"A Pirate of Exquisite Mind" by Diana and Michael Preston

This is a biography of William Dampier, the first person to circumnavigate the world three times, who landed on the coast of Australia 80 years before Captain James Cook and who became the best selling author who inspired the new genre of travel writing as well as Robinson Crusoe (being on both the expeditions which marooned Alexander Selkirk and which rescued him) by Daniel Defoe (whose biography is reviewed here) and Gulliver's Travels. He is also responsible for a host of words including avocado, barbeque, chopsticks and sub-species.

But he started off as a buccaneer. Sailing to the West Indies he began working on a sugar plantation but his wanderlust soon got the better of him. He spent time as a logger before signing on as a pirate. His career in piracy was pretty lacklustre; in his first voyage he sacked a couple of towns but kept missing the rich prizes and he returned to England (having rounded Cape Horn and crossed the Pacific) after twelve years at sea with little to show for his trouble. His second voyage, as a captain of a scientific vessel for the Royal Navy was equally unsuccessful. Only on his third voyage, demoted to navigator under the command of Woodes Rogers, did he help in capturing a Spanish Galleon which earned him some thousands of pounds, enough to pay his debts after he had died. In all, he did better as an author.

The Prestons tell his tale in great detail which sometimes slows the narrative. A great deal of time is spent on the first voyage (to be fair, it was the longest, it took twelve years). But Dampier did so much and discovered so much that it is difficult to see how any less detail would be possible. Certainly the book is action packed to the extent that I got a little lost a times. I would have liked to see some (modern) maps to show exactly where he was at which time.

This is is an interesting biography of a fascinating man and well worth reading.

August 2015; 461 pages

"The Eustace Diamonds" by Anthony Trollope

This is the third in the Palliser series of novels (it follows Can You Forgive Her? and Phineas Finn and precedes Phineas Redux, The Prime Minister, and The Duke's Children) but it stands alone, although there are occasional appearances by characters from the other novels and you might not want to read them out of order in case you discovered who married whom which would be a bit of a spoiler.

Lizzie Greystock is a scheming, lying minx who persuades Lord Eustace to marry her; he soon dies having fathered a son. She is left the income (£4,000) from the Scottish estate for life and, so she claims, a £10,000 diamond necklace. But lawyers for the estate claim that the necklace is an heirloom. All is set for a legal battle in which possession is nine-tenths of the law.

She also wants to marry again, to gain a protector. She catches penniless Lord Faun in her wiles but he then wants to withdraw from the engagement because of the potential scandal about the necklace. So she then sets her cap at her cousin, barrister and MP (and also penniless) Frank Greystock. But he has pledged himself to governess Lucy Morris though all his friends tell him that he must break off this engagement because he cannot afford to marry on his barrister's income whilst still having the expenses that accrue to an MP (unpaid in these days). Every man who comes close to Lizzie is captivated by her beauty and turned inside out by her verbal dexterity in which she recasts all their honourable motives as bad and makes them believe that the only thing that they can do is to marry her; if she will have them.

The legal complexities surrounding whether the necklace could have been a gift, and the will-he-won't-he surrounding Lizzie and her two lovers make up the essence of the plot on the long-winded first half od the novel.

About half way through the book, after a typically Trollopian invocation of the joys of fox-hunting (he was a keen hunter and liked to include a scene about hunting in every novel), we meet a set of penniless adventures Lord George, Sir Griffin, Mrs Carbuncle and her daughter Lucinda Roanoke, and the preacher Mr Emilius. With the arrival of this crew the story really takes off and the plot begins to develop. The second half of the book is more like a thriller in the style of Wilkie Collins while the first half was a very slow social comedy with a plot worthy of Jane Austen.

As with Austen, we are entirely within the world of gentility. The novel depends for much of its tension on whether Lord Faun or Frank Greystock will behave like gentlemen according to their code of honour. There is comedy when Frank inadvertently rides the horse of a merchant. The lower classes are either clowns or crooks. And Lizzie's wickedness stems from the way she uses her position as a lady to get away with lying (she is believed by a jury even after she admits lying on oath on a previous occasion) and, perhaps, with stealing.

Trollope exposes his anti-Semitic prejudices. Moneylenders are repeatedly associated with Jews and Mr Emilius is suspect despite being a Church of England preacher because he is suspected of Jewish roots: "the fashionable foreign ci-devant Jew preacher"; "The man was a nasty, greasy, lying, squinting Jew preacher"; he has a "hooky nose". These were, of course, the prejudices of Trollope's age and social context (as were the anti-lower class prejudices noted above) amd therefore can be explained and understood, if not necessarily pardoned. But it does reflect badly on this novel as a work of art, because the use of stereotypical characters is lazy writing (and lazy thinking).

The central character of Lizzie, a clever but manipulative woman who is transparently awful while at the same time being hypnotically alluring, fundamentally a heroine who believes her own lies, who thinks she is much put upon, forced to fight for what is rightfully hers, is excellent. Frank, the hero, is another complex character: a man who knows what he wants to do to secure his long-term happiness but is too weak not to be repeatedly tempted by Lizzie and by the general opinions of his class of society. Another good character is Lord Fawn, who wants to please everybody and, of course, ends up pleasing no-one. Mr Emilius, despite his unpleasantness, is sexually magnetic. Trollope can draw characters with strengths and weaknesses. But Lucy Morris is much too good to be true and most of the minor characters, such as kind Lady Fawn ("known as a miracle of Virtue, Benevolence, and Persistency"; Ch 3), or cross Lady Linlithgow, or conscientious Mr Camperdown, are one dimensional.

I first read this book in August 2015 and I enjoyed it. Trollope is still popular among today's genteel middle classes who form a, important part of the reading public. Why? Reading it again in July 2023, I find that Trollope is hugely flawed:

• The first half is too long and too dry. The second half rattles along. Although, in terms of pacing, the principal turning point occurs almost exactly half way through, the slowness of the first half compared to the second unbalances the pace of the book.
• He desperately needed an editor. Not only does he write at far too much length, but there are errors:
• Frank Greystock is over thirty and simultaneously nearly thirty;
• one of the key points of the plot hinges on whether the diamonds were taken from the jewellers in Scotland on 4th September or in London on 24th September but Trollope tells us that Lizzie's honeymoon lasted six weeks in Scotland which meant that she couldn't have been in London until mid-October making this key point, repeatedly mentioned, irrelevant;
• in chapter 24 we are told that there are only "a few stunted trees around" Portray Castle because trees don't prosper but earlier Lizzie had been accused of cutting down a forest of old oaks.
• Trollope writes using the omniscient point of view. The narrator's voice repeatedly intrudes from time to time:
• "Although the first two chapters of this new history have been devoted to the fortunes and personal attributes of Lady Eustace, the historian begs his readers not to believe that that opulent and aristocratic Becky Sharp is to assume the dignity of heroine in the forthcoming pages." (CHAPTER 3 Lucy Morris)
• "the poor narrator has been driven to expend his four first chapters in the mere task of introducing his characters. He regrets the length of these introductions, and will now begin at once the action of his story." (CHAPTER 4 Frank Greystock)
• The intrusion of the author can be done with great effect. It can be Brechtian, reminding the reader that it is just a story. It can be a way of adding humour; Henry Fielding in Tom Jones does this. It can comment on the action. Trollope doesn't seem to have any coherent reason for his intrusions. It just adds words.
• The concept of suspense seems alien to Trollope. The diamonds have vanished so Trollope immediately tells us where they are because "The chronicler states this at once, as he scorns to keep from his reader any secret that is known to himself." In chapter 12 of his Autobiography (1883), Trollope contrasts his 'realistic' novels with the 'sensationalist' novels of Wilkie Collins. "The readers who prefer the one are supposed to take delight in the elucidation of character. Those who hold by the other are charmed by the continuation and gradual development of a plot." Which would be all very well if Trollope's characters actually had character development but they don't.
• Trollope repeatedly flouts the dictum 'show, don't tell'. He shows and then he tells. From his omniscient narrator's point of view, he tells us the innermost thoughts of each of his principal characters. He describes their characters at length, in almost as much detail as he describes their physical characteristics. He leaves almost nothing to the reader's imagination. And if you haven't got it the first time round, he tells you again. And again.

And perhaps this is the secret of his success. The reader doesn't have to do any work. Thus, Trollope is accessible to all. He is the fiction equivalent of easy listening. You can just let Trollope waft over you. And, nowadays at least, because he is a Victorian novelist and therefore regarded as highbrow, you can claim literary bragging rights for having read him. But he wrote 47 novels and most of them were long: never mind the quality, count the quantity is a maxim that springs to mind.

At my U3A 'The English Novel' book group, we were asked to compare Lizzie Eustace with Becky Sharp, the bad-girl protagonist of Thackeray's Vanity Fair; Trollope himself makes this comparison. There is a difference. Becky Sharp was always a penniless chancer whereas Lizzie's post-widowhood crimes were committed even though she was comfortably off; Becky was eventually punished by society, being forced into poverty-stricken exile abroad, while Lizzie retired to a very comfortable Scottish seclusion. 

We also learned that Trollope's mother was a prolific writer. We were told she wrote 114 books. Wikipedia itself only claims "over 100 volumes" (some books were published in multi-volume format) and lists 34 novels and 7 non-fiction works written between 1832 (when Mrs T was already in her 50s) and 1856 which gives a galloping rate of nearly two every year. Trollope set himself the target of writing 40 pages per week, about 10,000 words (I try to write 7,000 words per week but the majority of those don't make it into the final version). This is why, I believe, Trollope's work is careless, unstructured and paradoxically lazy: he simply didn't have time to create properly rounded minor characters from social strata witch which he was unacquainted. 

Selected Quotes:

• "It was admitted by all her friends, and also by her enemies – who were in truth the more numerous and active body of the two – that Lizzie Greystock had done very well with herself." (CHAPTER 1 Lizzie Greystock)
• "Admiral Greystock ... was a man who liked whist, wine – and wickedness in general we may perhaps say, and whose ambition it was to live every day of his life up to the end of it. People say that he succeeded, and that the whist, wine, and wickedness were there, at the side even of his dying bed." (CHAPTER 1 Lizzie Greystock)
• "It was a new pleasure, and one which, though he had ridiculed it, he had so often coveted." (CHAPTER 1 Lizzie Greystock)
• "she had no idea what her money would do, and what it would not" (CHAPTER 2 Lady Eustace)
• "They were long, large eyes – but very dangerous. To those who knew how to read a face, there was danger plainly written in them." (CHAPTER 2 Lady Eustace)
• "How few there are among women, few perhaps also among men, who know that the sweetest, softest, tenderest, truest eyes which a woman can carry in her head are green in colour!" (CHAPTER 2 Lady Eustace)
• "it is nicer to be born to £10,000 a year than to have to wish for £500." (CHAPTER 3 Lucy Morris)
• "Her light-brown hair was soft and smooth and pretty. As hair it was very well, but it had no speciality." (CHAPTER 3 Lucy Morris)
• "It frequently happens with men that they fail to analyse these things, and do not make out for themselves any clear definition of what their feelings are or what they mean. We hear that a man has behaved badly to a girl, when the behaviour of which he has been guilty has resulted simply from want of thought." (CHAPTER 4 Frank Greystock)
• "His father was a fine old Tory of the ancient school, who thought that things were going from bad to worse, but was able to live happily in spite of his anticipations." (CHAPTER 4 Frank Greystock)
• "To have been always in the right, and yet always on the losing side; always being ruined, always under persecution from a wild spirit of republican-demagogism – and yet never to lose anything, not even position, or public esteem, is pleasant enough. A huge, living, daily increasing grievance that does one no palpable harm, is the happiest possession that a man can have." (CHAPTER 4 Frank Greystock)
• "There is, probably, no man who becomes naturally so hard in regard to money as he who is bound to live among rich men, who is not rich himself, and who is yet honest." (CHAPTER 9 Showing what the Miss Fawns Said, and what Mrs Hittaway Thought)
• "he was slow and could not think and hear at the same time." (CHAPTER 10 Lizzie and her Lover)
• "She looks like a beautiful animal that you are afraid to caress for fear it should bite you" (CHAPTER 12 I Only Thought Of It)
• "The only doubt might be whether paste diamonds might not better suit her character." (CHAPTER 17 The Diamonds are Seen in Public)
• "To be alone with the girl to whom he is not engaged, is a man’s delight; – to be alone with the man to whom she is engaged is the woman’s." (CHAPTER 18 And I Have Nothing to Give)
• "But I get into debt, unfortunately; and as for other men’s wives, I am not sure that I may not do even that some day." (CHAPTER 19 As My Brother)
• "The quickness with which she sprung from her position, and the facility with which she composed not her face only, but the loose lock of her hair and all her person, for the reception of the coming visitor, was quite marvellous." (CHAPTER 19 As My Brother)
• "As a house it was not particularly eligible, the castle form of domestic architecture being exigeant in its nature and demanding that space, which in less ambitious houses can be applied to comfort, shall be surrendered to magnificence." (CHAPTER 21 ‘Ianthe’s Soul’)
• "as the world goes now, young widows are not miserable" (CHAPTER 21 ‘Ianthe’s Soul’)
• "It is pleasant to win in a fight; – but to be always fighting is not pleasant." (CHAPTER 21 ‘Ianthe’s Soul’)
• "that strong indignation at injustice which the unjust always feel when they are injured." (CHAPTER 23 Frank Greystock’s First Visit to Portray)
• "It is the debauched broken drunkard who should become a teetotaller, and not the healthy hard-working father of a family who never drinks a drop of wine till dinnertime." (CHAPTER 24 Showing what Frank Grey stock thought about Marriage)
• "The outside world to them was a world of pretty, laughing, ignorant children; and lawyers were the parents, guardians, pastors and masters by whom the children should be protected from the evils incident to their childishness." (CHAPTER 28 Mr Dove in his Chambers)
• "When you have your autumn holiday in hand to dispose of it, there is nothing more aristocratic that you can do than to go to Scotland. Dukes are more plentiful there than in Pall Mall, and you will meet an earl or at least a lord on every mountain." (CHAPTER 32 Mr and Mrs Hittaway in Scotland)
• "how, my lord, would you, who are giving hundreds, more than hundreds, for this portrait of your dear one, like to see it in print from the art critic of the day, that she is a brazen-faced hoyden who seems to have had a glass of wine too much, or to have been making hay?" (CHAPTER 35 Too Bad For Sympathy)
• "With whom are we to sympathize? says the reader, who not unnaturally imagines that a hero should be heroic." (CHAPTER 35 Too Bad For Sympathy)
• "He had not eyes clear enough to perceive that his cousin was a witch whistling for a wind, and ready to take the first blast that would carry her and her broomstick somewhere into the sky." (CHAPTER 35 Too Bad For Sympathy)
• "The nothing with which the dean had hitherto been contented had always included every comfort of life, a well-kept table, good wine, new books, and canonical habiliments with the gloss still on; but as the Bobsborough tradesmen had, through the agency of Mrs Greystock, always supplied him with these things as though they came from the clouds, he really did believe that he had never asked for anything." (CHAPTER 35 Too Bad For Sympathy)
• "For five minutes, during which everybody else was speaking to everybody – for five minutes, which seemed to her to be an hour, Lizzie spoke to no one, and no one spoke to her." (CHAPTER 37 Lizzie’s First Day)
• "I’m not a man who does things without thinking; and when I have thought I don’t want to think again." (CHAPTER 41 ‘Likewise the Bears in Couples Agree’)
• "We never know where each other’s shoes pinch each other’s toes." (CHAPTER 54 ‘I Suppose I May Say A Word’)
• "Perhaps, on the whole, more power is lost than gained by habits of secrecy." (CHAPTER 57 Humpty Dumpty)
• "pleasures should never be made necessities, when the circumstances of a gentleman’s life may perhaps require that they shall be abandoned for prolonged periods." (CHAPTER 57 Humpty Dumpty)
• "You may knock about a diamond, and not even scratch it; whereas paste in rough usage betrays itself" (CHAPTER 65 Tribute)
• "There was a twang in his voice which ought to have told her that he was utterly untrustworthy. There was an oily pretence at earnestness in his manner which ought to have told that he was not fit to associate with gentlemen." (CHAPTER 66 The Aspirations of Mr Emilius)
• "Mrs Carbuncle was much too strong, and had fought her battle with the world much too long, to regard such word-pelting as that." (CHAPTER 73 Lizzie’s Last Lover) Love word-pelting
• "A man, to be a man in her eyes, should be able to swear that all his geese are swans; – should be able to reckon his swans by the dozen, though he have not a feather belonging to him, even from a goose’s wing." (CHAPTER 73 Lizzie’s Last Lover)
• "I never was so sick of anything in my life as I am of Lady Eustace." (CHAPTER 80 What Was Said About It All At Matching)

July 2023; lots and lots of pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Adventures of a Black Bag" by A J Cronin

People of my age and older will remember Doctor Finlay's Casebook, the television series that starred Bill Simpson as Dr Finlay, Andrew Cruickshank as old Dr Cameron and Barbara Mullen as the housekeeper Janet, set in the fictional Scottish village of Tannochbrae.

These are some short stories about Dr Finlay, although they are mostly set in the industrial port of Levenford; Tannochbrae being a small village nearby. The stories are set in the pre-National Health days when you had to pay for the Doctor's consultation; one of the stories features the new and controversial diagnosis of Appendicitis and a number of the treatments involve little more than good food and bed rest. As a social document, the stories are interesting.

But I couldn't stand Dr Finlay. Not only is he a goody goody but he is as omniscient as God and as prone to performing miracles. Almost every story revolves around the way the wicked and naughty characters he encounters are brought back to the straight and narrow by this interfering and meddlesome healer who is able to do far more for their souls than for their bodies. He is a paragon of virtue and thoroughly dislikeable.

The stories themselves are very short, very simple moral fables. In this brief format, Cronin has little opportunity to develop character and most of those we encounter are thoroughly two-dimensional, selected for the role they will play in the plot, which is mostly to allow Finlay to redeem them.

A definite whiff of medical romance stories.

Other A J Cronin books in this blog:

• The Keys of the Kingdom which is a full length novel with a real, complex character and is sooooooo much better than these short stories.
• Hatter's Castle: about the fall of a prideful bully
• The Citadel a novel about an idealistic voung doctor who goes astray

August 2015; 158 pages

"At Home in the Universe" by Stuart Kauffman

Kauffman is a pioneering complexity scientist and this book endeavours to show how life could have emerged from a sufficiently large and diverse collection of molecules with autocatalysis. Despite being unable to point to an example where some scientist has successfully replicated the necessary reactions, his arguments are compelling. Complex networks of individual agents can give rise to emergent phenomena: life, consciousness and more. There is no need for a designer or an intelligence or indeed any external influence; you don't even need the agents to be purposeful or (in economic terms) rational. Given the right conditions of complexity (and in Kauffman's models, rather more than in those of Per Bak, there is a degree of tuning required to ensure that the parameters give rise to critical sustainability rather than subcritical inert stability or supercritical chaos), emergence will, er, emerge.

The phenomenon of self-organization means that systems not in thermodynamic equilibrium will create what Kauffman calls "order for free". The second law of thermodynamics continues, of course, to apply to systems in equilibrium, systems that are closed to inputs and outputs of matter and energy, in which entropy or disorder inevitably increases but Kauffman's systems are ones through which matter and energy flow.

Kauffman clearly finds these exciting. He keeps repeating his discovery that we are not the random products of chance, rather we are the inevitable results of the way the universe works. He is right, of course: this is a revolutionary thesis as important as the Copernican paradigm shift or Darwin's Natural Selection. But this is where I began to find the work a little muddled. His lyrical descriptions of the desert in bloom are presumably meant for the general reader but at the same time there is a lot of technical details about his theoretical models. On the other hand, when I try to understand more deeply these same models I am frustrated by gaps in the explanations. For example, he states a formula S = lnG and I think I know what he means by G but I am not certain; he is not clear. He tells us on page 163 that pleuromona has between 500 to 800 genes but on page 42 it is between "a few hundred to about a thousand". He explains that some systems can jump beyond the 'correlation length' of a fitness landscape but he never tells us how to measure this length. Perhaps this is just me not being clever enough or picking too many nits but a few minor changes could have really helped me understand this work.

This is an important and ground-breaking book. It would benefit from slightly better editing. August 2015; 304 pages.

Other works on this exciting topic:

• Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin which is an immensely readable and interesting overview of this area and similar non-equilibrium systems and 100% recommended
• Emergence: from chaos to order and Complexity: a very short introduction, both by John Holland, one of the leading experts in the field
• Ubiquity by Mark Buchanan
• How Nature Works by Per Bak, another expert who can really write
• Six degrees about small world networks by Duncan Watts who worked with Steven Strogatz
• Smart swarm by Peter Miller
• The Information by James Gleick although his Chaos (not reviewed on this blog) is perhaps better
• sync by Steven Strogatz

Other books not reviewed on this blog on this topic include:

• The Wisdom of Crowds 
• Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell about fads
• Ubiquity which is brilliant about fractals and power laws
• Critical mass by Philip Ball which is a brilliant explanation about phase changes

"Did she kill him? by Kate Colquhon

This is the story of Florence Maybrick, a young American married to James, an older man who is a merchant in Liverpool. Tensions lurk behind their solid Victorian middle-class front, in their house containing a cook, maids and a nanny for their two children. James has a mistress and Florence is flirting with another man. And then, after a short illness, James dies.

His brothers are convinced that he has been poisoned by Florence and suggest this to the doctors. Slowly, the cumbersome machinery of Victorian detection and justice swings into action.

The house is littered with Arsenic in many forms, chiefly as patent medicines. Did Florence use them to remove herself of a husband who was beginning to turn violent or did James poison himself through his hypochondria and an addiction to arsenic? Did he even die from arsenic or was it simply gastro-enteritis? Nothing in this case is what it seems.

What is particularly brilliant about the narration of this case is that Colquhon never tells you what is going to happen before it happens. At each stage of the case there is doubt about what will happen next. Did she do it? Will she get off? Slowly, inexorably, the story unfolds. It is as good as any thriller. The only way it is marred is when Colquhon spends rather too long judging the social circumstances by repeated reference to Victorian novels, especially to those of Henry James.

Otherwise a brilliant real-life whodunnit.

August 2015; 346 pages

Kate Colquhon also wrote the desperately exciting Mr Briggs' Hat about the first railway murder in Britain.

"The Keys of the Kingdom" by A J Cronin

The fictional life of a catholic priest from Scotland by a master of storytelling.

In many ways Father Francis Chisolm, the hero of Cronin's tale, reminded me of the whisky priest on Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. He is a very ordinary man, convinced of his own unfitness and inadequacy to serve God, who has an extraordinary faith based on a naive personal relationship with God, perpetually at odds with the Church hierarchy. His life, from being a rivet monkey in Tyneside shipyards, a recalcitrant student and seminarian, a curate battling for working men and women, to a Chinese missionary, is contrasted with that of his boyhood friend Anselm Mealy who rises through the church to become a fat and flabby Bishop. His unorthodox beliefs ("the best man I ever knew was an atheist"), his self-doubt, and his struggles (trying and failing to be a pacifist when a Chinese warlord is shooting at his mission) make him a Christ-like figure. And there were moments when it became so sad or so touching that I found it difficult to read. Sniff!

And just like the whisky priest he is convinced of his failure to the very end. But we know that, despite the scorn of the world, here is a true hero.

There's nothing fancy about Cronin's style. He tells a good story, with clearly drawn characters. Perhaps the characters are a little bit too baddy or goody and perhaps the coincidences are a little too obvious  but it was a real page turner with lots of action and a wonderful lead character. He might not have been a posh author but he could really spin a yarn. I'll have to locate some more of his work.

The Keys to the Kingdom was a 1944 film starring Gregory Peck (and earning him an Oscar nomination).

He also wrote The Citadel (his first book and a best-seller; its description of medicine in the 1920s was helpful in the setting up of the NHS), Hatter's Castle, The Stars Look Down (an inspiration for Billy Elliot) and created the character of Dr Finlay in Adventures of a Black Bag.

An incredible book. August 2015; 316 pages

"On the Edge" by Edward St Aubyn

This novel follows a group of people as they travel to California for a week of meditation and new age workshops culminating in Tantric Sex.

It is wickedly funny in many places although I found myself uncertain as to whether St Aubyn was just poking fun at these people or whether he actually believed some of the nonsense they spouted. Certainly he seemed to be in agreement with at least some of the long lecture given by Adam towards the end of the book. And clearly the Tantric Sex worked for a number of the characters.

My favourite moment came when one character asked why God doesn't "alleviate our suffering" and answers that it is "because he doesn't see it as suffering" to which the other character replies: "Clearly he's less bright than one imagined." Another good moment came when the split between body and soul was dismissed as being analogous to the distinction between a rose and its scent.

But I found the first few chapters extremely difficult. Each chapter stared with a new set of characters and the second chapter is an eighteen page description of an LSD trip in the American desert. I found it very difficult to care about any character when they were introduced and dismissed so quickly, especially when their purpose seemed to be so that the author could mock them. The book didn't really hit its stride until we met the sceptical Peter who is just going through the mystical experiences in order to track down a woman he had sex with for three days and then we meet the equally sceptical Julian. (Why were the only real sceptics the two English men?)

In part I was reminded of Evelyn Waugh. The wit is caustic and can be very funny, the descriptions and observations sometimes lyrical and poetic but wit and poetry don't make a novel and I found the format too fragmented to be able to enjoy to the full the stories that were developing. In the end I didn't really care enough about the people.

August 2015; 278 pages

"Breakfast with the Borgias" by DBC Pierre

Computer Scientist Ariel Panek finds himself in heavy fog in a taxi making for a hotel on the Suffolk coast. He is desperate to send a message for his student waiting in Europe; he is due to go to a conference and hopes to arrange a dirty weekend with her but he has no mobile phone (cell phone) or wi fi connectivity.

The hotel is old fashioned. He still can't get connected and the kitchen is closed. So is the bar but in the residents' lounge he meets the Border family, a strange assortment of weirdos, drinking cocktails. Leonard the father is trying to arrange a business consortium and wants Ari to invest. Wheelchair bound Margot tries to connect with him by talking about quantum entanglement. Rob the son hides behind the curtain playing computer games. Ari definitely fancies Olivia the teenage daughter. Then anorexic Gretchen arrives with a mobile phone that actually works; she proceeds to dismantle it and use it to gouge a wound into her arm. Slowly, the situation becomes worse and worse and Ari finds himself trapped with these strange people, the games they are playing, and the lies they are telling.

A Hammer novel, this book is meant as a horror to be written in a single setting. As such it failed on both counts for me. There was also too much made of the difference between the quantum world and the classical world; as an ex-Physics teacher I think I understood most of this but I doubt the average reader would find this more than geek-padding. But what really makes this book stand out as a classic was the brilliant dialogue. Every character is driven by their own internal logic and every utterance they make conforms to this. But rarely does a whole conversation make sense. So you are trying to decipher what is happening to these people (and it keeps you guessing almost to the very end) and what the hell is going on. As such it is beautifully crafted and absolutely gripping.

DBC Pierre also wrote the brilliant if equally quirky Booker-prize-winning Vernon God Little. August 2015; 248 pages

"Love on the Dole" by Walter Greenwood

Squalor and despair set in an industrial town in northern England in the 1930s. No matter how hard you work, you can never earn enough to life yourself out of poverty. You pawn your possessions and darn your clothes, your furniture is rented and if you need to borrow money you must find a local loan shark who will charge you extortionate amounts of interest. Bullies and bookmakers and small time criminals prosper; respectable hard-working people do all they can to stay afloat. Then the local engineering firm gets new machines or finds a cheaper source of labour and you lose your job, any possibility of making ends meet, and your self-respect. You can't even afford to love.

Despite its simplistic storyline and sometimes didactic nature, this is a classic story of penury and hopelessness which has a very real message for today.

August 2015; 256 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God