"Frankie and Dot" by Rosie Radcliffe

This is a highly readable, page-turner of a book about rehabilitation and redemption.

Frankie, posh wife of a junior Government minister, is framed for arson and sent to prison. Once released, separated from her husband who is now openly in a gay relationship, rejected by her father and her son, she has to rebuild her life in a boarding-house on the Lancashire coast with ex-cellmate Sal and her partner Buster, autistic Angus the IT whizz-kid, and the mysterious Aunty Dot. On probation, she starts a cleaning job (in her previous life she employed a 'daily') and begins the slow climb to rehabilitation. But mysterious messages threaten her with being returned to prison and she starts talking to a journalist about her husband's murky past. At the same time she begins a relationship with charity manager Nik, a widower with a daughter and a mother. 

It's very readable; there's almost too much plot. For me, the best part of the book was the first quarter when the trials facing newly released and nearly destitute prisoners were carefully detailed: this section was clearly thoroughly researched and Frankie and her problems seemed very real. There was a hint that this might be an updated feminist version of the revenge classic The Count of Monte Cristo. But at the 25% first turning point the mysterious text messages arrived and we begin the subplot about the new relationship with Nik and we begin another subplot about son Justin and around the 50% mark we discover that Dot is more than she seems (Elizabeth from The Thursday Murder Club). Soon we reach the third turning point around the 75% mark when the journalist we last met half a book ago turns up trumps and ex-husband Henry's house of cards comes crashing down. The last quarter is then rattled through at a significantly faster pace.

Frankie is a brilliant protagonist and a fearfully honest narrator and most of the other characters are solidly crafted although I could never quite believe in Dot. Of the two antagonists, both male, I was impressed by Nik who was a complex character with both strengths and weaknesses but ex-husband Henry was a pantomime villain with no saving graces whatsoever which drained him of credibility.

But where the focus was on Frankie overcoming the everyday problems facing ex-cons, the writing was strong. This was a promising debut.

Selected quotes:

• "For someone brought up as I’d been, those early weeks were not so much a rude awakening as a total tsunami of culture shock." (Ch 2)
• "I could never get my fruit to line up. Story of my life." (Ch 11)

November 2024

Published in 2024 by The Book Guild

I read the 2024 kindle edition 

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

"The Present and the Past" by Ivy Compton-Burnett

Flavia is the second wife of Cassius Clare and has done her best to bring up the two boys of his first wife as if they were her own, equal - except in that they are older - with her own three children. But this harmony is disturbed when Catherine, the first Mrs Clare turns asking for access to her sons. But it is the paterfamilias who has most to lose.

We are in classic ICB territory. The setting is a big house inhabited by a family supported by an independent income with no need to work and served by at least seven servants. The head of the household, Cassius, is a typical ICB domestic tyrant: demanding, self-pitying and manipulative.

The form is more or less what we would expect from ICB. It isn't in the least naturalistic. The plot is fast-paced, twisty and not very convincing. Plot devices, such as Mr Clare’s pills, are introduced just before they are needed. Unusually for an ICB book, there are paragraphs of description, such as: “Alfred Ainger was a tall, active man of forty, with a round, yellow head, a full, high-coloured face, very blue, bunched-up eyes, an unshapely nose and a red-lipped, elaborate mouth that opened and shut with a vigorous movement. His bearing carried an equal respect for his master and confidence in himself.” (Ch 2) But most of the narrative is carried by stiffly formal dialogue in which every character speaks aloud fully-formed thoughts. This allows the author to develop the characters while at the same time exploring the situation. She particularly enjoys questioning unthinking turns of phrase. For example, when an adult says, about the father, “He is devoted to you in his way.” one of the children replies: “I dare say a cat does the right thing to a mouse in its way.” (Ch 1) Or when Cassius tells his son: “It would do you good to have to face some real trouble.” and Henry (aged 8!) replies: “You know it would do us harm.” (Ch 1)

The servants form an echoing chorus, commenting upon the values held by the family from their perspective of dependent upon and yet essential to their masters if not betters. Some, like butler Ainger, value their albeit lowly place in the hierarchy. Others, like Halliday, who has been in service for nearly fifty years and never risen beyond ‘general man’, have reluctantly accepted their position. Still others, such as the Cook, maintain a core of anger that the idle family should be so much better off than they are. Why should the master attempt suicide? There is “no reason but discontent with a life that is better than ours.” (Ch 11)

But the real truth-telling is done by the children, especially Megan (aged 7) and Henry (8). Their comments are honest and direct and dissect the easy assumptions of the adults:

• “What is the good of knowing things, when you have to get older and older and die before you know everything?” (Ch 1)
• “It seems a pity ... that when two women agreed to marry Father, he did not like being married to either of them.” (Ch 3)
• “I don't think there is much to understand about Father ... When he is unhappy himself, he wants other people to be.” (Ch 3)

Of course, these are unbelievably precocious but that is not the point. As I have already mentioned, ICB is not aiming at naturalism. And three-year-old Toby's dialogue is a delight: everything is referred to himself and he takes a simple pleasure in smashing things. After he presides over a funeral service for a mole, it is predicted he will become a parson.

I can understand why people might not enjoy reading an ICB novel. It isn't just that they are set in a world that has long since passed. The mannered style is Brechtian, alienating the reader so that suspension of disbelief and immersion in the story becomes impossible. The narrative is so densely told that you have to concentrate; a passage skimmed is a passage you will have to reread. Nevertheless, characters are created, family dynamics are explored and, believe it or not, considerable humour is extracted. I find them enjoyable and impressive and, along with nouveua roman French novelist Natalie Sarraute (author of Tropismes), I can't understand why ICB's work was undersung in her own time and why she is practically forgotten today.

Selected quotes:

• “They loved her not as themselves, but as the person who served their love of themselves, and greater love has no child than this.” (Ch 1)
• “Our religion is a gloomy one. There are other and happier creeds.” (Ch 1)
• “I wanted to marry. Many women do. I wanted to have children. Many women want that too. And why should they not want it? And Cassius offered it to me. Does it need to be so much explained?” (Ch 5)
• “You are too busy admiring yourself to have any admiration left over.” (Ch 6)

November 2024; 171 pages

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

An Ivy Compton-Burnett bibliography with links to those works reviewed in this blog:

• Dolores (1911)
• Pastors and Masters (1925)
• Brothers and Sisters (1929)
• Men and Wives (1931)
• More Women Than Men (1933)
• A House and Its Head (1935)
• Daughters and Sons (1937)
• A Family and a Fortune (1939)
• Parents and Children (1941)
• Elders and Betters (1944)
• Manservant and Maidservant (1947)
• Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949)
• Darkness and Day (1951)
• The Present and the Past (1953)
• Mother and Son (1955)
• A Father and His Fate (1957)
• A Heritage and Its History (1959)
• The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)
• A God and His Gifts (1963)
• The Last and the First (posthumous, 1971)

"Every Man For Himself" by Beryl Bainbridge

 Winner of the 1996 Whitbread Award for Fiction; shortlisted for the 1996 Booker Prize.

This is a loss of innocence story set on the doomed Titanic. The title referring to the situation in a disaster when (presumably after 'woman and children first') everyone is entitled to do their best to save their own life. But the phrase is used in the novel by the antagonist Scurra who, having had sex with the protagonist's love interest, tells him that all is fair in matters of the heart (or rather the genitals).

The story is narrated by the protagonist, Morgan, a young male first-class passenger. Helpfully from the point of view of the novelist he is not only rich, being related to J Pierpoint Morgan whose companies controlled the White Star Line who owned the Titanic, but also an orphan whom JPM rescued from poverty, and furthermore an apprentice draughtsman who had worked on the Titanic's design; this threefold background enables him to have connections to all levels of the ship and yet to be at home nowhere. He is naive around women (there is the suggestion that he is not a virgin after experiences in brothels but he is hopeless with women 'of his own class') an one of the plot elements is his farcical wooing of Wallis. The antagonist Scurra is a mystery man who seems to move at will in all spheres; he knows some of the secrets of Morgan's background but pre-empts Morgan with Wallis.

Told in the first person past tense; nevertheless a significant part of what drives the reader onwards is not knowing whether Morgan will survive the shipwreck. It also has some superb descriptions (see Selected Quotes).

Beryl Bainbridge is author of a number of novels, those reviewed in this blog have links.

• A Weekend with Claude (1967)
• Another Part of the Wood (1968, revised 1979)
• Harriet Said... (1972)
• The Dressmaker (1973) – shortlisted for Booker Prize
• The Bottle Factory Outing (1974) – shortlisted for Booker Prize, won the Guardian Fiction Prize
• Sweet William (1975)
• A Quiet Life (1976)
• Injury Time (1977) - winner, Whitbread Prize
• Young Adolf (1978)
• Another Part of the Wood (revised edn) (1979)
• Winter Garden (1980)
• Watson's Apology (1984)
• Filthy Lucre (1986)
• An Awfully Big Adventure (1989) – shortlisted for Booker Prize
• The Birthday Boys (1991)
• Every Man for Himself (1996) – shortlisted for Booker Prize, winner of the Whitbread Prize
• Master Georgie (1998) – shortlisted for Booker Prize
• According to Queeney (2001)
• The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress (2011)

Selected quotes:

• “Then the water, first slithering, then tumbling, gushed us apart ...” (Prologue)
• “My aunt held that the rich, having a heightened sense of property, were bound to feel such betrayals [theft by a servant] more keenly than the poor.” (One)
• “He did have layers, but like an onion they were all the same.” (Two)
• “I'd seen productions of Madame Butterfly on many occasions ... and always found the story unconvincing and sentimental. Who can believe that a woman, and a Japanese one at that, is capable of such passion?” (Three)
• “It's bunkum to suppose we can be touched by tragedies other than our own.” (Three)
• “I was left, a blind voyeur, scrabbling for memories to blot out the continuing din of their beastly coupling.” (Four)
• “I jerked like a rabbit in a trap as the sliver of ice slid further down my spine.” (Five)

November 2024; 214 pages

First published by Duckworth in 1996

I read the 2011 reprint of the 1997 Abacus edition

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

"A Father and His Fate" by Ivy Compton-Burnett

 A study in domestic tyranny, told almost entirely in dialogue.

It is set in a large house inhabited by a family. Nobody (except the servants) need work, except to administer the household and the estate. They are utterly dependent upon the patriarch whose rule is arbitrary and self-serving. The story is told almost entirely in formal dialogue in which thoughts are spoken aloud.

In other words, this is classic ICB both in its traditionalist content and its modernist form. It requires careful reading: skim over a line and you're likely to need to go back. It feels stilted and yet somehow the characters build themselves and inhabit the reader's mind. 

Miles Mowbray, who is more or less the only character to speak in paragraphs rather than single lines, has three adult daughters but an 'entail' (a legal device now mostly defunct) means that it must be inherited by a male; therefore Malcolm, the adult son of Miles's brother, lives with them, learning to administer the estate. There is an unspoken assumption that Miles's daughters will remain (unmarried) in the house and be supported by Malcolm when  he inherits. The future of Malcolm's mother and brothers, who live nearby, also depends upon Malcolm's inheritance.

What could go wrong? The plot, more heavily contrived than a Shakespearean comedy, extracts every drop of potential drama and double-dealing from this set-up. Almost every plot twist was foreshadowed with heavy signposting.

Miles is the central monster. He sees himself as the master of the universe, repeatedly using the possessive 'my': my daughters, my wife, my nephew ... He is sexist: when he inadvertently quotes Christina Rossetti he denies it: “Naturally I should not quote a woman. What man would?” (Ch 15) He is bullying and demanding: “You will obey me in the matter. I impose my command upon you. You are one of the women of my family and owe me obedience at its head. And you will not question it.” (Ch 8) He slanders those who would oppose him: “A set of poor, little people without perception or pity!" When  it comes to his own behaviour, he finds every excuse for selfishness and is self-pitying: “I think it is time I was spared something. I think it is indeed.” (Ch 13). Even when shown up for the man he is, he still refuses to accept any blame: "Oh, I have not so much fault to find with myself.” (Ch 13) He is what King Lear might have become had he refused to give up his Kingdom.

His wife, Ellen, tries to talk reason to him but she is ignored. He has three daughters who act as a sort of chorus commenting upon Miles's behaviour: one is highly critical, one forgiving and one tries to ignore it and get on with her own, hugely restricted life. Malcolm, the heir presumptive, is the main antagonist, sometimes abetted by redundant governess, Miss Gibbon.

There is another Greek chorus in Malcolm's possessive mother, Eliza, who sweeps in from time to time to comment upon the situation, followed by her sons Rudolf and Nigel who do a comedy double-act of acerbic asides. Eliza, is another domestic tyrant only limited by her lack of any real power. As Miles seeks to command even the thoughts of hius daughters, Eliza thinks she can speak for Malcolm, her son: “He would like his mother to be next to him ... We are not used to being separated.” (Ch 4) She insists on being told the little asides, like a teacher insisting on a note being read aloud after it has been furtively passed around the class. Malcolm resents being constantly belittled and often defies her. He is rude about her: “No one who thinks she is a goddess, can be happy ... she must always be finding that people do not agree.” (Ch 4) Ursula agrees: “I grant her superhuman qualities. Her self-esteem and insistence on support for it are above the human scale.” (Ch 4) But if those living in Miles’s household can see Eliza as a bit of a nuisance, she has destroyed the lives of her other sons, Rudolf and Nigel, turning them into non-entities. And when it comes down to it, Eliza's self-satisfied tyranny is a shadowy imitation of Miles's.

There is plenty of humour. ICB likes to question conversational cliches. For example, when Eliza is described as 'good at heart', Audrey responds: “How I should like to meet someone who was bad at heart!” (Ch 4)

Selected quotes:

• “Most of us have two views of ourselves. One our own, and one to share with other people.” (Ch 1)
• “I am awkward with women. ... Whether I fall in love with her or not, she will not with me.” (Ch 2)
• “We show the selves we are accustomed to show, and other people to expect.” (Ch 5)
• “‘We ought not to grudge anyone his happiness, least of all our own father.’ ‘We can grudge him selfishness and folly and the indulgence of them.’” (Ch 7)
• “Things are so easy for people who have the power and must be obeyed.” (Ch 12)

November 2024; 205 pages

Originally published by Victor Gollancz in 1957

My edition the 1984 Oxford University press paperback.

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

An Ivy Compton-Burnett bibliography with links to those works reviewed in this blog:

• Dolores (1911)
• Pastors and Masters (1925)
• Brothers and Sisters (1929)
• Men and Wives (1931)
• More Women Than Men (1933)
• A House and Its Head (1935)
• Daughters and Sons (1937)
• A Family and a Fortune (1939)
• Parents and Children (1941)
• Elders and Betters (1944)
• Manservant and Maidservant (1947)
• Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949)
• Darkness and Day (1951)
• The Present and the Past (1953)
• Mother and Son (1955)
• A Father and His Fate (1957)
• A Heritage and Its History (1959)
• The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)
• A God and His Gifts (1963)
• The Last and the First (posthumous, 1971)

"Leonard and Hungry Paul" by Ronan Hession

This advertisement for non-toxic masculinity is a gentle book, grounded in normal everyday life, which uses meticulous observation and psychological insights to discover the drama inherent in our shared human experience.

Leonard and Hungry Paul are men in their thirties, both living in their parental homes (though Leonard's mum and dad are both dead when the story begins). Neither has (or ever had?) a girlfriend. Leonard works in an office ghost-writing factual books. Hungry Paul occasionally works as a casual postman.

My first reaction, as a reader, was that these are a couple of life's losers. The book sets me up in this expectation: “Though an adult son living with his widowed mother is a situation about which society has yet to adopt a formal position, it is clearly seen in second-best terms.” (Ch 1) But by the end, I was rooting for them. They are contemplatives, like modern secular monks, and Hungry Paul clearly understands far more about the spiritual values of judo than his gi-selling sensei.

On one level, this novel is a study of non-toxic masculinity. The three major female characters are all far more proactive in life, and more sexually experienced, than the three main men. Grace, Hungry Paul's sister, has a high-powered job and a string of ex-boyfriends. Shelley, the lady Leonard hopes to make his girlfriend, has a son. Hungry Paul's mum is still in part-time work and "had a good long look at the field before picking my man" (Ch 6) while his father, who is retired and just potters around, says “I knew that if I waited, all the good-looking girls would eventually drop their standards until they reached my level.” (Ch 6) These characters are fulfilling their roles in the equal opportunities utopia of the future.

The plot involves Leonard's clumsy-through-inexperience endeavours to woo Shelley, Hungry Paul's tentative steps towards greater engagement with the world, and Grace's preparations for her marriage. The delight is that a plot so mundane can make the reader long to know what will happen next. The secret is the reader's absorption into some very real, complex and beautifully delineated characters.

And there is a lot of humour in it, mostly understated but sometimes laugh-out-loud. It comes from the author's in-depth scrutiny of modern life, such as the episode where Leonard, awaiting Shelley for a restaurant date, pops into a McDonald's and buys a Happy Meal so that he can use the toilets and is then discovered eating the burger by vegetarian Shelley. Or the mime artist at the Chamber of Commerce presentation.

Delightful, charming and funny, with an important message about what it might mean to be a man in the modern world.

Selected quotes:

• “She was a keen walker and had good gallery feet, being able to wander around any reasonable exhibition in its entirety without being distracted by the gift shop honey-pot that drew in tired women half her age.” (Ch 1)
• “It was as if his baldness had been caused by gravity, with the hair drawn from his scalp into his head, now tufting out of his ears, nose and eyebrows.” (Ch 2) That sounds like me.
• “Beyond the age of twelve or so, men tend not to see each other's bedrooms as it can be difficult to contrive a plausible premise for asking.” (Ch 2)
• “Hungary Paul then dropped to the floor and started to push up on his knuckles. There was a cracking sound, followed by some oaths, and then he started again, looking like a break dancer doing the caterpillar.” (Ch 2)
• “Rather like the Green Cross Code, I like to stop, look and listen before getting involved in things. It has stood me well and kept me on peaceful terms with my fellow man. It's certainly better than trying to make my mark on the world, only to end up by defacing it.” (Ch 2) Hungry Paul’s philosophy.
• “The Romans were bullies. The Romans picked on everybody for four hundred years and were only eliminated when they got outbullied themselves by the Goths and Barbarians.” (Ch 3) A description of a world containing hugely toxic masculinity.
• “Not for the first time, he longed for an ‘undo’ button in his life.” (Ch 8)
• “His romantic feelings were now starting to awaken, with all their crazy body chemistry. It was exhausting. It was actually physically uncomfortable: all this genetic programming kicking in at once, while his poor fragile personality got run over.” (Ch 8)
• “His opinions on politics all amounted to other people pulling up their socks just like he did.” (Ch 12)
• “Hungry Paul woke with the feeding of being fastened to his bed by Velcro.” (Ch 13)
• “At the previous evening’s judo class ... Hungry Paul had been paired off with a man who was built like a wheelie bin ... called Lazlo ... Even when Lazlo stood still without putting up any defence, Hungry Paul could barely lift one of his legs off the mat, ending up with his arms and legs clamped around him like a randy corgi.” (Ch 13)
• “To deprive life of experiences deliberately and to hide from its realities was not special. It was just another form of fear that led to a life-limiting loneliness that accumulated and accumulated and became so big that it blocked up the front door, drowned out conversations and put other people behind soundproof glass.” (Ch 14) I love the alliteration in ‘life-limiting loneliness’. And then the physical description of the psychological state: the blocked front door and the soundproof glass.
• “The drama that comes with wine: the little taste to see if it's corked and then the Man-from-Del-Monte nod when it's not.” (Ch 14)
• “Does any of this make any sense to you, or am I just talking fluent Prosecco at this stage?” (Ch 14)
• “Nothing looks as much like old age as dead space that has been dusted and vacuumed meticulously.” (Ch 15)
• “As they each suspected some frostiness in the other because of the midweek cancellation of their Monopoly game, they misread each other's mood, and in doing so doubled their helping of unhappiness.” (Ch 16)
• “Grace refilled her glass and shook the end of the bottle in puzzlement, as if it had been emptied by a leak or something.” (Ch 17)
• “Watch him the next time you spill something. His whole attitude is that it has already happened, and he just moves on to cleaning it up.” (Ch 20)
• “Hungry Paul stared at the stippled ceiling and bathed in the quiet all around him. He tuned his ears to listen to the ever-present silence itself, rather than the bubbles of noise that floated in it. He began to appreciate its profound scale. All major spiritual and philosophical traditions throughout history had emphasised the value of silence. The universe, whether expanding or contracting, does so amidst a vast ocean of it. The big bang sprang from it and will one day return to it.” (Ch 21)
• “Leonard had a look at his bookshelves for some of the paperbacks he had bought recently, which had been stacked in the horizontal unread pile ever since, vertical alignment being reserved for those he had already finished and enjoyed.” (Ch 22) I do that!
• “Even when doing nothing, people do it differently.” (Ch 28)

November 2024; 240 pages

Published by Bluemoose books in 2019

Ronan Hession has also written Panenka and Ghost Mountain.

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

"Little Boy Lost" by Marghanita Laski

 

A novel with a huge emotional charge. Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian (15/09/2001) said: "If you like a novel that expertly puts you through the wringer, this is the one."

Hilary, an Englishman, travels to post-war France, searching for John, the son he only saw as a day-old baby before the Nazi invasion drove him from Paris. Now a friend of his late wife's believes he has tracked the lad down in an orphanage. But is the little boy that he meets his real son?

The protagonist, Hilary, is the archetypal ‘stiff upper lip’ Englishman. In the first chapter, disconnected by being set in England rather than France and nearly two years before the main action, we discover that Hilary’s relationship with his mother is one of “bitter incessant strife” since his father died, partly because his mother insists on enjoying a social life. He wants her to comfort him instead. He is the sort of man who, starved of familial love, has taken refuge in literature and poetry. But there was a moment in his past when, on a year in Paris, he fell in love and married and fathered a son. That happiness was snatched from him by the war and he has retreated again into his books, building a shell to protect him from further hurt. Now, if he is to find his son, he must expose himself again to the possibility of pain.

The first third of the book deals with the mechanics of how the little boy was lost. There’s a slightly disconnected preface when Hilary discovers, on Christmas Day 1943, that not only was his French wife killed by the Gestapo for her role in the Resistance but also that his son had gone missing. The informant, Pierre, pledges to find John because he feels guilty because his own wife was entrusted with John before she too was captured and killed by the Gestapo. The book picks up again in 1945 when Pierre tells Hilary that he has found a boy called Jean in an orphanage in a northern French town. The chain of events linking John to Jean is traceable but by no means certain. Jean himself is too young to remember his earlier life.

Thus we are launched into the main part of the book which focuses on Hilary meeting Jean and trying to decide if Jean is John. This section is set in a town which has been brought to its knees by invasion and occupation and even by the violence used to liberate it. The infrastructure has sustained heavy damage. The necessities of life are in short supply. The meals at the hotel are meagre and unappetising ... but there is the choice of the black market menu which those like Hilary who have money can enjoy. Life at the orphanage is even worse. Jean is poorly fed and worse clothed. His toys are “a pinecone, a stone marble with nearly all its colour rubbed away, a used American stamp, and a tiny little celluloid swan with its head broken off.” (Ch 6) His dormitory is, of necessity, shared with boys who have TB; since milk is prioritised for those under six, rickets is inevitable for the older boys.

And the people are damaged too. When your country is occupied, it is almost impossible to survive unless you collaborate to some extent. Pierre, who has lived under the Nazis and been part of the Resistance, understands that. He says: “I am tired of ‘collaborationist’ as a term of abuse; we each did under the Germans what we were capable of doing. ... Some found they were better than they thought, some worse.” (Ch 2) But Hilary, who never suffered occupation, is unable to see beyond black and white. When Pierre reveals his support for Charles de Gaulle, Hilary dumps him: “He’s a fascist ... to take him with me would be to contaminate my ordeal.” (Ch 4) Later he describes France as “enveloped in a miasma of corruption”. (Ch 10) This is a man who does not do empathy and one almost fears for the future of Jean if he is brought up by such a moral absolutist. 

There's more than a hint of Oliver Twist in this part. As he revealed in a Preface to the third edition of his novel, Dickens "wished to show, in little Oliver, the principle of good surviving through every adverse circumstance, and triumphing at last." Oliver's core goodness cannot be infected by the baseness of his environment. Similarly, the maths teacher tells Hilary that Jean "is the son of someone like you. ... He is of a mental calibre quite different from the other boys. ... I should certainly say that he came from a cultured and intellectual background." (Ch 10). Dickens clearly believed that 'good birth' trumped a terrible upbringing and Laski subscribes to this view; the only difference between them being that Dickens saw things in terms of immutable social classes and Laski in terms of intellect and culture.  

But that's the scenery. The foreground of this part of the book is whether Jean is John. Hilary takes Jean for walks, trying to find evidence, intuitive if not physical. As the author described the pathetic little orphanage boy and charted the developing relationship between Hilary and Jean, I started to urge Hilary to adopt Jean whether or not they are related; my view was shared by some of the other characters in the story and by other readers to whom I have talked. But Hilary knows how much raising a child will disrupt the life he has built around poetry and London and intellectual company. Even encountering the orphanage’s maths teacher, who used to do research into maths at the university in Paris, he finds it “inconceivable that an intelligent man should be happy to live in a provincial town and talk about everything in the world with people less intelligent than himself.” (Ch 10)

I adored this middle section of the book. I was absorbed into Hilary’s dilemmas and I longed desperately for him to make the right choices. This was writing at its most immersive.

This part of the book is the liminal zone, in which Hilary is filled with doubts, conflicts and uncertainties. But a plot must have a conclusion and this is achieved in the final quarter of the book when Hilary goes to the cinema to watch a film and breathe in the cheap perfumes of the women in the audience. He tells himself with his trademark priggishness: “Both the film and the perfume had been manufactured on the assumption that sexual desire was a potent force and that people could choose to lead lives in which the satisfaction of that desire was the driving motive.” (Ch 12) Suddenly his sex-drive is reignited. Immediately, bursting onto the scene like a deus ex machina, temptation arrives in the form of Nelly, a lady whose way of life is supported by multiple men. But Nelly comes with a cost: she’ll only let him love her if he comes to Paris and, since his money is running out, that means abandoning Jean. The scenery changes too from the predominantly drab tones of the lifeless town to the arrival of a circus and fair.

We shift into a higher gear. The need to make a decision becomes more urgent. The tension is ratcheted up. The plot is driven towards its ending. But it all felt a little out of the blue. The transition felt clunky. I felt that I could see the mechanism of the plot being operated. The ending is nail-bitingly tense and hugely dramatic ... but it felt contrived.

In summary, the book certainly works on the level of a page-turning read with an important question and a plot which races to find an ending. There are moments when the nuanced moral challenges reminded me of a Graham Greene story. The centre section of the book was spell-binding. But I found the ending too manipulated. This was a meal that could have been a banquet but was let down by its dessert.

Selected quotes

• “As groups we often do evil that good may come and very often the good does not come and all that is left is the evil we have pointlessly done.” (Ch 1)
• “One can never be short of the end, only of the means, and so we must be sure that the means are good.” (Ch 1)
• “Once - but so long ago! - Hilary had understood food. He had treated his palate as a precious instrument of pleasure, and indulged it with esoteric knowledge. But all this was so far away that his consciousness had forgotten its sensations. For so many years now meals had been dull, methodical exercises less pleasurable, in terms of real pleasure, then the movements of the bowel that were their necessary complements.” (Ch 4)
• “I don't like children as such; they bore me. I used to think a child of my own would make me happy, but I know that isn't true any more.” (Ch 4)
• “The little boy came in and in the instant before his eyes perceived the child there was torn from his blood, his body, his very consciousness the conviction that this was his son.” (Ch 6) I found this sentence ambiguous. Was the conviction torn out of him or away from him?
• “Hilary was a fast reader and dreaded nothing more than to be stranded without print.” (Ch 8)
• “When I was a young woman ... there was a word for women who wore clothes for this purpose - and believe me ... that was not ‘member of the Resistance’.” (Ch 10)

November 2024; 220 pages

Originally published by Cresset Press in 1949.

My Persephone Books edition was published in 2001

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

"The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chandler

 

The beautifully written classic of hard-boiled detective fiction.

The Crime Writers Association thought it the 2nd best crime novel of all time in their list of the 100 best published in 1990. The Mystery Writers of America rated it 8th in their top 100 published in 1995. Time Magazine chose it as one of the best 100 novels since Time began (1923).

This is very much a book of two halves. Chandler's hero solves the case for which he has been hired by the 50% mark but he then worries away a couple of loose ends. It was no surprise for me subsequently to discover that he constructed TBS by sticking together two short stories that he had already written Killer in the Rain, 1935, and The Curtain, 1936. He then added threads to make them seem a coherent whole. In the process of this he added his trademark atmospheric descriptions.

TBS is unusual for its time in being a murder mystery in which the first-person narrator is the detective. The tradition, established with Conan Doyle's Holmes and Watson and continued with Agatha Christie's Poirot and Hastings and Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, had been to use the sidekick as narrator. Otherwise, most of the stories of the 'golden age of detective fiction' (1920s and 1930s) are written in the never-quite-omniscient (by definition since a mystery must perforce involve hiding things) third person. 

For all his disillusion, Marlowe sees himself as an old-fashioned knight rescuing a damsel in distress. This theme comes from the very first page as Marlowe sees "a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair.” (Ch 1) Much later, he is considering a chess problem and realises: “Knights had no meaning in this game. it wasn't a game for knights.” (Ch 24) And almost - but not quite - at the end he sees that “The knight in the stained-glass window still wasn't getting anywhere untying the naked damsel from the tree.” (Ch 30) But he does solve the case and he also rescues the damsel.

The joy in TBS doesn't lie in the plot (there is a loose end that is never properly tied up) but in the prose. Marlowe is a master of metaphor and simile and he uses this to create perfect descriptions which are brief but original and as precisely tuned as a resonant frequency:

•  “The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and storks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.” (Ch 2)
• “The white made the ivory look dirty and the ivory made the white look bled out.” (Ch 3)
• “She looked like a nice old horse that had been turned out to pasture after long service.” (Ch 3)
• “Sodden trees dripped all over the landscape.” (Ch 6)
• “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.” (Ch 8)
• “He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money.” (Ch 9)
• “Their accounts of the Affair came as close to the truth as newspaper stories usually come - as close as Mars is to Saturn.” (Ch 20)
• “You leak information like a radio announcer.” (Ch 23)
• “He wore a blue uniform coat that fitted him the way a stall fits a horse.” (Ch 26)

His longer descriptions are also meticulously observed:

• “The gourd player rubbed his fingertips together as if they were sore and got a cigarette into his mouth almost with the same movement. The other four, with a timed simultaneous stoop, reached under their chairs for glasses from which they sipped, smacking their lips and flashing their eyes. Tequila, their manner said. It was probably mineral water. The pretence was as wasted as the music.” (Ch 22)
• “He hit me again. There was no sensation in my head. The bright glare got brighter. There was nothing but hard aching white light. Then there was darkness in which something red riddled like a germ under a microscope. Then there was nothing bright or wriggling, just darkness and emptiness and a rushing wind and a falling as of great trees.” (Ch 27)

Selected quotes:

• “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be.” (Ch 1)
• “She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable.” (Ch 1)
• “I could see ... that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.” (Ch 1)
• “There was a lot of oriental junk in the windows. I didn't know whether it was any good, not being collector of antiques, except unpaid bills.” (Ch 4)
• “Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.” (Ch 6)
• “I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust. ... A French writer, a connoisseur in degenerates. you wouldn’t know him.” (Ch 11)
• “You have to have your teeth clamped around Hollywood to keep from chewing on the stray blondes.” (Ch 21)
• “The little dead man sat silent in his chair, beyond fear, beyond change.” (Ch 26)
• “I’m ... just a plain ordinary copper. Reasonably honest. As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it's out of style.” (Ch 30)
• “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep.” (Ch 32; start of final paragraph)

November 2024; 251 pages

First published in 1939 by Knopf in the USA

My edition published in 2011 by Penguin

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

"Woman on the Edge of Time" by Marge Piercy

 

A woman in a mental hospital visits a Utopian future by means of  telepathic time travel.

Connie (Consuela) is a poor Latino woman living in New York. Whilst trying to shelter her niece she breaks a pimp's nose, for which she is returned to mental hospital. Here she is selected for neurosurgery to have electrodes planted in her brain so that she can be controlled. This reminded me of Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

From time to time Connie visits, through some form of telepathy, a Utopian commune in rural Massachusetts, 160 years in the future. She meets the people and they explain their way of life. It's very communistic and, having liberated women from bearing children and breast-feeding, the genders have equal status. There has been and still is warfare against less enlightened society but her new friends look forward to the time when they will have solved their external problems. 

Connie's problem, which drives the plot, is to avoid the impending neurosurgery. She attempts escape but in the end is forced to considered a more drastic solution.

For me, the very best examples of speculative fiction  keep world-building to a minimum; for example classics such as Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro or The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham are set firmly in the everyday world we all know ... with one or two little tweaks that make all the difference. Woman on the Edge of Time is the opposite: it indulges in full-throttle world-building. In order that the reader can appreciate all the finer points of the depicted utopia (and an alternate dystopia) it uses a tour-guide approach whereby one of the characters explains all the features of the world to Connie. Not only was this rather wearisome, especially when we had a full chapter on the funeral rites of one of the characters, but also it meant a great deal of telling rather than showing. On the other hand, if you like world-building, it meant that a lot of world got built quickly.

The tour-guide approach reminded me of Virgil leading Dante through Hell in Dante's Inferno and that is referred to rather more explicitly.  As Connie enters the mental hospital we are told “Here she was with her life half spent, Midway through her dark journey". This echoes the first line of the Inferno: "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita" ('When in the middle of the journey of our life'). 

At then end of the book we are left with the uncertainty about whether the time travel was real or fantasised by Connie; she is in a mental hospital and she is diagnosed with schizophrenia.

I found that the sheer unlikelihood of it all made it difficult for me to suspend my disbelief. I am always slightly suspicious of the idea that if we all went back to nature everyone would be nicer: people in rural areas often seem more fanatically prejudiced than those in more cosmopolitan places. The process of reaching Utopia also always seems underestimated: in the case of this novel there must have been savage depopulation over a relatively short space of time. 

It very much reminded me of News From Nowhere by William Morris in which the protagonist falls asleep and wakes up in another rural paradise in the future. Both in the 'brooder' baby hatchery of Chapter 5 and in the children attempting to have sex in Chapter 7 there are clear echoes of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. However, WotEoT lacks the moral nuancing of BNW; this is very much a tale of goodies and baddies.

But there are some great characters. Many in the supporting cast felt real and Dolly was a delight, especially when she visits the mental hospital in Chapter 11 and is so befuddled by drugs that she keeps recycling though the same conversation. I enjoyed Jackrabbit as well, although most of the creation of his character came from what others said about him, again a matter of telling rather than showing.

There are some stunning descriptions too, especially of the mental hospital and Connie's attempted escape. The first scene is wonderfully dramatic. I also enjoyed the way the author gave the characters in the future their own words whose meanings the reader had to work out for themselves, a technique used with great effect in The Book of Dave by Will Self and, supremely, in The Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, another book with psychological personality manipulation as a theme.

Selected quotes:

• “She pitched forward, weak as string.” (Ch 1)
• “When blocked, manoeuvre to survive. the first rule of life inside.” (Ch 1)
• "Then the gates swallowed the ambulance-bus and swallowed her as she left the world and entered the underland where all who were not desired, who caught like rough teeth in the cogwheels, who had no place or fit crosswise the one they were hammered into, were carted to repent of their contrariness or to pursue their mad vision down to the pit of terror.” (Ch 1) 
• “Houses filled with machines and lapped by grass.” (Ch 2)
• The modern world is described as “fat, wasteful, thing-filled times.” (Ch 3)
• “We are born screaming Ow and I! the gift is in growing to care, to connect, to cooperate.” (Ch 12)
• “Your drug companies labelled things side effects they didn't want as selling points. It's a funny way to look at things, like a horse in blinkers.” (Ch 14)
• “A factory makes a product. But that's not all. It makes there be less of whatever it uses up to make that product. ... A factory may also produce pollution - which takes away drinking water downstream. Dead fish we can't eat. Diseases or gene defects. These too are products of that factory. A factory uses up water, power, space. It uses up the time, the lives of those who work in it. If the work is boring and alienating, it produces bored, angry people.” (Ch 14)

An interesting book but too heavy on the exposition and too light on making the future believable. 

November 2024; 417 pages

Originally published in the US by Knopf in 1976

I read the DelRey edition published in the UK in 2016.

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