"Excellent Women" by Barbara Pym

 A sort of Jane Austen novel but written in the first person (and the past tense) and updated to just after the second world war (but with nearly as much ignoring of the geopolitical context as Austen herself displays). The narrator (Miss Mildred Lathbury) is one of a host of unmarried spinsters (the legion of 'Excellent Women' of the title) who live in rented apartments in less fashionable areas of London off private incomes, perhaps supplemented with a little part-time work, and find a meaning to their lives by attending and helping out at the parish church. And perhaps dream, somewhat forlornly. of marriage. The reader is teased as to whether Mildred will marry the Vicar, the downstairs neighbour, or the anthropologist. Difficulties to this union are thrown in her way. The Vicar becomes engaged, the downstairs neighbour (the glamorous and flirtatious Rockingham) is already married (but unhappily) and the anthropologist (Everard Bone!) seems to be involved with Rockingham's wife. Will love triumph?

It starts with the arrival of Mildred's new neighbours in the person of Rockingham's wife and it starts with a disappointing amount of exposition. But give it a chance. It blossoms into a gentle but sometimes savage portrayal of spinsterhood.

There are wonderful, almost anthropological (not for nothing are some of the characters anthropologists) observations of social customs and more, delivered with clear-sighted penetration, such as:

• “Perhaps Rockingham with his love of Victoriana also enjoyed cooking, for I had observed that men did not usually do things unless they liked doing them.” (Ch 1)
• “Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.” (Ch 5)
• “‘Men are so strange,’ she said, in a pathetic puzzled way, as if she were finding it out for the first time.” (Ch 22)
• “A clergyman’s just the same as other men, isn't he, only he wears his collar back to front.” (Ch 23)

But these are mingled with heartbreaking self-reflections which highlight the pathos and loneliness of the lead character:

• “Women like me really expected very little - nothing, almost.” (Ch 4)
• “I must not allow myself to have feelings, but must only observe the effects of other people's.” (Ch 9)
• “I remember girlhood dances where one had stayed there [in the Ladies cloakroom] too long, though never long enough to last out the dance for which one hadn't a partner. I didn't suppose Helena had ever known that, and yet it was in its way quite a deep experience.” (Ch 10)
• “Love was rather a terrible thing, I decided next morning, remembering the undercurrents of the evening before. Not perhaps my cup of tea.” (Ch 11)
• “What had we done? We had not made particularly brilliant careers for ourselves, and most important of all, we had neither of us married. That was really it. It was the ring on the left hand that people at the Old Girls' Reunion looked for.” (Ch 12)
• “Widows nearly always do marry again. ... They have the knack of catching the man. Having done it once I suppose they can do it again. I suppose there's nothing in it when you know how.” (Ch 13)
• “Perhaps I really enjoyed other people's lives more than my own.” (Ch 24)

She is really a very sad woman, not at all reconciled to spinsterhood: she is forever remembering the damp squib of her previous romance or considering the possibility of having a future romance, even when eating spaghetti: “Perhaps long spaghetti is the kind of thing that ought to be eaten quite alone with nobody to watch one's struggles. Surely many a romance must have been nipped in the bud by sitting opposite somebody eating spaghetti.” (Ch 10)

The idea of the Vicar [Spoiler alert!] rowing with his fiancee, breaking off his engagement and then going round to Mildred's flat, all the while carrying a pair of ping pong bats, was so wonderfully surreal as to seem completely what a normal person would really do. 

Notes:

Crome Yellow is a novel by Aldous Huxley which I haven't yet read.

The 'c 1300' poem quoted from the Oxford Book of English Verse is called Spring-Tide or (afeter its first line) 'Lenten ys come with love to toune'. It's one of the Harley Lyrics. The passage quoted is

• Deowes [properly 'deawes'] donketh the dounes,
• Deores with huere derne rounes
• Domes forte [should be 'for to'] deme;

This means: Dews dampen the downs/ Animals with their mysterious secrets/ which they tell one another. Mildred's response is "that would teach me not to be so foolish" I think the point is that it is a hymn to spring love and plants blossoming and animals making love. A couple of lines later it states: 'Wymmen waxeth wounder proude' (women grow marvellously proud). Perhaps that is also to the point. Nevertheless, I would make yet another plea to editors: don't leave untranslated foreign (or archaic) passages without providing at least a footnote!!!!

Selected quotes:

• “The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one.” (Ch 1)
• “It was part of his charm that he could make people like that feel at ease. He must be rather a shallow sort of person really.” (Ch 4)
• “I had an inexplicable distrust of widows, who seem to be of two distinct kinds, one of which may be dangerous.” (Ch 5)
• “Nobody really likes to be called a dear. There is something so very faint and dull about it.” (Ch 14)
• “The voices seem to be raised as if they were having an argument. I'm afraid it was impossible not to hear some of the things they were saying, but I cannot bring myself to record them here.” (Ch 16)
• “If I ever wrote a novel it would be of the ‘stream of consciousness’ type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.” (Ch 17)
• “I learned that a package or envelope sealed with white of egg cannot be steamed open.” (Ch 18)
• “On the rare occasions when I had a fresh egg to poach I should continue to delve for it in the bubbling water where the white separated from the yolk and waved about like a sea anemone." (Ch 20)

Gentle and entertaining social comedy.

October 2026; 288 pages

First published in GB in 1952 by Jonathan Cape

My paperback edition was issued by Virago in 2022

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Parade" by Dave Eggers

A fable told in a simplistic style, third person from the PoV of 'Four', past tense, with every character pseudonymous.

'Four' has been contracted to drive a machine which will create a tarmac road through a country recently riven by civil war. He is partnered with 'Nine' who will drive a quad bike to clear potential obstacles ahead. But while Four is a model of conscientiousness, Nine is "a vortex - all rationality was devoured within him.” (Ch 9) Nine breaks the rules: sleeping with prostitutes, eating at local restaurants, giving to the needy. Inevitably, they clash. And with dangers all around, from malaria to bandits, can they finish the road on time for the celebratory parade.

A gripping 'buddy movie' tale in which the menace crescendos to a climax.

Selected quotes:

• “Medallion had created a raft of hope and Four found himself climbing onto it.” (Ch 15)

Eggers has also written:

• The Every (2021)
• Contrapposto (2026)

October 2026; 179 pages

First publsished in the USA by Knopf in 2019

My paperback edition issued in the UK by Penguin in 2020

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Course of the heart" by M John Harrison

 We can be fairly certain that Yaxley persuaded three Cambridge students - Pam Stuyvesant, Lucas Medlar and the unnamed first person narrator - to do something, perhaps a ceremonal magic rite - which someone opened a portal between this world and another; and that Pam and Lucas have been haunted by the consequences ever since. But this novel is a masterpiece of obliqueness so we can be sure of nothing. What are we to make of the moment when Lucas calls the narrator "a mere priest" when we have been repeatedly told (by the narrator himself) that he is a publisher.

Playing around with what the reader knows, and what they can only guess, with the epistemology of certainty, is a Harrison trademark, also to the fore in his Booker shortlisted The End of Everything and his Goldsmith's Prize winning The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again.

As a writer who is sometimes criticised for explaining too much (the heritage of having been a teacher, a profession in which clarity is important, especially when teaching science), I feel I have a lot to learn from Harrison. On the other hand, some critics say that the primary sin is to confuse the reader and I was frequently confused by this book (though not as much as by TEoE). I guess the secret is to achieve the perfect balance which will maximally arouse the reader's curiosity. Certainly, I was eager to learn whatever I could from this novel, though in the end, I still had many questions.

Nevertheless, there is a great deal of magic to be found in this book, starting with some spell-bindingly original descriptions:

• “I was drenched in the rough, dusty, aromatic smells of dock-leaves and marigolds.” (Prologue: Pleroma)
• “I could close my eyes and visualize precisely the curves at the base of her spine where it seemed to hold its breath before it arched out into the smooth, heavy muscles of her behind.” ” (Prologue: Pleroma) The narrator seems to have a thing about transitions of the flesh, about another woman he writes: “I touched the place where the nape of her neck made its soft but powerful transition into the muscles of her freckled upper back.” (2.6: the Facsimile)
• “It was an old cat ... and when I picked it up it was just lots of bones and heat that weighed nothing.” (1.1: Misprision of Dreams)
• “Sheets of newspaper fluttering around the upper floors of an office block like butterflies courting a flower.” (1.1: Misprision of Dreams)
• “From one window you could see the sodden facade of Museum Street, bright green deposits on the ledges, stucco scrolls and garlands grey with pigeon down.” (1.1: Misprision of Dreams)
• “Every conversation, every echo of a voice or a footstep or a rustle of clothes, was gathered up into its high ceilings in a kind of undifferentiated rumble and sigh - the blurred and melted remains of meaning - which made you feel as if your parents had abandoned you in a derelict swimming bath.” (1.2: N’Aimez Que Moi)
• “My head felt like an empty cinema.” (3.13: Fatalité Intérieure)
• “The surf of interference.” (3.14: Burnt Rose)
• “Carnforth is less a town than a kind of late efflorescence of the old A6 as it hinges away from Morecambe Bay.” (3.15: Every Web Remained Unbroken)

As for the mystery, I suppose it was inevitable. If you are writing about magic - at least for a grown-up readership - you can't really spell out the hocus-pocus. The essence of magic is mystery as the essence of conjuring is misdirection and therefore Harrison's novelistic techniques perfectly match his subject.

And reading about a fantasy version of mediaeval central European history, juxtaposed with the brutal realism of a women undergoing cancer treatment, gave some light relief to what would otherwise have been grim.

Selected quotes:

• “Queens, dancers, Courtesans, romantic individuals determined to batter themselves to death like huge rawboned moths inside the Japanese lamps of their own neuroses.” (Prologue: Pleroma)
• 
  
• “What if evolution were ideological after all? ... with aesthetic goals?” (1.1: Misprision of Dreams)
• “Things look so bright and energetic in the shops ... but as soon as you get them home, they're just seemed crude.” (1.2: N’Aimez Que Moi)
• “Years of hiding had made them adept at manipulating each other's silences.” (1.4: Dark Rapture)
• “He's barking up the wrong tree - you could learn more from a pair of little girls' shoes left in a ditch.” (1.4: Dark Rapture)
• “This Platonic reversal, the suggestion that ours is not perhaps after all the shadow but the thing - the Pleroma, not its imperfect index.” (2.8: On the White Downs)
• “The hospital was a maze, with every exit marked ‘Oncology’.” (3.10: It Always Happens To Someone Else)
• “Where Pam saw melancholia, fear, bewilderment (in some archaic sense of that word which implied lost bearings, night, tangled woods), Lucas saw only a failure of imagination.” (3.10: It Always Happens To Someone Else)

Notes

The Pleroma is a real concept. In early Christianity and Gnosticism, it refers to spiritual fullness, such as the totality of God and his divine powers and, particularly in gnosticism, perfect (so therefore complete) knowledge.

October 2026; 265 pages 
First published by Gollancz in 1992
My paperback edition was issued by Serpent's Tail in 2025

Novels and books about Magic and Magicians reviewed in this blog.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Some novels by M John Harrison

• The Viriconium sequence:
• The Pastel City (1971)
• A Storm of Wings (1980)
• In Viriconium (1982) Nominated for the Guardian Fiction Prize
• The Committed Men (1971)
• The Centauri Device (1975)
• Climbers (1989) Winner of the Boardman Trasker Prize
• The Course of the Heart (1992)
• Signs of Life (1996)
• The Kefahuchi Tract sequence
• Light (2002)
• Nova Swing (2006) 
• Empty Space (2012)
• The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020) winner of the 2020 Goldsmith's Prize
• The End of Everything (2026) shortlisted for the 2026 Booker.

"Flagey in Spring" by Simon Mundy

 

The third ensemble novel based around the lives of people living around the Place Flagey in Brussels, including barmen, MEPs and assistants to MEPs, art gallery owners, and journalists. In this installment, journo Rory travels to Rome to monitor the machinations by which disgraced MEP Roberto attempts to become Italian PM. A back channel opens involving Catrina, Nikita, Mercedes and Commisioner Lucia Redetti. Meanwhile Elise is ill, again, Flamand falls for a harpist putting gorgeous Agnestina's nose out of joint, and nasty Bruno negotiates with his nemesis Tyron Wangstrutt.

Selected quotes:

• "The breeze coming across the lake towards Place Flagey was busy, making the sunshine useless." (1: Saturday: On the Way)
• “It was as much part of the Sunday ritual as the gravy that he watched sport, dropped off and woke immediately if the channel was switched, at which point it had to be changed back again.” (2: Sunday: Postprandial Summons)
• “Gwynedd made any table look as though she was a mad professor trying to find the one vital formula amongst a lifetime of random calculations.” (3: Monday: Not so Mickey Mouse)
• “She was used to being the centre of attention and for the world to defer to her beauty, represented by her whim.” (5: Wednesday: Troubles)

The third in the series, preceded by Flagey in Autumn and Flagey in Winter, this was another entertaining read, reminiscent of the Scotland Street novels by Alexander McCall Smith, such as The Unbearable Lightness of Scones. I'm looking forward to Flagey in Summer.

October 2026; 253 pages

Published by Hay Press in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"heart, be at peace" by Donal Ryan

 

The sequel to The Spinning Heart, this novel won the 2025 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and the 2024 Irish Novel of the Year. Like TSH, it builds up a portrait of a small Irish town with short chapters, each narrated by one of the inhabitants. Like TSH, it starts with builder Bobby and ends with his wife Triona. It chronicles the aftermath of the murder of Bobby's father and the kidnap of Dylan, Seanie Shaper's son. The first book focused on the effects of the 2008 financial crash and subsequent recession leading to the collapse of Pokey's building firm. This book centres on the corrosive effects of drugs on the small community.

It's been seven years since I read TSH, and I'd remembered my excitement at the style but almost completely forgotten the individual characters, and it wasn't until almost the end of the book when a metal heart spins in the gate of the hose of Bobby's father that I realised the two books were related. They can certainly stand on their own. But it did mean that I had to consciously record the multiple names of the characters and their relationships and it took a long time before I recognised recurrent characters. 

Nevertheless, I love this 'mosaic' style of narration. 

And there is a lot going on. The plot is perhaps not as clearly shaped as TSH, which has the murder and kidnap centre-stage, but there's a lot of incidents, plenty to keep the reader turning the pages, and a general sense of increasing jeopardy. 

Where the book excels is as a masterclass in characterisation. The characters are mostly seen through the eyes of others, like a set of 360-degree appraisals. This allows a delightful tension between the way a character sees themselves - and aren't we all unreliable narrators? - and the 'truth' of them. It also allows an interplay between moral condemnation on the one hand and forgiveness or at least acceptance on the other.

And above all, the picture that is jigsawed together creates a compelling picture of today's small-town Ireland, rising free from the old tropes. In particular, the twin dominances of the church and the bar seem to have faded, leaving the building trade and the drugs trade as masters of the field.

The other great strength of this book, as with so many Irish novels, is the glory of the language.

Selected quotes:

• "That feeling like my ears and eyes are being strained by something in my brain, being pushed out against the edges of themselves." (Bobby)
• "I don't know in the fuck why I went on Seanie Shaper's brother's stag. I thought I had to, I suppose. Colum is a good skin, and I thought the lads would think I was a dry balls if I didn't go." (Bobby)
• "One of those big low houses that was built on a foundation of bribes and bullshit back in the eighties." (Josie)
• "It's a licence to print money, Dad, he said. He knows I hate that kind of auld foolish talk, the suggestion that a man can defy the simple equation that has effort on the one side and reward on the other." (Josie)
• "The only man I ever loved, and he one half of a gorilla and one half of a bull and two ends of a bastard." (Lily)
• "I could tell by the shift in his features, his probing expression, that he was searching for the truth of me and concealing the truth of himself." (Vasya)
• "Your one had a face like a bulldog chewing a scorpion." (Realtin)
• "You're only ever one step from disaster, one fuck-up from shitting in a bucket in a cage with an arse bandit smiling at you, holding your jacks roll, telling you to make sure you wipe it nice and clean." (Jason)
• "Her cooking, too, is much improved. Or maybe my palate has atrophied." (Lloyd)
• "You get used to reading the tides of men." (Denis)
• "Like the church in Nenagh that was only meant to be half the size but the builders were given the plans for a cathedral by mistake." (Denis)
• "I heard a long keening sound echo off the handball alley wall  and realized it had come from me." (Mags)
• "It's hard to be a policeman, these days. ... Every bigmouth ball-scratching do-nothing bastard watching their every move and filming it or writing about it on their mobile telephones and every other gom with their mouth open reading all about it." (Jim)
• "I was able always to add my instinct and intuition to me received intelligence, putting it together like a collage of tiny bits to form the clearest picture of the truth of things." (Jim)

October 2026; 194 pages
First published in GB by Doubleday in 2024
My Penguin paperback was issued in 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Other fiction by Irish authors reviewed in this blog may be found here.

"Sunrise" by Tea Obreht

 

Three stories, joined in a sandwich structure, so that 'An incident over Horsebone Lake' is split into two parts and arranged first and last, 'An incident at Burnt Creek on the occasion of a homecoming' is split into two parts and arranged 2nd and 4th, and 'An incident at the cabin bar outside the town of Salt Draw' is, in its entirety, in the middle. This arrangement reminded me of similar arrangement of the stories in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell except that where they are linked by theme, the stories in Obreht's book are linked by taking place in the town of Sunrise, and by the author of a book about the main character in the 2nd (and 4th) story; a tape used for her research being more or less in the centre of the book. 

And there is a very neat twist in the end. And another in the last couple of pages.

In terms of style, tone, or genre, it is a bit of a portmanteau. The first (and last) story is about Nina trying to survive after falling from a plane into a lake in the wilderness. The second (and fourth) story is about a legendary gunslinger returning to the town where he became famous. And the middle story is about the director of the annual theatrical event in memory of the gunslinger. 

All the stories are told from the 3rd person limited PoV of the protagonist. The outside story is told in the present tense, the others in the past tense. Each of the plots made me want to read to the end: the plane crash story because the protagonist was battling for her life against the wilderness, the western story to solve the mystery of his the protagonist died, and the central story because I wanted to understand how these three apparently unrelated narratives fitted. 

The central characters were all well developed. Nina, the plane crash survivor, is as stressed and disorganised as anyone would be in similar circumstances ... even if they made it to the beach. Anton Vargas, the notorious gunslinger returning old and terminally ill to the town that turned him into a dime-novel hero, is perhaps too tough to be true. But Coll, the local historian, who isn't quite brave enough to stand up to a local delinquent with a dismembered wolf, is the embodiment of conflict between what we all wish we would do and the lesser reality. 

This is a novel about truth and myth making. There are also doses of fantasy. Anton's badger dream is significant to the plot, but to what extent is Nina's sighting of Ben a hallucination? As for the dreadful wolf disease which seems to be able to pick and choose its victims ...

Fundamentally, it was well-written and well-told and I enjoyed reading it. But I'm not sure it compares with the best in these genres. For a story about a horse-riding posse trying to survive in the mountains, I preferred Pity the Beast by Robin Maclean.

Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife won the 2011 Women's Prize for Fiction

Selected quotes: 

• “She's fighting the chaos of the moment, the sense that she's been teleported into this cold horror.” (An incident over Horsebone Lake #1, day 1)
• “Only a magpie soundlessly spearing worms out of the ground.” (An incident over Horsebone Lake #1 day 3)
• “The impulse to signal for intrusion with yet another ‘hello’ doesn't quite override her terror of receiving a response. What would she actually do if something said ‘hello’ back? It wouldn't be a living thing. She knows that.” (An incident over Horsebone Lake #1, day 3)
• “Her whole life has come down to the mathematics of loss.” (An incident over Horsebone Lake #1, day 3)
• “If Nina had ever laid eyes on Death, she would have taken his hand right away. She wouldn't have hung on for a night under the rubble, like her mother had. She had no fight in her at all.” (An incident over Horsebone Lake #1, day 4)
• “It was still quite dark, but he could see the serration of distant mountains taking on the first pink of dawn. In a few days, Preacher would tell him this was called alpenglow.” (An incident at Burnt Creek on the occasion of a homecoming #1)
• “Gum-cudding.” (An incident at the cabin bar outside the town of Salt Draw)
• “A dress so yellow his beleaguered brain smelled lemons when he saw it.” (An incident at the cabin bar outside the town of Salt Draw)
• “Bobby's whole face was straining with thought.” (An incident at the cabin bar outside the town of Salt Draw)
• “Every sinner on the torchlit lawn before him, even the white-haired men leaning on canes, had more time in his hourglass then did Vargas.” (An incident at Burnt Creek on the occasion of a homecoming #2)
• “He didn't even like the spring. Didn't long for it. Found no comfort, as other people did, in the smell of last year's rotted leaves emerging. Why was he suddenly on the verge of tears at the thought of not seeing it again?” (An incident at Burnt Creek on the occasion of a homecoming #2)
• “The pain ... had a tendency to make him feel the full measure of every moment.” (An incident at Burnt Creek on the occasion of a homecoming #1)

October 2026; 320 pages

Published in 2026 by Random House in the USA and Weidenfield & Nicolson in the UK.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Contrapposto" by Dave Eggers

Book of the month in the August edition of Good Housekeeping.

A kunstlerroman, told, at least initially, as if it were a cartoon, using as few details as possible and yet creating a picture of real, vivid characters.

Illustrated with line drawings of life models, it is narrated in the past tense and from the third person PoV of the protagonist Cricket, a young man artist from a humble background who wants to be an artist and imagines his talent will be spotted and he will be whisked off to become an apprentice to a master. It's a lot harder than that, especially since he is determined to stay true to his artistic principles, his metier being classical life drawing.

He's a pure sort of lad, quiet and self-contained, and as a child he encounters and falls in love with the slightly older Olympia, his exact opposite, an exuberant girl bursting with ideas which pour out of her mouth. She too wants to work in the art world, perhaps as the curator of a gallery. Their lives are destined to be intertwined, meeting at intervals (a bit like the novel structure in One Day by David Nicholls but not so regular). He's in love with her but she's in love with life, the world, so many different people, and he is jealous, he can't cope with this: “She was not one person, she was multitudes. Her heart had a thousand doors, and all were open.” (part 4) 

It is, as life itself is, a bittersweet story, beautifully written. I fell in love with all the main characters and was desperately rooting for Cricket to have a happy ending.

When I was researching my novel Bally and Bro, I read a number of novels and books about art, but not this one. I wish I had. I learned more about how an artist thinks and feels than from any of the others. And more about drawing and painting, too.

Selected quotes:

• “She had arranged an apple, a banana, and a bunch of green grapes that spilled over the edge of the bowl like bubbles overflowing from a tub.” (Part 1)
• “Much of the rightness of a drawing ... came through time and diligence and discernment. It came from work and humility - being able to recognize if something is wrong, and knowing how to address it. There was room for talent ... but he was surprised by the role of sheer doggedness.” (Part 2)
• “A music student would learn Bach, and the constraints would be severe - to play these notes in this order, at this tempo - but even then, there could be feeling. There could be style. The individual player could emerge, even through the strict rules of the composition.” (Part 2)
• “She ... laughed a thunderclap laugh. Her laugh had its own echo.” (Part 2)
• “Art was remembering, documenting. Spending a day recording a day and thus freezing time." (part 2)
• “With his greasy jeans and western style button-down, it was unclear if he had anything to do with the school, or if he was a farmhand who’d gotten lost.” (Part 3)
• “You have been fed the lie that intent is achievement. It is not. You have been fed the lie that explaining your ideas is the same as realizing them. It is not. You have been fed the lie that people enjoy looking at theories and gags and pranks. They do not.” (part 3)
• “A great composition will still work upside down.” (part 3)
• “The happiest people, in every society and every era, were those who created things, but without ambition. The people who make belts, vases, toys. You bring something new into the world, like a god, but without the human need to be recognized for it.” (part 3)
• “There's this unique selfishness built into the mythology of the modern artist. There's this notion that the best art is the most so-called personal and is deaf to its audience. ... You and I both know that very often the most personal work is absolute trash. It can be personal, but it also has to be good.” (Part 3)
• “What young man's death has meaning?” (part 3)
• “He knew it was bad. Worse than bad. Anything even approaching mediocrity could be praised reflexively. But the truly bad had stunned a viewer into silence.” (part 3)
• “The idea of creation was delicious, pure pleasure, while the execution of that idea was so often an unendurable slog ending in tragic disappointment.” (part 4)
• “Cricket stayed to watch the sky brightened to a filthy satin, a filthy yellow stained with the careless pollution of a species without shame.” (part 4)
• “I lost forty pounds. I look like a used condom.” (part 5)
• “He looked left and right, briefly a lost old man, and finally found the door and strode to it. He was not wearing jodhpurs or carrying a riding crop, but his gait indicated both.” (part 6)
• “‘You could have done much more.’ ‘Well, I didn't, and that's why I'm alive and content.’” (part 6)
• “I never thought we'd be so young at this age. There's so much time.” (part 6)

Zola's novel The Masterpiece is name-checked. Other books about art reviewed in this blog can be found on this page.

October 2026; 415 pages

Published in the US by Knopf and in the UK by Canongate in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Frenchman's Creek" by Daphne du Maurier

 Seldom has derring do been better derring done. A love story between a bored aristocratic woman and a pirate set in the days of the Restoration.

The first chapter, set in the present day and written in the present tense, acts as an extended blurb, outlining the story and setting the tone. The story proper starts with chapter two; it is written in the past tense and in the third person, almost always from the point of view of the protagonist, Dona. 

It begins with Dona fleeing from her dissolute life in London, ashamed of a prank, heading, with her two young children and the nanny, for a new world in her stately home in Cornwall. “She had reached a crisis in her particular span of time and existence, and must travel through that crisis, alone.” (Ch 2) Talk about a call to adventure!

This coach journey seemed an almost perfect parallel to the one at the start of du Maurier's Jamaica Inn (which was written five years earlier) in which a strong-willed protagonist heads for a new life, although Dona is rich and Mary poor. 

When she meets the mysterious manservant at the new house, iwe seem to be reprising Mrs Danvers from Rebecca which was written three years before, as a servant with split loyalties.

There is a dramatic act of piracy at the very mid-point of novel.

The novelist must grapple with two difficulties. The first is the brutality of piracy. Stealing things is, in itself, not a very nice thing to do. Dona understands this: “You - when you have captured your prize or meet your landing - sail away with a sense of achievement, whereas I, in my pitiful little attempt at piracy, was filmed with self-hatred, and a feeling of degradation.” (Ch 9) 

In order to alleviate this difficulty, du Maurier makes her pirate, like Robin Hood (eg in Ivanhoe) and so many highwaymen in fiction such as Tom Faggus in Lorna Doone, one who never kills (except where absolutely necessary) and one who always behaves honourably towards women (unless the women invite dishonourable actions). Not entirely realistic but the reader accepts this as one of the rules of the genre. She further throws a cloak over any remaining qualms by simply making the adventures so perilous and so thrilling that moral considerations are submerged, as if adrenaline conquers conscience. 

The second difficulty is that Dona is a mother who almost entirely ignores her children. Will she run away with her pirate lover and abandon them? Looking at her toddler son, she thinks “He would no doubt grow up to be fat, and gross, and unattractive, making some woman miserable.” (Ch 3) Not very motherly! But this is a serious quandary that both Dona and the pirate consider:

• “We are all cogs in a wheel, and mothers most especially. It is only the pirates who are free.” (Ch 7)
• “Women are more primitive than men. For a time they will wonder, yes, and play at love, and play at adventure. And then, like the birds, they must make their nest. Instinct is too strong for them.” (Ch 15)

There is a rich quality in her descriptions of the Cornish countryside and the joys of sailing. But my favourite descriptive passage is this one that anchors the period: “The artificial painted London, the link-boys with their flares tip-toeing through the dusty cobbled streets, the swaggering gallants standing at the doors of the taverns laughing a little too loudly and singing over much, that roistering, rather tipsy atmosphere” (Ch 8)

There is one delightful demonstration of writerly skill in which Dona engages in a dialogue with William. But he, as a servant, can only respond by affirming what she has said. This 'dialogue' is, in effect, a monologue, or soliloquy, in which Dona can 'think aloud'. Very clever!

Selected quotes:

• “Dear William, he was most companionable. He always understood. It was like having a confessor who never reproved or condemned.” (Ch 8)
• “It seemed to her ... that she had never known peace before, until this moment, that all the restless devils inside of who fought and struggled too often for release were all ... now appeased.” (Ch 9)

If you're going to write slushy romantic fiction, write well and write hard.

I first read this book in October 2014. This review is from my reread in October 2026; 253 pages
First published by Victor Gollancz in 1941
My Virago paperback was issued in 2003

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

An abbreviated du Maurier Bibliography
Novels:

• The Loving Spirit (1931)
• I'll Never Be Young Again (1932)
• The Progress of Julius (1933) (later re-published as Julius)
• Jamaica Inn (1936)
• Rebecca (1938)
• Frenchman's Creek (1941)
• Hungry Hill (1943)
• The King's General (1946)
• The Parasites (1949)
• My Cousin Rachel (1951)
• Mary Anne (1954)
• The Scapegoat (1957)
• Castle Dor (1961) (with Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch)
• The Glass-Blowers (1963)
• The Flight of the Falcon (1965)
• The House on the Strand (1969)
• Rule Britannia (1972)

Selected non-fiction:

• Gerald: A Portrait (1934)
• The Du Mauriers (1937)
• The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (1960)
• Golden Lads: Sir Francis Bacon, Anthony Bacon and their Friends (1975)
• The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall (1976)

"House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski

 

A tour-de-force of surreal art.

It purports to be the second edition of a book originally written by 'Zampano' with an introduction and extensive notes, not to mention an added Appendix, by Johnny Truant. Zampano's narrative is an account of a film made by a film-maker called Navidson. So a narrative about and narrative about a narrative. And layers of footnotes too. My copy also included Post-It Notes and I have no ideas whether they were intended by the author or added by a mischievous reader.

In addition, it is highly creative typographically. The word 'house' (or 'haus' is always (?) printed either above or below the main line, or unspaced from the previous word, or in a fainter type, or ... There are pages on which most of the text is XXXX as though it has been deleted. Elsewhere, lines are struck through. Some pages have only a few words on them, on others the text comes from a corner of the page, or is sideways, or upside down. In one section there is a sidebar (listing famous places or buildings)  on the left of the left hand page running down several pages ... and another sidebar (listing architects) on the right of the right hand page also running across several pages ... but upside down. In the same section there is a square in the centre of the page, around which the main text flows; the same text appears in the same square on the versa page in mirror writing as if this square is a mirror with the words written on glass. Some pages have photographs.

The epigraph is "This is not for you." There were times I agreed. There were times when things became so dense and difficult that I skimmed and skipped. As 'Johnny's' introduction says: "there were reams and reams of it. Endless snarls of words, sometimes twisting into meaning, sometimes into nothing at all, frequently breaking apart, always branching off." (Introduction, xiv)

What about the story? The film-maker has discovered, in his family home, that there is a door into a corridor which is larger than the house itself (a bit like Doctor Who's TARDIS spaceship whose inside is larger than its outside). He ventures into this corridor and discovers a labyrinth. He and some friends mount expeditions to explore the labyrinth (which is in pitch darkness) but they find that the dimensions expand or shrink so they become disorientated and lost. People die. 

The Johnny Truant narrative is told through his annotations to Zampano's text. He is a young man working as assistant to a tattooist in LA, enjoying the footloose lifestyle of a young unattached man, taking recreational drugs and sleeping with any woman available. But when he discovers the Zampano manuscript, he becomes obsessed and drifts into paranoia, losing his job, his home and his mind (at which point he becomes an obviously unreliable narrator, although this has been well-signalled since one of his chat-up techniques is to tell far-fetched but allegedly autobiographical stories). 

Towards the end, there are hints ("fine and a half minutes", p 517) that perhaps Johnny has made the whole thing up and is thinking of his mother, committed to a mental hospital, lost in the labyrinth of her own thoughts, writing letters to her son. She even describes herself as the Sybil of Cumae (p 642) who was Aeneas's guide to the Underworld in the Aeneid and who wrote her prophecies on leaves.

Neither of these stories would have interested me in its own right, as a fiction - it doesn't help that the footnotes can last several pages so I had lost track of the original story by the time I had finished with the footnote - although the labyrinth story is packed with sufficient symbolism to become an interesting puzzle as to its hidden meanings. As a puzzle, it is fascinating. As a work of almost abstract typographical art, I was impressed. But as a novel, it didn't work for me. 

It reminded me of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the book published in Venice in 1499, whose arcane symbolism still intrigues scholars today. Other works that were called to mind included A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, the 2011 winner of the Pulitzer Prize, which is a set of interconnected short stories, one of which is presented as a slide show. Or the cut-up technique used by William Burroughs in such books as Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Wild Boys. Sometimes the inchoate style reminded me of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. There was also a touch of Cain's Book by Alexander Trocchi and some of the (unreliable) reports of madness put me in mind of American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis

It references works including: 

• Dante's Inferno: Lasciate ogni speranza, vio ch'entrate, the words written on the door to Hell, which underground place of 'circles' spiralling downwards is an obvious parallel to Danielewski's labyrinth which is dominated by a spiral staircase. 
• He quotes Virgil's Aeneid book 6 in which the hero descends to hell at the top of chapter 9. The quote Hic labor ille domus et inextricabile error which he translates as Here is the toil of that house, and the inextricable wandering, is obviously apposite.
• At one point he tells a story (as if it were true) about Pierre Menard who wrote something which turned out to be identical to a passage that Miguel de Cervantes write in Don Quixote ... but this is lifted from a short story called 'Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote' in a collection of short stories entitled Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. This is, I suppose, intended as a self-referential joke.
• The ancient Greek legend of the Minotaur, a mythical beast trapped within a labyrinth.
• Douglas Hofstadter who wrote Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid, a study of self-referentiality.
• Given that the labyrinthine world within a world is accessed through what might be a wardrobe, I wondered whether there was a hint of the 'Narnia' novels of C S Lewis, such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Selected quotes:

• "Leaving me feeling dumb and sad, a bit like a broken thermos - fine on the outside, but on the inside nothing but broken glass" (Ch 2, p 15)
• "Knowledge is hot water on wool. It shrinks time and space"
• "The hall, a place with dull walls where a pink corpse occasionally referred to as a carpet stretches over and down the stairs" (Ch 13, p 324)
• "Of course real horror does not depend on the melodrama of shadows or even the conspiracies of night." (Ch 18, p 415)
• "The dull look that comes to faces when they're glad to be leaving but in no great hurry to arrive." (Ch 21, p 511)

Spoiler alert: What's it all about? For me, the final clue came on the very last page (p709), after the Index and the Credits. This is the word Yggdrasil, done in the shape of a tree. Yggdrasil was the sacred tree as the centre of the Viking cosmos, its roots deep underground, its branches stretching to the heavens. Yggdrasil was an ash tree. The house is on Ash Tree Lane.

A tour-de-force of art but not, IMHO, of significant literary merit.

September 2026; 709 pages
First published in 2000
My copy was issued 2001 by Doubleday

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The End of Everything" by M John Harrison

 Longlisted for the 2026 Booker prize, this novel has an unstructured and disjointed 'plot' and lacks coherent characters ... which is, I think, the point, since it is exploring a post-apocalyptic dystopia in which even geography is fluid and very little makes sense.

Phillip Tennent, one of a community of beachcombers, rescues something seemingly organic and alive from the sea. His murderous grandmother, a painter, doesn't want it in her house. He considers selling it to Hampson who runs some sort of research facility from a remote rectory, seeking to make contact with the cosmos. 

Set in an England which has been invaded by the iGhetti - aliens from another dimension, projections from the astral sphere, consequences of human imaginations, who knows? - with refugees abandoning their SUVs and boarding ships to leave these shores. This is a post-apocalyptic fantasy. In some ways life carries on as normal: there seems to be no problem getting food to eat or fuel for cats but the art galleries have been abandoned. But little makes sense. The characters' actions seem almost random. The plot is a sequence of events. Surrealism rules as the reader struggles to understand. In this way, the novel reflects the breakdown of society.

This is a world where location becomes vague. “He had found his way to her along the coast as if blindfold, relying on some internal compass of nostalgia.” (1: A house on the borderland) When moving north  towards London from the English south coast, the sea appears to be on the left. The Continent is shrouded in mist and may not exist anymore: Phillip's grandmother Marnie obsessively and repetitively paints signs asking "HOW CAN YOU MISPLACE A CONTINENT". Memories become unreliable. Humans frequently suffer moments, which they call, 'bad patches', when dreams seem to take over waking consciousness: “Generally, a patch had a more public narrative as well as a more obvious one. It placed you in the position of an accidental spectator. Everyone saw roughly the same thing, as though the world was patiently replaying an extract from its repertoire for an audience that would never quite understand it.” (1: Lost species)

Everything is transient and shifting, even smells. “There was a faint compound smell - fish and salt, perfume and fried food. For a moment it seemed like a language, with a shifting, impermanent syntax: but when she listened it had nothing to say.” (1: Limit case) 

The first section is entitled 'War in Heaven' which has connotations of Milton's Paradise Lost. Harrison seems to be saying that we are on the verge of losing "this other Eden, demi-paradise" (to quote John of Gaunt in Shakespeare's Richard II). Perhaps the iGhetti are the rebel angels. Tennent's girlfriend Alice, once the wife of a man who was paid a million pounds for a month's work, becomes one of the emigrants who flees England for the uncertainties of abroad. And Hampson, the scientist searching for truth, notes that “There aren't many anagrams of the word insect.” (1: Hampson's notebooks.) Actually there are a few. Incest is one, and nicest another but I suspect Hampson is aiming for ‘scient’ which means ‘knowing’ or ‘aware’. If this really is an allegory of the Fall, we must remember that Adam and Eve were damned for eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The knowledge being the key, especially for Hampson, searching after truth. 

Perhaps this is also a condemnation of capitalism. Does the name of the iGhetti come from the acquisitive cry of greed: 'I get it!'? They focus their attack on the City of London, cradle of capitalism. But capitalism has spread, even to the coast with its typical seaside attractions: “The amusement arcade ... is the perfect miniature of capitalism, every attraction screaming to be heard above the next; every one of them offering something you can't have.” (1: Dear Phillip)

I adored Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again which introduced elements of surrealism into a relatively normal narrative. I'm less certain about this novel which seems to have taken a further step into nonsense. Perhaps I'm too conventional. I sought to impose order, to understand, and perhaps the message of the novel is that it is - or will be in the post-apocalyptic dystopia to which we seemed doomed - impossible to make sense of catastrophe. 

If nothing else, the lack of a structured plot or ordinary character motivations, and the sometimes shifting syntax, is resonant with the theme of a world become uncertain and chaotic.

Whether you 'like' the novel or not, it is impossible not to admire Harrison's creativity. And there are moments where the prose ascends into the stratosphere. 

It's well worth reading the review of this book by Max Puffins: https://maxpuffins.substack.com/p/book-review-the-end-of-everything

Selected quotes:

• “The beachcombers had their limits. Their superstitions gave the tideline its social structures and distinctive quality on the palate.” (1: Tidelines)
• “The hinterland was dark, a little more threatening, with its flattened hashmark of streets and its differing sets of rules.” (1: Tidelines)

September 2026; 198 pages
Published in 2026 by Serpent's Tail

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God