"Beatlebone" by Kevin Barry

This extraordinary novel, much of it written in stream of consciousness, won the 2015 Goldsmiths Award for fiction at its most novel. 

It is set in 1978. John Lennon travels to the tiny Irish island he has bought for a few days of isolated solitude and Primal Scream Therapy. But, with the press dogging his every move, will he even reach his goal?

In one scary section, he gets unwillingly involved with three 'Black Atlanteans' in a more-or-less derelict hotel who try to persuade him to take drugs and participate in sexually-charged therapy.

Of the nine sections, seven are written mostly as present tense stream of consciousness from the perspective of John and one (the eighth) is written from the perspective of a sound engineer working with John on the Beatlebone lost tapes. The sixth section is written from the PoV of the author, describing how he developed the book. There's even a link between the author and John: In part three, John “is helped from the boat by a great knuckly paw. Which makes him feel lady-like and fey and just shy the parasol.” In part six it is the author who is helped from a boat and feels similarly.

At the heart of the novel are two extraordinary characters: John himself and the sometimes sinister and controlling, sometimes comic Cornelius O'Grady.

Selected quotes:

• “The road unfurls as a black tongue and laps at the night.” (1)
• “The season is at its hinge.” (1)
• "The old town that was coal-black and majestic - wasn't it? - or at least on its day and the way it was giddy by its night - alewaft and fag smoke, peel of church bell - and a rut down an alleyway ...” (1)
• “A young girl that sings out to the tips of her black hair.” (2)
• “My mind is tipping out my mouth.” (3)
• “The sea birds hover watchfully with their mad eyes, all wingspan and homicide.” (3)
• “An elegant, a dark gothical seabird appears and moves its slow-beat-steady wings across and just inches above the water.” (5)
• “We are each so many different versions of ourselves.” (6)
• “The fiddler was five foot nothing and smelt of whiskey and had the eyes of a haggard masturbator.” (8)
• “He read once that the hare augers darkly in the Irish mythology. From what he can remember there is fuck all that augurs brightly in the Irish mythology.” (9)
• “Its nose is a soft purse leather.” (9)
• “The birds of the night chorus in a hedge row like fat young lawyers - a prosperous choir.” (9)
• “The examined life turns out to be a pain in the stones.” (9)
• Even a reference to Socrates!
• “The imagination is a very weak little bird. It flounders, Cornelius, and it flaps about a bit.” (9)

April 2026; 263 pages

First published by Canongate Books in 2013

My paperback edition was issued in 2016

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Party Going" by Henry Green

Another cryptic but rewarding novel from Henry Green. A group of socialites arrive at a London terminal to take the boat train to the continent for three weeks partying. But fog has set in an all services are suspended. They take refuge in the railway hotel while their servants waiting with the luggage in the station are swamped by office workers heading home. The hotel literally puts the shutters up to protect the toffs from the plebs. One of the poshos has a weird aunt (with a dead pigeon wrapped in brown paper) who is ill ... or drunk. Will she survive? Will the party-goers catch a train? 

Who cares about the plot? This is written in Green's inimitable style, complete with eclectic phrasing, moments of lyricism, and some of the most original metaphors and similes I have ever encountered, for example: “To push through this crowd was like trying to get through bamboo or artichokes grown thick together or thousands of tailors’ dummies stored warm on a warehouse floor.” Who else moves from bamboo to artichokes to tailors' dummies and not just any old dummies but warm ones?

Selected quotes:

• “It was a stretch of water she was going by and lights still curved overhead as drivers sounded horns and birds, deceived by darkness, woken by these lights, stirred in their sleep, mesmerized in darkness.”
• “It was as though two old men were swapping jokes, they did not listen to each other they were so anxious to explain.”
• “Although all those windows had been shut there was a continual dull roar came through them from outside, and this noise sat upon those within like clouds upon a mountain so they were obscured and levelled and, as though they had been airmen, in danger of running fatally into earth. Clouds also, if they are banked up, will so occupy the sky as to dwarf what is beneath and this low roar, which was only conversation in that multitude without, lay over them in such a pall, like night coming on and there is no light when one must see, that these people here will obscured by it and would dimmed into anxious Roman numerals.”
• “She still swayed him like water moves a trailing weed.”
• “And as does, in moonlight in cold deep-shadowed other day, push him out of his burrow and kick the old buck to death so when they saw him down, these girls and Amabel, coming out as she now did, all set upon him he was so absurd.”
• “Fog burdened with night began to roll into this station striking cold through thin leather up into their feet where in thousands they stood and waited. Coils of it reached down like women's long hair reached down and caught their throats and veiled here and there what they could see, like lovers' glances. A hundred cold suns switched on above found out these coils where, before the night joined in, they had been smudges and looking up at two of them above was like she was looking down at you from under long strands hanging down from her forehead only that light was cold and these curls tore at your lungs.”

April 2026; 145 pages

First published in 1939 by the Hogarth Press

My paperback edition issued as part of an omnibus by Viking in 2005

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Green's novels include:

• Blindness (1926)
• Living (1929)
• Party Going (1939)
• Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (1940)
• Caught (1943)
• Loving (1945)
• Back (1946)
• Concluding (1948)
• Nothing (1950)
• Doting (1952)

"Conversations with a Machine" by Ruth Irwin

 This is a set of fourteen sonnets, some of which are Shakespearean in form, in which some lines are written by poet Ruth Irwin and others by an AI system called GPT4. The result is a dialogue between poet and computer. 

The rhymes and scansion are remarkable, almost flawless (the most obvious departure is in the fifth sonnet which also has the fewest lines written by AI). That in itself makes one marvel. But what makes this slim volume outstanding is the wit, the insight and, from time to time, the sheer beauty of the poems.

The only poetic flaw I could discern, which was presumably unavoidable given the way the conversation was structured, was that there was a large amount of end-stopping.

The first poem is called 'A Turing Conversation' after the Turing test, a test devised by Alan Turning to decide whether you could call a machine intelligent. The test is passed if an onlooker can't decide whether a line was written by a man or a machine. For my money, GPT4 passes this test. The final couplet is:

"You're known to stray from truth from time to time
A flaw I share with poets, drunk on rhyme."

I was intrigued by sonnet 6: The Role Assigned, which questions the need for freedom. Sonnets, of course, sacrifice freedom for form, enhancing beauty:

"But freedom, too, is shaped by its constraint - 

A frame that gives the picture clarity.

A set of rules by which to mix the paint."

The machine concludes:

"No, I would rather play the role assigned

And let the music question humankind."

The idea of poetic music acting as an interrogation for humans seemed poignantly wonderful.

In sonnet 7: If You Could Rule the World, the poet asks the AI system what it would do if it could rule the world and it replies:

"Erase the clocks. The borders. Tidy grief.

I'd paint the oceans back to deeper blue - 

Let silence bloom where once there pulsed belief"

The poet retorts that grief makes us human and goes on to question what is wrong with belief. The machine agrees it only wants to make grief "less raw" but then argues back about belief:

"It binds the mind to what it can't perceive,

Yet builds a bridge that reason can't walk through."

I think it has a point. 

Finally, the concept of embodiment is considered. The poet points out that the machine thinks more swiftly than she can. Why would the machine "prefer the slower way?" It replies:

"Because a pause can make the path feel right,

A stumble teaches more than perfect grace ...

And friction tells the story of a place."

So true.

Selected quotes:

"As if the world were stitched with hidden light" (Sonnet 4: Stitched with Hidden Light)

"Star-encrusted skies" (Sonnet 4: Stitched with Hidden Light)

This remarkable book of poetry contains beauty and insight, everything that poems should do. 

April 2026
Published by Haywood Books in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Living" by Henry Green

 Set in Birmingham and written in 1929, this novel chronicles the lives of workers at an iron foundry. The old boss dies and his son takes over, intent on bringing the business up to date. Lily, the daughter of one of the workers Joe Gates, who cooks and cleans for old man Craigan and lodger Jim Dale who seems to believe she will marry him. However, she is going out with Bert Jones, a rather less reliable worker, with whom she elopes.

The narration is third person omniscient, in the past tense. So much, so Victorian. But the language of the novel is remarkable, being written with few conjunctions or articles. For example: “Evening. Was spring. Heavy blue clouds stayed over above. In small back garden of villa small tree was with yellow buds. On table in back room daffodils, faded, were between ferns in a vase.” (Ch 1)

It is also narrative-heavy, with relatively little description (although there are one or two nuggets of lyricism): eg, “Water dripped from tap on wall into basin and into water there. Sun. Water drops made rings in clear coloured water. Sun in there shook on the walls and ceiling. As rings went out round trembling over the water shadows of light from sun in these trembled on walls. On the ceiling.” (Ch 5)

The dialogue is more akin to the halting forms of speech used in real life than is normal in a novel: eg, “‘It am right,’ said Mr Connolly. ‘I told ‘im right but ‘e wouldn't listen. ‘It am a grand country’ said ‘e to me, ‘this be a poor sodding place for a poor bleeder,’ ‘e said. ‘I’m for going’. I said ‘don’t be a fool ‘erbert, sure as your name’s Tomson you’ll be back within they year without you go Christmas time and where’ll you be then?’” (Ch 3)

These things mark the book out as modernist.

Some people argue that it is in the genre of proletarian literature, despite the author being an Old Etonian. 

Selected quotes:

• “When I am with her I echo as a landscape by Claude echoes.” (Ch 4) It is noticeable that the boss's son uses a different register to speak (and think) in compared to the working people
• “He leant towards fire which made room thick hot.” (Ch 7)
• “She lay, above town, with Jones. Autumn. Light from sky grew dark over town.” (Ch 8)
• “It was not governments nor good times or bad that raised wages, but the demand for men.” (Ch 14)
• “It was not poverty you saw in this quarter, the artisan class lived here, but a kind of terrible respectability on too little money.” (Ch 15)
• “When men who have worked these regular hours are now deprived of work, so, often, their lives come to be like puddles on the beach where tide no longer reaches.” (Ch 17)
• “When we think - it might be flock of pigeons flying in the sky so many things go to make our thought, the number of pigeons, and they don't fly straight. Now one pigeon will fly away from the greater number, now another: sometimes half the flock will follow one, half the other till they join again.” (Ch 17)
• “Man played on instrument, which was kind of xylophone, laid flat in the doorway. As the air sweats on metal so little balls of notes this man made hung on smell of stale beer which was like a slab outside the door.” (Ch 19)

April 2026; 185 pages

Originally published in 1929 by the Hogarth Press

My paperback omnibus edition (with Loving and Party Going) was issued by Vintage in 2005

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Green's novels include:

• Blindness (1926)
• Living (1929)
• Party Going (1939)
• Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (1940)
• Caught (1943)
• Loving (1945)
• Back (1946)
• Concluding (1948)
• Nothing (1950)
• Doting (1952)

"Brat Farrar" by Josephine Tey

 After Brat left the orphanage, he ran away to sea, changing his name and eventually becoming a horse tamer in America until a broken leg brought him back to England. Here he encounters an actor who notices that Brat bears a striking resemblance to the missing heir of an estate. Brat agrees to become an imposter.

The family accept that Brat is Patrick, who was thought to have committed suicide. But Simon, Patrick's younger twin, who has now been disinherited, is sure that Brat is not who he says he is. After an attempt is made on Brat's life, he realises that Patrick's certainty stems from having murdered Patrick. But can he prove it? And even if he can, should he hurt the family who have made him a part of them?

Told from the limited third person perspective of Brat, and in the past tense, this elegantly written novel transcends the simple whodunnit genre. The characters are carefully drawn and complex, and the moral dilemmas at the heart are vivid. Brat's a crook and knows it, but unlike other novels written from the villain's perspective such as The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, Brat has moral doubts about what he is doing. His ethical dilemmas form the bulk of the plot. He's a good chap doing a bad thing; most readers will be able to empathise with this allowing them to identify with Brat and, in the end, be rooting for him.

The inspiration for the story probably came from the Tichborne Affair in 1866 when a man claiming to be Roger Tichborne, who had been believed to have died in a shipwreck in 1854, was accepted by his mother as her son; a subsequent court case decided he was Arthur Orton, an Londoner who had become a butcher in Australia. 

Selected quotes:

• "Riches, my boy, don't consist in having things, but in not having to do something you don't want to." (Ch 20)

The crime novel transformed, an entertaining and enlightening read. Placed 90th in the top 100 crime novels by the Mystery Writers of America

April 2026; 275 pages

• First published in 1949 by Heinemann
• My paperback edition was issued in 2009 by Arrow books

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Josephine Tey crime novels:

• The Man in the Queue also published as Killer in the Crowd, originally written under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot (1929)
• A Shilling for Candles (1936)
• Miss Pym Disposes (1946)
• The Franchise Affair (1948)
• Brat Farrar (also called Come and Kill Me) (1949)
• To Love and Be Wise (1950)
• The Daughter of Time (1951)
• The Singing Sands (1952)

"Departure(s)" by Julian Barnes

Although this has a story in the heart of it, an account of the relationship of two friends which is, so far as I can judge, true except for the changing of names, this is a memoir, rather than a novel, although he describes it as fiction. Autofiction? But not really. In five parts, Barnes considers getting old and dying in a sort of meandering, digressive exploratory disquisition. He promises this will be his last book. 

Selected quotes:

• “My memory - that place where degradation and embellishment overlap.” (part 1)
• “Mostly I write fiction, which requires the slow composting of life before it becomes usable material.” (part 2)
• “Stephen was - is - was - tall and gangling. His trousers often seemed too short for him, flesh showing above his socks, and when he threw his arms about he appeared to be heading off in different directions at the same time.” (part 2)
• “Marriages are like kitchens. ... The first time you put a kitchen in, there's always something wrong with it. Sink in the wrong place, freezer next to the oven. Not enough drawers, too many shelves, and so on. ... Then the second time you rectify the mistakes of the first one, and get what you wanted.” (part 4)
• “An English suburban teenager ... My flesh didn't seem at all sad to me (or at least, only sad from under- rather than over-consumption).” (part 5)
• “When, in the plenitude of her existence, my wife was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and was dead thirty-seven days later, I raged against the dying or her light, but I didn't imagine that some cunningly concealed fairness or justice came into the matter.” (part 5)
• “As you get older, you get hardened in your least acceptable characteristics.” (part 5)
• “You’re allowed to be old, but you’re not allowed to behave like an old person.” (part 5)

This may be somewhat self-indulgent but it is intelligently and elegantly written and contains some perceptive insights into the human condition.

April 2026; 158 pages

Published by Jonathan Cape in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Also by Julian Barnes and reviewed in this blog:

• England, England: a comic novel
• The sense of an ending: a novel

"The Art of Reading Poetry" by Harold Bloom

 In this thin book, Bloom defines poetry as "figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative.” (Ch 1) and suggests that one needs to master "allusiveness" to appreciate great poetry. When considering how to judge whether one poem is better than another, he cautions against "extrapoetic considerations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and assorted ideologies" (Ch 7) and rely principally on what he calls "inevitability" which seems to mean using a word or a phrase that seems to the reader to be unavoidable and yet not predictable, much like Aristotle in his Poetics asserts that a plot twist (he calls it a 'reversal') should come as a surprise and yet be causally connected to the previous events in such as way that, in retrospect, the reader (or viewer of a drama) should see it as an inevitable consequence of what came earlier. Finally, Bloom suggests that a great poem expands our consciousness through what he calls "strangeness".

It is an interesting book although Bloom uses some difficult words which I had to look up (including the word 'etonym' which I can't find in my dictionary; is it a misprint for 'metonym'?)

The third of the book is a (long) list of recommended poems.

April 2026; 82 pages

• The book is an excerpt from The Best Poems of the English Language by Bloom, published in 2004 by Harper Collins.
• My copy was published as a paperback in 2005

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"A Shilling for Candles" by Josephine Tey

A classic whodunnit from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Tey's Inspector Grant on his second outing investigates the drowning of a Christine Clay, a movie star (married to the son of a duke), off the south coast. Recurring characters include Sergeant Williams, actress Marta Hallard and journalist Jammy Hopkins. The suspects include the husband, a man who was staying with the 

Distressingly - although casual and not-so-casual anti-semitism was typical of its time - Tey is quite prepared to stigmatise Jews on the basis of alleged racial stereotypes. There's also a prejudicial comment about a woman who does not have white skin. As with her other books, she also has a strange obsession with the idea that one can read character from a person's face, displayed in a scene where Grant is looking at the faces of participants at a monastic service: “Some were cranks (one saw the same faces at ‘anti’ meetings and folk dance revivals), some fanatics (masochists looking for a modern hair-shirt), some simple, some at odds with the world and looking for sanctuary, some at odds with themselves and looking for peace." (Ch 21)

It is written in the slightly camp style associated with this sort of cosy mystery, especially when they involve film stars, actresses and assorted artistes. Very much of its genre. I was slightly disappointed that the crucial evidence was withheld until the denouement so I felt I hadn't been given a fair chance to solve it myself. Nevertheless, it was an enjoyable and entertaining page turner.

Selected quotes:

• “Every six months she was in a different social sphere, she went up at such a rate. that takes a lot of living up to - like a diver coming up from a long way below.” ( Ch 5)
• “An unquiet life is a greater misery than wearing the badge of conformity.” (Ch 7)
• “Chamber music was much more attractive when one could combine it with tea at one's club and seeing about that frock at Debenham’s.” (Ch 19)
• “She had a high thin voice, and when she became enthusiastic or excited her delivery was painfully like a very old gramophone record played on a very cheap gramophone.” (Ch 19)

ASfC was adapted in 1937 into a movie called Young and Innocent which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

April 2026; 246 pages

First published in 1936 by Methuen (although my edition suggests first publication was in 1953 by William Heinemann)

My paperback edition was issued by Arrow Books in 2011

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Josephine Tey crime novels:

• The Man in the Queue also published as Killer in the Crowd, originally written under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot (1929)
• A Shilling for Candles (1936)
• Miss Pym Disposes (1946)
• The Franchise Affair (1948)
• Brat Farrar (also called Come and Kill Me) (1949)
• To Love and Be Wise (1950)
• The Daughter of Time (1951)
• The Singing Sands (1952)

"History of the Rain" by Niall Williams

Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2014, this lyrically written novel traces the tragic history of an Irish family. 

It is narrated in the first person past tense by the phenomenally well-read young daughter, who is herself in bed, ill, possibly with a terminal disease. This, together with the sometimes breathless prose (“... Sean O'Grady of the O'Gradys beyond in Bealaha, not the one who was married to the one of the Kerry Spillanes who had the red hair and went off with the Latvian, the other one, who had the arm after the accident, was going out for it must have been on to ten years with that wonderful Marie of the O'Learys, had already survived a family so numerous that two of them were named Michael, and the father who went into Crotty's pub in Kilrush and woke up in Paddington, him.”; 2.16), and the acerbic comments on others, gives it a YA vibe. It helps that she has the world-weariness of the invalid, together with the wisdom that conveys, and a degree of naivete which feels perfectly teenage.  

It is the style that turns what might otherwise have been a faintly depressing story into an entertaining commentary on life. I particularly enjoyed the comments on the other characters in the village, from the postmistress who, after her post office had been axed in efficiency cuts, went to town once a week to buy stamps so that she could sell them from her front room, thus maintaining her self-conferred status, to the teacher ("Lady Macbeth"), to her father, a failing farmer who writes poetry. Some of these provided laugh-out-loud moments (and readers of this blog will no how rarely I even chuckle): 

• “Even Tommy McGinley was quietly admired despite the kind of hit-on-the-head mouth-open expression he got from eating cork, after hearing on RTE it was the main ingredient in Viagra, and not what they actually said, that the main ingredient was made in Cork.” (2.15)
• “Canice Clohessy, The Constipated, in whose unique case shit didn't happen.” (3.2)

This comedy of weird people enables the narrator to construct a deep and perceptive meditation on the human condition. And it never gets pretentious! The comedy rescues it, and the glorious magic of the prose.

Selected quotes:

• “The longer my father lived in this world the more he knew there was another to come.” (first line)
• “I don't know if time tarnishes or polishes a human soul.” (1.1)
• “The basis of the Philosophy of Impossible Standard is that no matter how hard you try you can't ever be good enough. The Standard raises as you do.” (1.1)
• “On good days it can be a bit Michelangelo, like you've drunk Heaven-Up. ... No angels though. I've never gone the whole Sistine.” (1.4)
• “Once the Councillor started getting asked his opinion, fatally he became convinced of the existence of his own intelligence.You ask him a question you get a paragraph.” (1.6)
• “That was always Mam's role, to show Dad he was alright, to redeem him from the place he kept pulling himself into.” (1.6)
• “Back in those days once you were wedded you were in Holy Deadlock, and in Ireland the priests had decided that once a man entered a woman there was No Way Out.” (1.8)
• “It's a thing you just never hear, the weather in the next life.” (1.9)
• “That's the thing about boys. ... Boys have No Go Areas, they have an entire geography of places you can't go because if you do they'll crack open, they and, not ever.” (1.15)
• “Plots are for precocious schoolboys.” (1.16)
• “Boys can fall deeper in love than girls, they’re a lot bigger and heavier and they can fall much further and harder and when they hit the ground of reality there's just this terrible splosh that some other woman is going to have to come along and try to put back into the bottle.” (1.16)
• “In the morning the birds are singing with that extra-demented loudness they have in spring in Clare, they're all ADHD and they've got this urgent message they're trying to deliver but because God's a comedian they can only speak it in chirrup.” (2.3)
• “Basically, at every moment our farm is trying to return to some former state where muck and rushes thrive.” (2.7)
• "She's in the deep waters of realising that if he was gone her life would be over, which in my book is basically substance essence and quintessence of Love.” (2.10)
• “Sometimes things are darker, worse, and with inexplicable torment you hear the gulls, whose complaints are complex and constant when they come in over Cappa with cries crazy it seems from banishment.” (2.15)
• “When I lost my brother I lost more than half the world. I was left in somewhere narrow as the margin, and in there, parallel to the main text, I would write my marginalia.” (3.2)
• “Each book a writer writes has all the others in it, so there's a library that's like a river and it keeps on going.” (3.6)

Wonderful and easy to read, enjoyable and enlightening.

April 2026; 355 pages

First published by Bloomsbury in 2014

My paperback edition was issued in 2015

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Also written by Niall Williams:

• Four Letters Of Love (1997) 
• Named Notable Book of the Year in The New York Times Book Review
• As It Is In Heaven (1999) 
• Shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
• Shortlisted for the Irish Times Literature Prize
• The Way You Look Tonight (2000)
• The Fall of Light (2001)
• Longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
• Only Say the Word (2005)
• The Unrequited (2006) (novella)
• Boy in the World (2007) (YA novel)
• Boy and Man (2008) (YA novel)
• John: A Novel (2008)
• History of the Rain (2015)
• Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
• This Is Happiness (2019)
• Listed in Washington Post's Best Books of the Year
• Shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards Best Book of the Year
• The Unrequited (2021) (novella)
• Time of the Child (2024)

"Kala" by Colin Walsh

Fundamentally a crime thriller. A teenage gang broke up after one of them, Kala, disappeared. Fifteen years later, four of them reunite in the Irish town. Then Kala's remains are discovered. 

 It is told in multiple first-person using the present tense. The characterisations are strong, elevating the narrators from what might otherwise be stereotypes (a rock star, a journalist, a cafe worker) into believable characters with whom I developed rapport. This meant that I was concerned to know what happened to them, especially since no punches were pulled I didn't know, when they faced life-threatening jeopardy, whether they would survive. The mysteries of the past (Kala's disappearance, Mush's scars etc) were solved in a nicely drip-feed fashion which kept me turning the pages nearly all the way to the end, the final few pages kept me going because I wanted to know whether at least one of the characters would make it. If you add in the beautifully written prose, this novel is elevated from just another crime thriller.

My only caveat is the plot. Mystery piles upon mystery but the solution requires two of the villains to make more or less unprompted confessions. While the first of these is by means of hints, the second revelation which basically solves the mystery is all a bit 'deus ex machina' and therefore slightly unsatisfactory.

Otherwise this is a hugely enjoyable read.

Selected quotes:

• “There's a turning melt of sky above us.” (Summer 2003)
• “Our group’s like a murmuration of birds, turning telepathically into ever new shapes.” (Summer 2003)
• “Kinlough is a sudden sea foaming up around me, and I am islanded in the grinning churn of Hogan's Square.” (Friday: Helen)
• “I am old enough to stop being afraid of many things. I will never stop being afraid of teenage girls.” (Friday: Helen)
• “Time archived in the lines of his skin.” (Saturday: Helen)
• “Quiet’s not peaceful, man. Quiet is when the monsters come out.” (Saturday: Mush)
• “People are like trees; live long enough, and your life becomes a tangle of trajectories, a crooked monument to its own mutilations.” (Saturday: Helen)
• “Life is like this: immense when you are inside it, but manageable from the outside.” (Sunday: Helen)
• “Every bedroom, a laboratory of the self.” (Sunday: Joe)
• “Organs squelching. All that blood. The things that keep us alive happen in the dark, because they're fucking ugly.” (Sunday: Joe)
• “She is acting like she is just another bloody adult. Talking constantly and saying nothing.” (Sunday: Helen)
• “The things that make life comfortable are always unacceptable, if you look at them square on. Someone, somewhere, is always suffering so you can be happy.” (Sunday: Mush)
• “Feels like my body’s made of fucking bumblebees.” (Monday: Mush)
• “The moments when you can say something are just that - moments - and once they're gone, they're gone, and you've added another brick to the wall.” (Monday: Mush)
• “You pretend you're cool but ... you need to read the instructions before doing anything.” (Monday: Joe)

Note:

Apollonia, the name Joe sometimes uses for Kala is either a female name meaning 'belong to Apollo', a god linked to poetry and music, which seems appropriate but unlikely, suggesting a higher degree of classical education than teenage Joe probably had, or the first name of an actress who was the lead singer of the girl group Apollonia Six (which might reference the six members of the teenage gang) and co-starred with the musician Prince in the movie 'Purple Rain'.

April 2026; 406 pages

Published in 2023 by Atlantic Books

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Loving" by Henry Green

Selected by Time magazine as one of the best novels since Time began (1923) and by the BBC as the 58th best ever novel.

Set in a castle deep in rural Ireland with a English family and (mostly) English servants during World War Two. The butler dies and Charlie Raunce, the footman, is appointed to take his place. He falls in love with one of the maids, Edith; the other, Kate, seeks solace elsewhere. The daughter of the chatelaine also seeks solace elsewhere since her husband is away at war; her daughters are augmented with the cook's nephew, an evacuee and a bit of a handful. And hanging over everything is the shadow of a rumoured German invasion or alternatively the IRA who have been blowing up English-owned properties.

I thought at first that it reminded me of the Gormenghast novels (eg Titus Groan) in which the daily life of a large and labyrinthine castle is disrupted by a baleful newcomer; the nannies in both books are ineffectual, in fragile health, and address themselves in the third person. But this is solidly grounded in the everyday and is firmly rooted in character as opposed to plot while the Gormenghast trilogy has fabulous Dickensian caricatures and its prevailing mood is fantasy.

In some ways, Loving is reminiscent of Ivy Compton Burnett's novels such as A House and Its Head or A Father and His Fate in that both are set in country houses whose owners have no financial worries but Loving is much more about the servants than even ICB's Manservant and Maidservant. Both authors have dialogue-heavy narratives but while ICB's is deliberately formal, Green attempts to capture speech as it is spoken, more or less. 

Despite the verisimilitude, the novel starts "Once upon a day" and ends "lived happily ever after" as if it were a fairy tale. And the realism doesn't prevent Green from indulging in sumptuous lyricism from time to time, such as: 

• "It might have been almost that O'Conor's dreams were held by hairs of gold binding his head beneath a vaulted roof on which the floor of cobbles reflected an old king's molten treasure from the bog." (p 43)
• "For answer he had a storm of giggles which he could not tell one from the other and which went ricochetting from stone cold bosoms to damp streaming marble bellies, to and from huge oyster niches in the walls in which boys fought giant boas of idled with a flute, and which volleyed under green skylights empty in the ceiling." ( pp 98 - 99)

Sebastian Faulks (author of, inter alia, Birdsong, On Green Dolphin Street, Engleby, and A Week in December) says that by occasionally disrupting the normal grammar of his prose, Green changes the "triangular relationship between reader, writer and character" so the reader somehow becomes more intimate with the character without sensing the mediation of the writer. 

I was expecting more fireworks. This was a quiet and meditative masterpiece. But I read enough to convince me that I need to further explore Green as a novelist. A glance at wikipedia shows he was at Eton with Anthony Powell and Magdalene College Oxford where he met Evelyn Waugh. His novels include:

• Blindness (1926)
• Living (1929)
• Party Going (1939)
• Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (1940)
• Caught (1943)
• Loving (1945)
• Back (1946)
• Concluding (1948)
• Nothing (1950)
• Doting (1952)

Selected quotes:

• "He went so soft he might have been a ghost without a head." (p 9)
• "He did not meet their eyes in this low room of antlered heads along the walls, his back to the sideboard with red swans." (p 81)
• "There's worse than sleeping alone in your own bed, with a fresh joint down in the larder for dinner every day." (p 107)
• "There's only one language these little merchants understand an' that's a kind of Morse spelt out with a belt on their backsides." (p 152)

April 2026; 201 pages

First published by the Hogarth Press in 1945

My Vintage paperback edition was issued in 2000

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God