"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey

 

This great but morally dubious novel was later made famous by an Oscar-winning movie starring Jack Nicholson.

Selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels since Time began (1923).

It is set in a psychiatric ward containing both chronic patients, some in a more or less vegetative state, and acute patients which is run with fearsome efficiency by the autocratic Nurse Ratched. Randle McMurphy is a new patient who has feigned mental illness in order to avoid the harsh prison conditions of a work farm. He is a natural rebel and refuses to fit in with the rules of Ratched, even after he realises that he had been Committed and will never get out unless she endorses his sanity. So he and Big Nurse lock horns. She is for order and control and he is for laughter and gambling. She keeps the patients bullied and downtrodden; he tries to free them. The battle for dominance between these two drives the plot and enables the author to explore questions relating to human freedom.

The novel is narrated in the first person present tense by a mixed-race Native American, 'Chief Bromden', who is thought by the rest of the ward, including the staff, to be deaf and dumb. This narrative trick enables Chief, who repetitively cleans the ward, to be present at staff meetings to which patients would not be admitted, and patient discussions in the absence of staff. 

One of the strong points of the novel is the dialogue. Randle speaks in a free-wheeling slang, Billy Bibbit has a nervous stutter, Harding is refined, educated and articulate (enabling him to explain many of the concepts of psychiatric care to newcomer Randle). 

The plot is structured mostly around set pieces such as the fishing trip.

One of the themes is the idea of the emasculation of men in society. The novel was written in 1962, in the USA, which in hindsight seems a very patriarchal time and place. Indeed, McMurphy's attitude towards women is that of the sexually promiscuous rake. Billy Bibbit is a 31 year old virgin whose timidity with women is a result of a domineering mother who has colluded with Nurse Ratched - a symbol of overbearing womanhood - to have Billy incarcerated, presumably so he doesn't leave her for a woman of his own. The climax of the book comes when McMurphy rips Nurse Ratched's uniform to expose her breasts and then attempts to strangle her. 

There is an element of critique of McCarthyism. Although the book was first published in 1962, after the 'red scare' of the late 1940s to mid 1950s, McCarthy's use of supposition and innuendo, unrevealed 'evidence' and character assassination was still fresh in the public mind. So, for example, Scanlon tells McMurphy regarding the way that Nurse Ratched uses the therapy sessions: "If you don't answer her questions, Mack, you admit it just by keeping quiet. It's the way those bastards in the government get you." (part 1). The battle between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched in a supposedly democratic ward can be seen as an extended metaphor for the individual trying to assert their rights to freedom against an authoritarian government.

Selected quotes:

• “He's hard in ... the way a baseball is hard under the scuffed leather.” (part 1)
• “This world ... belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the week.” (Part 1)
• “You are strapped to a table, shaped, ironically, like a cross, with a crown of electric sparks in place of thorns.” (A patient's description of ECT)
• “How come they treat this new guy different? He's a man made outa skin and bone that's due to get weak and pale and die, just like the rest of us. He lives under the same laws, got to eat, bumps up against the same troubles.” (Part 1)
• “Being lost isn't so bad.” (Part 1)
• “Nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.” (Part 2)
• “The glass came apart like water splashing.” (Part 2)
• “It wasn't me that started acting deaf; it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.” (Part 3)
• “You could read the dates of the coins in her Levi pockets, they were so tight.” (Part 3)
• “We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you?” (Part 3)
• “You have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just keep the world from running you plumb crazy.” (Part 3)

It is a beautifully constructed book with clearly distinguished characterisations. The theme of David against Goliath, the rebellion of the little man, the individual, against the establishment, is universal and eternal. BUT it contains a tremendous amount of misogyny, perhaps typical for its period. Nurse Ratched is described as a "ball-cutter"; she is characterised as an emasculator of men. Almost the only other female roles are prostitutes. McMurphy's response to rules is violence. It could be an ur-text for the manosphere and, as such, leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth.

Synopsis: (spoiler alert)

A new patient, McMurphy, arrives at the lunatic asylum. But he's not mad. He's faked madness to get out of a prison sentence. He immediately begins a psychological battle with the woman who runs the ward, Nurse Ratched. He tried to persuade the other patients to stand up for themselves, the ward is supposed to be run on democratic lines. His rebellion includes gaining permission from a pliant doctor  to use a room that is otherwise locked for a card school, and forcing and winning a vote to allow the patients to watch the World Series on TV. When he wins a battle, the Nurse practises passive rebellion (she switches the TV off during the World Series matches); when McMurphy loses a battle he resorts to violence, such as thrusting his hand through the pane of glass that separates the nurses' control station from the ward. 

The individual against the system is a key theme of the novel. Much of McMurphy's focus is on gambling: when he bets that he can pick up a large piece of machinery and throw it through a window, he fails, but walks away saying "But at least I tried." The Chief extrapolates this outwards from the ward into the external world, hallucinating that what he calls The Combine are turning humans into robots and remembering how his tribe were defeated by government bureaucrats who wanted to impose a hydro-electric power scheme on tribal land. 

About half way through the book, McMurphy organises a fishing trip, another symbol of macho independence: the only woman to participate is a prostitute of McMurphy's acquaintance. Subsequent to this taste of freedom,, McMurphy and the Chief get involved in a fracas which results in them being sent to the Shock Shop for  electro-convulsive therapy. 

McMurphy organises an unsanctioned party on the ward, bribing the night porter, partly with the aim of helping Bibbit lose his virginity and partly to enable him to escape from the ward in the early hours. But he falls asleep with his own prostitute and the morning shift discovers him and Bibbit in flagrante, together with the mess of the party. Bibbit, finally loses his stutter, answers back to Nurse Ratched ... until she threatens to tell his mother. He slits his throat. McMurphy blames Nurse Ratched and attacks her, stripping her of her uniform and trying to strangle her. He is moved to the Disturbed ward. When he returned, he has been lobotomised and is in a vegetative state. In the night, The Chief smothers McMurphy with a pillow, throws the hydrotheraphy machinery through the window and escapes.

First reviewed in April 2012; revised in July 2026; 310 pages

First published in the US by Viking in 1962

My Picador paperback was issued in 1973

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Beasts They Turned Away" by Ryan Dennis

In the depths of rural Ireland, as a traditional way of life sputters towards it end,  remarkably stubborn old man, Iosac Mulgannon, stands firm, defending a nameless and voiceless (and ungrateful) child, who wears, over his head, the skull of a cow. The child is believed to be a cursed jinx by the rest of the village. Certainly, in the child's presence, strange things happen, including violence to the old man. Things go missing - religious items from the church, even goal-posts - and the child gets the blame but is seems more likely to be a marauding pack of Viking raiders, possibly from Dublin (originally a Norse settlement) or from Iceland. At one point seven teenagers rise from a pool, later fish leap from a river. There is a confrontation in which the old man's hurl "scratches a spit in the sky" from which ash falls (this is later explained as an Icelandic volcano). The village is gradually cut off: the last bus service departs, the road is overwhelmed by a landslide: "The crumbled road like a fallen ribbon, lost in the grass." (The Bog Slide). Extreme weather plays a part towards the end of the book. 

The occurrences lend the book a mythic air. Is the cow-headed child the minotaur? The third horseman of the apocalypse (famine), who rides the dark horse with the scales of justice in his hands, is referenced. I was reminded of the work of Alan Garner, such as The Owl Service, or Treacle Walker, but also of James Joyce's Ulysses. 

The villagers and others - a brave woman representing child welfare, the foul-mouthed priest who attempts to exorcise the child - are constantly trying to separate the old man and the child. The old man resists all such efforts. He also refuses to open letters sent to him - "Letters can say all manner of things, but he has known them only to harm" (The Bog) - including bills and legal letters, which means that he is pursued by the bank who want to take the farm away. He meets all threats with violence. 

I think (but I don't know it well enough to be sure) that there may be a number of references to the Irish legendary hero Cuchulainn, who as a young man played hurling (an Irish version of hockey although it might be more true to say that hockey is a tamed version of hurling), who was a protector of cattle - the old man is a dairy farmer and the book is full of descriptions of cows, usually suffering or dying or dead - and a great fighter who fought from his chariot (or Ford tractor in this case). 

The old man's superhero skill is to "stand" or to endure, perhaps echoing Cuchulainn's death when, facing overwhelming odds in battle, he tied himself to a standing stone so he could die upright. His principal adversary, young John Allen (who seems a rather decent chap for an antagonist), is described thus: "He is not a man tested and tried, and therefore not worthy. He does not struggle as good men do, does not feel the hunger, pain inside. He is not a man called, but to which it is given." (The Old Man Disks) The implication is that the old man is the antithesis of these traits: "The old man has stood. He is the rock they turn the ploughs around." (The Old Man Disks)

The story is narrated in the present tense from the third person omniscient perspective. Most of the sentences are direct, short and simple; there are very few sub-clauses. This meant that meaning was densely packed; I had to read slowly and not infrequently had to read a paragraph more than once. 

I often found it difficult to understand. I had to google Irish words such as geansai (a 'Guernsey' jumper), hurl (the stick used in hurling), sliotar (the hurling ball) and peist (an Irish monster, worm or dragon). 

Furthermore the way the story is told in fragmentary episodes, often no more than two or three pages long with matter-of-fact headings such as "The Old Man Ploughs", meant that I struggled to assemble a coherent whole. Towards the end, there were moments when light dawned, but for at least the first half of the book I was more confused than intrigued which meant that I was less motivated to read on; this in turn made it more difficult for me to pick up the pieces when I returned to the book.

But it is not about the narrative. Even with the matter-of-fact sentences, the prose is lyrical, if dark, and its earthy texture made me feel as if I was stomping across a peaty bog in a pair of muddy wellies and a tattered geansai. There is a mythic feel to the book. But it certainly isn't an advert for dairy farming.

Selected quotes:

• “Young John's face collects gullies of shadows as it frowns.” (The Standoff)
• “He had extinguished himself into an early sleep" (The Visit)
• “The curse as much the child as the skin he was born in.” (The Rooks)
• “A field is a lifetime. So it is by natural law that when the headlands are reached a man who gives himself fully would not be measured as he was on the first thorough.” (The Old Man Ploughs)
• “It comes a point that you’re the last one standing then that's who you measure yourself.” (The Midges)
• “Clouds seal over the sky and dampen the moon. Everything in degrees of shadow and the idea of things and not the things themselves.” (The Old Man and Child Walk in the Dark.)
• “The past floods into the present until it's a struggle to keep them in different corners.” (The Old Man and Child Walk in the Dark.)
• “Night-birds flutter between branches. Lift into flight as tittering shadows.” (The Icelanders)
• “Town is an invention born of fear ... First man came and then man farmed, and then those who couldn't farm drew together and put their houses close to one another so as to not have the space to be of anything themselves.” (The Town Goes Dark)

July 2026; 228 pages

Published by epoque press in 2021

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Lodger" by Drew Gummerson

This is a charming and joyous book which affirms the pleasure that can be found in the simple routines of life. There were moments when the style reminded me of 'kitchen sink' novels from the 1950s and 1960s such as The Lowlife by Alexander Baron and a couple of slim novels by Wolf Mankowitz: Make Me an Offer and A Kid for Two Farthings.

Honza, a gay man, a writer and wannabe novelist, takes a lodger to help with the bills. Andy moves in. Andy is childlike in his simple pleasures: he eats baked beans on toast, watches telly, drinks beer. Together, they look after Nicholas, Honza's little nephew: there are delightful descriptions of the innocent fun to be found entertaining children. But there are clouds on the horizon. Nicholas's mother plans to take him to London with her. Then Andy announces he has killed a man.

The plot is a slow burner. Gummerson takes his time to build up the characters. Nevertheless, I found it a page turner because of the way the author drops in little clues to keep the reader trying to solve the enigma that is Andy. It even flirts towards the end with thriller genre.

Much of the writing is unaffected and innocent. There is a significant amount of explicit gay sex, but I found that too to be (most of the time, when it was good sex) joyous.

I hardly ever laugh aloud, but there were one or two moments in this book when I could not restrain an audible chuckle. Such as when, in chapter seven, four-year-old Nicholas, having told his Mum: "Andy's having a piss" is reproved with the word: "manners" and replies "Please. Andy's having a piss. Thank you." Or, in chapter eight, when teenager Martin, having been taught how to put on a condom on a carrot and told to practise, asks to borrow a carrot because his Mum only using tinned ones. "'I didn't mean on the carrot,' says Andy." Or when in chapter fifteen, Andy goes to A&E to have a cork removed from his rectum. "'How long?' said the nurse. And held up his thumb and middle finger indicating a distance. ... 'No,' said the nurse. Deadpan. 'How long ago did it happen?'" 

Selected quotes:

• “I was beginning to realize how cold it was. I had goosebumps on my arms, legs, and was starting to suffer from cryonics of the balls.” (Ch 1)
• “This wasn't a voice that was easily mistakable. It was an inharmonious mix of Leo Sayer practising scales and a seventeenth-century castrato mid-op.” (Ch 1)
• “Queues are good places to meet people. Even the corniest of lines in a queue smacks of the naturalism of a sentence in a novel by Emile Zola.” (Ch 7)
• “As a stripper Dark Angel wasn't bad. He had the body of a gladiator, the moves of a ballerina suffering from steroid abuse. It was Schwarzenegger doing Swan Lake for the Swedish soft porn industry.” (Ch 7)
• “Showers are the casual sex of washing. No foreplay is required, no expensive offerings. You just dive in there, get what you want and then leave with barely a thankyou. Baths however require commitment.” (Ch 12)
• “Graham worked for a local newspaper. Cliches were his bread and butter.” (Ch 16)

Delightful, well-written, entertaining and heart-warming.

Drew Gummerson has also written:

• Me and Mickie James
• Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel
• Saltburn

July 2026; 331 pages

Published in 2002 by GMP

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Night and Day" by Virginia Woolf

 This novel was published in 1919. Woolf published Mrs Dalloway in 1925. What a difference! Mrs D is stream of consciousness; in contrast Night and Day seems Victorian and Woolf's trademark lyricism repeatedly tips over into melodrama. 

It is written in the third person omniscient, though usually from the point of view of one of the main characters, and in the past tense.

Katherine Hilbery is the grand-daughter of a famous poet. Her father edits a Review. Her mother is writing the poet's biography, with Katherine's help. The family hosts tea parties where eminent novelists (eg Mr Fortescue who might be a portrait of E M Forster) pontificate. Very Bloomsbury! We are instantly in a world of privilege. 

The initiating incident is when young Ralph Denham (usually referred to by his surname), a solicitor's clerk with a desire to be better cultured - just like Leonard Bast in Howards End - attends the tea party. He is gauche, but instantly falls in love with Katherine.

The plot then flows like that of a Midsummer Night's Dream. There are two pairs of lovers and, almost inevitably he fancies her but she doesn't fancy him and the other he fancies her but she doesn't fancy him either - or does she? - and the other he fancies him but knows that he fancies someone else. This set up starts when the four young people all wander into the 'enchanted forest' of Lincoln and its surroundings, where they meet by accident. Katherine regularly changes her mind. 

Of course we have to throw obstacles in the way of a resolution. Despite the characters thinking they are aware of what another is thinking, there must be opportunities for misunderstanding, such as a conversation held outside in which the wind snatches words away leaving ambiguous sentence fragments. Unbelievably, one resolution is achieved through a Shakespearean cliche when one of the characters overhears a conversation between two others while hiding behind a curtain.

There are some passages when Woolf abandons herself to Victorian baroque:

• “The smaller room was something like a chapel in a cathedral, or a grotto in a cave, for the booming sound of the traffic in the distance suggested the soft surge of waters, and the oval mirrors, with their silver surface, were like deep pools trembling beneath starlight. But the comparison to a religious temple of some kind was the more apt of the two, for the little room was crowded with relics.” (Ch 1) 
• “She no longer completely possessed her love, since her share in it was doubtful; and now, to make things yet more bitter, her Clear Vision of the way to face life was rendered tremulous and uncertain, because another was witness of it. Feeling her desire for the old unshared intimacy too great to be born without tears, she rose, walked to the farther end of the room, held the curtains apart, and stood there mastered from a moment. The grief itself was not ignoble; the sting of it lay in the fact that she had been led to this act of treachery against herself. Trapped, cheated, robbed, first by Ralph and then by Katharine, she seemed all dissolved in humiliation, and bereft of anything she could call her own. Tears of weakness welled up and rolled down her cheeks.” (Ch 21)
• “She had gone without speaking; abruptly a chasm had been cut in his course, down which the tide of his being plunged in disorder; fell upon rocks; flung itself to destruction. The distress had an effect of physical ruin and disaster. He trembled; he was white; he felt exhausted, as if by a great physical effort.” (Ch 28)
• “But gaining upon this clearness of sight against her will, and to her dislike, was a flood of confusion, of relief, of certainty, of humility, of desire no longer to strive and to discriminate, yielding to which, she let herself sink within his arms and confessed her love.” (Ch 31)

As ever, with Woolf, there is an atmosphere of cultural elitism which can become outright intellectual snobbery:

• “‘No one ever does do anything worth doing nowadays,’ she remarked. ... ‘No, we haven't any great men,’ Denham replied.” (Ch 1)
• "The Baskerville Congreve ... I couldn't read him in a cheap edition." (Ch 6)
• “‘The office atmosphere is very bad for the soul ... Still, if the clerks read poetry there must be something nice about them.’ ‘No, because they don't read it as we read it.’” (Ch 7)
• “She ought to be given the chance of hearing good music, as it is played by those who have inherited the great tradition.” (Ch 22)

When Denham, disappointed in love, decides to live as a hermit is seems utterly inevitable that he intends to write a book.

I suppose you can't blame Virginia. Write what you know, they say, and she lived in a very precious bubble.

But it is fascinating to wonder what happened to Virginia in those six years between 1919 and 1925 which so changed her writing. What were her influences? I can only point to the Stream of Consciousness pioneers. Dorothy Richardson had been publishing since 1915 (Pointed Roofs) but I don't know whether (or when) Woolf read her. We do know she read (and didn't like, possibly for reasons of snobbery) Ulysses by James Joyce and given that Mrs Dalloway is, like Ulysses, about people wandering around a city and occasionally interacting, it seems a likely influence. We also know she started reading Proust in 1922. I wonder if she also was influenced by the modernist short stories of her friend (at the time) Katherine Mansfield? 

The Characters

Katherine Hilbery

The main character. Her secret passion is maths. She spends much of her time flip-flopping about whether she is in love, and if so with whom.

Mary Datchet

One if many children of a vicar, she lives in a flat on the Strand and works (unpaid; I'm not quite sure how she makes ends meet) on a committee promoting women's suffrage. She holds meetings in her rooms. At one of these Mr Rodney reads a paper about the use of metaphor in Elizabethan poetry. Mary is good sense personified.

Ralph Denham

• The Leonard Bast character, the disrupting influence, Ralph is a poor boy who aspires to be posh but never quite fits in because he doesn't have good breeding. He wants to watch birds rather than shoot them! “He had always made plans since he was a small boy; for poverty, and the fact that he was the eldest son of a large family, had given him the habit of thinking of spring and summer, autumn and winter, as so many stages in a prolonged campaign.” (Ch 2)
• “Denham was ... too positive, as to what was right and what wrong. ... He appeared to be a rather hard and self-sufficient young man, with a queer temper, and manners that were uncompromisingly abrupt, who was consumed with a desire to get on in the world, which was natural ... but not engaging." (Ch 10)

Somewhat improbably, in chapter 28 we discover that Ralph isn't quite sure of how many brothers and sisters he has; "Six or seven", he thinks.

William Rodney

Both fool and villain, Rodney is a playwright and poet of skill but no talent whose behaviour with the women he loves is patronising and controlling. 

• “By profession a clerk in a government office, he was one of those martyred spirits to whom literature is at once a source of divine joy and of almost intolerable irritation. Not content to rest in their love of it, they must attempt to practice it themselves, and they are generally endowed with very little facility in composition." (Ch 4)

Minor characters

• Mrs Hilbery, Katharine's mother, is a scatterbrain who can never settle to anything without being sidetracked.
• Aunt Celia is the childless, self-appointed guardian of the family morals.

Selected quotes:

• “It may be said, indeed, that English society being what it is, no very great merit is required, once you bear a well-known name, to put you in the position where it is easier on the whole to be imminent then obscure. ... and when one of them dies the chances are that another writes his biography.” (Ch 3)
• “Beneath all her education she preserved the anxieties of one who owns china.” (Ch 4)
• “The night was very still, and on such nights, when the traffic thins away, the walker becomes conscious of the moon in the street, as if the curtains of the sky had been drawn apart, and the heaven lay bare, as it does in the country.” (Ch 5)
• “Katharine’s ignorance of Shakespeare did not prevent her feeding fairly certain that plays should not produce a sense of chill stupor in the audience, such as overcame her as the lines flowed on, sometimes long and sometimes short, but always delivered with the same lilt of voice, which seemed to nail each line firmly onto the same spot in the hearer's brain.” (Ch 11) 
• “We want some one to show us what a good man can be. We have Laura and Beatrice, Antigone and Cordelia, but we have no heroic man.” (Ch 12)
• “He snuffed the air, and felt more keenly than he had done for many weeks the pleasure of owning a body.” (Ch 15)
• “She spent most of her time in pretending to herself and her neighbours that she was a dignified, important, much-occupied person, of considerable social standing and sufficient wealth. In view of the actual state of things this game needed a great deal of skill; and, perhaps, at the age she had reached ... she played far more to deceive herself than to deceive any one else.” (Ch 17)
• “As so often happens in these large families, a distinct dividing-line could be traced, about half-way in the succession, where the money for educational purposes had run short, and the six younger children had grown up far more economically than the elder.” (Ch 17)
• “If you can give way to your husband ... a happy marriage is the happiest thing in the world.” (Ch 17) 
• “To be engaged to marry some one with whom you are not in love is an inevitable step in a world where the existence of passion is only a traveller's story brought from the heart of deep forests and told so rarely that wise people doubt with the story can be true.” (Ch 17)
• “The best of life is built on what we say when we're in love.” (Ch 24)
• “She thought gloomily of her loneliness, of life's futility, of the barren prose of reality ... and the unfinished book.” (Ch 27)

June 2026; 783 pages (large-print edition)

First published in 1919

My large-print hardback edition was issued by Thorndike Press in 2003

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Synopsis (spoiler alert):

Ralph Denham attends a tea party at Katharine Hilbery's house and sees the relic room where her grandfather, a famous poet, worked. He decides "she'll do". He meets her again at a gathering at Mary Datchet's flat where William Rodney is reading a paper about Elizabethan dramatists. William, a conventionally respectable cultural elitist, proposes to Katharine via a sonnet; she accepts. Mary, who works for a committee dedicated to the cause of Women's suffrage, falls in love with Ralph and invited him to spend Christmas with her family who live just outside Lincoln. Coincidentally, William and Katharine are staying near Lincoln. All four meet. Also William meets Cassandra, Katharine's cousin. Katharine realises that she doesn't love William and tells him; he is heartbroken and she agrees to continue their engagement. Then he realises that he loves Cassandra. They mutually agree not to be engaged but this shall stay secret otherwise William won't have a chance of seeing Cassandra. Meanwhile Ralph realises Mary loves him and she realises he loves Katharine. After intervention by Aunt Celia, the upholder of the family morals, who has realised the true state of affairs between William and Cassandra, Katharine's hitherto hands-off father sends Cassandra home and bans William from the house. Meanwhile Katharine and Ralph agree to be 'friends'. At length it all gets sorted out: William gets Cassandra, Katharine Ralph and Mary has her work.

Other novels by Virginia Woolf:

• The Voyage Out (1915)
• Night and Day (1919)
• Jacob's Room (1922)
• Mrs Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Orlando: A Biography (1928)
• The Waves (1931)
• The Years (1937)
• Between the Acts (1941)

"Sex and Rockets" by John Carter

 This is a biography of rocketry pioneer Jack Parsons which explains the 'rockets' part of the title. He was also a leading member of a group of ceremonial magicians following the Thelema school of magic of Aleister Crowley; the 'sex' part of the title presumably refers to the fact that sex magic was used during their rites.

The introduction, by Robert Anton Wilson, focuses on another key alleged interest of Jack Parsons, suggesting that he was a leading communist. This is unmentioned in the body of the biography.

At times, the book's scholarship lapses. For example, there is the claim that the original owner of the house Parsons leased, in which the rites of Thelema were practised, was Arthur Fleming, “a noted philanthropist and Nobel Prize winner who had made a good deal of money in the Canadian logging industry.” (Ch 5) A very small amount of research shows that he didn't win a Nobel Prize, although a Pasadena newspaper said he was awarded a noble [sic] prize for Civic Duty. There is also a flavour of credulity, for example where it mentions “An unconfirmed statement attributed to conspiriologist John Judge claimed that Parsons may have flown with the pilot Kenneth Arnold, who in 1947 saw several silver discs over Mount Rainier in Washington state and coined the term ‘flying saucer’ to describe them.” (Ch 10) The multiple qualifications - 'unconfirmed', 'attributed to' and 'may have' - mean that this statement is so far from 'evidence' that it really shouldn't have been included in a respectable work.

A far better biography of this fascinating man is Strange Angel by George Pendel.

Selected quotes:

• “The priest ... was a lean, dynamic little man with bright, light blue eyes, driven by a virulent hatred of God. ... he was the son of a British clergyman who must have been the real target of that savage animosity.” (58)
• “The rapport between Jack and Betty, the strong affection, if not love, they had for each other, despite their frequent separate sextracurricular [sic] activities, seem pretty permanent and shatterproof.” (94)
• “He must learn that the sparkle of champagne is based on sound wine; pumping carbonic acid into urine is not the same thing.” (95, quoting Crowley)

June 2026; 203 pages

Published by Feral House in 2004

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Do What Thou Wilt is a fascinating biography of Aleister Crowley, for those with an interest in him. 

"Flesh" by David Szalay

 

This novel, which won the 2025 Booker Prize, follows the life of a Hungarian man called Istvan all the way from adolescence to old age. It is narrated in the third person, almost always from Istvan's PoV, and in the present tense. Its dialogue is remarkable, consisting of the short, frequently single word utterances of everyday speech. As reader, I gleaned a feeling that each character was isolated within his or her own head, trying to communicate what they feel and to understand what their friends and family are feeling, but frequently failing. In fact Istvan often fails to understand why he has done the things he does. 

There's also a sense that few of the characters have agency. The most frequent word is 'okay'; Istvan and his son are fundamentally reactive. As The Guardian review points out, this is a hero's journey in which the hero hardly ever initiates anything, but accepts the plans that others make for him, going with the flow. 

Some of the plot seems to echo Hamlet with Istvan as Claudius and his  stepson Thomas ("a young man, dressed mostly in black"; Ch 9) as the self-destructive Prince. Is the novel's title linked to Hamlet's 'to be or not to be' soliloquy which references "the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to?" (I disagree with The Guardian reviewer who links it to Biblical misquote, "the way of all flesh" and thence to the Samuel Butler novel of that name.)

But it doesn't sound like Hamlet! Shakespearean blank verse seems baroque in contrast to the minimalist prose of this novel, which The Guardian review likens to the work of Henry Green, eg Living, Loving, and Party Going. It has a crisp, refreshing feel which emphasises and accentuates the few occasions when, with stark clarity, he discusses Istvan's feelings. For example: "Perhaps it's at that age, he thinks, that you first have the sense that you and your body are not entirely identical ... because some part of you seems to lag the transformation of your body, and to be surprised by it ... and it starts to make sense to talk about it as if it was something slightly separate from yourself, even while you seem more powerless than ever to deny it what it wants." (Ch 8) Puberty encapsulated.

Selected quotes:

• "He has this feeling, with women, that it's hard to have an experience that's entirely new, that doesn't feel like something has already happened, so that it never feels like all that much is at stake." (Ch 5)
• "You don't know what to do when something like that happens. The shock is so great." (in between Ch 8 and Ch 9)
• "He desperately wants to believe that his son still exists - still exists in some actual sense, not just as a memory. ... He knows it's not true, that's the problem." (Ch 9)

June 2026; 349 pages
First published by Jonathan Cape in 2025
My paperback edition was issued by Vintage in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Synopsis: spoiler alert

As a teenager, Istvan loses his virginity to a next door neighbour, with whom he has an affair. After she stops it, he has an argument with her husband whom he pushes downstairs, killing him. He spends time in a juvenile detention centre.

He joins the army and receives a medal for his action during an ambush in which his best friend dies. He gets PTSD.

In England, he works first as a doorman at a Soho club and later as a security driver. He begins an affair with Helen, his employer's wife. They fall in love. After his employer dies of cancer they marry. The son, Thomas, will inherit all the money when he turns 25; in the meantime they persuade the lawyer in charge of the trust fund to lend Istvan the money he needs to develop properties. He becomes extremely rich. He has a son called Jacob. Thomas, realising what is happening, accuses his mother and stepfather of 'stealing' money from the trust fund.

In a car accident, Helen and Jacob die.

Thomas sues Istvan for the improper loans. Istvan and his company both go bankrupt. He returns to live in Hungary with his mother, becoming a security guard.

"Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel" by Drew Gummerson

Narrated in the anonymous second person, present tense, this week in the life of dishwasher employed at the hotel who, like Walter Mitty, repeatedly escapes from his dead-end squalor into a world of fantasy is hilarious.

The 2nd person narration creates a feeling of empathy (please, not identity, 'your' life is too sad and sordid for that) with the narrator as he fails again and again to improve his sex-life (“It is a long time since you have made love to a woman, possibly as long as two years or if it may even be as long as eight if the woman being in the same room as yourself is the deciding factor.”; Monday. At work. A shambles within a shambles.). Somehow, every attempt to hook up with a hot woman (or even a hunky man) ends in an explicit (but squalid rather than erotic) and humiliating disaster. 

He remembers his past: bullied at school, living in a shopping mall after his dad murdered his mother, friendless as university, an unconsummated relationship with a performance artist in America, a brief marriage ... No wonder that he tells tall tales to his colleagues and seeks solace in building wish-fulfilment pipe-dreams of his glorious future.

He then embellishes these excursions into the world of make-believe. They become more and more convoluted, gloriously so, as he doubles down. For example, when he imagines being kidnapped and held to ransom but left to rot when not only relatives but even a crowdfunding pages doesn’t raise the money. Or this part of a sentence: “You are considering purchasing a Russian bride although you know you will not because you will purchase one that does not like you and she will sit in the corner glowering at you, smoking strong Russian cigarettes that sting your eyes, or she will read long psychological novels by Dostoevsky and Gogol and she will not even glower at you which will be even more painful especially as you have rung the agent, Sergei, who used to be in the KGB, and Sergei has told you that she doesn't come with a refund option or a money back guarantee.” (Friday morning. Glory. Love is in the Air.) 

And there are some outrageous puns:

• “Another day, another douleur” (Monday: The Flamingo Hotel. Monday morning. A win win situation.)
• “Peter and John, the co-joined twins, stand shoulder to shoulder by the fridges.” (Monday. At work. A shambles within a shambles.)
• “He can dissect a deadly blowfish as easily as other people cut the mustard.” (Sunday night. The End.)

I've been struggling to find comparisons. I think this is the first comic novel I have encountered that uses the second person. Is the humour Rabelaisian? The disastrous biography reminded me of Voltaire's Candide. The rambling discursiveness reminded me of Tristram Shandy. There was a hint of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. 

Selected quotes:

• “You are an ant upon the globe, lacking significance as much as you lack a purpose.” (Monday: The Flamingo Hotel. Monday morning. A win win situation.)
• “You can only think that your affair started at a low point in your life although this low point is hard to pinpoint as there have rarely been any high points.” (Monday. At work. A shambles within a shambles.)
• “Why do you have to make these changes today? That is the beauty of days. There are always other ones.” (Monday. To the end of the day. The Birdland Bar.)
• “She licks you, starting at the big toe and working her way slowly up your body, even including your bumhole which only your pet dog Sparky has ever licked (an event which both of you regretted)” (Tuesday lunchtime. This Sporting Life.)
• “It made you contemplate how much sperm you had wasted in your life. It was a lot. More than a bucket full but not as much as a swimming pool. Somewhere between the two.” (Tuesday lunchtime. This Sporting Life.)
• “You add making love to Peggy-Sue to your list of things to do before you die. This list you keep on a roll of shiny toilet paper you stole from Paddington train station toilets after you'd been chased there by a gang of angry skinheads. It has over two and a half thousand items on it. Sometimes you take it out and weep.” (Wednesday evening. The Man in a Pink Suit. With a bum on his face.)
• “It was your foreskin that saved your life. Not many people can say that.” (Thursday afternoon. The forsaken foreskin. Part 2.)
• “And the tears form in your eyes because on your best days you have never been as good as second best.” ( Friday, at work. The Greatest Love of All. Polye Thylene.)
• “The moon is out in full, like a dinner plate a small child has thrown up on.” (Friday night. Your Love is King. Part 2)
• “It was your counsellor at the nuthouse who gave you the copy of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In your drug-addled state you had confused it with Tyrannosaurus Rex and believed it to be yet another sequel to Jurassic Park.” (Sunday morning. the beginning of the end. some thoughts about death.)

Comic genius.

Drew Gummerson has also written:

• Me and Mickie James
• The Lodger
• Saltburn

July 2026

Published by Bearded Badger in 2020

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"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