"The Monogram Murders" by Sophie Hannah

 Can Hercule Poirot solve the three murders in a London hotel, linked (sorry!) by a monogrammed cuff-link in the mouth of each victim?

Clues and red herrings abound in this classic Poirot continuation novel, narrated by a more-than-usually-hopeless sidekick, Inspector Catchpole of Scotland Yard whose personal inadequacies make one question how he ever was appointed as a constable, let alone made it to his rank on the murder squad. But as usual, all the little impossibilities are solved by the man with the moustache though the final solution is possibly more far-fetched (farther-fetched?) than any of those proposed in the interim.

And what does it all have to do with evil happenings fifteen years ago in a village stuffed with more than its fair share of rustic weirdos?

Selected quotes:

"I try to be a good Christian , but I have my weaknesses, as we all do. Mine is the inability to forgive the inability to forgive." (Ch 10)

Sophie Hannah has had the blessing of the Agatha Christie estate to write this novel and its sequels:

1. The Monogram Murders (2014)
2. Closed Casket (2016)
3. The Mystery of Three Quarters (2018)
4. The Killings at Kingfisher Hill (2020)
5. Hercule Poirot's Silent Night (2023)
6. The Last Death of the Year (2025)

May 2025; 373 pages

First published by HarperCollins in 2014

My paperback edition issued in 2015.

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

"This Part is Silent" by S J Kim

한국인

 In a series of short pieces in this "book that is not a novel" (Dear Manchester Chinatown), Kim records her frustration with the British academic system: she doesn't get called 'professor' as she would if she was working in the USA, and she has to produce 'research' (in her case write at least 8,000 words of a novel in two years) in order to pass her probation and be made permanent. Inter alia, she records instances in which she feels threatened or undervalued by men because she is a woman and occasions which she perceives as racist because she is Korean.

Scattered throughout the book are Korean (I presume) characters, sometimes forming blocks of text. As regular readers of my blog will know, this is one of my pet hates. Usually it is authors who use French or Latin either on the assumption that I can read these languages (or can be bothered to use Google Translate) or simply to show off their knowledge. I suspect that, in this book, Kim is using these characters deliberately so that I cannot understand what she is saying.

While I defend the right of an artist to create work purely because that fulfils some creative need within themselves (just as I would defend a religious person to worship before a congregation of themselves only, because worship is about the relationship between the worshipper and the god), they aren't entitled to demand my support. One of the functions of art is to communicate and art that fails to communicate is not as good as art that succeeds. So, for example, when a poet gives a long explanation of what their poem 'means' before reciting it: a better poem wouldn't need the explanation. So, for example, when a piece of work on a gallery wall is accompanied by text telling you what it's all about: a better artwork wouldn't need the text. 

Kim's use of Korean characters seems to be more about making a political point than attempting to communicate with this reader. I persisted reading this book to the end but I neither enjoyed it nor felt anything but alienated.

Selected quotes:

• "A public history seeps into the body, the way tea leaves soak upo the scent of a fridge." (Forgive me my eyeballs)
• "They drove for some time, their headlights cutting white through the strangely tinctured dimness of the tunnel." (Forgive me my eyeballs)
• "In creating his own oeuvre under the declaration of a new language, Komunyakaa provokes participation in the living dialogue of his poetry" (Dear Manchester Chinatown) In creating her hybrid language, Kim failed to provoke my participation in the monologue of her prose.
• "Nearly all of us still recognize the sun as a prickly circle, or a tree as a cloud hanging about two sticks." (Dear Manchester Chinatown) 
• "Sprawled there on the hood was a forest of little handprints in bright orange dust, as if the hands of countless children had been pressed there, sticky with thick pollen dust." (Dear Manchester Chinatown) This is the culmination of a superbly tense little horror story.

This book was longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

May 2025; 172 pages

First published in the UK by And Other Stories in 2025

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

"Heresy" by Catherine Nixey

Christians claim theirs is the true faith but “In the beginning there was not ... one single Christian message.” (Introduction). The form of Christianity we have inherited persecuted all other forms out of existence. The word 'heresy' means choice and the pagan philosophers believed that it was good to choose, rationally, who and how one would worship. But "within the first century of the birth of this new religion, ‘choice’ for Christians had become no longer a praiseworthy attribute but a ‘poison’.” (Introduction)

In this scholarly but always entertaining book, Nixey continues what she had started in her best-seller The Darkening Age which chronicled the violent persecution of the pagans unleashed as soon as Christianity became the officially endorsed religion of the Roman Empire. Now she shows how most of the manifold versions of Christianity which existed in those first few centuries were branded heretical and had their exponents criminalised and killed and their books burned. Nevertheless, some vestiges of them survived. The ox and the ass of the nativity scene only appear in a banned gospel. 

On the journey, we learn about alternative sons of god, born of a mortal virgin woman who healed the sick and even raised the dead, such as Apollonius of Tyana.

We learn that the three 'wise men' should properly be translated as magicians and that Jesus could be seen as a magician too: “In Greek and Roman texts, wands had long been associated with magicians: Circe held a wand when she transformed Odysseus’s men into pigs; Mercury held a wand when he led the dead back to life. ... In early Christian art, Jesus holds a wand when he is performing miracles. In one fifth-century wooden panel, he holds one when he is changing water into wine and when he performs the miracle to multiply loaves; in a third-century image from the catacombs, he holds one when he raises Lazarus from the two ... While the sign of the cross is almost entirely absent from early Western Christian art, wands are widely seen.” (Ch 4)

We learn that our image of Jesus is one of many originals: “In the early years and centuries of this religion ... Sometimes he appears as a bearded old man, at others as a beardless young one; in some images he is shown bare-chested and as macho as a Greek god, while at other times he is depicted as far more sexually ambiguous" (Ch 6)

Our images of Hell are not found in the canonical gospels but in pagan authors and non-canonical writings such as the Apocalypse of Peter  and the Apocalypse of Paul (Ch 7)

We are told that all these non-canonical versions (not 'apocryphal' because they were rarely hidden and were often the most popular accounts) should not be regarded as not important because they can be unbelievable: "that is to miss the point. Such texts matter not because they are believable - but because they were believed and read by Christians for centuries. It is understandable that some Christian historians may have wished to ignore them - but it is intellectually indefensible to do so. Do so and you are not writing history, but theology with dates.” (109)

This is an immensely readable and important book. 

Selected quotes:

• “Most people do not require being a flogged with leaden weights to abandon their ideas; for most, the fear that they might lose their job, or that they might merely lose a friend, is enough to make them change their beliefs - or at least stop talking about them." (Introduction)
• “Things first become unwritable, then unsayable and finally unthinkable.” (Introduction)
• “A great deal of all ancient religion was a little more than healthcare with a halo.” (Ch 2)
• “For all the brilliance of Greek and Roman medicine, doctors nonetheless struggled to identify the difference between the seemingly obvious conditions of ‘being dead’ and ‘being alive’.” (Ch 2)
• “There were spells in the Greek magical papyri that offered a far larger menu than Jesus managed ... not only loaves and fishes but side orders too.” (Ch 4)
• “A Roman gladiator had better odds of surviving a fight than an emperor did of enjoying a peaceful conclusion to his reign.” (Ch 12))
• "Bishops had been consolidating their power for centuries ... Bishops started to command that everything in a church must go through them: baptism without a bishop did not, or so bishops argued, count; Eucharist without a bishop did not count either. Prayers, bishops argued, worked better with a bishop present.” (Ch 15)
• “It was perfectly clear to numerous ancient observers that religions were less separate entities, virgin-born and pristine, than variations on a theme ... The names were different perhaps, but the deities were fundamentally the same.” (Ch 16)
• “It was a common complaint that the church persecuted less from a love of righteousness than from a love of real estate.” (Ch 18)
• “Books are not being burned maybe to bring about controlled today: they are being burned for posterity; they are being burned to control the memory of the future.” (Ch 19)
• “The past is not merely today in togas; it is far odder and more eccentric than we often expect.” (Ch 19)

May 2025; 279 pages

Published by Picador in 2004

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

"Footsteps in the Dew" by Marsali Taylor

 

A historical murder mystery set in an exciting period of Viking history.

1150. Shetland. Rannveig, the eldest daughter, has taken the place of her dead mother helping her father run their small farm with sidelines in fishing and pottery. A stranger is found dead in a nearby stone circle. Clues include a footprint and a bead from a broken necklace. Whodunnit? Members of the old paganism, still celebrating Thor even though the country is supposedly pagan? Or was the stranger a spy for one of the three kings who rule Norway in a supposedly harmonious triumvirate? And why was silver stolen from father's hiding place and then put back? 

Rannveig's investigation progresses against a background of Vikings and crusaders. The setting is perfect and includes such archaic processes of justice as the ordeal by bier-right - when the dead man's body is wrapped in white cloth and laid in the church and each man from the locality must in turn place his hand on the body and swear his innocence and the body is watched to see whether it will bleed indicating guilt - and the steeple run in which a man and his accuser must race for the steeple and the first one to touch it is innocent and the loser is hanged but the kinsfolk and friends of either man can impede either runner. 

It's a story which is full of local colour and it also contains the Marsali Taylor trademark pitch-perfect descriptions:

• "The grassy hill sparkled with morning dew ... as if an angel had sprinkled curled shavings of silver over the green blades." (Ch 1)
• "The amber sun shone on the shorn field, strengthening the hay, sealing the goodness in." (Ch 4) 'Shone on the shorn', what wonderful assonance!
• "The turning point between summer and winter was haustblót, the great harvest feast, held three weeks after the autumn equinox, as the dark ate away at the daylight, and the hills turned from their royal purple to rusted pink. On the lower ground, the marsh grass darkened to olive, and the bog asphodel made patches of burnt orange among the bleaching grasses. The wild geese creaked overhead, dark wings spread against the pale sky." (Ch 4) Not only a description from which a painter could create a painting, but also the dark eating the daylight and the geese creaking overhead. Wow!
• "Rannveig was reminded of the way he had walked up the hill after they had told him Midder was dead, as if his feet were too heavy to life." (Ch 9)

I thoroughly enjoyed this murder mystery which reminded me of childhood favourites such as The Woolpack by Cynthia Harnett and the Henry Treece series of Viking books including Viking's Dawn, The Road to Miklagard, and Viking's Sunset. 

Marsali Taylor is also the author of the Shetland Sailing Mysteries, a series of murder mysteries starring intrepid sailor and amateur investigator Cass Lynch. The series so far is:

• Death on a Shetland Longship
• The Trowie Mound Murders (Buried in a Shetland Tomb)
• A Handful of Ash (The Shetland Night Killings)
• The Body in the Bracken (Grave of a Shetland Sailor)
• Ghosts of the Vikings (The Shetland Poisonings)
• Death in Shetland Waters
• Death on a Shetland Isle
• Death from a Shetland Cliff
• The Shetland Sea Murders
• A Shetland Winter Mystery
• Death in a Shetland Lane
• Death at a Shetland Festival

May 2025, 135 pages

This novel was originally written in 2015, serialised in the magazine Shetland Life.

My paperback edition was issued in 2020

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

"Pity the Beast" by Robin McLean

An epic poem in prose, a sort of Iliad for the modern-day Wild West.

It is set in a ranching community. Dan has discovered that his wife, Ginny, has been having an affair. Furthermore, his mare is pregnant by a Percheron horse and suffers a difficult birth. Neighbours gather to help with the consequences and one thing leads to another and the gathering turns into a drunken party and, inflamed by an erotic story started by Ginny's sister, Ella, Ginny is gang-raped, flung into a lime pit and left for dead. But she isn't. She escapes into the mountains. And the party-goers must form a posse to track her down and either persuade her to keep silent or finish the job they started.

It’s a story about the animal inside each of us, but it is also about how this is in tension, in humans, with their need to be accepted. Wanting to be part of the group makes people do things that later they may wish they hadn’t, either though guilt or from the very practical consequences that might stem from the act.

The narrative is driven by the characters. Ella is a storyteller who discovers the devastating potential power of a narrative especially one fuelled by sibling rivalry. Saul. Ella’s husband, plays the preacher when a blessing is requested (although he thinks that “The Burning Bush was Abraham”). Like anyone so self-certain, so flawed, he can be encouraged by his wife to participate in gang-rape, he can be recruited to murder. The Rodeo Kid dreams of fame and fortune like any youngster; being young, he can’t imagine himself as a failure, as a lost cause, as dead. The Deputy, a greenhorn in the mountains, sees himself as the avenging hand of the Law, doing his duty even when he’s lost. Dan loves his wife and wants to forgive her even though she is the one who has been sinned against and is now seeking to escape; perhaps he really wants to forgive himself. Maul the muleman is gay. Bowman the tracker is a martinet who cannot show any sign of vulnerability. Ginny’s fatal flaw is that her passions overrule her reason, even to the extent of undermining her own instinct for self-preservation.

Each of these characters is tested by the challenging trek into the mountains. Their hopes and dreams crash into reality. But more than this, the author shows how each of these characters develops in response to the others. Our experiences mould and warp our souls. Life as survival can make life not worth living, just as the progress of our species might destroy the world.

But this is not a judgemental novel. The author describes her characters with tenderness and love. We get inside the head of each of them so that we understand them - as much as one can understand their ambiguous and muddled thought processes - and empathise ('Pity the Beast') with them. This reminded me of the inhabitants of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.

There also interludes of science fiction. I didn't really understand why they were there, the're very short and widely-spaced and seemed to me to add little to the novel. Perhaps, together with the sometimes fractured narrative, they provided a faint atmosphere that reminded me of a William Burroughs novel such as The Place of Dead Roads or The Wild Boys.

Much of the writing uses short, sometimes staccato phrases, densely packed with meaning. It needs to be deciphered which can be hard work and slows the reader down. Often the paragraphs contain what seem to be unrelated items and these too need to be separated and related to themselves. For example: “The valley was a great black bowl with a few lights. The kid unsnapped his first pearly snap, then the second and third. The sky was clear but for a thunderhead. Heat lightning is a misnomer. There is always thunder. Its sound dissolves over distance obstructed by mountains or hills or the curve of the earth. ... The kid’s shirt was open to his belt. His skin steamed from the too-close flame. The party rubbed hands on knees, crossed and resettled their legs, and a boot kicked a leg and the fire sparked and flared and resettled.” (Percheron, p 51 - 52) We have description setting up a sympathetic fallacy. There is a sentence about ‘The kid’ and later in the paragraph another couple which are working to establish his macho naivety. There is more scene-setting description. There is talk about ‘the party’ which is a group of individuals who are attending an impromptu party, one which will end in tragedy. 

It felt hugely original, as if it was a sort of stream of consciousness in which the thoughts of the characters were mingled and mixed with the thoughts of the environment. It felt as if the stream-of-consciousness-tag of Virginia Woolf in which the interior monologue hops from head to head had merged with the cut-up technique of William Burroughs. It wasn't easy to read but - boy! - what a ride.

Selected quotes:

• “On the old ranch, running water was a girl sprinting with a bucket.” (Percheron, p33)
• “The Kid stands in the dusty ranch yard, his fists at the navy piping of dirty pants. He wears no shirt. He lost it in the confusion before our commercial break. His face is filthy, his chest and arms likewise. ... His eyes are blue as the sky, as sapphire shining in the sun, too rare a color to play an Indian. His day as the Indian is done. He is young. He is both thrilled and disappointed. He walks to the well, bows to it. There is soap in a tin cup. He sets his arm to work at pumping and he cleans himself of Indian. ... He’s been a child, a puppet. The strings are broke now. His privates still tingle. His eyes are full.” (Percheron, p 65)
• “The winds here can scream like a human man.” (Percheron, last sentence)
• “The mind contracts around paradox like a pearl.” (Bear, p 86)
• “Grannie never believed in trauma. She’d laughed at the word when it came into style. The world was made by trauma. Pray you have some or your life is dull.” (Bear, p 91)
• “We are each separate little dinghies, all floating alone but together, all caught in the same currents in the same ocean: a human lifetime.” (Dog, p 282)
• “The straying mariner is honor bound also. His duty is to offer an oar across the gap, to catch hold of the rope thrown to him, to pull back to the boats with all his might, to make the greatest effort to save himself. ... His life is borrowed property while he lives it, and so muct be preserved. The duty of each boat os equal and opposite and reciprocal.” (Dog, p 283)
• “The water jugs gonged on the mules’ ribs.” (Mule, p 320)

May 2025; 377 pages

First published in 2021 by And Other Stories

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

"Shakespeare" by Bill Bryson

This might be a short, lightweight and very readable biography of the Bard but its 'evidence first' approach debunks a number of myths.

For example, the book considers whether Shakespeare spent his lost years in a Roman Catholic household in Lancashire and finds no evidence for it. It comprehensively debunks the theories that the plays were written by Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford and lists the considerable evidence that they were written by ... William Shakespeare. Though it does show that he lifted some of his material from his sources. 

I also learned that the Curtain Theatre had no curtains.

A perfect introductory biography to this great playwright.

Selected quotes:

• “Even the most careful biographers sometimes take a supposition ... and convert it within a page or two to some-[page break]thing like a certainty.” (Ch 1)
• “We know more about Shakespeare then about almost any other dramatist of his age.” (Ch 1)
• “A standard part of a teacher's training ... was how to give a flogging.” (Ch 2)
• "Vegetables were eaten mostly by those who could afford nothing better.” (Ch 3)
• “For foreigners English ale was an acquired taste even then ... it was ‘cloudy like horse’s urine’.” (Ch 3)
• “Shakespeare was a wonderful teller of stories so long as someone else had told them first.” (Ch 5)

May 2025; 195 pages

First published in 2007 by HarperPress

My updated paperback edition was issued by William Collins in 2016

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

"Stone Yard Devotional" by Charlotte Wood

Life is a struggle against nature. Live with it.

A woman, an atheist, seeking a refuge from the world visits a Roman Catholic religious community of women in a rural Australia. There is a plague of mice. The body of one of the members, who disappeared years ago in Thailand, is returned to the abbey. The famous nun who accompanies the bones is someone whom the narrator used to know, the victim of bullying when they were schoolgirls together. This is the cue for a lot of guilt and the seeking of forgiveness. Other memories, mostly of people dying, and the need to kill the cannibalistic mice, put life into context. 

It's written in a diary style without explicitly being a diary: some present tense, mostly past. The perspective is first-person from PoV of the never-named protagonist.

One of the themes seems to centre around Hamlet's question: "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them?" Almost on the last page of Part Two, Sister Helen Parry, the visiting nun, tells the community at breakfast that "if you don't live your rightful dharma, then you will cause grave spiritual injury to yourself". Ironically, this is a Buddhist philosophy and Buddhists tend to seek acceptance of the world and detachment from it but Helen Parry is activist, forever campaigning. The other nuns take Helen's comment as a criticism for their life of retreat from the world and Sister Bonaventure responds "I was born for this life". The narrator herself has struggled to understand the relevance of chanting the Psalms, poems written over two thousand years ago, to the community's life and the book is, on one level, her journey of acceptance of ritualised meaninglessness in order to achieve spiritual awakening.

One thing that the narrator needs to accept is the Darwinian world of life, predation and death. (So many Australian books seem to centre on life as an endless, and losing, battle against a hostile natural world which surely can't help their tourist industry.) The book's final words are "reverence for the earth itself". This seems a key message.

It is difficult to see what has made this book so popular among reviewers. There's little finely crafted prose. I picked out one or two nice descriptions:

• "The sweeping, broad structure of this land gently shifts from one plane into another, each sloping yet almost flat, like a shoulder blade." (Part One, Day Four)
• "I woke with the thin blanket pulled up to my chin for protection ... The sticky cobweb of it clung to me through Vigils, through showering, through breakfast." (Part Two, p 192) I liked 'sticky cobweb'. 

But on the whole to writing is like the landscape, plain and unrelenting. Nor is there anything thrilling about the plot which is very simple, although the juxtaposing of an atheist into this religious community and the coincidence of there being not one but two faces familiar from her schooldays (it helps that the abbey is not far from the narrator's home town) enables a continuing conflict to keep the readers interest alive. And it is direct, diving deep into the soul of our shared humanity and there is a raw honesty to the writing which gives it a powerful charge.

Selected quotes:

• "Do all religions include some form of this repetitive movement? It feels ancient, superstitious. Walking in circles, bowing and prostrating, kneeling and standing. What is its purpose? Eradication of the ego in some way?" (Part One, Day Three)
• "Today's psalms were not so full of evil foes but there was a lot of nationhood-praise stuff. ... I struggle to see the relevance of any of it to these women and their lives. What is the meaning of this ancient Hebrew bombast about enemies and borders and persecution? What's the point of their singing about it day after day after day?" (Part One, Day Three)
• "My notion of prayer was juvenile: forget this telephone line to God bullshit, she snapped, hot with impatience. It wasn't even about God ... Praying was a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking. ... It's not chitchat; it's hard labour." (Part Two, p 161)
• "What is most grotesque is this: every time I have found the cannibalised corpses, it is only the faces that are eaten away." (Part Two, pp 167 - 168)
• "Expressions of intense emotion often take place when a person's thoracic spine is immobilised. It's to do with its relationship to the autonomic nervous system." (Part Two, p 185)
• "I used to think there was a 'before' and 'after' most things that happen to a person; that a fence of time could separate even quite catastrophic experience from the ordinary whole of life." (Part Two, p 210)
• "Annabel was so disgusted by greed, by the ruination of the natural world because of it, that, like the ascetics before her, the only action she could take was to remove herself, bit by bit, from the obscenity of the excess." (Part Three, p 268)
• "It's been my observation over many years that those who most powerfully resist convention quite peaceably accept the state of being reviled." (Part Three, p 269)

Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.

May 2025; 293 pages

Published in the UK by Sceptre, a division of Hodder & Stoughton

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

"Graven with Diamonds" by Nicola Shulman

 

A biography of Thomas Wyatt, twice sent to the Tower by Henry VIII and the man who introduced the sonnet to England. Winner of the 2011 Writer's Guild Award as best non-Fiction book.

Subtitled: The many lives of Thomas Wyatt: Poet, Lover, Statesman, and Spy in the Court of Henry VIII.

He must have been a remarkable man and his life is well-told by this very readable biography. A nice feature is the use of his poetry to explain what he might have been thinking as he took part in some of the momentous events of Henry VIII's reign, including the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn - was Wyatt one of her lovers or did he betray those who might have been?

She writes very well (“This was a time of immense change, when medieval values mingled with those of the inpouring Renaissance humanism in varying degrees of emulsification.”; Ch 1) and explains the historical contexts clearly, usually - but not always - explaining any archaic words.

I'd have liked more about the poetry: he was the first to use Italian forms such as the "eight-line strambotto and terza rima, as well as the Petrachan sonnet" (Ch 5) But I can't really complain because Shulman is quite explicit that her work is focused on the man, not the history of poetic techniques.

I was left wanting to know more about the poetry and some of the minor but fascinating characters in Wyatt's drama.

Selected quotes:

• “Kent was a turbulent region, sensitively located between London and continental Europe.” (Ch 1)
• “C S Lewis’s sense of humour is arguably his own weak point. There is only one joke in the Narnia books.” (Ch 1) What is it? I feel I should have been told!
• “Baldly put, Skelton believed that old texts and deep matters could be best understood through studying the commentaries of wise men, accumulated over centuries; Erasmus and Mountjoy respected these mediations as much as a picture conservator respects crude overpainting and yellow varnish on some fresh, delicate panel.” (Ch 2)
• “Wyatt has invoked the possibility of unconditional love and with that, he exits the Middle Ages. He leaves behind the medieval lover, that industrious model of masculinity who must always be doing something ... He becomes an inward man whose feedings towards women are not expressed by a series of prescribed, public actions but communed in tunnels of intimacy, from heart to open heart.” (Ch 9)
• “This was of interest ... for reasons beyond prurient curiosity: the arrested men were all in possession of extensive lands and offices, now about to come up for redistribution under the treason laws.” (Ch 12)
• “Descriptions of diplomatic heroism rose in inverse relation to diplomatic successes, as Henry's legates, whose missions were often doomed to failure through no fault of their own, pressed for the introduction of an effort grade as well as one for achievement.” (Ch 19)

May 2025, 355 pages
First published in the UK by Short Books in 2011
My Steerforth Press paperback was the first US edition and was issued in 2013

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

"Under Milk Wood" by Dylan Thomas

“To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.”

This is a play for voices, first performed on the radio with the mellifluous Richard Burton supplying the narration. It was written by Dylan Thomas who, as you can see in the quote above, had a way with words.

The story is set over a single day in the Welsh seaside town of Llareggyb - famously, Thomas originally used the name Llareggub because it was ‘bugger all’ backwards, but was persuaded to modify it.

It starts at night, with the inhabitants of the town asleep and dreaming. Typically, they dream of sex. Miss Price, for example, dreams of “her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samsonsyrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass'd and barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving hotwaterbottled body.” Sex pervades the play, portrayed, not in a romantic air-brushed light but as an everyday, matter-of-fact, warts-and-all, embodied coupling and conjugating.

Death is also present in dreams. Captain Cat dreams of drowned shipmates. Mrs Ogden-Pritchard is with both her husbands, Mr Ogden and Mr Pritchard, in her dreams.

The dawn arrives and the inhabitants wake and go about their daily lives. Willy Nilly postman delivers letters. Polly Garter scrubs a floor. Sinbad Sailors opens the pub. The children go to school. The listener follows, hopping from character to character. From time to time the narrator interrupts with a set piece, marking the hours of the day like a prayer:

• “There's the clip clop of horses on the sunhoneyed cobbles of the humming streets, hammering of horse- shoes, gobble quack and cackle, tomtit twitter from the bird-ounced boughs, braying on Donkey Down. Bread is baking, pigs are grunting, chop goes the butcher, milk-churns bell, tills ring, sheep cough, dogs shout, saws sing. Oh, the Spring whinny and morning moo from the clog dancing farms, the gulls' gab and rabble on the boat-bobbing river and sea and the cockles bubbling in the sand, scamper of sanderlings, curlew cry, crow caw, pigeon coo, clock strike, bull bellow, and the ragged gabble of the beargarden school as the women scratch and babble in Mrs Organ Morgan's general shop where everything is sold: custard, buckets, henna, rat-traps, shrimp-nets, sugar, stamps, confetti, paraffin, hatchets, whistles.”
• “The sunny slow lulling afternoon yawns and moons through the dozy town. The sea lolls, laps and idles in, with fishes sleeping in its lap. The meadows still as Sunday, the shut-eye tasselled bulls, the goat-and-daisy dingles, nap happy and lazy. The dumb duck-ponds snooze. Clouds sag and pillow on Llaregyb Hill. Pigs grunt in a wet wallow-bath, and smile as they snort and dream. They dream of the acorned swill of the world, the rooting for pig-fruit, the bagpipe dugs of the mother sow, the squeal and snuffle of yesses of the women pigs in rut. They mud-bask and snout in the pig-loving sun; their tails curl; they rollick and slobber and snore to deep, smug, after-swill sleep. Donkeys angelically drowse on Donkey Down.”

Many of the characters have wonderful names: PC Attila Rees. Polly Garter the good-time girl, Organ Morgan who likes to play his organ at night, Nogood Boyo, Lord Cut-Glass, Willy Nilly postman, Captain Tom Cat, Farmer Utah Watkins from Salt Lake Farm.

I was reminded of Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, another study of the inhabitants of a town. Both authors have a remarkable facility with words. They make their characters come alive. And, crucially, they show life in all its aspects, with empathy, without judgement. As Thomas says: “We are not wholly bad or good/ Who live our lives under Milk Wood.”

Selected quotes:

• “And before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes.”
• “A bit of stone with seaweed spread/ Where gulls come to be lonely.”
• “Mrs Dai Bread Two, gypsied to kill in a silky scarlet petticoat above my knees, dirty pretty knees, see my body through my petticoat brown as a berry, high-heel shoes with one heel missing, tortoiseshell comb in my bright black slinky hair, nothing else at all but a dab of scent, lolling gaudy at the doorway, tell your fortune in the tea-leaves, scowling at the sunshine, lighting up my pipe.”
• “I know what you're thinking, you poor little milky creature. You're thinking, you're no better than you should be, Polly, and that's good enough for me.”
• “From Beynon Butchers in Coronation Street, the smell of fried liver sidles out with onions on its breath.”
• “She feels his goatbeard tickle her in the middle of the world like a tuft of wiry fire, and she turns in a terror of delight away from his whips and whiskery conflagration.”
• “Mrs Pugh smiles. An icicle forms in the cold air of the dining-vault.” Not dining room! Vault. Connotations of a crypt.
• “The only sea I saw/ Was the seesaw sea/ With you riding on it./ Lie down, lie easy./ Let me shipwreck in your thighs.”
• “They make, in front of their looking-glasses, haughty or come-hithering faces for the young men in the street outside, at the lamplit leaning corners, who wait in the all-at-once wind to wolve and whistle.”

May 2025

Originally published in 1954

I read my 2025 Renard Press paperback edition while listening to the BBC Sounds original recording of the radio play version from 1954.

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

"Gliff" by Ali Smith

Gulliver in the land of the Houyhnhnms?

Two children, Briar and Rose, say goodbye to their mother and return home in the campervan with Leif. But someone has painted a red line around their home so they have to spend the night parked in a supermarket car park. But they wake up to find a red line around their campervan. Leif takes them to an abandoned house, gives them food and money and then leaves. And this is the start of a scary adventure in a dystopian world where even smart-watch wearing children can be Designated Data Collectors and those who are Unverified must hide in the shadows. 

And there is a grey horse in a field.

Ali Smith has total control over this narrative, rationing information in driblets. The reader tries to make sense of it and, like a child, pieces together the clues. There is horror but you never see the monsters full-on and that makes them even more terrifying. Especially since the worst thing comes from what is inside each one of us.

Her characterisations are also drawn with a few brief brush strokes and yet they are real people and I was utterly unprepared for the revelatory twist on page 214.

A dystopian masterpiece from a writer at the very top of her game.

Selected quotes:

• “It was like they all had their backs to me, even the ones facing me.” (Horse p7)
• “If you could take these boards up and look at what had ended up down there in that under-the-boards space it’d look like just dirt and grime. But you'd not just have DNA galore, you'd have the actual matter of what was left of those people and their times. This was a completely different sort of matter, the kind people say doesn't matter when they talk about what history is.” (Horse p 34)
• “The grey horse's bones were close to its skin all over it ... It moved with laidback strength and with a real weightiness though it wasn't weighty at all, it was as spare as a bare tree.” (Horse p 47)
• “You are bullying me with words longer than the length of my life, she said.” (Horse p 49)
• “We can't solve it. But we can still salve it.” (Horse p 52)
• “The horse was lightning white, all electricity. The lion was calm, dark, massive-pawed, dripping surreptitiousness. The horse, dismayed. The lion, shifty.” (Horse p 111)
• “All the people living here, including the feral children, were right now unverifiables. They were largely unverifiable because of words. One person here had been unverified for saying out loud that a war was a war when it wasn't permitted to call it a war. Another had found herself declared unverifiable for writing online that the killing of many people by another people was a genocide. Another had been unverified for defaming the oil conglomerates by saying they were directly responsible for climate catastrophe. Another had been unverified for speaking at a protest about people's right to protest.” (Power p 162)
• “Was a horse more lost to the world, because of no words, or was the horse more found - or even founded - in the world because of no words? Were we in our worded world the ones who were truly deluded about where and what we believed about all the things we had words for?” (Power p 162)
• “I heard her voice in my head ... Bri. Don't be stupid. Why do you think they call it a net? Why do you think they call it a web?” (Power p 172)
• “Like there was such a thing as a family of words, one that stretched across different languages or touching on each other, hitting or striking each other, acting on each other, influencing each other, agreeing with each other or throwing each other out, disturbing each other, doing all of these things at once.” (Power p178)
• “Why are you such a walking question mark? she said to me. You even walk like a question mark would walk if it was a person.” (Power p 193)
• “The voids are where you learn what power does and what the word void can mean.” (Lines p 222)

Imagine that your nightmares survived the dawn and became everyday reality.

May 2025; 274 pages

Published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK in 2024

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