"The Tonbridge Outrage" by John Brookland

The true story of rape and murder in early twentieth century England. 

This is the true crime story of the rape and murder of seven-year-old Frances O'Rourke in the Kentish town of Southborough, near Tonbridge on New Year's Eve 1901. It contains details of the investigation by the newly established Kent detective police, who were hampered by the rudimentary state of forensics at the time and built their case from (a lot of) circumstantial evidence. It details the trial of the accused and the aftermath. 

It was mostly well written although in the first few chapters some of the reconstructed dialogue felt stilted. The author was particularly good at giving a sense of the period and explaining the legal procedures which sometimes felt very alien to modern ideas. I appreciated the provision of maps and photographs to help the reader follow what sometimes felt like a deluge of witness testimony.

Selected quotes:

• "Shafts of sunlight shone diagonally across the court as though to try and brighten the sombre proceedings." (Ch 11)
• "It is a common misunderstanding that someone who can commit such an extremely degenerate and horrific crime must be a monster, but paradoxically many commit such crimes so that they can feel normal in the hope it will remove a sense of impotency." (Ch 13)

August 2024

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

"Stay with me" by Hanne Orstavik

 

“No one at home ever said they loved me. If I'd asked, I know they would have said yes, Mamma and Pappa, of course they loved me. Only I didn't ask, part of the reason being that I didn't want Pappa getting angry. And of course it was such an unquestionable thing. Like god loving mankind. It's something you know. Why couldn't I feel it?” 

So starts this book in which the author, a writer, recounts her relationship with a much younger man, M, from whom she fears violence, and remembers the threat of violence in the family in which she grew up, from which her mother fled. 

There are two interwoven narratives. There is the one above, which sounds like a memoir, and there is the novel that the writer is trying to write. This novel sounds highly autobiographical. Both protagonists are recovering from a bereavement. Both are dating a much younger man. But the frame narrative is the one that has the constant fear of domestic violence, which seems to be the fundamental theme of the book.

What distinguished this book was the quality of the prose. She tended to write long paragraphs, sometimes containing rambling sentences full of comma-separated phrases, such as this one: “It's like we've gone behind a curtain and discovered a hidden place, the pond at the centre of everything, a place where there's no through-wind anymore, where everything that isn't carried along on the whirling current instead loses momentum and is deposited at the side and then just lies there, hesitantly almost, until enough detritus has collected and something else takes over and sort of shoves it into motion, gets it going again, a little bit more, come on, only then, eventually, when it's no longer possible to get any further, when there's nothing else left to come and carry it along, it all just collects at the side again, in the stagnant water.” (p 60) She has an inconsistent relationship with question-marks, as here: “How long does the beginning last. When does the beginning melt into something else, and become a person's days. And when do those days change, and become something else still.” (p 14) The idiosyncrasies were unimportant, what I loved was the way she could write about some transcendent ideas is very simple terms yet at the same time produce prose that seemed full of illumination. Look at that quote about the pond again. Isn't it brilliant? 

Selected quotes:

All extracts and page references are from the 2024 translation by Martin Aitken published by &And Other Stories, Sheffield, ISBN 9781916751088

• “It wasn't leaving the milk out, it was being that sort of person. The sort who's negligent, thoughtless, who never pays heed.” (p 8)
• “All I know is that I was afraid, afraid was a skin beneath my skin that couldn't be shed.” (p 8)
• “Love was something others were doing. I saw it in films and could imitate it. But it wouldn't let me in. I had no idea how to do it.” (p 10)
• “She looks down into the water, as if the water was a membrane and there was another world underneath.” (p 12)
• “The way everything is so big and there's no movement anywhere. As if she's a little girl in an over-dimensioned house surrounded by streets and trees and enormous skyscrapers, the big river rushing its course, and all around, to all sides, the endless prairie. The path leading across the lawns, and there’s such a long way to the cars and to the outside walls of the house. Space between all things.” (p 27)
• “Every moment, no matter if it hurts, no matter if it's terrible, is so intense then, it bursts open, and everything else is shoved out to the edges.” (p 34)
• “There's something we're permitted to see and there's something else for absolutely not permitted to see, and it's the line between those two things that makes the image shimmer.” (p 90)
• “Are we put together from multiple parts, where some of those parts are rudimentary and primitive and small, while others are bigger, older, more grown-up, competent and responsible? Do all those parts rattle around us, and who if anyone knows how they fit together? Is there someone who takes care of it all, who keeps us together, holds us tight and looks after us? Or is it all just parentless chaos in there, a legion of different-aged children, some retreated into the darkness of corners, others running around, boisterous and physical, sometimes at odds, while still others attempt to maintain order, meeting out punishments and keeping the rest in check?” (p 154)

A beautifully written novel, full of epiphanies, about a very troubling issue.

August 2024; 216 pages

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

"The Groote Park Murders" by Freeman Wills Croft

Who murdered the man whose body was found on a railway line in South Africa? A police procedural set in the 1920s, when forensics was in its infancy, bobbies patrolled their beats and the detectives had to book a car if they needed one. The second half of the novel investigates a linked crime in Scotland whose shocking denouement throws new light of the first murder.

A classic whodunnit from the golden days of detective fiction written by one of the masters of the genre in his time, now sadly unrecognised.

As was common in those days, the Jewish diamond merchant is portrayed with the usual anti-Semitic stereotyping; casual racism is also to be found in the portrayal of the 'negro' witness.

August 2024; 254 pages

Freeman Wills Croft was a prolific author. Aldo reviewed in this blog:

• Crime At Guildford

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

"Zeno's Conscience" by Italo Svevo

Zeno is a rich but incredibly ineffectual hypochondriac. 

This novel is set in Trieste in the early years of the twentieth century (1900s) when Trieste, now part of Italy, was the naval base on the Adriatic Sea for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Zeno is a rich man who over-analyses every thing he does, from getting married (to the wrong woman) to taking a mistress to being an immensely unsuccessful businessman. It seemed to me a rather more explicit version of The Diary of a Nobody except that it had fewer laughs and significantly more words. 

Perhaps that was the point. Zeno could not decide on any action unless he had considered it from every perspective. Usually, what he did was embarrassingly inappropriate, at which point he reanalyses everything to prove to himself that he was right after all. I suppose it was meant to be funny but the joke was suffocated under the weight of words. Wearisomely long-winded.

On the other hand, the meditation on Trieste by Jan Morris - Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere - is a superb book. 

Selected quotes:

• “I recall once staying a full half hour in a dark cellar, together with two other boys of whom I remember nothing but their childish clothing. Two pairs of short socks that stand erect because there were once bodies inside them, which time has erased.” (Smoke)
• “In the end, my days were full of cigarettes and of resolutions to smoke no more.” (Smoke)
• "Exercise? No, because experience told him that whatever moved eventually stopped." (My Father's Death) At school. I had a friend who was reluctant to exercise because he believed that one was endowed at birth with a certain number of heartbeats and he didn't want to use them up too quickly.
• "The most intense life is narrated, in synthesis, by the most rudimentary sound, that of the sea-wave, which, once formed, changes at every instant till it dies!" (The Story of My Marriage)
• "Those who have not experienced marriage believe it is more important than it is. The chosen companion will renew, improving or worsening, our breed by bearing children, so she induces us to believe that our wife will also bring about a renewal of ourselves:: a curious illusion not confirmed by any text." (The Story of My Marriage)
• “When I went to that house ... I counted the steps that led me to that upper floor, telling myself as if their number was odd it would prove she loved me, and it was always odd because there were forty-three of them.” (The Story of my Marriage)
• “For all my efforts I achieved the result of that marksman who hit the bullseye, but of the target next to his.” (The Story of my Marriage)
• “Giovanni ... thought at the top of his lungs.” (The Story of my Marriage)
• “I retained those theories and I amplified them by reading Weininger. They never heal you, but they come in handy when you are chasing women.” (The Story of my Marriage)
• “An imaginary sick man was genuinely sick, but more intimately and even more radically than the genuinely sick.” (Wife and Mistress)
• “It was a slightly forced smile: the true look of gratitude.” (Wife and Mistress)
• “The battle with sin in some circumstances becomes very difficult because you have to renew it every day and every hour: as long as the girl remains on that landing, in other words.” (Wife and Mistress)
• “Wine is a great danger, especially because it doesn't bring truth to the surface. Anything but the truth, indeed: it reveals especially the past and forgotten history of the individual rather than his present wish; it capriciously flings into the light also all the half-baked ideas with which in a more or less recent period one has toyed and then forgotten; it ignores the erasures and reads everything still legible in our heart.” (Wife and Mistress)
• “The fact remains that when two people are hugging each other, they are in a position quite different from when one is cleaning the other shoes.” (Wife and Mistress)
• “Men in this world learn only by listening to themselves; in any case, they are unable to learn by listening to anyone else.” (The Story of a Business Partnership)
• “A mistress shared is the least compromising mistress.” (The Story of a Business Partnership)
• “The horrible period in which my children soiled and screamed would pass.” (The Story of a Business Partnership)
• “All organisms extend along a line. At one end is Basedow’s disease, which implies the generous, mad consumption of vital force at a precipitous pace, the pounding of an uncurbed heart. At the other end are the organisms depressed through organic avarice, destined to die of a disease that would appear to be exhaustion but which is, on the contrary, sloth. The golden mean between the two diseases is found in the centre and is improperly defined as health, which is only a way-station.” (The Story of a Business Partnership) An Aristotelian view suggesting that happiness lies in moderation, between the extremes.
• “Natural law does not entitle us to happiness, but rather it prescribes wretchedness and sorrow.” (The Story of a Business Partnership)
• “Nothing is more conducive to meditation than watching the flow of water. You stand motionless, and the running water supplies the distraction needed, because it is never identical to itself, in its colour and its pattern, not even for a moment.” (Psychoanalysis)

August 2024; 437 pages

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

"The Lodgers" by Holly Pester

Homelessness does not necessarily mean living on the streets. 

This novel about transience has two alternating narrations. In one the narrator describes, in the first person, her present life, using the past tense. The other narrative, written in the second person, is an imaginary reconstruction of the life of the person who replaced her in her previous lodging. This 'reconstruction' is clearly based on her own experiences in that house so it refers to the past while being written in the present tense.

In the present life, she is living in a sublet, forever awaiting the arrival of a flatmate. Her flat overlooks her mother's house; she goes round from time to time (she has a back door key) but her mother (called 'Moffa') isn't there. Moffa used to be an actress and was notorious in the neighbourhood for her parties; the narrator recalls being on tour as a child with her mother with all the transience that life entailed; her childhood seems to be mostly one of loneliness and observing others. Even now she is clumsy and socially awkward.

In the past life she lives in a town nearer the coast, where she studies a therapy course based on triangles. She rents a room (weekday evenings and nights only, since it was used as a workroom during the day; she has to make alternative arrangements for weekends) from a woman who lives with her daughter, a badly-behaved little girl. A professor also lodges there and they have occasional casual sex; more transience.

The novel is very good at conveying how much of an outsider a lodger is

• “How we cater for and clean ourselves will be convenient for another person we live with, or not.” (p 29)
• “What else are we except things for whoever we live with to put up with?” (p 29)
• "I learned, like you, to lodge, I mean, adapt and hide my needs rather than dig down, simply hover without much substance, meekly occupy, as the tenant of the tenant, it's how I was born.” (p 85)

The narrator is eternally trying to 'triangulate'. At the 50% turning point, she gives several meanings for this word, from psychology, geometry, and data science. She and the professor form a triangle with the child. In geometry, triangulation is a technique of establishing where something is in reference to two other points; perhaps the narrator is trying to work out where she is psychologically in reference to Moffa's house and the house in which she previously lodged. Triangulation in data science is something similar: it examines findings from different viewpoints in order to test a hypothesis; "it's a process of rigour and caring about truth" (p108). This is exactly what the narrator's competing narratives are doing.

In map-making, triangulation involves using two fixed points in order to locate a third point. But it only works if you have those fixed points. The narrator grew up with the unstable Moffa, and an apparently absent father (who is referred to only thus: “The house is all mother, carpets and bed linen, while the domain, the father, is the reason we can't look in mirrors at night.”; p 44). She has no fixed home. She is fundamentally lost.

This sense of dislocation and rootlessness is repeated time and again:

• “I had journeyed; had been myself in transit.” (p 3)
• “Maybe you also shift it around and email strangers, and move through life trying to be in the right place but keep ending up in slightly the wrong place.” (p 10)
• “I was always spinning around on the hoof of having-just-left and on the hoof of having-just-got-back.” (p 44)

She also conveys, I think, this sense in the words she uses and the sentences she constructs. What she is saying is all about utterly mundane reality, but the way she puts it can verge on the psychedelic. For example: “Having to be impermanent but ready - like an imminent alarm clock, encountering street names and weather, sacrificing one plan and one direction in favour of another, regarding a nice tree, dead tree, common threat, bad design, couples walking together, sunrise, nature in reality against my idea of it - is a socially inherited condition. What I mean is: that same morning I woke up very early and went for a walk in a nearby woods.” (p 148) Lists like this one occur sporadically throughout the book; their apparent grammatical and semantic incoherence jars and disturbs. At least this sentence is followed by its explanation. Others, such as “A child is a moving bloom of orphaned licence. Her world is made of unstoppable radial prompts.” (p 124), or “Something fundamental about men struck me in that instant: they are the inevitable figures of conclusions.” (p 204 - 205), I was unable to translate.

Inevitably, there is little in the way of plot, since a plot implies a purpose. Tenancies do, however, have a beginning and an end and so the narrative does have a shape. This hidden structure uses glimpses of the everyday life of these lodgers to build up a mosaic portrait of the narrator. Not everything is explained, the reader has to fill in a lot of gaps, but in the end one gets a sense of the character. 

Selected quotes:

Page numbers refer to the 2024 Granta paperback edition

There are some phenomenal descriptions:

• “The sandwich ... was still in the box, hardening and weeping humous.” (p 5)
• “I found a sputniky barbecue that was so rusty it made my teeth sing to be near it.” (p 46)
• “As the tap dripped into the steel sink of my sour kitchenette that night ...” (p 163)
• “The sky went a nuclear peach colour. All garden life was pulsing and gasping. Gaseous vegetal trailers and pink-lipped flowers with dark, musky herbs, nightmare-winged little birds dipping towards the light, drips from the leaking water feature, drain smell - I was part of it all.” (p 207)

Other selected quotes:

• “As a bored and nervous young girl I often imagined climbing inside a small case or container, like a piano stool or matchbox, a washing-machine drum or bread bin, and living in there.” (p 1)
• “Your route is one I've taken before, it ends on the riposte of a cul-de-sac.” (p 10)
• “A friend of mine told me once ... that we needed to hyper-empathise with the faceless people who disturb us. For instance we should say to ourselves, that bastard needs to play his music right now at that volume because he's had a terrible nightmare and he suffers from anxiety that’s eased if he dances on the spot. Or, that disgusting slob behind me on this train is eating crisps so noisily because he's hungry, he didn't have time to eat today, he's rushing from work, his name is Nico and he's on his way to the bed size of his sick daughter who is on nil byi mouth and he doesn't want to eat in front of her. Or, that arsehole screams at her cats because she loves them so much, and she’s a war veteran. She’s an alcoholic. Her heating has been cut off.” (pp 72 - 73)
• “I've tried to trick and tempt and triangulate work, love and their materials into an order. it never works. I was more myself living in the margin of Moffa’s house." (p 85) 
• “Life makes horrible door-whackers of us all.” (p 89)
• “A child moves as she thinks, the two of the same, and because she cannot understand who you are, she bangs into you. you do the same when you can't understand what your life is, you bang into things.” (p 124)
• “After everything I still believed that if you transmit both need and warmth into the universe, the universe will send something back.” (p 204)

This novel isn't always easy reading but it certainly has an atmosphere of disruption and displacement which chimes perfectly with its subject matter.

August 2024; 217 pages

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

"Only here, only now" by Tom Newlands

A girl grows up in the squalor of an impoverished town, surrounded by drug addicts and petty criminals. Is there any hope that she can escape?

Cora Mowat is a feisty 14-year-old lassie with ADHD, growing up with her wheelchair-bound mother in 1994 Muircross, an impoverished (and fictional) town in Fife, Scotland, a place she describes in chapter one thus: “It was a manky wee hellhole set out by itself on a lump of coast the shape of the chicken nugget, surrounded by pylons and filled with moonhowlers and old folk and seagulls the size of ironing boards that shat over everything. Chaos and fighting and shite in your fringe, that was Muircross. ... The town looked like a handful of grey gravel chucked up the coast.” (Ch 1)

Right from the start you can hear Cora's distinctive voice and enjoy her unique and eloquent observations of her world. She is a damsel in distress, surrounded by peril. The dangers include getting pregnant, male violence, falling foul of alcohol abuse or drug addiction or a gangster boyfriend, being bullied for being different, getting sucked into a life of petty crime, or just giving up hope. Her only chance seems to be her mum's shoplifting boyfriend.

There's plenty of action in the plot ranging from a hilarious date with a Goth boyfriend whose car is attacked by burgers and shakes outside a fast food restaurant to the terrifying fate of the lad trapped in a phonebox with an ignited box of fireworks. Conflict abounds. There's menace and there's tragedy, there's dancing and there's death. She seems drawn to the damaged and the bullied, like the rollerblading girl at school whom nobody likes. And when she has a chance, Cora is an expert in self-sabotage. All the time I was hoping and praying she'd make it and fearing and expecting she wouldn't. This kept me turning the pages all the way to the end.

Cora is a fabulous character, a first person narrator growing up before our eyes. The peripheral characters are mostly complex and interesting. The stereotype, I suppose, is that kids from these backgrounds grow up damaged and there were certainly some who descended into personal hells. But of course poor people are normal people and despite their circumstances they could be kind and generous, and clever and thoughtful, and honest and decent. These characters are visceral and real. 

One of the characters is Cora's environment. Poverty abounds. Jacket potatoes with oven chips is a healthy meal, noodles in a chicken flavoured sauce is commoner fare. Gunner's signature dish is spaghetti with a sauce made from a can of chicken soup, milk and water with scrunched up crisps toasted under the grill for a topping. When she is given a decent pair of trainers she knows they must have been stolen. Everything in her world has a price and mostly it is too expensive for her. And the streets are litter-strewn, the community facilities are vandalised, and the seaside is a rubbish dump. 

The theme is hope despite this background of post-industrial urban decay. These characters might be weeds in a wilderness but most of them are struggling towards the light. 

This is realism in the tradition of Zola: his Germinal is set among the downtrodden and impoverished inhabitants of a coal mining village. The closest recent novel with which it bears comparison is, I think,  Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. 

Selected quotes:

• “Round here you lived in your town and then you died in your town.” (Ch 1)
• “He was a gangly-looking thing, head like a conker, hair shaved off, nose like a witch from a crap cartoon. just the one eye.” (Ch 2)
• “Round here the options for lassies like me were school or a wean, shelf-stacking or shoplifting, gin on the Shreddies or tongue in the socket.” (Ch 4)
• “Auntie Janine used to say that even wasps wouldn't land on my mam's cooking.” (Ch 4)
• “The smudgy blue evening sky made me feel so calm.” (Ch 7)
• “Most of all I hated the future - anything could happen there.” (Ch 8)
• “All adults ever did was tell you bad news or lies or make you eat things at a certain speed.” (Ch 12)
• “He laughed. ‘Been to the zoo once and think you're a tiger.’” (Ch 15)
• “Music was predictable and it gave me a wee bit control over my surroundings. You could rewind and replay.” (Ch 26)
• “It's like your bones have been crying out for light since the day you were born. Then heroin pulls you inside out.” (Ch 27)
• “Imagine you're a sexy wee delicate plant breaking through the first time. You could be growing anywhere in the world, and you twiddle your petally head round for a look and realise you're stuck for life growing in a crack in the tarmac in Whiteinch. Peeping out of the bit where the wires off a phone box go underground.” (Ch 30)
• “Kira had been right, there does come a point where you have to accept who you are and start living.” (Ch 33)
• “You feel useless through almost every second of school and now you're going out into the adult world with the tomato sauce moustache praying that people won't see the wee fraud you are. Some days you can't remember what’s in your own pockets, you can't hold a conversation without interrupting or humming Wet Wet Wet songs to yourself and you've never once been on time. Now the future you want depends on people thinking you're normal.” (Ch 33) Imposter syndrome before an interview!
• “Shame was just a cheap badly fitting neon ski jacket with a broken zip that you had to go around wearing forever, making you a flat-chested hunchback, reminding you of the past.” (Ch 36)

August 2024; 392 pages

A brilliant bildungsroman with a post-industrial decay realism setting.

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

"Midnight's Children" by Salman Rushdie

By Shiva_as_the_Lord_of_Dance_LACMA.jpg, photographed by the LACMA.derivative work: Julia\talk, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14771931

Winner of the Best of the Bookers: the prize for the best Booker Prize winning novel (1981) in the first forty years of the prize. It also won the 1981 James Tait prize. Rated by Robert McCrum as 91st of the Guardian's 100 best novels of all time. Chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels since Time began.

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight, at the exact same time as the nation of India is born (achieving independence from the British Raj on 15th August 1947). At the age of ten he discovers he has telepathic powers; all the children born within the first hour of India's independence have one superpower or another. His story and the story of his family are inextricably linked with the story of India.

Saleem's life does indeed seem to follow the trajectory of the prophecy made shortly before he was born.

It's an epic both in size and in its attempt to "embody the history and aspirations of a nation" (which is part of the definition of epic in the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory). 

It is narrated by Saleem as an older man (therefore past tense, first person) to his paramour, pickle maker Padma, who delightfully critiques his narration (this reminded me of Jeffrey Farnol's The Geste of Duke Jocelyn) and repeatedly switches into Saleem's present. It's discursiveness and the fact that Saleem's birth doesn't happen until the 25% mark, reminded me of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. 

It is peopled by a cast of eccentrics worth of Dickens, The central section of the book was for me the best. It follows Saleem through his childhood, and we meet his mates Eyeslice and Hairoil and Cyris the Great and Sonny and Evie Lilith Burns and the adult neighbours such as (naval) Commander Sabarmati, film magnate (and thus employer of Saleem's uncle Hanif) Homi Catrack, Doctor Schaapsteker ... One of the merits of the book is that there are so many characters and they are all memorable (and many of them pop up later) but they are caricatures, flat characters, who can be summed up in a few lines and who never change despite the contortions of the convoluted plot.

Many of the characters change their names. Saleem himself gets nicknamed Snotnose and Sniffer and Stainface, Baldy and Piece-of-the-Moon; he later becomes the buddha.  His sister Brass Monkey becomes Jamila Singer. His mother was Mumtaz Aziz and is Amina Sinai. Her first husband is Nadir Khan who later becomes Nasir Qasim. Cyrus the Great becomes Lord Kushro Khusrovand. Identity and its ability to change is one of the themes of the book. I loved so many of the characters. 

The only other of the Children of Midnight born as the clock chimed, in the same hospital as Saleem, is Shiva, a Hindu deity often depicted as the four-armed Lord of the Dance, one of whose attributes is as destroyer. But Saleem believes that he himself is the catalyst who brings death on his friends and relatives. The hero as destroyer seems to be another of the themes of this book; this reminded me of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. 

There are other recurrent motifs such as noses (Saleem's is enormous, a "cyranose" and, once cleared, is able to smell emotions) and spittoons.

This is a hugely entertaining book and some moments of great humour.

Selected quotes:

• “Clock-hands joined in respectful greeting as I came” (Book One: The Perforated Sheet)
• “His face was a sculpture of wind on water: ripples made of hide.” (Book One: The Perforated Sheet)
• “I sit like an empty pickle jar in a pool of Anglepoised light.” (Book One: The Perforated Sheet)
• “I wish, at times, for a more discerning audience, someone who would understand the need for rhythm, pacing, The subtle introduction of minor chords which will later rise, swell, seize the melody.” (Book One: Methwold)
• “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.” (Book One: Tick Tock)
• “In those days, Bombay had been declared a dry state. the only way to get a drink or to get yourself certified as an alcoholic; and so a new breed of doctors sprang up.” (Book Two: The Fisherman's Pointing Finger)
• “All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate.” (Book Two: Snakes and Ladders)
• “Children get food shelter pocket-money longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it's a sort of compensation for having been born.” (Book Two: Accident In A Washing Chest)
• “Old people shroud themselves in the past during a war; that way they're ready to die whenever required.” (Book Two: Accident In A Washing Chest)
• “The sad mature wisdom of dirty washing lingered with me, teaching me its philosophy of coolness and dignity-despite-everything and the terrible inevitability of soap.” (Book Two: Accident In A Washing Chest)
• “Maya ... may be defined as all that is illusory; as trickery, artifice and deceit, apparitions, phantasms, mirages, sleight-of-hand, the seeming form of things: all these are parts of Maya.” (Book Two: At the Pioneer Cafe)
• “Cocksure men do terrible deeds. Women, too.” (Book Two: At the Pioneer Cafe)
• “You got to get what you can, do what you can with it, and then you've got to die.” (Book Two: At the Pioneer Cafe)
• “Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.” (Book Two: Alpha and Omega)
• “Unconscious in the night-shadow of a mosque, I was saved by the exhaustion of ammunition dumps.” (Book Three: The buddha)

August 2024; 647 pages

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

"When the Dead Speak" by Sheila Bugler

Eastbourne pier, a location in this whodunnit

A murder mystery that ticks all the boxes.

A young woman is found dead on the altar of St Mary's church in a scene that parallels an unsolved murder from sixty years previously. Freelance journalist Dee sets out to investigate but her police detective boyfriend Ed is off the case because his now-dead uncle was accused of the earlier crime. Cue repeated lies and failures of communication between the two of them as Ed goes maverick to try to clear his uncle's name and Dee has trust issues. Characters include sleazy hoteliers, dying doctors and self-righteous Christians. In the end, after the principal ladies encounter life-threatening violence, the convoluted plot is unravelled.

It was a quick, easy read. I found it a little difficult to keep on top of who was who among the suspects, especially as there were two sets, from the past and from the present. The narrative was regularly broken by flashbacks using the device of diary entries from the 1960s which lacked verisimilitude; it just didn't sound like a diary. On the other hand, the use of real places in and around Eastbourne (the Hydro hotel, the pier, St Mary's Church, the Lamb Inn, Seasons cafe at the Harbour) added credibility for someone like myself, who lives there. 

I think my biggest problem lay with Dee and Ed's relationship. They repeatedly failed to communicate either by omission or the use of falsehoods. This created lots and lots of conflict but it seemed artificial. They fell out with monotonous regularity, as if they sensed when the plot needed another twist to maintain the tension. Ed, who had been quite a believable character in the first of this series, I Could Be You, was reduced to a stereotypical male while Dee was eternally ready to see the worst in him while giving herself a blanket pardon for the same sins. His obstinacy was her strength of character ("if other people felt differently that was their problem, not hers"; Ch 15). She made everything about her, from the fact that her neighbour had other friends and might move away from the substandard caravan she rented from her to the fact that her cousin was having an affair; Dee was always the centre of her youniverse.

But the pacing was spot on, with the turning points coming at all the right places, the book was easy to read and the pages quick to be turned.

Selected quotes:

• "Unlike her husband, who was flashy to the point of trashy, everything about Karen's appearance seemed designed to make her as invisible as possible." (Ch 12)

August 2024; 348 pages

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

 

"The Demoniacs" by John Dickson Carr

 

Did the old lady found next to a chest of jewels in a house on old London Bridge in 1757 really die of fright? And was her death connected to a runaway heiress and her uncle's mistress? Bow Street runner Jeffrey Wynne investigates on behalf of blind Sir John Fielding.

This novel is set in Georgian London and features the Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens, made famous in Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (half-brother of the real-life Sir John), Newgate prison and a pre-Tussauds waxworks, and even visiting clergyman Laurence Sterne (real-life author of Tristram Shandy and real-life member of a Hell-Fire club called The Demoniacs). It's a glorious pre-Regency romp complete with duelling and carriages careering over the cobbles at breakneck speed and scandalous secrets. There is a hideously over-complicated family tree which utterly baffled me. The identity of the murderer also baffled me but when the denouement came and the clues that had been scattered throughout the text were explained, I thought: 'Of course, of course, of course. I should have spotted that, I should have thought of that.' And that is the mark of a satisfying whodunnit. 

John Dickson Carr was a prolific writer of whodunnits, specialising in the 'locked room mystery'; he was perhaps best known for a series of books starring Dr Gideon Fell. He also wrote a number of historical murder mysteries. This is an excellent example of the genre.

Selected quotes:

• "Mrs Lavinia Cresswell, widow, could have passed for thirty anywhere except in the broad daylight most fashionable ladies avoided." (Ch 2)
• "To praise a woman because she has never exercised her sex is as though you should praise a man because he has never exercised his brains." (Ch 2)

August 2024; 216 pages

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

"Narcissus and Goldmund" by Hermann Hesse

Sculpture from wood (a pieta) in Durham cathedral

 Hesse's exploration of how to reconcile the two sides of human nature: the Apollonian world of ideas and the Dionysian world of the senses.

In the mid-1300s, in middle Europe, Goldmund, an attractive golden-haired boy, is brought up in a monastery where he forms an unlikely friendship with Narcissus, an austerely intellectual scholar. Then he experiences the love of a woman. He leaves the monastery to become a vagabond, playing “the joyous, secret game of lips and limbs” (Ch 7) as he travels. He's a bit of a stud: “For love, and the game of loving, he was gifted.” (Ch 8) Then he feels the calling to become a wood-carver. Natch, he is naturally gifted at this too. But just carving wood isn't good enough for him. “For him all art and artistry were worthless unless they shone like the sun, had the might of storms in them - if they only brought pleasant, narrow happiness.” (Ch 11) He is torn between the discipline of his chosen vocation and the urge to wander and he hits the road again just as the Black Death strikes.

It's a brilliant portrait of an artist: it reminded me of My name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok though that book goes rather deeper into the technicalities; this is more about the need in some men for creative fulfilment: “Art was the fusion of two worlds, the world of the spirit and the blood, the world of the father and the mother. Rooted in the grossest senses, she could grow to the clearest abstract thoughts, or take her origin in the rarest, incorporeal world of the intellect, to end in the solidist flesh and blood ... All these legitimate, true born works of art, not jugglers' pieces but true craftsmen’s - presented this same perilous, two-faced smile.” (Ch 11)

Yes, it is a book of ideas, enthused and motivated by its attempt to explore the division between the Apollonian world of the intellect represented by Narcissus and the Dionysian world of sensuality represented by Goldmund. But the artistry of Goldmund demands, and gets, some wonderful passages of description, such as:

• “Why had they never seen these anguished gills, these eyes glazed with the agony of death, these tail-fins, beating the air so wildly - or felt the bitter, desperate horror of this slithering fight against extinction, this last, unbearable transformation of lovely and mysterious fish, as a shiver ran along their dying bodies, and they lay, exhausted and limp, pitiful meals for the table of some gluttonous burgess.” (Ch 12)
• “Goldmund examined all these faces. In the little maid’s, though already it was puffed and swollen, there was a look of helpless shrinking away from death. This mother's nape and hair, who had burrowed so deeply and wildly, had a kind of rage and terror, of passionate flight in them. This tousled hair would not be reconciled with death. The man's face was defiant, and set in pain: he seemed to have perished there by inches; his beard was thrust sharp into the air; a warrior, stretched upon the field. His rigid defiant sullenness was beautiful.” (Ch 13)
• “Every stick and stone held some gentle memory of his boyhood, and his love impelled him to seek out each, listen again for every cloister-sound, the Sunday bells, and builds to offices, the rushing of the dark millstream between its narrow walls, green with moss, the clatter of sandals, the evening jingle of keys, as the brother-porter went his rounds for the night.” (Ch 18)

I was confused about the names of the main characters. Narcissus in the thinker and yet he has the name of the beautiful youth of Greek myth who caught site of his own reflection in a pool of water and fell in love with it. Not exactly the man described as “a thinker and anatomiser” (Ch 2) “This subtle scholar, the learned, the penetrating.” (Ch 2) “dour and certain, clear and inexorable.” (Ch 3). Perhaps Hesse believes that intellectual pursuits are inherently narcissistic. Narcissus does show a significant understanding of psychology and a good degree of self-knowledge (“Mine is the nature of a scholar, and my branch of scholarship is science.”; Ch 4) which must have come from self-reflection. Goldmund, on the other hand, is given the name of an archbishop of the early Christian church: St John Chrysostom. The identity is explicit: “Once he dreamed himself his patron-saint, the Holy Christostom, the golden-tongued, whose mouth was gold, from which he uttered golden words, and the words were a swarm of little birds, rising and flying off in glittering bands.” (Ch 5) But for all his eloquence, Johnny C was a very puritanical archbishop who disapproved of theatre and sports, destroyed pagan shrines and sided with iconoclasts. So the name of each of the twin protagonists refer to characters who are their opposites! Perhaps Hesse is thinking of the yin and yang symbol in which the black has a white eye and the white is centred by a dot of black; this symbol stands for the unity that can come from opposites. “All being, it seemed, was built on opposites, on division. Man or woman, vagabond or citizen, lover or thinker - no breath could be both in and out, none could be man and wife, free and yet orderly, knowing the urge of life and the joy of intellect. Always the one paid for the other, so each was equally precious and essential." (Ch 16)

One of these key opposites is between life and death. Some might say that Goldmund represents the life force and Narcissus the death force, like Boris and Theodore in Donna Tartt's superb novel The Goldfinch. But I think that is unfair on Narziss. Certainly Goldmund the young stud represents life and Goldmund the artist represents creation but it is in the travels of Goldmund that we encounter the Black Death and it is Goldmund himself who comes to see death as a return to the mother who had abandoned him as a child: “In him death's wildest song had a different echo, a voice calling homewards into the earth, home to a mother; its sounds not harsh and white, but sweet and enticing.” (Ch 14) 

And Goldmund is the one who kills. And when he faces death, there is a superb description of the pleasures of life: “He must take leave of his hands, his eyes; of thirst and hunger, food and drink, of love and lute-playing, sleep and waiting: of all. tomorrow a bird would skim through the air, and Goldmund have no eyes to watch it with, a girl stand singing at her window, and he have no ears for her song; the river would flow on and on, the dumb, shadowy fish swim with it, a wind spring up, and strip the yellow leaves to earth; there would be a moon, and glittering stars, young men would go out to dance at Christmas fairs, the first snows whiten the distant hills - and all these things would be for ever, each tree spreading out its shadow, men with joy or mirth in their living eyes, and all without him; none of it his!” (Ch 16)

It has clear resonances with other books by Hermann Hesse:

Knulp is his story of a vagrant.

The Glass Bead Game is an exploration of knowledge; one could see Narcissus being the lead character in this.

Siddhartha is a version of the story of the Buddha; Siddhartha's life has parallels with Goldmund's in that there is wandering, there is a period of sensuality, and in the end there is reconciliation.

In the end this is: “The history of a lecher and a wastrel, a homeless, faithless, vagabond of the roads; yet all that he had left of it, there in the wood, was fair and true, and full of vivid love. How strange and secret life could be, how dark and muddy flowed the stream, how clear and beautiful what remained with us!” (Ch 19)

Yes, it is a book of ideas but it also has two brilliantly complex characters, some incredible descriptions and a perfectly-paced plot that kept me turning the pages. It has made me want to go back and re-read Hesse novels that, like this one, I first read over fifty years ago. This book is worthy of the man who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946.

Selected quotes:

• “He, often enough, had felt with repulsion the longing eyes of elder men upon him, had encountered often enough with dumb rejection their proffered friendship and caresses.” (Ch 2)
• “One of them saw, and one was blind, and so they went together, side by side. That the blind knew nothing of his blindness was a comfort only to himself.” (Ch 3)
• “Have you not heard that one of the shortest ways to sanctity may be a life of carnal riot?” (Ch 3)
• “It is not our task to come together; as little as it would be the task of sun and moon, of sea and land. We two, my friend, are sun and moon; sea and land. Our destiny is not to become one. It is to behold each other for what we are, each perceiving and honouring it in his opposite: each finding his fulfilment and completion.” (Ch 4)
• “We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full reality. Ours is a thin and arid life, but the fullness of being is yours; yours the sap of the fruit, the garden of lovers, the joyous pleasances of beauty. Your home is the earth, ours the idea of it. Your danger is to be drowned in the world of sense, ours to gasp for breath in airless space. You are a poet, I a thinker. You sleep on your mother's breast, I watch in the wilderness. On me there shines the sun; on you the moon with all the stars. Your dreams are all of girls, mine of boys -” (Ch 4)
• “It was a glorious thought that there should be such love in the world, love that is all spirit and selfless joy. How different from that love in the sunny field, the drunken, reckless love of flesh and blood. And yet both were love.” (Ch 6)
• “How many dreams this fair brown maid had given him, how many buds she had brought to flower, how much restless longing stirred, how much re-awakened!” (Ch 7)
• “Oh, if a man could change his shape!” (Ch 7)
• “He found that his freedom was very dear to him, and did not remember a single mistress so sweet he could not forget her with the next.” (Ch 8)
• “Such may have been his deep Intent, that he should get to master women and love in all their thousand modes and differences, as some musicians become the masters of three or four instruments, or of many.” (Ch 8)
• “You will wander through the world, and every woman you meet will love you, yet all the while you will be alone.” (Ch 8)
• “As this groaning mother screamed her pain, the twisted lines of her face differed little from those he had seen in the moment of love's ecstasy, on the faces of the women he had clasped.” (Ch 9)
• “Since his sight of this sweet and blessed Mother of God, Goldmund had a thing he had never known, a thing here often smiled at, or envied, in others: an aim. Yes, he had an aim, and would reach it, and so, perhaps, his whole confused existence might take on a new meaning and unity.” (Ch 9)
• “I have watched many faces and shapes, and afterwards thought of them ... I have seen how always, in every shape, a certain form, a certain line, repeats itself; how a forehead seems to tally with a knee, a hip with a shoulder; and how the essence of all this is the very being and temper of the person.” (Ch 10) Later in the book, Narcissus refers to the Platonic theory of ideals.
• “Goldmund was not one of those luckless artificers who, though they bear within them the highest gifts, can find no right craft by which to express them. There are many such who, seeing all the beauty of the earth, can find no way to give it forth again, and share with others what they have seen.” (Ch 11)
• “He knew, not in thoughts or words, with the sure, deep knowledge of the blood, that all his ways would lead him to the mother; to lust and death. The other, the father-side of life, the intellect and will, were not his home. There dwelt Narziss.” (Ch 11)
• “But art did not come as a free gift, certainly she was not to be had for the asking, she cost dear, demanding many offerings.” (Ch 11)
• “Every real secret, he thought, all the true-born pictures of the mind, were like this one small secret of water. They had no form, no clear, accomplished shape, would never let themselves be perceived, save as a far-off lovely possibility: they were veiled and had many meanings.” (Ch 12)
• “Dreams and the greatest works both had their mystery.” (Ch 12)
• “How can I live happily here, if I know that soon it will all be past and over?” (Ch 13)
• “The rich had brought the plague, the poor said, and the rich said it was the poor; while many said it was the Jews, and some the Italians, or the leeches.” (Ch 14)
• “A man could live, letting his senses have free rein, sucking his fill at the breasts of Eve, his mother - and then, though he might revel and enjoy, there was no protection against her transience, and so, like a toadstool in the woods, he shimmered today in the fairest colours, tomorrow rotted, and fell to dust. Or he could set up his defences against life, lock himself into a workshop, and seek to build a monument beyond time. And then life herself must be renounced ... though he might serve eternity he withered, he lost his freedom, fullness, and joy of days. ... And yet our days only had a meaning if both these goods could be achieved, and life herself had not been cleft by the barren division of alternatives.” (Ch 16)
• “When we sing we don't hinder ourselves with asking if our singing is really a wasted time. We sing, and that is all. That is how you must pray.” (Ch 18)
• “Only now do I begin to perceive how many paths lead us to knowledge, that study is not our only way to it, and perhaps not the best to follow.” (Ch 19)
• “You craftsmen take the most perishable of all things to your hearts, and, in their very transience and corruption, you herald the meaning of the world. You never look beyond or above it, you give yourself up to it, and yet, by your very devotion, you change it into the highest of all, till it seems the epitome of eternity.” (Ch 19)

August 2024; 300 pages

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