"Rare Singles" by Benjamin Myers

Fifty years ago Bucky cut two records before living the rest of his life in obscurity. Now, newly bereaved, crippled with arthritis and addicted to opioids, he has been invited to leave the US for the first time and travel to Scarborough in England where his four songs have achieved cult status. But he leaves his pills on the plane. Will he be able to battle cold turkey, his pain and his grief to get on stage and sing?

The plot may be stereotypical (aimed straight at Hollywood?) and its inspiration seems to be a blend of Demon Copperhead and Searching for Sugar Man (see below) but the question is whether Ben Myers, a superb author responsible for Cuddy, Pig Iron and The Perfect Golden Circle, can breathe life into it? 

I was disappointed. The key characters all seemed to be exactly as you would expect them. Bucky with his "sweetpea" and his "honey" was a stage American. Dinah's husband and son were predictably awful. The Moslem hotel cleaner had a heart of gold, of course she had. Even the malevolent seagull came straight from central casting. 

Worse, there were several paragraphs of dialogue, mostly involving Dinah, that seemed artificial, designed to provide information rather than to build character. They broke the verisimilitude; I was no longer absorbed in the story but alienated, realising I was a reader and this was a book.

There were some stunning pieces of prose:

• “The whisky tasted of burnt oranges and wet ash, lonely nights and bitter mornings.” (p 106)
• “Voices of doubt grew like stalactites in the dark, dripping caves of his mind.” (p 106)
• “The day had drifted, the morning yawning into afternoon, the afternoon tightening into a cool autumnal evening. Evening glancing towards night.” (p 127)

From most authors, this would have been a decent book but I have come to expect more, much more, from the author who can create the young labourer with the mother dying of cancer in  the final part of Cuddy, John-John in Pig Iron, and the wonderful pair of mavericks in The Perfect Golden Circle. 

Selected quotes:

page references refer to the Bloomsbury hardback edition 2024

• “Down into the rough, cloying quicksand of a second strange sleep.” (p 13)
• “It bombed like Dresden.” (p 22)
• “Dinah knew her love for her son was diminishing ... but she refused to succumb to guilt over this recent realisation, and in fact wondered if love and the capacity to give it had a limit. ... Was there a discernible moment when all the love for someone is gone?” (p 63)
• “Sometimes it seems like the working  life is out to break a man rather than make a man.” (p 85)
• “He had known that this day was coming for years ... What he hadn't expected was that it would be here, wedged between a dreary sea and a low -ceiling sky in a foreign land.” (p 92)
• “The weight of history was pressing him deeper down into the pit of withdrawal. All those memories that he had put into holes and buried. They hadn't disappeared though, merely corroded.” (p 97)
• “Everything that stands against the sea is scrubbed away eventually.” (p 105)
• “Maybell was just better equipped to deal with the day-to-day act of living than he was - and it was an act, because pretending was part of it, always had been. Pretending you were thriving rather than just surviving; pretending you were strong when you felt weak; pretending you didn't give a damn when really you were scared of every shadow; pretending you were happy, you were cool, you were chilling.” (p 132)
• “Rain was indifferent. Rain ruled the world. It amplified his insignificance; it reminded him that just when you think you're at the bottom, there's always further to plummet.” (p 163)
• “Were we simply stagnating like the lonely pond that is no longer being refreshed by rain, and is simply sitting in the sun, losing all its oxygen; all of the life forms that it harbours slowly suffocating, the foetid stench of decay hanging over the unmoving body of browning water.” (p 184)

November 2024; 207 pages

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

Searching for Sugar Man is a documentary film about Sixto Rodriguez, a musician from Detroit who cut two albums in the early 1970s which bombed in the US but achieved cult status in apartheid South Africa. The film rather gives the impression that, following his rediscovery, his comeback tour of South Africa was the first time he had played his music for nearly thirty years; in fact he was also well-known in Australia, where he had concert tours in 1979 and 1981, and New Zealand, Botswana and Zimbabwe. Just as in 'Rare Singles', his work has been sampled by rappers and featured in a movie. In my humble opinion, the intro to 'I Wonder' is one of the great bass guitar riffs.

"Fire Exit" by Morgan Talty

Does our identity depend upon our heritage? And is our heritage passed down to us through 'blood' or 'stories'?

The narrator, Charles, is the stepson of Frederick, a member of the Penobscot nation, an indigenous people living in Maine. Because Charles doesn't qualify as Penobscot he is not allowed to live on the reservation. Instead he lives across the river and spends his days watching his daughter growing up with her mother and another man. Meanwhile his mother, Louise, who has battled episodes of depression throughout her life, is now drifting into dementia.

He wants to tell his now adult daughter that he is her father. “She needed to know that her blood was her blood. nothing could take that away, and nothing could even come close to capturing it.” (Ch 12) He hasn't really grasped the implications: not only does that cast doubt on her identity as Penobscot but also she will discover that her parents have been lying to her all these years. 

It's a nice conundrum. The narrator is obsessed by bloodline and yet many of the deepest and most meaningful relationships in this book are between people with no genetic connections, such as Charles with his beloved stepfather and Bobby with Louise. 

The subplot of his mother's voyage into dementia is a counterpoint that reinforces and strengthens the theme.

I found the first chapter very confusing (even after I discovered I had skipped two pages and returned to reread them). But the structure of the plot is nicely balanced between keeping the reader guessing, letting curiosity drive the page-turning, and providing sufficient information. It ends in a dramatic climax with is both surprising and a necessary consequence of what went before; Aristotle would have approved.

Selected quotes:

• “I knew her only by the conversations we had on the phone, her body the shape of a voice on the other end of the line.” (Ch 3)
• “The only true thing I could be certain about ... was that blood is messy, and it stains in ways that are hard to clean, especially if that stain can't be seen but we know it is there, a trail of red or dark red leading back to a time we cannot go to remove it.” (Ch 6)
• “I wasn't sure Louise knew who I was anymore, but I was quite certain I was nobody. And as I sat there I felt myself slipping away to damp depths of sadness as I had done the night before, and I was thinking and thinking and thinking about how, in just the past year, I had just started to know her, but then I began to unknow her, getting farther and farther away like watching a boat drift from the shore and head out not to some other land but to an open water that never, ever ends. And she did not even know this, that she was on the boat.” (Ch 21)
• “We are made of stories, and if we don't know them - the ones that make us - how can we ever be fully realized? How can we ever be who we really are?” (Ch 26)

November 2024; 292 pages

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

"Revolutionary Road" by Richard Yates

Chosen by Time magazine as one of the Hundred best novels since Time began, this debut novel first published in 1961 was a finalist for the National Book Award. It became a three-times Oscar nominated film directed by Sam Mendes and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet; I've never seen the film.

It's about how the need to grow up and earn a living destroys our dreams.

It's 1955 in the USA. Frank wants life to be meaningful. April, his wife, married him because he was always talking of things that seemed important and worthwhile. But now he is saddled with “the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs.” (1.2) She is a housewife and mother bringing up two children. They devise a plan to drop out of the rate race and move to Europe where she will work and he will find himself. But events and human weakness conspire to undermine their dreams.

We've all been there. We've all had to compromise on our hopes. This is a universal theme.

Despite being written in the third-person 'omniscient' and past tense, it was almost entirely from the PoV of Frank.

My problem was that I didn't like the characters. Now that should be a sign of excellence in writing: to inspire such a reaction in your reader. But I wasn't sure that I wholly believed in them:

• April was a neurotic doormat. She seemed to live entirely for her man. She seems entirely contented with her role as a domestic servant; her plans for the future revolve around making her man more fulfilled. She says things like: “You always do have the right instinct about things like this. You’re really a very generous, understanding person, Frank.” She belatedly realises this when, finally and of course disastrously, she makes up her mind to rebel. “The only real mistake, the only wrong and dishonest thing, was effort to have seen him as anything more than that. Oh, for a month or two, just for fun, it might be all right to play a game like that with a boy; but all these years! And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear.” (3.7) But in terms of the book this epiphany came too late. I suppose you can argue that their row-strewn marriage was fuelled by her unrealised anger. I suppose you can argue that women in America in 1955 were complacently subservient. But it didn't ring true to me.
• Frank almost completely lacks self-awareness. He's a self-pitying bully and tyrant. He wants to feel that he's a man. In conversation he's a bore. Somehow he has done less than the minimum at work for seven years and kept his job. He can embark upon an affair without any feelings of guilt. Of course you don't need your main character through whose eyes the others are seen to be a hero  but Frank was so unpleasant that, even though he had dreams (although he never really visualised them) and now his life is dull dull dull, I couldn't sympathise. Stop whingeing and get over it was how I felt. 

I am aware that I am judging these characters (a) as if they were real (which suggests that the book was well-written) and (b) in the light of contemporary standards, after we have had nearly seventy years of feminism.

The other characters were very much in the background. Mrs Givings (I kept reading that as 'misgivings') was a nice little cameo role.

The plot was mostly predictable and paced very much as you would expect. 

There are some wonderful descriptions:

• "as homely as his own sore feet, his own damp climbing underwear and his own sour smell.” (1.2)
• “His temple ached in zeal and triumph as he heaved a rock up from the suck of its white-wormed socket and let it roll end over end down into the shuddering leafmold, because he was a man.” (1.3)
• “His thin gray body, which seemed to have been made for no other purpose than to fill the minimum requirements of a hard-finish, double-breasted business suit.” (2.4)

But if you want trapped suburban American angst, I'd prioritise Rabbit, Run by John Updike and its sequel Rabbit Redux.

There's an interesting homage to The Great Gatsby. Compare these two passages:

• “‘I just remembered that today’s my birthday.’ I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.” (The Great Gatsby, Ch 7)
• “I just thought of something ... Tomorrow’s my birthday. ... I'll be thirty years old.” (Revolutionary Road 1.4)

Is it a coincidence that the protagonist's name is Frank and that F. Scott Fitzgerald's first name was Francis?

Selected quotes:

• “His face did have an unusual mobility: it was able to suggest wholly different personalities with each flickering change of expression.” (1.2)
• “Nothing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn't seen in years, a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing ... and that then before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny but whom he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt constricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach." (1.2)
• “You want to know why everybody thinks you're a jerk? Because you're a jerk, that's why.” (1.2)
• “It was turning into mindless, unrewarding work, the kind of work that makes you clumsy with fatigue and petulant with lack of progress.” (1.3)
• “Wasn't it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn't really wanted to do?” (1.3)
• “He had never seen such a stare of pitying boredom in her eyes.” (1.4)
• “Her hair was as unattractively wild now as it must have been in childhood; it seemed to have exploded upward from her skull into hundreds of little kinks. She touched it delicately with her fingertips in several places, not in any effort to smooth it but rather in the furtive, half-conscious way that he had sometimes touched his pimples at sixteen, just to make sure the horrible things were still there.” (1.6)
• “Don't ‘moral’ and ‘conventional’ really mean the same thing?” (3.1)
• “She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known ... that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.” (3.7)
• “The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something.” (3.9)

October 2024; 337 pages

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

"Manservant and Maidservant" by Ivy Compton-Burnett

 

This is a classic ICB novel. It is set in a large house with an extended family (husband and paterfamilias, Horace, wife, Charlotte, five children, cousin, Mortimer, and aunt) and a cast of servants of whom the main ones are Bullivant the butler, Mrs Selden the cook, workhouse boy George being trained as a manservant and orphanage girl Miriam, being trained as a cook's assistant. Horace is a domestic tyrant, imposing penny-pinching economies despite (or because of) the fact that he depends on his wife's money. The servants have low wages, the fires are starved of coal and therefore inadequate against the cold, the children have tattered clothing. But tyranny fosters rebellion from servants who refuse to 'know their place' to Mortimer who plans to replace Horace in Charlotte's affections. Even after Horace mends his ways, the resentment he has caused still festers.

The story is presented in ICB's utterly individual style. It is very heavy on dialogue. (She once said: “I do not see why exposition and description are a necessary part of a novel. They are not of a play, and both deal with imaginary human beings and their lives.”) The dialogue that there is is highly formal. Even the children, down to the youngest, speak in perfectly parsed sentences: “Is father gone now? I don't want him to come here. He is always in all the places. I don't want him to come where I sleep. I don't like to think he might look at me in the night.” (Ch 2) The butler observes of the Cook: "You have language, Mrs Selden, beyond what would be looked for." (Ch 3) They all have. But on the analogy of a play, one could argue that Shakespeare rarely gave his characters realistic dialogue and yet ...

There's plenty of plot. One of the wonderful things about ICB novels is that her forensic scrutiny of everyday life can provide plenty of excitement. "We only have to look at what is near us, to find the drama of existence," says Charlotte in chapter 11. Everywhere, in this novel, is conflict. George, a young trainee servant recruited from the workhouse (a consequence of Horace's cheese-paring ways) and coming into daily contact with the idle rich finds it hard to accept his subservience; as a result he clashes with the older servants who recognise the futile frustration of challenging the status quo. Mortimer, the poor relation, is nettled by his dependency, though he affects urbanity. The children fear and hate their father. 

But there's humour too, often detected in the gap between what people say and what they mean and what they do:

• “‘She is the most blameless creature. I'm sure she has never heard a fly.’ ‘Well, that is nice of her. Most of us do begin by hurting flies.’” (Ch 6)
• “‘The truth is the kindest thing.’ ‘Is that so? I wonder what would be the unkindest.’” (Ch 6)
• “‘Dear, dear, dear!’ said Cook. ‘Well, well, well!’ said Bullivant. ‘Come, come’ said Miss Buchanan, suppressing an impulse to say the word a third time.” (Ch 8)
• “You said you were not going to speak about it ... and you keep on all the time.” (Ch 10)

You need to concentrate to read an ICB novel but the effort is rewarding for the fun, the humour, and especially for the way her dissection of everyday life allows her to make penetrating insights into human nature as it must be twisted to fit into our hierarchical society.

Selected quotes:

• “Horace had married her for money, hoping to serve his impoverished estate, and she had married him for love, hoping to fulfil herself. The love had gone and the money remained, so that the advantage lay with Horace.” (Ch 1)
• “We cannot ask Bullivant about it ... because he is not paid quite enough himself. Of course we do not dare to pay him much too little. We only oppress the weak.” (Ch 1)
• “I wonder who began this treating of people as fellow creatures ... It is never a success.” (Ch 1)
• “Her look at her father might have been one of aversion, if it had been possible; and it was possible.” (Ch 2)
• “‘We are waiting for time to pass.’ ‘What a way to talk about time, the most precious thing there is! Those are terrible words to use.’ ‘There seems to be plenty, and it is not much good. We don't know what to do with it.’” (Ch 2)
• “Horace felt that an argument ended in his favour, when his opponent wept, and as he always pursued one to this point, had no experience of defeat in words.” (Ch 2)
• “I wish they would not think ... Their thinking can be done for them.” (Ch 2) Apropos the servants.
• “This one is afraid of himself, and I am always afraid of people then. it shows there is something to be afraid of.” (Ch 3)
• “Well, Miriam, does staring teach you anything? In which case you must be attaining a standard by now.” (Ch 3)
• “‘The gentry follow their own ways more than others do,’ said Bullivant. ‘ The higher they are, the more is that the case.’ ‘ They have less call to conform,’ said Cook.” (Ch 3)
• “‘Isn't it better to be high up?’ said Miriam. ‘It is not always better for the people themselves,’ said Bullivant. ‘ From royalty downwards that is the trend.’ ‘We are a good way down from royalty,’ said George. ‘Well, there are intervening steps,’ said Cook. ‘But those who are further down still, can hardly estimate the matter. it is for them to do their duty at their point of the scale.’” (Ch 3)
• “‘I see no advantage in delay, if it is the destined thing.’ ‘Well, we will hope it is not.’ ‘What good will that do? People talk as if their hopes will influence the future.’ ‘And also as though their prophecies will.’” (Ch 5)
• “I see no reason for forgoing a good thing, because some people abuse it.” (Ch 8)
• “I have not behaved like a man. Or rather I expect that is what I have done. The words, ‘behave like a man,’ seem to have assumed the sense of behaving like a god.” (Ch 9)

October 2024; 299 pages

Published in 1947, this was said to be ICB's favourite book. 

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

Other books by Ivy Compton-Burnett

• Dolores (1911)
• Pastors and Masters (1925)
• Brothers and Sisters (1929)
• Men and Wives (1931)
• More Women Than Men (1933)
• A House and Its Head (1935)
• Daughters and Sons (1937)
• A Family and a Fortune (1939)
• Parents and Children (1941)
• Elders and Betters (1944)
• Manservant and Maidservant (1947)
• Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949)
• Darkness and Day (1951)
• The Present and the Past (1953)
• Mother and Son (1955)
• A Father and His Fate (1957)
• A Heritage and Its History (1959)
• The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)
• A God and His Gifts (1963)
• The Last and the First (posthumous, 1971)

A biography of ICB:

• Ivy by Hilary Spurling

"She Stoops to Conquer" by Oliver Goldsmith

She Stoops to Conquer was first performed in 1773 at the Covent Garden Theatre in London. I have seen it as a Digital Theatre presentation of the  National Theatre/ Out of Joint co-production performed at the Theatre Royal Bath in 2003.

It's a classic farce, founded on the premise that two travellers are made to believe that Mr Hardcastle's house is an inn and he is an innkeeper. Subplots include two courting couples.

The characters: 

• Mr Hardcastle is the homeowner who loves telling stories about the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene who fought together during the War of Spanish Succession in the early 1700s; if Mr H was with them as a young man, the play must be set no later than 1750.
• Mrs Hardcastle, his wife, longs to go to fashionable London. She also wants her son, Tony, to marry her niece, Constance, so that the girl's jewels (which she keeps) are kept in the family.
• Tony Lumpkin, Mrs Hardcastle's son by her first marriage, spends his time down the local pub, The Three Pigeons, hunting and playing practical jokes. He does NOT want to marry Constance.
• Kate Hardcastle, the daughter of the house. Mr H has arranged for her to meet, with a view to marrying, Mr Marlow, son of his old friend Sir Charles Marlow.
• Mr Marlow's problem is that, although he enjoys seducing lower class women, he is tremendously shy with women of his own class: "Among women of reputation and virtue he is the modestest man alive; but his acquaintance give him a very different character among creatures of another stamp: you understand me." (Act 1)
• George Hastings, travelling companion of Charles Marlow, who loves Constance and plans to elope with her.
• Constance Neville wants to elope with Hastings but only if she can get hold of her fortune (in the shape of the jewels kept by Mrs H) first.
• Assorted servants, revellers and Marlow's father.

Selected quotes:

• "Here we live in an old rumbling mansion, that looks for all the world like an inn, but that we never see company." (Act 1): Mrs Hardcastle almost immediately foreshadows the main plot.
• "I love everything that's old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine; and I believe, Dorothy (taking her hand), you'll own I have been pretty fond of an old wife." (Act 1)
• "You may be a Darby, but I'll be no Joan" (Act 1) This was already a proverbial phrase. It seems to have originated in 1735 when Henry Woodfall, who had been apprenticed to printer John Darby, wrote a peom called The Joys of Love Never Forgot which talked about the love of "Old Darby, with Joan by his side."
• "MARLOW: We were told it was but forty miles across the country, and we have come above threescore. HASTINGS: And all, Marlow, from that unaccountable reserve of yours, that would not let us inquire more frequently on the way." (Act 1) Some things never change!
• "Zounds, man! we could as soon find out the longitude!" (Act 1) This comment, expressing the difficulty of following Tony Lumpkin's directions, was hugely topical. Determining longitude was a difficult navigational problem (latitude was easy) which had led to shipwrecks such as in 1707 when four large naval ships under the command of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell were wrecked on the Isles of Scilly with the loss of nearly 2,000 men as a result of not knowing their position accurately. This triggered the British government to offer a prize for whoever could determine an accurate way of determining longitude, which was won by John Harrison with his invention of the chronometer, the prize being awarded in 1773, the year this play was first performed.
• "I have often seen a good sideboard, or a marble chimney-piece, though not actually put in the bill, inflame a reckoning confoundedly." (Act 2)
• "An impudent fellow may counterfeit modesty; but I'll be hanged if a modest man can ever counterfeit impudence." (Act 2)
• "One of the duchesses of Drury-lane." (Act 2) Drury Lane is a street very close to Covent Garden where this play was first performed; the 'duchesses' would have been prostitutes plying their trade among the theatregoers.
• "This is Liberty-hall, gentlemen. You may do just as you please here." (Act 2) The phrase 'Liberty-hall' first appeared in a song written in 1770 by George Alexander Stevens, an actor who performed at the Covent Garden Theatre. The song imagines the construction of 'Liberty-Hall', framed by (King) Alfred (the Great), whose corner-stone is Magna-Charta, threatened by "Courtlings of ribband and lace, The spaniels of power" (almost certainly a reference to the later Stuart kings Charles II, who loved spaniels, and James II), whose doors were "thrown open" after "Revolution had settl'd the crown" (probably referring to the 'Glorious Revolution' when James II was chased out of England and replaced with William of Orange and his wife Mary, another action settled by the Duke of Marlborough when, as plain John Churchill, leading the troops blocking the road to London, he defected to William.   
• "I no more trouble my head about Hyder Ally, or Ally Cawn, than about Ally Croker." (Act 2) Hyder Ali was the Sultan, military leader and de facto ruler of Mysore, an Indian Kingdom, who fought two wars against the East India Company at the time they were trying to establish British colonial rule in India. Ali Cawn (or Khan) is difficult to track down. There was a complaint made by his widow against Warren Hastings, Governor General of India, in which she claims that he was a Prince who was imprisoned by Hastings and, after she had ransomed him, hanged and delivered to her dead, but her published Remonstrance refers to the impeachment trial of Hastings which took place after the play was first performed (although the scandal might have predated the play). Ally Croker was an Irish ballad composed about 1725 by Larry Grogan in which the narrator rails against the girl who dumped him, whose real name is Alicia Crocker. 
• "Bully Dawson was but a fool to him." (Act 3) Bully Dawson was a swaggering gambler in London at the time of Charles II. He appears in the Newgate Calendar after he was robbed at gunpoint of 18 guineas won at the gaming tables by one Davy Morgan. He was supposed to be a model for the character Captain Hackhum in The Squire of Alsatia, a restoration comedy by Thomas Shadwell written in 1688. He was also mentioned in the 2nd number of the Spectator, the magazine written by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in 1711. 
• "when a girl finds a fellow's outside to her taste, she then sets about guessing the rest of his furniture. With her, a smooth face stands for good sense, and a genteel figure for every virtue." (Act 3)
• "Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no fibs." (Act 3) This is believed to be the origin of the saying (more usually: Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies)
• "They say women and music should never be dated." (Act 3)
• "Please your honour, liberty and Fleet-street for ever!" (Act 4)
• "What think you of the Rake's Progress, for your own apartment?" (Act 4) Hogarth's 'A Rake's Progress', a series of prints showing the consequences of a libertine's lifestyle engraved by William Hogarth, was published in 1735.
• "The Dullisimo Maccaroni." (Act 4) A 'macaroni' was a dandy, a fop, a young man dressed in extravagant fashion. The name derived from the membership of the Macaroni Club, founded in 1764 for those returning from the Grand Tour. There are suggestions that these young men had, in their travels abroad, developed a taste for macaroni, the Italian pasta but they might also have acquired their name from the Italian word for a fool: 'maccarone'. Alternatively they could have been called after the word 'macaronic', an adjective describing verse that is written in a mixture of two or more languages; perhaps they regularly used words from abroad as an affectation.
• "this is all but the whining end of a modern novel." (Act 5)

October 2024;

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

"The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" by John Le Carre

 The classic Cold War espionage story written by a master of the trade.

Following the collapse of the spy network that he has been running, Alec Leamas retires from the British Secret Service. His life spirals downhill through a succession of meaningless jobs, his disillusionment numbed with whisky. Even new girlfriend Liz can't reach him. After he hits rock bottom, in prison, he is courted by the East Germans and agrees to tell them his secrets. But things aren't as they seem. This is a game of bluff and double bluff, of trick and be tricked. And as things collapse towards a disastrous conclusion, there is still one more twist to the story.

It is narrated in the 'omniscient' third person past tense (with occasional authorial glosses) but the reader only has access to the thoughts of the principal characters, Leamas and Liz. This keeps the narration tightly focused.

But I think the main reason why this novel stands head and shoulders over most of its genre is that Le Carre takes time to build up the characters and the settings and that he keeps everything so everyday and therefore so believable. Despite his vast experience and his repertoire of skills, Leamas is no James Bond (although Ian Fleming's original Bond is more vulnerable and grittier and credible than his film alter ego). This is real world spying and the reader can imagine themselves in the role and identify with Leamas without falling into fantasy. 

The other separation between this and its many imitators is the morality question. I compared this with Rip Tide by Stella Rimington (in real life a spymaster) in which the action is performed against a backdrop of 'us' and 'them': whatever we do is good and whatever they do is bad. But Leamas operates in a world where he can scarcely justify his actions even to himself (he seems mostly motivated by anger and hate). It's a seedy, sordid world of deception which corrodes the souls of the often pathetic actors who play in it. And it is perfectly matched to the background: the pathetic fallacy reigns supreme.

This makes this novel is one of the greatest spy stories of all time. The film starring Richard Burton is superb too.

Stylistically, it fits well with its near contemporaries: the work of Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow and John Osborne etc: the 'kitchen sink' dramas and novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Selected quotes:

• “He developed small dishonesties, borrowed insignificant sums from secretaries and neglected to return them, arrived late or left early under some mumbled pretext. At first his colleagues treated him with indulgence; perhaps his decline scared them in the same way as we are scared by cripples, beggars and invalids because we fear we could ourselves become them.” (Ch 3)
• “Liz wanted to weep at the crabbed delusion of their dreams.” (Ch 5)
• “They hated him because he succeeded in being what each in his heart longed to be: a mystery.” (Ch 6)
• “Ashe was typical of that strata of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resistance, retreat.” (Ch 6)
• “He had the drunkard’s habit of ducking his mouth towards the rim of his glass just before he drank, as if his hand might fail him and the drink escape.” (Ch 7)
• “Liz made a rather exaggerated shrug, the kind of overstressed gesture people do make when they are excited and alone.” (Ch 16)
• “It was like mid-week evensong when she used to go to church - the same dutiful, little group of lost faces, the same fussy self-consciousness, the same feeling of a great idea in the hands of little people.” (Ch 19)
• “What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.” (Ch 25)
• “It's far more terrible, what they are doing; to find the humanity in people, in me and whoever else they use, to turn it like a weapon in their hands, and use it to hurt and kill ...” (Ch 25)

October 2024; 240 pages

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

"Ivy: the Life of I. Compton-Burnett" by Hilary Spurling

Ivy Compton-Burnett wrote short, heavily-mannered novels. Their settings are traditional, often revolving around an upper-middle-class family in a big house, with servants. But her style was revolutionary. An early reviewer (Raymond Mortimer in the New Statesman in  1935) said: “At first sight her work strikes you as clumsy and heavy-fisted; her figures, though solid, are not what is called ‘life-like’, and she composes her books on highly defined and artificial designs. In fact, she is open to all the reproaches laid upon the founders of post-impressionism.” Natalie Sarraute (author of Tropismes and one of the pioneers of nouveau roman) ranked her with Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka. She is almost completely forgotten today.

She was born as the eldest child from the second marriage of her father, an extraordinary man who rose from humble beginnings to become England's leading homoeopathic doctor. She had five surviving half-siblings and five full-siblings; not one of the children had children of their own. She herself died an unmarried virgin (her books show an early tolerance of homosexuality but there is no evidence that she herself was a lesbian). She was educated in Hove and in Bedford before attending university at Royal Holloway College. Her first novel Dolores showed the influence of George Eliot and Victorian writers, then the First World War intervened, bringing the break up of her family home (which Ivy had ruled like a tyrant after the death of her mother), the death of favourite brother and the death by suicide of her two youngest sisters. She set up home with another woman, Margaret Jourdain, "a published poet and prose poet, an editor and essayist, translator and disciple of Baudelaire and the symbolists, as well as a regular reviewer for the literary weeklies.” who specialised in books about the decorative arts. Then, in 1925, she published Pastors and Masters and her new style was born. Over the next forty years she wrote another eighteen books. She died a Dame and widely revered by other writers such as L P Hartley (author of The Go-Between), Rosamund Lehmann (Invitation to the Waltz), Elizabeth Bowen (The Heat of the Day) and Elizabeth Taylor (Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont).  

This biography gives a real flavour of her life and places it squarely in the context of her childhood; her work is referred to wherever possible (which means that the books sometimes appear in non-chronological order). There are a lot of characters (Ivy's ten siblings, Margaret's nine - and none of them reproduced either - not to mention friends, other relations, and other writers, and I sometimes had to make notes to keep track of them all. But the book seems to manage the trick of being exhaustive while not exhausting, comprehensive while not over-detailed, thorough and yet readable. I doubt it will be read by anyone who is not one of ICB's small and dwindling number of fans, but the effort is more than worthwhile.

Selected quotes:

• “Ivy seems to have been a [page break] resolutely reticent small girl, learning early that principle of concealment which was afterwards invariably central to her theory of survival.” (Ch 2)
• "Ignorance ... enables the insensitive safely and with a good conscience to practise all forms of meanness.” (Ch 3)
• “We weren't allowed bicycles in case we will run over, we weren't allowed to swim in case we drowned, we weren't allowed to ride in case we had a fall.” (Ch 5)
• “Margaret herself sided emphatically with the spinsters in Ivy's books who are apt to reply to any suggestion that marriage might mean a fuller life: ‘ I don't want the things it would be full of’.” (Ch 11)
• "Reading ‘Elders and Betters’ was like sucking a lemon ... she often felt inclined to hurl the lemon to the far end of the room but was aware that she would have to get up and pick it up again.” (Ch 14)

October 2024; 545 pages

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

ICB Bibliography

• Dolores (1911)
• Pastors and Masters (1925)
• Brothers and Sisters (1929)
• Men and Wives (1931)
• More Women Than Men (1933)
• A House and Its Head (1935)
• Daughters and Sons (1937)
• A Family and a Fortune (1939)
• Parents and Children (1941)
• Elders and Betters (1944)
• Manservant and Maidservant (1947)*
• Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949)
• Darkness and Day (1951)
• The Present and the Past (1953)
• Mother and Son (1955)
• A Father and His Fate (1957)
• A Heritage and Its History (1959)
• The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)
• A God and His Gifts (1963)
• The Last and the First (posthumous, 1971)

"The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side" by Agatha Christie

A masterpiece. Not literature. It isn't meant to be. It is a puzzle.

Were I judging this in the same way as other books I would note the two-dimensionality of the characters (some of them paper-thin marionettes), the weaknesses of the plot (two characters intimately connected with the distant past of the supposed murder victim just happen to be within a few yards of her when the murder is committed; exactly how did the butler die?) and the overall lack of verisimilitude. But this isn't meant to be read like this. It is a barebones murder mystery, intended to bamboozle the reader, and as such it is a masterpiece.

I've read it before (I think I've read Miss Christie's entire oeuvre). I've seen the film at least once. But I had to read it again for the Grove Book Club before watching a stage performance at the Grove Theatre, Eastbourne so I thought I'd try reading it from the back, first reminding myself of the murderer, the means, the motive and the opportunity and then seeing how the author dropped clues and/or misled us.

I hadn't realised how much we are told, clearly, how the crime was committed, why, and by whom.

Everything else after this is a spoiler.

The victim is a Heather Badcock. Why was she killed? The first time the Mrs B encounters Miss Marple (Ch 2), our classic amateur detective, she tells her the story which will provide the motive. Miss Marple then tells her that she reminds her of someone who “always saw her own point of view so clearly that she didn’t always see how things might appear to, or affect, other people.” This person then died. The foreshadowing is blatant.

The actual death occurs just before the 25% turning point. It is reported to Miss Marple by her cleaner, Cherry. "Heather Badcock's kind all right ... Overkind, some people say. They call it interfering. Well, anyway, she up and died." (Ch 6) We are reminded of the character of the victim immediately before we hear of her death. Then, exactly at the 25% mark, to the page, Miss Marple’s very first discussion with her policeman nephew contains these lines: “Supposing you went into a shop, say, and you knew the proprietress had a son who was the spivvy young juvenile delinquent type. He was there listening while you told his mother about some money you had in the house, or some silver or a piece of jewellery. It was something you were excited and pleased about and you wanted to talk about it. And you also perhaps mention and even that you were going out. you even say that you never lock the house. You're interested in what you're saying, what you're telling her, because it's so very much in your mind. And then, say, on that particular evening you come home because you’ve forgotten something and there's this bad lot of a boy in your house, caught in the act, and he turns around and coshes you.” (Ch 6.2) The motive has been nailed down ... but immediately Miss C blows smoke into our eyes with an alternative theory: “I wondered if it might have been the wrong murder”. (Ch 6) This leads to considering the people that Marina might have seen over Mrs Badcock’s shoulder ... and we have a list of suspects. The usual detective inquiry proceeds.

Now we focus on the means and the opportunity. Mr Badcock remembers that Mrs B’s elbow was jogged so she spilt her cocktail all over her dress and that Marina gave Mrs B her untouched glass BUT this is framed by the detective (and therefore the reader) as the way in which the ‘wrong’ murder was committed. This 'wrong murder' theory swells. Marina herself gets in on the ‘wrong murder act’ in chapter 9.2 Jason Rudd tells the detective about Mrs B having flu when she met his wife years ago ... and within a page he ‘accepts’ the theory advanced for him that the intended victim was his wife “you’re quite right, Chief Inspector, I have been sure of it all along.” (Ch 10) The climax comes a page before the 50% mark when Inspector Craddock tells Miss Marple “I think the intended victim was Marina Gregg” and Miss Marple replies “that would seem almost certain, wouldn't it?” (Ch 12) The red herring has now been sanctified. And a red herring suspect is immediately introduced in the shaped of Marina’s adopted children, having dismissed the biological child (the actual motive) a paragraph before.

Now we spend several chapters running the red herrings in the form of blackmailers and further deaths. It is assumed that these are further poorly aimed attempts to kill Marina although soon we are reminded that Heather Badcock was “a woman who invariably talked about herself.” (Ch 14)

The next real clue comes from Gladys in Ch 16 just before the 75% turning point. She says that it was “funny” because “when she spilt the cocktail ... I’m almost sure she did it on purpose.” This is a masterful piece of misdirection because the ‘she’ and the ‘she’ are intended to be different people. This might be unfair of Agatha if she hadn’t already, several times, referred us to the problem of people misusing pronouns (when the carer keeps calling Miss Marple ‘we’). We are told in three pages (exactly at the 75% mark) that some one must have seen the murder being committed although the Inspector is referring to adding the drug to the cocktail glass. And on the next page one of the detectives says “All right ... The moron saw it, the moron didn’t grasp what the action meant.” Rather rude about Gladys but nevertheless ...

But the very final piece of evidence doesn’t come till the chapter before the denouement when Miss Marple is told that Heather Badcock covered up her illness with face powder, so it wouldn’t have been whooping cough. The page before the local doctor had talked about “real doctoring. Eight to ten cases of German measles, half a dozen whooping coughs, and a suspected scarlet fever.” (Ch 22)

I am utterly impressed by the way Agatha Christie hides her clues in plain sight while misdirecting masterfully. A classic of the genre.

Selected quotes:

“Old Laycock then displayed his particular genius which was that of enthusiastic agreement and subsequent lack of performance.” (Ch 1)

October 2024; 224 pages

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