"His Bloody Project" by Graeme Macrae Burnet

This book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016. Other Booker novels, in 2016 and other years, can be found here.

Set in a remote highland village in 1869, this novel is made up of the testimonies of Roderick Macrae, a crofter's son accused of a gruesome triple murder, and others involved in the case. There is never any question of whodunnit, only of why and whether the accused can be described as insane. All the characters are intensely believable (although the narration of the protagonist is hugely articulate and apparently lacking in dialect) and I can't remember so rooting for a murderer since Good Times, Bad Times by James Kirkwood. Once we get into the narrative, it was a page turner. At the same time, the author uses the narrative to highlight the iniquities and abuses of power inherent in the laird-crofter relationship of the time.

Selected quotes:

• "My father did not like Mr Gillies. He was too clever for his own good and teaching children was not proper work for a man." 
• "For folks like us there is no other ship than the hard ship."
• "Mrs MacLeod was an ancient widow known as the Onion on account of the great number of layers of clothing she wore." 
• "It is not the blow that causes greatest distress, but the anticipation of it."
• "The gaoler showed no surprise ..., This class of being exists almost entirely in the present; they think little of the past nor project their thoughts into the future, and are thus incapable of being surprised by anything. They are similarly incapable of experiencing boredom and are accordingly well-suited to undemanding and repetitive labour."
• "Prisoners rarely express remorse for what they have done. Any feelings of regret they might feel are generally limited to the fact of their being apprehended." 

July 2022; 280 pages

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

"Wild" by Cheryl Strayed

 A journey along the mountaintops of the Pacific Crest Trail doubles as a journey from lost to found for a daughter grieving for her mother, whose death caused the whole family to disintegrate, including Cheryl's own divorce after a period of drug-fuelled promiscuity.  This biographical travel book is written by the author of the brilliant autobiographical novel Torch. 

Those of us who have done a little hiking will be impressed by this extreme version of the activity and will sympathise with Cheryl's struggles; I too have experienced losing toenails and a too-heavy pack but what she endured was on a whole new level.

Selected quotes:

• "My mother died fast but not all of a sudden. A slow-burning fire when flames disappear to smoke and then smoke to air." (Ch 1)
• "Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I'd often disputed. But it turned out that it didn't matter whether she was right or wrong. Both flowed out of my cupped palms." (Ch 2)
• "I felt like the pack was not so much attached to me as me to it. Like I was a building with limbs." (Ch 4)
• "Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story." (Ch 4) 
• "When Tom took my hand to shake it, I could read precisely the expression on his face. It said: 'I've got to get these fucking boots of my feet'." (Ch 7)
• "My flesh morphing into what I can only describe as a cross between tree bark and a dead chicken after it's been dipped in boiling water and plucked." (Ch 12)
• "The wind doing little more than whip the dust into swirls at my feet." (Ch 12)
• "I was a big fat idiot, yes, one who might die of dehydration and heat exhaustion, yes, but at least I was in a beautiful place" (Ch 12)
• "It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets." (Ch 13)
• "The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding." (Ch 13)
• "The ashes of her body were not what I'd expected. They weren't like ashes from a wood fire, silky and fine as sand.They were like pale pebbles mixed with a gritty gray gravel," (Ch 16)
• "I'd reached the point where if a character in one of the novels I was reading happened to be eating, I had to skip over the scene because it simply hurt too much to read about what I wanted and couldn't have." (Ch 17)

July 2022; 311 pages

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

"Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II! by Paul Doherty

 Isabella was the daughter of King Philip IV 'le Bel' of France who was married to Edward, the first Prince of Wales, the son of King Edward I of England, as a way of ensuring peace between the two countries. They were wed in Boulogne. But Edward became Edward II and he was a weak King. He had favourites. His first was Piers Gaveston. This was probably a homosexual relationship, though of course that can't be proved, and Isabella seems to have tolerated it; Edward was providing her with children. But the Barons hated Gaveston as a Gascon upstart and rebelled against Edward until he agreed to exile Piers and when Piers returned they rebelled again and assassinated Piers.  Edward then took another favourite, Hugh Le Spencer, who acted as a gangland boss, greedily laying his hands on all the property he could and flouting the rule of law, both terrorising and alienating the barons. Isabella hated him; Doherty suggests this was because Edward and Hugh insisted on a wife-swap. Eventually Isabella went away to France, where she met rebel baron and exile Roger Mortimer, and soon persuaded Edward to send to her their son Edward, the crown prince. Armed thus, and having hot the useful county of Hainault on side by promising that Philippa, the daughter of the count, would marry her son Edward, she and Mortimer landed an invasion force and defeated and captured Edward II and Hugh. The latter was horribly executed and Edward was deposed and jailed in Berkeley. The story is that he there met his end when a red-hot poker was thrust into his anus, as played on stage in Edward II by Christopher Marlowe. Isabella and Mortimer were, is anyhting, greedier than Hugh Le Spenser, and almost as ruthless, but three years later the now 18 year old Edward III staged a coup and won his own kingdom back; Mortimer was executed and Isabella sent into retirement.

And then rumours started that Edward II was not dead but had escaped Berkeley Castle and was not living abroad. These are the rumours that Doherty, working sometimes from previously unpublished chronicles, dissects, deciding, in the end, that there is some evidence that the body buried in Gloucester Cathedral is not actually Edward II.

The author has written six non-fiction history books and over one hundred (100) (!!!!!) historical novels. He has also been a headteacher for thirty years. How?

Selected quotes:

• “Once Edward II had been transferred to Berkeley, both before and after his death, no one was allowed to see him.” (225)

July 2022; 236 pages

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

"Angel Rock" by Darren Williams

 This novel is set in a small town in the Australian outback. Tom, a young boy, may be poor and bare-footed but he is nice and polite and honest and clever. But he gets lost in the bush while looking after his little step-brother and when he is found, he's alone. Whatever happened seems to be linked to the running away to Sydney and the suicide of Darcy, the brother of Sonny, a boy who hates and bullies Tom. Pop, the town's policeman, and Sydney detective Gibson, have to explore deep into the past to find out what has happened.

It's a lovely story, well-told, that pulls no punches. It's real beauty is the lyrical descriptions of Australia. It sounds like a dreadful place, a harsh landscape which can easily kill a man, and the Australians that inhabit it have been toughened and coarsened to survive. 

As a thriller it didn't quite work for me because there were a lot of characters and I lost track of who was who. But the principal characters of Tom and Grace and Pop and Gibson were incredibly real and alive and their stories were told with sensitivity and understanding. There was young love and there was revenge, there was redemption and there was betrayal, there was loss and there was heartbreak and there was madness. But the main character was the landscape and here the author's descriptions made the book into literature.

Selected Quotes:

• "The first real heat of summer had just steamed into Angel Rock in a welter of frayed tempers and sunburnt noses." (first lines)
• "A butcherbird on the fence watched a dragonfly jig and jag its way over the lawn. Bees hummed in the orange blossoms. Soft nbw leaves fluttered in the trees like tassels and ribbons, like echoes of other celebrations, other occasions. Births, deaths, marriages." (Ch 4)
• "He wondered what the odds were now on finding the boys alive. If he could find God's bookie he would certainly ask him. What are the odds?" (Ch 6)
• "There was a deafening crack as a great electric key reached down and tried to unlock the earth." (Ch 19)

July 2022; 311 pages

More Australian novels reviewed in this blog can be found here.

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

"Starter for Ten" by David Nicholls

 Nicholls is the author of the hugely successful One Day. This is his first book. It is very entertaining and has a great plot which was very easy to read and kept me turning the pages, the sort of characters in whom you not only believe but also root for, and some laugh aloud moments.

Brian, an immature general knowledge geek with very few social skills (if he can make a faux pas, he will), joins the University Challenge quiz team in his first term at university, partly because it was the favourite TV programme of his late father and partly because he is besotted with the beautiful Alice. The book chronicles his toe-curlingly embarrassing attempts to 'pull' Alice and the even more embarrassing tension between his middle class values, his working class roots and his upper class university friends.

I went to uni ten years before the protagonist and almost every word rang true. 

Outing myself as an ubergeek, I think there is an error: George III is cited in Chapter 2 as the last British monarch to see active military combat [presumably while king]; I think it was George II.

Selected quotes:

• "Spencer's so cool he even likes jazz ... proper jazz, the irritating, boring stuff." (Ch 1)
• "I can swim, but only in the same way that any drowning animal can swim." (Ch 3)
• "I'd like to wake up in the morning and be handed a transcript of everything I'm about to say during the day, so that I could go through it and rewrite my dialogue, cutting the fatuous remarks and the crass, idiotic jokes." (Ch 9)
• "I suppose great physical beauty must be some kind of burden, but as burdens go it surely has to be one of the lighter ones." (Ch 14) 
• "There's only so long you can stand at the edge of a group like that before you start to feel as if you should be clearing the empties off the table." (Ch 17)
• "I have nothing but contempt for cool, self-satisfied, privileged cliques ... but unfortunately not quite enough contempt to not want to be part of it." (Ch 17)
• "A great deal of heavy mascara that makes her look intimidating and glamorous at the same time, like the Hollywood branch of the Baader-Meinhof gang." (Ch 22)
• "A little strange and unsettling, like seeing Stalin on a skateboard." (Ch 29)
• "People are clinging to the furniture like it's The Raft of the Medusa by the French nineteenth century realist painter Gericault." (Ch 29)
• "'Independence' is the luxury of all those people who are too confident, and busy, and popular, and attractive to be just plain old 'lonely'. ... Being lonely is just so banal, so shaming, so plain and dull and ugly." (Ch 31)
• "Whenever I hear Edith Piaf sing 'Non, je ne regrette rien' - which is more often than I'd like, now that I'm at university - I can't help thinking 'what the hell is she talking about?' I regret pretty much everything." (Ch 37)" (Ch 37)
• "The kind of good-looking bastard who looks as if he rows everywhere." (Ch 39)

Great fun to read.

July 2022; 469 pages

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

"Silas Marner" by George Eliot

This classic novel is, especially given its relative brevity, a great introduction to the works of that great Victorian novelist George Eliot.

The Plot: spoiler alert

Silas Marner comes from "north'ard"; he was a member of a puritan sect who was accused of stealing money by a fellow member; who, we infer, had designs on the girl betrothed to Silas and framed Silas while Silas was in a "cataleptic fit". Silas, expelled from his home town, comes to Raveloe, a "Merrie England" village in the middle of the country. Silas, regarded with suspicion by the peasants because of his newcomer status, because he rejected the offered role of 'wise woman' after he suggested a herbal remedy, and because he doesn’t have a pint at the Rainbow. 

He's a weaver, like a spider, and all he lives for is work (in a social comment Eliot says that Marner changes to fit his loom: "Marner's face and figure shrank and bent themselves into a constant mechanical relation the the objects of his life, so that he produced the same impression as a handle or a crooked tube, which has no meaning standing apart"; in the same way as in Huxley's Brave New World men are bred to for the assembly line to which they are destined). He needs very little money to feed and clothe himself etc and he no longer contributes to the church so he buries his savings. 

The other side of the coin [sorry about that] is that the rich are corrupt. The Squire's son Godfrey has embezzled from his father, loaning money to his brother, Dunstan, who threatens to expose the fact that Godfrey has married secretly. A plan to sell Godfrey's horse falls at the first jump [sorry again] when the horse dies (badly ridden by Dunstan, a metaphor for the ruling class exploiting the workers). Walking home in a fortuitous mist, Dunstan finds Silas out and steals his gold. 

The loss of his gold prompts Silas to seek help, walking into a comedy crowd scene at the local pub (it's always great to schedule the humour immediately after a moment of great drama - as with the porter scene in Macbeth which comes immediately after the murder of the King). This is the first interaction Silas has had with the village, and asking for help is the first indication that nobody can live entirely alone. Silas begins to mellow. 

The New Year’s Day party at the Squire’s  mirrors the crowd scene in the pub, being a sort of upper class comedy sketch to complement the peasantry version.

Godfrey’s abandoned wife is heading through the snow with their child, intent of confronting him at the party. But she is addicted to opium and, taking a draught, the soporific drug combines with her fatigue to send her to sleep; hypothermia finished her off. Her toddler toddles off and wanders into Silas's cottage (he is in yet another convenient fugue state so he doesn’t notice her coming in) and falls asleep in front of the fire. Silas comes to and thinks the child is his missing gold, returned in human form. Pulling himself together, he retraces  the girl’s steps to find the woman in the snow and then turns up at the Squire's feast with the baby, asking for the doctor. 
Godfrey semi-recognises the child but says he doesn’t; Silas insists the child is his (the gold went, the child came; both being mysterious) and, since the woman is dead, Godfrey, now free to marry Nancy, lets Silas take the child. 

Dolly Winthrop proves invaluable to Silas in instructing him to to bring up the girl, now called Eppie, and giving him baby clothes etc from her last-born Aaron. She insists Silas gets Eppie baptised. As a toddler, Eppie proves a handful, and Silas is too soft to discipline her. But his love for her begins to soften him.

Sixteen years later (this is a little like 'A Winter's Tale' in which a girl is lost and rediscovered after a long gap) the Stone Pits are being drained. Dunstan's body, with the stolen gold, is discovered. Godfrey confesses to (childless) Nancy that Eppie is his child (by the dead woman). 

Godfrey and Nancy go to Silas and claim Eppie as theirs; they propose to take her away (though they will make sure that Silas is cared for in his old age, and permit Eppie to continue to see him) and adopt her. However, Eppie elects to stay with Silas (though she will soon be marrying Aaron) and Godfrey (and Nancy who, though very much the wronged woman, sides with her husband in this game of social one-upmanship) are turned away.

Nancy and Godfrey reflect on what has happened and decide that they must make the best of things. Chastened, they repent.

Silas and Eppie journey to Lantern Yard ... to find that the church has been replaced by a factory and the city is too busy for their simple country ways.

The structure of the plot

One of the joys of SM is the juxtapositions. Immediately after the dramatic theft of Silas's gold comes the comic rustic yokel scene in the pub; this reversal reminded me of the way, in Macbeth, the murder of the King is immediately followed by the only comic interlude, the 'hell porter' scene. Eliot then follows the scene in the pub with another scene of a social gathering: the New Year's Eve party thrown by the squire to which the poor people are invited to entertain the guests (and afterwards to dine off the leftovers). Both social occasions are interrupted by Silas, once to announce that his gold has gone and the second time to announce that Eppie, who symbolises eternal gold (Eliot would have known that in the Bible's Gospel of Matthew chapter 6, (verses 19-20) Jesus is reported to have told his followers "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth. and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal".

Sleeping Beauty or Hero's Adventure?

Christopher Booker in The Seven Basic Plots (pp 202 - 203) cites SM as a classic ‘Rebirth’ story along the lines of Sleeping Beauty. The jealous fairy is William Dane, who frames Silas for theft, so stealing his fiancee and causing Silas to seek self-exile in the semi-mythical rural paradise of Raveloe. But the poison has entered the soul of Silas and he gradually (over fifteen years, about as long as it would take a princess to grow up) withdraws from the world, first into his miserhood, and then, following the loss of his gold, into embittered "Self-pitiful brooding". From this “state of living death” he is awakened by the semi-magical arrival of Eppie and is happy but the 'ever after' bit is undecided until Eppie acknowledges Silas as her father, despite discovering that her natural father is Godfrey. One might also note that the two of the three moments of magic in the Sleeping Beauty tale, the fairy's curse and the prince's kiss are both occasions on which Silas has fallen into his "cataleptic fit", itself an echo of the Sleeping Beauty. (Perhaps the other moment of magic, when Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger, is heralded by the fortuitous mist that shields the theft of Dunstan ... and leads him to fall, with his stolen gold, into the pools.)

An alternative analysis of the story is that it is a 'Hero's Adventure' (an analysis along these lines is supported by the comment of GE herself that SM was a "legendary story"). Silas, the hero, leaves his home country to travel to the mythical land of Raveloe where he meets trials: the first being the offer of becoming the village's 'wise woman', which he fails; the second being the theft of his gold, which he passes, at least in part, by seeking help from the village pub; and the third being his acceptance of the responsibility for the care of the abandoned child. The grail that the hero has been seeking turns out to be Eppie's love and, armed with this, he returns to his own world, only to find that it has changed and that the past no longer has any hold over him. In this analysis the antagonist is Godfrey and he is in many ways the mirror image of Silas: wasteful and indolent rather than hard-working and miserly, and, fundamentally, he ducks responsibility where Silas accepts it.

The author's messages
Although George Eliot believed fiction should have a morally beneficial effect, as a critic, she asserted that “We don’t want a man with a wand, going about the gallery and haranguing us. Art is art and tells its own story.” Nevertheless, as an author, she cannot resist the authorial voice commenting upon issues, though it is far less intrusive than in many contemporary novels. But Silas Marner is, first and foremost, a story and the dance of the characters offers the reader enjoyment and delight.

• One of my U3A Central Eastbourne reading group suggested that the book's message is that suffering is rewarded.
• Another suggestion is that the message is that a man can only find fulfilment when he is part of a community in which he both gives help and receives it. 
• Alternatively, a man can find fulfilment only when he acknowledges both the male and the female sides of his character. Silas has his masculinity ripped away from him when he is first falsely accused and doesn't stand up for himself and second has his gold stolen (symbolic of emasculation) and accepts the loss. When he adopts Eppie he accepts that a human can only be complete if he accepts responsibility for and nurtures and cares for others. (One could argiue that the role of protector is a masculine virtue and he has therefore reasserted his masculinity when he says, pivotally, apropos the baby Eppie: "It's come to me - I've a right to keep it."; Ch 13).
• Another message might be that neither miserliness nor wastefulness bring happiness. Marian Evans knew her Dante and in Dante's Inferno one of the circles of hell contains both those who spend too much come against those who spend too little. Dante, like Aristotle, believed in the doctrine of the golden middle: that good lies in moderation. Silas himself is, famously a miser: "as Silas walked homeward across the fields in the twilight, he drew out the money and thought it was brighter in the gathering gloom.” (Ch 2) What is less obvious is the wastefulness of the squirearchy. This is referred to overtly in chapter one: "there were several chiefs in Raveloe who could farm badly quite at their ease, drawing enough money from their bad farming, in those war times, to live in a rollicking fashion". In chapter two we are told that the poor people enjoy the leftovers from the feasts of the rich (an early example of trickle-down economics or further confirmation that the rich are wasteful?) One of the symbols of this waste is the undrained and deserted stone-pit next to which Silas lives (though it is Godfrey's decision to drain the stone-pits that leads to the discovery of Dunstan the thief and Godfrey the unacknoledged father). The Lammeters are Eliot's ideal: “for the Lammeters had been brought up in that way, that they never suffered a pinch of salt to be wasted, and yet everybody in their household had of the best, according to his place.” (Ch 3) Silas himself recognises the virtue in moderation near the end of the book when he has achieved wisdom: urged to continue smoking he demurs: “I’ve done enough for to-day. I think, mayhap, a little of it does me more good than so much at once.” (Ch 16) Nancy's sister, a Lammeter, describe: “that way o’ the men—always wanting and wanting, and never easy with what they’ve got: they can’t sit comfortable in their chairs when they’ve neither ache nor pain, but either they must stick a pipe in their mouths, to make ’em better than well, or else they must be swallowing something strong, though they’re forced to make haste before the next meal comes in.” (Ch 17) but she specifically exempts “our father” (is that a deliberate Biblical echo?) from this general foolishness.

Two types of faith

Eliot, who herself as a young woman moved from a devoted Christian to an agnostic position, contrasts two conceptions of faith:

• Eliot explicitly attacks the narrow-mindedness of the Lantern Yard (surely a deliberate name with its implications of the light for the world) version of Christianity: “The little light he [Silas] possessed spread its beams so narrowly, that frustrated belief was a curtain broad enough to create for him the blackness of night.” (Ch 2) 
  
• In contrast, the faith of the village is relaxed and easy-going; perhaps one might say that it is less concerned with right and wrong and more with good and bad. The village is almost pre-Christian in its beliefs: “Such strange lingering echoes of the old demon-worship might perhaps even now be caught by the diligent listener among the grey-haired peasantry; for the rude mind with difficulty associates the ideas of power and benignity. A shadowy conception of power that by much persuasion can be induced to refrain from inflicting harm, is the shape most easily taken by the sense of the Invisible in the minds of men who have always been pressed close by primitive wants, and to whom a life of hard toil has never been illuminated by any enthusiastic religious faith. To them pain and mishap present a far wider range of possibilities than gladness and enjoyment: their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all overgrown by recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear.” (Ch 1; second paragraph)
  
• The fundamental faith in the village is ‘neighbourliness’, a word Eliot often uses. This is pretty close to the Christian commandment to ‘Love Thy Neighbour’: “There was a fair proportion of kindness in Raveloe; but it was often of a beery and bungling sort, and took the shape least allied to the complimentary and hypocritical.” (Ch 10)
  
• Even going to church is not central to the villagers’ faith, although it is thought more suitable for the higher social orders: “The inhabitants of Raveloe were not severely regular in their church-going, and perhaps there was hardly a person in the parish who would not have held that to go to church every Sunday in the calendar would have shown a greedy desire to stand well with Heaven, and get an undue advantage over their neighbours—a wish to be better than the “common run”, that would have implied a reflection on those who had had godfathers and godmothers as well as themselves, and had an equal right to the burying-service. At the same time, it was understood to be requisite for all who were not household servants, or young men, to take the sacrament at one of the great festivals: Squire Cass himself took it on Christmas-day; while those who were held to be “good livers” went to church with greater, though still with moderate, frequency.” (Ch 10)
  
• Dolly expresses the fundamental faith of the villagers thus: “there’s trouble i’ this world, and there’s things as we can niver make out the rights on. And all as we’ve got to do is to trusten, Master Marner—to do the right thing as fur as we know, and to trusten. For if us as knows so little can see a bit o’ good and rights, we may be sure as there’s a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know—I feel it i’ my own inside as it must be so.” (Ch 16)
  
• These two faiths are explicitly contrasted in the rambling story about a marriage which the sexton tells in Chapter 6. In the story, he parson muddles up the words ‘wife’ and ‘husband’ in a wedding ceremony: “Is’t the meanin’ or the words as makes folks fast i’ wedlock?” (Ch 6) the sexton asks.
  
• Eliot seems to be attacking the narrow-mindedness that accompanies monotheism. “In the early ages of the world, we know, it was believed that each territory was inhabited and ruled by its own divinities, so that a man could cross the bordering heights and be out of the reach of his native gods, whose presence was confined to the streams and the groves and the hills among which he had lived from his birth.” (Ch 2) This idea has Biblical roots. There is a lot of evidence that the early Israelites (eg pre Moses) were not monotheistic, but possibly polytheistic, or at best henotheistic (they recognised many gods but worshipped only one. For example, in Exodus 20:3 God tells the Israelistes that “you shall have no other gods to set against me”, implying that there are others. In Psalms 89: 5-7 there is a question: ’Who among the heavenly beings is like Yahweh, a God feared in the council of the holy ones, great and awesome above all that are around him?’ Finally, there are suggestions that other gods are local. Deuteronomy 32:8-9 states “When Elyon [translated in the New English Bible as ‘the Most High’] apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods [the NEB has ‘sons of God’]; Yahweh’s own portion was his people, Jacob his allotted share.” Lastly, David, exiled by Saul, curses those who have sent him into foreign lands where he will have “to serve other gods” (1 Samuel 26:19)
  

Social commentary

There is a degree of social commentary which might suggest that politically Eliot is to the left of the spectrum; she is on the side of the working man rather than the landowner:

• From early on, it is made clear that there is nothing special about the social hierarchy of the village. The Squire “was only one among several landed parishioners”, the big difference being that he not only owned his land, he even “had a tenant or two”. (Ch 3)
• “It was still that glorious war-time which was felt to be a peculiar favour of Providence towards the landed interest, and the fall of prices had not yet come to carry the race of small squires and yeomen down that road to ruin for which extravagant habits and bad husbandry were plentifully anointing their wheels.” (Ch 3)
• “the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families, and the poor thought that the rich were entirely in the right of it to lead a jolly life; besides, their feasting caused a multiplication of orts, which were the heirlooms of the poor.” (Ch 3)
• “The Squire had been used to parish homage all his life, used to the presupposition that his family, his tankards, and everything that was his, were the oldest and best” (Ch 9)
• “By this advanced hour of the day, the Squire ... felt it quite pleasant to fulfil the hereditary duty of being noisily jovial and patronizing” (Ch 11)
• At the squire’s party, Ben Winthrop (father to Aaron, husband to Dolly, and therefore representative of the kindly, easy-going villagers, defends Godfrey the Squire’s son against sexton Mr Macey: “I should like you to pick me out a finer-limbed young fellow nor Master Godfrey—one as ’ud knock you down easier, or ’s more pleasanter-looksed when he’s piert and merry.” Macey replies: “he isn’t come to his right colour yet: he’s partly like a slack-baked pie. And I doubt he’s got a soft place in his head, else why should he be turned round the finger by that offal Dunsey as nobody’s seen o’ late, and let him kill that fine hunting hoss as was the talk o’ the country? And one while he was allays after Miss Nancy, and then it all went off again, like a smell o’ hot porridge, as I may say. That wasn’t my way when I went a-coorting.” (Ch 11)

But how radical was Eliot? Her idealised village community of Raveloe is set in the past (Eliot had seen many of the early Victorian changes in the countryside and she is aware that Raveloe is special in that it is set away from a coaching route (and pre railway) and so has remained unspoilt); Eliot is a small-c conservative at heart (as is shown by her horror at the industrialisation of Lantern Yard at the end of the novel). 

In her treatment of women, despite Eliot's own scandalous personal life, Eliot is quite conventional: the three main female characters are Dolly, the perfect farmer's wife (perhaps paralleled by Mrs Poyser in Adam Bede), Eppie, the adopted daughter of Silas, who has remained steadily nice despite being spoiled rotten as a child, and Nancy, the only remotely complex female character, who is the wronged but loyal wife of the young squire.

Of course, the peak of the social commentary comes when we ask whether the right of a biological father (and from there the old traditional system of inheritance of land and title) should overturn the right of an adopted father. Eliot's answer in this case is a resounding 'no'. 

• “Godfrey had from the first specified Eppie, then about twelve years old, as a child suitable for them to adopt. It had never occurred to him that Silas would rather part with his life than with Eppie. Surely the weaver would wish the best to the child he had taken so much trouble with, and would be glad that such good fortune should happen to her ... Was it not an appropriate thing for people in a higher station to take a charge off the hands of a man in a lower?” (Ch 17)
• “But I’ve a claim on you, Eppie—the strongest of all claims. It’s my duty, Marner, to own Eppie as my child, and provide for her. She is my own child—her mother was my wife. I’ve a natural claim on her that must stand before every other.” (Ch 19)

Influences:

The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan: One of our U3A group suggested that Eliot derived the original idea for Silas from seeing a jobbing weaver going across the countryside with a large pack on his back ... and remembered the description of Christian, in the early part of the Pilgrim's Progress, who travelled with a burden on his back until, with sufficient faith, he could cast it off.

Shakespeare: as well as the murder/hell porter juxtaposition in Macbeth described above, the rural pub scene could have been inspired by Nick Bottom and his mates in A Midsummer Night's Dream. But the obvious Shakespearean influence is A Winter's Tale, in which Perdita is a child who is lost and then rediscovered after a gap of sixteen years. 

The Bible: As well as the reference from Matthew, above, and from Exodus and Deuteronomy, one could see call some of the villagers in the pub scene Job's comforters, after Silas has his gold stolen. The Christian interpretation is made even stronger when Silas is identified as Christ in only the fourth paragraph when the “Raveloe lasses ... declare that they would never marry a dead man come to life again.” (Ch 1)

Pantomime. We have discussed Sleeping Beauty. In the Introduction to the Penguin edition of this book, Q D Leavis suggests that Silas Marner is an 'anti-Cinderella' story: "Eppie ... renounces her birth-right as the Squire’s heiress to marry a working-man” (p 34)

Selected quotes:

• “Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices.” (Ch 1)
• “Every man’s work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.” (Ch 2)
• “The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.” (Ch 5)
• “joy is the best of wine, and Silas’s guineas were a golden wine of that sort.” (Ch 5)
• “there’s allays two ’pinions; there’s the ’pinion a man has of himsen, and there’s the ’pinion other folks have on him.” (Ch 6)
• “there’s reasons in things as nobody knows on—that’s pretty much what I’ve made out; yet some folks are so wise, they’ll find you fifty reasons straight off, and all the while the real reason’s winking at ’em in the corner, and they niver see’t.” (Ch 6)
• “he’d got a bit confused in his head, what wi’ age and wi’ taking a drop o’ summat warm when the service come of a cold morning.” (Ch 6)
• “Did ever a ghost give a man a black eye? That’s what I should like to know. If ghos’es want me to believe in ’em, let ’em leave off skulking i’ the dark and i’ lone places—let ’em come where there’s company and candles.” (Ch 6)
• “Now, don’t you be for overshooting the mark ... That’s what you’re allays at; if I throw a stone and hit, you think there’s summat better than hitting, and you try to throw a stone beyond.” (Ch 8)
• “Like many violent and implacable men, he allowed evils to grow under favour of his own heedlessness, till they pressed upon him with exasperating force, and then he turned round with fierce severity and became unrelentingly hard.” (Ch 8)
• “I wouldn’t speak ill o’ this world, seeing as Them put us in it as knows best—but what wi’ the drink, and the quarrelling, and the bad illnesses, and the hard dying, as I’ve seen times and times, one’s thankful to hear of a better.” (Ch 10)
• “he isn’t come to his right colour yet: he’s partly like a slack-baked pie” (Ch 11)
• “It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.” (Ch 12)
• “uncle Kimble ... shuffled before his adversary’s deal with a glare of suspicion, and turned up a mean trump-card with an air of inexpressible disgust, as if in a world where such things could happen one might as well enter on a course of reckless profligacy.” (Ch 13)
• “We may strive and scrat and fend, but it’s little we can do arter all” (Ch 14)
• “For if the child ever went anyways wrong, and you hadn’t done your part by it, Master Marner—’noculation, and everything to save it from harm—it ’ud be a thorn i’ your bed for ever o’ this side the grave; and I can’t think as it ’ud be easy lying down for anybody when they’d got to another world, if they hadn’t done their part by the helpless children as come wi’out their own asking.” (Ch 14)
• “Eppie was a creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires” (Ch 14)
• “Silas had taken to smoking a pipe daily during the last two years, having been strongly urged to it by the sages of Raveloe, as a practice “good for the fits”; and this advice was sanctioned by Dr. Kimble, on the ground that it was as well to try what could do no harm” (Ch 16)
• “I know the way o’ wives; they set one on to abuse their husbands, and then they turn round on one and praise ’em as if they wanted to sell ’em.” (Ch 17)
• “‘A man must have so much on his mind,’ is the belief by which a wife often supports a cheerful face under rough answers and unfeeling words” (Ch 17)

July 2022; 244 pages

There is a BBC In Our Time podcast about Silas Marner which can be found here, although it spends more time considering GE than SM. 

A short biography of George Eliot can be found here.

Biographies of George Eliot reviewed on this blog are:

• George Eliot by Jenny Uglow
• George Eliot: A Life by Rosemary Ashton

Other novels written by George Eliot include:

• Scenes of Clerical Life
• Adam Bede
• The Mill on the Floss
• Middlemarch
• Silas Marner
• Felix Holt
• Romola
• Daniel Deronda

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

"Hunger" by Knut Hamsun

 "It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania [now Oslo], that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him." This is the start of a strange novel about an anonymous penniless writer with nothing left to pawn, who can't pay his rent and cannot afford to eat. He gets so hungry that he even tries wood shavings and bites his own finger. His only source of income is from selling unsolicited articles to newspaper editors, but when he is hungry and homeless he finds it difficult to concentrate enough to write: "I had noticed distinctly that every time I went hungry for a long time it was as though my brain trickled quietly out of my head, leaving me empty." (part one). To add to this vicious circle he has an unquenched pride which makes it impossible for him to accept charity; fundamentally self-destructive (eg the finger-biting incident), he lies to protect himself from the humiliation of poverty, he insults those who try to help him and then further impoverishes himself by giving money and possessions away when he has them. As Paul Auster (1970) says in the Afterword: "Order has disappeared for him; everything has become random. His actions are inspired by nothing but whim and ungovernable urge, the weary frustration of anarchic discontent."

In one section, the protagonist invents a new word but cannot think of what it means, although he knows a lot of things it doesn't mean. Somehow this epitomises the meaning of his life. 

The protagonist echoes Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (with the inner monologue, teetering on the edge of insanity, of the narrator in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground). 

Published in 1890, Hunger heralds modernism. The style is early 'stream of consciousness' and the motif of a protagonist wandering around a city would later be echoed in mature 'stream of consciousness' novels Ulysses by James Joyce and Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, though in both of these the timescale is collapsed into a single day. The no-frills narration reminded me of Kafka (eg The Trial). Perhaps the closest parallel I have read are the four novellas by Samuel Beckett: The Expelled, The Calmative, The End, & First Love.

One interesting style feature is that some paragraphs switch tense between past and present:

• "Flies and gnats stuck to the paper and disturbed me; I blew on them to make them go away, then blew harder and harder, but it was no use. The little pests lean backk and make themselves heavy, putting up such a struggle that their thin legs bend They just cannot be made to budge. Having found something to latch onto, they brace their heels against a comma or an unevenness in the paper and stand stock-still until they find it convenient to take off." (part one)
• "The sea stretched away like blue mother-of-pearl, and small birds flew silently from one place to another. A policeman is patrolling his beat some distance off, otherwise there is not a soul to be seen and the entire harbour is quiet." (part two)
• "The darkness had taken possession of my thoughts and didn't leave me alone for a moment. What if I myself were to be dissolved into darkness, made one with it? I sit up in my and flail my arms." (part two)

This confusion between then and now, and the meandering of the protagonist through the city, and the way his attention is always being distracted, seem to represent the way we think.

This sort of book isn't easy to read. As Paul Auster (1970) says in the Afterword, "it is a work in which nothing happens". There is no obvious plot and the skeletal structure seemed to be a spiral into which the protagonist plunges; there was little character development except for the protagonist; the end was abrupt; much of the 'action' seems meaningless and repetitive. Nevertheless, I think it will be one of those books which I will remember for a long time.

Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. A list of other laureates, many of whom have books reviewed in this blog, can be found here.

Selected quotes:

• "Over by the door, where my room was papered with old issues of Morgenbladet, I could see, very clearly, a notice from the Director of Lighthouses, and just left of it, a fat, swelling ad for freshly baked bread" (part one)
• "Autumn had arrived, that lovely cool time of year when everything changes colour and dies." (part one)
• "Where am I to go? I had to be somewhere, after all." (part one)
• "A brooding darkness was all around me. Everything was still, everything. But up aloft soughed the eternal song of wind and weather, that remote, tuneless hum which is never silent. I listened so long to this endless, faint soughing that it began to confuse me; it could only be the symphonies coming from the whirling worlds above me, the stars intoning a hymn ..." (part one)
• "My hunger pains were excruciating and didn't leave me for a moment. I swallowed my saliva again and again to take the edge off, and it seemed to help." (part two)
• "The intelligent poor individual was a much finer observer than the intelligent rich one. The poor individual looks around him at every step, listens suspiciously to every word he hears from the people he meets ... He is alert and sensitive, he is experienced, his soul has been burned ..." (part three)
• "I didn't want to torture her but did so anyway." (part three)
• "And so too my own conscience bids me ..." (part four) is a sentence he never manages to finish.

 A challenging but incredibly worthwhile read.

July 2022; 217 pages

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

"The Glass Bathyscaphe" by Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin

Perhaps I missed it. I don't remember reading anything about a glass bathyscaphe (a power underwater craft made mainly of glass). I checked the index: no bathyscaphe is mentioned. The title seems to refer only to the illustration on the cover. The book is focused entirely on its subtitle: 'How Glass Changed the World'.

Glass-making has been around for a long time in Eurasia but its early use was almost entirely ornamental, using opaque, coloured glass. Thin transparent glass requires glass-blowing techniques, developed “somewhere in Syria or Iraq” in c100 BCE (Ch 2). The authors carefully distinguish various uses of glass as ornaments, vessels, windows and mirrors and suggest that it was the fact that glass windows were so useful in the cold climates of northern Europe (enabling people to work indoors; there were glass windows in Britain during the Roamn occupation)  that led to the emphasis on transparent glass which is so useful for the key scientific instruments that were essential for the scientific revolution (not just see-through (and heat-proof and inert) reaction vessels for chemistry but also thermometers, barometers, vacuum-pumps, telescopes and microscopes, not to mention lanterns, sextants and chronometers to assist sea travel and even light bulbs.

As well as science, the authors consider the effect of glass on art, particularly the development of perspective, which they suggest, with evidence from contemporary sources, was facilitated by the use of mirrors. They also suggest that windows encouraged paintings because both are framed and show how some early renaissance artists used panes of glass as drawing aids.

They further hypothesise that the western European cult of individuality was encouraged by glass mirrors; they suggest the rise of autobiographies correlates with the rise of glass mirrors.

They even suggest that the reason the scientific revolution did not take place in East Asia was because they never developed spectacles. The book theorises that this is because they have much higher rates of myopia than in western Europe. They hypothesise that this is because (a) the traditional rice and vegetable diet contains too little vitamin A and (b) they have a strong literary tradition, with young children forced to learn a large number of literary texts from a very early age; the resultant eye strain causes myopia. But myopia in young children is an eye defect among the relatively economically powerless so there was no need for spectacles (and a short-sighted person can still read by putting their face very close to the page); furthermore the gradual increase in long-sightedness as people age would mean that older people didn’t need spectacles. In contrast, the eye defect in the west was predominantly long-sightedness which makes it nearly impossible to read and this stimulated the demand for spectacles.

This is therefore an ambitious work! The arguments are persuasive although I was rarely convinced; perhaps a smaller focus and a greater depth of evidence would have sealed the deal. Nevertheless, it was an entertaining read. But where was the bathyscaphe?

Selected quotes:

• “Discovery sometimes comes after a first rough set of guesses has begun to seem plausible enough to justify detailed examination.” (Ch 1)
• “A world of continuous investigation and assessment of nature and social relations, has many enemies. Most human beings prefer certainty and order above all else. Most innovations and change threaten such orderliness. In particular, new ideas can be subversive and dangerous. Much of history shows the tendency of thought systems to close down, solidify, and put up increasing barriers to disturbance. ... One aspect of this is what might be termed roughly the tendency towards inquisitorial thought. ... ‘Heresies’ are now rooted out; challenges to the thought system are seen as threats to the social and political order. The thought police are active, but do not need to be called in because of self-emasculation by individuals under all sorts of pressures, including those of loved ones. ... Whether it is the Jesuits or the Mandarins or the Mullahs, a strict enforcement of the notion the certain ideas must not be challenged becomes widespread. It is more important to learn the old truths and reinterpret them than to learn new ones.” (Ch 3) 
• “This curiosity, the impetus to test and speculate, the sense that there were expanding horizons of knowledge, that not all was known and there were new worlds to be discovered, were boosted by the rapidly expanding wealth and technology of the period. The new burst of power through the intensive exploitation of wind, water and animals, the growth of trade and cities, and the expansion of Christianity ... encouraged experimentation.” (Ch 3)
• “Glass shifts authority from the word, from the ear and the mind and writing, to external visual evidence. The authority of elders is challenged; the test is the individual eye and the authority of the doubt-filled and sceptical individual.” (Ch 4)
• “At the two ends of Eurasia very different cosmologies and ideologies developed ... at one end of the continent a glass civilisation emerged, and at the other a pottery and paper one.” (Ch 6)
• “It is one of the ironies of life that just as they reach the peak of knowledge, in their late forties and fifties, many people find it impossible to continue reading without glasses.” (Ch 8)
• “The invention of spectacles in creased the intellectual life of professional workers by fifteen years or more. ... The revival of learning from the fourteenth century onwards may well be connected to this. ... The active life of skilled craftsmen, often engaged in very detailed close work, was also almost doubled.” (Ch 8)

July 2022; 213 pages

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

"Service with a smile" by P G Wodehouse

 Another Blandings novel and yet again there is a plot to steal the Empress of Blandings, the prize pig about which Lord Emsworth is obsessed. Once again there is a pair of cross-matched lovers and once again there is an imposter ("Blandings Castle had imposters the way other houses had mice"; 6.3). Wodehouse recycles his plots even more than he recycles his lines.

But you don't read these books for the farce. You read them for the moments when the prose turns into liquid jewellery.

So here are some of those selected quotes:

• "the large brown eyes ... had something in them of the sadness one sees in those of a dachshund which, coming to the dinner table to get its ten per cent, is refused a cut off the joint." (1.1) PGW doesn't just say 'she had the eyes of a dachshund but he elaborates; that's his secret.
• "South Kensington? Where sin stalks naked through the daek alleys and only might is right." (2.1) PGW likes exaggeration and likes to juxtapose it with the least likely comparison.
• "He had a face that would stop a clock." (2.1)
• "He, too, had lived in Arcady." (2.1) PGW isn't afraid of making oblique obscure cultural references and just leaving it at that, for some readers to appreciate, and others, presumably, to pass by.
• "Hell has no fury like a woman scorned, and very few like a woman who feels she has been tricked into entertaining at her home a curate at the thought of whom she has been shuddering for weeks." (5.2) PGW enjoys taking metaphors literally and stretching them.
• "She could, he estimated, be counted on for at least ten thousand words of rebuke and recrimination, administered in daily instalments over the years." (6.1)
• "The ideal person with whom to plot is the furtive. shifty-eyed man who stifled his conscience at the age of six and would not recognize a scruple if you served it up to him on an individual blue plate with bearnaise sauce." (7.2) PGW keeps the elaboration going by adding detail after detail.

July 2022; 224 pages

Here you can find a link to other P G Wodehouse books reviewed in this blog 

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

"The Moonstone" by Wilkie Collins

 Not the first time I have read this Victorian classic, often hailed as the first detective novel, but I am re-reading it for the book club at the Grove Theatre in Eastbourne. This means that I am reading having already known whodunnit and how; this in turn means that I can spot the hints dropped in the plot which make the solution of the mystery possible. It's a clever plot. Below, I analyse the plot and this section contains a spoiler alert.

Sergeant Cuff, the detective, was probably based on the real-life Inspector Whicher, an early detective employed by the London Metropolitan Police, whose investigation into a murder at Road Hill House for which Constance Kent was subsequently found guilty also involved a nightdress. Sergeant Cuff's retirement to a cottage where he grows roses preceded the retirement of Hercule Poirot (who grows Vegetable Marrows) in Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a brilliant novel which also shares a narrative device with The Moonstone. The relationship between the clever, but sometimes enigmatic, detective and the slow-witted butler who narrates much of The Moonstone is clearly the model for Sherlock Holmes and his narrator Watson, and for Poirot and Captain Hastings. The character of Gooseberry, the nimble-witted street urchin, in The Moonstone is clearly a model for the Baker Street Irregulars in the Sherlock Holmes books. And of course the local policeman is incompetent! Thus, this book pioneers many of the tropes of detective fiction.

It is told from multiple perspectives. One of the narrators is unreliable: I can't think of any novel previous to the Moonstone which uses this device. The first section is narrated by the steward, Mr Betteredge. He is a fussy old man with an amusing (and rather unPC) view on life; this narrative allows Collins to add humour, both laughing with Mr B and laughing at him: "On hearing those dreadful words, my daughter Penelope said she didn't know what prevented her heart from flying straight out of her. I thought privately that it might have been her stays." (Ch 3) The second section is narrated by Miss Clack, a poor relation of the family, whose genteel poverty have led her to become a proselytising Christian, forever handing out unwanted tracts and advice; Collins skilfully pokes fun at her naivete. Other narrators include a principal protagonist, a medical assistant, and a solicitor. 

Collins employs subtle humour in his characterisations of the steward, Miss Clack and Mrs Merridew; these comic characters are far more skilfully drawn than the crude but compelling caricatures of Dickens.

Pacing: Warning: this section contains spoilers

• The crucial clues are clustered at the 13% and 14% mark: these are the painting of the door, Miss Rachel's character, and Mr Franklin sleeping badly.
• The diamond is stolen at 19%
• The Great detective arrives at 23%
• Rosanna dies at 34%
• Sergeant Cuff is dismissed at 38%
• We discover who took the Moonstone from Rachel's room at 65%
• The opium addiction theory is advanced at 80%

This means that most of the action occurs in the first half of the book and the second half is a sometimes long-winded explanation of who and, more importantly, how. A full third of the book occurs after the thief has been unmasked. This has, to modern eyes, the feeling that the narration isn't quite balanced.

The Moonstone as a commentary on social class

Collins shows a lot of class consciousness in this novel. 

• One of the main characters is a servant girl (an ex-thief whose mother was a prostitute) who dares to fall in love with the young gentleman of the house. Of course the object of her love is ignorant of the fact and of course she comes to a bad end (and you could argue from this, and from the conventional ending, that Collins believed that any disruption of the social hierarchy would lead to misery) but this character does enable Collins to make the point that "Suppose you put Miss Rachel into a servant's dress, and took her ornaments off -? ... young ladies may behave in a manner which would cost a servant her place." (2.3.4) 
• The bulk of the narration is undertaken by the family steward. He is an old man who has spent all his life in service and understands his place in the social hierarchy. Again, you could argue that Collins believes that 'knowing your place' is essential for social stability. Nevertheless, this loyal family retainer understands the unfairness of the system which is revealed through the use of gentle irony:
• "People in high life have all the luxuries to themselves - among others, the luxury of indulging their feelings. People in low life have no such privilege. Necessity, which spares our betters, has no pity on us. We learn to put our feelings back into ourselves, and to jog on with out duties." (1.20) 
• "Gentlefolks in general have a very awkward rock ahead in life - the rock ahead of their own idleness.  ... the secret of it is, that you have nothing to do with your poor empty head, and nothing to do with your poor idle hands. And so it ends with your spoiling canvas with paints, and making a smell in the house; or in keeping tadpoles in a glass box full of dirty water, and turning everybody's stomach in the house; or in chipping off bits of stone here, there, and everywhere, and dropping grit into all the victuals of the house; or in staining your fingers in the pursuit of photography, and doing justice without mercy on everybody's face in the house. It often falls heavy enough, no doubt, on people who are really obliged to get their living, to be forced to work for the clothes that cover them, the roof that shelters them, and the food that keeps them going. But compare the hardest day's work you ever did with the idleness that splits flowers and pokes its way into spiders' stomachs, and thank your stars that your head has got something it must think of, and your hands something that they must do." (1.8)
• There is also a disabled girl who acts as a sort of Greek chorus to the story of Franklin and Rosanna and who prophesies that "the day is not far off when the poor will rise against the rich." (1.23)

Selected quotes:

• "I have myself (in spite of the Bishops and the clergy) an unfeigned respect for the Church." (1.5)
• "Everything the Miss Ablewhite's said began with a large O; everything they did was done with a bang; and they giggled and screamed, in season and out of season, on the smallest provocation. Bouncers, that's what I call them." (1.9)
• "We had our breakfasts - whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast." (1.11)
• "The ugly women have a bad time of it in this world." (1.14)
• "In my line of life, if we were quick at taking offence, we shouldn't be worth salt to our porridge." (1.16)
• "Through the driving rain we went back - to meet the trouble and the terror that were waiting for us back at the house." (1.19)
• "I have only been blindfolded; I have only been strangled; I have only been thrown flat on my back, on a very thin carpet, covering a particularly hard floor." (2.1.2) A nice example of dramatic irony used to highlight the sanctimonious Pharisaical hypocrisy of one of the major characters.
• "You have contracted two very bad habits ... You have learnt to talk nonsense seriously, and you have got into a way of telling fibs for the pleasure of telling them." (2.1.2)
• "I am not ignorant that old Mr Ablewhite has the reputation generally (especially among his inferiors) of being a remarkably good-natured man. According to my observation of him, he deserves his reputation as long as he has his own way, and not a moment longer." (2.1.8) A great observation of a minor character which chimes with the theme of 'not everyone is who they seem to be'.
• "He had what I may venture to describe as the unsought self-possession, which is a sure sign of good breeding, not in England only, but everywhere else in the civilized world." (2.3.9) I think it is described as the arrogance of entitlement nowadays
• "That terrible time in the early morning - from two o'clock to five - when the vital energies even of the healthiest of us are at their lowest. It is then that Death gathers in his human harvest most abundantly." (2.3.9)
• "The bees were humming among a few flowers placed in pots outside the window; the birds were singing in the garden, and the faint intermittent jingle of a tuneless piano in some neighbouring house, forced itself now and again, on the ear." (2.3.10) A perfect example of the pathetic fallacy suggesting not all is perfect in this rural idyll.
• "I used to attend scientific experiments when I was a girl at school. They invariably ended in an explosion." (2.4)
• "It is only in books that the officers of the detective force are superior to the weakness of making a mistake." (2.5.1)

July 2022; 472 pages

Nominated by Robert McCrum as 19th in the Guardian's 100 best novels of all time.

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

Peter Ackroyd has written a biography of Wilkie Collins.