"Stone Blind" by Natalie Haynes

 A retelling of the myth of Perseus killing the gorgon Medusa and rescuing Andromeda, much of it seen from the point of view of Medusa. It confronts the reader with the moralities of the situation - the male Olympians are serial rapists, Medusa is very much a victim, Perseus has no defensible reason for killing her, or cheating the Graiai - and questions the 'othering' of 'monsters'. It does this by narrating things from a very modern perspective although it never seriously questions the hierarchy.

The conceit of portraying the characters as if they were modern men and women (rather as also done by Stephen Fry in, for example, Mythos and Heroes) is frequently delightful and often very funny although I felt towards the end that this was insufficient to carry the whole book. Nevertheless, it certainly cuts the gods and heroes down to size (although the Greek myths already portray the gods as having very human failings; perhaps this exercise should be repeated for gods who are still worshipped or would that be blasphemy?). 

I was not convinced that Perseus was, as the voice of the head of Medusa tells us, "a vicious little thug". He's much more complicated than that. There are times when he is heroic - if heroism is to act despite overwhelming fear - such as when he climbs the cliffs or faces the sea-monster. He is repeatedly humiliated, for example by Athena for not being as clever as she is and by the kleptomaniacal Hesperides when they catch him skinny-dipping. Fundamentally he is a plaything of the gods. When he is wicked it is, perhaps, not because of who he is but because he is burdened with unrealistic expectations and, later, too much power. 

And how does Athena get away without censure for what she does to Medusa? 

Nevertheless, there are some wonderfully funny scenes, such as the conversations between Perseus, Hermes and Athena, and the wonderfully comic Hesperides, and there are some fabulous characterisations. This is, above all, a brilliantly comic novel.

I was disappointed not to find out whether Perseus did, in the end, kill his grandfather.

Selected quotes:

• "Hera and Zeus were ideally matched, at least in terms of their capacity to antagonize one another. There were days when she believed he could scarcely rise from his bed without seducing or raping someone." (1: Hera)
• "Zeus was on the verge of saying he had never seen anything more beautiful unless she was naked, when he caught sight of his wife's eyes ... and decided that perhaps some thoughts were better left unsaid." (1: Hera)
• "Imagine being a god, she thought, and still needing to tell everyone how impressive you were." (1: Medusa)
• "Being afraid of dying must be especially awful, because there was no hope of avoiding it." (1: Danae)
• "Even the birds had stopped singing, as though they knew he was going the wrong way and couldn't bear to watch." (3: The Graiai)
• "He had learned to assess travellers by however well or ill prepared they appeared for whatever was to come. These two looked like what was to come would have to prepare for them." (3: The Graiai)
• "He's just a bag of meat wandering around irritating people." (4: Athene)

A very funny comic novel.

For a totally different modernisation of Greek myth, read Country by Michael Hughes, which updates the Iliad, setting it in Northern Ireland at the time of the Troubles. 

March 2024; 368 pages

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

"Triple Tease" by Tony Flood

This is a fast-paced novel. It uses many short paragraphs which often contain only one or two sentences.The short chapters average four pages. This made it very easy to read.

It is also straightforward about the characters and their motivations. This is not an author who believes in 'show don't tell'. Here is his protagonist's self-assessment of her character: "For all my outward display of confidence, I'm riddled with doubt. There are hundreds of insecurities behind my smile. It's almost as if I've got two different personalities." (Ch 3)

At the start, it seemed to be a thriller about vigilante justice but the hero of this section, Katrina, disappears when the book morphed into a police procedural murder mystery. She bounces back in at the end as a sort of deus ex machina to solve the plot. 

I say 'police procedural' but the police seemed to honour the procedure more in the breach than in the observance. The lead detective uses a civilian as an agent provocateur and conspires to cover up a murder. He also makes a verbal slip which suggests he knows the identity of the main murderer so perhaps he is corrupt as well as indifferent to the rules.

The portrayal of misogyny within the CID as evidenced, inter alia, by puerile penis-jokes was probably accurate. Unfortunately, the sexism spilled over into the rest of the book. The attitudes to women in display through most of this novel were old-fashioned to say the least. The wife of the chief copper is a nagging shrew with a sporadic Scottish accent. Other women are victims or sex-workers. There was a focus on their looks: they were either drop-dead gorgeous or grotesque. Katrina, whose physical assets were repeatedly extolled, has her degree and post-graduate study dismissed as "basic qualifications". I found this problematic, especially when the principal crimes involved sex-based violence towards women.

There is an interesting moment of meta-fiction (or was it a commercial break?) when the author appears as a character. 

There is an audacious twist at the end.

March 2024; 282 pages

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

"The School for Scandal" by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

 I saw a 'Tilted Wig' production of this classic play from 1777 performed at the Devonshire Park Theatre in Eastbourne on the evening of 19th March 2024. It inspired me to read the text.

There a several plots, intertwined. Sir Peter Teazle, an elderly man, has recently married a young wife from the country (shades of William Wycherley's 1675 play The Country Wife with perhaps a dash of the Commedia dell'Arte although Sir Peter is much too nice to be a proper Pantalone; the mastermind who ensures the goodies win in the end is the servant Rowley, which is a very old theme indeed) and she has embraced 'fashionable' society, joining a set led by Lady Sneerwell which enjoys scandalous gossip. Lady Teazle is tempted by thoughts of an affair with Joseph Surface, a hypocrite, who fancies Lady T but has designs (for her money) on Sir Peter's ward, Maria, who herself loves Joseph's profligate and debt-ridden young brother Charles, who loves Maria (and is also loved by Lady Sneerwell, although he doesn't know that). Meanwhile Sir Oliver, the uncle of the Surface brothers, is returning from India where he has been living for so long that the boys don't know what he looks like (despite treasuring a portrait of him painted in his youth). He plans to 'test' them before deciding whether to leave his considerable fortune to them. So he pretends to be a moneylender in order to test Charles and a poor relation seeking financial support in order to test Joseph. The play climaxes with a farce scene which sees both Lady Teazle hiding behind a screen from her husband and Sir Peter hiding in a closet from Charles. In the end, despite scandalous reports of a duel, the evildoers are unmasked and good triumphs.

The play was a critical and commercial success, building on the reputation of Sheridan's debut hit The Rivals. 

The play repeats anti-semitic tropes about Jews and usury; in the performance I saw, the moneylender was rebranded as a black wide-boy (though I'm not sure that replacing one racist slur with another is necessarily an improvement). 

The first scene is a discussion between Mr Snake and Lady Sneerwell that explains the status quo ante to the audience and lays bare some of the characters and their motivations: it's a tell don't show that would be regarded as rather clumsy in modern theatre. The need to set up the situations means that the first half of the play is a sometimes slow build-up. The fun gets going properly in the second half, with the auction scene, the farce, and the wonderfully conflicting reports of the consequent duel. 

Selected Quotes:

• "Wit loses its respect with me when I see it in company with malice." (1.1)
• "'Tis now six months since Lady Teazle made me the happiest of men - and I have been the miserablest dog ever since." (1.2)
• "The fault is entirely hers ... I am myself the sweetest-tempered man alive and hate a teasing temper - and so I tell her a hundred times a day." (1.2)
• "If you wanted authority over me, you should have adopted me and not married me. I am sure you were old enough." (2.1)
• "You had no taste when you married me." (2.1)
• "I hate to see prudence clinging to the green suckers of youth; 'tis like ivy round a sapling and spoils the growth of the tree." (2.3)
• "I don't care how soon we leave off quarrelling, provided you'll own you were tired first." (3.1)
• "There's the great degeneracy of the age! Many of our acquaintance have taste, spirit, and politeness, but plague on't, they won't drink." 3.3)
• "Here’s to the maiden of bashful fifteen;
• Here’s to the widow of fifty;
• Here’s to the flaunting extravagant quean,
• And here’s to the housewife that’s thrifty." (3.3)

A little dated but still good fun.

March 2024; 

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

"Glister" by John Burnside

 The houses of Innertown cluster around the abandoned chemical plant. Many of the people living there are sick and dying, all of them have abandoned hope. A teenaged boy disappears. The policeman knows what happened but he helps the town's richest resident cover it up. Since then another five lads have vanished, one after another.

Leonard thinks he will be the next. Meantime he cares for his dying father, reads voraciously at the local library, fucks his girlfriend, Elspeth, drinks psychedelic tea with the Moth Man, and gets rather too involved with Jimmy's gang.

Chapters of the stunning story are narrated in the third person by the policeman, his wife, his ex-employer, and Elspeth, but the bulk of the story, including a prologue which seems to be written after his death, is narrated in the first-person by Leonard. The story is strange, haunted by themes of avenging angels and guilt and loss and the desolation of decay. The narrating characters are beautifully described: the guilt-ridden policeman ("that dim, self-pitying doormat of a man";  1: The Book of Job: Connections) and his alcoholic wife, the cynical and manipulative boss, needy but loving Elspeth. Jimmy's gang is wonderfully feral, following only the rules of the pack (and provides a hilarious moment when Mickey gets chloroform and chlorophyll confused). Mythic roles are taken by John the Librarian and the Moth Man (a character first met at the 50% turning point and presumably named after the strange folklore supernatural creature from West Virginia). And, central to all, is the doomed Leonard, intelligent and caring, but accepting of his fate. I just wish he'd had the chance to finish reading Proust.

Selected quotes:

• "It's the story that's unreliable, not the narrator - and  I don't believe there's such a thing as 'the author' at all." (Life Is Bigger)
• "A secret, enclosed space where a boy with more imagination than friends might sit out late, playing at wilderness." (1: The Book of Job: Homeland)
• "Compared to a number puzzle, or a complicated jigsaw, people were like those dodgem cars at the fair, going round in circles and bumping into one another noisily to no real purpose." (1: The Book of Job: Connections)
• "When you ignore what people feel and want, when you see them as objects in the fullest sense of the word, they become the most interesting pieces in the most compelling and elegant puzzle of all." (1: The Book of Job: Connections)
• "Nothing in the world is as contagious as the expectation of failure."  (1: The Book of Job: Connections)
•  "The great thing about public money is that it doesn't stay public for long."  (1: The Book of Job: Connections)
• "Mistakes don't happen in a single, decisive moment, they unfold slowly through a lifetime."  (1: The Book of Job: Morrison)
• "Smith didn't ask for favours, he offered them. Nevertheless, it took nothing more than a smile and a friendly handshake for Morrison to know that his soul was being claimed."    (1: The Book of Job: Morrison)
• "He had that air of calculated affability that let you know he didn't give a fuck about you or anybody else."   (1: The Book of Job: Morrison)
• "Being insulted by a navvy in a suit was the least of his problems."  (1: The Book of Job: Morrison)
• "The dead go away into their solitude, but the young dead stay with us, they colour our dreams, they make us wonder about ourselves, that we should be so unlucky, or clumsy, or so downright ordinary as to carry on without them."   (1: The Book of Job: Morrison)
• "Lying on the bed in a tight sleeve of pills and vodka."   (1: The Book of Job: Alice)
• "You find that with teachers: as soon as they have a run-in with somebody, they go straight to the weakest cub in the pack.It's how they restore order."   (1: The Book of Job: Et In Arcadia)
• "That's how the world works. The bad people win and the rest pretend they haven't noticed what's going on, to save face." (1: The Book of Job: Et In Arcadia)
• "Even in the most law-abiding place, what makes the difference is that one man is capable of killing and another isn't." (1: The Book of Job: Et In Arcadia)
• "I think, on the whole, that romance is something that should be saved for later, when you're old enough to deal with it. In the meantime, there's fucking. Kids are better at that than romance and all that difficult shit." (1: The Book of Job: Et In Arcadia)
• "trapped in the slow run of time like a swimmer caught in a current that's too strong to resist." (1: The Book of Job: Et In Arcadia)
• "He's borrowing moments, borrowing looks and smiles and the odd word from people who are luckier than he is." (1: The Book of Job: Rivers)
• "He had a sad look now, a look that took all the disappointments he'd ever had in a whole lifetime and brought them together in one final foregone conclusion." (2: The Fire Sermon: Undoing)
• "like when God sent the angel to kill all the eldest sons of the Egyptians, but spared the Israelite kids. You had to give it to those Israelites, they were hard bastards.  ... Some fucking angel was going to be running through the town killing children, and they just lay down and had a good night's sleep, without a second thought. Me, I'd have felt a bit bad about some of those Egyptian kids. I'd have wanted to tip somebody off." (2: The Fire Sermon: Leonard)
• "Now, faces loom up at her out of the floor, or they come leering out from a wall, dead faces, but mocking, mocking and desperate at once ... Worse still, though, are the noises in her head - not voices, never voices any more, just a noise like furniture being moved, wooden table legs dragging across a floor, or saucepan lids falling and  clattering on tiles, or maybe the sound of piano wires resonating in the dark, where someone is rocking the frame back and forth." (2: The Fire Sermon: Dreaming)
• "That's the twist about hell ... the fact that, in hell, it's not the guilty who suffer, it's the innocent. That's what makes it hell. Some random principle wanders through the world, choosing people for no good reason and plunging them into hell. Grief for a child. Horrifying sickness. Noises and faces coming from nowhere ..." (2: The Fire Sermon: Dreaming)
• "This patient, self-contained man is one of life's watchers ... not possessed of animosity or any other emotion, simply someone who enjoys having power over others." (2: The Fire Sermon: Morrison)
• "People like to look at sadness because it isn't pain, and because it echoes something in themselves."  (2: The Fire Sermon: Morrison)
• "The policeman's offence is too grievous to go unpunished, the most extreme form of an offence the whole town has been mired in for decades: the sin of omission, the act of averting our gaze ... the sin of not wanting to know; the sin of knowing everything and not doing anything about it. ... I'm not saying we should try to help the people in Somalia, or stop the devastation of the rainforest, it's just that we don't feel anything at all other than a mild sense of discomfort or embarrassment when we see the broken trees and the mudslides, or the child amputees in the field hospitals - and it's unforgivable that we go on with our lives when these things are happening somewhere." (2: The Fire Sermon: Heaven)

This is what urban fantasy ought to be: not fairies in the subway but gritty, post-industrial decay with a visit from the angel of death. 

March 2024; 258 pages

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

Also by John Burnside and reviewed in this blog:

• The Devil's Footprints

"Lessons" by Ian McEwan

 The typical McEwan novel starts with an inciting incident such as premature ejaculation, a balloon death, or betrayal, and traces the ramifications of that as they trickle down through the years. In this book, Roland the protagonist-narrator is touched and kissed by his (female) piano teacher when he is eleven years old; from there we discover the rest of his biography. But this time there is more complexity, which is, I suppose, why this is longer than the normal McEwan. Because, in a long life, many things impinge upon one and shape one's personality. Roland's childhood is in Libya, where his army father was stationed. His father bullies his mother. His mother has children from a previous marriage. Roland's first wife (like Doris Lessing) abandons him with a baby so that she can write novels, becoming Europe's foremost novelist. He survives with a portfolio of employments  - pianist, poet and tennis coach - but his is unable to develop any one of his multiple talents to the point of expertise. 

This is McEwan saying that the fall-out from sexual abuse (and by extension any single incident) is not that simple; this is McEwan saying that life is full of messy complexity. In time, Roland will be urged - by the police, by women who come to know of his story - to call the piano teacher to account but he knows that blame cannot be so easily apportioned. "His life had been altered. Some would say ruined. But was it really? She had given him joy." (Ch 9) That makes this perhaps the most mature thing that McEwan has ever written.

And yet it also makes the book less like a novel. Roland's life is a muddle and the narrative is muddled (and this is exacerbated by the frequent flash-backs and reminiscences). Expectations are set up which are not fulfilled. Judgements are withheld. The plot meanders and I spent a lot of time wondering where it was heading and what was the point of it all. And that is, I think, the point. Life is not like a work of art. Life's chaotic and you never can tell what effect those flapping butterfly's wings will have. As Roland realises in old age, as he reads through his diaries: "Reading back ... did not bring him any fresh understanding of his life. There were no obvious themes, no undercurrents he had not noticed at the time, nothing learned. A grand mass of detail was what he found and events." (Ch 12)

The book is also set against the backdrop of European politics since the second world war, hinging on the fall of the Berlin wall and tracking the rise and fall of social democracy. Another messy narrative.

Selected quotes:

• "The bass clef coiled like the foetus of a rabbit in his biology book." (Ch 1)
• "The self-made hell was an interesting construct. Nobody escaped making one, at least one, in a lifetime. Some lives were nothing but." (Ch 1)
• "One-handedly he fetched a mop, filled a bucket and cleared up the mess, spreading it widely. This was how most messes were cleared up, smoothed thin to invisibility." (Ch 1)
• "One day, the English teacher, Mr Clayton, came into the class and said, 'I want to talk to you boys about masturbation. ... I've only two words to say to you ... Enjoy it'." (Ch 2)
• "Ah, the great consumer marketplace of self-realisation, whose lethal enemy was the selfishly mewling baby in league with the husband and his absurd requests. He had crushed ambitions of his own, had put in the nights and days with the neonate." (Ch 7)
• "Some love affairs comfortably and sweetly rot." (Ch 8)
• "How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events." (Ch 8)
• "He had the splayed-leg swagger  of a boy alive to fresh bulk between his legs." (Ch 9)
• "He believed it was extremely difficult to write a very good novel and to get halfway there was also an achievement." (Ch 10)
• "In forty-five languages she took up space in the minds of several million people." (Ch 10)
• "He could not bring himself to sing a hymn. However sweet the melodies or the rhythm of the lines he could not get past the embarrassment of their blatant or childish untruths." (Ch 10)

This is a hugely autobiographical novel and consequently much more complex than much or McEwan's earlier stuff. It's not a quick and easy read, but it teaches some important lessons about life. Possibly McEwan's masterpiece.

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

Extras:

McEwan wrote an introduction to The Wall Jumper by Peter Schneider and the way he describes the divided city of Berlin has resonances with that book.

McEwan's early life was following the postings of his Army major father. He was educated from the age of eleven in a boarding school in Suffolk; he claims the English teacher is a real person but that the piano teacher did not exist.

McEwan did discover, fifty years afterwards, that his mum and dad had a brother during the second world war (while his mum was married to another man) who was given up for adoption.

Roland is really very well read. Among the authors he has enjoyed are: Elizabeth Bowen (The Heat of the Day), Jack Kerouac (On the Road, Big Sur, Satori in Paris, Lonesome Traveller, Pic, The Dharma Bums), Hermann Hesse (Demian, Steppenwolf), Albert Camus (The Outsider, The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Plague), Michael Moorcock (The Whispering Swarm), J G Ballard (Crash, Empire of the Sun, Cocaine Nights, High Rise, The Unlimited Dream Company, Millennium People)William Burroughs (Naked Lunch, The Ticket that Exploded, The Place of Dead Roads, The Wild Boys, The Soft Machine), Henry Green , Antonia White, Barbara Pym, Ford Madox Ford (The Good Soldier, Last Post, A Man Could Stand Up, No More Parades, Some Do Not ...), Ivy Compton-Burnett, Patrick Hamilton (Hangover Square, The Plains of Cement, The Siege of Pleasure, The Midnight Bell), Olivia Manning. 

Ian McEwan's novels:

• The Cement Garden (1978)
• The Comfort of Strangers (1981)
• The Child in Time (1987)
• The Innocent (1990)
• Black Dogs (1992)
• Enduring Love (1997)
• Amsterdam (1998)
• Atonement (2001)
• Saturday (2005)
• On Chesil Beach (2007)
• Solar (2010)
• Sweet Tooth (2012)
• The Children Act (2014)
• Nutshell (2016)
• Machines Like Me (2019)
• The Cockroach (2019) (novella)
• Lessons (2022)

"How Green Was My Valley" by Richard Llewellyn

When I was younger, I watched the 1976 BBC TV adaptation of this novel, starring Stanley Baker, Sian Phillips, and Nerys Hughes and loved it; I went on to read this book and the three sequels. But this is the first time I have reread the book.

Ii's a coming-of-age novel, a bildungsroman, in which young Huw Morgan  grows up into a large Welsh mining family during the later part of the reign of Queen Victoria. The pay of the miners is being steadily eroded by the pit owners and the beautiful green hillsides of the valley are being covered with slag heaps; the river is becoming increasingly polluted and the slag is threatening the houses of the men. There are problems with the unions and there are strikes and children start dying after one strike drags on and on. The tensions threaten to divide Huw's father from his more militant sons. At the same time there are the pressures of the 'chapel' morality that exists in the valley. Huw objects vociferously when a young girl is shamed in chapel for becoming pregnant out of wedlock but shame seems to be one of the principal ways in which good behaviour is enforced within the family and the closed society.  The day after Huw is beaten by a schoolmaster, two family friends, prize-fighters, invade the school and beat up the teacher with impunity; Huw's father employs the prize-fighter to teach Huw how to box; later, when Huw attacks a fellow pupil, breaking his jaw, he escapes prosecution. It seems that sexual morality is rigorously enforced but brute violence is encouraged. 

The principal characters (Dada, Mama, Bronwen, Mr Gruffydd, and Huw himself) are carefully drawn, in their complexity, although they are always seen from the point of view of Huw, whose understanding develops as he grows. Other characters are more tangentially glimpsed: inevitable, I suppose, when Huw's own family is so large and when you add to that all those who marry into the family and the other villagers. Thus, I found it difficult to distinguish between the characters of Huw's brothers Ivan (the choirmaster), and Ianto and Davy (the union leaders), and Owen (the mechanic), and Gwilym who married the girl that Owen should have married, and while Angharad his sister has a key place to play, I was less certain about the personalities of Ceridwen and Huw's last sister seems to be  forgotten almost as soon as she has been born.

But the principal joy of the reading lies in the prose and the descriptions which are lyrical and original. Sometimes, however, the exuberance that is Huw's love for life got in the way of the narrative. For example, I couldn't quite pin down the moment that Huw broke his leg. Nor was I certain whether Ceinwen actually does get pregnant; Bronwen hints at this but it isn't made explicit and later Huw hints that he has no children, again without saying so clearly. It's great to be impressionistic, but I felt that some of these points were important for me to know.

It is never easy working out exactly how old Huw is at any moment in the narrative but he seems sexually innocent and naive for far too long, not knowing how babies are made even after witnessing a woman giving birth. He has scarcely learned the facts of life before he is having sex on the mountainside. The morality is a little inconsistent although I feel that is an accurate depiction of the quandary that is adolescence. 

The strength of this book, which I suspect is what made it a best-seller in 1939 when it was first published (and a feature film in 1941), is the wonderful joie de vivre depicted in the descriptions of the taste of food and the beauty of the countryside (and the pleasure of sex). Llewellyn writes like a mixture of Dylan Thomas and Laurie Lee: the prose is lyrical and musical. 

Selected quotes:

• “There was never any talk while we were eating. ... And that way, I think, you will get more from your food, for I never met anybody whose talk was better than good food.” (Ch 1)
• “If I had not started to think things for myself and find things for myself, I might have had a happier life judged by ordinary standards, and perhaps I might have been more respected.” (Ch 3)
• “There must be some way to live your life in a decent manner, thinking and acting decently, and yet manage to make a good living.” (Ch 3)
• “It is a pity that real, well-meant tears cannot come with out the sounds that go with them. The scrapings in the throat, the fullness of spittle, the heavy breaths and halting, gulping sighs, are not fitted to be the servants of heart-felt grief.” (Ch 5)
• “He always said that God sent the water to wash our bodies and air to wash our minds.” (Ch 5)
• “All along the river, banks were showing scum from the colliery sump, and the buildings, all black and flat, were ugly to make a hurt in your chest.” (Ch 5)
• “There is a good dripping toast is by the fire in the evening. Good jelly dripping and crusty, home-baked bread, with the mealy savour of ripe wheat roundly in your mouth and under your teeth, roasted sweet and crisp and deep brown, and covered with little pockets where the dripping will hide and melt and shine in the light, deep down inside, ready to run when your teeth bite in.” (Ch 5)
• “It was then that I had thoughts about Christ, and I have never changed my mind. He did appear to me then as a man, and as a man I still think of him. ... If he had been a God, or any more son of God than any of us, then it is unfair to ask us to do what he did.” (Ch 7)
• “The clock rocked away, seeming to get louder at every stroke, as though it were rowing time towards us, until I was wondering why it was never heard at other, ordinary, times.” (Ch 8)
• “There is a fright you will have to stand up before lines of faces that have become wet and shaky through the nervous water in your eyes. Your mouth is dry, with sand on the tongue and in the throat, so that your breath comes hot and sore with you. Then it is time to sing and you have forgotten the words. Each one has grown a wheel and rolls away from you down into the pit of Forgot.” (Ch 10)
• “Beautiful was the valley this afternoon, until you turned your head to the right. Then you saw the two slag heaps.” (Ch 11)
• “Foolish is the mind of man to make bogeys for itself and to live in terrors of fear for things which lack the substance of truth.” (Ch 11)
• “So we breathed, both of us on top of the mountain, while the mists went to purple and rose, and the sun burnt through and covered us both with warmth and came out across the Valley in such strength that we could not bear to look. So it may be, I think, when we meet God. But worse.” (Ch 11)
• “In the clerking jobs we were supposed to dress like princes on the money of a maggot.” (Ch 12)
• “Hard it is to suffer through stupid people. They make you feel sorry for them, and if your sorrow is as great as your hurt, you will allow them to go free of punishment, for their eyes at the eyes of dogs that have done wrong and know it, and are afraid.” (Ch 16)
• “The everyday things, those little jewels that stud the action of living, we're making themselves known. A blister on the heel, sweat about the neckband, a wrinkle in the stocking, were coming to mean more than the feelings brought forth by that which filled the little white coffin.” (Ch 17)
• “O, Brandy Broth is the King of Broth and royal in the rooms of the mouth. ... Drink down the liquor and raise your eyes to give praise for a mouth and a belly.” (Ch 18)
• “It is strange how you should hate the man, and yet pity him from the depths.” (Ch 19)
• “One night I heard a choir of a thousand voices singing in the darkness, and I thought I heard the voice of God. Then children began to die.” (Ch 20) What a juxtaposition!
• “Poverty is not a virtue, any more than poverty of the spirit. Life is good, and full of goodness. Let them be enjoyed by all men.” (Ch21)
• “I found a risen newness pillared in my middle, yet, for all its newness, so much a part of me that no surprise I had, but only a quick, sharp, clear glorying that rose to a shouting might of song in every part of me and drew tight the muscles of my body, and as the blood within me thudded through my singing veins, a goldness opened wide before me, and I knew I had become of Men, a Man.” (Ch 24) Huw’s first erection.
• “There is good to see happy faces round a table full of good food. Indeed, for good sounds, I will put the song of knives and folks next to the song of man.” (Ch 24)
• “No pig fits his skin better.” (Ch 24)
• “What is there, in the mention of the Time To Come, that is so quick to wrench at the heart, to inflict a pain in the senses that is like the run of a sword, I wonder. Perhaps we feel our youngness taken from us with the soothe of sliding years, and the pains of age that come to stand unseen beside us and grow more solid as the minutes pass, are with us solid on the instant, and we sense them, but when we try to assess them, they are back in their place in Time To Come, ready to meet us coming. ... Sad, sad is the thought that we are in for a hiding in every round, and no chance to hit back, fighting blind against a champion of champions, who plays with you on the end of a poking left, and in the last round puts you down with a right cross to kill.” (Ch 28)
• “The mouth reaches for newer fruit that seems to be near, but never to be tasted. The fingers are intent on searching to soft places, but the senses are too far from their tips and impatient of their fumblings. And at the middle, where the arrow steel is forged, there is a ruination of heat that seems to know, within itself, that coolness will come only in the hotter blood of woman. There is itch to find the pool, twisting to be free to search, momental miracles of rich anointments, sweet splendours of immersion, and an urgency of writhings to be nearer, and deeper, and closer. In that kissing of the bloods there is a crowding of sense, when breathing is forgotten, muscle turns to stone, and the spinal branch bends in the bowman's hand as the singing string is pulled to speed the arrow. ... Then the tight-drawn branch is weak, for the string has sung its song, and breath comes back to empty lungs and a trembling to the limbs. Your eyes see plainly. The trees are green, just the same as they were. No change has come. No bolts of fire. No angels with a flaming sword. Yet this it was that left the Garden to weeds. I had eaten of the Tree. Eve was still warm under me.” (Ch 30) Huw loses his virginity.
• “I knew from the way she said it, without feeling, an opening of the mouth with one word after another on a string, all the same size and weight, that it was no use to ask why. A wasting of time.” (Ch 31)
• “The air was a stink of blueness, sharp with the heat of bodies, and with the weight of puddled beer drying into boards that never knew soap and water, and soured with tobacco spit.” (Ch 37)
• “Born in the image of God, they were, every one of them, and some loving woman having pains of the damned to bring them forth, to sit there with their mouths open, like calves under the net in the market-place.” (Ch 37)
• “Big jaws he had, that seemed to come out of his chest without help of a neck.” (Ch 37)
• “For please to tell me what is better to look at than a lovely woman, and I will come from my dinner to see.” (Ch 40)
• “There is a wholeness about a woman, of shape, and sound, and colour, and taste, and smell, that you will want to hold tightly to you, all, every little bit, without words, in peace, with jealousy for the things that escape the clumsiness of your arms. So you feel, when you love.” (Ch 41)

March 2024; 447 pages

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

"Plain Murder" by C S Forester

 Forester is more famous for writing the 'Hornblower' novels, about an officer in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars, and for writing the novel that inspired the film The African Queen. 

Less well-known is his exploits as a crime novelist.

This book isn't a whodunnit. There is no mystery about who committed the murder. Rather, it is a psychological portrait of the murderer. His victim is a work colleague. The murder itself is easy, the problems start in its aftermath as he struggles to keep himself safe from detection. It's a delightfully unusual take on the genre and is well-written and full of psychological insight. I also liked the way it was set in a very ordinary world and told of the mundane and sometimes joyless existences of those who worked in a small advertising agency and the domestic life of the murderer. It felt very real.

It was easy to read and kept me turning the pages: I read it in three sittings during the same day.

Selected quotes:

• "Morris with his scowling brow, his woolly hair horrid with grease, his eyelid drooping and his mouth pulled to one side to keep the cigarette smoke out of his eyes." (Ch 1)
• "Morris had that disproportionate sense of the importance of his own well-being as compared with other people's which is one-half of the equipment of the deliberate murderer." (Ch 1)
• "Morris devising a murder was in the same lofty. superhuman state of mind as is a poet in the full current of composition. Thoughts poured through his brain in clear. rushing streams." (Ch 1) A very early description of the psychological state later known as 'Flow'. 
• "We've got no more chance of getting it than - than we have of getting hell's advertising when hell sets up as a winter resort." (Ch 6)
• "The main characteristic of the crime of which Morris was guilty is its tendency to reproduce itself. A second murder will occur no additional penalty if the first is to be discovered, so that fear of punishment does not act as a deterrent. Fear of discovery is very largely overridden by the knowledge of previous success, and any natural repugnance the criminal may feel towards the taking of human life is largely blunted by the time he begins to consider the repetition of the crime." (Ch 13)
• "She was too busy looking about her for all the actresses - and worse - who are notoriously accustomed to living in Maidenhead." (Ch 20)

A well-structured, beautifully written and entertaining crime novel written from an unusual angle. Well worth reading

March 2024; 188 pages

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

"Poor Things" by Alasdair Gray

Winner of the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1992.

This is a charmingly bizarre feminist version of Frankenstein which begins in Victorian Glasgow.

It’s Gothic metafiction
Gray delights to play with literary form.

For example, in his earlier novel Lanark, Book 3 comes at the start, and in the Epilogue, placed within Book 4, there is a discussion about the plot between the author and the protagonist, there are footnotes, and there is an 'Index of Plagiarisms' directing the reader's attention to the literary sources of the novel.

Poor Things starts with an Introduction by the author in which he defends the truth of the subsequent material with ‘Michael Donnelly’, who considers it fiction. The bulk of the book consists of a narrative by McCandless which incorporates source material such as Wedderburn’s confessions and Bella’s letters, followed by a testament by Victoria McCandless which contradicts the story by McCandless, followed by chapter notes and a critical evaluation by the author. As well as the main sections of the book, many of the details, such as Baxter’s physical appearance, are introduced to the reader in a piecemeal way. Thus any such story as the reader can find has been put together from sometimes contradictory parts, which seems to be a metaliterary version of the Frankenstein story.

It’s a modern, and feminist, version of Frankenstein
The bulk of the narrative, by McCandless, tells us that Bella has been created by super-surgeon Baxter from the body of a drowned woman and the brain of her unborn baby.

Dr Godwin Bysshe Baxter is known to Bella, his creation, as God. The Bysshe was part of Shelley's name and Shelley was the husband of Mary Shelley nee Wolstonecraft who wrote Frankenstein.

The twist is that Bella is beautiful (though Godwin is incredibly ugly) and that Bella has a strong lustful desire for a sexual partner (as Frankenstein's monster wanted a partner).

Bella emerges as an intelligent woman with a strong character. She has an almost insatiable desire for cuddles and sometimes for wedding (her name for sex) and this is interpreted by the men around her as nymphomania to the extent that one of them wants her to have a clitoridectomy. Apart from Bella, a housekeeper and the madam of a French brothel, almost all the people around her are men and, apart from God(win) who wants to empower her with free will, they all want to control her, usually by marrying her.

Bella is a young mind in a mature body, much like a typical adolescent, and her early adventures in the world involve enjoyment, often sexual. But an encounter with abject poverty makes her, like the Buddha, renounce her pleasure-seeking life and seek to serve people. Her later life, as Victoria, is as a socialist doctor and controversial pioneer of birth control.

One of the delights of the book is the way it shows Bella maturing through her dialogue. Here is an example of her childish talk: “Sit on that bench, God. I am taking Candle for a walk saunter stroll dawdle trot canter short gallop and circum-ambu-lation. Poor old God. Without Bella you will grow glum glummer glummest until just when you think I am forever lost crash bang wallop, out I pop from behind that holly bush.” (Episodes 7)

The film
Poor Things has been turned into a film of the same name. Although some things had to be changed (we see Baxter all at once, for example) and the film delights in adding steam-punk settings in discordant technicolour after the initial, mostly black and white, part set in Glasgow, the fundamentals of the story are maintained. It isn’t metacinematic, though.

Selected Quotes:

• “Morbid anatomy is essential to training and research, but leads many doctors into thinking that life is an agitation in something essentially dead. ... But a portrait painter does not learn his art by scraping layers of varnish from a Rembrandt, then slicing off the impasto, dissolving the ground and finally separating the fibres of the canvas.” (Episodes 2)
• “The big dogs lay somnolent on a hearth-rug, their chin's cushioned on each other's flanks. Three cats sat as far apart as possible on the backs of the highest chairs, each pretending not to see the rest but all twitching if one of them moved.” (Episodes 4)
• “Bed bugs too must have their unique visions of the world.” (Making a Conscience 14)
• “Punch says only lazy people are out of work so the very poorest must enjoy being poor. They also have the consolation of being comic.” (Episodes 15)
• “Natives ... are people who live on the soil where they were born, and do not want to leave it. Not many English can be regarded as natives because we have a romantic preference for other people's soils.” (Episodes 15)
• “Prosperous parents tell their children that nobody should lie, steal or kill, and that idleness and gambling are vices. They then send them to schools where they suffer if they do not disguise their thoughts and feelings and are taught to admire killers and stealers like Achilles and Ulysses, William the Conqueror and Henry the Eighth. This prepares them for life in a land where rich people use acts of parliament to deprive the poor of homes and livelihoods.” (Episodes 16)
• “He told me that a clean, unexpected flesh wound, however painful, was a flea bite to one who had been educated at Eton.” (Episodes 17)
• In Chapter 17 the madam of the Notre-Dame (a brothel) tells apprentice prostitute Bella: “This Wedderburn is obviously an oversucked orange. You will be a far better wife to your husband if you now enjoy some variety.” But in chapter eighteen, Bella contradicts this: “I will not be a better wife because of the variety enjoyed in the Notre-Dame, unless it pleases him to see me lying flat murmuring ‘Formidable’ in a variety of astonished tones.”
• “I hate military training, of course. The sight of young men marching in regular rows, each imitating the stiff movements of a clockwork doll while their movements are controlled by a single screaming sergeant - that sight sickens me even more than the sight of young women in a musical-hall chorus-row, kicking up their heels in unison.” (A Letter to Posterity) Not sure here about the repetitions of both ‘movements’ and ‘row’.
• She also hates “sham-gothic” structures such as St Pancras Station: because “Their useless over-ornamentation was paid for out of needlessly high profits: profits squeezed from the stunted lives of children, women and men working twelve hours a day, six days a week in needlessly filthy factories.” (A Letter to Posterity)

Delightfully off the wall. 

March 2024, 317 pages

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