"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins

Fifty years old this year, this masterclass on the role of the gene in Darwinian evolution is a classic not just because of the eye-opening revelations of its arguments but also because they are clearly explained in easy-to-read and engaging prose. 

Dawkins thesis is that organisms - you and me, all other animals, including insects, plants and fungi and bacteria, all living things - are 'survival machines' for more-or-less immortal 'replicators' (genes). He suggests that once upon a time there were chemicals in a soup. Some were more stable than others. And just like crystals form by atoms joining together at the behest of their chemistry, so 'replicators' formed at the behest of theirs, but these didn't simply accumulate but formed and then split so their numbers increased. The most successful (those that lasted longest, or replicated fastest, or had greatest copying-fidelity) increased in number at the expense of the least successful. Then some developed protective protein sheaths and became cells.

These genes are the only thing about you that is more or less immortal;  some of them have been going for millions of years, swapping from one body to another. Many of them collaborate to develop embryos and bodies and continue to collaborate as all your cells work together to keep you alive; they collaborate because their only path to immortality is through your sperm or eggs. Other genes (eg those in bacterial infections) don't collaborate because they can hop from body to body in other ways (sneezes, touches etc) so they don't have to wait for the host to reproduce. Still other genes may be parasitic: much of your DNA is 'junk' but it still gets replicated. 

He goes on to explain things such as altruism (an evolutionary successful strategy if the genes of a lot of your relatives are preserved through your self-sacrifice) and how an evolutionary stable strategy can lead to a population of mixed doves and hawks (too many hawks would kill one another while a population of mostly doves would be easily exploited by a few rogue hawks). He shows why parents might kill off their own runt children in order that more of their children survive and why fathers are more likely to leave their children than mothers are (and the advantages for a female in playing hard to get). 

He also introduces the idea of memes and points out that a successful meme might be a more likely path to immortality than a gene.

I found this book enlightening and very easy to read. I'm sure that some of the science has dated (and I would recommend reading about epigenetics in How Life Works by Phillip Ball) but it is still eye-opening and educational. A classic!

Selected quotes:

• “We, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world.” (Ch 1)
• “I know I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case. ... unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it being true.” (Ch 1)
• “Before the coming of life on Earth, some rudimentary evolution of molecules could have occurred by ordinary processes of physics and chemistry.” (Ch 2)
• “No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means.” (Ch 3)
• “Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes.” (Ch 3) 
• "The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.” (Ch 3)
• “A caterpillar and the butterfly it turns into have exactly the same set of genes.” (Ch 3)
• “It is often possible to picture males as high-stakes, high-risk gamblers and females as safe investors.” (Ch 4)
• “All animal communication contains an element of deception right from the start, because all animal interactions involve at least some conflict of interest.” (Ch 4)
• “To a blackbird, a mole may be a competitor, but it is not nearly so important a competitor as another blackbird.” (Ch 5
• “It is a simple logical truth that, short of mass immigration into space. with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second, uncontrolled birth rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death rates.” (Ch 7)
• “Contraception is sometimes attacked as ‘unnatural’. So it is, very unnatural. The trouble is, so is the welfare state. I think that most of us believe the welfare state is highly desirable. But you cannot have an unnatural welfare state, unless you also have a natural birth control; otherwise, the end result will be misery even greater than that which obtains in nature. The welfare state is perhaps the greatest altruistic system the animal kingdom has ever known. But any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.” (Ch 7)
• “When lemmings flood in their millions away from the centre of a population explosion, they are not doing it in order to reduce the density of the area they leave behind! They are seeking, every selfish one of them, a less crowded place in which to live.” (Ch 7)
• “There is bound to be variation in the population of males in their predisposition to be faithful husbands. If females could recognize such qualities in advance, they could benefit themselves by choosing males possessing them. One way for a female to do this is to play hard to get for a long time ... Any male who is not patient enough to wait until the female eventually consents to copulate is not likely to be a good bet as a faithful husband.” (Ch 9)
• “Language seems to ‘evolve’ by non-genetic means, and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution.” (Ch 11)
• “When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation.” (Ch 11)
• “When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. ...But as each generation passes, the contribution of your genes is halved. It does not take long to reach negligible proportions ... We should not seek immortality in reproduction. But if you contribute to the world's culture ... it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. ... The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus, and Marconi are still going strong.” (Ch 11)
• "It does not seem ever to have been satisfactory answered why the two first operational atomic bombs were used ... to destroy two cities instead of being deployed in the equivalent of spectacularly shooting out candles.” (Ch 12)

June 2026; 357 pages
Originally published by the Oxford University Press in 1976
My 40th anniversary edition was issued in paperback by the OUP in 2016

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Upperdown" by David Brennan

The first thing you notice is the enormously distinctive narrative voice, characterised by expressions such as “I knows I ...” and “I wonders I” in which the first person appears both before and after the verb, and as represented in the first few lines: “I gets up and cranks the whistling tune to the kettle and the bell of a broken belly. Job is physicist. Calculating the curvature of butterfly wings and the amount of resolution needed to determine the thickness of nothing. I knows the flow. At times I can see it, smell it, hear it whispering little trickies in me ears, almost lick the tongue with it, but I can’t capture it.” (Ch 1) The first person present tense narrator is a Professor of Physics on an extended sabbatical, endeavouring to prove the Riemann hypothesis (about a mathematical function that links to the distribution of prime numbers) from the perspective of quantum physics. He doesn’t seem to do much maths (although prime numbers haunt him and there is a hint of the Konigsberg Bridge problem in the geography of the town). Instead, he eats eggs (buying 24, discarding one and cooking a job lot of 23), and rambles around Upperdown in the company of Rex, his three-legged dog, meeting Dickensian characters such as Butcher Morley.

Music is important, and not just for the talented Piano Man. There’s also Petronius O’Grady, the supremely cacophonous busker, and C-flat Rebecca who strums a guitar. The Professor has perfect pitch and identifies the key signature of every sound he hears, from birdsong to busker. His favourite expression is “Fiddle dai fiddle day fiddle day di oh.” But he has secrets, including his brother, his sister and his mother.

The inciting incident is his meeting with the Piano Man, a ragamuffin musician dressed in a robe covered in strange mystical and mathematical symbols. The reader swiftly identifies this character as the pied Piper, more so when he rids the town of its rats. The children start to disappear.

The Professor is immediately convinced the Piano Man is a bad ‘un, a feeling intensified when Danny the homeless town drunk informs the professor that the Piano Man has been having sex with Beatrice Nolan whom the Professor is in love with (but he is too cowardly to declare himself). Seeking evidence, the Professor picks up a photograph that has dropped from the Piano Man’s pocket. This becomes the focus of one of the demands of the Piano Man after the children have started to go missing.

The plot then becomes a murder mystery, the suspects including the Piano Man, the beer-swilling red-faced, heading-for-a-heart-attack Butcher of Upperdown, the Professor himself, his brother Ned, Noddy the village idiot, and, perhaps, the Doll Man. Following the genre, we now discover more about the background of the Piano Man and the Professor.

Encountering Danny’s dead body on the riverside, the Professor loses control and smashes the corpses face in with a rock. He then reports the body to the police, which makes detective ‘Mad’ Mulligan (whose investigative strategy reminded me of Porfiry Petrovich from Crime and Punishment) suspect him.

The missing children send the town into a self-destructive frenzy which centres on two town meetings, the second followed by a pagan sacrifice and a full-scale riot. Paranoia rules. Mirroring the breakdown of order in the town is the increasing chaos in the Professor's mind, which leads to violence and a dramatic conclusion.

It's a book about the descent into the madness which lurks in each of us, in our society. Getting rid of the rats seems to trigger the release of this suppressed madness. The characters, all of whom have wonderful names (Bat Hayes the barber, Rashers Iscariot the hardware store owner, Mayor Bullwhip, Peeler Quirk the banker...) are magnificent grotesques, some of whom have intriguing complexities. The plot is perfectly paced with key turning points, the mystery is intriguing and there are hugely original and yet precise descriptions:

• “Me left hand tremors slightly, rippled by the waves and weight of existence. An ancient drumbeat resonates in the tap dripping.” (Ch 1)
• “The heat is already rising like a thick blanket of wet hell.” (Ch 1)
• “I sees row of houses after rows of houses like cabbages planted in a field for giants.” (Ch 1)
• “Morley, the mouth of a moon the belly of a hippopotamus” (Ch 1)
• “The day is hot like I’m a microbe on the hot wet tongue of a cow.” (Ch 2)
• “Someone else screams, and then another, like a train of misery leaving the station.” (Ch 3)
• “Giant mechanical beasts lumbering awkwardly like drunk insects. They’re dismantling in intricate dance patterns, gnawing away at the bones, hungry for the marrow within. Machines to rip and pull. Machines to grind, crush and squash.” (Ch 4)

This is a really well written book in so many ways, but the star is the prose.

Selected quotes:

• “Been in since yesterday. Stranger in a stranger’s land with money big and talk small. Don’t know what way he’ s cut. ... The get up on him, like he’s the very Jack O Diamonds walked right off the card and into the café. ... A man with a devil inside him. Bouncing to get out. Dancing to get up and howling to get even.” (Ch 1)
• “The whole of mankind is in the cusp of my hands and I touches the ivory keys and tempts them into their own sins and salvations and I deliver them to the gates of their own shortcomings, the banks of their own drowning, if you will.” (Ch 1)
• “As we walk I talks to me mind of the past. All the years seem to be culminating and pressing down upon me. Atlas grew to love his burden. What was he without his burden or I mine?” (Ch 1)
• “Where but are the answers you seeks but in the very places you fears to look.” (Ch 1)
• “If thine eye offends thee pluck it out, yes, pluck it out like you’s pulling onions out of the soil.” (Ch 1)
• “I explores. I goes into room after room and some is dark and some is bright but I have no way of turning on the light. Each room has its own smell its own taste and its own secrets. Each room is connected to every other room but some rooms is more connected. Each room has its own manipulation its own irregular number of windows and sometimes the curtains is closed and sometimes they’s open. I moves from room to room. Press to press. Cupboard to cupboard and corner to corner. I lies down and tries to pull meself along like a serpent to see things from a different perspective. I moves up the stairs. Crawling sometimes hopping at others. When I enters the room I goes under the beds. I licks the walls. I beat my head off them. I put me fists through the windows. I liquefy and pour meself into the sink and travel through the pipes looking for a colour to cling to. I goes into the electric cables and travel light-speed round the house and out the flashbulbs and still me cannot find the essence of it. The truth of it. The taste of it. The flower of it. The faith of it.” (Ch 1) A real foreshadowing of the madness to come.
• “Some things are just unknowable. And even if you know them then you cannot find words to express them. You cannot find notes to play them. They’s in between the white and black keys, down in the dust filled spaces of black matter.” (Ch 1)
• “At night the smells intensify and I pass from one sphere of odor into another; from chips boiling in vats of fat, to the smell of the brewery wafting out malty yeast, to the vomit particles of a footpath drunk” (Ch 1)
• “You might think that a bell has just a single note but hidden in layers are five distinct notes. The Nominal, an octave higher and normally assigned as the pitch of the bell, the Hum, an octave lower, the Tierce, a minor third which gives a church bell its plaintive sound and the Quint, a perfect fifth. In every bell all five notes must be in accurate tune with the five notes of every other bell.” (Ch 1)
• “The women’s all floating round him like butterflies in heat” (Ch 2)
• “I thinks I she the most beautiful creature ever to walk the long squawky road of existence.” (Ch 2) Isn't that amazing? It starts off as a ho-hum cliche and then you hit "squawky road"!
• “It’s when we wake in the middle of the night that the truth lays itself bare before our very eyes. What we choose to do with it is then up to us.” (Ch 2)
• “I focuses on me breathing like a lantern swinging in the arch of π.” (Ch 3)
• “I not like noise. No, never have. The key is destroyed” (Ch 3)
• “There seems to be in existences such a law, and I’ve seen it confirmed by my own eyes, and the law of which I speak is this. If the help I gives is not returned then bad things happens” (Ch 3)
• “We’s like snowflakes whistling in the wind waiting to melt into nothingness.” (Ch 4)
• “She’s an awful woman for the talking. She can’t stop. If she stops she’ll drop dead on the floor. She’s bursting with an energy so full that indeed some have remarked that to keep herself going she usurps the energy of those around her.” (Ch 4)
• “Ned the kind a man who think everybody owe him something and him never give nothing but trouble in return.” (Ch 4)
• “E flat major speaks the morning, mingled in the rays of sun and the rakey wind which drives across this land and brings down upon Upperdown the brunt of its fury.” (Ch 4)
• “I looks down at me ill-fitting trousers, stained in patterns random, and I looks at me worn shoes and I thinks I should be mounted on a wooden cross and hung out in a field of turnips to scare away the crows.” (Ch 4)
• “Be I the ass pulling the cart with the carrot dangling in front of him? Still, I is happy with the sight of the carrot and the smell of it. Does it not make the journeys a little more bearable?” (Ch 5)
• “Tonight I hears the evening creak.” (Ch 5)

Easy to read, enjoyable and memorable. I shall be reading more by this author soon.

June 2026; 

Published by epoque press in 2019

I read the kindle edition

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"John the Pupil" by David Flusfeder

 This novel purports to be a fragmentary chronicle, assembled from scraps of parchment, recording the journey taken by the eponymous John, a pupil of the Franciscan monk Roger Bacon, with two other young monks Andrew and Bernard, to carry Bacon's Great Work to Pope Clement IV.

It's a historical novel. Bacon (c 1219 - c 1292), a proto-scientist who studied, amongst many other things, lenses and gunpowder, really did send his Opus Maior to Clement in either 1267 or 1268. Other characters are also historical, including nobleman Cavalcante de Cavalcanti and his son Guido who was a part-time poet and a friend of Dante Aligheri. Other characters are fictional. 

The book attempts to add verisimilitude with a 'Note on the Text' at the start, describing how the chronicle was discovered, reassembled and translated, and endnotes which, inter alia, cast doubt on some aspects of the text (is it a contemporary diary or was it written later, or worse ...). For example, on p52 (St Hubert's Day) John states "In such a way did we affect our first escape from Simeon the Palmer"; had this been written at the time he would not have known it would be the first escape. 

The main text starts with an ellipsis as though the text is incomplete; this is repeated at times. Many of the sections give a potted biography of the saint on whose days they were written, a conceit I found a little wearisome as it was repeatedly repeated.

It is structured as a Hero's Journey. John, who is clever, travels with Andrew who is beautiful and Bernard who is strong. They encounter temptations (alcohol, women, a garden paradise) and dangers. They are befriended and betrayed. Bandits try to steal their possessions, including the book. Like all good heroes on their journey, they have to use their gifts in order to overcome these trials. 

There is a huge amount of historical research which makes it interesting for a student of that period. As the endnotes point out: "All historical novels are failures or, at best, metaphors, dressing up the present day in anachronistic disguise." (p 212)

It is a triumph of re-creation. But, in the end, it stands and falls as a novel on whether you empathise with John and his mates and you like the buddy-journey sort of tale. 

Selected quotes:

• "Brother Bernard ... is always suspicious, he would interrogate the motives on an angel" (St Hubert's Day, p 43)
• "Beauty speaks to beauty." (St Edgar's Day, p 62)
• "The Devil tempts only the very good and the very bad." (St Ephrem's Day, p 70)
• "They had a kind of priest among them, a man with a wildness about him, as if he had stared for too long into a consuming fire." (St Silverius's Day, p 79)
• "To go to Rome, much labour, little profit." (St Bartholomew's Day, p 85)
• "Lines rounden, loop, droop, curve." (St John the Baptist's Day, p 88)
• "You are the seal of the image of God, full of wisdom and perefect in beauty." (St Swithin's Day, p 96)
• "Hunger is too hard a stepmother to learning." (St Swithin's Day, p 97)
• "We walked towards the mountains and it was as if they refused us. They grew no larger, although it appeared to me that we were getting smaller." (St Thomas of Canterbury's Day, p 100)
• "Pope Clement, in a larger voice than I would have thought his body could contain, invited me to stand." (St Tiburtius's Day, p 188)
• "My master has enumerated some of the accidents [Flusfeder uses words in their mediaeval meaning] of old age, grey hair and pallor and wrinkled skin and excess mucus and stinking stool, the sickly bleariness of eyes, low blood and low spirits, crabbiness and absent-mindedness, and Pope Clement seems to exhibit them all." (St Tiburtius's Day, p 196)
• "Pope Clement's voice, profound and wise, stepping out the words like a traveller choosing where to place the stones to make a path over the river." (St Tiburtius's Day, p 197)

Synopsis (spoiler alerts)

John and his companions beautiful Andrew and strong Bernard are sent by Roger Bacon to walk from Oxford to Viterbus in Italy carrying Bacon's book to the Pope. On the way they are waylaid by a 'pilgrim for hire' whose attempt to steal the book is confounded, firstly by John demonstrating a burning glass and secondly by the gunpowder in a decoy box exploding. Other temptations include Bernard getting drunk in Paris and Andrew being bedded by a serving wench. John is tempted by Father Gabriel, a wise priest who has a paradisaical garden and uses herbs to help the sick; he urges John to stay. The trio fall out among themselves: John is upset when Andrew and Bernard reveal they have read his 'diary'; they are upset he hasn't been upfront about their task, Bernard steals ink and parchment in order to do drawings of mythical beasts. Finally they become the guests of a Guelph nobleman who sets John up as a healer and Bernard as a jeweller. Only John and Andrew leave. They then encounter Daniel, another friar from their monastery, who has been sent by Bacon with a smaller version of the Great Work; Daniel is martyred by bandits which enables John to escape. Finally, all alone, he comes to Rome and meets the Pope. The burning lens demonstration fails to work but Clement is delighted when he discovers the lens can be used to correct his failing eyesight and help him to read again. Finally, John decides not to hand the book over.

David Flusfeder has also written Something Might Fall

June 2026; 220 pages
First published by Fourth Estate in 2014
My paperback edition was issued in 2015

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Strange Angel" by George Pendle

 This is a biography of American rocket pioneer Jack Parsons, whose actual first name was Marvel.

Inspired by science fiction, Parsons dreamed of constructing a rocket that would travel to the moon. But this was in the 1930s, after his wealthy grandparents had lost their fortune in the Wall Street crash and his privileged upbringing on Orange Grove Avenue ('millionaire's row') in Pasadena had come to an end. And, at the time, when aeroplanes were still in their glamorous infancy, rocketry did not exist outside a handful of amateur eccentrics. 

Not being able to afford a university education, Parsons began working in explosives for mining companies. Then he teamed up with schoolfriend Ed Forman, who was an engineer equally lacking in tertiary qualifications, and maths graduate Frank Molina, to persuade CalTech professor Theodore von Karman (an aerodynamicist who had explained the collpase of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge) to let them use CalTech facilities to test rocket motors, although they still had to fund the experiments themselves. They began working with the military who wanted to add jets to help bombers achieve take-off speeds on shorter runways. But they had problems with the powder fuel: there were always cracks between the clumps of powder grain so burning was uneven. After watching workmen laying molten asphalt on a road, Parsons made his breakthrough and turned the powder into tar which could be poured into the rocket engines. The 'Suicide Squad' founded NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the company Aerojet which still sends rockets into outer space.

Parsons was increasingly interested in magic and became the leader of the Agape Lodge in LA, a group following the Thelema teachings of occultist Aleister Crowley (whose biography Do What Thou Wilt by Lawrence Smith I read recently). Parsons moved the group to a large house on Orange Grove Avenue which he had bought and began performing sex magick ceremonies. According to this book, L Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, moved in and stole Parsons's girlfirend (but Parsons, psychologically dominated by Hubbard, put up with it). In the end it all went wrong and Parsons, having lost most of his money in a failed business venture with Hubbard, went back to making explosives. He blew himself up.

This was a brilliantly written book. I loved the way it clothed its story, by telling us the background: LA in the 1920s, a mix of “evangelists like Aimee Semple McPherson ... performing exorcisms over the new medium of radio ... while the social campaigner and writer Upton Sinclair was arrested for reading the First Amendment of the United States Constitution (the right to freedom of expression) in public." (Prologue). The core rocketeers, a group of young men, working like dogs and risking their lives for their passion, seem just like the young geeks who founded Google and facebook and Microsoft and the other IT start-ups of the internet revolution, or like rock musicians hoping to be big. And the 'also starring' cast has a host of other names such as Suicide Squad members Apollo Smith whose father had given his sisters the names Diana and Athena, his brothers the names Hermes and Orpheus, and the dog was called Cerberus and Tsien who “was descended from the tenth-century emperor Qian Liu Tsien", science fiction writers like Robert Heinlein, E E 'Doc' Smith, L Sprague de Camp and L Ron Hubbard, Jack Cornog who first isolated tritium, and  rocket pioneer Robert Goddard who lived in Roswell, New Mexico, 

Selected quotes:

• “John Whiteside Parsons had gone from being a young genius dead before his time to the most overworked, hackneyed, science fiction cliche of them all." (Prologue)
• “The world is drowning - that is exactly why it will clutch at a straw.” (Ch 6, quoting Crowley)
• “Magic, like science, was an attempt to control events by performing technical acts.” (Ch 6)
• “Bob Cornog remembered stumbling into Parsons’ room one morning to find Hubbard and Betty entwined, ‘like a starfish on a clam’.” (Ch 11)
• “The Parsonage, as it had come to be called, had briefly been an adult playground saturated with philosophical hopes and pungent romanticism, fruit brandies and fencing, bohemians and scientists, poetry and rockets.” (Ch 11)

A fascinating story told by a born storyteller.

June 2026; 307 pages
First published in the USA by Harcourt in 2005
My paperback edition was issued in the UK by Weidenfield and Nicholson in 2006

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Ivanhoe" by Walter Scott

This is perhaps the most celebrated novel by an author who was a huge best-seller in his time and respected by Jane Austen, George Eliot and Charles Dickens among others.

It belongs to the now-outdated 'gadzooks' style of historical fiction with lots of 'thous', 'haths' and 'yes' etc. I suppose that created verisimilitude in those days but it sounds forced and inauthentic to my ears. Modern historical novelists, such as Ken Follett, in The Pillars of the Earth, avoid this. But you can say for Scott, who was one of the pioneers of historical fiction, that he did it better than some of his later imitators, such as Charles Kingsley in Hereward the Wake.

It is told in the 3rd person omniscient style, past tense, and framed as a story, allowing scope for the author to interject, for example: “His furred cloak and high cap, seen by the wiry and broken light, would have afforded a study for Rembrandt, had that celebrated painter existed at the period.” (Ch 22) He also bids for verisimilitude by citing his sources. For example, in chapter 24 he mentions both the Anglo-Saxon chronicle and the Wardour manuscript as sources. The latter, however, is fictional, Wardour being a character in The Antiquary, published 4 years before Ivanhoe).

He has clearly done a significant amount of historical research. This is displayed as early as  chapter one, when Wamba points out that Saxons talk of swine and oxen because they farm the animals, while the Normans use the words pork and beef when they eat the meat. Given how early this was written, I was impressed with how accurate Scott seemed to be, although there are some discrepancies and inconsistencies, in particular with dynastic relationships, where, for example, great uncles and prescribed and grandfathers and grandfathers as fathers.

In terms of the plot, it is a cracking yarn, a classic adventure story. It includes a jousting and melee tournament with not one, but two, incognito knights who, naturally, defeat all comers. It includes outlaws waylaying travellers in the forest, an attempt at torture in a castle dungeon, the siege of that castle and an ordeal by combat to save the life of one of the heroines who is threatened with being burned as a witch. Robin Hood, Richard the Lionheart, and bad King John make an appearance.

On the other hand, the characters are very one-dimensional. In the main, heroes are goody-goody superheroes and villains are horrid. There are exceptions. The Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert is initially no more than a rapist but, impressed by Rebecca's spirit, woos her for a mistress and, in the showdown, when selected as champion for the Templars against Rebecca, asks her to elope with him. Similarly, Maurice de Bracy is in two minds about Rowena. 

Is it anti-Semitic? Isaac the Jew, a moneylender, is a major character and is stereotyped as both cowardly and covetous. However, Scott spends considerable length pointing out how the Jews in this period in England were persecuted and terrorised and in this way condemning anti-Semitism. Rebecca, Isaac's daughter, is the principal heroine; she is strong-minded and virtuous.

Is it sexist? Comments such as, “Women are but the toys which amuse our lighter hours.” (Ch 36) make it seem so, although that is spoken by a villain. Again, Scott is keen to create strong heroines. But there is nevertheless a feeling that he is making stereotypical assumptions. Perhaps the best that can be said is that he was enlightened for his time.

Is it racist? There are very few characters of colour and they are in subordinate positions. There are some unpleasant racial epithets.

So what did Jane Austen see in Scott? (She once said she would read no novels other than those by herself, Maria Edgeworth, who wrote Castle Rackrent, and Walter Scott.) Scott reviewed Emma favourably so the respect was mutual. Fundamentally, they wrote in very different genres. Scott compared Austen's style to that of Dutch interior painting: controlled and utterly realistic. He was writing melodrama and deliberately using exaggeration and extravagance to create drama and to excite the reader: very baroque. 

Selected quotes:

• “It is comfort to think that we leave behind us on earth those who shall be wretched as ourselves.” (Ch 24)
• “This damsel has wept enough to extinguish a beacon light. Never was such wringing of hands and such overflowing of eyes ... A water-fiend hath possessed the fair Saxon." (Ch 25)
• “Glory ... is the rusted mail which hangs as a hatchment over the champion's dim and mouldering tomb.” (Ch 30)
• “Even in our own days, when morals are better understood, an execution, a bruising-march, a riot, or a meeting of radical reformers, collects, at considerable hazard to themselves, immense crowds of spectators.” (Ch 43)

It's an entertaining story but somewhat long-winded for modern tastes (every character must be introduced with a long paragraph of description) which I found wearisome. 

There is a full synopsis of the plot (spoiler alert) under my byline.

June 2026; 519 pages

First published in 1819 by Archibald Constable

My paperback edition was issued by Penguin Popular Classics in 1994

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Synopsis: spoiler alert

Ivanhoe is set in 1194 when King Richard I, captured returning from the crusades, has been ransomed and is expected back in England soon. Since the 1066 Norman Conquest, almost all of the land is owned by Norman barons who act like warlords, tyrannising the local populations of Saxons.

It starts with a group of Norman knights and church leaders riding through Sherwood Forest, asking directions for Cedric’s manor, hoping to spend the night there. Cedric is one of the few Saxons still in possession of land. He hosts the Normans; the dinner is interrupted by another stranger, Isaac, a Jewish moneylender. The anonymous pilgrim who escorted the Normans to the house wakes early the next morning and, having overheard Templar knight Bois-Guilbert planning to abduct Isaac, warns Isaac; helped by faithful swineherd Gurth, the pair slip away. In gratitude, Isaac lends the man a suit of armour and a warhorse.

A tournament is being held at Ashby Castle in the presence of King John. The first day is jousting. A mysterious knight who calls himself Desdichado (= Disinherited) defeats, one by one, the five champions, including Bois-Gilbert, and is declared champion of the day; he chooses as Queen of the Tournament, Lady Rowena, the beautiful and royal Saxon ward of Cedric, engaged to a Saxon nobleman called Athelstane but in love with Cedric’s son Wilfred of Ivanhoe (who was disinherited by his father for this presumption and has left the country to go on the crusades).

On the second day there is a mock battle between two sides. Desdichado’s side is triumphant but only after another anonymous knight who calls himself Le Noir Faineant (= The Black Sluggard) rides to the rescue of Desdichado. The wounded Desdichado is revealed to be Ivanhoe. Rebecca, Isaac’s daughter, a skilled healer, takes him to her house to treat him.

The tournament ends with an archery competition won by an archer called Locksley. It’s Robin Hood!

Le Roi Faineant has spent the night eating, drinking and singing in the cell of hermit The Holy Clerk of Copmanhurst (Friar Tuck).

Travelling through the forest, Isaac, Rebecca and the wounded Ivanhoe, as well as Cedric, Athelstane and Rowena, are captured by mercenary knight Maurice de Bracy and his companions, who are masquerading as outlaws, and taken to Torquilstone, the castle of Reginald Front-de-Bœuf. Gurth and Wamba, Cedric’s jester, escape only to encounter Locksley, leader of the real outlaws. Le Roi Faineant and the Friar turn up. They go to besiege the castle.

Inside, Front-de-Boeuf tries to extort money from Isaac by torturing him in the dungeons. De Bracy tells Rowena he wants to marry her; she turns him down. Bois-Guilbert tells Rebecca he wants her to be his mistress; she threatens to jump out of the tower window if he lays a hand on her.

The siege starts and the besieged send a message that they will kill their captives. Wamba, disguised as a priest, goes into the castle’to hear Cedric’s confession’ but then changes clothes with Cedric who slips out of his cell. On his way out, Cedric meets withered crone Ulrica, and has a lengthy conversation with her, eliciting her back story as if he has all the time in the world. As Urfiried, she was daughter of the original lord of the castle which Front-de-Bouef usurped, raping her and keeping her imprisoned. In revenge, she sets light to the castle as the besiegers gain entrance. Front-de-Bœuf is killed in the fire. De Bracy is forced to surrender to the Black Knight, who identifies himself as King Richard. Athelstane is wounded and presumed dead. Bois-Guilbert escapes with Rebecca to the local Templar preceptory.

Lucas de Beaumanoir, the Grand Master of the Templars, is in the preceptory to to sharpen it up. Discovering that Bois-Guilbert's girlfriend is a Jew, he accuses her of witchcraft. Prompted secretly by Bois-Guilbery, she demands a trial by combat. She must find a champion in three days to defeat the champion appointed by the Templars or be burned to death. The Grand Master picks Bois-Guilbert as the Templar’s champion. He’s in a dilemma: does he fight for the love of his life, or fight against her champion and thus maintain his chivalric honour.

At his own funeral, Athelstane returns to life, demanding food. He pledges allegiance to King Richard and cedes Rowena to Ivanhoe. Ivanhoe hears about Rebecca’s plight and rides hard to become her champion. He arrives in the nick of time but he’s exhausted. Bois-Guilbert and Ivanhoe ride a joust; both fall. Ivanhoe gets up; Bois-Guilbert stays down. He has had a stroke or a heart attack from the conflict of emotions inspired by loving Rebecca and having to fight against her, and he is dead.

Rebecca goes to Rowena and tells her that she and her father are leaving for Cordoba in Muslim held Spain where the Jews aren’t persecuted. She will become a healer. Rowena wins Ivanhoe.

Other novels by this author

Scott wrote a series of historical novels which were hugely influential at the time. They are known as the Waverley novels after the title of the first (later novels were often published anonymously as 'by the author of Waverley). 

• Waverley (1814) set during the 1745 Jacobite rebellion
• Guy Mannering (1815) set in Scotland
• The Antiquary (1816) set in Scotland
• The Black Dwarf (1816) set in Scotland
• Old Mortality (1816) set in Scotland
• Rob Roy (1818) about a Scottish bandit
• The Heart of Midlothian (1818) set in Scotland after which the Edinburgh football team was named
• The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) set in Scotland which inspired the opera Lucia di Lammermoor by Donnizetti
• A Legend of Montrose (1819) set in Scotland
• Ivanhoe (1819) set in mediaeval England, complete with Robin Hood
• The Monastery (1820) set in Scotland
• The Abbot (1820) set in Scotland
• Kenilworth (1821) set in Tudor England
• The Pirate (1822) set in Shetland and Orkney
• The Fortunes of Nigel (1822) set in Jacobean London
• Peveril of the Peak (1822) set in England
• Quentin Durward (1823) set in mediaeval France and Belgium
• St Ronan's Well (1824) set in Scotland
• Redgauntlet (1824) set in Scotland and northern England
• The Betrothed (1825) set in  Wales
• The Talisman (1825) set in Palestine at the time of the Crusades
• Woodstock (1826) set in England and Brussels during the English civil war
• The Fair Maid of Perth (1828) set in Scotland
• Anne of Geierstein set in Switzerland
• Count Robert of Paris (1831) set in Constantinople in 1097
• Castle Dangerous (1831) set in Scotland

"Vigil" by George Saunders

 Saunders returns to the theme of his 2017 Booker winning Lincoln in the Bardo with this novel. Dead Jill returns to earth (as a ghost? an angel?) to comfort a dying man. During his life he was the CEO of one of the biggest oil extraction firms, responsible for a huge amount of climate change and also responsible for denying climate change even while (through his firms secret research) being aware it was happening and taking steps to mitigate the consequences for his company's profits. Even on his deathbed he is justifying himself, often to other ghosts summoned to accuse him by a dead Frenchman responsible for the invention of the 'machine'. Is he responsible or is he a helpless product of his genetic make-up and the circumstances of his upbringing? And can he manage to find peace before he passes over? Furthermore, can Jill, who seems to be doomed to repeat her task of comforting the dying until she too can be 'elevated' to a higher sphere?

If there is any philosophy behind this, it would seem to be the Buddhist idea that we are trapped on this earth, endlessly reincarnating, until we can learn to renounce the self and achieve, on death, nirvana, nothingness. In this book, ghosts, including Jill, are trapped as ghosts, until they can renounce the self and achieve 'elevation': "If your worth depends on your glories, it must also depend on your sins ...forswear the glory, forswear the culpability. The self is the culprit." (p 81)

The glory of this novel is the characters, almost all of them ghosts (again, this is very similar to LitB) and the imaginative whimsy used to create them. But Saunders also has the ability to nail images and ideas in remarkably simple, sometimes shocking, phrases.

Selected quotes:

• "I made for the front door and, not yet walking competently, collapsed to the earth like a just-unstrung puppet" (p4)
• "When you regretted, folks pounced. You were weak with regret, they felt it, they pounced." (p 39)
• "From the wedding came a squeal of shock, as if something unthinkable but delightful had just been revealed to a previously demure matron." (p 67)
• "A bottom-dweller has one bright, shining moment and can't help shit the bed about it." (p 93)
• "Soon will come that special thunk made by: inert load, dropping ... After which, devoid of its former vitality, his sad former-person-bearing meatlump will begin to rot." (p 100)
• "Sheet buttloads of senseless crap" (p 103)
• "My charge had been born him. But he had never chosen to be born him. That had just happened to him. Then life had happened to that him, exerting upon it certain deleterious effects ... which had led him to strive, which, in turn, led him to accomplish, and, in accomplishing, he had brought about harm." (p 165)

Part clifi, part meditation of dying and death, this is a fascinating book of ideas.

May 2026; 174 pages
First published by Random House New York in 2026
My edition was the paperback International Edition

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Persian" by David McCloskey

 Written by an ex-CIA man, you would expect this spy thriller to have the ring of authenticity and it does, in spades, from interrogations (though, thankfully, the book does not go into details of the torture) to the organisation of terrorism to drone attacks to traffic jams in Tehran to guns. What does not always come with an ex-spy is the ability to write a good tale but this was a well-constructed, well-written and entertaining story which had me turning the pages. It reminded me - and I have no higher praise - of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre.

The story is largely narrated through the extracted confessions of Kam, an Iranian dentist of Jewish descent, who has decided to spy for MOSSAD to fund his California retirement dream. We also see things through the perspective of his MOSSAD spymaster Arik Glitzman. Iranian Colonel Ghorbani is sending drones to assassinate members of Glitzman's team and Glitzman has devised an audacious plan to kidnap the Colonel and take him to Israel. This requires Kam to con Roya, an innocent Iranian who happens to work as administrative assistant to Ghorbani's team, into thinking that he is working for Iranian security. But could love complicate the con? (I told you it was like the le Carre book.) 

It's a great story told with verve. But I was thoroughly depressed by this portrait of fanatics on both sides engaged in a potentially endless game of tit for tat, a war of attrition in which decency and respect for humanity cannot survive.

Selected quotes:

• “He begins to chew on another sugar cube and stares down Kam with the look of a man who despises fornicators because he desperately wants to be one.” (Prologue; The interrogation room)
• “Developed haphazardly, growing in disorganized spurts, Tehran, like most of us, lacks any coherent centre.” (Ch 3)
• “Lean and beautiful with cheek bones high as heaven.” (Ch 3)
• “Amir-Ali's leaking blood counts down like sand rushing fast through an hourglass.” (Ch 4)
• “She now had a phone, cigarettes, and an audience with an Iranian official. Whatever the Mullahs say, Paradise is a fluid concept.” (Ch 30)
• “Rivka laughed - it was the first time I'd heard one from her, and it was more delicate, hesitant, than I'd expected. I suppose she didn't have much practice.” (Ch 38)
• “Believe the breath from my mouth.” (Ch 40)
• “Love comes with a knife, my mother would say.” (Ch 52)
• “Love is the king of all cons.” (Ch 52)
• “The afternoon had brought the smog, and I sucked in a huge breath of Tehran's toxic air: all exhaust, no relief.” (Ch 72)

May 2026; 388 pages

First published in GB by Swift Press in 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Something Might Fall" by David Flusfeder

 We are introduced to New York doctor Nicholas and his author wife Emma in a brilliant piece of head-hopping stream of consciousness - it reminded me of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and the 'falling' leitmotif is also appropriate - as they sit in a fashionable restaurant. The first part of the narrative then settles mostly into Emma's perspective as she shepherds her young son, little Nicky, around town. She has developed writer's block and is worried about something falling on her head. 

The couple are famous for their seasonal parties but an error is dispatching invitations leads to upset and angry words from one of the couples they are friendly with. They decide to forgo a party and the rumour mill sends their reputation into a nosedive. 

In the second part of the narrative, set two years later, little Nicky wanders around New York alone with the money from his birthday.

It is a tiny novella, beautifully written, which explores how life's happiness can pivot on the most trivial of fulcra.

Selected quotes:

• “So this is how people feel, we're making something here, the stuff of popular song and lyric poetry, and it may not be the opera I was expecting, and dreading, but there's something said for the manufactured pop song, its reliability, its form that we know so well, time for the chorus again now, but instead it's still at the bridge, which seems to go on forever.” (pp 17 -18)
• “It's like listening to jazz, but not the freeform stuff in which the listener is the performer’s victim, condemned to applaud wherever whim and virtuosity take them; here the listening is equal, part of the show, a spontaneous interaction, your self, my self, this place, your idea, our breaths, her fancy, her imagination, this sunshine, my ears, her kindness, her generosity, she is embodying something, giving flight to a shared endeavour.” (pp 18 - 19)
• “Children and doormen and barbers mostly have names that end with y, whereas parents never do.” (p 23)
• “Things tremble. She can see the vibrating edges of objects that she had previously assumed to be stable. Lines are liquid, everything shimmers as if just about to dissolve. Planes she had previously thought to be solid are, she discovers, made of light ready to merge. For so long she had assumed things were fixed, but they are not, it is all pure unstable energy on the point of collapse.” (p 35)
• “She is not taken away, she is not mistaken for a mental case, she is not dumped into the poor ward along with all the other lost matrons, the estrogenal detritus of the five boroughs, dried out, used up, nuts, sedated and strapped and self-soiled ...” (p 41)
• “The man talking to him is sprawled at the base of the low wall that separates the sidewalk of Central Park South from the Park itself. It is as if he had been dropped there and hasn't troubled to reorganise his body from the fall. He looks both utterly at ease and terribly uncomfortable.” (p 63)

Beautifully written and poignant.

May 2026; 75 pages

First published in 2026 by Salt publishing

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Flusfeder also wrote John the Pupil, an reimagination of a mediaeval hero's journey.

"We Live Here Now" by C D Rose

Winner of The Goldsmiths Prize in 2025, this remarkable novel is made of fourteen sections, each recounting strange occurrences. Many of the characters appear in more than one section, sometimes as principals and at other times as walk-on parts, or even mentioned but not present. Delightfully, the chapter headings across the top are printed so they fade away. The page numbers sometimes appear in different places. The whole thing is remarkably Kafkaesque.

1. In the first, written as a review article for an art magazine, the career of a performance artist who has gone missing is assessed; those who worked with her seem to be cursed. There are ambiguities and gaps in the record, the main source for the story may be an unreliable narrator. The work is described thus: "You can walk in, and it seems as if there are fewer of you, as if the person you are with isn't really there." (We live where now?)
2. In the second, Kasha, an art agent, loses a piece of art before tracing it to a shipping container.
3. In the third, Rachel Noyes, who records sound, is on her own in a flat in a strange town waiting to be interviewed for a job.
4. In the fourth a ship carrying a cargo of shipping containers experiences strange happenings aboard; the captain is the brother to a collaborator with the performance artist in the first section and the Dynamic Positioning Officer comes from South Uist.
5. Death #47, the fifth section, is about a man who has, so far, died 46 times, although he has always survived. So far. "His whole life had been a dérive" (I am fascinated by the concept of the dérive as promulgated by Guy Debord and the Letterist International.)
6. In Commission, Ryan, a photographer, is commissioned to create a portrait of a multimillionaire whose company makes cables and owns container ships.
7. Thomas Vyre, whose father once worked on South Uist, has had his identity stolen. Five times. So there are six of him, one of whom knocks at his door. 
8. Sweeney is perpetually on a train, all the subway systems in the world, which somehow interconnect.
9. Ton, a composer, has become obsessed with a video of some Russian teenagers climbing an immensely high building; this section links with the one about Rachel Noyes.
10. Joe, an actor, is making an experimental film (Rachel is the sound technician) on South Uist where there is a container is a military base. 
11. Jen works on the night desk for apartments reserved for guests.
12. Silas, friend of Kasha, attempting to launder money he has earned by selling drugs, buys and sells artworks ... and makes even more money that he can't bank. 
13. In the penultimate section many of the characters assemble for a talk by Lukas Lemnis, art philosopher extraordinary. 
14. The books ends with a comeback show entitled Klein Bottle, which might be significant, reported again by Che Horst-Prosier, who wrote the first section.

Having written all that, I realise that I have given almost no idea of what this book is about. I have almost no idea of what this book is about and trying even to describe the sections (without spoilers) is impossible. That seems to fit. This is a book which needs rereading again and again, to properly understand the interconnections. It is highly experimental and immensely interesting. It reminded me of M John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, another worthy winner of the Goldsmiths Prize. I must read more of this author's work.

Selected quotes:

• “Kasha knew her job was to blow the smoke and polish the mirrors.” (It is what it isn't, we are where we aren’t)
• “That was what she did. She got away with things.” (It is what it isn't, we are where we aren’t)
• “‘This is just impostor syndrome’, she told her brain, but then realized it couldn't really be Impostor syndrome because that was when one falsely believed one wasn't actually up to the task, and Kasha knew full well that she wasn't up to the task. She couldn't have the syndrome if she actually was an impostor.” (It is what it isn't, we are where we aren’t)
• “Kasha remembered the time Silas had told her to read Kafka, ‘because, actually, it's fucking hilarious’. She hadn't found it hilarious. She thought it was realistic.” (It is what it isn't, we are where we aren’t)
• “Kasha walked out and dug around in her bag to find a Lavender Kalm. They made her burps taste like an old lady's bathroom but it was the best she was going to be able to get right now.” (It is what it isn't, we are where we aren’t)
• “No echo, only that short sucking noise, as if the sound was trying to hide itself before it even registered.” (Every echo is a leak)
• “The tangerine sky of the early dawn.” (Manifest)
• “As soon as Oreste Lauro had stepped out of that pub he knew he was about to die, again.” (Death #47)
• “Thomas knew that every Echo was a leak, a clue, a map of space.” (Six versions of Thomas Vyre)
• “When he tried to remember the past, which he sometimes did, Sweeney believed only that he had been there forever, and would forever be there.” (Ich Verstehe Nur Bahnhof)
• “Sweeney knew that history emerged from geography.” (Ich Verstehe Nur Bahnhof)
• “Sweeney knew that the spaces between the signs, the gaps and the lapses, were as important as the signs themselves.” (Ich Verstehe Nur Bahnhof)
• “Echo and drone, drone and echo.” (Crazy Russian Kids Climb Old Soviet Tower.)
• “The sound of their youth crackling with potential. Their mortality was as nothing to them. It flew distantly above them, giddy, drunken. Death was just another one of their mates, the slightly crazed one who none of them would trust that much, the one with a bit of a cracked look in their eye, the one they all knew was having trouble at home.” (Crazy Russian Kids Climb Old Soviet Tower.)
• “She realized she'd imagined a den of louche and opulent decadence, a secret boudoir rich with bosky perfumes and the potential for debauchery. Instead she found the executive suite of a mid-range ring-road hotel.” (Contract)
• “Everyone was doing the art look. No one was looking at each other. They were looking for someone who might be more interesting.” (Chicago Typewriter)
• “We were very much against physical space but then we realized we had to rethink space, territory, consider what it could be, project it into a future - I mean, it's like space, isn't it? And you can't give up on that? On the body. We all have bodies, don't we?” (Chicago Typewriter)
• “Che Horst-Prosier was telling Kasha Hocket-Baily why a container ship was the perfect exemplar of a Foucauldian heterotopia.” (Chicago Typewriter)
• “To us, a Klein bottle looks like a fancy vase in which it would be impossible to put any flowers, or a trick wine glass from which you are tantalisingly unable to drink, or a Murano version of a twisted doughnut, or a Möbius strip, or the universe itself, crafted by a particularly talented glass blower.” (Klein Bottle: the Comeback)

You have to read it to appreciate it. It isn't difficult to read, each section is enjoyable and entertaining. But what it means ...

Just read it.

May 2026; 309 pages
First published by Melville House in 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God