"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

"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

"Upperdown" by David Brennan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selected quotes:

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

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

June 2026; 

Published by epoque press in 2019

I read the kindle edition

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"John the Pupil" by David Flusfeder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selected quotes:

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

Synopsis (spoiler alerts)

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

David Flusfeder has also written Something Might Fall

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

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Strange Angel" by George Pendle

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

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

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

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

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

Selected quotes:

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

A fascinating story told by a born storyteller.

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

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God