"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

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

"Maybe the world will end so we won't have to" by Natasha Bell

 

Autofiction layered. Tasha, ie the author (and we learn that 'Bell' is a pseudonym) decides to write about her life by creating herself as a character called Harriet Payne (aka Harry) who herself has the idea to write an autofictional novel representing herself as a character called Natalie Lucas.

There are meditations on writing and whether one should write about the people one loves and lives with, no matter how disguised. 

I found the start very slow. The first quarter of the book meanders as it sets the scene, building up the characters, exploring the themes of autofiction and the writer's life. “While novels need plot and autobiographies need chronological timelines, autofiction’s organising force is emotion, so it doesn't require either.” (Ch 6) I wasn't sure, on the evidence of this first section of the book, that I  agreed. 

And this was yet another book about the tribulations of writing another novel. Her character, Natalie, asks: “Does the world really need another book about how hard it is to write a book?” (The Last Word). No, it doesn't.

I contemplated abandonment. 

Furthermore, It seemed as if the book was aimed at a readership that not only ignored me but semi-actively excluded me. What should I, a man, make of statements such as: “She scrolls on, dismissing quotes from Hemingway and David Foster Wallace as male and uninteresting.” (Ch 2) or “She acknowledges that there are some perfectly nice men, even of the cis-white variety.” (Ch 3)? The "some" and "even" made me feel unwanted. Since 'Harry' seems to read almost exclusively female authors, maybe I should reciprocate. But I decided that would limit my horizons and I wanted to expand them. Isn't that the point of fiction? for the reader to be challenged, to explore new worlds and meet new people, whether they be burnt out cops, daredevil spies, African villagers, Cornish lovers from the eighteen hundreds ... So I persevered.

I'm glad I did. At the 25% turning point, Harry's partner, Ellen, becomes ill. Harry decides write a story in which Natalie's partner (also called Ellen) dies from the same illness, in the hope that the fates will be confounded and Harry's Ellen will survive. At last some real-life drama to which I could relate. Plus, I very much appreciated this really clever idea: whether the Fates, symbolised by a spider spinning its web, could be manipulated and defrauded, especially as it was elaborated into the story of Arachne.

And I enjoyed the added complication that Harry daren't tell Ellen that she is not only using her life as a story ("did it not occur to you that maybe I don't want everyone knowing that I could be shitting into a bag soon?"; Ch 11) but also that, in the story, Ellen dies.  This means that, at some stage Ellen is probably going to find out that Harry has been imagining her death .... This ratchets up the tension nicely.

So, in the end, the autofictional conceit interacted with the very human jeopardy to create a haunting dilemma. And perhaps the slow build-up was needed to achieve this degree of reader empathy. Perhaps.

I also enjoyed the fact that the Acknowledgements involved the character of Natasha who has a dialogue with the author Tasha in The Last Word, which follows the Acknowledgements; thus spreading the story beyond its usual confines, in the way that some films include sometimes meaningful out-takes after the credits or the way Alasdair Gray inserted into early editions of his novel Lanark an erratum slip which read 'This erratum slip has been inserted by mistake'. A character arguing with the author reminded me of Flann O'Brien's brilliant metafiction At Swim-Two-Birds (another novel which starts slowly; perhaps it is a characteristic of the genre).

So I'm glad I stuck with it. In the end it was an enjoyable and even gripping read. And there were some flashes of genius, including “The closest she's ever come to a radical subculture is getting a piggyback from a drag queen at Brighton Pride.” (Ch 5) which made me laugh out loud.

Selected quotes:

• “Stuck on a Mobius strip of her own bad mood.” (Ch 3)
• “Most of life is just an ugly scribble along the middle line.” (Ch 3)
• “The streetlamp puddles like liquid around their feet.” (Ch 5)
• “Her thoughts flickering like a worn-out projector.” (Ch 5)
• “The problem with trying to harness potential is that it increases the stakes of failure.” (Ch 8)
• “She had a tutor once who asked them to switch their first and last lines, to see what reconstruction was necessary to create symmetry.” (Ch 11)
• “What, after all, is writing, but an attempt to secure the last word?” (Ch 13)
• “You’re meant to come here and allow the road to change you, right? what is a pilgrimage if not a belief in story?” (Acknowledgements)
• “Your male characters rarely have two brain cells to rub together in order to contemplate their own abandonment.” (The Last Word)

September 2026; 239 pages
Published by Renard Press in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Lorna Doone" by R D Blackmore

Romantic historical fiction, set in England in the days of the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II after the English Civil war; continuing into the early days of the reign of his brother James II, when the Duke of Monmouth led a rebellion in south west England.

The hero, protagonist and narrator John Ridd must leave school after his father also John) is murdered by the Doones, a set of bandits living on Exmoor. Even the journey home, on horseback, has its jeopardies, as John encounters a party of Doones returning after attacking a family in a coach.

The boy grows, learning to be a farmer. One day, following a stream to catch fish, he climbs a waterslide and enters Doone Valley where he encounters a beautiful young girl, Lorna Doone. Love at first sight.

He returns home and grows into manhood, more concerned with farming and family matters, such as his sister's infatuation with a cousin, one of the local highwaymen. After a while he resumes his acquaintance with Lorna and the pair of them declare their love for one another. But she is threatened with a coerced marriage to Carver Doone, the man who killed John's father, and, in a winter full of blizzards and snowdrifts, John needs to rescue her from his clutches. Surely the Doones will extract a terrible revenge.

All this and more. The subplots include John being summoned to London to give evidence about the Doones, the strange behaviour of his uncle Reuben Huckaback whose daughter Ruth has set her cap at John, the fermenting of rebellion on Exmoor on behalf of the Duke of Monmouth, raids and counter raids. And there's the mystery of Lorna's birth. It is a thriller of a plot, full of foreshadowing and carefully constructed, which never for a moment flags, and keeps the rollercoaster drama going almost to the very final page.

What of the characters? All flat, I fear. Not so grotesque as the caricatures of Dickens but none of them with a developed arc. John is a giant of a man, more brawn than brain, but not so daft as he repeatedly protests. Lorna is little better than a love object. Annie, John's sister, is a much more developed woman, as is Ruth. Tom Faggus, the highwayman, is a loose cannon, designed to add jeopardy on demand, and John Fry the farmhand is the butt of the narrator's humour, a stereotypical stupid and lazy yokel with a rich line in dialect. 

They're not particularly realistic characters but at least they're fun.

As for the prose. John expresses himself in an extraordinarily long-winded style. If he could only be a little more terse, the story would have been wrapped up in half the time. And yet it is so full of incident that rarely if ever did it drag. And his view of the world, for all his pretence to be dim-witted, is full of astute observations and he regularly pokes sly fun at his characters. 

It's also a mine of historical information about a period I scarcely knew, the later years of Charles II when the 'county party' (prototype Whigs) sort to exclude the King's brother from being heir to the throne on the grounds that he was a Roman Catholic. There were political shenanigans and plots to assassinate the royal family (eg the Rye House plot) and the 'Popish Plot' which seems to have been entirely fictitious and dreamed up by a fantasist called Titus Oates. 

Finally, it is wonderfully evocative of farm life on Exmoor. The book was worth reading just for the descriptions of the Great Winter (1683 - 1684). And I've just finished Andrew miller's The Land in Winter, set during the winter of 1962 - 1963, also in a west country farm.

But it is a classic of its kind. My mum was a great fan of the book, believing herself to be descended from the Ridds. We spent several family holidays exploring 'Lorna Doone' country, including Bagworthy Water, and visiting Oare church and other places mentioned in the text such as Dunster and Watchett.

This novel is a classic Victorian romance with quite a side serving of humour. For my money it is streets ahead of Charles Kingsley's Hereward the Wake (which is dreadful) and could be compared with some of the Walter Scott novels such as Ivanhoe, or Guy Mannering.

Selected quotes:

• “The principal business of good Christians is, beyond all controversy, to fight with one another.” (Ch 2)
• “All of them very sober; for father would have no company with any man who went beyond half-a-gallon of beer, or a single gallon of cider.” (Ch 4)
• “The greatest point in learning is to find that you must do it.” (Ch 7)
• “We desolate more than replenish the earth.” (Ch 7)
• “We call all this part ‘Gibbet-moor’ ... but though there were gibbets enough upon it, most part of the bodies was gone, for the value of the chains, they said, and the teaching of young chirurgeons.” (Ch 13)
• “Nothing is easier than sharp words, except to wish them unspoken.” (Ch 14)
• “‘Tis the surest heirship to the block, to be the chip of an old one.” (Ch 26)
• “They had resigned themselves, as even pigs do, to a kind of fast, hoping to break their fast more sweetly on the morrow morning. But now they tumbled out all headlong, pigs below and pigs above, pigs point-blank and pigs across, pigs courant and pigs rampant, but all alike prepared to eat, and all in good cadence squeaking.” (Ch 32)
• “The two villains looked very happy - which villains have no right to be, but often are, meseemeth.” (Ch 37)
• “The three learned professions live by roguery on the three parts of a man. The doctor mauls our bodies; the parson starves our souls; but the lawyer must be the adroitest knave, for he has to ensnare our minds.” (Ch 39)
• “Broad white curtains of the frost-fog looped around the lower sky.” (Ch 42)
• “She was not so utterly unreasonable; although she did read books.” (Ch 42)
• “Of all human dealings, satire is the very lowest ... it is the equivalent in words, for what bullying is indeed; and no more bespeaks a clever man, than the other does a brave one.” (Ch 46)
• “True and false are but a blind turned upon a pivot.” (Ch 51)
• “But women, who are (beyond all doubt) the mothers of all mischief, also nurse that babe to sleep, when he is too noisy.” (Ch 57)
• “I thought it a wise precaution ... to load my gun with a dozen slugs made from the lead of the old church-porch, laid by, long since, against witchcraft.” (Ch 58)
• “No doubt but that some men enjoy it, being born, like worms, to dig and to live in their own scoopings.” (Ch 59)
• “True charity begins at home, and so did his; and was afraid of losing the way, if it went abroad.” (Ch 68)
• “Her eyes, which none on earth may ever equal, or compare with, told me such a tale of hope, and faith, and heart’s devotion, that I was almost amazed, thoroughly as I knew them. Darling eyes, the clearest eyes, the loveliest, the most loving eyes - the sound of a shot rang through the church, and those eyes were dim with death.” (Ch 74)
• “For in my sick distracted mind ... like the bead in a wisp of frog-spawn drifted by the current, hung the black and worthless burden of the life before me. A life without Lorna; a tadpole life. All stupid head; and no body.” (Ch 75)

September 2026; 679 pages

First published as a three volume novel in 1869 and then as a single volume novel in 1870

My edition was published by Thomas Nelson; it is undated.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Meets Lorna at 10% mark.

The rescue of Lorna from Doone valley is in the centre of the book

Tarr-steps (Ch 18)

Mother Melldrum (Ch 18)

Valley of the rocks (Ch 18)

The accounts of the battles (two attacks of Doone Valley and the Battle of Sedgemoor) seem to be understated and come off as rather damp squibs

The revelations of Lorna’s true parentage comes at the 2/3 mark, where the second of the three volume original publication would have ended.





History

Lord William Russell’s death in the time of Charles II. From 1668, Charles ruled through a group of ministers called the CABAL (Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale) who technically formed the Committee for Foreign Affairs. They were perceived as having conspired to topple Clarendon and to form an organised group intent on control of the King, the Privy Council. and Parliament. They were opposed by the ‘country party’, a forerunner of the Whigs, of which Russell was a prominent member. He was a passionately anti Roman Catholic and opposed the King’s friendship with Louis XIV of France (which involved a secret treaty in exchange for French money). Russell seconded the Exclusion Bill in Parliament, an attempt to exclude the Duke of York, brother and heir to Charles II, from becoming King after Charles, on the grounds of his roman Catholicism, and promoted the alternative, protestant, illegitimate son of Charles II, the Duke of Monmouth. Following his peripheral participation in the Rye House plot, an attempt to attack Charles and James on their return from the Newmarket races, Russell was executed for treason. Lord Essex and Algernon Sidney were also Rye House plotters.



The Black Box was an alleged box which contained papers proving that Charles II was legally married to the mother of the Duke of Monmouth, which would have made him, rather than James, the Duke of York, heir to the throne.

The meal-tub refers to another alleged conspiracy, written details of which were found at the bottom of a tub of ground meal.

Titus Oates was a fantasist who claimed to have evidence of a 'Popish Plot' against Charles II; alleged conspirators were convicted and some executed on the basis of his flimsy evidence. Eventually he himself was tried and convicted of perjury. 

"Beginnings, Middles and Ends" by Nancy Kress

A manual on how to write fiction, both short stories and novels, which is structured by focusing on the three sections of the story, as the title implies.

For me there were several key take-aways:

• Every story makes two promises to its readers: an emotional promise which says, “Read this and you'll be entertained, or thrilled, or scared, or titillated, or saddened, or nostalgic, or uplifted - but always absorbed.” (Ch 1); and an intellectual promise, that you will see this world from a new perspective or be transported to another world etc. These promises must be established in the beginning, developed through the middle, and fulfilled in the end.
• Stories are planned in events and then written in dramatic scenes, full of dramatic detail, in which characters are in conflict and in which something changes. (Ch 1)
• By the end of the second scene the reader should know the genre, the main characters, the tone, and what sort of conflict you are promising. (Ch 2)
• The middle is like a bridge which the characters cross, forming and reforming alliances as they do; some of the characters change during this journey. (Ch 4)
• In the middle, the author can keep on track by remembering (a) the motivations of the protagonist, (b) the narrator (which may change from scene to scene, and (c) the 'throughline' which is the single-sentence elevator pitch which describes what happens to the protagonist. Never do more than two scenes without returning to the throughline. (Ch 4)
• In the centre of the book, the protagonist must undergo a change. To make this change realistic there must have been dramatised scenes, showing the protagonist with conflicting motivations (the old one and the new one) which will lead up to the change that foreshadow it. (Ch 5)
• The end must be a climax. It must be justified. No deus ex machina or cavalry coming over the hill. (Ch 7)
• After finishing the story, you revise it by (a)  becoming the reader and annotating  to show where it drags or it is unclear; (b) by tracing the promise; (c) by analysing each scene to ensure it both advances the plot and develops the characters. (Ch 9)

I found this a clearly written and (potentially) very helpful book.

September 2026; 143 pages

Published by f-w publications in 1993

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Black Bag" by Luke Rennard

Shortlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize.

 An actor, rarely in work, agrees to take part in a university psychology experiment. He had to dress in a black bag that covers him completely, except for his naked feet and ankles, and sit in lectures and seminars without saying anything or making any movement. He begins to grow into the role, questioning the nature of identity when one is utterly anonymous. Other people react to him in different ways. One of the professors, Justine, finds him the perfect partner with whom to have unconventional sex (given Justine's sexual predilections it cannot be a coincidence that she is named after the eponymous heroine of a novel by the Marquis de Sade). And his best friend Claudio, who earns a very good income from live streaming critiques of video games, seeks to monetise the Black Bag situation.

The narrator-protagonist is, inevitably, anonymous; the narration is in the first person and the present tense.

I was initially hooked by the premise, by the tribulations of an actor's life, always hustling for the next role, and by some sharp and witty observations of life. However, I found the middle section less interesting. I think this may have been because I didn't really understand the satire. The psychology lectures given are presumably meant to parody theories of identity which I didn't understand sufficiently to enjoy the mockery. There is a lot of development during this middle section - of the relationship with Justine, of Claudio's money-making ideas, of how it feels to be inside a black bag - but nothing really happened. Then, almost exactly at the 75% mark, things become suddenly sinister.

Since the inciting incident had come at less than 10% of the way in, I suspect that this structured pacing was deliberate.

This paragraph contains spoilers so you might wish to skip it. He decides to break up with Justine and she tells him he can't. The lecturer who employed him disappears. Claudio goes missing. He sees another Black Bag and discovers the existence of a secret cult. He travels (via pedalo) to a disused warehouse, almost drowning on the way - did the author think he was obliged by the rules of story structure to insert a near-death experience; is this a meta-fictional satire? He participates in a religious service, all the while scared that he might be recognised, even though he is one Black Bag among many. All of these plot lines suggest jeopardy ... and all of them fizzle out. He escapes from the warehouse/ church. After a visit from Justine's husband, this situation seems to be resolved. He finds out where the lecturer lives ... and discovers he has just retired. Claudio turns up on his doorstep. The monetisation project works and he becomes rich. 

I enjoyed the concept and I loved the humour, but I felt the plot was insufficiently developed. All of the twists that arrive in the final quarter could have been deployed to energise the middle section.

But there was much to celebrate in the prose. There are some awesomely original descriptions:

• “Following the customary laryngopharyngeal noises of the espresso machine the barista brings me my flat white.” (Ch 10)
• “My nipples look like the snouts of shrews or voles; I get them mixed up.” (Ch 10) It became even funnier when my voice typing recognition software reworded these as ‘shoes or bowls’
• “The chair is like a utilitarian typeface, like Arial.” (Ch 12)
• “Next morning I watch the fiery sunrise from Claudio's giant window. I think of something blooming in a petri dish.” (Ch 23)
• “A glass of barley water of a man.” (Ch 46) So wholesome!
• “Any swan's face, real or plastic, resembles that of a man who doesn't really want to be at the masquerade ball.” (Ch 81)

I also loved the way he used interpolations to delay, just for a few seconds, the reader from discovering what happened next. This is what E M Forster describes as ‘look out of the window’ moments; they tweak the tension a little higher: 

• “I hear seagulls outside complaining of the sunset.” (Ch 82) is sandwiched between the moment when, at a critical juncture, he stands up, drawing attention to himself when he ought to remain anonymous, and the consequence.
• “I can hear the vague histrionics of a minor opera on a radio.” (Ch 84) This brilliantly economical and skewering description comes as he is trying to discover what happened to his employer.
• “I punch him on the shoulder, which is quite solid. ... Have you been lifting? Yeah, I want nice arms.” (Ch 87) This irrelevant exchange is inserted into Claudio's explanation of what he has been doing.

Selected quotes:

• “If you met anyone as whiny, as disobliging and egocentric as the average narrator of a novel in real life you'd find them unbearable. You'd give them about five minutes before you excused yourself to get another drink, or moved to a different carriage, or asked to be transferred to an alternative department so you didn't have to work with them any more.” (opening lines; Ch 1)
• “There was a time when a genuinely bohemian lifestyle was possible, by which I mean economically feasible. Where it persists now, it is only as cosplay the board kids with private incomes.” (Ch 2)
• “The heterodox architecture of the university campus represents many different areas of hope, progress, despair, practicality and defiance. A theme park of uneasy truces between high court and departure lounge, tenement and winter palace.” (Ch 6)
• “This must be how it feels to hide in a cake waiting to burst out into the party.” (Ch 12)
• “The walls are white, the floorboards are immaculate oak veneer with the occasional pubic hair.” (Ch 15)
• “This is something they say about any artist at the top of their game: the thing that’s good about them is that they are absolutely themselves. but as an actor I must be absolutely not myself.” (Ch 16)
• “I have always disliked the awkward way academic years must be recorded, 22/23, 23/34 ... the years edging and overlapping each other like lumpy starfish in tidepools, in grotesque colours, in time-lapse.” (Ch 29)
• “I stare at the points of her nipples with the shock, gratitude and trepidation with which I customarily welcome a potential sexual encounter.” (Ch 30)
• “Is this not the way it always is, seeing one's parents? We do not really want them to know or see how we go about in the world, what strange compromises and strategies we have developed, our laziness and vigour, charm and petulance. We'd be embarrassed, so would they.” (Ch 44)
• “If not my desires, what would I have left to be ashamed of?” (Ch 62)
• “Justine would call sadism a kind of homeopathic cure for maleness.” (Ch 70)
• “It is an unremarkable evening, overcast and a little damp. This is what the weather would be like in the English version of Heaven.” (Ch 73)
• “I am a lid. Or a cork. Or a thumb stuffed into a fissure in the world.” (Ch 79)
• “I pass an expensive burger restaurant where the burgers are too thick to eat. Bottomless brunch. Downsized platters and infinite drinks for thirty quid. The last bone late capitalism intends to throw us.” (Ch 80)
• “You never know what to expect of someone's home, a site more intimate than the naked body as it includes our every thought and necessity made visible.” (Ch 84)
• “Most of our instincts derive from trying, preemptively, to avoid disappointment.” (Ch 84)
• “Sometimes intellectuals live in a state of actual decay in damp cottages surrounded by snails, grates overflowing with ashes, something more permanent than them growing between their teeth, swaying heaps of books to the ceiling, spines inward, for some reason, even on the shelves. Their system of order exclusively whimsical.” (Ch 84)
• “This is a strange job, he says. We're supposed to be the finest minds in our respective disciplines but we're required to spend most of our time boring hungover teenagers to sleep.” (Ch 84) About being a university lecturer.
• “To trust in the Arts is an act of hubris so self-destructive the gods don't even bother to punish you for it. It is to become a monstrous politician of an insecure republic, an estate agent of your own soul, a demon of lubricity.” (Ch 85)

Most of the philosophising in this novel seemed to about identity, especially masculinity, with a dose of 'what are the arts for?' thrown in. Most of this passed me by. But much of the narrator's perspective on life was very funny and I enjoyed the humour and the beautiful writing.

September 2026; 386 pages
Published by John Murray in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God