"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

"The Enchanted April" by Elizabeth von Arnim

Four English ladies rent a castle in Italy (complete with servants) for a month. When they arrive, the beauty of the place works magic. All the problems of their lives at home are solved by love. It's a fairy-tale. Inevitably, the castle is separated from mainland Italy by a long causeway. 

The four women are: 

• Mrs Wilkins, wife of a solicitor, who lives in Hampstead and spends her days at her "economical" club on Shaftesbury Avenue. Her married life has lost its magic. She's the first to be enchanted by the castle. Even before they arrive she 'sees' things and makes mystic pronouncements.
• Mrs Arbuthnot, wife of a successful author, who has replaced marital love with going to church and doing good works in the community.
• Mrs Fisher, a selfish and egocentric old lady whose talk is of the heroes of her youth: Gladstone and Thomas Carlyle and Robert Browning, all of whom she knew.
• Lady Caroline Dester who is fed up with being the target of others, especially wannabe husbands, who want to 'grab' her. She is cursed by being so beautiful and having such a melodious voice that even when she tries to be nasty, no-one notices.

Notice that they are all posh. They are all ladies of leisure, even before the holiday. Meanwhile the servants are stereotypical comedy material (the lower-classes often are, if they are not perceived as threats).

Sadly, given that the theme of the book is that this enchanted place is transforming sad people into happy people and cross people into nice people, I preferred the characters who were sad and cross; they were so much more interesting. But none of them are real people; they are representatives of types. This is in keeping with the magical atmosphere of the setting; the reader isn't expected to take these people seriously. It is all in keeping with the flavour of fairy tale and myth about this book. I was strongly reminded of the Shakespeare play A Midsummer Night's Dream but most of his comedies are set in unreal places with unrealistic characters. This is the essence of comedy.

And it was funny. There were some delightful lines:

• “When she chiefly flourished, husbands were taken seriously, as the only real obstacles to sin.” (Ch 7)
• “It is true she liked him most when he wasn't there, but then she usually liked everybody most when they weren't there.” (Ch 16)
• “He certainly looked exactly like a husband, not at all like one of those people who go out abroad pretending they are husbands when they are not.” (Ch 21)

I found the ending a little contrived.

There are moments of excessive description. The walk up to the castle was narrated for what seemed to be every step of the way. This was, I suppose, a way of emphasising the journey from reality to fairyland and certainly underlined the separation of the two, but it was boring. There was a lot of description, mostly eulogising pretty flowers, very unoriginal. 

But the overall impression was of a delightful book with some very thoughtful moments.

Selected quotes:

• “Chatsworth on the gate-posts of a villa emphasises the villa.” (Ch 1)
• “Such beauty; and she alive to feel it.” (Ch 6)
• “Now she had taken off all her goodness and left it behind her like a heap of rain-sodden clothes, and she only felt joy. She was naked of goodness, and was rejoicing in being naked.” (Ch 6)
• “Up to now she had had to take what beauty she could as she went along, snatching at little bits of it when she came across it, - a patch of days on a fine day in a Hampstead field, a flash of sunset between two chimney pots.” (Ch 6)
• “She was having a violent reaction against beautiful clothes and the slavery they impose on one, her experience being that the instant one had got them they took one in hand and gave one no peace till they had been everywhere and been seen by everybody. You didn't take your clothes to parties; they took you.” (Ch 6)
• “The trivial and barren young people who still, in spite of the war, seemed to litter the world in such numbers.” (Ch 9)
• “Mr Fisher ... had during their married life behaved very much like macaroni. He had slipped, he had wriggled, he had made her feel undignified, and win at last she had got him safe, as she thought, there had invariably been little bits of him that still, as it were, hung out.” (Ch 9)
• “Beauty! All over before you can turn around. An affair you might say of minutes.” (Ch 10)
• “Imagine being old for as long as two or three times as being young.” (Ch 10)
• “As though justice mattered. as though justice can really be distinguished from vengeance.” (Ch 11)
• “I hate authors. I wouldn't mind them so much if they didn't write books.” (Ch 12)
• “How and where husbands slipped should be known only to their wives. Sometimes it was not known to them, and then the marriage had less happy moments; but these moments were not talked about either; the decencies continued to be preserved.” (Ch 12)
• “Often she had met wives who didn't want their husbands either, but that made them nonetheless indignant if they thought somebody else did.” (Ch 13)
• “Reading was very important; the proper exercise and development of one’s mind was a paramount duty.” (Ch 13)
• “Old friends ... compare one constantly with what one used to be ... They are surprised at development. They hark back; they expect motionlessness after, say, fifty, to the end of one's days.” (Ch 16)
• “Inheritance was more respectable than acquisition.” (Ch 18)
• “All the loneliness of age flashing upon her, the loneliness of having outstayed one's welcome in the world.” (Ch 22)

October 2025; 361 pages

First published in 1922

My Virago paperback was issued in 1989

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

Book group questions:

1. In contrast to some of our recent books featuring schools, boys, religion, morals and misery, this ‘feel-good’ novel is a light-hearted advocate of how atmosphere and mood can change our outlook and perceptions. Do you think it is simply a shallow fantasy / fairy-tale, or can you relate to the premise of this book, that a complete change of scene can have a transformative effect?

2. Published in 1922, the same year as James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, ‘The Enchanted April’ was met with criticism by some of von Arnim’s literary contemporaries. Her cousin Katherine Mansfield initially called it ‘a sad tinkle from a music box’, Rebecca West said it was outdated and ‘in the nature of a disaster’, while Virginia Woolf, reluctant to praise von Arnim’s writing in public, said that it made her shout with laughter, some parts were ‘absolutely top hole: as good as Dickens.’ Which viewpoint do you most agree with?

3. The theme of the novel is one of self-discovery, transformation, redemption, and healing. The four main characters in the novel are ladies whose lives were strongly influenced by men in very different ways. Which of the characters do you feel was most constrained by their situation and had the most need to break free?

4. With the exception of Rose’s good works among the poor of her church, there is little in the novel to inform us about the working classes during the years following WW1. Instead, it focusses on the predicaments of four female characters and their ‘escape’ to Italy, and has been called a ‘feminist’ novel, progressive for its time for

daring to allow its female characters to engineer their own happiness. Do you agree with this ‘feminist’ label?

Do you think that Elizabeth von Arnim anticipated or intended this categorisation of her novel?

5. Karen Usborne, in her book ‘Elizabeth,’ claimed that ‘The Enchanted April’ had contributed to the feminist cause after it was published by changing the perception of women who decided to leave their husbands and go off on holiday on their own or with each other. Do you think that the happy ending, when the marriages of Lotty and

Rose are reinvigorated, and Lady Caroline Dester finds love with Mr Briggs, detracts from this feminist notion?

6. The novel has been seen as largely responsible for the masses of English tourists who holidayed on the Italian Riviera in the period between the wars. Did any of Elizabeth von Arnim’s descriptions of the San Salvatore castle and its gardens stand out as the perfect advertisement for an Italian villa rental?

7. If you were invited to share an Italian holiday villa with any of the characters, who would it be, and why? Which character(s) would you least like to spend time with?

8. Although the four women take centre stage in the novel, husbands and men do play a very significant role, primarily by their absence. Were you surprised when, despite being desperate to have a break from her unhappy life with her husband, Lotty decided to invite him to join her, and she encouraged Rose to do likewise?

9. This novel is considered to be the most positive and uplifting of Elizabeth von Arnim’s works, and is the most widely read, praised for its witty and perceptive characterisation. Would you describe it as romantic and sentimental or witty and ironic? Did you find any examples of her text particularly amusing and worth sharing

with the group?

10. Having read ‘The Enchanted April’, might you seek out the 1991 film version of the book, or read any of Elizabeth von Arnim’s other works?

11. The novel has, perhaps, a rather too tidy, contrived, ‘happy-ever-after’ ending. Do you think that any of the characters’ new found happiness would have survived on their return to England, with its dank, wet, miserable weather? How do you see their futures panning out? Will any of them stay in touch, or will they return to their

former circles of friends and lifestyles?

"Life of Pi" by Yann Martel

I read this winner of the 2002 Booker Prize nearly twenty years ago and I had remember it mostly as the story of survival following a shipwreck with a funny joke about religion. I have more recently seen the National Theatre production (see below the byline). But rereading it I realised what an incredibly well-written book it is.

It's beautifully paced with a four-part structure:

• The first quarter of the book is concerned with Pi's childhood in Pondicherry, the ethics of zoo-keeping, and his discovery of religions (culminating in the moment I had remembered when a priest, an imam and a pandit converge on him in the street. The turning point is when the family sell their zoo and begin their voyage, with animals, across the Pacific. And the ship sinks.
• The second part of the book concerns Pi's survival as the hyena devours the zebra and kills the orang utan and then the tiger kills the hyena. The turning point comes when Pi realises that if he is to survive, he will have to tame the tiger.
• The third part of the book is the battle for survival. The turning point comes when he goes blind and encounters another blind ship-wrecked sailor (French, a food expert) who, however, is killed by the tiger.
• In the fourth part of the book he regains his sight and lands on a floating island, full of mysteries which he later has to abandon. At the 90% mark he reaches land. Then he is interviewed by Japanese salvage experts who suggest that his story cannot be true. He offers them an alternative. 

That twist in the end is very clever. Suddenly, the reader realises that the yarn spun may not be true. But it was so well told, that it seemed true.

And there is a frame. Some of the chapters, italicised, purport to be the author interviewing the real-life hero of the Life. This technique adds verisimilitude. It culminates in Pi scoffing at those who disbelieve his story on the grounds that no tiger was found in Mexico: “And they expected to find - ha! In the middle of a Mexican tropical jungle, imagine! Ha! Ha! It's laughable, simply laughable. What were they thinking?” (Ch 11) This is the author teasing our understanding of reality. Even if we don't believe Pi's tale, we are still tempted to believe that he exists.

My friend Michele Tracy was most interested by the religious aspects of the story.

• Her starting point is that in the frame story, the narrator Pi tells the author "I have a story that will make you believe in God."
• She also points out that the name of the ship that sinks, the Tsimtsum, is also the (Jewish) idea that God withdrew or contracted his infinite light in order to create the universe. This left “empty space” for the cosmos and for free will. The ship's sinking can then be compared to God withdrawing, leaving Pi alone to become an independent person with a strong faith.
• She further speculates that the lifeboat with tiger is Hell, that the carnivorous island might be Purgatory, and that Mexico is Heaven, making Pi's voyage a Dantesque one.
• Finally she believes that the main message in the book is that life can and will be difficult, but that people must persevere by any means necessary.

There are some wonderful descriptions:

• After drinking water following severe dehydration: “Blood started flowing through my veins like cars from a wedding party honking their way through town.” (Ch 51)
• Lightning at sea: “For two, perhaps three seconds, a gigantic, blinding white shard of glass from a broken cosmic window danced in the sky.” (Ch 85)

Selected quotes: 

• “Reason, that fool’s gold for the bright.” (Ch 1)
• “In many ways, running a zoom is a hotelkeeper's worst nightmare ... the guests never leave their rooms; they expect not only lodging but full board; they receive a constant flow of visitors, some of whom are noisy and unruly. ... There is much cleaning to do, for the guests are as unhygienic as alcoholics ... Each guest is very particular about his or her diet ...To speak frankly, many are sexual deviants ... regularly affronting management with gross outrages of free sex and incest.” (Ch 4)
• “Animals in the wild live lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where thes supply of fear is high and the supply of food low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured. What is the meaning of freedom in such a context?” (Ch 4)
• “To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.” (Ch 7)
• “What is the Ramayana but the account of one long, bad day for Rama?” (Ch 17)
• “If God on the cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ.” (Ch 14)
• “Our encounters always leave me weary of the glum contentment that characterizes my life.” (Ch 21)
• “Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer?” (Ch 37)
• “Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness - how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I've got!” (Ch 60)

October 2025; 319 pages

First published by Knopf in Canada in 2001

My paperback edition issued by Canongate Books in 2018

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

National Theatre production of 'Life of Pi'
I saw the National Theatre production of ‘Life of Pi’ on 30th March 2023 screened live to the Beacon cinema, Eastbourne.

I hadn’t really understood the book and I was initially sceptical about a play with puppets. I mean, puppets! I had heard of the NT production of Equus, using puppet horses but I had seen the production of Equus at the Theatre Royal Stratford (Saturday 23rd March 2019, matinee) and in this a male actor, Ira Mandela Siobhan, wearing only shorts bent forward slightly and stuck his arms in from of him as though they were the stiff forelegs of a horse and moved his body so that I believed he was a horse. Somehow he could manage to ripple his muscles in the way that you can see shivers running through a horses flanks; somehow he twitched and shyed and nuzzled exactly like a horse. It was perhaps the most remarkable purely physical performance I have ever seen any actor give; the first time I have experienced the production’s best performance be one entirely without words. So I doubted that puppets (one up from the masks of a Greek chorus) would be good enough for the suspension of disbelief that I need to fully immerse myself in the experience.

And, indeed, at first I was too concerned with the mechanics. They were distracting. I was reminded of when I took my stepson Paul to the Jorvik centre in York. He must have been about thirteen or fourteen, a young lad with a scientific bent. We sat in a carriage which moved around the exhibits on some sort of rail, stopping and starting, and he spent most of his time trying to work out how the thing worked rather than enjoying the show. That’s how I was at the start of this play.

But by the end of the first half, when the animals fought on the boat, I was so involved that I felt squeamish when the hyena disembowelled the Zebra, and distressed when it tore the throat out of the Orangutan. So. It worked. And the staging was equally brilliant. A boat rose from the floor of the stage. The storm, in which water came aboard the ship, was done with lights. When Pi went overboard and was drowning he was carried by stagehands and it really felt as if was sinking through the water as puppet fish swarmed around him. The whole thing was stunning. Truly immersive. Wow.

As for the lead actor himself, Hiran Abeysekera, he was amazing. He was on stage all the time, in what was often a very physical performance (he must have incredible stamina and agility) and he delivered some very funny lines with a deadpan wide-eyed innocence; it was a stupendous performance.

A great evening.

"Bilal's Bread' by Sulayman X

 Bilal has problems. He's a Kurdish Moslem immigrant in America in the aftermath of 9/11. His father was killed by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein; his family is poor, depending on the wages of his two older brothers and the bread his mother bakes. He is sixteen and coming to terms with being homosexual, something taboo in his Islamic school. Since the age of 9, he has been sexually and physically abused by his older brother, Salim, an angry and frequently violent man.

When I was about half-way through this carefully-written novel, I thought that the story was over but I was wrong. Time and again another tragic plot point punched me in the face. The tension continued until very nearly the final page. 

There was a moment towards the end when the lump in my throat and the water in my eyes made it difficult to continue (especially since I was reading it on a long train journey and I didn't want to start crying in front of the other passengers in the carriage). This book certainly carries emotional dynamite.

And yet the characterisation is, on the whole, simplistic. There are goodies (the Imam and his son, Bilal's sister Fatima) and baddies such as Bilal's headteacher. There was a moment when wicked Salim's back-story suggested he might be damaged rather than evil but that rug was swiftly pulled from under our feet. Bilal himself has a journey to make from confusion to understanding and from submission to self-assertiveness but the most interesting character by far was his mother who was the only truly complex human being depicted.

It was written in the third person mostly from Bilal's perspective but it was driven by the issues. As a result, dialogues became carefully structured explorations, with the participants making quite long and carefully reasoned speeches. This extended into Bilal's thoughts: the reader was told what was happening rather than being shown and allowed to work it out for themselves. To take a trivial example: "Whenever Hakim was drunk, he tended to get a bit emotional. He usually wanted to make sure that Bilal didn't think he was a bad person. Bilal didn't. Hakim never seemed to remember that, so they wound up having the same conversation again and again." (Ch 1) This could be shown rather than told.

Perhaps there was too much plot; had the book been more character-led it would have been slower and longer.

There are sexually explicit scenes and descriptions of violence. It felt like a YA book but perhaps best suited to the older end of that, around the sixteen years old that Bilal himself is.

But wow. I was weeping in the train. That's a testament to any book.

Selected quotes:

• "When she started talking about the old days, it meant she was tired - tired of the struggle in America. Tired of not being able to speak English, of not being able to get along properly. Tired of the daily battle just to survive." (Ch 11)
• "Muhammad stood up and began clapping. It was a solitary, forlorn sound in the auditorium." (Ch 14)

October 2025; 240 pages

Published by Alyson Books, Los Angeles in 2005

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

Outline of plot: spoiler alerts:

• Salim sexually abuses younger brother Bilal including oral sex and anal rape. Emotional abuse includes threatening that if Bilal does not please Salim, Salim will fuck their little sister Fatima.
• Neighbourhood thugs bully Bilal when he is delivering bread.
• At a sleepover, Bilal has consensual gay sex with his best friend Mohammed.
• Salim discovers Bilal has been surfing gay porn at school.
• Salim thrashes Bilal and throws him out onto the streets. Bilal takes refuge with Malik, the local Imam, Mohammed's dad.
• Bilal confesses the physical abuse to Mr Malik who threatens that if Salim continues to beat Bilal, he will go to the police.
• Bilal confesses to Mr Malik that Salim rapes him.
• Salim tells Bilal that he was gang-raped by Iraqi police while their father was forced to watch. Then the dad was shot.
• Salim beats Bilal again and breaks his wrist. At the hospital, the statutory reporting procedures come into play, including anal swabs for semen, and Salim is arrested.
• Bilal's mum wants Bilal to drop the charges so that Salim can come home.
• Hakim reveals that Salim used to rape little boys back home in Iraq.
• Salim commits suicide in his cell the night before his pre-trial hearing.
• Bilal uses a poetry competition to out himself at school.

"The Gay Decameron" by Christopher Whyte

A group of gay men, mostly in pairs, gather for a dinner party in the posh Edinburgh flat of one of the couples. They reminisce about the past and tell stories. Some of them have been lovers, or have made love to someone whom someone else at the party has loved. Some of their friends are now dead, for example one committed suicide and another died from AIDS. Each of them remembers their own journey from the first realisation that they were gay to now. 

It's quite convoluted and I needed notes to keep track of who was who and who had slept with whom. Although the characters had different experiences and did different things, I didn't feel that they were sufficiently differentiated. In a way, and perhaps this was the theme of the book, they all merged into one archetypal gay experience. Not that they were all the same! Some experienced long periods of chastity, others were very promiscuous. But the basic pattern was that relationships begin tentatively, with risk, and frequently end in toxic unhappiness, but the goal is almost always a stable, loving and enduring partnership.

The one part of the book I would have junked is the fantasy story of the young lovers set somewhere in the Middle East in the middle ages. I suppose the idea was that this was a world in which gay love was accepted as everyday. But it read like soft porn and clashed with the realistic stories of modern gay life in Edinburgh (and Barcelona). 

Selected quotes:

• “A crossroads town with ramshackle buildings lining either side of the street, like drunken soldiers unexpectedly summoned to parade.” (Ch 2)
• “Sad and alone ... rattling around in this huge flat like the last biscuit left in the tin.” (Ch 11)
• “The further up the tree a monkey is, the more of its backside you get to see.” (Ch 15)
• “The further upwards in price range one goes, the more anonymous hotel rooms become.” (Ch 16)
• “Candles were hard and solid. Yet they transformed themselves into light the moment you gave them the chance.” (Ch 23)

October 2025; 346 pages

First published by Victor Gollancz in 1998

My paperback edition was issued by Indigo in 1999.

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