"Utz" by Bruce Chatwin

Kaspar Utz had a part-Jewish and part-baronial ancestry, growing up on an estate in Czechoslovakia between the First and Second World Wars. By flexibility and cunning, he survived the Nazis and now lives in Prague under the communists in a small flat with his maidservant and a fortune in collectable porcelain.

This elegant novel, written with all the precision of a porcelain objet d'art, explores the contradictions and the futility inherent in communism and in collecting, and the compromises we all make in our lives.

Selected quotes:

Page numbers refer to the 1989 Picador paperback edition

• "I thought for a moment that lunch was going to end in a slanging match - until I realised that this was another of their well-rehearsed duets." (p 36)
• "All golem legends derived from an Ancient Jewish belief that any righteous man could create the World by repeating, in an order prescribed by the Cabbala, the letters of the secret name of God. 'Golem' means 'unformed' or 'uncreated' in Hebrew. Father Adam himself had been 'golem' - an inert mass of clay ... until Yahweh ... breathed into his mouth the power of speech." (p 42)
• "It depressed him, on crossing the Czech frontier, to see the lines of barbed wire and sentry-boxes. But he noted, with a certain relief, that there were no more advertising billboards." (p 88)
• "There is a microphone in this wall. One in that wall. Another in the ceiling, and I know not where else. They listen. listen. listen to everything. But this everything is too much for them. so they hear nothing!" (p 96)
• "Things are the changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate." (p 113)

April 2022; 154 pages

This novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1988

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

"Uncle Fred in the Springtime" by P G Wodehouse

 A Blandings novel. As usual, Blandings Castle, the seat of the Earl of Emsworth, is infested with imposters, on this occasion the Earl of Ickenham who is pretending to be a psychiatrist for reasons which escaped me. As usual there is a plot to steal Emsworth's adored prize-winning sow, the Empress of Blandings. As usual chaos ensues. 

The characters may be thin (and too many - I lost count of who was who and why) and the plot over-convoluted. The joy of Wodehouse lies in the language.

Selected quotes:

• "Like all English springs, the one which had just come to London seemed totally unable to make up its fat-headed mind whether it was supposed to be that ethereal mildness of which the poet sings or something suitable for ski-ers left over from the winter." (Ch 1)
• "Nature, stretching Horace Davenport out, had forgotten to stretch him sideways, and one could have pictured Euclid, had they met, nudging a friend and saying: 'Don't look now, but this chap coming along illustrates exactly what I was telling you about a straight line having length without breadth.'" (Ch 1)
• "She was the sweetest thing that had ever replied 'Yes' to a clergyman's 'Wilt thou'?" (Ch 3)
• "'Who was the chap who was such a devil with the other sex? ... Donald something.' 'Donald Duck?' 'Don Juan'." (Ch 5)
• "You've got the stuff my boy. It's the penalty you pay for having an ancestress who couldn't say No to Charles the Second." (Ch 5)
• "Poets, as a class, are business men. Shakespeare describes the poet's eye as rolling in a fine frenzy from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, and giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name, but in practice you will find that one corner of that eye is generally glued on the royalty returns." (Ch 13)
• "He sat down heavily. And some rough indication of his frame of mind may be gathered from the fact that he forgot to pull the knees of his trousers up." (Ch 18)

Delightful nonsense. April 2022

Other books by P G Wodehouse reviewed in this blog can be found here.

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

"The Pilgrim's Progress" by John Bunyan

 

This quiet spot off the River Ouse in Bedford was where John Bunyan baptised people.

This classic allegory is one of the best-selling books ever. It was written in 1678 by John Bunyan, a tinker who had been a soldier with the Parliamentary army during the English Civil War,  while he was in Bedford prison for being an unlicensed preacher during the religious repressions following the restoration of the English monarchy. 

It is presented as a series of dreams. The characters are, as was the fashion of the time, named for the characteristics: thus Christian, Mr Valiant-for-Truth, Mr Standfast, Mercy and so on. In the first part Christian travels through hardships such as the Slough of Despond and the Valley of the Shadow of Death and encounters temptations such as Vanity Fair and monsters such as Apollyon before fording the River of Death. In the second part, Christian's wife Christiana and his four sons form the nucleus of a party making a second pilgrimage in his by-now-famous footsteps. 

The prose is inevitably old-fashioned. There are no chapters but there are marginal annotations which describe which part of the story you are in. Poems, presumably hymns, are interspersed through the narrative.

Some of it is rather tedious theologising - it is, after all, a sermon - but the picaresque story, despite the inevitability of the happy ending, still has its charm.

The book has been hugely  influential, not least to other writers such as George Eliot (for example in Silas Marner). Some of the quotations below have reached the status of proverbs. And, of course, it contains 'Bunyan's hymn': 

"Who would true valour see,Let him come hither;One here will constant be,Come wind, come weather;There's no discouragementShall make him once relentHis first avowed intentTo be a pilgrim.

"Who so beset him roundWith dismal stories,Do but themselves confound—His strength the more is.No lion can him fright;He'll with a giant fight;But he will have a rightTo be a pilgrim.

"Hobgoblin nor foul fiendCan daunt his spirit;He knows he at the endShall life inherit.Then fancies fly away,He'll fear not what men say;He'll labour night and dayTo be a pilgrim."
It has been rated best in the Guardian's top 100 novels of all time.

Selected quotations:

Part One

• "As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a dream." (First line)
• "there is a company of these crazy-headed coxcombs, that, when they take a fancy by the end, are wiser in their own eyes than seven men that can render a reason."
• "He is, by reason of age, and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger days, grown so crazy and stiff in his joints, that he can now do little more than sit in his cave's mouth, grinning at pilgrims as they go by, and biting his nails because he cannot come at them."
• "What you will. I will talk of things heavenly, or things earthly; things moral, or things evangelical; things sacred, or things worldly; things past, or things to come; things foreign, or things at home; things more essential, or things circumstantial, provided that all be done to our profit."
• "at this fair are all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not."
• "to tell you the truth, I am become a gentleman of good quality, yet my great-grandfather was but a waterman, looking one way and rowing another, and I got most of my estate by the same occupation."
• "we are always most zealous when religion goes in his silver slippers; we love much to walk with him in the street, if the sun shines, and the people applaud him."
• "Sin was very sweet to my flesh, and I was loath to leave it."

Part Two

• "Now the seal was the contents and sum of the passover which the children of Israel did eat when they came out from the land of Egypt, and the mark was set between their eyes." 
• "Why doth the pelican pierce her own breast with her bill? ... To nourish her young ones with her blood, and thereby to show that Christ the blessed so loveth his young, his people, as to save them from death by his blood." 
• "the way is the way, and there's an end."
• "I know thou art a cock of the right kind, for thou hast said the truth."
• "Mr. Fearing was one that played upon this bass; he and his fellows sound the sackbut, whose notes are more doleful than the notes of other music are; though, indeed, some say the bass is the ground of music. ... The first string that the musician usually touches is the bass, when he intends to put all in tune."
• "When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the river-side, into which as he went he said, 'Death, where is thy sting?' And as he went down deeper, he said, 'Grave, where is thy victory?' So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side."

April 2022

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

"Ley lines" by Danny Sullivan

 A 'ley' is a line on the landscape joining points of interest, often involving religion of superstition. Originally 'discovered' by Alfred Watkins in his classic book The Old Straight Track and thought by him to be neolithic trading routes, there is considerable debate around whether they are any more than coincidental alignments and, if they are, what their function is. This book offers theories and evaluates them without seeming to come to a definite conclusion. 

For example, the author debunks the 'trading routes' hypothesis by observing that ley lines often travel through inhospitable terrain when, presumably, a trader would take a detour. He also shows that some alleged long distance lines are artefacts of mapping that don't take into account the curvature of the earth. He then considers hypotheses such as that ley lines join navigation beacons for UFOs, and that they are associated with supernatural activity, such as sightings of ghosts and death-foretelling Black Dogs. If he comes to any conclusion it is that “The ley ... is not responsible for paranormal events" but that mysterious underground earth forces, possibly related to (presumably straight line) geological faulting and seismic activity and possibly having electromagnetic effects might be responsible for "causing hallucinations, time slips and unconsciousness" and therefore causing 'sightings' of ghosts and UFOs. (Ch 6)

The arguments are mostly reasonable with the occasional lapse into rhetoric, eg when discussing Jacob's dream of a ladder going up to heaven,  “the fact that he used a rock as a pillow cannot be mere coincidence” (Ch 4; my highlight). There is a useful chapter on how to go hunting for your own ley lines and an appendix detailing some of the most well known.

Selected quotes 

• "When the brain is exposed to strong electromagnetic fields, a form of epileptic attack can be triggered and various symptoms can be experienced including hallucinations, seeing odd lights, a feeling of being watched and of paralysis. The person who undergoes these bizarre ‘attacks’ can be completely convinced the events were entirely real and physical.” (Ch 4)
• “The Indo-European root-words reg and rect mean ‘movement in a straight line’ ... The same root words also surface in ... right, righteous and rectitude, regal ... and ruler.” (Ch 5)
• "The wind blowing over the feet of the corpses on its way to the houses of the doomed.” (Ch 6)
• “The souls of the dead fly close to the ground and will not tolerate any obstructions that stand higher than an ell.” (Ch 6)

April 2022

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

"The Carhullan Army" by Sarah Hall

 'Sister' (we never learn her real name) escapes a town under authoritarian rule, where toiling but redundant workers subsist on meagre rations in overcrowded and squalid tenements and reproduction is controlled, to seek out Carhullan, the semi-mystical feminist hill-farm commune. But can the women learn to defend themselves if and when the urban Authority seek to extend their rule?  And in what way is the frequently tyrannical leader of Carhullan any more moral than the more anonymous rulers of the Authority?

This is classic dystopian fiction. What distinguishes it from the pack is the astonishing descriptions which are lyrical, detailed and original and which convey a huge amount of verisimilitude. The first quarter of the book is stuffed with these and the world-building is carefully drip-fed in but the reader is motivated to keep reading because ambiguous and perplexing hints as to what might happen next are provided. This is achieved because, although the story is told in retrospect, we discover the action as if the narrator is living through it, learning the mysteries of her new life bit by bit.

Some examples of the descriptions:

• "It was a wet rotting October when I left. In the town the leaves had begun to drop and their yellow pulp lay on the ground. The last belts of thunderstorms and downpours were passing through the Northern region. Summer was on its way out. The atmosphere felt as if it was finally breaking apart, and at night and in the mornings something cooler had set in. It was a relief not to wake up sweating under the sheet in our room in the terrace quarters, coming out of some hot nightmare with milky dampness on my chest." (FILE ONE COMPLETE RECOVERY)
• "Each year after the Civil Reorganisation summer’s humidity had lasted longer, pushing the colder seasons into a smaller section of the calendar, surrounding us constantly with the smog of rape and tar-sand burning off, and all of us packed tightly together like fish in a smoking shed." (FILE ONE COMPLETE RECOVERY)
• "The van disappeared behind the tangle of waxy green bushes lining the road. I heard it stall, and its ignition turn over phlegmatically, like the congested coughing of the town’s sick dogs." (FILE ONE COMPLETE RECOVERY)

Other selected quotes

• "You don’t fear possibility when you are young." (FILE ONE COMPLETE RECOVERY)
• "It was the smell of nature, untouched and original, exempt from interference. For all my weariness, it made me feel a little more alive, both human and feral together, and somehow redeemed from the past." (FILE TWO COMPLETE RECOVERY)
• "Carhullan could have been the gatehouse to Abaddon." (FILE TWO COMPLETE RECOVERY)
• "They were letting me break apart, so I could use the blunt edges of reason to stave in my mind, and the jagged ones to lance open the last blisters of sanity." (FILE TWO COMPLETE RECOVERY)
• "I’d felt like a ghost moving through the quiet loft of the farmhouse, undressed and trailing a sheet; a wisp, little more than vapour." (FILE THREE COMPLETE RECOVERY)
• "It is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most that will conquer." (FILE FIVE PARTIAL CORRUPTION)
• "Revolutions always begin in mountain regions. It’s the fate of such places. Look around you. Look where you are. These are the disputed lands. They have never been settled. And those of us who live in them have never surrendered to anyone’s control. Nor will we ever." (FILE SEVEN PARTIAL CORRUPTION)
• "It was the anatomy of a fanatic." (FILE FIVE PARTIAL CORRUPTION)

A beautifully written novel which kept me hooked to the end.

April 2022

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

"Blackout" by Simon Scarrow

 A serial killer is at lose in Berlin in the middle of a snow-bound December in 1939, as the Nazi party tightens its grip on power. Inspector Horst Schenke of the Kriminal Polizei is assigned the case by a senior Gestapo official: does the Party have something to hide? And what is the involvement of the Abwehr, the MI6 of the Reich?

A classic murder mystery with plenty of thriller action and a wonderfully literal Gestapo officer who reminded me of Jasper de Zoet in Utopia Avenue.

Selected quotes:

• "The boughs of the trees were laden with ice and snow, c learly visible against the night sky, so that Schenke was reminded of a photographic negative, as if the world was the opposite of what it should be." (Ch 5)
• "It's like the country has been taken over by the kind of people who underperformed at school, and refused to read anything other than the headlines of the gutter press." (Ch 16)
• "He was reminded of the secretive Christian sects in Roman times who lived under the shadow of the crosses onto which those who were discovered were nailed and left to die." (Ch 25)
• "What, then, was the point of being a policeman when criminals ruled?" (Ch 25)

April 2022; 418 pages

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

"George Eliot" by Jenny Uglow

Although biographically arranged, and giving details of Eliot's life, this is more of a literary criticism of Eliot's works written from a predominantly feminist perspective. I therefore found it most interesting when it dealt with one of the novels I have read (Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede, Silas Marner) and somewhat obscure when dealing with a book I have yet to read. 

Selected quotes:

• “Evangelical teaching often linked two ideas, which one can trace in Eliot's fiction - that women were the more sensitive, emotional sex and that their ‘natural’ maternal Instincts were inseparably linked to an ethic of self-renunciation.” (Ch 1)
• “The still lingering mistake, that an unintelligible dialect is a guarantee for ingenuousness, and that slouching shoulders indicate an upright disposition.” (Ch 3)
• “She took a male pseudonym ... to avoid being caught in a net of critical prescriptions and sanctions - no one laid down rules about ‘men's novels’.” (Ch 5)
• “It is important to notice that Eliot does not wish to banish the Madonna altogether, she merely demands that she be balanced by the old women scraping carrots.” (Ch 6)
• "The law of consequences in fact increases personal responsibility, for our actions can set off a chain of reactions as inexorable as those described by a law of physics, and this chain stretches far beyond our own lives because society is a complex interlinked body and not a random collection of individuals.” (Ch 11)
• “We feel the current of great events running through the novel like the main stream of a river, but what we experience are the eddies near the bank on which we are placed as readers.” (Ch 12)
• “Marian became increasingly irritated by the arrogance of the English upper classes, so evident in the growing concentration on Empire. Her dismay was fostered ... by her long-standing championship of European culture.” (Ch 13)
• “how can it be, when space and time make the individual as insignificant as a dot on a page, that a personal event like an unhappy marriage can be so overwhelming as to blot out the sun?” (Ch 13)
• “Gambling ... is one way ... that people feel they can fling aside the overt rules which govern their existence.” (Ch 13)
• “The impulse to surrender ... so destructive when turned inwards, is closely akin to the artist’s abnegation of self.” (Ch 13)

Other biographies of George Eliot reviewed in this blog:

George Eliot: A Life by Rosemary Ashton

April 2022; 305 pages

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

"God Drives a Flying Saucer" by R L Dione

I love books like this. I love the warped and twisted logic. I love way rhetoric is deployed in place of rationality. And I admire the authors for being able to get a publishing deal for such transparent lunacy.

R L Dione offends scholarly standards of evidence in so many ways:

• The references that he gives for his claims are (deliberately?) uncheckable; for example: 
• “An ancient papyrus from Egypt” (Ch 1)
• “Research at Cornell University has established that ... electromagnetic radiation bypasses the auditory system, directly stimulating the brain, producing a buzzing sensation.” (Ch 4)
• “From recent flying-saucer reports it appears that saucerians can also glow and appear luminous - probably by means of a sterilizing device built into their uniforms.” (Ch 6)
• "Consider, for example, the two satellites of Mars, which many astronomers believe to be artificial.” (Ch 10)
• Sometimes the evidence he offers is completely absence, such as: 
• “UFOs appear and disappear by the simple expediency of adjusting their luminosity and color to blend with the luminosity and color of the background.” (Ch 2)
• “Remarkable heating effects characterize many UFO encounters.” (Ch 4)
• He uses the trope of 'things we don't yet know or understand': "UFOs operate on some electromagnetic principle not yet known to mankind - an electromagnetic principle which perhaps can create and control its own gravitational field.” (Ch 3)
• Alternatively, he uses the argument that 'since you can't prove me wrong I must be right': “theory can be neither proved nor disproved, and since its verification would explain all the flight characteristics of UFOs, thus eliminating the necessity for accusing millions of witnesses of having mass hallucinations or of lying, I can see no justification for assuming that it is in error.” (Ch 3)
• He claims certainty for things that are debatable: (my highlights)
• “Another established fact is that UFOs while in flight sometimes emit a tangible substance that drifts down to the ground." (Ch 4)
• “If the Lady can predict great disasters why can she not predict whether her people will obey? ... It seems obvious, therefore, that she is not supernatural.” (Ch 6) 
• “Surely he’s describing nothing else than a flying saucer” (Ch 7)
• He offers a limited set of alternatives and then dismisses the straw men he has set up, forcing us to choose his favoured alternative without considering the many other possibilities. For example, when discussing the truth or otherwise of miracles, he says that the alternatives are:
• “We can deny the truth of the Bible ...” (Ch 7)
• “We can accept it as true ... claiming supernatural powers are responsible.” (Ch 7)
• “We can accept it as true and explain it as a manifestation of supertechnological devices.” (Ch 7)
• He attacks those he doesn't like ad hominem while credulously believing in that trope of UFOlogists, the 'reliable witness': “Philosophers, other intellectuals and clergyman have bumbled, and continue to bumble, with the idea that the essence of man is a strange mixture of a physical and spiritual being. They bumble, because such a view is inconsistent with reason" (Ch 8)

This book is also distinguished by the author's errors in simple Physics, such as when he confuses mass and weight, so deciding that the "neutralization" of Earth's gravitational field would make a spaceship's inertial mass zero (Ch 3) or when he describes momentum as “the force which throws drivers against windshields in car accidents” (Ch 3)

Other selected quotes:

•  "No system of logic yet devised can resolve the inconsistencies and paradoxes inherent in the belief that man is inhabited by a mystical supernatural and immortal something called a soul.” (Ch 8) 
• “Aristotle was on the right track when he said, ‘ if the eye were a body, Vision would be its soul.’ in other words, the soul is the function of the body: the thoughts, the acts and all the emotions ... but ... the existence of spiritual characteristics, such as emotions, does not validate the dualistic view that man is both spiritual and physical. If it did, then by the same reasoning we could prove that a car or a radio or any other inanimate object is both spiritual and physical.” (Ch 8)
• “Most of us believe that God wants us to live a good life and to believe in Him, for which He will in the end reward us with life everlasting. ... The question is, What does God get out of it?” (Ch 10)
• "God ... brags, He cajoles, and He even threatens us in an attempt to win our faith in Him and our love for Him. ... If the father of a family on earth were to demand love a respect the way that God does of His family, he would be considered a psychopath.” (Ch 10)

Entertaining nonsense. April 2022; 131 pages

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

"Sk1nn3r" by Nathan Jones

Set in Bristol, the book opens with a murder. We then scoot forward thirty-four years, into the future, and meet our protagonist Dayne, a very ordinary person working for the health services but in his spare time writing  a book about four serial killers in Bristol, the latest being Sk1nn3r, who flays a part of each victim. As Dayne develops his thesis that the killers, each of whom has a theme, are part of a cabal, his researches bring him closer to an inevitable clash with Sk1nn3r himself.

It is a very dark theme, made even darker by the graphic descriptions of the horrors Sk1nn3r inflicts upon his victims. In response, the whole mood of the book is unremittingly sombre. The near-future setting is one in which the technological advances, mostly very probable, have made the world an even bleaker place. The protagonist suffers from multiple problems including severe intestinal problems and bipolar disorder exacerbated by seasonal affective disorder. He finds it difficult to make friends and is plagued at work by an unsympathetic boss. He's a very ordinary little man, with no superpowers or special skills and this makes the story hugely realistic, even when the Batman-like villain is a reclusive billionaire with special abilities, a secret lair, android servants, and access to futuristic technology. It also makes the ending portion of the book, when Dayne spirals down into drug abuse and paranoid madness, compelling.

The book is a fascinating fusion of horror and scifi, with a dash of thriller for added spice. We are introduced to the dystopian setting bit by bit, as is natural, rather than all at once. Consistent with the theme of the book, and with the condition of the protagonist, this is a dark and forbidding place, and I welcomed the few moments of humour as glimpses of a rainbow in a stormy sky.  It is the product of an author whose skills have improved even beyond his great debut novel, Travelling Without Moving.

Selected quotes:

• "If you’re going to join an exclusive club, it would be wise to get to know the other members first." (Sunday, 1st March   2015)
• "Smart fella, empathetic to the pathetic." (Thirty-four years later.)
• "I wrote a novel a few years ago. Put my heart and soul into it and not a single bugger got round to reading it. Not one. Friends nor family."  (Thirty-four years later.)
• "Dayne thanked the bus as he alighted, a habitual throwback to the days when buses were still operated by human drivers." (Friday, 3rd December   2049)
• "His mum’s face, on the other hand, was plagued by wrinkles; an insane, beautiful webwork of interconnected facial lines that only seemed to emphasise the naive, innocent form of wisdom she’d been blessed with." (Friday, 3rd December   2049)
• "Dayne set his wooden peppermill on its side and gave in a spin." (Tuesday, 7th December   2049)
• "In his current state, he doubted he could string together enough meaningful words to form a haiku." (Thursday, 23rd February   2050)
• "The cloud-cocoon he had become, reverse-metamorphosising him from wasp to larva, also stole his senses one-by-one. First sight, stealing all colour, then taste and smell, then hearing, and even touch. During this devolution, the cloud crept along his nerves to his brain, dulling his thoughts and slowing his mind." (Thursday, 23rd February   2050)
• "the words tumbled from me anyway, my mind jumping from thought to though randomly, cutting up the logic into nonsense, like a William S. Burroughs book." Extract from Dayne S Mitchell’s Notes App Dated Thursday, 31st March   2050)
• "Harper stood and began circling the sofa. After two circuits, Dayne asked her what she was considering. ‘I’m trying to decide which Disney heroine is most beautiful, what the fuck do you think I’m thinking about, Dayne?’" (Friday, 1st April   2050)

April 2022

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

"Utopia Avenue" by David Mitchell

 I loved it. It's a big book but it kept me hooked all the way from the start to the finish. Well before the end I was so worried about whether these four characters would survive that I literally couldn't pout the book down.

Utopia Avenue is a rock band formed in 1967 by bassist Dean, a working-class lad from Gravesend with a troubled home background, keyboardist Elf, a folk singer from a posh family, jazz drumming no-nonsense northerner Griff, and poshboy Jasper, a brilliant lead guitarist with a history of mental disease. Each chapter is given the title of the song that one of them is writing during that chapter. They progress from penniless obscurity, playing in student bars, to stardom. They meet, on level terms, the icons of the day: Hendrix and Brian Jones, John Lennon and David Bowie (still working in an office and waiting for his big break), Marc Bolan and Leonard Cohen to name bust a few. But every step of the way is filled with danger, from drug busts to paternity suits, family tragedies to psychotic episodes. 

I think it is fundamentally about Dean whose songs top and tail the book but for me the most fascinating character was Jasper, despite the chronological weirdness of his dip into madness. I loved his polite honesty and his insistence on taking everything literally. 

But the book revolves around four different personalities who, despite their individual rivalries and jealousies, gel because of their shared passion for music, and the music itself becomes one of the characters. Yes, Dean is the 'typical' rock star, taking every drug going and sleeping around but fundamentally each of them is a musician and even Dean forswears cocaine before a gig after discovering the effect it has on his performance. 

It was brilliantly structured, with a wonderful plot (although I spotted the foreshadowing and guessed the ending) and perfectly drawn characters. There were incredible episodes - I think my favourite moment was Jasper sitting at the wrong table at Elf's sister's wedding - and endless great lines.

The story of Jasper clearly has links with other David Mitchell novels: his girlfriend has an LP of the Cloud Atlas Sextet, from Cloud Atlas, and Jasper himself is a descendant of Jacob de Zoet, from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. 

So many selected quotes:

• "Outside, rain bombards the crocuses to silky mush." (A Raft and a River)
• "'Life has chapters,' says Imogen. 'One ends, another begins'." (A Raft and a River)
• "Sunday evening pools in London's gardens, seeps through cracks and darkens streets." (A Raft and a River)
• "Keeping track of each of us would drive God quite insane." (Darkroom)
• "Writing is a forest of faint paths, of dead-ends, hidden pits, unresolved chords, words that won't rhyme. You can be lost in there for hours. Days, even." (Darkroom)
• "Charm in a guy is a warning sign. Like black and yellow stripes in nature mean, 'Watch out, there are stings near this honey'." (Mona Lisa Sings the Blues)
• "At the end of its eight minute journey from the sun, light passes through the stained glass of St Matthias Church in Richmond, London, and enters the dual darkrooms of Jasper's eyeballs." (Wedding Presence)
• "Jasper notes the Jesus's disciples were, essentially, hippies, long hair, gowns, stoner expressions, irregular employment, spiritual convictions, dubious sleeping arrangements and a guru." (Wedding Presence)
• "They listened to a Cambridgeshire morning's unscored music: a tractor in a nearby field; cars; crows." (Wedding Presence)
• "Jasper felt what you feel after someone leaves the room." (Wedding Presence)
• "Birdsong is chromatic and glinting." (Wedding Presence)
• "The last track, 'A Day In The Life', was a miniature of the whole album, like the way that the Book of Psalms is a miniature of the whole Bible." (Wedding Presence)
• "Dean hated his dad, hated himself for not standing up to him, and hated his dad for making him hate himself." (Purple Flames)
• "If I can play ... it's because I practised in lieu of living. It's not a method I recommend."  (Purple Flames)
• "Dean never saw the point of church. 'God works in mysterious ways' seemed no different from 'Heads I win, tails you lose'."  (Purple Flames)
• "Marriage is a prison, funded by the prisoners."  (Purple Flames)
• "A dustcart drove by. Bare-chested bin-men clung to the side, one with an Action Man's physique, one with a darts player's." (Unexpectedly)
• "Burn the candle at both ends, and soon you've got no candle." (Unexpectedly)
• "Every lover is a lesson and Angus's lesson is that kindness is sexy." (Unexpectedly)
• "She's all nag, no shag." (The Hook)
• "Love's blind ... and is no fan of eye-doctors." (Last Supper)
• "Grief is the bill of love, fallen due." (Builders)
• "For a brief spell, we share a stage. Others are coming to kick us off. But while you're here, write yourself a good part. Act it well."  (Builders)
• "A soggy winter sky, like sodden toilet paper."  (Builders)
• "People say 'While there's life there's hope', but every saying has a B side and this one's is 'Hope stops you adapting to a new reality'." (Roll Away the Stone)
• "Elf's father and Mrs Sinclair exude uncertainty about what to exude." (Even the Bluebells)
• "Small talk, thinks Elf, is Polyfilla you fill cracks with so you don't have to watch them widening." (Even the Bluebells)
• "Grief is a boxer, my sister's a punchbag, and all we can do is watch." (Even the Bluebells)
• "When he played, he forgot he was a scared dropout wasting away in a psychiatric facility in the Netherlands. When he played, he was a servant and a lord of Music." (Sound Mind)
• "Unfortunately, Dean now realised, unwritten contracts have as much fine print as the written variety."  (Look who it isn't)
• "The word 'faster' is becoming a synonym of 'better'. As if the goal of human evolution is to be a sentient bullet." (Chelsea Hotel #929)
• "Do you ask a book for permission before you read it?" (Who shall I say is calling?)
• "The world has too many mystics and too few scientists." (Who shall I say is calling?)
• "Elf considers how the metaphor of life as a journey underplays how the traveller herself is changed by the road." (What's Inside What's Inside)
• "Disaster is rebirth, seen from the front. Rebirth is disaster, seen from behind." (What's Inside What's Inside)
• "You know how ... when you go abroad, you learn more about where you're from than where you're visiting?" (What's Inside What's Inside)
• "Labels ... They're easy to use. They save you the bother of thinking." (What's Inside What's Inside)
• "Art's made by artists, but artists are enabled by a scene." (What's Inside What's Inside)
• "If ethics aren't grey, they aren't really ethics." (Timepiece)
• "The only people who actually live in dreams are people in comas." (I'm a stranger here myself)
• "A girl walks by, leaving a trail of herself in her slipstream." (The narrow road to the far west)

This is such a good book that, having borrowed it from the library, I am now going to buy a copy for my shelves.

April 2022; 561 pages

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

"The Dickens Boy" by Thomas Keneally

 The fictionalised biography of Edward 'Plorn' Dickens, son of the famous novelist. Plorn, an academically challenged sixteen-year-old who has never read his father's books, is sent to Australia to become a sheep-rancher. We learn a great deal about the frontier Australia of the day, about sheep-farming and the newly-dispossessed aborigines, and the logistical and social contexts of farming a remote homestead. Plorn's experiences of love and loss, of kindness and hatred and danger, and his gradual understanding of sex and its relation to the scandalous divisions between his mother and father, help him to grow up.

This is a slow-paced book, gently told. The essential themes are 'coming of age' and the difficulties of being a normal son of a famous father. But the problem with 'true' stories is that some events happen and then other ones do, without the unification imposed by a nove's structure. For example, what promises to be a major character dies quite early in the narrative and another fades out. Then other characters have to arrive to carry the story. And some situations, as in real life, never get fully resolved. While this adds verisimilitude, it makes the book less of a  page-turner. Certainly I was less motivated to read it than by Keneally's most famous book 'Schindler's Ark', the bionovel on which 'Schindler's List' was based (the book is better because it really explores the shadowy fringes of heroism). 

Selected quotes:

• "How far did the reverberations of my famous father reach? Colonies of birds in the desert oaks were engaging in the last clamorous parliament of their day, but Dickens was in the hut at the heart of Ullollie!" (Ch 7)
• "I'd felt inexpressibly strange and even repelled by the idea of my father and mother being one flesh and sharing somehow the stew and the sanctity of that." (Ch 9)
• "The priest uttered his benediction in Latin and very exactly quartered the air to make a cross above the company's heads." (Ch 26)
• "This performer strove for relevance by means of volume." (Ch 33) The context suggests that the performer was loud but it could be read as a snide comment of writers such as Dickens who, at least in Plorn's view, achieve their effects by the quantity of their text.

April 2022; 390 pages

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

"Rise and Fall: The Free World Trilogy #1" by R B Aiken

The bulk of the narrative is an energetic shoot-em-up action  thriller set in a dystopian future America. The narrative is introduced, and occasionally punctuated, with a story about a galactic federation who are using consciousness based 'empathic' beings to decide whether the rather-too-violent earthlings should be invited to join. 

I enjoyed the thriller part, which was so full of graphic violence that I sometimes felt that I was part of a video game. The plot moved at a  relentless pace and contained all the usual features of the genre, including treachery and the ordinary-man-hero with some exceptional fighting skills, although there is no extramarital sex. It was an exciting ride.

Selected quotes:

• "All those years ago it had seemed that they were still fighting for freedom. And where did all that freedom go after we fought for it? he grimly wonders." (Ch 1)
• "He sees these men not for what they are, but for what they have been made" (Ch 2)
• "He's been beaten three ways from Sunday and blood is pouring from his mouth and nose." (Ch 4)

April 2022

This book is available to purchase on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09S16CVJ7

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

"Underland" by Robert Macfarlane

A travel book in which the author explores a variety of subterranean landscapes including cave systems and glacier moulins as well as those that are manmade, such as the catacombs below Paris and mine-workings and underground storage facilies.

Much of the joy of this book lies in his descriptions. Here is one example, from the first page:

• “Late-summer heatwave, heavy air. Bees browsing drowsy over meadow grass. Gold of standing corn, green of fresh hay-rows, black of rooks on stubble fields. ... A swan flies high and south on creaking wings.” 

There is much of this throughout the book, combining detailed observation with precise vocabulary and perfect metaphor.

There’s a lot of science (from an experiment to detect dark matter, buried in an English mine, to geology to climate change), much of it viewed through a quasi-mystical lens. Most of the journeys that Macfarlane makes are, for him, deeply spiritual experiences, and he connects them with legends about the underworld, and more recent stories - perhaps legends in the making - such as the Victorian obsession with a hollow earth.

I found many of Macfarlane’s journeys horrific. He squeezes into impossibly narrow tunnels, descends gulping sinkholes, wades starless rivers and wanders underground labyrinths, sometimes describing his terror, and I really didn’t want to share his experiences. Even when he is above ground, climbing glaciers and mountain sides, often alone, sometimes in heavy fog, far from any prospect of help, I was terrified on his behalf.

My favourite part was his description of the underground urban explorers in the Paris catacombs: perhaps because I am fundamentally a townie I could understand the romance and excitement of this below-street counterculture (though I still wouldn’t go down there: too scary!).

He makes the point repeatedly that geology has a much longer time span than humans and that all our little lives and dreams will disappear into nothingness. But then he also talks about the ‘anthropocene’, the new geological era characterised by human activities, and implicitly suggests that we shouldn’t produce so much plastic waste, or consume so much oil, or mine so much, or bury long-half-life nuclear waste. “Viewed from the perspective of a desert or an ocean, human morality looks absurd - crushed to irrelevance.” (Ch 1)

There is a great deal to enjoy in this book ... but there is a great deal. I thought it went on too long. It belaboured the environmental message and over-romanticised the ‘little people’ who lived simple lives in impossibly beautiful (and often dangerous) landscapes - and still burned oil and produced wastes. And, at the end, there were just too many tunnels to squeeze through, too many mountains the climb, and the last ones just sounded the same as the earlier ones.

But the descriptions were beautiful.

Selected quotes:

• “An aversion to the Underland is buried in language. In many of the metaphors we live by, height is celebrated but depth is despised. To be ‘uplifted’ is preferable to being ‘depressed’ or ‘pulled down’. ‘Catastrophe’ literally means a ‘downwards turn’, ‘cataclysm’ is ‘downwards violence’.” (Ch 1)
• “To perceive matter than casts no shadow, you must search not for its presence but for its consequence.” (Ch 3)
• “If we’re not exploring, we’re not doing anything. We’re just waiting.” (Ch 3)
• “All cities are additions to the landscape that require subtractions from elsewhere.” (Ch 5)
• “A densely stacked modern cityscape leads, inevitably, to a new geography of inequality ... Broadly speaking, wealth levitates and poverty sinks.” (Ch 5)
• “Urban exploration mandates itself as a radical act of disobedience and liberation: a protest against state constraints on freedom within the city.” (Ch 5)
• “The city was full of portals - service hatches, padlocked doorways, manhole covers - that lay unseen in plain sight.” (Ch 5)
• “The leather noise of their wings kept time for me.” (Ch 5): Bats emerging from a cave at night
• “That cenote was understood by the local indigenous people to be an access point to the Mayan underworld, to ‘xibalba’ ... ‘place of fear’ ... a brutal realm ... heavily staffed by demons ... Just to reach Xibalba, you had to cross a river filled with scorpions, a river filled with blood, and a river filled with pus. If you were lucky to make it that far, you were then tested in the six deadly Houses of Trial.” (Ch 5)
• “The sound of this starless river is like none I have ever heard before. It has volume. Its volume has hollowness. Each sound has its echo, and each echo its interior.” (Ch 6)
• “In the Celtic Christian tradition, ‘thin places’ are those sites in a landscape where the borders between world or epochs feel at their [page break] most fragile. Such locations were ... often to be found on westerly headlands, islands, canvas, coasts and other brinks.” (Ch 8)
• “It is so cold the ink in my pen freezes in under a minute.” (Ch 10)

Shortlisted for the 2019 Waterstones Book of the Year

April 2022; 425 pages

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