"Hidden Hands" by Mary Wellesley

 A book about mediaeval manuscripts sounds dry as dust. I loved it. From the visceral description of how parchment is made from goatskin (including a photograph of the author having a go) to the wonderful two-language quotes from manuscript so you can try your hand at translating Old English and check how accurate you were, this book is a delight. I learned so much!

• Parchment was invented when a bibliophile ruler of Pergamon was unable to import papyrus from nearby Egypt: pergamenum is the Latin word from which we get parchment. (Prologue)
• The closely related vellum is technically made from calf-skin (veal) (Prologue)
• When making parchment the dried goatskins are stretched across a frame called a 'herse', a word related to the word 'hearse' which originally meant "a frame for carrying lighted tapers over a coffin". (Prologue)
• You can determine the social status of old skeletons by measuring the amount of radiocarbon in their bones because higher-status individual ate more fish (Ch 3)
• Manuscript artists were called limners short for luminers which meant illuminator from the Latin lumen meaning light. (Ch 4)
• Surreal monsters are a characteristic of the pictures on manuscripts dating from the Gothic period (1200 - 1350) (Ch 4)
• "The rise of universities in England from around the twelfth century created a demand for books outside of any specifically monastic context" (Ch 5)
• The word 'brethele' which means a worthless person or a pauper is related to the word 'brothel'. (Ch 5)
• The word 'author' is related to the word 'authority'. (Ch 7)

If I have a criticism it is that towards the end of the book, especially in chapter seven, the author drifts away from talking about the manuscripts and focuses on mediaeval authors, especially women, whom she regards as having been ignored by later generations of misogynist scholars. The blurb on the back cover describes this as "an insistent emphasis on the early role of women as authors and artists". But I was reading the book to learn about the texts, not to speculate on their producers.

But there is much else in this book to treasure, including fifty beautiful colour plates and a most wonderful glossary.

An interesting history of some fascinating artefacts.

Selected quotes:

• "Literary fame appears to be a fleeting thing." (Ch 6)

November 2023; 280 pages

This review was written by the author of

Bally and Bro, Motherdarling and The Kids of God

"The Dark is Rising" by Susan Cooper

This book is the sequel to Over Sea, Under Stone ... but it is almost entirely different. There is only one shared character: Merriman Lyon. The setting has moved from Cornwall in summer to the Thames Valley in the grip of a fierce winter; the tone had changed from bright to very dark.

Will Stanton is the seventh son of a seventh son; on his eleventh birthday he discovers that he is one of the Old Ones, a group defending the Light against the Dark. He has to collect a set of signs; once they are assembled together the Dark will be defeated, although only for a time. The whole plot conforms very closely to that of the 'hero's journey' with a delightful status quo ante in the real world followed by a call, helpers on the journey, tests along the way and a final climactic challenge. 

At he start I was very much enamoured. There was a real sense of menace, there were some beautifully poetic moments, written to be chanted aloud, and there were some beautiful descriptions (which continued throughout). But almost as soon as the magic started, I became, ironically, disenchanted. 

Okay, it's a children's book. But there was no questioning, no resistance. Will was eleven. There was no sense that he was at all resistant when he was told he was special, with magical powers, by a rather strange old man. There was no questioning of the idea that the old ways are good: Will lives in a very cosy country world of carol-singing and church-going, with a Lady of the Manor and her butler, and distinctly feudal ideas. When Merriman exploits and betrays another human being he regrets the consequences but this doesn't raise questions about whether the Old Ones are good or bad.

And I had my usual problems when magic is involved. It's a cop out. There can be no real danger when you can perform tricks. Will is repeatedly protected from harm by the signs, by Merriman, and by other Old Ones. It all seemed too easy.

So it was a wonderful start but as it went on it became more stereotyped and predictable. Probably I was expecting too much. It's a children's book. 

Great descriptions:

What makes these descriptions great is their simplicity. A single word (picture-writing!) or a short phrase conjures up so much. 

• "The snow flurried against the window, with a sound like fingers brushing the pane." (1, Midwinter’s Eve)
• "The fear jumped at him for the third time like a great animal that had been waiting to spring." (1, Midwinter’s Eve)
• "all around them was a quivering of things, a movement like the shaking of the air over a bonfire or over a paved road baked by a summer sun." (1, The Sign-Seeker)
• "nobody had been along the path since the snow began; down there it lay untrodden, smooth and white and inviting, marked only by the picture-writing of birds’ footprints." (1, The Walker on the Old Way)

Selected Quotes:

• "The radio let out a sudden hideous crackle of static as he passed the table. He jumped." (1, Midwinter’s Eve)
• "this night will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond imagining." (1, Midwinter’s Eve)
• "It was then, without warning, that the fear came. The first wave caught him as he was crossing the room to his bed. It halted him stock-still in the middle of the room, the howl of the wind outside filling his ears. The snow lashed against the window. Will was suddenly deadly cold, yet tingling all over. He was so frightened that he could not move a finger." (1, Midwinter’s Eve)
• "He had never known a feeling like this before. It was growing worse every minute. As if some huge weight were pushing at his mind, threatening, trying to take him over, turn him into something he didn’t want to be." (1, Midwinter’s Eve)
• "All his senses sprang to life at once, under a shower of unexpected sounds, sights, smells." (1, Midwinter Day)
• "Any great gift of power or talent is a burden, and this more than any, and you will often long to be free of it. But there is nothing to be done. If you were born with the gift, then you must serve it, and nothing in this world or out of it may stand in the way of that service, because that is why you were born and that is the Law." (1, The Sign-Seeker)
• "For the Dark, the Dark is rising. The Walker is abroad, the Rider is riding; they have woken, the Dark is rising. " (1, The Sign-Seeker)
• "For all times co-exist, and the future can sometimes affect the past, even though the past is a road that leads to the future" (1, The Sign-Seeker)
• "You changed me from a man into a creature always running, always searching, always hunted. You stopped me from growing decently old in my own time, as all men after their lives grow old and tired and sink to sleep in death. You took away my right to death." (3, The Hawk in the Dark)

The full poem:

When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back; 

Three from the circle, three from the track; 

Wood, bronze, iron; water, fire, stone; 

Five will return, and one go alone.

Iron for the birthday, bronze carried long; 

Wood from the burning, stone out of song; 

Fire in the candle-ring, water from the thaw; 

Six Signs the circle, and the grail gone before.

Fire on the mountain shall find the harp of gold 

Played to wake the Sleepers, oldest of the old; 

Power from the green witch, lost beneath the sea; 

All shall find the light at last, silver on the tree.

November 2023

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

"A Glastonbury Romance" by John Cowper Powys

A huge book in which a number of members of a Norfolk family wind up in Glastonbury where there are culture wars between a capitalist businessman, various left-wing would-be revolutionaries, and a lay preacher and faith-healer with miraculous powers. 

E M Forster, in Appendix A of Aspects of the Novel, says “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.” A Glastonbury Romance is supposed to have half a million words in it; my print copy ran to 1120 pages. Writing something of that length is a considerable achievement and testimony to the endurance of the author. But AGR is not on my list of great literature.

For John Burnside, however, as reported in The Guardian of 3rd February 2024, this was the book that made him want to become a writer.

In 2006, Margaret Drabble wrote in the Guardian that "Words poured from him, and he was famous for never rereading any of them." A friend of mine who is in the John Cowper Powys society says that he certainly revised some of his books but perhaps not AGR. I think this shows. The reader (and, I suspect, the writer) is overwhelmed by the flood of words. Some readers say they loved that feeling of inundation, that they abandoned themselves to it and luxuriated in it. I just felt suffocated.

It is written in the past tense with an omniscient point of view, head-hopping through the consciousnesses of the characters, including insects.

There is a huge cast of characters, from all social levels, though most of the lower-class characters seem to be there principally to create entertainment and background colour. To call the characters Dickensian is both accurate and a back-handed compliment. Most characters are eccentric and can be described quite easily. For example, Owen Evans is obsessed with Merlin but also has sado-masochistic fantasies which he finds difficult to suppress. Philip Crow is a businessman intent on making money and obsessed with his cousin's wife (although he is very supportive of his own wife, despite his repeated philandering). Many of the principal male characters (John Crow, Sam Dekker, Owen Evans, Mayor Geard) have extensive spiritual lives, although their spirituality seems to be different aspects of the same thing, making them both distinct from one another and somehow weirdly similar. The women are fundamentally concerned with attracting a male (although there are several lesbians) and keeping house. My JCP society friend says, however, that JCP is good at describing elderly spinsters and thinks that Euphemia Drew and Aunt Elizabeth are successes. Voice is used to distinguish social classes rather than individuals. Opportunities to develop characters are often missed. For example, John has spent years living on his wits in Paris and is described as having a rather wolf-like nature but when he gets to Glastonbury he settles down, gets a job and gets married and his distinctive personality seems to merge in with the others; it's almost as if JCP became bored with John and his attention was distracted by other characters. I suspect that it is not possible, even over 1120 pages, for an author to properly explore characters when there are so many of them. But Mayor Geard is an interesting character as is Sam Dekker.

I was desperately disappointed by the plot (my JCPSoc friend says he is less interested in plot as he grows older). Two of the major plot developments are the creation of a commune in Glastonbury and the murder of one of the main characters. Both of these rely on characters who spring into action only in the last third of the book, as if they are afterthoughts. Most of the book therefore seems to be preamble. There was little feeling of structure. Margaret Drabble says "the plot rambles". 

But my JCPSoc friend points out that even if the structure is missing, there are patterns, for example in the opposition between the 'heathen triangle' of John, Mary and Barter and the Christian triangle of Sam, Nell and Matt; also the opposition between the triumvirate of Dave Spear, Paul Trent and Red Robinson against the vested interests of Philip. 

There is an awful lot of mystical clap-trap, such as: "It is a natural fact that there Two Twilights are propitious to psychic intercourse with the First Cause while other hours are malignant and baleful." (Ch 2). This, to be fair, seems to be the catnip that generates many of the five star reviews. JCP sets the tone from the first sentence: "At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred with a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar system one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occurs when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe." (Ch 1) There's a lot of this sort of thing, both in terms of its long-windedness and its mysticism: scarcely any of the principal characters can perform any action without a vast amount of soul-searching in terms often as obscure as this. In the end I agreed with Ned Athling when he said "I feel somehow ... as if all these Grail stories, all this mediaeval mysticism, had grown tiresome and antiquated." (Ch 17)

Several of the characters have mystical experiences. John Crow has a vision of Excalibur being flung from Pomparles Bridge. Sam Dekker has a vision of the Grail coupled with a sensation of a spear being thrust into his bowels ... which makes him either Jesus on the Cross of, more likely, the Fisher King. Other Christ-like figures include Owen Evans who apparently dies when enacting crucifixion during the Pageant but revives at the hospital and Geard who is a faith-healer, curing cancer and raising from the dead, who finally sacrifices his life for another, dying while clinging to an aeroplane which has a cross-like shape.

Don't get me wrong; when I was a kid I loved books in which children battled with mystical forces that had somehow been woken and were intruding into the world: books such as Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel The Moon of Gomrath, or Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper, or Earthfasts by William Mayne. Later, these morphed into adolescent dramas on TV such as Raven in 1977 starring Phil Daniels and The Owl Service, based on the Alan Garner book. So I am not averse to this style of fantasy. I don't think I've grown out of it. I just think that fiction should involve seductively persuading the reader to suspend their disbelief but JCP's approach is so unsubtle as to make it seem ridiculous. 

There is the usual 1930s assumption that racial characteristics are innate and eternal. John says: "we Crows are plain sea-faring Danes ... We haven't the goodness of the Saxon, not the power of the Norman, not the imagination of the Celt." (Ch 2) Later we are told: "Though Lord P's bastard had never sailed the sea, his Norse ancestors had, and that manner of life lay deep in his blood." (Ch 26) Enduring (in this case for more than thirty generations) racial consciousness might have been fashionable then but it nowadays sounds racist and eugenicist.

JCP has a lot of fun with regional accents, although only servants and other working-class people speak like that normally:

• "He do say that Miss Mary over the way have a cousin come to town what be lodging wi' Mr Evans, the new Antiquities man whose looking after wold Jones' shop, who's to Hospital again with one of they little cysteses what do trouble he." (Ch 4)
• "There do come to I, of nights, the shaky-shivers, as ye might say, when, as I lies awake in thik girt white ward, where thro' they cold windies be blowin' every draught of Heaven; and I do hear they ghosties come out of they Ruings, brother, and go whush, whush, whush over all the roofs, and I feel, for sure, that some girt change be coming over this town." (Ch 13)
• "They tease I terrible ... they call I 'Bastie, Bastie'. They did run after I in dinner-hour yesterday ..." (Ch 13)

There's a lot of sex, although it is sometimes difficult to be sure exactly what is going on. The phrase 'make love' didn't, in those days, refer to full sexual intercourse; when two lads sleep together that doesn't necessarily mean they are having sex, even when they have both previously been described as having a crush on another male character. Many characters are, apparently, chaste even after they appear to have had sex. Thus John and Mary 'make love' almost from the start but she is unbedded even after marriage, for a few days at least. Sam Dekker's goings on with married Nell have scandalised the neighbourhood but they don't have sex till much later. Nevertheless, sex is omnipresent and acknowledged. Nell's husband Will suggests that they live with Sam as a menage a trois. Mrs Legge rents out rooms to unmarried couples. Philip has an illegitimate child and sleeps with his married cousin Persephone (who in turn has a lesbian affair and then an affair with Will) and Tom Barter has a string of conquests among the servant class before impregnating Tossie. 

Somehow the attitude to sex seems typified by Sam Dekker who enjoys his (only?) sexual experience with Nell so much that he decides not only to abandon her and the child he has fathered but also to forswear sex for the rest of his life and become a sort of saint. I found this difficult to believe.

Punctuating all the spiritual stuff is everyday life including mountains of bread and butter and oceans of tea. One aspect of JCP's work that I admired was the way his characters perform strange little actions, the sort of thing that we all do in our everyday lives, moments of subconsciousness, such as when the reverend, at the moment that his son leaves home, picks up a dead fish from his aquarium and "raising it to his nostrils, sniffed at it with inquisitive interest!" (Ch 28) This is a moment of surreal nonsense but it suddenly lends verisimilitude to the whole scene.

My JCPSoc friend believes that JCP has attempted to write a novel encompassing the universality of life, its "slowness and constant irrelevancies" and at the same time the abstract, spiritual side of life. That's certainly some ambition and if he has failed, he should surely get full marks for trying.

One thing I didn't admire was JCP's prolific use of exclamation marks. He obviously thinks they add tension. He also uses italics a lot to mark the key moments of a thought or speech ... which is at least useful given that they are so many unitalicised words swamping the important ones.

But what do I know? John Cowper Powys was regarded as a great author by novelists as diverse as Henry Miller, Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble. Hermann Hesse admired AGR.

Other reviews:

• Space cadet on Amazon: "rather like watching paint dry, although taking much, much longer."
• Dr Enoch on Amazon: "mannered and constipated"
• Paul Bryant on goodreads: "this may be the most flawed five star novel ever"

Selected quotes:

• "Jealous and exacting are all the gods, and a divided worship is abhorrent to them." (Ch 1)
• "They formed a loquacious group around the car, uttering those spontaneous and lively genialities which among human beings imply instinctive relief at being able to get rid of one another." (Ch 5)
• "A girl isn't a bottle of wine for a man to lock up in a cupboard, to take a sip from whenever he wants to!" (Ch 6)
• "Here in these back alleys lived the failures in the merciless struggle of life." (Ch 9)
• "We are all a herd of gibbering monkeys in a madhouse of inherited superstitions; and the maddest and wickedest of these superstitions is the idea that private people have a right to be rich." (Ch 9)
• "'Tis not be tormenting folk that good parsnips be growed and good 'taties be dug." (Ch 19)
• "The history of any ancient town is as much the history of its inhabitants' nightly pillows as of any practical activity that they perform by day." (Ch 24)
• "We are all scales, scurf, scab, on the same twisting, cresting dragon of the slime." (Ch 25)
• "We can't all dig, Will. That's true enough; but we'd all dodge it if we could. I'd be content if those who did the dirty work got more pay than the rest of us - instead of much less; and being looked down upon us as well." (Ch 26)
• "He looked like a deboshed verger who had turned billiard-marker in some fifth-rate club." (Ch 27)
• "A limit there must be, thought Sam, to the sympathy one soul can give to other souls - or all would perish. Absolute sympathy with suffering would mean death. If Christ had sympathised to the limit with the pain of the world it would have been hard for him to have lived until the day of his Crucifixion. ... Sympathy with pain kills happiness. There comes a point when to live at all we must forget!" (Ch 28)
• "A man's backside be a turble squeamy pleace." (Ch 28)
• "Three's company ... and two's immorality." (Ch 28)
• "He do trust nature; whereas I do say, 'tis nature what did the damage. Us must go further afield for the cure of thik damage. Us must go to Science." (Ch 28)

November 2023; 1120 pages

Also by John Cowper Powys and reviewed on this blog:

• Wolf Solent

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

"Over Sea Under Stone" by Susan Cooper

The first novel in the series The Dark is Rising.

It was rather stereotyped. Three polite and well-brought-up middle-class kids come to Cornwall for their holidays, staying in an old house in a fishing village. Their parents (a doctor and an artist natch) more or less leave them to their own devices. They discover, in the loft, an old parchment and a map; there seems to be some suggestion of King Arthur. There are sinister people in the village including a clearly lower-class boy. Their mysterious great uncle, known as 'The Professor' looks after them. It's very reminiscent of the Famous Five. There's even a dog!

It became quite exciting towards the end and there were some moments of great description:

• "The end of the headland, rocky and grey, stretched out far beyond them into the sea, and sweeping towards it the land looked immensely solid, as if it were all rock and the soil above it no more than a skin." (Ch 7)
• "it was easy to scramble from one grey jagged ridge to the next, skirting the small pools where anemones spread their tentacles like feathered flowers among seaweed leaves, and shrimps darted transparent to and fro." (Ch 13)

It was well-paced and easy to read. It is aimed at young children. IO have always liked this sort of book in which mysterious and mystic forces intrude upon everyday life. But this wasn't a patch on Alan Garner's work (eg The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel The Moon of Gomrath, and especially Red Shift and the superb The Owl Service).

Selected quotes:

• "A part of him which had not quite gone to sleep at all was warning him of some danger very near." (Ch 9)

November 2023

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

"Filming If ...." by David Wood

If .... (with four dots, apparently) was an avant garde and frequently surreal film made in 1968 directed by Lindsay Anderson and starring Malcolm McDowell. It was set in a boys' public school which was intended as a metaphor for Britain at the time. The system is rotten and corrupt. Three of the senior lads rebel and, with a girl met in a transport cafe, stage an armed attack on guests assembled for Founder's Day. The film proved quasi-prophetic, being filmed (though not released) weeks before the French students rioted in Paris and young people across the western world rebelled against the establishment. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

I was only eleven. when If.... premiered. I came to the film late, when I was at a boarding school in many ways identical to the one shown in the film; I first encountered the film as a published screenplay in the School Library. It was one of many influences which prompted me (already a square peg in a round hole) to rebel against my surroundings.

David Wood was a young actor who played one of the rebels. This short memoir describes how he was chosen for the role and gives a blow by blow account of the filming. It ends with a 'where are they now?' He himself has had a long career acting, mostly in theatre, and writing playscripts and some filmscripts mostly for productions aimed at children; he wrote the screenplay for the 1974 films of 'Swallows and Amazons' whose filming is described in Sophie Neville's memoir The Secrets of Filming Swallows and Amazons.

Filming If .... is a well-written account of the production of a film that has achieved cult status. 

November 2023; 83 pages

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

"William Shakespeare: his life and work" by Anthony Holden

 

A competent biography of the celebrated playwright. Much of the details I already knew. What this book adds is a (slightly speculative) suggestion that Shakespeare was a closet-Catholic in his youth, having lived in a Catholic household in Lancashire during the 'lost years' when he was young. I also hugely enjoyed the very start of chapter one in which Holden roundly trashes the "usually snobbish attempts" to deny that Shakespeare was the author of the plays via conspiracy theories that must assume that Ben Jonson and Robert Greene and Will Kemp and King James I all lied when naming Shakespeare as a playwright/actor/shareholder. 

While one can always quibble with anybody about the chronology of the plays (eg the BBC recently put Titus Andronicus first, as a collaboration with George Peele, while Holden gives primacy to Henry VI), this book is a useful reference for sources; it is both scholarly and well written.

A useful addition to the canon. Other works about Shakespeare reviewed in this blog can be found on this page.

November 2023; 328 pages

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

"Germinal" by Emile Zola

Corn, Jack, 1929-, Photographer - Wikimedia commons File:FIRST SHIFT OF MINERS AT THE VIRGINIA-POCAHONTAS COAL COMPANY MINE ^4 NEAR RICHLANDS, VIRGINIA, LEAVING THE ELEVATOR.... - NARA - 556393.jpg

This no-holds-barred story tells of the people living in a French mining village in the 1860s. Hugely realistic, it chronicles their lives as men, women, children and horses go down into the pit to extract coal. It describes their poverty and the near-bestial lives they lead, unable to make ends meet, living together in single rooms, taking their pleasure in one another's bodies in the fields. They are struggling to survive. But there is a recession and the Company, awash with surplus coal, seeks to reduce the wages of the workers. This leads to a strike and to violence.

The title, which refers to a spring month in the French revolutionary calendar, relies on the last lines of the novel which, after so much bleakness and hardship, seem to promise a fresh start and hope for the future: "Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upwards for the harvests of future ages. And very soon their germination would crack the earth asunder." (7.6; last lines)

The central character, Etienne, is previously seen in another of Zola's twenty volume novel sequence in which he set out to write a a naturalistic and realistic mirror to society focusing on a single family.

Germinal is generally recognised as Zola's masterpiece. Its unrelenting focus on poverty reminded me of George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier but it was written in 1885, fifty years before Orwell. Its political views reminded me of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, written in the 1910s. I cannot think of any contemporary English novel that comes anywhere close to Germinal as an unrelenting 'warts and all' portrait. Yes, there are elements of Victorian prose-style, there is a touch of melodrama, and there is a clear cut division between the 'salt of the earth' poor and the decadent and selfish bourgeois, but it is as honest a portrait as anything I have read of the time.

It is the descriptions that make this a masterpiece. But Zola also works on the characters. Many of these are flat and one-dimensional, but others, such as Etienne and Catherine and Maheuse and Moquette are beautifully complex.

It might help to know that there were twenty sous to a franc, so a sou is worth five centimes. 

Selected quotes:

• "She sweated and panted and her joints cracked, but she never complained, for familiarity had brought apathy, and you would have thought that being doubled up like that was part of the normal course of human suffering." (1.4)
• "Perhaps he found in his new friend the good smell of the open air, the long-forgotten smell of the sun-kissed grass, for all of a sudden he burst into a resounding whinney, a song of joy with a sob of wistfulness running through it." (1.5) The horses have a stable in the pit, once sent down they never see daylight, and the old horse is a character all of his own.
• "Girls don't grow very fast hereabouts." (1.4) Catherine, despite being fifteen, has not yet had her first period, presumably because of malnutrition.
• "He pushed her to the table, cracking jokes to celebrate the one good moment a chap can enjoy during the whole day, calling it taking his dessert - and free of charge, what's more!" (2.4) There's a lot of sex in this book and very little romance. The poorer classes are described as if they are animals reproducing so that the bosses can have a constant supply of workers. 
• "Now who could pretend that the worker had had his fair share of the extraordinary advance in wealth and living standards over the last hundred years. It was a mockery to call them free - yes, they were free to die, and they did that all right!" (3.1)
• "It was ... her boast that not a single haulage girl became pregnant without first having lost her virtue at her establishment." (3.2)
• "Were they just cattle then, to be herded together like this in the fields, so on top of each other that nobody could change his shirt without showing his behind to his neighbours?" (3.4)
• "But even the Gregoires came back to the strike, expressing their astonishment that there was no law to prevent workpeople from leaving their work." (4.2) Following the recent public sector strikes in the UK, Conservative MPs have called for precisely this: laws to force public servants to work to provide minimum standards of cover. Has anything changed since Zola's day?
• "Even if you do have fun with men that doesn't mean you're a slacker." (4.5)
• "As though everything in the garden were lovely just because you had bread to eat." (5.5) Zola even-handedly shows that rich people have their problems ... and some of them are made to suffer as a consequence of the strike.
• "Everywhere, in the morning mist, along the shadowy roads, the trampling herd could be seen, lines of men plodding along with their noses to the ground like cattle being driven to the slaughterhouse." (7.6) 
• "Was Darwin right, then, was this world nothing but a struggle in which the strong devoured the weak so that the species might advance in strength and beauty?" (7.6)

A triumph of realism and a book set in the past which has so many uncomfortable echoes for our own days.

November 2023; 720 pages

There is a podcast about this novel on the BBC Radio 4 In Our Time website; it can be accessed here.

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

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Becker0804

 The breakthrough novel by the winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, this book does what it says on the title: it records a single day in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a political prisoner in a 'special' work camp in Siberia. It was first published in November 1962; Soviet leader Khruschev had to give permission for publication. 

Shukhov's day is controlled by the prison guards and by all the little tricks and trades that a prisoner must do to stay alive, such as cheating the cook into providing an extra bowl of skilly for breakfast, and hiding a discovered hacksaw blade (a turning point for the day, occurring at the 50% mark of the book), and buttering up his team leader so her gets an extra ration for lunch, and borrowing tobacco. Throughout his day he is in constant peril of being caught by the guards breaking a regulation and being sent to the cells. The main part of the day involves the prisoners being marched out to a building site and, in sub-zero temperatures, building a wall.

Every moment is described in meticulous detail, told entirely from Shukhov's point of view, unchaptered, and in the third person past tense. The reader is told his thoughts, rather than being left to infer them. This technique added a certain distance and made it more difficult to empathise with the character; I couldn't feel him from the inside but then, as he says on page 23: "How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?" But if I wasn't inside his skin, I was watching from a close distance and admiring and learning how a man with his attitude could survive even such a terrible environment. 

At the end of the day, when he reflects on all that has happened, he decides that it has been a good day. Some critics think this shows the that the human spirit can triumph over the most appalling circumstances. I don't agree. Triumph is the wrong word. The word I would use in its place would be 'endure'. 

But it is a miniature mesmerising masterpiece.

I suspect that a lot of the power of the book comes from the decisions that Solzhenitsyn made while planning it. The decision to write in the third person meant that he was unable to describe the feelings and emotions of his character from the inside, avoiding the possibility that the intensity of those emotions might almost inevitably spill over into melodrama. The decision to restrict the action into a single day, as it were conforming to the Aristotelian unity of time (and pretty much the the other Aristotelian unities , of place and action, as well), focused and concentrated the drama. The setting is bleak which both contrasts with and reflects the protagonist: on the one hand he is warm and human, retaining his individuality despite his surroundings, on the other his use of the third person and his limited opportunities are mirrored by the sterility of his environment. 

Fundamentally, what I believe that Solzhenitsyn was trying to do was to use the day in the prison camp as a microcosmic metaphor for the situation of an ordinary man within a wider society.

Some people are tempted to regard the book as a condemnation of a particular political philosophy but it should be pointed out that political prisoners and slave labour have existed over a wide range of societies. Apart from the environmental temperature, is Shukov's condition much different from that of a slave in the southern United States in the first part of the 1800s? Or a forced labourer in one of Albert Speer's Nazi work camps? And it should also be remembered that Siberian prison camps with forced labour were inherited by the Soviets from the previous Tsarist regimes. 

Selected quotes: (page references for the AD 2000 Penguin classics edition)

NB: 'zeks' are political prisoners

• "Pay short money and get short value." (p 39)
• "How time flew when you were working! ... The days rolled by in the camp - they were over before you could say 'knife'. But the years, they never rolled by: they never moved by a second." (p 56)
• "Moments like this ... were transforming him from an eager, confident naval officer with a ringing voice into an inert, though wary, zek. And only in that inertness lay the chance of surviving the twenty-five years of imprisonment he'd been sentenced to." (p 68)
• "This was according to the rule: one man works, one man watches." (p 84)
• "There are loafers who race one another of their own free will round a stadium. Those devils should be running after a full day's work, with aching back and wet mittens and worn-out valenki - and in the cold too." (p 92)
• "It's pretty steep being imprisoned here with Bendera's men ..." (p 101) The fictional Shukhov was imprisoned because, in WWII, he was captured by the Germans and then escaped and made his own way back to his lines, at which point he was suspected of treason, something that really happened to Russian soldiers. The real-life Stepan Bandera was a right wing Ukrainian nationalist who fought with the Nazis against the Soviet Union. Even Shukhov, a victim of the Soviet system, is anti-Bandera. This helps to explain the Russian PoV regarding the present war with the Ukraine. 
• "Nothing seems to make the authorities madder than zeks kipping quietly after breakfast." (p 112)
• "The belly is a rascal.It doesn't remember how well you treated it yesterday, it'll cry out for more tomorrow." (p 122)
• "Prayers are like those appeals of ours. Either they don't get through or they're returned with 'rejected' scrawled across 'em." (p 138)
• "There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch. ... The three extra days were for leap years." (p 142; last lines)

November 2023; 162 pages

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

"A Little Life" by Hanya Yanagihara

Two caveats. Firstly, I saw a filmed production of the National Theatre stage show of A Little Life before I read the book so I knew what was going to happen. This clearly coloured my experience of reading it. Secondly, it is a long book, 720 pages in my paperback edition, and as E M Forster says in Appendix A of his Aspects of the Novel: “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.”

The plot concerns four American men who made friends at college. Willem is an actor, Malcolm is an architect, JB is a painter, and Jude is a lawyer. The inciting incident, which comes at about the 10% mark, is that we discover that Jude, who is the most secretive of the four friends, self-harms. Slowly the book focuses more and more on Jude. His past, the reason for the self-harming, is very slowly laid bare. At the same time, the consequences of his past for his present are described in meticulous detail. There are some horrors here. If it is any consolation, the medical details are more graphic than the sexual.

The fundamental set up of the book seems beyond belief. We have four friends who met in college because they all happened to be assigned to the same dorm. When we first meet them, three of them are more or less penniless New Yorkers (one has rich parents) but as the book progresses they will all have significant success in their fields. Ordinary guys? Not really. Jude is so clever that when he is employed as a private tutor it is to teach "Latin, math, German, and piano" (2.1); he is very handsome, cooks like a cordon bleu chef, is a brilliant gardener, and has a great singing voice. He becomes a hugely successful lawyer. He works incredibly long hours, often six days a week, sometimes staying at the office until sunrise. Nevertheless, he never seems to collapse for lack of sleep. He also fits in an active social life, attending plays, films, art gallery openings, and dinner parties galore. The sort of guy who lives down my street? Not really. Towards the end of the book the main characters, including many of the minor ones, are more than happy to travel to London or Paris to attend a birthday party. These surely aren't your average Americans. Perhaps I'm jealous that I can't fit 36 hours of endeavour into 24 hours of daytime. How do they do it? They don't seem to read books or watch television ... but they can sneer at someone who pronounces 'Proust' wrong which implies that they have read him. I suppose the thesis of the book is that even the elite can have serious psychological problems but in my opinion, it is more difficult for a reader to have empathy with characters who are so clearly superior superheroes. 

In addition, there seem to be more gay or lesbian couples than heterosexual ones; hardly anyone has children and if they do, the children die. Does this reflect contemporary metropolitan America? I doubt it. 

As well as the characters being decidedly too good to be true (which seems a trend in modern fiction) there is some wonderfully unrealistic dialogue: "Mathematical logic, or pure logic, is essentially a conversation between truths and falsehoods. So, for example, I might say to you 'All positive numbers are real. Two is a positive number. Therefore two must be real.' But this isn't actually true, right?" (2.1) This is not a snippet of conversation often heard in the circles I move in. 

It is told in the third person, past tense from the multiple perspective of four of the principal characters (the four friends); and in the first person in Harold's section which gives the impression that Harold is the ultimate narrator, especially since he has the final say. This form of narration enables us to consider the protagonist, Jude, from more than one viewpoint. But it also means that we are distanced from the characters, an effect enhanced because the book is very didactic in the sense that the reader is told how the characters feel rather than being allowed to infer those feelings. Stream of consciousness this is not; interior monologue it is only if you are in the habit of thinking of yourself in the third person. Therefore we never really get inside the head of any of the characters, even though we are told all their thoughts and feelings. 

Nevertheless, by the end of the book, I felt I knew the characters. Furthermore, the book does have an emotional impact; more than once my eyes were leaking and there was a lump in my throat. I suppose that this effect has been achieved by the overwhelming effect of so much book. We enter into every detail of the lives of these characters, described in micro-detail, over years, and this is what packs the punch.

I read it at the same time as I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (in which the narrator also uses the third person) and it seemed to me that the style was very much the same: its effect is achieved by the use of exhaustive and meticulous detail. But One Day is a much shorter book!

So is ALL a good book or a great book? It was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize, the 2015 Women's Prize for fiction, and for the 2015 Waterstones Book of the Year. The vast majority of early reviews were extremely positive. Certainly, although it demanded a lot of effort and concentration, and although the story is gruelling and harrowing, filled with unhappiness, I looked forward to picking it up every day. On the other hand, given the superhero status of the lead characters and the consequent air of fantasy about their stories, I'm not sure this book would have had anything without the emotional punch of the misery-porn story. My feeling in the end was that it was an achievement but that my breath wasn't taken away by how good it was (as with, for example, Demon Copperhead). 

Selected quotes:

• "their identical expressions of exhaustion, that blend of determination and resignation that only the immigrant possesses." (1.2) Nevertheless, in this book, only native-born Americans achieve success. 
• "When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy?" (1.2)
• "Could you have a real friendship if some part of you was always expecting betrayal?" (2.1)
• "You have never known fear until you have a child." (2.2)
• "He couldn't stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in fluorescents, were gone." (3.3)
• "There is a sort of symmetry to his pairing with Caleb that makes sense: they are the damaged and the damager, the sliding heap of garbage and the jackal sniffing through it." (4.1)
• "He was warm from the scotch, and from his own blood, which lapped at him as it pooled around his legs - his insides meeting his outsides, the inner bathing the outer." (4.3)
• "Relationships never provide you with everything. The provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person - sexual chemistry, say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of those things. Three - that's it. Maybe four, if you're very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere." (5.3)
• "I assumed he was going to be one of those typical surgeons - you know, 'not always right, but always certain'." (5.3)
• "It is one of those summer days when the air is so hot, so dry, so still, the sun overhead so white, that one doesn't so much see one's surroundings as hear and smell and taste them: the lawnmower buzz of the bees and locusts, the faint peppery scent of the sunflowers, the oddly mineral flavor the heat leaves on the tongue, as if he's just sucked on stones." (5.3)
• "For the first time in his life he understood, viscerally, what it meant when people said their hearts were in their throats, although it wasn't just his heart that he could feel but all his organs thrusting upward, trying to exit him through his mouth, his innards scrambled with anxiety." (5.3)
• "Joyfulness, abandon: they had had to relearn those, they had had to re-earn them. But they would never have to relearn fear." (5.3)
• "He has the feeling, unhappy as it is, that he was at his most valuable in those motel rooms, when he was at least something singular and meaningful to someone, although what he had to offer was being taken from him, not given willingly." (6.3)
• "All the most terrifying Ifs involve people. All the good ones do as well." (6.3)

A monumental work, full of terrible things, told with meticulous and precise detail. But flawed because the lead characters are too good to be true.

November 2023; 720 pages

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