"Julius Caesar" by William Shakespeare

 

A sort of mixture between history and tragedy, whose real hero is not the eponymous Julius but Brutus, the moral man destroyed by his ideals. 

The play revolves around one of the best-recorded events in classical antiquity: the assassination of Julius Caesar which signalled the end of the Roman Republic and began the transition towards Empire. 

The background to the play, which would have been well-known to educated people of the time, is that the Roman Republic was founded after Lucius Junius Brutus overthrew King Tarquin the Proud; the fundamental ethos of the Republic is to distribute power so as to avoid a monarchy; any suggestion of king-making is anathema to the Roman citizens.

So when, in Act One, Caesar, who is the effective ruler of Rome following his defeat of Pompey the Great during civil war, is offered a crown, Marcus Junius Brutus, descendant of the earlier Brutus, is profoundly disturbed. Even though Caesar three times rejects the crown, Brutus believes that Caesar would like to be King. Cassius, a senator who had previously supported Pompey, uses this to persuade Brutus to join a group of conspirators who plan to assassinate Caesar. Cassius needs the support of Brutus so that the Roman citizens, recognising Brutus as a moral idealist, will believe that the motive of the assassins is to liberate Rome from tyranny, rather than just to facilitate regime change.

In Act Two there are repeated references to portents in the weather and unusual occurrences. Caesar's wife has an ominous dream. A soothsayer warns Caesar to beware the ides of March. Brutus has to make a decision: Caesar is one of his best friends but may prove a threat to the Republic. Caesar himself is indecisive, oscillating between the warnings, which frighten him, and his public persona which has to be one of fearlessness. But the conspirators manage to persuade him to go to the Capitol.

The assassination occurs in Act Three. Brutus then speaks to the Roman people and convinces them that killing Caesar was for the public good. But Brutus, idealistically impractical and against the advice of the politically astute Cassius, then allows Caesar's ally, Marc Antony, to speak at Caesar's funeral. This speech, a classic of oratory, making much use of irony in its repeated references to the "honourable" Brutus, turns the crowd against the assassins. It is the midpoint and the principal turning-point of the play. 

Act 4 sees Antony plotting with Octavius, Caesar's nephew, to assassinate their political rivals and to defraud the Roman citizens and to pin the blame on Lepidus, the third member of their triumvirate. The contrast between Antony's high-minded rhetoric at the funeral and this cynical opportunism is immediate. The next scene shows Cassius and Brutus falling out (Brutus, ever the idealist, accuses Cassius of self-interest while at the same time asking him to provide the money that Brutus needs to pay for troops because Brutus himself can't stoop to base means of raising cash). They need one another, however, too much and so they reconcile, deciding to do battle with Antony and Octavius at Philippi (another bad decision made by Brutus). 

Act 5 is the battle. Cassius and Brutus are defeated and commit suicide. Antony calls Brutus "the noblest Roman of them all".

There are four main characters. Brutus is the tragic hero, doing the wrong thing for the right reasons (this was a very renaissance view of Brutus; in the middle ages Brutus was seen as a man who betrayed his friend, a traitor nearly as bad as Judas, consigned to the lowest level of the Inferno by Dante). Cassius acts as the tempter, almost a devil, who works on Brutus much as Iago works on Othello. The antagonist is, in the first half of the play, Caesar, though scarcely glimpsed in the first act, who is ambiguously portrayed both as the ambitious wannabe monarch feared by Brutus and as a frail human. Upon Caesar's death, Marc Antony takes over as a much more cynical and dangerous opponent. 

Themes:

Brutus, the virtuous murderer

In many ways, this play is a tragedy and the tragic hero is Brutus, whose fundamental flaw is his idealism. Cassius and the conspirators recognise that they need Brutus on their side to give the assassination of Caesar the appearance of something that is honourable (the word repeatedly mocked by Mark Antony) so that they can gain the support of the Roman people. But recruiting Brutus means that they are saddled with his impractical idealism which leads him to make mistake after mistake. They recognise that Mark Antony might prove dangerous and propose murdering him as well, but Brutus won't let them. Instead, disastrously, he lets Mark Antony speak at Caesar's funeral. Later it is the hypocritical idealism of Brutus that fuels his fight with Cassius when he reproaches Cassius for failing to provide him with cash for his troops while telling Cassius that it won’t do for a Brutus to be sullied with extracting taxes from the peasantry.

Brutus is saddled with the reputation of his glorious ancestor who gave birth to the Republic of Rome after sending the last of their kings into exile. Brutus believes, or is manipulated into believing, that Caesar seeks to become king and that it is an act of virtue to prevent this. His naive idealism is displayed when he tries to divorce the act of murder from its reality. "Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods,/ Not hew him as a carcase fit for hounds." he says in Act 2 Scene 1 (173 - 4), trying to pretend to himself that an act of butchery can be reinterpreted in religious terms. This is more hypocrisy. 

But perhaps his greatest moral failing is that he doesn't condemn his friend Caesar for what he is but for what he might become. Caesar has rejected a crown three times but Brutus believes that Caesar wants to be king. And that "might change his nature" (2.1.13). Brutus tells himself that must think of Caesar "as a serpent’s egg/ Which hatch’d, would, as his kind grow mischievous;/ And kill him in the shell." (2.1.32 - 34) It's a preemptive strike. 

There's more hypocrisy on display within this same speech. Brutus, seeking justifications for killing his friend, muses that"The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins/ Remorse from power" (2.1.18-19). He admits that he's never seen this in Caesar ... yet. But the irony is that Brutus himself is planning murder, which is an act of power thoroughly disjoined from remorse.

I suppose it was quite a testament to the renaissance rehabilitation of Brutus for him to appear as a hero at all. In Dante, Brutus is consigned to the lowest level of hell, as a traitor, on a par with Judas.

Selected quotes:

• "I was born as free as Caesar" (1.2.97)
• "this man/ Is now become a god; and Cassius is/ A wretched creature, and must bend his body,/ If Caesar carelessly but nod on him." (1.2.115 - 118)
  "Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world/ Like a Colossus, and we petty men/ Walk under his huge legs, and peep about/ To find ourselves dishonourable graves." (1.2.134 - 137)
• "Men at some time are masters of their fates:/ The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/ But in ourselves, that we are underlings." (1.2.138 - 140) What's particularly nice about this is the way that Brutus semi-quotes this back to Cassius in act 4 scene 3 when he talks about the "tide in the affairs of men".
• "Let me have men about me that are fat,/ Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights:/ Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;/ He thinks too much: such men are dangerous." (1.2.191-195) One of my father's favourite quotes; he was always a slender man!
• "He reads much." (1.2.200)Another reason for Caesar to be suspicious of Cassius!
• "Between the acting of a dreadful thing/ And the first motion, all the interim is/ Like a phantasma or a hideous dream." (2.1.64 - 66)
• "Cowards die many times before their deaths" (2.2.32)
• "When love begins to sicken and decay,/ It useth an enforced ceremony." (4.2.20 - 21)
• "There is a tide in the affairs of men,/ Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;/ Omitted, all the voyage of their life/ Is bound in shallows and in miseries." (4.3.216 - 219) More irony: Brutus is about to make yet another error.

Other Shakespeare plays reviewed in this blog may be found here.

I saw JC in a superb RSC production at Stratford in March 2017. I was in the front row of the stalls! At one point, Brutus, who was reading a letter, handed it to me; not knowing what to do I nodded wisely and returned it. My wife enjoyed it particularly because Cassius not only had "a lean and hungry look" but also an impressive six-pack and was topless for a large part of the time.

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

"Sea of Tranquillity" by Emily St John Mandel

 Strange happenings suggest that what we perceive as reality, including ourselves, might be a simulation. So the Time Institute sends a time traveller to investigate. 

As is usual with this sort of fiction, it is more interesting when the reader is still in the dark as to what has happened: monsters are always scarier before they are seen. But there are several appealing characters and the plot has a clever twist towards the end.

Mandel is best known for Station Eleven, a novel set in a post-pandemic world, presciently written pre-Covid. (This book also involves a pandemic.) As with that book, the plot is somewhat contrived, with key questions unasked (such as, if we are in a simulation, who is writing the program? and why? and how can they cope with all that information? and are they in a simulation themselves?) but the characters are strong.

But I do wish that authors wouldn't write about authors. It seems like cheating. I know they say 'write what you know' but shouldn't you also write characters that resonate with your readers?

The first section is written in the present tense; the past tense is used in most of the other parts. A first-person narrative is used for Gaspery's sections; otherwise the narratives are third-person but written from the perspective of the principal character.

It was a pleasant and easy read but I doubt it will linger in my mind.

Selected quotes:

• "Sometimes you don't know you're going to throw a grenade until you've already pulled the pin." (Remittance: 4)
• "This place is utterly neutral on whether he lives or dies." (Remittance: 7)
• "A man who works long hours can hide anything." (Mirella and Vincent: 1)
• "Mirella wore a great deal of make-up at work, and when she was tired in the afternoons, sometimes her face felt heavy." (Mirella and Vincent: 1)
• "Sometimes order can be relentless." (Last Book Tour on Earth: 1)
• "What is time travel if not a security problem?" (Last Book Tour on Earth: 1)
• "Doesn't everything seem obvious in retrospect?" (Last Book Tour on Earth: 1)
• "Won't most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of others?" (Last Book Tour on Earth: 1)
• "The traveller's presence itself is a disruption." (Bad Chickens: 7)
• "As a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world." (Last Book Tour on Earth: reprise)
• "His heart flapped deathlessly." (Remittance 1918, 1990, 2008)

December 2023; 255 pages

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

"To Paradise" by Hanya Yanagihara

This is a big book divided into three parts, of which the second and third are further subdivided.

The first book seems to be a not particularly original reconsideration of the tension between love and duty. Set in 1894, in an alternative history of New York, centre of a breakaway republic in which gay marriage is the rule rather than the exception, gently, drifting David Bingham, a scion of a powerful banking family, must choose between an arranged marriage with an older man and a love affair with a penniless music teacher who might well be intending to rip him off. Spoiler alert: there is no resolution, the reader will never find out what happens in the end.

The first book is entitled 'Washington Square' and the tension between the husband the paterfamilias wants the child to marry, and the child's own choice of a potential wastrel is very similar to the central tension in the Henry James book of the same name. 

The second book, set in 1994, tells the story of another David Bingham, the kept lover of powerful lawyer Charles Griffith. David would have been heir to the throne of Hawaii if history had been different and the second half of this book is a long letter (written, in secret, by a man who is apparently blind and almost too weak to leave his bed) from his father explaining how he, the dad, was persuaded by another Edward to leave his home and live in the wilderness. Once again, we never find out what happens to the principal characters.

The third book, comprising the second 50% of the novel, alternates between letters written by Charles, a scientist living in 2043 and later, as he describes having to make difficult choices, restricting personal freedoms in a society swept by repeated pandemics, and his granddaughter Charlie, living in a totalitarian regime in New York of the 2090s, mentally and physically scarred by disease, offered an opportunity to escape (but once again we will never learn if she succeeds).

Besides the obvious themes of homosexuality and the response of society to pandemics, each of these three stories has a weak and gentle character, cared for by a more powerful man, forced to decide between being safe and looked after, and risking everything for freedom. 

This is a long novel and I repeatedly questioned whether it was worth the effort of reading. The three stories are linked by devices such as the repeated names and the Washington Square location, and by the themes. But I found this somewhat artificial and irritating, and the lack of resolution of any story irritated me even more. There were also moments of high artificiality, such as the PI report in the first book and the father's letter in the second. There were moments when dinner-table  discussions sounded like dissertations, and when it was implicitly assumed that modern-day mores would survive into the future. Time and again my ability to suspend my disbelief, surely important in a novel rooted in alternative history and dystopian scifi,  was challenged. I got the feeling the Yanagahira was playing with form rather than concentrating on writing a novel that might appeal to the reader. 

Nevertheless, there are brilliant characters, drawn so that the reader really believes in them, and the tensions between what will keep them safe and what might offer them fulfilment are carefully explored and genuinely involve the reader in the dilemmas faced by the characters: should David in book one believe Edward (no!), should Charlie in book three believe David (yes) and attempt to flee (not sure). etc? Book Two was the weakest in this respect: more and more I cared less and less. 

On the other hand, it sometimes felt that, as with her previous novel A Little Life, Yanagihara's character are drawn from a tiny subsection of humanity. Although the principals (David, David and Charlie) are gentle, weak, powerless characters, they are all privileged being born into either rich or royal or powerful families. And their milieu is equally drawn from the higher echelons of society: rich and powerful and cultured. Almost everyone is handsome. Their challenges are the challenges of the lucky. Does Yanagihara not know any ordinary folk?

There are moments of perfect description and other moments when Yanagihara can succinctly nail aspects of the human condition. But fundamentally I was alienated by the formal tricks, by the first world problems, by the lack of resolution and by the sheer bulk of the book. 

Selected quotes:

Moments of perfect description:

• "The man’s head was tipped back on his neck, which was long but supple and strong, like a snake, and as he sang, David watched a muscle move in his throat, a pearl traveling upward and then sliding down" ((Book 1, Washington Square, 4)
• "Around him, the world was impossibly vivid: the sky assaultively blue, the birds oppressively loud, the smell of horse manure, even in the cold, unpleasantly strong." (Book 1, Washington Square, 16)
• "they seemed made not from flesh but from something silty and cold. Not marble, but chalk." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "on the wall opposite, a square of light flickers and vanishes, flickers and vanishes, flickers and vanishes, like a code meant only for me." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 4)
• "what I hadn’t realized until everyone left is that the small, human sounds of this gathering, the sighs and snores and murmurs, the sharp flick of someone flipping the page of a book, the glug of water being swigged from a bottle, somehow balanced the other noise: the refrigerated trucks idling at the docks, the cottony thud of sheet-wrapped bodies being stacked atop one another, the boats chugging to and fro." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 6)

Other great passages:

• "He felt at times as if his life were something he was only waiting to use up, so that, at the end of each day, he would settle into bed with a sigh, knowing he had worked through a small bit more of his existence and had moved another centimeter toward its natural conclusion." (Book 1, Washington Square, 2)
• "He was a bite of an apple, but Edward Bishop was that apple baked into a pie with a shattery, lardy crust pattered with sugar, and after a taste of that, there was no going back to the other." (Book 1, Washington Square, 4)
• "his leisure was so well-known that it had become its own kind of prison, a schedule in the absence of one." (Book 1, Washington Square, 5)
• "What would it be like to be someone anonymous, someone whose name meant nothing, who was able to move through life as a shadow?" (Book 1, Washington Square, 5)
• "His path was never his own to forge, for someone had already done it for him, clearing obstacles he would never know had once existed. He was free, but he was also not." ((Book 1, Washington Square, 5)
• "It was as if he had been bewitched and, knowing it, had sought not to fight against it but to surrender, to leave behind the world he thought he knew for another, and all because he wanted to attempt to be not the person he was—but the one he dreamed of being." (Book 1, Washington Square, 5)
• "Now it was time to seek. Now it was time to be brave. Now he must go alone." (Book 1, Washington Square, 16)
• "He could make his lack of knowledge—about flowers, baseball, football, modernist architecture, contemporary literature and art, South American food—sound like a boast; he didn’t know because there was no reason to know. You might know, but then you had wasted your time" (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1) A similar sentiment may be found in Washington Square by Henry James: "'Well, I never knew a foreigner!' said young Townsend, in a tone which seemed to indicate that his ignorance had been optional."
• "it sometimes felt as if he ... was an understudy, hurried onstage in the middle of a scene he couldn’t remember, trying to read his fellow actors’ cues, hopeful his lines would return to him." Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "he would listen in silence as they discussed things—people he had never heard of, books he had never read, movie stars he didn’t care about, events he hadn’t been alive for" (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "But he was also aware of feeling like a child. Charles chose his clothes and where they would vacation and what they would eat" (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "here was someone who allowed him to be the object of worry, never the worrier." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "Preparing to be thirty, much less forty or fifty, was like buying furniture for a house made of sand—who knew when it would be washed away, or when it would start disintegrating, falling apart in clots? It was far better to use what money you could make proving to yourself that you were still alive." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "To be hungry was to be alive, and to be alive was to need food." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "Even his new grossness was a kind of shout, a defiance; he was a body that took up more space than was allowed, than was polite. He had made himself into a presence that couldn’t be ignored. He had made himself undeniable." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "You should always have a close friend you’re slightly afraid of.” (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "the enjoyable things—eating, fucking, drinking, dancing, walking—falling away one by one, until all you were left with were the undignified motions and movements, the essence of what the body was: shitting and peeing and crying and bleeding, the body draining itself of liquids, like a river determined to run itself dry." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "it was when you were dying that people most wanted things from you—they wanted you to remember, they wanted reassurance, they wanted forgiveness. They wanted acknowledgment and redemption;" (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "The problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you’d been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you’re nothing once again." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 2)
• "the government will do anything to delay confronting and correcting the actual problem: Americans’ scientific illiteracy." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 2)
• “'With every person you see, you should try to notice five things,' Grandfather would say when I was struggling to describe someone. “What race are they? Are they tall or short? Are they fat or thin? Do they move quickly or slowly? Do they look down or straight ahead?" ((Book 3, Zone Eight, part 3)
• “Those who congratulate themselves on their sacrifices for their families aren’t actually sacrificing at all ... because their family is an extension of their selves, and therefore a manifestation of the ego. True selflessness ... meant giving of yourself to a stranger, someone whose life would never be entangled with your own." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 8)
• "we are the left-behind, the dregs, the rats fighting for bits of rotten food, the people who chose to stay on earth, while those better and smarter than we are have left" (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 8)
• "when you’re twenty-four, your body is for pleasure and you’re constantly in love." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 8)"
• "to the young, anything unpleasant can be blamed on or attributed to old age." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 8)

Some great moments, showing considerable authorial skill, but its flaws make it a chore to read.

Oh, and it's about personal freedoms in the face of a pandemic. Like so many other recent fiction. Ho hum.

December 2023; 792 pages

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

"Close to Home" by Michael Magee

 

Sean escaped from Belfast, going to Liverpool to study English Literature. Now he's back in an environment of hardship and hopelessness. He works in a dead-end job for low wages, lives rent-free in a building due to be demolished, steals from the supermarket, cheats taxi drivers and does what he must to get by. He also takes drugs and gets drunk to cope with the depressing bleakness of his life and his future. 

Then, during a party,  he assaults another young man and he is charged with assault. 

The story charts Sean's precarious life. He wants to be a writer but his encounters with the arty-farty student crowd leave him feeling alienated. Temptation is ever present: his friends encourage him to take drugs and, given his prospects, why wouldn't he? Why shouldn't he call in sick? And the aftermath of the Troubles, when terrorists and paramilitaries shot and bombed, is still around.

It's a bleak world and Sean's future seems gloomy. I empathised with him almost immediately and then spent a lot of this book hoping he would behave himself and fearing he wouldn't. There were so many opportunities for him to fail. This made it a powerfully absorbing but sometimes gruelling read.

Selected quotes:

• "Silences hung like curtains around her." (Ch 11)
• "Only a few years before,I had watched her trail Debbie Porter by the hair across the pavement and punch her over and over again until she screamed for Mairead to stop. Now she was smiling along to the poems being read by a woman who had translated Catullus." (Ch 12)
• "She was a vegan. At least, she ordered a vegan meal, and I didn't know why anybody would do that to themselves if they weren't." (Ch 20)
• "It was one of those hugs that asks a lot of the other person." (Ch 20)
• "That leathery look had aged him, and dyeing your hair will only take you so far when you look like a handbag." (Ch 21)

December 2023; 278 pages

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

"Country" by Michael Hughes

 A 2018 Book of the Year in the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement.

The story is the story of the Iliad but transposed to Northern Ireland at the time of the Troubles, just before the ceasefire. The Greeks become Republican gunmen seeking to disrupt the fragile ceasefire; Achilles is their famous sniper Achill (aka Liam O'Brien), Agamemnon is Pig, their commanding officer, his brither Dog is Menelaus, Sid is Odysseus, and old Ned is Nestor. The Trojans are the British, holed up in an army base (called Castle William but some vandals have torn down the W so it had become Illiam), with their various allies including the police and the local Orangemen, Hector is Henry, married to Anna, father of baby Max. Helen is Nellie, married to Dog, but now, having become an informer, she is living with Alex, nicknamed Paris. The Olympian Gods are the Higher-Ups, the untouchable politicians, who make decisions and dispose of men's lives.

It is remarkably faithful to the plot, even including the necessary long speeches and some of the Iliad's hideous descriptions of the effects of violence on the human body. But it works! Written using the contemporary Irish slang, translating meals into fry-ups, chariots into cars and even the funeral games of Patroclus into competitions held between men at a wake. This is a clever and even insightful version of a classic epic.

In fact it is better than that. Yes, part of the pleasure of reading lies in the ability to decrypt it. But its immersion in Irishness and Irishisms give it an utterly authentic feel. 

Selected quotes:

• "Fury. Pure fury. The blood was up. Lost the head completely." (Ch 1; first lines)
• "Told her if she couldn't decide, to just give each of them a number and roll a dice. ... He said you didn't have to do what the dice said, but how you felt when the number came up would show you what you really wanted." (Ch 10) I've advised students to do this in multiple-choice exam papers but not as a way of choosing a boyfriend.
• "She couldn't believe they had a bottle of wine on the table while they were eating. Not that they opened it." (Ch 16)
• "He gave her a wee smiley frown that said, You really don't need to call me sir. And she gave him a wee smiley frown back that said, Och I know, but sure old habits die hard after eight hundred years of oppression. Sir." (Ch 29)
• "Dog hated being wounded. All that sitting around. Fuck all to do. He always ended up thinking. And he really hated thinking." (Ch 34)
• "Thinking gets you nowhere in this game. ... Crack on with the job, and leave the brain-work to the higher-ups." (Ch 35)
• "But like any man who got to be the best at what he did, they promoted him off that job, and sat him in a wee office directing others who weren't half as good." (Ch 37)
• "Death looks like glory to a young man. Get a few more years on you, and glory starts looking a lot like death." (Ch 47)
• "Back at the Ships, Ned was in full flow. He'd seen the like before, many's and many's the time. He'd heard all the pros and cons for and the pros and cons against." (Ch 49)
• "Of all the operations you set in motion, you were lucky if one out of fifty made the news. Most people never appreciated it was hard fucking work. Tedious. Frustrating. Soul-destroying." (Ch 50)
• "You don't listen to what a man says. You watch what he does, and you know who he is." (Ch 58)

Not only is it clever, not only is it well-written, but its transposition  into such a visceral context provides a fresh perspective on the original. Spell-binding.

December 2023; 314 pages

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

"Great Circle" by Maggie Shipstead

Photo by Keven Rutherford //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cape_Cod_biplane.JPG

Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize and the 2022 Women's Prize for Fiction

Two interleaved narratives tell the birth-to-death bildungsroman of Marian Graves (and her twin brother Jamie, and her childhood friend Caleb Bitterroot), a young American girl who loved flying and disappeared on an attempt to fly around the world, over the two poles, in 1950, and the current story of the wild child actress who plays her in the biopic. It's a big book, full of incident and humour and packed with details that create such a sense of authenticity that I googled Marian to see if she was a real person. 

I was captivated by the story of Marian and her brother and Caleb; when they were in peril, my heart was in my mouth. I was enthralled by them. And the counterpoint story brought humour and lightness to the book.

Enormously readable and great fun.

One tiny quibble. I don't think rugby was played at Eton in the 1940s.

Selected quotes: (pages refer to the 2022  paperback published by Penguin in the UK)

• "Water was always on its way somewhere bigger." (p 51)
• "White water was shouldering at the bumper the way Wallace did when his Cadillac got stuck in the mud." (p 52)
• "I reeled like a charred and tottering cartoon knight who'd just been flambeed in dragon's breath." (p 184)
• "box-hedge eyebrows" (p 188)
• "There are always a bunch of these rich kids floating around LA, riding on fortunes they didn't earn as though on litters born aloft by the ghosts of their ancestors." (p 191)
• "I'm told girls dream of being wives, but wifedom seems an awful lot like defeat dressed up as victory." (p 319)
• "Different moods sweep through her gaze the same way the leaf shadows blow across the floor." (p 382)
• "The Days were wearing dress shirts and chinos so tightly tailored they looked like superheroes' unitards." (p 387)
• "Knowing what you don't want is just as useful as knowing what you do." (p 392)
• "Muskoxen wander past her outhouse, ancient-seeming creatures, haloed by their own frozen breath, their thick coats swinging around their ankles like monks' robes." (p 394)
• "The Bellanca gets wrecked and patched so many times it's a jumble of spare parts flying in formation." (p 395)
• "Both of us aiming our words in the same direction like we were driving down a road somewhere." (p 419)
• "So many years up in the north trying to freeze her heart solid and let the wind erode it down to nothing." (p 482)
• "He'd been present for every minute, every second of his own life, and he hadn't known himself." (p 544)
• "Time stopped and started again, stuttered as though it were yet another machine running out of fuel." (p 556)
• "Theater actors play multiple parts both to save money and to show off." (p 557)
• "We don't always notice beginnings. Endings are usually easier to detect." (p 558)
• "Almost no-one has more than a few scattered data points, but they connect the dots however they please." (p 571)
• "She understands now this place, vast and lifeless, might as well be death itself." (p 627)
• "Where is the border between life and oblivion? Why should anyone presume to recognize it." (p 629)

December 2023; 670 pages

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

"The Island of Missing Trees" by Elif Shafak

Shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Prize and the 2022 Women's Prize for fiction. 

 This book centres around Kostas, a Greek Cypriot boy, and Defne, a Turkish Cypriot girl, who fall in love during the tensions leading up to the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus which divided a community on the brink of civil war into two separate communities. There is a second strand, set in the late 2010s: in which, following Defne's death, her sister Meryem visits Kostas, Defne's bereaved husband, and their daughter in London, Ada.

The narrative is told in the past tense and largely from the unusual perspective of a fig tree growing in the middle of a taverna is Cyprus and in a London back garden (Kostas took a cutting). The fig tree acts as an omniscient narrator, partly because it is told what is happening by insects, birds and animals that 'talk' to it. This conceit permits the author to, somewhat didactically, recount the twentieth century history of intercommunal strife of Cyprus and offer a philosophy which, in short, seems to be 'Nature - especially trees - good, humanity bad'. I suppose that if you want to learn about Cyprus and arboriculture this might be the book for you but I felt that this focus meant the author was less focused on the characters.Meryam is a bit of a stereotype. Kostas the boy and Kostas the man seem like two different people. The gay couple who run the pub are two people but mostly felt like one.  I was never really fully immersed in anyone except, perhaps, the young Kostas. And that meant that I felt like a disinterested observer when awful things happened. There was so much potential for developing empathy for characters in hugely tense situations generating enormous emotions ... but I scarcely felt involved. 

There were a number of plot lines that seemed undeveloped. For example, Ada screams in class ... but this wasn't developed except as an online embarrassment. There is a visit to an exorcist ... but then nothing. 

Some people don't like it when a book jumps back and forth between different times. I understood that a straightforwardly chronological story would have been difficult (lots happen in 1974, nothing for 40 years, lots happen again) but otherwise there didn't seem to be a compelling reason, just as the development of a theme, for this structure. It also meant that the early parts of the book contain spoilers which reduced the narrative tension and undermined any surprises. 

It just didn't grab me.

Part of the problem is its preachiness: it can't seem to touch on a problem or issue without sermonising, and always from the perspective of an ecologically aware millennial. I like books that challenge me to think and this book repeatedly told me what to think.

There were some great touches. I loved Meryam who conversation was peppered with proverbs (see below). There are moments of great description (eg: "The tang of jasmine, winding around the wrought-iron balustrade  like a golden thread through homespun cloth, perfumed the air"; 3: Definition of love). I also enjoyed the teenage truculence of Ada. There were some very authentic bits of dialogue. But I didn't really care about Kostas or the dead Defne; I was reading with my head and not my heart.

Selected quotes:

The proverbs of Meryam:

• "Eat according to your own taste, dress according to others." (2: Music Box)
• "If a cat wants to eat her kittens, she'll say they look like mice." (2: Music Box)
• "Good advice is always annoying, bad advice never is. So if what I say irritates you, take it as good advice." (3: Bell Peppers)
• "Sorrow is to the soul what a worm is to wood." (3: Bell Peppers)
• "If your beard is on fire, others will light their pipes on it." (3: Bell Peppers)
• "We're not going to search for a calf under an ox." (4: Proverbs)
• "The bear knows seven songs and they are all about honey." (4: Proverbs)
• "A gardener in love with roses is pricked by a thousand thorns." (4: Proverbs)
• "If you weep for all the sorrows in the world, in the end you will have no eyes." (6: Interview)
• "If a stone falls on an egg, it is bad for the egg; if an egg falls on a stone, it is still bad for the egg." (6: Kitchen)

And other selected quotes:

• "Time is a songbird, and just like any other songbird it can be taken captive." (Prologue: Island)
• "Storm clouds descended over London and the world turned the colour of melancholy." (1: Fig Tree)
• "First generation immigrants ... wear a lot of beige, grey and brown. Colours that do not stand out. Colours that whisper, never shout." (1: Fig Tree)
• "More and more he noticed that in order to have her move a step closer, he had to take a step away first." (1: Night)
• "Like a story, a tree does not grow in perfectly straight lines." (1: Fig Tree)
• "The past is a dark, distorted mirror. You look in it, you only see your own pain." (2: The Castle)
• "Unlike in history books, stories come to us not in their entirety but in bits and pieces, broken segments and partial echoes" (5: Fig Tree)
• "Tribal hatreds don't die ... they just add new layers to hardened shells." (5: Ammonite)

December 2023: 339 pages

Strangely, I have just finished reading another book in which a character communicates with a tree and there is a parrot: Still Life by Sarah Winman. It's a lot better because she really concentrates on developing a small cast of utterly eccentric and yet believable characters. It's also a lot funnier.

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

"Homer and his Iliad" by Robin Lane Fox

This is a book about the Iliad written by an expert in his field. I have previously read RLF's Alexander the Great, which I found slightly heavy going, and Travelling Heroes in which he attempts to show that colonists from the island of Euboea were instrumental in many of the early advances of the classical Greek world. Like Travelling Heroes, Homer and his Iliad is full of ideas and simply stuffed with scholarship but rather incoherently present. I never found it difficult to understand but as an intelligent non-specialist, I rather lost the wood for the trees. He was trying to establish some facts about Homer but often the evidence seemed to amount to little more than his opinion and is distributed about the book is such a way that I found it difficult in my head to assemble all the little snippets to decide whether he had adequately supported his main thesis.

For example, he works hard to establish that Homer was a single author who wrote the entire Iliad, except for the Catalogue of Ships in Book 2 and the 10th Book, which, he claims, were interpolations by later authors. But his supposition that the Iliad was created as a spoken or recited poem (evidenced by features such as repetition and ring composition which he says are typical of oral poetry) militates against the single author theory: other epic poems in the oral tradition are reinterpreted each time a new poet recites them. So RLF maintains that Homer must have dictated the poem, thereby fixing its form (and dating the composition to after the introduction of alphabetic literacy in Greece). But then he cites other passages which suggest a later date for composition than he now maintains and he can only explain these away by assuming that they are interpolations by those subsequent to Homer. Indeed, as I discovered in Hidden Hands, it was common for scribes when copying a manuscript to make additions or amendments. But surely this undermines his argument against the 'patchwork' theory: that the Iliad was created by a number of authors. He states “In general terms it is a fallacy to assume that unity of design entails a single author, but the rest of the Iliad’s plot is so pervasively signposted that a single author is evidently guiding its course.” (Ch 6) which seems to underline the feeling that RLF has started with a theory and isn't prepared to let inconvenient facts spoil it.

Furthermore, the arguments for dating the composition of the Iliad seem to be scattered over several chapters and presented in no particular order. I found this confusing. It would have been clearer if RLF had concentrated on a few key dates. For example, even though his stories are set firmly in the Bronze Age there is a mention of iron-tipped arrows ploughshares and this therefore dates (at least that passage which may, of course, be a later interpolation) to after this technology was introduced which puts an earliest composition date at c1020 BC. On the other hand, Homer never mentions coinage and, since this was introduced into that area of the world in about 650 BC it might be inferred that the Iliad was written after that date. Simple arguments such as this, especially if presented on a timeline would have made the dating of the poem clearer.

One feature that I desperately needed was the addition of a map. RLF repeatedly refers to places such as the Troad and I for one wasn't sure where they were. (He also repeatedly refers to the land-mass known to the Romans as Asia Minor and nowadays as Turkey as 'Asia' which is surely bound to lead to confusion!). He even gives geographical arguments, such as Chryse walking down the shore to a temple. My understanding of these arguments would have been massively enhanced with a few simple maps.

There were times when his obvious partiality for the Iliad (and for a couple of other epic poems that he had studied) seemed to lead him to make instant judgements. For example, after establishing how careful Homer was with his geographical references in the Iliad (saying that “throughout antiquity, Greek poetry and cult shows a strong connection to particular sites and landscapes in the real world.” Ch 3), he then dismisses generations of scholars who have tried to use geographical references in the Odyssey to trace the path of Odysseus (for example Ulysses Found by Ernle Bradford) by calling it "a journey into neverland" (Ch 3) without, so far as I can see, a single shred of evidence to back this statement up. This isn't the only time when RLF appears to want to have his cake and eat it.

Don't get me wrong, there were many interesting things in this book, just as there were with Travelling Heroes. But the incoherence confused me and the apparent cherry-picking of facts left me unconvinced. Map and a timeline too, please.

Selected quotes:
“When Helen and Paris re-meet in his bedroom in book 3, how much of the day has passed? They make love, but are they having prime-time sex, in the afternoon?” (Ch 5)
“Close encounters with Homeric gods or goddesses follow a general pattern. They appear, concealing their identity. They talk and intervene, and usually only when they are departing does their identity become clear. Intimacy provokes awe and fear, but the god reassures. This pattern ... also occurs, independently, in parts of the Bible, in the visits paid by angels.” (Ch 28)
“In societies where social relations are highly unequal and stratified, those relations of power are projected onto gods” (Ch 28)
“There is no cosmic justice. ... Homer’s listeners were aware that gods had anger and spite and [it] might lie behind disease or the destruction of a city. It might cause earthquakes or famine.” (Ch 280)
“The explanation of misfortune is a crucial function of religion.” (Ch 28)
“Sex with a god always makes a girl pregnant. If he has sex with her twice in one encounter, she has twins.” (Ch 29)

December 2023; 398 pages

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

"Greenwitch" by Susan Cooper

The third in the 'Dark Is Rising' series of five books aimed at children.

We return to Cornwall, scene of the first book (Over Sea Under Stone). The grail that  Simon, Barney and Jane discovered has been stolen from the museum and they have a week of Easter holiday with Great Uncle Merry to search for it. Tagging along is Will, the hero of the second book (The Dark is Rising); unknown to the other three kids, Will is one of the Old Ones, magicians who fight for the Light against the Dark. 

I was a little disappointed that the opportunities for jealousy and resentment are not really exploited but this is, after all, a children's book. The mood of the book has returned to the light, carefree atmosphere of the first book - these are Cornish holidays - and I missed the dark, threatening mood of the start of the second book, set in a wintry Thames valley. But the arousal of Wild Magic, independent of either Light or Dark, partly made up for this.

One of its strengths is that it did have some excellent descriptions which I have included among the selected quotes below. The best chapters were those featuring Jane: making the Greenwitch and the night of chaos.

It's a very short and simple book which would probably appeal to well-behaved middle-class kids aged about ten.

Selected Quotes:

• "Under the sunset sky the sea was glass-smooth. Long slow rollers from the Atlantic, rippling like muscles beneath the skin, made the only sign of the great invisible strength of the ocean in all the tranquil evening." (Ch 3)
• "Her horror came not from fear, but from the awareness she suddenly felt from the image of an appalling, endless loneliness. Great power was held only in great isolation." (Ch 3)
• "In a little while the mist covered all the sky, so that the sun hung there familiar and yet strange, like a furry orange." (Ch 4)
• "They were moving slowly, the old man still hobbling on a stick; Jane could sense the suppressed impatience in the boys’ deliberate pace." (Ch 6)
• "This was a region of fear and treachery, where every fish ate every other fish, where life was made only of fierce attack and the terror of desperate flight." (Ch 7)
• "They huddled in the dark warehouse doorway, watching. No wind blew now, and the sudden stillness was unnerving, broken only by the rumbling waves. The murmur of passing motor-cars came now and then from the main road higher in the village, but the children did not heed them. Nothing in the world seemed to exist but this thing that loomed before them, rising higher each moment out of the swaying sea." (Ch 9)
• "gently but urgently" (Ch 9)
• "in the darkness, wherever she looked, Jane could see things moving." (Ch 9) As with so many horror films, this statement was more powerful than when the author actually described the moving things.
• "this is why he wanted us to sleep. Safe and empty with a blanket over our minds" (Ch 10)
• "Long grass rose lush and new round rusting pieces of farm equipment left in the yard: a skeletal old plough, a harrow, the remnants of a tractor with its great tyres gone, In the pen of a deserted pig-sty, nettles grew tall and rank." (Ch 12)
• "They lay in variously abandoned attitudes in the sunshine on the beach, recovering from an enormous picnic lunch." (Ch 13)

December 2023

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