"Darkness Falls From the Air" by Nigel Balchin

 

This novel is set in London during the blitz of the Second World War. The protagonist, Stratton, is an industrialist working as a temporary civil servant, seeking to make British industry more efficient, facing opposition from vested interests who want to make profits during the war, and from the inertia of the civil service. At the same time, his wife, Marcia, is having an affair with an artistic type, a writer called Stephen. Stratton has, so far, tolerated the affair in the hope that Marcia will see Stephen for what he is. She tries to end the affair but Stephen threatens suicide. 

I thought this was potentially a fascinating situation, not least because it is a wartime novel in which almost all the characters are non-combatants. My father spent most of the war as a 'boffin' enjoying the glorious beauty of the Malvern Hills while working on researching and developing radar. I would argue that he had a greater impact on the war than that of my uncle who fought in North Africa and then Italy but civilians receive no medals and their service is mostly unrecognised. I welcome a novel that redresses this balance. Furthermore, a novel that points out the selfish inefficiencies of capitalism is a challenge to our modern mindset, especially as we face the existential threat of climate change. I found these ideas refreshing, although I suspect many people will take away the hackneyed message that civil services can be mired in inertia.

Unfortunately, I was mostly bored. There are some magnificent descriptions of wartime London: civilians seeking refuge in the tube, rich people continuing to eat out in underground restaurants (no mention of rationing), the daily decision as to whether to try and sleep through a bombardment or find a bomb shelter. But an awful lot of the story is given as dialogue. Stratton the protagonist attempts to reason his wife out of her affair, he talks to Stephen, he talks to his friends, he chats to people at parties. He hardly ever does anything. Then, at work, he talks to his secretary, his colleagues, on committees, to the Minister. There's a lot of pontificating. Much of the conversation is allusive and euphemistic, in that sort of clipped way that may well be realistic, especially of the period, but undermines the drama. The anger is deeply buried. Perhaps this is how people react when their lives are being threatened on a daily basis but perhaps not. Whatever, I wanted more passion. 

At the end (spoiler alert, but not, given the title, very much of a spoiler alert) the situation is resolved with a very predictable deus ex machina. 

Read The End of the Affair by Graham Greene instead. 

Trigger warnings:

As you would expect given the period in which the book was written there are a couple of anti-semitic references, one incident of domestic violence, and some workplace sexual harrassment.

Selected quotes:

• "What with looking at me anxiously and looking at Stephen anxiously, Marcia's anxious expression was doing heavy overtime." (Ch 1)
• "I wished to God Marcia were in, and it wasn't only for her sake. Air-raids are a game for two or more players." (Ch 2)
• "At one time you used to do things. Nowadays you nearly do them and tell me about it afterwards." (Ch 2)
• "Marvellous how slowly these hysterical people can rush." (Ch 6)
• "I was feeling a bit straight-run and Lifebuoy Soap myself." (Ch 8)

November 2026; 204 pages
First published in 'Great Britain' in 1942
My Cassell Military Paperback edition was issued in 2002

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Life of M" by Rachel Cusk

No-one writes quite like Rachel Cusk. Her sentences feel all more or less the same. Simple declarations predominate; there's no room for florid language. She aims for the clarity of a modern kitchen: all white and clinical, with gleaming worktops, everything tidy and in its place. Ambiguity is minimised, although she makes the reader pause and wonder with statements that seem gnomic or deliberately contradictory: “I had never learned how to make experience easier for myself. For M it was the reverse. Her difficulty lay in her distance from the random violence of insignificance. Personally I felt saturated with that violence. All my life it had been made clear to me how unimportant I was.” (p 2) I'm not quite sure what that means, so I suppose it must be profound. Elsewhere there were passages I did (I think) comprehend and they were definitely profound, eg: “The simplicity of the dogs, sometimes so soothing, can without warning make the complexity of our lives and our arrangements intolerable. Our friends wonder why we have them when we already have so much else to manage. The dogs are the statement of our intention. We intend to be stable and calm, to take our time, to give each thing the attention it is due. The dogs are the continual reminder of this intention. They are foolish and funny; it would be easy to be cruel to them, and so our non-cruelty attains an actual value. Yet their dumb love sometimes disturbs us.” (p 84)

Some of her descriptions are more precise than photographs, achieving a sort of hyper-reality:

• “The waste collectors come early, before it is even light. In their big truck they rampage noisily through the dark streets, pausing at each building in turn. Two men drive while the others ride on the back. At each stop they hop off before the truck has fully come to a halt. They aren't trying to save time: this flourish is something they're offering to themselves. They fan out over the street in the darkness and perform a choreographed routine, some wheeling the plastic municipal bins out into the road while others attach them to the truck’s rear forks. The forks lift and upend the bins over the belly of the truck then jerkily set them back down, empty. The street lamps rain their yellow haze over the truck and over the men and the municipal bins, gilding their movements; overhead the sky begins to lighten to a deep and jewel-like blue.” (p 79)
• “Down the centre of the table stand empty wine bottles with candles jammed into their necks. On the wall behind the table, opposite the windows, there are several bookcases. They are filled with books but also with other things, perhaps put there in haste to clear the room: photographs, coffee cups, plastic pens and markers, notepads, a tortoiseshell hair comb with big curved teeth. The light in the room is warm and dim without being artful. It is as though the items in the room with their warm density have gradually absorbed the light's objectivity.” (p 120)

The descriptions may be hyper-real and yet the structure of the book embraces artificiality. There is no plot, at least in the conventional sense. A writer is writing the autobiography of a film actress. Straight away we encounter a contradiction: this is an 'auto'biography written by another person. The first and last sections, written in the first person singular, and the past tense, are about the writer meeting the film star. Within this frame, the sections alternate (mostly) between those written by the writer in the first person plural and those written about M in the third person singular; these are in the present tense.

It is clearly experimental. Her last novel, Parade, won the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize so she clearly enjoys subverting forms. The just-jacket notes say "Rachel Cusk has again fashioned a new kind of literature. A novel stripped of artifice." I loved the innovation which reminded me of Tropismes by Natalie Sarraute, although the style of these two authors could scarcely be more different: Sarraute is Monet to Cusk's Courbet.  

Selected quotes:

• “On sunny mornings people ran beside the river, men and women running past like gods in the sun, tall with dazzled eyes and windswept hair. Other men and women lived in tents beneath the stone bridges and brushed their teeth in the water fountains. Sometimes their shoes could be seen placed neatly side by side outside the tent’s zipped entrance.” (p2)
• “It is like an old play that was once hugely successful and now runs continuously in some small and out-of-the-way theatre.” (p 49)
• “The woman opposite M, for instance, is wearing a studded leather bodice, conveying something risky and countercultural that its artful and expensive design immediately neutralises.” (p 96)
• “When darkness falls she has no choice but to catch it.” (p 141)
• “Concentration is like a white field into which we levitate, leaving ourselves behind in time.” (p 146)
• “We think about our own history as a series of collisions to which we attached a narrative of wrong and right that obscured their essential violence. We see that there was nothing especially intentional about the wrongs that were done to us. It was simply the collision of another character with our own.” (p 151)

This is one of the most daring and exciting novels I have read this year. I need to read more from this author.

November 2026; 183 pages

Published in the UK by Faber & Faber in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Dreamers" by Gilbert Adair

 

Three teenagers, Parisian twins Theo and Isabel and their fellow cinephile friend American Matthew, spend the summer of 1968 in sensual exploration while Parisians man the barricades. This coming of age novel brought to mind Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles with just perhaps a tiny hint of Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin.

i enjoyed the Bertolucci movie even though I saw it by accident, muddling it with another film called Dreamer. This book, dedicated to the three young stars of that movie, was rewritten after the movie which was based on Adair's debut novel called The Holy Innocents. The plot of the book differs from that of the film.

Although I am by no means enough of a cinephile to understand the movie references, nor enough of a francophile to be able to decipher the French lyrics quotes, I adored the book. Matthew, the third person protagonist, is a delightfully complex teenager, still unsure of his own sexuality (there is a laugh-out-loud scene in which he thinks, mistakenly, that a friend is coming out to him), lonely and socially inept, and bedazzled by the sophistication of his Parisian friends. 

And there are some startlingly original lines.

Selected quotes:

• “Under his jumble-sale clothes one imagined delicately chiseled ankle bones and subtle, shark’s-fin shoulder-blades.” (p 6)
• “He appeared to walk on the tips of his toes without actually tiptoeing.” (p 7)
• “He was also terrified that he hadn't properly read the small print of their relationship. He forgot that true friendship is a contract in which there can be no small print.” (p 8)
• “A lonely man thinks of nothing but friendship, just as a repressed man thinks of nothing but flesh.” (p 8)
• “There is fire and fire: the fire that burns and the fire that gives warmth, the fire that sets a forest ablaze and the fire that puts a cat to sleep. So is it with self-love.” (p 10)
• “He couldn't decide whether or not they ought to be picked up between the ironic pincers of quotation marks.” (p 13)
• “When two people agree it means one of them is redundant.” (p 14)
• “He was like the player who would rather fumble the ball on the winning side than score a goal for the losers.” (p 14)
• “If shit could shit ... it would smell just like your friend Jacques.” (p 17)
• “As a Trappist monk takes a vow of silence, she had taken a vow of conversation.” (p 22)
• “He cried out, But his heart is in the right place! - only to provoke these passers-by into screaming, No his heart is in the wrong place!” (p 25)
• “Like every couple, in whatever manner conjoined, they formed a two-headed eagle, now pecking each other's eyes out, now fondly nuzzling each other's beaks.” (p 39)
• “He stood up and ... walked out of the dining room with a gait so machine-like one would not have been too surprised to discover a wind-up key protruding from his back.” (p 61)
• “Other people's parents are always nicer than our own ... Yet, for some reason, ... our own grandparents are always nicer than other people's.” (p 62)
• “The thing was to make the right mistake, not the wrong one.” (p 78)
• “Alas, the trouble with the flesh is not that it's weak but that it's strong.” (p 87)
• “He ... stood before them, knees together, shivering slightly, like some arrowless Sebastian. ... free of the grubby chrysalis of his own clothes.” (p 98)
• “Vengeance, says a French proverb, is a dish best eaten cold. It was clear that Theo preferred his piping hot. A chacun son gout, as the French also say.” (p 103)
• “Days divided by nights as two frames of a film are divided by a black strip.” (p 126)
• “Unhappiness may lie in our failing to obtain precisely the right sort of happiness.” (p 129)
• “Fretful mothers hovered in the wings of demonstrations until, spotting their teenaged offspring, they would cuff them on the ear and drag them home, death to the immemorial objection that their pals had been permitted to stay.” (p 166)
• “In his contorted features they could read the terrible truth that one not only dies alone, one dies alive.” (p 185)

October 2026;189 pages

The Holy Innocents was first published in 1988

The Dreamers was first published in 2004 by Faber and Faber

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"A Phantom Lover" by Vernon Lee (Violet Paget)

Later entitled Oke of Okehurst, this is a supernatural novella by Vernon Lee, the pen-name of Violet Paget. It is written in the first person and the past tense, narrated from the point of view of the portrait painter who, commissioned to paint portraits of Mr and Mrs Oke, goes to stay at their secluded country house in Kent. 

It starts with a classic call (the portrait is commissioned) followed by a near refusal of the call ("I began to regret ..."; Ch 2), immediately followed by the journey into the other world, that of the Okehurst estate, in which mysterious things, such as hauntings, are possible.

This is a perfect example of a Victorian Gothic tale of the supernatural. An isolated house, a marriage on the rocks, a woman who identifies with an ancestress who was unfaithful ... will tragedy repeat itself?

Selected quotes:

• “It seemed to me that I was being led through the palace of the Sleeping Beauty.” (Ch 2)
• “If there are such things as ghosts ... I don't think they should be taken lightly. God would not permit them to be, except at a warning or a punishment.” (Ch 3)
• “She seemed to know every word that Alice had spoken, every idea that had crossed her mind. It sometimes struck me as if she were telling me, speaking of herself in the third person, of her own feelings.” (Ch 5)
• “Outside, the mists were beginning to rise, veiling the parkland dotted with big black oaks, and from which, in the watery moonlight, rose on all sides the eerie little cry of the lambs separated from their mothers. It was damp and cold, and I shivered.” (Ch 6)
• “How would it ever be possible to get this serious, conscientious, slow-brained representative of English simplicity and honesty and thoroughness to understand the mixture of self-engrossed vanity, of shallowness, of poetic vision, of love of morbid excitement, that walked this earth under the name of Alice Oke?” (Ch 8)

Beautifully told.

October 2026; 94 pages
First published in 1886
My paperback edition was issued by Renard Press in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Every" by Dave Eggers

 A cross between a savage satire such as Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift and a dystopian novel such as Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, this is a story of a wannabe saboteur infiltrating the biggest company on Earth, a monopolistic conglomerate of digital companies, which offers convenience and security in return for freedom by innovating apps which are "a mixture of benign utopianism and pseudofascist behavioral compliance” (Ch 2) for humanity's ubiquitous phones.

One of the themes is that the world is climate-doomed unless the wastefulness of humans is curtailed which means reducing choice. Foreign travel is replaced with virtual tours, putting millions out of work. Foodstuffs from far-off places, such as bananas, are more or less banned.

The workers in the corporate headquarters, a self-contained world, are being driven crazy by the demands of the workplace, which monitors their every move and gives them targets based on spurious research, such as the need to aim for ten hours sleep each night to maximise their creativity. Eye-tracking means they are forced to read every word of their non-disclosure agreements.

A wave of suicides follows when the eye-tracking is made available in the outside world, at which point everyone can see who you are eyeing up, and which bits of them you're ogling.

One of the strengths of this novel - a little like Milton's poem Paradise lost, in which the devil has the best lines - is that the arguments in favour of the totalitarian monopoly are so convincing. Who doesn't want a sustainable world, where we can live in safety, without perverts?

Selected quotes:

• “His worldview had remained that of a high-minded teenager: bad was bad, good was good, rebellion inherently noble.” (Ch3)
• “Every person has his blind spot, Delaney thought. ... But I don't know my own blind spot, she wondered, what does that mean? Being blind to one's blind spot: it did not portend well.” (Ch 17)
• “Subjectivity is just objectivity waiting for data.” (Ch 18)
• “A very tall man with a tremendous beard - a sort of waterfall of black lichen.” (Ch 22)
• “You can get anything you need here. You just can't get everything you want. Or anything you think you want.” (Ch 26)
• “He ... hopped up to sit on the counter, where his fleshy thighs spread like an oil spill.” (Ch 26)
• “Shame ensued, and shame was deserved, and shame was the internet's currency and lever for change.” (Ch 29)
• “It turns out my goals were out of reach ... Which is funny because one of my main ... goals was to set goals that were out of reach. Growth mindset, right?” (Ch 40)

A comic novel with a cutting edge. Chilling.

October 2026; 577 pages
First published in the USA by McSweeney's in 2021
My paperback edition was issued in the UK by Hamish Hamilton

Other works by Dave Eggers reviewed in this blog include:

• Contrapposto
• The Parade

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Excellent Women" by Barbara Pym

 A sort of Jane Austen novel but written in the first person (and the past tense) and updated to just after the second world war (but with nearly as much ignoring of the geopolitical context as Austen herself displays). The narrator (Miss Mildred Lathbury) is one of a host of unmarried spinsters (the legion of 'Excellent Women' of the title) who live in rented apartments in less fashionable areas of London off private incomes, perhaps supplemented with a little part-time work, and find a meaning to their lives by attending and helping out at the parish church. And perhaps dream, somewhat forlornly. of marriage. The reader is teased as to whether Mildred will marry the Vicar, the downstairs neighbour, or the anthropologist. Difficulties to this union are thrown in her way. The Vicar becomes engaged, the downstairs neighbour (the glamorous and flirtatious Rockingham) is already married (but unhappily) and the anthropologist (Everard Bone!) seems to be involved with Rockingham's wife. Will love triumph?

It starts with the arrival of Mildred's new neighbours in the person of Rockingham's wife and it starts with a disappointing amount of exposition. But give it a chance. It blossoms into a gentle but sometimes savage portrayal of spinsterhood.

There are wonderful, almost anthropological (not for nothing are some of the characters anthropologists) observations of social customs and more, delivered with clear-sighted penetration, such as:

• “Perhaps Rockingham with his love of Victoriana also enjoyed cooking, for I had observed that men did not usually do things unless they liked doing them.” (Ch 1)
• “Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.” (Ch 5)
• “‘Men are so strange,’ she said, in a pathetic puzzled way, as if she were finding it out for the first time.” (Ch 22)
• “A clergyman’s just the same as other men, isn't he, only he wears his collar back to front.” (Ch 23)

But these are mingled with heartbreaking self-reflections which highlight the pathos and loneliness of the lead character:

• “Women like me really expected very little - nothing, almost.” (Ch 4)
• “I must not allow myself to have feelings, but must only observe the effects of other people's.” (Ch 9)
• “I remember girlhood dances where one had stayed there [in the Ladies cloakroom] too long, though never long enough to last out the dance for which one hadn't a partner. I didn't suppose Helena had ever known that, and yet it was in its way quite a deep experience.” (Ch 10)
• “Love was rather a terrible thing, I decided next morning, remembering the undercurrents of the evening before. Not perhaps my cup of tea.” (Ch 11)
• “What had we done? We had not made particularly brilliant careers for ourselves, and most important of all, we had neither of us married. That was really it. It was the ring on the left hand that people at the Old Girls' Reunion looked for.” (Ch 12)
• “Widows nearly always do marry again. ... They have the knack of catching the man. Having done it once I suppose they can do it again. I suppose there's nothing in it when you know how.” (Ch 13)
• “Perhaps I really enjoyed other people's lives more than my own.” (Ch 24)

She is really a very sad woman, not at all reconciled to spinsterhood: she is forever remembering the damp squib of her previous romance or considering the possibility of having a future romance, even when eating spaghetti: “Perhaps long spaghetti is the kind of thing that ought to be eaten quite alone with nobody to watch one's struggles. Surely many a romance must have been nipped in the bud by sitting opposite somebody eating spaghetti.” (Ch 10)

The idea of the Vicar [Spoiler alert!] rowing with his fiancee, breaking off his engagement and then going round to Mildred's flat, all the while carrying a pair of ping pong bats, was so wonderfully surreal as to seem completely what a normal person would really do. 

Notes:

Crome Yellow is a novel by Aldous Huxley which I haven't yet read.

The 'c 1300' poem quoted from the Oxford Book of English Verse is called Spring-Tide or (afeter its first line) 'Lenten ys come with love to toune'. It's one of the Harley Lyrics. The passage quoted is

• Deowes [properly 'deawes'] donketh the dounes,
• Deores with huere derne rounes
• Domes forte [should be 'for to'] deme;

This means: Dews dampen the downs/ Animals with their mysterious secrets/ which they tell one another. Mildred's response is "that would teach me not to be so foolish" I think the point is that it is a hymn to spring love and plants blossoming and animals making love. A couple of lines later it states: 'Wymmen waxeth wounder proude' (women grow marvellously proud). Perhaps that is also to the point. Nevertheless, I would make yet another plea to editors: don't leave untranslated foreign (or archaic) passages without providing at least a footnote!!!!

Selected quotes:

• “The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one.” (Ch 1)
• “It was part of his charm that he could make people like that feel at ease. He must be rather a shallow sort of person really.” (Ch 4)
• “I had an inexplicable distrust of widows, who seem to be of two distinct kinds, one of which may be dangerous.” (Ch 5)
• “Nobody really likes to be called a dear. There is something so very faint and dull about it.” (Ch 14)
• “The voices seem to be raised as if they were having an argument. I'm afraid it was impossible not to hear some of the things they were saying, but I cannot bring myself to record them here.” (Ch 16)
• “If I ever wrote a novel it would be of the ‘stream of consciousness’ type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.” (Ch 17)
• “I learned that a package or envelope sealed with white of egg cannot be steamed open.” (Ch 18)
• “On the rare occasions when I had a fresh egg to poach I should continue to delve for it in the bubbling water where the white separated from the yolk and waved about like a sea anemone." (Ch 20)

Gentle and entertaining social comedy.

October 2026; 288 pages

First published in GB in 1952 by Jonathan Cape

My paperback edition was issued by Virago in 2022

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Parade" by Dave Eggers

A fable told in a simplistic style, third person from the PoV of 'Four', past tense, with every character pseudonymous.

'Four' has been contracted to drive a machine which will create a tarmac road through a country recently riven by civil war. He is partnered with 'Nine' who will drive a quad bike to clear potential obstacles ahead. But while Four is a model of conscientiousness, Nine is "a vortex - all rationality was devoured within him.” (Ch 9) Nine breaks the rules: sleeping with prostitutes, eating at local restaurants, giving to the needy. Inevitably, they clash. And with dangers all around, from malaria to bandits, can they finish the road on time for the celebratory parade.

A gripping 'buddy movie' tale in which the menace crescendos to a climax.

Selected quotes:

• “Medallion had created a raft of hope and Four found himself climbing onto it.” (Ch 15)

Eggers has also written:

• The Every (2021)
• Contrapposto (2026)

October 2026; 179 pages

First publsished in the USA by Knopf in 2019

My paperback edition issued in the UK by Penguin in 2020

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Course of the heart" by M John Harrison

 We can be fairly certain that Yaxley persuaded three Cambridge students - Pam Stuyvesant, Lucas Medlar and the unnamed first person narrator - to do something, perhaps a ceremonal magic rite - which someone opened a portal between this world and another; and that Pam and Lucas have been haunted by the consequences ever since. But this novel is a masterpiece of obliqueness so we can be sure of nothing. What are we to make of the moment when Lucas calls the narrator "a mere priest" when we have been repeatedly told (by the narrator himself) that he is a publisher.

Playing around with what the reader knows, and what they can only guess, with the epistemology of certainty, is a Harrison trademark, also to the fore in his Booker shortlisted The End of Everything and his Goldsmith's Prize winning The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again.

As a writer who is sometimes criticised for explaining too much (the heritage of having been a teacher, a profession in which clarity is important, especially when teaching science), I feel I have a lot to learn from Harrison. On the other hand, some critics say that the primary sin is to confuse the reader and I was frequently confused by this book (though not as much as by TEoE). I guess the secret is to achieve the perfect balance which will maximally arouse the reader's curiosity. Certainly, I was eager to learn whatever I could from this novel, though in the end, I still had many questions.

Nevertheless, there is a great deal of magic to be found in this book, starting with some spell-bindingly original descriptions:

• “I was drenched in the rough, dusty, aromatic smells of dock-leaves and marigolds.” (Prologue: Pleroma)
• “I could close my eyes and visualize precisely the curves at the base of her spine where it seemed to hold its breath before it arched out into the smooth, heavy muscles of her behind.” ” (Prologue: Pleroma) The narrator seems to have a thing about transitions of the flesh, about another woman he writes: “I touched the place where the nape of her neck made its soft but powerful transition into the muscles of her freckled upper back.” (2.6: the Facsimile)
• “It was an old cat ... and when I picked it up it was just lots of bones and heat that weighed nothing.” (1.1: Misprision of Dreams)
• “Sheets of newspaper fluttering around the upper floors of an office block like butterflies courting a flower.” (1.1: Misprision of Dreams)
• “From one window you could see the sodden facade of Museum Street, bright green deposits on the ledges, stucco scrolls and garlands grey with pigeon down.” (1.1: Misprision of Dreams)
• “Every conversation, every echo of a voice or a footstep or a rustle of clothes, was gathered up into its high ceilings in a kind of undifferentiated rumble and sigh - the blurred and melted remains of meaning - which made you feel as if your parents had abandoned you in a derelict swimming bath.” (1.2: N’Aimez Que Moi)
• “My head felt like an empty cinema.” (3.13: Fatalité Intérieure)
• “The surf of interference.” (3.14: Burnt Rose)
• “Carnforth is less a town than a kind of late efflorescence of the old A6 as it hinges away from Morecambe Bay.” (3.15: Every Web Remained Unbroken)

As for the mystery, I suppose it was inevitable. If you are writing about magic - at least for a grown-up readership - you can't really spell out the hocus-pocus. The essence of magic is mystery as the essence of conjuring is misdirection and therefore Harrison's novelistic techniques perfectly match his subject.

And reading about a fantasy version of mediaeval central European history, juxtaposed with the brutal realism of a women undergoing cancer treatment, gave some light relief to what would otherwise have been grim.

Selected quotes:

• “Queens, dancers, Courtesans, romantic individuals determined to batter themselves to death like huge rawboned moths inside the Japanese lamps of their own neuroses.” (Prologue: Pleroma)
• 
  
• “What if evolution were ideological after all? ... with aesthetic goals?” (1.1: Misprision of Dreams)
• “Things look so bright and energetic in the shops ... but as soon as you get them home, they're just seemed crude.” (1.2: N’Aimez Que Moi)
• “Years of hiding had made them adept at manipulating each other's silences.” (1.4: Dark Rapture)
• “He's barking up the wrong tree - you could learn more from a pair of little girls' shoes left in a ditch.” (1.4: Dark Rapture)
• “This Platonic reversal, the suggestion that ours is not perhaps after all the shadow but the thing - the Pleroma, not its imperfect index.” (2.8: On the White Downs)
• “The hospital was a maze, with every exit marked ‘Oncology’.” (3.10: It Always Happens To Someone Else)
• “Where Pam saw melancholia, fear, bewilderment (in some archaic sense of that word which implied lost bearings, night, tangled woods), Lucas saw only a failure of imagination.” (3.10: It Always Happens To Someone Else)

Notes

The Pleroma is a real concept. In early Christianity and Gnosticism, it refers to spiritual fullness, such as the totality of God and his divine powers and, particularly in gnosticism, perfect (so therefore complete) knowledge.

October 2026; 265 pages 
First published by Gollancz in 1992
My paperback edition was issued by Serpent's Tail in 2025

Novels and books about Magic and Magicians reviewed in this blog.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Some novels by M John Harrison

• The Viriconium sequence:
• The Pastel City (1971)
• A Storm of Wings (1980)
• In Viriconium (1982) Nominated for the Guardian Fiction Prize
• The Committed Men (1971)
• The Centauri Device (1975)
• Climbers (1989) Winner of the Boardman Trasker Prize
• The Course of the Heart (1992)
• Signs of Life (1996)
• The Kefahuchi Tract sequence
• Light (2002)
• Nova Swing (2006) 
• Empty Space (2012)
• The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020) winner of the 2020 Goldsmith's Prize
• The End of Everything (2026) shortlisted for the 2026 Booker.

"Flagey in Spring" by Simon Mundy

 

The third ensemble novel based around the lives of people living around the Place Flagey in Brussels, including barmen, MEPs and assistants to MEPs, art gallery owners, and journalists. In this installment, journo Rory travels to Rome to monitor the machinations by which disgraced MEP Roberto attempts to become Italian PM. A back channel opens involving Catrina, Nikita, Mercedes and Commisioner Lucia Redetti. Meanwhile Elise is ill, again, Flamand falls for a harpist putting gorgeous Agnestina's nose out of joint, and nasty Bruno negotiates with his nemesis Tyron Wangstrutt.

Selected quotes:

• "The breeze coming across the lake towards Place Flagey was busy, making the sunshine useless." (1: Saturday: On the Way)
• “It was as much part of the Sunday ritual as the gravy that he watched sport, dropped off and woke immediately if the channel was switched, at which point it had to be changed back again.” (2: Sunday: Postprandial Summons)
• “Gwynedd made any table look as though she was a mad professor trying to find the one vital formula amongst a lifetime of random calculations.” (3: Monday: Not so Mickey Mouse)
• “She was used to being the centre of attention and for the world to defer to her beauty, represented by her whim.” (5: Wednesday: Troubles)

The third in the series, preceded by Flagey in Autumn and Flagey in Winter, this was another entertaining read, reminiscent of the Scotland Street novels by Alexander McCall Smith, such as The Unbearable Lightness of Scones. I'm looking forward to Flagey in Summer.

October 2026; 253 pages

Published by Hay Press in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"heart, be at peace" by Donal Ryan

 

The sequel to The Spinning Heart, this novel won the 2025 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and the 2024 Irish Novel of the Year. Like TSH, it builds up a portrait of a small Irish town with short chapters, each narrated by one of the inhabitants. Like TSH, it starts with builder Bobby and ends with his wife Triona. It chronicles the aftermath of the murder of Bobby's father and the kidnap of Dylan, Seanie Shaper's son. The first book focused on the effects of the 2008 financial crash and subsequent recession leading to the collapse of Pokey's building firm. This book centres on the corrosive effects of drugs on the small community.

It's been seven years since I read TSH, and I'd remembered my excitement at the style but almost completely forgotten the individual characters, and it wasn't until almost the end of the book when a metal heart spins in the gate of the hose of Bobby's father that I realised the two books were related. They can certainly stand on their own. But it did mean that I had to consciously record the multiple names of the characters and their relationships and it took a long time before I recognised recurrent characters. 

Nevertheless, I love this 'mosaic' style of narration. 

And there is a lot going on. The plot is perhaps not as clearly shaped as TSH, which has the murder and kidnap centre-stage, but there's a lot of incidents, plenty to keep the reader turning the pages, and a general sense of increasing jeopardy. 

Where the book excels is as a masterclass in characterisation. The characters are mostly seen through the eyes of others, like a set of 360-degree appraisals. This allows a delightful tension between the way a character sees themselves - and aren't we all unreliable narrators? - and the 'truth' of them. It also allows an interplay between moral condemnation on the one hand and forgiveness or at least acceptance on the other.

And above all, the picture that is jigsawed together creates a compelling picture of today's small-town Ireland, rising free from the old tropes. In particular, the twin dominances of the church and the bar seem to have faded, leaving the building trade and the drugs trade as masters of the field.

The other great strength of this book, as with so many Irish novels, is the glory of the language.

Selected quotes:

• "That feeling like my ears and eyes are being strained by something in my brain, being pushed out against the edges of themselves." (Bobby)
• "I don't know in the fuck why I went on Seanie Shaper's brother's stag. I thought I had to, I suppose. Colum is a good skin, and I thought the lads would think I was a dry balls if I didn't go." (Bobby)
• "One of those big low houses that was built on a foundation of bribes and bullshit back in the eighties." (Josie)
• "It's a licence to print money, Dad, he said. He knows I hate that kind of auld foolish talk, the suggestion that a man can defy the simple equation that has effort on the one side and reward on the other." (Josie)
• "The only man I ever loved, and he one half of a gorilla and one half of a bull and two ends of a bastard." (Lily)
• "I could tell by the shift in his features, his probing expression, that he was searching for the truth of me and concealing the truth of himself." (Vasya)
• "Your one had a face like a bulldog chewing a scorpion." (Realtin)
• "You're only ever one step from disaster, one fuck-up from shitting in a bucket in a cage with an arse bandit smiling at you, holding your jacks roll, telling you to make sure you wipe it nice and clean." (Jason)
• "Her cooking, too, is much improved. Or maybe my palate has atrophied." (Lloyd)
• "You get used to reading the tides of men." (Denis)
• "Like the church in Nenagh that was only meant to be half the size but the builders were given the plans for a cathedral by mistake." (Denis)
• "I heard a long keening sound echo off the handball alley wall  and realized it had come from me." (Mags)
• "It's hard to be a policeman, these days. ... Every bigmouth ball-scratching do-nothing bastard watching their every move and filming it or writing about it on their mobile telephones and every other gom with their mouth open reading all about it." (Jim)
• "I was able always to add my instinct and intuition to me received intelligence, putting it together like a collage of tiny bits to form the clearest picture of the truth of things." (Jim)

October 2026; 194 pages
First published in GB by Doubleday in 2024
My Penguin paperback was issued in 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Other fiction by Irish authors reviewed in this blog may be found here.

"Sunrise" by Tea Obreht

 

Three stories, joined in a sandwich structure, so that 'An incident over Horsebone Lake' is split into two parts and arranged first and last, 'An incident at Burnt Creek on the occasion of a homecoming' is split into two parts and arranged 2nd and 4th, and 'An incident at the cabin bar outside the town of Salt Draw' is, in its entirety, in the middle. This arrangement reminded me of similar arrangement of the stories in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell except that where they are linked by theme, the stories in Obreht's book are linked by taking place in the town of Sunrise, and by the author of a book about the main character in the 2nd (and 4th) story; a tape used for her research being more or less in the centre of the book. 

And there is a very neat twist in the end. And another in the last couple of pages.

In terms of style, tone, or genre, it is a bit of a portmanteau. The first (and last) story is about Nina trying to survive after falling from a plane into a lake in the wilderness. The second (and fourth) story is about a legendary gunslinger returning to the town where he became famous. And the middle story is about the director of the annual theatrical event in memory of the gunslinger. 

All the stories are told from the 3rd person limited PoV of the protagonist. The outside story is told in the present tense, the others in the past tense. Each of the plots made me want to read to the end: the plane crash story because the protagonist was battling for her life against the wilderness, the western story to solve the mystery of his the protagonist died, and the central story because I wanted to understand how these three apparently unrelated narratives fitted. 

The central characters were all well developed. Nina, the plane crash survivor, is as stressed and disorganised as anyone would be in similar circumstances ... even if they made it to the beach. Anton Vargas, the notorious gunslinger returning old and terminally ill to the town that turned him into a dime-novel hero, is perhaps too tough to be true. But Coll, the local historian, who isn't quite brave enough to stand up to a local delinquent with a dismembered wolf, is the embodiment of conflict between what we all wish we would do and the lesser reality. 

This is a novel about truth and myth making. There are also doses of fantasy. Anton's badger dream is significant to the plot, but to what extent is Nina's sighting of Ben a hallucination? As for the dreadful wolf disease which seems to be able to pick and choose its victims ...

Fundamentally, it was well-written and well-told and I enjoyed reading it. But I'm not sure it compares with the best in these genres. For a story about a horse-riding posse trying to survive in the mountains, I preferred Pity the Beast by Robin Maclean.

Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife won the 2011 Women's Prize for Fiction

Selected quotes: 

• “She's fighting the chaos of the moment, the sense that she's been teleported into this cold horror.” (An incident over Horsebone Lake #1, day 1)
• “Only a magpie soundlessly spearing worms out of the ground.” (An incident over Horsebone Lake #1 day 3)
• “The impulse to signal for intrusion with yet another ‘hello’ doesn't quite override her terror of receiving a response. What would she actually do if something said ‘hello’ back? It wouldn't be a living thing. She knows that.” (An incident over Horsebone Lake #1, day 3)
• “Her whole life has come down to the mathematics of loss.” (An incident over Horsebone Lake #1, day 3)
• “If Nina had ever laid eyes on Death, she would have taken his hand right away. She wouldn't have hung on for a night under the rubble, like her mother had. She had no fight in her at all.” (An incident over Horsebone Lake #1, day 4)
• “It was still quite dark, but he could see the serration of distant mountains taking on the first pink of dawn. In a few days, Preacher would tell him this was called alpenglow.” (An incident at Burnt Creek on the occasion of a homecoming #1)
• “Gum-cudding.” (An incident at the cabin bar outside the town of Salt Draw)
• “A dress so yellow his beleaguered brain smelled lemons when he saw it.” (An incident at the cabin bar outside the town of Salt Draw)
• “Bobby's whole face was straining with thought.” (An incident at the cabin bar outside the town of Salt Draw)
• “Every sinner on the torchlit lawn before him, even the white-haired men leaning on canes, had more time in his hourglass then did Vargas.” (An incident at Burnt Creek on the occasion of a homecoming #2)
• “He didn't even like the spring. Didn't long for it. Found no comfort, as other people did, in the smell of last year's rotted leaves emerging. Why was he suddenly on the verge of tears at the thought of not seeing it again?” (An incident at Burnt Creek on the occasion of a homecoming #2)
• “The pain ... had a tendency to make him feel the full measure of every moment.” (An incident at Burnt Creek on the occasion of a homecoming #1)

October 2026; 320 pages

Published in 2026 by Random House in the USA and Weidenfield & Nicolson in the UK.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God