"The Fortune Men" by Nadifa Mohamed

In 1952, Tiger Bay in Swansea is a melting pot of different nationalities; there are tensions between the indigenous white community and those they describe as 'black'. Somali Mahmood Mattan has married a white woman and fathered three sons but now, unemployed and a gambler with a criminal record for petty theft, he is separated. So, when local shopkeeper and money-lender Violet is found murdered, the police arrest Mahmood. This novel, based on a real case, and told in the present tense, mostly from the third-person perspective of Mahmood, chronicles what happens next.

It is beautifully written and explores Mahmood's life growing up in what was the British Somaliland and later became a merchant seaman, working in the engine room and travelling all over the world, before settling in Tiger Bay. The descriptions of the multi-cultural communities in Tiger Bay is also fascinating.

I found it a little slow at the beginning but towards the end I was page-turningly desperate to find out what happened. 

My only criticism is, as regular readers of this blog will guess, the use of foreign words. Use them, please, to give colour and authenticity. But offer translations as footnotes or a glossary.

The book was shortlisted for the both Booker Prize and the Costa award in 2021. Other Booker shortlisted novels, many reviewed in this blog, can be found here.

Selected quotes:

• "Talking to the dregs of society. Knowing their habits better than they do. Holding your dinner down when confronted with their bestial acts, that's the knack to this job." (Ch 5)
• "She savours these moments first thing, before the past, present and future have solidified, when time feels timeless and screeching seagulls have safely navigated her from dreams of soundless wailing." (Ch 6)
• "The macalim [teacher] taught Mahmood that becoming a man was like turning wood into charcoal: a process of destruction until something pure and fiercely incandescent emerged." (Ch 7)
• "This didn't have to be the sum total of his life: this vista, this horizon, this language, these rules, these taboos, this food, these women, these laws, these neighbours. these enemies." (Ch 7)
• "One second he can understand everything, then they change frequency, like a fuzzy radio, and go into their university talk, leaving him with only isolated words to hold on to." (Ch 9)
• "They think a man stupid because he talks with an accent, but he wants to shout, 'I teach myself five languages, I know how to say "fuck you!" in Hindi and "love me" in Swahili'." (Ch 9)
• "In the touch of her hands they felt love, while he sensed pollution, in her laughter he heard betrayal, while they saw pleasure, in the distant gaze that he read as slyness, they perceived sadness." (Ch 10)
• "She was a tree that he wanted to chop down, and he used the law as his axe." (Ch 10)
• "'Yallah! Yallah! [O God] No way to put out the fire but to burn it!' Those were words to live by." (Ch 11)

September 2022; 370 pages

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

"The Man of Feeling" by Javier Marias

 A tenor, appearing in Verdi's Otello in Madrid, becomes friendly with Natalia Manur, wife of a rich man; they are staying, with their companion, in his hotel. Slowly, their relationship develops. 

The story is told in the first person from the point of view of the tenor and we are deep inside his head, treated to his interior monologue as he observes, and as he vacillates. He flicks between then and now, four years later. His thoughts are very discursive; he is rarely straightforward. In this, it is a spot-on successor to classics such as Tristram Shandy and Knut Hamsun's Hunger. Sometimes I found myself rather confused - and I think that might have been intended - in the long paragraphs which frequently stretch over more than a page. I don't think I would have finished it had it not been such a short book.

Although, given that the narration is buried so deep inside the narrator's consciousness, and given that he tells you the minutest detail, a lot happens.

Selected quotes:

• "the impression ... of a person quite prepared to smile for decades whether or not it was appropriate to do so." (p 3)
• "If you ever see a young man wearing a scarf around the end of June or the beginning of September, you can be sure that he's a singer." (p 27)
• "For the last person is the one who counts, thus, for example, it will be our last widow who will have to be consoled, and any inheritance we leave will almost always go to those who did not know us when we were young." (p 112)

September 2022; 133 pages

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

"V2" by Robert Harris

 Dr Graf is a senior member of the team launching V2 rockets to bomb London in World War Two, but he doesn't believe in the Nazi attempts to win the war. Kay Caton-Walsh is one of the number-crunchers who are trying to pinpoint the rocket launch site so that the RAF can bomb and destroy them. This is a thriller immersed in its history, with plenty of statistics for those who like watching Top Gear and reading Jane's Encyclopaedias.

Selected quotes:

• "I have spent the last ten years of my life by the side of the sea, he thought, always with the smell of pine in my nostrils and the taste of salt in my mouth, listening to the seagulls and straining my eyes at a wide sky." (Ch 7)
• "In Germany now there are three choices ... You are shot by the SS, you are imprisoned by the SS, or you work for the SS." (Ch 17)

September 2022; 307 pages

Robert Harris is the author of many many books, some of them reviewed in this blog:

• The Second Sleep
• Conclave
• The Ghost

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

"On the Beach" by Nevil Shute

 1963. There has been a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere. Everyone seems to be dead. A radioactive cloud is drifting south. Melbourne is the furthest south big city. The inhabitants are waiting to die. 

The story revolves around Australian Navy officer Peter Holmes, his wife and baby; US Submarine commander Dwight Towers, missing his presumably dead wife and children, consoled by wannabe girlfriend Moira; and scientific officer John Osborne. Each of them try to continue as if nothing is happening. Peter and his wife worry about the baby's health and make plans for their garden; Moira's father puts in fencing for his farm; Dwight buys presents for his (probably dead) wife and kids; John wants to win the very last grand prix race. Some people keep working, others get drunk.

A stunning, beautifully written study of human behaviour, and the quest for meaning in life, when faced with inevitability.

Of course, it is of its time. The women are fundamentally passive, seeking a life of housewifery and motherhood. Patriarchal attitudes are everywhere: "These bloody women, sheltered from realities, living in a sentimental dreamworld of their own. If they'd face up to things, they could help a man,help him enormously. While they clung to the dreamworld they were just a bloody millstone round his neck." (Ch 5). But the husband uses the excuse of work to leave her and go into town.

Selected quotes:

• "It's not the end of the world at all ... It's only the end of us. The world will gone on just the same, only we won't be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us." (Ch 3)
• "You get scared stiff. Then directly it's over you want to go on and do it again." (Ch 7)

September 2022; 296 pages 

Shute also wrote, among many other books, A Town Like Alice

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

"A History of Magic and Witchcraft" by Frances Timbers

This history of Witchcraft from the middle ages until the present day is scholarly yet extremely readable. The author debunks many of the myths (eg the Spanish Inquisition used less torture and more common-sense in hunting witches than in several protestant countries; there is no independent evidence of witches attending a sabbat until the demonologists suggested it:“The addition of the sabbat to the concept of heretical witchcraft was mostly a top down phenomenon imposed by the dominant literate culture via inquisitors and judges.”; Ch 4) and uses original sources to describe a phenomenon which was fuelled both from the bottom-up (village communities needed healers/ midwives and 'cunning men') and from the top-down (theologians trying to make sense of the Problem of Evil). The result is a most illuminating end enjoyable read.

Selected quotes:

• “One culture’s religious practices can be another culture’s magic.” (Ch 1) 
• “Fear was a key emotion in the propagation of Christianity ... The fear of involvement with bad spirits helped to convert the masses to the new sect. At the same time, the burden of guilt could be lifted from any wrongdoing by blaming evil spirits.” (Ch 1)
• “Demonologists were anxious to prove the reality of witchcraft ... it was just a hop, skip, and a jump from discounting the power of Satan to discounting the power of God.” (Ch 3)
• "It was not possible for a human to metamorphose into another animal, because man was made in God’s image” (Ch 3)
• “The satyrs loved sex, wine, and frenzied dancing (who doesn’t?)” (Ch 4) 
• “Another account, recorded by a Byzantine historian in the sixth century, described a group of Frankish men who were called up in the night to go down to the sea and row special boats to the opposite shore. The boats appeared empty, but they sat low in the water as if they were full, implying that they were occupied by spirits.” (Ch 4) This particularly interested me because in Dante's Inferno, Charon realises that Dante is alive because the ferry is lower in the water than normal because spirits have no weight.
• "holy water was Devil’s urine (It seems that sometimes the demonologists forgot that the Devil did not have a physical body.)” (Ch 4)
• “Magicians were almost exclusively educated, elite men, including aristocrats, physicians, clerics, and lawyers. This is the same class of men who practised alchemy ... A magus needed to be able to read the Latin manuscripts that held the instructions and the long invocations. A knowledge of astrology was also useful, and theological training came in handy ... both of which were learned in the university setting.” (Ch 6)
• "Magic was also employed in treasure hunting, which was a very popular past time [sic] in early modern Europe. Without banks to deposit money into, people often buried their valuables." (Ch 6)

An illuminating and enjoyable read.

September 2022; 188 pages

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

"Alexandria: The Quest of the Lost City" by Edmund Richardson

 This is a wonderful story about a private in the East India Company in India in 1827 who deserts and reinvents himself as explorer Charles Masson. He has multiple adventures before becoming besotted with the idea that Bagram, near Kabul in Afghanistan, is the site of Alexandria-Under-the-Mountains, one of the many lost cities founded by Alexander the Great (he had previously stumbled across the site of the Harappan civilisation, but doesn't seem to have been impressed). His journeys included the giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan, and the man-made caves behind them, Gholghola, the City of Screams (made by the wind passing through its pinnacles) which was destroyed by Genghis Khan, and a 'dead dragon'. His researches include the translation of an unknown Indian script and the discovery of "the very earliest dateable image of the Buddha which has ever been found" (Ch 6), a work of art with clear Greek influences. When his past caught up with him he was blackmailed into spying for the East India Company on his friends, the rulers of Kabul; he later became involved in the loot-fuelled British invasion of that country, then, suspected as a double agent, a British prisoner, until finally he escaped from India just as the British hubris caught up with them and they were slaughtered while retreating from Kabul in the winter of 1841 - 1842.

It is an incredibly romantic story, full of action, and would make a superb film. As well as the exotic location and the multiple story of survival despite incredible hardships, it is people with larger-than-life characters:

• James Lewis/ Charles Masson himself. He repeatedly reinvented his own story.
• Josiah Harlan, an American fantasist, traveller, and spy, who claimed to have been created Prince of Ghor (Ch 14)
• Joseph Wolff, a fanatical preacher. "He was the exception to the rule that travel broadens the mind. He had spent years wandering ... preaching all the way. Every day, he had become grumpier and more dogmatic." After annoying one party of Afghans they stripped him so he had to walk into Kabul naked. "Even when fully clothed, Wolff was a remarkable sight. ... Naked, he quite baffled the thesaurus."  (Ch 4)
• Henry Pottinger, the East Indian Company's resident in Bhuj: "Think back to the most easily irritated person you have ever met. Double their sensitivity. You might now be coming close to Pottinger. If you left him alone in a room for a few minutes, he would probably be nursing a lifelong grudge against the sofa and two of the floorboards by the time you returned." (Ch 6)
• "treasure-hunting Transylvanian Johann Martin Honigberger ... liked quoting Cicero, practising homeopathy, and smashing things." (Ch 6)
• Dost Mohammed, a ruler of Kabul, spent years "drinking his courtiers under the table" before becoming abstemious and banning alcohol. He has a proverbial reputation as a just ruler. (Ch 6)

It is also a chronicle of the shame of colonialism. Some incidents recounted are even more sickening than the comprehensive condemnation in The Anarchy by Willaim Dalrymple:

• "East India House was loot made manifest." (Ch 12)
• "'One or two little bits of smashery took place,' laughed one officer. 'It is perfectly annoying to see a lot of those fellows come screeching after you that they have been looted. This generally happens during the first or second day you enter a place'." (Ch 15)
• Loveday, a political officer, enslaved Indians to work on building his palace, one of whom displeased him and was savaged by Loveday's bulldogs, later dying  of his injuries. "He was proud of 'blowing from a gun' one local chief ... Loveday slid up the greasy pole like a man born to the art ... Loveday proved to be a world-class looter." (Ch 15)
• It's not just British imperialism that was evil. Alexander the Great massacred all the men of military age and enslaved all other inhabitants at both Tyre and Gaza. He looted and burned Persepolis. (Ch 20)

Selected quotes:

• "When Lewis was a teenager, the British economy was teetering on the brink of collapse. London's streets filled up with the newly homeless. ... The government responded with a sympathy which has marked British attitudes to the poor for centuries: they announced a plan to execute the protesters." (Ch 1)
• "When you walk into a room full of strangers, there's a precious moment when you can become whoever you want to be." (Ch 2)
• "The Pashtuns say that when God created the world he had a heap of rocks left over, out of which he made Afghanistan." (Ch 3) This reminded me of a similar quote about the founding of Montenegro, as found in The Venetian Empire by Jan Morris.
• "Alexander [the Great] travelled far. But stories about him have travelled even further. There is an Icelandic Alexander Saga and an Armenian epic, a Balinese poem and a French romance." (Ch 7)
• "Then the assassins came for Masson. One night, a sudden noise pulled him from sleep. He blinked awake and stumbled to the door. Men with knives were running up the stairs." (Ch 9)
• "The people of Malana are proud of their ancestor, Alexander the Great. The family business is no longer world conquest, but the cultivation of some of the most potent marijuana on earth." (Ch 11)
• "He was still convinced ... that the East India Company cared; that a thoroughly amoral, capitalist empire could also be kind." (Ch 12)
• "When it rained, the lower town flooded, and the poor waded through the shit of the rich." (Ch 15)
• "The Parsis had arrived in India from Persia over a thousand years earlier. They brought with them stories about Alexander: fearful tales, legends of a violent, ruthless king, who brought nothing but death and destruction in his wake." (Ch 20)
• "Heinrich Schliemann loved a tall tale even more than Charles Masson did. Today, schollars are divided between those who think he was a liar, and those who think he was a 'pathological liar'." (Ch 21)
• "Evans is another of history's great archaeological stars ... It is rarely mentioned that many of his craftsmen worked two shifts: the first, restoring Minoan antiquities, and the second, faking Minoan antiquities." (Ch 21)

This is an absolutely brilliant book. The hero is incredible, his adventures page-turning, and the cast of characters beautifully drawn. In addition, it is very well written. 

September 2022; 261 pages

Other travel and exploration books reviewed in this blog may be found here.

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

"Goodbye to Berlin" by Christopher Isherwood

This isn't a novel, nor is it a series of short stories; it isn't a diary and it is clearly fiction so it isn't a memoir. It is a somewhat ramshackle portmanteau of vignettes designed to show Berlin between 1930 and 1933. The author appears as the narrator, though I suspect he is a first-person character, and in the second paragraph he states: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed." (A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930) He isn't as passive as he pretends; on the other hand he is remarkably tolerant of the wide variety of people he encounters, and he stays scrupulously neutral for most of the book (not perhaps in the final section) despite the period covered by the book being a time of tremendous social and political upheaval which culminated in the rise of the Nazi party. The Guardian said: "Reading this novel is much like overhearing anecdotes in a crowded bar while history knocks impatiently on the window." George Orwell called it "brilliant sketches of a society in decay."

Much of the book explores the difference between what appears to be and the reality beneath (not something that a camera can do). The first paragraph describes Berlin: "From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops, where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scroll-work and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class." (A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930) This is a town of faded grandeur. It is a city that had become a byword for decadent night-life, both straight and gay (the author is homosexual) and all the possibilities of the rainbow. But this was a background of serious economic weakness following Germany's defeat in the First World War and the subsequent political turmoil. This first paragraph seems to encapsulate the idea of faded grandeur, and the idea that the city was rotten behind its impressive frontage.

This theme of superficiality versus reality is found throughout the book. For example, in the first section we are introduced to Christopher's landlady Fraulein Schroder, who pretends that her lodgers are guests and that she was, and is, better than she appears. She insists that she has “got the money to be independent” but she spends her days cleaning and gossiping and empties chamber pots. She talks about past lodgers including “a Freiherr [Baron] once, and a Rittmeister [a captain in the cavalry] and a Professor”, and the son of a surgeon. Now she has “Herr Issyvoo”, a barman, a lady who yodels in music-halls, and a prostitute. Her best friend Fraulein Mayr is another such who talks about the days when she was “a slip of a girl”; now “the muscles of Frl Mayer’s nude fleshy arms ripple unappetizingly.” Outside the lodgings, Christopher gives private tuition in the district in which they rich live; this provides another contrast between the dream and the reality: "Most of the richest Berlin families inhabit the Grunewald. It is difficult to understand why. ... Few of them can afford large gardens, for the ground is fabulously dear: their only view is of their neighbour's backyard, each one protected by a wire fence and a savage dog. Terror of burglary and revolution has reduced these miserable people to a state of siege. They have neither privacy nor sunshine. The district is really a millionaire's slum." (A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930)

In the second section we are introduced to the marvellously over-the-top Sally Bowles, and again we see the contrast between hope and truth: her clothes Sally’s clothes “produced a kind of theatrically chaste effect, like a nun in a grand opera”; Sally paints her fingernails bright green which only draws attention to her dirty fingers. Sally is a wannabe actress and sings in night-clubs, she is promiscuous with a succession of boyfriends, all of whom she exploits but she is a hopeless gold-digger, a poor lover abandons her for richer pickings, a rich man promises to take her for a tour of Europe but departs alone, a sixteen-year-old con artist swindles her out of some savings.

The third and fourth sections focus on Otto, a poor young boy who goes 'gay for pay'. We first meet him as the 'companion' of Peter in a seaside resort; he torments Peter by repeatedly going dancing with girls and later dumps him. We rediscover Otto in his poverty-stricken working-class family when Christopher, down on his luck, lodges with them, sharing Otto's room. The family is one of contrasts: the father a communist, the elder son a Nazi who earns a few pennies where he can, Otto, who sleeps in and doesn't work, until he returns home with twenty mark notes, having done something his mother knows is shameful. In some ways Otto is a male version of Sally.

In the fifth section we meet the Landauers, a rich Jewish family who own a posh department store. The young girl, Natalia, who, when perplexed, says “Then I’m sorry. I can’t help you.” (whatever that means) is a perfect innocent in contrast with Sally. It’s never quite clear what she means by this (her English is imperfect) but this doesn’t seem to matter. The father of the family wanted to be an academic, Bernhard's ambition was to be a sculptor, but they both spend their lives working for the family firm: it doesn't really matter if you are rich or poor, your dreams are undermined by economic reality.

The final section, set in the winter of 1932 - 1933, is one of bleak despair ... and scarily appropriate to today.

• "Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold ... I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railways, in the iron work of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)
• "People like Bobby are their jobs - take the job away and they partially cease to exist." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)
• "Everybody stole. Everybody sold what they had to sell - themselves included." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)
• "Most of them, if they cannot get work, will take to crime. After all, people cannot be ordered to starve." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)
• "You see those two buildings? One is the engineering-works, the other is the prison. For the boys of this district there used to be two alternatives ... But now the works are bankrupt. Next week they will close down." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)

The characterisations are brilliant. The dialogue, often at cross-purposes, adds tension and complexity and depth to the characters. And the descriptions are stupendous. This is a writer at the top of his form.

But I've said it before in this blog and I will repeat it here: I hate it when author's use untranslated foreign language. Is every reader supposed to know German? Or is the author just showing off? Why doesn't an editor at least add a footnote translating the words? I either have to get out a dictionary or use Google Translate or just skip that bit and wonder whether it was important. All of these actions disrupt the free flow of the reading process and make me dislike the book a little tiny bit; dislikes which can accumulate (as they did, for example, with Trilby by George du Maurier).

Selected quotes:

• "Where, in another ten years, shall I be myself? Certainly not here. How many seas and frontiers shall I have to cross to reach that distant day; how far shall I have to travel, on foot, on horseback, by car, push-bike, aeroplane, steamer, train, life, moving-staircase, and tram? How much money shall I need for that enormous journey? How much food must I gradually, wearily consume on my way? How many pairs of shoes shall I wear out? How many thousands of cigarettes shall I smoke? How many cups of tea shall I drink and how many glasses of beer? What an awful tasteless prospect! And yet - to have to die ... A sudden pang of apprehension grips my bowels." (A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930)
• “Most rich people, once they have decided to trust you, can be imposed upon to almost any extent.” (A Berlin Diary)
• “In a few days, I thought, we shall have forfeited all kinship with ninety-nine per cent of the population of the world, with the men and women who earn their living, who insure their lives, who are anxious about the future of their children. Perhaps in the Middle Ages people felt like this, when they believed themselves to have sold their souls to the Devil. It was a curious, exhilarating, not unpleasant sensation: but, at the same time, I felt slightly scared. Yes, I said to myself, I’ve done it, now. I am lost.” (Sally Bowles) The narrator is watching a Nazi procession.
• "Yesterday morning I saw a roe being chased by a Borzoi dog, right across the fields ... the roe went bucketing over the earth with wild rigid jerks, like a grand piano bewitched." (On Reugen Island)
• "The old man had a nervous tic and kept shaking his head all the time, as if saying to Life: No. No. No." (The Nowaks)
• "They all thronged around us for a moment in the little circle of light from the panting bus, their lit faces ghastly like ghosts against the black stems of the pines." (The Nowaks)

The Sally Bowles section of this book formed the basis for the brilliant must-see musical Cabaret.

September 2022; 256 pages

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

"A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain

An engineer from 1890s Connecticut is transported back to Camelot in the mid-6th century. Appalled by the feudalism and the monarchism (as an American he is a staunch republican), he sets about to defeat superstitious magic with the aid of science (mostly by dynamiting Merlin's tower) and to develop the economy using engineering, newspapers and advertising. It is a paean to the virtues of the nineteenth century.

But it is a small conceit for such a long novel and I found the joke wearing very thin at times. In addition, it left a rather bad taste in my mouth. Twain seems utterly blind to the possible evils of his own society. In the middle of the book, the narrator (known as The Boss) takes King Arthur in disguise to learn about the condition of the common people (shades of Twain's The Prince and the Pauper here). The poverty and sickness and cruelty of the master to the serf and the wickedness of slavery are highlighted, but in the end one gets the feeling that the narrator doesn't actually care whether poor people are lynched or starve to death or are burned alive ... providing it's not him. For example, when The Boss and The King have been enslaved and are on a scaffold waiting to be hanged for slave rebellion, he watches the first two slaves hanged with equanimity and only starts worrying when the noose is around the King's neck. 

And towards the end, when The Boss is battling the knights, he kills at first one, then dozens and later tens of thousands using guns, electrocution and explosives. If anything, he is proud of the body count. It reminded me of the jingoistic exultation of Victorian Britons when their soldiers, armed with guns, slaughtered soldiers armed with spears and swords and called their opponents 'savages'.

If course it is possible that Twain intended the book as a satire against colonialist capitalism. I think the Introduction of the Penguin edition is trying to make this point.  ... but I certainly didn't get that sense.

Selected quotes:

• "By his look he was good-natured; by his gait , he was self-satisfied." (Ch 2)
• "As is the way with humourists of his breed, he was still laughing ... after everybody else had got through." (Ch 4) I think this remark could apply to this book, if Twain had any sense of how he himself appeared.
• "It is no use to throw a good thing away merely because the market isn't ripe yet." (Ch 4)
• “It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their King and Church and nobility: as if they had any more occasion to love and honour King and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honour the stranger who kicks him!” (Ch 8)
• “It is enough to make a body ashamed ... to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always been figured as its aristocracies - a company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions.” (Ch 8)
• “The nation as a body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before King and Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and postures of adulation, that they might walk in pride and think themselves the gods of this world.” (Ch 8)
• “Human daws who can consent to masquerade in the peacock-shams of inherited dignities and unearned titles, are of no good but to be laughed at.” (Ch 8)
• "Spiritual wants and instincts are as various in the human family as are physical appetites, complexions, and features, and a man is only at his best, morally, when he is equipped with the religious garment whose colour and shape and size most rightly accommodate themselves to the spiritual complexion, angularities, and stature of the individual who wears it." (Ch 10)
• "She was as welcome as a corpse is to a coroner." (Ch 11)
• "King, nobility and gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort of use or value in any rationally constructed world." (Ch 13)
• "There were two 'Reigns of Terror' if we would but remember it ... the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons' the other upon a hundred millions." (Ch 13)
• "He believed that if you were to strip the nation naked and send a stranger through the crowd, he couldn't tell the King from a quack doctor, nor a duke from a hotel clerk." (Ch 18)
• "When red-headed people are above a certain social grade, their hair is auburn." (Ch 18)
• "The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded, the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name." (Ch 25)
• "His head was an hour-glass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once." (Ch 28)
• "A royal family of cats would answer every other purpose, They would be as useful as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same disposition to get up to shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably vain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive; finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other royal house." (Ch 40)

September 2022; 410 pages

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

"Trio" by William Boyd

This novel is set in 1968 during the making of a movie in Brighton, England. It charts a few weeks in the lives of the three main characters:

• Anny is an American film star, whose ex-husband is on the run from the FBI for terrorism offences, is enjoying a delightfully innocent and purely physical sexual relationship with her co-star, a failing pop singer.
• Elfrida is an alcoholic novelist with writer's block who is married to the film's director.
• Talbot, the film's producer, has a wife and children and a wholly secret flat in London where he is known by another name.

For each of them, their problems multiply until they reach a crisis, at which point each of them finds a different resolution.

It was an interesting story but I found it hard to really empathise with any of the characters. The novel is told from the alternating point of view of the three main characters and, each time, you are inside their heads, feeling what they sense and experiencing their thoughts. But I never felt I was actually inside their heads and I think this was because it was told in the third person and the past tense which kept me at a distance. In film terms it was as if I was watching the actors from a standard camera without any extreme close ups (or any long distance shots). 

It is formally divided into three books entitled Duplicity, Surrender and Escape. I suppose the theme of the book is that all of these characters are trying to locate their true self ... and it is only when you know who you truly are that you can be happy.

Selected quotes:

• "idly watching a rhomboid of sunlight on the maroon carpet turn itself into an isosceles triangle." (Duplicity 2)
• "The world is composed of people who bow their heads and people who don't" (Duplicity 3)
• "Novelists should be - are - the least recognised of minor celebrities, she thought, almost invisible." (Duplicity 5)
• "She didn't particularly like Virginia Woolf's novels. ... She found the novels overwrought and fey." (Duplicity 5)
• "There were two basic types of alcoholics ... 'Benders' were out of control - wholly appetite-driven, consummation was rapid and destructive, swift oblivion was the aim. ... 'Sippers' on the other hand were more discreet and shrewd. They steadily topped themselves up throughout the day n- sipping -aiming to maintain a constant level of potent, satisfying nut - hopefully -unnoticeable inebriation." (Duplicity 20)
• "People are opaque, utterly mysterious. Even those dearest to us are closed books. If you want to now what human beings are like, actually like, if you want to know what's going on in their heads behind those masks we all wear - then read a novel." (Duplicity 28)
• "She saw Lincoln-green Anaglypta wallpaper hung with etchings of historic martial triumphs ... all to do with war and conflict, as if that was what defined a nation rather than its culture." (Surrender 4)
• "It would have been better if the day had been dull with perhaps some intermittent drizzle - the pathetic fallacy had always seemed to her an under-rated literary tool." (Escape 1)
• "As an adult, all the emotions you experienced were unconsciously measured against their adolescent equivalents - and found wanting ... all your adult emotions failed to equal or come close to the intensity of those emotions that you experienced as an adolescent." (Escape 10) I'm not quite sure why he felt the need to more or less repeat himself in this quote.

September 2022; 343 pages

Boyd also wrote An Ice-Cream War (for which he was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1982) and Waiting for Sunrise

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

"The Song of Simon de Montfort" by Sophie Therese Ambler

I find the middle ages fascinating and this biography of Simon de Montfort is no exception. It covers, roughly, the period of rapid constitutional change from the issuing of Magna Carta, a document to protect the rights of barons and to limit kingship, via the first parliaments to the calling of the first parliament by Simon to include townspeople, ie the start of the House of Commons. The political theories are fascinating: Magna Carta applied to the 50% of the population who were 'freed' (ie not the serfs) whereas Simon's Provisions of Oxford applied to all people in the realm. For the first time royal officials became truly accountable for their actions and could be acted against by ordinary people in courts. The Franciscans and Dominicans were spreading like wildfire at this time, and learning was advancing rapidly (one of Simon's mentors was Robert Grosseteste, a seminal figure in the history of science, one of Simon's opponents founded Merton College in Oxford). Simon himself was an important figure who made what was almost certainly a love match with King Henry III's sister (to Henry's fury), ended up rebelling and defeating and capturing the King and his Heir, and was at one time offered the regency of France. Not all was progress. Henry III was the first king to order that Jews wore distinctive marks on their clothes and Simon encouraged the persecution and killing of Jews. But it was a key time in English history.

It was well written and very well explained and there were some very useful maps, but one of my criticisms is that the author expects you to remember which year you are in. She gives dates such as '9 June' (for the Oxford Parliament) but if I have forgotten the year I have to move back through the pages until I can find the year mentioned; in this case it was (by implication) in the previous chapter. There are also occasions when people are mentioned and more could have been said. For example, one of the magnates supporting SdM at Oxford is listed as "Hugh Despenser"; what is not mentioned is that he is the father of High Despenser the Elder and the grandfather of Hugh Despenser the Younger who was a controversial favourite of Edward II. Why did I have to to look this up on wikipedia?

Selected quotes:

• “The worst sort of decision was one made behind closed doors. King John had been guilty of this, and it had been a major cause of resentment amongst his nobles. ... It was expected that great matters of state, affecting the whole kingdom, would be discussed in a formal setting.” (Ch 3)
• "Henry had begun to seize estates from subjects simply because he wished to - the sort of action that could see a king labelled a tyrant.” (Ch 3)
• “Suffering is to the righteous what pruning is to vines, what cultivation is to untilled land, what washing is to dirty garments, what a healing but bitter drink is to those who are ill, what shaping with a hammer is to vessels that are not yet fully moulded, what proving in fire is to gold.” (from a letter of Robert Grosseteste to SdM; quoted in Ch 4)
• “Trial by ordeal was in effect banned by Pope Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, on the basis that it did not work.” (Ch 7, footnote).
• “The barons ... were seeking to protect lesser folk ... from the iniquities of royal justice. But what is most remarkable is how they were also determined to protect lesser folk even against baronial injustices.” (Ch 9)
• “The kings of England had carried a dragon banner perhaps since the Anglo-Saxon age ... By the thirteenth century, the raising of the dragon standard carried a particular meaning: no enemy was to be spared.” (Ch 13)

September 2022; 339 pages

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

"The Map that Changed the World" by Simon Winchester

 Simon Winchester also wrote The Surgeon of Crowthorne about a homicidal maniac who made a significant contribution to the Oxford English Dictionary while detained in a mental hospital.

This book is about William Smith, son of a blacksmith, who created the world's first geographical map and virtually invented single-handed the science of stratification, being the first man to realise that fossils could be used to date sedimentary rocks. It is also a tale of a snobbish Georgian upper-class closing ranks against this ill-bred man and consigning him to bankruptcy, debtor's jail, and ignominy before recognising his genius. It's a great story, well-written, which hardly ever flags (though I perhaps didn't want to know quite so much about Oolitic Limestone). 

Smith was born in 1769, the year that Josiah Wedgwood opened the 'Etruria' pottery near Hanley, the year that James Watt patented the first condensing steam engine, and the year that Richard Arkwright made the first water-powered spinning frame. It was also the time when agriculture was improving in productivity by leaps and bounds, following the Enclosure Acts, resulting in boom in population which made it clear that Britain couldn't feed its people. 

The book is filled with wonderful pen portraits of remarkable characters, albeit cameo roles in Smith's drama:

• The Duke of Bridgewater, who started the canal craze by building one from his coalfields to Manchester to ship his coal: "He was at first widely disliked. As a young man he was irredeemably philistine, with little regard for art or society. He dressed intolerably badly. He loathed flowers and all kinds of ornamentation. He smoked like industrial Manchester, consumed pounds of snuff, never wrote letters, had arguments with everyone.  ... He was a curmudgeonly bachelor and a misogynist who so despised women that he would even allow one to serve him at table." (Ch 4)
• John Farey, who started as the steward of the Duke of Bedford at Woburn, "became an expert musician (and a chorister of note), a mathematician whose work (on the curious proerties of vulgar fractions) is still known today, and a contributor to encyclopaedias on such topics as astronomy, engineering, the history of pacifism, the design of steam-engines, the decimalization of currencies and the population theories of Thomas Malthus." (Ch 12)
• "William Wollaston  was ... said by all to be a man blessed with the most acute powers of observation. He could apparently see the tiniest of flowers while riding on horseback. He invented the camera lucida after noticing something odd in the crack in his shaving mirror. He was one of the few men who ever noticed a mirage on the River Thames. He was doctor, an expert on kidney stones and on mineral-based enlargements of the prostate." (Ch 17)

And there is a roll-call of other interesting people who were associated with Smith, from the Duke of Bedford to Selina Hastings, from Adam Sedgwick to Roderick Murchison. from Sir Joseph Banks to Louis Agassiz who invented the concept of the ice age.

Selected quotes:

• "It has long been said that the people of England could never be poor, since they lived on an island made of coal, and surrounded by fish." (Ch 4)
• "Adelard, 'England's first scientist', a twelfth -century philosopher who had written treatises on the abacus and the astrolabe, had been born in Bath." (Ch 9)

September 2022; 299 pages

Other books on the History of Science and Biographies of Scientists can be found here.

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