"Burmese Days" by George Orwell

 The debut novel by the author of Animal Farm and 1984. 

The plot centres on the relationship between Flory, a lonely sahib who has been too long in Burma, who loves the country and the people, and Elizabeth, a young girl just arrived who needs to get married to avoid poverty and the incestuous advances of her alcoholic uncle. The sub-plot involves the need for the club, against all the instincts of its white members, to elect a native to membership. Villainous magistrate U Po Kyin plots (why is it always baddies who drive narratives, so much so that the word plot both means to conspire and to construct a narrative?) to discredit the good Doctor Veeraswami so he will win the election. Throw in a love rival for Flory, a local rebellion and any amount of racism and we have the making of a great novel with a strong plot, some beautifully developed characters, and an exotic setting.

The discussion at the club in chapter two is an incredible indictment of chauvinism and, as such, there is much use of terribly racist language, and the n-word. But this is the reason why it is necessary to retain uncensored and unexpurgated version of historical texts: it is the intention that matters. This use of the n-word is in order to condemn racism. The purpose of this whole novel, even with one of the indigenous characters being a corrupt villain, is to open eyes to the horrors of racism. It's important to defend the artist's right to say such things. 

Selected quotes:

• "He was a man of fifty, so fat that for years he had not risen from his chair without help, and yet shapely and even beautiful in his grossness; for the Burmese do not sag and bulge like white men, but grow fat symmetrically, like fruits swelling." (Ch 1)
• "His practice ... was to take bribes from both sides and then decide the case of strictly legal grounds. This won him a useful reputation for impartiality." (Ch 1)
• "No European cares anything about proof. When a man has a black face, suspicion is proof." (Ch 1)
• "All his meals were swift, passionate and enormous; they were not meals so much as orgies, debauches of curry and rice." (Ch 1)
• "Poor chap ... regular martyr to booze, eh? Look at it oozing out of his pores. Reminds me of the old colonel who used to sleep without a mosquito net. They asked his servant why and the servant said: 'At night, master too drunk to notice mosquitoes; in the morning, mosquitoes too drunk to notice master'." (Ch 2)
• "The only way I can even keep a servant is to pay their wages several months in arrears." (Ch 2)
• "In my young days, when one's butler was disrespectful, one sent him along to the jail with a chit saying 'Please give the bearer fifteen lashes' Ah, well, eheu fugaces!" (Ch 2)
• "Creeping round the world building prisons. They build a prison and call it progress." (Ch 3) Flory thus characterises the spread of the British Empire, alluding to the Agricola by Tacitus which has a British chieftain rallying his troops to resist the spread of the Roman Empire in the first century AD by saying: "Where they make a desert they call it peace." 
• "Beauty is meaningless until it is shared." (Ch 4)
• "There is a prevalent idea that men at the 'outposts of Empire' are at least able and hardworking. It is a delusion. ... The real work of administration is done mainly by native subordinates and teal backbone of despotism is not the officials but the Army. Given the Army, the officials and the business men can rub along safely enough even if they are fools. And most of them are fools." (Ch 5)
• "Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself." (Ch 5)
• "Her whole code of being was summed up in one belief, and that a simple one. It was that the Good ('lovely' was her name for it) was synonymous with the expensive, the elegant, the aristocratic; and the Bad ('beastly') is the cheap, the low, the shabby, the laborious. Perhaps it is in order to teach this creed that expensive girls' schools exist." (Ch 7)
• "The peasants steamed garlic from all their pores." (Ch 13)
• "Our motto, you know, is, 'In India, do as the English do'." (Ch 13)
• "Blessed are they who are stricken only with classifiable diseases! Blessed are the poor, the sick, the crossed in love, for at least other people know what is the matter with them and will listen to their belly-achings with sympathy. But who that has not suffered it understands the pain of exile?" (Ch 15)
• "His Urdu consisted mainly of swearwords, with all the verbs in the third person singular." (Ch 18)
• "Like all sons of rich families, he thought poverty disgusting and that poor people are poor because they prefer disgusting habits." (Ch 18)
• "What's it got to do with you if he needed kicking? You're not even a member of this Club. It's our job to kick the servants, not yours." (Ch 18) Not even a thought as to whether anyone was justified in kicking another human being!

This is an excoriation of the disgusting racism of the British Empire. Yes, there are flat characters (eg Ellis) but Flory and Elizabeth are drawn with three-dimensional empathy. Orwell at his best is so much better than 1984!

June 2024; 300 pages.

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

Orwell also wrote, (where linked, reviewed in this blog):

• Animal Farm: a novel
• 1984
• Homage to Catalonia: a memoir of the Spanish civil war
• The Road to Wigan Pier: journalism
• Down and Out in Paris and London: journalism and memoir

A biography of Orwell is reviewed here.

"Crime at Guildford" by Freeman Wills Croft

 This was a beautifully written police procedural from the days when constables on the beat noticed men walking late at night, and when the police weren't allowed to pay for information! The days when there were butlers and maids and when even policeman were fearful of unemployment.

A jewellery firm is facing going stony (sorry!) broke. Some of the directors arrange a weekend at the chairman's country house near Guildford. On the Sunday morning the company accountant, who was ill the night before, is discovered dead in his bed. The next Monday morning, all the jewels that represent the working stock of the company have vanished from the safe. Are the crimes linked? Whodunnit? And how?

Inspector French plods through the evidence. One by one the suspects are eliminated. Even, after an ingenious twist (I got it!), the truth is revealed, there is still the need for evidence resulting in a chase into Europe. 

Selected quotes:

• "A girl like that has the ear of the boss ... and so she doesn't know her own size." (Ch 11)
• "When you've no job you get into the way of spending as much time everywhere as you can. There's always too much of it." (Ch 18)

Classic crime fun. June 2024; 252 pages

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

"1541: The Cataclysm" by Robert William Jones

This book is the first in the Micklegate series. It is an entertainingly irreverent romp blend of at least three genres: historical, thriller and fantasy. The tone is set right from the start with an execution described by a narrator with a very dark sense of humour. 

'Lord' Silas, a village idiot, Robert, Lord Mayor of York, two monks chucked out of the monasteries following the Dissolution, washerwomen ex-nun Elspeth and her crippled friend Wynnfrith, farmer Richard Shakespeare (grandfather of the playwright), Edward Fawkes (father of Guy) and assorted others form an impromptu group (the Agents of the Word) led by a talking mouse with a secret (not just that he talks) and an attitude problem. Their purpose is to save Tudor England from a Cataclysm. 

There were moments when the pacing was spot on (the group coheres at exactly the 33% mark, there is a revelation worthy of W S Gilbert as the 50% mark) but there were other moments when the plot seemed to suddenly speed up. Some elements of the quest such as the discovery of the books and the recovery of Abigail seemed rather too easy. I wasn't sure how the Lizzie sub-plot fitted in but I appreciated that not everyone lived happily ever after. Nor am I sure that I fully understood all the clues in the convoluted plot but it was certainly an ingenious climax. There was even a twist in the mouse's tale. 

Selected quotes:

• "Annie was a middle-aged horse with the strength, dedication and attitude of a foal." (Ch 1)
• "Bacteria in all its glorious forms was here and having an all-night party, but simultaneously, completely absent in the imagination of the sixteenth-century public." (Ch 2)
• "He was a crap juggler spending most of the morning chasing his balls around the market, if you’ll forgive the expression." (Ch 5) 
• "We will win because we are good" (Ch 15) A character who understands the rules of fiction!
• "She’d find a better catch in the river!" (Ch 16)
•  "The King has planted a new Bishop there. More a pawn than a Bishop. " (Ch 17)
• "I didn't have an opinion about this. Strange, you think. Is the mouse unwell?" (Ch 18)
• "'What an unfortunate mismatch of miscreants and misfits!’ He annoyingly alliterated." (Ch 23)

An entertaining slice of horrible history with lots of humour. June 2024

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

"Crypt" by Alice Roberts

“Osteoarchaeology, paleopathology and now archaeogenomics are transforming our understanding of the past.” (Epilogue) In this fascinating and utterly readable book, Professor Alice Roberts shows how the study of ancient skeletons can mesh with the sequencing of DNA and, where available, historic documents to give us new insights into our human past.

This book is a sequel to Ancestors, which focused on BC, and Buried which considered the first millennium AD. This book studies burials from 1002 AD until 1545. But as well as learning about archaeology and history and bony anatomy, I also learned about how archaeologists can work out where a skeleton grew up from the balance of strontium and oxygen isotopes in the teeth, a great deal about leprosy - who knew you can catch it from an armadillo? - 

The first chapter analyses skeletons found in Oxford that appear to have been buried after being violently killed. Are they the bodies of people killed on Saint Brice's day (13th Nov) in 1002 after Ethelred the Unready called for a massacre of Danes? The second investigates the graveyard of a mediaeval leper hospital and asks whether leper hospitals originated in pre-Conquest England. Chapter 3 tells the story of the martyrdom of St Thomas a Becket and asks whether a skeleton discovered in 1888 could belong to him. Chapter 4 is surprised by a high incidence of Paget's Disease in a single churchyard. Chapter 5 traces, through osteoarchaeology, the prehistoric lineage of the bacterium responsible for the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death and Bubonic Plague. Chapter 6 considers bone deformities in the skeletons of those drowned when Henry VIII's flagship the Mary Rose sank and Chapter 7 asks whether syphilis found in the skeleton of a mediaeval anchoress can tell us whether the disease came to Europe from the New World in the wake of Columbus.

Seven fascinating stories. History, prehistory, science and even some maths, all told in an engaging style (with some very poor puns, see selected quotes). What's not to like?

Selected quotes:

• “It shows the potential for aDNA from fishbones - which everyone had previously thought would be dead in the water.” (Ch 1)
• “Archaeology explores the past from the ground up, not the top down.” (Ch 2)
• “Henry arranged to have his son, Henry Junior, crowned in preparation, so that he could immediately step into his father's clogs when he popped them.” (Ch 3)
• “Some diseases kill so quickly, there are no traces lift on bones.” (Ch 5)

July 2024; 298 pages

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

"Climbers" by M John Harrison

 Mike the narrator is a young man bitten by the climbing bug who travels north to join a loose community of climbers: Normal and Sankey, Mick and Stox and Andy Earnshaw and Bob Almanac. They are unemployed or in mostly dead end jobs; these form the background as do their wives and girlfriends and sisters and friends. These things aren't important. These lads live for climbing. What really matters is the 'problem': how to get to the top of a challenging climb. 

There's a lot of technical information about climbing, most of it, like the climbers, over my head. It seemed to me that the biggest difficulty, and this could be a metaphor, is that rock surfaces are eroded by the weather so that, far from the solidity that the concept of stone embodies, a rockface is covered with potentially treacherous handholds that flake away when you place your trust in them. This is a paradox.

But an even bigger paradox is that these people can only enjoy and find meaning in their lives when they are risking it. They aspire to climb but they are haunted by the fall. The 'fall' was everywhere; even Pauline's daughter falls from a table and ends up in hospital. Even the sections, labelled Winter, Spring, Summer after the seasons, end with Fall. And one by one the climbers fall, some fatally. Death, or injury, weeds them out. 

It is a complex narrative, jumping forwards and backwards in time and from character to character. It seems to be deliberately fractured. There is a suggestion very near the start that one of the major characters has died; there is a moment of fantasy about children who have been lost from day trips to the moors growing up feral. It starts and ends with reminiscences. 

I'm not sure, after a single reading, I have fully appreciated the narrative. But the quality of the writing was unmistakable. 

There are some remarkable descriptions. They combine forensic exactness and technical terms with some remarkable images.

• "Light poured in over the blackened threshold of the old smokehouse, falling among the eroded beams onto a clutter of broken ladders. A few dry beech leaves blew about in the heap of coal. As he stood there looking in, thunder banged tinnily again over towards Huddersfield." (Winter; 2)
• "As you face the sea the cliff goes up on your left, whitish, dusted with the same lichen you can see on any other limestone crag ... custard yellow, dry and crusty. You get to the top among the yew trees bent and shaved by the wind." (Spring; 7) 
• "The right bank of the cove is a clinted slab overgrown with whin, short turf and hawthorn bushes. From there the tourists can gaze out to sea or at the weed-covered rocks at the base of the cliff like green chenille cushions in the front room of a fussy old woman." (Spring; 7) What a simile, to compare rocks with interior decorating.
• "The sun came down and scraped into the irregular corners." (Spring; 7) Scraped ! 
• "Masses of hawthorn blossom were piled up like exotic buttercream, from which streamed downwind vanilla and corruption intertwined. ... In the evenings the rock seemed to sweat inside. As it grew dark the lupins in front of Sankey's house gave off like tall translucent candles a perfume so delicate it might have been mistaken for a faint white light." (Spring; 9)

Some of the characters, such as Normal and Sankey, have their stories told in shards which the reader must assemble. It's all show don't tell. Other, more marginal characters, are presented with little vignettes or snippets of back story. 

There isn't a conventional plot. It is more of a Bildungsroman, a coming of age novel chronicling the narrator's apprenticeship as a climber, and his becoming an acknowledged member of this self-selecting group (though the suggestions from both the beginning and the ending is that, though still a climber, he now no longer one of them but an outsider looking in). But this book is not about plot; it is about the characters. In this way it reminded me of The Rock Pool by Cyril Connolly. 

One of the delights, as with this author's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, is his ability to disrupt a scene and set the reader's teeth a little bit on edge with an overheard remark, utterly irrelevant in the context of the narrative but somehow adding verisimilitude and colour while giving a slight sense of weirdness:

• "I throw a lot of frombies. ... At least that's what my husband calls them. Frombies." (Summer; 12)
• "Behind him one woman was telling another, 'I get quite passionate about being wrong - I mean really passionate: I hate it!', firmly italicising 'passionate', 'really', 'hate'." (Fall; 17)

Selected quotes: 

• "In weather like that you never quite sleep. Long dreams merge seamlessly with the long days, leaving you entranced and stuporous but somehow restless; hypnotised yet full of ambitions you cannot dissipate." (Summer; 12)
• "The youngest had sponged themselves as clean of life as the sides of a brand-new plastic bath." (Summer; 12)
• "He arranged much of what he said around the hinge of that 'but'." (Summer; 12)
• "You spend Christmas ... surrounded by other people's assessment of you." (Fall; 13)
• "Fossils emerged from the landlady's cheap slaty coal as it split into thin leaves in the smoke." (Fall; 13)
• "Stalybridge itself is compromised, neither town nor country but a grim muddle of both." (Fall; 15)

A complex novel with sufficient challenge for the reader to feel pleased and proud when it is mastered, like a climber reaching the summit of a new 'problem'. Great characters and wonderful descriptions. June 2024; 234 pages

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

"Abducted" by Susan A Clancy

Why do people believe they have been abducted by aliens?

The author is a sceptic in that she believes that “there is no objective evidence that an alien spacecraft has ever visited Earth or that anyone has ever been abducted.” (Ch 6). Aside from that, this account is remarkably balanced. She has clearly taken these stories seriously. She claims to have read every account of alien abduction published and more or less everything written about abduction narratives. She's watched almost all of the films and TV shows. And she's personally interviewed dozens of people who believe they have been abducted. I feel confident that this book is an unbiased, even sympathetic account of alien abduction experiences.

Firstly, they're not mad. Abductees are no more likely to have psychiatric disorders than you or me. They are, however, often creative, imaginative and prone to fantasy.

Secondly, most of those who believe they have been abducted do not have any memory of the abduction. Most of them have had strange experiences (such as sleep paralysis which is a state where sleep overlaps with wakefulness so that people continue to dream even while awake) which they are desperate to explain and which they have subsequently realised are similar to the experiences reported by someone else who claims to have been abducted. There is more than a hint of 'confirmation bias' about this. When asked why they can't remember, they often claim that the aliens had erased their memories.

Thirdly, those who claim to remember abduction experiences have in almost every case reconstructed their memories with the help of "imaginational therapies" such as hypnosis. Clancy is clear that such reconstructed memories are unreliable. She asserts that it is a myth that hypnosis is like a truth serum; in fact it puts patients into a suggestible state when they are liable to confuse imagination with reality. "The key to generating false memories ... is the protected imaging of an event in the presence of authority figures [such as a hypnotist or 'alien expert'] who encourage belief in and confirm the authenticity of the memories that emerge.” (Ch 3) She points out that the 'memories' recovered during hypnosis are usually incoherent and only later woven into a coherent narrative. In fact, many abductees question the reality of their early memories. “After my first regression, I wondered if I was making it all up ... I still don't remember it like a real memory, like I remember walking to class yesterday.” (Ch 3) She also points out that many of the 'memories' generate intense emotions such as terror and that the very intensity acts as a validation to their perceived truthfulness: “What happened to me was - overwhelming. It was more real than my sitting here talking with you right now.” (Ch 5)

When asked why she doubts abduction reports when they are so consistent, she replies that they aren't. The narrative arc is similar but the individual details vary quite a lot. She also points out that there were no reported cases of alien abduction until 1962, after the first films and TV shows had offered fictional narratives about abduction.

In the end, she concludes that “Aliens are ... the imaginative creations of people with ordinary emotional needs and desires. We don't want to be alone. We feel helpless and vulnerable much of the time. We want to believe there’s something bigger and better than us out there. And we want to believe that whatever it is cares about us, or at least is paying attention to us. That they want us (sexually or otherwise). That we're special.” (Ch 4) Abductees can regard their abduction experience as the most traumatic thing that ever happened to them, or the best thing. Having the abduction explanation not only explains the problems they face (such as depression or insomnia) but also absolves them of responsibility (it's not my fault ...). “Every single abductee at some point during an interview said, ‘Things make sense now.’” (Ch 5) She points out the similarity between Christianity and abduction: “Alien abductions feature all-knowing, nonhuman, advanced entities whose presence resists the explanatory power of science. The entities bring moral guidance. They tell us that time is running out, that we must change our selfish ways or our planet will be destroyed. They have come to Earth for our sake, and they are working for humanity’s redemption.” (Ch 5)

Selected quotes:

• “Nursery schools were being shut down and teachers imprisoned because, after lengthy and suggestive questioning, children were describing bizarre episodes of abuse, some involving flying clowns and broomsticks and the killing of large animals.” (Ch 1)
• “Being abducted is creepy; it's painful; it involves terrifying sexual and medical experimentation; and claiming to have been abducted is a sure way to be labeled daft. Why on earth would people subject themselves to this without strong reasons?” (Ch 1)
• “Abduction beliefs poignantly reveal that the desire to find meaning and purpose in life is more fundamental than many of us realise.” (Ch 1)
• “If anecdotal evidence or the words of attractive authorities could be relied on, we’d have to accept that Yeti and the Loch Ness Monster exist, that Elvis Presley, James Dean and Jimi Hendrix are alive, that psychoanalysis causes schizophrenia, and that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq at the time of the 2003 invasion.” (Ch 2)
• “Our lives, after all, are only what we remember of them. It's unnerving to realize that our stories, feelings, memories of the past are reconstructed over time, and that we make up history as we go along.” (Ch 3)
• “The idea that a patient is an unbiased report of his or her experiences and the therapist is an unbiased listener, and that together they are engaged on an archaeological expedition of the past, runs counter to everything memory researchers know about the malleable, unstable nature of memory and especially about the way our memories are altered by our expectations and feelings.” (Ch 5)
• “Science demands reason, argument, rigorous standards of evidence and of honesty ... you must prove your case in the face of determined, expert criticism; diversity and debate are valued. The most we can hope for are successive improvements in our understanding, the chance to learn from our mistakes. Absolute certainty will always elude us. Nothing is ever known for sure, and there are no sacred truths.” (Ch 6)

Authoritative, exhaustive and hugely readable. Possibly the last word in the debate.

June 2024; 155 pages

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

"The First Crusade" by Peter Frankopan

When, in November 1095, Pope Urban II preached at Clermont, France, in about the need for a crusade to recover Jerusalem from the Muslims, it was partly to boost his own standing (he was one of two alternative popes, the other having control of Rome) and partly in response to a call for help from Byzantine emperor  Alexios I Komnenos. This book rewrites the myths to show how important Alexios was to the ultimately successful campaign to retake Jerusalem. Even though he was never physically present, preferring to lead from Constantinople, and was therefore accused of cowardice (unfairly, as a soldier before he became emperor and subsequently as emperor he often led his armies in the field) and sidelined by a history mostly written by the westerners, nevertheless his contribution to the logistics, ensuring that the armies were almost always well-provisioned, was crucial. 

This book is therefore an important contribution to the history of those times, as well as being immensely readable. Of all the characters, my favourite is the immensely brave and hugely talented soldier Bohemond who decided to keep Antioch for himself thus provoking a crisis in the leadership of the allies. When Bohemond returned home to the west he needed to pass through waters controlled by Byzantium. “Bohemond was so convinced that the emperor would take revenge for his treachery during the Crusade that he travelled home in secret. He even spread reports that he had died and had a coffin designed which purported to be carrying his corpse. As his ship passed through imperial waters, he lay in his sarcophagus alongside a dead chicken whose rotting carcase lent the coffin a powerful and unmistakable smell of death.” (Ch 10)

Readable and interesting. June 2024; 206 pages

Peter Frankopan also write The New Silk Roads

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

"My Man Jeeves" by P G Wodehouse

 

A collection of some of the first short stories in which Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves make their appearance. The collection also includes some stories featuring Reggie Prepper.

I would argue that Jeeves and Wooster represent the pinnacle of Wodehouse's oeuvre and it is interesting to trace the evolution of these characters. First there was Psmith, who first appeared in the novel Mike as schoolboy cricketer Mike's new friend. Psmith, like Wooster, has an air of indolence and a wonderful way with words but unlike Wooster he is really rather wise and it is he who enables the farcical plot to reach a successful conclusion. It is as if he is Wooster and Jeeves in a single person. Reggie Prepper is more like Wooster in that he is likely to get himself into scrapes and need rescuing; he is also the first person narrator of the stories. The transcendent moment came when Wodehouse took Psmith, removed his competence and placed them all in Jeeves, and, as with Prepper and also rather like Watson and Holmes, used Wooster as the foolish first person narrator.

The Wooster stories are set in America where Wodehouse lived during the First World War and where the third Psmith novel (Psmith, Journalist) is set. 

The joy is in the farcical situations in which the upper class twits are enmeshed and in the wonderful verbal dexterity with which the stories are told, as evidenced in some of the quotes below. His principal talent is for exaggerated similes and metaphors.

Selected quotes:

• "One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He's like one of those weird chappies in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them." (Leave it to Jeeves)
• "I hadn't the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself." (Leave it to Jeeves)
• "I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare - or, if not, it's some equally brainy lad - who says that it's always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping." (Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest)
• "What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them? Makes it so bally discouraging for a great city." (Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest)
• "The days down on Long Island have forty-eight hours in them; you can't get to sleep at night because of the bellowing of the crickets; and you have to walk two miles for a drink." (Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest)
• "Women with hair and chins like Mary's may be angels most of the time, but, when they take off their wings for a bit, they aren't half-hearted about it." (Absent treatment)
• "'Women are frightfully rummy,' he said gloomily. 'You should of thought of that before you married one,' I said." (Absent treatment)
• "In his official capacity, Voules talks exactly like you'd expect a statue to talk." (Rallying Round Old George)
• "I did a murder last night ... It's the sort of thing that might happen to anyone." (Rallying Round Old George)
• "'How long were you engaged?' 'About two minutes.'" (Rallying Round Old George)
• "It's just on the cards that I may have drowned my sorrows a bit."  (Rallying Round Old George)

June 2024; 135 pages

Other Wodehouse works reviewed in this blog may be found here.

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

"The Rock Pool" by Cyril Connolly

This is the sad story of a lonely man, a man with no discernible charisma, trying to be liked. 

A English expat and wannabe writer (of course!) with a small private income (such a trope!) staying on the French Riviera visits Trou-sur-Mer, a hilltop town that used to be an artists' colony and is now the watering hole for wannabe artists and writers and assorted bohemians. He decides that they and their milieu will make an interesting study for a book, positioning himself as the archetypal outsider (letters from England show that he was an outsider there; he reflects "They all seemed to be playing a game of grandmother's steps, in which, whenever he looked round at them, they were somehow blandly and innocently nearer the social success which was their universal goal."; Ch 10). 

But it's lonely being an outsider. What he really wants is to make friends. But he repeatedly fails to fit in: "He felt old and miserable, going through life trying to peddle a personality of which people would not even accept a free sample." (Ch 5). Some accept him because they want to sponge from him (almost no one has any money) and he spends much more than he can afford trying to buy their friendship. He occasionally gets to sleep with one of the women. A gay man makes overtures towards him: "He felt like the second most unpopular boy at a school receiving overtures from the first." (Ch 3)

It was one of those books which had so many characters that not only was it difficult for the reader to keep track of them but also the writer was unable to make any of them distinctive. The only character that felt fully fleshed was the narrator, Naylor. 

The plot, such as it was, followed the deterioration of Naylor as he tried and failed to make friends, as he spent his money and became poor (and therefore unwanted by the others) and as he devolved from being an observer to becoming one of the creatures in the rock pool.

I think it was the looseness of the plot (and the abruptness of the ending) that was one of the aspects of this book that most annoyed my fellow readers in my U3A Eastbourne Central reading group. But lots of books focus on a group of characters rather than driving a narrative. This book reminded me of novels such as Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, or Less than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis or Generation X by Douglas Coupland or Cocaine Nights by J G Ballard or Climbers by M John Harrison. Perhaps I just have a taste for nihilistic downward spirals!

I think the purpose of the book was to be a study of pond life. The inhabitants of Trou lived off each other, predators and prey, and established their position in the food chain. There seemed no higher purpose to their existence other than to survive and to satisfy their needs. Some affected strange costumes or adopted strange behaviours while others flitted in and out of the shadows.

There was a pervasive sense of sadness. I empathised strongly with this lonely, unpopular man.

In the end, the author asks himself: "Would whatever he wrote remain subject to the laws which governed the young Englishman's first novel and made it a slop-pail for sex, quotations and insincerity?" (Ch 10) Given that this was Connolly's first (and only) novel, these seem appropriate questions to ask:

• Though it is never explicit, there is a lot of sex as the bohemians bed-hop across the town. There is frank discussion of both gay and lesbian relationships (which made it impossible to publish in England; this was 1936 and Radclyffe Hall's ground-breaking lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was declared obscene by an English court in 1928. 
• There are not that many quotations but there is a lot of foreign words and phrases in French and German and Latin. Regular readers of this blog will know that this is one of my pet hates. Is the author just showing off? Probably. Am I expected to be multilingual or does he want me to miss potentially key moments? What's wrong with footnote translations?
• But I get the feeling that is is sincere. Connolly was clearly a snob both in terms of class ("Naylor suddenly realised that she was middle-class and, worse, was assuming that he was."; Ch 1) and in terms of intellectuality (all those foreign phrases, the works of literature cited, words like logophagous etc) but I get the feeling that the description of Naylor as a lonely misfit came from the author's heart.

Notes:

• In French 'trou' means a hole or an orifice. In slang it can be used, among other things, as short for 'trou de cul' (arsehole) or to mean a prison cell. Thus 'Trou-sur-Mer' might mean hole-on-sea, arsehole-on-sea, or prison-cell-on-sea. All these are relevant.
• Taormina is a resort in Sicily which at the time in which the novel is set was known as a haven for gay men.
• At one stage he remembers considering writing book which is a mixture of Petronius (presumably the Satyricon) and Lazarillo de Tormes, the classic Spanish picaresque novel.
• Votre truc means 'your thingy', votre machin means 'your thingymajig'

Selected quotes:

• "She had something expectant and glistening about her, like a penguin waiting for a fish." (Ch 1)
• "Being told that they were both English, Naylor and Varna began those elaborate manoeuvres of introduction which are performed so punctiliously in that formal country by its inhabitants and its dogs. Their problem was how to find, while asking the fewest and least indiscreet questions, their common boasting ground." (Ch 1)
• "To wake up in love, to wake up with a procession of buried feelings, bars of music, forgotten poetry returning like the cavaliers of sixteen-sixty; to surprise the priests of the oldest, falsest religion celebrating their mysteries in the reconsecrated heart!" (Ch 2) Of course a sentence full of pretentious melodrama such as this has to end with an exclamation mark!
• "Such a horror of the human race that he once had to go to bed for three weeks after standing in a queue." (Ch 2)
• "In the streets he seemed to wade through quarrelsome women in cheap pyjamas." (Ch 3)
• "It was a world of externals, where jewellery and large cars formed the true background." (Ch 3)
• "It was the hour when the soft night of southern cities holds the clearest promise of release and adventure, when a light going off is a portent and the lowering of a blind seems like a sign from heaven." (Ch 3)
• "She looked at him complicitly as the matron of a girls' school might at an obstetrician who'd had to be summoned." (Ch 3)
• "She held herself so erect that all other women seemed to stoop when one looked at them." (Ch 3)
• "For some time he lay like a crushed snail on a garden path." (Ch 4)
• "She made him feel as if he wasn't in the room." (Ch 4)
• "Jimmy did not pay much attention to the spurts and silences of Naylor's explanation." (Ch 4)
• "There are times when the fear of life is greater than the fear of death, when the remaining years ... stretch out ahead like the steps of an infinitely tiring staircase." (Ch 5)
• "He didn't like to talk while he was dancing; for him it was like driving through traffic." (Ch 5)
• "My! You can see what Trou has done to you, I've never seen anyone so altered. The ravages! It reminds me of the Picture of Dorian Gray, only it's the other way round; my portrait can't keep pace with all the changes." (Ch 6)
• "It was natural to want to go to bed with people." (Ch 6)
• "Like the circles made by a stone in a pond, his memories of her, yesterday so close and finite, widened into larger, hazier ripples that troubled every part of his consciousness." (Ch 7)
• "Is it cynical to learn from much unpleasant experience that experience is usually unpleasant?" (Ch 7)
• "The Jealous God, the Envious Being who would pinch any happiness that came one's way, if one showed it, or destroy and excellence." (Ch 7)
• "He managed a laugh, if that was the right name for his lubricious whinny." (Ch 9)
• "Regeneration does not come quickly, and the drafts of night are seldom honoured by the grim cashier of day." (Ch 10) 

It's not very structured and sometimes overwritten; most of the characters come across as self-indulgent hedonists. But, as the selected quotes above show, there were moments of wonderful writing.

June 2024; 138 pages

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

"Babel" by R F Kuang

 If you are seeking a novel that tells you how to think, this may be for you. But I prefer a book that challenges me to think for myself.

In some ways this is 'Harry Potter goes to University'. It even starts with Robin, the boy who lived, being rescued by a magician after his mother dies. Once he arrives at Oxford, the arcane rituals, such as wearing gowns, are told with Rowlingesque relish. And there is magic in amongst the scholarship. The biggest difference seems to be that spells are worked not only in Latin but by evoking the mismatch in the translation of a word between one language and another. Perhaps the only part of this novel that I enjoyed were the moments when the author explains the etymology of words. These nuggets were absolutely fascinating but they did nothing to enhance the plot, the characters or the setting.

The plot involves a struggle between the University, who make magical bars of silver which power industry at home and warships abroad, fostering the domestic inequalities of capitalism and the horrors of colonialism, and a secret society of rebels. It is fundamentally a thriller plot with the usual tropes; I don't think there were any twists that I failed to see coming. The blurb quotes the Guardian: "an ending to blow down walls." But by the time I neared the ending I was bored with the book and I didn't care for any of the cardboard characters, so I skim-read just to get to the end.

Intensely didactic, this book is set in the first half of the nineteenth century so that it condemn the horrors of colonialism with no need for nuance. Issues are presented as black and white; the goodies are always right and the baddies are always wicked. At the same time, it is an alternative history so that its protagonists can have thoroughly modern attitudes and viewpoints, such as "The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state" (Ch 17). Such anachronisms are made possible by the genre but drain verisimilitude from it.

To hammer its point home it uses footnotes to give the appearance that this is a work of history. Somehow these are even less nuanced than the main text. Some of these footnotes are factual, others are clearly set in the world of the novel. There are also many authorial insertions. RFK may believe that Percy was less talented than Mary Shelley or that William IV was "an eternal compromiser who pleased no one" but it would be more honest to place these opinions in the mouth of a character so they can be seen as opinions.

There is not a single white male character who is good, apart from the obviously named Abel Goodfellow. Skin colour seems to be shorthand for character. "I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy," says one character in chapter 23 and the only example suggested that breaks this rule is almost immediately shown to be a Judas. Such stereotyping is shallow. I prefer my fiction to have more depth. 

There are plenty of villains. Almost none of the baddies had any saving grace whatsoever. This rendered them caricatures. It's very easy to set up such straw men and knock them down. But I prefer antagonists who feel human, who seem real, who have wants and needs and failings and strengths. They're more authentic, they feel more dangerous, and they can pose emotional and intellectual challenges to the protagonists (and to the readers). 

Sadly, apart from Robin and Griffin, none of the goodies had any complexity to their characters and of these two only Robin had what might be called a character arc, although it was difficult to see how the Robin at the end could have evolved from the Robin of the early pages. These characters weren't flesh and blood, they were puppets clothed to represent aspects of an argument.

Somehow, in a book about young students at university, there was almost no sex. There were some romantic moments and there was a moment when the lead protagonist felt a physical desire for his best buddy but when the lads were offered a prostitute they reacted like maiden ladies from an old novel. Maybe this caters to a new puritan readership but it certainly didn't help the verisimilitude.

I suppose you might regard the novel as a satire, such as Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (from whom Robin takes his surname) but I prefer my novels to have more interesting plots, characters with more than two dimensions, and a deeper appreciations of the problems facing human beings living in an imperfect world.

Selected quotes:

• "He's got the personality of a wet towel: damp and he clings." (Ch 7)
• "The translator dances in shackles." (Ch 8)
• "The thick dawn mists had just given way to blue sky when the horizon revealed a thin strip of green and grey. Slowly this acquired detail, like a dream materializing; the blurred colours became a coast, became a silhouette if buildings behind a mass of ships docking at the tiny point where the Middle Kingdom encountered the world." (Ch 16)
• "The public merely wanted all the conveniences of modern life without the guilt of knowing how these conveniences were produced." (Ch 27)

June 2024; 544 pages

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