"Time Shelter" by Georgi Gospodinov

 This book won the International Booker Prize in 2023.

The author and narrator (GG) meets a mysterious man called Gaustine (G) at a conference. Gaustine tries to treat dementia patients by taking them to 'time shelters': rooms which are authentic replicas of some moment of their past, the time they 'want' to live in. Gaustine's clinic has a floor for the 1940s, another for the 1950s, and so on.

The idea catches on. Bulgaria holds a referendum to determine whether it, as a nation, shall turn the clock past to its glorious nationalistic past (pre World War II) or its post World War 2 socialist heyday. Soon, nations across Europe are choosing the decade in which they want to live (although each referendum is divisive and prompts some to secede from the national era and choose their own time zons). Europe becomes a chaos of different nations returning to different times. Of course, the spectre haunting Europe is the Second World War. 

As the narrator starts to lose his own memory, re-enactment groups set out not just to replicate but to recreate the trigger points of the first and second world wars with deadly consequences.

This is very much a novel of ideas. It is strong on ideas. However, I felt it sacrificed characters and narrative to the ideas. For example, section 4 is devoted to explaining which decade was chosen by which country; the narrative of the rest of the book (such as it is) being suspended for about twenty pages. The only character I could imagine as flesh and blood was Demby; even the narrator seemed an intellectual construct, despite the information that dribbled out about his previous life. I felt that this distanced me emotionally from the story; in the end I didn't really care what happened.

The translation had some quirks (eg the use of the words 'gotten' and 'ass') which made me suspect that it had been rendered into American English.

Selected quotes:

• "The times is coming when more and more people will want to hide in the cave of the past." (1.11)
• "For us the past is the past, and even when we step into it, we know that the exit to the present is open, we can come back with ease. For those who have lost their memories, the door has slammed shut once and for all." (1.11)
• "Isn't it truly astonishing that there is no recording device for scents? ... we don't even have names for smells ... Rather, it's always through comparison ... It smells like violets, like toast, like seaweed, like rain, like a dead cat ..." (1.14)
• "A forgetful God, a God with Alzheimer's, would free us from all obligations. No memory, no crime." (1.20)
• "The most terrible thing about hide-and-seek is realizing that no one is looking for you anymore." (1.21)
• "Time doesn't nest in the unusual, it seeks a quiet, peaceful place." (1.27)
• "We are factories for the past. Living past-making machines, what else? We eat time and produce the past." (1.37)
• "Does the past disintegrate, or does it remain practically unchanged like plastic bags, slowly and deeply poisoning everything around itself." (1.37)
• "If hate were the gross domestic product, then  the growth of prosperity in some countries would soon be sky-high." (2.2)
• "fellows of an undefined middle-age (but with well-defined potbellies)" (3.12)
• "In short, that's how the sixties ended, like a college party where you've gotten drunk, just gotten your buzz on, and suddenly the cops bust in." (4.5)
• "God is not dead. God has forgotten. God has dementia." (5.4)
• "When I write, I know who I am, but once I stop, I am no longer so sure." (5.5)

August 2023; 302 pages

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

"The Two Gentlemen of Verona" by William Shakespeare

This shows the moment when Valentine rescues Silvia from Proteus with 'Sebastian' (Julia) looking on. It was painted by Angelica Kauffman in 1789 and is in the public domain.

One of Shakespeare's earliest plays, this comedy explores the betrayal of friendship.

The Plot

Valentine and Proteus, the two gentlemen of Verona, are best mates, having grown up together. Valentine is about to travel to Milan and wants Proteus to come, but Proteus is in love with Julia (who, despite her protestations to the contrary, reciprocates his love) and he wants to stay in Verona. So they part.

In Milan, Valentine falls in love with the Duke's daughter, Silvia, and she with him, but her dad the Duke wants her to marry Thurio, who is richer. Meanwhile, back in Verona, Proteus is told to go to Milan by his father. Proteus and Julia say their fond farewells, exchanging kisses and rings and promising eternal fidelity.

When Proteus arrives in Milan he meets Silvia and falls in love with her. (His namesake, Proteus, was the 'Old Man of the Sea', a figure from Greek myth famed for his shape-shifting. It is from this that we get the word 'protean' meaning changeable.) So when Valentine tells Proteus of his plan to elope with Silvia, using a rope ladder to rescue her from the tower her father shuts her in at night, Proteus sees his opportunity to pinch his mate's girl. He betrays Valentine to the Duke, and Valentine is banished from Milan. In the countryside he is captured by a band of outlaws but they are impressed by his gentlemanly looks and his ability to speak more than one language and they make him their captain.

Meanwhile, back in Verona, Julia decides to travel to Milan in search of Proteus. To “prevent/ The loose encounters of lascivious men” she decides to disguise herself as a male page. 

Proteus pretends to assist Thurio who serenades Silvia. Julia arrives and realises that Proteus is in love with Silvia. Silvia, who knows that Proteus has betrayed Valentine, berates Proteus: “Thou subtle, perjured, false, disloyal man”. 

Sebastian employs pageboy 'Sebastian' (Julia in disguise) to take a present to Silvia: it is the ring Julia gave Proteus. Silvia refuses the ring.

Silvia flees Milan searching for Valentine. The Duke enrols Proteus and Thurio in a posse to capture the absconders. 

Silvia has been captured by the bandits but Proteus frees her. He thinks she should be grateful but she still refuses him so he decides to rape her. At this point Valentine, who has been lurking in the undergrowth, steps forward. He's a bit cross with Proteus who begs forgiveness. Val grants this and says “All that was mine in Silvia I give thee”. Sebastian (Julia), who witnesses all this, swoons. Recovering she tells Proteus that she failed to deliver his ring to Julia and then gives him the ring that he gave to her. She reveals her identity. Proteus, still protean, realises he really loves her.

The outlaws come in with captives: the Duke and Thurio. Thurio claims Silvia but when Valentine threatens to kill him, renounces Silvia. The Duke, unimpressed by Thurio’s cowardice, gives Silvia to Valentine and unexiles all the outlaws.

Added to this are two (three?) other key roles. The servants of Valentine and Proteus are Speed and Launce (who has a dog, Crab) respectively. Speaking usually in prose (often reserved by Shakespeare for lover-class characters) this pair comment on the action and have solo and paired comedy routines. But it's classed as a comedy because of the happy ending.

Shakespeare at his most misogynistic?

Modern sensibilities have difficulty with the scene in which Valentine, having prevented Proteus from raping Silvia, then appears to offer her to him as a gesture of friendship with the words: “All that was mine in Silvia I give thee”. This sounds utterly patriarchal. On the one hand there is love at first sight and on the other hand marriage as a dynastic partnership between two patriarchies. Silvia is a very strong women, refusing to marry the man her father has chosen for her, contracting a secret relationship with another man, running away to be with him when he is sent into exile; will she acquiesce to become a mere body gifted by Valentine to his inconstant mate? This is either Shakespeare at his most misogynistic or Shakespeare the tyro dramatist who hasn't yet realised that plot must follow character.

The sources Shakespeare may have used

Aspects of the Julia-Proteus courtship (the business with the letter and Julia’s annoyance with her maid in 1.2, Proteus being sent away by his father in 1.3, Julia, disguised as a boy, becoming the page of her lover and being used to carry messages to his new sweetheart in 4.4) are drawn from the story of 'Felix and Felismena' in Los Siete Libros de la Diana by Jorge de Montemayor originally published in Spanish in Valencia in 1542 but translated into English by Bartholomew Yong in 1598. 1598 is later than the normally accepted date for 2GoV but Yong claims in his preface to have finished his translation in 1582, so it is possible that Shakespeare saw a manuscript copy; alternatively he saw the French translation which was published in 1578. A third (and I think the likeliest) possibility is that he saw a play (by anon) called The History of Felix and Philomena which was performed at Greenwich Palace by the Queen's Men on 3 January 1585. This is likely to have starred Richard Tarlton, the best-known clown of the time, a leading player in the Queen’s Men (and possibly the original of Yorick), who was known for working with a dog; there are suggestions that Shakespeare wrote the part of Launce for Tarlton but that Tarlton never performed it because he died in 1588.

Another likely source was The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, a narrative poem by Arthur Brooke, published in 1562, which contains a character called Friar Laurence and the device of a young man attempting to meet with his forbidden love using a rope ladder.

Another source is thought to be Arcadia by Philip Sidney published in 1590 which contains a woman dressed as a page who follows her betrothed and another character who becomes captain of an outlaw gang.

The friendship of Valentine and Proteus may have been inspired by the intimacy of Titus and Gisippus in The Boke Named the Governour by Thomas Elyot published in 1531 (which is based on a story in the Decameron but there are more verbal similarities between 2GoV and The Governour than the Decameron). In The Governour, Titus and Gisippus are inseparable until Gisippus falls in love with Sophronia. He introduces her to Titus, but Titus is overcome with jealousy and vows to seduce her. Upon hearing of Titus' plan, Gisippus arranges for them to change places on the wedding night, thus placing their friendship above his love.

Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, a novel by John Lyly, published in 1578 also mentions two friends, inseparable until divided by a woman. Lyly (whose younger brothers went to school with Christopher Marlowe) was private secretary to the Earl of Oxford - thought by some fools to be the author of Shakespeare’s work - and leaseholder of the Blackfriars Playhouse where his boy-company performed plays, some of which he wrote, including Midas, performed in 1589 - 1590, which contains a scene similar to that between Launce and Speed discussing the pros and cons of a woman.

Date when Shakespeare wrote 2GoV
2GoV was mentioned in Palladis Tamia by Francis Meres which was published in 1598, so it predates this.

If we accept the theory that one of the sources was The History of Felix and Philomena then 2GoV must date to 1585 or later. If Richard Tarlton was the original player for Launce, 2GoV was written before 1588 when Tarlton died. But If Shakespeare also used the material from Lyly’s Midas the earliest date for 2GoV is 1589. So it may be that Shakespeare wrote the part for Tarlton but hadn't completed the play before Tarlton's death and maybe went back to it at a later date.

Many experts argue that 2GoV is one of the earliest plays Shakespeare wrote, possibly the first. There are a variety of flaws:

• Whenever there are three participants in a dialogue, one tends to fall silent, making it a duologue. Shakespeare employs duologues, soliloquys and asides almost entirely. 
• The conversation between the outlaws is less a conversation and more an arrangement of speeches. 
• Proteus is not the only character to be inconstant: Valentine is the perfect romantic gentleman until he seems to hand Silvia to his rival; Silvia is a strong women until she fails to protest against being handed over; Sir Eglantine is reputed to be brave but is a coward at the first opportunities

Furthermore, much of the blank verse is end-stopped; in his later plays Shakespeare made much more use of enjambement and caesuras. He also is much stricter with his iambic pentameters in 2GoV than in his later verse. 

All these things argue for an early date of composition. Shakespeare is thought to have arrived in London in about 1590 so 2GoV probably dates to around 1591 or 1592.

Flaws and errors
Some snobs refuse to believe that a lower middle-class oik like the son of a glover from Stratford could possibly write the wonderful poetry contained in the plays; instead they postulate that they must have been penned by an aristocrat. They suggest that Shakespeare's knowledge of Europe could only have come from somebody who had been on the Grand Tour. 

In 2GoV (Act 1, Scene 1) Valentine says his father seeks to see him “shipped” (1.1.54) from Verona to Milan and Proteus, near the end of the scene, tells Speed, Valentine’s servant, to “be gone, to save your ship from wreck” (1.1.145). But to travel from Verona to Milan by ship would be crazy. You’d need to go to Venice first (that's heading in the opposite direction from Milan) and then sail all the way around Italy, land at Genoa, and then travel overland to Milan. The overland section of the journey alone would be longer than the direct land route from Verona to Milan. Perhaps Valentine knew about the bandits and was trying to avoid them, and when he went into exile (travelling overland) he didn't much care about being caught. On the other hand, Julia, when she goes off in search of Proteus, travels overland. Perhaps she didn't know about the bandits which might explain why she didn't get caught.

Other geographical errors include the Duke of Milan, in Milan, who says he fancies a “lady in Verona here” (3.1.81) and Speed who welcomes Launce to "Padua" (2.5.1) when they are in Milan.

I, personally, love it when Shakespeare makes mistakes and when his plays are flawed. I don't want to think of him as the "immortal" bard. He isn't born a genius. To me he is a lad from Stratford who has a talent for writing plays and poetry. He reads voraciously and watches lots of rival plays and is a reasonable actor who specialises in the second-string roles. He has to learn his craft and his plays get better and better. He's quick at taking the ideas of others and improving them; in particular he learns blank verse from Kit Marlowe. He writes for the actors he knows and for the playhouses in which they perform; he writes for the audience and he becomes expert in knowing what will work on stage which is why he is so good at adapting the work of others. This is a portrait of a real writer rather than the impossible 'icon on a pedestal' fantasy so beloved by so many.

Selected quotes

• “For he was more than over shoes in love” (1.1.25)
• “I think him so because I think him so.” (1.2.24)
• “They do not love that do not show their love." (1.2.31)
• “Thus have I shunn'd the fire for fear of burning,
  
• And drench'd me in the sea, where I am drown'd.” (1.3.78-79
• “O, how this spring of love resembleth
• The uncertain glory of an April day,
• Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,
• And by and by a cloud takes all away! (1.3.84-87)
• “Ay, but hearken, sir; though the chameleon Love can feed on the air, I am one that am nourished by my victuals, and would fain have meat.” (2.1.164-7)
• “I'll be as patient as a gentle stream,
• And make a pastime of each weary step,
• Till the last step have brought me to my love,
• And there I'll rest, as after much turmoil,
• A blessed soul doth in Elysium." (2.7.34-38)
• “Wilt thou reach stars because they shine on thee?” (3.1.156)
• “For Orpheus' lute was strung with poets' sinews,
• Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones,
• Make tigers tame and huge leviathans
• Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands. (3.2.78-81)
• I wonder whether the ‘huge leviathans’ were inspired when Shakespeare read John Stow’s Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles ... Abridged which had multiple edition, including one in 1590 and which mentions on page 314 a “monstrous fish of the sea did shoot himself on shore, where for want of water beating himself on the sands he died” in 1574 at the Isle of Thanet.

August 2023

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

Other Shakespeare plays reviewed in this blog can be found here.

"Gold" by Chris Cleave

 

Zoe and Kate are Olympic-standard cyclists, rivals on the track, and for the affections of Jack, another Olympic cyclist. Tom is their coach. Sophie, Kate and Jack's little daughter, is suffering from her second bout of leukaemia. Will Zoe or Kate make it to the London Olympics? Will Sophie die? Will Zoe self-destruct? This tear-jerking story chronicles the dedication, the obsession, and the reality behind sporting success.

It is told in the past tense and in the third person from the shifting narrative viewpoint of each of the five main characters. The author has clearly done a huge amount of research (sometimes it showed) both into cycling and leukaemia. The plot is carefully structured with some nice foreshadowing. There is a certain sense of artificiality about the way the characters have been opposed: Zoe (a very extreme character) and Kate are opposite sides of a coin, Tom is the stereotypical wise old man, Jack the flip-flopping husband. Nevertheless, it was genuinely tense and I did not know which way the plot was going to twist and there were two occasions when I really had a lump in my throat and any writing powerful enough to move this cynical old critic must have something. It punched. Otherwise, it was very much in the mainstream of contemporary novels. 

Selected quotes:

Page numbers for the 2013 Sceptre paperback edition

• "This new breed of men with cyclonic souls that sucked like Dysons and never needed their bag changing in order to keep on and on sucking." (p 57)
• "Time and space were training wheels on a bike - you were pretty limited until you could ride without them." (p 61)
• "This was just one of those unfortunate moments in life, like going to dinner parties. You didn't need to enjoy it to survive it." (p 67)
• "He waved the idea away. You get to a certain age and kindnesses become these invisible flies to be swatted." (p 70)
• "There were multiple protocols to treat leukaemia, but the only known cure for being eight was being nine." (p 170)
• "Phil Collins' lyrics held meaning the way a pocket mirror held the moon." (p 262) It's a great phrase but I'm not certain if it's good or bad.
• "If later really cared, it should try turning up at places sooner." (p 281)
• "She and time were oil and vinegar shaken up and left to stand." (p 285)
• "This was the nature of time: it was a wide, elegant and gently descending spiral staircase whose last dozen steps were unexpectedly rotten." (p 345)
• "The anaesthesia had stilled even the echo of character that her face showed in sleep." (p 371)

My overall reaction is that it is a great page-turning novel creating genuine emotional involvement so I can't deny it five stars but there was a slight feeling of disappointment that there wasn't something a little bit more to it. I'm hard to please!

Chris Cleave also wrote The Other Hand

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

"The Edge of the World" by Michael Pye

 This history purports to tell the story of 'how the North Sea made us who we are' (its subtitle) and there are indeed chapters about the Frisians, the Vikings and the Hansa but other chapters, while continuing to focus on the countries bordering the North Sea, are about the development of literacy and lawyering, fashion and nature, and plague. I suppose that the idea is that the communications enabled by travelling across the North Sea shaped these developments, but I felt that the focus was lost.

Having said this, the book was well-written and, as with all well-written histories, I learned not just about the topics being examined but also more, in delightful asides. I certainly learned how ruthless the Hanseatic merchants were in enforcing protectivism for their own trade: they even blockaded Norway till the population started to starve to bring the King of Noway to heel (Dealers rule)

Selected Quotes:

• "The North Sea is much more than the water between a thousand beaches." (Introduction)
• "Before there were passports and papers and notions of national identity, or even national history, you identified with where you happened to be, not where your mother and father were born. Your identity was lived in the present tense." (The invention of money)
• "The rules of the sea: the best sex is available sex" (Making enemies)
• "They were wilderness people out on the moors ... warriors who went howling into battles like wolves." (Settling)
• "Monks were particularly forbidden to wear anything split, tight, short, pleated, or, worst of all, with the new-fangled buttons." (Fashion)
• "Clothes cost so much that men couldn't marry, which was leading to sodomy, so fashion was distracting people from the serious business of replenishing the population." (Fashion)
• "Eleanor was not a lady, not if she was working Cheapside when the light had gone on a Sunday night in December in 1394. Mind you, Eleanor was not a woman, either." (Love and capital)
• "Plague became the reason, just like terrorism today, ... for taking away a worker's right to choose what work he wanted, for deciding which of the poor are worthy of help and which are just wastrels."  (The city and the world)

Many fascinating moments. August 2023; 328 pages

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

"Lapvona" by Ottessa Moshfegh

Lapvona is a fantasy book. Marek is the crippled son of shepherd Jude, his mum Agata is missing presumed dead. There are peasants in the village, bandits in the mountains, and a lord in his castle on the hill.

But the prose style is very different from most fantasies. Lapvona is mostly written in short, declarative sentences: "They boiled lamb's milk and covered the pot with a cloth to keep the flies away while it cooled. Marek picked the bugs off some potatoes and plunged them and a few apples in the fire. They were old apples from the fall harvest. Jude had eaten only lamb's milk, bread, apples and potatoes, and wild grasses his entire life. Like the rest of Lapvona, he didn't eat meat. Nor did he drink mead, only milk and water. Marek are what Jude ate, always saving a few bites for Go: he knew that sacrifice was the best way to please him." This simple third person past tense narration included the explication of characters and their motives. There is very little left for the reader to infer.

Furthermore, the narration was done as a sequence of events: first this, then this. There seemed very little connection between the events; any causal connections were straightforward. There was never any nuance.

I quickly found this monotony of style extremely irksome; I was swiftly bored. It seemed to me that the only way the author could keep my interest was to ramp up the weirdness. The story is full of bizarre, frequently grotesque and horrible occurrences. 

Yo be charitable, one could argue that the style suited the content. It reminded me of how Kafka narrates Metamorphosis ("As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”). It had a fairy tale feel to it. Perhaps a deadpan, direct narration is the best way of recounting weird stuff, as if the plainness of the style is the only way to add verisimilitude to what would otherwise be unbelievable. And a lot of fairy tales are full of violence and childish, crude, cruel humour. So to write as if one is writing for young children (although the content is frequently adult, with sex, starvation, mutilation, death, cannibalism and spontaneous lactation) is perhaps the only way to persuade the reader to suspend their disbelief.

It didn't work for me. I began to long for a difficult word or even a subjunctive clause. I didn't care about the characters, I didn't believe the setting, I had no involvement. I did wonder why the author was so keen on the word 'pubis' but this was the most interesting aspect about this book.

Having read a selection of other one star reviews on goodreads, I find that most of them condemn the book for its focus on things likely to cause disgust. I prefer to review a literary work on its style rather than its content.

Selected quotes:

• "A puddle of ink had pooled under the pen." (Summer) A rare moment of metaphor.
• "Flesh was mortal. God was not. Got was not alive. God was life itself." (Summer)
• "One stray germ and the Second Coming wouldn't come." (Winter)
• "Should I put the horseman in the stockade?" (Winter) I think the author means 'stocks'.

August 2023; 304 pages

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

"The Gold Bug Variations" by Richard Powers

 

A librarian, Jan O'Deigh, and Franklin Todd, a computer technician, try to discover the story behind Frank's colleague, Stuart Ressler, who used to be a scientist on the cutting-edge of research into the mechanism by which DNA (its double helix structure recently discovered by Watson and Crick) controls genetic inheritance. As they learn about the Stuart's love affair, they themselves fall in love.

There are three narratives: Jan's present-day narrative, told in the first person; Jan's memories of the previous year when she and the now absent Frank tried to uncover Stuart's story, also told by Jan; Stuart's story from 1957, told from his perspective but in the third-person.

There are a lot of thematic correspondences:

• The Gold Bug: a short story by Edgar Allen Poe about cryptography. Ressler's task is to decoding in the sense that he is trying understand which of the 64 possible combinations of triplets of RNA correspond to which of the twenty amino acids that build up proteins.
• The Goldberg variations: a suite of musical pieces by Bach whose structure seems to mirror the combinations of the bases in the RNA triplets.
• The fact the Jan is a librarian and DNA is, in a sense, a giant reference book of how to build proteins.
• The fact that Frank and Stuart work with computers and computer programs are, in a sense, similar to DNA
• The fact that Stuart gets cancer (not a spoiler, we learn this early): cancer is caused by inaccurate replications of DNA
• Love as the drive towards reproduction and the problems this may have for some people
• The fact that the story is about the love affairs bonding two pairs of people, as in DNA the bases are paired: A with T and C with G, unless there is an error in replication, symbolised in the book by infidelity.

It is the interplay of themes that is, one senses, most important for the novelist and he extends this to the idea that the text is also a coded message that the reader is deciphering into ideas; word-play is often used to show what might happen to the thoughts generated when the code is changed slightly: "Can all this babel come from the same idiot idiolect?" (Ch 12)

Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid by Douglas Hofstadter plays with similar ideas.

It is a fascinating book but it is long. If there is an excursion which can provide further illustration of the theme, the author does not hesitate to explore it. Thus, one character discovers that his daughter is colour-blind and, since he isn't, disowns her: classic red-green colour-blindness in carried on the X chromosome so that, for a girl to have it, she must inherit it from both her mother (where it could be recessive) and her father (where it couldn't). A computer malfunction has life-or-death consequences. But there are other aspects which seem less related to the theme. Do we need to know the profession of Jan's ex-partner? Do we need to learn about an obscure Flemish painter (Frank's dissertation is on art history)? These trees sometimes seemed to get in the way of my seeing the wood.

And Powers has a very long-winded style. One sentence is rarely enough: "She is a natural history, a sovereign kingdom, a theory about her environment, a virtuoso pedal-point performance. She follows a curve, a cadence, an animal locomotion he cannot help but lose himself to. Jeanette Ross is her own phylum." (Ch 11) It's certainly a virtuouso performance but I often felt that a little more precision, a little more succinctness, a little less prolixity ... it's catching!

This is an author who expects a lot of his readers: "A line runs down the office he shares with Lovering, straight as a surveyor's cut, an osmotic membrane separating the organization of Ressler's area from the entropic mayhem of his office mate. On Lovering's side, arboreal colonies of books, lush, vegetative pools of mimeograph, and ruminant herds of manila-enveloped crap creep up to the divide and abruptly drop off. On Ressler's side: the formal gardens of Versailles." (Ch 10) It's not just the need to have some sort of understanding of biuochemistry and thermodynamics and French history; you also need to be able to decipher sufficient of the unusual words (osmotic, entropic, arboreal, mimeograph, ruminant etc) to have the motivation to keep reading. On the other hand, the richness of the vocabulary and the ecstatic juxtaposition of so many ideas make reading this book a rewarding experience, even though it slows you up. But perhaps there's a happy medium, combining verbal and mental pyrotechnics with more conciseness, making the book an exhilarating romp up a hillside rather than an arduous slog up a mountain.

• Selected quotes:
• "Ressler's definition of chance: the die is random, but we keep on rolling until we hot necessity." (Ch 1)
• "Those few months were the only ones of my life that I experienced firsthand." (Ch 1)
• "The angel-files in each half-stair must somehow be capable of latching on to their proper mates out of angelic bouillabaisse." (Ch 4)
• "It had succumbed to creeping graffiti fungus, the surreal, urgently illegible signatures of the buried." (Ch 4)
• "We are the by-product of the mechanism in there. So it must be more ingenious than us." (Ch 5)
• "News confuses significant with novel." (Ch 7)
• "Her curves tend toward a topographical fullness he associates with varsity cheerleaders and nursing mothers." (Ch 7)
• "Even level-headed women are programmed to spread themselves through every available backwater of the gene pool. At thirty, though, lust is no longer the giddy-maker it once was." (Ch 7)
• "The innovations that daily made a liar of Ecclesiastes. Recent sighting of the W particle. Stone Age tribe hitherto escaping detection. Pioneer 10, passing Neptune on its way to being the first artificial thing to quit the solar system." (Ch 14)
• "Organisms are only the necessary evil, the way DNA has hit upon to make more DNA." (Ch 15)
• "The male model of parenthood: everything between ejaculation and tossing the football with the twelve-year-old is trivial." (Ch 17)
• "There are a lot more ways to fall off the tightrope than to inch forward." (Ch 19)
• "Genetic engineering is full of attempts to replace a dense, diversified, heterogeneous assortment of strains with one superior one. Something about us is in love with whittling down: we want the one solution that will drive out all the others." (Ch 19)
• "I recently saw French literature defined as English literature without the Bard." (Ch 20)
• "The first article of scientific skepticism: meaning always reveals pattern, but pattern does not necessarily imply meaning." (Ch 20)
• "Part of me dearly wants to pay taxes. I love schools, sidewalks, museums, research funding, food relief. You simply cannot get a better return on investment." (Ch 21)
• "Ultimately, the Goldbergs are about the paradox of variation, preserved divergence, the transition effect inherent in terraced unfolding, the change in nature attendant upon a change in degree. How necessity might arise out of chance. How difference might arise out of more of the same." (Ch 28)

Gosh, this was hard work to read. But so worthwhile. I suspect that the verbal dexterity and the unquestionable polymathic brilliance of the author will mean that this book lingers in my memory long after easier but more trivial books have been forgotten.

August 2023; 675 pages

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

"Freedom" by Sebastian Junger

This book is framed by a travelogue. The author, with three friends and a dog, walked for a year (although not all in one go) along the railroad lines in the American east, sleeping rough. It is in many ways a classic American journey: the men are emulating the pioneers, they are practising the cherished American ideals of self-sufficiency and freedom from authority.

They are a macho bunch. Four men, all experienced in warfare (Junger is a journalist and war reporter, and the friends are a conflict photographer and two veterans from the Afghan campaign), who anticipate trouble: “We were always worried about the locals and on a weekend night it seemed like a good idea to sleep at a place that was hard to find and easy to leave. If they came up one side, we’d go down the other. If that didn’t work, we’d stay on top and see how badly they wanted this.” (Book Two: Fight) Indeed, they are shot at more than once.

As they walk, Junger muses over that classic American ideal: Freedom. He and his friends feel free (“most nights we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. There are many definitions of freedom but surely that is one of them.” ; Book One: Run) but this is a mirage because their existence is marginal and precarious. Freedom is "first and foremost ... the absence of threat. A person who can be killed without any consequences for the killers is not free in the most important sense of the word” (Book One: Run) There must be a trade-off between autonomy and security. Junger and his friends may have no obligations to outsiders but to stay safe they have to become tightly interdependent, ceding personal freedom to the needs of the group. In the same way, the American pioneers as a group were tightly bound by a code of obligation to one another because each might need the other to help when the Indians (Native Americans) attacked. This is the same bargain as that made when joining a street gang: "The inside joke about freedom ... is that you’re always trading obedience to one thing for obedience to another.” (Book One: Run) 

But surely hunter-gatherer societies are freer than others. Movement from place to place is, he suggests “subversive for the development of authority ... Adults of either sex can readily, if they choose, obtain enough food to feed themselves and are potentially autonomous.” (Book One: Run). His group of friends are like nomads but although they feel free he realises that “everything we needed—food, clothes, gear—came from the very thing we thought we were outwitting. ... Few people grow their own food or build their own homes, and no one—literally no one—refines their own gasoline, performs their own surgery, makes their own ball bearings, grinds their own eyeglass lenses, or manufactures their own electronics from scratch. Everyone—including people who vehemently oppose any form of federal government—depend on a sprawling supply chain that can only function with federal oversight, and most of them pay roughly one-third of their income in taxes for the right to participate in this system.” (Book One: Run) 

Most people live as citizens of a nation state and have surrendered a part of their own freedom in return for prosperity within that state. Junger realises that, counter to the opinion that freedom means the freedom to make money, a society with a great discrepancy between the poor and the rich must have limited freedom for the poor (a wage slave is still a slave). “An important part of freedom is not having to make sacrifices for people who don’t have to make sacrifices for you.” (Book Three: Think)

 Similarly, nations are prepared to bargain away some of their sovereignty in exchange for prosperity (as brought by mutual trading alliances) or security (achieved through common defence systems). Junger believes that in human societies the powerful cannot always prevail against the powerless, citing examples (eg Afghanistan) in which insurgencies have defeated powerful armies. He sees this as key to the development of international human rights which may curtail freedom but are essential to ensuring the freedom of citizens within societies. 

The book is also a meditation on walking. I have done some long-distance walks (though much shorter than this one - up to 100 miles - and not sleeping rough but deliberately seeking out towns, hotels and restaurants as part of the experience) and I enjoyed this aspect of the book.

Selected quotes:

• “The ancient Celtic measurement of a “league” was defined as the distance a man could walk in an hour—roughly three or four miles.” (Book One: Run)
• “The poor have always walked and the desperate have always slept outside.” (Book One: Run)
• “One of God’s great oversights is that dogs don’t live as long as men” (Book Three: Think)
• “Rightly or wrongly, society tends to value women’s survival more than men’s, and that makes machine-gunning them problematic.” (Book Three: Think)
• “History is littered with fascist leaders who have rigged elections and tortured or killed critics, but their regimes are remarkably short-lived—especially considering the obsession these men usually have with holding power.” (Book Three: Think)

Freedom is an interesting, if very personal, exploration of an important philosophical concept. It's also a fun read!

August 2023

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

"The Marriage Portrait" by Maggie O'Farrell

As with O'Farrell's most recent bestseller, Hamnet, this book is written from a close-up psychological distance such that you were inside the coherent thoughts of the narrator, despite keeping the narrator in the third person. What I disliked most about Hamnet was the too-good-to-be-true superwoman at the heart of that book, a real Mary Sue character. In this book Lucrezia, the narrator, despite being an incredibly good artist, and having almost supernatural intuition, does have weaknesses and doubts, which made her seem more human, although she still seemed unbelievably psychologically mature for a sixteen-year-old (obviously the Florentine elite grew up quickly in those days). 

Hamnet is also flawed, in my opinion, with some stereotypical male characters, whereas the principal man in TMP, the husband Alfonso, is the most wonderful villain I have read for ages. Yes, he is capable of sudden and brutal violence. Yes he is controlling. But he is so much more than the textbook male baddy as repeatedly represented in so much modern fiction. He is charming and charismatic and cultured. He can be tender and loving, to the extent that there are times when Lucrezia doubts her instinct that he means to murder her. The scene in which he finally sees the marriage portrait and has to pronounce on whether he likes it or hates it was a moment of visceral tension. His presence alone was sufficient to elevate the book to masterpiece level. He was a wonderfully complex character who reminded me of Count Fosco in The Woman in White, or Dracula.

I met a lady on the Thameslink train between Gatwick Airport and London St Pancras who said she'd found this book had too many descriptions. Descriptions can certainly disrupt the flow of a narrative and slow it down but, in this book, as with Hamnet, the atmosphere is built up by the accumulation of acutely observed details which gives massive verisimilitude, perhaps particularly important in historical fiction, and a wonderfully rich and deep texture. And we must remember that the narrator is an artist and sees things with the eye of a painter: "The building ahead of her is astonishing ... A long stretch of red-tiled floor sweeps away from her, with pale repeating arches on either side. Light enters at an oblique angle from invisible lofty windows, high above their heads, warming the apex of the arches, alchemising the white plaster to lozenges of gold. Candles gutter and flare, piercing the dust, each at the centre of their own glowing corona. The lines of the roof, the lines of the aisle lead the eye irrevocably all the way to an altar surrounded by painted saints with golden halos, and windows of many-coloured glass."  (The Duchess Lucrezia on her wedding day)  I loved this aspect of the book.

The plot starts in the present with the most wonderful hook: Lucrezia is convinced that Alfonso means to murder her. It then jumps back to her childhood and the 'present' and'past' narratives are then intertwined. About half-way through the book I thought both narratives were effectively over and wondered how O'Farrell could spin out the remaining moments into the second half; nevertheless she managed this without the pacing seeming lob-sided. The ending was well signalled by earlier foreshadowings (and there was a rather obvious deus ex machina) but the tension (would it be a tragedy or have a happy ending?) was maintained until the last few pages. 

Beautiful prose, an entertaining story and a wonderful villain. I was impressed. 

Spoiler alert

This is a discussion of the end of the book.

I wasn’t surprised by the ending. There was plenty of foreshadowing.

But it left me with an unpleasant feeling. It is clearly intended to be a ‘happy’ ending and the author managed to manipulate me so that I did feel happy for Lucrezia.

But the maid died (unwillingly) in her place. My happiness at Lucrezia’s survival means that I am happy that the maid has died. It is as if I am agreeing that there are people who matter and there are people who don’t matter. It’s amazingly common in stories that pawns are sacrificed for higher value pieces but that doesn’t make it right.

Of course, it also happens in real life. Bodyguards die protecting their principals. One of the rescue divers died in the mission to rescue the young Thai footballers trapped in the Tham Luang caves but most people believe that the rescue was a success because all the young people were saved. 

It could be argued that fiction is designed to reflect real life and if lower status people are worth less than higher status people in reality, this is what should happen in literature. But I believe that great literature should challenge accepted beliefs. This means that The Marriage Portrait is not great literature, rather it is comfort reading.

I wish Maggie O’Farrell had ended the book, not with Lucrezia’s triumph as an artist, but with the family of Emilia, wondering what has happened to her, grieving her, never able to reach closure. Or perhaps with Lucrezia, who has in effect caused the death of the faithful Emilia, making some sort of atonement.

But no. It’s happy ever after. So the author's message is that little people don’t matter.

Selected quotes:

• "Cosimo, like most adults, was working from his own version of events." (Venison baked in wine)
• "He cleared his throat: a two-note sound." (Everything changes)
• "The faces of the Florentines lining the street and blurred by motion, daubs of paint dissolving in water" (The Duchess Lucrezia on her wedding day)
• "She has always had a secret liking for this part of the embroidery, the 'wrong' side, congested with knots, striations of silks and twists of thread." (Honey water)
• "The people who applaud the loudest, Lucrezia notes, are the ones who talked through the performance." (Sisters of Alfonso II, seen from a distance)
• "She then leans over and thrusts the edge of the letter into the sconce burning on the wall of the stairwell. For a second or two, it seems the flame cannot believe its luck, refusing to consume the page. Then it comes to its senses, asserting its grasp, turning the edges of the paper black, shrivelling and devouring them." (Sisters of Alfonso II, seen from a distance)

Shortlisted for the 2022 Waterstones Book of the Year and the 2023 Women's Prize for fiction

August 2023; 432 pages

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

"Cuddy" by Benjamin Myers

Longlisted for the 2024 RSL Ondaatje Prize.

The work of this author is enriched by the most marvellous descriptions and suffused by his extraordinary empathy with ordinary people. This book won the Goldsmiths Prize which is awarded to "fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form".

The book, inspired by St Cuthbert, aka Cuddy, the patron saint of Durham Cathedral, is divided into a prologue, an intermission, and four parts:

• The prologue is mostly written as a poem, purportedly intoned by Cuddy as he dies. 
• Book One, written in prose and poetry interspersed by quotations from books about Lindisfarne and St Cuthbert, tells the story of a young woman, servant and cook to the haliwerfolk (the people of the holy man), a group of monks who are taking St Cuthbert's body from place to place around the north of England, having fled Lindisfarne from the marauding Vikings, seeking a place to bury Cuddy and to build a shrine. She has visions of the cathedral to come. She starts a relationship with another slave/servant, a boy with wide eyes who looks after the horses. 
• Book Two, written in prose, is set in 1346 and written from the point of view of a brewster, married to an archer, who begins an adulterous relationship with a stonemason at Durham Cathedral, which is observed by a predatory homosexual monk.
• The Interlude is set in 1650 and written as a short play about the Scottish soldiers who were imprisoned in Durham Cathedral .
• Book Three is almost a ghost story. Set in 1827, this is the diary of an Oxford professor who is summoned to Durham to witness the exhuming of Cuddy's remains (his body is said to be imperishable; the exhumers want to check). He meets a mysterious young boy, with owl-like eyes, and has visions of the haliwerfolk.
• Book Four, set in 2019, in written from the perspective of a young labourer (with big eyes) whose mother is dying of cancer, was the most moving of all.

Each of the stories had its strengths. To be honest, I found the variety of styles in Book One distracted from my enjoyment of the story; I think I understand what the author is trying to do, working towards the rhythms of early English, perhaps, but it didn't work for me. The playlet in the Interlude left me cold. This probably says more about my inability to enjoy work outside the limits of my narrow prose comfort zone than about the work. Experimental writing should be encouraged, indeed cherished. 

I enjoyed the late mediaeval infidelity, with its ever-present threat of what would happen if the archer found out. The ghost story narrated by the pompous professor was fun. But the final section tore out my heart.

And the descriptions:

• "Where possible, he takes alternate routes ... following frozen streams through narrow woodlands where the trickling flow makes a type of music through the frost-fringed sunken waterways." (Book Four) Frost-fringed sunken waterways: wow!
• "The sky is grey, pregnant, a bulging net of snow, and a gust of freezing wind fills his mouth, as if the air were solid matter. He feels the cold in his teeth, his eardrums, behind his eyes. Cold as a dull weighted ache. He gags on it." (Book Four)

Selected quotes:

• "Death is a surprise party you knew all along was to be thrown in your honour" (Prologue)

• "Even Chad splits his face with a smile, though it looks more like a blade wound." (Book One Part 6)
• "Christmas, looming like a black obelisk against the white winter sun. That dismal day, dedicated to other people's happiness." (Book Four)
• "He turns up the heating, boils the kettle, puts pie and chips in the oven, plumps his mother's pillows, empties her bedpan, checks her meds and does all the other chores that make him feel less guilty for feeling more alive than he has for a long time while she, a real-life living saint, is wading headlong into death's dark water." (Book Four)

Other wonderful books by this hugely talented author:

• The Perfect Golden Circle: my favourite so far, about two misfits who make crop circles
• Pig Iron about a traveller, just out of prison
• Rare Singles about the comeback, in Scarborough, of a forgotten US soul singer

August 2023; 438 pages

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

Here is a link to a BBC Radio 4 In Our Time podcast about St Cuthbert.