"Lily" by Rose Tremain

Tremendous verisimilitude but a dearth of complex characters in this novel about Victorian England.

 Foundling Lily, saved from wolves as a newborn by a policeman, is raised by the Coram foundation. Following an idyllic six years raised on a farm in the countryside, she is returned to the strictures and abuses of the orphanage. As a young adult becomes a wig-maker (hair is a theme that runs through the novel). But she has murdered someone and when she re-encounters the policeman who saved her, now a detective, she realises that her discovery is inevitable. 

Following the first line hook "She dreams of her death", we are told that the eponymous protagonist-narrator has murdered someone but it is not until we are two-thirds of the way through the book that we finally witness it happening. I felt that this was over-prolonged, perhaps because there is little drama elsewhere in this predictable story about hardship and cruelty in a Victorian orphanage.

This is the sort of historical novel in which the past is viewed through the eyes of the present. It therefore presented easy targets and was inevitably condemned. Opposing arguments (such as the idea that life inside the orphanage, for all its traumas, is better than the life of an orphan on the streets of London) are weakly made. I prefer novels which challenge contemporary thinking and make me think, such as the robust defence of zoos mounted in Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

The story is thoroughly grounded in the period; the author's research creates enormous verisimilitude. But the characters are either goody-goodies (the rustics) or baddies (of course, the figures of authority who are either unspeakably wicked or complacently ineffective). This undermines the realism and turns this bildungsroman into a fairy tale.

Selected quotes:

• "Swaithey was a place where life more more slowly than time." (Rookery Farm)
• "Age kills us piece by piece." (The Brass Crucifix)
• "The long sigh of someone whose habit it was to sound a lamentation on her daily quota of existence." (The Brass Crucifix)

I have loved some Rose Tremain novels (The Road Home, Absolutely and Forever, The Gustav Sonata) but this is one of the ones which was merely okay.

November 2025; 274 pages

First published by Chatto & Windus in 2021

My Penguin Vintage paperback was issued in 2022

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

Rose Tremain novels:

• Sadler's Birthday (1976)
• Letter to Sister Benedicta (1978)
• The Cupboard (1981)
• Journey to the Volcano (1985)
• The Swimming Pool Season (1985)
• Restoration (1989)
• 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year
• Shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize
• Sacred Country (1992)
• Winner of the 1992 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
• Winner of the 1994 Prix Femina Etranger
• The Way I Found Her (1997)
• Music and Silence (1999)
• Winner of the 1999 Whitbread Award
• The Colour (2003)
• The Road Home (2008)
• Trespass (2010)
• Merivel: A Man of His Time (2012)
• Shortlisted for the 2012 Wellcome Book Prize
• Shortlisted for the 2013 Walter Scott prize
• The Gustav Sonata (2016)
• Winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award
• Shortlisted for the 2016 Costa Book Awards
• Longlisted for the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for fiction
• Winner of the 2017 Ribalow Prize
• Islands of Mercy (2020)
• Lily: A Tale of Revenge (2021)
• Absolutely & Forever (2023)
• Shortlisted for the 2024 Walter Scott Prize

"Blood on the Dining Room Floor" by Gertrude Stein

 This short novella isn't a conventional murder mystery but a modernist experiment, regarded as one of the least accessible of Stein's works.

In 1893, as a young woman, Stein studied under psychologist William James (brother of Henry James the novelist); he thought her his most brilliant woman student. She developed what was then called 'normal motor automism' which we might now called automatic writing, a sort of free-flowing prose which tried to bridge the gulf between speaking and writing, a forerunner of the 'stream of consciousness' techniques later practised by Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage: Pointed Roofs, Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and James Joyce in Ulysses. 

Later, when she moved to Paris, she became an art collector and hosted a salon which attracted some of the leading lights of the modern art scene, including:

• Pablo Picasso
• Henri Matisse
• Georges Braque
• Ernest Hemingway
• F Scott Fitzgerald
• Sinclair Lewis 
• Ezra Pound
• Thornton Wilder
• Sherwood Anderson

Her writing can be seen as an attempt to do the same for prose as Picasso and Braque were doing for art. This makes Stein an important writer. It doesn't make her work easy to read.

What, for example, is one to make of "Should they be briefly in tears a mother a cousin and no brother." (Ch 12)?

Features of her style:

• There's very little punctuation, mostly full stops (periods if you're American) and commas and not that many of those.
• It is littered with repetitions, eg: "Now that he had come back from the war they grew richer and richer. Nothing changed but that. They grew richer and richer. Nothing changed but that. After a war is over if they come back from the war and they grow richer and richer sometimes everything changes and something nothing changes but that." (Ch 1)
• She often seems to address the reader directly, eg: "Which one. Which one oh which one." (Ch 12)
• Some times she seems to get carried away with words that rhyme: "She cried when she tried but soon she did not try and so she did not cry. As a day was a day it came to be that way." (Ch 1)
• The book is peppered with injunctions to 'Lizzie' such as "Lizzie do you understand" (eg Ch 1) or "Lizzie do you mind" (eg Ch 1) which are thought to refer to Lizzie Borden the infamous American alleged axe murderer (she was acquitted) whose story is told eg in the novel See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt.

Sometimes I think there is more style than substance. It is intriguing. As reader I found myself puzzling over her words. But was she just playing with me? Was it indeed all style and no substance?

Is there a murder? There are servant problems, as one couple replaces another in a seemingly endless succession. Two cars are sabotaged. A woman falls out of a window of her hotel and is thought to have walked in her sleep to her death. A horticulturist has a family of eight whose eldest wants to become a priest but becomes a lawyer instead while his youngest brother becomes the priest (I think). There is another family. As for the blood on the dining room floor ... I never found out whose it was. 

It was a fascinating reading experience. But entertaining? No.

Nevertheless, it has whetted my appetite to read more Stein.

Selected quotes:

• "The next ones were immigrants. That is immigrants exist no longer because no nation accepts them. These however had been immigrants years ago when everybody wanted them." (Ch 1)
• "Why should blood on the floor make anyone mad against automobiles and telephones and desks. Why." (Ch 1)

November 2025; 70 pages plus a foreword, notes and a short biography of the author.

• Written in 1933
• First published in 1948
• My Renard Press paperback edition issued in 2025

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

"The Mystery of Three Quarters" by Sophie Hannah

By Henrycooksey - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11806025

 An Hercule Poirot continuation novel. Poirot and faithful sidekick and narrator Inspector Edward Catchpool . A classic 'cozy' murder mystery involving a country house, the use of a great deal of psychology, well-hidden clues and a satisfying twist near the end.

But I was rather put off at the start when Poirot was satisfied that his taxi pulled up at the entrance of his apartment block such that "one could draw a straight line from the middle of the vehicle to the exact point where the doors met." (Ch 1; first paragraph). My problem is that, mathematically speaking, one can draw a straight line between any two points. I presume that Hannah means that the straight line would be perpendicular to the doors (and to the side of the cab)? I suspect that Poirot, being at least as pedantic as I am, would have corrected her himself.

Selected quotes:

• "English discretion, Poirot had observed, had an outward appearance that suggested doubt." (Ch 1)
• "What little hair he had hung in isolated strands of white, as if remnants of a wig he had once worn had adhered to his scalp." (Ch 16)

November 2025; 384 pages

First published by HarperCollins in 2018

My paperback edition issued in 2019

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

Sophie Hannah has had the blessing of the Agatha Christie estate to write this novel as part of this series:
The Monogram Murders (2014)
Closed Casket (2016)
The Mystery of Three Quarters (2018)
The Killings at Kingfisher Hill (2020)
Hercule Poirot's Silent Night (2023)
The Last Death of the Year (2025)

"Zazie in the Metro" by Raymond Queneau

 Teenage girl Zazie comes to Paris for the first time to stay with her Uncle Gabriel, a dancer in a drag act, for a few days. Her ambition is to go on the Metro but it has been closed by a strike. She embarks upon a picaresque among the ordinary folk of the city.

The novel is distinguished by a remarkable vocabulary. I was reading in translation so I don't exactly know what Queneau was doing but the translator twists the language used. For example, the novel's first word is "Howcanaystinksotho" which I translated as 'How can they stink so though?' as Gabriel protects himself from the collective odour of his fellow Parisians using a handkerchief drenched in perfume. From this moment on we embark upon a voyage through a neologistic paradise. Added to this bizarre word-play is a set of descriptions which give a freshness to concepts. For example, a wife's husband is described as "the one legally entitled to mount her" (Ch 1). All this adds up to a story told in hugely original prose. But you have to concentrate and that can be quite exhausting. 

Other neologisms too many to list but including eg):

• boko = nose
• tsgo = let's go; there's a lot of this sort of thing, such as "Ida know" for 'I don't know'.
• Exetra = etc
• orama = view (as in panorama)
• hormosessual = homosexual

Selected quotes:

• “Superb skyscrapers four or five storeys high lined a sumptuous avenue on the pavement of which verminous street-stalls were jostling one another.” (Ch 4)
• “They fitted like a cross between a glove and a dream.” (Ch 6)
• “I wonder why people think of the city of Paris as a woman. With a thing ike that. Before they put it up, perhaps.” (Ch 8): They’re looking at the Eiffel Tower
• “Open wide your peepers, clots and clottesses.” (Ch 9)
• “One is wont to drink soft drinks of strong colour and strong drinks of pale colour.” (Ch 12)
• “The two fops lapsed into collapse.” (Ch 17)

It reminded me of the work of Flann O'Brien such as At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman and of Road Kill - The Duchess of Frisian Tun by Pete Adams. 

October 2025; 157 pages

First published in French by Librarie Gallimard in 1959

My paperback edition was translated by Barbara Wright and issued as a Penguin Classic paperback in 2000

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