"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

"Tales of Love, Madness and Death" by Horacio Quiroga

 Short stories from a Uruguayan who spent much of his life in Argentina, dying of prostate cancer in 1937. He wrote plays and poems and at least one novel as well as short stories. This collection shows that he was influenced by Edgar Allen Poe; in turn he would go on the influence Jorge Luis Borges, although the style he demonstrates in this early collection is very much his own.

The tales range from derivative horror to hugely original stories told about very poor people in the jungle and from the PoV of animals.

One of my favourite stories, Sunstroke, is told from the perspective of a five pet dogs of a farmer. They see the man's doppelganger in the fields and realise that Death has come for the farmer, and they bark furiously, and the Doppelganger wanders off in the direction of a horse. It's a delightful tale with a pack of loyal mutts. And the next story, Barbed Wire, has horses escaping from a field and having a chat with cows about their fearless bull. Another story, Little Jaguar, also features a dog (another fox terrier), considering his scavenging life in the face of a drought: it could be a metaphor for the life of a human on the poverty line. Another of his stories, The Exploited, considers just such a person: a man who builds up a debt in port, being taken for a ride by women and barmen, and then has to work almost as an indentured slave to repay his boss. And the final tale, Meningitis and Its Shadow, which is perhaps a metaphor for the attachment between a therapist and their client, tells of an engineer recruited to dance attendance night after night on an aristocratic girl on her sick-bed since it is only his presence that can soothe the fever caused by her meningitis. 

A fascinating and original collection published by Will Dady at Renard Press who seems to be making a habit of unearthing forgotten classics. 

Selected quotes:

• “When a man lusts after a beautiful body he doesn't let opera glasses get in the way.” (Isolde’s Demise)
• “On moonlit nights, the grave digger walks amongst the Tombs with particularly rigid steps.” (Artificial Hell)
• “The honeymoon gave her the shivers.” (The Feather Pillow)
• “Footsteps echoed throughout the house, as if years of neglect had refined its resonance.” (The Feather Pillow)
• “The only thing a labourer really owns is his brutal capacity for squandering.” (The Exploited, Los Mensu)
• “There has been no time of greater joy for Maria and me than that which our aunt afforded us, with her death.” (Our First Cigarette)

March 2026; 213 pages

First published in Spanish in 1917

My paperback edition of a translation by Diego Jourdan Pereira was issued by Renard Press in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"White Sunrise" by John Newton

This sage-style novel is mostly set in East Africa starting in 1902 and continuing past 1920, centring on the war between the British and German settlers. Narrated in the past tense (sometimes slipping into present tense for internal monologue) and 3rd person limited from the perspectives of Adam, Eva, Christy and Kristina. among others, it's a long story which shifts between genres. It starts as an apparently faithful and detailed exposition of the development of a farm from scratch reminded me of A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale, (although farming all alone in Canada and managing a team of Africans to farm for you in Africa are surely very different experiences). But it then metamorphises into a tale about multiple adulteries, after which it becomes about war - I was reminded of William Boyd's An Ice Cream War (written from the British perspective) which was shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize and Afterlives (from the African perspective) by 2021 Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah. It then turns into a spy thriller before slipping into the brothel fiction genre. 

Lots happened but I was bored well before the end. For me, a long book has to have some great characters to keep me interested and White Sunrise, being plot-driven, never took sufficient time to develop the characterisation of its cast sufficiently for me to care about any of them or to believe in the reversals within their character arcs. Adam is a good man, Eva and very temptable woman, Kristina the prostitute with a heart of gold (well, money) and Christy the ultimate pantomime villain, a sort of portmanteau of everything nasty, not just a rapist but also a coward. (I did wonder whether there was a metaphorical significance in the names Adam, Eve and Christy but I couldn't decide on the theology intended).

It is problematic to write a book about colonisation without considering whether it is racist. There are certainly comments made by some of the characters which seem to imply that the colonisation project is a 'Good Thing' bringing civilisation to benighted natives:

• “They’re [the indigenous Masai] from the Stone Age and we’re from the future....” (Ch 2)
• “Being good Christians we’ll probably push the blacks into reservations and make them work for all the European settlers Eliot plans to bring in. In no time at all we’ll have the place all sewn up - just like America.” (Ch 4)
• “‘What about land for Africans?’ ‘We’re putting them in locations to the east of town. Out of the way but in easy reach as labour. Brilliant arrangement, don’t you think?” (Ch 5)
• “We settlers must cooperate to build a business and political base and make the British Government realise this is a white man’s country - our country.” (Ch 16)
• “The Government plans to transfer the northern Masai down off the Laikipia Plateau and free more land for white settlers. We’ll reunite the tribe in a big reserve on the Mara plain. Been planning it for years. The Masai are not stupid. They know Laikipia is good cattle land. Last year they took us to court. Who would have thought it? Bloody people may still live in the Stone Age but they’re sharp enough to hire lawyers and take an injunction against the Government to stop the move.” (Ch 17)
• "The sun is rising from the west. A lot more Europeans are on the way to join us. Good British stock. ... Soon we'll have the whole area booming with farms and industry and towns." (Ch 57)

These remarks could be justified on the basis that they are made by racist characters and that they are being used by the author to illustrate the immorality of the colonial project. But there are also moments when the racism seemed to extend to the author, starting with the title (White Sunrise) and a comment in chapter one in which the white protagonist is travelling with a huge retinue of Africans who are carrying for him, labouring for him, serving him and protecting him comes across some other white people and remarks "Good to have company for breakfast. I found it damned lonely out here on my own”. Fundamentally the Africans, even the heroes such as Musa, are there as supporting characters, rather than considered as proper people. It made me wonder whether the author believes that some genes are superior to others. Much later in the book, I found evidence suggesting this might be the case. When tracking down the ancestry of one of the characters. it seemed important that he isn’t low-born but rather the illegitimate son of an aristocrat, as if intelligence and physical prowess are reserved for those with special DNA, a position adopted by eugenicists which underpins racism. This left an umpleasant taste in my mouth.

It was also difficult to read in the literal sense because of the multiple glitches in layout and typography in my kindle version. I found it very distracting to be continually required to decipher words. At one point, chapter 16 seems to be (mostly) repeated which was confusing. These factors certainly didn't help my enjoyment.

But in the other hand, if you enjoy stories with plenty of action, lots of sex and a fair bit of death, war and hunting and excitement, with Churchill and Bela Kun thrown in, then this might be the book for you.

Selected quotes:

• “As the column settled into stride between brilliant white mountain to the west and brilliant gold sun to the east, her mood changed and she almost wept at a barely remembered dream of death.” (Ch 2)
• “We had bubonic plague in the bazaars. Bloody rats everywhere. Only solution was to burn the place. So we did. Hope it works.” (Ch 5)
• “‘You don’t believe in God’ ‘I do when He gets something right.’ said Musa.” (Ch 5)
• “Death nearly got me three times. Will it try again? No one ever talks about four times lucky....” (Ch 29)

March 2026

Originally published in 2013

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Magician" by W Somerset Maugham

An early novel by a master story-teller, inspired by WSM's encounters with Aleister Crowley, the occultist whose biography I reviewed, in  Paris in the early 1900s. It's an entertaining story, though very Victorian Gothic horror in style, occasionally straying into Grand Guignol. WSM himself, in a prologue to my copy, states: “The style is lush and turgid, not at all the sort of style I approve of now, but perhaps not unsuited to the subject; and there are a great many more adverbs and adjectives than I should use today. I fancy I must have been impressed by the ‘Écriture artiste’ [a highly mannered and impressionistic style favoured by, among others, Edmond de Goncourt] which the French writers of the time had not yet entirely abandoned.”

Arthur Burdon, a young British surgeon, is engaged to his ward, Margaret, who is presently living in Paris, sharing a flat with her friend Susie, to study art. At a restaurant, they encounter Oliver Haddo, a self-styled magician whom animals instinctively fear. Arthur is sceptical of Haddo's claims and, when Haddo kicks a dog who bites him, thrashes Haddo. Humiliated, Haddo vows revenge ... and what could be sweeter than to seduce Margaret. 

Selected quotes:

• “The formal garden reminded one of a light woman, no longer young, who sought, with faded finery, with powder and paint, to make a brave show of despair.” (Ch 1)
• “The eyes of most persons converge when they look at you, but Oliver Haddo’s, naturally or by a habit he had acquired for effect, remained parallel. It gave you the impression that he looked straight through you and saw the wall beyond.” (Ch 3) This is more or less repeated in chapter 6. WSM, in his prologue, remarks that it was a characteristic of Aleister Crowley, whom he knew.
• Elemental forces, such as the wind, have an existence which depends upon “the continuance or some natural object, and hence for them there could be no immortality. They must return eventually to the abyss of unending night, and the darkness of death affected them always.” (Ch 3)
• “Magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love, and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the scene is the measure of the unseen.” (Ch 3)
• “Magic ... may be described merely as intelligent utilization of forces which are unknown, contemned, or misunderstood of the vulgar.” (Ch 3)
• “If the adept is active, pliant, and strong, the whole world will be at his command. He will pass through the storm and no rain shall fall upon his head. The wind will not displace a single fold of his garment. He will go through fire and not be burned.” (Ch 3)
• “No well-bred sorcerer is so dead to the finer feelings as to enter a room by the door.” (Ch 4)
• “If he sought for gold it was for the power it gave him, and it was power he aimed at when he brooded night and day over dim secrets.” (Ch 7)
• “Only he who desires with his whole heart will find, and to him only who knocks vehemently shall the door be opened.” (Ch 7)
• “Naked and full of majesty he lay, the outcast son of the morning.” (Ch 8)
• “The hours passed with lagging feet.” (Ch 15)

Notes:
Mackenzie Crook, the writer of the BBC TV sitcom Small Prophets must have been inspired by The Magician (or both WSM and Crook were inspired by the same original source) since this description is growing homunculi is very close to the instructions given by Michael Palin in the sitcom: “There were ten homunculi - James Kammerer calls them prophesying spirits - kept in strong bottles, such as are used to preserve fruit, and these were filled with water. ... The bottles were closed with a magic seal. The spirits were about a span long, and the Count was anxious that they should grow. They were therefore buried under two cart loads of manure, and the pile daily sprinkled with a certain liquor prepared with great trouble by the adepts. The pile after such sprinklings began to ferment and steam, as if heated by a subterranean fire. When the bottles were removed, it was found that the spirits had grown to about a span and a half each; the male homunculi were come into possession of heavy beards, and the nails of the fingers had grown. In two of the bottles there was nothing to be seen save clear water, but when the Abbé knocked thrice at the seal upon the mouth ... the water turned a mysterious colour, and the spirits showed their faces.” (Ch 7)

This is an enjoyable and entertaining read but it is not in the first league of WSM books.

March 2026; 233 pages

First published by Heinemann in 1908

My Vintage paperback edition issued in 2000

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Novels and short-story collections (designated SS) by William Somerset Maugham

• Liza of Lambeth (1897)
• The Making of a Saint (1898)
• Orientations (SS, 1899)
• The Hero (1901)
• Mrs Craddock (1902)
• The Merry-Go-Round (1904)
• The Bishop's Apron (1906)
• The Explorer (1908)
• The Magician (1908)
• Of Human Bondage (1915)
• The Moon and Sixpence (1919)
• The Trembling of a Leaf (SS, 1921)
• The Painted Veil (1925)
• The Casuarina Tree (SS, 1926)
• Ashenden (SS, 1928)
• Cakes and Ale (1930)
• Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (SS, 1931)
• The Book Bag (SS, 1932)
• The Narrow Corner (1932)
• Ah King (SS, 1933)
• The Judgement Seat (SS, 1934)
• Cosmopolitans (SS, 1936)
• Theatre (1937)
• Christmas Holiday (1939)
• Princess September and the Nightingale (SS, 1939)
• The Mixture as Before (SS, 1940)
• Up at the Villa (1941)
• The Hour Before the Dawn (1942)
• The Unconquered (SS, 1944)
• The Razor's Edge (1944)
• Then and How (1946)
• Creatures of Circumstance (SS, 1947)
• Catalina (1948)
• Quartet (SS, 1948)
• Trio (SS, 1950)
• Encore (SS, 1951)