"Uncle Vanya" by Anton Chekhov

 I saw 'Vanya', the one-man (Andrew Scott) version of this classic play, produced by the National Theatre, when it was streamed to cinemas on 22nd February 2024. I felt at the time that it was a superb showcase for Andrew Scott but that I needed to read the script and to see a more conventional production to be able to understand why it is regarded as one of the plays that made Chekhov's reputation.

It is typical Chekhov in that it revolves around a group of upper-class people whose lives seem to have no meaning. The estate supports Alexandre Serebriakov, a professor, who has spent most of his life as an absentee landlord, using the income from the estate to pursue his academic career. He came into possession of the estate through his first marriage and technically it belongs to Sonia, his daughter by that first marriage. He has now retired to the estate with his new wife, Yeliena, who is much younger than him. Ivan 'Vanya' Voinitsky is Sonia's uncle; it was his father who originally owned the estate and he gave up his share of the inheritance in order to help Serebriakov; he now runs the estate with the help of Sonia and Ilyia 'Waffles' Teleyghin, an impoverished hanger-on whose family originally owned the estate.

Other characters include Sonia's old nanny Marina and Mikhail Astrov, a local doctor.

Both Vanya and the doctor are in love with Yeliena, who loves her husband. Sonia is hopelessly and unrequitedly in love with the doctor.

It's always difficult judging a play just from the script, especially when you are relying on a translation. But here goes.

It is constructed from four acts, each of a single scene. The first two acts set the scene. The play really comes alive in act three when Vanya discovers the doctor and Yeliena kissing, we discover Alexandre's plans, and a gun is fired. I felt that this came rather late in the play and would have been more appropriate in the middle, especially just before the interval. The final act deals with the aftermath which seems to be that everyone will return to the status quo before the start of the play. 

There were several moments which seemed to be clumsy ways of giving the audience information. For example, in the first few lines the doctor says: "By the way, Nanny, how many years is it we've known each other?" Later in the same act Vanya has a long speech in which he tells the audience about Professor Serebriakov's career. Later the nurse tells Serebriakov about "Vera Petrovna, Soniecheka's mother" which seems ludicrous given that Serebriakov was Vera's husband and is Soniechka's father, facts of which he is well aware. Clearly there is a problem for a playwright in having to impart information to the audience which the characters already know but these moments stood out as maladroit.

I was surprised by what seemed to be the 'green' message of the play. The doctor is a tree-planter and an ecofreak who gives a mini-lecture on the disappearing forests of the locality: "The Russian forests are literally groaning under the axe, millions of trees are being destroyed, the homes of animals and birds are being laid waste, the rivers are getting shallow and drying up, wonderful scenery is disappearing." (Act One) But I suspect that Chekhov, rather than propagandising in favour of sustainability, is in fact using the decline of the forests as a metaphor for what he sees as the pointless worsening of life because the doctor later goes on to say: "You may say that ... the old way of life naturally had to give place to the new ... and I would agree - if on the site of these ruined forests there were now roads and railways, if there were workshops, and factories, and schools. Then the people would have been healthier, better off, and better educated - but there's nothing of the sort here. There are still the same swamps and mosquitoes, the same absence of roads, and the dire poverty, and typhus, and diphtheria, and fires. Here we have a picture of decay due to an insupportable struggle for existence, it is decay caused by inertia, by ignorance, by utter irresponsibility. ... Already practically everything has been destroyed, but nothing has been created to take its place." (Act Three)

The overall message of the play is hopelessness. Not only is there the doctor's ecological despair. There are the lovers. Naturally, no-one is in love with someone who loves them back. The ending of the play brings us back to where we were before it started. Vanya says, in Act Two: "Day and night I feel suffocated by the thought that my life has been irretrievably lost. I have no past - it has all been stupidly wasted on trifles - while the present is awful because it's so meaningless." And, in Act Four, in the final speech of the play, Sonia says: "We shall go on living, Uncle Vanya. We shall live through a long succession of days and tedious evenings. We shall patiently suffer the trials which Fate imposes on us; we shall work for others, now and in our old age, and we shall have no rest. When our time comes we shall die submissively, and over there, beyond the grave, we shall say that we've suffered, that we've wept, that we've had a bitter life, and God will take pity on us." I think she thinks that will be a happy ending!

Selected quotes: 

• "You were young and handsome then, but you've aged now. And you're not as good-looking as you were." (Act One)
• "Ignorance is better ... At least there's some hope." (Act Three)

February 2024; 62 pages

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

"Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann

Winner of the US National Book Award in 2009. My book group voted unanimously that this was a hit.

Based on a true story, as they say. On the morning of 7th August 1974 (the day before President Richard Nixon announced that he would resign because of the Watergate scandal), Philippe Petit performed an illegal tightrope walk on a wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. This novel tells the linked stories of a number of New Yorkers: mother and daughter prostitutes Tilly and Jazzlyn, Corrigan, a monk-in-the-world, bereaved mother Claire, her husband Judge Solomon and her friend Gloria, and Lara, a drug-taking artist. And the walker himself.

The chronology is non-linear and it took me a long time before I understood that all these individual narratives are linked not only by the tightrope walk but also intimately to one another. But this isn't a book in which the plot is centre-stage. This is much more about a slow exploration of the characters and their relationships with one another, and building this up into a portrait of New York in 1974 in all its beauty and its ugliness.

Corrigan is most important character who doesn't narrate; what we learn of him comes mostly from his brother, Cieran. Following the abandonment of the family by his father, Corrigan becomes a very religious boy who loves to hang out with the homeless, drinking with the down-and-outs. He reminded me very much of Sally Trench, author of the memoir Bury Me In My Boots. Having travelled from Dublin to New York, he becomes a friend of prostitutes, allowing them to urinate in the bathroom in his flat. He is a fascinating portrait of a modern-day St Francis. His scarcely-understanding brother says: "I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student - thirty six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten."  (All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here)

Another key character is Claire whose privileged world, living in an art-strewn penthouse apartment overlooking Center Park, is destroyed by the death of her only son in Vietnam. The depth of her sorrow hollowed me out. Colum McCann deserved awards just for this gut-wrenching portrayal of grief: "Death by drowning, death by snakebite, death by mortar, death by bullet wound, death by wooden stake, death by tunnel rat, death by bazooka, death by poison arrow, death by pipe bomb, death by piranha, death by food poisoning, death by Kalashnikov, death by RPG, death by best friend, death by syphilis, death by sorrow, death by hypothermia, death by quicksand, death by tracer, death by thrombosis, death by water torture, death by trip wire, death by pool cue, death by Russian roulette, death by punji trap, death by opiate, death by machete, death by motorbike, death by firing squad, death by gangrene, death by footsore, death by palsy, death by memory loss, death by claymore, death by scorpion, death by crack-up, death by Agent orange, death by rent boy, death by harpoon, death by nightstick, death by immolation, death by crocodile, death by electrocution, death by mercury, death by strangulation,  death by bowie knife, death by mescaline death by mushroom, death by lysergic acid, death by jeep smash, death by grenade trap, death by boredom, death by heartache, death by sniper, death by paper cuts, death by whoreknife, death by poker game, death by numbers, death by bureaucracy, death by carelessness, death by delay, death by avoidance, death by mathematics, death by carbon copy, death by eraser, death by filing error, death by penstroke, death by suppression, death by authority, death by isolation, death by incarceration, death by fratricide, death by suicide, death by genocide, death by Kennedy, death by LBJ, death by Nixon, death by Kissinger, death by Uncle Sam, death by Charlie, death by signature, death by silence, death by natural causes." (1: Miro, Miro, on the Wall) I don't normally enjoy what seems to be a common practice in American writing of offering lists. The book begins: "Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey." I don't think this list of streets adds anything; if its objective is to anchor the narrative in verisimilitude, it doesn't. But the list of deaths ... Wow!

Selected Quotes:

• "A flying chocolate wrapper touched against a fire hydrant. Taxi doors slammed. Bits of trash sparred in the darkest reaches of the alleyways. ... Revolving doors pushed quarters of conversation out into the street." (Those who saw him hushed)
• "She turned at the door and smiled. 'There'll be lawyers in heaven before you see somethin' so good again'." (1: All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here)
• "When you're young, God sweeps you up. He holds you there, The real snag is to stay there and to know how to fall. All those days when you can't hold on any longer. When you tumble. The test is being able to climb up again." (1: All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here) 
• "I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student - thirty six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten."  (1: All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here) Lots of tightrope-walking imagery although, of course, when you perform between the Twin Towers without a safety line you're never going to get up after you fall. The tightrope-walker is described elsewhere as an angel, or perhaps a demon, and Lucifer was the angel who fell to earth. There's also a mention of Dante and Jigsaw, a pimp, is buried in Potter's Field, which is a burial ground for paupers and the unknown, so named because in the Bible a Potter's Field was purchased to be a burial ground with the money that Judas had accepted for betraying Christ.
• "Nothing holy is free." (1: All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here)
• "Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get." "I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student - thirty six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten."  (1: All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here)
• "The overexamined life, Claire, it's not worth living." (1: Miro, Miro, on the Wall) A clever version of the maxim attributed to Socrates: that the unexamined life is not worth living.
• "He calls me his little honeybee sometimes. It started from an argument when he called me a WASP." (1: Miro, Miro, on the Wall)
• "If you stand in the same river for too long, even the banks will trickle past you." (A Fear of Love)
• "A row of smokers stood out in front of Metropolitan Hospital ... Each looked like his last cigarette, ashen and ready to fall."  (1: A Fear of Love)
• "It was the type of hospital that looked like it needed a hospital."  (1: A Fear of Love)
• "BEAUTY IS IN THE WALLET OF THE BEHOLDER" (1: A Fear of Love) 
• "Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable."  (1: A Fear of Love)
• "When I was seventeen, I had a body that Adam woulda dropped Eve for. ... and Jesus himself woulda been in the background saying, Adam, you're one lucky motherfucker." (2: This is the House that Horse Built)
• "I don't know who God is but if I meet Him anytime soon I'm going to get Him in the corner until He tells me the truth. ... And if he says Jazz ain't in heaven, if He says she didn't make it through, He's gonna get Himself an ass-kicking."  (2: This is the House that Horse Built)
• "It was so much like having sex with the wind. It complicated things and blew away and softly separated and slid back around him." (The Ringing Grooves of Change)
• "Every now and then the city shook its soul out." (3: Part of the Parts)
• "New York kept going forward precisely because it didn't give a good goddam about what it had left behind." (3: Part of the Parts)
• "When he was young and headstrong, he'd been sure that one day he'd be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that."  (3: Part of the Parts)
• "The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own." (3: Centavos) 
• "She wasn't a godly woman, mind; she used to say that the heart's future was in a spadeful of dirt." (3: All Hail and Hallelujah)
• "People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time." (3: All Hail and Hallelujah)
• "It was like they had spent their lives breathing each other's breath." (3: All Hail and Hallelujah)
• "Sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear." (4: Roaring Seaward, and I Go)
• "We stumble on, now, we drain the light from the dark, to make it last." (4: Roaring Seaward, and I Go)

A book to treasure for the writing and for the characterisation.

Colum McCann also wrote This Side of Brightness, also about New Yorkers

February 2024; 349 pages

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

"The Council of Justice" by Edgar Wallace

 This is the sequel to Wallace's debut novel, The Four Just Men, starring three of the original quartet (Manfred, Gonsalez and Poiccart) who recruit a fourth whose alias is Courtlander. The FJM are vigilantes dedicated to murdering those who are getting away with criminal activities (a bit like the eponymous hero of the Saint books by Leslie Charteris).  In this novel they are up against the Red Hundred, an anarchist group. Various adventures ensue while Scotland Yard looks on helplessly. Finally, justice having been meted out and a proposed assassination averted, Manfred is captured while meeting his arch-rival and potential love interest The Woman of Gratz. He is tried for murder and convicted. Can he escape the hangman's noose? 

It is a naive thriller relying on expert chemists creating swift-acting poisons and wonderful explosives, me who are masters of disguise, fluent in many languages, rich and well-supplied with information from a huge range of naturally impeccable sources. Modern readers are usually too sophisticated to suspend their disbelief so easily. But it does give wonderful insights into London in the year before the First World Wars, a place well used to terrorist 'outrages' (through bombs being dropped from Zeppelins were a little premature), a country where anarchists held their conferences and everyone had access to a revolver. 

Told in mostly simple language, in short chapters, with a very direct style in which 'tell' is often privileged over 'show', this is very easy to read. With the exception, perhaps, of the Woman of Gratz, the characters are one-dimensional and clearly divided into goodies and baddies, despite the moral ambiguity of making vigilante outlaws the heroes. (But on the other hand, what else is the classic English folk hero Robin Hood?) There is an even-handedness in making both heroes and villains exotic foreigners which was rarely emulated in contemporary and subsequent alternatives, such as Sexton Blake and James Bond where the English goody commonly battles baddies from abroad. The fundamental motivation for continuing to read is not to find out whether the heroes will eventually triumph but to solve the convoluted puzzle of how they will achieve their aims. The focus is therefore on why a huge hole has appeared in the building in which two bodies are found, why a strange house has been constructed in the Spanish countryside, and how Manfred will effect his escape?

Selected Quotes:

• "There are no straight roads, and you cannot judge where lies your destination by the direction the first line of path takes." (Ch 2)
• "His liabilities were of no account because the necessity for discharging them never occurred to him." (Ch 5)
• "Eden in sight - he pleaded for an Eve." (Ch 6)
• "He was as close ... as the inside washer of a vacuum pump." (Ch 7)
• "Possessed of the indifference to public opinion which is equally the equipment of your fool and your truly great man." (Ch 9)
• "The sons of fathers who were the sons of fathers who had some time ruled by might, and left the legacy of their dominion to their haphazard progeny." (Ch 10) Wallace is clearly in thrall to aristocrats and royals and great men, perhaps because of, perhaps in spite of, his own humble and confused beginnings ... but he could see the other side of the argument.
• "If in England you race a horse and it wins your Derby, must the stock of that horse be acclaimed winners of the race from birth?" (Ch 10) It's a good argument against a hereditary monarchy!
• "Spoken like a cheap little magazine detective." (Ch 18)

NB: An electrolier is a chandelier in which the lights are electrical (rather than candles).

One of the classic progenitors of thriller fiction. 

February 2024; 310 pages

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

"The Satyricon" by Petronius (?)

 The Satyricon is composed of fragments from a much longer Latin work which most scholars think was written by Petronius. It is written in both prose and poetry and seems to be based on the Odyssey, being a comic picaresque following the adventures of a runaway slave called Encolpius (the narrator), his boyfriend young Giton, and his friend (and rival for Giton's affections) Asclytus

Much of the work is lost. The first (incomplete) remaining section seems to be an account of the punishment of Encolpius and Asclytus for having (inadevertently?) seen the secret female rites of Priapus: they are tied up and buggered by a male prostitute. 

The second, and most famous, section involves a dinner hosted by a freed ex-slave turned millionaire called Trimalchio (which includes a story about a man turning into a werewolf). Trimalchio has been seen as the model for Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. This section also influenced Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray. 

They then fall in with a windbag of a poet called Eumolpus and board a boat which they then discover is owned by the slave-owners they are running from; shipwreck is the deus ex machina which gets them out of a very tight situation. 

They then travel to a place called Croton.

It is difficult to judge the literary merit of a work that only exists in fragments. I suspect that much of its fame rests on the fact that the narrator is joyfully gay.

Selected quotes:

• "An adolescent taste is quite worthless." (Puteoli 4)
• "I personally went colder than a winter in Gaul." (Puteoli 19)
• "He pulled the cheeks of our bottoms apart and banged us" (Puteoli 21)
• "So the starry sky turns round like a millstone, always bringing some trouble, and men being born or dying." (Dinner with Trimalchio 39)
• "It's night 'fore y'can turn around. So the best thing's get out of bed and go straight to dinner."  (Dinner with Trimalchio 41)
• "A hot drink's as good as an overcoat."  (Dinner with Trimalchio 41)
• "If you were somewhere else, you'd be talking about the pigs walking round ready-roasted back here."  (Dinner with Trimalchio 45) A version of 'the grass is always greener'

February 2024; 123 pages

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

"Tennis Lessons" by Susannah Dickey

 

A book narrated in the second person which is an incredibly unusual thing to do.

It is, I suppose, a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age novel. 'Your' story starts at three years old and progresses to twenty-eight. 'Yours' is a very ordinary life in a normal house in a normal town, you go to a normal school. You're a bit of an ugly duckling but you are clever and quick-witted. Unfortunately, perhaps because you are bullied for being 'weird', this doesn't translate to academic success at school. The first part of the novel takes you to the threshold of your school-leaving exams in a series of snapshots taken through the years. The second part of the book recounts some traumatic events at the time of the exams and their consequences. The third part returns to the snapshot format and considers the fall-out.

It was well-written and viscerally rooted in ugly everyday reality. No murders, no superheroes, no death-defying struggles, no grand adventures. Just ordinary life. But there was drama, there was tension, there were challenges to be overcome, there were little triumphs, there were larger disasters, there was even, of a sort, love. This makes it as weird but as honest and as truthful as its protagonist, who says: "You wish your class could read books about something other than war and the children of war; you want to read about normal people trying to do normal things." (Part One: 13 years old - May) The wish has here been granted.

Selected quotes:

• "Your stomach yodels with hunger." (Part One: 11 years old - February 11th)
• "You wonder if she likes her life, or if she, like you, is dependent on the idea that things will improve." (Part One: 17 years old - December)
• "The thought of going makes you anxious. The thought of not going makes you anxious." (Part Two: 17 years old - May 16th today)
• "You imagine it's much easier to endure unhappiness if you have a child who is beautiful and clever and loved. What have you been worth?" (Part Two: 17 years old - May 16th today)
• "When you get closer you realize it's a dead kitten. Its legs are curled up into its torso and its head is pressed to its chest. It looks like an asterisk and a closed parenthesis; a bass clef; the curved end of a hockey stick." (Part Two: 17 years old - May 16th today)
• "It's a bit like talking to someone who's wearing a space helmet, like everything you say to her is muffled and there's a time delay in her response." (Part Three: 22 years old - March)
• "A Sunday carvery approach to religion" (Part Three: 24 years old - December) It means an approach to religion that just selects which bits the believer wants to follow eg abortion bad, adultery yes please.
• "Sprinkle the salt of your dreams on the slugs of your enemies." (Part Three: 27 years old - November)
• "Perhaps living contentedly is just finding pursuits that distract you from thoughts of oblivion. It occurs to you that everyone else probably figured this out long ago." (Part Three: 28 years old - August)

A book full of the troubles of growing up. Well worth a read.

February 2024; 240 pages

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

"No Dumping Allowed" by L M Ford

"Amanda Danvers stared at the arm sticking out from behind the dumpster" is a great first line which hooked my attention straight away. We are instantly launched into a murder mystery set in a small town in the USA. Amanda, the new owner of a car-wash business where the body has been dumped, investigates whodunnit. Needless to say, she succeeds where the cops fail, unravelling the mystery despite a number of red herrings. 

It is targeted at 12 - 18 years and there are many aspects of this novel which make it suitable, particularly for readers at the younger end of the age range:

• It is very easy to read. The author has a direct style which focuses on the plot, stripping away unnecessary sentences. I would have liked a  little more description to help me better visualise what was going on and I suspect some of the older teenagers would have enjoyed more gore but the author is probably wise to avoid too much detail.
• It is almost inevitable for a murder mystery to have a large cast of characters: suspects, witnesses and the detective and her friends and helpers. Given that the book was deliberately designed to be short, some of these characters were necessarily underused. I would have loved to have more of the golf-playing coroner, for instance. But each of the main characters was distinctive and I never confused them. I suspect that this book is the first of a series; I hope we meet some of the characters again.
• The heroine is clearly an adult and I wondered how easy it would be for some of the younger readers to identify with her. There is a romantic element to the plot but it doesn't progress beyond kissing. Again, older readers might see this as too tame but it seemed appropriate to me.
• There are a couple of scary situations. I would have liked more of a sense of threat but there is a delicate balance to be struck between increasing the tension and scaring the younger readers.
• There were dead ends and in a longer novel there might have been the scope for progressing further down these. Similarly, the size of the book seems to have precluded the classic 'extra twist'.

I found the simplicity of the narration refreshing.

I think my favourite moment came in chapter one when Amanda is pondering how to write a commiserative social media post about the death; among other great lines she rejects are: 

• You can’t wash away bad karma, even at a carwash. 
• Real estate developer ends up with only ten inches of land behind a dumpster. 
• Carwash owner issues reminder: dumping is illegal and so is murder.

My next favourite quote was:

• "Maybe she was just spinning her wheels, but they were her wheels and [she] had a right to spin them if she wanted." (Ch 8)

An unpretentious and straightforward murder mystery.

February 2024

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

"Boulder" by Eva Baltasar

 Astonishing prose.

A cook on a cargo ship in South America falls in love with a Scandinavian; they begin a lesbian relationship, move to Iceland, settle down in a house and have a daughter. But can a free spirit be tied down in domesticity?

Astonishing prose. Or is it poetry? This author (and translator, Julia Sanches) makes magic out of words. Don't read this for the plot though it is strong but simple. Do not read this for the characters though both the major characters, the unnamed narrator-protagonist and her partner-antagonist are true to life, springing from the page in all their complicated three-dimensionality. Don't read it for the insights that it offers into life, though these are well-observed and original. Read it for the wonder of the words.

Selected quotes (to show you what I mean): 

• "A night years ago. Sometime after ten. No sky, no vegetation, no ocean. Only the wind, the hand that grabs at everything." (Ch 1)
• "The cold feels peculiar. It's possible I've drunk some of it myself, since I can feel it thrashing and bucking under my skin, and also deeper inside, in the arches between each organ." (Ch 1)
• "Stained teeth bared in greeting." (Ch 1)
• "Water, earth, lungs. The perfect conditions for silence." (Ch 1)
• "Food comes to us wrapped in skin, and to prepare it you need a knife." (Ch 1)
• "The islanders rise. They look like enormous turtles hatched from a large egg. They plod through the rain, and as the pass me I feel like an insignificant foreigner, disease-white and sopping wet under my dark blue rain jacket. You'd need two of me to make one body as tough as theirs." (Ch 1)
• "I don't fuck her, I whet myself on her. I drink her like I'd been raised wandering the desert. I swallow her as if she were a sword, little by little and with enormous care. The hours layer over one another, blanketing us." (Ch 1)
• "These new, single-family homes have ravenous souls that feed off your own little human soul - sucking dry your freedom, your independence, and all trace of your passion." (Ch 2)
• "The house gathers itself up and looms over you. It unhinges its jaw like those terrifying snakes that bleed the milk from sleeping mothers then curl up like necklaces against their skin." (Ch 2) A foreshadowing of motherhood?
• "I'm not into kids. I find them annoying. They're unpredictable variables that come crashing into my coastal shelf with the gale force of their natural madness. They're craggy, out of control, scattered." (Ch 2)
• "The truth is we'd never made any plans, we'd just taken huge bites out of life." (Ch 2)
• "The sofa is a place for sitting and talking, a sensible piece of furniture designed to promote verticality and position the head as the sovereign supreme of all the subordinate organs, including the heart." (Ch 2)
• "The hormones are doing their job, they season and marinate her body, manipulating it to cater to the baby's taste and satisfaction." (Ch 2)
• "Time has set its sights on us and slowly worn us down, sharpening its teeth on our bodies." (Ch 2)
• "If you could only set fire to every word that evokes an illness." (Ch 3)
• "I'm sick of the extrasensory powers that biology confers upon its devotees." (Ch 4)
• "Personality is a dress made of scraps that I never stop washing or mending; it clothes me, might even suit me, but it will never, ever define me. The nakedness I conceal is what makes me a person." (Ch 5)

Boulder won an English Pen Translates award in  2021. It was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023. 

February 2024; 105 pages

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

"Offshore" by Penelope Fitzgerald

Winner of the Booker Prize in 1979.

An exploration of the liminal lives of a group of houseboat owners on Battersea Reach in the tidal Thames in the early 1960s, as Swinging London gets underway. Richard, retired from the Royal Navy, lives with his wife (who longs for a normal house) on a converted minesweeper. Maurice lives on his own on a dutch barge and most nights he brings home a customers from the local pub; his boat is also used by Harry to store stolen goods. Willis, a 65 year-old artist, is trying to sell his leaky boat before it sinks. Nenna's boat is home to herself and her two daughters, 12 and 6; her hopeless husband can't bear living abroad and has left her to cope alone. Woodie and Mrs Woodie are an elderly couple who support the others through the various crises.

The constant reference to leaks, to the need for continual maintenance, and the rats, certainly put paid to any romantic notions I might have had about living on a boat.

The book refers several times to "the short uneasy period between land and water" (Ch 7) and the characters do seem to be living in a kind of limbo. The epigraph is taken from Dante and there is a reference to the river that souls must cross to enter the classical underworld: "Rat-ridden and neglected, it was a wharf still. The river's edge, where Virgil's ghosts held out their arms in longing for the farther shore, and Dante, as a living man, was refused passage by the ferryman ... there, surely, is a place to stop and reflect." (Ch 1) There are a lot of endings, from the three drowned sailors seen by little Tilda, to a sinking ship, to the death of a marriage, to an attempted murder. All the characters seem to be betwixt and between, living lives of transience, and those who live on land in proper houses, such as the priest, disapprove. I suspect that the author is saying that life itself is impermanent and that places that remind us of this are indeed places to "stop and reflect". 

This feeling of liminality is reflected in the chronology. The book seems to be set in late 1961 (the spring of 1962 is said to be in 6 months time and Nenna married in 1949 and her eldest child in 12) but Heinrich wants to see "Swinging London" which is generally agreed to have started in 1964. This anachronism seems appropriate when you live on the threshold. And Nenna is asked (in an imaginary court trial), "'Look here, is it Wednesday or Thursday?' 'I don't know, Ed, whichever you like'." (Ch 3). Time is unimportant in a liminal space. Again, in chapter 5, the author describes the old mother of Willis as "perdurable" which means imperishable but later in the sentence we discover that the woman has died of cancer; this seems to be a deliberate oxymoron.

It is, however, paced just like a classic novel: the key turning point comes almost exactly in the centre of the book.

 Have I ever mentioned how much I hate it when authors write in a foreign language? This novel's epigraph (that's the quotation at the start to you and me) is "che mena il vento, e che batte la pioggia/ e che s'incontran con si aspre lingue" which are two lines of mediaeval Tuscan taken from Dante's Inferno (canto 11) which mean "those whom the wind drives, and those whom the rain batters, and those who encounter one another with such bitter words." 

Selected Quotes:

• "Duty is what no-one else will do at the moment." (Ch 1)
• "It's not the kind who inherit the earth, it's the poor, the humble, and the meek. ... the kind ... get kicked in the teeth." (Ch 6)
• "It was like one of those terrible sights of the racecourse or the battle field where wallowing living beings persevere dumbly in their duty although mutilated beyond repair." (Ch 7)
• "It's my last chance. While I've still got it I can take it out and look at it and know I still have it. If that goes, I've nothing left to try." (Ch 7)
• "I can't for the life of me see why, if you really feel something, it's got to be talked about." (Ch 8)
• "He disliked comparisons, because they made you think about more than one thing at a time." (Ch 8)
• "All distances are the same to those who don't meet." (Ch 10)
• "The James family seemed to have few possessions. Mrs Woodie felt half inclined to lend her some, so as to have more to sort out and put away." (Ch 10)

The plot might be minimal but this is a book of beautifully drawn characters in a very special world.

February 2024; 181 pages

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

"The Wren, The Wren" by Anne Enright

The Shelbourne hotel Dublin is mentioned in the novel

 The story consists of periods, shuffled chronologically, in the lives of three members of an Irish family. Each has their chance to narrate. Phil, the grandfather was a poet; he remembers his boyhood in the country. Carmel, one of his daughters, ran, or perhaps runs, a language school and brought up her daughter, Nell, as a single parent. Nell is a freelance writer, working for influencers and producing work to market, for example, travel destinations. No-one seems to need to work very hard in order to earn a decent living and, in Nell's case, travel the world but we're not focusing on their economic activity. Rather, the book targets their sex lives.

Phil believes that all poetry is about unrequited love, and that all love is unrequited. He deserts his wife and daughters to travel and marry an American; he probably had multiple affairs as well. Carmel has divorced sex and relationships; the only real loves in her life are her Dadda and her daughter and she abandons a potential partner when it becomes clear that he might expect her to look after him. Nell is trapped in a physically abusive relationship with a man who is clearly seeing other women but whom she is in love with. 

Men certainly don't come out of this well. Most of them are portrayed as violent. The nice ones are needy but they all (except the gay one) expect to be looked after and serviced. And yet Phil the poet seems irresistible to women, Nell can't leave the man who hits her because she loves him. So why can't the women treat the men as potential sperm donors and live without them? Perhaps because, as Mal, the gay friend in Utrecht, tells Nell: "The thing women don't understand is that love and sex are opposite things ... Love requires ... two acts of submission, and sex ... really doesn't." (p 201)

But the joy in this book doesn't lie in its characters, strong though they are, nor in its fragmented and meandering plot, nor in its exploration of the issue of domestic violence, but in its words. The narratives are separated by Phil's poetry, and I don't really understand poetry, but scattered throughout are phrases and sentences of pure gold. Some are descriptive, some are nuggets of wisdom, 

Selected quotes: page references are from the 2023 Jonathan Cape hardback edition

Funny moments:

• "I was making my way out in the big bad world, and for some reason this involved a lot of staying in." (p 10)
• "The Hoover sat gathering its own dust at the top of the stairs." (p 60) 

Perfectly captured descriptions:

• "I stayed over, waking in the morning to the sight of him asleep, his lips easy and full, the air slipping into his body and slipping out again." (p 17)
• "I feel the room carve in two in front of my jostled eyes and space remake itself. That is what the gristle of his soul-splitting prick can do to me. And when he has pulled me apart, I remain whole." (p 53) Oh my goodness. Jostled eyes! Gristle!
• "It was starting to rain again, but there was a brightness in the air. The river ran full and fast, and all the colours were stronger for being wet." (p 157) Wow! So true. Colours are 'stronger' when they are wet.
• "I stared until the air in front of me became particulate." (p 181)  Yes! It is as if the world pixellating in front of your eyes.

Words of wisdom:

• "We don't walk down the same street as the person walking beside us." (p 4) Which is why we need novels.
• "I never tell my mother anything. I am not that stupid." (p 23)
• "Most of the time, I think, people aren't listening to each other, they are just waiting their turn to speak." (p 18)
• "Without beauty there can be no fear." (p 206)

More magical moments:

• "A year out of college, I was poking my snout and whiskers into the fresh adult air and I knew how to be ... My body was not on mute. I knew how to enjoy sex, eat, get drunk and recover, touch myself, touch someone else. I knew how to dance, get a little out of it and have big deep stupid discussions" (p 6) Even at my age, I can remember student days and weren't they just like this!
• "A nightjar, by the way, can ventriloquise. Its song sounds as though it is coming from the other tree. This must be confusing when mating with a nightjar - you'd have to land on a lot of other trees first." (p 9) An original way of saying that you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince, so relevant to Nell in this part of her life.
• "My mother is strongly of the opinion that, if you don't think about yourself then you won't have any problems. For Carmel, having a pain means you are self-obsessed." (p 11)
• "In those days, men were not expected to be around: the difference between married and deserted could be the seven hours your husband spent asleep in bed." (p 68)
• "The same mixture of cooing and shrieking around the cot that happened around the wedding ... It was the sound women make, she thought, when they are offering their lives up for slow destruction." (p 102)
• "Birth was not the end of pregnancy, she thought, it was just pregnancy externalised." (p 110)
• "There were scones on the bottom tier, tiny sandwiches in the middle, fancy pastries at the top - all of which remained untouched. It was a little competition. A cake off." (p 160)
• "I can't stop the giggles. They well up, burst out of my face in a slow-motion, peristaltic wave. I am a broken-hearted woman, trapped in a body that finds everything hilarious. It feels a bit like vomiting." (p 201)
• "The fear I have is the fear of angels. It is not terror, but awe." (p 206)
• "The first words out of every angels mouth are, Do not be afraid." (p 207)
• "Nell's thumbs flying on her screen - as though late capitalism ... could be defeated by hashtags and eating kimchi." (p 216)
• "For Imelda, information was like money. She didn't want you to have it, in case you spent it in the wrong shop." (p 227)
• "This guy's sense of humour is so bone dry, his jokes are identical to not funny at all." (p 246)

It's not so much a novel as a beautiful piece of jewellery, its scintillations catching your eye as you look at if under different slants of light.

February 2024; 273 pages

The author won the Booker Prize in 2007. 

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