"Ruined City" by Nevil Shute

 A novel, set in 1930s England, about the redemptive power of enlightened capitalism.

Henry Warren, a merchant banker, is on a walking holiday when he becomes seriously ill. He is taken to a hospital and treated as a charity case. The hospital is in a town in the north-east of England which has been ruined following the closure of its shipyards. Confronted with the reality of the depression, the banker undergoes an epiphany and decides to buy the shipyard and source orders for ships. It isn't easy and involves sailing close to, and perhaps crossing, the line that demarcates legality.

You might not expect a bent banker to be the hero of a book about unemployment. There are a host of alternative perspectives. Shute might, for example, have depicted a penniless widow defrauded by Warren's machinations but instead takes a greedy vicar as his paradigmatic investor. He might have suggested, a la Marx, that all profit reaped by capitalism is money squeezed out by not paying workers the full value of their labour; instead he takes the modern view that entrepreneurs are job creators rather than exploiters: “I believe that's the thing most worth doing in this modern world ... to create jobs that men can work at, and be proud of, and make money by their work. There's no dignity, no decency, or health today for men that haven't got a job. ... Without work men are utterly undone.” (Ch 10) You might promote Henry Georgism as in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell.

Shute sticks with telling a story and, perhaps as a consequence, it packs nothing like the punch of classics such as Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood or The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. 

The book is recommended reading in Another England by Caroline Lucas

Trigger warning: Racist language and assumptions about blacks, Arabs, Jews and particularly Balkanites.

Selected quotes:

• “The weekly dole ... meant undernourishment. You did not die when you were drawing public assistance money, but you certainly did not remain alive.” (Ch 4)
• “He's something in the cinema industry, but I don't think he comes into the picture.” (Ch 6) Please tell me this pun was deliberate!

October 2025; 269 pages

First published by Cassell in 1938

My Vintage paperback was issued in 2009

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

"The Zebra and Lord Jones" by Anna Vaught

This is a work of magical realism. Two zebras escape London Zoo during the blitz of world war II. They meet an ineffective and rather pathetic man, son of an Earl, who takes them to his family's estate in Wales. Here he is met by the housekeeper who looks after the animals and teaches the nobleman to be a man.

I have a problem suspending disbelief with magical realism and fantasy. As a result the author has to work hard to bolster verisimilitude. Thus, she uses a real setting and a real time-frame and introduces real characters such as Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, in exile. However, there are repeated disruptive injections of unreality. It's one thing to give zebras a voice and even to claim they can have conversations with humans but another to provide them with the ability to telepathically communicate with other zebras around the world. Footnotes are used which can enhance verisimilitude (Byron did this) but here they seem to be used ironically, in a version of Brechtian alienation. Furthermore, it is narrated in an iterative, looping way, with images and concepts and even phrases appearing and reappearing, as if part of a conversation, a little like the narrative style of The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. Another technique used was to interrupt the narrative to address the reader directly and again this emphasised the artificiality of the story:

• “Oh, and one more thing. This might have been a book with all manner of talking beasts, but we've magic enough.” (Ch 11)
• “Oh, you do not believe in mermaids. Well now, what do you believe in?” (Ch 17)
• “Still, as we know, it is terribly hard to know which stories are true and which are apocryphal, and how we define true, anyway.” (Ch 25)

This mix of reality and fantasy (and mermaids) reminded me of Saltburn by Drew Gummerson though the stories in that collection are more exultant, crazier and in-your-face absurd. 

As perhaps suits a story about zebras, there was a lot of black and white. There were goodies and there were baddies and no character seemed to have moral complexity apart, perhaps, from Lord Jones. His character at least had a journey although it was less one of being forged by circumstance and more a discovery of his underlying self.

Anwen Llewellyn, was such a strong women character that she overshaded the others. Heightening the sense of unreality, she was a 'Mary Sue' character, a superwoman who appeared to have no faults or failings, like the lead protagonists in Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus and Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. 

There was also a lot of shooting at easy targets:

• We know that some of aristocrats were seduced by Nazism in the 1930s (as told in eg The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro).
• The English were mocked or vilified, eg "the English love to get off with fascists" (Ch 25). Ernest's fulfilment was enabled when he abandoned Deptford and embraced Wales. I became wearied at the repeated digs at the English.
• Macho-manliness was symbolised by Mussolini as a shorthand for 'evil'. The ideal of masculinity was represented by Lord Jones, emotionally and physically crippled, in need of a woman (human or equine) to realise his potential. For a rather more positive image of a gentle man read Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession.
• The wickedness of mankind as opposed to the innocence and goodness of other animals was easy to illustrate by setting the story during a world war.

The story was packed with incidence, including espionage and the Ark of the Covenant. There were some very funny moments. I particularly enjoyed the cultural appropriation of Myfanwy who not only stole a line of Christopher Marlowe's but also claimed a Latin epigram as being from the Mabinogion.

If you like absurdist whimsy with a Welsh edge, this is the book for you.

Selected quotes:

“She was in a column of astringent tweed and her mouth was pursed.” (Ch 7 and later)

October 2025; 298 pages

Published by Renard Press in 2023

Also written by Anna Vaught and reviewed in this blog:

• Her Winter Song

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

"Tom Brown's Schooldays" by Thomas Hughes

 The classic bildungsroman of the English public school, written to adulate Dr Thomas Arnold, the famous reforming headteacher of Rugby School, the personification of muscular Christianity.

Tom Brown, the privileged son of landed gentry, grows up playing with the village children in the local countryside. Later, at Rugby School, he and his chums, especially Harry 'Scud' East, make a name for themselves standing up to the bully Flashman. He is regarded as the epitome of incipient manliness: “Our hero... had nothing whatever remarkable about him except excess of boyishness; by which I mean animal life in its fullest measure, good nature and honest impulses, hatred of injustice and meanness, and thoughtlessness enough to sink a three-decker.” (Ch 1.7) But he has to be rescued from himself being expelled by being given the responsibility of mentoring sickly goody-two-shoes George Arthur. 

Tom reaches Rugby during the reign of William IV (1830 - 1837); In one scene, East reads an “early number of ‘Pickwick’” (Ch 1.8) He leaves school in the second year of the reign of Queen Victoria. So there is a decided whiff of regency rakes and morals during the schooling. The boys (gentlemen in training) are allowed to roam the countryside, skinny-dipping and catching fish in the river, climbing trees to steal eggs and hatchlings to be cooked by their servants. There are stage coach rides and a bare knuckle fight. It’s very reminiscent of the early works of Dickens such as the Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby. 

I wasn't impressed by the characterisations. George Arthur and Tom are no more than representations of their stereotypes: goodness and manliness respectively. If Tom does change from a scapegrace to a mentor it is because of his innate sense of moral justice which insists that a strong lad like him looks after the weaker. Flashman, although writ larger than life and consequently rather more fun, is a caricature of the cowardly bully. 'Scud' East is the only character with an interesting character arc. Tom's friend and mentor from the early days, he remains a rascally scamp when Tom finds responsibility which rather ruptures their relationship but enables him to act as the voice of worldly reason when Tom himself decides to become holier than thou. Harry East says of himself that he “was like a prophet’s donkey, who was obliged to struggle on after the donkey-man who went after the prophet ... He had none of the pleasure of starting the new crotchets, and he didn't half understand them, but had to take the kicks and carry the luggage as if he had all the fun.” (Ch 2.7) 

Although the pacing of the plot begins to follow the classical four-part structure with Tom arriving at the school just after the 25% mark, and standing up to Flashman at the 50% turning point, from then on the major points are Tom beginning to mentor George Arthur (60%) and GA almost dying of a fever (83%). Furthermore, the story gets off to a slow start with the first three chapters more or less irrelevant to the main story. And somehow the memorable incidents, such as the fag strike, Tom's roasting and the death of Thompson, are slipped over while much more narrative time is given to the football match, the cricket match, and the long discussions about Christianity. 

An early critic suggested there was too much preaching. There is! The author rarely misses the chance to address the reader: this is not so much a novel as propaganda promoting the English gentleman whose duty it is to colonise the lands of savages and civilize them whether they need it (or want it) or not. The idea that the British Empire was built on an education that seemed to consist solely of the translation of Greek and Latin classics into English is farcical, and the spectacles through which the author views England and her colonies are tinted so heavily with rose that he is blind to the multiple abuses, both of the English working classes and the oppressed peoples abroad.

In the early parts there are one or two suggestions that Thomas Hughes recognised that there were tensions and divisions in society:

• “Class amusements [by which are meant amusements which attract only one class, as opposed to, for example, cricket, where everyone competes from gentleman to farm labourers], be they for dukes or plough-boys, always become nuisances and curses to a country.” (Ch 1.2)
• “Something to try the muscles of men's bodies, and the endurance of their hearts, and to make them rejoice in their strength. In all the new-fangled comprehensive plans which I see, this is all left out; and the consequence is, that your great Mechanics’ Institutes end in intellectual priggism, and your Christian Young Men's Societies in religious Pharisaism.” (Ch 1.2)
• “Lords’ hand and ears and feet are just as ugly as other folks’ when they are children ... Tight boots and gloves, and doing nothing with them, I allow make a difference by the time they are twenty.” (Ch 1.3)

But his solution is to maintain the status quo. For Tom there are two classes: “lout or gentleman”. (Ch 2.6). And when a farmer catches Tom and his friends poaching the matter is arbitrated by sixth-formers who high-handedly dismiss the evidence of the farmer and arrange monetary compensation. Nothing must be allowed to upset the social order, even though the sixth-former recognises the unfairness inherent in it: “There's nothing so mischievous as these school distinctions, which jumble up right and wrong and justify things in us for which poor boys would be sent to prison.” (Ch 2.4) This is a time when a peasant caught poaching on a gentleman’s estate might be transported.

Hughes also recognises that in a poorly-run boys' school, as his own novel shows that Rugby was even for a time under the rule of Dr Arnold, there is the potential for wickedness to flourish. 

• “It is the leading boys for the time being who give the tone to all the rest, and make the School either a noble institution for the training of Christian Englishmen, or a place where a young boy will get more evil than he would if he were turned out to make his way in London streets.” (Ch 1.8)
• “The youth ... was one of the miserable little pretty white-handed curly-headed boys, pitted and pampered by some of the big fellows, who wrote their verses for them, taught them to drink and use bad language, and did all they could do to spoil the everything in this world and the next.” (Ch 2.2) This passage attracts a footnote suggesting that although the author has attracted criticism because "there were many noble friendships between big and little boys” he won’t strike the passage and “many boys will know why it is left in”. One presumes he’s hinting at homosexuality.

Save for its very domestic setting, this reads like many other uplifting boys' adventure stories of the empire, tales of manly derring-do such as King Solomon's Mines by Rider Haggard, Beau Geste by P C Wren and The Coral Island by R M Ballantyne. They're entertaining reads with clearly established goodies and baddies but they are rarely complex or challenging. It would be nice to think that Lord of the Flies (deliberately written by William Golding as an antidote to The Coral Island) would have finally ended the genre; certainly its exploration of what would happen if a bunch of boys were left to their own devices has a very different ending to that experienced by Tom Brown. But there are still innumerable best-selling novels whose goodies are too good to be true and whose villains are too bad to be believable. 

There were a number of  references which I didn’t know and had to look up:

• In chapter 1.1, the author refers to the present generation having a lack of “sacer vates”, Latin for ‘sacred poets’ who would sing paeans of praise.
• In chapter 1.8, a boy is mocked for translating “triste lupus” as “the sorrowful wolf”. Embarrassingly, Google Translate offers ‘sad wolf’. In fact the line comes from one of the Eclogues of Vergil; the full line is “Triste lupus stabulis, maturis frugibus imbres, arboribus venti, nobis Amaryllidos irae”. The word ‘triste’ is used as a noun rather than an adjective, to mean ‘a grief’ rather than ‘sorrowful’. So the translation should be something more like: "Grief {is caused by} the wolf to the {sheep}fold, the rain to the ripe crop, the gales to the trees, and the anger of Amaryllis to us.”
• A “cornopean” (Ch 2.8) is a now obsolete lage valved trumpet.
• In chapter 1.1, the author describes the White Horse carved on Uffington Hill as having been made under King Alfred’s orders, following his victory at the Battle of Ashdown. But he then says the white horse has been overlooking its Vale for “these thousand years”. But the book was written in 1857 and the Battle of Ashdown was in 871 so the thousand years lacks fourteen. The fault, given that Hughes suffered the same education as Tom Brown, seemingly without mathematics, is excusable.
• In his fever, George ‘Geordy’ Arthur has a vision which he later compares to “the living creatures and the wheels in Ezekiel” (Ch 2.6), a strange passage in the Old Testament which some Ufologists believe is an early report of an encounter with a flying saucer.

Selected quotes:

• “The last ghost, who had frightened the old women, male and female, of the parish out of their senses ... turned out to be the blacksmith's apprentice, disguised in drink and a white sheet.” (Ch 1.2)
• “Though there was a good deal of drinking and low vice in the booths of an evening, it was pretty well confined to those who would have been doing the like, ‘veast or no veast’.” (Ch 1.2)
• “Life ... was no fool’s or sluggard’s paradise into which he had wandered by chance, but a battle-field ordained from of old, where there are no spectators, but the youngest must take his side, and the stakes are life and death.” (Ch 1.7)
• “What would life be without fighting? ... From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honest business of every son of.” (Ch 2.5)
• “On the Saturday Thompson died, in the bright afternoon, while the cricket-match was going on as usual on the big-side ground.” (Ch 2.6)

October 2025; 307 pages

First published in 1857

My Penguin Popular Classics paperback edition was issued in 1994

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

On a personal note

Some of the practices in this public school of the 1830s were still extant during my public school education of the 1970s. In my first two years, I was a fag (which meant I acted as servant for the senior boys, making their bed in the morning and lighting their fire, perhaps making them tea or toast or tidying their room) and the practice of shouting ‘fag’ (although the cry in my school was ‘boy-up’) in a corridor and giving the task for the last one only started to be phased out in my last year, after the boarding houses were connected by telephone. Sport was also prominent: I was required to take some form of physical exercise such as playing in a football or cricket match, or doing a cross-country run, or playing fives (but the rather more sophisticated Eton version of the game) six days out of seven. Chapel was compulsory, at first every day and later on Sundays. We too did ‘construe’. Fortunately, we did learn rather more than just Latin and manliness.

The photo at the top shows me at one of the notable buildings at my alma mater.

"Rabbit is Rich" by John Updike

 

The third novel in the Rabbit tetralogy. Awarded the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

It's written using the interior monologue of Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, the American Leopold Bloom. He thinks of sex (he can scarcely see any woman without undressing her in this mind), the people he knows who have died, and money, even to paragraphs in which he calculates profits and margins. His conversation is of the outlook for business (the oil crisis of the mid-1970s is hitting America hard) and the shortcomings of others. I presume he represents the soulless Everyman of the USA.

The narrative sometimes slides into the thoughts of Nelson, the son whose life journey is too similar to his father's for their relationship to be anything but antagonistic. The young lion is trying to supplant the head of the pride who is using every trick in a social animal's to stay dominant.

The lives of the characters are documented with unblinking honesty to produce a bleak portrait of suburban America of that time. Is it so different today?

Trigger warning: racist words are used by racist characters.

The first two books are:

• Rabbit, Run
• Rabbit Redux.

Selected quotes:

• “The great thing about the dead, they make space.” (Ch 1)
• “He and the kid years ago went through something for which Rabbit has forgiven himself but which he knows the kid never has. A girl called Jill died ... But the years have piled on, the survivors have patched things up, and so many more have joined the dead, undone by diseases for which only God is to blame, that it no longer seems so bad, it seems more as if Jill just moved to another town, where the population is growing. ... Think of all the blame God has to shoulder.” (Ch 1)
• “They say you should encourage reading, but they never say why.” (Ch 2)
• “What a threadbare thing we make of life!” (Ch 2)
• “His sentences seem to keep travelling around the corner after they are pronounced.” (Ch 2)
• “If a meaning of life was to show up you'd think it would have by now.” (Ch 3)
• “The thing about those Rotarians, if you knew them as kids you can't stop seeing the kid in them, dressed up in fat and baldness and money like a cardboard tuxedo in a play for high school assembly.” (Ch 3)
• “That's why we love disaster ... it puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God. Without a sense of being in the wrong with no better than animals.” (Ch 4)

In the final chapter Rabbit muses about "some professor at Princeton's theory that bin ancient times the gods spoke to people directly through the left or was it the right half of their brains, they were like robots with radios in their heads telling them everything to do, and then somehow around the time of the ancient Greeks or Assyrians the system broke up ..." I presume this is the theory advanced in 1976 by Julian Jaynes in his book The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Given that this book follows Rabbit's stream of consciousness, this theory has substantial implications for the narrative.

October 2025; 285 small print pages

First published in the USA  in 1981

My 'Rabbit Omnibus' edition was issued in the UK by Penguin in 1991.

Also by Updike and reviewed in this blog:

• Brazil
• Terrorist

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

"Peter of Savoy: The Little Charlemagne" by John Marshall

Pevensey Castle: Barbara van Cleve, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

A biography of the uncle of Eleanor, the Queen of King Henry III of England, who built a palace on the Strand in London where the Savoy hotel now stands.

Henry III had a long but troubled reign. He inherited the throne from his father King John in the middle of a baronial revolt and French invasion. He was forced to re-concede the Magna Carta and, later in his reign, cede absolute rule to a council of barons headed by his arch-enemy and brother-in-law Simon de Montfort. 

Pierre de Savoie, was the younger son of Thomas I, Count of Savoy. His sister's children included four daughters who, at some time, became queens: of France, of England, of the Romans and of Sicily. Pierre spent some of his time in Savoy where he ruled lands that later became the French-speaking cantons of Switzerland, and some time in England, trying to secure the succession of his sister's son, Lord Edward, who would eventually become Edward I of England. He was part of a wave of Savoyards who held offices under Henry III (his brother Boniface became Archbishop of Canterbury) eventually leading to a wave of xenophobia that helped Simon de Montfort gain power over Henry. 

This biography chronicles Pierre's life and traces the far-reaching consequences. 

It is clear that, as is common with biographers, the author hero-worships his subject. Nothing he does is viewed in anything but a positive light. Matthew Paris, the chronicler, a key primary source, is repeatedly castigated as biased and xenophobic. Simon de Montfort, whose influence on English politics can scarcely be denied, is depicted as self-serving and villainous, principally for having the temerity to challenge a king.

But my principal criticism of this book is the number of times I found it confusing. One expects difficulties when records are ambiguous or incomplete and when several people are named the same (for example, both Henry III and his brother Richard of Cornwall had a son called Edmund), but a good historian should resolve these problems. Instead, I found Marshall added to them. For example:

• “In 1229, at Lausanne, Pierre began a career that would lead eventually to being one of a council ruling England and Count of Savoy, under the tutelage of the provost, Conon d’Estavayer” who had been educated at Paris. (p 14). The final part of the sentence doesn't make it clear whether the tutelage was in Lausanne or England. Furthermore, the data of 1229 is contradicted on the next page when he is recorded as a canon in Nov 1226.
• “One of his tasks concerned Englishmen of the locale who had not been to church within the prescribed forty days, something that will no doubt have made him popular.” (pp 26 - 27) But we aren't told what he did nor  nor why this action should have made him popular. Perhaps it's irony.
• On page 41 I became very confused as to exactly where Richmond and its castle were, given that three roads are mentioned and two castles; I resorted to Google Maps.
• On page 45 the author lists the Cinque Ports. He says there are five, he names six. A little research suggested that in Pierre's time there were 7.

There were other examples. I ought to be able to read a history without having to resort to Google and wikipedia to clear things up.

In addition, on page 167 Marshall repeats the description of the London cook shop and London’s trade already quoted on pp 72 - 73. This looks suspiciously like padding. 

There's a great deal of interest in this book; it was a fascinating chapter in the political history of England. But the writing detracted from the reading experience.

Selected quotes:

• “In England the genie was out of the bottle; many had rather liked the idea that the king ruled with the consent of his people.” (Ch 8)

September 2025; 188 pages plus extensive appendices and notes

Published in 2023 by Pen and Sword History

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

"Another England" by Caroline Lucas

From 2010 until 2024, Caroline Lucas was Britain's first and only Green MP (others were elected in 2024, when she stood down). This book is an attempt to create a blueprint for a better society in England.

But while I agreed with her whenever she analysed the problems we face, I felt her suggested solutions would be unlikely to convince one of her opponents. 

For example, at one stage she discusses alternatives to the nation state: the religious community and the dynastic realm. Neither appeals! The problem, it seems to me, is that we equate a community with its territory. This is why I have started to redefine my ethnic identity. If I am asked my ethnicity from a medical point of view, I understand that they need data about my physical body and so I am prepared to respond 'White British' if that is the appropriate option. But otherwise, for example on the most recent census, I choose the 'other' box and self-define as 'English speaker'. Because for me, the most important thing about being English is the language and the culture.

Furthermore, she states her intention is to consider English literature to show that England is, fundamentally, deep down, the society to which she aspires. But this is window-dressing rather than the focus of her arguments. Furthermore, her choice of authors sometimes seemed to undermine her points.

For example, when she is discussing rural England she makes the point that the countryside is always held up as the ideal environment even though most people live in cities. “The England of roads and railways, urban housing and shipyards ... are relegated to second place, as are the people who live and work there, in all their rich and diverse reality.” (Ch 6) She goes on to criticise the nostalgia implicit in Jane Austen, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, as well as (more explicitly) George Orwell. Great, I thought. Now she will praise authors who write about the urban environment, and she does indeed mention Zadie Smith's novel NW, as well as Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (really? it may be set in London but isn't exactly urban). But then she goes on to talk about the profoundly rural William Cowper, Chaucer, Wordsworth and John Clare, as well as the anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Hasn't she just relegated urban England to second place?

[I acknowledge that it is difficult to find urban authors. James Joyce's Ulysses is Dublin through and through, and the Vernon Subutex trilogy by Virginie Despentes does something similar for Paris but what about England? Suggestions please!]

[When I was writing my third novel Bally and Bro I wanted to depict my protagonist Bally as so much a product of his city environment that he couldn't even think in proverbs such as 'Make hay while the sun shines'. But it is very difficult to find town-based alternatives!]

Equally, when she is discussing the plight of the poor in our society, by her own admission Charles Dickens is a strange choice. The whole point of Oliver Twist, despite its clothing of workhouses and thieves kitchens, is to demonstrate that a well-bred lad would triumph over the naturally lower-class oiks. 

There are hard-hitting moments, such as when she shows that the difference in life-expectancy between Kensington and Middlesborough “is comparable to the difference between the UK on the one hand and Guatemala, Iraq and Syria on the other.” (Ch 4). But I was unconvinced that she had the answers.

Selected quotes:

• “The moment Englishness took a political form it became anathema. The English flag was acceptable fluttering from a church tower in a picturesque village, but was instantly interpreted as a form of racism if hanging from someone's window on an estate.” (Preface)
• “The top 1 per cent ... have an average monthly income ... a full twenty times that of the lowest 10 per cent. It is impossible to justify this: though this doesn't stop a surprising number of the better-off from complaining that the poor have made ‘bad decisions’ or ‘lifestyle choices’, or from handing out patronising advice about how to cook on a budget, just as their Victorian predecessors did.” (Ch 4)
• “Work is not in itself a good thing. If it gives people a sense of purpose ... then this is generally very positive. ... But not all jobs provide these things.” (Ch 4)
• “Ours is an age in which the financial rewards of work and the autonomy of the employee have little connection to the demands of the role or the value they provide to society.” (Ch 4)
• “The Thatcherite ideal of a property owning democracy [is based] ... on the nasty implication that if you do not own your own home, you have a lesser stake in society, are more likely to be a burden, and are less committed to your community.” (Ch 5)
• “By any measure - life expectancy, human capital, infrastructure, economic development, democracy ... - the vast majority of England's former colonies are far better off now than they were under the Empire.” (Ch 7)
• “For all the talk of shared values and a common loyalty to the crown ... the empire remained a profoundly racist endeavour. If you were English, you could serve in the administration in Burma or Uganda, but if you were Burmese or Ugandan, you could not do the same in England. The British Empire was unlike the Roman, where if you adopted the language and culture, you could go to Rome and become an official, even a senator, even Emperor.” (Ch 7)
• “When you believe your military commanders should be appointed because they come from the right social class, not on ability, then it is no surprise if you are outfought, as in the Crimea.” (Ch 8)

September 2025; 240 pages

Published by Hutchinson Heinemann in 2024

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

"Never Laura" by Ewgeniya Lyras

An extraordinarily creative and original cyberpunk novel set in a dystopian world of artificial intelligence, human enhancement and hallucinogenic drugs.

Following the loss of both her parents during a suicide pandemic and her subsequent rape by a priest, trust-funded Laura spends her time in nightclubs drinking, taking drugs and having sex, usually with women. Then she takes a 'soul flight' and wakes up with bionic bits. This is a world in which IT implants are as common as piercings, allowing people to achieve all sorts of things, from making phone calls to controlling their surface appearance. This is a world in which many jobs are controlled by robots or by cyborgs. This is a world of hallucination and consequent epistemological and ontological fluidity, in which neuroscientists are working to free one's soul from one's body.

There were moments when I was reminded of Dhalgren, the classic of speculative fiction by Samuel R Delaney, of the work of Angela Carter and especially of the novels of William Burroughs such as The Wild Boys, Naked Lunch, and The Soft Machine. 

But it's a work of two halves. In the first seventeen chapters, leading to just past the 50% mark, the reader is immersed in a nightmarish world in which reality is hardly ever what it seems. The second half jumps back to before the beginning, using a far more conventional narrative form to provide the back story, to contextualise and explain the first part, and to lead us to a resolution. This is an interesting design, reminding me of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, an attempt to offer alternative perspectives on the same story, something I myself am attempting with my next novel. I'm not sure that it worked.

Equally, there were some wonderfully original phrases (see the selected quotes) but there were moments when these came perilously close to tipping over into rococo absurdity: “Battered strings of my dim energy floated between planets like rotten debris of algae in the ocean.” (Ch 17)

Nevertheless, this fascinating book offers the sort of experimental fiction that is all too rare today.   

Selected quotes:

• “Black night primed the canvas of the city and neon lights painted the portrait of its drunken soul.” (Ch 1)
• “Coming back to a sober brain is never a sweet experience.” (Ch 5)
• “His expression greased with satisfaction.” (Ch 9)
• “People convolved into sculptures of orgies, digging out unforeseen desires from the wrinkles of each others’ minds.” (Ch 10)
• “An awkward, bony guy, too smart to be talkative.” (Ch 14) My wife, who is far from laconic, was not impressed when I quoted this to her.
• “The drug-sodden air flogged the anxiety from Rick's bones.” (Ch 15)
• “Their three silhouettes shared every border, every curve and cavity.” (Ch 15)
• “It's OK to embrace pleasure. It's OK to have desires. Otherwise what’s the purpose of flesh?” (Ch 15)
• “My soul was a magical sucker on the tentacle of a giant cosmic octopus.” (Ch 15)
• “The white light of her supernova accompanied her final breath, and the blinding outburst swallowed the last bits of her before shooting the bullets of her energy through my celestial body, pervading me with her life.” (Ch 17)
• “My groin was moaning like a cat in spring.” (Ch 18) !!!

September 2025; 309 pages

Published by Hay Press in 2023

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

"On Beauty" by Zadie Smith

One may as well begin by acknowledging that although the plot is based on Howard's End by E M Forster, Zadie Smith has written a novel that not only translates the action to American academic life but spectacularly transcends her original.

The bare bones of the story are there. It starts with the line: “One may as well begin with Jerome's e-mails to his father” (Kipps and Belsey: 1) Jerome Belsey, going to stay with the Kipps family (whose right-wing patriarch is at academic war with Jerome's dad, Howard) falls in love with Victoria Kipps, daughter of the family. Howard pays a visit and spectacularly causes embarrassment. But his wife Kiki Belsey forms a friendship with Mrs Kipps, an ethereal woman very much in the mould of the original. This friendship prompts Mrs K to scribble a hand-written unwitnessed codicil to her will, leaving the family's most valuable painting to Kiki, a donation the Kippses hush up and burn.

Leonard Bast appears to, in the figure of cool and gorgeous hip hip artist Carl, with whom Zora Belsey, Howard's daughter falls in love and whom her poetry class at college patronise (in both senses). 

I guess the sixteen year old Levi Belsey is supposed to mirror Tibby in Howards End but Tibby is academic and so vague as to be translucent while Levi fizzes with life and hooks up with some Haitians in an attempt at revolutionary socialism with all the misguided zeal of his youth. 

Victoria's equivalent disappears to Africa for most of the Forster book but Victoria makes a huge impression on the text by sleeping not just with Jerome but also with his father and with Carl. So the plot element of the man whose secret affair becomes known is still there but with the 'wrong' family.

But why worry about the correspondences? The characters in this book are wonderfully and anarchically real, taking the plot by the scruff of its neck and forcing it into the shape they want.

Of all the characters it is Howard who experiences the most 'only connection' when he has a series of epiphanies in the middle of the book.

• At Mrs K's funeral “a man in front of Howard checking his watch as if the end of the world (for so it was for Carlene Kipps) was a mere inconvenience in his busy day, even though this fellow too would live to see the end of his world, as would Howard, as do tens of thousands of people every day, few of whom, in their lifetimes, are ever able to truly believe in the oblivion to which they are dispatched.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 2) which is too much for Howard and he has to run out of the church.
• Then he finds himself in a London street with all the variety of people there. “We scum, we happy scum! From people like these he had come. To people like these he would always belong.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 3)
• He then finds himself in a pub watching football on the television. “Soon he was cheering and complaining with the rest.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 4)

But it is Levi who articulates it, in a scene interpolated into the three scenes of Howard's: “Sometimes it's like you just meet someone and you just know that you're totally connected, and that this person is, like, your brother - or your sister.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 4)

And the beauty? There is a poem entitled 'On Beauty' and there are many discussions of aesthetics. There are questions such as whether hip-hop is 'proper' poetry (the poets try to make Carl write a sonnet). Zora is transfixed by Carl's physical beauty. Howard gives lectures debunking Rembrandt and is told by Victoria (who becomes one of his students) that there comes a point when he should stop discussing tomatoes and just say 'I like tomatoes'. 

But the analysis deadens a book which, otherwise, is brimming with life, driven by some unforgettable characters. 

And it can be very funny:

• “She lived through footnotes. ... so intent was she upon reading the guidebook to Sacre-Coeur that she walked directly into an altar, cutting her forehead open.” (Kipps and Belsey: 7)
• “Whenever Howard saw an opportunity to take the moral high ground he pretty much catapulted himself towards it.” (Kipps and Belsey: 9)
• “When confronted with people she knew to be religious she began to blaspheme wildly.” (Kipps and Belsey: 12)
• “Jack’s two PhDs, in Lydia's mind, made up for all the times he tipped coffee into his own filing cabinet.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 2)
• “Zora's silent sulks were always oppressive, and as belligerent as if she was screaming at you from the top of her lungs.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 6)
• “Somehow if you ordered the cheesecake as an afterthought it had fewer calories in it.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 6)
• “These shoes took stairs in only one direction.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 11)

Selected quotes:

• “It's very cool to be able to pray without someone in your family coming into the room and (a) passing wind (b) shouting (c) analysing the ‘phoney metaphysics’ of prayer (d) singing loudly (e) laughing.” (Kipps and Belsey: 1)
• “When you are guilty, all you can ask for is a deferral of the judgment.” (Kipps and Belsey: 2)
• “The windows retain their mottled green glass, spreading a dreamy pasture on the floorboards whenever strong light passes through them.” (Kipps and Belsey: 3)
• “He thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies.” (Kipps and Belsey: 5)
• “Levi treasured the urban the same way previous generations worshiped the pastoral.” (Kipps and Belsey: 8) And why not?
• “Faced with the smallest slight to himself or his character, and, in particular, his clothes, Levi would argue for justice for as long as he had breath in his body, even when - especially when - he was in the wrong.” (Kipps and Belsey: 9)
• “Summer left Wellington abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent the leaves to the ground all at once.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 1)
• “Bottom line? I'm not a big talker. I don't express shit well when I talk. I write better than I speak. ... Talkin’? I hit my own finger. Every time.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 1)
• “She too had spent much time in universities. She understood the power of the inappropriate.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 3)
• “‘I don't ask myself what did I live for,’ said Carlene strongly. ‘ that is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.’” (The Anatomy Lesson: 4)
• “Levi was still only sixteen, living with his parents in the middle class suburb of Wellington, and therefore not really a viable stand-in father for her three small children.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 5)
• “Situationists transform the urban landscape.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 5)
• “This concern with beauty as a physical actuality in the world ... that’s clearly imprisoning and it infantilizes ... but it's true.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 6)
• “Try walking down the street with fifteen Haitians if you want to see people get uncomfortable.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 6)
• “And now the practical hats of the Kippses were put on. The women in the room were not offered hats and instinctively sat back in their chairs.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 1)
• “Opportunity ... is a right - but it is not a gift. Rights are earned.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 8)
• “She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 9)
• “Inside Levi's room the smell of boy, of socks and sperm, was strong.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 12)

September 2025; 443 pages

First published by Hamish Hamilton in 2005

My Penguin paperback edition issued in 2006

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