"Loving" by Henry Green

Selected by Time magazine as one of the best novels since Time began (1923) 

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)

"Slow Horses" by Mick Herron

Significantly better than most of the offerings in this genre. this is 

an enjoyable and entertaining spy thriller, containing plenty of comedy and moments of genuine tension.

A student has been kidnapped and his captors are threatening to behead him live on the internet. Can the 'slow horses' of Slough House, where the failures from MI5 are sent so, bored with mundane paperwork, they will resign, save the young man. 

It is written in the past tense using multiple 3rd person limited points of view.

Selected quotes:

• Hobden “still read [journalistic] copy as if it were Braille; bumps in the language letting him know when D-notices were an issue; when the Regent's Park mob had left their fingerprints on the facts.” (Ch 2)
• “Half of the future is buried in the past.” (Ch 2)
• “Nobody wanted to get on the wrong side of Moody, and most sides of Moody were the wrong one.” (Ch 2)
• “He worked with a bunch of morons. Couldn't make a pun with a dictionary and a Scrabble board.” (Ch 4)
• “She waved her hand airily; her standard semaphore for trivial detail.” (Ch 5)
• “You had more chance of reaching a consensus with a vox pop on Marmite.” (Ch 8)
• “If we're paying for supper, we get to glance at the menu, surely?” (Ch 8)
• “The look she bestowed upon him would have stuck six inches out the back of a more sensitive man.” (Ch 8)
• “‘Once upon a time’ was another way of saying the old days.” (Ch 8)
• “The wheels started coming off before you screwed them on.” (Ch 11)
• “This couldn't have fallen apart faster if you'd bought it at IKEA.” (Ch 11)
• “Sleep was ceding control. While you slept, anything might happen.” (Ch 13)
• “Web was under thirty, and married to the notion that anyone twenty years older was lucky to have made it through the flood.” (Ch 15)

Notes:

• The dodgy politician Peter Judd ("PJ") is a caricature based on ex-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (BJ).
• At one point, Slough House is compared to Pincher Martin's Island. Pincher Martin is a novel about a shipwrecked sailor written by William Golding.

March 2026; 328 pages

First published in 2015 by John Murray

My paperback edition was issued in 2017

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Cliff House" by Chris Brookmyre

 

A group of women assemble for a hen weekend on a remote and uninhabited Scottish island. Once there, they become cut off, all communications cut. One is kidnapped. 'The reaper' contacts them, threatening to murder the kidnap victim unless each of the women confesses their secrets. They all have them.

Michelle is a pop star who ditched her guitarist, childhood friend Helena, on the road to stardom. Helena, in revenge, has hacked Michelle's cloud and released a self-made porn tape of the pop star having sex. Jen, another childhood friend, murdered her husband Jason, who raped Michelle, and who is Beattie's brother. Nicolette, Kennedy and Beattie also have secrets. 

It's a sort of version of And There Then Were None (other titles are also available) by Agatha Christie. It is told in the past tense from the third person limited PoV of each of the women. 

I guessed every one of the twists.

Selected quotes:

• "Sometimes when you have a secret it makes you feel vulnerable. You are afraid of what you could lose, afraid of what everyone might discover. But ... being the one who knew a secret gave you a power over everyone who didn't." (Helena)
• "The kind of place where the bouncer frisked you for weapons, and if he didn't find any, gave you one before he let you in." (Beattie)
• "She was starting to understand what it must feel like to be a stag when the royal family were loose in your postcode." (Nicolette)
• "You tend to scream louder when a blow hits a sensitive spot." (Michelle)
• "Looks had always meant a lot to Jason. Some called him vain, buit that was what the envious said when someone more blessed than themselves wore their pride without apology." (Beattie)

Entertaining.

March 2026; 344 pages

First published in 2022 by Little, Brown

My paperback edition was issued in 2023.

I have also read The Cut by Chris Brookmyre

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Cut" by Chris Brookmyre

A crime thriller told principally from the PoVs of Millie, once a make-up artist on films, recently released after serving over twenty years for a murder she didn't commit, and Jerry, a mixed-race film studies student whose accent seems to become more Scottish as the novel progresses. They are on the run across Europe after Millie stumbles across a clue to why justice miscarried for her and somebody tries to kill her. As is typical of the genre there is the mystery of a supposedly-cursed horror film whose negative has gone AWOL, a leavening of comedy in the dialogue between these two mismatched characters, and a secret which must be revealed before the final reel. 

Entertaining.

Selected quotes:

• “Maybe she didn't have a trust fund, and maybe Danby didn't either, but Jerry was damn sure that whatever their fathers gave them, it was more than his. The only thing daddy had given Jerry Kelly was pigmentation.” (Belonging)
• “Jerry had heard it said that there were two types of rich people: smart people who knew they'd got lucky, and lucky people who thought they were smart.” (Belonging)
• “She had dealt with people like Anne for decades: a rulebook with shoes.” (A social call)
• “Everybody dreams of being a starving artist until dinner time” (Blood)
• “Weirdly, after months of imposter syndrome at uni, he was finding it easier being an actual imposter.” (Intruders)
• “It turned out that sourcing condoms was not an issue when a rock band's tour bus was parked outside.” (The Fog)
• “It was like I was searching in the fog, not because the answers lay there, but because the fog looked intriguing, mysterious. But fog is not just insubstantial, it is constantly changing.” (The Fog)
• “Peroxide locks that hadn't changed a Pantone in decades.” (Casting)
• “I wonder if the French have a word for volte face.” (Casting)

March 2026; 404 pages

Published by Little, Brown in 2021

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

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

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

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

The book contains glorious descriptions such as:

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

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

Selected quotes:

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

March 2026; 314 pages

First published by Faber & Faber in 2002

My paperback edition issued in 2009

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" by Gabrielle Zevin

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selected quotes:

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

March 2026; 478 pages

First published in the USA by Alfred P Knopf in 2022

My Vintage (Penguin) paperback was issued in 2023

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Out of the Ashes" by Michael Morpurgo

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

It made even cynical old me tearful.

Selected quotes:

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

March 2026; 112 pages

First published in 2001 by Macmillan

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The characters are more caricatures than nuanced:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selected quotes:

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

Notes:

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

March 2026; 315 pages

First published by Collins in 1935

My Virago Classics paperback was issued in 1986.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God