"The Land in Winter" by Andrew Miller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selected quotes:

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

August 2026; 371 pages

First published by Sceptre in 2024

My paperback edition was issued in 2025

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

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Scotland's Merlin" by Tim Clarkson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 2026; 136 pages and three appendices

Published in 2016 by John Donald

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Love in a Cold Climate" by Nancy Mitford

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

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

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

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

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

Selected quotes:

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

August 2026; 166 pages

First published by Hamish Hamilton in 1949

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

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Pursuit of Love" by Nancy Mitford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selected quotes: 

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

August 2026; 151 pages

First published by Hamish Hamilton in 1945

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

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Biographies written by Nancy Mitford and reviewed in this blog:

• Madame de Pompadour
• The Sun King

"The Iceman Cometh" by Eugene O'Neill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selected quotes:

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

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

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"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