"The Jew's Beech" by Droste Hulshoff

 First published in German in 1842, this novella includes lots of Gothic elements such as poretending thunderstorms and corpses discovered in forests ... and two men who look very much alike. Friedrich Mergel is the clever peasant son of a mother who was physically abused by her husband; he has a short temper and ideas 'above his station in life'. He is best friends with his lookalike Johannes Niemand, a rather dim peasant whose name means Johnny Nobody. 

It's basically a prototype murder mystery. At the core of the story are Friedrich's Uncle Simon, a dodgy dealer for whom Friedrich works, and a team of crooks who are illegally cutting down trees, repeatedly pursued by foresters. One of these foresters is found dead after having had an argument with Friedrich; the lad is suspected but there is no proof one way or another. Four years later, Aaron the Jew, to whom Friedrich owes money, is found dead. Friedrich runs off - with Johannes - and disappears and is consequently again suspected of the crime but later exonerated after another man who later commits suicide confesses to killing a Jew named Aaron. Then, twenty-eight years later ...

The biggest difference from today's whodunnit tropes is this statement just over half-way through the book: "For the sake of those readers who are perhaps eager to learn the outcome of this affair, I must mention that it was never cleared up." (p 59) It seems that Anthony Trollope (as I have observed in reviews of his books The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux, and Barchester Towers) was not the only author who enjoyed the self-spoiler. In this case, Hulshoff excuses herself: "It would be unfair to leave the reader's curiosity unsatisfied in a tale of fiction, but all this really happened - I cannot subtract or add anything." (pp 59 - 60)

The story has the folklore quality of a Grimms' fairy tale and the rustic setting of a pre-industrial Germany in which the countryfolk are utterly unromantic and mostly, it seems, petty thieves. There was a whiff of Silas Marner in the relationship between the party-loving peasants and the paternalistic squire. It was a delightful glimpse into a vanished world.

Selected quotes: 

(page numbers refer to the paperback edition translated by Lionel and Doris Thomas and published by Alma Classics in 2024)

• "A house which, boasting a chimney and window panes rather larger than usual, testified to the pretensions of its builder, while its dilapidated state indicated the miserable circumstances of the present owner." (p 15)
• "an eerie fellow in whom pompous reserve often alternated with a candour just as affected." (p 25)
• "When children are small, they trample on our laps - when they are big, on our hearts!" (p 54)
• "As soon as anybody had a few shillings to spare, he wanted to have a wife as well who would help him eat well today and starve tomorrow." (p 64)
• "As she let everything given to her go to rack and ruin, the village people had soon tired of helping her, for it is natural to man to abandon those who are actually the most helpless." (p 87)
• "The fields were bare, the leaves began to fall, and many a consumptive felt the shears of fate at his life thread." (p 94)

April 2024; 99 pages

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

"The Fragile Land" by Simon Mundy

 This is a retelling of the story of 'King' Arthur. It draws on both the legends and the 'historical' sources: thus it includes the story of the sword in the stone, Arthur is not a 'King' but Overlord - Dux Bellorum, meaning Warlord in the sources - and the story culminates in the Battle of Mons Badonicus. It is set in the context of a Britain that has reverted to fragmented Celtic Kingdoms after the Romans have left and is being assailed by raiders and invaders: Hibernians from Ireland and Anglo-Saxons ('Barbarians') from across the North Sea.

It is divided into three books. Book One starts with a long scene-setting description like a Victorian novel and then seemed to morph into a retelling of The Sword in the Stone by T H White, as Geraint, a teenage princeling living in a tiny kingdom on the English-Welsh border is told by Myrddin (Merlin) that he is really Arthur and trained to become Overlord of Britannia. There was a clear 'Hero's Journey' moment when Geraint rejects the call but his rebellion seems to fizzle out before the next day dawns. Book Two, set sixteen years later, starts with a battle and then follows the twists and turns of Arthur's diplomatic attempts to create an effective unity amongst the discordant Britannian Kings, culminating in a conference around a Round Table. Book Three, set later that year, sees the climactic battle of Badon and sets off for the sequel as Medraut (Mordred) is introduced and Arthur plans to marry Gwynafir (Guinevere).

It's the sort of historical novel that uses huge amounts of detail to create verisimilitude. We know the details of Arthur's meals, his sleeping arrangements, the ebb and flow of the battles, and all the complexities of the negotiations with the Kings. Arthur crisscrosses the land and we learn of every town he passes through - each one referred to by its Roman name. There are over twenty kingdoms referred to by their Celtic tribal names. He meets a large number of characters (there were at least a dozen kings at the big conference). Despite repeatedly referring to a cast list and a list of all the towns and their modern equivalents and a map of all the Kingdoms, I was overwhelmed. How was I supposed to keep track and distinguish between Caldoros King of Dumnonia and Candidianos King of Dobunnia, or Cunorix King of Catuvellaunia and Cunegnus King of Cornovia? All this plethora of detail made it sound like an authentic history but it was exhausting.

The real danger with having a cast of thousands is being unable to create characters of sufficient depth and complexity. Most of the Kings were ciphers, either goodies (eg Candidianos) or baddies (eg Cunorix and Vortebelos). But the principals were nicely drawn. Arthur was an interesting Jekyll and Hyde character: one moment cultured, thoughtful and kind, the next a decisive and ruthless warrior. The rivalry between Gwenan his lover who wanted to be his queen and Modlen his tongueless scribe who wanted to be his mistress was nicely played. Myrrdin was, as usual, played for laughs: "the old advisor relished the company of a good-looking young woman who was intelligent enough to understand what he was talking about but couldn't interrupt him." (Ch 24)

There were some clever resonances drawn between Arthur's Britain and our own. The country is depicted as having been cut off from the continent by the withdrawal of the Romans (echoes of Brexit) and by the conservatism of some of the Kings who seek to return to the pre-Roman past. Like Arthur we live in a post-imperial past, forever confronted by reminders of ancient glories: "I just feel despair at living in such an inadequate generation." (Ch 5)  The hostility to the Hibernians and Anglo-Saxons had parallels with that directed to modern immigrants. The decay of their cities (in part caused by plague) seems to mirror those of our own, post-austerity post-Covid times: "these ancient ruins, so depressing in their dereliction - not because of how destroyed they were, but because of what they said about how the country had changed for the worse." (Ch 10)  There's even a nod to climate change: the Barbarians are, in part, being forced to leave their coastline "as water levels rose" (Ch 11)

These subtle connections enriched the narrative of this extraordinarily detailed historical novel.

April 2024; 398 pages

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

"The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again" by M John Harrison

What brilliant writing. Winner of the Goldsmith's Prize for 'fiction at its most novel' in 2020.

This was a fascinating book. Although it has been characterised as fantasy, because the author has written works of fantasy and scifi before, it is embedded so deeply in gritty reality that I think its genre is more magical realism. 

There is an element of fantasy in it. There are repeated references to water and both the major characters have experiences of strange green creatures associated with the water. This is flagged up in some folklore and urban myths, such as the tale of a seventy-year-old man who believed there were things alive in his toilet bowl: "Everywhere Patrick Reed passed water, green children grew." (Ch 5) with the suggestion that these creatures, like aphids, can photosynthesise.

The watery theme runs through the book. Every chapter has some reference to water, or fish, or something aqueous. Many of the characters have names that link to something aquatic, such as Pearl, or Reed, or Shaw {Shore}. The townsfolk where Victoria lives seem to be fascinated by The Water Babies. Shaw lives in Wharf Terrace and works on a barge. Victoria's favourite cafe turns into an aquarium shop. 

It shares a feeling that the characters a deeply embedded in their locations, much like the novels of John Burnside (for example Glister and The Devil's Footprints). In chapter three, Shaw, one of the two protagonists, tells Victoria, the other one, that he is "making his way dérive by dérive up the Brent river." I had to look up the meaning of 'dérive'. It is a French word, translated as drift, and refers to an unplanned journey through an urban landscape; it was coined in 1956 by an avant garde intellectual and can be used to analyse the 'psychogeography' of a situation. This, I think, is a clue to the book. The characters more or less meander through their urban environments, Shaw in riverside London, Victoria is a Midlands town on the Severn. Neither of them have definite directions, both are drifting. There is some sort of plot underlying it all, I think, but there seemed to me to be a number of loose ends and neither protagonist nor myself really understood what was going on. Nevertheless, I found it compelling reading.

In the sense that the characters wander through a landscape, it is very like Ulysses by James Joyce, or Hunger by Knut Hamsun, or Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and it made me wonder whether all stream-of-consciousness books are essentially dérives. But this novel is not stream of consciousness. It is told in the third person and it feels more like Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, another dérive with elements of fantasy, which in turn has been compared with Kafka.

The style of the prose, and this is definitely one of those books you read for the prose, reminded by of the work of Tony Hanania such as Homesick and Eros Island. It seems characterised by original descriptions and closely observed behaviours. One of the hallmarks is the non-sequitur: "The wind rose a little, bringing smells of fried food and the faint sounds of jackdaws keeping watch from the ruins of Geoffrey de Lacy's keep. To get some idea of its own strength, perhaps, it rustled about in the dry-cleaner's bag on Pearl's arm. She looked down absently and then away again." (Ch 7). That final sentence is unmoored from what went before and what comes after. In chapter 12, Shaw critiques the logic of Tim's beliefs and book: "None of it made any sense to Shaw. When he said so, Time nodded wisely, as if a careful academic point had been made. 'What haunts me is exactly that! In the end, is logic in any sense the right method to be applying here?' ... Stories reproduced from every type of science periodical appeared cheek-by-jowl with listicle and urban myth. These essentially unrelated objects were connected by grammatically correct means to produce apparently causal relationships. Perfectly sound pivots, such as 'however' or 'while it remains true that' connected propositions empty of any actual meaning, as if the writer had learned to mimic sentence structure without having any idea how to link it to its own content." (Ch 12) I felt that the author was being, to some extent, self-referential, mirroring this sort of prose to give his narrative an eerie sense of unreality whilst using descriptions to boost verisimilitude, creating a sense of contradiction.

Much of the dialogue has the feel of snippets of overheard conversation, squashed together. Of Victoria's emails, it is said: "They were less like emails than the sound of a cheerful but indistinct radio programme coming from an open window a little way down the street." (Ch 12) The dialogue is like that, less for communication than to flesh out the ambience of a situation. 

I loved it!

Selected quotes:

• "The tea had a metallic taste, as if it was dissolving a spoon." (Ch 2)
• "The woods were soft. Sluggish brooks dissected them at random. Beneath sphagnum and hart's tongue and crusts of dead leaves over black mud lay the contorted and paradoxical strata from which, for almost a thousand years, the local profits had been gouged." (Ch 7) This is a book founded on 'contorted and paradoxical strata'. 
• "Early afternoon had fixed the old man and his daughter like figures in a symbolic painting, the one hunched eternally over his meal, the debris of which had spread to the table around the plate; the other behind the counter, with her damp cloth, her still life of cupcakes under glass and her long-distance stare." (Ch 7)
• "His eyes were the oldest, most used-up part of him." (Ch 7)
• "The scaffolding had already come down, across a morning, pole after pole ringing on the bed of the waiting lorry like the parts of an experimental xylophone." (Ch 7)
• "They bustled out of their cars, slammed the doors, greeted each other in unison an octave apart: 'Orright?' The subsequent exchange often took place under the auspices of saying goodbye. Over before it began, it nevertheless seemed difficult to complete. No one was anxious to let anyone go." (Ch 8)
• "He was staring into the display window of an estate agent, one of the crocodile of a dozen or so that slithered its way up the high street from the river." (Ch 13). Why is it that estate agents always hunt in packs?
• "In repose their faces had the raw look of people who have become, too early in life, estate agents or wellness coordinators." (Ch 14)
• "It had started to rain. The quenched air outside the window smelled autumnal - rubbish bins, diesel particulates, something unidentifiable from the river." (Ch 15)
• "The air was dark and rain-stained." (Ch 16)
• "People assume they have a swim bladder ... some basic assumption - less about themselves than about their world - that keeps them, upright and afloat." (Ch 16)

Mesmerisingly well-written. April 2024; 254 pages

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

 

"Grey Bees" by Andrey Kurkov

Sergeyich lives with his six bee hives in a small village in the no-man's-land between the Ukrainian army and the Russian-backed separatists of the Donblas region. Only one other person lives in the village: Pashka, his friend whom Sergeyich has disliked since school. There is no electric power, so the TV doesn't work and Sergeyich can't even charge his mobile. During the long cold days of winter, the boredom is broken only by the sound of artillery overhead, Sergeyich's scheme to rename the villages two roads, the arrival of the post during a truce and the occasional visitor. There is a dead man in the field behind the house and a sniper somewhere in the village. 

The first half of the book describes how Sergeyich endures. It reminded me of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In the second half, Sergeyich spends summer in his beaten-up old Lada, seeking an orchard where his bees can find pollen and make honey while he lives with them in tent, occasionally making forays to town. His first stop, an idyll with a lady shopkeeper, comes to an end when the hostility and suspicion he faces boils over into violence. Sop he travels to Russian-held Crimea where he meets a family of Tartars. 

In the blurb, the Telegraph reviewer describes the author as a "post-Soviet Kafka". I looked up 'Kafkaesque' in as thesaurus and discovered synonyms such as nightmarish, surreal, phantasmagoric and illusory, all words which I would associate with Ishiguro's The Unconsoled but not this novel. There are similarities with Kafka. When Sergeyich confronts the state, usually in the form of law enforcement or the military, he is baffled by it but often it treats him well, letting him pass through borders with ease; in my experience it can be more difficult gaining access to the USA. Another similarity to Kafka's prose (and Solzhenitsyn's) is the deadpan delivery. Sergeyich does this and thinks that: there is no melodrama here, even though he confronts life or death situations.  But I wouldn't call this book Kafkaesque.

It reminded me more of a picaresque in which the lovable rogue is replaced as protagonist by a lovable innocent. In some ways Sergeyich is the holy fool found in Russian literature such as Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. His adventures reminded me of Candide in Voltaire's Candide or the hero of The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek (although I read that a long time ago and it is rather hazy in my memory). 

But he wasn't particularly innocent. He tells Petro, the Ukrainian soldier, where the sniper's hideout is and shortly afterwards the sniper is blown to bits by a land mine placed under his lair. Clearly Sergeyich is responsible for this death. You can forgive this. The man was a sniper; he probably killed the man Sergeyich sees lying dead at the start of the book. But you can't describe Sergeyich as innocent.

The foreword, which refers to the Russo-Ukrainian war, suggests that the author intends this book to convey a message, although what that message is rather bewilders me. Is it that a holy fool, clumsy in the way he interacts with other people (though invariably getting away with it) can, by his meddling, cause harm? Or is it simply to show how an ordinary man, bumbling through live without ever taking sides, can survive when the rest of the world is riven by conflict?

Why is everyone so nice to Sergeyich, starting with Petro but continuing with ex-wife Vitalina, occasional girlfriend Galya and beekeeper Bekir? Almost everyone, including border guards, help and support Sergeyich; some journalists even hold a whip-round to pay for the damage to his car. There are a couple of villains, but even they aren't very effective.

The characters are fascinatingly under-drawn. Precisely what is Pashka's relationship with the separatists; is it sinister or is it no different to Sergeyich's relationship with the Ukranian soldier Petro who, for some reason I didn't understand, repeatedly risks his life to service Sergeyich's smallest whims? Perhaps the fuzzy drawing of the other characters reflects Sergeyich's own lack of interest in other people. He's only really interested in his bees.

This is the second 'beekeeper' book I have read recently, the first being The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri in which the hero is a refugee from the Syrian civil conflict. Perhaps there is a cultural meme which uses beekeeping as a shorthand for 'innocent fleeing war'. Although the hero of TBoA isn't an innocent either; he also causes a bad man to be killed.

Selected quotes:

• "You live somewhere long enough, and you'll have more family in the ground there than above it." (Ch 4)
• "He listened to himself coughing as if were outside his body, as if he had been split in two: the patient-self and the healer-self." (Ch 10)
• "The sun appeared to be weakening, as if its voltage had dropped." (Ch 16)
• "Sergeyich missed work ... Not the kind you have to travel to in packed minibuses, but the kind your hands itch to get done. Labour like that can distract you from idle sadness, and can even bring you joy, if it has an immediate goal - like the removal of snow, for example." (Ch 21)
• "Smoking kills - vodka thrills." (Ch 24)
• "He wouldn't always show up drunk, of course; sometimes he wouldn't show up at all." (Ch 25)
• "It's better to talk when you're with a person - when their voice isn't torn loose from their body, when you can see them." (Ch 38)
• "He found himself in a fairy tale, where nature not only serves people but dotes upon them." (Ch 46)

April 2024; 349 pages

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

"The New Silk Roads" by Peter Frankopan

 A sort of economic history of the future world, this book considers the shift in global economic power from the Atlantic to the Pacific, in particular considering the economic rise of China whose GDP on a “purchasing power parity” basis has risen from 39% of the US in 2001 to 114% in 2016. This phenomenal growth has been achieved by investing in infrastructure, particularly energy and transport. And this is a story seen in other nations too, for example in India. But not in the West. Frankopan states that according to the OECD “not one of the ten fastest-growing economies of 2017 is located in the western hemisphere, nor has one been for the last decade.” (The Roads to the East)

Now China is seeking to export its economics to the world. To safeguard its growing demand for food, it is purchasing food producers in other Asian countries and in Africa and Australia. And it is investing over a trillion US dollars, again principally in transportation and energy production, in over 80 countries in central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Turkey, Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Their shipping initiatives alone could reduce shipment times by an average of 12% and trading costs by 10%. 

There are downsides and not just the environmental impact. The China investment programme risks feeding corrupt elites and saddling poor countries with unsustainable debts (which have led to the Chinese seizing control of national assets including territory). And many of the countries “have poor records on human rights, limited freedom of expression in matters of faith, conscience and sexuality, and control their media.” (The Roads to the Future) But when the West's response to, for example, human rights violations is to wield the big stick and impose sanctions, the Chinese are poised to offer help, increasing their economic power and weakening that of the West.

Indeed, the West is shown to be almost totally outplayed in this game. Sometimes they don't even realise what is happening. “The relentless focus on the White House, on Brexit and on the day's latest breaking news ... means there is limited focus on what is going on elsewhere in the world.” (The Roads to the Heart of the World) When they do react it is often to shoot themselves in the foot. Trump's sanctioning of Iran and attempts to sanction those who traded with Iran pushed a number of countries including Russia and Turkey towards China. The UK concern over immigration has meant that “More anglophone students from across Africa now take courses in China than they do in either the UK or the US.” (The Roads to Beijing) “Compared with the Silk Roads and Asia, Europe is not so much moving at a different speed as in a different direction. Where the story in Asia is about increasing connections, improving collaboration and deepening co-operation, in Europe the story is about separation, the re-erection of barriers and ‘taking back control’.” (The Roads to the Future) Profound Eurocentrism betrays a lack of historical perspective and is “symptomatic of the melancholy that accompanies the setting of the sun in a part of the world that has enjoyed the benefits of centuries basking in its warm rays.” (The Roads to the Future)

Already much of the world view the West with deep suspicion. The US, for example, is viewed as responsible for the instability in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. They are seen as wanting to prevent the change that is lifting so many out of poverty. “Those most incentivized to apply the brakes are those with the most to lose - namely the west, which having been asleep at the wheel now wants to return to ‘ normal’ and expects the newcomers to resume their old positions in the world order.” (The Roads to the Future) As a consequence of these perceptions, they are losing friends. “It is striking to note just how few true allies the US has around the world, and how even long-term partners question it's basic reliability.” (The Roads to the Future)

As someone who values liberal democracy and the right to free speech, not to mention my comfortable way of life, this book made me profoundly fearful for the future. But it is cogently argued and the conclusions seem inescapable. “As new connections forge and old links are renewed ... the west is in danger of becoming less and less relevant. When the west does engage in playing a role, it is invariably to intervene or interfere in ways that create more problems than they solve - or to place obstacles and restrictions in place that limit the growth and prospects of others.” (The Roads to the Future)

The only thing that makes sense is for us to play the same game as the Chinese. We need to invest in infrastructure, especially transport links and renewable energy. We need to invest in making friends (and trading partners) around the world instead of becoming defensive and pulling up the drawbridge. We even have to accept that our own lifestyles must be sustainable and on the basis of equality with others around the world. As Chinese president Xi Jinping says, "
the real enemy 'is not the neighboring country; it is hunger, poverty, ignorance, superstition and prejudice’.” (The Roads to the Future)

An eye-opening book. April 2024; 289 pages

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

"Carnivalesque" by Neil Jordan

An only child, visiting a carnival, enters the Hall of Mirrors and somehow becomes detached from his reflection, which goes home with his parents while he is trapped in the mirror. And while he is released to join the carnies and the roustabouts who run the carnival, his doppelganger starts to disrupt family life (initially his mother puts it down to a difficult adolescence) and becomes a focus for evil happenings. 

A version of the changeling legend, in which we discover the magical powers of the carnies and their convoluted and sometimes mythical genesis and history, and we head towards a showdown with their arch-enemy who has somehow planned all this, the Dewman.

In many ways it is a tale of child abduction but the message seems to be that there are benefits to being 'snatched' from everyday life and made to grow up 'far too soon': "He was a perfect solution to what one could have called the Huckleberry urge." (Ch 19)

This novel is a fascinating and sustained flight of fantasy which mixes the very real traumas of growing-up with the magical world of the carnival. There are moments of achingly beautiful prose and piercing insights. There were times when the convolutions of the mythic history of the carnies seemed to be a step too far, but the threads are all pulled together in a literally gut-wrenching climax.

Selected Quotes:

• "The father noted the strange colourless inflection of his speech. As is his words were water that had been fed through a filter of some kind." (Ch 2)
• "If there was anything worse than being nothing but a reflection, he realised, it would be a reflection that couldn't be seen." (Ch 3)
• "There was something either very old, that should have died a long time ago, or something very new, that had not yet been born, about those hands." (Ch 4)
• "Everything, he found, every facet of the seemingly endless carnival, fitted into something smaller than itself, as if its instinct was to shrink and almost vanish." (Ch 5)
• "He felt giddily released from all of those only-child duties and hoped the one who had walked home with them would do a better job than he did at being the perfect son." (Ch 5)
• "Well, he thought. At least she isn't - And he didn't want to finish that thought, about all the things she wasn't." (Ch 6)
• "Cederick kept jealous and watchful suzerainty over the ghost train, a stance more understandable when one considered the fact that several of his siblings resided inside." (Ch 12)
• "She ... found herself among crowds of adolescents, a little older then him,but in their air of removal, abstraction, in their constant glances at the glowing screens of their telephones, just like him. It was a communal virus, she realised, that came upon beloved children suddenly, removed them from whatever emotional realm they had inhabited, with no hint that they might ever return. So she did what mothers all around her seemed to be doing: she bought him things." (Ch 17)
• "She was propelled upwards by some mysterious inner heat, the way a fragile piece of ash rose with its own displacement of the air around it." (Ch 18) This is doing what Muriel Spark said an author must do to make the supernatural acceptable, which is to integrate it with natural phenomena. 
• "The pink sugar that was already assembling itself around the candyfloss stick ... looked like the dyed hair of a girl who wanted to be seen to be a teenager, but didn't quite know how." (Ch 18)
• "There was the void before there were things to fill it, there was the gasp before the void and the gasp filled it." (Ch 20)
• "That muscled carapace that could be called the true carnie form was beginning to clad his own boyish limbs." (Ch 29)
• "The ghost wasn't being given up, was it? The ghost was what they were becoming." (Ch 31)
• "They had plied their trade along the pavements and cafes. with the whiff of poodle dogshit in their noses and the echoes of Strauss waltzes in their ears." (Ch 34) It is the 'poodle' that really makes this sentence, although the juxtaposition of dogshit and waltzes is also brilliant.
• "Burleigh howled as he saw the multiple images of himself approaching ... to make a cube around him first, then a pentahedron then a dextrahedron then a duodenalhedron ..." (Ch 48) I adore how this sentence starts off normally enough and then wanders off into the realm of imaginary words, just like the reality of the book surrenders to the fantasy of magic.

April 2024; 282 pages

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

"A Far Cry from Kensington" by Muriel Spark

For a short novel, this book is crammed with characters and plot. Mrs Hawkins, the narrator-protagonist works as an editor at a small publishing house heading towards bankruptcy. She offends a wannabe writer whose malevolent revenge includes getting her sacked, twice, and attempting to make her die. The story also includes poison pen letters, radionics, blackmail, unwanted pregnancy, and suicide. But it takes some time before the meandering threads of this tale are brought together into a tapestry and even afterwards there are loose ends, for example, Isabel. It feels like a real memoir (it is written in the first person and from a perspective of thirty years later) even though the single evil genius presiding at the heart of all the misfortunes is highly unlikely, so full marks for verisimilitude. Apparently it is a roman a clef, Spark's revenge on an ex-lover who trolled her.

But the prose! There are times when it becomes tortuous and I had to read a sentence several times just to understand what it was saying. For example: "But even now when I return to London, to Kensington, and have paid the taxi and been greeted by the people waiting there, and have telephoned the friends and opened the mail, that night I find again my hours of sweet insomnia and know that it is a far cry from that Kensington of the past, that Old Brompton Road, that Brompton Road, that Brompton Oratory, a far cry." (Ch 1) This is ironic when you consider that the narrator-protagonist is supposed to be a respected editor in a publishing house and that the antagonist becomes an enemy because she criticises his writing: "His writing writhed and ached with twists and turns and tergiversations, inept words, fanciful repetitions, far-fetched verbosity and long Latin-based words." (Ch 4) Pot and kettle? 

The first chapter introduces the characters of her rooming house: the narrator, the landlady Milly, Basil and Eve Carlin, Wanda, Kate, Isabel and William Todd. We are also introduced to Mr Twinny, who redecorates, and to the people working at the narrator's office: Mr Ullswater and Martin York, Cathy, Ivy and Patrick. Almost all of these people, and quite a few others, play a significant part in the story to come. Nevertheless, introducing fourteen characters in the first twelve pages seemed a rather steep start for the reader. I was concerned that not only could I not cope but also that the author would not be able to do more than give us silhouette characters, without flesh. However, despite the limitations of space, Spark breathed life into most of the major characters (Wanda, Milly, Hector Bartlett, Isabel ...) and made even the minor characters appear real.

As so often in books of this period, the world is inhabited by posh people. The narrator, Mrs Hawkins, works in publishing. Other inhabitants of the rooming house include a nurse, a medical student, and engineering accountant and Isabel who is decidedly posh. There always seems to be money for eating out and taking cabs even when unemployed: "I always took a taxi to an interview." (Ch 6) Being sacked (twice) doesn't bring on any sort of panic about poverty: "I had some savings and a small pension, so I had no need to find another job immediately." (Ch 5) How she had any savings from her poorly paid job in publishing, her last week's work unpaid, I have no idea. Perhaps life was much, much cheaper then. 

There was one point in which I recognised a fellow feeling. After being sacked the second time, she spends weeks travelling London on buses. When I was depressed, nearing a nervous breakdown, and coming to the end of working as a research assistant, I did the same, taking a bus to wherever it was going, alighting at random, and taking another, crisscrossing London. 

It was pointed out by other members of my reading group that the narrator-protagonist lacks any sort of back story before her (very brief) wartime marriage. Does she have parents? Siblings? In-laws? How and where was she educated? The transition from land girl to editor in a publishing house is unchronicled. She just appears, fully formed.

It is an entertaining novel which reminded me of a light drawing room comedy stage play; one critic compared it to the Ealing Comedy film 'The Lavender Hill Mob'. Witty and charming but somewhat lightweight.

But sometimes it was very funny:

• "I had a sense he was offering things abominable to me, like decaffeinated coffee or coitus interruptus." (Ch 8)

Selected quotes:

• "So great was the noise during the day that I used to lie awake at night listening to the silence." (Ch 1; first line)
• "Basil, by his own definition, was an engineering accountant." (Ch 1) He was. It's a perfectly respectable career. So why the 'by his own definition'?
• "Wanda, the Polish dressmaker, whose capacity for suffering verged on rapacity." (Ch 1)
• "Wanda looks out of the window. ... She sees spies standing at the corner of the road. She sees spies in the grocer shop, following her. Private detectives and government spies." (Ch 4)
• "There isn't an author who doesn't take their books personally." (Ch 6)
• "I concluded that it was better to belong to the ordinary class. For the upper class could not live, would disintegrate, without the ordinary class, while the latter can get on very well on its own." (Ch 7) She works in publishing, an industry which seems unlikely to provide someone with the skills to survive the collapse of civilization.
• "The advice of St Thomas Aquinas had been to rest one's judgement on what is said, not by whom it is said." (Ch 8)
• "One might as well have taken a carpet sweeper to clear the jungle as edit that book." (Ch 8)
• "My advice to any woman who earns the reputation of being capable, is not to demonstrate her ability too much." (Ch 11) She's not exactly a feminist.
• "He can quote chapter and verse, any of my novels. It's amazing. ... He generally gets it wrong, I'll admit. But his dedication to me is there." (Ch 11)
• "It is a good thing to go to Paris for a few days if you have had a lot of trouble, and that is my advice to everyone except Parisians." (Ch 13)
• "Fred talked like the sea, in ebbs and flows each ending in a big wave which washed up the main idea." (Ch 13)

April 2024; 194 pages

Also by Muriel Spark and reviewed in this blog:

• The Ballad of Peckham Rye in which the devil character really, maybe, is.

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

 

 

"The Unconsoled" by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro channels his inner Kafka and adds a healthy dose of Lewis Carroll in this fantastical story.

The narrator-protagonist is Mr Ryder, a celebrated pianist, who arrives in an unnamed Central European city where he is due to give a speech and perform at a forthcoming concert. But as soon as he arrives at his hotel, things begin to go wrong. Hilde Stratmann has put together a busy schedule over the next few days but she doesn't share it with him. Instead, everyone he meets makes demands upon his time. The hotel porter Gustav, whose mission is to improve the status of hotel porters, wants him to meet his fellows at a local cafe where they collectively urge him to make a statement supporting their cause.  Stephan, the son of the hotel manager wants Mr R to hear him play the piano and advise him if he is good enough to perform at the concert. Sophie, who seems to be Ryder's wife, wants him to look after Boris, her son, and Boris wants him to go back to their old apartment to find a toy that was left behind in the move. A newspaper photographer wants him to pose before a controversial monument and he agrees, despite being privy to a conversation which makes it clear he is being set-up. He is expected to mend the fractured relationship between an alcoholic orchestra conductor and his ex-wife. Etcetera. 

It seems he cannot say no to anyone and in his endeavours to meet these multiple demands he crisscrosses the town and its surrounding countryside, never quite sure where he is going but often reaching his goal even though the landscape must shrink and twist and buckle like an Escher version of the Mobius strip for him to get there (this reminded me hugely of chapter 2 of Alice Through the Looking Glass when the paths in the garden twist and turn and Alice is advised that if she wants to get somewhere she should head in the opposite direction). And, of course, on each of his travels he meets new characters, including several plucked straight from his childhood, who make fresh and further demands upon him. 

Usually, when he meets people, they treat him with respect and show that they expect great things of him, increasing the feeling that he is subject to demands that it will prove impossible to meet. But sometimes they ignore him completely and at other times he encounters hostility. Some characters discuss him as if he wasn't there. On other occasions he is able to follow characters and listen in to their discussions, understanding their thoughts, even though they are round a corner or inside a building where he cannot possibly have followed them. It's all incredibly surreal.

Doors, as in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, are portals into new places and new areas of experience. Except, perhaps, for the door into the broom cupboard which he opens by mistake even though he is well aware of the comedy trope about people walking into a broom cupboard by mistake. 

It reminded me of the stress I was under when I was a deputy headteacher. I even wrote an article for the Times Educational Supplement (under the pseudonym Chris Jarrett) in which I explained my fear of corridors ... because they were places where doors would open and people would pop out and expect you to do something. It reminded me of how impossible the job was, the repeated demands of others, my inability to delegate (mostly because I didn't have anyone to delegate to) and how my personal life suffered. 

But as well as being a frighteningly accurate portrait of a man under pressure, it also allegorised our dystopian world. Many of the demands were for Ryder to help people solve what was widely perceived as a crisis in the city, to aid the citizens in their attempts to bring about a cultural and consequently economic rebirth of their town. I wondered whether these were a comment on post-imperial Britain.

• "Our city is close to crisis. There's widespread misery. We have to start putting things right somewhere and we might as well start at the centre." (Ch 8)
• "Why don't we resign ourselves to being just another cold, lonely city? Other cities have. At least we'll be moving with the tide." (Ch 9)

Alternatively, some of it seemed to be the torments of a celebrated artist, struggling with the expectations of others and an inner feeling of worthlessness, of imposter syndrome:

• "I have to keep going on these trips because, you see, you can never tell when it's going to come along. I mean the very special one, the very important trip, not just for me but for everyone, everyone in the whole world." (Ch 15)
• "These lovely dreams in the early morning. When the day starts and none of it happens, I often blame myself bitterly." (Ch 28)
• "Even back then you were never a real musician. And you'll never become one now. ... You'll never be anything more than a charlatan. A cowardly, irresponsible fraud ..." (Ch 34)
• "From the beginning I said to myself, I'll tell him tomorrow, we;ll have a proper talk about it tomorrow when they'll be more time. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I kept putting it off." (Ch 35)
• "Leave him be, Boris. Let him go around the world, giving out his expertise and wisdom. He needs to do it. Let's just leave him to it now." (Ch 38)

Is it a five hundred page nightmare? It certainly follows the tangled logic of a dream narrative. Is it an almost endless acid trip? Is it a nervous breakdown? Is this how a newly famous author must feel when the expectations of the world are so out of proportion with his assessment of his own abilities? (In chapter 22, the narrator, realising he hasn't had time to practise the piece he will perform, tells a man who wants him to plays for his dog's funeral: "I've been obliged to attend to too many requests, and as a result I'm now very hard pressed to get done the most important things.") Or is it a rewriting of Kafka's Trial? 

Yes it went on and on but it was fluently written and endlessly inventive and it certainly produced a claustrophobic feeling of  pressure. I had to finish it, I needed to know whether the culminating concert would be a success or not and whether the needs of so many needy people would be satisfied. It was an epic read. I've never read anything quite like it. I think it is probably a masterpiece.

The Guardian called it "difficult, perplexing and uniquely challenging"; I couldn't disagree.

Selected quotes:

• "If she wasn't so beautiful ... she'd have been universally hated." (Ch 9)
• "Until recently, Mr Brodsky was really only ever noticed when he got very drunk and went staggering about the town shouting. The rest of the time he was just this recluse who lived with his dog up by the north highway." (Ch 9)
• "In order to get inside and close the door again I was obliged to squeeze more tightly into a corner and to tug the edge of the door slowly past my chest." (Ch 23)
• "This wall is quite typical of this town. Utterly preposterous obstacles everywhere. And what do you do? Do you all get annoyed? Do you demand that it's pulled down immediately so that people can go about their business? No, you put up with it for the best part of a century. You make postcards of it and believe it's charming." (Ch 26)
• "I was still making my way rapidly along the corridor when I became aware of several figures standing in a line against the wall. Glancing towards them, I saw they were all wearing kitchen overalls and, as far as I could make out, were each waiting their turn to climb into a small black cupboard." (Ch 34)
• "Leave us. You were always on the outside of our love. Now look at you. On the outside of our grief too. Leave us. Go away." (Ch 38)

Surreal and superb. April 2024; 535 pages

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

"The Devil's Footprints" by John Burnside

A woman kills herself and her sons, but not her daughter; did she believe the boys were fathered by the devil? Her brother was killed by the narrator, who was also her former lover; was he the father of her daughter? The daughter runs away, or is she abducted? Another woman is killed by a car driven by the town drunk, one of those who has been persecuting her family for years. Two men are abducted ... but only one is tortured and killed. Has this small seaside town been cursed by the devil whose snow-bound footprints crossed it from the sea to the countryside a hundred years ago?

Beautifully written, with a wonderful hook at the 3% mark: "Even though Moira didn't know it, even though nobody knew it but me, I was the one who had killed her brother, when I was thirteen and he was fifteen, killed him and left him to rot in the old limeroom on a weekday afternoon, when we should have been in school." (The Evening Herald; p 10). I defy you not to read on after that.

It continues, drip-feeding the avid reader with other nuggets. As the narrator says: "I was told this story as a child; or rather, I overheard it. I caught a fragment here, a glimpse there, and I put it together piecemeal, adding details and amendments of my own, making it richer, making it bright and mythical and sure. Making it up." (The Devil's Footprints; p 5) The construction is nearly perfect.

 Selected quotes:

The page numbers refer to the Ulverscroft Large Print Edition of 2008

• "A forceful and crudely handsome boy, manufactured ... on one of God's off-days." (The Evening Herald; p 9)
• "Family is a self-perpetuating mechanism, like a virus." (The Evening Herald; p 20)
• "Out here the stars have always felt closer, the wind a participant in my daily life, giving me the dreams I dream, following me into the house on a blustery day like a familiar dog, snuffling around the hall for a minute or two before vanishing into the kitchen." (The Evening Herald; p 34)
• "His tongue flickered between his lips in soft appraisal." (The Evening Herald; p 60)
• "A forlorn child in a narrow seaside town, a boy among grim-faced adults whose only life was church and work." (The Evening Herald; p 79)
• "She didn't want to live ... like some stain fading slowly on the air" (Le Reniement De Saint Pierre; p 135) This reminded me of The Great Divorce by C S Lewis in which he describes ghosts as "man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air.”
• "Just a man; which was to say: a set of wants, a collection of impulses, a bundle of needs, only half of them visible to his own sorry gaze." (The Dark End of the Fair; p 239)

John Burnside also wrote (reviewed in this blog):

• Glister about another boy in a seaside town damned and doomed by the ruins of the industrial manufacturing plant.

April 2024; 311 pages

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