"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, in particular, writing 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. After all, this is about creative lesbians and I'm a straight male. What should I 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 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 twist 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

Longlisted 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

"Ghachar Ghochar" by Vivek Shanbhag

 

This beautiful jewel of a novella describes the corrosive effect of wealth on the inter-relationships within a family. "Ghachar ghochar", we discover, is a made up word to describe an entanglement, a snarled and knotted web of entwined threads.

The storyline itself is tangled as the narrator jumps around chronologically, starting in the present tense and then telling his story in the past. It is always his story and therefore coloured by his preconceptions and shaped by the limitations of his perceptions. 

The family consists of father Appa and mother Amma, his sister Malati and the anonymous male narrator, and their uncle Chikkappa; clearly Appa, Amma and Chikkappa mean Father, Mother and Uncle; we do not learn their names. In this way the family becomes generic and the story becomes a metaphor for us all.

To start with, the family rely on the income of Appa, who works hard and conscientiously as a salesman. When he is made redundant, Chikkappa takes over as breadwinner, using Appa's redundancy money and his own business acumen to found a company retailing spices. The family becomes wealthy ... and the wealth corrodes their inter-relationships. This becomes especially apparent when Malati and the narrator marry. There are also hints that Chikkappa has a hidden, possibly darker side to him. There is a potentially sinister but ambiguous ending.

What delighted me about the story is the way it was made absolutely real by the details - the clothing of the waiter, Vincent, the spillage of the masoor dal - and at the same time so much of the narrative is made up from suggestions, oblique hints and implications which the reader must piece together to understand what might be - might be - going on. 

It's also a masterpiece of metaphor. The family is invaded by ants - a species famous for being organised closely interlinked - and become inured to killing them. The spilling of the masoor dal suggests secrets being brought into the open.

It's a tour de force of subtext with some beautifully buried, often symbolic, foreshadowing.

Selected quotes:

• “One story, many sides.” (Ch 1)
• “Who's to say the gods cannot take the form of a waiter when they choose to visit us?” (Ch 1)
• "I knew that tea shouldn't lead to a broken arm, or a forgotten key to murder. It wasn't about the tea of the key: the last strands of a relationship can snap from a single glance or a moment of silence." (Ch 1)
• “The whole family stuck together, walking like a single body across the tightrope of our circumstances.” (Ch 2)
• “We thought of the family as being interdependent: a person who spent money was also taking it away from the others.” (Ch 5)
• “It's not we who control money, it's the money that controls us.” (Ch 5)
• “There's a vast difference between the moral underpinnings of a business family and the household of a salaried teacher.” (Ch 6)
• “Whatever fragrance the whole wardrobe had was missing in the individual clothes it held.” (Ch 7)
• “Those types who will point out the mustard seed under your feet, but a blind to the pumpkin beneath them.” (Ch 7)

September 2026; 118 pages
First published in India (written in Kannada) in 2013
My paperback edition, translated into English by Srinath Perur, was issued in 2018.
I discovered this book from a recommendation from @maxpuffins on BlueSky; he has published a review on his substack blog which is well worth a read.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Ultra-Processed People" by Chris van Tulleken

 This is a popular science book which attacks ultra-processed foods (UPF or UPFs) as being bad for human health, in particular being responsible for the increase in obesity and obesity-related diseases.

The crux of the thesis seems to be that UPFs are tastier than non-UPFs, that they are softer (and therefore easier to eat), that they are higher in calories, and that they are aggressively marketed; these four factors mean that people eat more and become fat. 

In addition, some of the additives may be implicated in health problems, including inflammatory bowel diseases.

As someone who has been struggling to lose weight recently (according to my BMI, I was 'obese' and am now 'overweight'), I have some sympathy for some of the claims. There are some foodstuffs that do seem to be addictive (for me, digestive biscuits and Quorn cocktail sausages among others) and generally I find it difficult to stop eating once I have started (I also eat quickly, which is, according to this book, a genetic trait). I also have colitis which might have been caused by my diet.

However, I have major problems with this book. I trained as a scientist and the author is a respected scientist. Why then does this book exhibit so many of the features of pseudoscience?

• A lot of the evidence is anecdotal, including the author's own experience, that of his twin brother, and observations of his young daughter. He even includes one of his nightmares.
• He frequently attacks those involved in the production of UPFs, or those scientists who argue against him, often on the basis of their funding sources and sometimes because they work for companies who also produce non-food chemical products. Such attacks are 'ad hominem', a classic rhetorical trick widely recognised as a logical fallacy. 
• Conversely, he paints rosy pictures of those scientists with whom he agrees. What is the relevance of, for example, their art collections? This is another rhetorical trick, designed to make the reader like these people and therefore more ready to believe them. It also approaches the logical fallacy of 'arguing from authority'.
• Similarly, he uses adjectives to influence the reader, either 'boo words' such as when he describes a critic as a "contrarian", or 'wow words' such as when he talks of "proper" sourdough bread. Once again, this is rhetoric, not scientific evidence.
• He adopts the 'speck in your eye' approach of focusing on criticising the arguments of his opponents while not holding his own arguments to the same standards (such as when he adopts the NOVA definition of UPFs while attacking nutritional information panels and traffic light labels on UK foods as being too complex). 
• He attacks 'straw men' (another logical fallacy) such as when he attacks vitamin supplements: “There aren't any supplements that work for healthy people ... outside the context of possible deficiency vitamins supplements don't work.” (Ch 2). The whole point of supplements, as the word implies, is that they are for people who are deficient in a vitamin.
• He presents hypotheses and uses them as is they were facts, such as in "food produced for profit might be designed, deliberately or inadvertently, to make us consume it" (Ch 2) where the word 'might' means that the statement is not definitive, but it is swamped by the rest of the clause.
• Sometimes he uses the 'you never can tell' argument, such as in this passage commenting on the  dimethylpolysiloxane in KFC Hot Wings. "Extensive experiments in rats show that hardly any is absorbed when eaten and it passes out unchanged in the faeces. Dimethylpolysiloxane may very well be safe. Or it may be subtly harmful over a long period through some mechanism yet to be discovered.” Here he admits that the scientific evidence shows this additive is safe, but he then dismisses this through the 'yet to be discovered' argument, which can be used to cast doubt on every scientific (and even pseudoscientific) argument.

In the text, rhetoric swamps evidence though, to be fair, there are a lot of footnotes linked to scientific papers.

However, my major criticism is the way in which he defines UPFs. He uses the cumbersome NOVA definition: "Industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients (formulations) including sugar, oils, fats and salt (generally in combination and in higher amounts than in processed foods) and food substances of no or rare culinary use (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates). Group 1 foods are absent or represent a small proportion of the ingredients in the formulation. Processes enabling the manufacture of ultra-processed foods include industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; application of additives including those whose function is to make the final product palatable or hyperpalatable such as flavours, colourants, non-sugar sweeteners and emulsifiers; and sophisticated packaging, usually with synthetic materials. Processes and ingredients here are designed to create highly profitable (low-cost ingredients, long shelf-life, emphatic branding), convenient (ready-to-(h)eat or to drink), tasteful alternatives to all other Nova food groups and to freshly prepared dishes and meals. Ultra-processed foods are operationally distinguishable from processed foods by the presence of food substances of no culinary use (varieties of sugars such as fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, 'fruit juice concentrates', invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose and lactose; modified starches; modified oils such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils; and protein sources such as hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein and 'mechanically separated meat') or of additives with cosmetic functions (flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents) in their list of ingredients."

This definition is catch-all in the extreme. It seems to suggest that foods that are tasty and convenient to prepare are, by virtue of these attributes, UPFs. He acknowledges the complexity of this definition so he provides 'rule of thumb' alternatives:

• “UPF has a long formal scientific definition, but it can be boiled down to this: if it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you would usually find in a standard home kitchen, it’s UPF.” (Introduction)
• “Almost every food that comes with a health claim in the packet is a UPF.” (Introduction)
• “My personal rule of thumb is: if I’m struggling with whether to call a food UPF then it probably is UPF.” (Ch 10)
• “Are you reading an ingredient list? That’s probably UPF.” (Afterword, FAQs)

The effect of these rules of thumb is to make the definition of UPF even more catch-all. And this is a major problem with the field. Because some food processing is good for us. The human gut has evolved since the invention of cooking; cooking allows us to extract more calories from our food (van Tulleken seems to suggest this is a bad thing because too many calories make us obese) and this might have been what drove the prehistorical increase in our brain size. The iodisation of cooking salt has not only prevented iodine deficiency diseases but there is evidence that it has increased the IQ of the global human population by an average of 4 IQ points. The flour used for most bread is supplemented, under UK law, with vitamins and, recently, folic acid in order to protect people from deficiency diseases (I recently read an article attacking the addition of folic acid and sneering that it was predicted to prevent 'only' between 100 and 150 cases of babies born with spina bifida). So a definition of UPF which can distinguish between what is 'good' processing and what is 'bad' seems to me essential. This is precisely what van Tulleken fails to provide. Instead, he seems to be encouraging us to eschew all processed food. 

He does recognise that one of the major problems facing the elimination of UPFs is that they are cheaper and more convenient than non-UPFs. He accepts that this may be a problem for poor people (he cites figures suggesting that In the UK, because of the relatively high cost of housing, fuel and transport, in order to have a diet that adhered to the national healthy guidelines the poorest 50% would need to spend 30% of their income on food and the poorest 10% would need to spend 75% of their income on food). He has two solutions: firstly that they use cookbooks which will teach them how to make nutritious meals from cheap ingredients, and secondly that the savings he claims will be made from governments needing to spend less on healthcare (because there will be mush reduced obesity) can be used to subsidise foods. I suspect he is looking forward to the time when the pizza he buys made from "proper sourdough" costs the same as the supermarket pizza rather than more than five times the price. This seems utopian. And one thing he doesn't seem to consider is convenience. In the old days (the 1950s?) a typical family might have a mother who stayed at home and was able to pop out to the shops to buy food every day. Nowadays, a typical family may well need both parents to be 'breadwinners' and don't have the spare time for daily shopping. Foods with long shelf-lifes are therefore essential.

I agree absolutely that there should be rigorous governmental regulation of anything added to our food; the self-regulation system he describes in the US seems fraught with danger. Additives proved dangerous should be banned. Those sitting on regulatory bodies should be independent of the food industry, though I can't accept his suggestion that scientists employed by the food industry "should be rigorously excluded from the policy space and public debate. They shouldn’t be quoted in articles or appear on the news.” This seems to be anti-freedom of speech and very definitely anti-science which relies on ideas being tested through sceptical debate. I would applaud his suggestion of 'black hexagon' labelling for any food high in fat or sugar or salt. But the exclusion of certain foodstuffs from our diets must be done on the basis of the evidence and, for me, this book foregrounded rhetoric over science.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"My Cousin Rachel" by Daphne Du Maurier

Set in the days before motorised transport, before railways, when it still took three weeks to travel from south-west England to Florence, this is a historical romance fused with a murder mystery which inevitably reminded me of du Maurier's masterpiece Rebecca.

A young orphan, Philip, the past tense, first person narrator, is adopted and brought up by his bachelor cousin, Ashley. His education includes Harrow and Oxford, but not females. Ashley then travels to Italy and falls in love with and marries another cousin, the eponymous Rachel, who is half-Italian and already a widow. Mysterious and hysterical letters reach Philip in which Ashley says he is ill and blames Rachel. Philip travels to Florence but discovers that Ashley is already dead and Rachel has vanished. Back at home, he is reunited with Rachel ... and falls in love with her. Despite repeated warnings about her, he is determined to marry her and to settle on her the inheritance that Ashley has given him. 

The reader is reduced to shouting 'Don't do it' and, like all the other onlookers, watch helplessly as Philip progresses towards self-destruction. Can he come to his senses in time?

It's a classic tale, well told ... but it relies on the suspension of disbelief, specifically that Philip would be so infatuated that, despite warnings, he would do what he does. I just never accepted that. Nor did I accept that those surrounding him who could see what was happening would allow it to happen. Would the godfather have witnessed the deed? Would Louise have remained silent for so long? It simply didn't ring true to me.

I didn't believe in Philip's character. He was a one-dimensional sucker. The only complex characters were those of the villains: Rachel and her Italian adviser Signor Rainaldi. The others are bystanders.

The mystery element of the plot relies on subtle foreshadowing: clues must be provided so that the reader has a fair chance of guessing the ending and yet, by the use of misdirection or red herrings, the reader must be surprised by that ending. In Aristotle's terms (in his Poetics), a twist (he called it 'peripeteia') should be something that defies the reader's expectations and yet can be understood as a necessary outcome of what went before. Du Maurier, however, wants the reader to be in a superior position to the protagonist-narrator, so that the reader can see what is about to happen, so that they can urge the protagonist not to be so stupid, as I did. Therefore, du Maurier needed to make the foreshadowing clues easy to recognise. I did, and I felt this spoiled a lot of the suspense.

Du Maurier expects me to believe that at the end of the book, Philip still has doubts. I didn't, I couldn't. No one, not even someone educated at Harrow and Oxford, could be so stupid.

A nice portrait of a villain but fundamentally flawed.

Selected quotes:

• “No one will ever guess the burden of blame I carry on my shoulders; nor will they know that every day, haunted still by doubt, I ask myself a question which I cannot answer. Was Rachel innocent or guilty?” (Ch 1)
• “The flat stale heat of evening, buried too many hours in the walls and roofs of houses.” (Ch 5)
• “There is nothing so defeating to ease of manner as being uncomfortably seated.” (Ch 8)
• “A halo can be a lovely thing, providing you can take it off, now and again, and become human.” (Ch 10)

I was disappointed. Du Maurier is a great novelist.

September 2026; 335 pages

First published in 1951 by Victor Gollancz

My paperback edition was issued by Virago in 2003

Du Maurier also wrote Jamaica Inn.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"What the Fog Conceals" by R A Marno

This is either a work of genius or it isn't.

Recently, I sat for two hours in the cinema watching Nostalghia, a film from celebrated director Andrei Tarkovsky. I was baffled. People moved incredibly slowly through surreal scenes. The camera panned in or out at a snail's pace. Very little made sense. Cineastes have told me it is a classic but a film buff friend with whom I watched it asked: is this a case of the Emperor's new clothes?

This novel felt like that. It is divided into chapters, each one told in the past tense from the third person point of view of one of the characters. The characters move and think slowly. They seem to spend their entire time wandering around a stately home, along corridors, from room to room, frequently pausing at a door of a room which they then decide not enter. In most of the chapters, they are alone. They discover strange things such as keys, or accounts ledgers, or maps, or buttons, or scraps of ribbon, and - in almost every chapter - a piece of paper, almost always folded, which has been wedged somewhere it wasn't before. This piece of paper will contain, usually, a gnomic inscription. These are, presumably, clues to a mystery. But there are so many of them that the reader loses track, unless they start noting things down - at which point they discover discrepancies that suggest unreliable narration. At this point (about chapter 9 out of 30) I started to lose the will to read on. 

These leitmotifs were repeated so frequently, and so regularly, that I started to giggle when the next one came. The fog is thickening again, now it's thinning, oh no, it's getting thicker. Floorboards are creaking even though no-one is stepping on them. A door is ajar, another door is ajar, yet another door is ajar. Edward touches a latch, Kate touches a latch, Harriet touches a latch. This room is subtly different, the furniture has moved. And here's another map and, - guess what? - the map doesn't quite conform to the actual layout of the estate. This ledger has some blank pages: that must mean something. Here's a name, here are initials, here's a number. I felt as if I was trapped inside an automaton. I think I was supposed to feel mystified, horrified, I think I was supposed to feel impending doom, but it seemed more like farce. 

I really wanted to like this book.

The prose is exquisite but at the same time pompous, portentous. I was impressed by the first few chapters. After that, I was deadened by the funereal rhythm of the sentences and irritated into mocking laughter by the repetitions. 

And what made it really difficult to read was when I began to recognise an ostinato. Almost every chapter is narrated in the past tense from the point of view of a 3rd person character: Harriet, Edward, Kate of Patrick. However, all the voices of the characters sounded the same. This intrusion of the author's voice was most obvious in some of the characteristic phrases:

• He tended to define things in terms of what they weren't:
• “This was not work. It was atonement.” (Ch 12)
• “It was not that the house was empty. It was that it was elsewhere, preoccupied with memory.” (Ch 14)
• “It had not been placed there for worship. It had been left there to haunt.” (Ch 15)
• “There was a quiet gasp from someone watching - not fear, not awe. Just release.” (Ch 16)
• This was frequently done with a not ... but form: 
• “It had been placed there - not dropped, not fallen, but left.” (Ch 14)
• “The gilded edge had warped slightly, not from damage, but from misalignment.” (Ch 14)
• “Not the stillness of repose, but the breathless hush of something standing just out of sight.” (Ch 14)
• “The names were not in order. They were not complete. But they were written with care.” (Ch 15)
• “Not physically. Not visibly. But in weight. In presence.” (Ch 18)
• “The past had returned not for apology, but for placement.” (Ch 19)
• “And yet, they had come. Not for spectacle. Not for guidance. But to witness.” (Ch 19)
• There was a great deal of use of very short sentences: 
• “When the line is crossed, it will not be redrawn. Only reburied.” (Ch 9)
• “The registry book was gone. Not moved. Removed.” (Ch 12)
• “A single name had been written in the centre: M. Quinn. No date. No notation. No cause.” (Ch 12)
• “No age. No date. No annotation.” (Ch 15)

A surprisingly high percentage of paragraphs were ended in this way. It felt like an authorial tic.

I wondered whether this was a mark of genius. Ravel's Bolero is repetitive and achieves its mesmeric fascination through its constant repetition (it is said to be every snare drummer's nightmare). But the effect on this reader was sometimes to be irritated and at other times to be lulled into sleepiness. It became difficult to concentrate. And there are so many little details that needed my full attention.

Having said that, the plot isn't that difficult. Perhaps it is too simple for the long build up, shrouded in possibly spurious mystery. Some people have gone missing from the estate surrounding the stately home; they have been forgotten. Now something is bringing back the memories of the disappeared. Sometimes it seems as if the house and the land itself is taking an active part in these prompts to remember, but presumably the house itself isn't writing cryptic comments on usually folded scraps of paper so there must be some human agency at work. I'm not sure I was concentrating hard enough to learn who, if anyone, was doing that. By the end, I couldn't be bothered. I didn't care.

And yet ... 

I wish I had enjoyed it. But in the end, I was exhausted.

Selected quotes:

• “The fog had not rolled in with motion, nor settled like a drifting veil. It had arrived with purpose - dense, deliberate - folding itself around the house and grounds with a finality that felt less like weather and more like erasure.” (C 1)
• “The land wasn't hidden; it was withholding.” (C 1)
• “Stillness, to Harriet, had always been a form of power. Movement betrayed uncertainty. Stillness let the world explain itself.” (C 1)
• “The silent precision of a woman who understood the house as both cathedral and tomb.” (C 1)
• “The house was not just offering memories - it was selecting them. Curating impressions.” (C 2)
• “He began to suspect that the house had not simply waited for him. It had summoned him.” (C 2)
• “Even the slope beyond the chapel had taken on a subtle lean, as though the ground itself had been exhaling too long, and now sought to reclaim its breath.” (Ch 14)
• “Every piece of the past was surfacing. Deliberately. She did not believe in hauntings, but she had begun to believe in persistence.” (Ch 15)
• “The light changed before she entered. The mirror in the upper corridor returned its image half a second too late. The fire in the parlour burned crooked if she lit it herself.” (Ch 25)

September 2026; 328 pages
Published by Salt Publishing in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Sons and Lovers" by D H Lawrence

Painted by Nottinghamshire artist Sheila Wood

An exploration of the Oedipus complex. Paul Morel, second son of his possessive mother, finds his soulmate in Miriam but his love for Mum makes it impossible for him to consider marrying the girl. Can he find love with married woman Clara?  

The Oedipus complex is, perhaps, the fundamental theme of the book:

• As a young boy: “Paul loved to sleep with his mother.” (Ch 4)
• Paul is torn between Miriam and his mother: “After all, she [his mother] was the chief thing to him, the only supreme thing.” (Ch 8)
• “And he [Paul] came back to her [his mother]. And in his soul was a feeling of the satisfaction of self-sacrifice because he was faithful to her. She loved him first; he loved her first. And yet it was not enough. His new young life, so strong and imperious, was urged towards something else. It made him mad with restlessness.” (Ch 9)
• “A good many of the nicest men he knew were like himself, bound in by their own virginity, which they could not break out of. They were so sensitive to their women that they would go without them forever rather than do them a hurt, an injustice. Being the sons of mothers whose husbands had blundered rather brutally through their feminine sanctities, they were themselves too different and shy. They could easier deny themselves than incur any reproach from a woman; for a woman was like their mother, and they were full of the sense of their mother. They preferred themselves to suffer the misery of celibacy, rather than risk the other person.” (Ch 11)
• “There was a good deal of his life of which necessarily he could not speak to his mother. He had a life apart from her - his sexual life. The rest she still kept. but he felt he had to conceal something from her, and it irked him. There was a certain silence between them, and he felt he had, in that silence, to defend himself against her; he felt condemned by her. Then sometimes he hated her, and pulled at her bondage. His life wanted to free itself of her. It was like a circle where life turned back on itself, and got no further. She bore him, loved him, kept him, and his love turned back in to her, so that he could not be free to go forward with his own life, really love another woman.” (Ch 13)

There are a number of religious references:

• When a drunken Walter Morel throws a drawer at his wife during a domestic dispute, cutting her brow, the blood drips onto baby Paul as a sort of baptism. (Ch 2)
• When Paul accidentally smashes his sister Annie's doll, he then decides to “sacrifice” her, burning her in a fire and then smashing what's left under stones. (Ch 4) Could this symbolise Paul's relationship with women?
• “Paul felt crumpled up and lonely. His mother had really supported his life. He had loved her; they two had, in fact, faced the world together. Now she was gone, and forever behind him was the gap in life, the tear in the veil, through which his life seemed to drift slowly, as if he were drawn towards death.” (Ch 14) The tear in the veil is a reference to the crucifixion; as Jesus dies, according to Matthew 27.51, Mark 15.38, and Luke 23.45, the veil in the temple which shrouded the Holy of Holies - so that only the priests who were permitted could see into the inner sanctum - was ripped in two.
• When Clara and Paul make love: “And after such an evening they both were very still. having known the immensity of passion. They felt small, half afraid, childish, and wondering, like Adam and Eve when they lost their Innocence and realized the magnificence of the power which drove them out of Paradise and across the great night and the great day of humanity.” (Ch 13)

There are some powerful descriptions:

• “The snowflakes, suddenly arriving on the window-pane, clung there a moment like swallows, then were gone, and a drop of water was crawling down the glass. The snowflakes whirled around the corner of the house, like pigeons dashing by. Away across the valley, the little black train crawled doubtfully over the great whiteness.” (Ch 4)
• “They all loved the Scargill Street house for its openness, for the great scallop of the world it had in view. On summer evenings the women would stand against the field fence, gossiping, facing the west, watching the sunset flare quickly out, till the Derbyshire Hills ridged across the crimson far away, like the black crest of a newt.” (Ch 4)
• “The limbs and bowed heads of six men struggled to climb into the room, bearing the coffin that rode like sorrow on their living flesh.” (Ch 6)
• “There was a great crop of cherries at the farm. the trees at the back of the house, very large and tall, hung thick with scarlet and crimson drops, under the dark leaves.” (Ch 11)

Other selected quotes:

• “There was the halt, the wistfulness about the ensuing year, which is like autumn in a man's life. His wife was casting him off, half regretfully, but relentlessly; casting him off and turning now for love and life to the children. Henceforward he was more or less a husk. And he half acquiesced, as so many men do, yielding their place to their children.” (Ch 3)
• “Mrs Morel ... had never expected him [Paul] to live. ... Perhaps it would have been a little relief to her if he had died. She always felt a mixture of anguish in her love for him.” (Ch 4)
• “If you don't like it, alter it, and if you can't alter it, put up with it.” (Ch 6) Mrs Morel's advice to her son Arthur.
• “She herself was something of the princess turned into a swine-girl, in her own imagination.” (Ch 7) An early description of Miriam: 
• “She wanted to show him a certain wild-rose bush she had discovered. She knew it was wonderful. And yet, till he had seen it, she felt it had not come into her soul. Only he could make it her own, immortal.” (Ch 7)
• Mrs Morel “She did not care for Miriam. ‘She is one of those who will want to suck a man's soul out till he has none of his own left,’ she said to herself.” (Ch 7)
• “They both were late in coming to maturity, and psychical ripeness was much behind even the physical. Miriam was exceedingly sensitive ... The slightest grossness made her recoil almost in anguish. ... But, perhaps because of the continual business of birth and of begetting which goes on upon every farm, Miriam was the more hypersensitive to the matter, and her blood was chastened almost to disgust of the faintest suggestion of such intercourse. Paul took his pitch from her, and their intimacy went on in an utterly blanched and chaste fashion. It could never be mentioned that the mare was in foal.” (Ch 7)
• “A soldier! - and a common soldier! - nothing but a body that makes movements when it hears a shout!” (Ch 8)
• “‘You make me so spiritual!’ he lamented. ‘And I don't want to be spiritual.’” (Ch 8)
• “Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued, so will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether.” (Ch 8)
• “Miriam was the threshing-floor on which he threshed out all his beliefs. While he trampled his ideas upon her soul, the truth came out for him. She alone was his threshing-floor. She alone helped him towards realization.” (Ch 9)
• “The difference between people isn't in their class, but in themselves. Only from the middle classes one gets ideas, and from the common people - life itself, warmth. You feel their hates and loves.” (Ch 10)
• “So long as life's full, it doesn't matter whether it's happy or not. I'm afraid your happiness would bore me.” (Ch 10)
• “She's for ever on that ‘igh horse of hers, an’ its back’s that thin and starved it'll cut her i’ two one of these days.” (Ch 10)
• “She relinquished herself to him, but it was a sacrifice in which she felt something of horror. This thick-voiced, oblivious man was a stranger to her.” (Ch 11): Miriam surrenders her virginity to Paul.
• “And afterwards he loved her - loved her to the last fibre of his being. He loved her. But he wanted, somehow, to cry. There was something he could not bear for her sake.” (Ch 11)
• “He knew he had landed her in a nasty hole, and was leaving her in the lurch. It angered him. ... He sat silent in bitterness. At last the whole affair appeared in a cynical aspect to him. She had really played with him, not he with her. She had hidden all her condemnation from him, had flattered him, and despised him. She despised him now. He grew intellectual and cruel. ... He sat in silence. He was full of a feeling that she had deceived him. She had despised him when he thought she worshipped him. She had let him say wrong things, and had not contradicted him. She had let him fight alone. But it stuck in his throat that she had despised him whilst he thought she worshipped him. She should have told him when she found fault with him. She had not played fair. He hated her. ... His heart was hard against her.” (Ch 11)
• “He loved to paint large figures, full of light, but not merely made up of lights and cast shadows, like the impressionists.” (Ch 12)
• “If a woman's got nothing but her fair fame to feed on, why, it's thin tack, and a donkey would die of it!” (Ch 12)
• “Miriam ... saw what he was seeking - a sort of baptism of fire in passion, it seemed to her. She realized that he would never be satisfied till he had it. Perhaps it was essential to him, as to some men, to sow wild oats; and afterwards, when he was satisfied, he would not rage with restlessness anymore, but could settle down and give her his life into her hands. Well then, if he must go, let him go and have his fill - something big and intense, he called it. At any rate, when he had got it, he would not want it, that he said himself; he would not want the other thing that she could give him. He would want to be owned, so that he could work. It seemed to her a bitter thing that he must go, but she could let him go into an inn for a glass of whisky, so she could let him go to Clara, so long as it was something that would satisfy a need in him, and leave him free for herself to possess.” (C 12)
• Clara’s view of Paul at the end: “He looked paltry and insignificant. There was nothing stable about him. Her husband had more manly dignity. At any rate he did not waft about with the wind. There was something evanescent about Morel, she thought, something shifting and false. He would never make sure ground for any woman to stand on.” (Ch 14)

Notes:

• Mrs Morrel's ancestors are said to have “fought with Colonel Hutchinson” (Ch 1); he was an MP and Army officer fighting for Parliament during the English Civil War; he also signed the death warrant of Charles I.
• Billy Pillins, really Billy Phillips, will later be mentioned in The Rainbow as a school mate of Ursula. (Ch 4) 
• The young Miriam is a fan of the novels of Sir Walter Scott, among her heroes are the “Rowenas, Brian de Bois-Guilberts, Rob Roys and Guy Mannerings.” (Ch 7) The first two appear in Ivanhoe, the second pair are the eponymous heroes of their own novels.
• One of Annie’s boyfriends is Jim Inger (Ch 7); Winifred Inger is the name of Ursula’s lesbian lover in The Rainbow.
• They holiday in Mablethorpe which is on the Lincolnshire coast slightly north of Skegness. My great aunt and uncle were from Nottingham and had retired to a little house in Mablethorpe.
• When they are on holiday they go to the “Coons”. This is presumably a blackface minstrel show. These are nowadays condemned as racist and the word ‘coon’ is racially offensive.
• In chapter 12, Paul and Clara dress up posh to go to the Theatre Royal in Nottingham to see La Dame aux Camelias, starring Sarah Bernhardt; this is a play (on which the opera La Traviata was based) about a courtesan.

It's more focused than The Rainbow, and easier to read. The characters are complex, each one being torn by opposite emotions. Assuming that Paul, the hero, is a portrait of the artist, this is a searingly honest portrayal, showing Paul as hugely damaged by his mother but also showing him as a bit of a shit, exploiting both his girlfriends.

September 2026; 491 pages

First published in 1913 by Heinemann in an edition edited by Edward Garnett who made many cuts. An unredacted text was not published until the 1992 Cambridge University Press edition.

My edition was published by Random House in 1936 and was therefore the redacted version.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Other novels by D H Lawrence include:

• The White Peacock (1911)
• The Trespasser (1912)
• Sons and Lovers (1913)
• The Rainbow (1915)
• Women in Love (1920)
• The Lost Girl (1920)
• Aaron's Rod (1922)
• Kangaroo (1923)
• The Plumed Serpent (1926)
• Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)
• The Escaped Cock (1929), republished as The Man Who Died

Collection of short stories:
England, My England