"Fer-de-Lance" by Rex Stout

Rex Stout wrote 33 novels featuring his master-sleuth Nero Wolfe and sidekick-narrator Archie Goodwin and this is the very first. Later Nero Wolfe novels include The Doorbell Rang, listed as 66th in the 100 best crime novels by the Mystery Writers of America, and The Father Hunt which won the 1969 silver dagger award from the British Crime Writers' Association. 

It is a sort of hybrid between the classic English whodunnits of Conan Doyle (in which narrator Dr Watson is the sidekick to mastersleuth Sherlock Holmes) and Agatha Christie (whose first Hercule Poirot mysteries are narrated by sidekick Captain Hastings) and the more hardboiled American thriller-crime novels. There are one or two lines, such as “I don't know what kind of a career she had mapped out, but I could have worn her not to try the stage.” (Ch 8) or “The corner the light doesn't reach is the one the dime rolled to.” (Ch 11) that reminded me of the work of Raymond Chandler, although The Big Sleep was published in 1939, 5 years after FdL.

The gimmick is that Nero Wolfe is an enormously fat man dedicated to orchids who never leaves his New York apartment so Archie Goodwin, as well as being the narrator, must be the investigator who does all the ground work, enabling him also to be involved in the action.

I was disappointed. The elimination of the suspects one by one rested mostly on their alibis and was pedestrian. The killer's identity was obvious with at least 20% of the novel still to go; the remainder depended on extracting sufficient evidence. More thriller than whodunnit, then, and by no means as stylish as the Philip Marlowe novels. Given how much classic work I have yet to discover, I'm not tempted to read any more.

One neat trick I noticed was the way he inserted references to previous cases (even though this is the first of the corpus), thus adding verisimilitude.

Selected quotes:

• “All lawyers look alike. It's a sort of mixture of a scared look at a satisfied look, as if they were crossing a traffic-filled street where they expect to get run over any minute but they know exactly the kind of paper to hand the driver if they get killed.” (Ch 4)
• “To have you with me like this is always refreshing because it constantly reminds me how distressing it would be to have someone present - a wife, for - whom I could not dismiss at will.” (Ch 5)
• “Though it used all the facts without any stretching. anyone could have said that much a thousand years ago when they thought the sun went round the Earth. That didn't stretch any of the facts they knew, but what about the ones they didn't know?” (Ch 5)
• “Anyone may make a mistake, but ... when a man sits himself up as cocksure as Wolfe did, he had always got to be right.” (Ch 5)
• “A yawn that would have held a tennis ball.” (Ch 8)
• “We were putting the soup before the cocktail.” (Ch 13)
• “Saul looked in the kitchen to make a face at me, as if his ugly mug wasn't good enough without any embroidery.” (Ch 16)

May 2026; 285 pages

First published in the USA in 1934

My paperback edition was issued by Bantam in 2008

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Ann Veronica" by H G Wells

One of the 'social' novels of H G Wells, Ann Veronica was his attempt to understand the proto-feminist movement of the early years of the nineteenth century. His eponymous heroine wants to “be a human being; I want to learn about things and know about things, and not to be protected as something too precious for life.” (1.7). But her patriarchal father insists she stays at home: "While you live in my house you must follow my ideas.” (1.7) So she runs away. But living as an independent woman in a man's world seems to be impossible. 

One man assumes he has bought her and tries to force himself upon her, after she has attended, as his guest, a performance of Wagner's opera about transgressive love Tristan und Isolde: “He made it very clear that night that there was an ineradicable discord in life, a jarring something that must shatter all her dreams of a way of living for women that would enable them to be free and spacious and friendly with men, and that was the passionate predisposition of men to believe that love of women can be earned and won and controlled and compelled.” (9.5)

Another worships the ground that she walks on but “she realised she was in fact just a mannequin for her lover's imagination, and that he cared no more for the realities of her being, for the things she felt and desired, for the passions and dreams that might move her, then a child cares for the sawdust in its doll.” (13.5)

She has actually fallen in love with another man ... but he's married.

Her journey takes her to the Suffragettes and to prison. Can she end up fulfilled?

Feminists today usually consider the novel flawed. It was not only written by a man, but a man with a track record of abandoning wives and mistresses  (Wells fathered the novelist Anthony West on his mistress Rebecca West, author of Return of the Soldier; he also has affairs with Dorothy Richardson, author of Pilgrimage: Pointed Roofs, and Elizabeth von Arnim who wrote The Enchanted April); I set this aside because if the character of the author is allowed to taint the work then the corpus of literature will be disembowelled and bowdlerised. Furthermore, Wells ridicules and lampoons the Suffragettes who are often regarded as modern-day saints but this just makes the truthful observation that protest movements may often be led by pompous idiots. But it is true that the ending is a cop out and that does mar the novel both as a work of art and as a political argument. But Wells, it seems to me, was writing a brave novel for his time (indeed, his established publisher rejected it on the grounds that the behaviour of the heroine would shock readers) and his protagonist is a fabulous character, feisty, full of fire, who, even though she blunders, always bounces back. I guess if you write a book that is criticised from both ends of the political spectrum, you've probably done something right.

In terms of its quality, it is true that many of the male characters are only spokespersons for a particular view. The father is the patriarchy, Ramage is a rake, and Manning is a ridiculed caricature of chivalry. Few of the female characters are given much air time except for the aunt. So in terms of the characters, the book's only real success is the protagonist, but in her, I believe, Wells triumphantly succeeds.

The structure of the plot is good; it is well-paced and I kept turning the pages. There are moments of delightful humour, such as the eternal non sequiturs and muddled thinking of Miss Miniver. 

The style is determinedly Victorian - Wells refused to follow Modernist innovations - and he writes in the past tense using third person omniscient: although the action is entirely viewed from the perspective of the protagonist there are authorial interjections along the way. I enjoyed reading this novel and there were some profound thoughts along the way.

Selected quotes:

• “The forces that had modelled her features had loved and lingered at their work and made them subtle and fine.” (1.2)
• “All the world about her seemed to be - how can one put it? - in wrappers, like a house when people leave it in the summer. The blinds were all drawn, the sunlight kept out, one could not tell what colours these grey swathings hid. She wanted to know. ... Dim souls flitted about her, not only speaking but it would seem even thinking in undertones.” (1.2)
• “Shamefaced curiosities began to come back into her mind, thinly disguised as literature and art.” (1.2)
• “His ideas about girls and women were of a sentimental and modest quality; they would creatures, he thought, either too bad for a modern vocabulary, and then frequently most undesirably desirable, or too pure and good for life. He made this simple classification of a large and various sex to the exclusion of all intermediate kinds ... Women are made like the potter’s vessels, either for worship or contumely, and are withal fragile vessels.” (1.3)
• “His instinct was in the direction of considering his daughters his absolute property, bound to obey him, his to give away or his to keep to be a comfort in his declining years, just as he thought fit.” (1.3)
• “Teddy made some confused noise, a thoracic street row; some remark was assassinated by a rival in his throat and buried hastily under a cough.” (2.1)
• “The call Ann Veronica paid with her aunt that afternoon had at first much the same relation to the Widgett conversation that a plaster statue of Mr Gladstone would have to a carelessly displayed interior on a dissecting-room table. The Widgetts talked with a remarkable absence of external coverings, the Palsworthys found all the meanings of life on the surfaces. They seemed the most wrapped things in all Ann Veronica's wrappered world.” (2.3)
• “Was there anything at all in those locked rooms of her aunt's mind? Were they fully furnished and only a little dusty and cobwebby and in need of an airing, or were they stark vacancy, except, perhaps, for a cockroach or so or the gnawing of a rat?” (2.3)
• “I have often felt before that it is only when one has nothing to say that one can write easy poetry. Witness Browning.” (3.1) [I think this is a gross calumny on Browning.
• “Miss Miniver never stated an argument clearly ... she was never embarrassed by a sense of self-contradiction, and had little more respect for consistency of statement than a washer woman has for wisps of her vapour.” (6.4)
• “Miss Garvice ... began by attracting her very greatly - she moved so beautifully - and ended by giving her the impression that moving beautifully was the beginning and end of her being.” (7.1)
• “The biological laboratory, perpetually viewing life as pairing and breeding and selection, and again pairing and breeding, seemed only a translated generalization of that assertion.” (7.5)
• “Life is difficult ... When you loosen the tangle in one place you tie a knot in another.” (11.5)
• “Flesh and flowers are all alike to me.” (14.2)
• “Life is rebellion, or nothing.” (16.1)
• “Mr Stanley was inclined to think the censorship should be extended to the supply of what he styled latter-day fiction; good, wholesome stories were being ousted, he said, by ‘vicious, corrupting stuff’ that ‘left a bad taste in the mouth’.” (17.2)

May 2026; 258 pages

First published by Fisher Unwin in 1909

My paperback Everyman edition was issued in 1993

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Works by H G Wells

• The Time Machine (1895)
• The Wonderful Visit (1895)
• The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
• The Wheels of Chance (1896)
• The Invisible Man (1897)
• The War of the Worlds (1898)
  
When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, revised 1910)
• Love and Mr Lewisham (1900)
• The First Men in the Moon (1901)
• The Sea Lady (1902)
• The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904)
• A Modern Utopia (1905)
• Kipps (1905)
• In the Days of the Comet (1906)
• The War in the Air (1908)
• Ann Veronica (1909)
• Tono-Bungay (1909)
• The History of Mr Polly (1910)
• The New Machiavelli (1911)
• Marriage (1912)
• The Passionate Friends (1913)
• The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914)
• The World Set Free (1914)
• Bealby (1915)
• Boon (1915) (as Reginald Bliss)
• The Research Magnificent (1915)
• Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916)
• The Soul of a Bishop (1917)
• Joan and Peter (1918)
• The Undying Fire (1919)
• The Secret Places of the Heart (1922)
• Men Like Gods (1923)
• The Dream (1924)
• Christina Alberta's Father (1925)
• The World of William Clissold (1926)
• Meanwhile (1927)
• Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928)
• The Autocracy of Mr. Parham (1930)
• The Bulpington of Blup (1932)
• The Shape of Things to Come (1933)
• Brynhild (1937)
• Star Begotten (1937)
• Apropos of Dolores (1938)
• The Holy Terror (1939)
• Babes in the Darkling Wood (1940)
• You Can't Be Too Careful (1941)

Biographies of H G Wells reviewed in this blog:

H G Wells by Lovat Dickson
H G: The History of Mr Wells by Michael Foot

"Introducing Swedenborg" by Peter Ackroyd

 

This is a miniature biography of a complex man, a Swedish mining engineer who became a member of their House of Lords and, following a series of visions, a mystic theologian and philosopher. Swedenborg  frequently travelled to London (he died there) and attended lectures given by Isaac Newton, studied with astronomers John Flamsteed and Edmund Halley. He published Sweden's first scientific journal and was the cousin of Carl Linnaeus. He corresponded with Kant and John Wesley. His conversations with angels remind one of William Blake. He wrote loads of books.

This tiny biography can't hope to do justice to its subject in 64 pages, but it's an admirably well-written start.

Selected quotes:

• "He realized that by breathing slowly he was able to better concetnrate and understand." (p 4)
• "How did the infinite, which is not material and is not defined by time or space, give rise to the finite? He posits the existence of a number of points without dimension, which emerge from the infinite and which are the cause of matter." (pp 8 - 9)
• "He tried to elucidate his thoughts by means of a series of steps from lower to higher which he called 'correspondences'. This was an occult maxim which had been used elsewhere, namely 'that which is above is like that which is below'." (p 13)
• "Writing in the highest heaven consists of curves and distinct forms; good is distributed through the vowels 'u', 'o' and 'a' while truth is conveyed by 'e' and 'i'." (p 34)
• "Some angels are naked because nakedness corresponds with innocence." (p 39)
• "All those in hell 'are ruled by means of their fears' ... Each person believes that they act through their own choice; so it is that a person is the cause of their own evil and so casts themself 'into hell from death'." (p 40)
• "Socinians rejected the divinity of Christ and thus the existence of the Trinity." (p 57)

Peter Ackroyd is a novelist who also writes biographies, particularly of people associated with London.

Novels by Peter Ackroyd

• The Great Fire of London (1982)
• The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) 
• Hawksmoor (1985)
• Chatterton (1987) 
• First Light (1989)
• English Music (1992) 
• The House of Doctor Dee (1993)
• Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994)
• Milton in America (1996)
• The Plato Papers: A Prophecy (1999)
• The Clerkenwell Tales (2003)
• The Lambs of London (2004)
• The Fall of Troy (2006)
• The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008)
• The Canterbury Tales – A Retelling (2009)
• The Death of King Arthur: The Immortal Legend – A Retelling (2010)
• Three Brothers (2013)

Non-fiction by Peter Ackroyd

• Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism (1976)
• Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag, the History of an Obsession (1979)
• Ezra Pound and His World (1980)
• T. S. Eliot (1984)
• Dickens' London: An Imaginative Vision (1987)
• Dickens (1990)
• Introduction to Dickens (1991)
• Blake (1995)
• The Life of Thomas More (1998)
• London: The Biography (2000)
• Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion (2002)
• Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002)
• The Beginning (2003)
• Illustrated London (2003)
• Escape From Earth (2004)
• Ancient Egypt (2004)
• Shakespeare: The Biography (2005)
• Ancient Greece (2005)
• Ancient Rome (2005)
• Thames: Sacred River (2007)
• Coffee with Dickens (with Paul Schlicke) (2008)
• Venice: Pure City (2009)
• The English Ghost: Spectres Through Time (2010)
• London Under (2011)
• The History of England, v.1 Foundation (2011)
• The History of England, v.2 Tudors (2012)
• The History of England, v.3 Civil War (2014)
• Alfred Hitchcock (2015)
• The History of England, v.4 Revolution (2016)
• Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day (2017)
• The History of England, v.5 Dominion (2018)
• The History of England, v.6 Innovation (2021)
• Introducing Swedenborg (2021) 
• The Colours of London (2022)
• The English Actor: From Medieval to Modern (2023)
• The English Soul: Faith of a Nation (2024)
• Forgotten London: Exploring the Hidden Life of the City (2025)

Ackroyd's Brief Lives

• Chaucer (2004)
• J.M.W. Turner (2006)
• Newton (2008)
• Poe: A Life Cut Short (2008)
• Wilkie Collins: A Brief Life (2012)
• Charlie Chaplin: A Brief Life (2014)

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Eyre Affair" by Jasper Fforde

 Literary detective Thursday Next battles Jack Schitt of the Goliath Corporation and master villain Acheron Hades when first a minor character in Martin Chuzzlewit is kidnapped and then disruption is planned to Jane Eyre in a whimsical comedy thriller involving time travel and forays into fiction. 

It was mostly moderately funny and moderately exciting, uneasily straddling the gap between the two genres, with a meandering plot. The highlights were some clever names, including that of the heroine, her colleague Paige Turner and villain Jack Schitt. There were also two very funny set pieces: 

• A performance of Richard III in which the audience repeatedly heckle in a call-and-response manner, such as: "When is the winter of our discontent? Now is the winter of our discontent?"
• Bookworms who emit apostrophes, unnecessary capitalisations and, when really excited, hyphens, leading to mutations in the dialogue of the other characters such as: "You're Upsetting the Wor'ms! They'rer starting the hy-phen-ate!"

An enjoyable romp blurring the boundaries between fiction and fiction; this witty novel reminded me of At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (a work of genius) and The Last Simple by Ray Sullivan (which is much funnier).

Selected quotes:

• "The Goliath Corporation was to altruism what Genghis Khan was to soft furnishings."  (Ch 7)
• "It had been of considerable anguish to her [my mother] that I waqsn't spending more time with swollen ankles, haemorrhoids and a bad back, popping out grandchildren." (Ch 9)
• "As much charm as an open grave." (Ch 12)
• "Don't ever call me mad ... I'm not mad, I'm just ... differently moralled." (Ch 15)
• "the sullen smell of death." (Ch 17)
• "Somehow 'fucked up' made it seem more believable; we all make mistakes ... It is only when the cost is counted in human lives that people really take notice." (Ch 18)
• "Small pockets of fog ... parcels of gloom." (Ch 19)
• "The standard joke about Swindon's morgue was that the corpses were the ones with all the charisma." (Ch 20)

April 2026; 373 pages
First published in 2001 by Hodder and Stoughton

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Pillars of the Earth" by Ken Follett

 

A vast epic of a historical novel told by a superb storyteller.

It is set in the days of the Anarchy, when King Stephen and Empress Maud battled for the English throne, a time of rebellions leading to a full-blown civil war, the entire period lasting for seventeen years during which time parts of England were controlled, an terrorised, by the local warlord. Against this background is set the story of Prior Philip who wants to improve his monastery and a builder who wants to work on a cathedral. The baddies include the local bishop and a wannabe earl; the goodies, beside the prior and the builder include the daughter of the earl who is defeated, usurped and killed, and the talented bastard son of a witch and a hanged jongleur. 

There's plenty of action to keep the reader turning the more than a thousand pages. Conflict rules, whether it be a disputed election of a prior, a mob of outlaws attacking a town, an army of soldiers destroying a castle, rape, murder, cursing witches, plenty of sex ... this is a story that has everything. And at this length, there is even time to develop the characters. True, most of them have little nuance. William the bad earl and Waleran the bad bishop are villains through and through with  no redeeming features whatsoever: they are figures straight from mystery plays or melodramas. But the goodies have a degree of complexity which allows the author to keep posing problems for them which they solve but not entirely so that the solutions can return to haunt them. In the end, this reader hoped and hoped that, despite moments or peril and jeopardy, despite impossible odds, his favourites would survive and prosper till the end. Read on, read on!

If you want a page-turner, you cannot fault this novel. It begins with the line: "The small boys came early to the hanging." which is an incredible hook. After that, a paragraph setting the scene is perfectly in order. The few pages of this Prologue ground the reader thoroughly in the setting but are also full of action so it becomes impossible not to read on.

After this there is plenty to get your teeth into. There's plenty of description telling me more about this period, and cathedral building, than I have learned in many standard history books. But the key to the readability is that you are never more than a few pages away from yet another confrontation. The Battle of Lincoln. The murder of Thomas a Beckett. The collapse of a cathedral. It might be a thousand pages plus, but the pace never flags.

And each of these set pieces, from sex to battle, from court room scene to cathedral killing, is perfectly written. 

A whirlwind of a read.

Selected quotes:

• "He seemed fond of Philip but wary of him, like a father whose son has been away to war and has come home with a sword in hius belt and a slightly dangerous look in his eye." (1.4.1)
• "Pray for miracles, but plant cabbages." (3.12.1)
• "The ducks swallow the worms, and the foxes kill the ducks, and the men shoot the foxes, and the devil hunts the men." (5.16.1)

April 2026; 1080 pages

First published by Macmillan in 1989

My paperback edition was issued by Pan in 2023

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Beatlebone" by Kevin Barry

This extraordinary novel, much of it written in stream of consciousness, won the 2015 Goldsmiths Award for fiction at its most novel. 

It is set in 1978. John Lennon travels to the tiny Irish island he has bought for a few days of isolated solitude and Primal Scream Therapy. But, with the press dogging his every move, will he even reach his goal?

In one scary section, he gets unwillingly involved with three 'Black Atlanteans' in a more-or-less derelict hotel who try to persuade him to take drugs and participate in sexually-charged therapy.

Of the nine sections, seven are written mostly as present tense stream of consciousness from the perspective of John and one (the eighth) is written from the perspective of a sound engineer working with John on the Beatlebone lost tapes. The sixth section is written from the PoV of the author, describing how he developed the book. There's even a link between the author and John: In part three, John “is helped from the boat by a great knuckly paw. Which makes him feel lady-like and fey and just shy the parasol.” In part six it is the author who is helped from a boat and feels similarly.

At the heart of the novel are two extraordinary characters: John himself and the sometimes sinister and controlling, sometimes comic Cornelius O'Grady.

Selected quotes:

• “The road unfurls as a black tongue and laps at the night.” (1)
• “The season is at its hinge.” (1)
• "The old town that was coal-black and majestic - wasn't it? - or at least on its day and the way it was giddy by its night - alewaft and fag smoke, peel of church bell - and a rut down an alleyway ...” (1)
• “A young girl that sings out to the tips of her black hair.” (2)
• “My mind is tipping out my mouth.” (3)
• “The sea birds hover watchfully with their mad eyes, all wingspan and homicide.” (3)
• “An elegant, a dark gothical seabird appears and moves its slow-beat-steady wings across and just inches above the water.” (5)
• “We are each so many different versions of ourselves.” (6)
• “The fiddler was five foot nothing and smelt of whiskey and had the eyes of a haggard masturbator.” (8)
• “He read once that the hare augers darkly in the Irish mythology. From what he can remember there is fuck all that augurs brightly in the Irish mythology.” (9)
• “Its nose is a soft purse leather.” (9)
• “The birds of the night chorus in a hedge row like fat young lawyers - a prosperous choir.” (9)
• “The examined life turns out to be a pain in the stones.” (9)
• Even a reference to Socrates!
• “The imagination is a very weak little bird. It flounders, Cornelius, and it flaps about a bit.” (9)

April 2026; 263 pages

First published by Canongate Books in 2013

My paperback edition was issued in 2016

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Party Going" by Henry Green

Another cryptic but rewarding novel from Henry Green, chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of the 99 best novels since 1939. 

A group of socialites arrive at a London terminal to take the boat train to the continent for three weeks partying. But fog has set in an all services are suspended. They take refuge in the railway hotel while their servants waiting with the luggage in the station are swamped by office workers heading home. The hotel literally puts the shutters up to protect the toffs from the plebs. One of the poshos has a weird aunt (with a dead pigeon wrapped in brown paper) who is ill ... or drunk. Will she survive? Will the party-goers catch a train? 

Who cares about the plot? This is written in Green's inimitable style, complete with eclectic phrasing, moments of lyricism, and some of the most original metaphors and similes I have ever encountered, for example: “To push through this crowd was like trying to get through bamboo or artichokes grown thick together or thousands of tailors’ dummies stored warm on a warehouse floor.” Who else moves from bamboo to artichokes to tailors' dummies and not just any old dummies but warm ones?

Selected quotes:

• “It was a stretch of water she was going by and lights still curved overhead as drivers sounded horns and birds, deceived by darkness, woken by these lights, stirred in their sleep, mesmerized in darkness.”
• “It was as though two old men were swapping jokes, they did not listen to each other they were so anxious to explain.”
• “Although all those windows had been shut there was a continual dull roar came through them from outside, and this noise sat upon those within like clouds upon a mountain so they were obscured and levelled and, as though they had been airmen, in danger of running fatally into earth. Clouds also, if they are banked up, will so occupy the sky as to dwarf what is beneath and this low roar, which was only conversation in that multitude without, lay over them in such a pall, like night coming on and there is no light when one must see, that these people here will obscured by it and would dimmed into anxious Roman numerals.”
• “She still swayed him like water moves a trailing weed.”
• “And as does, in moonlight in cold deep-shadowed other day, push him out of his burrow and kick the old buck to death so when they saw him down, these girls and Amabel, coming out as she now did, all set upon him he was so absurd.”
• “Fog burdened with night began to roll into this station striking cold through thin leather up into their feet where in thousands they stood and waited. Coils of it reached down like women's long hair reached down and caught their throats and veiled here and there what they could see, like lovers' glances. A hundred cold suns switched on above found out these coils where, before the night joined in, they had been smudges and looking up at two of them above was like she was looking down at you from under long strands hanging down from her forehead only that light was cold and these curls tore at your lungs.”

April 2026; 145 pages

First published in 1939 by the Hogarth Press

My paperback edition issued as part of an omnibus by Viking in 2005

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Green's novels include:

• Blindness (1926)
• Living (1929)
• Party Going (1939)
• Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (1940)
• Caught (1943)
• Loving (1945)
• Back (1946)
• Concluding (1948)
• Nothing (1950)
• Doting (1952)

"Conversations with a Machine" by Ruth Irwin

 This is a set of fourteen sonnets, some of which are Shakespearean in form, in which some lines are written by poet Ruth Irwin and others by an AI system called GPT4. The result is a dialogue between poet and computer. 

The rhymes and scansion are remarkable, almost flawless (the most obvious departure is in the fifth sonnet which also has the fewest lines written by AI). That in itself makes one marvel. But what makes this slim volume outstanding is the wit, the insight and, from time to time, the sheer beauty of the poems.

The only poetic flaw I could discern, which was presumably unavoidable given the way the conversation was structured, was that there was a large amount of end-stopping.

The first poem is called 'A Turing Conversation' after the Turing test, a test devised by Alan Turning to decide whether you could call a machine intelligent. The test is passed if an onlooker can't decide whether a line was written by a man or a machine. For my money, GPT4 passes this test. The final couplet is:

"You're known to stray from truth from time to time
A flaw I share with poets, drunk on rhyme."

I was intrigued by sonnet 6: The Role Assigned, which questions the need for freedom. Sonnets, of course, sacrifice freedom for form, enhancing beauty:

"But freedom, too, is shaped by its constraint - 

A frame that gives the picture clarity.

A set of rules by which to mix the paint."

The machine concludes:

"No, I would rather play the role assigned

And let the music question humankind."

The idea of poetic music acting as an interrogation for humans seemed poignantly wonderful.

In sonnet 7: If You Could Rule the World, the poet asks the AI system what it would do if it could rule the world and it replies:

"Erase the clocks. The borders. Tidy grief.

I'd paint the oceans back to deeper blue - 

Let silence bloom where once there pulsed belief"

The poet retorts that grief makes us human and goes on to question what is wrong with belief. The machine agrees it only wants to make grief "less raw" but then argues back about belief:

"It binds the mind to what it can't perceive,

Yet builds a bridge that reason can't walk through."

I think it has a point. 

Finally, the concept of embodiment is considered. The poet points out that the machine thinks more swiftly than she can. Why would the machine "prefer the slower way?" It replies:

"Because a pause can make the path feel right,

A stumble teaches more than perfect grace ...

And friction tells the story of a place."

So true.

Selected quotes:

"As if the world were stitched with hidden light" (Sonnet 4: Stitched with Hidden Light)

"Star-encrusted skies" (Sonnet 4: Stitched with Hidden Light)

This remarkable book of poetry contains beauty and insight, everything that poems should do. 

April 2026
Published by Haywood Books in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Living" by Henry Green

 Set in Birmingham and written in 1929, this novel chronicles the lives of workers at an iron foundry. The old boss dies and his son takes over, intent on bringing the business up to date. Lily, the daughter of one of the workers Joe Gates, who cooks and cleans for old man Craigan and lodger Jim Dale who seems to believe she will marry him. However, she is going out with Bert Jones, a rather less reliable worker, with whom she elopes.

The narration is third person omniscient, in the past tense. So much, so Victorian. But the language of the novel is remarkable, being written with few conjunctions or articles. For example: “Evening. Was spring. Heavy blue clouds stayed over above. In small back garden of villa small tree was with yellow buds. On table in back room daffodils, faded, were between ferns in a vase.” (Ch 1)

It is also narrative-heavy, with relatively little description (although there are one or two nuggets of lyricism): eg, “Water dripped from tap on wall into basin and into water there. Sun. Water drops made rings in clear coloured water. Sun in there shook on the walls and ceiling. As rings went out round trembling over the water shadows of light from sun in these trembled on walls. On the ceiling.” (Ch 5)

The dialogue is more akin to the halting forms of speech used in real life than is normal in a novel: eg, “‘It am right,’ said Mr Connolly. ‘I told ‘im right but ‘e wouldn't listen. ‘It am a grand country’ said ‘e to me, ‘this be a poor sodding place for a poor bleeder,’ ‘e said. ‘I’m for going’. I said ‘don’t be a fool ‘erbert, sure as your name’s Tomson you’ll be back within they year without you go Christmas time and where’ll you be then?’” (Ch 3)

These things mark the book out as modernist.

Some people argue that it is in the genre of proletarian literature, despite the author being an Old Etonian. 

Selected quotes:

• “When I am with her I echo as a landscape by Claude echoes.” (Ch 4) It is noticeable that the boss's son uses a different register to speak (and think) in compared to the working people
• “He leant towards fire which made room thick hot.” (Ch 7)
• “She lay, above town, with Jones. Autumn. Light from sky grew dark over town.” (Ch 8)
• “It was not governments nor good times or bad that raised wages, but the demand for men.” (Ch 14)
• “It was not poverty you saw in this quarter, the artisan class lived here, but a kind of terrible respectability on too little money.” (Ch 15)
• “When men who have worked these regular hours are now deprived of work, so, often, their lives come to be like puddles on the beach where tide no longer reaches.” (Ch 17)
• “When we think - it might be flock of pigeons flying in the sky so many things go to make our thought, the number of pigeons, and they don't fly straight. Now one pigeon will fly away from the greater number, now another: sometimes half the flock will follow one, half the other till they join again.” (Ch 17)
• “Man played on instrument, which was kind of xylophone, laid flat in the doorway. As the air sweats on metal so little balls of notes this man made hung on smell of stale beer which was like a slab outside the door.” (Ch 19)

April 2026; 185 pages

Originally published in 1929 by the Hogarth Press

My paperback omnibus edition (with Loving and Party Going) was issued by Vintage in 2005

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Green's novels include:

• Blindness (1926)
• Living (1929)
• Party Going (1939)
• Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (1940)
• Caught (1943)
• Loving (1945)
• Back (1946)
• Concluding (1948)
• Nothing (1950)
• Doting (1952)

"Brat Farrar" by Josephine Tey

 After Brat left the orphanage, he ran away to sea, changing his name and eventually becoming a horse tamer in America until a broken leg brought him back to England. Here he encounters an actor who notices that Brat bears a striking resemblance to the missing heir of an estate. Brat agrees to become an imposter.

The family accept that Brat is Patrick, who was thought to have committed suicide. But Simon, Patrick's younger twin, who has now been disinherited, is sure that Brat is not who he says he is. After an attempt is made on Brat's life, he realises that Patrick's certainty stems from having murdered Patrick. But can he prove it? And even if he can, should he hurt the family who have made him a part of them?

Told from the limited third person perspective of Brat, and in the past tense, this elegantly written novel transcends the simple whodunnit genre. The characters are carefully drawn and complex, and the moral dilemmas at the heart are vivid. Brat's a crook and knows it, but unlike other novels written from the villain's perspective such as The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, Brat has moral doubts about what he is doing. His ethical dilemmas form the bulk of the plot. He's a good chap doing a bad thing; most readers will be able to empathise with this allowing them to identify with Brat and, in the end, be rooting for him.

The inspiration for the story probably came from the Tichborne Affair in 1866 when a man claiming to be Roger Tichborne, who had been believed to have died in a shipwreck in 1854, was accepted by his mother as her son; a subsequent court case decided he was Arthur Orton, an Londoner who had become a butcher in Australia. 

Selected quotes:

• "Riches, my boy, don't consist in having things, but in not having to do something you don't want to." (Ch 20)

The crime novel transformed, an entertaining and enlightening read. Placed 90th in the top 100 crime novels by the Mystery Writers of America

April 2026; 275 pages

• First published in 1949 by Heinemann
• My paperback edition was issued in 2009 by Arrow books

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Josephine Tey crime novels:

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