"One of Us" by Elizabeth Day

Ben, a politician transparently based on Boris Johnson, intends to bid for the premiership. But will he be destroyed by the murky secrets in his past?

The plot of this novel is so predictable that I started playing thriller trope bingo. It could have been written from a checklist of recent scandals:

• MP surfs porn on office computer
• MP is rehabilitated through a reality TV show
• Oil protestor is daughter of Cabinet minister
• Another oil protestor is an undercover cop (this seems doubtful since he is the leader of the group and therefore any possible prosecution would be compromised by accusations that he was an agent provocateur).
• A young girl is sexually abused by an older male family member
• Rape
• A rehabilitation clinic is presided over by an Austrian doctor with a comic German accent
• The rich daughter of the gentry becomes a drug addict
• There is gaslighting

To be charitable one could say this is satire but it's too heavy handed to be funny. And so many of the targets for its scorn are cheap and easy. Trains, for example, always run late.

What about the characters? Stereotype after stereotype: Hapless MP, ruthless MP, ruthless hedge fund manager, gay academic, poor little rich girl, sidelined wife and mother. On the other hand, the main protagonist, Martin, is was a scholarship boy at a posh School, simultaneously entranced and rejected by the upper classes. Given that this describes my own schooling almost exactly, you would have thought I would have empathised like mad and identified with this character. But the pedestrian quality of the writing and the predictability of the plot left me not caring at all what would happen to any of these wooden puppets.

How is it written? It is narrated, mostly in the present tense, from a multiple third person close perspective, each chapter being from the point of view of one of the characters. At the beginning of the book, some of the chapters are dominated by exposition. The maxim 'show don't tell' is mostly ignored by this author.

There are moments when the editing seems slapdash. A mixed metaphor is pointed out when half of the metaphor hasn’t been mentioned. Timelines sometimes seem discrepant. 172,437 is said to be 0.000000149% of 67 million when it is actually 0.25%. 0.000000149% of 67 million is 1. I couldn't work out whether Martin's suspension from employment ended.

Apparently it is a sequel and the Guardian reckons it is better than the earlier novel, so I won't be reading that. The last line, in which the author directly addresses the reader, opens up the possibility of a further sequel. I won’t be reading that either.

Selected quotes:

• “Cheeks like a hamster on a particularly nutritious seed binge.” (Ch 1)
• “My mother taught me early on that life was meant to be endured and, if possible, mocked.” (Ch 1)
• “I am all sides. A hall of mirrors in human form.” (Ch 1)
• “Long dining tables set with family silver and inherited insouciance." (Ch 4)
• “We believe we are a country incapable of dictatorial rule when, in truth, we are just as susceptible to the lure of monstrous men (and it is always men) as everywhere else.” (Ch 6) It isn't always men: Mrs Gandhi. Catherine the Great. Madame Mao.
• “My life was a constant criss-crossing over different classes and cultures.” (Ch 6)
• “LGBTQ-A-B-C-D-plus-minus” (Ch 8)
• “Gary told him it didn't matter if he cried; that it would, in fact, ‘show your human side’ - as if he possessed another, more noticeable, non-human side.” (Ch 8)
• “Wanting is only for the people who have to try.” (Ch 9)
• “The smallest child, built like an oblong with hair, start growling from his seat at the table.” (Ch 11)
• “Rocket, the most overrated of the brassicas.” (Ch 11)

Once again I am left failing to understand how such a poorly written book could be praised. Stanley Tucci calls it "brilliantly written". Lucy Foley compares it to Patricia Highsmith and describes it as a "gimlet-eyed interrogation". Kate Mosse says it is "superbly crafted". It is a bestseller. The Guardian reviewer praised it. What did these people see that I missed?

January 2026;

Published in 2025 by 4th Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Laurels are Poison" by Gladys Mitchell

 A whodunnit set in a Teacher Training College for Young Ladies. It seems to be paying homage to Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers, a murder mystery set in a women's college at Oxford starring Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey. The plot is similar, and one of the lead characters, Laura, rather like Lord Peter, fills her speech with so many literary allusions that her dialogue needs to be interpreted rather than read: 

• “I fig-ew-er that the Duchess of Malfi put on burglar's gloves and then did those knots with a hair pin. ... There is going to be one devil of a fine pow-wow-plus-fight; referee and timekeeper that vicious and unstable Old Maid of the Mountains Principal du Mugne, Old Mutt and Young Jeff, defendants our humble selves.” (Ch 4)
• “Somebody must have collected a bevvy of Edgar Allans.” (Ch 4) This refers to a collection of chamber pots. Pot, pronounced to rhyme with Poe, thus Edgar Allan. Cockney rhyming slang or pure whimsy? 

It isn't just Laura who speaks like this. Many of the characters do and even the narrator joins in. “They stayed not for brake and stopped not for stone.” (Ch 7) is a line from Sir Walter Scott’s poem Lochinvar.

Generally speaking the dialogue has an affected, high camp quality that made this novel seem immensely dated. Of course the social context on single sex educational institutions and college 'rags' also seem old fashioned. As for the treatment of the working classes ... The servants are principally there to provide humour and as such are stereotypes. One family of servants are surnamed Ditch and have concerns about a discussion about archaeology: "do ee thenk their brains, like, ull stand et? Tes like so much wetchcraft to I.” They also suggest rape as a courtship procedure: "Master Jonathan ded ought to make a bold bed there, and bring her to et violent. Tes the only way. Her'd gev en, easy enough, ef he act forceful." (Ch 7) One of the servants at college, Lulu, is a black woman (her boyfriend is described as a “mulatto”) who speaks in stereotypical patois: “Sho’ we hasn’t another dry swab in de house wid all dis water.” (Ch 7) These are cliches of the worst kind. It might be argued that the novel reflects the social conditions of the time, and the attitude of the reading public. However, such an unthinking use of hackneyed archetypes suggests laziness on the part of the author and undermines suggestions that this work might have literary merit.

It also meant that I found it very difficult to empathise with or find credible any of the characters. This meant I struggled to maintain interest. And the plot was so convoluted that, well before the end, I was reading simply for the sake of finishing, without even caring whodunnit or why.

In chapter 15 the play Richard of Bordeaux by Gordon Daviot is referenced, presumably as a tribute to Josephine Tey (GD was her pen name), a vastly superior writer of murder mysteries, who Daughter of Time was regarded by the Crime Writers' Association as the best crime novel of all time (Gaudy Night came 4th, Gladys Mitchell does not feature in the top 100). 

Selected quotes:

• “The teacher is the stage-manager, not the chief actor.” (Ch 8)
• “You could love me, too. It's perfectly easy. My parents have managed it for years, and then not terribly talented.” (Ch 11)

January 2026; 237 pages

First published by Michael Joseph in 1942

My paperback edition was issued by the Hogarth Press in 1986

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Slings and Arrows" by Nick McLoughlin

 A pub darts team enters a national competition and starts winning. How far can they go? And how will the private lives of the members affect their progress?

Terry, the main character, married to nurse Pat, is made redundant and has to borrow money to buy a milk round. Then cancer strikes. Meanwhile, Martin his son has rejected going to college and moved in with a girlfriend. Phil's wife is having an affair. Tom's wife, Fiona, is depressed because she can't have children.

With stupendous verisimilitude, this author conjures up the world of the working - often unemployed -  class in 1980s England under the Margaret Thatcher regime. The characters drink beer in and out of pubs, smoke cigarettes, and eat Sunday roasts. They struggle to make ends meet: Terry and Pat are forced to downsize to a static caravan. Leisure activities include a few days at the seaside, a trip to a local beauty spot, coarse fishing, and, of course, darts. The picture is as authentic as a Bruegel; I remember this world.

The plot uses the landmarks of the darts competition and Terry's cancer treatment to give structure to the pace. These create tension and momentum. The focus is on Terry; the other characters also have their narrative arcs (the PoV is a multi-third-person-close perspective) but the real jeopardy comes from Terry battle with first unemployment and then cancer. These are what elicit and retain the reader's sympathy. As for the ending. No spoilers here. I am sure the ending will annoy some readers but I thought it perfect. 

These are real characters, carefully observed, facing real world problems, gaining strength from real relationships. 

There are some great descriptions:

• "Her nose was a contradiction, strong and sharp down the ridge, the nostrils flared and plump. Below it, a deep, wide groove, like the impression made by a child's finger in moist clay, appeared to tug gently on her upper lip." (Ch 20)
• "It was thicker than the dark hair around it and more wiry, like a long white bristle of a painter's brush." (Ch 20)
• "The tide was out, the sea a distant brush stroke of Oxford blue beneath an azure sky." (Ch 25)

And there is humour. One of my favourite moments is when Tom leaves the adoption agency's office to fund a young boy staring at his BMW. He chases him away and says: "Bloody kids!" (Ch 10) I also enjoyed this description of Terry's belly: "His gut, all bought and paid for as he liked to say, overhung the belt on his jeans." (Ch 1)

Selected quotes:

• "The kind of bloke ... that, if he'd been chocolate, he'd have happily eaten himself." (Ch 4)
• "Terry felt saddened, and somehow guilty, at the concern etched in Pat's face, at the pinch of her mouth and the sharp crease between her eyes." (Ch 38)

A very readable and enjoyable book. A perfect antidote to all those shelves of speculative fiction, thriller and crime.

January 2006; 291 pages

Published by The Book Guild in 2024

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Only Recently" by Paul Canon Harris

 

A book of poetry. I have explained before in this book that I don't really understand poetry and that my tastes, such as they are, are traditional, so I am finding it difficult to review this book. 

The poems are mostly written in free verse. The scansion is uncontrolled so there is rarely any sense of rhythm. Sometimes there are end rhymes (and sometimes rhymes within the line) but these appear haphazardly (at least it seems to to me) which gives the impression that they are fortuitous happenstances rather than deliberate. There is little suggestion that the poet is using words for their sound. There is no capitalisation at the start of a new line unless that happens to coincide with the beginning of a sentence so it was sometimes difficult to get a sense of where a line began or where it continued and appeared to begin because of the justification process. 

The poems are explorations of ideas, and sometimes of feelings. Quite a lot of them are linked to the Christian faith, some to Christmas and some to Easter. Some of the ideas resonated with me:

• “Everyone wants to go to heaven/ But no one wants to die.” ('Life - An Anomaly')
• '1973' in which the author remembers being told by adults to “Slow down you have all the time in the world”; the final line is the devastating: “They lied.”
• “The male is an uncomplicated beast, a walk, a stroke, a sniff and the next feast ... less a hierarchy of needs - more a canine shopping list.” ('The Dog Watch')

There are some funny verses such as 'Define Silly' in which the narrator is told by his wife not to do anything “silly” while she is out and considers some very silly possibilities, before realising that the word is a euphemism. In 'Dress Code', the author imagines dressing for a Buckingham Palace Garden party and the rivalries this will inspire among the clothes: 
“Boxers were throwing their weight around, trunks looked confident and briefs had little to say.”

Some of the poems are poignant, such as 'To Catch a Thief' in which an old lady wants her son to protect her against imaginary fears but he realises the true thief is the one who is stealing her memory.

'The Secret' appears to be about depression, perhaps caused by the dark days of winter. I enjoyed the images elicited by these lines:
“Unmuzzled, unbridled a constant threat
they plotted and planned for a legacy of regret.
He employed tactics, ruses to deflect their blows,
deployed novels, pictures and poems like
coastal defences, determined to hold back the flows,
desperate not to be swept away on a tide of
despair.
He cultivated ear worms of fragile hope to
muffle the noises, perfidious voices, sinister
whispers of frayed rope, flickering wicks, broken
reeds, hopeless needs.”

'Kite Flying with Auntie' has a great start:
“For one summer you were my locum mum and I
your ersatz son.”

'My twin' considers the poet's id: "the shadow side we let no one see ... The one who looks at another’s sin and says ‘I’d like to give that a try'.” That's brilliant!

My favourite poems were at the start and the end: 'Same Old Same Old' compared  the New Year with a new car: “Haven't had a test drive yet but, sitting here all shiny in the showroom it does look remarkably like the old one.” 'Only Recently' was quite spooky: the poet, realising that "you are ahead of me", also realises that he is afraid to follow: were we talking about someone such as a parent who had recently died or - given the Christian subtext of so many of the poems - Jesus?

An interesting collection.

Paul Canon Harris has also authored a novel reviewed in this blog called Called into Question.

This book was independently published in October 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"To Let" by John Galsworthy

 This is the third novel of the Forsyte Saga. It follows The Man of Property and In Chancery. Galsworthy was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932.

It is set shortly after the first world war. The baby girl born to Soames Forsyte at the end of In Chancery has grown into a beautiful but slightly wilful and very spoilt young woman called Fleur. The boy born to Young Jolyon and Irene has grown into a naive youth named Jon (short for Jolyon, of course) who was just too young to fight in the war. Fleur and Jon meet and instantly fall in love. But neither know the family secret: that Jon's mother was married to Fleur's father, that the marriage was unhappy, that she had an affair with an architect, that Somaes forced himself Irene, that the architect died, that Soames and Irene separated, that twelve years later Soames tried to persuade Irene to return to him but Young Jolyon helped her fend him off, that Soames then sued Irene for divorce citing Young Jolyon as co-respondent, that that this persuaded Young Jolyon to marry Irene , hence Jon. And that this family feud threatens to split Jon as Romeo apart from Fleur as Juliet.

I remember it vividly from watching the BBC adaptation in the late 1960s, before I was a teenager.

The Forsytes represent the moneyed classes. The old generation, all dead apart form Timothy in this book, made money from property, the law, the tea business, publishing etc, many of the latest generation are living off annuities inherited from the old. The main exception is Soames, a solicitor, the"Man of Property" from the first book. To Let is an exploration of his character as he approaches old age. He continues to collect art, but thinks of it in terms of how much he could sell it for. The most "treasured possession of his life.” (1.1) is his daughter Fleur. He is terrified of being poor “He had always been afraid to enjoy today for fear he might not enjoy tomorrow so much.” (1.2) and also terrified on scandal. He is a nimby: “He was quite of opinion that the country should stamp out tuberculosis; but this was not the place. It should be done farther away." (2.2) And he certainly doesn't believe in any form of positive action to combat disadvantage: "He took, indeed, an attitude common to all true Forsytes that disability of any sort in other people was not his affair, and that the State should do its business without prejudicing in any way the natural advantages which he had acquired or inherited.” (2.2)

But Soames is growing old. He doesn't understand modern art or modern machinery: “The car ... typified all that was fast, insecure, and subcutaneously oily in modern life.” (3.7) In general, “As modern life became faster, looser, younger, Soames was becoming older, slower, tighter.” (3.7)

His daughter Fleur has acquired some of his possessive attitude:

• “Never in her life as yet had she suffered from even a momentary fear that she would not get what she had set her heart on.” (2.4)
• “Instinctively she conjugated the verb ‘to have’ always with the pronoun ‘I’.” (3.5)

The conflict at the heart of this novel is not so much the battle between the young lovers and the family feud as the conflict within Soames himself. He is still in love with Irene, his first wife, whom he lost to Jon's father. His present wife, knowing that her marriage was merely to provide Soames with an heir, is having an affair and Soames is terrified of the scandal this might cause; perhaps realising that to have two wives leave him for another man might reflect badly upon himself. But he dotes on his daughter Fleur, whom he has spoiled, and can't bear the thought of her being unhappy. He's in a no-win predicament.

Selected quotes:

• “Mumbling over in his mind the bitter days of his divorce.” (1.1)
• “The boy was good looking ... with something sunny, like a glass of old sherry, spilled over him; his smile perhaps, his hair.” (1.1)
• “Life's awful like a lot of monkeys scramblin’ for empty nuts.” (1.9)
• “ If only we were born old and grew younger year by year, we should understand how things happen, and drop all our cursed intolerance.” (1.10)
• “To be kind and keep your end up - there's nothing else in it ... How wonderfully Dad had acted up to that philosophy!” (3.3)
• “ The quiet tenacity with which he had converted a mediocre talent into something really individual.” (3.6)
• “This child of his would corkscrew her way into a brick wall!” (3.7)

There is one quote I have included because it seemed to me a clever way of introducing a character by giving the reader an information dump which at the same times as telling, shows the reader the character. It's also a master-class in the use of the semi-colon: “She had never heard anyone say so much in so short a time. He told her his age, twenty-four; his weight, ten stone eleven; his place of residence, not far away; described his sensations under fire, and what it felt like to be gassed; criticised the Juno, mentioned his own conception of that goddess; commented on the Goya copy, said Fleur was not too awfully like it; sketched in rapidly the condition of England, spoke of Monsieur Profond ... as ‘an awful sport’; thoughts her father had some ‘ripping’ pictures and some rather ‘dug up’; hoped he might row down again and take her on the river because he was quite trustworthy; inquired her opinion of Tchekov, gave her his own; wished they could go to the Russian ballet sometime ...” (1.12) 

December 2025; 210 page
This Novel was originally published in 1920, sixteen years after The Man of Property.
My paperback edition was issued in an omnibus together with The Man of Property, To Let and the Interludes 'The Indian Summer of a Forsyte' and 'Awakening', in 2012 by Wordsworth Editions

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

The Forsyte saga in total is made up of nine novels and several interludes. In narrative order (dates published in brackets) they are:

• The Man of Property (1906)
• Interlude: The Indian Summer of a Forsyte (1918)
• In Chancery (1920)
• Interlude: Awakening (1920)
• To Let (1921)
• The White Monkey (1924)
• Interlude: A Silent Wooing (1927)
• The Silver Spoon (1926)
• Interlude: Passers-By (1927)
• Swan Song (1928)
• Maid-in-Waiting
• Flowering Wilderness
• Over the River (aka One More River)

There was also a prequel: On Forsyte 'Change, a collection of short stories

"Stranger on a Train" by Jenny Diski

This delightful travel-book-cum-autobiography won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the J R Ackerley Prize for Autobiography  in 2003. 

It has some awesome moments but structurally it rather rambles. For example, it starts with her travelling on a cargo ship to America. Then she embarks on a train journey from Savannah to Tucson, Arizona where she is meeting a friend. Then she has another journey from New York in a counter-clockwise circle around America back to New York, although the account of this journey peters out on the final leg somewhere in South Carolina. Throughout, her account of the journey (mostly the characters she meets in the smoking carriage) repeatedly lurches into autobiography.

Nevertheless, the book is enjoyable because of the things she discusses, such as a friend dying of cancer which prompts her to compare the non-existence of before birth with the non-existence after death and find both equally horrid. She also discusses politics (she is far more left-wing than most of the Americans she meets), mental handicaps and illnesses, the solipsism of sleep, and smoking (a lot). She has the ability to make the reader since old ideas from a new perspective. 

There are also some very funny moments, such as when a teenager complains about the notice warning about "live tracks" on the ground that tracks can't be alive: “I mean, like, live tracks. What's that supposed to mean? ... do they think people would really believe the tracks were alive? Like, how stupid do they think people are? You know, like rails are made of metal, how can they be alive? Only people and animals are actually living. Everyone knows that. Live tracks. Isn't that incredible?” (Journey Two: Live Tracks)

Selected quotes:

• “I hate neat endings. I have an antipathy to finishing in general. The last page, the final strains of a chord, the curtain falling ... living happily ever after; all that grates on me. The finality is false, because there you still are, the reader ... left out of the resolution of the story that seduced you into thinking yourself inside it.” (Circles and Straight Lines)
• “A great-bellied man entirely at the mercy of gravity. Everything about him tended downward: his belly, his chin, his jowls and the corners of his eyes and mouth.” (Journey One: Magic Monotony)
• “I found myself thinking a good deal about the condition of not yet having been born ... a state of non-existence which we had all already not-experienced. ‘So you've already not been. How was it for you?’ ... ‘It didn't bother me at the time.’ ... But the more I thought about it, the more I tried to use the time before my birth as an idea to make death more tolerable, the angrier I became at having been excluded from the events that occurred in history, which is what we call the period before our personal arrival on the planet.” (Journey One: Magic Monotony)
• “We may try to console ourselves that death is not the end of the world, but it's the fact that it isn't the end of the world that is so blindingly difficult to cope with.” (Journey One: Magic Monotony)
• “America might look vast on the map, but for many people it's as small as their local town, beyond which is an uncharted wilderness inhabited by monsters.” (Journey One: Only the Lonely)
• “The humiliation of being caught is what has kept me relatively docile and law-abiding all these years, because although the desire to transgress rules simply because they exist no longer amounts to a compulsion, I still experience an innate and unresolved dislike of authority in any form.” (Journey One: When You’re Strange)
• “The sky is vast and vacuously blue, the empty deserts at sunset threaten the spirit with theirs scrubby grey-green dying light, the rivers wind from bare trickles in parched Earth to thunderous rushing torrents, the canyons dismay and dizzy you as you stare down into them and try to make out the bottom, the mountains loom in anthropomorphic shapes of things seen best in dreams, the grasslands and wheatfields wave like an endless syrupy ocean tickled into motion by the breeze.” (Journey One: Too Much To Ask)
• “Life on a train, in a circumscribed space with a group of others all with our lives on hold ... is also the way of the boarding school, the convent, the prison and the psychiatric hospital.” (Journey One: Too Much To Ask)
• “The ghost of good-looking on his wrecked features.” (Journey One: Too Much To Ask)
• “You're the wrong kind of retard.” (Journey One: Too Much To Ask)
• “When you've lost everything because of the booze, you only have the booze left to comfort you.” (Journey One: Too Much To Ask)
• “The blue, we like to believe, is a place apart from life, a separate realm where the discontinuities exist, queuing, or more likely jostling, for their moment to drop on an unsuspecting world. The bolts from the blue manifest themselves in unscheduled knocks on the front door, the phone ringing late at night ...” (Journey One: By the Time I Got to Phoenix)
• “How strange it is during childhood that we are told it is rude to point, that is, to point out what is pointedly different, to remark on the remarkable, to notice the noticeable. Don't look, my mother used to say, whenever there was anything worth looking at.” (Journey Two: Live Tracks)
• “What you discover, when you first spend the night with someone else, is that, whatever the quality of togetherness the sex might bring you, the quality of separation and utter aloneness when the one of you that isn't you is asleep it's unlike anything else in the world. People sleep alone, no matter that you are in their arms or they in yours. They go away when they sleep to a private place surrounded by overgrown briars and walls of unconsciousness as impenetrable as stone. ... It's a private truth. There are some between people. The solipsism of sleep is one of them.” (Journey Two: Live Tracks)
• “Even those you live with are alone sometimes and retain momentary secrets. You can't watch all the time.” (Journey Two: Live Tracks)
• “He sank his teeth and most of his face into one of the most evil-smelling microwaved hotdogs it was ever my misfortune to have waft my way.” (Journey Two: Expending Nerve Force)
• “When I was growing up in the centre of London, I never saw young people sleeping on pavements. It didn't happen until Margaret Thatcher was elected.” (Journey Two: Expending Nerve Force)
• “A tired-looking woman with a body that had broken free of its youthfully contained voluptuousness.” (Journey Two: Expending Nerve Force)
• “Silence and food in company is a very bad combination in my view. ... the only thing I managed to think at these monkish meals was how no one was talking and however everyone had their own special, and increasingly disgusting, way of shovelling food into their faces.” (Journey Two: Just Like Misery)
• “So far as I could see it [baseball] was rounders but so slow it made cricket look like an extreme sport.” (Journey Two: Just Like Misery)

January 2026; 280 pages

First published by Virago Press in 2002

My paperback edition issued in 2004

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"A Clubbable Woman" by Reginald Hill

The first Dalziel and Pascoe murder mystery.

Veteran rugby player Connie gets a knock on the head and goes home early to crash out. Later that evening he reports discovering his wife murdered. 

Set in and around a rugby club, most of whose members seem to be having affairs with the wives of their friends. There's adultery, poison pen letters and voyeurism but minimal forensics. There's domestic violence and sexism and very few police procedures. This murder mystery written in 1970 is set firmly in its period.

It also introduces Andy Dalziel, the fat superintendent, whose first appearance is recorded thus: “Superintendent Andrew Dalziel was a big man. When he took his jacket off and dropped it over the back of a chair it was like a Bedouin pitching camp. He had a big head, greying now; big eyes, short-sighted, but losing nothing of their penetrating force behind a pair of solid-framed spectacles; and he blew his big nose into a khaki handkerchief a foot-and-a-half square. He had been a vicious lock forward in his time, which had been a time before speed and dexterity were placed higher in the list of a pack’s qualities than sheer indestructibility. The same order of priorities had brought him to his present office.” (Ch 2) There is less focus on equally new debutant Peter Pascoe: “He seemed a highly educated kind of cop. The new image. Get your degree, join the force, the Yard’s the limit.” (Ch 3)

The narration is from multiple perspectives, each in the third person (fairly close) and the present tense.

It's an interesting and well-written debut novel but not nearly as good as the only other one in the series that I have read, the golden dagger winning Bones and Silence.

Selected quotes:

• “He shook his head, remembering when Mary had used to come down on Saturday afternoon. The catering like everything else had been more primitive then. Once they became wives they stopped coming. Then they tried to stop you coming. Then they even stopped that.” (Ch 1)
• “Antony talked eloquently, interestingly, without strain; with none of those changes of direction, grammatical substitutions, syntactical complexities, whose existence her linguistic lecturer assured her was the real framework of the spoken language.” (Ch 1)
• “Jenny grinned. She had tried to stop grinning. She thought it made her face fall apart in the middle, and she still had to count her teeth to assure herself she had not got twice as many as other people. But she kept on forgetting” (Ch 1)
• “Dalziel’s wife, now divorced, had gone off with a milkman fifteen years before. At least, she had gone off. The milkman might have been malicious invention.” (Ch 2)
• “The sky was cloudless, its blue more thinly painted than the blue of summer but the sun was too bright to stare in the eye.” (Ch 3)
• “the real triumphs were never boasted of, but remembered in secret; first with reminiscent delight, but soon with fear and cold panic.” (Ch 3)
• “He wanted sand which rose and fell like the sea, but so slowly that it was only when it drowned his own civilization that a man recognized its tides.” (Ch 3)
• “Buses and trains both set you thinking, she thought. But not in the same way. Trains gave you a rhythm, sent you into dreams, cut you off from reality. Buses were always stopping and starting; traffic, roadjunctions, lights; and of course, bus-stops. The world you passed through was observable. And real.” (Ch 3)
• “Death doesn’t change things, then. It merely petrifies things for those who go on living.” (Ch 5)
• “It is only by going too far sometimes ... that we know we have gone far enough.” (Ch 5)
• “People need more money at Christmas, even crooks. And there’s more about. In the shops; in the wagepackets; moving to and from the banks ... And it’s darker. Gloomier. Half the bloody day. Makes it all seem easier. Darkness encourages other things too. Children have to come home in it. Women in lonely places are there more in the dark than at any other time of the year. Or if you want something else, the weather’s rotten as well.” (Ch 6)
• “Things happen just because it’s Christmas. Life showing its arse at the universal party.” (Ch 6)
• “Nothing’s so important that it won’t keep. Or if it is, and you keep it too long, it stops being important, and that’s much the same thing.” (Ch 7)

January 2025; 232 pages (according to kindle)

First published 1970

My kindle edition was issued by HarperCollins in 2015.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God 

Dalziell and Pascoe books in order:

• A Clubbable Woman (1970)
• An Advancement of Learning (1971)
• Ruling Passion (1973)
• An April Shroud (1975)
• A Pinch of Snuff (1978)
• A Killing Kindness (1980)
• Deadheads (1983)
• Exit Lines (1984)
• Child's Play (1987)
• Underworld (1988)
• Bones and Silence (1990)
• One Small Step (1990), novella
• Recalled to Life (1992)
• Pictures of Perfection (1994)
• The Wood Beyond (1995)
• Asking for the Moon (1996), short stories
• "The Last National Service Man"
• "Pascoe's Ghost"
• "Dalziel's Ghost"
• "One Small Step"
• On Beulah Height (1998)
• Arms and the Women (1999)
• Dialogues of the Dead (2002)
• Death's Jest-Book (2003)
• Good Morning, Midnight (2004)
• The Death of Dalziel (2007), (Canada and US Title: Death Comes for the Fat Man)
• A Cure for All Diseases (Canada and US title: The Price of Butcher's Meat) (2008) Shortlisted for Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award 2009.
• Midnight Fugue (2009)

Also by Reginald Hill: Joe Sixsmith (Luton PI) books in order:

• Blood Sympathy (1993)
• Born Guilty (1995)
• Killing the Lawyers (1997)
• Singing the Sadness (1999)
• The Roar of the Butterflies (2008)

"The Rest of Our Lives" by Ben Markovits

Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Twelve years ago, Tom's wife, Amy, had an affair. He decided then that he would leave their children had left home. Now he is driving daughter, Miriam, from the environs of New York to university in Pittsburgh. After settling her in ... he keeps driving westward, visiting his brother and an ex-girlfriend, as well as others, before ending up in Los Angeles with his son.

It's a road trip novel, whose antecedents include Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig, TRoOL parallels the physical journey with a psychological journey into the memories of the narrator. Like Rabbit, Run by John Updike, the protagonist is representative of middle-class America (though in this case upper-middle-class) and considers the ins and outs of marital problems with a didactic frankness. Another echo of this novel is that both protagonists were basketball players in their youth.

There are two other plot lines that run parallel to his reminiscences. The first is that he is growing increasingly ill - he thinks it is long Covid. The second is that he has been suspended from his law school because he got involved in a dispute where a basketball club owner was accused of discriminatory practices. He is becoming redundant as an old white male, refusing to use the standardised pronoun sign-off on  his email. On his journey, he meets a white player who wants to sue the basketball authorities because of the under-representation of white players in the top flight of basketball and seeks the narrator as representative. 

I found it difficult to get involved in the story for two reasons. Firstly, the style of the prose which is matter of fact to the point where much is told rather than shown. Secondly, there were so many culturally-specific references to American life that I began to long for footnotes. I am sure that this increases the verisimilitude of the novel for an American audience, but it led to me feeling alienated and consequently less empathetic towards the protagonist-narrator. Sometimes, I understood the reference, after long immersion in Hollywood movies and US TV shows and novels, such as "We obviously had ... a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life." (Ch 1) which references the American school grading system. I am struggling to catch up when a character "graduated salutatorian, and even got elected Homecoming Princess" (Ch 1) When the narrator starts talking about baseball or basketball (and he seems, like so many Americans at least in novels, utterly obsessed with sport) I am hopelessly lost and I don't really care.

It also had that thing that quirk typical to American novels in which character is exemplified through  possessions, menu choices, and particularly clothing:

• "He wore a Foegley Landscape short-sleeved collared shirt." (Ch 2) He is a very minor character, a walk-on part, and yet what he wears appears to be important. Presumably 'Foegley Landscape' is a brand.
• "Betty had on black leggings and Nike running shoes, with a neon yellow swoosh; she wore an oversized men's shirt." (Ch 3)

Selected quotes:

• "I started signing off with he/I/mine ... I don't like being referred to in the accusative. It literally objectifies I." (Ch 1)
• "All that was thirty-five years ago. Ar a certain point with these family dynamics, you'd think the stature of limitations would run out." (Ch 2)
• "Nobody tells you what an intense experience loneliness is, how it has a lot of variations." (Ch 2)
• "The whole afternoon had a post-nap flavour of unreality." (Ch 2)
• "It's a funny thing to be driven by your son, you feel the power dynamic shifting." (Ch 3)
• "That look you get from flying, where you put up a front all day, and the front gets a bit dented." (Ch 3)

The reviews, for example that of the Sunday Telegraph which claimed the novel "Packs a serious emotional punch" left me mystified. True, the plot ends up in a life-or-death situation for the narrator. But I found it difficult to identify with an upper-middle-class American man and the prose had failed to engage me so, actually, I was an observer to the crisis rather than a participant; fundamentally, I didn't really care.

January 2026; 239 pages

First published in the UK by Faber & Faber 2025

My paperback edition was issued in 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Japanese Fairy Tales" by Yei Theodora Ozaki

 A fascination anthology of Japanese Fairy Tales collected and translated in 1903 by the child of a Japanese father and an English mother, with illustrations by a Japanese artist Kazuko Fujiyama. 

They have a typically fairy-tale narration, the simple 'this happened and then that happened' lending credence to the otherwise unbelievable happenings. As with Western fairy-tales a la Grimm, there are cruelties and horrors: per dogs are slaughtered, people killed without any sense that this might be any more than a personal tragedy. I was, however, a little surprised when, in 'The Happy Hunter and the Skilful Fisher' the hunter tries fishing and loses his brother's fish-hook and has to go down to the undersea palace of the Dragon King (who rules underwater) and the fish is found embedded in the throat of the red bream who is held responsible for stealing the hook and only escapes punishment because of how much he has already suffered with the hook inside him. There is no suggestion that the Dragon King might protect his subjects against the evil humans who are snatching them from the sea to be eaten!

There are some themes and motifs. Kintaro, the Golden boy, grows up alone in the wilds, a sort of cross between Tarzan and Dr Doolittle. Under the orders of her stepmother, a princess is taken out into the wilds by a servant to be abandoned (but he takes pity on her) just like Snow White and her male predecessors such as Oedipus. There is another princess who is to be the prize of a competition between suitors. Clearly folklore themes are universal expressions of the human condition.

But the context of emperors from the mythological age and samurai and dragons etc is all great fun. and lends the feeling that you are reading these tales for the first time.

Entertaining and interesting. With notes and a biographical sketch of the anthologist.

January 2026; 226 pages

First published as The Japanese Fairy book  in 1903

My paperback edition was issued by Renard Press in 2025.

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