"Gone for Good" by Harlan Coben

Eleven years ago Will's girlfriend was murdered. The prime suspect was his brother who went missing. Now Will believes his brother is back. And then his new girlfriend goes missing.

A classic thriller full of levels of duplicity, exotic characters including an assassin nicknamed The Ghost and a yoga teacher cum homeless charity van driver with a tattoo on his forehead, and twists all the way to the end. I thought it was a bit too twisty, to be honest. It kept up the excitement to the end but I'm not sure that I was concerned for the fate of any character.

 Technically Coben has to be the master of the pause. His dialogues are full of moments of business for the characters to think, to accentuate what they have just said, for the reader to think: what the heck, this is exciting and the writer has just pressed the pause button. Moments like: “The shower stopped. I picked up a poppy-seed bagel. The seeds stuck to my hand.” (p 206)

He has some wonderfully dry asides as well:

• “The TV stories gave it lip service that was so tongue-in-cheek you'd expect your television to smirk at you.” (p 24)
• “We took off from LaGuardia, which could be a lousier airport, but not without a serious act of God.” (p 303)

He also has some utterly unforgettable descriptions:

• “Her skin was in that cusp between jaundice and fading summer tan.” (p 1)
• “Raquel was the size of a small principality and dressed like an explosion at the Liberace museum." (p 173) [Raquel is a huge muscled black transvestite.]
• “Hospital rooms normally smell of antiseptic, but this one reeked of male-flight-attendant cologne.” (p 240)
• “The cell reeked of urine and vomit and that sour-vodka smell when a drunk sweats.” (p 244)
• “There were shades of skin colour that could inspire the people at Crayola.” (p 245)

And more great lines:

• “the thing about cliches is that they're often dead-on.” (p 10)
• “I collapsed into the chair and stared at the phone as if it'd tell me what to do. It didn't.” (p 61)
• “Taking the newbies out of circulation eliminates competition. If you live out in the streets, you get ugly in a hurry.” (p 73)
• “Gone before good-bye.” (p260)

The thing about thrillers is when they are so well written as this one they have to be good. October 2017; 383 pages

Another Coben book reviewed in this blog: Hold Tight

"Out of the Silent Planet" by C S Lewis

C S Lewis is famous for his Narnia books though his Space Trilogy starting with this book predated Narnia. These are also allegories in which a character, in this case an eminent philologist, travels to another world and, after a series of adventures with talking nonhumans, meets the planet's 'god'. All the elements are there.

But it is adults. Ransom, a philology don on a walking holiday, is kidnapped by mad professor Weston and treasure hunting Devine and taken on a space ship to Malacandria, a planet where there are three species of rational beings. Quite a lot of the book is taken up with realistic descriptions of the planet and its flora and fauna. Almost exactly half way through comes the crime, or tragedy, that marks the turning point and sends Ransom on a journey to the god of the planet.

There are several moments of homage to H G Wells. At the start of the book Ransom is described as "The Pedestrian" as Wells only ever calls the protagonist of The Time Machine as “The Time Traveller"; both books end with the narrator talking direct to the reader. There is a reference to Ransom having read Wells.

There is a delightful part at the end when one of the other humans, a bad man who arrived with the narrator, is given a speech in which he justifies his desire to colonise the new planet in terms of the march of life, of civilization, and of his own species. This would be heavy going if he just droned on for two or three pages! So his speech must be translated and this opens up first the opportunity for the translator to interrupt so that the speech is broken up by 'business' and second (and most wonderfully) the opportunity for the weasel words in the speech to be explored. Thus "To you I may seem a vulgar robber" becomes "there is a kind of hnau who will take other hnau's food and - and things, when they are not looking. He says he is not an ordinary one of that kind." This is a very clever piece of technique.


Roger Lancelyn Green described the experience of reading Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis: "remembers vividly the thrill of excitement - the sudden moment of joy - when ... he realized in a blinding flash to what Oyarsa was referring ... it was like stepping into a new dimension." (Lancelyn Green and Hooper, 1974, 165)

Great lines:
“The last drops of the thundershower had hardly ceased falling when the Pedestrian stuff his map into his pocket.” (p 1; first line)
“Dressed with that particular kind of shabbiness which marks a member of the intelligentsia on a holiday.” (p 2)
“One of those irritating people who forgets to use their hands when they begin talking.” (p 13) This allows CSL to punctuate the speech with (a) longings of Ransom to see the bottle uncorked and (b) Devine stopping talking to do another bit of the uncorking ceremony.
“It, too, was in the grip of curiosity. Neither dared let the other approach, yet each repeatedly felt the impulse to do so himself, and yielded to it. It was foolish, frightening, ecstatic and unbearable all in one moment. It was more than curiosity. it was like a courtship - like the meeting of the first man and the first woman in the world; it was like something beyond that; so natural is the contact of sexes, so limited the strangeness, so shallow the reticence, so mild the repugnance to be overcome, compared with the first tingling intercourse of two different, but rational, species.” (pp 65 - 66)
“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.” (p 89)
“Would he want his dinner all day or want his sleep after he had slept?” (p 89)
“How could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back - if we did not know that every day in a life filled the whole life with expectation and memory?” (pp 91 - 92)
“I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, no love so sweet, if there were no danger.” (p 92)
“A world is not meant to last for ever, much less a race.” (p 126)
“They are like one trying to lift himself by his own hair - or one trying to see over a whole country when he is on a level with it - like a female trying to beget young on herself.” (p 129)
“What it might mean to grow up seeing always so few miles away a land of colour that could never be reached and had once been inhabited.” (p 130)

This is a fun book. Although there is too much 'world-building' for me I understand that there are a lot of science fiction aficionados who adore that aspect of sci-fi. It is a little dated: it was written in 1938 when Dons did take walking holidays and the working class really did tug their forelocks. I suppose it is a grown-up version of Narnia.

Perhaps another source is Paradise Lost: the mythology of Malacandria does seem to involve the fall of Lucifer and his banishment to the earth.

This author also write two sequels to this book, the Screwtape Letters, and the seven book Narnia series as well as 'The Discarded Image', a fascinating study of mediaeval literature. He was also the subject of a biography by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper.

October 2017; 206 pages

"Artful" by Ali Smith

Wow.

This book was shortlisted for the 2013 Goldsmiths Prize which is awarded to "fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form"

The narrator is haunted by their dead lover. Viscerally haunted. This ghost tips coffee from mugs and breaks things and steals things. They lie beside the narrator in bed and snore. Their eyes and nose disappear and they smell. Although the narrator knows that all these things are simply the result of their imagination, and are caused by the grief of bereavement, nevertheless the haunting is real.

And the narrator starts to read the dead person's unfinished notes for a series of literary lectures: On Time, On Form, On Edge, On Offer and On Reflection. Witty titles! And the lectures celebrate wonderful poetry and prose. So half of the book is a meditation on art and the other half a meditation on grief and love.

Which makes it utterly and totally original.

And that makes it difficult to review. But I can say her prose is pitch perfect and her originality breathtaking. And her lecture notes are fascinating too.

One of the key texts is Oliver Twist, a book the narrator discovers and reads over the course of this book. This book ends by pointing out that, near the end, Dickens sums up what happens to the main characters but he 'forgets' to mention the Dodger. Who is, of course, Artful.

There are so many great lines, both Smith's own and the ones she quotes. This passage “Edges are magic, too; there's a kind of forbidden magic on the borders of things, always a ceremony of crossing over, even if we ignore it or are unaware of it. In mediaeval times weddings didn't take place inside churches but at their doors - thresholds as markers of the edge of things and places are loaded, framed spaces through which we passed from one state to another.” (pp 126 - 127) shows how she uses words with precision as if they were charms which can conjure us to the real world of dreams.

Other great lines (mostly Ali's):

• “Thread is a great word here, calling to mind yet more worms, and the three Fates with their sisters with the scissors ready to cut us off at the end of our stamina when the life stories all sewn up.” (p 28)
• “We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once.” (p 31)
• “If only I'd reimagined you without your snoring. But then it wouldn't have been true, would it? It wouldn't have been you.” (p 44)
• “When I think about what it was like to live with you ... it was like living in a poem or a picture, a story, a piece of music ... it was wonderful.” (p 50)
• “In the beginning was the word, and the word was what made the difference between form and formlessness, which isn’t to suggest that the relationship between form and formlessness isn’t a kind of dialogue too, or that formlessness had no words, just to suggest that this particular word for some reason made a difference between them - one that started things.” (pp 64 - 65)
• "God, or some such artist as resourceful
• Began to sort it out.
• Land here, sky there,
• And sea there.” (p 65, quoting Ted Hughes translating Ovid)
• “Form is a matter of clear rules and unspoken understandings, then. It’s a matter of need and expectation. It’s also a matter of breaking rules, of dialogue, crossover between forms. Through such dialogue and argument, form, the shaper and moulder, acts like the other thing called mould, endlessly breeding forms from forms.” (p 67)
• “There’ll always be a dialogue, an argument, between aesthetic form and reality, between form and its content, between seminality, art, fruitfulness and life, There’ll always be seminal argument between forms - that’s how forms produce themselves, out of a meeting of opposites, of different things’ out of form encountering form.” (p 69)
• “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.” (p 81 quoting Flaubert)
• “I liked how Dickens called the Dodger all his names, the Artful, the Dodger, the Artful Dodger, Jack Dawkins, Mr John Dawkins, like he was a work of shifting possibility.” (p 91)
• "I could understand any huge bell hung high in a bell tower, hollow and full, stately and weighty, as high in the air as a bird, beginning the slow ceremonious swing of itself against itself that means any second the air is going to change its nature and become sound.” (p 105)
• “Leonora Carrington was an expert in liminal space ... It’s kind of in-between. A place we get transported to.” (p 111)
• “As it develops it plays out in full what it means to be naive, intelligent, a phoney, lying, attractive, a wanker.” (p 122)
• “Broken things become pattern in reflection.” (p 186)
• “unkissed boy.” (p 191)

Other works by this brilliant and repeatedly original author that I have read and reviewed in this blog include:

• The Accidental: a holidaying family is gatecrashed by a young woman
• There but for the: a set of stories linked by a man who, at a dinner party, locks himself into one of the upstairs rooms of his host and refuses to come out
• How to Be Both which has two halves which can be read in either order (and some copies of the book are printed one way and some the other): one half has a teenage girl trying to cope with the death of her mother; the other half is the exuberant reflections of a renaissance artist who was a woman pretending to be a man.
• Autumn: a collage type work
• Winter, another collage type work which weaves the story of a Christmas Carol with Cymbeline and the Nativity and reflects on Britain following the Brexit referendum.

Wow! October 2017; 192 pages

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

"The Educated Mind" by Kieron Egan

This fascinating book traces the development of thought in a human.


The Somatic phase (0 to 5 yo). This is prelinguistic. Egan argues that it carries on into later life too: "As when we become literate we do not cease to be oral-language users, so when we become oral-language users we do not cease to be prelinguistic sensemakers" (p 166)

The Mythic phase (5 to 10 yo) As language begins, so do myths. Egan points out that creation myths often include naming. Myths feature binary dualisms. Vygotsky noted that children assemble collections using contrast rather than similarity: in group, out group. Egan believes that binary oppositions are fundamental to all language eg "nouns (stasis) and verbs (change)" (p 39) "Organizing one's conceptual grasp on the physical world by initially forming binary structures ... allows an initial orientation over a range of otherwise bewilderingly complex phenomena." (p 40) Subsequently oppositions are used "to ascribe meaning to any intermediary terms" like putting warm between hot and cold. (p 40). Although some educators seem to assume that kids of this age cannot understand concepts such as "oppression and freedom, love and hate, good and bad, fear and security" (p 43) a kid couldn't understand Star Wars without such concepts.

The Romantic phase (10 to 15 yo) typified by the Histories of Herodotus which scorns the myths preceding it but tells history as the story of great men. This is the most fascinating part of Egan's thesis. He points out that aged 5 "magic is entirely unobjectionable" but aged 10 you need to know the details. (p 71) Bacchilega (1997, 8) states that "In folk and fairy tales the hero is neither frightened nor surprised when encountering the otherworld". Is this because they are aimed at an audience of five-year-olds? However, Egan understands that"In some cultures this transition from a world in which fantasy and magic perform explanatory work does not take place in anything like the form that is common in the West." (p 72)

"Romantic understanding represents crucial elements of rationality developing along with persisting features of myth" (p 80). He now makes observations about characteristics of this phase. Kids of this age are interested in extremes: "Why is the average ten-year-old so interested in who was the tallest person who ever lived?" (p 84) He thinks this is to do with self-contextualising. Similarly kids of this age collect. And finally kids of this age hero-worship because "When we are ten ... we are typically subject to endless rules and regulations - parental, societal, and , not least, natural. The person, institution, or team that the child associates with usually gives clear clues to the constraints found most problematic. ... The tension characteristic of romance comes from the desire to transcend a threatening reality while seeking to secure one's identity within it." (p 90)

The Philosophic phase (15 yo and older) is typified by Thucydides who attempted to explain history as a system (he used a disease metaphor. This is the world of the ideology. It is the world of the Enlightenment.

"Students begin to grasp that what we are does not result from romantic choices and associations but from laws of nature, human psychology, social interactions, history, and so on, which apply to our selves as to everyone else The fading of the importance of romantic associations, then, can appear more a matter of putting aside childish things; having seen as through a glass darkly, students can attain a fuller, theoretic, consciousness of their place in the world." (p 124)

"Establishing the truth about history, society, and the cosmos is serious business. When Philosophic understanding dominates the mind, it can work with powerful intensity. The seriousness of Philosophic concerns, and the focus on knowledge that supports or challenges any one general scheme, tends to reduce interest in the extremes and in the dramatic. Romantic knowledge thus is often dismissed as irrelevant, pointless, a trivial pursuit; Romantic hobbies and collections lose their interest. ... A note of earnestness common in modern Philosophic students echoes Victorian high seriousness." (p 125)

However "This form of intellectual activity can easily slip into narcissism." hence the popularity of anthropology, sociology and psychology (p 126) Furthermore, if the developed world view is seen to fail it can lead to "angst, tears, depression, suicide, pills" (p 131).

The final (?) Ironic phase: This is the postmodern world. "All generalizations are false" (p 137)
"A more common theme in the Western intellectual tradition is that without some clear foundation, come bedrock of truth, human life and our sense of the natural world are chaotic and meaningless. The fear of raw contingency has long driven the pursuit of truth. But in this century ... ironic voices have suggested that nothing much happens if we give up looking for foundations to knowledge, and even for meaning; the sky holds in place, daily life goes on." (p 139)
"What was so disturbing about Darwin's ideas was ... the mechanism of natural selection and its implication that we owe our precious consciousness not to God, framing our symmetry for some high purpose, but to blind chance, to raw contingency." (p 139)
"In the early dialogues ... Socrates lives up to his claim that he 'knows nothing and is ignorant of everything' ... he deconstructs other's claim to knowledge but offers nothing positive of his own in their place. He solves no problems, shows that all the proffered solutions are inadequate, and cheerfully leaves us to sort things out as best as we can. ... To Thrasymachus, this is merely a cheap rhetorical ploy, ensuring for Socrates that he cannot be caught in the contradictions in which he delights to catch others; but it is a ploy whose cost is often destructive and negative, establishing nothing, and as such is pointless and irritating." (p 140 - 141)
"After endless philosophical work by the greatest Western thinkers, almost nothing is agreed, nothing is uncontested. If the enterprise were possible, surely something would be secured by now." (p 153)

This is AFTER an introductory chapter in which he dissects education as having three old, incompatible ideas:
Socialization:  "to inculcate a restricted set of norms and beliefs - the set that constitutes the adult society the child will grow into. ... a prominent aim of schools is the homogenization of children" (p 11)
"Intellectual cultivation": "to connect children with the great cultural conversation" (p 14)
"Fulfilling the individual potential of each student" (p 16)

Beautifully written and powerfully convincing. But does it belong to the philosophic stage or the ironic stage?

Other brilliant moments:

• "The very structure of modern schools in the West ... can accommodate only a very limited range of nonconformity. ... pushed to extremes ... the socially necessary homogenizing process can become totalitarian in its demands for conformity." (p 11)
• "The crucial feature of stories is that they end" (p 63)
• Syllogisms "cannot be managed easily or at all by people who cannot read alphabetic script" (p 75)
• "The archetypal romantic figure is the hero. The hero lives, like the rest of us, within the constraints of the everyday world but, unlike the rest of us, manages somehow to transcend the constraints that hem us in." (p 88) 
• "We are born alone and we die alone, and in the short interval between, underneath our languages, histories, cultures, and socialized awareness, we live alone." (p 167)

October 2017; 279 pages

"Down and Out in Paris and London" by George Orwell

George Orwell writes so clearly about such dreadful conditions. As with The Road to Wigan Pier he combines acute observation with insightful social commentary.

He starts by being unemployed and hungry in Paris. So hungry he starts to starve. He finds a job as a plongeur (dishwasher plus sous chef) in a Paris hotel and later a restaurant: he works long hours at breakneck speed in atrocious conditions.

Brilliant lines include:

• “The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves and given up trying to be normal or decent. poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.” (p 3)
• “Comment épouser un soldat, moi qui aime tout le régiment?” (p 6)
• “And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.” (pp 16 - 17)
• “Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else.” (p 36)
• “You're not fit to scrub floors in the brothel your mother came from.” (p 68)
• “The pace would never be kept up if everybody did not accuse everybody else of idling.” (p 74)
• “It is the pride of the drudge - the man who is equal to no matter what quantity of work. At that level, the mere power to go on working like an ox is about the only virtue attainable. Debrouillard is what every plongeur wants to be called. A debrouillard is a man who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will se debrouiller - get it done somehow.” (p 77)
• “Mario ... had the typical drudge mentality. All he thought of was getting through ... and he decide you to give him too much of it. Fourteen years underground had left him with about as much natural laziness as a piston rod.” (p 77)
• “Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.” (p 79)
• “For many men in the quarter, unmarried and with no future to think of, the weekly drinking-bout was the one thing that made life worth living.” (p 96)
• “Sharp knives, of course, are the secret of a successful restaurant.” (p 116)
• “A ‘smart’ hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they do not really want.” (p 119)
• “A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not, he must work, because work in itself is good - for slaves, at least. ... I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them to busy to think.” (p 120)
• “Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some fundamental difference between rich and poor ... the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.” (p 121)
• “I saw a hang-dog man, obviously a tramp, coming towards me, and when I looked again it was myself, reflected in a shop window.” (p 130)
• “Dirt is a great respecter of persons; it lets you alone when you are well dressed, but as soon as your collar is gone it flies towards you from all directions.” (p 130) 
• “I noticed, too, how the attitude of women varies with a man's clothes. When a badly dressed man passes them they shudder away from him with a quite frank movement of disgust, as though he were a dead cat.” (p 130)
• “Dressed in a tramps clothes it is very difficult, at any rate for the first day, not to feel that you are genuinely degraded.” (p 130)
• “He could pronounce the words ‘the dear Lord Jesus’ with less sham than anyone I ever saw. No doubt he had learned the knack in prison.” (p 142)
• “Flat feet, pot bellies, hollow chest, sagging muscles - every kind of physical rottenness was there.” (p 149)
• “How sweet the air does smell - even the air of a back-street in the suburbs - after the shut-in, subfaecal stench of the spike.” (p 149) 
• “De sight of all dat bloody print makes me sick.” (p 153)
• “He pined for work as an artist pines to be famous.” (p 153) 
• “You can have cartoons about any of the parties, but you mustn't put anything in favour of Socialism, because the police won't stand it.” (p 164)
• “Have you ever seen a corpse burned? ... They put the old chap on the fire, and the next moment ... he's started kicking. It was only his muscles contracting in the heat - still, it gave me a turn. Well, he wriggled about for a bit like a kipper on hot coals, and then his belly blew up and went off with a bang you could have heard fifty yards away.” (p 169)
• “The sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.” (p 169)
• “Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised.” (p 175) 
• “Of its very nature swearing is as irrational as magic - indeed, it is a species of magic.” (p 178)
• “It was an evangelical church, gaunt and wilfully ugly.” (p 184)

Orwell writes so clearly; some of his descriptions are masterpieces. I loved the women "shuddering" away from the tramp "as though he were a dead cat". The verb is simple but accurate; it conveys a whole movement and emotion; the simile is spot on. There were characters in here who are as three dimensional as they would be if you met them on the street. There is no plot as such, but the everyday experiences kept me turning the pages. 

A wonderful piece of writing. October 2017; 216 pages

My review of Michael Shelden's biography of Orwell can be found here.

Other books by Orwell include:

• Homage to Catalonia, his memoir of the Spanish civil war
• Animal Farm
• 1984

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

"The Sealed Letter" by Emma Donoghue

By the author of the breathtakingly brilliant and bestselling Room.

Based on a real-life divorce case in Victorian London, this is the story of 'Fido' Faithfull, a spinster proprietor of a printing press active in the 'womanist' movement, and her best friend Helen, wife of Admiral Codrington. After seven letterless years Helen returns from Malta with a young naval officer in tow; soon we discover that they are having an affair. But then the Admiral begins to suspect. What is the truth and who is telling it? Every character has a reason to tell lies; nothing is simple in this beautifully crafted tale. Donoghue's tale is full of contradictions: Fido, heavily asthmatic, smokes; she is strong in support of female rights and yet she is appalled by adultery. Everyone has secrets; this is a world in which truth, even perjury, is of less consequence than respectability. Just as steam trains with open carriages run in tunnels beneath the streets of London, so unquenchable passion surges beneath the surface of elegant matrimony.

To encapsulate this she uses one very striking (perhaps obvious) metaphor. The father tells his daughters: "There's a house in Bayswater that's only a false facade, constructed to cover a railway tunnel ... It looks more harmonious that way, I suppose. Otherwise people walking down that street would suddenly glimpse a train rushing past their feet."  The unspoken message is that respectability is a necessary facade built to cover our underground passions, otherwise people walking down the street would be frightened. Of course, already at this point Helen and Fido (with Helen's boyfriend) have travelled on the Underground railway. Symbolic!

One of the striking things about the way this book is written is its use of the present tense.

Lots of lovely lines:

• “The skin-tightening sensation of encountering a friend who is no longer one.” (p 6)
• “You’re not the stuff of a chapter ... several volumes at least.” (p 10)
• “The phrases are delivered with the sort of rueful merriment, as if by an actress who knows herself to be better than her part.” (p 10)
• “If one get paid for one’s work, one knows somebody wants it.” (p 31)
• “Prigs are the worst of women; all that prudery hides lust for power.” (p 35)
• “Haven't the years done anything to soften you two to each other? 
•         Oh you innocent ... that's not what the years do.” (p 38) 
• “The problem with deterrence is that it can only be inferred, not proved. It's like having some fat porter outside with a pistol in his greatcoat ... who shakes himself awake when you open the door, to assure you that since breakfast his presence has kept a dozen murderers from garotting the whole family!” (p 82) 
• “The happiest marriages are made up of three parties.” (p 116)
• “He's weeping like a child, weeping for all the times over the years that he's shrugged instead.” (p 128)
• “I'm not managing to plan anything: I'm running and leaping and tripping like some hunted rabbit!” (p 137)
• “The machine rolls on but squeals, the little screws are starting to loosen and pop out.” (p 144) 
• “Helen is fallen: that odd word always makes Fido think of a wormy apple.” (p 230)
• “Really bad women can move from vice to vice, like butterflies in a flowerbed.” (p 352)

But most of all, fantastic characters trapped in insoluble dilemmas. I turned the pages! October 2017; 464 pages

"From Hell" by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

This graphic novel is a fictional account of Jack the Ripper. It favours the theory that the assassin was Sir William Withey Gull, a royal surgeon, who was recruited (by Queen Victoria herself in this story) to silence a group of prostitutes who were blackmailing the Crown because they knew that Victoria's grandson, heir to the throne Prince Albert Victor Edward ('Eddy') had secretly married and had a daughter by a girl who worked in a sweet shop in Cleveland Street, later to be the scene of the famous male brothel allegedly frequented by Prince Albert Victor and investigated by Inspector Abbeline who also investigated the Ripper murders. Apparently painter Walter Sickert knew everything.

The book also lays heavy stress on Gull alleged membership of the Freemasons, on the supposed occult significances of the churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor, many of which are in the vicinity of the murders, and it introduces a science fiction element with Gull's spirit traversing the fourth dimension and inspiring Ian Brady, the Moors Murderer, and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, not to mention (going backwards in time) Gull appearing as a scaly fiend in a vision to William Blake.

It is an immense sweep. I was happy to take it all on board although this might have been because I have read most of the major source books including the outstanding novel Hawksmoor by the brilliant and prolific Peter Ackroyd; Ackroyd's masterful biography of William Blake, and Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper: the Final Solution. Without such a thorough grounding I might have become quickly lost; Moore provides extensive notes for the general reader.

Even with the notes I feel that the scope of the book was its downfall. There was a moment when Walter Sickert delivered the baby daughter of prince and shopgirl to the shopgirl's parents, said girl having been incarcerated in a mental asylum. At this point the grandfather confesses to incest with his daughter. This takes several frames, a tiny fraction of the book, amounting to perhaps a few paragraphs in a novel. One would have thought such a potentially major sub-plot deserved a little more (If the grandfather not the Prince was the father of the shopgirl's daughter then the child is not a royal bastard and perhaps less drastic action might be taken). Alternatively, leave it out entirely. This sort of occurrence left a feeling that this work was just looking at the surface of a story which had potentially a great deal more; it felt shallow and unsatisfying.

I suspect it is my own inability to properly appreciate the visual arts that makes me fail to recognise that the cartoon drawings add value. I suppose that they help to add an air of menace to the whole book but I would have preferred the potential for rich description that a traditional novel might have offered. Mea culpa for being such a words man.

Is this a Gothic work? Of course it has many of the classic Gothic elements such as horribly killed corpses, dark places, and even a ghost. The secret brotherhood (in this case the Freemasons) reminds one of the controlling Catholic priests in The Monk. It also incorporates science fiction which has been suggested as the new Gothic. The idea of a monster preying on women is very reminiscent of Dracula. But does this book have any of the thresholds and their transitions that have been suggested as characteristics of Gothic literature? There is the chapter of Gull spiritually  travelling through space and time but this is scarcely fundamental to the story. There are two worlds, that of mundane Victorian London and the symbolic and spiritual Masonic London that exists in Gull's mind. This is an important theme and I suppose that if Gothic literature is equated with conspiracy theories this makes the work essentially Gothic.

My favourite line:

• Policeman talking about one of the butchered women: "makes you think there's naught to us but shit and mincemeat". This reminded me of remains of the corpse after the bombing in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent: "the by-products of a butcher's shop"

Alan Moore also co-authored graphic novel V for Vendetta.

October 2017; a lot of pages

"Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley

A classic dystopian novel, BNW is fundamentally a satire. I found the humour rather obvious and heavy-handed but a lady at my Eastbourne Central U3A group has convinced me that the book’s much funnier than I had seen: she quoted in particular the scene from the first page when the Director, described as having “a long chin and big, rather prominent teeth, just covered, when he was not talking, by his full, floridly curved lips” is talking to students who take down his words “straight from the horse’s mouth”. That’s funny. But he says it twice, so it still isn’t very subtle.

Perhaps the best bit of the book is the irony in which Huxley proposes a dystopia in which everyone is happy. Babies are hatched, genetically manipulated and brainwashed into five castes, the clever alphas and the sub-human epsilons who do the donkey work, but are quite content. Everyone belongs to everyone else and everywhere there is guilt-free promiscuous sex. There is no disease. There is no ageing. People work, play, and take soma, the wonder drug that just keeps them happy with no ill effects. The missing ingredient, for John the Savage, and for Helmholtz, is the opportunity for artistic freedom. At the climax of the philosophical debate, dissatisfied because “nothing costs enough here”, John claims this right. The World Controller responds: “you're claiming the right to be unhappy ... Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” (Ch 17) And John says ‘yes’. 

I think that is the kind of response that an Eton-educated, privileged member of the intellectual elite might make; I’m not sure that a member of the underclass would be so sure.

It isn’t really a novel. The only character who has internal conflicts is Bernard, who is a brilliant portrait of a weak, vacillating man who wants to have his cake and wants to eat it too, just like the rest of us. The ‘hero’ John the Savage faces conflicts too, but they are between what he wants and what the world will allow him to do; he scarcely has a recognisable character arc and certainly the book does not conform to the classic pattern of a tragedy. This is much more a ‘novel of ideas’, which is to say that it is fundamentally a fictionalised work of philosophy, like A Socratic dialogue, or like Candide. 

So the message is to the forefront and the message is a critique of society and a warning that, if the trends the author perceives are to continue, then the consequences will be unpleasant. So first it is important to consider the context in which the novel was written.

The contexts

Sexual promiscuity

The 1920s, which followed the slaughter of the First World War, which destabilised the old social order, was widely seen as a time of sexual promiscuity.

Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa was published in 1928 and suggested the Samoan sexual mores were considerably more relaxed, especially in its toleration of adolescent promiscuity, than in Europe of the time. This book was a best-seller and was a key anthropological text for many years. Is it not ironic that the sexual promiscuity of the civilized world BNW is derived from the sexual promiscuity observed by ‘savages’ on an island?

Marie Stopes published Married Love, a best-selling book advocating, among other things, birth control, in 1918. She was accused of being a ‘Neo-Malthusian’ by a male doctor who opposed birth control and fought a controversial libel case against him in 1923, losing in the House of Lords in 1924. 

One of the key tensions in the book is the mismatch between Lenina and John. As Margaret Atwood says: the love affair between the Savage and Lenina is doomed because she wants sex for fun and he wants love and a real relationship. 

The title of the work is from lines spoken by Miranda in the Tempest when, having been brought up on an island where the only two males are her father and Caliban, an ogre, she first sees eligible men and falls in love at first sight with the male beauty of Ferdinand. John’s understanding of love is shaped by Shakespeare: when he sneaks into Lenina’s bedroom and watches her sleeping, he quotes Troilus talking about his adoration of Cressida and Romeo speaking about Juliet. (Ch 9) After watching a porn ‘feely’ film starring a black man (as the villain, natch) he remembers Othello. But why should Shakespeare’s view of romantic love (which was in his day the rebellious response to the orthodoxy of arranged matches as evidenced in many of the plots, in particular R&J) be the paradigm?

Huxley also wrote Ape and Essence (taking this title from a line in Measure for Measure, a play largely about sexual morality) about a post-nuclear-holocaust society in which sex has been harnessed entirely for the service of breeding; there are still orgies in the five weeks of the annual breeding season (males who can’t control themselves at other times are castrated).

Bolshevism

Upper class Britain in the 1920s was terrified of Bolshevism. The Russian Revolution was in 1917 and had been followed by British forces invading Russia to try to foment a counter-revolution. The General Strike took place in 1926 when upperclass volunteers conspired to defeat the workers. The names derived from the socialist revolutionaries (Bernard Marx, Lenine Crowne) and BNW emphasis on ‘stability’ may reflect these fears. 

Aldous Huxley was, of course, an Old Etonian (as was George Orwell, Huxley returned to Eton to teach for a year and Orwell was in Huxley’s French class) and this is a book (like 1984) in which an upper-class intelligent ‘alpha’ male writes about a world created for upper-class intelligent ‘alpha’ males (at least, in 1984, Winston Smith observes the ‘proles’ and even envies their ‘freedom’). In 1984, a book by the ‘Trotsky’ character (Goldberg?) states that a revolution is an opportunity for the middle class to replace the ruling class in the name of the working class; that the working class never gain power but only ever change their masters. BNW is just such a book.

Are there any books from this period written by lower class people about lower class people? Walter Greenwood published Love on the Dole in 1933 (BNW was written in 1931 and published in 1932, 1984 was famously written in 1948).

Economics

At the other end of the spectrum, the end of the 1920s and the start of the 1930s saw the Wall Street Crash and the beginnings of the Great Depression. Having initially spoken the Brave New World line in praise of the beauty of Lenina, John the Savage later uses it ironically two more times, and both times he is triggered by the sight of the clones. The book itself starts with the assembly line production of humans. They are created and conditioned to fit the assembly-line systems of production, a system invented (in 1913) by Henry Ford who also invented the Model-T Ford car, giving the book its religious focus: 

• “Standard men and women; in uniform batches. ... Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines! ... The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.” (Chapter 1).

One of the key features of the BNW society is also the insistence that everyone keeps on consuming (no-one mends clothes anymore). Capitalism needs continual growth in order to survive: “old clothes are beastly,' continued the untiring whisper. 'We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending” (Ch 3)

Eugenics

Huxley is living in an age when eugenics was seriously being considered, and not just by Hitler, and when it was seriously believed that genetic racial differences justified social stratification. Eugenics was a word coined by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, in 1883; he believed that the British upper class owed its position to superior genes. TH Huxley, Darwin’s ‘bulldog’, was grandfather of Aldous. A Eugenics Institute at UCL was first led by Galton and, following his retirement in 1907, by statistician Karl Pearson who believed in creating ‘a homogeneous white race, whose fertility shall markedly dominate that of the black’ and in discouraging reproduction among ‘the unthrifty … the mentally defective’ and ‘the criminal, the tramp and the congenital pauper’, insisting that the right to live did not confer the right to reproduce.

Marie Stopes was in favour of eugenics, warning against a "vast and ever increasing stock of degenerate, feeble-minded and unbalanced who ... populate most rapidly and tend proportionately to increase and ... are like the parasite upon the healthy tree sapping its vitality.”

In the USA, in 1906 Kellog founded an institute to promote eugenics in the US: various states promoted forcible sterilisation of those deemed unfit, such as lunatics, and even forced euthanaisa (one mental institution put TB germs into the milk the patients drank, reasoning that those genetically immune would survive; the death rate was 30 to 40%. 

These were mainstream scientific views and are scientifically justified in the sense that if it is possible through selective breeding to create animals that are better in specific ways (eg racehorses that are faster, sheep that are woollier etc) then it should also be possible for humans though it may be morally indefensible. In BNW Huxley points out the possibility of using Eugenics to make assembly-line production even more efficient.

Relativity

The golf in BNW is played on a Riemann surface. Riemann was a mathematician who developed non-Euclidean geometry in 1854, in effect extending geometry from flat to curved surfaces. This became important following Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity in 1915 which showed that space-time has curvature imposed upon it by mass. One presumes that this is what made Riemann’s work known to Huxley.

What aspects make us aware that Huxley is dealing with a dystopia?

The epigraph at the start of the novel is in French and quotes Nicolas Berdiaeff, (Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev who was exiled from Soviet Russia in 1922): “Les utopies apparaissent comme bien plus réalisables qu’on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante: Comment éviter leur réalisation définitive? … Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-être un siècle nouveau commence-t-il, un siècle où les intellectuels et la classe cultivèe rêveront aux moyens d’éviter les utopies et de retourner à une société non utopique, moins “parfaite” et plus libre.” which can be translated as “Utopias appear to be much more achievable than previously thought. And we currently find ourselves faced with a much more agonizing question: How to avoid their definitive realization? … Utopias are achievable. Life marches towards utopias. And perhaps a new century is beginning, a century in which intellectuals and the educated class will dream of ways to avoid utopias and return to a non-utopian, less ‘perfect’ and freer society.”

The Outsider

Both Bernard (through nature, or at least the error while he was being developed) and John the Savage (through nurture) are outsiders. They have both been rejected by the societies in which they have grown up. 

“The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone.” (Ch 4)

Our Ford

Apart from the obvious word play (the use of the phrase ‘Our Ford’ as opposed to the Christian ‘Our Lord’, the description of Mustapha Mond, the “Resident Controller for Western Europe, one of the Ten World Controllers”, as “his fordship”), there are the religious Ts (crosses with their top cut off, representing, presumably, the ‘model-T- Ford car) and the confusion between Ford and Freud as “for some inscrutable reason” [and that’s irony!] Ford is said to have called himself “whenever he spoke of psychological matters”

‘Brave New World’

The title of the book is taken from The Tempest. They are quoted by John on three occasions ( chap 8, Chap11 and Chap 15). What are the differences in interpretation?

Chapter 8: The Savage, John, is hoping to go to the BNW. He has also fallen in love at first sight with Lenina. So he is using Miranda’s words in a hopeful, optimistic sense. Miranda, bedfazzled by the beautiful young men among the shipwrecked crew, says: ‘Oh wonder! /How many goodly creatures are there here! /How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world, /That has such people in’t.’ to which her father Propsero retorts ‘’Tis new to thee’. He, of course, knows that these creatures are from the old world, and that they are his enemies. He knows the wickednesses of the old world. Both Miranda and John are naive innocents.

Chapter 11: Bernard takes John to a factory where all the workers have been bred for the precise task required (including left-handers where left-handedness is needed) and John repeats: ‘Oh brave new world, /That has such people in it’: This time it is in a clearly ironic context because, almost immediately, “the Savage had suddenly broken away from his companions and was violently retching, behind a clump of laurels, as though the solid earth had been a helicopter in an air pocket.”

Chapter 15. Immediately following his mother’s death, John again encounters a horde of clones. “Like maggots they had swarmed defilingly over the mystery of Linda's death. Maggots again, but larger, full grown, they now crawled across his grief and his repentance. ... 'How many goodly creatures are there here!' The singing words mocked him derisively. 'How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world...' ... 'O brave new world, O brave new world...' In his mind the singing words seemed to change their tone. They had mocked him through his misery and remorse, mocked him with how hideous a note of cynical derision! Fiendishly laughing, they had insisted on the low squalor, the nauseous ugliness of the nightmare. Now, suddenly, they trumpeted a call to arms. 'O brave new world!' Miranda was proclaiming the possibility of loveliness, the possibility of transforming even the nightmare into something fine and noble. 'O brave new world!' It was a challenge, a command.” He now sees the phrase as a challenge and throws all the soma being handed to the clones out of the window, provoking a riot.

The debate

The main theme of the novel is summarised in the debate between Mustafa Mond and John.What are their opposing points of view and do you have any sympathy for Mond’ s ideas?

The preliminary arguments are given in the conversation between MM and John and Bernard and Helmholtz in Chapter 16:

• “People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; ... they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave.” (Ch 16)

• “stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt.” (Ch 16)

• “An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work--go mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized--but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got to run. He can't help himself; he's foredoomed. Even after decanting, he's still inside a bottle--an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course,' the Controller meditatively continued, 'goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles” (Ch 16)

• “The optimum population,' said Mustapha Mond, 'is modelled on the iceberg--eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.” (Ch 16)

• The workers don’t find their work awful. “On the contrary, they like it. It's light, it's childishly simple. No strain on the mind or the muscles. Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies. What more can they ask for? True,' he added, 'they might ask for shorter hours. And of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn't.” (Ch 16) Of course, no-one actually asks the epsilons. This argument seems dangerously like the one I heard made in favour of people in Gambia being contented with the squalor of their lives because they didn’t know any different.

• The key requirement of a government is stability: “We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That's another reason why we're so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.” (Ch 16)

• But MM admits that the fundamental reason is that capitalism depends upon consumption: “Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't.” (Ch 16)

• “The gods are just. No doubt. But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; Providence takes its cue from men.” (Ch 17)

• “industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.” (Ch 17)

• “'civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic.” (Ch 17)

Common themes for dystopian novels

• 1984 by George Orwell: The little man against a Big authoritarian society. The complacency of the rulers who assume that everything is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds. The rebellion of the individual against the collective.

• Ape & Essence by Aldous Huxley: set in a post-nuclear apocalypse world and presciently preaching against environmental catastrophe, A&E portrays a world in which gamma rays have made all but a despised minority 'on heat' only for a five week window every year; those males who are permanently randy are castrated. The Belial-worshipping society is communist-authoritarian and babies born with more than the usual number of disabilities (thanks to gamma rays) are killed as infants just before the next round of copulation. The religion is devil-worship on the grounds that the devil is in all of us as clearly evidenced by the way mankind repeatedly self-destructs. The themes of an authoritarian society (in this case a hierocracy) and the manipulation of the sex-drive are reminiscent of BNW. There is also a message that individuality must be crushed: "If a machine is fool-proof, it must also be skill-proof, talent-proof, inspiration-proof. Your money back if the product should be faulty and twice your money back if you can find in it the smallest trace of genius or individuality." The title comes from another Shakespeare play, Measure for Measure: “But man, proud man, /Drest in a little brief authority, /Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d; /His glassy essence, like an angry ape, /Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, /As make the angels weep.” M4M, of course, is about the hypocrisy of the lords of society punishing inappropriate sex (and the fascinating concept of the Duke who, like God, set up the imperfect world, departs to see what happens, and returns at the end to condemn.

• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

• The Book of Dave by Will Self

• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

• The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall

• The Kids of God by Dave Appleby: a rather imperfect authoritarian society where control and domination is fragile and crumbling.

Are all dystopias necessarily totalitarian? Most modern dystopias written in the western world, or influenced by western mores, seem to assume that freedom, at least artistic freedom, is good, control is bad. And yet the alternative is anarchy.

The only anarchic dystopia that I can think of is that in Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney.

The third alternative?

AH in his 1946 foreword to BNW says that he should have offered the Savage a third alternative “the possibility of sanity ... in a community of exiles and refugees from the Brave New World, living within the borders of the Reservation. In this community, economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque and co-operative.” 

According to wikipedia: Henry George was a theorist whose best-selling and hugely influential book ‘Progress and Poverty’ showed how technological and social progress could exacerbate poverty. For example, if public services are improved, land and natural resources  become more valuable. Those who own these resources therefore seek higher returns. Speculation drives up the price of land faster than wealth can be produced and therefore the wealth left over to pay for wages is reduced. This results in businesses at the margin failing, resulting in a depression causing unemployment. His solution was to tax everything freely supplied by nature but held as private property; he believed this would be sufficient to make other taxes unnecessary and provide limitless investment in public services as well as a basic income. 

Kropotkin was a Russian anarchist who believed that the hallmark of a successful society (as observed in animals and pre-industrial societies) was mutuality and co-operation as opposed to the competition advocated by social Darwinists. He therefore proposed an economic system based on mutual exchange and voluntary cooperation. 

Quotations

• “That is the secret of happiness and virtue--liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.' (Ch 1: spoken by the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning)
• “Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work-tables.” (Ch 1)
• “Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green ... and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides, they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.” (Ch 2)
• “Home, home--a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells. ... And home was as squalid psychically as physically. Psychically, it was a rabbit hole, a midden, hot with the frictions of tightly packed life, reeking with emotion. What suffocating intimacies, what dangerous, insane, obscene relationships between the members of the family group! Maniacally, the mother brooded over her children (her children)... brooded over them like a cat over its kittens; but a cat that could talk, a cat that could say, 'My baby, my baby,' over and over again. 'My baby, and oh, oh, at my breast, the little hands, the hunger, and that unspeakable agonizing pleasure! Till at last my baby sleeps, my baby sleeps with a bubble of white milk at the corner of his mouth. My little baby sleeps...' ... Our Ford--or Our Freud, as, for some inscrutable reason, he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters--Our Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life. The world was full of fathers--was therefore full of misery; full of mothers--therefore of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity; full of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts--full of madness and suicide.” (Ch 3)
• “every one belongs to every one else” (Ch 3)
• “Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.” (Ch 3)
• “Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly--they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.” (Ch 4)
• “The sexophones wailed like melodious cats under the moon, moaned in the alto and tenor registers as though the little death were upon them.” (Ch 5) Presumably the ‘little death’ is a translation of the  French phrase ‘petite mort’ which is used as a euphemism for orgasm.
• “Murder kills only the individual ... Unorthodoxy ... it strikes at Society itself.” (Ch 10)
• “That young man will come to a bad end,' they said, prophesying the more confidently in that they themselves would in due course personally see to it that the end was bad.” (Ch 11)
• “a savage reservation is a place which, owing to unfavourable climatic or geological conditions, or poverty of natural resources, has not been worth the expense of civilizing.” (Ch 11)
• “Once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose--well, you didn't know what the result might be.” (Ch 12)
• “It was the sort of idea that might easily de-condition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes--make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible.” (Ch 12)
• “as I make the laws here, I can also break them” (Ch 16)
• “you can't make tragedies without social instability” (Ch 16)
• “a philosopher [is] ... a man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth.” (Ch 17)
• “At Malpais he had suffered because they had shut him out from the communal activities of the pueblo, in civilized London he was suffering because he could never escape from those communal activities, never be quietly alone.” (Ch 17)
• “You can't play Electro-magnetic Golf according to the rules of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy.” (Ch 17)

Reread April 2022

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