"Black Cake" by Charmaine Wilkerson

 When Benny and her big brother Byron attend the reading of their mother's will, they little realise that they will hear a story about a missing sister and a murder. Jumping backwards and forwards across time and from the Caribbean to the UK and to the USA, this novel reveals the secrets of the mother's (and their father's) past and, eventually, reveals whodunnit.

Although, close to the end, there was a moment when I got a lump in my throat, for the vast majority of this book I didn't really care about these people and their convoluted histories. I think the problem was this this was a novel driven first by issues (black men in the US fear the traffic police, black men get discriminated against at work, women are raped, women are coerced into relationships, women are sometimes forced to give up their babies, sugar is linked to slavery, foods that are seen as 'belonging' to a certain region often don't etc) and this led to the primacy of plot over character. A lot happens in this book. And because a lot has to happen there had to be a lot of characters. And because some of the characters have secrets, the story has to be told from a number of points of view (at least eleven of them get to speak). Therefore, the author has adopted the technique of 'head hopping': switching from narrator to narrator. The narrative is fragmented into a lot of very short sections, told from different PoVs. But, except for one or two moments when a specific word was dropped in, the voices of each of the characters sounded identical. The author tells us what is happening, sometimes she even explains the thought processes of the character narrating, but I never felt that I was inside the head of whoever was narrating; I never felt that I saw what was happening through the eyes of the character narrating, except in the most superficial sense.  And, as a result, I never felt that any character was at all real. That's why I didn't care about the characters and, this in turn meant that although I understood the arguments, I didn't have any emotional connection to the issues.

Several of the characters are, in any case, too good to be true. Of course Byron is "the African American social media darling of the ocean sciences" (he's also a "brainy athlete"). Of course one of his mother's friends becomes a world-record holder for endurance swimming. Of course his half-sister is another social media and TV star, this time for cooking, who wipes the floor on live TV with a "coffee guru". These are the sort of people we all meet every day of our lives.

Of course, it is a "New York Times bestseller": book buyers in New York don't seem to want character-driven narratives. It has a strong, fast-paced and intricate plot, but because of the thin and sometimes stereotyped characterisations, it lacked verisimilitude and I found it shallow and superficial.

The point was made in my book group that, despite being purportedly anti-racist, the image portrayed of the Chinese characters is negative and stereotyped, perhaps reflecting an unconscious bias on the part of the author.

Selected quotes:

• "Her satin-covered shoes lay strewn on the lawn outside like tiny capsized boats." (Prologue: Then 1965)
• "A chubby, squiggle-headed baby girl following him around the house" (Part One: Now: 2018)
• "The delicate mechanics of having to work for a living"
• "Eleanor had lied to her husband for all these years because she understood that is you wanted someone to keep loving you, you couldn't ask them to bear all of your burdens, couldn't risk letting them see all of who you were. No one really wanted to know another person that well." (Part Three: Decency)

June 2023; 416 pages (but actually shorter because of the fragmented narrative)

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

"American Heiress" by Jeffrey Toobin

 This is the story of the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, her subsequent radicalisation and recruitment into the SLA, and the subsequent bank robberies, shootings and kidnappings, including her eventual capture and trial. It's a fascinating story, recapturing a period in recent American history when the counterculture was producing urban guerrillas and the FBI seemed hopelessly inadequate. 

This is a typically American piece of reportage which follows the story step by step, offering little pen sketches of each of the major participants (and there are quite a few) in such a way that the main thrust of the narrative is never disrupted. Most of us will know how it ends ... but that doesn't matter. The writing is so clear and the narrative is so strong that it is page-turning reading. It becomes manifest that over the period of a few weeks Hearst was transformed from a rich student into a revolutionary; she may have initially seen this as a way to stay alive but the author makes it clear that she had ample opportunities to escape once she became a full member of the SLA so the defence of duress couldn't hold. 

So was she brainwashed? Her transformation happened very quickly (she was kidnapped on February 4th 1974, she joined the SLA on March 31st, participated in a bank robbery with a loaded gun on April 15th, and shot up a street on May 16th) with little coercion, and, once she was on remand and realised her legal peril, it was reversed equally quickly. Perhaps it serves as a warning how any one of us, given the circumstances, can change a whole outlook on and way of life.

Indeed, all of the members of the SLA had similar stories. Only one, the leader and only African American (in a group that purported to fight for the rights of African Americans but was disowned by the Black Panthers) was a career criminal. The others were actresses and students who moved from idealistic political activists, such as prison visiting, to acts of terrorism almost by accident. They seem to be playing at revolutionaries with their rambling manifestos and their military-style drills and their noms de guerre. In  many ways they were hopeless. When they tried to destroy a safe house full of evidence linking them to an assassination they forget to leave the windows open so the fire, staved of oxygen, goes out. When on the run, they are tracked down because they leave an envelope of cash (to pay a parking fine, which has the address of where the infringement occurred) in a getaway car. Bombs fail to go off, bullets are sprayed around causing no injuries (or guns go off accidentally, killing people). These were rank amateurs but they were heavily armed and, even though they numbered only nine at their maximum, created terror.

As often with books like this, the 'seven steps' rule means that names can be dropped. For example, before becoming a revolutionary Angela was a drama student working with Kevin Kline. The Reverend Jim Jones who subsequently brainwashed hundreds of his cult followers into committing mass suicide wanted to be involved with the food giveaway demanded as a ransom for Ms Hearst. 

Selected quotes:

• "DeFreeze was almost the opposite of a master criminal; he was most inventive in finding ways to get caught." (Ch 3)
• "They believed that sex was a basic human need, like food or shelter. Like those other necessities, sex should be shared in an egalitarian manner. ... This, in any event, was the theory. Predictably, the sexual merry-go-round had failed to maintain harmony within the house. Sexual tensions and rivalries among the comrades were epidemic, especially in the claustrophobic confines." (Ch 9)
• "In and around San Francisco, the music stopped when the 1980s arrived. There was, essentially, no more counterculture; the term became obsolete. Radical outlaws like the members of the Symbionese Liberation Army ... virtually disappeared altogether." (Aftermath)

June 2023; 339 pages

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

"For Those Who Are Without Sin" by D B Cooper

Gerald is father to five wayward adult children. When he dies they discover his sealed will leaves a fortune far beyond their expectations to only two of them. Death then stalks the family. Who, or what, is killing them? How are these murders linked to the four horsemen of the apocalypse? How are they connected to physical and sexual abuse at an Irish orphanage? Oddball private detective Herschel (an art-living genius, natch) teams up with an typically stupid policeman in an attempt to solve the mystery and prevent further deaths.

More unnuanced thriller than murder mystery, this novel taps into a large number of tropes. The characterisation may be thin and the dialogue unrealistic but the story is fast-moving (except when the author takes a detour to give back story or description) and often entertaining, particularly in the vigorously described action scenes (eg: "Sean's head span off his shoulders with an elegant ease, removed from his body like a loose tyre from a speeding racing car, pirouetting and bouncing across the room." (Ch 4: The Red Horse)

Selected quotes:

• "Gerald had almost no profile under the sheets. He seemed to be melting into the very fabric of the bed." (Ch 1: Death)
• "the struggle for control of the casket real-estate" (Ch 2: Funeral)
• "It was a classic blend of traditional Rococo, Romantic and Neoclassical tables, sofas and chairs and paintings juxtaposed against bleeding-edge technology" (Ch 5: Herschel)

June 2023

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

"We Begin At The End" by Chris Whitaker

 This book is brilliant in no fewer than four ways.

Firstly, it is an American crime novel written by an English novelist. It is written in the vernacular, it is set in small town American with a deep understanding of that way of life, it is thoroughly immersed in the American style, and I had to look up the novelist before I could believe that he wasn't American. This showed incredible skill.

Secondly, it uses an almost impressionistic mode of description. It does this by using sentence fragments and adjectives that are out of place, resulting in something akin to poetry:

• "They moved through dusk streets, the lull of picket fences and fairy lights. Above the moon rose, guided and mocked, as it had for thirty years. Past grand houses, glass and steel that fought the nature, a vista of such terrible beauty." (Ch 1): "dusk" and "lull" and "the nature" are words that don't fit properly ... and as a consequence draw your attention to them.
• "a factory that smoked away dreams" (Ch 3)
• "Walk watched the slow wake of Main." (Ch 15)
• "He made the drive from day to night, high beams, blinking wildflower, Mojave nothing but morphing shapes." (Ch 28)
• "Rising billboards, styled magicians with eyebrows arched and aging starlets taking their back catalog all the way to the bank." (Ch 28)

Thirdly, although for most of the novel you think this is a rather run-of-the-mill thriller with a very obvious outcome, it accelerates towards the end and finishes with a twist that was not just audacious but brilliantly breadcrumbed. Aristotle, in his Poetics, said that a drama should have an ending that follows as a necessary consequence from the set-up, and from the characters, and yet should surprise the audience; the twist in  this novel was exactly right.

Fourthly, the portrait of Duchess Day Radley, outlaw, a thirteen year old girl, neglected by her wayward mother, who will fight the whole world to care for and protect her little brother, was a wonderful creation. She was the epitome of vulnerable kids who have been brutalised by life. Throughout the book, the reader is rooting for this little tearway whilst being fearful that her story will end up as another tragedy. She's an unforgettable character. She alone raises this book to the level of outstanding.

Perfectly paced, the inciting incident happens almost exactly at the 25% mark, there is a key turning point at the 50% mark and an important breadcrumb shortly afterwards, and we enter the end-game three-quarters of the way through.

I read it in one day less than I had allocated: towards the end it was literally unputdownable. Towards the end I was pacing my apartment, book in hand, unable to relax even while I was reading it. Towards the end I wept.

Selected quotes:

• "Milton was hairy. Thick swirls sprouted from every inch of him, the kind of man who had to shave his eyeline three times a day in case a passing zookeeper shot him with a tranquilizer dart." (Ch 3)
• "He wore his size like an ill-fitting suit." (Ch 4)
• "I am the outlaw, Duchess Day Radley. And you are the barstool pussy, and I'll cut your head clean off." (Ch 5)
• "He was soft, jelly, pudding. Soft smile, soft body, soft way of looking at her world. She had no use for soft." (Ch 6)
• "You wish for what you want, and pray for what you need." (Ch 9)
• "Do I look like the kind of boy that has a light?" (Ch 23) Thomas Noble, always referred to by first name and surname, is another brilliant creation: a skinny, delicate, well-brought-up kid who is the antithesis of Duchess and yet just as determined, just as persevering.
• "Ours is a small story, Chief Walker. Sad enough, but small. Let's not pretend different." (Ch 28)

Possibly the best thriller I have ever read. June 2023; 454 pages

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

"Homage to Catalonia" by George Orwell

George Orwell's account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War was written in 1938, before the final victory of the Fascists under Franco, so it is necessarily incomplete. But this doesn't matter. It isn't an attempt at history. It is a very visceral account of fighting in a war. It starts with his experiences as a dreadfully ill-equipped militiaman in the trenches following which he goes on leave to Barcelona only to be caught up in street fighting when the different anti-Fascist factions decide to fight among themselves; finally he has to escape from Spain after the socialist organisation with whom he has enlisted are proscribed.

It's an enthralling read. He has passages in which he describes aspects of his experience in which his adjectives are perfectly chosen:

• "My memories of that part of the war - the red flags in Barcelona, the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers creeping to the front, the grey war-stricken towns further up the line, the muddy, ice-cold trenches in the mountains." (Ch 1): Gaunt trains: wow!
• "the atmosphere of that time ... is all bound up with the winter cold, the ragged uniforms of the militiamen, the oval Spanish faces, the Morse-like tapping of machine-guns, the smells of urine and rotting bread, the tinny taste of bean-stews wolfed hurriedly out of unclean pannikins." (Ch 6)
• "Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered with willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen - all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the road of bombs." (Ch 12) Final words. I adore the horses who "browse and meditate". Brilliant!

The only difficulty I had with this book was understanding all the different factions, referred to usually by their initials. I can pardon some confusion: immediately before and during the Civil War, Spain was a chaos of competing political tendencies to the extent that in one day she had three premiers! Orwell does his best to explain things (who was POUM and PSUC and UGT and NCT etc) in Appendix I but I needed this information drip-fed to me through the text. 

 Nevertheless, I don't think I have ever read a book which better captures the experience of soldiering, although Laurie Lee's memoir of the Spanish Civil War A Moment of War and Joyce Cary's Memoir of the Bobotes both come close. 

Selected Quotes:

• "the characteristic smell of war - in my experience a smell of excrement and decaying food." (Ch 2)
• "I never think of my first two months at war without thinking of wintry stubble fields whose edges are encrusted with dung." (Ch 2)
• "It was beastly water, hardly more transparent than milk." (Ch 3)
• "In war all soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm enough. The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae - every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles." (Ch 5)
• "There was a kind of harrow that took one straight back to the later Stone Age. It was made of boards joined together, to about the size of a kitchen table; in the board hundreds of holes were morticed, and into each hole was jammed a piece of flint which had been chipped into shape ... It made me sick to think of the work that must go into the making of such a thing, and the poverty that was obliged to use flint in place of steel. I have felt more kindly towards industrialisation ever since." (Ch 5)
• "No sooner had the fighting started than the hotel filled to the brim with a most extraordinary collection of people. There were foreign journalists, political suspects of every shade, an American airman in the service of the Government, various Communist agents, including a fat, sinister-looking Russian, said to be an agent of the Ogpu, who was nicknamed Charlie Chan and wore attached to his waistband a revolver and a neat little bomb, some families of well-to-do Spaniards who looked like Fascist sympathisers, tow or three wounded men from the International Column, a gang of lorry drivers from some huge French lorries which had been carrying a load of oranges back to France and had been held up by the fighting, and a number of Popular Army officers." (Ch 9)
• "Even a man as tall as I am cannot wear a long Mauser down his trouser leg without discomfort. It was an intolerable job getting down the corkscrew staircase of the observatory with a completely rigid left leg. Once in the street, we found that the only way to move was with extreme slowness, so slowly that you did not have to bend your knees." (Ch 9)
• "The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency." (Ch 10)
• "Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock - no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing." (Ch 10) Orwell's experience of being shot in the neck.
• "No one I met at this time ... failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all." (Ch 10)
• "It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench." (Appendix One)

Other books by Orwell that I have reviewed in this blog:

• The Road to Wigan Pier: a masterpiece of reporting on social conditions in England in the 1930s
• Down and Out in Paris and London

Here is a review of Orwell's biography by Michael Shelden

June 2023; 248 pages

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

"The Armor Thieves" by Mark Budman

A thriller with a scifi/fantasy element and a delightfully amiable and likeable protagonist. When engineering genius Andrey returns to Berengaria, an East European socialist dictatorship, he discovers parts of a suit of armour that used to belong to Queen Berengaria, from whom he is descended, which have the power to render the wearer invulnerable. Despite his father's profession of secret policeman, and despite being newly married, Andrey decides to steal the armor and use it to help a group of rebel guerrillas.

I felt that the portrayal of life under a dictatorial autocracy had great verisimilitude. The security systems at the archive where Andrey works border on the incompetent; they weren't much better at the military research labs where his wife works. There was petty corruption, there was inefficency, one got a sense of the inconveniences of life, but there was never a real hint of menace.

Less plausible were the characters. Andrey is not only descended from royalty but, as he tells us, at Harvard "I graduated in record time. I had a few job offers from America’s most prestigious companies, but I ignored them." (Ch 1) His friend Viktor is "a math genius, an ace code breaker, and perennially unlucky with the girls" (Ch 1). As I have said elsewhere in this blog, I find multi-talented characters unrealistic. Fortunately, however, Andrey actually seems really rather normal. He gets a job as an archivist (and even that may be due to his family pulling strings) and marries his long-time girlfriend. More of an Everyman than a Marty Stu.

Nevertheless, the most interesting characters were those baddies who were conflicted between good and evil.

The story is mostly told from Andrey's viewpoint which provides a delightfully witty commentary. Some chapters are narrated by others. The end of the book suggests the likelihood of a sequel.

It's a good yarn and a definite page-turner.

Selected Quotes:

• "I’m trapped in an underground room, which for me is low on the list of 25 Breathtaking Places to Visit Before You Die. It’s stuffy and smells rotten and evil as if a vampire or a werewolf had finally expired after being hit with too many silver bullets or wooden stakes." (Ch 1)
• "Dad dragged the biggest skeleton out of the family closet and plopped its smelly, yellow bones on the desk in front of me." (Ch 1)
• "no one likes spies except maybe their superiors, and the spy novel readers." (Ch 5)
• "As they say in my country, it’s as easy as pissing on your fingers." (Ch 12)
• "Vesna’s and Nadya’s Dad hates birthdays, especially his own. At his fiftieth, he said that every birthday reduces the chances of the next one." (Ch 20)
• "The best attack is a 50-50 mixture of randomness and predictability. It would confuse anyone, even the attacker. And life is too short for squandering it on defense." (Ch 20)
• “People say life is a jungle,” he says. “Life is not a jungle but an African savanna. The antelopes are marching on, and the lions are pulling out and devouring the random ones. People are like that, but instead of lions, we are randomly killed by diseases and the enemies of the state. Or the state itself.” Vesna feels obligated to reply. “It’s not that random,” she says. “Young and fit antelopes generally survive, and so are young and fit people. I mean they survive diseases, not the enemies of the state. It’s a 50-50 mixture of randomness and predictability.” (Ch 23)
• "How do I get rid of useless knowledge so I’d have more room in my head for something useful?" (Ch 29)

June 2023

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

"The Painter of Signs" by R K Narayan

Set in an Indian city, probably in the 1960s. Raman, the sign painter, leads a pleasant bachelor existence, looked after at home by a very devout aunt, enjoying male companionship at a coffee-shop, reading book after book on philosophy and religion. He has no intention of getting married. Until he meets Daisy.

Daisy works for a government family-planning campaign. She wants him to make her a sign. From their very first meeting, he can't stop thinking about her. They they go into the countryside, from village to village, so she can plan her campaign, and he can work out where to place family-planning propaganda signs. Over these three weeks together, Raman falls in love.

But, with a key turning point almost exactly half way through the book, the course of true love never runs smoothly.

It is beautifully written. The story is told from the point of view of the narrator and we are privy to all the details of his life, his small obsessions, his habits, his ideas; his is a character which is explored in all its complexity. The other two main characters are only seen through his eyes and so, although they are convincing as real people, there are many things that we do not understand about them. There is a colourful supporting cast. The way of life of the people in the city is described with detail and affection, adding verisimilitude and making the setting into another, very real, character.

The story of Shantanu is referenced in  the book. For those unfamiliar with Hindu epics (I had to look this up), he was a King who met a beautiful woman but she would only marry him providing he never asked her any questions about her actions. They had seven sons; she drowned them one by one. When she was about to drown the eighth son, he broke his promise and asked her what was going on. After explaining something about demons, she (and the boy) vanished.

Selected quotes:

• "He was aware that he had of late got into the habit of communicating on two planes - audibly and inaudibly at the same time."  (Part One)
• "Through the open roof of the courtyard, smoke from the holy fire was escaping with the unholy fire from the kitchen." (Part One)
• "He realized that he was perhaps picking his own loot in the general scramble of a money-mad world! He wished he could do without it, but realized too that it was like a desire for a dry spot while drifting along neck deep in a cesspool." (Part One): Do I recognise this as an image from Dante's Inferno?
• "On three occasions you need not speak the truth. To save a life, to save an honour ... and the third I can't remember." (Part One)
• "The bookseller ... had absolutely no customers coming into his shop, and what sustained him was his acceptance of failure." (Part One)
• "If you write my life, you will be producing a masterpiece, which people will read and enjoy." (Part One)
• "He had a muddled desire not to offend her in any manner, and he had thought 'madam' would be a prophylactic against it." (Part Three)
• "I don't believe in the romanticism created by the literary man. It has conditioned people's thinking and idiom and made people prattle like imbeciles in real life too." (Part Three)

A simple tale, carefully told, grounded in the everyday life of the protagonist. I'd love to read more from this author.

And now I have: The Guide

June 2023; 143 pages

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

"The African Queen" by C S Forester

 Many people will know this book from the film directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn which won Bogart his only best actor Oscar and was nominated for three others: best picture, best director and best actress. Many people will know the author for his Hornblower books. The African Queen was written in 1935 just before these novels but he was already a seasoned writer by then.

The book is set in German Central Africa during World War I. After the Germans have raided their mission station, the Reverend Samuel Sayer dies of illness leaving his sister Rose alone. Charlie Allnutt, a cockney engineer who has been sailing down the river with supplies for the local Belgian mine, arrives and Rose and Charlie decide to travel down river in Charlie's boat, the African Queen. The pair are frequently in conflict. Rose is teetotal, Charlie enjoys gin. Rose wants to go out onto the lake at the end of the river and sink the German steamer that is there, to strike a blow for the British was effort. Charlie thinks this will be too difficult. 

So the pair must overcome their conflicts and also overcome the formidable obstacles ahead, including passing a German fortress, being shot at, running rapids, mending a broken propellor and negotiating a swamp and a mangrove forest before they can finally try to convert the ship into a torpedo for a suicide attack on the German steamer. 

It's well written and the interplay between the two characters keeps it humming along, although I was much influenced by my memories of the film (in the book Charlie is a cockney, but I can't help but hear it said in Bogart's accent). 

Being a British book of its time, there is plenty of class awareness. Charlie is a cockney and, despite his considerable skills both at sailing the boat and as an engineer, he is implacably of a lower class than the sister of a Reverend ... although Rose is actually not much above him, since her father kept a shop. At the start he calls her Miss. 

As you would expect for a book of this time, there is some casual racism in the book. The Africans are treated as ignorant savages. However,  the German officers are not demonised in the way that they might have been had the book been written earlier, or later. The book recognises the patriarchal sexism of the society in which it is set ("She had lived in subjection all her life"; Ch 6; "men were, in their inscrutable oddity, and in the unquestioned deference accorded them, just like miniatures of the exacting and all-powerful God whom the women worshipped."; Ch 8)), but works against that, mostly by having Rose as the dominant partner in the relationship but also by allowing sex to rear its ugly head.

There are some fantastic descriptions:

• "She lurched and wallowed and shook herself loose like some fat pig climbing out of a muddy pool." (Ch 5)
• "A beam of sunlight reached down over the edge of the gorge and turned its spray into a dancing rainbow." (Ch 7)

Selected quotes: 

• "She had read the newspapers occasionally at that time - it was excusable for a girl of twenty to do that in a national crisis." (Ch 2) The national crisis referred to is the Boer war.
• "Rose came from a stratum of society and of history in which woman adhered to her menfolk's opinions." (Ch 2)
• "As Rose sat sweating in the sternsheets of the African Queen she felt within her a boiling flood of patriotism. Her hands clasped and unclasped; there was a flush of pink showing through the sallow sunburn of her cheeks." (Ch 2) The pink refers to the colour in which the British Empire was shown on contemporary maps.
• "Allnutt was not sufficiently self-analytical to appreciate that most of the troubles in his life results from attempts to avoid trouble." (Ch 3)
• "At the same time she seethed with revolt and resentment even against the god-like male." (Ch 4)
• "They were of the generation and class which had been educated to think that all good food came out of tins." (Ch 9)

Book club questions

• What do you make of the character of Allnutt? How does he show his practical skills? What makes him become a hero?
• What breaks down the barriers between Rose and Allnutt?
• How are the Germans portrayed throughout the story?
• How is Forester’s love of boats and maritime skills shown?
• What makes for an adventure story? How is this different from serious fiction or classic literature? Which features of adventure writing are seen in The African Queen?
• What did you think of the ending - from the time Rose and Allnutt enter the big lake and spot the Luise?
• Forester’s critics say that he is good at adventure writing but weak on romance. How is this weakness shown in this novel?
• How does the novel reflect the ideas of its time, written in the mid 1930s and set in the First World War? You might like to consider gender, race, empire and class. Is it right for us to judge fiction written in a different era using our modern sensitivities?
• Having recently read another novel set on a boat journeying up an African river over a hundred years ago, how does Heart of Darkness compare with the African Queen? Are there any similarities?

I have recently read Heart of Darkness, the Joseph Conrad novella about a boat travelling along an African river.

I have also read two books set in German East Africa during the First World War:

• An Ice Cream War by William Boyd
• Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah

June 2023; 190 pages

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

"Forgive me, Leonard Peacock" by Matthew Quick

 A young adult story set in a high school in the USA about the first world problems of a privileged teenager. The narrator is Leonard Peacock; today is his eighteenth birthday. He plans to take a gun to school, shoot fellow student Asher Beal and then kill himself. But first he has to deliver a gift to each of four friends.

Obviously this is a great premise for a book. It was well-written and easy to read. But I found the necessary suspension of disbelief difficult to achieve. Leonard lives on his own because his fashion designer (and extraordinarily unmaternal) mother lives and works in New York and his one-hit wonder rock star father is in South America, on the run from the tax authorities. That's great for the plot but lousy for verisimilitude. Leonard has no financial problems, being able to spend $200 on a cab. Poor little rich kid? "I understand I am relatively privileged from a socio-economical viewpoint, but so was Hamlet" (Ch 15); OF COURSE he compares himself with Hamlet. One of his friends is a virtuoso violinist. He has a holocaust class at school. "There are no black people living in our town". As a result of these niggles, I never really felt any sense of empathy with the narrator and so I didn't really care about his problems.

I kept reading because I wanted to see how the story was resolved, clearly there were secrets about his relationship with Asher Beal which were key to Leonard's motivation. When they were revealed I wasn't surprised: I hadn't predicted the detail but the general outline of the issue was clear from early in the book. 

There are repeated echoes of Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger but this is decidedly less edgy.

I enjoyed the extensive use of footnotes to provide a sometimes witty commentary upon the main narrative. I was less excited by the occasional use of unorthodox typography.

It is good pacing, with key turning points at the 50% and 75% mark.

Selected quotes:

• "The lies are so vivid, they're beginning to burn out my retinas." (Ch 19)
• "You're different. And I'm different too. Different is good. But different is hard." (Ch 19)
• "If god existed and he created the whole universe ... why would he need our help, let alone our praise?" (Ch 21)
• "I got the sense that she didn't really believe the things she was saying so much as she was clinging to those answers because she didn't have any other answers and maybe having the wrong answers was better than having no answers." (Ch 22)
• "It's crazy the pessimistic shit we're made to memorize in school and then carry around in our skulls for the rest of our lives." (fn 54; Ch 25)
• "These people we call Mom and Dad, they bring us into the world and then they don't follow through with what we need." (Ch 26)
• "It's a fend-for-yourself free-for-all in the end, and I'm jut not cut out for that sort of living." (Ch 26)

A canon 'gainst self-slaughter with an unlikeable protagonist in a unlikely environment.

June 2023; 273 pages

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

"Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes

Scifi, but the best sort of Scifi, the sort of Scifi that involves the tweaking of a single parameter which changes the world, like Day of the Triffids and other books by the great John Wyndham.

It is set in the USA, in the early 1960s. Charlie Gordon is a 'retard'. He narrowly escapes being sent to an asylum for retards, getting a job sweeping up in a bakery through the kindness of the bakery owner. The other workers laugh at him and tease him and he is happy, thinking they are his friends. 

Following the successful trial of a new neurosurgery technique on Algernon, a mouse who is better at navigating mazes than dumb Charlie, the surgeons operate on Charlie. Bit by bit, at first slowly but soon by leaps and bounds, Charlie's intelligence improves. The misspellings and poor punctuation disappear from his self-penned progress reports. He starts reading, and learning languages. He starts going to lectures at the university where he has had his surgery. 

But it comes at a price. He realises that his 'friends' were patronising him, teasing him, humiliating him. Now, however, they aren't friends anymore because now that he is so much cleverer than them, they feel inadequate. As he grows clever and cleverer he starts to alienate the people who are working with him at the university too. He's much brighter than they are!

But he has problems with sex. He has emotional hang-ups from his childhood, when he was a retard, and when his mum was fearful that he would hurt his little sister.

And then (exactly half way through the book) Algernon shows signs that his mental improvement may be only temporary.

It's a great read. There are explicit references to Adam and Eve in it. About one third of the way through the nook, one of the bakery workers is decorating a wedding cake and tells Charlie: "It was evil when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. It was evil when they saw they was naked, and learned about lust and shame. And they was driven out of Paradise and the gates was closed to them. If not for that none of us would have to grow old and be sick and die." (p83) which references the forbidden knowledge theme and the sex theme and foreshadows the closing of the book all in four sentences. Much later, Charlie picks up Paradise Lost: "I could only remember it was about Adam and Eve and the tree of Knowledge, but now I couldn't make sense of it." (p 222)

Less explicitly, the book echoes Frankenstein by Mary Shelley in its tale of a creature created and then rejected by its creator, a creature who is spurned by others and is lonely. 

• "It may sound like ingratitude, but that is one of the things that I resent here - the attitude that I am a guinea pig. Nemur's constant references to having made me what I am." (p 111)
• "Everyone kept talking about me as if I were some kind of newly created thing." (p 123)
• "You've boasted time and again that I was nothing before the experiment, and I know why. Because if I was nothing, then you were responsible for creating me, and that makes you my lord and master." (p 190) Not just what the monster might have said to Frankenstein ... but also what Adam might have said to God.

Selected quotes:

• "I was holding on tite to the chair like sometimes when I go to a dentist onley Burt aint no dentist neither but he kept telling me to rilax and that gets me skared because it always means its gonna hert." (p 2) The author uses a clever technique of starting off with Charlie misspelling words and using poor grammar and punctuation (although I'm not convinced in this extract with 'because').
• "Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together." (p 60) True for novels and some mediaeval theologians suggested this was also true for God and that therefore there were limitations on what God could do (eg he couldn't create logical contradictions).
• "How foolish I was even to have thought that professors were intellectual giants. They're people - and afraid the rest of the world will find out." (p 76)
• "The best of them have been smug and patronizing - suing me to make themselves feel superior and secure in their own limitations. Anyone can feel intelligent beside a moron." (p 94)
• "You can't tell how I feel or what I feel or why I feel." (p 96)
• "People of honest feelings and sensibility, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes ... think nothing of abusing a man born with low intelligence." (p 153) There's always that excuse: I worked hard at school and I got qualifications so I assume that if you didn't get qualifications that meant you didn't work hard and therefore I am entitled to condemn you to a low-paid, low-status life.
• "Although we know the end of the maze holds death ... I see now that the path I choose through that maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being." (p 169)
• "Ideas explode in my head like fireworks. There is no greater joy than the burst of solution to a problem." (p 184)
• "There were lots of people sitting in conversation groups, the kind I find impossible to join." (p 186) Know the feeling.
• "Charlie doesn't want me to pierce the upper curtain of the mind. Charlies doesn't want to know what lies beyond. Does he fear seeing God? Or seeing nothing?" (p 217)
• "Why am I always looking at life through a window?" (p 228)

Not just scifi but a well written novel to provoke plenty of thought. And there are bits which are very sixties, too.

June 2023; 238 pages

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

 

"Pig Iron" by Benjamin Myers

John-John, a traveller (sometimes called a gypsy) from the north-east of England comes out of prison where he has spent five years for a crime of violence. He gets a flat through his probation officer and a job selling ice cream. He's determined to go straight. But he is haunted by the shadows of what he has done and by the physical abuse of his father, one-time bare-knuckle boxing champion of the gypsies.

The story, told in a gentle vernacular, is told by John-John, and his mother, alternating. The writing is wonderful. I loved the repeated device in which John-John uses a word he has learned in prison, when he read voraciously: "Some might say that's whatsit. Aye. Ironic."

The narration is carefully measured out. There are some things (including what I have written above) that are left to the reader to infer. There were questions that I knew I couldn't properly resolve, which are resolved in the final pages. There are twists. As the story unfolds, particularly in the last third of the book, there is a growing sense of dread, a growing understanding of the inevitability of tragedy. There are twists near the end. You'll have to read the book to know how it turns out.

It's a beautifully written book, by the author of the book The Gallows Pole that has now been dramatised by the BBC. I have already ordered more novels by this writer.

Selected Quotes:

• "For now the night is still fuzzy around the edges. Blurred. It's not dark and it's not light. The sun hasn't risen. The sane world is sleeping. It'd that strange inbetween stage that belongs to the creatures." (Part One)
• "If you can't fetch yersel somewhere by foot, then it's not worth fetching to." (Part One)
• "And that's the other thing about being locked up: your body becomes programmed to routine. If they tell you to shit at six, soon enough you'll be shitting at six on the dot. They don't just own your time, they own your bowel movements an all." (Part One)
• "The clouds are so thin they fade away to nowt but pure blue, and the light is shining down in magical looking shafts. Heavenly almost. And there's that smell in the air an all. That special smell; the smell of wet roads and dandelions and warm gravel; ragwort and mulch." (Part One)
• "When I come here, or when I'm out in the fields at dusk, and the sun is setting ower a freshly-cut filed and the hares are out dancing and boxing and that, or the sun is coming up over a still pond and the fish are rising, or when you're up on the moors and there's a proper storm brewing and the air starts to crackle and the light turns this weird brown colour and all your hairs are standing up on end - well, that's when I know what it must feel like to be religious ... Thee idea of summat bigger, I mean. Summat you can't explain." (Part Two)
• "Wow, says Maria so quietly that the word is just the faintest of mumbles falling from her bottom lip." (Part Two)
• "Sleep with dogs and you wake up with fleas." (Part Three)
• "All these years of coming here and I've only just realised that this green cathedral of mine was built by man an all, just like the one in town, only this one is the shell of a cathedral, a cathedral-shaped hole." (Part Three)

June 2023; 282 pages

Also by this author and reviewed in this blog:

• The Perfect Golden Circle about a pair of mavericks making crop circles
• Cuddy about the influence of St Cuthbert through the generations
• Rare Singles in which a washed-up US soul singer has a comeback concert in Scarborough

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