"Love in a Cold Climate" by Nancy Mitford

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

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

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

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

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

Selected quotes:

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

August 2026; 166 pages

First published by Hamish Hamilton in 1949

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

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Pursuit of Love" by Nancy Mitford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selected quotes: 

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

August 2026; 151 pages

First published by Hamish Hamilton in 1945

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

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Biographies written by Nancy Mitford and reviewed in this blog:

• Madame de Pompadour
• The Sun King

"The Iceman Cometh" by Eugene O'Neill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selected quotes:

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

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

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Escaped Cock" by D H Lawrence

This novella about Jesus (never actually called Jesus) after his resurrection was published, after Lawrence had died, as 'The Man Who Died', a title Lawrence had resisted. 

Trigger warning: blasphemy. As you might expect from such an iconoclastic author, much of the content would be deemed shockingly heretical by orthodox Christians. Jesus survives crucifixion because he has been cut down too early, rather than through any divine intervention. He rejects his calling: “How good it is to have fulfilled my mission, and to be beyond it. Now I can be alone, and leave all things to themselves, and the fig tree may be barren if it will, and the rich may be rich. My way is my own alone.” (p 26). He wanders off to 'find himself' part of which involves losing his virginity. Guess what he means when he says "I am risen!" (p 62). Some people would think that was blasphemous.

He also pities Judas: “I know I wronged Judas, my poor Judas.” (p 18) This might also be considered blasphemy, or heresy, but as the Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar points out, without him there would have been no crucifixion (and therefore no resurrection) and if God is really all-powerful then Judas can at best be seen as a puppet and a scapegoat.

There are many other phrases taken from the Bible, for example: “And last, the eyes opened. On to the dark. ... Yet perhaps there was a pale chink of the all-disturbing light, prising open the pure dark. ... And again it was finished.” (pp 6 - 7)

The very Lawrencian theme is the fierce forcefulness of life:

• “The young cock crowed. ... It was the necessity to live, and even to cry out the triumph of life.” (p 13)
• “The man who had died looked nakedly on life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flee itself up in stormy or subtle wave-crests, foam-tips emerging out of the blue invisible, a black and orange cock or the green flame-tongues out of the extremes of the fig tree. They came forth, these things and creatures of spring, glowing with desire and with assertion.” (p 14)
• “The destiny of life seemed more fierce and compulsive to him even then the destiny of death.” (p 15)

It is written in the past tense and the third person and mostly from the PoV of "the man who died". 

It starts with the story of a young rooster who is cocksure and proud but whose peasant master fears might escape so the cockerel is tethered by a strong to his leg. Following his escape from the tomb, the man who died takes refuge with the peasant family and empathises with the bird. When he leaves to go on his travels, he takes the cock with him.

In the second part of the narrative he meets a priestess of Isis on the Levantine coast.

The prose is splendidly muscular. Could anyone but Lawrence write “She stood among the dry trunks of the outermost pines, on the rocks under which the sea smote and sucked, facing the open where the bright sun gloried in winter.” (p 33)? "The sea smote and sucked" Wow!

He is unafraid of repetition. His prose is already as strong as the torso of a boxer but with these repetitions it punched the reader into submission. But the repetitions are perfectly consonant with the original source, the Bible (although the Testaments probably used repetitions because they were principally delivered orally and this technique aided memory).

I was a little surprised at the number of exclamation marks Lawrence uses! In this way he is a little closer to the Victorians than to modern fiction writing.

But mostly I just gloried in the brilliance of Lawrence's prose.

Selected quotes:

• “At the same time, at the same hour before dawn, on the same morning, a man awoke from a long sleep in which he was tied up. He woke numb and cold, inside a carved hole in the rock.” (p 5)
• “Who would want to come back from the dead?” (p 6)
• “And in the safety of the yard, the young cock was dear to him, as it shouted in the helpless zest of life, and finished in the helpless humiliation of being tied by the leg.” (p 22)
• “In the tomb he had slipped that noose which we call care.” (p 26)

August 2026; 68 pages

Originally published in 1929 by Black Sun Press

My paperback edition was issued by Renard Press in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Missing Person" by Patrick Modiano

 A short novel by a French Nobel Laureate.

A list of other winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature can be found here.

A private investigator leaves work when his boss retires, to dedicate himself to tracking down his own past, which he has forgotten because of amnesia.

It's a great book for two reasons: one is the way the investigator assembles truth, the second is the way the novel explores identity.

The concept which enables the author to create a sort of Noir mystery novel. The PI follows clues to track down people who might have known him in the past, although they often say they don't recognise him, or if they do, they give ambiguous or conflicting testimonies. He uses photographs, government records and eyewitness accounts to try and piece together a coherent narrative for himself. But is he joining the jigsaw pieces together correctly? “Until now everything has seemed so chaotic, so fragmented ... Scraps, shreds have come to light as a result of my searches ... But then that is perhaps what a life amounts to ...” (Ch 40) he asks himself, and then immediately worries: “Is it really my life I'm tracking down? Or someone else's into which I have somehow infiltrated myself?” (Ch 40) That's a question that I, as reader, had been asking for some time.

When he finally begins to remember - at which point the memories arrive with startling clarity, so vivid that they might almost be illusory reconstructions, just like a fiction itself - he remembers himself trying to escape France during the Nazi occupation of World War Two.

This allows Modiano to explore the idea that one's identity depends on one's memories, and one's memories can be fuzzy, imprecise and equivocal if not downright false. He repeatedly returns to an image of evanescent vapour, from the very start to the finish:

• “I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the cafe terrace, waiting for the rain to stop.” (first lines)
• “Strange people. the kind that leave the nearest blur behind them, soon vanished. Hutte and I often used to talk about these traceless beings. They spring up out of nothing one fine day and return there, having sparkled a little. Beauty queens. Gigolos. Butterflies. Most of them, even when alive, had no more substance than steam which will never condense.” (Ch 8)
• “We were gradually becoming invisible. Even our town clothes ... melted into this fog. Who knows? Perhaps we would end up evaporating altogether. Or we would merge with the mist which covered the windows, this stubborn mist you could not wipe off.” (Ch 37)
• “A little girl is returning from the beach, at dusk, with her mother. She is crying for no reason at all, because she would have liked to continue playing. She has already turned the corner of the street, and do not our life dissolve into the evening as quickly as this grief of Childhood?” (last lines)

He counterpoints the essential indistinctness and confusion of his narrator with crystal clear descriptions of the external world, of which these are just a few examples:

• “A veranda which overlooked a pond. To the left, a small hump-back bridge, in the Chinese style, led to another bungalow, on the other side of the pond. The French windows were brilliantly lit up and I could seek couples moving behind them. They were dancing. Snatches of music reached us.” (Ch 2)
• “Everything about him was round. His face, his blue eyes and even the thin moustache, cut in an arc. His mouth too, and his plump and dimpled hands. He made me think of those balloons children hold on a string and which they sometimes release to see how high they will climb.” (Ch 7)
• “No furniture, except for an old divan, covered in worn red velvet upholstery on which we sat. He took a pipe from his pocket and lit it calmly. The stained glass windows gave the daylight that filtered through a pale blue tint.” (Ch 11)
• “We were standing before a lawn like the one I had tried to cross to reach the chateau, but here, the grass was not nearly so high. To my astonishment, the back of the chateau did not conform at all with its facade: it was built of gray stone. The roof was not the same either: on this side it was more elaborate, with cut off corners and gables, so that a house which at first sight looked like a Louis XIII chateau, from the back looked like one of those late-nineteenth-century seaside resort mansions.” (Ch 11)
• “The cigarette and pipe smoke irritated my eyes and made me cough a little. There was a smell of lard in the air.” (Ch 17)

It's a bit like the way Kafka makes us believe in his fantastical worlds by describing them in terms of everyday reality. I suspect that, without the opposition of his detailed descriptions, the ambiguities of identity would be less obvious.

A classic, worthy of a Nobel laureate.

The English title makes a lot of sense, although perhaps 'Missing Identity' might be more accurate, but is in no way a translation of the French title, Rue des Boutiques Obscures which I translate as 'The Street of Strange Shops' and which itself seems to derive from what the author describes as "my old address in Rome: Via delle Botteghe Oscure" (Ch 47)

Selected quotes:

• “He stared as though the light of a projector had been turned on his face.” (Ch 7)
• “The Eiffel Tower generally so reassuring, looked like a hulk of oxidized scrap-iron.” (Ch 7)
• “In the end, we were all ‘beach men’ and that ‘the sand’ ... ‘keeps the traces of our footsteps only a few moments’.” (Ch 8)
• “I've just returned from the Golden Tripe Competition ... I was one of the judges. We had to swallow a hundred and seventy pieces of tripe over a period of one half days” (Ch 10)

August 2026; 180 pages
First published in French as Rue des Boutiques Obscures in 1978 by Editions Gallimard
My English translation by Daniel Weissbort was first published by Jonathan Cape in 1980. I read the Penguin paperback version of this which was issued in 2019.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Other novels by Modiano reviewed in this blog:

• In the Cafe of Lost Youth
• The Black Notebook

Other novels by French authors which I have reviewed in this blog may be found here.

"Death in a Shetland Family" by Marsali Taylor

 

These murder mysteries starring sailor and sleuth Cass Lynch are getting better with each novel. 

In fact, the whodunnit element is increasingly taking a back seat to an exploration of life in the Shetlands. In this novel we enter the horse world with an escaped stallion and a horse show. We learn about crofting, Roman Catholicism, and genetics. And, of course, there is the sailing.

There is also a murder. Cass doesn't know the family herself, but she knows those who do. She listens to the gossip, weaving together the testimonies to try to find a story. Red herrings are deftly presented. Ambiguities are exploited. And in the end Cass is imperilled, captured, fleeing, hunted. This is a skilfully written classic cosy crime with a dash of jeopardy.

Gavin, the policeman boyfriend? He is in the Highlands because his mother is ill. Meanwhile Cass has to tend their small-holding, including hens, ponies and sheep. She worries whether she can cope with living off the water.

Real characters with real dilemmas.

And the book is brightened by some fabulous descriptive passages, of which my favourite were:

• "Even though it was a bonny day, blue and warm as summer, the colours had turned. The orange hens-and-chickens along the Tingwall verges had withered to brown lollipop heads, and the royal purple of the heather on the hill behind them had bleached to a creamy white, with blue pincushions of scabious growing through." (Ch 1)
• "Kitten was the colours of spices shaken over a worktop, ginger and nutmeg and cinnamon all mixed together" (Ch 2)
• "I woke to a shepherd’s warning; the glass of the window reflected a red light onto the white shade of the overhead lamp, and the window framed thin cirrus tinged coral-gold which faded as the sun rose. A grey shroud lay over the hills, somewhere between a summer heat haze and an autumn mist. In the garden, a last magenta rose flared among the cloud shape of the daisy bushes." (Ch 4)
• "The sea was fretted over with ripples; the hills were auburn, with hummocks of moss like jade rocks among the heather." (Ch 7)
• "I looked west as I came out of Cribba Sound, past the Atlantic swell rolling in from the sea road leading to where there was nothing in the world but your ship poised on a saucer of shining water under a great arch of sky, and felt my heart ache for it." (Ch 9)
• "It was only five o’clock, but the light was already mellowing to tints of evening, the hills dusted with gold, the moorgrass stems glistening. The yellow buttons of tansy by the gate were translucent above their fresh green leaves." (Ch 9)
• "The sun was behind the hills now, but there were slanting gold shafts of light through the gaps in the clouds, and over the soft green hills, and the sound was filled with whisky-amber water." (Ch 21)

Marsali Taylor must be a talented artist: she can certainly paint irresistible pictures with words. These passages are a literary equivalent of a promotional film for the Shetlands tourist board. If only she hadn't mentioned the midges!

She's also very good with psychology, showing a deep understand of human (and, in the first quote, horse) nature:

• "He’s got himself into that high state where he wants things to be back to normal but doesn’t quite know how to get there, like a toddler refusing to go to bed." (Ch 1)
• "Even Vaila, who knew her own mind and shared it generously, paused to think when Rainbow suggested caution." (Ch 2)
• "He oozed superiority, but if he really felt that far above us all, he wouldn’t need to try so hard." (Ch 3)
• "‘So,’ I said, summing up, ‘a man in possession of a good croft needs a wife with a good income to support him.’" (Ch 16) Okay, she's nicked that one but it's a lovely bit of humour.

This series now transcends the crime genre. Exceptionally entertaining but also a delightful read.

July 2026

Published by Headline Accent in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

This is the fourteenth novel in a crime fiction series that gets better and better. The books, in order, with alternative names, are:

• Death on a Shetland Longship
• The Trowie Mound Murders (Buried in a Shetland Tomb)
• A Handful of Ash (The Shetland Night Killings)
• The Body in the Bracken (Grave of a Shetland Sailor)
• Ghosts of the Vikings (The Shetland Poisonings)
• Death in Shetland Waters
• Death on a Shetland Isle
• Death from a Shetland Cliff
• The Shetland Sea Murders
• A Shetland Winter Mystery
• Death in a Shetland Lane
• Death at a Shetland Festival
• An imposter in Shetland

"Outside Looking In" by T C Boyle

 

A novelisation of the story of Timothy Leary and his promotion of LSD.

After a 'Prelude' set in Basel in 1943 in which we learn of the discovery of LSD from the point of view of the discoverers research assistant, we move to Harvard in 1962 where Professor Tim Leary is conducting 'research' into the effects of psilocybin, ostensibly to see whether its hallucinogenic properties could be used in the treatment of mental issue (a debate still very much alive today, with some scientific evidence that it can but other suggestions that it is no better than alternative treatments). 

The psychologist researchers, and their families, start experimenting at parties in Harvard, before spending a couple of summer vacations in Mexico, before being expelled by the authorities and dismissed by Harvard and ending up living in a giant commune in New York State. Sexual boundaries start to dissolve, the children become feral, and the local authorities start to persecute them.

The first and third sections are narrated in the past tense and 3td person from the point of view of Fitz, a graduate student who feels himself on the outside and desperately wants to be part of the inner circle. The middle section is narrated by his wife, Joanie. 

The finish of the book was so sudden that, even though I knew there could not be more than one or two pages, I turned the page looking for the start of the next paragraph. And yet it was a good line to end on.

This novel links to real people and other works of art. Tim Leary was real and his Castalia foundation was named after the sect in Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. The music of the Beatles is mostly despised by the psychologists who adore jazz and Satie's Gymnopedies. One of their heroes is Aldous Huxley; his latest novel Island is mentioned. Another is Ken Kesey, a fellow psychologist whose debut novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is also mentioned. Kesey later appears with his Pranksters in their coach, as documented by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. 

Wolfe's book is so outrageous - consonant with its subject - that it might be thought to overshadow this novel. But the two have different aims. Wolfe is celebrating psychedelia. Boyle is chronicling the damage caused by the hedonistic lifestyle - and it doesn't need to be mind-altering drugs, it could have been alcohol, or sexual promiscuity, or gourmandising, or even unbridled capitalistic consumerism - to the participants. Yes, the 'squares' in society are repressive but the true dangers lie in ignoring real relationships in the obsessive pursuit of elusive dreams. It could equally well apply to writing a novel.

I enjoyed this book. There were some delightful moments and there are some interesting descriptions of the hallucinations caused by taking these drugs, although that was somewhat downplayed compared to the more experimental fiction concerning drug abuse. It is particularly good at portraying the bleak realities of ordinary life, dramatically juxtaposed against the siren promise of chemical liberation.

Selected quotes:

• “Did you see the way the daffodils are pushing up everywhere? I thought somebody'd smeared the whole landscape with butter while we were asleep.” (Prelude)
• “Table legs. the antimacassar on the chair. The end table, the telephone, my shoes! Everything has a life of its own totally independent of us.” (Prelude)
• “This haggard red-faced pathetically ordinary woman who wouldn't have known transcendence if it swooped her up on angels’ wings and sailed her high out of the glittering crest of the universe.” (1.1)
• “Mid-January, bleak as the bottom of a shoe” (1.2)
• “Interiority by its very definition was exclusive, selfish even.” (1.7)
• “The village and its stew of smells.” (2.1)
• “She'd ... watched the full moon scroll its icy script across the face of every wave in existence.” (2.1)
• “They’d gone back to the apartment with the mouse turds, only to find that it too had been taken by somebody whose level of desperation must have been positively Dostoevskian.” (2.3)
• “Worlds collided, glaciers calved, civilizations marched across the landscape erecting temples and tearing them down and starting all over again.” (3.1)
• “Nothing quite fit right, as if the world were a suit of clothes that had shrunk in the dryer and had to be pinched and tugged till it stretched back out again.” (3.2)
• “A June morning, the air heavy as a wet sock and the sun hanging unencumbered overhead.” (3.4)
• “He saw himself as from a distance, a partially dressed great ape with a tube of tobacco in one hand and the concentrated residue of a caffeinated plant in the other.” (3.4)
• “For a long while he sat there on her bed while the sun backed away from him inch by inch across the carpet till it hung suspended in the window and finally dropped out of sight.” (3.6)

July 2026; 385 pages

First published in the US by Ecco Press in 2019
My paperback edition issued in 2020.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Flagey in Winter" by Simon Mundy

 

An ensemble comedy of manners, this novel returns us to the characters established in its precursor, Flagey in Autumn, the staff and customers of the Cafe Franck in Place Flagey in Brussels. 

In early January, the weather is cold and icy, so when Elise, skiing with her brother Artur in Bolsano, Italy, ends up in hospital, her lover Fidel is summoned to her side. It being Sunday, and he being too old to be fluent with making travel arrangements online, the friends pitch in to help ... and some decide to accompany him. Funded by Russian Nikita, who has closed her gallery for the time being, Fidel is sent with Mercedes (Nikita's employee) and her new boyfriend (a new character) Rory, a Scottish journalist. Later they will be joined by Catrina and her boyfriend barista Patrice, by Nikita herself, by Esko the Finnish MEP and his new girlfriend French filmstar Amelie, and by Agnestina who is newly out of love with Flamand and whose laptop was used to make the bookings.

Back in Brussels, Bruno is bested by unaccredited lobbyist Tyron Wangstrutt. 

I found this sequel slightly disappointing. Like love, the first book had the excitement of discovering new characters, while this had the stale feeling you get when the joy of fresh love starts to become routine. The only pairing that still sparkled was that of Esko and Amelie and that was only because Amelie's filmstar antics made Esko (and me) permanently on edge as to whether he would be dumped or not.

However, it was fun. I am developing affections for each of them (except, perhaps, Saskia). I hope poor Mariana finds love soon! Flamand? 

I wondered whether the split setting quite worked: the joy of the first book had been that all the shenanigans had been focused tightly in one place.

The third person omniscient viewpoint enables the reader to eavesdrop on the thoughts of each of the characters and the constant flitting from one to another keeps the narrative from flagging. It was a very easy read (two days) and there were many moments of quiet humour. I enjoyed reading this book.

I look forward to reading the sequel, Flagey in Spring.

Selected quotes:

• "If in doubt, procrastinate." (Sunday: First thing)
• "Museums bored her even more than being bored." (Sunday carried on: Cold wine for a cold Sunday)
• "She growled in frustration, a scarring contralto growl like parts of an engine disintegrating" (Sunday carried on: Cold wine for a cold Sunday)
• "Old age was what happened to other people, like being born a man." (Friday: What might have been)

July 2026; 239 pages
Published by Hay Press in 2024

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Flagey in Autumn" by Simon Mundy

 An ensemble novel, much like the Scotland Street series of Alexanderr McCall Smith, such as 44, Scotland Street (2005) and its sequels such as Espresso Tales (2005), Love Over Scotland (2006), The World According to Bertie (2007) and The Unbearable Lightness of Scones (2008).

Flagey in Autumn (and its sequels) is about the customers of the Cafe Franck on Place Flagey in Brussels. It starts on a Saturday and ends on the following Saturday. The first few sections are inevitably crowded with details: we are meeting most of the cast in a few pages. I resorted to making notes. But by the time Sunday had arrived, I was confident I knew who was who. From then on, as the plot lines wove and intersected, I enjoyed the ride.

It was an entertaining book with some nice character development. I look forward to meeting the cast again in the sequels, Flagey in Winter and Flagey in Spring. 

Selected quotes:

• "To go back to Derby was the sort of slow death reserved for spinsters in a Victorian novel." (Saturday: Catrina mulls)
• "She thought of herself as a bundle of bones with random splatterings of flesh, as though they had been slapped on by a disinterested sculptor." (Saturday: Oops)
• "Fidel could talk about football – it was incumbent to his image as an intellectual with his instincts still rooted in the people – but the actual watching of a game truly horrified him" (Sunday: Above and Below)
• "The professor bellowed. It was the sound of an enraged intellect or, as his grinning colleague Wilfred Tinnemans decided two doors down, the sound an ox makes when the cowman slips a tight rubber ring round its balls. The meeting was going to be a lot of fun." (Monday: Elise considers)
• "It was a relief not to have a lover who, like the French girls, knew everything about love-making and marked him out of ten while he put his clothes on." (Wednesday: Considerations)
• "She was not a woman to walk on air. There was a slight lack of co-ordination about her movements that suggested that, had she tried to walk on air, she would have fallen off." (Wednesday: New jobs)
• "He looked like an elderly tomcat who had found an endless supply of cream." (Thursday: Late lecture)
• "Those with nothing more pressing to do: foreigners between meetings, writers between pages, artists between brush strokes or pausing in the search for random objects to install. And students." (Thursday: Ruptures in paradise)
• “Politics is not about great plans; it is about great management of the unexpected which makes everyone think you had great plans” (Friday: No time for contemplation)

July 2026; 256 pages in the print version

Published in April 2015 by Hay Press

I read the kindle version

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Also by Simon Mundy and reviewed in this blog: 

• The Fragile Land: a new take on the Arthurian legend

Synopsis: spoiler alert

Dutch Saskia bumps into English Catrina, causing her to spill tea on Spanish Mercedes. Because she refuses to apologise, barista Patrice bans her from the cafe. He then turns his attention to Catrina and that night they will end up in his bed. Fidel, a Professor of rhetoric, watches ... and recognises Elise, another cafe worker, from the bar in the jazz club on Friday night. Fidel and Elise will also start an affair that night after he discovers that she has moved in to the flat below his.

Saskia has lunch in another cafe. Leaving it, she sees Catina and Patrice across the square. They converge with hostile intentions but collide with bystander fat Louise, knocking her over. Saskia helps Louise back to her flat and spontaneously embarks upon her first lesbian experience.

Esko, a Finnish MEP, goes to a film festival and leaves with French film star Amelie. They are photographed kissing. By Tuesday they are in the papers and Amelie is besieged by reporters inside Esko's flat. Esko's wife Rikka, a Finnish MP in Helsinki, dumps him over the phone.

Mariana, Esko's parliamentary assistant, is in love with him and angry about his affair with Amelie. She tries to seduce Esko but fails. He takes her to lunch and gives her a job working with Writers Against Injustice.

Fidel's office at the university has been tidied and painted. He is furious. Elise persuades him to start the Utterly Free University, where lectures will be online and available via podcast, to be funded by advertising. He hates new technology but also hates lecturing in person so he resigns.

Catrina, who is yet another parliamentary assistant, hates her Tory boss so she asks a Welsh Nationalist Green MEP for a job ... and gets it.

Mercedes is turned down for a job with an Italian lobbying company and instead takes a job with Nikita, the Russian owner of an art gallery.

Agnestina is looking for Flamand in the cafe but doesn't see him because he is hidden behind fat Louise. When they finally meet again, each thinks the other jilted them. The situation is resolved when Patrice shows them what happened on the cafe's CCTV.

Esko is elected head of his parliamentary group because of the way he has successfully dealt with the media in the last week.