"That They May Face the Rising Sun" by John McGahern

A lyrical evocation of life in rural Ireland. Not so much a novel as a fictionalised (?) account of a year in a small farming community peopled with wonderfully eccentric characters, such as: 

• Bill Evans was brought up by the church in an orphanage and then sent out to work for a farm as little more than a slave; he demands cigarettes and drinks from everyone he meets.
• John Quinn's fundamental philosophy is that the Lord intended men and women to copulate. His first wife bore him eight children, his second left him after which he contented himself with casual affairs; now he is seeking a third wife.
• Jamesie is a clown.
• The Shah owns the scrapyard and is the richest man in town but now wants to sell the business to the man who works for him despite the fact that they refuse to speaks to one another.
• Patrick travels across Ireland as a jobbing builder ... but has left one job unfinished for years.

The book contains glorious descriptions such as:

• “A river of beaten copper ran sparkling from shore to shore in the centre of the lake. On either side of this bright river peppered with pale stars the dark water seethed. Far away the light to the town glowed in the sky. His own footsteps were loud. When he came to the corner of the lake, the heron rose out of the reeds to flap him lazily around the shore, ghostly in the moonlight. On such a night a man could easily want to run from his own shadow.” (pp 201 - 202)
• “Hundreds of daffodils and scattered narcissi met the spring again with beauty. Birds bearing twigs in their beaks looped through the air. The brooding swan resumed her seat on the high throne in the middle of the reeds. The otter paths between the lakes grew more beaten. In shallows along the shore the water rippled with a life of spawning pike and bream: in the turmoil their dark fins showed above the water and the white of their bellies flashed when they rolled. The lambs were now out with their mothers on the grass, hopping as if they had mechanical springs in their tiny hooves, sometimes leapfrogging one another.” (pp 250 - 251)

The nearest comparisons I could think of were My Family and Other Animals and its sequels by Gerald Durrell. I was also strongly reminded of This is Happiness by Niall Williams, another book set in rural Ireland in a village when the telephone poles appear.

Selected quotes:

• “He was ... drawing in the cigarette smoke as if it were the breath of life, releasing it to the still air in miserly ecstasy.” (p 15)
• “Empty houses, falling down houses, one house on the mountain, its floor covered with rat traps, new bungalows full of children. Dreams in tatters with the 'For Sale’ sign at the gate.” (p 17)
• “We think the birds are singing when they are only crying ‘this is mine’ out of their separate territories.” (p 21)
• “As with many diminished people, Edmund’s response was to rephrase each thing the other person said in the form of a question.” (p 51)
• “He's still as thick and as ignorant as several double ditches.” (p 66)
• “I would not swap with a lord. We all want our own two shoes of life. If truth was told, none of us would swap with anybody. We want to go out the way we came in. It's just as well we have no choice. If there was a choice you'd have certain giddy outfits having operations to get themselves changed into other people like those sex change outfits you see in the newspapers.” (p 66)
• “Lies can walk while the truth stays grounded.” (p 98)
• “How can time be gathered in and kissed? There is only flesh.” (p 132)
• “Cattle round a bullying cow in the middle of a field would be more decent.” (p 199)
• “There are times I don't know who I am from one minute to the next. That's why I always liked the acting. You are someone else and always know what you are doing and why.” (p 214)
• “Anyone with livestock is going to have deadstock.” (p 265)

March 2026; 314 pages

First published by Faber & Faber in 2002

My paperback edition issued in 2009

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" by Gabrielle Zevin

 

This entertaining book felt like YA written for adults. I wasn't surprised that John Green, author of YA classics such as The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down, and Paper Towns called it "one of the best books I've ever read." 

It is propaganda for the American Dream: that hard work allied with capitalism will make you rich (though it helps to be incredible talented). In this sense, it reminded me of that other fantasy about hard-working geniuses, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, though T&T&T has far less misery.

Sam is half-Jewish, half-Korean, handicapped after his foot was injured in a car accident, but he is a math genius so he gets into Harvard. Sadie has a better start in life but she is sufficiently brainy not only to get into MIT but to be an outstanding student. Marx has rich Japanese parents and he's at Harvard. They take time out from their studies to create a computer game and set up their own company to sell it. They work incredibly long hours so, of course, the game is hugely successful. An everyday story of typical folk this is not. 

It is written in the past tense. At first sight it appears to adopt a multi-third-person-close perspective but given the fact that the narrator repeatedly chips in with exposition, character notes and back story, it is more like third-person-omniscient.

A feature of the narrative style is the remarkable amount of exposition. Time and again, something happens and we then cut to an explanation, usually involving back-story but also frequently describing character. For example:

• “Without knowing why, Sam had tried to keep Sadie and Marx apart. It wasn't about either of them as individuals. But Sam could be private, verging on paranoid, and he liked to control the flow of information. He feared them comparing notes and somehow ganging up on him ... No one, Sam felt, had ever loved him except those who had been obligated to love him: his mother (before she had died), his grandparents, Sadie (disputed hospital volunteer), Marx (his assigned roommate).” (2.2)
• “Marx was great at being in love, for a bit, and certainly, no one ever left a relationship with Marx feeling abused or hurt. He had the gift of letting people think it was their idea to end the relationship, thereby converting most of his ex-lovers into friends.” (2.3)
• “She hated being drunk, though she did enjoy smoking a joint every now and then. She liked playing games, seeing a foreign movie, a good meal. She liked going to bed early and waking up early. She liked working. She liked that she was good at her work, and she felt proud of the fact that she was well paid for it. She felt pleasure in orderly things - a perfectly efficient section of code, a closet where every item was in its place. She liked solitude and the thoughts of her own interesting and creative mind. She liked to be comfortable. ...” (3.3)
• “Including Lola, Sam had had four different sexual partners in his life, and he had never enjoyed sex with any of them. He had slept with one boy and three girls. While no one had ever mistreated him, sex had given him considerably less pleasure than masturbation. He did not like to be naked in front of other people. He did not like the messiness of sex - it's fluids, it's sounds, it's smells. He worried that his body could not be relied upon.” (3.4a)
• “He was no longer the boy who wanted to taste everything at the buffet.” (5.2)

 This is, I suppose, a good way of giving lots of information while keeping the story moving along at a swift pace. This is already a long book and I imagine it would be much longer had the author tried to 'show don't tell'. 

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it. It was a fast-paced entertaining blockbuster. But the repeated nuggets of exposition meant I was being told how to perceive the characters, rather than being allowed to find out about them for myself.

Selected quotes:

• “A truly magnificent thing about the way the brain was coded, Sam thought, was that it could say ‘Excuse me’ while meaning ‘Screw you’.” (1.1)
• “It was impossible to be eleven, with a sick sister, and for people to find your conduct beyond reproach. She was always saying the wrong thing, or being too loud, or demanding too much (time, love, food), even though she had not demanded more than what had been freely given before.” (1.2)
• “Sadie was, by nature, a loner, but even she found going to MIT in a female body to be an isolating experience.” (1.3)
• “A bromide about the creative process is that an artist's first idea is usually the best one.” (2.2)
• “The alternative to [cultural] appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don't you?” (2.2)
• “Beauty ... is almost always a matter of angles and resolve.” (2.2)
• “When Sadie was asked a question ... she gave a specific answer, usually no more than two sentences. ... When Sam was asked a question, he turned into a novella.” (3.2)
• “Marx is always in love. He's an emotional harlot. What does love even mean when you can find it with so many people and things?” (3.3)
• “The last thing she packed were the handcuffs. She slipped them into the zippered pocket of the large duffel she was planning to check. She didn't want Dov to use them on some other girl. She wasn't sure if this impulse came from a sense of sorority or sentimentality.” (3.5)
• “Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.” (4.3a)
• “The whiteboard was no longer white, and its permanent palimpsest was an archive.” (4.1)
• “You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you and it's a perfect time to sit down in front of your computer and make another game. You try again. You fail better.” (5.1)
• “It isn't a sadness, but a joy, that we don't do the same things for the length of our lives.” (5.2)
• “She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn’t.)” (5,2)
• “It was easy to dislike the man; it was harder to dislike the little boy who existed just below the surface of the man.” (6.2)

March 2026; 478 pages

First published in the USA by Alfred P Knopf in 2022

My Vintage (Penguin) paperback was issued in 2023

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Out of the Ashes" by Michael Morpurgo

Written in the form of diary entries, the diarist being the 13 year-old daughter of the farmer, this harrowing YA novel charts the visitation of foot and mouth disease to a farm in Devon. The reader knows from the outset what is going to happen ... but there is still a twist in the tale.

It made even cynical old me tearful.

Selected quotes:

• “As I was praying I got angry, angry with God. Why did he let it happen?” (Monday, March 5th)
• “The smell of death is stronger than perfume, and lasts longer.” (Friday, March 9th)
• “I want tomorrow never to come. But tomorrow always comes.” (Monday, March 12th)
• “This evening the farm is still, is silent. The fields are empty, and it's raining.” (Tuesday, March 13th)
• “So the worst wasn't the worst. Some prayers do work after all.” (Thursday, April 5th)

March 2026; 112 pages

First published in 2001 by Macmillan

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Full House" by M J Farrell (Molly Keane)

This novel is set in a country house in Ireland. The household is dominated by Olivia, Lady Bird, a matriarch who bullies the servants (particularly poor ineffectual Miss Parker the governess) unmercifully, holding over them the ultimate power of unemployment, and bullies her children; her husband, Julian adores her (despite the fact that we are told in the second chapter that she had "entanglements" due to her "promiscuous generosity" early in their marriage) and spinelessly puts her and her interests first, even before his children. The children respond by hating her. John, the eldest (whom she still refers to as 'Boy'), is returning to the house after being treated for a nervous breakdown; Sheena the daughter copes though subterfuge and defiance, Markie the little boy shows disturbing symptoms: he calls his mother a “silly bitch” (all three refer to their parents as Olivia and Julian rather than mum or dad), he kicks his pet dog and shows a bloodthirsty interest in hunting and fishing. 

The theme of the monstrous mother (referenced at one point to Mrs Bennett in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice; perhaps this is why the character Eliza is so named) reminded me of another book recently read, The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen. Both books are also concerned with the Anglo-Irish 'ascendancy' a class of mostly Protestant landlords living in big houses in mainly Roman Catholic Ireland, supporting themselves through rents paid by the farming and labouring poor people who live on the estates. Neither book allows its characters to show any overt awareness of the political situation. 

The monstrousness of Olivia's behaviour has made this family dysfunctional. They all seem mad; John's behaviour is the least of the problems. Nevertheless, the plot rests on the eugenicist assumption that the madness in the family resides in Julian's genes (it is believed that he had a mad ancestor) so when Sheena proposes to marry Rupert (who also had a mad forebear) the young people themselves accept that any children they might have are almost certain to be mad. 

The love affair of Rupert and Sheena is the principal plot, a classic comedy (in the sense that two lovers are kept apart by opposing forces and yet reconciled at the end); the sub-plot of the adventures of Miss Parker never actually goes anywhere and we are forced to conclude that Miss P is herself to blame for being subservient and bullied because she is too weak to stand up for herself, a conclusion which left a rather unpleasant taste in my mouth, since the reader had been led to pity Miss P, to no avail.

It's not much of a plot (the problem is that when you write a story about bored people it can easily become boring) though it is well paced with significant turning points at the 25%, 50% and 75% marks and a classic peripeteia (a twist which is unexpected and yet which has been well-signalled) in the last 10%.

I did wonder whether there was a (well-buried) political subtext. Is Miss Parker supposed to symbolise the Irish people, exploited to the point of slavery and yet unable to assert themselves? The 50% turning point is when she is marooned on the deserted island, rescued by Nick O' The Rocks (whose name surely hints at an Irish heritage), who himself was a character first introduced at the 25% turning point. Late in the book there is a moment when Miss Parker and Nick almost come together in what would be an act defiant of the established code of behaviour but they are fundamentally unable to communicate and so the moment fizzles out. Could this symbolise the half-heartedness of Irish liberation: the suppressed Easter Uprising, the creation of an Irish Free State under the dominion of the the British monarch following a rebellion, the ensuing civil war and the fact that six of the nine counties of Ulster were kept under British rule? Perhaps this is the point at which speculation goes too far.

There are some first-class descriptions which often employ the pathetic fallacy:

• “A double, twining staircase of lovely swinging curves - two airy curves perfectly resolved in wood. A romantic staircase, perpetually pleasing.” (Ch 3)
• “All the sofas that had been superseded in other parts of the house seemed to have gathered themselves here in ungainly hordes.” (Ch 4)
• “The sun was gone. The lake was the colour of a grey boat and the colour of the last primroses and the colour of moonlight. And the sky was grey. There was no bright sun to make the water dance and glitter offensively. But whenever they lifted their heads to the mountains those heights were changed a little, for the light was not dead.” (Ch 18)
• “It had a disheartening effect upon her, this lovely gateway, for it was sad as many gateways are. The curves of its walls were melancholy and the perpetual damp of the climate had greened each separate fluting of the four cut-stone pillars.” (Ch 22)
• “The sky arched pale and tremendous over the sea, and the headlands and the mountains were as dark in the evening as the red fuschias.” (Ch 27)

The characters are more caricatures than nuanced:

• Olivia the monstrous mother, eternally pursuing her vanishing youth and beauty, vain to the point of narcissism, whose utterly self-centred behaviour is destroying the lives of her children.
• Julian the husband, always flying under the radar for the sake of a quiet life, but fundamentally an enabler of Olivia's rule.
• Poor Miss Parker, the ineffectual governess, exploited by Olivia, ignored by others to the extent of being marooned on a deserted island, seen as a person only by the tolerated poacher Nick O' The Rocks' but when she plucks up courage to fling herself at him he doesn't even recognise what she is doing.
• John, the elder son, belittled as 'Boy' by his mother, who returns to the house after a spell under the care of a doctor following a nervous breakdown.
• Sheena, the rebellious daughter, besotted by neighbour Rupert, desperate to sow some wild oats.
• Markie, the young son of the family, headstrong and cruel to his governess and his pets, a burgeoning psychopath.
• Eliza, the old friend of Olivia (though ten years younger) whose own husband died after only a few months of marriage, who is now secretly in love with Julian, who acts as a good stepmother to the children and is instrumental in moving the plot.
• Rupert the handsome neighbour, the young romantic lead, whose chance of happiness with Sheena is destroyed by his plotting sisters.
• Nick O' The Rocks, a somewhat mysterious figure who lives in a little cottage on the estate and seems to combine poaching with gamekeeping.

MJF is able create character indirectly. The first page of the book, which considers Miss Parker the hapless governess, allows the reader to understand at once what a vain, egocentric monster Olivia is. It's a neat trick creating one character while focusing on another. 

But all too often, the reader was told, rather than shown, the character. This repeated injection of the author's voice became almost a narrative tic and spoiled my enjoyment of the book. For example: 

• “The inconsequence and the obviousness of all her posturings and nonsense. How could she blind herself to the fact that they could not deceive her reasonably intelligent and spiteful offspring? They did not even see the shadow of her pretended self, only her pretences.” (Ch 4)
• “Why was Rupert romantic? Partly because he looked romantic, which really meant nothing at all. Partly because he did dangerous and skillful things well. But neither of these given things imply romance. Romance is a quality some people have the power of keeping within themselves. A power to be alone and secret. Rupert had this and with it he had a great simplicity of spirit.” (Ch 11)

I compared this with the way Ivy Compton-Burnett - who also wrote books about domestic tyranny, set in large houses whose inhabitants have no need to work but live lives of meaningless leisure, such as A House and Its Head - creates character almost entirely through dialogue. MJF's primary technique is that of exposition; she believes in telling rather than showing. This technique requires considerably less effort from either author or reader and may explain why her novels are so much more popular than those of ICB. 

It is written in the 3rd person  omniscient and the past tense and the style uses short pithy statements, often splitting up longer sentences in favour of sentence fragments, thus: “Sheena had learnt to accept Julian's attitude of defence towards Olivia. His standing between her and her own idiocies and between her and their children's unkindness. It was no good questioning it. There it was. And one could often work round Julian and get the inside turn of Olivia. So long as he knew she suspected no conspiracy or understanding between any of them against her. But he would sacrifice any of them or any of their schemes rather than hurt her. For he loved her best. They all knew this.” (Ch 6)

But what let it down was this tendency to interject exposition. The omniscient narrator is forever commenting upon what has just happened. It is as if MJF doesn't trust her readers to infer what has just happened, she has to make it clear. For example: “Rupert depended on his own power too much. He was not particularly vain but it did not occur to him that he could lose Sheena like this, or ever. He kissed her, and because she responded defenselessly with virginal ardour he thought all argument was over. There were no words or reasons left against such love as this. This was not an older love such as understands itself, keeping its rules and knowing its own brief limitations, knowing how purely incidental its kisses are, knowing how time love changes love and asking no imperative question of the future hour. Such love as they had was not schooled at all by accepted experience. They knew of no great lovers but themselves. Love was theirs alone for they had found it and the very meaning of these embracing lay in their belief that such happiness can be changeless.” (Ch 18) This is not character thought because the whole point is for the narrator to point out that Rupert and Sheena are making a mistake due to their inexperience. This comment accompanies a delightful section of dialogue between the two which is full of illogicalities and inconsistencies. 

But fundamentally it is an entertaining and enjoyable read. I juts wanted less exposition!

Selected quotes:

• “To be young is to care too much.” (Ch 3)
• “Greetings of any sort are mainly futile, futile whether they mean nothing or anything.” (Ch 4)
• “She knew her only use and power with her friends. She loved and she was of use to them. They loved her for her use but not for her love.” (Ch 4)
• “There was Sheena holding her breath as it were in one hand and her shoes in the other.” (Ch 7)
• “Because she was for once without people she was less lonely. For it was the loneliness of being with people that Miss Parker knew about, not the divine loneliness of being by herself.” (Ch 17)
• “She looked so like a choir boy who had gone wrong (very wrong) that it was touching indeed to see her with that fat, hardy old tart Silene, talking sense to her there in the sunlight.” (Ch 18)
• “Miss Parker read it through again, and as she read it the sense of not being to others a person filled up at the first time with anger.” (Ch 27)
• “Olivia ate an immense meal, complaining a great deal as she did so about the way her cook cooked French beans, about the way her cook made curry, about the way her gardener grew lettuce, about the way her cook made cream cheese, biscuits, plum tarts, and coffee.” (Ch 28)

Notes:

• I wasn’t sure whether “she was as greedy as a bird” (Ch 5) meant she gobbled like a gannet or ate almost nothing.
• Who or what is the WG?
• At one moment they play Heavy Saturn; my research suggests this my be a Victorian parlour game in which the players had to blow a ball of wool sitting on a table so it fell off the table on their opponent's side rather than theirs. 
• I couldn't decide, given the evidence of this passage, whether MJF approved or disapproved of fox-hunting.
• “Below the moat [was] a gorse covert where a famous breed of foxes habited and reared their children now in great peace and comfort, and heaps of leisure to teach them to be straight-necked and to smell strong like all their uncles and aunts, and to enjoy their gallant deaths when the proper time came.” (Ch 11)

March 2026; 315 pages

First published by Collins in 1935

My Virago Classics paperback was issued in 1986.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Open Water" by Caleb Azumah Nelson

 This extraordinary debut novel, written in the 2nd person, present tense, about the experiences of a young black man in present-day south London, garnered many awards when it was first published in 2021 including winning the Costa debut novel award, the Betty Trask award, and the Somerset Maugham award,  being shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year, and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott prize and the Dylan Thomas prize. It was named one of the top ten debut novels of the year by the Observer and one of the best novels of the year by TIME.

It chronicles a love between the unnamed protagonist ("you") and his equally unnamed girlfriend, the anonymity and the second person narration plunging the reader into deep empathetic identification with the characters.

The prose is lyrical and poetic. The author frequently uses repetition to bludgeon the reader into acceptance of his ideas, thus:

• "You think about what it means to desire your best friend in this way. You think about holding onto this feeling for so long, holding it down, holding it in, because sometimes it's easier to hide in your own darkness than to emerge, naked and vulnerable, blinking in your own light. You think about whether she has been doing the same. You think about spillage, and whether this is something that can be mopped up. You think as you walk through the night ..." (Ch 13)
• "It's summer now, and you're looking forward to worrying less. You're looking forward to longer nights and shorter days. You're looking forward to gathering in back gardens and watching meat sputter on an open barbecue. You're looking forward to laughing so hard your chest hurts and you feel light-headed. You're looking forward to the safety in pleasure. You're looking forward to forgetting, albeit briefly, the existential dread which plagues you, which tightens your chest, which pains your left side. You're looking forward to forgetting that, leaving the house, you might not return intact. You're looking forward to freedom, even if it is short, even if it might not last." (Ch 14)

But there are also many phrases that recur like leitmotifs, separated bu pages, even chapters, but popping up time and time again. These repetitions, like a heartbeat, like a drum keeping a rhythm in the background, reminded me of the style of At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop, another book about the black experience but in a very different context.

The book refers to Zadie Smith's NW, a story about black character in north London. The experiences and feeling of doomed black youth strongly reminded me of Poor by Caleb Femi, a book of poetry gathered from the experiences of black youths in London.

The novel provides a visceral description of what it is like to be a talented (he's hugely artistic, immersed in music and paintings and theatre and literature and photography) young black man in London. Many of his experiences resonated: I, too, have been in situations he describes and have shared these emotions, but I haven't had the relentless exposure to jeopardy day in day out that creates an existential dread, a foreboding of inevitable doom. Mostly, I felt like an outsider. But it was a privilege and an education to gain a glimpse or two of his reality.

And the prose!

Selected quotes:

• "There should be no shame in knowing what one wants." (Prologue)
• "You lost your god so you can't even pray, and anyway, prayer is just confessing one's desire and it's not that you don't know what you want, it's that you don't know what to do about it." (Ch 7)
• "There are really only two plot devices when writing: a stranger comes to town, or a person goes on a journey." (Ch 9)
• "The intense mess of being intimate with another." (Ch 10)
• "You look like you got hit by a bus, and you dusted yourself off, and did it again for the hell of it." (Ch 11)
• "To be you is to apologize and often that apology comes in the form of suppression." (Ch 12)
• "You want to find yourself in a basement, neck loose, bobbing your head as a group of musicians play, not because they should, but because they must." (Ch 14)
• "You ... pushed apologies towards her in the way one would do when diffusing a bomb in the movies: one eye closed, snip at the wire and hope for the best." (Ch 15)
• "You're like a pair of musicians, forever improvising. Or perhaps you are not musicians but your love manifests in the music. Sometimes, your head tucked into her neck, you can feel her heartbeat thudding like a kick drum. Your smile a grand piano, the glint in her eye like the twinkle of hands caressing ivory keys. The rhythmic structure of a double bass the inert grace she had been blessed with, moving her body in ways which astound. A pair of soloists in conversations so harmonious, one struggles to separate. You are not the musicians but the music." (Ch 17)
• "You're scared that she might not just see your beauty, but your ugly too." (Ch 18)
• "He had spent a life so close to death that it was less a life lived and more one survived." (Ch 25)
• "You gaze in the mirror and you see that you are not a coward but you have done a cowardly thing and that you're not malicious but you have hurt her and you're not an embarrassment but you are ashamed." (Ch 26)
• "Freedom is really the distance between hunter and prey." (Ch 27)

A wonderful book.March 2026; 145 pages

First published by Viking in 2021

My Penguin paperback was issued in 2022

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Trumpet" by Jackie Kay

When Joss Moody, a famous jazz trumpeter, dies, it is discovered that 'he' was a woman, who lived as a man. His grieving widow, the only one who knew the truth, is on the run from the press. His adopted son, Colman, shocked by what he sees as a betrayal, is giving exclusive interviews to a woman, Sophie Stones, who wants to write the authorised biography. We also hear from others: the doctor, the registrar, the undertaker, the cleaner, the drummer and an old school friend who used to know 'him' when she was a girl. 

In this way, the Joss's identity is explored from a variety of viewpoints, like a 360-degree appraisal in a work-place. Those who talk of him also reveal their own selves in the process, and how they see themselves. Thus, the writer, who sometimes refers to herself in the third person, as Sophie, loves buying clothes, becoming in a sense a reflection of the musician, who always dressed smartly, and as a man. The son wonders whether he should revert to his birth name. The widow remembers that the musician used to refer to himself as a little girl in the third person. The text itself plays between first person and third person viewpoints; the son adopts both. There is even one moment of deliberate head-hopping, almost at the centre of the novel (in 'Interview Exclusive') when we are first in Sophie's head ("He's a bit of an asshole really, she thinks. But cute." and a few paragraphs later, in the same scene, we are in Colman's head (He can't stand all those scented teas."); clearly the opportunity to hop from 'she' to 'he' was not to be missed.

The tense can vary too. Most of the key narrators talk in the present tense, some of the incidentals narrate in the past tense. This miscellany of styles emphasises the incoherence of who we are and underlines the truth that we can change in fundamental ways.

A fascinating book.

Selected quotes:

• “I met a man once who wouldn't let me take his picture with Joss. He said it would be stealing his soul. I remember thinking, how ridiculous, a soul cannot be stolen. Strange how things like that stay with you as if life is waiting for a chance to prove you wrong. Joss’s soul has gone and mine has been stolen. It is as simple and as true as that.” (House and Home)
• “The girl I was has been swept out to sea. She is another tide entirely.” (House and Home)
• “It's a tall order when you are expected to be somebody just because your father is somebody. The children of famous people aren't allowed to be talentless, ordinary fuckwits like me.” (Cover Story)
• “I liked the dark corners of sulking.” (Cover Story)
• “He always spoke about her in the third person. She was his third person.” (House and Home #2)
• “Her letter says, with hindsight would you have done anything different? You don't live in hindsight though, do you? Hindsight is a different light. It makes everything change shape.” (House and Home #2)
• “The word transvestite has got more in it than the word cross-dresser. What is a cross-dresser anyway when he or she is at home? someone who dresses in a fit of fury.” (Money Pages)
• “Are you trying to bribe me? Away and raffle yourself.” (People: The Drummer)
• “I went about, according to my mother, with a huge chip on my shoulder. Not just a chip, my father would say, a whole fish supper.” (Interview Exclusive)
• “Sophie Stones smiles a huge mile of a smile.” (People: the Cleaner)
• “Shopping staves depression.” (Style)
• “Life is just a journey from milk teeth to false teeth with fillings and crowns thrown in between for relief.” (People: The old school friend)

March 2026; 278 pages

First published in 1998 by Picador

My Picador paperback was issued in 2016

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Snow Ball" by Brigid Brophy

 

Elegant. Glittering. Intoxicating. But is this account of a costume party at a rich man's house, with overtones of Mozart's Don Giovanni, style over substance? It certainly reeks of snobbery but more of those familiar with high culture than those who have money, the spelling mistakes in Ruth's diary and “Edward’s own taste preferred cars that crouched low as though over dropped handlebars.” (3.16) are sneers at the rich, as is the comment: “The rich have libraries, whereas people like us have books. People like us read books. The rich have them catalogued.” (2.6). The rich host and hostess are fat and ugly. There is a whiff of pretentiousness, as evidenced by the repeated use of the word 'declivity' when another author might say 'dip' or 'dent' and the choice of 'discomfortable' over 'uncomfortable'. Perhaps she is just being precise, but I had the impression that shje was flaunting her vocabulary.

Elegant, glittering, intoxicating and, to that extent, entertaining, but very little happens. There is a ball. The New Year is sung in. Three couples, one married, have sex. 

Selected quotes:

• “The neat whisky she had been drinking brought her heart not to her mouth but, much more discomfortably, to the flat part of her chest, to what seemed to be a precise location on top of the flat bone above the breasts.” (1.1)
• “Anna, whose own answer had long been Yes, she could tolerate it, cherished her face without pity or special pleading.” (1.2)
• “‘You’re made of money, aren't you, Rudy?’ ... ‘and you're made of flesh and blood, but you'd squeal if you had to part with any, just the same.’” (1.4)

February 2026; 196 pages

First published in 1964

My Faber paperback was issued in 2020

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Also reviewed in the blog:

• Hackenfeller's Ape by Brigid Brophy

"Gently Does It" by Alan Hunter

 The book that introduced Chief Inspector George Gently who went on to solve crime in another 46 novels, not to mention a TV drama starring Martin Shaw that ran for eight series. 

Gently, a methodical homicide expert with Central on holiday, clashes with the local police whose attitude is more to gather evidence implicating the prime suspect. Of course the tiny discrepancies in the case are sufficient to locate the real culprit. The problem is not so much whodunnit but how it can be proved.

It was an enjoyable classic of its kind, although the protagonist's tic (he eats so many peppermint creams that one fears for his dental health and imminent diagnosis of diabetes) was a little annoying; I was reminded of Inspector Claud Eustace Teal's obsession with chewing gum in The Saint books by Leslie Charteris. The clash with the local plods is also a trope of this style of fiction.

Very much of its time. Gently is a sexless bachelor who lives with a landlady, several other male characters are rather less sexless bachelors living alone with women who do for them. There is a servant, a classic working class vamp, and a daughter of the rich dead man who speaks with a strong foreign accent despite apparently having lived entirely in England and her brother having no accent at all. Everyone has big lunches: "what does one's figure matter when one is one the wrong side of fifty?" (Ch 11)

Nevertheless, it is thoroughly entertaining.

Selected quotes:

"Susan was a pretty, pert blonde girl with a tilted bra and an accentuated behind. She wore a smile as a natural part of her equipment. She had a snub nose and dimples and a pleased expression, and had a general supercharged look, as though she was liable to burst out of her black dress and stockings into a fierce nudity." (Ch 4)

February 2026; 250 pages

First published in 1955

My paperback edition issued by Robinson in 2010

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Model Behavior" by Jay McInerney

In Bright Lights, Big City the 2nd person narrator works for a New York magazine as a fact-checker although his employment seems precarious; his girlfriend is a model who has vanished off to Paris and he is afraid she has left him. In this novel, the 1st person narrator works for a New York magazine as a writer although his employment seems precarious; his girlfriend is a model who has vanished off to Paris and he is afraid she has left him. So there was a distinct sense of deja vu.

The 'gimmick' this time is that the story is broken up into small sections, some no longer than a paragraph though most manage more than a page, as if the novel is in the style of a magazine article.

I found this rather tedious at first. I forgave him because he can write wonderfully wise-cracking descriptions (see the selected quotes). And because of one brilliant scene in which the narrator's mum and dad take him and his depressed sister to a meal at a posh restaurant and the conversation unwinds into a hilarious show-down.

The ending is pretty clever too.

Selected quotes:

• “Phil calls Brooke the scrambled egg head.” (Immediate family)
• “Watching the other men. Sorry bastards. ... And I am one of them. Sitting at our tables naked with yearning, inappropriately dressed for the party. We are penises trussed up in wool suits and silk ties.” (Mount Olympus) He is in the audience at a lap-dancing club.
• “There are exactly two kinds of movie star, the Solipsist and the Seducer: one speaks only of himself, not believing in the existence of anyone else; the other still seems not to believe in his or her own existence at all, and has to seek constant verification from every possible fan in the room, working it like a politician, looking into the great round mirrors of our eyes, trying to seduce us all one at a time.” (Connor among the plutocrats)
• “As a straight male I am viewed as the urban equivalent of the village idiot - harmless, perhaps, but kind of a communal embarrassment.” (How I got my job)
• “Somewhere between the middle and the end is always the best part, but we never know exactly where it is until it's over.” (The first time)
• “Within the year we moved to New York - which is to monogamy what the channel changer is to linear narrative.” (Tokyo, autumn 1993)
• “I've always found the minute portraiture of nineteenth century fiction fairly useless. For me, those precise descriptions of the hero's nose/ mouth/ eyes/ moles/ forehead never come together as an actual face ... they always end up jumbled, like a portrait in the analytic cubist mode.” (Physical appearance)
• “You know I don't like drugs that make me feel stupid. I feel stupid enough to begin with.” (Psychopharmacology)
• “I didn't want other guys to fuck her, honest. I just wanted other guys to want to fuck her.” (The Silk route)
• “Sent the cleaning lady away last week ... because I was embarrassed even for her to see the wreckage, with the result that it has grown and compounded itself as rapidly as the interest on an unpaid VISA balance.” (House call)
• “It should be counted to Jeremy's credit that he is generally unaware of the interest he excites in the opposite sex, though an ill-wisher might chalk up this obliviousness to self-absorption.” (Another literary mystery solved.)
• “Not the limelight, exactly. More like the lemonlight, the reflected
  glory experienced by one-day sensations and the sexual partners of the stars.” (Connor faces the Press)

February 2026; 230 pages

First published in 1998

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Devil's Elixirs" by E T A Hoffmann

This Gothic novel, a classic of doppelganger fiction, is heavy on plot, if you can call this convoluted picaresque a plot, but light on character. Having drunk a wine associated with the relic of Saint Anthony and reputed to be one of the Devil's elixirs, with which Satan had unsuccessfully tried to tempt the Saint, Brother Medardus has an interlude as a highly successful preacher which puffs him up with pride before, as a penance, he is sent by his Abbot to Rome. On the course of this journey he assumes the identity of a Count who he has just seen fall from a cliff, falls in love with a noblewoman and murders her brother, escapes, travels to a Princely court, wins a fortune gambling, encounters his doppelganger, meets a smooth-talking barber, is arrested for murder, escapes, and continues his journey to Rome where he repents of his sins and seeks redemption. I may have missed a few dozen incidents out and confused others. After a while, I stopped paying attention.

All of the usual Gothic tropes are here: 

• the hero is a mad monk (there is even a name check to the English novel The Monk by Matthew Lewis which was published in 1796), 
• there is the usual Protestant hysteria over Roman Catholicism, 
• there is murder, 
• there is a doppelganger, 
• there is imprisonment in a dungeon (and the doppelganger tunnels his way into the cell in what seems like the source of a similar episode in the Count of Monte Cristo which was written by Alexandre Dumas pere in 1846), 
• there is a mysterious painter described as the Wandering Jew, 
• there's a secret trapdoor set in motion by a spring, 
• there is the phrase “odour of sanctity” (2.2) which always makes me wonder what sanctity smells of, I personally imagine a mix of must and floor polish
• there is the phrase "subtle cruelty" (2.2): something in Gothic romances of the time always had to be subtle.
• there is a thunderstorm

It is written in the heightened headlong hysteria common to the genre at the time: “Are you then free from sin, that you dare to look in loss to my heart as if you were the purest man alive, yea as if you were God Himself, whom you despise; that you dare to pronounce the remission of my sins - you, who will struggle in vain for forgiveness, for the blessedness of haven which will always be denied you? Despicable hypocrite, soon the hour of requital will come, and you will be grounded in the dust like a venomous serpent, rising in mortal shame and moaning in vain for release from your unutterable agony!” (1.2) When a writer uses words such as ‘unutterable’ or ‘indescribable’ I always think that, if they had sufficient skill, they would be able to utter or describe it.

Descriptions are equally rococo:

“As the coach moved off there were flashes of lightning in the distance and the clouds which the wind had hurled together and was driving across the sky, became blacker and blacker; the thunder rolled in a thousand echoes, and red lightning rent the heavens as far as the eye could see. The tall pines cracked, shattered to their roots, and the rain poured down in torrents.” (1.3)

Did I enjoy it? Not much. It just went on and on. Madness gets boring quite quickly. I did enjoy the barber who had a joie de vivre he expressed in wonderfully impetuous language, at once similar to and different from the standard prose of the book: “You will see the modern gentleman of fashion in every conceivable refinement - now boldly outshining everyone, now morose and disinterested, now naively flirting, now ironic, witty, ill-tempered, melancholic, bizarre, dissolute, graceful, jovial.” (1.3) He claims he isn't mad but a clown: “Is not a barber of genius inevitably a clown right from the beginning? Clowning is a protection against madness, and I can assure you, reverend sir, that even by north-northwest I can clearly distinguish a church spire from a lamp-post.” (2.2) This is clearly quoting Shakespeare. In Act 2 Scene 2, Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: "I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw".

It had its moments. I wondered whether the Elixirs were a metaphor for drug addiction, whether the Devil was a pusher: “O Brother Medardus, the Devil walks the earth unceasingly, offering his elixirs to men. Who has not at some time or other delighted in his potions?” (2.2) There were some wonderfully wacky moments which often seemed to include owls. But I struggled to finish it.

Selected quotes:

• “Just as Classical forms of architecture have been preserved in the churches, so a ray of light from the joyful age of Antiquity seems to have shone into the dark mysticism of Christianity, bringing with it something of the radiant glory which surrounded the ancient gods and heroes.” (1.1)
• “Satan ... leered mockingly at The Saint and asked him whether he would like to taste the elixirs that were in the bottles he was carrying.” (1.1)
• “Let us climb onto the roof beneath the weathercock, which is playing a merry tune for the owl’s wedding. Up there we will fight with each other, and the one who pushes the other over will become a king and be able to drink blood.” (1.3)
• “You wobbled about like a badly-made skittle.” (2.2)
• “Banished from the church, excluded like a leper from the gatherings of the brethren, I lay in the vaults of the monastery, ekeing out a pitiable existence on tasteless herbs boiled in water, whipping and torturing myself with instruments devised by the most subtle cruelty, and raising my voice in self accusation, in contrite prayer for my redemption from hell, whose flames were already glowing within me.” (2.2)
• “There was a confused rustling and whispering; people I had known before appeared, madly distorted; heads crawled about with grasshoppers’ legs growing out of their ears, and leering at me obscenely; strange birds, ravens with human heads, were beating their wings overhead. I saw the choir master from B — and his sister, who was wildly dancing a waltz while her brother accompanied her by playing on his breast, which had become a fiddle. Belcampo, with the ugly face of a lizard, was sitting on a horrible dragon; he made a rush as if to comb my beard with a red-hot iron comb, but he did not reach me. The chaos became mad and madder, the figures more and more weird, from the smallest ant dancing with human feet to the elongated skeleton of a horse with glittering eyes, its skin a saddlecloth on which was sitting a knight with a shining owl’s-head; his armour was a mug with the bottom knocked out, his helmet a funnel turned upside down.” (2.2)

Hoffmann was also author of The Sandman, which formed the basis for the first act of Offenbach's opera Tales from Hoffmann and the ballet Coppelia by Delibes; another of his short stories formed the basis the The Nutcracker, the ballet by Tchaikovsky. 

First published in 1816

My OneWorld Classics edition, based on Ronald Taylor's 1963 translation was issued in 2008.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God