"The Rainbow" by D H Lawrence

This rainbow soars over a housing estate nowadays, but the built arch was the doorway to a foundry which produced, among other things, a steam plough for Garibaldi.

 This novel was published in 1915. It is a multi-generational family saga.

There are multiple religious themes. 

• Will Brangwen, when courting Anna, is carving wood to show the Creation of Eve: God stoops over a sleeping Adam  and Eve "was issuing like a flame towards the hand of God, from the torn side of Adam." (Ch 4) But once he is married, he cannot continue with the work. Anna jeers at it: “It is impudence to say that Woman was made out of Man's body ... when every man is born of woman.” (Ch 6) So he burns it.
• When newlywed Will is enjoying an extended honeymoon, lying in bed with Anna in their new home, he feels "as though this house was the Ark in the flood, and all the rest was drowned." (Ch 6) Later on (Ch 9) there is a real flood and one of the major characters is drowned.
• As Ursula grows into sexuality, she is intrigued by the verse: "The Sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair" (Ch 10; quoting the King James Bible version of Genesis 6.2; a verse that is part of the reason given for why God sought to destroy mankind with a flood) and she wonders whether the Sons of God would have found her fair, and who these Sons of God were: "Was not Jesus the only begotten Son? Was not Adam the only man created from God? ... Had God many offspring, besides Adam and besides Jesus, whose origin the children of Adam cannot recognize? And perhaps these children, these Sons of God, had known no expulsion, no ignominy of the fall." (Ch 10) Ursula seems to be trying to come to terms, as children must in adolescence, with the fact that she is a sexual being, despite the apparent proscription of sexuality by the Church, as encapsulated in the Garden of Eden story that recounts that once Adam and Eve had disobeyed God by tasting the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they were ashamed of their nudity and made for themselves clothing. 
• This is one of the themes of the novel, that sexual love is spiritual, as shown in the heightened emotions of the following passages:
• “She was sure to come at last, and touch him. Then he burst into flame for her, and lost himself. They looked at each other, a deep laugh at the bottom of their eyes, and he went to take of her again, wholesale, mad to revel in the inexhaustible wealth of her, to bury himself in the depths of her in an inexhaustible exploration, she all the while revelling in that he revelled in her.” (Ch 2) 
• “But hard and fierce she had fastened upon him, cold as the moon and burning as a fierce salt. Till gradually his warm, soft iron yielded, yielded, and she was there fierce, corrosive, seething with his destruction, seething like some cruel, corrosive salt around the last substance of his being, destroying him, destroying him in the kiss. And her soul crystallized with triumph, and his soul dissolved with agony and annihilation. So she held him there, the victim, consumed, annihilated. She had triumphed: he was not anymore.” (Ch 11) And later "She began to caress him to life again. For he was dead.” Ursula has just kissed (yes, it is only a kiss) Anton. But it sounds like they have had sex. And the corollary of sex is that afterwards the man's penis is (usually) limp and must be encouraged to become erect again which is what sounds like is happening in that added line. But Lawrence is, perhaps, adding the religious overlay of the resurrection of Jesus after his death.
• “Darkness cleaving to darkness, she hung close to him, down to the source and core of his kiss, herself covered and enveloped in the warm, fecund flow of his kiss, that traveled over her, flowed over her, covered her, flowed over the last fibre of her, so they were one stream, one dark fecundity, and she clung at the core of him, with her lips holding open the very bottom-most source of him.” (Ch 15)
• When Anna gets pregnant “The blaze of light on her heart was too beautiful and dazzling, from the conception in her womb. She walked glorified, and the sound of the thrushes, of the trains in the valley, of the far-off, faint noises of the town, were her ‘Magnificat’.” (Ch 6) The Magnificat is the from Luke 1.46 - 55; it is a song which the Virgin Mary, newly pregnant with Jesus, sings. Here Anna is identifying herself with Mary and Lawrence seems to be suggesting that the everyday miracle of pregnancy has a spiritual dimension.
• "Gradually it dawned upon Ursula that all the religion she knew was but a particular clothing to a human aspiration. The aspiration was the real thing, - the clothing was a matter almost of national taste or need. The Greeks had a naked Apollo, the Christians a white-robed Christ, the Buddhists a royal prince, the Egyptians their Osiris." (Ch 12)
• The day after her first passionate kiss with Anton, Ursula goes to church and glances at Genesis ("her favourite book") in the Bible: "And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth." (Genesis 9.1) Ursula seems to interpret this as a commandment to have have sex. Lawrence then has Ursula reflect on lines later in the chapter: "And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh." (Ch 11) This 'bow' is a rainbow and given that this is the title of the book, this must be significant. 
• There are two other mentions of the rainbow. Already Anna, at the end of chapter 6, Ursula being newly born, interprets the rainbow as an arched door, like a new day: "Dawn and sunset were the feet of the rainbow that spanned the day, and she saw the hope, the promise." She is pregnant again and sees herself as that door: "She was a door and a threshold, she herself. Through her another soul was coming" (Ch 6) Then, on the very last page, Ursula has a similar vision. Having dumped her lover and then discovered that she isn't after all, pregnant, she sees a rainbow and interprets it, as Anna did, as God promised in Genesis, as a symbol of hope: "And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption were living still, that the rainbow arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a hew growth, rising in the light and the wind and the clean air of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earths new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven." Here we have a last remembrance of Zola's novel about mining communities, Germinal, in that word "germination". We have a hint of the flood that swept the corrupt world away. And we have the promise of renewal.

But this sprawling novel also touches on other issues:

Time and again, Lawrence, in part by giving sex such a spiritual charge, highlights the importance of having children over other activities:

• “It was so sweet and satisfying lying there talking desultorily with her. It was sweeter than sunshine, and not so evanescent. It was even irritating the way the church-clock kept on chiming.” (Ch 6) The best things in life, Will thinks, are lying in bed next to one's mate.
• “He did not attach any vital importance to his life in the drafting office, or his life among men. That was just merely the margin to the text.” (Ch 6) Will realises work is not important.
• “He wanted to loom important as master of one of the innumerable domestic craft that make up the great fleet of society. It seemed to her a ridiculous armada of tubs jostling in futility.” (Ch 6) Anna sees having a job as unimportant.
• “Containing birth and death, potential with all the noise and transition of life, the cathedral remained hushed, a great, involved seed, whereof the flower would be radiant life inconceivable, but whose beginning and whose end were a circle of silence. Spanned round with the rainbow, the jewelled gloom folded music upon silence, light upon darkness, fecundity upon death as a seed folds leaf upon leaf and silence upon the root and the flower.” (Ch 7) Even a cathedral is fundamentally about fecundity.
• “The altar was barren, its light gone out. God burned no more in that bush. It was dead matter lying there.” (Ch 7)

There is a scathing critique of the exploitation of those who labour in a mine. This seemed to draw on Germinal, Zola's 1885 novel about a mining community in France; indeed  the word 'Zolaesque' is used. The thesis is that the demands of the mine subvert morals and even shape the men working in it:

• "They believe they must alter themselves to fit the pits and the place, rather than alter the pits and the place to fit themselves." (Ch 12) This reminded me of the thesis in The Time Machine by H G Wells that  humans would evolve into two species: one living lives of ease and happiness on the surface, the other toiling underground.
• “Marriage and home is a little side-show. ... Every man has his own little side-show, but the pit owns every man. The women have what is left.” (Ch 12)
• “Mrs Smith has two sisters who have just changed husbands. ... They're not interested enough to be very immoral - it all amounts to the same thing, moral or immoral - just a question of pit wages. The most moral duke in England makes two hundred thousand a year out of these pits. He keeps the morality end up.” (Ch 12)
• “There was a horrible fascination in it - human bodies and lives subjected in slavery to that symmetric monster of the colliery.” (Ch 12) This reminded me of Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

More scathing social comment is reserved for the school in which Ursula teaches: “The first great task was to reduce sixty children to one state of mind, or being. This state must be produced automatically, through the will of the teacher, and the will of the whole school authority, imposed upon the will of the children. ... Children will never naturally acquiesce to sitting in a class and submitting to knowledge. They must be compelled by a stronger, wiser will. Against which will they must always strive to revolt.” (Ch 13)

Nor is Ursula impressed by the teaching in her college:

• “The lecturer was a mouth-piece, a priest. As he stood, black gowned, on the rostrum, some strands of the whispering confusion of knowledge that filled the whole place seemed to be singled out and woven together by him, till they became a lecture.” (Ch 15)
• “What was Latin? - So much dry goods of knowledge. What was the Latin class altogether but a sort of second-hand curio shop.” (Ch 15)
• “This was no religious retreat, No seclusion of pure learning. It was a little apprentice-shop where one was further equipped for making money. The college was a little, slovenly laboratory for the factory.” (Ch 15) Views diametrically against those of Mrs Gaskell in North and South in which a factory owner seeks tuition in the classics to culture himself and to become a gentleman.
• Her disillusion with learning culminates in a brilliant metaphor in which Lawrence inverts Plato's Allegory of the Cave: “She could see the glimmer of dark movement just out of the range, she saw the eyes of the wild beast gleaming from the darkness, watching the vanity of the camp fire and the sleepers; she felt the strange, foolish vanity of the camp, which said ‘Beyond our light and our order there is nothing’, turning their faces always inward towards the sinking fire of illuminating consciousness ... ignoring always the vast darkness that wheeled round about, with half-revealed shapes lurking on the edge. Yea, and no man dared even throw a firebrand Into the darkness. For if he did he was jeered to death by the others who cried, ‘Fool, antisocial knave, why would you disturb us with bogeys? There is no darkness. We move and live and have our being within the light, and unto us is given the eternal light of knowledge.” (Ch 15)

There is a lesbian affair between Ursula and one of her teachers but there's also a hint of male homosexuality when Tom Brangwen meets Winifred Inger who has been having a lesbian affair with Ursula. He looks at her and “Immediately, he knew they were akin.” This suggests that he's gay and so’s she. And that's why they get married.

So that's the content; what about the style. The prose is remarkable for its passion. This sort of stuff could easily be mocked, as Stella Gibbons did in Cold Comfort Farm, but Lawrence's passion has depth and is from the heart. 

• “In autumn the partridges whirred up, birds in flocks blue like spray across the fallow, rooks appeared on the grey, watery heavens, and flew cawing into the winter. Then the men sat by the fire in the house where the women moved about with surety, and the limbs and the body of the men were impregnated with the day, cattle and earth and vegetation and the sky, the men sat by the fire and their brains were inert, as their blood flowed heavy with the accumulation from the living day.” (Ch 1) 
• “They were such strangers, they must forever be such strangers, that his passion was a clanging torment to him. Such intimacy of embrace, and such utter foreignness of contact! It was unbearable. He could not bear to be near her, and know the utter foreignness between them, know how entirely they were strangers to each other.” (Ch 1) He makes use of repetition to emphasise, almost to pound his words into the reader’s brain. This occurs time and again, and reminded me of the repetitions in the Bible. 

Selected quotes:

• “She was like one walking in the Underworld, where the shades throng intelligibly but have no connection with one.” (Ch 2)
• “His heart heavy as the sudden earth.” (Ch 2)
• “She looked at him, and oh, the weariness to her of the effort to understand another language, the weariness of hearing him.” (Ch 2)
• “How did she say he was old. He walked on in the rain, sweating with pain, with the horror of being old, with the agony of having to relinquish what was life to him.” (Ch 4)
• “Was his life nothing? Had he nothing to show, no work? He did not count his work, anybody could have done it. What had he known, but the long, marital embrace with his wife! curious, that this was what his life amounted to! At any rate, it was something, it was eternal.” (Ch 4)
• “There was no peace, however old one grew! One was never right, never decent, never master of oneself.” (Ch 4)
• “He did not count the days. but like a man who journeys in a ship, he was suspended till the coming to port.” (Ch 4)
• “Brangwen was staring away at the burning blue window at the back of the altar, and wondering vaguely, with pain, if he ever should get old, if he ever should feel arrived and established.” (Ch 5)
• “She had thought him just the bright reflex of herself. As the weeks and months went by she realized that he was a dark opposite to her.” (Ch 6)
• “He and she were not one. His heat was not always to suffuse her, suffuse her, through her mind and her individuality, till she was of one heat with him, till she had not heard own self apart. She wanted her own life. He seemed to lap her and suffuse her with his being, his hot life, till she did not know whether she were herself, or whether she were another creature.” (Ch 7)
• “He thought of the ruins of the Grecian worship, and it seemed a temple was never perfectly a temple, till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs.” (Ch 7)
• “She was the day-time, the daylight, he was the shadow; put aside, but in the darkness potent with an overwhelming voluptuousness." (Ch 8)
• “It was when they brought him to her house dead and in his wet clothes, his wet, sodden clothes, fully dressed as though he came from market, yet all sudden and inert, that the shock really broke into her and she was terrified. A big, soaked, inert heap, he was, who had been to her the image of power and strong life.” (Ch 9)
• “As Ursula passed from girlhood towards womanhood, gradually the cloud of self-responsibility gathered upon her. She became aware of herself, that she was a separate entity in the midst of an unseparated obscurity, that she must go somewhere, she must become something.” (Ch 11)
• “A fearless-seeming clean type of modern girl whose very independence betrays her sorrow.” (Ch 12)
• “She was brought to the conclusion that the human desire is the criterion of all truth and all good.” (Ch 12)
• “And yet - and yet - one's kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go.” (Ch 14)
• “The great notice-board with its fluttering papers seemed to slam away all sense of retreat and mystery from the far wall.” (Ch 15)
• “She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth.” (Ch 15)
• “What did it mean, Ursula Brangwen? She did not know what she was. Only she was full of rejection, of refusal. Always, always she was spitting out of her mouth the ash and grit of disillusion, a falsity. She could only stiffen in rejection, in rejection. She seemed always negative in her action.” (Ch 15)
• “But his eyes were quite still, like a washed sky after rain, full of a wan light, and quite steady, almost ghost-like.” (Ch 15)
• “I could love a hundred men, one after the other. ... Why should I not go on, and love all the types I fancy, one after another, if love is an end in itself?” (Ch 15)

Influences

It feels like a Victorian novel, such as The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler which was published in 1903. There's also a feel of the social novels of H G Wells, such as Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905), and The History of Mr Polly (1910). The concept that humans might evolve as a result of industrialisation is mentioned; this was first explored by H G Wells in The Time Machine (1895). There's also a mention of the Invisible Man by H G Wells: “She was reminded of the Invisible Man, who was a piece of darkness made visible only by his clothes.” (Ch 15) And the use of the term "Zolaesque" in the context of a mining village, is presumably a reference to Zola's Germinal (1885).

In the run up to 1915, H G Wells and Arnold Bennett (Anna of the Five Towns) had started to prove that working class people could be novelists. The influence of Thomas Hardy might have given Lawrence the confidence to use dialect in his fiction.

Aftermath

The Rainbow was prosecuted for obscenity, seized and destroyed; it disappeared from the (English) market for 16 years. You can understand the objections of the moralists of the time. Not only does it treat sex as a natural and, indeed, spiritual part of everyday experiences, but it also includes passages an orthodox Christian might consider blasphemous, and it contains an episode of lesbian love. This was thirteen years before Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness celebrated sapphism and was successfully prosecuted for obscenity. Perhaps 'The Rainbow' set a precedent.

Notes:

The Pillens (Phillips) family, school pupils with Ursula, and teacher Miss Inger, are mentioned in Lawrence's debut novel, Sons and Lovers

September 2026; 496 pages
First published by Methuen in 1915
My Penguin paperback was issued in 1985

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Other novels by D H Lawrence include:

• The White Peacock (1911)
• The Trespasser (1912)
• Sons and Lovers (1913)
• The Rainbow (1915)
• Women in Love (1920)
• The Lost Girl (1920)
• Aaron's Rod (1922)
• Kangaroo (1923)
• The Plumed Serpent (1926)
• Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)
• The Escaped Cock (1929), republished as The Man Who Died

Collection of short stories: 

• England, My England 

"The Wedding People" by Alison Espach

This funny, well-observed and sometimes profound novel opens with a stunning hook, when Phoebe, the only guest at the hotel not to be part of a week-long wedding party, announces to the bride that she is there to kill herself: “‘This is the most important week of my life,’ the bride pleads. ‘Same,’ Phoebe says.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)

Just before this was a very clever section in which two at first anonymous characters, guests at the wedding, are gossiping. Phoebe, the third person narrator, overhears them and thus the scene is set. It reminded me of how Shakespeare often has an early scene using two citizens chatting, but it seemed much more natural and integrated with the narrative.

But then there is a section of back story which (a) dampens some of the curiosity aroused - I wondered whether it would have been even better to have drip-fed many of these details into the story later - and (b) interrupted the narrative drive. 

The book then continues with a frankly unbelievable juxtaposition of two characters although I, as reader, forgave the unlikeliness because of my fascination with the ensuing cage fight.

And the book, like the wedding, continues, the author forever highlighting the contrast between the shallow consumerist extravagance of the celebrations and the real emotions of the people doing the celebrating. We soon become aware that not all is as perfect as it seems. We explore at least some of the characters. Some, like High Bun and Neck Pillow, are primarily there as foils and to provide comedy; they are what E M Forster calls 'flat' characters. But we explore the principals such as the bride and her mother, and the groom and his daughter, and Phoebe, and these characters are developed into complex and real-feeling persons. 

The plot is basically a set of opportunities to put these characters together and see what ensues. The reader than wants to know what will happen and this tension turns the pages. Did I anticipate the end? To some extent. But there are details left unresolved even on the last page.

It is told in the present tense and the third person from the sole perspective of Phoebe.

There are some moments of pure comedy, such as the delightful scene in which Phoebe, driving, is loaned a mobile phone from someone in the car so she can use sat nav ... only for sexts from the woman’s boyfriend to keep popping up.

The are some interesting discussions of literature (Phoebe teaches Victorian literature) and the book neatly parallels  Mrs Dalloway, another novel in which a party clashes with a suicide.

I learned other things as well. I learned that the Cubists “believed if you aren't seeing something from all sides, you aren't seeing fully.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party) And there are a lot of interesting thoughts about Life. 

Selected quotes:

• “The hotel ... sits on the edge of the cliff like an old and stately dog, patiently waiting for her arrival.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “Wasn't that the point of clothing? To prove that you were normal?” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “Cinderella never would have been at the centre of the novel if her mother had lived. (Neither would Jane Eyre ...) The mother had to die so that the girl started in a place of desperation.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “It made her feel silly, fighting over her husband with a female colleague who had her arm wedged in drawer five, like she was about to help birth a document.” (Tuesday: the opening reception) Neat image.
• “Seems more plausible that Hell is some revenge fantasy concocted by unhappy people so they could punish all the happy people in their minds.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “My father owned landfills. Gary is a gastroenterologist. totally different jobs, but ... they're both in waste management.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “The professor is always tempted to say something wise that will get the student to reflect on their own words.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “Don't even bother telling me you have plans, because I know you are planning on being dead right now.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “Bridesmaids need the same kinds of stories soldiers do, stories that justify why they do what they do.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “They are a classic older man and younger woman combo. Gary is the stage and Lila is the song.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “I'm not a monster, Phoebe. I would care if a woman died at my wedding. I have feelings.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “If everybody in my life is always telling me I can be anyone I want, but then whenever I do one thing they don't like, they act like I ruined myself.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “Maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “Her face is too stiff, the way people's faces look when their abs are slightly clenched.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “I’m like Rapunzel. Except nobody wants to abduct me.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “Do you know what a talker Lila really is? ... As a little girl, she was even worse. Total stream of consciousness. Like living with a little Salinger novel.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “I fell in love with what Henry gave me. And he gave me so much. He truly did. But loving someone like that doesn't make you a better woman. Only losing them does.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “She always imagined getting older as a narrowing street that got darker as you walked.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “We’ve only been sexting since Tuesday and I've already run out of ways to describe my vagina.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “You are a thousand different people orbiting around a pole. ... Aren't we all that pole? ... Though sometimes I'm not sure there is even a pole.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “I don't think about what I want. I just worry about what might happen to me and then figure out how to keep those things from happening.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “Nobody can take care of you the way you need to take care of yourself. It's your job to take care of yourself like that.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “That's the point of art, isn't it? ... Artists look at the world and see opportunities for creating meaning.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “She is drawn to the exhaustion of a lived life.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “Good writing is driven by a question ... And the essay is the writer's best attempt at answering that question.” (Friday, the Blending of the Families.)
• “How are we not supposed to talk about the slow decay of our bodies?” (Saturday, the Rehearsal Dinner)
• “To collect is to care more than most. But it is also to hoard. To take things out of the world and make them only yours.” (Saturday, the Rehearsal Dinner)

August 2026

First published in the USA by Henry Holt in 2024

My paperback edition was issued by Phoenix Books in 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Land in Winter" by Andrew Miller

Set in Devon in the great winter of 1962-3, when many villages were cut off from the world by blizzards and snow-drifts, when trains were forced to abandon journeys, when the sea off the Kent coast had pack ice and some of the upper reaches of the Thames froze, this is a historical novel. It focuses principally on four characters: Eric, a GP who is having an affair with one of his patients, and his pregnant wife Irene, and Bill, a novice dairy farmer and his pregnant wife Rita, a former show girl in a nightclub who has a passion for science fiction and hears voices in her head. The story is told, in the past tense (with the occasional flash forward into the future), from the perspective of each of these characters.

As someone who remembers that winter, I am not sure that historical fiction ought to be set within living memory. It made for an interesting experience. I remember the milkman bring the milk on a sledge!

It starts from the PoV of another person, a patient in the local asylum, who finds the dead body of another patient, who suicide has been facilitated by the unusually large quantity of drugs prescribed by Dr Eric. It ends with total weirdness: a descent into madness or a strange occurrence which might have been foreshadowed by the following lines: “At the edge of the field, by the shadow-line of the hedge, a dog, or something like a dog, raised its head into the light, studied them a moment, the two women upright in the field, then dropped out of sight again, soundlessly.” (Part Two: Saturday, 5th January)

In fact many of the characters' thoughts hover on the cusp of the bizarre:

• “The time? He sifted it from the air, from the many small clues it gave.” (1.1)
• “Time would level it out, for that, he had learned (quite recently), was what time did.” (1.2)
• “This was something else she had learned, that drop into the fever of not knowing, except it’s not confusion exactly, more a case of one part of you not yet ready to accept what the other part knowns perfectly well.” (1.3)
• “She imagined the bull in his pen, the night moving like a river through the big sack of his head. The world, the fog world in its brittle glass sheath of now, was aching for an arrival. Stare long enough, hard enough, and it might be happening already.” (1.10)
• “Each secret meeting tied another thread and tautened the ones already there.” (14th December 1962; 1)
• “He thought of the expression ‘to collect oneself’, of what it meant and how it might be done.” (Part Two: Thursday 10th January)
• “My mind, thought Bill, is like a fly in a matchbox.” (Part Two: Thursday 10th January)
• “The dexamyl was starting to work, the first threads. For a few hours the voices would lie on their backs, frozen, beaks wide but silent.” (Part Two: Thursday 10th January)
• “The other's body, with its lumps and strappings, its terrible softness, was an animal you meet in a dream and must placate with songs and silences; a wicked witch who turns out to be a middle aged woman with poor circulation and some unsheddable grief you are free to look away from.” (Part Two:Saturday 12th January)

I suspect that the theme of families being isolated by the world is a metaphor for the lockdown imposed by the Covid pandemic, which must have been around the time that Miller was writing the novel.

It is one of those novels that take a long time to get going. We are half way through before the snow descends. But this means that it can establish its characters thoroughly in their complexity and with all their background. These feel like real people! And that in turn means that when they think strange thoughts, the reader accepts them. In the second half of the novel, things, even violent things, happen and again, because the build-up had been so painstaking, they do not seem forced or jolt the reader from the suspension of disbelief. Even the final chapter can be credited, although different readers will develop different interpretations. 

There are also some deft touches, such as when Eric draws the sheet over his face, mirroring his action  when his father died ... in the same bed. Beautiful mirroring! This care with the brush strokes suggest an author at his most skilled. 

In 2025, the novel won the Winston Graham Historical Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Selected quotes:

• “The wireless, lost between stations, hissed like escaping gas then suddenly spoke, posing a question in a language he did not know.” (1.1)
• “In retrospect he seemed, like most of the other masters, a man in despair, who gave expression to it - got some relief from it - by being violent towards children.” (1.4)
• “His wellingtons ... were spotless, and one imagined them to have their own faint pattern of pinstripe.” (1.8)
• “It was a child's bed - she was too big for it, an imposter, an alien.” (Part Two: Thursday 10th January)

August 2026; 371 pages

First published by Sceptre in 2024

My paperback edition was issued in 2025

Andrew Miller has written a number of novels including Pure, also historical fiction, which I reviewed in 2012.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Scotland's Merlin" by Tim Clarkson

Clarkson, an "independent researcher and historian", claims that the figure of Merlin, the wizard in the Arthurian legends, may in part have been based upon a man called Lailoken.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote Historia Regum Britanniae, the best-selling (there are still over 200 extant manuscripts of this work written c 1136), work which popularised the legends of King Arthur and introduced 'Merlin' to the Arthurian court, also wrote a later work Vita Merlini in which the subject of the biography was involved in a battle, on the side led by Peredur K of Gwynedd, allied with Rodarch, k of Cambrians against Guennolous, K of Scottish forces. He went bonkers following the battle, seeking solitude in the forest. When discovered he was made captive by Rodarch. Here he noticed that the King’s wife had a leaf in her hair and correctly deduced that she had been committing adultery. This got him returned to the forest. Geoffrey also says that Merlin came from Carmarthen.

The Black Book of Carmarthen, compiled c1250, includes poems by a first person narrato called Myrddin) without trappings of Arthuriana but mentioning a battle in which he fought at Arfderydd in northern Britain and subsequent flight in madness to Coed Celyddon; the forest of Celyddon. One of his prophecies concerns a battle fought in 1198 and therefore it can be concluded that the poem was composed after that.

So the hypothesis is that there was a chap called Myrddyn whose name Gdeoffrey changed to Merlin possibly to avoid the Norman-French connotation of 'merde' = 'shit'.

These tales about Myrddin/ Merlin seem to echo tales about a chap called Lailoken who fought in a battle fought in a plain between Lidel and Carwannock and then fled into the wilderness. Lailoken foresees a threefold death in which he is stoned by shepherds, falls into a river and is impaled on a stake which keeps his head below water so he drowns. Another theme is that he sees that the King’s wife has a leaf in her hair and correctly deduces she has been committing adultery.

The battle of Ardferydd which is mentioned three times by 'Merlin' in the Black Book of Carmarthen was a historical battle fought in 573. The battlefield has been identified (though this is still under dispute) as near the modern Carwinley, a hamlet at the confluence of the rivers Esk and Liddel.

Rhydderch Hael aka Roderc was a historical character associated with Alt Clut - the Rock of Clyde = Dun Breatann = Fortress of the Britons = Dumbarton. He had a palace at Pernech = Partick where dwells a madman called Laloecen.

So there seems a sufficient number of similarities to dismiss the possibility of coincidence and accept that thesis that Merlin and Lailoken are the same character.

Coincidentally, there is another 'wild man' of the same period, in the Irish chronicles, called Suibhne (pronounced Sweeney). He too went mad and vanished into the woods, wandering naked following a battle. He literally flew from the battlefield. At one point he went to Britain and met another wild man of the woods called Alladhan (is this Lailoken?). The poetry romance that tells this story was used as the basis for some of the poems allegedly spoken by Mad King Sweeney, a character in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds; ‘Swim-Two-Birds is the English version of the name of a ford in the River Shannon that Sweeney allegedly visited.

Like many of the books of this genre, this is liberally padded and the final conclusion has to be that there is too little evidence to be certain whether the tale told is true or false. However, there was sufficient evidence for me to accept the thesis. And I enjoyed the read: the material i much better organised than many similar books and ther author avoids preposterous claims. 

August 2026; 136 pages and three appendices

Published in 2016 by John Donald

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Love in a Cold Climate" by Nancy Mitford

If you like 'Downton Abbey' and similar work set in the world of the English aristocracy between the First and Second World Wars, you might enjoy this light comedy. Or you might be interested by the glimpses it gives into the attitudes of an unpleasant minority. I suspect some might defend it on the grounds of satire, but if it is, it has a toothless bite and the narrator - and, I suspect, the author - clearly shares some of the nastiest views. “‘I love being so dry in here,’ as Lady Montdore put it, ‘and seeing all those poor people so wet.’” (1.8) might indeed be satire but when the narrator says “The front door was opened by a slut.” (2.1) the satire slips and the sneers are seen for what they are. This is entitlement writ large: “Since I had as yet no servant, I was obliged to get up very early and cook Alfred's breakfast.” (2.1) cuts little ice with those of us who have never had servants. It was difficult to remind myself that this was written as recently as 1949. 

It is also tolerant of paedophilia. One of the most sympathetic characters feels quite sorry for a man who likes interfering with little girls when he is hoist by his own petard and virtually entrapped by one of his victims: “He can't be expected to guess that because he strokes the hair of a little girl when she's fourteen she's going to insist on marrying him when she grows up. Bad luck on a chap I call it.” (1.13) The vengeance of grooming.

And the second half of the book is dominated by a portrait of an extravagantly gay man who embodies all the stereotypes of that role.

There was one moment which seemed inconsistent. In 2.2, Lady Montdore says:“I hope he's not an artist. well, if he is we shall simply have to get him out of it - he must learn to behave suitably.” (2.2) But in 1.7, we have been told that she and her husband are always“occupied ... with what they called ‘their art’, producing enormous portraits, landscapes and still lifes by the dozen.”

There are some amusing moments, but on the whole this was a novel which left a bad taste in my mouth, when it wasn't plain boring.

Selected quotes:

• “That was where her charm lay. ... the charm of a purring puma.” (1.3)
• “Charm allied to riches and position is almost irresistible.” (1, 6)
• “‘All this’, on her lips, meant position allied to such solid assets as acres, coal mines, real estate, jewels, silver, pictures, incunabula, and other positions of this sort.” (1.6)
• “Oxford is a place where social life ... is designed exclusively for celibate men ... the whole tradition is in its essence monastic, and as far as society goes wives are quite superfluous.” (2.1)
• “It seemed to me quite plain and uninteresting except for the label in its lining, and they long to put this on the outside so that people wouldn't know where it came from.” (2.4) She’s wearing a Schiaperellii dress. Nowadays, of course, designers do put their labels on the outside so that vain people can brag about their clothes.
• “You are so fortunate not to be a beauty, Fanny, you'll never know the agony of losing your looks.” (2.5)

August 2026; 166 pages

First published by Hamish Hamilton in 1949

My edition was issued with The Pursuit of Love in 1980.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Pursuit of Love" by Nancy Mitford

 Anyone who knows the much-publicised history of the Mitford family will know that this is a fictionalised version of that. (And sanitised; there is no mention of the fact that one of the Mitford sisters married the leader of the British fascists and another was an ardent supporter of Hitler who attempted suicide in Germany when the Second World War started; presumably in 1945 when this novel was published these issues were still hot potatoes so Nancy Mitford decided to avoid them.)

It purports to follow the romantic career of Linda, best friend and cousin of the narrator, Fanny. Linda, whose father is a bigoted Earl with a large country house, loads of servants, and a lot of land, falls in love with the son of a nouveau riche banker, with predictably dreadful consequences. She then has an affair with an upper-class communist, leading to her divorce and second marriage. Finally, returning from the south of France having realised that her second husband is in love with someone else, she meets and becomes the mistress of a wealthy Frenchman, finally finding love, although they are parted by the Second World War.

This fairy tale of romances is backed with what purports to be social satire, although it is clear that the narrator (the author wearing a disguise only very slightly less transparent than some of the characters) is very much on the side of the upper-classes: 

• “Planes was a horrible house ... The garden which lay around it would be a lady water-colourist’s heaven, herbaceous borders, rockeries and water-gardens were carried to a perfection of vulgarity, and flaunted a riot of huge and hideous flowers, each individual bloom appearing twice as large, three times as brilliant as it ought to have been and if possible of a different colour from that which nature intended.” (Ch 12)
• “I have seen too many children brought up without nannies to think this at all desirable.” (Ch 21)

As a result, the humour is gentle and whimsical rather than cutting: a few wry smiles rather than a single belly-laugh. If you want comic fiction of the upper-classes from this period, read P. G. Woodhouse who piles on the absurdities rather than taming them. For me the funniest line, purely because it is tautologous, came as late as chapter 21: “Once a foreigner always a foreigner in my opinion.”

That the author is writing for her fellow subscribers to Tatler is evidence from the fact that she gives passages, and sometimes whole conversations, in untranslated French. When one cannot understand the punchline, the joke falls flat. But I suspect that the point is that Mitford has thereby demonstrated her superiority to those born without her advantages.

Nevertheless, she has a few memorable characters although the strongest, such as Uncle Matthew, are Dickensian caricatures. 

Many people are impressed by the vanished world of the upper-classes in their country houses. These are the fans of Upstairs Downstairs, Downton Abbey, and keen visitors of National Trust properties. This is a book for them. I'd rather read literature.

Selected quotes: 

• “Over the chimney-piece clearly visible in the photograph, hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out.” (Ch 1)
• “The behaviour of civilized man really has nothing to do with nature, ... all is artificiality and art more or less perfected.” (Ch 5)
• “His hair seemed to be slipping off backwards, like an eiderdown in the night.” (Ch 6)
• “That fella, what's ‘is name, Romeo, might have known a blasted papist would mess up the whole thing.” (Ch 6)
• “He was in his last year at Oxford, a member of Bullingdon, a splendid young man with a Rolls Royce, plenty of beautiful horses, exquisite clothes, and large luxurious rooms, where he entertained on a lavish scale.” (Ch 7) Not today’s typical undergraduate.
• “‘We must keep our ends up,’ said Linda uncertainly. ‘O,h dear,’ I said, ‘the thing about me is, I always feel much happier with my end down.’” (Ch 7)
• “A Moses basket full of wails.” (Ch 10) Description of a baby.
• “His general attitude to what he called the man in the street was that he ought constantly to be covered by machine guns: this having become impossible ... he must be doped into submission with fiction that huge reforms, to be engineered by the Conservative Party, were always just around the next corner.” (Ch 11)
• “The Alconleighs were obliged to face the fact, as parents must sooner or later, that their children had broken loose from control and had taken charge of their own lives.” (Ch 13)
• “It would never have occurred to the Alconleighs to visit the continent for any other purpose than that of fighting.” (Ch 15)

August 2026; 151 pages

First published by Hamish Hamilton in 1945

My edition, together with Love in a Cold Climate, was issued in 1980.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Biographies written by Nancy Mitford and reviewed in this blog:

• Madame de Pompadour
• The Sun King

"The Iceman Cometh" by Eugene O'Neill

 This classic play is  set in a bar in New York in 1912; the characters are all failures in life, such as a bent policeman drummed out of the force, two combatants from either side of the Boer war, a card sharp from a circus, and an ex-socialist. The barman has a couple of prostitutes working for him but he denies he is a pimp because he doesn't best them up and a pimp wouldn't have another job; he sees himself as an agent for the girls. He still takes their money (and slaps them but that isn't the same as beating them ...) The owner of the bar and associated rooming house in which many of the characters live is Harry, who hasn't been outside for twenty years, since his wife died. They are waiting to celebrate Harry's birthday. A young man, Porritt, unknown to the rest, arrives to talk to Larry, an ex-anarchist who has given up causes to become a "grandstand philosopher"; Porritt is clearly troubled about the fact that his mother, an anarchist, has been arrested and may be facing a life sentence in jail. Hickey is expected to come any moment; the deadbeats look forward to his arrival because he always buys them drinks and cheers them up.

But when he does arrive, they discover he is on a mission. He wants to improve them. He wants them to face up to the fears that have paralysed them, that has caused each one of them to put his life on hold, awaiting a better tomorrow. He wants them all to be free.

I became convinced, in Act Two, that there was a religious dimension to this play. One of the key characters is the "grandstand philosopher" Larry, described by O'Neill thus: “He stares in front of him, an expression of tired tolerance giving his face the quality of a pitying but weary old priest’s.” (Character description of Larry Slade). Hickey had lines that made him sound like Jesus, for example: “I saw I couldn't do what I was after alone. Not in the time at my disposal. I knew when I came here I wouldn't be able to stay with you long. I'm slated to leave on a trip. ... Why, if I had enough time, I’d get a lot of sport out of setting my line of salvation to each of you all by my lonesome.” (Act 2: Hickey) The furniture which is cabaret style in the first act is rearranged in the second to form a single long table: the Last Supper, I thought, and Larry's comment: “By God, it's a second feast of Belshazzar, with Hickey to do the writing on the wall!” (Act 2: Larry) reinforced the religious vibes. Meanwhile, Parritt is a Judas-like betrayer. And, true enough, Hickey is preaching a gospel of salvation from the curse of tomorrow to slightly more than twelve disciples. Even the ending (spoiler alert) in which Hickey is led away by the police to be condemned to death and executed, follows the story of Christ.

The play has a lot of words; it is a very wordy play which needs nearly four hours to be performed in an uncut version. Each of the characters has an arc and there are a lot of characters. They all have their individual issues and most of them have a number of speeches. The final act is dominated by some very long speeches from Hickey.

The play has very specific descriptions for each character. Not all of these were obeyed by the production I saw - Hickey, described as having "a stout roly-poly figure" was played by a slender actor. The stage settings are also minutely described. Sometimes the playwright instructs the actors how to speak. O'Neill didn't seem to want to leave much to the discretion of the director!

I read this as a playscript but at the same time I watched a brilliant (if black and white and grainy) 1960 American TV movie production starring Jason Robards as Hickey (he played the role in the second theatre production, in which TIC was recognised as a classic of American theatre) and featuring a young Robert Redford. The production I watch cut more than a few lines to trim the play into two feature-length halves; the original must have run for at least 3h 30m excluding intervals.

It may be a marathon but it is an extraordinarily wonderful play.

Eugene O'Neill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. 

Selected quotes:

• “I saw men didn't want to be saved from themselves, for that would mean they'd have to give up greed, and they'll never pay that price for liberty.” (Act 1: Larry)
• “I took a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall asleep observing the cannibals do their death dance.” (Act 1: Larry)
• “No one here has to worry about where they're going next, because there is no further they can go. It's a great comfort to them.” (Act 1: Larry)
• “I was born condemned to be one of those who has to see all sides of a question. When you're damned like that, the questions multiply for you until in the end it's all question and no answer. As history proves, to be a worldly success at anything ... you have to wear blinders like a horse and see only straight in front of you. You have to see, too, that this is all black, and that is all white.” (Act 1: Larry)
• “I know all about that game from soup to nuts.” (Act 1: Hickey)
• “I've watched many cases of almost fatal teetotalism, but they all came out of it completely cured and as drunk as ever.” (Act 1: Mosher)
• “You can't be too careful about work. It's the deadliest habit known to science.” (Act 1: Mosher)
• “He has to be punished, so he can forgive himself.” (Act 2: Hickey)
• “She just had to keep on having lovers to prove to herself how free she was.” (Act 2: Parritt)
• “Honour or dishonour, faith or treachery are nothing to me but the opposite of the same stupidity which is the ruler and king of life, and in the end they rot into dust in the same grave.” (Act 2: Larry)
• “The Iceman of Death.” (Act 3: Larry)
• “It was like a game, sizing people up quick, spotting what their pet pipe dreams were, and then kidding ‘em along that line, pretending you believed what they wanted to believe about themselves. Then they liked you, they trusted you, they wanted to buy something to show their gratitude. It was fun.” (Act 4: Hickey)
• “I could see disgust having a battle in her eyes with love.” (Act 4: Hickey)
• “I'd get so damned lonely. I'd get thinking how peaceful it was here, sitting around with the old gang, getting drunk and forgetting love, joking and laughing and singing and swapping lies.” (Act 4: Hickey)
• “Go, for the love of Christ, you mad tortured bastard, for your own sake!” (Act 4: Larry)

The play was first performed in New York by the Martin Beck Theatre in 1846.
The script was first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape in 1947
The script I read was for the Royal National Theatre production and published by Nick Hern Books in 1993.
I read it, and watched it, in August 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God