"Writing Down the Bones" by Natalie Goldberg

I was immediately attracted to this astonishingly inspirational manual for creative writers by the endorsement on the back from Robert Pirsig, author of one of my top ten novels: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Then I discovered that it had a foreword written by Judith Guest, author of Ordinary People, another of my top classic novels. At once my expectations were sky-high and I was not disappointed.

If there is a single message, it might be summarised as write, write and write some more. Writing, she says, is like running: the more you do the better you get. She advocates free writing, ten minutes of losing control. Write about the ordinary experiences of life. And rewrite, because sometimes we need more than one attempt.

I particularly liked the concept of composting, the process by which our mind makes sense of our experiences: “Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil blooms our poems and stories. ... Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil.” (14)

But I think what she is suggesting might work better for poems than for novels, which need rather more preparation and understanding of structure. Nevertheless, this a book full of sage advice, beautifully expressed.

Selected quotes:

• “It’s good to go off and write a novel, but don’t stop doing writing practice. It’s what keeps you in tune, like a dancer who does warmups before dancing.” (13)
• “Writers write about things that other people don’t pay much attention to. For instance, our tongues, elbows, water coming out of a water faucet, ... A writer’s job is to make the ordinary come alive, to awaken ourselves to the specialness of simply living.” (99)
• “Learn to write about the ordinary. ... Make a list of everything ordinary you can think of. Keep adding to it. Make a promise to yourself, before you leave this earth, to mention everything on your list at least once in a poem, short story, newspaper article.” (100)
• “The trick is to keep your heart open.” (28)
• “Every minute we change ... At any point we can step out of our frozen selves and our ideas and begin afresh. ... There is no permanent truth you can corner in a poem that will satisfy you forever.” (33)
• “Step out of the way and record your thoughts as they roll through you.” (35)
• “Writing is not a McDonald’s hamburger. The cooking is slow, and in the beginning you are not sure whether a roast or a banquet of a lamb chop will be the result.” (37)
• “If you want to get high, don’t drink whiskey; read Shakespeare ... aloud.” (51)
• “Stay on the side of precision; know your goal and stay present with it.” (55)
• “Writing is not psychology. We don’t talk ‘about’ feelings. Instead the writer feels and through her words awakens feelings in the reader.” (68)
• “Writers write about things that other people don't pay much attention to. For instance, our tongues, elbows, water coming out of a water faucet ... A writer's job is to make the ordinary come alive.” (99)
• “When you want to write in a certain form ... read a lot of writing in that form.” (124)
• “The world is not the way we think it is ... solid and structured and forever.” (128)
• “We don’t actually know when we will die.” (128)
• “If only one line in a poem has energy, then cut the rest out.” (159) 
• “Anything we fully do is an alone journey.” (169)
• “The world is not the way we think it is ... solid and structured and forever.” (128)

February 2026; 170 pages

Published in 1986 in the USA by Shambhala publications

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Names" by Florence Knapp

 The prologue shows Cora going to register the birth of her newborn son. What should she call him? Her husband insists on Gordon, his name and, by tradition, the name of first-born boys in their family. But Cora favours Julian and her young daughter Maia suggests Bear. This is a high-stakes decision because Cora's husband is a man who controls his family by physically beating his wife. The rest of the novel follows Bear, Julian and Gordon in their separate lives.

At first I thought that this took the theory of nominative determinism to extremes (I myself am called a name that is not on my original birth certificate and I don't believe it has had a significant effect on my life). But actually this is more about the butterfly effect, the theory that a small change has repercussions that cascade through time. So that the husband's different reactions to his son's name is what drives the story.

I loved the Prologue because of the wonderful descriptions of a storm and its aftermath:

• “Outside, gusts lever at the fir trees behind the house and burst down the side passage to hurl themselves at the gate. Inside, too, worries skitter and eddy.” (Prologue)
• “Cora feels a draft of cold air, as though it's attached itself to his clothing and followed him up the stairs.” (Prologue)
• “The sounds of the storm meter out the minutes of night unravelling into day.” (Prologue)
• “A few doors up, a man's shirt is caught on a privet hedge, pegs still pinched at its shoulders.” (Prologue)

Wow! I thought. If it continues like this, I'm going to love it.

But I was swiftly disillusioned. My main problem was with the antagonist, the husband. He was a monster, he was an ogre, he was a dragon, he was Mr Hyde (although professionally he was Dr Jekyll), he was the embodiment of evil. He was said to be a wonderful GP although this was hard to believe because he was painted so black in his domestic life. For me, he felt two dimensional. There was little explanation for his wickedness, other than the fact that his neurosurgeon father was disappointed in him for becoming a GP. There was negligible exploration of his character; he was always a symbol of the very real problem of domestic abuse. I wondered whether the author realised his fundamental implausibility which was why he was swiftly sidelined in two of the three ensuing narratives, becoming a menacing bogeyman. In short, I felt that this was an issue-driven novel rather than about a character.

I also had problems with the structure of the novel, a sort of bildungsroman triptych. It is divided into seven year sections and further divided into subsections, each bearing the name of the boy (Bear, Julian or Gordon) whose story we are following. These sections are further divided so that the story is told from the limited third person perspective of the principal characters, mostly Cora, Maia and the boy. The present tense is used. This means that the reader is required to follow three storylines in which many of the characters (not just the major characters but also some of the minor ones) reappear but with different trajectories. I sometimes struggled to remember, for example, who Maia was involved with in this particular story, and whether a particular incident belonged to the storyline of Bear, Julian or Gordon.

This division of the narrative into three also meant that the three different plots become more prominent, and the fact that we were following at least five major characters left the author little time to develop them as characters.

Nevertheless, I developed a degree of empathy for at least two of the sons and there were a couple of lump-in-the-throat moments. So the novel was a success in those terms. I just felt it could have been more.

Selected quotes:

• “Sometimes big men feel small inside.” (Prologue)
• “He remembers his father's hands on the steering wheel, big and firm, a smattering of hair on the backs of them.” (1994; Julian)
• “Mr Radley chats to Maia, but his eyes are drawn back to his wife as though she is a slice of chocolate cake and he is politely waiting for the moment when Maia leaves, and he will be free to tuck in.” (1994; Gordon)
• “Julian can almost hear the sadness in her footsteps as she retreats down the hall.” (2001; Julian)

I suspect this will be popular with those who like their novels to be about important issues and are less worried about character development.

February 2026;343 pages

Published by Phoenix Books in 2025.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

I suspect that one of the inspirations behind this book is the novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

"Do What Thou Wilt" by Aleister Crowley

 

A biography of Aleister Crowley, creator of the Thelema rite of ceremonial magic, dubbed by the British press: the most evil man in the world.

He was born in 1875; his father was a Plymouth Brethren preacher who died when Aleister was 11. The boy was eventually inherit sufficient money not to need to work, but he spent his fortune pursuing his dreams: mountaineering (he attempted Kanchenjunga), poetry (almost all through paid-for publishing) and magic. Throughout his life he had sex, sometimes under the guise of sexual magic, with both male and female partners, fathering at least three daughters, two of whom died very young, and a son. His publications included erotic verse and books of magic. He founded the religion of Thelema whose motto was 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law' and set up a temple on Sicily where he would instruct disciples until he was banished by Mussolini's police.

In some ways, the man's life is summarised on page 2: “A spoiled scion of a wealthy Victorian family, who embodied many of the worst John Bull racial and social prejudices of his upper class contemporaries, a blisteringly arrogant opportunist who took financial and psychological advantage of his admirers, an unadmiring and even vicious judge of most of his contemporaries, a sensualist who relished sex in all forms, a hubristic experiment in drugs who was addicted to heroin for the last twenty-five years of his life.”

The problem with writing a biography of a man like this is that the reader quickly becomes wearied of the details of yet another sexual partner, yet another magical rite, and yet another publication. Oh, he's fallen out with somebody else. The book itself didn't make things better by the use of long chapters whose contents were sometimes so diverse that I wondered whether they had a theme, other than covering another few years of Crowley's life. 

Perhaps the most interesting thing was the long list of people I would have thought respectable who participated in magical rites (and sometimes had sex) with him. He was involved with the mystical order of the Golden Dawn, of which Yeats was also a member. One of his big mates Allan Bennett (another one) went on to become a Buddhist monk and edited the journal of the International Buddhist society. Frederick Charles Fuller was “one of the premier military theorists of all time” yet befriended Crowley for four years (though he was eecentric, later joining the British Union of Fascists, and attending Hitler’s 50th birthday celebrations in April 1939). Victor Neuberg, disciple and gay partner, later became a literary reviewer and discovered Dylan Thomas. Other acquaintances included Dennis Wheatley, Dion Fortune, Tom Driberg and Somerset Maugham (who based his novel 'The Magician' on Crowley.

The most shocking moment came when he was the leader of the Kanchenjunga expedition and three climbers, together with three porters mutinied and left camp. On the descent they triggered an avalanche which buried and killed one of the climbers and all three porters. The next day Crowley left the mountain, passing the ongoing rescue attempts without offering his help, and returned to England. The letters he wrote to the papers to justify himself led to widespread condemnation and the end of his mountaineering career. 

He died in a guesthouse in Hastings.

There is one mistake, I think. The Book of Four, published as a square, was priced at four groats. Sutin mistakenly equates this to a shilling but a groat was 4d and therefore 4 groats = 1/4d.

Selected quotes: 

• “I reached a point where my physical reflection in a mirror became faint and flickering. It gave very much the effect of the interrupted images of the cinematograph in its early days. ... “the real secret of invisibility is not concerned with the laws of optics at all; the trick is to prevent people noticing you when they would normally do so.” (Ch 3)
• “The assignment of a governing true will to an entire gender seems to contradict the sense of self-discovery that lies at the heart of Thelema.” (132)
• “The aged god Saturn can only counsel despair; Jupiter is impotent; Mars is beset by lust and lacking in wisdom; Apollo the Sun is slain because he cannot harmonize the good and even natures that battle within him; Venus lovingly mourns Apollo but her sorrow lacks redemptive force; Mercury possesses the seeds of magical wisdom, but he can no longer server psychopomp to humankind.” (Ch 6) 
• “The psychological task of concluding his ‘Autohagiography’ ... must have been severe. he had lost both his Abbey and his reputation and no longer had a publisher for the massive work on which he laboured. The tone of the ‘Confessions’ reveals none of this - throughout, it is all but unremitting in its braggadocio.” (Ch 9)
• “Magick is the Science and Art of Causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” (Ch 9)

February 2026; 419 pages

Published by St Martin's Press, New York

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"To Love and Be Wise" by Josephine Tey

 Salcott St Mary is an English village beloved by writers: it is an artist's colony containing three novelists, a broadcaster, a playwright, a dancer,  and an actress. Enter Leslie Searle, an amazingly good-looking photographer from the USA and suddenly the heads of all the women are turned and the men become jealous. Then he vanishes and Inspector Alan Grant from Scotland Yard is called in to investigate.

It's a delightful mystery of the classic kind with a clever solution, written in Tey's elegant if slightly dated style. Page-turner? I read it in just over a day.

Selected quotes:

• "Grant paused to look at the yelling crowd asparagus-packed into the long Georgian room." (Ch 1)
• "His actor's need to be liked was stronger than his resentment, and he was putting forth all his charm." (Ch 4)
• "It was difficult to decide how much of the facade was barricade and howe much was mere poster-hoarding." (Ch 11)
• "You commit murder because you are one-idead. Or have become one-idead. As long as you have a variety of interests you can't care about any one of them to the point of murder. It is when you have all your eggs in the same basket, or only one egg left in the basket, that you lose your sense of proportion." (Ch 13)

Interesting side-note: apparently in those days people "watched" radio plays.

A very enjoyable read, recommended for readers of classic crime.

February 2026; 256 pages

• First published by Peter Davies in 1950
• My paperback version issued by Arrow Books 

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Josephine Tey crime novels:

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

"Villette" by Charlotte Bronte

A preposterous plot told by the world's most miserable narrator in prolix and hysterical language. And French.

Imagine that when you are young you live for several months with your godmother and her son and another girl and then, when you have grown up, you meet the son again, over several months repeatedly, working closely with him, and you fail to recognise him. Seems unlikely? Not only does this plot point happen but, a little later, you meet the girl you lived with and fail to recognise her! And then you meet a priest a second time and fail to recognise him! Same unlikely plot point in triplicate.

Add the ghost of a nun and another nun whose death has caused one of the most unlikely love objects in fiction to dedicate himself to chastity.

These are the best bits of a plot that often just rambles. I get that the story is based upon the author's early life as a teacher in Brussels but novels are different from memoirs in that a novel is supposed to have a structure.

Add to that a narrator who is dedicated to being a martyr. Apparently she is a grown woman before she first encounters a mirror. She reflects (pun intended, sorry): “Thus for the first, and perhaps only time in my life, I enjoyed the ‘giftie’ of seeing myself as others see me. No need to dwell on the result. It brought a jar of discord, a pang of regret; it was not flattering, yet, after all, I ought to be thankful; it might have been worse.” (Ch 20) This 'it might have been worse' seems to sum up her victim's attitude to life. “I see that a great many men, and more women, hold their span of life on conditions of denial and privation. I find no reason why I should be one of the few favoured.” (Ch 31)

But this makes her incredibly bitter. I noted as early as chapter 14 that she is dreadfully censorious, no wonder she has no friends. Later she acquires friends who for some unfathomable reason seem to like her even as she disapproves of them. Basically, if they are happy she assumes they must be shallow. And goodness help them if they happen to be: 

• Royal: “Her features, though distinguished enough, were too suggestive of reigning dynasties and royal lines to give unqualified pleasure.” (Ch 20)
• Irish: “She might possibly have been a hanger-on, nurse, fosterer, or washer-woman, in some Irish family: she spoke a smothered towel, curiously overlaid with mincing cockney inflections.” (Ch 8) 

As for the Roman Catholics! This self-righteous prig listens to readings from a book containing “tales of moral martyrdom inflicted by Rome; the dread boasts are confessors, who had wickedly abused their office, trampling to deep degradation high-born ladies, making of countesses and princesses the most tormented slaves under the sun. Stories like that of Conrad and Elizabeth of Hungary, recurred again and again, with all its dreadful viciousness, sickening tyranny and black impiety: tales that were nightmares of oppression, privation and agony.” She believes RC priests are laying fiendish plans to entrap her into their religion which, she assumes, is akin to devil worship.

Add one of my pet hates, passages in a foreign language which are untranslated, as if the author is sneering at those of us whose French is sufficient for a few words here and there but not for whole paragraphs. I imagine I missed some important plot points but I don't care.

Add the usual corkscrewed sentences of Victorian prose: 

• "no furrowed face of adult exile, longing for Europe at Europe's antipodes, ever bore more legibly the signs of homesickness than did her infant visage." (Ch 2)
• “And he mentioned a name that thrilled me - a name that, in those days, thrilled Europe. It is hushed now: its once restless echoes are all still; she who bore it went years ago to her rest: night and oblivion long since closed above her; but then her day - a day of Sirius - stood at its full height, light, and fervour.” (Ch 23)

Over 500 pages of small print.

Reader, I hated this book.

Selected quotes:

• “Epidemic diseases, I believed, were often heralded by a gasping, sobbing, tormented, long-lamenting east wind.” (Ch 4)
• “What honest man on being casually taken for a housebreaker, does not feel rather tickled than vexed at the mistake?” (Ch 10)
• “Take up that pity ... in both hands, as you might a little callow gosling squattering out of bounds without leave.” (Ch 25)

February 2026; 507 pages

First published in 1853

My Penguin Popular Classics paperback was issued in 1994

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Franchise Affair" by Josephine Tey

An elderly woman and her middle-aged daughter are accused of having abducted and beaten a girl who went missing from her home for four weeks. The girl is able to describe aspects of her imprisonment that match the details of a house she has supposedly never seen. Can a middle-aged solicitor with no experience in criminal cases prove that the girl is lying?

The crime mystery novel was rated as 11th best of all time by the Crime Writers' Association.

The story is based on the case of Elizabeth Canning, a girl who went missing in January 1753 and accused two women of abducting her. 

It is an enjoyable read; the mystery plot parallelling the understated romance between the solicitor and the younger of his clients. All the characters are carefully drawn although my favourite is the old lady. The one aspect that didn't work for me - but this is common to many novels of this period - is the concept that baby-blue eyes mean one is over-sexed, or that eyes set far apart make one a liar. Such ability to read character from a face seem to be persistent fossils of phrenology and about as reliable. If criminals all looked the same, wouldn't the job of the police be so much easier?

Selected quotes:

• “Childhood’s attitude of something-wonderful-tomorrow persisted subconsciously in a man as long as it was capable of realization, and it was only after forty, when it became unlikely of fulfillment, that it obtruded itself into conscious thought, a lost piece of childhood crying for attention.” (Ch 1)
• “Bert deserved better out of life than a good-time wife and a cupboard-love kid.” (Ch 8)
• “‘Haven’t you got a wife?’ Marion asked. ‘Not of my own,’ Stanley said demurely. (Ch 12)
• “They say that horse sense is the instinct that keeps horses from betting on men.” (Ch 14)

January 2026; 254 pages

First published by Peter Davies in 1948

My Penguin paperback was issued in 1985

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Josephine Tey crime novels:

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

"The Man in the Queue" by Josephine Tey

 Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time was chosen by the Crime Writer's Association as the best crime novel of all time; she also was ranked in 11th place for The Franchise Affair. Her historical play Richard of Bordeaux (written under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot, her real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh) was also a best-seller in the 1930s, propelling John Gielgud to superstardom and even making it to TV as far back as 1938. Tey was a respected writer. The Man in the Queue was her debut mystery novel, submitted for, and winning first prize in, a competition. It introduces her detective Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant. 

A man in a queue waiting for sold-at-the-door seats in a theatre is stabbed in the back. The man has removed all identifying marks on his clothing and has only a few coins in his possession, but he does have a revolver in his pocket. The police have to identify the victim and interview the other people in the queue. Swiftly, they suspect a "dago" (the book suffers from a certain amount of racial prejudice) who was in the queue and then left it. Much of the excitement of the novel is generated by the process of identifying this suspect and a thrilling manhunt across the Scottish moors that reminded me of The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan. But once the quarry is captured, can the police prove their case? And, of course, there is a final twist in the tail.

It is a classic of the genre, despite the old-fashioned police procedures (I kept screaming 'forensics!' as Grant repeatedly handles the murder weapon), and a thoroughly readable book. 

There are some fabulous descriptions:

• “A pleasant country, England, at ten of a bright morning. Even the awful little suburban villas had lost that air of aggressiveness born of their inferiority complex, and were shining self-forgetful and demure in the clear light. Their narrow, inhospitable doors were no longer ugly in the atrociousness of cheap paint and appliqué mouldings; they were entrances of jade and carnelian and lapis lazuli and onyx into particular separate heavens. Their gardens, with their pert ill-dressed rows of tulips and meagre seed-sown grass, were lovely as ever the Hanging Gardens of Babylon had been. Here and there a line of gay motley child's clothes danced and ballooned with the breeze in a necklace of coloured laughter.” (Ch 5)
• “It sounded like the protesting row of an alarmed hen as she rockets over a fence to safety.” (Ch 11)
• “The river babbled its eternal nursery-rhyme song at his feet.” (Ch 11)
• “He felt grateful to the ancient hat that collapsed more than drooped over his face.” (Ch 11)
• “Gowbridge Police Court is at no time a cheerful building. It has the mouldering atmosphere of a mausoleum combined with the disinfected and artificial cheerfulness of a hospital, the barrenness of a schoolroom, the stuffiness of a tube, and the ugliness of a meeting-house.” (Ch 16)

I'm not convinced that every single clue is absolutely fair but my joy in reading an intelligently written whodunnit (there are some awful examples of the genre) was great.

Selected quotes:

• “In the old days in the Highlands, to take to the Hills had been synonymous with flying from Justice - what's the Irish call being on the run.” (Ch 10)
• “In any human relationship you've got to decide for yourself, apart from evidence, what a man is like.” (Ch 18)

As a dweller on the Sunshine Coast, I was charmed that a chapter was set in Eastbourne, complete with a mention of Holywell and Beachy Head. 

January 2026

First published by in 1929 under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot

My Penguin paperback was issued in 1978

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Josephine Tey crime novels:

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

"Hackenfeller's Ape" by Brigid Brophy

In this novel, London Zoo houses a pair of Hackenfeller's Apes, the nearest primates to humans. The Professor is studying them, hoping to become the first human to observe them mating. Edwina is willing but Percy is reluctant. Then Kendrick arrives and announces he has purchased Percy so he can be placed in a space capsule and launched into space. Can the Professor prevent this happening?

It was written in 1953, when British troops were still fighting communist-led guerrilla freedom fighters in an attempt to re-establish their colonial government in Malaya following the occupation by the Japanese. The first primate in space was a rhesus macaque monkey called Albert II who was launched on a V2 rocket from New Mexico in the USA into outer space reaching an altitude of 83 miles before dying on the return journey when the capsule’s parachute failed to deploy.

It is told from an omniscient perspective in the past tense which gives a sense of detachment; it is primarily a novel of ideas in which issues are debated, often through dialogue. 

It is generally sparsely and elegantly written though there are one or two moments of fabulous description, such as: “The canal stood black and transparent like indian ink, between banks mottled by sun. Once or twice a day a boat slowly passed, silencing the fish in their continual scratching of the water.” (Predicament of an Ape; Sunday)

There's a nice moment at the end when an embryo compares its situation to being sealed inside the capsule of a space rocket.

Selected quotes:

• “Kendrick liked men and machines for what they could do. The Professor liked men and monkeys for what they could not do.” (Predicament of an Ape; Monday)
• “That's the sin of it! the monkey has no choice. if Kendrick went, he'd be risking his own life, of his own free will.” (Predicament of an Ape; Monday)
• “The last two wars brought economic ruin to Europe but we still think that war is an economic necessity.” (Predicament of an Ape; Monday)
• “All the periods when your operas and other forms of art have flourished have been characterized by the most bloodthirsty ‘necessities’. The Greeks believed slavery was necessary to stable government. The Victorians believed empire was necessary to progress.” (Predicament of an Ape; Monday)
• “Behind my back my hand reaches for the door knob. My body moves away; my dress seems to get up and follow it a minute later.” (Escapade of a Professor; The Night Tuesday - Wednesday)
• “Percy, fat, bald and, with his pink lips, repulsive; yet compelling; Percy ring-encrusted; Percy with wet cigar and lisp; racketeering in drink, drugs, gaming and pornographic pictures.” (Escapade of a Professor; The Night Tuesday - Wednesday)

January 2026; 128 pages

First published by Rupert Hart-Davis in 1953

Mt paperback edition was issued by Faber & Faber in 2023

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"One of Us" by Elizabeth Day

Ben, a politician transparently based on Boris Johnson, intends to bid for the premiership. But will he be destroyed by the murky secrets in his past?

The plot of this novel is so predictable that I started playing thriller trope bingo. It could have been written from a checklist of recent scandals:

• MP surfs porn on office computer
• MP is rehabilitated through a reality TV show
• Oil protestor is daughter of Cabinet minister
• Another oil protestor is an undercover cop (this seems doubtful since he is the leader of the group and therefore any possible prosecution would be compromised by accusations that he was an agent provocateur).
• A young girl is sexually abused by an older male family member
• Rape
• A rehabilitation clinic is presided over by an Austrian doctor with a comic German accent
• The rich daughter of the gentry becomes a drug addict
• There is gaslighting

To be charitable one could say this is satire but it's too heavy handed to be funny. And so many of the targets for its scorn are cheap and easy. Trains, for example, always run late.

What about the characters? Stereotype after stereotype: Hapless MP, ruthless MP, ruthless hedge fund manager, gay academic, poor little rich girl, sidelined wife and mother. On the other hand, the main protagonist, Martin, is was a scholarship boy at a posh School, simultaneously entranced and rejected by the upper classes. Given that this describes my own schooling almost exactly, you would have thought I would have empathised like mad and identified with this character. But the pedestrian quality of the writing and the predictability of the plot left me not caring at all what would happen to any of these wooden puppets.

How is it written? It is narrated, mostly in the present tense, from a multiple third person close perspective, each chapter being from the point of view of one of the characters. At the beginning of the book, some of the chapters are dominated by exposition. The maxim 'show don't tell' is mostly ignored by this author.

There are moments when the editing seems slapdash. A mixed metaphor is pointed out when half of the metaphor hasn’t been mentioned. Timelines sometimes seem discrepant. 172,437 is said to be 0.000000149% of 67 million when it is actually 0.25%. 0.000000149% of 67 million is 1. I couldn't work out whether Martin's suspension from employment ended.

Apparently it is a sequel and the Guardian reckons it is better than the earlier novel, so I won't be reading that. The last line, in which the author directly addresses the reader, opens up the possibility of a further sequel. I won’t be reading that either.

Selected quotes:

• “Cheeks like a hamster on a particularly nutritious seed binge.” (Ch 1)
• “My mother taught me early on that life was meant to be endured and, if possible, mocked.” (Ch 1)
• “I am all sides. A hall of mirrors in human form.” (Ch 1)
• “Long dining tables set with family silver and inherited insouciance." (Ch 4)
• “We believe we are a country incapable of dictatorial rule when, in truth, we are just as susceptible to the lure of monstrous men (and it is always men) as everywhere else.” (Ch 6) It isn't always men: Mrs Gandhi. Catherine the Great. Madame Mao.
• “My life was a constant criss-crossing over different classes and cultures.” (Ch 6)
• “LGBTQ-A-B-C-D-plus-minus” (Ch 8)
• “Gary told him it didn't matter if he cried; that it would, in fact, ‘show your human side’ - as if he possessed another, more noticeable, non-human side.” (Ch 8)
• “Wanting is only for the people who have to try.” (Ch 9)
• “The smallest child, built like an oblong with hair, start growling from his seat at the table.” (Ch 11)
• “Rocket, the most overrated of the brassicas.” (Ch 11)

Once again I am left failing to understand how such a poorly written book could be praised. Stanley Tucci calls it "brilliantly written". Lucy Foley compares it to Patricia Highsmith and describes it as a "gimlet-eyed interrogation". Kate Mosse says it is "superbly crafted". It is a bestseller. The Guardian reviewer praised it. What did these people see that I missed?

January 2026;

Published in 2025 by 4th Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Laurels are Poison" by Gladys Mitchell

 A whodunnit set in a Teacher Training College for Young Ladies. It seems to be paying homage to Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers, a murder mystery set in a women's college at Oxford starring Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey. The plot is similar, and one of the lead characters, Laura, rather like Lord Peter, fills her speech with so many literary allusions that her dialogue needs to be interpreted rather than read: 

• “I fig-ew-er that the Duchess of Malfi put on burglar's gloves and then did those knots with a hair pin. ... There is going to be one devil of a fine pow-wow-plus-fight; referee and timekeeper that vicious and unstable Old Maid of the Mountains Principal du Mugne, Old Mutt and Young Jeff, defendants our humble selves.” (Ch 4)
• “Somebody must have collected a bevvy of Edgar Allans.” (Ch 4) This refers to a collection of chamber pots. Pot, pronounced to rhyme with Poe, thus Edgar Allan. Cockney rhyming slang or pure whimsy? 

It isn't just Laura who speaks like this. Many of the characters do and even the narrator joins in. “They stayed not for brake and stopped not for stone.” (Ch 7) is a line from Sir Walter Scott’s poem Lochinvar.

Generally speaking the dialogue has an affected, high camp quality that made this novel seem immensely dated. Of course the social context on single sex educational institutions and college 'rags' also seem old fashioned. As for the treatment of the working classes ... The servants are principally there to provide humour and as such are stereotypes. One family of servants are surnamed Ditch and have concerns about a discussion about archaeology: "do ee thenk their brains, like, ull stand et? Tes like so much wetchcraft to I.” They also suggest rape as a courtship procedure: "Master Jonathan ded ought to make a bold bed there, and bring her to et violent. Tes the only way. Her'd gev en, easy enough, ef he act forceful." (Ch 7) One of the servants at college, Lulu, is a black woman (her boyfriend is described as a “mulatto”) who speaks in stereotypical patois: “Sho’ we hasn’t another dry swab in de house wid all dis water.” (Ch 7) These are cliches of the worst kind. It might be argued that the novel reflects the social conditions of the time, and the attitude of the reading public. However, such an unthinking use of hackneyed archetypes suggests laziness on the part of the author and undermines suggestions that this work might have literary merit.

It also meant that I found it very difficult to empathise with or find credible any of the characters. This meant I struggled to maintain interest. And the plot was so convoluted that, well before the end, I was reading simply for the sake of finishing, without even caring whodunnit or why.

In chapter 15 the play Richard of Bordeaux by Gordon Daviot is referenced, presumably as a tribute to Josephine Tey (GD was her pen name), a vastly superior writer of murder mysteries, who Daughter of Time was regarded by the Crime Writers' Association as the best crime novel of all time (Gaudy Night came 4th, Gladys Mitchell does not feature in the top 100). 

Selected quotes:

• “The teacher is the stage-manager, not the chief actor.” (Ch 8)
• “You could love me, too. It's perfectly easy. My parents have managed it for years, and then not terribly talented.” (Ch 11)

January 2026; 237 pages

First published by Michael Joseph in 1942

My paperback edition was issued by the Hogarth Press in 1986

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Slings and Arrows" by Nick McLoughlin

 A pub darts team enters a national competition and starts winning. How far can they go? And how will the private lives of the members affect their progress?

Terry, the main character, married to nurse Pat, is made redundant and has to borrow money to buy a milk round. Then cancer strikes. Meanwhile, Martin his son has rejected going to college and moved in with a girlfriend. Phil's wife is having an affair. Tom's wife, Fiona, is depressed because she can't have children.

With stupendous verisimilitude, this author conjures up the world of the working - often unemployed -  class in 1980s England under the Margaret Thatcher regime. The characters drink beer in and out of pubs, smoke cigarettes, and eat Sunday roasts. They struggle to make ends meet: Terry and Pat are forced to downsize to a static caravan. Leisure activities include a few days at the seaside, a trip to a local beauty spot, coarse fishing, and, of course, darts. The picture is as authentic as a Bruegel; I remember this world.

The plot uses the landmarks of the darts competition and Terry's cancer treatment to give structure to the pace. These create tension and momentum. The focus is on Terry; the other characters also have their narrative arcs (the PoV is a multi-third-person-close perspective) but the real jeopardy comes from Terry battle with first unemployment and then cancer. These are what elicit and retain the reader's sympathy. As for the ending. No spoilers here. I am sure the ending will annoy some readers but I thought it perfect. 

These are real characters, carefully observed, facing real world problems, gaining strength from real relationships. 

There are some great descriptions:

• "Her nose was a contradiction, strong and sharp down the ridge, the nostrils flared and plump. Below it, a deep, wide groove, like the impression made by a child's finger in moist clay, appeared to tug gently on her upper lip." (Ch 20)
• "It was thicker than the dark hair around it and more wiry, like a long white bristle of a painter's brush." (Ch 20)
• "The tide was out, the sea a distant brush stroke of Oxford blue beneath an azure sky." (Ch 25)

And there is humour. One of my favourite moments is when Tom leaves the adoption agency's office to fund a young boy staring at his BMW. He chases him away and says: "Bloody kids!" (Ch 10) I also enjoyed this description of Terry's belly: "His gut, all bought and paid for as he liked to say, overhung the belt on his jeans." (Ch 1)

Selected quotes:

• "The kind of bloke ... that, if he'd been chocolate, he'd have happily eaten himself." (Ch 4)
• "Terry felt saddened, and somehow guilty, at the concern etched in Pat's face, at the pinch of her mouth and the sharp crease between her eyes." (Ch 38)

A very readable and enjoyable book. A perfect antidote to all those shelves of speculative fiction, thriller and crime.

January 2006; 291 pages

Published by The Book Guild in 2024

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God