"The Geste of Duke Jocelyn" by Jeffery Farnol

 In the days of Merrie England, a Duke Jocelyn rides forth disguised as a jester to woo Yolande. His problem, and the reason for his disguise, is that he has been injured and is facially disfigured and he wants Yolande to love him for himself rather than for his Dukedom and wealth. He is accompanied by his best friend, disguised knight Sir Pertinax, whose favourite oath is "Par Dex" On his journey he encounters an outlaw named Robin, an old witch and her grandson, a cudgel swinging dwarf named Lobkyn Lollo and a variety of baddies. Adventures include a spell in the castle dungeons and a jousting tournament.

It was written in 1919 and it sounds like a romantic-historical potboiler of the worst type. Indeed, it is peppered with 'quoth' and 'forsooth' and such like. There are twelve chapters which are called 'fyttes' and each is introduced with a rhyming couplet as its argument. But it isn't nearly as dreadful as I'd feared. 

It is written in rhyming verse (usually couplets) and blank verse and prose; the author seems to swap from one to the other almost randomly except for the dwarf Lobkyn who has been cursed and has always to speak in rhyme. My heart sank as I saw all the verse because I find that slower and more difficult to read; in fact Farnol's facility with easy rhyme made it quite fun. This wasn't high class poetry but it was decent narrative verse. It was made even more entertaining by Farnol making jokes about this which came close to self-parody. For example, Robin frequently has passages which torture words - "Which is, Witch, that wich none but witch the like o' thee might do ... Thus, but for they witch-like witcheries the which, Witch, witch do prove thee ..." 

It also becomes meta-fictional when the author's daughter Gillian (who has a nice line in inter-war slang words such as 'corking' and 'top-hole') interrupts him at frequent but irregular intervals to argue with him about the characters and plot. Naively, Gillian thinks that the author is in control of his characters: "You've made her all of pen and ink./ So you, of course can make her do/ Exactly as you want her to." To which he replies: "Dear innocent! You little know/ The trials poor authors undergo./How heroines when they break loose/ Are apt to play the very deuce,/ Dragging their authors to and fro,/ And where he wills - they will not go."

There are also humorous details. For example: "For 'neath the gate lounged lusty fellows three/ Who seldom spoke yet spat right frequently." (Fytte 1) I can just see the three layabouts, the same in mediaeval days as in 1919 and as now, leaning up against the gateposts spitting on the ground. (Some of the humour is unintentional, such as when heavy drinkers in a tavern are correctly described as 'tosspots' which has changed its meaning since 1919.) I also enjoyed the witch who stage-managed her spells so that her audience believed they were seeing magic when in fact ... A nice touch of the Gothic 'explained supernatural' there. 

This isn't great literature but it was entertaining nonsense; it was fun. The characters were caricatures done with Dickensian verve, the plot was just a tweak or two cleverer than standard and it was clearly written by a wordsmith with a love for language. And the meta-fictional aspects added that extra something.

May 2024; 253 pages

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

"The Diary of a Nobody" by George & Weedon Grossmith

First published as a serial in  the satirical magazine 'Punch' and then turned into a short novel, this Victorian classic pokes gentle fun at Mr Pooter, a middle clerk Victorian working as a clerk in a London office. It records the trials of working with unreliable tradespeople - the laundress loses socks and bleaches coloured handkerchiefs, the eggs from the grocer aren't fresh etc - and the antics of a wayward son who loses his job almost as often as he falls in love. Despite what Michael Irwin says (in the Introduction to my edition, a Wordsworth Classics paperback) the humour is essentially fuelled by snobbery: we are invited to laugh at Mr Pooter's pretensions and pomposity as he is regularly brought down to earth ("I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat."; Ch 12) or discovering a tradesman at the Lord Mayor's Ball or being snubbed at a dinner party. He is fundamentally a social climber and we are invited to mock him. He is like a diluted version of Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced Bouquet) in the BBC TB sitcom 'Keeping Up Appearances'. Perhaps it was funnier back in the days but I have laughed far more at The Diary of Adrian Mole or Nobody's more or less exact contemporary Three Men in a Boat.

The funniest things are the dreadful jokes, mostly based on word-play, such as: "I hoped it would not be long before I knew Mr Short. He evidently did not see my little joke, although I repeated it twice with a little laugh." (Ch 19)

I was disappointed at the ending which seemed to arrive like a bolt out of the blue brought about by a deus ex machina.

George Grossmith was the leading man in the first productions of many of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas playing, among other roles, The First Lord of the Admiralty in HMS Pinafore, the Major-General in The Pirates of Penzance, and the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado. 

May 2024; 169 pages

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

"A Greek Misadventure" by Elaine Collier

 Two best friends, Donna and Fiona, nearing the big five-oh, decide to take a holiday in Greece to resurrect memories of their student days.Within days of their arrival they are locked up and accused of smuggling drugs. They are released from jail to protective custody on a luxury yacht from which they are then kidnapped. Can the police find them and rescue them before they are murdered?

If you like simple thrillers in which the goodies do battle with the baddies in classic holiday locations with a bit of romance thrown in, this may be the book for you. It was easy to read and quick, I suspect, to write. 

It took a long time to get going. A lot of the first quarter was concerned with the mechanics of going on holiday. In some books this might have been an opportunity for character and theme development but it was mostly about expounding the back stories. I failed to see the point of some chapters, for example chapter 11.

Even after we had finally started the main story, there is very little tension. We are told the identity of the man seen unloading the boxes within pages, as if the author herself is immune to spoiler alerts. 

The characterisation lacks nuance and is mostly delivered through 'tell don't show'. We are told the lead villain "had the swagger of a cocky little shit." (Ch 21) He lacks any saving grace. Fiona's husband, another baddy, is similarly one-dimensional: "The man was a total self-obsessed arse who just wanted a trophy wife." (Ch 42) One presumes Fiona married him either through extreme stupidity or extreme cupidity. Only one character, a minor villain, had any sort of character development. As for the owner of the yacht, he was extraordinarily handsome, charming, a multi-millionaire and so nice he was prepared to get himself shot just to help out. Such people must exist but I've never met them.

There was some humour. Of a member of the air crew, we are told: "His training programme flew by and before he knew he was working on a real aircraft". (Ch 13)

May 2024

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

"Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont" by Elizabeth Taylor

This exquisite little book was shortlisted for the 1971 Booker Prize. It was number 87 is Robert McCrum's hundred best novels of all time.

Mrs Palfrey, widowed, becomes a long-term resident of London's Claremont hotel, a place where old people, mostly women, eke out their lives in as much gentility as they can afford, obsessed with the menu and fighting the twin evils of boredom and decrepitude.

Mrs P's place in the pecking order is threatened by the fact that nobody ever visits her, despite the fact that she boasts of a grandson living nearby. So after a chance encounter, she pretends that Ludo, a penniless writer, is the grandson. Just over half way through the book the inevitable occurs.

The sub-plot, concerning Ludo the wannabe novelist, offers a little hint that there is cultural change coming with the next generation: this novel is set in London in the 1960s.

This short novel rivals Jane Austen in its elegance of prose style: her punctuation, her word placement and the occasional use of discordant but perfectly aimed adjectives are delightful, and very much in line with the context. There are also meticulous, sometimes laugh-out-loud observations and some wicked asides, such as: "The backs of hotels, which are kept for indigent ladies, can't be expected to provide a view, she knew. The best is kept for honeymooners, though God alone knew why they should require it." (Ch 1) 

There are times when the narrative reeks of loneliness, wistful memories and ennui like the mingled smells of urine and over-cooked cabbage The prevailing tone is one of gentle sadness. 

• "I must not wish my life away, she told herself; but she knew that, as she got older, she looked at he watch more often, and that it was always earlier than she had thought it would be." (Ch 1)
• "Menus offered a little choosing, and satisfactions and disappointments, as once life had." (Ch 2)
• "He had a glass of wine on the table beside him, but did not touch it. He sat patiently still, with his hands on his knees, as if waiting for the drink to drink itself." (Ch 2)

The characters are beautifully drawn. Mrs Arbuthnot fears bending up in a cheap nursing home, the inevitable end of her crippling arthritis. Mrs Post wants to be noticed. Mr Osmond wants a friend. Ludo, also lonely, woos not-so-hard-to-get Rosie and dutifully visits his mother. One of the things that makes this book stand out is that the characters could so easily be caricatures but they never do, even when Taylor is having fun at their expense. There are no goodies and baddies; there is sympathy for those who behave badly; after all, Mrs Palfrey, as well as being strong and stoical, has been weak enough to lie.

Selected quotes:

• "She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked as Lord Louis Mountbatten might in drag." (Ch 1)
• "Her face had really gone to pieces, with pouches and dewlaps and deep ravines, as if a landslide had happened." (Ch 2)
• "One can always read a good book twice ... In fact one always should read a good book twice." (Ch 3)
• "'Well, another Sunday nearly gone,' Mrs Post said quickly, to cover a little fart. She had presence of mind." (Ch 5)
• "As they aged, the old women seemed to become more like old men, and Mr Osmond became more like an old woman." (Ch 6)
• "The callous traffic swept down Cromwell Road." (Ch 7) There are some fascinating adjectives.
• "As one becomes older, life becomes all take and no give. One relies on other people for the treats and things. It's like being an infant again." (Ch 13)
• "When one's old, Mr Osmond suddenly marvelled, no one calls you by your Christian name. You might just as well not have it." (Ch 15) This would have been an interesting and astute observation, but the use of the verb 'marvelled' really highlights it.
• "There is always the one who offers the cheek and the one who kisses it." (Ch 15)

It would be difficult to find a novel more perfectly written.

May 2024; 193 pages

My (Virago paperback) edition has an introduction by Paul Bailey who claims to be the inspiration if not the the model for Ludo.

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

"One Woman Crime Wave" by Bee Rowlatt

This book will probably appeal to reading groups who are looking for a light, easy read with a contemporary feel. 

Ashleigh is the babysitter that the posh mums recommend to one another, never realising that, when they are out for the evening, she is searching through their possessions, ferreting out their secrets and taking souvenirs.

It's a great premise for a book and it opposes poor Ashleigh, the intelligent kid from the single-parent home, against rich Tara, the wife who has it all and yet has nothing, who hates the empty chatter at dinner parties and yet turns vicious when standards of service aren't exactly as she expects them to be. These are two great characters and the tension really builds up in the first half if the book.

But then it all falls apart. After the inevitable discovery, the tight drama degenerates into a thriller. Suddenly we have a drug dealer and an attempted child abduction, and another child under threat, and somehow in all this noise the original plot is lost in the muddle and the resolution is, at best, partial. Either the author didn't know how to resolve the plot, or she didn't trust herself to keep the reader's attention through the resolution, or she felt the need to spin the story out into a longer one.

There seems to be a common belief with some novels and a lot of TV 'drama' series that excitement equals action when the opposite is often the case.

The structure of the book was further undermined, in my opinion, by the prologue. A lot of modern novels like to start with a few pages taken from the middle of the action. Of course these pages are intended to hook and to tantalise but they mustn't give too much away. I suppose they are there because the main story takes a little time to get going. In fact this book would have been a lot better if the prologue had been scrapped (and not just because it was taken from the poor second half of the story). If you want to start 'in media res', start with Ashleigh in Tara's house, going through her possessions. That was chilling. And now that you have my attention, backtrack a little and explain what's going on.

Nevertheless, Ashleigh was a wonderful character and gave a real insight into the mind of someone who is hugely intelligent, badly damaged by life, and whose behaviour is at best obsessive stalking and at worst borderline psychopathic. And Tara was another villain who was also a victim, someone deserving of sympathy until you realised just how much emotional vandalism she could cause. Of the other characters, Ludi was a little one dimensional and Giles was a total stereotype. Such a caricature may appeal to the target audience but it felt lazy.

The pacing is nearly perfect with the major turning point almost exactly at the 50% mark. The narration is principally from the PoV of Ashleigh and Tara but other chapters are narrated by other more minor characters.

There is also a wonderful satire of the dinner party from Hell which acts, together with the reading group and the school gate mums, as a powerful indictment of the exclusive clique of privilege to which Tara - poor Tara - belongs. 

Selected quotes:

• "Tara's voice was full of exclamation marks and her eyes and mouth were big." (Ch 1)
• "The conversations were already beginning to self-select by gender." (Ch 2)
• "Certain truths applied everywhere ... They all wanted to show some things and hide others." (Ch 3)
• "He was the dry nightmare to her wet dream." (Ch 4)
• "These things were like the honesty of people's bodies, the ultimate give-away, the physical truth. They made everyone the same." (Ch 5)
• "Breaking the ice - no fucking way. It was her life's mission to maintain the permafrost and keep people out of her business." (Ch 7)
• "He expanded on the subject for the rest of the walk home while Tara felt like her side of the conversation could have been maintained by a face drawn on to a paper bag." (Ch 10)
• "Those hate-smiling school-gate mums." (Ch 15): 'Hate-smiling' is a wonderful phrase.
• "These people, they parent so hard it's not even funny. Success at any cost. She'd often heard parents say it, 'We just want the best for them.' She heard that and thought, go on - finish the sentence: the best for them at any price. No matter what." (Ch 17)
• "They'd probably think she was trying to be Robin Hood. Stealing from the rich to give to the poor? No. They had no idea. That was so basic. ... How about forget the poor and infiltrate the rich, penetrate them, eat them from the inside." (Ch 35)
• "Dads weren't anywhere, not even as an insult. Even bloody Christmas was around a mum holding a baby. Joseph in the background like a mug." (Ch 37)

May 2024; 238 pages

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

"Orwell: The Authorised Biography" by Michael Shelden

 A biography, authorised by the literary executors, of Eric Blair who, under the pen name of George Orwell wrote, among other works:

• Animal Farm
• 1984
• Down and Out in Paris and London
• The Road to Wigan Pier
• Homage to Catalonia

Eric Blair was born in Bengal where his father was involved in selling opium under the auspices of the Indian Civil Service, an administrator for the British Raj. He went to a prep school in Eastbourne and then Eton College; he then joined the British Empire as a policeman in Burma, hated working for imperialism, and embarked on a career as a novelist and journalist for the political left wing. To further these goals he became a tramp in London and a dishwasher in Paris, he joined the republican army to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and lived in a cheap lodging house in Wigan. He adopted a baby, ran a village store in remote Hertfordshire, and lived on the Scottish island of Jura 25 miles from the nearest shop. This enormously readable biography not only chronicles the remarkable life of this unusual individual but also gives an insight into his work, both fiction and journalism. 

As with many biographies of this sort, some of the delight is in encountering other people were touched by the life of the principal. Thus, Orwell knew Cyril Connolly both at Eastbourne and Eton and in later life. He was at Eton with Steven Runciman who became an expert in the history of Constantinople. As a young man, Orwell worked as a private tutor to, among others, Richard Peters who became Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of London, one of my alma maters. His second wife had been the lover of Lucian Freud. I love this sort of thing: within seven steps I can link myself to Sigmund Freud ...

Selected quotes:

• "St Cyprian's appears to have been a prison camp cunningly disguised as a top-notch, expensive preparatory school." (Ch 2)
• "He regards the loss of self-respect as a fate worse than poverty. In his eyes beggars are contemptible only if they come to share society's contempt for them." (Ch 9)
• "It is clearly past any hope of reform when the empire-builders are reduced to fighting over who has the right to kick the butler - completely ignoring the question of whether anyone should have that right in the first place." (Ch 10)
• "What Orwell is describing is ... the use of a dual perspective to bring into intimate contact two normally separate worlds." (Ch 10)
• "'Every book is a failure', he remarked in later years, but as soon as one 'failure' was complete, he could not wait to go on to write the next, always unsatisfied, always in doubt about his talent but always intent on doing his work better." (Ch 10)
• "A shilling was deducted from the man's pay whenever a fellow miner was killed - the money was contributed to a fund for the widow - but this deduction, or 'stoppage' occurred with such grim regularity that the company used a rubber stamp marked 'Death stoppage' to make the notation on the pay checks." (Ch 12)
• "The poor in Marrakech ... are, of course, all too visible, with their rags and outstretched hands, their physical afflictions, their corpses. But Orwell knows that these conditions exist because the colonial powers who could improve them have chosen not to see them." (Ch 15)
• "The one serious defect in the novel [Coming Up For Air] is Orwell's attempt to be the voice of his narrator-protagonist. He does not make a convincing middle-aged, overweight, suburban-dwelling, low-brow insurance salesman." (Ch 16)
• "Orwell finds numerous examples in Dickens's work of significant flaws - the cloying sentimentality, the over-reliance on character types, the superficial understanding of commercial and industrial work, the hopelessly unrealistic endings, the avoidance of genuine tragedy." (Ch 16)
• "Connolly wrote a short piece about a love affair between a young man and a woman in a totalitarian state headed by 'Our Leader', whose face looks down on people from neon signs high above the streets. The young man is arrested for treason, tortured by officials from the Censor's Department and forced into approving his death sentence." (Ch 17)
• "For most writers the use of slang or other informal expressions creates dangerous pitfalls, tempting them to be too casual in the construction of sentences." (Ch 18)
• "There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin." (Ch 18)
• "The philistines are determined to deny the independence of artistic vision, while it defenders are just as determined to exalt it beyond the reach of criticism." (Ch 20) Orwell wanted to be able to defend an artist's art while still admitting that the artist themselves might be an obnoxious specimen of humanity.
• "He wanted to establish just the right tone for the novel, and he wanted to show in the very style of his own prose how much would be lost in a future world dominated by the impoverished vocabulary of Newspeak." (Ch 22)
• "There must be time for wandering among old churchyards and making the perfect cup of tea and balancing caterpillars on a stick and falling in love. All these things are derided as sentimental and trivial by intellectuals ... but they are the things which form the real texture of a life." (Ch 22)

That rare biography which is at once comprehensive, and easy-to-read and offers a good insight into its subject. May 2024; 489 pages

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

"Nothing Left to Fear from Hell" by Alan Warner

Bonnie Prince Charlie has escaped the killing grounds of the Battle of Culloden, fled across mainland Scotland, and is now hiding among the Hebridean islands, hungry, dirty and frequently sodden, with a few loyal companions, ever alert for a hint of a redcoated soldier.

This short novel describes, in visceral detail, his tribulations.  In the first chapter, we watch as he vomits, defecates and urinates. Warner deploys remarkable powers of description as we endure, with the Prince, the infamous West Highland midges, we tramp with him across then landscape, losing our shoes in sucking bogs. To start off with I wondered if, perhaps, the descriptions had gone overboard, foregrounding the language to the extent that the narrative was disrupted.  for example, the end of the second paragraph states that "a blunt phalanx of fumes manouevred from the outcrops of the low island snuffing its colours down to a bulk." The third paragraph then begins: "A shore emerged from the briny effluvium ..." Words such as 'phalanx' and 'effluvium' seemed to me to shout for attention, as if the author was showing off. But then I thought that this sort of language would be routine if this was poetry. That's when I realised that this is wildly, wonderfully, impressively poetic prose. And, once we have reached the second chapter, the balance between description and dialogue, between observation and action, somewhat settles down, leaving the reader with a story that is nevertheless rendered in language so lyrical as to become a thing of beauty in itself.

Then we learn about the characters, focusing on that of the Young Pretender. He is portrayed as "a chancer who brought havoc" as the author himself says in an afterword. He's a chameleon of a man, stoic and terrified, charming and petulant, selfish and repeatedly self-deluding as he describes the latest roofless byre as a palace and assures his followers that he will return with a French army, at times courageous and at others, such as when he is hysterically frightened of being captured and hanged, drawn and quartered, a frightened rabbit. 

This is a remarkable picture of a human being in all his moods and  aspects and it combines with the rapturously expressive and passionate descriptions of the landscape, a character in its own right, to make an outstanding work of literature.

Selected quotes:

• "Rising and dipping oars sounding like the slap of linen shirts on riverside stones." (Ch 1) What a metaphor! And so in period!
• "A terrible frown cracked along the brow, showing some tender pink in a single serration, like the glistening raw streak against the charcoal of barbecued mutton, skewered fresh and smoking from fire." (Ch 2)
• "The hems of her sacking shroud were a sodden mash that dragged over heather clumps, so the creature's means of phantom locomotion beneath were invisibled." (Ch 2) I loved this sentence from the alliteration at the start of the sentence to the anthimeria of 'invisibled' at the end.
• "Herring gulls passed over low, curiously silent like possible informers." (Ch 5)
• "The way to have peace on earth: blindness for all. For sightless men could make no war. ... The cannon? Are you certain our cannon face them, and not us?"  (Ch 6)
• "The magnitude of these cliffs, no so close and huge above them, was a nauseating thing, putting far away the comforting notions that among houses, formed fields, tracks and hedgeways, as we walk to church, we move in a world God fitted for us with snug accommodation, adapted to the size and shape of humankind and rightly appointed." (Ch 8)
• "It walked like an adrift coo with a deid stillborn hanging out the hole in its arse." (Ch 9)
• "The mountainsides were reflected in those waters below, faithful and absolute, so every dimple and dapple of the braes became imitated and inverted on the dark water surface - it was as if the world was unsure which way up it actually stood, for the steady and gorgeous birdsong was unaffected by inversion, the sound had no top and no bottom." (Ch 11)

May 2024; 136 pages

 Warner also wrote Morvern Callar.

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

"Northline" by Willy Vlautin

A young woman flees an abusive relationship in Las Vegas and becomes a waitress in an all-night diner in Reno. She encounters other poor Americans, damaged by life, and each one gives her a precis of their life story.

It was written in lean prose, using mostly short sentences, like reportage, to encapsulate gritty reality. But every voice was the same. As they were telling their stories there was very little in the way of characterisation. And once the characters had delivered their testimony, they tended to disappear from the narrative. As a result, this seemed more like a documentary than a novel. 

Selected quotes:

• "She had the face of a woman who drank every day and forgot to eat when she did." (The Verdict)
• "Men are a pain in the ass. I'd rather sit at home with the TV and a few snacks then have to watch sports and do laundry all the time." (The Little Nugget)
• "Remember, kid, there ain't no place you can escape to. There's no place where there ain't weirdos and death and violence and change and new people." (A Late Night Conversation)

Gritty, but bitty. May 2024; 192 pages

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

"Milkman" by Anna Burns

Winner of the 2018 Booker Prize; shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. 

This is a portrait of a society distorted by sectarian division, described through the strange and sometimes bizarre experiences of the characters who have been warped and buckled by the way their lives have had to adapt to their damaged environment. One might guess where and when it is supposed to be but the city is unnamed, as is the narrator, as are the characters. This story can be applied to anyone, anywhere, at any time. 

It is a world where gossip and rumour reign supreme, to the extent that one is judged not by what one is or even what one does, but what is said to have done. In this world your life, even your self image, can be controlled by what other people think. The narrator's big failing is, as she is told: "You are not inferable. You cannot be deduced - and they don't like that." (Ch 5) Because 'they' cannot understand her, therefore they make up stories about her. Thus the narrator is treated as though she is the girlfriend of Milkman, even though for most of the book she does her best to avoid him. Because of what she is supposed to be she is applauded, reproved, threatened, and almost killed. Other characters are also not what they are supposed to be. Chef isn't a chef, though he does like cooking. Milkman isn't a milkman but real milkman is. Nigel and Jason aren't called Nigel and Jason. 

The only character who truly knows everything there is to know about everyone is the omniscient Milkman, a bogeyman who pops up from time to time, always unexpectedly, and disappears without warning. I wondered whether he was intended to be real, or a fantasy created by the beliefs of the inhabitants of the city; perhaps he was meant to be God. And yet the first sentence of the book tells us that he has died. Perhaps he has. 

It is a world created by the distorted perceptions of its inhabitants. There is a wonderful scene in chapter 3 when the French teacher tells his class of adult learners that the sky isn't only blue but many colours and they refuse to believe it, some of them even when he has them staring at a sunset. The narrator reflects: "there were sunsets every day ... we weren't meant to be coffined and buried while all the time still living". This acts as a brilliant metaphor for the selective blindness that can be caused by ideological bigotry.

It is a world peopled by gloriously eccentric characters, including:

• Protagonist-Narrator: she runs, she walks and she reads nineteenth century literature as she is walking. She is more or less in the middle of a family of three boys, seven girls, a mother and a dead father. 
• Maybe-boyfriend: a car mechanic and hoarder who lives on his own in a house with four bedrooms, his mum and dad having abandoned their four sons to become champion ballroom dancers touring the world and his three elder brothers having moved out. 
• First brother-in-law: nosy and interfering but also creepily over-friendly with NP
• Chef: a gay lad full of nervous energy who likes cooking and, while cooking, talks to himself. 
• Third brother-in-law: a runner
• Mother: a religious woman who wants her sixteen year old daughter to get married before it is too late.
• Tablet's girl: a poisoner
• Wee sisters: the three sisters younger than the NP who are intellectual prodigies
• Real milkman aka the man who didn't love anybody
• Somebody McSomebody
• Nuclear boy: despite living between armed renouncers and soldier, his greatest fear is nuclear war

There is a sense of unreality. Even some of the settings are magical, such as the liminal 'ten-minute area' a "bleak, eerie, Marie Celeste little place" (Ch 3), so named because it takes ten minutes to walk through. When First sister, when summoned on the phone at the end of the book, says she will be there in fifteen minutes plus ten minutes, because she has to walk through the ten-minute area.

It is narrated with just the right amount of internal monologue to give the reader a feeling that they are genuinely inside the narrator's head but hardly ever so much as to obstruct the flow of narrative. The structure is loose, almost dream-like, and the chronology regularly loops back and forth in time (the first line isn't resolved until nearly the end of the book). There is very little in the way of plot as such but there is character development. And, bit by bit, we start to learn the inner truth of some of these characters.

Selected quotes:

• "The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the day the milkman died." (Ch 1; first line)
• "This sister was standing in her drainpipes and flip-slops with every toenail painted a different colour. ... She had a glass of Bushmills in one hand and a glass of Bacardi in the other." (Ch 2)
• "In our area there existed two types of mental aberrations: the slight, communally accepted ones and the not-so-slight, beyond-the-pale ones." (Ch 2)
• "Da had ... big, massive, scudding, whopping, black-cloud. infectious, crow, raven, jackdaw, coffin-upon-coffin, catacomb-upon-catacomb, skeletons-upon-skulls-upon-bones crawling along the ground to the grave types of depressions." (Ch 3)
• "With da it was never 'Must get down on knees and give thanks that others in the world are suffering far worse than me.' I couldn't see how he couldn't be right too, because everybody knew life didn't work like that. If life worked like that then all of us - except the person agreed upon to have the most misfortune in the world - would be happy, yet most people I knew weren't happy." (Ch 3)
• "No one has ever come across a cat apologising and if a cat did, it would patently be obvious it was not being sincere." (Ch 3)
• "What if she was wrong about ... moving on to next chapters? What of the next chapter was the same as this chapter, as had been the last chapter? What if all the chapters stayed the same or even, as time went on, got worse?" (Ch 3)
• "Not a case of being unable to face reality. More a case, I'd say, of getting out the magnifying glass and having a good gawp at it." (Ch 3)
• "They have this idea, these people, that you're stupid, that you're incapable of discerning that they think you stupid. Also they don't see you as a person but instead as some cipher, some valueless nobody whose sole objective is to reflect back on them the glory of themselves." (Ch 3)
• "I'd strike them as a textbook, some kind of log table - as in correct, but not really right either." (Ch 4)
• "People can be extraordinarily slipshod whenever already they have made up their minds." (Ch 4)
• "Along with the district poisoner, the poisoner's sister, the boy who killed himself over America and Russia, the women with the issues, and real milkman, also known as the man who didn't love anybody. I too, was one of those intemperate, socially outlawed beyond-the-pales." (Ch 4)
• "Are you saying it's okay for him to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read Jane Eyre in public?" (Ch 4)
• "My knowledge of the world consisted of fucking hell, fucking hell, fucking hell, which didn't lend itself to detail, the detail really being those words themselves." (Ch 5)

A wonderful portrait of a dysfunctional society. May 2024; 348 pages

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

"News from Nowhere" by William Morris

The original uploader was VAwebteam at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

The narrator of this story, who calls himself William Guest, goes to sleep and wakes up in the future. If that reminds you of Rip van Winkle by Washington Irving, it's not the only model. There is the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus which was included in the mediaeval Golden Legend and - as the Companions of the Cave - the Quran; their legend is mentioned in The Grey King by Susan Cooper. There's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, which was published the year before News from Nowhere was first serialised, although in this book the time travel is backwards and caused by a blow to the head. And, perhaps most obviously, there is Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, a novel which Morris reviewed, in which the protagonist falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in a socialist world in 2000; it was a best-seller in its day. Morris had a lot of possible models for his fiction.

But News from Nowhere is only tangentially a novel. For a start, the plot is really just a chronicle of things happening, with very little novelistic shape to it: it's no more than a frame on which to hang philosophical speculations. Fundamentally, there is a lack of conflict, and conflict is what drives most novel narratives. The characters surrounding the protagonist, are fundamentally nice, including the grumpy granddad. The only real tension is that the narrator is worried that he will let slip that he is from the past; he pretends to be from another country. 

It's poorly written. None of the characters have any depth, in fact they are so flat they are scarcely even two-dimensional. Of the principals:

• Dick is Mr Marvellous. Not only is he incredibly nice - he happily forgives his girlfriend after she has had an affair with another man - and eternally cheerful and immensely generous with his time but also he is a wonderful rower and, as he himself modestly says, “a pretty good mower”. I disliked him from the start.
• His grandfather, Hammond, is nice and kind and very wise.
• There is a grumpy old man who is grumpy about everything.
• The women are delightfully kind and delightfully pretty.

The first chapter is a third person narrative describing things happening to “a friend”; this then morphs in the second chapter and subsequently into a first person narrative. This narrative shift could be seen as the creation of a frame narrative in order to distance the ‘I’ of the narrator from the author, despite the many hints in the text that these are, in fact, one and the same (for example, they end up at Kelmscott Manor, the house where Morris lived, and this is described by the narrator as being familiar). In fact it just feels clumsily inconsistent.

There are poorly written sentences. For example:

• “As he sat in that vapour-bath of hurried and discontented humanity, a carriage of the underground railway, he, like others, stewed discontentedly.” (Ch 1) The repetition of discontented/ discontentedly does not seem deliberate (as it would be if this was an example of anaphora) and therefore, although the image is compelling, this is a poorly constructed sentence.
• “To her quoth Dick, ‘ Maiden, would you kindly hold our horse while we go in for a little while?’” (Ch 6) The use of ‘quoth’, archaic even then and used mainly in fiction set in the mediaeval period, and the strange word order, and the use of ‘Maiden’ as a title to address a young girl by, all suggest that Morris is trying to evoke Merrie England in the way that typically hack Victorian writers such as Charles Kingsley in Hereward the Wake and Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter did.
• “All work is now pleasurable; either because of the hope of gain in honour and wealth with which the work is done, which causes pleasurable excitement, even when the actual work is not pleasant, or else because it has grown into a pleasurable habit.” (Ch 15) Lots of pleasure! Is this anaphora? Or carelessness?

But it isn't really intended to be a novel. Like the central part of 1984, it is basically a platform for Morris's utopian socialist political ideas. The basis of it is that the Industrial Revolution was a Bad Thing and that the perfect future is a return to the rural paradise that Morris thinks was England in the Middle Ages. It was fashionable at the time (for example, Oscar Wilde with his aestheticism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with which Morris was associated, being a lifelong friend of Edward Burne-Jones and sharing his wife with Dante Gabriel Rossetti) to romanticise the mediaeval period. Morris is aware is wasn't all great back then: “Have you not read of the Mediaeval period, and the ferocity of its criminal laws; and how in those days men fairly seemed to have enjoyed tormenting their fellow-men? - nay, for the matter of that, they made their God a tormentor and a jailer rather than anything else.” (Ch 7) 

He seems to believe that all was parasidical back then as a matter of taste. He loves the Gothic aesthetic, being an enormous fan of that architecture and adoring Mallory's Morte D'Arthur. Mediaeval good, Victorian bad is a dogma with him and anything made of metal, such as “the beastly iron bridge” (C 14), is horrid and bad. 'Chacun a son gout', or 'one man's meat is another man's poison', or 'de gustibus non est disputandum' are not precepts which sway Morris. 

Fundamentally, his socialist utopia is achieved by clearing the slums of London and sending the population back into the countryside (sounds a bit like what Mao did in the Cultural Revolution, or what Pol Pot did in Cambodia) where they will be housed in the stately homes on the grand estates (plenty of room?) and will produce the necessities of life by farming. He suggests that much of what is produced in the Victorian factories is unnecessary, cheap and shoddy wares which are only wanted because people have been brainwashed into thinking they are necessary. True necessities (presumably including the pipe and tobacco that the narrator buys) can be hand produced. And Morris believes that hand-production is inherently pleasurable for the labourer. Therefore people will not need to be incentivised or forced to work, they will do it because they enjoy it, whether it is the outside work of ferrying or haymaking or digging up the road which they do because it makes them feel fit, or the more artisan work such as making beautiful pipes. 

This obviously reflects Morris’s own life. He set up a craft co-operative producing furniture and interior decoration such as wallpaper. The irony was that despite it being backed by Morris’s personal fortune (inherited shareholdings in, among other things, copper mines) the company made things that only well-off people could afford. Even nowadays, Morris designs and artisan products are more expensive that mass-produced goods and there are many people who have no chance of affording them. Perhaps this dream of a utopia was Morris trying the reconcile the realities of his life (inherited money, crafts produced for the wealthy) with his socialist ideals. 

Dick's forgiving nature when his girlfriend asks to return to him following her affair is an opportunity for Morris to set out his views of marriage. He doesn't believe in it, or at least not in the way that, in the Victorian era, women were often treated as property, belonging to father or brother before being sold to a husband. In this respect, the novel matches reality. Morris married Jane Burden, who had been one of the models (and possibly one of the lovers) of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Jane was available because Rossetti married another model, Lizzie Siddal. But when Siddal died, Rossetti returned to 'claim' Jane, and for a while Morris, Rossetti and Jane lived in a threesome where it seems likely that Jane, still married to Morris and mother to his two daughters, slept exclusively with Rossetti. The utopian ideal of free love in the pages of News from Nowehere, matches this situation (although there are suggestions that Morris wasn't particularly happy with the arrangements). But in other respects, Morris isn't quite as enlightened: “Don't you know that it is a great pleasure to a clever woman to manage a house skilfully, and to do it so that all the house-mates about her look pleased and are grateful to her?” (Ch 9) Not a lot of liberation! And, since he has abolished parliamentary democracy, he fudges the issue of women’s suffrage.

On the other hand, as an ex-teacher who was once a pupil at Eton College, I thought he made some valid points about education:

• “You expected to see children thrust into schools when they had reached an age conventionally supposed to be the due age, whatever their varying faculties and dispositions might be” (Ch 10)
• “In the nineteenth century, society was so miserably poor, owing to the systematised robbery on which it was founded, that real education was impossible for anybody.” (Ch 10)
• “In the nineteenth century Oxford and its less interesting sister Cambridge ... were the breeding places a peculiar class of parasites, who called themselves cultivated people.” (Ch 10)
• Eton College is “a place for the ‘aristocracy’ ... to get rid of the company of their male children for a great part of the year.” (Ch 24)

Other selected quotes:

• “They were clothed like women, not upholstered like arm-chairs.” (Ch 3)
• “A big mastiff, who was as happily lazy as if the summer-day had been made for him alone.” (Ch 7)
• “His face, dried-apple-like as it was seemed strangely familiar to me; as if I had seen it before - in a looking glass it might be, said I to myself.” (Ch 9)
• “Was not the Parliament on the one side a kind of watch-committee sitting to see that the interests of the Upper Classes took no hurt; and on the other side a sort of blind to delude the people into supposing that they had some share in the management of their own affairs?” (Ch 11)
• “It was a current jest of the time that the wares were made to sell and not to use.” (Ch 15)
• “Their raiment, apart from its colour, was both beautiful and reasonable - veiling the form, without either muffling or caricaturing it.” (Ch 19)
• “As for your books, they were well enough for times when intelligent people had but little else in which they could take pleasure, and when they must needs supplement the sordid miseries of their own lives with imaginations of the lives of other people.” (Ch 22)

An interesting, rather than a fun read. It's a dream of an ideal society. It didn't convince me, although there is very little argument expended in order to try and convince me.

May 2024; 182 pages

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