"The Double" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

This is a delightful short novel by Dostoevsky written in 13 (is this significant?) chapters.

As with much of D's work, it concerns a very ordinary man, an Everyman, full of the hesitancies and uncertainties that characterise most of us, in an extraordinary situation. D's dialogue really brings this home: the hero's first remark (talking to himself as he looks in the mirror) is: "what a thing it would be if I were not up to the mark today, if something were amiss, if some intrusive pimple had made its appearance, or anything else unpleasant had happened; so far, however, there's nothing wrong, so far everything's all right." Brilliantly ordinary. He is searching his face for spots like any teenager (although he is quite a lot older, we assume). But he is looking in the mirror.

This is just one of many breadcrumbs scattered around in the very first pages. He has already waken up and then laid in his bed "as though he were not yet certain whether he were awake or still asleep, whether all that was going on around him were real or actual."

He goes out, riding in a hired carriage, and is embarrassed to meet his boss. Then he does that thing we all do, he pretends not to notice him. Then he is not sure about this: should he "pretend that I am not myself, but somebody else strikingly like me," he says to himself.

He goes to his doctor although he pretends he is "quite himself, like everybody else" but he is behaving so strangely that the doctor is concerned. The problem, Mr Golyadkin reassures his doctor, is not himself but all the others who are ganging up on him. And he goes off to meet some aristocratic friends in their big house (although the servants have orders not to admit him). On the way he meets some clerks from his office who laugh at him. He is the sort of person, he tells them, who "only mask themselves at masquerades" and his rule is "if I fail I don't lose heart, if I succeed I persevere". But "who's the hunter and who's the bird in this case?"

Then, in the middle of a snowstorm, G meets a man he thinks he recognises but can't quite remember where from. "He would not for any treasure on earth have been willing to meet that man" and he runs away, followed by "a little lost dog, soaked and shivering". He does home to see the stranger sitting on his own bed; the stranger is his double.

And next day the double has started work in his own office.

Next night he welcomes G2 to his home and gives him a meal. But G2 writes a sinister little poem (it reminded me of Sting's stalking song, Every Breath You Take:

"If thou forget me

I shall not forget thee;

Though all things may be

Do not thou forget me"

Things get worse. G2 takes credit for the work G does. G2 eats pies at the restaurant and G has to pay for them. G tries to confront G2 but every time he makes a mess of it. But he knows (we don't) that everything will be all right in the end: "one day, the wolf will have to pay for the sheep's tears."

At last we come to the climactic scene at the end ...

"The door opened noisily, and in the doorway stood a man, the very sight of whom sent a chill to Mr Golyadkin's heart. He stood rooted to the spot. A cry of horror dies away in his choking throat. Yet Mr Golyadkin knew it all beforehand, and had had a presentiment of something of the sort for a long time ... With a crushed and desperate air our hero looked about him."

Classic. April 2016; 135 words.

"The Citadel" by A. J. Cronin

The Citadel is the book that launched Cronin's career as a best-selling novelist. It is regarded as having been influential in the setting up of the NHS.

It is a very simply told tale of a young idealistic doctor in the 1920 to 1930s who works in a Welsh mining village before becoming a GP in London and being sucked in by the Harley Street crowd. It is fascinating as a document in social history, showing the conditions and abuses of the medical profession of that time. It has a lot of detail about individual diseases, many of which have now been wiped out by better working  conditions, less poverty, better sanitation and antibiotics. The drugs and medicines proscribed by the doctors (which they make up themselves) are often useless and blatant attempts to make money from a gullible (and ill) public.

The start of the book is constructed in little episodes. Just after young Dr Andrew Manson has arrived as a completely wet-behind-the-ears newly-qualified medical assistant, assisting the practice owner who has had a stroke, he teams up with another young idealistic assistant to blow up some sewers which are leaking into the water supply. He assists at a difficult birth. He goes underground after a fall at the mine to amputate an arm so that a young miner can be taken out. It is a classic television series format: individual episodes linked by character and a slow background development of his relationship. He gets married and moves to another town. He gets further qualifications and moves to London. There, in business for himself, he starts to exploit a few lucky breaks and becomes a society doctor. His marriage starts to fall apart.

I preferred the start when the adventures were more isolated to the longer sweep of the later parts. But the book is sparsely written and it is difficult to say why it had such appeal. The life and death situations inherent to medical practice make it exciting and Cronin is not afraid of some finely judged sentimentality (nothing too slushy) which often brought a lump to my throat. But this isn't great literature: it is a well told narrative.

Other Cronin books I have read are:

• The Keys of the Kingdom: a perfect gem of a book about a Catholic missionary to China. Read it!
• Adventures of a Black Bag: short stories which launched Doctor Finlay's Casebook. Of historical interest.
• Hatter's Castle: about the fall of a prideful bully

March 2016; 294 pages

"Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling" by Ross King

How the Sistine chapel was painted with a side order of Raphael working in the Papal Apartments.

The great thing about a Ross King book is that you learn history and history of art and at the same time you find out about the details of an artist's life. For example, originally the Sistine chapel ceiling was covered with stars, typical for vaults of that period, but subsidence led to cracking and an ugly white line of Polyfilla (or its Roman contemporary) across it so they had to repaint it. When Michelangelo started (on the flood scene) he had great problems with discolouration and mildew until someone reviewed the formula for the plaster he was using (which included Volcanic ash rather than sand) and realised he was using too much water. Michelangelo made sketches all the time of everything he saw and regularly reused things from other works of art: he seems to have stolen David's pose from a statue in Rome. Raphael also 'borrowed' often from Leonardo: the contrapposto pose of Eve in his Temptation seems to be a version of a sketch he made of Leonardo's Leda which is perhaps just as well since the original was destroyed Madam de Maintenon, the second wife of Louis XIV. Even just discovering what contrapposto means and why artists use it made the book worth reading! Another example is Botticelli's Venus.

This book is actually three stories woven into one. Michelangelo and his team of assistants are toiling away on their scaffold frescoing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (standing, bending backwards, not lying on their backs which myth arose from a mistranslation of the Italian). Meanwhile Raphael is frescoing the Pope's private apartments with scenes such as The School of Athens. And il papa terribile, the warmongering Julius II, is fighting the Venetians and the French for mastery of the Papal States.

Three immensely contrasting personalities. Julius is larger than life, growing a white beard in defiance of canon law, hunting pheasant with guns in defiance of canon law, and eating, drinking and making love to excess (in defiance of canon law). Meanwhile, Raphael is a sweet young man with an incredibly sunny disposition, beloved by everyone, especially women, from baker's daughters to high class courtesans. And Michelangelo is slovenly, depressive, ugly, and probably chaste, moping about on his own. There is a story that an isolated Michelangelo met Raphael and his crowd of admirers one day and sneered at him for being a 'bravo'; Raphael returned by pointing out the Michelangelo was friendless like a 'hangman'.

There is so much of interest in this story told as usual with Ross King's easy-to-read narrative style. It's wonderful.

March 2016; 296 pages

Other great Ross King books I have read include:

• Leonardo and the Last Supper: a wonderful description of how a great but wayward artist produced a masterpiece
• Brunelleschi's Dome: about how the dome of the Duomo in Florence was built
• The Judgement of Paris: the rivalry between Meissonier (I'd never heard of this great artist before!) and Monet which led to the triumph of Impressionism

"Weir of Hermiston" by Robert Louis Stevenson

This is the last book by RLS and it was left unfinished at his death, rather like Edwin Drood was by Charles Dickens. It finishes in the middle of a sentence ...

RLS was responsible for the pirate novel with Treasure Island, a novel which is almost perfect as it can be. The villain, one-legged Long John Silver, was based on a one-legged friend of RLS, W. E. Henley, a poet, who also knew J M Barrie the author of Peter Pan. Henley's daughter, who is buried beside him in Cockayne Hatley churchyard, as a child could not pronounce her rs. She called Barrie her 'fwendy-wendy' which is where the name of Peter Pan's girlfriend Wendy Darling comes from (and all subsequent Wendys).

I read Treasure Island when I was little and still remember having nightmares about blind Pew, tappping his way along the street.

RLS also wrote the horror classic Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, one of the very few novels to have created a mythic stereotype (perhaps Frankenstein, Dracula, and Treasure Island itself might be among the others).

Not content with that for a lifetime, he also wrote the brilliant adventure yarn Kidnapped in which the cattle-headed David Balfour is put on a boat by his evil uncle Ebeneezer and sent to be sold as a slave in the Americas but is rescued by the colourful, vain, dandyish Jacobite rebel Allan Breck Stewart; together they race through the heather across Scotland with a price on their heads.

I even enjoyed its sequel Catriona.

Weir of Hermiston is about a father, Weir the elder, a hanging judge, and his son, Archie Weir, who is rather ashamed of his dad and, having spoken out against the father, is exiled to be the laird of the family farm in Hermiston. There Archie, also called Erchie (the poorer characters speak broad Lallan Scots, the posher characters English) meets and falls in love with Christina, aka Kirstie, not to be confused with her aunt also called Kirstie, who has four black brothers made famous after their bloodthirsty revenge on the robbers who killed their father.

The fragment that we have sets the scene. Archie's father is a stern and rather horrid character, blackly drawn. Archie is a chip off the old block in some ways, being self-disciplined, but at the same time he takes after his dead mother (hers is a brilliant portrait of a pious lady completely down-trodden by her husband and regularly taken advantage of by servants). Old Kirstie regrets being an old maid and is jealous that the little boy she looked after is in love with young Kirstie. Young Kirstie is another wonderful character, well aware of clothes and the effect that a look can have on a lad, innocent in some ways but already old in the ways of coquetry.Into the Eden that is the Scottish countryside comes a snake in the guise of one of Erchie's old friends from Uni (although Erchie was only ever an acquaintance in the old days and is not so friendly now, extending the duties of a host with none of the tenderness for a guest) who guesses the secret love affair and decides to worm his way into the affections of young Kirstie. And the four black brothers include farmer Hob, Glasgow merchant Clem, and shepherd-poet Dand.

Wonderful characters and a wonderful setting, told in a mixture of English and beautiful Scots, looking set to create a great tale. The plan that we are left with is rather a melodrama involving seduction, murder, a prison-break and exile. Perhaps it is as well he never finished it.

March 2016; 111 pages

"The Europeans" by Henry James

This is a delightful little book, the fourth novel James wrote and rather reminiscent of Jane Austen.

The Baroness and her brother Felix have travelled from Europe where they were born to Boston to look up their American cousins. As the novel begins they are clearly short of money and presumably fortune hunting, Felix is an agreeable young man and the Baroness who has morganatic marriage with a minor European princeling is in the process of being divorced.

There is an immediate contrast between the sober, perhaps unhappy, introspective, virtually silent, reserved, buttoned-down Americans who are from the Boston merchant class and who are quietly, modestly, unspectacularly very wealthy and the happy-go-lucky carefree Felix, used to living on his wits and few talents, and the Baroness, cultured in the rather heavy handed styles of the courts of Europe. The young unmarried men of the Bostonian families are drawn to the Baroness as moths to a flame and the question becomes which one of them will propose and be entrapped in what will probably be an unsuitable marriage. And which of the girls will fall for Felix?

The characters are drawn subtly and well. Right from the outset, James uses dialogue and action to raise intriguing questions about each character.

It starts beautifully. The Baroness is looking out of her Boston hotel window at a graveyard, the stones covered in snow. She watches people, mainly women, scrambling onto a bus, she likens it to a life boat. The brother assumes that there is a very handsome man inside.

She is out of sorts whilst her brother Felix is, as always excessively optimistic, full of gaiety. She says he is too good-natured and he replies; "Good natured - yes. Too good natured - no." She thinks they have made a mistake but he says: "There are no such things as mistakes."

This is a storming start. The characters are beautifully contrasted: the carefree but happy brother, the depressed but elegant sister. Very little is told to us but we can work it out from the conversation. It becomes clear that they have travelled from Europe to America to discover the cousins that they have never seen before and that they hope the cousins are rich because they are on their uppers (though not enough to descend into working for a living).

In the next chapter, we meet Gertrude. Gertrude is 'odd' though wee are never quite told what is wrong with her; probably she has too much rebellious joy in her to fit in with the rest of the family, all of whom have gone to church. Mr Brand, the utterly wholesome minister,talks with her in the garden, trying to persuade her to go to church, but she declines and he goes off. One feels that he is probably in love with Gertrude. And when he has gone, Felix arrives to meet the long lost family.

And we are off. The decadent Europeans meet the upright, puritanical Bostonians. As well as Gertrude there is her sister Charlotte, much more of a decent young woman, her solid and stolid father, the picture of righteousness, and her brother Clifford who has shocked the family by being suspended from Harvard for sixth months for getting drunk. He is characterised as a delightfully innocent young man who desperately wishes to have amorous complications but is far too shy to achieve them, so he becomes gauche instead. Clifford is a brilliant character and, again, it is all there is the dialogue. Show, don't tell!

The Actons are around as well. Robert traded in China and his sister Lizzie (a pert little miss in the single scene she is allowed to play) is supposed to be on the verge of becoming engaged to Clifford.

So the scene is set for a classic romantic comedy:

• Will Felix try to seduce Charlotte or Gertrude?
• Will Gertrude end up with Felix or Mr Brand (does he have a first name?)
• Will Clifford or Robert Acton  end up with the Baroness?

Throughout, the dialogue is beautifully constructed and the conversation scintillating and brilliant. But unlike Oscar Wilde, there are no epigrams for the sake of epigrams. These people say the things they say because of who they are. There are no epigrams but there are some absolutely delightful quotes:

• "She seems to me like a singer singing an air. You can't tell till the song is done." (Chapter 3)
• "Forming an opinion - say on a person's conduct - was with Mr Wentworth a good deal like fumbling in a lock with a key chosen at hazard." (Chapter 7)
• "We may sometimes point out a road we are unable to follow." (Chapter 7)
• "If we have ever had any virtue among us, we had better keep hold of it now." (Chapter 9)

The only thing that I didn't like in this book (and I have said this repeatedly in this blog) is when the author uses a foreign language without any translation. I hate this! It is Henry James saying: I have lived in Paris; I can speak French. If you're going to write for an English (or American) audience WRITE IN ENGLISH!!

Apart from that I adored this little book.

Other James books I have read and reviewed:
Washington Square which has a similar theme: will the Doctor prevent his daughter from contracting a marriage with the unsuitable man with whom she has fallen in love?
What Maisie Knew: Maisie grows up unwanted by either of her parents who are too involved with having affairs and getting married again. The only people who seem to want her are her step-parents. Can there be a happy ending?

March 2016; 173 pages

"Bel Canto" by Ann Patchett

Loved it.

The winner of the 2002 Women's Prize for fiction.

"When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her" is a great first line. Within a few lines we are hooked, wondering why the lights went out. And then the terrorists burst in.

It is a birthday party for the head of a Japanese company hosted in the house of the Vice President of a Spanish American country which hopes that the Japanese company will invest in their country. The mogul is an opera fan so his favourite diva has been paid a fortune to sing. There are many honoured guests including the French ambassador, a Monsignor and a humble priest who loves opera and knew a friend of a friend. The president should have been there - it was him the terrorists were hoping to kidnap - but he stayed away to watch his favourite TV programme. So the terrorists (three generals and a bunch of teenagers) take the guests hostage and settle in for a long siege.

Under these conditions, people learn to appreciate different things, people change, people learn about themselves and others. Most of the besieged are mesmerised by the singing and the charisma of the great opera star. The French ambassador realises how much and how deeply he loves his wife. The Vice President settles into his role as a host and starts to clean his own house, for the first time ever taking pleasure in doing domestic chores. Gen the translator, a shadow of the media, becomes the most important person in this polyglot micro-world. Love begins to blossom.

The teenage soldiers are really children. Exposed to things they have never experienced before, they begin show previously hidden talents. One is a wonderful singer who could be an opera star. One learns to play chess. One learns how to tell the time. But hanging over them is the shadow of their inevitable fate. They are children but they are doomed.

Patchett writes beautifully. The story is told from multiple points of view, a difficult perspective but we never lose sight of who is thinking what. There are perfectly formed descriptions which tell just enough and never too much. There are moments of lyrical love, love in all its aspects, and there are moments of brutality and fear and there are some very funny bits as well (my favourite is Beatriz, a girl terrorist soldier with a wonderfully teenaged attitude problem). But we never forget the tension and the end which is coming.

This is a book which makes you glory in the joy of life and the potential of human beings and the wonder of love and then breaks your heart.

Is there anything in the fact that Carmen, one of the female soldiers, shares her name with the tragic eponymous heroine of Bizet's Opera and that Beatriz, another female soldier, whose name means 'brings joy' is the literally poisonous eponymous heroine of Rappacini's Daughter, a Spanish American opera which premièred in 1991?

Wow.

March 2016; 318 pages

Patchett has also written Commonwealth, a very different book although it is also told from multiple points of view. It is about an American 'blended' family. The six children run wild in their summer holidays. Tragedy results. Guilt haunts. Read it!

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

"The Broken Heart" by John Ford

To be honest, this play is a bit of a ragbag. Perhaps the version we have isn't complete. RADA cut out the subplot of the soldiers and the ladies in waiting without losing anything; they also cut out the cheeky male servant of Bassanes. But they couldn't tidy it up completely without rewriting an entirely new play.

There are a number of starts that show potential and then get forgotten. For example, in A1S3 Orgilus goes into hiding as a poor scholar and is recruited to act as a messenger between his sister and her lover. This is done with a lot of comedy and it has the potential to be a running comic theme or, alternatively, should Orgilus seek to bar the match, to have a lot of sinister possibilities. That's the last we hear of it. Orgilus approves his sister's match, despite Prophilus being best friend of the hated Ithocles, so the whole episode of his sister's promise and her marriage fizzles out into a sub-plot with no drama left in it.

There are bits that just confuse. In A3S2 Bassanes and Graulis are creeping through the palace at night. Why? They are discovered. So what? They are told off for disturbing Ithocles. Some time later Bassanes 'realises' that Penthea is with Ithocles and thinks that the brother and sister are having an incestuous fling (Ford had a bit of a thing about brother sister sex) and draws his swortd but it really doesn't spring form the tiptoeing in.

Mostly the problems with the play come from the characters sudden changes. Bassanes is a brilliant self-tortured jealous husband, a sort of comedy Othello, but when Penthea protests her innocence switches into an adoring and rueful man. Even one of the servants thinks he must have been gelded. One moment Nearchus is jealous that Calantha has given her ring to Ithocles, the next he is cool that they are getting married. Calantha is dancing when she hears that her father, her best friend and her fiancee are dead; she dances on. Later she explains that she was just messing with our minds. Someone is.

Ithocles has, before the play starts, done something shockingly bad by splitting betrothed sweethearts Orgilus and Penthea and forcing Penthea to marry the older Bassanes. Orgilus seems to forgive him for most of the play but then enacts his bloody revenge. Penthea forgives Ithocles so much that she pleads his suit to Princess Calantha.

This play should be strangled at birth were it not for moments of perfect poetry. There is a lot of spectacle: singing, dancing, murder, suicide and there is comedy but it lacks convincing psychology for most of the characters.

I first saw this on Friday 17th April 2015 at the Sam Wanamaker playhouse (the covered playhouse in the Globe complex) sitting on backless wooden benches; the discomfort rather distracted from my enjoyment of the play.

I saw this at RADA on Saturday 19th March. Luke Brady was a rather comic king Amycles, good humoured even when dying, and a suitably serious Tecnicus. Polly Mirsch was perfect as Penthea in the mad scene; her body language was wonderfully nervous and her delivery extracted the full poetic value of the lines. Tom Edward-Kane as Bassanes had perfect comic timing as he traded insults with Grausis, equally well played by Jordon Stevens. Even the grunts carried pathos and comedy.

Ithocles is a hell of a part. He is a successful soldier who did this very bad thing as a boy and now regrets it. He has to reconcile himself to Penthea, woo Calantha and trade insults with Nearchus and his servant. This is a character more unstable than mercurial, bordering on the schizoid. Thomas Martin was convincingly brash and aggressive and if he never seemed overly upset when his sister died perhaps that reflected the ambitious bastard he was playing.

Matt Gavan was excellent as a sinister and bitter Orgilus. He resisted the temptation to ham up the sinister asides. I don't know how anyone could play the 'nice' Orgilus and convince the audience that Orgilus is deceiving everyone by this act. Gavan's Orgilus was at his best when he killed and when he died.

The director, Iqbal Khan, notes the "challenges of this complex and profoundly moving play". I think RADA has been brave to attempt it and the reward for their courage has been a successful production.

This is a somewhat abbreviated synopsis of a complicated plot

Act One:
Scene 1: We are in Sparta. Orgilus explains to his father, Crotolon, why he is going to Athens. He had been betrothed to Penthea but when her father died her brother Ithocles married her off to Bassanes. But Bassanes is jealous, believing she will run off with Orgilus (which Orgilus protests he does not intend) and mistreating his new wife because of this. Orgilus believes that his departure to Athens will stop Bassanes being jealous.
Before leaving, Orgilus makes his sister Euphranes promise that she will not get married without his permission. A brother or course is in charge of his sister's sex life.
Scene 2: Ithacles has been victorious in war and Princess Calantha crowns him with a laurel wreath in the poresence of her father King Amyclas. They depart to leave a couple of soldiers Groneas and Hemophil who comically woo (by boasting of their martial exploits) reluctant ladies in waiting Christalla and Philelma. When the scornful ladies leave G and H resolve to 'treat em mean to make them keen'.
Scene 3: Ogilus hasn't gone to Athens but disguised himself as a scholar at the philosophy school of Ternicus. O then sees his sister and Prophilus courting; O walks past with his nose in a book. E admits she loves P but needs to get permission from dad and brother. E fears they are overheard by O but when he realises that O is just a poor scholar (O talks academic nonsense) promises to buy him books if he will act as go-between.
Scenes 2 and 3 could easily be played for comic effect possibly with a sinister undertone, which might make the later descent into revenge and hatred a greater and more shocking contrast.

Act Two:
Scene 1: This is a brilliant scene. The two servants are both very funny and very astute. Bassanes, the jealous husband, tells Phulas his servant to block a window to prevent his wife lusting; he threatens to harm Phulas is Mrs B (Penthea) receives a letter; the extravagance of Bassanes' threats makes this scene wonderful. Phulas, pretending to be an idiot, tells his the news: multi-coloured beards, dancing bears and dragons and oh by the way there's a new law mandating divorce in cases where the husband becomes jealous. B, who mixes adoration of Penthea with vexatious aggression, has a right old ding dong with her maid, old Grausius, whom he calls a "juggling bawd ... damnable bitch-fox" and threatens to "chop thee into collops". But when all but B and G leave the stage he suborns her into spying on her mistress, a role which she accepts.
Scene 2: Ithocles, successful general, soliloquises on ambition. Armostes and Crotolon enter, arguing, A trying to persuade C to let Euphranes marry Prophilus; C saying they must wait till Orgilus gives permission. I joins the argument, recommending Prophilus but C is bitter and angry, reminding I of the part he played in tsaking Penthea from Orgilus and marrying her to Bassanes. I admits it was a foolish act of a young boy and offers reparation. C agrees that E should marry P.
A load of people now come in: E who agrees with her father C that she will marry Prophilus; B and Penthea, B still suspicious etc; when they go I is left with Penthea and arranges a private rendezvous in the palace grove. Bassanes overhears and is suspicious: "If I be a cuckold and can know it,/I will be fell, and fell."
Scene 3: Prophilus has escorted Penthea to the grove where he leaves her under the 'protection' of the disguised Orgilus. The disguised 'scholar' speaks words of love to Penthea who tells him to get lost. But then O reveals himself. She is torn between her marriage vows and her betrothal love for O. She decides that O doesn't deserve second dibs and she will stay true to Bassanes. She tells him again to go and he goes. Now B comes in with Grausis whom he scolds roundly for falling asleep, so failing in her trust. They meet Penthea and then all go off to see Ithocles who, aparently, has been taken ill.

Act Three:
Scene 1: Tecnicus warns Orgilus against doing something stupid: "let not a resolution/ Of giddy rashness choke the breath of reason." T is acting as the old man who warns the young hero in a fairy tale. But Orgilus is determined to go back to the world. Tecnicus gives a speech warning him that "real honour/ Is the reward of virtue" and "He then fails/ In honour, who for lucre or revenge/ Commits thefts, murders, treasons, and adulteries ... honour must be grounded/ On knowledge, not opinion". O goes and Armostes enters, bringing a casket contain a prohecy of the Delphic oracle; the King summons T to give counsel about it.
Scene 2: Someone sings a song asking whether you can do impossible things such as "paint a thought" or "Rob a virgin's honour chastely?" Bassanes and Grausis are creeping through the palace. Ithocles is with his twin sister Penthea; he is dying. He apologises to her for marrying her off to Bassanes instead of Orgilus. Penthea is bitter, she loved O and is a whore for being married to B when promised to O. She wants I to kill her. I tells her he loves Calantha, princess of Sparta, but C doesn't know it, nor even Prophilus his best mate. Bassanes enters with others and a dagger; he thinks that Ithocles is making advances to Penthea. Ithocles, obviously feeling a bit better, draws his sword. Penthea tells Bassanes she hasn't been unfaithful and he, slightly swiftly and unconvincingly, declares her a chaste goddess and kneels for forgiveness. Ithocles decides that B is unstable and he must protect his sister; lots leave and only B and G remain.
This is getting complicated.
Scene 3: King Amyclas is about to betroth Calanthus his daughter and heir to Nearchus, king of Argos. I, who loves her secretly, and O, who hates I, arrive. I apologises to O for the wrong he has done him and promises to serve him faithfully.
Scene 4: O tells his dad C that he likes and respects Prophilus but that he can't forget that P is I's best mate. C is angry with O and suspicious that he 'came back from Athens' before even being sent for; he suspects O; O lies and tells him that Athens has an infection.
Scene 5: Penthea, forecasting her own imminent demise, asks Calantha to be her executrix and tells C that I loves her.

Act Four
Scene 1: Nearchus is wooing Calantha, trying to take from her a ring. She throws it on the ground near I who picks it up and returns it. Nearchus and his servant have the hump. Tecnicus has a sealed prophecy for the King and says he is going away forever. He tells Ithocles: "When youth is ripe, and age from time doth part,/The lifeless trunk shall wed the broken heart." He tells Orgilus: "Let craft with courtesy a while confer, / Revenge proves its own executioner." O assumes that T is in his dotage.
Scene 2: Bassanes is sorry for being jealous. Too late. Penthea has gone mad and let her hair down (the stage direction says she enters with "her hair about her ears". In some wonderful poetry she regrets she won't have children, recognises Orgilus as one she once loved and then faints. She hasn't slept or eaten for ten days.
Scene 3: The King Amyclas is dying. He doesn't understand the explanation of the oracle. When Calantha asks to marry Ithocles he assents, even though he had previously planned for her to marry Nearchus. Orgilus, in a sinister aside, notes of Ithocles that :"The youth is up on tiptoe, yet may stumble."
Scene 4: Penthea is dead. Ithocles is caught in a booby trapped chair prepared for him by Orgilus who then stabs him to death.

Act Five:
Scene 1: The remorseful Bassanes is scared of Orgilus
Scene 2: Calantha is dancing. As she does, Armostes whispers that her dad the king is dead. She goes on dancing and he is shocked. Then Bassanes tells her Penthea is dead. She dances on and he is shocked. Then Orgilus tells her Ithocles is murdered. She keeps dancing to the end and he is "thunderstruck". Then she tells the company that she heard these rumours and Orgilus confesses freely he killed Ithocles. She condemns him to death. He chooses to bleed to death; he himself will be the surgeon. He dies.
Scene 3: Calantha, now queen, makes various appointments. Then she puts a ring on the finger of the corpse of ithocles. She kisses him and her heart breaks; she dies. Armostes remembers the prohecy: "The Lifeless Trunk shall wed the Broken Heart".

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

"The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde

This famous story, rated 27th in The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time, is fundamentally a retelling of the story of Faust.

The bargain is made between protagonist Dorian Gray (DG) and the painting, and Lord Henry Wootton (LHW) is the tempter, Mephistopheles to Dorian’s Faust.

LHW is a knowing Mephistopheles. He realises that his influence will be to corrupt Dorian. “All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view. ... Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul.” (Ch 2) But he goes on to encourage Dorian to be tempted: “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” (Ch 2) Later, LHW determines to possess DG’s soul: “He would make that wonderful spirit his own.” (Ch 3) Later, DG acknowledges their relationship: “I cannot help telling you things. You have a curious influence over me. If I ever did a crime, I would come and confess it to you. You would understand me.” (Ch 4)

But when DG falls, he falls: “If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!” (Ch 2). This is a very explicit Faustian bargain.

Or is this novel a retelling of the story of Frankenstein?

If LHW is Mephistopheles and Dorian is Faust, what is the role for Basil Hallward, who actually creates the painting? In a sense, as creator, he is God. The story opens in Basil’s studio which is surrounded by a beautiful garden. Is this the garden of Eden? Is the artist in the act of creation a proxy for God? Or is he to be regarded as usurping the powers of God, as Victor Frankenstein did?

Basil is instantly afraid of what he has created. In chapter one, foreshadowing the eventual denouement, he tells LHW “we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.” He goes on to say that he will not exhibit the painting because “I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.” and finally, he warns LHW: “Don’t spoil him. Don’t try to influence him. Your influence would be bad.” Perhaps we can regard Basil as having foreknowledge, another god-like attribute.

Finally, Basil returns to Dorian to warn him about the rumours he has heard. In this sense he acts like Dorian’s conscience (in Freudian terms, the superego) which is another God-like property. Dorian shows Basil the disfigured painting which makes Basil urge Dorian to pray. Instead, Dorian murders Basil. God, as Nietzsche later said, is dead.

Dorian Gray is a paean to the importance of beauty?

There is a fundamental association in this book between beauty and moral goodness. The aesthetic movement in which Oscar Wilde was prominent was obsessed with beauty. In his preface, Wilde says: “The artist is the creator of beautiful things. ... Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. ... Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect.”

The trouble with idolising beauty is that it equates ugliness with badness. This happens repeatedly through the book. For example:

• One woman is described as “a perfect saint amongst women, but so dreadfully dowdy that she reminded one of a badly bound hymn-book” (Ch 3)
• “I can sympathize with everything except suffering,” said Lord Henry ... “It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing.” (Ch 3)
• The lower class characters are inevitably ugly. Sibyl Vane’s mother Is a “faded, tired-looking woman” with “thin, bismuth-whitened hands” (Ch 5). The theatre manager and usurer (inevitably, in those anti-Semitic days, a Jew) is “hideous” with “greasy ringlets”, a “soiled shirt” and “an air of gorgeous servility”. (Ch 4) Harriet’s brother “was thick-set of figure, and his hands and feet were large and somewhat clumsy in movement. He was not so finely bred as his sister.” (Ch 5) The audience in the music hall are described as “common rough people, with their coarse faces and brutal gestures” (Ch 7)
• It’s not just that DG’s portrait grows old. It reflects his soul and here the equivalence of goodness with beauty, of wickedness with ugliness, is made explicit. “What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty and eat away its grace. They would defile it and make it shameful.” (Ch 10)
• After rumours begin to circulate that DG is wicked and immoral, they are not believed because DG looks so pretty. “Even those who had heard the most evil things against him—and from time to time strange rumours about his mode of life crept through London and became the chatter of the clubs—could not believe anything to his dishonour when they saw him. He had always the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the world.” (Ch 11) Basil Hallward has heard the rumours but can’t believe them: “At least, I can’t believe them when I see you. Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.” (Ch 12)

This equation of prettiness with moral rectitude is hugely simplistic and highly prejudicial. Such shallow thinking undermines any suggestion that Wilde might have had some sort of insight into the nature of life.

Homosexuality

There are hints of homosexuality throughout:

• The reference to the Satyricon, whose narrator and protagonist is gay.
• The hero of the ‘yellow’ book imagines himself as Elagabalus, a notoriously gay teenaged Roman Emperor. (Ch 11)
• The ‘yellow’ book also mentions “the young Cardinal Archbishop of Florence, child and minion of Sixtus IV., whose beauty was equalled only by his debauchery, and who ... gilded a boy that he might serve at the feast as Ganymede or Hylas” (Ch 11)
• In Chapter 12, Basil asks Dorian: “Why is your friendship so fatal to young men? There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable. What about Adrian Singleton and his dreadful end? What about Lord Kent’s only son and his career? I met his father yesterday in St. James’s Street. He seemed broken with shame and sorrow. What about the young Duke of Perth? What sort of life has he got now? What gentleman would associate with him?” The book was written in 1890- 1891, shortly after the law criminalising homosexuality had been passed (1885) and very shortly after the Cleveland Street scandal when a male brothel catering to aristocrats was discovered in London. Suicide, self-exile, shame and ostracism were in those days the common ends of gentlemen in society who were outed as homosexuals.
• DG is described by LHW as “this son of love and death”. On a literal level it describes Dorian’s parentage: his mother ran away with a soldier and died in giving birth to him. He is also likened to Adonis, whose own birth came through the incestuous coupling of his mother Myrrha with her own (unknowing) father; he was discovered by Aphrodite, the goddess of love who later fell in love with him, and taken to be fostered by Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. He was also loved by Apollo, taking the feminine role in their relationship. So Adonis was bisexual.

But there are alternative interpretations. Adrian Singleton is revealed to be an opium addict.

The plot

The book starts in the painting studio of artist Basil Hallward, who is making the portrait of a beautiful young man, Dorian Gray. Lord Henry Wootton sits in on the sitting and points out that the portrait will stay beautiful while Dorian grows old: “there is such a little time that your youth will last” (Ch 2) Dorian wishes it was the other way around. “If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!” (Ch 2). Be careful what you wish for ...

Dorian then becomes infatuated with an actress called Sybil Vane. It is interesting that he becomes entranced by a person whose profession is to pretend, to make convincing fakes. He becomes obsessed with her and she falls in love with him. They become engaged. But then he watches a performance in which she acts badly; he sees through the illusion. He repudiates her and she, heart-broken, kills herself.

It is now that he notices for the first time that the portrait has changed.

He realises that the portrait, like the scapegoat laden with the sins of the community and driven out into the desert, or like Jesus, crucified for the sins of mankind, the portrait represents for him a ‘get out of jail free’ card. It will suffer (there is a hint that we might be talking about STIs such as syphilis) while he will lead a charmed and charming life. Not only that, but he could monitor his rake’s progress through the image it portrayed: “This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul. ... Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be strong, and fleet, and joyous. What did it matter what happened to the coloured image on the canvas? He would be safe. That was everything.” (Ch 8)

Now he embarks upon his wicked progress through the world. He hosts lavish parties. He is inspired by a ‘yellow’ book which LHW has given him to host lavish parties and become a connoisseur and collector. His early dissipations involve little more than collecting beautiful objects: Gothic art, perfumes, music, jewels, embroideries, ecclesiastical vestments etc. These things don’t seem so terribly wicked in themselves, although one might argue that Dorian’s incredible wealth might be put to better use. Perhaps the wickedness lies in the intemperance. In Dante’s Inferno, the sinners in hell include those who are misers and those who are extravagant; Dante, like most mediaeval thinkers, was following Aristotle's lead in saying that virtue lies in not going to extremes.

Basil Hallward, disturbed by the rumours about Dorian (though he can’t believe them), comes to warn Dorian that he is in danger of losing his good name. They argue and Dorian shows Basil the picture. Horrified, Basil tries to make Dorian pray, instead Dorian murders him. He pays someone to dispose of the body.

He revisits scenes of dissipation and begins to regret his lifestyle choices. Finally, after another discussion with LHW, he returns home and stabs the portrait. He is discovered dead with the dagger in his own heart. The portrait has reverted to its beauty; Dorian has, in death, become old and disgusting.

The parties

There is a reference to the Satyricon. Dorian hopes that he will become to London what Petronius, thought to be the author of the Satyricon, was to the Rome of Nero, its style guru, its Beau Brummel. But the Satyricon is also famous for the section describing Trimalchio's banquet and this could well be the inspiration for Dorian’s parties (Trimalchio is also referenced by F Scott Fitzgerald when talking about the parties thrown by The Great Gatsby). Furthermore the Satyricon's hero is openly gay which reinforces the homosexual theme.

The yellow book

He reads a 'yellow' book that LHW has given him. There has been critical discussion about which book this was. It can't refer to the "Yellow Book" magazine since DG was published in April 1891 and the YBmag was published between 1894 and 1897. Rather, the yellowness probably refers to the fact the lascivious French novels were often wrapped in yellow paper.

Wilde tells us: “It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediæval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book.” (Ch 10)

Also: “The hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life had himself known this curious fancy. In the seventh chapter he tells how, crowned with laurel, lest lightning might strike him, he had sat, as Tiberius, in a garden at Capri, reading the shameful books of Elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him and the flute-player mocked the swinger of the censer; and, as Caligula, had caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables and supped in an ivory manger with a jewel-frontleted horse; and, as Domitian, had wandered through a corridor lined with marble mirrors, looking round with haggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger that was to end his days, and sick with that ennui, that terrible tædium vitæ, that comes on those to whom life denies nothing; and had peered through a clear emerald at the red shambles of the circus and then, in a litter of pearl and purple drawn by silver-shod mules, been carried through the Street of Pomegranates to a House of Gold and heard men cry on Nero Caesar as he passed by; and, as Elagabalus, had painted his face with colours, and plied the distaff among the women, and brought the Moon from Carthage and given her in mystic marriage to the Sun.” (Ch 11)

Many critics have opted for À rebours by French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans whose single character, Jean des Esseintes, is eccentric and reclusive, the final descendant of an aristocratic family. He retreats into an aesthetic world of literature, painting and religion. The title, which means Against Nature, might refer to the author's reaction against Naturalism, the Zola dominated style in which he had previously worked, although he retained the use of minute detail to achieve verisimilitude.

Evaluation

While the ‘yellow’ book is described as “a novel without a plot”, Dorian Gray is fundamentally an allegory with little more than plot. The characters are mostly puppets playing their preordained roles. Dorian is sometimes interesting but his soliloquies are marred by melodrama. I found LHW a most unsatisfactory character. He is a character who seems to speak entirely in epigrams, which makes him a witty and charming dinner party conversationalist, according to the book, although to me he sounded shallow. His typical gambit is to voice a paradox or a controversial view. There is no attempt to justify his platitudes, or to offer any evidence in their support. He just spouts, like an oracle, and then moves on. Even Dorian criticises him for this telling him: “You cut life to pieces with your epigrams.” (Ch 8) I quickly became bored of his interminable witticisms. Basil, who has the advantage of an interesting perspective on life, is missing for the bulk of the narrative, only required to start the whole thing off and then wheeled on later to be murdered. The lower-class characters are unsurprisingly stereotyped. It is the failure of characters that undermine the claims of this book to be considered a masterpiece. Its position in the canon is due to the conception, which is brilliant.

Selected quotes:

• “The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.” (Ch 1) The bourdon note comes from a stopped organ pipe and is a very low note, strong in fundamental, which creates a sort of humming buzz; its name derives from the French for bumblebee. OW is at once separating London from the beautiful garden surrounding the beautifully decorated artist’s studio that he has so far described, and simultaneously making London the background for the work of art he is creating. It’s also interesting that he has chosen an unusual word, as though to emphasise his own vocabulary.
• “I really can’t see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus” (Ch 1)
• “beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.” (Ch 1)
• “The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.” (Ch 2). This is a very egotistical perspective on life.
• “Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.” (Ch 2)
• “His father ... had retired from the diplomatic service in a capricious moment of annoyance on not being offered the Embassy at Paris, a post to which he considered that he was fully entitled by reason of his birth, his indolence, the good English of his dispatches, and his inordinate passion for pleasure.” (Ch 3)
• “the one advantage of having coal was that it enabled a gentleman to afford the decency of burning wood on his own hearth” (Ch 3)
• “In politics he was a Tory, except when the Tories were in office, during which period he roundly abused them for being a pack of Radicals.” (Ch 3)
• “Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.” (Ch 3)
• “The mere shapes and patterns of things becoming, as it were, refined, and gaining a kind of symbolical value, as though they were themselves patterns of some other and more perfect form whose shadow they made real ... Was it not Plato, that artist in thought, who had first analyzed it?” (Ch 3): The Platonic Theory of Forms.
• “Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.” (Ch 3)
• “Philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled before her like frightened forest things.” (Ch 3)
• “I like Wagner’s music better than anybody’s. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says” (Ch 4)
• “Her death has all the pathetic uselessness of martyrdom, all its wasted beauty.” (Ch 9)
• “he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system” (Ch 11)
• “The harsh intervals and shrill discords of barbaric music stirred him at times when Schubert’s grace, and Chopin’s beautiful sorrows, and the mighty harmonies of Beethoven himself, fell unheeded on his ear.” (Ch 11)
• “Society—civilized society, at least—is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef.” (Ch 11)
• “The middle classes air their moral prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper about what they call the profligacies of their betters in order to try and pretend that they are in smart society and on intimate terms with the people they slander. In this country, it is enough for a man to have distinction and brains for every common tongue to wag against him. And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? ... we are in the native land of the hypocrite.” (Ch 12)
• “Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault.” (Ch 16)
• “all sins, as theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience. When that high spirit, that morning star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he fell.” (Ch 16)
• “His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts. Why had he worn its livery? Youth had spoiled him.” (Ch 20)

Dorian Gray is an allegory rather than a novel. Although the concept is brilliant, it lacks complex characters and is further undermined by its social snobbery and aesthetic elitism. 

I first read this and blogged about it in March 2016. This post is the result of a re-reading and re-evauation in March 2024.

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

"Fashionable Nonsense; Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science" by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont

Sokal in 1996 sent a spoof article to "Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity" a cultural studies journal; they published it in a special issue dedicated to rebutting the attacks on postmodernism by scientists. Following the success of this hoax, this book is dedicated to chronicling the absurdities written by postmodern writers such as Jacques Lacan, who asserts "This sort of torus really exists and it is exactly the structure of the neurotic"; Luce Irigaray who claims that Einstein was interested in "accelerations without electromagnetic reequilibrations", whatever they are and the E=mc2 is a sexist equation because it "privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us"; Jean Baudrillard who talks of "Our complex, metastatic, viral systems, condemned to the exponential dimension alone (be it that of exponential stability of instability), to eccentricity and indefinite fractal scissiparity, can no longer come to an end."; and of course Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari who assert among many other things that "a function is a Slow-motion".

In between these dissections of the bizarre assertions of these writers (why do they all seem to be Francophone?) these authors make some excellent points about the Scientific method, undermining the strict Popperian falsification thesis, whilst denying the Duhem-Quine underdetermination thesis with some sound common sense.

"There are several ways to swim, and all of them have their limitations, but it is not true that all bodily movements are equally good ... There is no unique method of criminal investigation, but this does not mean that all methods are equally reliable (think about trial by fire)." (p 80)

The analyses of daft postmodernists tend to get a bit boring but the understanding of these writers about how science really works seems to be spot on.

March 2016; 279 pages

"The Discarded Image" by C S Lewis

This is a book about the Medieval world view written by the master of medieval literature who also happened to be the author of the Narnia books (and therefore of interest to me in my researches into liminality) and a Science fiction trilogy starting with Out of the Silent Planet.

Lewis argues that the Medieval Model, their cosmological picture of the Universe, appeared in modified form throughout their poetry, even down to Paradise Lost.

Lewis sees medieval man as fundamentally "an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems", instancing the codes of chivalry and courtly love, the Summa of Aquinas and the Divine Comedy of Dante (p 10)  but what particularly distinguished the medieval academic from those of either before or after was his heavy reliance on the written word: "They are bookish. They are indeed very credulous of books. They find it hard that anything an old auctour has said is simply untrue." (p 11) But Lewis is writing about literature and what he calls the "backcloth for the arts" selects from the Model of the Universe "only what is intelligible to a layman, and only what makes it appeal to imagination and emotion." (p 14)

He writes briefly about dreams. Microbius, following the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus from the 1st century AD, divides dreams into five, the first three useful (because prophetic) and 'true': (p 63)

• allegorical (p 63)
• prophetic giving a vision of the future (p 64)
• oracular: listening to someone forecasting the future (p 64)
• preoccupied: reviewing the events of the day (p 64)
• surreal including nightmares (p 64)

Lewis goes through the hierarchies of angels of pseudo-Dionysius and is very detailed about the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius but it is his side sayings that are best.

We learn, for example, that Medieval man had little sense of aporia:

• "All sense of the pathless, the baffling and the utterly alien - all agoraphobia - is so markedly absent from medieval poetry when it leads us, as so often, into the sky." (p 99)
• Dante "is like a man being conducted through an immense cathedral, not like one lost in a shoreless sea." (p 100)
• Medieval literature is swamped by the classics and 'even' Arab influences and there is very little room for old Norse, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon influences save for some of the old romances and ballads,"things that can only live on the margins of the mind" (p 9)

There are one or two horrible bits of racism when he speaks degradingly of Africans trying to ape Western culture; he clearly thinks they are too savage.

But there are also a number of little gems:

• the Antipodes was the region where people had their feet on backwards (p 28)
• "Nothing about a literature can be more essential than the language it uses" (p 6)
• the words feigned, figment and fiction have a common root (p 65)
• as do the words 'grammar' and 'glamour' which both mean scholarship (p 187)
• "The beauty of clothes is either theirs (the richness of the stuff) or the skill of the tailor - nothing will make it ours." (p 83) ... "Nobility is only the fame ... of our ancestors' virtue." (p 84)
• "Medieval art was deficient in perspective, and poetry followed suit. Nature, for Chaucer, is all foreground; we never get a landscape." (p 101)

Overall this was a well-written and delightfully illuminating book.

March 2016; 223 pages

Read my review of the biography of C S Lewis: a tender account of a man who was first class mediaeval scholar but became a best seller in three different ways.

"Washington Square" by Henry James

James is sometimes considered as one of the originators of the modern novel but this is a rather old fashioned book; written in 1880, the year before the Portrait of a Lady, it comes close to the end of the early James. The story is straightforward and narrated in a linear fashion by a third person omniscient narrator who from time to time speaks directly to the narrator. The sentences are simple and straightforward without the convoluted sentences of his later prose.

The story revolves around Catherine Sloper, the plain, dull-witted but determined daughter of a rich New York doctor. Catherine, who has an excellent income left to her by her late mother and prospects of considerably more when her father dies, is courted by Morris Townsend, an idler who has already run through one fortune and is clearly intending to marry Catherine for her money. Dr Sloper is determined to put a stop to this, taking Catherine for a year abroad to Europe to forget him and threatening to cut her out of his will if she does marry Townsend. However, the Doctor's widowed sister Mrs Penniman, who is a foolish woman obsessed with the ideals of romantic fiction, schemes and plots to bring the young lovers together (this allows a certain amount of comedy: all the other characters are exasperated by Mrs Penniman's foolish contrivances). Most importantly, Catherine has fallen in love with Morris. But Morris wants the Doctor's money as well.

It is a tight little book and the four characters are well drawn. One feels very sorry for Catherine, crushed between the determination of her father and her own love of a man she gradually comes to realise doesn't love her back. One suspects the worst but I won't spoil it by telling you what happens.

In many ways it reminded me of The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope in which the stubborn woman marries the waster despite her father and then lives to regret it.

Selected quotes:

• Mrs Penniman, at this, looked thoughtful a moment. 'My dear Austin,' she then inquired, 'do you think it is better to be clever than good?'
• 'Good for what?' asked the Doctor. 'You are good for nothing unless you are clever.' (Ch 2)
• Catherine was always agitated by an introduction; it seemed a difficult moment, and she wondered that some people ... should mind it so little. (Ch 4) I came across this characteristic again in the protagonist of Dostoevsky's short novel The Double
• 'Well, I never knew a foreigner!' said young Townsend, in a tone which seemed to indicate that his ignorance had been optional. (Ch 5)

A nice little book and soooooooo much easier to read than the later James.

March 2016; 151 pages

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

"Doctor Thorne" by Anthony Trollope

Doctor Thorne is the third in Trollope's Barsetshire series of novels coming after The Warden and Barchester Towers.

Doctor Thorne, a cousin of the grand Thornes of Ullathorne who appear in Barchester Towers, is a simple country daughter who lives with his niece Mary. Mary's parentage is mysterious, though as is usually with Trollope the mystery lasts no more than a few pages; I have never met any novelist more determined to give the game away. Mary's father was Doctor Thorne's rakish brother Henry who seduced and impregnated Roger Scatcherd's sister; as a result Roger, a stonemason and great drinker, bashed Henry to death (getting six months for manslaughter; who said modern courts were lenient!) and the mother got married and moved to America leaving the baby girl in the care of her uncle the doctor.

Roger Scatcherd's wife had also been wet nurse to Francis Gresham, son and heir of Greshambury.

Twenty one years on, Frank comes of age. He has more or less grown up with Mary around and he has fallen in love with her. But his family estate is burdened with debts. Already Roger Scatcherd, who has made a fortune post-prison as a railway magnate, has bought a significant portion of the estate and Frank's dad owes Roger another eighty thousand pounds or so. So Frank's family want him to marry money and stop making love to Mary. They (and everyone else except the Doctor who soon confides in Roger, now Sir Roger (Bart)) are unaware that Mary is potentially the heiress to Sir Roger's three hundred thousand pounds.

Frank is sent away to de Courcey Castle (despite protesting that he needs to go back to Cambridge where he is close to finishing his degree) to meet Miss Dunstable, heiress to the Oil of Lebanon fortune, who turns out to be a terrible funny, sensible girl who really likes Frank as a friend but, after he proposes to her, advises him to marry Mary. This proposal comes in the centre of the book and is, in one sense, the turning point. This is the growing up of Frank, the point from which his boyish passion is replaced by a manly love. From now on, although Frank will be tempted, we are sure that (with the repeated assistance of Miss Dunstable the good fairy) he will stay true to Mary.

The main tribulations seem to be around sending Frank away for varying periods of time and preventing communication between him and Mary (either deliberately or through the vagaries of the Post Office). At the start these 'cooling off periods' are necessary so that various other plot elements have time to come to fruition. Towards the end, when there is yet another fortnight delay, the aim seems merely to be to pad out the novel: was Trollope paid per word?

In the end, what we all knew was going to happen from the start happens and they all live happily ever after (except Augusta who is betrayed a second time in a rather nasty chapter that could easily be removed entirely from the narrative).

A fairy story with a bad witch, a good fairy, a young romantic hero, an ineffective Baron Hardup, and a sweet innocent Cinderella who is transformed from rags to riches. The only truly brilliant character is Miss Dunstable, a lady past her prime marrying age who nevertheless enjoys the attention of strings of would-be husbands on account of the Oil of Lebanon but who stays sane whilst being pursued by these unspeakables by having a brilliant sense of humour. Otherwise the characters are either too good to be true (Dr Thorne, Mary, Frank, Beatrice, the Squire, even Sir Roger, his wife etc) or pure villains such as Sir Louis and the avaricious and extravagant Lady Arabella.

Another Trollope. March 2016, 468 pages

I have also read and reviewed Trollope's Palliser novels:

• Can You Forgive Her? in which Alice Vavasor oscillates backwards and forwards between goody two shoes John Grey and her wicked cousin George Vavasor. This book is blessed with a humorous counterpoint as rich and merry widow Mrs Greenow oscillates between rich farmer Mr Cheesacre who repeatedly tells everyone how well to do he is and penniless chancer and fraud 'Captain' Bellfield; the funniest of the palliser books
• Phineas Finn, Irish charmer Phineas enters parliament and seeks marriage with Violet Effingham (he fights a duel over her) or Laura Standish (who rejects him for dour Scot Mr Kennedy whom Phineas subsequently saves from muggers) whilst being pursued by a poor Irish girl from home. Phineas suffers political tribulations but the best part of the book is the sadness over Laura's marriage.
• The Eustace Diamonds, The wonderful minx Lizzie Eustace, who has married a dying man for diamonds and is determined to keep them despite legal attempts to win them back for the family, is Trollope's best character. She lies, she manipulates and she breaks the law to retian what she has convinced herself is rightfully hers.
• Phineas Redux Phineas returns, is again embroiled in woman trouble, and stands trial for murder. This should be the most exciting of the Trollope books were it not for the fact that Trollope writres his own spoilers.
• The Prime Minister Plantagent Palliser, Duke of Omnium, becomes Prime Minister of a coalition but he is too concerned for his honour to be a successful leader and he struggles on the rack of his own conscience
• The Duke's Children in which Plantagenet's children do their best to make unsuitable matches. The Duke finds it hard to apply his own liberal principles to his children.