"Still Lives" by Reshma Ruia

Madame Bovary in Manchester. Emma Bovary becomes PK Malik, an Indian businessman in Manchester, whose business is struggling. Seeking an escape from his disappointing family life, seduced by glamour, he begins an affair with the wife of his most successful rival. Inevitably he finds himself living far beyond his means. All of his dreams are disappointed. 

This story of ordinary people is firmly rooted in reality, underscored by the matter-of-fact chapter titles, eg "A Football Match", "Tough Times", "A Pair of Red Shoes". This everyday style reminded me of the 'kitchen sink' novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe and The Lowlife by Alexander Baron. So many novels nowadays seem to harness escapism that it is refreshing to discover that authors can still find drama in the ordinary.

It is narrated in the present tense (although there are a couple of moments when it seems that PK is looking back on the story) by PK the protagonist. Many of the chapters end with letters written by Geeta, PK's wife.

The ring of truth about this novel is substantiated by the relentlessness of the trap that is tightening around the hero. The reader hopes that this remorseless author will find a happy ending but fears that PK's story can only end in tragedy.

The Set up of the Plot

 Prakash Kant 'PK' Malik left India and settled in Manchester where he became successful in the rag trade. A wannabe fashion designer, he was one of the pioneers of cheap fashion: taking haute couture, changing it slightly, and marketing it to the masses. But when the novel opens, his business in struggling. The competition is personified by Cedric Solomon. At the same time, his wife Geeta is growing fat and their only son Amar, born after a number of miscarriages, has special needs and is entering adolescence. Spending mushrooms in the absence of love, putting intolerable pressure on PK's finances. He seeks escape and begins an affair with Cedric's wife, Esther. I particularly enjoyed the irony when the clothes designer first seeks happiness by getting naked with his lover.

Selected quotes:

• “Anybody can be happy - there is no skill in that. what is important is to become a someone.” (Ch 17)
• “All love stories are accidents ... A crazy lurch in the dark, and if we're lucky someone steps out to catch us, to break our fall.” (Ch 18)

September 2025; 309 pages

Published by Renard Press in 2022

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

"A Brief History of Seven Killings" by Marlon James

Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize.

It's not brief. And there are far more than seven killings. In fact the seven killings referred to in the title (which is also the title of the magazine articles written by fictional journalist Alex Pierce) refer to one massacre which takes place in one chapter of the fourth part of this epic.

It is written from multiple viewpoints. The five parts (each introduced by the ghost of the first man to be murdered) are divided into shorter chapters, each being narrated in the first person perspective by a character. There are a lot of characters and many of them have individual voices, although they mostly divide into Jamaican gangster speak, Jamaican posh speak, and US speak. 

This use of language is one of the key characteristics of the novel, creating a vivid and direct connection to the reader. The Jamaican gangsters use patois mixed with Rastafarian words and a considerable amount of swearing; there are some limitations to this vocabulary (the almost ubiquitous use of the word "pussyhole" as an epithet for someone you don't like) which slightly undermines the suggestion that some of the gangsters are intelligent autodidacts. 

The raw freshness of this novel is created largely from the shock tactics of using this unexpurgated language as well as the repeated cold-blooded killing and the misogyny. 

It is a vivid portrayal of the emptiness of the gangster's life. These young men have to kill or be killed; their life expectancy is short; they have to be harder than their fellows in order to progress up the hierarchy and improve their chances of survival. As Demus, a young recruit says, he tried to kill the Singer not because he didn't like the Singer but to impress his fellow gang-members.

There's a lot of murder. One character has qualms (about killing the wrong person, an innocent kid). As the book progresses, the killing becomes more and more extreme, perhaps to show that the violence became worse once it was exported from its roots in the Jamaican ghetto, although that sounds racist. I think a more likely reason is that the author had to make the killing worse and worse (beheadings, burnings alive etc) in order to keep shocking the reader.

Given that the focus of the book is on criminal gangsters of whom only one is female, this misogyny is perhaps not surprising. Almost all of the men see women purely in terms of sex objects (or, occasionally, as brood mares). There are only two female narrators, one who has only a few pages and the other who reappears throughout the book although her name changes. Otherwise, the novel is dominated by the make perspective. In fact one might argue that gay men (there are two major characters, both killers, who are gay) have a larger say in the narrative than women.

In Aspects of the Novel, E M Forster writes “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.” This is a long book, nearly 700 pages in my paperback version. I actually think it should have been two or three books. The first two sections, dealing with the shooting of Bob Marley (he is only twice mentioned by name, once as 'Marley' {Original Rockers: Alex Pierce #1} and another time as 'Bob' - elsewhere he is always called 'the Singer' in his Jamaica home, would stand alone as a tightly structured novel. The next three sections drag out the aftermath, moving to the USA, following the characters who were involved, either as culprits or witnesses, and explaining how, by getting involved in drug dealing, Jamaican gang warfare led to an explosion in drug abuse in New York. I found these parts increasingly heavy going, I was reading just to get to the end, I did want to know what happened to the characters involved but I wouldn't have minded if their fates had been left a mystery. The fresh use of Jamaican patois had become routine, something to be admired because of the author's ability to long it out. The shock value of the swearing, the misogyny and the killings was blunted. The book was, for me, in the end, too long.

In the long run, and the run was long, I found this novel an impressive achievement but I didn't derive much enjoyment from reading it.

Selected quotes: 

• “If it no go so it go near so.” (epigraph) = If it didn’t happen just like that, it more or less did.
• “Living people wait and see because they fool themselves that they have time. Dead people see and wait.” (Sir Arthur George Jennings)
• “If change ever going to come then we will have to wait and see, but all we can do down here in the Eight Lanes is see and wait.” (Original Rockers: Bam-Bam #1)
• “People so poor they can't even afford shame.” (Original Rockers: Bam-Bam #1)
• “Every time you reach the edge, the edge move ahead of you like a shadow until the whole world is a ghetto.” (Original Rockers: Bam-Bam #1)
• “The sun is jumping ship and evening's coming.” (Original Rockers: Barry DiFlorio)
• "What does it mean when the conscience of America airbrushes pussy for a living?"  (Original Rockers: Barry DiFlorio) Referring to the fact that Penthouse, a soft porn magazine, combined its pictures with investigative reporting, particularly unveiling US government scandals.
• “Things hard and getting more and more crucial by the day when a nursery worker have to skin out onstage.” (Original Rockers: Josey Wales)
• “Only when we come to Revelation that we take stock of Genesis.” (Ambush in the Night: Papa-Lo #2)
• “She gave me that I-expected-just-a-little-more-from-you look that she either inherited or studied from Mummy.” (Ambush in the Night: Nina Burgess #2)
• “Soldier don't act like we is crime and them is order, soldier act like we is enemy and this is war.” (Ambush in the Night: Papa-Lo #3)
• “I wouldn't befriend him if he was all that could stop me from being buttfucked raw by Satan and his ten big-dicked demons.”
• “Guess what, for all its shit, communism is more socially progressive than us.” (Shadow Dancin’: Barry DiFlorio)
• “As small as America's dick is, those limeys will stretch across the Atlantic to suck it.” (Shadow Dancin’: Barry DiFlorio)
• “The sun running away before we get to the bay. It don't have what it take to witness when man get dark.” (Shadow Dancin’: Papa-Lo)
• “I'll bet anybody that my nothing is bigger than their nothing any day of the week.” (White Lines / Kids in America: Dorcas Palmer # 1)
• “Is that them call fatalism? I don't know, brethren, that word seem more connected to fatal than it connected to fate.” ((White Lines / Kids in America: Tristan Phillips #5)

August 2025; 686 pages

First published by Oneworld 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

"The Spire" by William Golding

 A Dean in the Middle Ages is inspired by a vision to add a spire to his cathedral. Opposition includes the master builder he hires to supervise the work. Will his monomaniacal determination win the day or will his dreams come crashing down? 

The wikipedia page on this novel has a detailed account of the plot (with spoilers), the characters and the symbolism.

For me, the best thing about the book is the carefully constructed gappy stream of consciousness narration (all from Dean Jocelin's perspective) which is a masterclass in how to hook and beguile the reader into piecing together what is going on from the sometimes disjointed clues. 

The key turning points are at the one-third mark and the two-thirds mark.

Captain Ahab meets Leopold Bloom?

Selected quotes

• “The most solid thing was the light. It smashed through the rows of windows in the south aisle, so that they exploded with colour, it slanted before him from right to left in an exact formation, ... Everywhere, fine dust gave these rods and trunks of light the importance of a dimension.” (Ch 1)
• “He had a tariff of knees. He knew how they should be after this length of kneeling or that.” (Ch 1)
• “Once more, the windows were coming together. the Saint’s life still burned in them with blue and red and green; but the spark and shatter of the sun had shifted.” (Ch 1)
• “The master builder often looked at things without seeing them; and then again, he would look at a thing as if he could see nothing else.” (Ch 2)
• “When the rain drizzled, then time was a drizzle, slow and to be endured.” (Ch 3)
• “When the wind came, it ... cuffed the air this way and that.” (Ch 3)
• “A workman fell through the hole above the crossways, and left a scream scored all the way down the air which was so thick it seemed to keep the scream as something mercilessly engraved there.” (Ch 3)
• “A midday without sun and therefore blasphemously without hope.” (Ch 3)
• “Some of the gargoyles seemed diseased, as they yelled their soundless blasphemies and derisions into the wind, yet made no more noise than death in another country.” (Ch 4) “no more noise than death in another country.”: what a phrase!
• “He was helpless ... as a girl herding too many geese.” (Ch 4) A nice mediaeval simile.
• “There comes a point when a vision’s no more than a child’s playing let’s pretend.” (Ch 4)
• “The earth is a huddle of noseless men grinning upward, there are gallows everywhere, the blood of childbirth never ceases to flow, nor sweat in the furrow, the brothels are down there and drunk men lie in the gutter. There is no good thing in all this circle but the great house, the ark, the refuge, a ship to contain all these people and now fitted with a mast.” (Ch 5) Earlier in the book, the cathedral is compared to a man lying on his back which makes the spire an erect penis.
• “There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.” (Ch 10)
• “Life itself is a rickety building.” (Ch 10)
• “His thoughts went trotting away like a horse unharnessed from the cart.” (Ch 11)

William Golding was a Booker prize winner (1980) and the 1983 Nobel Laureate. He wrote poetry, drama and these novels:

• Lord of the Flies (1954)
• The Inheritors (1955)
• Pincher Martin (1956)
• Free Fall (1959)
• The Spire (1964)
• The Pyramid (1967)
• Darkness Visible (1979) (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize)
• To the Ends of the Earth (trilogy)
• Rites of Passage (1980) (Booker Prize winner)
• Close Quarters (1987)
• Fire Down Below (1989)
• The Paper Men (1984)
• The Double Tongue (posthumous publication 1995)

My copy has a delightful cover by John Piper, an artist who designed a large opus of ecclesiastical work, including stained glass windows.

August 2025; 223 pages

Published by Faber and Faber in 1964

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

"Pilgrimage 1: Pointed Roofs" by Dorothy Richardson

This little novel, the first of a novel sequence of 12 further volumes, has a place in literary history as the first novel in English to be described as 'stream of consciousness' in a review by May Sinclair (author of Uncanny Stories) in the Egoist in April 1918. It is a fictionalised (not autofiction because the name of the narrator is changed) version of Richardson's 1891 experience as a 17-year-old student teacher at a finishing school in Hanover in Germany. The rest of the novel sequence closely follows the events of Richardson's life.

It wasn't what I would describe as 'stream of consciousness'. Although the narration is entirely from the perspective of protagonist Miriam Henderson, it seemed more of an interior monologue. There were moments when the prose departed from standard grammatical structure or when we experienced raw sensory impressions or when memories interrupted the conscious thought, but most of the time Miriam's thought processes were quite orderly and the narration normal. I suppose that it was a first attempt at SoC, but it showed how quickly the technique advanced: Ulysses by James Joyce began serial publication just 5 years after Pointed Roofs and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway was published ten years after PR. But certainly PR is written from a perspective inside the skin of its narrator and there are certainly elements of SoC.

Unfortunately, the events described in the book are really rather mundane. I suppose that a day in the life of an insurance salesman, or the hour-by-hour account of a lady planning a dinner party are also mundane but perhaps they are forgivable because of their tight time-frame, while PR's time period is months. 

It does evoke a feeling of the claustrophobia of an all-girls finishing school with its strained relationships. Towards the end there is a thunderstorm to which most of the schoolgirls (and the head teacher) react with hysteria. The headteacher is also liable to sudden storms and is memorably condemnatory when she discovers that the girls have been talking about boys which is impure! Although up till that point the attitude towards this sort of thing seemed to be relaxed.

The portraits of the headteacher Fraulein Pfaff and the informal Head Girl, confident Australian Gertrude, were well-developed. Otherwise there were probably too many characters for me to understand any of them in depth.

Selected quotes:

• “Lilla, with her black hair and the specks of bright amber in the brown of her eyes.” (1.1) I loved that detailed study of eye colour. Eyes are something the narrator repeatedly notices.
• “The polished floor was uncarpeted save for an archipelago of mats and rugs.” (3.4)
• “Perhaps that was how it was with the English. They knew, but they did not dare.” (3.8)

August 2025; 146 pages

First published in the UK by Duckworth in 1915

My paperback version was issued by Zinc Read in 2023.

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

"Ethan Frome" by Edith Wharton

This tiny little novel feels a bit like a miniature Wuthering Heights, without the ghosts and the romantic hero. It is set on an isolated farm in a wintry New England, as bleak and occasionally beautiful as the Yorkshire moors. The eponymous hero is trapped with a demanding invalid wife and becomes obsessed with the vivacious poor relation who lives with them. Will Ethan get a second chance at happiness? 

It's a classic novel of despair. The emotions are intensified by the claustrophobic settings and the fact that the inarticulate protagonist cannot voice his desires. And it has a stupendous twist at the end. 

It’s a story in a story. The unnamed, first-person narrator of the frame confesses to constructing “this vision of his story”. The main narrative is written in the third-person from Ethan's perspective; his is the only interior monologue we have access to.

One of the one-star reviews on goodreads describes the characters as shallow. It's a valid point. There are three main characters:

• Ethan is a classic tragic hero. Aristotle, in his Poetics insists that a tragedy must evoke both pity and fear which means that the reader must, to some extent, empathise with the tragic hero and I could certainly put myself in Ethan's place. Schreiber in chapter 8 of his Introduction to Literary Criticism, asserts that the hero must “contribute to his own downfall” but only by making a mistake of judgement rather than being morally unsound. This is also true, at least if you accept the contemporary morality in which divorce was possible. Ethan’s tragic flaw is that he has glimpsed a better world, so like Adam and Eve after they had tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge, he cannot remain content on his unproductive farm and in his loveless marriage. Aristotle would have approved of what he called peripeteia and we would call the twist at the end: it meets his criteria of both being unexpected and yet inevitable. 
• But if Ethan is an interesting and complex character, Zeena is as flat as they come, a stereotyped old shrew. Beautifully written but one dimensional. A classic villain in the sense that most plots are driven by the baddie's nefarious schemes. Whether you believe or not in Zeena's character arc is up to you. I accept that it is plausible. Nevertheless, Zeena is a car with only two gears: fast forward and reverse.
• Mattie is even more sketchily drawn. She's the love interest, pretty and vivacious and, for some reason, head over heels in love with Ethan, despite the fact that when we first see her she is flirting with Dennis Eady (but she can't have any interest in him because that would represent an escape route and she has to be trapped).

As for the central symbolism of the pickle dish, even the Guardian describes that as overly portentous. It was a wedding present for Zeena, ergo a symbol of her marriage. But she hid it away and never used it as if to symbolise her refusal to enter fully into her marriage (I presume that Ethan and her don’t have sex which is why they have no kids). It is broken (by the cat) immediately after Ethan and Mattie touch hands while eating together while Zeena is away from home, symbolising how their adultery (in their hearts if not in actuality) shatters the Frome marriage. There’s even a hint of ‘while the cat’s away the mice will play’!

There are some moments of stunning description, the plot is an absolute classic and the despair of Ethan's marriage is wonderfully portrayed. But I would have preferred more time spent on the characters.

Selected quotes

• “The storms of February had pitched their white tents about the devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to their support.” (Prologue)
• “The Frome farm was always ‘bout as bare’s a milkpan when the cat's been round.” (Prologue)
• “His father got a kick, out haying, and went soft in the brain, and gave away money like Bible texts afore he died.” (Prologue)
• “In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.” (Ch 1)
• “His father's death ... had put a premature end to Ethan's studies; but though they had not gone far enough to be of much practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.” (Ch 1)
• “‘We never got away - how should you?’ seemed to be written on every headstone.” (Ch 2)
• “His dread was so strong that, man-like, he sought to postpone certainty.” (Ch 2) Not sure about the 'man-like'. Unless it means 'human-like'. 

Wharton also wrote The Age of Innocence

August 2025; 181 pages

First published by Charles Scribner's Sons in the USA in 1911

My Penguin paperback was issued in 1987

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

Potted plot: spoiler alert

Ethan wanted to go to college and learn stuff but his father’s illness brought him back to manage the farm. After his father died, his mum became ill and he brought in Zenobia to help nurse her; subsequently he married her. But the marriage was a disaster. Zeena took the ‘invalid’ route forever complaining that she is ill. So they bring Mattie, a poor relation of Zeena’s, to help around the house for her board and lodging. Ethan, disappointed in marriage, falls in love with Mattie and she with him (although the love is unconsummated and inarticulate). Zeenie, suspecting this liaison, announces she is now so ill that they will have to bring in a hired girl to replace Mattie. Ethan has to take Mattie to the station but instead they decide to go skiing, making a suicide pact to deliberately steer into a tree to kill themselves. But they only injure themselves, Mattie being permanently crippled. They return to the farm where Zeena resumes the role of carer, no longer having time to invent her own illnesses. Ethan lives with these two women in a loveless, mostly silent and resentful, triangle of resentment.

"An Introduction to Literary Criticism" by S M Schreiber

Written as a series of lectures to sixth formers seeking to go to Oxbridge, this is old school literary criticism. It starts by insisting that literary creations should be compared to a canon of classics that have stood the test of time which immediately creates a prejudice against modern literature. It goes on to consider poetry and why poets write in verse (“piece of writing in which the syllables are so arranged as to produce a recurring rhythm.”; Ch 2) and how “the perfect union of sound and sense” (Ch 3) is achieved using imagery.

Needless to say, I was spitting feathers through most of this book. Repeatedly ageist, he managed at least once to be unthinkingly racist as well. Furthermore, he regularly made statements which I thought false. Nevertheless, I persisted, because he obviously knew the technical aspects of eg poetry and playwriting and he made a number of good points.

For example, he asks why we enjoy watching tragic drama, which often contains "that which would cause us unmixed pain in real life" (Ch 4), and suggests that the only way a dramatist can get away with this is by avoiding realism. But when he goes on to propose that this is why all great tragedy is written in verse, my eyebrows started to life. He also claims that tragic heroes must “tower above common humanity” so Hedda Gabler is too petty and limited to "move us to the depths of our being" (Ch 4). At this point I parted company with Schreiber.

He also suggests that the key difference between comedy and tragedy is that while tragedy makes us feel, comedy engages the head rather than the heart. Because it we had any empathy at all we wouldn't laugh at Malvolio: “the painful humiliation of a rebuffed social climber". (Ch 5) The only way in which we can laugh at people we also pity (he gives the example of Bottom) is if the setting is “the real world with the evil left out.” (Ch 5) That made me think! For example, Steinbeck's Cannery Row is funny and tender but a friend recently criticised it because, as he said, all the whores have hearts of gold and Mack isn't a nasty piece of work which is unrealistic. So I think Schreiber might have a point here. I'm not so sure when he goes on to say that this makes The Merchant of Venice a failure as a comedy because Shakespeare was seduced into making Shylock a character with depth and suffering rather than a sawdust villain. But on the other hand this justifies Peter Saccio (in a lecture in The Great Courses: 'William Shakespeare Comedies, Histories and Tragedies': https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/william-shakespeare-comedies-histories-and-tragedies) in his assertion that Merchant is fundamentally a fairy tale, ie not a real world or else a "real world with the evil left out" in Schreiber's phrase.

Schreiber goes on to consider the difference between classical and romantic in chapter 6, suggesting that the key difference is that classic literature seeks perfection within limits while the romantic seeks to transcend boundaries by rejecting rules.

Finally he considers the novel. He defines the difference between the traditional novel and the modern novel as the former's fundamental concern to tell a story. But he also distinguishes between good and bad in novels as whether, in the end, "it enriches us" or leads to “nothing but debilitation”: “The ultimate test of the quality of a novel lies, not in its ‘readability’, essential though this is, nor in a well-constructed plot, nor in its literary style, but simply and solely in the degree of truth which it embodies ... in the characters themselves, then in the picture of the world in which they are placed, and, finally, in the novelist’s sense of values” (Ch 7) I started spitting again. This seems to suggest that a trashy thriller in which the goodies triumph is a better novel that a work of art which leaves the reader questioning. I wasn't surprised that all his 'good' novels are from long ago. He particularly adores Jane Austen.

He finishes with notes on Aristotle's Poetics.

I'm glad I read it. It was easy to read and had some very interesting points, even those that I disputed. 

August 2025; 196 pages

First published by Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press in 1965

My edition was issued in 1969

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

"Basilisk" by Matt Wixey

Purporting to have been sent as an attachment to an anonymised email, the narrative is interspersed with comments from 'Holly Soames' who appears to be a law enforcement officer. The main story, told by protagonist Alex Webster, describes how she and her friend and colleague Jay Morton, both pentesters (computer hackers who are hired to seek out the vulnerabilities in a computer system in order that the hiring company can put safeguards into place), start playing a computer game in which they have to answer puzzles set by a shadowy character called The Helmsman; each puzzle solved is rewarded with a chapter of The Helmsman Texts - part autobiography, part philosophical treatise - the final chapter of which will be the basilisk, a cognitive hack which may drive a person insane.

The Helmsman Texts interrupt the novel narrative. To some extent it feels as if the purpose of the book was to present the philosophy in a way that a reader of horror, or speculative fiction, would tolerate. The first chapter considered Plato's Allegory of the Cave, the second described a cockroach invasion and discussed the possibilities of subliminal influencing, the fourth suggested that things such as religion and language could be considered a virus and the fifth promises the basilisk. We are never given the final chapter. The Texts include email chains, bibliographies, and playlets; the author has certainly been innovative. There's even a cryptic crossword (as a connoisseur I was a little disappointed in this). 

It's fundamentally an attempt to update the horror novel (“A long slow river leading to Kurtz.”; Ch 9) to the world of the internet. This was, for me, where it was weakest. The opposition, referred to only by a blanked out piece of text, were strange people with huge fixed smiles, half religious missionaries, half 'Men in black' clones. Their fundamental mission is for people to be happy which meant persuading them to stop playing the Helmsman's game, if necessary by killing them. Of course Alex and Jay, addicted to curiosity - rather like the teenagers in a horror film who, one by one, go down into the cellar - ignore the warnings. Much is made of the allegory of Eve plucking the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

The epigram is "ceci n'est pas un livre", French for 'this is not a book', a play on the famous Magritte painting of a pipe with the caption 'ceci n'est pas une pipe'. Presumably this is an example of the type of cognitive hack mentioned in the Helmsman Texts; the idea that if you can subvert a person's understanding of reality, you will drive them mad.

A book for someone who likes puzzles. Plot and style are much more important than character. It reminded me very much of another book which it quotes several times: Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hoftstadter.

I learned a great deal about hacking, including too many initials. I also realised, I think, why the Helmsman was called the Helmsman, something neither Jay not Alex seemed to fathom. The ancient Greek word for helmsman, or navigator, is κυβερνήτης, transliterated as kŭbernḗtēs, from which we derive the word 'cyber', cybernetics having been originally a science studying systems and their control.

Selected quotes:

• “On learning that we are being fucked, three questions present themselves: What am I being fucked by? Who is responsible for the fucking? And can I ameliorate the situation so that I am fucked as minimally as possible, and ideally not at all.” (Ch 1)
• “To be a hacker is to dance to hidden tunes ... It is to rewrite the song and repurpose the instruments. make a piano sound like a guitar; disguise a vuvuzela as a clarinet to get it past security; redesign a flute so that it produces the flatulent bellow of a tuba. All because we can.” (Ch 2)
• “There is precious little good fiction which concerns itself with hacking.” (Ch 4)
• “A significant amount of human effort ... is spent attempting to control the minds of others.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 3)
• “The argument that religion is a virus has been made before ... It is often hereditary, but also transmitted through friends and acquaintances. It causes marked and bizarre changes in behaviour, including, but not limited to: changes in diet; an inability to consider certain things rationally; a sometimes fanatical adherence to arbitrary codes of morality; the mutilation of children's genitals; an irrational hatred of people infected by a slightly different strain; and, in its most extreme forms, violence, murder, and suicide.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 3)
• “Convincing a person to cause significant harm to themselves or others is difficult ... Cassius uses astroturfing to convince Brutus to assassinate Caesar .... Lady Macbeth plays to Macbeth’s ambition to persuade him to kill Duncan ... Satan uses ‘perswasive words, impegn’d with Reason’ to convince Eve to consume the fruit of the tree of knowledge.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 3)
• “Human behaviour can be drastically altered as a consequence of ingesting new knowledge.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 3)
• “I find myself thinking whether there are ever glitches in reality, strange loops that repeat like records skipping forever. Little pockets of time that replay constantly while the world moves around them.” (Ch 7)
• “I've often thought that Otto is the human equivalent of vanilla - that if you cut him he would bleed beige, and it would congeal to look and smell like cold Ready Brek.” (Ch 7)
• “If we were to be arrested for our thoughtcrimes the overwhelming majority of the human race would be in handcuffs.” (Ch 7)
• “Thought experiments ... have changed the world, particularly in the field of physics (Einstein chasing a beam of light; Newton’s cannonball, etc)" (The Helmsman Texts chapter 4)
• “How we all fall! Slowly and then all at once!” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 5)
• “The world is a cacophony of noise, and deep underneath the waves is the occasional signal. Only a few penetrate. The world screams in your face, all the time, desperate for your attention and love!! Most of the time we give our attention to the things that scream the loudest.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 5)

August 2025; 

Published in July 2025 by Titan Books, London

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

"Falling Animals" by Sheila Armstrong

 A man is found dead on a beach near a small town in Ireland. He seems to have died of natural causes; he's riddled with cancer. No-one knows who he is: there are no identifying papers, even the labels have been cut from his clothes. 

The narrative works towards a solution to this mystery by telling the stories of the members of the community, from their perspective but in the third person. It is like a collage or a mosaic. Some of the stories interlink but, in the end, it is up to the reader to assemble them to see the whole picture. It's a clever device which reminded me of The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan, another book set in the fallout from the Irish financial crash of 2008. But I am encountering so many collage-style narratives that I have decided to include them in a page on this blog. 

Another dimension to this mystery is the feeling that a number of the narrators have of some supernatural presence on board the boat.

The title comes from a memorial built to commemorate those who have died at sea, and those who have lived at sea but died elsewhere, such as the body on the beach. A plaque on the memorial says: “For those fallen at sea and those still falling.” (3: the dead)

The final section is entitled 'the dead' in what I presume is a homage to James Joyce whose final story in Dubliners is also entitled The Dead.

There are some wonderfully lyrical descriptions, such as “The sunsets smear themselves across the sky and drown themselves in the temperamental sea.” (2: the artist) 

Selected quotes:

• “Out over the deep water, the dawn light is stretched out and thin ... Further out, the tent pole of a lighthouse props up the sky.” (1: the collector)
• “There are leapers and creepers, he once told her: those who get it over with in one go, and those that creep into the water, step by step, letting each part of their body adjust.” (1: the witness)
• “There will be another argument between them this evening, as inevitable as the rising sun, and like the sunlight, it will touch on everything but move nothing.” (1: the doctor)
• “There was something about him, as if the landscape was there to frame him instead of the other way around.” (1: the son)
• “At the edge of the village, land meets air meets sea, and a handful of buildings shy away from the cliffside to cradle a half moon of grass.” (2: the cook)
• “It's silhouettes that are unique - the shadow the person casts, what they look like behind the window, the shape they make against the backdrop of the landscape.” (2: the artist)
• “Even in an industry where people are treated as things, there are some who manage to treat them as less than that.” (3: the priest)
• “She is as proud as a cat and as untidy as a dog.” (3: the daughter)
• “We watch the others who come now, hidden away in too-small boats, seeking refuge. They pay dearly for hope, but bodies are money and money is bodies; this has always been the way of it.” (3: the dead)

August 2025; 226 pages

First published in GB by Bloomsbury in 2023

My paperback edition issued in 2024

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

Spoiler alert: The story told section by section

Part One:

• the collector describes a man retrieving for incineration the carcase of a seal from the beach.
• the witness is Oona, who discovers the body and later talks about it in the bar.
• the doctor, the pathologist, who is puzzled by why the man died.
• the son is Mitchell, an American living in the village with his mother who has MS. He saw the man, still alive, sitting on the beach.
• the driver, Darragh, drove the bus on which the man arrived at the village. He remembers he had a purple backpack.
• the wanderer is Yousef who found the backpack in a bin and took it.

Part Two:

• the seaman is a Filipino crew member on the boat that was shipwrecked in the bay.
• the cook was galley chef of the wrecked ship. She stayed in the village to run the cafe. 
• the firestarter, Donal, went out the the wrecked boat and lit a camp-fire. This ignited the remaining fuel and the wreck burned.
• the diver, Robert, has a panic attack swimming down the the wreck.
• the artist is Mitchell's mum. She has MS but is trying to paint what she thought she saw creeping to shore as the wreck burned. She prmoises to paint the cook's memory of her dead daughter.
• the barman is Matias. His father expelled him from his home in Colombia because he was gay and he wandered the world. An inheritance meant that he could buy the bat and he hopes to marry his live-in boyfriend Donal.

Part Three:

• the widow is a Polish madwoman who claims that the man whose body was found was her husband. He wasn't.
• the guard has worked on this case for years. He takes Donal's confession of starting the fire but rips it up.
• the priest works at the Seaman's Mission. He took confession from the man whose body was discovered.
• the fallen. Gunnar worked on the ship when it was bought by Iceland from the Russians to patrol their waters during the Cod War. He died trying to stop the anchor chain from rattling while the man whose body was found looked on, unable to help.
• the daughter is the doctor's daughter. She fancies Mitchell.
• the dead are those on the memorial.

"All the Colours of the Dark" by Chris Whitaker

 I was hooked from paragraph two, when we are told that protagonist Patch "lay dying in the woodland" which was a little (= massively) misleading because he survives. Nevertheless, I was hooked.

I fell for the will-they-won't-they romance between two kids growing up together in small town America. One-eyed Patch wants to be a pirate. Saint, being raised by her grandmother, wants to be his friend. So when he encounters posh Misty, another kid in their year at school, being abducted, and fights for her, and gets stabbed, and then himself kidnapped and imprisoned in a dark cellar, Saint turns detective to find where he is. But after she rescues him, his head is full of the girl who was in the cellar with him and he can't rest, not even as an adult, until he finds her. 

The path of true love never did run smooth.

I gobbled the pages. At times it was very hard to read because I feared something dreadful would happen. I haven't felt so involved in a character since Chris Whitaker's Duchess in We Begin at the End and even Duchess wasn't as heartbreaking. Whitaker put me through the wringer with this book. I couldn't consume it all at once, although I wanted to, because it is 576 pages, but I wanted to. I found it difficult to sleep because I was so worried for fictional characters. Whitaker is a magician.

And afterwards?

The author is a conjurer who misdirected my attention so I didn't focus on the sheer implausibility of the story he is telling. In many ways, this is the cliched small-town America of the cosy movies. Sammy, the town drunk (and art gallery owner and serial adulterer) has a heart of gold and bankrolls Patch on his mission to discover all the lost girls of America and reunite them (or their bodies) with their grieving loved ones. Patch also becomes a bank robber (a sort of pirate) and can't be captured until Saint joins the FBI. A one-night stand makes Patch a parent, a fact he only discovers after serving time. And, most strange, the friendly 'I'll look after everyone' Chief of Police for this little community participates in a miscarriage of justice involving a victim, a friend of his, who refuses to speak on his own behalf and who doesn't tell his best friend a crucial secret until he is on death row. In hindsight, the whole plot is ridiculous but Whitaker is so good at doing what he does that I didn't notice until afterwards.

By the way, Patch doesn't need to become a bank robber because he is such as supremely talented artist that his paintings are in demand with collectors but he refuses to sell them because they are paintings of abducted girls and he'd rather get a criminal record. He scarcely needs to eat or sleep. Everyone adores him.

By the way, Saint is the only law enforcement officer who can make sense of the cryptic messages encoded in what the girl in the cellar, who is incredibly knowledgeable, said to Patch which he has remembered word-for-word and which has enabled him to paint his pictures so they are the very spit of what has been described.

But I loved it.

Part of his technique with which he spun the web that captivated me is to hardly ever tell the reader anything. Instead the narrative is made of fragmentary gnomic sayings which flash like broken diamonds and make the reader struggle to piece together what the hell is going on. It's very clever. The reader never knows what crucial pieces of evidence say. Even after the denouement, it is not possible to be really certain. It is a masterclass in telling a story by what is not said.

And, of course, he makes you fall in love with the characters from the very start.

Selected quotes:

• “He stole only what he needed and not ever what he wanted.” (Ch 8)
• “A girl who looked to books for answers to questions that would never be asked of her.” (Ch 17)
• “Saint wanted to ask what it was like, to lose the thing that defined you. But perhaps she knew: it left you someone else. A stranger you had no choice but to tolerate, and see each day and feel and fear.” (Ch 28)
• “Death when it came was not light or confession, forgiveness or peace or fire. It was that cold piece of time before you were born, that glance into history books that told you the world went on before and would go on again, no matter who was there to witness it.” (Ch 39)
• “At ten years old he realized that people were born whole, and that the bad things peeled layers from the person you once were, thinning compassion and empathy and the ability to construct a future.” (Ch 39)
• “People talk about falling in love like a fall is ever a good thing.” (Ch 40)
• “God is a first call and a last resort, from christening to deathbed. In between is where faith is tested. The mundanity. Anyone can drop to their knees when they're facing crisis, but doing it when everything is steady ...” (Ch 96)

August 2025; 576 pages

It was first published by Orion in 2024.

My paperback edition was issued in 2025.

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