named characters: Marlow, the narrator protagonist, and Kurtz, the object of the quest).

Perhaps more importantly, the framing device allows the narrator Marlow to comment on the story as he is telling it, almost as if he were an editor adding footnotes. In particular he compares the location in the Thames estuary of the narrator and his listeners with the story’s setting on the (unnamed) African river, a comparison driven home from Marlow’s very first line: “And this also ... has been one of the dark places of the earth.” Marlow is telling his listeners that the difference between their cosy complacent ‘civilised’ world and the savage wilderness of the story is only on the surface: that the heart of darkness is inside each one of us, waiting for its opportunity to escape.

The plot of the novel corresponds fairly closely to a voyage made by the author about seven years before up the Congo river in what was then the Belgian Congo, a vast tract of Central Africa which was the personal fiefdom of King Leopold II of the Belgians in which the indigenous population was ruthlessly and often viciously exploited by quasi-private commercial concerns to extract the key resources of ivory and rubber. Conrad was horrified by what he observed on this journey and the novel can in some ways be thought of as a cathartic memoir. Marlow the narrator is also the narrator in two other Conrad novels (Lord Jim, written the year after HoD, and Chance) and a short story (Youth).

Seen through modern eyes, HoD contains a great deal of racism: Conrad repeatedly uses the word ‘nigger’, he repeatedly describes the Africans encountered as primitive, and he suggests that the life of a black man killed on the expedition to rescue Kurtz is not necessarily equal to that of Kurtz (“I am not prepared to affirm the fellow was exactly worth the life we lost in getting to him ... a savage who was no more account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara"; Ch 2). Furthermore, he does not condemn colonialism but makes a distinction between the practices he observes in the Congo (“robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale”; Ch 1) and colonialism (“They were no colonists”; Ch 1); he explicitly says that the idea of colonialism can redeem the practice: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only.” (Ch 1)

However, at the time, the book was a trail-blazing challenge to contemporary attitudes, and it can be seen as a catalyst in the campaign to end the worst aspects of the treatment of the native population which, following the Casement Report by the British government, led to the Belgian government taking (official) responsibility for the colony.

And it is a wonderfully written book.

Echoes of Jesus?

Officially Kurtz, which means ‘short’ in German, although Conrad states “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (Ch 3), was based on a real man named Klein (which means ‘little’). However, I am intrigued by the similarity between ‘Kurtz’ and ‘Christ’. My thesis is that Kurtz is meant to represent a Christ-like figure, although one with possibly satanic overtones.

Here is my evidence:

• Marlow describes the city where he receives his commission, the city (of Brussels) which is involved in the exploitation of the Congo, as a "whited sepulchre" (Ch 1), a phrase used by Jesus (Matthew 23.27) when he is calling the Pharisees hypocrites. 
• There are several moments in the early part of the story when we catch - often contrary - glimpses of Kurtz through the eyes of other people: “Kurtz whom at the time I did not see—you understand. He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything?” (Ch 1) It is as if Conrad is saying that there are many interpretations of God ... and no-one has the full truth. In the end, Marlow, who claims to know Kurtz as well as anyone could, himself realises that it is impossible to articulate a single, unified, coherent description of Kurtz. This description of what cannot be described uses the technique of ambiguity which Conrad’s friend Henry James had just used to great effect in The Turn of the Screw, another frame narrative, published just the year before HoD.
• Kurtz inspires religious-like devotion in his followers, not least the apostle-like Russian. He says that Kurtz talked of “love” and when Marlow, assuming, presumably, he means sexual love, says dismissively “Ah, he talked to you of love!” the manager replies “It isn’t what you think. ... He made me see things.” He says the tribesmen “adored” Kurtz.
• The people coming to take Kurtz back with them are described as ‘pilgrims’, an ironic appellation. They are presumably the pharisees and “the manager” is the High Priest Caiaphas.
• Marlow realises that the Africans travelling on the boat are cannibals. Is this an echo of holy communion in which Christians eat the body (bread) and drink the blood (wine) of Christ? 
• When Kurtz is told he must leave he promises “I will return. I’ll show you what can be done. ... I will return.” (Ch 3)
• The episode in which Marlow, acting perhaps as Judas, ‘captures’ Kurtz has echoes of the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. There are many ambiguities in this scene: does Marlow carry Kurtz to the boat or persuade him? And in this scene Marlow repeatedly mixes the physical with the spiritual. He says that Kurtz had “kicked himself loose of the earth.” He says “if anyone had ever struggled with a soul, I am the man.” He uses the phrase “for my sins, I suppose” when saying that he had to look within his soul.
• The paragraph before Kurtz says his last words (“The horror! The horror!”) begins “It was as though a veil had been rent.” In the Gospel of Matthew, during the final moments of Jesus on the cross, he shouts out “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” and then dies; “At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two”.
• And Conrad repeatedly compares Africa with England two thousand years ago, at the time of Christ or thereabouts, as if to suggest that Kurtz is a Messiah for the Africans.
• When, back in Europe, Marlow goes to see Kurtz’s girlfriend, they talk about Kurtz ... and she rewrites the story. She says it is impossible not to love him. She says “It is impossible that all this should be lost—that such a life should be sacrificed to leave nothing—but sorrow. You know what vast plans he had. I knew of them, too—I could not perhaps understand—but others knew of them. Something must remain. His words, at least, have not died.” She even says “his goodness shone in every act” and Marlow finds himself agreeing with her. And she says: “I cannot believe that I shall never see him again, that nobody will see him again, never, never, never.” Marlow comments “I saw him clearly enough then. I shall see this eloquent phantom as long as I live.”

But this isn’t the gentle Christ of the Anglican church. Kurtz has surrounded his hut with the heads of ‘rebels'; he is described as “very terrible”. I think Conrad is imagining a Christ who comes not to bring peace, but a sword.

For even more evidence, I suggest that in Conrad's short novel 'The Secret Agent', Mr Verloc is meant to be God. See my blog review here. 

Selected quotes:

• “And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” (Ch 1)
• “to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.” (Ch 1)
• “They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness.” (Ch 1)
• “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to....” (Ch 1)
• “I have a lot of relations living on the Continent, because it’s cheap and not so nasty as it looks, they say.” (Ch 1)
• “They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air—and nearly as thin.” (Ch 1)
• “Day after day, with the stamp and shuffle of sixty pair of bare feet behind me, each pair under a 60-lb. load. Camp, cook, sleep, strike camp, march. Now and then a carrier dead in harness, at rest in the long grass near the path, with an empty water-gourd and his long staff lying by his side. A great silence around and above.” (Ch 1)
• “there was only an indefinable, faint expression of his lips, something stealthy—a smile—not a smile—I remember it, but I can’t explain. It was unconscious, this smile was, though just after he had said something it got intensified for an instant. It came at the end of his speeches like a seal applied on the words to make the meaning of the commonest phrase appear absolutely inscrutable.” (Ch 1)
• “The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.” (Ch 1)
• “And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.” (Ch 1)
• “Then I noticed a small sketch in oils, on a panel, representing a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch. The background was sombre—almost black. The movement of the woman was stately, and the effect of the torchlight on the face was sinister.” (Ch 1)
• “You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies” (Ch 1) Marlow proclaiming himself to be a reliable narrator ... much as Nick Carraway does in The Great Gatsby.
• “Kurtz whom at the time I did not see—you understand. He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything?” (Ch 1) 
• “‘Of course in this you fellows see more than I could then. You see me, whom you know....’ It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one another.” (Ch 1) A nice contradiction. Marlow is talking about himself as a reliable narrator and about the difficulty of seeing Kurtz; he says that the others can see him ... but they can’t.
• “I saw him extend his short flipper of an arm for a gesture that took in the forest, the creek, the mud, the river—seemed to beckon with a dishonouring flourish before the sunlit face of the land a treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart.” (Ch 2)
• “I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones;” (Ch 2)
• “We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil.” (Ch 2)
• “The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.” (Ch 2)
• “No; I can’t forget him, though I am not prepared to affirm the fellow was exactly worth the life we lost in getting to him. I missed my late helmsman awfully—I missed him even while his body was still lying in the pilot-house. Perhaps you will think it passing strange this regret for a savage who was no more account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara. Well, don’t you see, he had done something, he had steered; for months I had him at my back—a help—an instrument. It was a kind of partnership. He steered for me—I had to look after him” (Ch 2)
• “They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house.” (Ch 3)
• “The knitting old woman with the cat obtruded herself upon my memory as a most improper person to be sitting at the other end of such an affair.” (Ch 3)
• “But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad.” (Ch 3)
• “The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress; and Kurtz’s life was running swiftly, too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time.” (Ch 3)
• “The shade of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mould of primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearances of success and power.” (Ch 3)
• “It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: ‘The horror! The horror!’” (Ch 3)
• “There was a lamp in there—light, don’t you know—and outside it was so beastly, beastly dark.” (Ch 3)
• “I went no more near the remarkable man who had pronounced a judgment upon the adventures of his soul on this earth. The voice was gone. What else had been there?” (Ch 3)
• “perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.” (Ch 3)
• “I had a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind. He lived then before me; he lived as much as he had ever lived—a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities; a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence. The vision seemed to enter the house with me—the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like the beating of a heart—the heart of a conquering darkness.” (Ch 3)
• “The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.” (Ch 3)

A stupendous book.

May 2023; 116 pages

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

"Isaac and the Egg" by Bobby Palmer

Isaac, grief-stricken after the death of his wife, stands on a bridge considering whether to jump, screaming, when he hears an answering scream in the forest. He finds an egg-shaped creature - is it an alien? He takes it home. Over the next few weeks, as he experiences the sharp pains of bereavement, he develops a relationship with the egg. But where does he go to some nights? And what is in the locked room at the top of the house?

On the one hand this a a bizarre story of an impossible creature (the principal film reference is ET; it was interesting that the author references films rather than books; I was thinking Kafka's Metamorphosis). But at the same time this is a gut-wrenching exploration of the emotions aroused by bereavement. 

There are some predictable but hugely poignant twists. The ending is a tear-jerker. 

Very strange but very readable.

Another book about bereavement is Grief is a Thing With Feathers by Max Porter: hugely recommended.

Selected quotes:

• "Whilst Isaac used to think his life was a rom-com, then a tragedy, now he knows it's a creature-feature." (Ch 3) There are lots of references to films, I spotted no references to books.
• "He simply vegetates on the sofa in a perpetual state of 1 per cent charged." (Ch 3) It's also very modern.

May 2023; 275 pages

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

"The Great Gatsby" by F Scott Fitzgerald

 The great American novel, apparently. I read GG many years ago and, while I remembered the bare bones of the story, I hadn't remembered much of the mechanics of the narrative.

The first-person narrator, Nick Carraway, lives on Long Island next door to millionaire Jay Gatsby and is invited to his many parties, not that one needs an invitation since most of the guests are gatecrashers. At the parties, one of the favourite topics of conversation is the host, a mystery man who seems to have risen from nothing. Some people say that he killed a man, and others that he is a bootlegger, and others that he went to Oxford University. One of the themes of this novel is the gradual discovery of the real Jay Gatsby.

Coincidentally, Nick's cousin Daisy is the woman Gatsby loved before being sent abroad to fight in the First World War. Daisy's polo-playing husband Tom is having an affair with Myrtle, the wife of a garage mechanic called Mr Wilson. These tangled relationship have tragic consequences.

The book is set in the Jazz Age, between the end of the First World War and the Wall Street Crash, when prohibition made alcoholic liquor illegal and gangsters rich, when a clever man with no scruples could make his fortune overnight, and when bright young things would party and make love all night and damn the consequences. The contrast between the lawns of the Gatsby mansion and the ash-covered streets surrounding the garage of the mechanic couldn't be greater.

It seems ironic that a book which is trying to peel away the superficialities to find the naked truth about the little people that we are, each one of us, should be remembered for the glitter and the sparkle of the hedonistic parties it describes.

Another irony is that a 'great American novel' should puncture the American dream of opportunity for all. Despite his huge wealth, despite being the ultimate in that American meme 'the self-made man',  Gatsby is still not accepted by the hedonists that make up Long Island's social elite. 

It's a short but carefully paced novel. The first party that the narrator attends is exactly 25% of the way through. At the 50% mark, the narrator sets up the reunion tryst between Gatsby and Daisy. The car crash that ushers in the final act comes just after the 75% mark.

On 27th May 2023 I attended a performance of The Great Gatsby staged as a radio play from the 1940s (complete with spoof adverts) and produced by the company at the Grove Theatre, Eastbourne. The least successful part of this was when the actor playing the narrator, Nick Carraway, needed to read out long paragraphs of scene-setting. This made me realise how much narration there was in the book. It was also clear how many epigrams there were: they couldn't be cut!

Is Nick Carraway gay?

At the end of Chapter Two, a confessedly drunk Carraway leaves Tom and Myrtle's rather awful party with a Mr McKee, described earlier as "a pale, feminine man", who lives in the flat below; Mr McKee's wife stays at the party. Mr McKee is told off by the elevator boy: "Keep your hands off the lever". Then there is an ellipsis  immediately before "I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear" There is no explanation for this moment. One presumes a homosexual encounter, although I can find no reason why this should be in the book. Sarah Churchill, writing in The Guardian, suggests that the novel's power comes from moments such as this when "we must learn to read between the lines" 

Why is this novel regarded as 'great'?

Literary historian Jeff Nilsson writing in USA today suggests that the greatness of the book lies in its language which he describes as "pitch-perfect". William Cain, writing in BBC Culture, agrees: "Ironically, given that this is a novel of illusion and delusion, in which surfaces are crucial, we all too often overlook the texture of its prose." It is clear that Fitzgerald crafted his sentences with great care, but this distracted from my enjoyment of the novel. I felt that Fitzgerald couldn't bear to cut a great epigram, such as "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired." (Ch 4). Neat but it doesn't fit and when the reader encounters it they are jarred out of the story. An even worse moment came when Nick the narrator realises mid-way through the day that today is his thirtieth birthday. This is silly enough already but it only seems to be there so that he can think, portentously and pompously: "Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade." (Ch 7) Even the famous ending ("So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."; Ch 9) feels as if he's trying too hard. 

Deseret suggests that the power of the novel lies in its metaphors ... but these are scarcely subtle. The lower class characters live along the railroad track in between hedonistic Long Island and the booming New York City in the ashy wastelands of industrial America. Overseeing, literally, this desert is an advertisement for an oculist which consists of a monstrous pair of eyes overlooking the desolation; the symbolism of the all-seeing eye of God (and perhaps a reference to the eye atop the pyramid on the dollar bill) is blatant. Gatsby's mansion is positioned so that he can look across the bay at the jetty for Daisy's house ... where there is a green light. 

Perhaps its simplicity is its secret. Kenneth Eble (1974 The Great Gatsby in College Literature 1.1.34 - 37) suggests that GG can claim to be the Great American Novel because it is efficiently told and therefore short enough for Americans to read, and because it isn't over-nuanced. I wonder if there are any other literary cultures out there for which 'short and simple' is the criterion for greatness. On this page I consider other contenders for the title of The Great American Novel.

Selected quotes:

• "That most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man'." (Ch 1)
• "Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas." (Ch 1)
• "ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air." (Ch 2)
• "When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms." (Ch 2)
• "There were whispers about him from those who had found little to whisper about in this world." (Ch 3)
• "It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance about it ... It faced ... the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wished to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself." (Ch 3)
• "I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known." (Ch 3( says the narrator. But is he? Really?
• "Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilisation." (Ch 7)
• "Her voice is full of money" (Ch 7)
• "His eyes leaking isolated and unpunctual tears." (Ch 9)
• "He was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby's liquor." (Ch 9)
• "Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead." (Ch 9)
• "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made ..." (Ch 9)

The GG mentions "the secret of Castle Rackrent" a novel by Maria Edgeworth and compares Gatsby to Trimalchio, the thrower of lavish dinner parties in Satyricon by Petronius.

Other books by Fitzgerald that are reviewed in this blog include:

• The Last Tycoon
• Tender is the Night

May 2023; 188 pages

The GG was rated 51st by Robert McCrum on The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time and also listed by Time magazine as on the the 100 best novels since Time began (1923).

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