"Four Letters of Love" by Niall Williams

“When I was twelve years old God spoke to my father for the first time. God didn't say much.” This is the opening of a debut novel of extraordinary lyrical beauty about the war between one's dreams and the reality of life.

The west coast of Ireland is the setting for magic. A young boy gifted with a talent for making music has a fit and is struck dumb and helpless. He lives in little better than a vegetative state while his sister goes to convent school, breaks all the rules, and has an affair and marries a wool and tweed salesman. Meanwhile, the father of a young boy in Dublin is called by God to paint and abandons his family to poverty while he creates abstract masterpieces. There are ghosts and visions. Underpinning the supernatural events is a hard core of reality: the purchase of a single can of soup for supper, years working as a clerk in the Civil Service, shooing donkeys, inarticulate appreciation (Galway, we are told, is "great. Just great. Is there another egg, Mam?") This juxtaposition with everyday nitty-gritty renders the mystical believable, the plain prose passages enable the lyrical flights.

The plot is that of a classic comedy: two lovers who must come together in the end despite all the obstructions placed in their way. It is at once both complex in the evolutions (only a modern comedy could include the obstacle that one of the lovers makes a half-hearted marriage to someone else) and immensely simple. For all that, it is perfectly paced.

The narration switches between the first person PoV of Nicholas, the Dublin lad, and an omniscient PoV; in the final section Nicholas is seen in the third person. It is told in the past tense.

The characters are strong, from the poetry-writing schoolmaster drowning his sorrows in whiskey to the mad artist, from the wayward Isabel to the hapless Seann and the bewildered Nicholas. I absolutely believed in these people and their behaviours. Isabel, guilt-ridden and hormonal, would have proved a wayward teenager and made foolish choices about prospective partners. Shiftless Seann, ruled by his mother, could be a romantic hero but a hopeless life partner. And I do love a villain who has the best of motives.

The descriptions are wonderful. Sometimes they are short and concise:

• “The embedded dagger of one-way love.” (1.10)
• “The air was puffy with fumes.” (4.14)
• “Panic pricked in his lower stomach like a bag of needles.” (5.9)
• “He walks his high frailty into the water, his ribcage and shoulders like a twisted jumble of coat hangers in an empty suit bag.” (1.1)

Sometimes they are extended like epic metaphors:

• “The skies we slept under were too uncertain for forecasts. They came and went on the moody gusts of the Atlantic, bringing half a dozen different weathers in an afternoon and playing all four movements of a wind symphony, allegro, andante, scherzo and adagio on the broken backs of the white waves. Clouds, thumping base notes or brilliant wild arpeggios, were never long in coming.” (3.8)

Much of the joy of this book is based on the transcending beauty of the language so it is perhaps not a surprise that when it was made into a film in 2024 it received poor reviews. 

Perhaps the thing that I admired most about this book was the control shown by the writer. He could have gone over the top with the language, the magic, and the madness, but every time he showed a hint of straying, he returned to mundane reality, leaving this book like a piece of granite, as solid as can be but with sparkles of crystal.

And it was hugely enjoyable. A real page-turner.

Selected quotes:

• “The grass grew three feet tall, and sometimes in the evenings I went out and lay down hidden inside it, feeling the soft waving motion of its sea around me and above me and watching the blue of the sky deepen to let out the stars. I kept my eyes open and thought of my father, out there, painting the hood of night over me.” (1.3)
• “‘Dad,’ I said and, turning, felt burst in tears the watery balloon of emotion.” (1.4)
• “Wives create their husbands. They begin with that rough raw material, that blundering, well-meaning and handsome youthfulness that they have fallen in love with, and then commence the forty years of unstinting labour it takes to make a man with whom they can live.” (1.14)
• “Back on the island they were prisoners of the weather now. ... The mainland was lost to them, and the freedom there was on a summer's day in seeing the limitless expanse of a blue sky over a blue sea was inversed now, and the stone walls of the houses and the little fields were the still jails of winter.” (2.2)
• “The sky was a steamed glass that cracked daily, letting slant through the falling air the shards of that long winter’s stay.” (2.4)
• “It was five o’clock in the morning, my feet were wet, my eyes stung and I had just learned the first lesson of that week's education in art: once you begin, nothing else matters, not love, not grief, not anything.” (3.6)
• “For him, in his paintings, sea and sky ... were the constant and yet ever-changing monologue of God himself, the swirling language of creation, the closest thing to the beginning of life itself.” (3.6)
• “My father saw God's changing humour in the afternoons and early evenings, the sky in the sea like a face ageing.” (3.6)
• “Time only exists if you have a clock. In our house the batteries in the clock on the kitchen windowsill had long since leaked the acid of Time.” (4.3)
• “He was a man who had found his place, and had ironed everything of the jumbled and frenzied chaos that life had thrown at him into the one, perfect crease of his work.” (4.3)
• “He couldn't easily tolerate the circle of sympathizers and the little hopeless audience of tea-drinkers and prayers, and he stood instead outside in the drizzle letting his despair fragment into the first words and phrases of a new poem.” (4.5)
• “She could have done anything, she seems so. So. Hurt.” (4.7)
• “Angels, my father once said, must pass us in the street every day. They must be as ordinary as birds, he said, and recognisable only in the brief moment of their connection to our lives.” (4.12)
• “Dreams, my father was certain, are the other you talking back.” (4.14)
• “How do you know what to do? how do you ever know?’ ‘You don't.... You ask for prompts, I suppose, don't get any and then just pick one thing or the other.” (5.4)
• “Her guilt swirled in the air like a fine dust; it caught in his throat and he began a coughing fit that lasted minutes.” (5.5)
• “Loss, loss, loss. The word passed across his chest like a knife opening his flesh and spilling his organs. How much easier it would have been to have been wounded, to have lost a limb, to stumble through the day one-legged, flap one-armed and show: this much of me is loss, this much hacked away by grief and despair.” (5.5)
• “Nothing in the natural world is random, was the principle tenet in William Coughlin's philosophy.” (5.6)
• “Muiris was walking a few inches above the surface of the island, carefully placing his feet and taking each step across the air with the concentration of a tightrope walker." (5.8)
• “A curled figure still in his trousers and vest, a hand dangling over the edge of the bed as if to pick up dreams.” (7.1)
• “She looked at him as if he had seven eyes and she could not figure out on which to focus.” (7.7)
• “The world wrinkles dreams quicker than skin” (7.7)
• “She ... put aside her fears that the spots appearing on the back of her hands were the rising to the surface of her sins.” (7.10)

The Latin quote in 3.7: "Dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt, Euryale, an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?" is from Virgil's Aeneid (9, 184–185), which means: "Do the gods put this fire into our minds, Euryale, or does each man's passion become his own desire?"

February 2026; 342 pages

First published by Picador in 1997

My paperback edition issued in 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Also written by Niall Williams:

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

"Bright Lights, Big City" by Jay McInerney

 

Naturalistic contemporary literary fiction narrated in the 2nd person (which is extremely unusual in a novel) and the present tense.

The narrator works in the fact-checking department of a magazine but, since his model girlfriend left him, he has spent too many nights snorting coke through the hours of darkness in nightclubs to have any chance of holding down a job. This is a chronicle of a world too chaotic and self-destructive to be called hedonistic. It reminded me of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson or Less Than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis.

It's beautifully written. The narrator, an eternal outsider, a wannabe writer who knows of Praxiteles and Socrates, is trapped in this self-imposed hell. But somehow he can keep his perspective in witty and perceptive observations of his fellow losers.

Selected quotes:

• “You have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings.” (It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?)
• “His friends are all rich and spoiled, like the cousin from Memphis you met earlier in the evening who would not accompany you below Fourteenth Street because, he said, he didn't have a low life visa.” (It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?)
• “Cheekbones to break your heart.” (It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?)
• “His voice ... is like the New Jersey State Anthem played through an electric shaver.” (It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?)
• “You like the way she moves, the oiled ellipses of her hips and shoulders.” (It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?)
• “If there were a branch of the family business in a distant, malarial colony, you would have been shipped off long ago, sans quinine.” (The Department of Factual Verification)
• “You suspect that his sexual orientation is largely theoretical.” (The Department of Factual Verification)
• “We must locate party fuel. Cherchez les grammes.” (The Utility of Fiction.)
• “You don't like this role of bird with broken wing, especially since that’s exactly how you feel. The lame-duck husband. You'd rather be an eagle or a falcon, pitiless and predatory among the solitary crags.” (The Utility of Fiction.)
• “Elaine moves with an angular syncopation that puts you in mind of the figures on Egyptian tombs. It may be a major new dance step.” (The Utility of Fiction.)
• “You think of Socrates, the kind of guy who accepted his cup and drank it down.” (A Womb with a View)
• “You feel like an integer in a random series of numbers.” (A Womb with a View)
• “More and more you realize that sport trivia is crucial to male camaraderie. You keenly feel your ignorance. You are locked out of the largest fraternity in the country.” (Coma Baby Lives!)
• “Above Forty-Second they sell women without clothes and below they sell clothes with women.” (Coma Baby Lives!)
• “She's still in media dress, as we say.” (Coma Baby Lives!)
• “You pass the Helmsley Palace - the shell of old New York transparently veiling the hideous erection of a real estate baron.” (Sometimes, a Vague Notion)
• “The man looks like he was carved by Praxiteles in 350 BC and touched up by Paramount in 1947.” (How It’s Going)

February 2026; 174 pages

First published  by Vintage in the US in 1984

My Bloomsbury paperback was issued in 2007.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The House in Paris" by Elizabeth Bowen

I struggled to enjoy this book.

Two children, Henrietta Leopold, meet at a house in Paris. The Fishers, mother and daughter, are acting as chaperones for Henrietta, who is between trains. Illegitimate Leopold is to meet his mother for the first time since she had him adopted as a baby. Madame Fisher is upstairs, dying. In the second part of the book, we visit the past to learn the circumstances of Leopold's parenthood. Finally, we return to the present for the crisis.

Not that it is a crisis. Everything in this book is so understated and polite you'd find more excitement in a dropped teaspoon at one of Jane Austen's gatherings.

A S Byatt, in her introduction, calls this "a model of good writing, an example of how to be precise about thought, emotion, passion and character." Hmm. I must have missed the passion. The prose is elegant but the standards of 'good' writing must have changed. When Madame Fisher finally tells Leopold the story of his conception and birth in 3.2, it is done as an extended exposition, an information dump, in long coherent paragraphs of dialogue, even though we are told “the last part of the story had laboured out in jerks, with agonised flaggings, and pauses that seemed not to know how they could end.” As marvellous as this description is, how much better if the preceding paragraphs had actually shown us a flavour of this. In 3.3 a ‘talking heads’ section of dialogue gives way to another extended exposition, as if the author is aware she is running out of pages and needs to give the reader all the information, like a set of captions at the end of a movie.

Sometimes the narrator sees things from the PoV of one of the characters ( although their thoughts sometimes seem to be too old for the children, eg: “His spirit became crustacean under douches of culture and mild philosophic chat from his Uncle Dee, who was cultured rather than erudite.”; 1.2) but fundamentally an omniscient third person narrates in the past tense with occasional authorial intrusions directly addressing the reader, eg:

• “There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.” (1.2)
• “Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own.” (2.1)
• “Actually, the meeting he had projected could take place only in Heaven - call it Heaven; on the plane of potential not merely likely behaviour. Or call it art, with truth and imagination informing every word.” (2.1)
• “To foresee pleasure makes anyone a poet.” (2.11) Is that pompous or simply utterly ridiculous?

As usual, we are in the world of the gentry. Even if they have to work, it isn’t exactly toil. Mr Michaelis must leave for the office at half-past-nine every day and Madame Fisher makes ends meet by hosting a couple of young ladies in her Parisian house. Max can’t afford to marry but he is sufficiently well-off to travel by train and boat and train to a hotel room for a dirty weekend. The book was written in 1935 but there is no hint of the catastrophic social changes unleashed by the first world war: the middle class are very comfortable, thanks to inheritance. “She thought: Servants are terrible: why should they share one’s house?” (2.7)

I enjoyed Elizabeth Bowen's The Heart of the Day on second reading after a discussion in my reading group convinced me there was more to it than I had initially appreciated. A S Byatt, who has read this novel several times, seems to have had different reactions to it at different periods of her life. I look forward to being convinced that I've missed something.

Selected quotes:

• “Feeling like a kaleidoscope often and quickly shaken, she badly wanted some place in which not to think.” (1.5)
• “The women came down with a kind of congested rush, like lava flowing as fast as it can.” (1.5)
• “You make him sound like a man who cannot pass a looking-glass.” (2.4)
• “Without their indistinctness things do not exist.” (2.6)
• “In her parents’ world, change ... meant nothing but loss. To alter was to decline.” (2.7)
• “Like rain on the taxi windows, soft affections and melancholies blurred her mind.” (2.11)
• “She was not of the generation that fingers things on a mantlepiece.” (2.11)
• “One leg writhed round the other like ivy killing a tree.” (3.1)
• “Why should I have to kiss them when I wish every time I have to that their faces would fall off, like the outsides of onions.” (3.2)

February 2026; 239 pages

Originally published in 1935 by Gollancz

My paperback Vintage Classics edition was issued in 1998

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Writing Down the Bones" by Natalie Goldberg

I was immediately attracted to this astonishingly inspirational manual for creative writers by the endorsement on the back from Robert Pirsig, author of one of my top ten novels: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Then I discovered that it had a foreword written by Judith Guest, author of Ordinary People, another of my top classic novels. At once my expectations were sky-high and I was not disappointed.

If there is a single message, it might be summarised as write, write and write some more. Writing, she says, is like running: the more you do the better you get. She advocates free writing, ten minutes of losing control. Write about the ordinary experiences of life. And rewrite, because sometimes we need more than one attempt.

I particularly liked the concept of composting, the process by which our mind makes sense of our experiences: “Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil blooms our poems and stories. ... Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil.” (14)

But I think what she is suggesting might work better for poems than for novels, which need rather more preparation and understanding of structure. Nevertheless, this a book full of sage advice, beautifully expressed.

Selected quotes:

• “It’s good to go off and write a novel, but don’t stop doing writing practice. It’s what keeps you in tune, like a dancer who does warmups before dancing.” (13)
• “Writers write about things that other people don’t pay much attention to. For instance, our tongues, elbows, water coming out of a water faucet, ... A writer’s job is to make the ordinary come alive, to awaken ourselves to the specialness of simply living.” (99)
• “Learn to write about the ordinary. ... Make a list of everything ordinary you can think of. Keep adding to it. Make a promise to yourself, before you leave this earth, to mention everything on your list at least once in a poem, short story, newspaper article.” (100)
• “The trick is to keep your heart open.” (28)
• “Every minute we change ... At any point we can step out of our frozen selves and our ideas and begin afresh. ... There is no permanent truth you can corner in a poem that will satisfy you forever.” (33)
• “Step out of the way and record your thoughts as they roll through you.” (35)
• “Writing is not a McDonald’s hamburger. The cooking is slow, and in the beginning you are not sure whether a roast or a banquet of a lamb chop will be the result.” (37)
• “If you want to get high, don’t drink whiskey; read Shakespeare ... aloud.” (51)
• “Stay on the side of precision; know your goal and stay present with it.” (55)
• “Writing is not psychology. We don’t talk ‘about’ feelings. Instead the writer feels and through her words awakens feelings in the reader.” (68)
• “Writers write about things that other people don't pay much attention to. For instance, our tongues, elbows, water coming out of a water faucet ... A writer's job is to make the ordinary come alive.” (99)
• “When you want to write in a certain form ... read a lot of writing in that form.” (124)
• “The world is not the way we think it is ... solid and structured and forever.” (128)
• “We don’t actually know when we will die.” (128)
• “If only one line in a poem has energy, then cut the rest out.” (159) 
• “Anything we fully do is an alone journey.” (169)
• “The world is not the way we think it is ... solid and structured and forever.” (128)

February 2026; 170 pages

Published in 1986 in the USA by Shambhala publications

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Names" by Florence Knapp

 The prologue shows Cora going to register the birth of her newborn son. What should she call him? Her husband insists on Gordon, his name and, by tradition, the name of first-born boys in their family. But Cora favours Julian and her young daughter Maia suggests Bear. This is a high-stakes decision because Cora's husband is a man who controls his family by physically beating his wife. The rest of the novel follows Bear, Julian and Gordon in their separate lives.

At first I thought that this took the theory of nominative determinism to extremes (I myself am called a name that is not on my original birth certificate and I don't believe it has had a significant effect on my life). But actually this is more about the butterfly effect, the theory that a small change has repercussions that cascade through time. So that the husband's different reactions to his son's name is what drives the story.

I loved the Prologue because of the wonderful descriptions of a storm and its aftermath:

• “Outside, gusts lever at the fir trees behind the house and burst down the side passage to hurl themselves at the gate. Inside, too, worries skitter and eddy.” (Prologue)
• “Cora feels a draft of cold air, as though it's attached itself to his clothing and followed him up the stairs.” (Prologue)
• “The sounds of the storm meter out the minutes of night unravelling into day.” (Prologue)
• “A few doors up, a man's shirt is caught on a privet hedge, pegs still pinched at its shoulders.” (Prologue)

Wow! I thought. If it continues like this, I'm going to love it.

But I was swiftly disillusioned. My main problem was with the antagonist, the husband. He was a monster, he was an ogre, he was a dragon, he was Mr Hyde (although professionally he was Dr Jekyll), he was the embodiment of evil. He was said to be a wonderful GP although this was hard to believe because he was painted so black in his domestic life. For me, he felt two dimensional. There was little explanation for his wickedness, other than the fact that his neurosurgeon father was disappointed in him for becoming a GP. There was negligible exploration of his character; he was always a symbol of the very real problem of domestic abuse. I wondered whether the author realised his fundamental implausibility which was why he was swiftly sidelined in two of the three ensuing narratives, becoming a menacing bogeyman. In short, I felt that this was an issue-driven novel rather than about a character.

I also had problems with the structure of the novel, a sort of bildungsroman triptych. It is divided into seven year sections and further divided into subsections, each bearing the name of the boy (Bear, Julian or Gordon) whose story we are following. These sections are further divided so that the story is told from the limited third person perspective of the principal characters, mostly Cora, Maia and the boy. The present tense is used. This means that the reader is required to follow three storylines in which many of the characters (not just the major characters but also some of the minor ones) reappear but with different trajectories. I sometimes struggled to remember, for example, who Maia was involved with in this particular story, and whether a particular incident belonged to the storyline of Bear, Julian or Gordon.

This division of the narrative into three also meant that the three different plots become more prominent, and the fact that we were following at least five major characters left the author little time to develop them as characters.

Nevertheless, I developed a degree of empathy for at least two of the sons and there were a couple of lump-in-the-throat moments. So the novel was a success in those terms. I just felt it could have been more.

Selected quotes:

• “Sometimes big men feel small inside.” (Prologue)
• “He remembers his father's hands on the steering wheel, big and firm, a smattering of hair on the backs of them.” (1994; Julian)
• “Mr Radley chats to Maia, but his eyes are drawn back to his wife as though she is a slice of chocolate cake and he is politely waiting for the moment when Maia leaves, and he will be free to tuck in.” (1994; Gordon)
• “Julian can almost hear the sadness in her footsteps as she retreats down the hall.” (2001; Julian)

I suspect this will be popular with those who like their novels to be about important issues and are less worried about character development.

February 2026;343 pages

Published by Phoenix Books in 2025.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

I suspect that one of the inspirations behind this book is the novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

"Do What Thou Wilt" by Aleister Crowley

 

A biography of Aleister Crowley, creator of the Thelema rite of ceremonial magic, dubbed by the British press: the most evil man in the world.

He was born in 1875; his father was a Plymouth Brethren preacher who died when Aleister was 11. The boy was eventually inherit sufficient money not to need to work, but he spent his fortune pursuing his dreams: mountaineering (he attempted Kanchenjunga), poetry (almost all through paid-for publishing) and magic. Throughout his life he had sex, sometimes under the guise of sexual magic, with both male and female partners, fathering at least three daughters, two of whom died very young, and a son. His publications included erotic verse and books of magic. He founded the religion of Thelema whose motto was 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law' and set up a temple on Sicily where he would instruct disciples until he was banished by Mussolini's police.

In some ways, the man's life is summarised on page 2: “A spoiled scion of a wealthy Victorian family, who embodied many of the worst John Bull racial and social prejudices of his upper class contemporaries, a blisteringly arrogant opportunist who took financial and psychological advantage of his admirers, an unadmiring and even vicious judge of most of his contemporaries, a sensualist who relished sex in all forms, a hubristic experiment in drugs who was addicted to heroin for the last twenty-five years of his life.”

The problem with writing a biography of a man like this is that the reader quickly becomes wearied of the details of yet another sexual partner, yet another magical rite, and yet another publication. Oh, he's fallen out with somebody else. The book itself didn't make things better by the use of long chapters whose contents were sometimes so diverse that I wondered whether they had a theme, other than covering another few years of Crowley's life. 

Perhaps the most interesting thing was the long list of people I would have thought respectable who participated in magical rites (and sometimes had sex) with him. He was involved with the mystical order of the Golden Dawn, of which Yeats was also a member. One of his big mates Allan Bennett (another one) went on to become a Buddhist monk and edited the journal of the International Buddhist society. Frederick Charles Fuller was “one of the premier military theorists of all time” yet befriended Crowley for four years (though he was eecentric, later joining the British Union of Fascists, and attending Hitler’s 50th birthday celebrations in April 1939). Victor Neuberg, disciple and gay partner, later became a literary reviewer and discovered Dylan Thomas. Other acquaintances included Dennis Wheatley, Dion Fortune, Tom Driberg and Somerset Maugham (who based his novel 'The Magician' on Crowley.

The most shocking moment came when he was the leader of the Kanchenjunga expedition and three climbers, together with three porters mutinied and left camp. On the descent they triggered an avalanche which buried and killed one of the climbers and all three porters. The next day Crowley left the mountain, passing the ongoing rescue attempts without offering his help, and returned to England. The letters he wrote to the papers to justify himself led to widespread condemnation and the end of his mountaineering career. 

He died in a guesthouse in Hastings.

There is one mistake, I think. The Book of Four, published as a square, was priced at four groats. Sutin mistakenly equates this to a shilling but a groat was 4d and therefore 4 groats = 1/4d.

Selected quotes: 

• “I reached a point where my physical reflection in a mirror became faint and flickering. It gave very much the effect of the interrupted images of the cinematograph in its early days. ... “the real secret of invisibility is not concerned with the laws of optics at all; the trick is to prevent people noticing you when they would normally do so.” (Ch 3)
• “The assignment of a governing true will to an entire gender seems to contradict the sense of self-discovery that lies at the heart of Thelema.” (132)
• “The aged god Saturn can only counsel despair; Jupiter is impotent; Mars is beset by lust and lacking in wisdom; Apollo the Sun is slain because he cannot harmonize the good and even natures that battle within him; Venus lovingly mourns Apollo but her sorrow lacks redemptive force; Mercury possesses the seeds of magical wisdom, but he can no longer server psychopomp to humankind.” (Ch 6) 
• “The psychological task of concluding his ‘Autohagiography’ ... must have been severe. he had lost both his Abbey and his reputation and no longer had a publisher for the massive work on which he laboured. The tone of the ‘Confessions’ reveals none of this - throughout, it is all but unremitting in its braggadocio.” (Ch 9)
• “Magick is the Science and Art of Causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” (Ch 9)

February 2026; 419 pages

Published by St Martin's Press, New York

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"To Love and Be Wise" by Josephine Tey

 Salcott St Mary is an English village beloved by writers: it is an artist's colony containing three novelists, a broadcaster, a playwright, a dancer,  and an actress. Enter Leslie Searle, an amazingly good-looking photographer from the USA and suddenly the heads of all the women are turned and the men become jealous. Then he vanishes and Inspector Alan Grant from Scotland Yard is called in to investigate.

It's a delightful mystery of the classic kind with a clever solution, written in Tey's elegant if slightly dated style. Page-turner? I read it in just over a day.

Selected quotes:

• "Grant paused to look at the yelling crowd asparagus-packed into the long Georgian room." (Ch 1)
• "His actor's need to be liked was stronger than his resentment, and he was putting forth all his charm." (Ch 4)
• "It was difficult to decide how much of the facade was barricade and howe much was mere poster-hoarding." (Ch 11)
• "You commit murder because you are one-idead. Or have become one-idead. As long as you have a variety of interests you can't care about any one of them to the point of murder. It is when you have all your eggs in the same basket, or only one egg left in the basket, that you lose your sense of proportion." (Ch 13)

Interesting side-note: apparently in those days people "watched" radio plays.

A very enjoyable read, recommended for readers of classic crime.

February 2026; 256 pages

• First published by Peter Davies in 1950
• My paperback version issued by Arrow Books 

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Josephine Tey crime novels:

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

"Villette" by Charlotte Bronte

A preposterous plot told by the world's most miserable narrator in prolix and hysterical language. And French.

Imagine that when you are young you live for several months with your godmother and her son and another girl and then, when you have grown up, you meet the son again, over several months repeatedly, working closely with him, and you fail to recognise him. Seems unlikely? Not only does this plot point happen but, a little later, you meet the girl you lived with and fail to recognise her! And then you meet a priest a second time and fail to recognise him! Same unlikely plot point in triplicate. It has been pointed out to me that it is implicitly suggested that narrator Lucy Snow does recognise Dr John Graham (although not immediately, because it is dark, and not explicitly later because she is unwell). Reasons were advanced for her failing to recognise him, and Paulina, and the Catholic priest. Nevertheless, this is fundamentally a plot device designed to keep the reader guessing and curious and it is bizarre that Bronte should have used the same dvice three times within the same novel.

Add the ghost of a nun and another nun whose death has caused one of the most unlikely love objects in fiction to dedicate himself to chastity.

These are the best bits of a plot that often just rambles. I get that the story is based upon the author's early life as a teacher in Brussels but novels are different from memoirs in that a novel is supposed to have a structure.

Add to that a narrator who is dedicated to being a martyr. Apparently she is a grown woman before she first encounters a mirror. She reflects (pun intended, sorry): “Thus for the first, and perhaps only time in my life, I enjoyed the ‘giftie’ of seeing myself as others see me. No need to dwell on the result. It brought a jar of discord, a pang of regret; it was not flattering, yet, after all, I ought to be thankful; it might have been worse.” (Ch 20) This 'it might have been worse' seems to sum up her victim's attitude to life. “I see that a great many men, and more women, hold their span of life on conditions of denial and privation. I find no reason why I should be one of the few favoured.” (Ch 31)

But this makes her incredibly bitter. I noted as early as chapter 14 that she is dreadfully censorious, no wonder she has no friends. Later she acquires friends who for some unfathomable reason seem to like her even as she disapproves of them. Basically, if they are happy she assumes they must be shallow. And goodness help them if they happen to be: 

• Royal: “Her features, though distinguished enough, were too suggestive of reigning dynasties and royal lines to give unqualified pleasure.” (Ch 20)
• Irish: “She might possibly have been a hanger-on, nurse, fosterer, or washer-woman, in some Irish family: she spoke a smothered towel, curiously overlaid with mincing cockney inflections.” (Ch 8) 

As for the Roman Catholics! This self-righteous prig listens to readings from a book containing “tales of moral martyrdom inflicted by Rome; the dread boasts are confessors, who had wickedly abused their office, trampling to deep degradation high-born ladies, making of countesses and princesses the most tormented slaves under the sun. Stories like that of Conrad and Elizabeth of Hungary, recurred again and again, with all its dreadful viciousness, sickening tyranny and black impiety: tales that were nightmares of oppression, privation and agony.” She believes RC priests are laying fiendish plans to entrap her into their religion which, she assumes, is akin to devil worship.

Add one of my pet hates, passages in a foreign language which are untranslated, as if the author is sneering at those of us whose French is sufficient for a few words here and there but not for whole paragraphs. I undertstand that thi is a way of adding verisimilitude but the problem is that if the reader fails to understand something they will fear that what they don't know is crucial to the plot. If they care about the plot. The other members of my reading group were almost unanimous in disliking this feature of the novel. Why don't modern editors not add translations in footnotes (NOT endnotes)?

Add the usual corkscrewed sentences of Victorian prose: 

• "no furrowed face of adult exile, longing for Europe at Europe's antipodes, ever bore more legibly the signs of homesickness than did her infant visage." (Ch 2)
• “And he mentioned a name that thrilled me - a name that, in those days, thrilled Europe. It is hushed now: its once restless echoes are all still; she who bore it went years ago to her rest: night and oblivion long since closed above her; but then her day - a day of Sirius - stood at its full height, light, and fervour.” (Ch 23)

Over 500 pages of small print.

Reader, I hated this book.

I understood more about the book following the discussion in my reading group. The member who chose the book said that it was one she reread every decade and it always seemed to bring a fresh perspective to her reading. This, she rightfully suggested, is the hallmark of a classic. 

Another member pointed out that the first person perspective, including interior monologue, is unusual in Victorian novels (although there are plenty of precedents, including Bronte's own Jane Eyre (1847), David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens, not to mention the pre-Victorian novels Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722) by Daniel Defoe, Tristram Shandy (1759) by Lawrence Sterne and the Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) by Goethe). He also suggested that the ambiguous ending was a literary first. These characteristics, he felt, suggested that Villette is a ground-breaking, almost modern work. 

This makes Villette a more interesting read although still not, for me, entertaining.

Selected quotes:

• “Epidemic diseases, I believed, were often heralded by a gasping, sobbing, tormented, long-lamenting east wind.” (Ch 4)
• “What honest man on being casually taken for a housebreaker, does not feel rather tickled than vexed at the mistake?” (Ch 10)
• “Take up that pity ... in both hands, as you might a little callow gosling squattering out of bounds without leave.” (Ch 25)

February 2026; 507 pages

First published in 1853

My Penguin Popular Classics paperback was issued in 1994

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

According to a post in Reddit, Lucy Snow, the heroine of Villette, is the female equivalent of a Byronic hero. That completely passed me by. Perhaps they meant the antithesis.

"The Franchise Affair" by Josephine Tey

An elderly woman and her middle-aged daughter are accused of having abducted and beaten a girl who went missing from her home for four weeks. The girl is able to describe aspects of her imprisonment that match the details of a house she has supposedly never seen. Can a middle-aged solicitor with no experience in criminal cases prove that the girl is lying?

The crime mystery novel was rated as 11th best of all time by the Crime Writers' Association.

The story is based on the case of Elizabeth Canning, a girl who went missing in January 1753 and accused two women of abducting her. 

It is an enjoyable read; the mystery plot parallelling the understated romance between the solicitor and the younger of his clients. All the characters are carefully drawn although my favourite is the old lady. The one aspect that didn't work for me - but this is common to many novels of this period - is the concept that baby-blue eyes mean one is over-sexed, or that eyes set far apart make one a liar. Such ability to read character from a face seem to be persistent fossils of phrenology and about as reliable. If criminals all looked the same, wouldn't the job of the police be so much easier?

Selected quotes:

• “Childhood’s attitude of something-wonderful-tomorrow persisted subconsciously in a man as long as it was capable of realization, and it was only after forty, when it became unlikely of fulfillment, that it obtruded itself into conscious thought, a lost piece of childhood crying for attention.” (Ch 1)
• “Bert deserved better out of life than a good-time wife and a cupboard-love kid.” (Ch 8)
• “‘Haven’t you got a wife?’ Marion asked. ‘Not of my own,’ Stanley said demurely. (Ch 12)
• “They say that horse sense is the instinct that keeps horses from betting on men.” (Ch 14)

January 2026; 254 pages

First published by Peter Davies in 1948

My Penguin paperback was issued in 1985

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Josephine Tey crime novels:

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