"Ideality" by Kai Alyx Sarus

Aurora's ex-husband is controlling and manipulative? Is her new boyfriend the same?

At 50, Aurora is a successful team leader when her company goes bankrupt and her ex-husband announces that he wants her back. Can she make a go of her new career as a music journalist? After all, when she was a teenager she was an ardent fan of heavy metal group Morpheme. 

I thoroughly enjoyed the start of the book because there were some nice phrases showing that the author can use words to create excellent images (see the selected quotes which come mostly from the early chapters). I also enjoyed discovering the mundane reality of Aurora's daily life which make a nice counterpoint to her memory-focused dreams. Aurora loses her job and starts a new career. But suddenly there was a major turning point at the 50% mark and we were into a love story in which the male leads were control freaks. It almost seemed like a new book and significant moments in the first half, such as the collapse of the company pension scheme, became virtually irrelevant to the plot.

It was written in the third person past, almost entirely from the perspective of the protsgonist but occasionally straying into the interior monologue of another character. 

There are some crucial moments of conflict in the second half of the story; these are moments when the story comes alive. But there are also large areas where conflict seems entirely absent. For example, Aurora has almost instant success when she begins a totally new career as a music journalist. Not only is her work widely read, the  quality of it is so hugely respected that her first critical review of her work is "in-depth and flattering." (Denial). It seems unlikely.; this aspect of the story lacked verisimilitude. As Aurora thinks: "Don’t get me wrong, but this all seems a bit quick." (Displaced)

The characters were divided into goodies and baddies. Three characters were more than puppets. Protagonist Aurora as a character seems to have been developed from wish-fulfilment. Does this heroine have a flaw? David, the ex-husband, is melodramatically horrid: I could almost hear the readership booing each time he appeared on the page. At least Oliver has two sides to him although by the time this reader appreciated this we were so close to the end that there was little opportunity to explore how these two sides can work together. I wanted complex nuanced characters and I was disappointed.

On the whole, the dialogue was a little clunky. No character had any dialogic tags or mannerisms that made them sound unique. No matter how much stress they were in, characters seemed to be able to express themselves coherently and articulately, making use of normal grammatical conventions. To give two examples picked almost at random: 

• "Don’t think like that. Enjoy it, make the most of what you’ve built up and live it. You’re the only person who has made this happen. No one else can take that away from you" (Dialectic)
• "Oh, Lesley, it’s good to see you. I’m fine, but I need a favour. Is there any way that you can let me leave the pharmacy by the back door?" (Desire)

The book was enjoyable and easy to read - the pages turned quickly - but in the end there seemed to be two different stories, hinged in the middle. 

Selected quotes: 

• "She felt the day stretch out before her like a tarmac runway." (Dream)
• "Despite the alarm going off, time leaked, minute by minute, and Aurora had to rush to the tube station." (Dream)
• "The train stopped suddenly and she pushed and pardoned her way off the carriage." (Dream)
• "She was emotionally exhausted, but relieved. She had got Jacqui through the dark tunnel and out the other end, but it had cost her a little bit of herself and she felt it, like a chipped porcelain statue." (Decision)

July 2024

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

"Journey to the End of the Night" by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The life journey of an Everyman teaches him to be a cynical misanthropist.

Ferdinand Bardamu joins the army at the start of the First World War; after being wounded he is invalided out although he spends some time at a psychiatric hospital to be assessed as to whether his developed reluctance to be killed is a mental disease or cowardice. He then travels to colonial Africa to become an agent. Escaping, he is shanghaied and made to work as a galley slave before finding freedom in New York. Returning to Paris he becomes a doctor in a poor suburb and becomes embroiled in a plot to murder an old lady. Throughout he does his best to avoid being killed, to earn enough money to survive, and to have sex as often as possible. 

I was reminded of Voltaire's Candide in which the eponymous hero travels the world having repeatedly dreadful experiences, except that Bardamu is the very opposite of Dr Pangloss, seeming to espouse the philosophy that everything is for the worst in this the worst of all possible worlds. Perhaps more obvious influences would be Rabelais and Jonathan Swift.

Incredibly this long, difficult book with its unstructured picaresque plot was a best-selling debut for the pseudonymous author (a real doctor who had been wounded and decorated in World War One and spent time in French colonial Africa). This was, perhaps, the reason why this rambling discursive style influenced later writers such as Jean Genet, Henry Miller and William Burroughs. 

Here's an example of his work which captures both his negativity towards the world, his discursivity, and his gloriously original description. “Leaving the delirious gloom of my hotel, I attempted a few excursions in the main streets around about, an insipid carnival of dizzy buildings. My weariness increased at the sight of those endless house fronts, that turgid monotony of pavements, of windows upon windows, of business and more business, that chancre of the world, bursting with pustulant advertisements. False promises. Drivelling lies.” (p 169) 

At various intervals on this odyssey he encounters his alter ego, a sort of negative doppelganger, Leon Robinson, first during the First World War, as a fellow soldier, again in Africa, and again when he is working as a doctor. Robinson does what Bardamu dreams of doing.

Bardamu is haunted by death. This starts with the first world war but he is repeatedly reminded of death, of course, when he's a doctor. Death is the night at the end of the journey. Almost exactly halfway through, in New York, trying to keep up his spirits, Ferdinand thinks to himself: “What with being chucked out of everywhere, you’re sure to find whatever it is scares all those bastards so. It must be at the end of the night, and that's why they're so dead set against going to the end of the night.” (p 182) This is repeated at the 75% stage: “The clock at the top of the little church started striking the hours and more hours, and on and on. We had reached the end of the world, that was becoming obvious. We couldn't go any farther, because farther on there were only dead people.” (p 297) Then, at the end: “The bar opened just before dawn for the benefit of the bargemen. As the night draws to an end, the locks open slowly. And then the whole countryside comes to life and starts to work. Slowly the banks break away from the river and rise up on both sides. Work emerges from the darkness. You begin to see it again, all very simple and hard. Over here the winches, over there the fences around the work site, and far away on the road men are coming from still farther away. In small chilled groups they move into the murky light. For a starter they splatter their faces with daylight as they walk past the dawn. All you can see of them is their pale, simple faces ... the rest still belongs to the night. They too will all have to die someday. How will they go about it?” (p 408)

Trigger warnings should include a negative attitude towards black people with the occasional use of racial slurs including the n-word  although on the whole this is in the context of his damning descriptions of French colonial Africa. Celine developed far-right political views and wrote anti-Semitic polemic in occupied France during world war two.

Selected quotes:

• He has some stunningly original descriptions:
• “His face like a rotten peach.” (p 23)
• “When he walked, it was with nervous, pigeon-toed steps, as though walking on eggs. Seeing him in his enormous greatcoat, stooped over in the rain, you'd have taken him for the phantom hindquarters of a racehorse.” (p 27)
• “Outside the kiosk the soda-water lady seemed to be slowly gathering the evening shadows around her skirt.” (p 48)
• “The rickety dribbling children with nosefuls of fingers.” (p 80)
• “People moved flabbily about like squid in a tank of tepid, smelly water.” (p 94)
• “An old man crumpling under the enormous weight of the sun.” (p 117)
• He doesn't like the countryside!
• “One thing I'd better tell you right away, I've never been able to stomach the country, I've always found it dreary, those endless fields of mud, those houses where nobody's ever home, those roads that don't go anywhere.” (p 11)  
• “Nature is a frightening thing, and even when it’s solidly domesticated as in the Bois, it gives real city dwellers an eerie anxious feeling.” (p 46)
• Other quotes:
• “You can be a virgin in horror the same as in sex.” (p 12)
• “That blackness ... was so dense you had the impression that if you stretched out your arm a little way from your shoulder you’d never see it again.” (p 20)
• “In this business of getting killed, it's no use being picky and choosy; you've got to act as if life was going on, and that lie is the hardest part of it.” (p 29)
• “Anybody who talks about the future is a bastard, it's the present that counts. Invoking posterity is like making speeches to worms.” (p 29
• “In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavour, it's indispensable.” (p 52)
• “We have got into the habit of admitting colossal bandits, whose opulence is revered by the entire world, yet whose existence, once we stop to examine it, proves to be one long crime repeated ad infinitum, but those same bandits are heaped with glory, honours and power, their crime are hallowed by the law of the land, whereas, as far back in history as the eye can see ... everything conspires to show that a venial theft, especially of inglorious food stuffs, such as bread crusts, ham or cheese, unfailingly subjects its perpetrator to irreparable opprobrium, the categorical condemnation of the community, major punishment, automatic dishonour and inexpiable shame, and this for two reasons, first because the perpetrator of such an offence is usually poor, which in itself connotes basic unworthiness, and secondly because his act implies, as it were, a tacit reproach to the community.” (p 56)
• “There were several young ladies from the entertainment world - actresses and musicians - who came with more debts than clothes.” (p 64)
• “She had no doubt that poor people like her were born to suffer in every way, that that was their role on earth.” (p 80)
• “That tropical steam bath called forth instincts as August breeds toads and snakes on the fissured walls of prisons. In the European cold, under grey, puritanical northern skies, we seldom get to see our brothers’ festering cruelty except in times of carnage, but when roused by the foul fevers of the tropics, their rottenness rises to the surface.” (p 94)
• “When you stop to think about it, at least a hundred people must want to dead in the course of an average day, the ones in line behind you at the ticket window in the Metro, the ones who look up at your apartment when they haven't got one themselves, the ones who wish you'd finish pissing and give them a chance, your children and a lot more.” (p 97)
• “Fear is probably, more often than not, the best means of getting you out of a tight spot.” (p 101)
• “Men have a hard time doing all that’s demanded of them: butterflies in their youth, maggots at the end.” (p 122)
• “In Topo the raw, stifling heat, so perfectly concentrated in that sandpit between the combined polished mirrors of the sea and the river, would have made you swear by your bleeding buttocks that you are being forced to sit on a chunk of sun there's a just fallen off.” (p 126)
• “The war had burnt some and warmed others, same as fire tortures you or comforts you, depending on whether you're in it or in front of it. you've got to work the angles, that's all.” (p 179)
• “Medicine is a thankless profession. When you get paid by the rich, you feel like a flunkey; by the poor, like a thief.” (p 217)
• “The prevailing smell by far is cauliflower. A cauliflower can beat ten toilets, even if they're overflowing.” (p 220)
• “Well, anyway, all those sons of bitches had turned into angels without my noticing! Whole clouds full of angels, including some very far-out and disreputable ones, all over the place.” (p 298)
• “‘You're a bourgeois!’ I told him finally (at that time I could think of no worse insult).” (p 319)
• “He looked as if he were trying to help us live. As if he had been trying to find us pleasures to go on living for. He held us by the hands. One hand each. I kissed him. That's all you can do in a case like that without going wrong. We waited. He didn't say anything more after that. A little later, maybe an hour, the haemorrhage came, internal and profuse. It carried him off.” (p 403) Even the death bed scenes are different.

A fascinating and original book. July 2024; 405 pages

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

"The Inheritors" by Nadeem Zaman

 

The Great Gatsby, relocated from 1920s New York to the bustling capital of Bangladesh in the 2010s.

But it's more than that. The Inheritors is a beautifully written critique of the gulf between the partying rich and the toiling poor; it explores the shallow relationships among the rich not-so-young things and the deeper but sometimes exploitative relationships between the wealthy and those who work for them. There are genuinely three-dimensional characters and a nice touch of mystery as Nisar the outsider tried to make sense of a world he didn't fully understand.

The Plot:

Nisar, the narrator, travels to Dhaka, which he left as a thirteen year old, thirty years earlier, to sell his father's properties. His next-door neighbour, Junaid, who holds lavish parties every Saturday night in an otherwise empty apartment block, is still in love with Nisar's cousin Disha even though their previous marriage ended; she is presently with Tarek. Bit by bit, Nisar discovers more about Dhaka and Junaid. As these rich young(ish) Bengalis live an opulent life-style, their various relationships fracture and reform until tragedy strikes.

The parallels:

The parallels with The Great Gatsby are clear and start with the characters' names, whose initial letters are identical:

• Narrator Nick Carraway becomes narrator Nisar Chowdhury. Nick comes from the midwestern US; so does Nisar. Nick gives a potted account of his ancestry: “The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch...” (TGG Ch 1) Nisar gives himself a rather more explicit ancestry, including his mother’s side, but it starts: “The Chowdhurys were of Yemeni Arab stock. They travelled to Bengal in around the 14th century and never looked back” (Ch 1) A difference is that Nick in TGG has his thirtieth birthday while Nisar is "flirting with my forties" (Ch 1) Another is that there is no suggestion that Nisar has gay sex.
• Protagonist Jay Gatsby becomes protagonist Junaid Gazi. Fitzgerald’s introduction to Gatsby is: “There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’” (Ch 1) Zaman’s introduction to Gazi is: “He existed in a kind of beauty that was undeniable. He exemplified the mysterious coexistence of opposing forces in one single being. He was as attuned to the universe as much as to his world, like an all-purpose machine, and picked up on the changes that took place miles ahead of others. His state of mind or any grand ability to tackle life with any special creative force towards the creative had nothing to do with it.” (Ch 1) Like Gatsby, the enormously rich Gazi lives next door to the narrator in a huge building empty except for the servants and himself. Like Gatsby, Gazi throws extravagant parties which he himself scarcely participates in. Like Gatsby, Gazi is in love with the narrator's cousin. Gatsby calls Nick 'old sport', Gazi calls Nisar 'boss'. Their ends are similar. Near the end of the book, Nick meets Gatsby's father, so Nisar meets Gazi's dad.  
• Daisy is Nick's second cousin, once removed; Disha is Nisar’s first cousin. Daisy had a romantic relationship with Gatsby and is now the wife of Tom Buchanan. Disha was married to Gazi but is now in a relationship with Tarek Bashir. 
• Antagonist Tom Buchanan, Daisy's husband, is a millionaire; he has a mistress. Tarek Bashir is still married but presently in a relationship with Disha. He is "running around with Maisha" (Ch 14)
• Jordan Baker is Nick Carraway's girlfriend for most of TGG though they grow apart towards the end. Nisar has a platonic relationship with Jasmine until nearly the end of TI.
• George Wilson is a garage owner.  Gowhar Wasim's family owns car dealerships.
• Myrtle Wilson is George's wife. She is Tom Buchanan's mistress. Gowhar's wife is Maisha Wasim. She is in some sort of relationship with Tarek.

There are other parallels. For example, in TGG, there is a billboard on a highway that runs through a desert of ashy wastelands that represent industrial America. On the billboard is an advertisement for an oculist which consists of a monstrous pair of eyes overlooking the desolation; the symbolism of the all-seeing eye of God (and perhaps a reference to the eye atop the pyramid on the dollar bill) is blatant. In TI, the character Gowhar is obsessed by the idea that the stars in the night sky are God's Eyes. Nisat says: “God's Eyes. I had a literal image of eyes wearing horn-rimmed spectacles staring down from the sky. A billboard along an American highway portending the end of days while those eyes watched and judged.” (Ch 18) Another visual image is that Gazi bought his apartment block because from its roof he can see where Disha lives; Gatsby bought his house because he can see, across the Sound, a green light on the jetty at the end of Daisy's lawn.

The famous last line of TGG is "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."; the last line of TI is “The past beats on, louder sometimes than the present, clearer than any visions of the future.” (Ch 28)

But there are differences. For example, Nisar has problems with a lawyer, Ehsan Kibria, who seems to have swindled his family. Both this solicitor and Meyer Wolfsheim (a friend of Gatsby's) have been involved in betting scandals; otherwise this plot line seems distinct.

I have no issues with a modern novelist mining and reforming an old source like this; Barbara Kingsolver did the same in Demon Copperhead. The only problem that I had, as with DC, was that once I had noticed the similarities, I started paying more attention to the parallels and less attention to the modern text; I was distracted from properly enjoying The Inheritors. Because this novel had a lot of great things going for it. The sense of placed was superb. The character of the narrator Nisar was much stronger than the original, Nick (a feature it shared with Demon Copperhead). There was a much stronger sense that the rich hedonists were parasites upon the poor. But the ending seemed a little rushed and, because of the parallels, it was highly predictable, even though Zaman tweaked it slightly.

Summary:

It was a fascinating glimpse into high society in Bangladesh and an entertaining story with some great characters.

Selected quotes:

• “Flirting with my forties, I'd reached a sort of morally stringent stance about the world. It had to stand upright, it had to pay unflinching heed to what was wrong, and I couldn't be bothered to understand its wayward, unruly ways, or care about the nuanced tendencies of human nature.” (Ch 1)
• “If bosses were that good there'd be no need for God.” (Ch 7)
• “His face was sunken into his cheeks, and half-moons of ashen blue hung under his eyes.” (Ch 8)
• “Dhaka isn't an easy place.” (Ch 12)
• “Old times are just that and no more. They're no longer the living, breathing present, they’re dead, not to be revived.” (Ch 14)
• “Disha and Gazi sucked the oxygen of ten people, and they didn't need to be present to do it.” (Ch 16)
• “If there’s a hell, it's right here - we’re standing in it. Heaven is the way out of it.” (Ch 18)
• “But there was no discomfort, no awkwardness, and we sat together as two people with a long and complex history, of many cycles of ups and downs, back once more to equilibrium.” (Ch 22)
• “Home isn't just one thing. it isn't a country, a city or a place of dwelling. Home is a going away, contained in loss, obscured by the brushstrokes of memory.” (Ch 28)

July 2024; 249 pages

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

"Half of the Human Race" by Anthony Quinn

This historical boy-meets-girl  romance ticks all the genre boxes.

1911. He's a wealthy public school boy and talented cricketer. She's a suffragette wannabe female surgeon. They fall in love. But. She is fighting against the entrenched values of the patriarchy; he is the establishment. He wants to marry her but  he is appalled by her militancy; she wants to marry him but she won't to give up her independence to become a wife and mother. Guess who changes?

There's nothing you can fault in this book. The author has clearly done his research (it shows). He can turn a good phrase (see the selected quotes). It is carefully plotted (though it rather relies on coincidences) and well-paced. The main characters are nicely fleshed-out and believable. But it is all so predictable. I foresaw every twist. The characters are so stereotypical (feisty female, disapproving elder sister, battleaxe mother, naughty granddad). And it targeted only low-hanging fruit. Who now can argue against women having the franchise? Isn't it terrible to force-feed a hunger striker? Who isn't aware that the generals in the first world war were intransigent fools whose tactics caused huge numbers of needless deaths? I longed to be challenged by this book but I was soon aware that Quinn's popularity depends on him expressing sentiments that everyone else agrees with. He's a good enough writer to be controversial but, unlike his heroine, he copped out. I felt as Connie felt in chapter 4: "Disappointment touched its limp hand to her heart."

The Rt Revd Lord Harries, ex Bishop of Oxford, said in a Gresham College lecture in 2008 that what distinguishes literature from propaganda is that it can entice us to “enter into the minds of people with fundamentally opposed views or characters.” On that basis, this novel is propaganda.

Selected quotes:

• "It was the snailing tedium of the weeks in hospital that most excruciated her." (Prologue)
• "She detested picnics: essentially, one took a pile of sandwiches for a walk, settled oneself on a scratchy tartan rug, then waited for the wasps to show up." (Ch 1)
•  "How could so many consciousnesses be contained in one world, she wondered, each of them believing themselves to be the centre of the universe?" (Ch 7)
• "She sensed trackless swathes of dead time in prospect, like an Arctic explorer looking out upon a tundra and suddenly daunted by the isolation." (Ch 10)

July 2024; 483 pages

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

"The Bone Clocks" by David Mitchell

In this typical David Mitchell, the forces of good and evil fight a supernatural battle which impinges repeatedly on the life of an Englishwoman. 

It is divided into six parts in each of which the protagonist, Holly Sykes appears. 

• Narrated by Holly, A Hot Spell is set in northern Kent in 1984. The teenage Holly runs away from home,  has strange visions and encounters savage murder.
• Narrated by Hugo Lamb, Myrrh is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume is set around Christmas 1991. Hugo meets a weird woman, exploits his friends and lovers, commits theft and goes on a skiing holiday.
• The Wedding Bash is set on the south coast of England in 2004. Ed, Holly's partner, has to choose between caring for his daughter and returning to war-torn Iraq where he is a journalist. 
• Narrated by Crispin himself, Crispin Hershey's Lonely Planet is the once-best-selling author's a five-year Odyssey around the world from 2015 until 2020.
• An Horologist's Labyrinth set in 2025 is when the fantasy element of the book is given full throttle with a war between different types of immortals. It is narrated by one of them.
• Holly as an old woman returns to narrates Sheep's Head, set on the coast of Ireland in 2043 after the social order has broken down in Europe.

David Mitchell's strength is writing wonderful characters. Holly Sykes is first encounter as a delightfully stroppy teenager running away from home after a bust-up with her mum but she is just as real as a grandmother. Hugo Lamb is cultured and charismatic but amoral almost to the point of psychopathy; he reminded me of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis. Ed Brubeck is addicted to danger. Crispin Hershey is a glorious creation: a spiteful, disillusioned, frequently drunken novelist sliding down the best-seller charts. Each of these is as real as the person you are standing next to.

I'm not a fan of fantasy. The 'Horologist's Labyrinth' was my least favourite part of the book. It reminded me of watching a horror film which is excruciatingly tense up until the moment that you see the monster, at which point you realise that it is an actor dressed up and the spell is broken. 

But the real-world parts of this novel were magnificent. Following Holly's journey from Gravesend to the Isle of Sheppey was as real as anything I have read for a long time; not only was I thoroughly immersed in the story, and convinced of Holly's reality, but I could see the jeopardy she was in at every step of the way. It needed no supernatural element. It was as tense as anything. And it was followed by Hugo Lamb, the most charming and debonair outright villain I have encountered for ages. As for Crispin: he was superbly Rabelaisian. Add these characters to superb writing (just look at the selected quotes below!) and you have another Mitchell masterpiece.

Longlisted for the 2014 Booker, it's just as good as the 2004 Booker shortlisted Cloud Atlas and nearly as good as the superb Utopia Avenue. 

Selected Quotes:

• “Mam was right. I loved Vinny like he was a part of me, and he loved me like a stick of gum. He’d spat me out when the flavour went, unwrapped another and stuffed it in.” (A Hot Spell, 30th June)
• “The wind unravels clouds from the chimneys of the Blue Circle factory, like streams of hankies out of a conjuror’s pocket.” (A Hot Spell, 30th June)
• “I drink until the sun's a pale glow through the thin bottom of the plastic.” (A Hot Spell, 30th June)
• “The sea-breeze and bike-breeze slip up my sleeves and stroke my front like a pervy Mr Tickle.” (A Hot Spell, 30th June)
• “Love’s pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at lone-shark prices.” (A Hot Spell, 1st July)
• “It's a black sea, utterly black-black, like darkness in a box in a cave a mile underground.” ((A Hot Spell, 1st July)
• “His pupils have morphed into lovehearts and, for the nth time squared I wonder what loves feels like on the inside because externally it turns you into the King of Tit Mountain.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, 13th December)
• “I rescue the condom before its gluey viscera stains her purple sheets, and wrap it in a tissue shroud. Coupling is frenzy: decoupling is farce.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, 20th December)
• “He sighs through hairy nostrils.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, 23rd December)
• “A terminally ill bus hauls itself up Charing Cross Road.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, 23rd December)
• “Penhaligon hears his future, and it sounds like a bottle-bank heaved off the roof of a multi-story car park.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, 13th December)
• “Human beings ... are walking bundles of cravings. cravings for food, water, shelter, warmth; sex and companionship; status, a tribe to belong to; kicks, control, purpose; and so on, all the way down to chocolate-brown bathroom suites. Love is one way to satisfy some of these cravings. But love’s not just the drug: it's also the dealer. Love wants love in return ... Like drugs, the highs look divine, and I envy the users. But when the side effects kick in - jealousy, the rages, grief - I think, Count me out. Elizabethans equated romantic love with insanity. Buddhists view it as a brat throwing a tantrum at the picnic of the calm mind.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, 29th December)
• “I emerge from the cubicle like the Son of God rolling away the stone.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, 31st December)
• “Empires die, like all of us dance in the strobe lit. See how the light needs shadows. Look: wrinkles spread like mildew over our peachy sheen; beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat, varicose veins worm through plucked calves; torsos and breasts fatten and sag.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, 31st December)
• “While the wealthy are no more likely to be born stupid than the poor, a wealthy upbringing compounds stupidity while a hard-scrabble childhood dilutes it, if only for Darwinian reasons. This is why the elite need a prophylactic barrier of shitty state schools.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, New Year’s Day 1992)
• “I left my old accommodation a la Spiderman. And landed a la sack-of-Spudsman. My scout pack did the Leaping from Buildings to Escape Violent Pimps badge the week I was away.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, New Year’s Day 1992)
• “Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. love is greedier.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, New Year’s Day 1992)
• “Half of me wants to hit you with something metal ... So does the other half.” (Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, New Year’s Day 1992)
• “The Great Envoy couldn't cook his own testes in a Jacuzzi of lava.” (The Wedding Bash, 17th April)
• “To dub Echo Must Die ‘infantile, flatulent, ghastly drivel’ would be an insult to infants, to flatulence, and to ghasts alike.” (Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet, 1st May 2015)
• “Men marry women hoping they'll never change. Women marry men hoping they will. Both parties are disappointed.” (Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet, 11th March 2016)
• “As the Arabic proverb has it, not even God can change the past.” (Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet, 14 March 2016)
• “Whither humanity sans youth? Whither language sans neologisms?” (Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet, 14th March 2016)
• “A torch-through-a-sheet sun.” (Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet, 20th September 2019
• “ A poet inhabits a poetic tradition to write within, but no poet can singlehandedly create that tradition. Even if a poet sets out to invent a new poetics, he or she can only react against what's already there.” (Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet, 23rd September 2019)
• “Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well ... and beware of the verb ‘seem’: it's a textual mumble. And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below ... if you can't decide ... it's only a three.” (Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet, 23rd September 2019)
• “Your characters potted life histories. Whom or what your characters love and despise. Details on education, employment, finances, political affiliations, social class. fears. Skeletons in cupboards. Addictions. Biggest regret; believer, agnostic or atheist. How afraid of dying are they? ... Have they ever seen a corpse? A ghost? Sexuality. Glass half empty, glass half full, glass too small? Snazzy or scruffy dressers? .... Foul mouthed or profanity averse? ... When did they last cry? can they see another person's point of view?” (Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet, 23rd September 2019)
• “ Heresy is fissiparous.” (An Horologist’s Labyrinth, 5th April)
• “Titles, titles, they drag behind one like Marley's chains, Jacob’s not Bob’s.” (An Horologist’s Labyrinth, 7th April)
• “If you could reason with religious people there wouldn't be any religious people.” (Sheep’s Head, 27th October)
• “She could think of three laws of physics that Marinus had apparently broken but, given time, she was confident of coming up with a few more.” (Sheep’s Head, 27th October)
• “For one voyage to begin, another voyage must come to an end, sort of.” (Sheep’s Head, 27th October; final sentence)

Wonderful! July 2024; 613 pages

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

"A Pearl Amongst Oysters" by John Silverton

Married Chris encounters Fong from Hong Kong in a Chinese restaurant in Grimsby. Can true love overcome the obstacles to their relationship?

The novel is written in the first-person and past tense from the perspective of Chris. The plot adopts a classic four part structure with major turning points at the quarter, half and three-quarters marks. There’s plenty of incident and the pace is kept up right to the end; I certainly didn’t guess the final twist.

There were moments when the narrative flow was interrupted for one of the characters to impart some nuggets of background research, for example on the history of Chinese food in Britain and on graphology. Research can add verisimilitude to a fiction but it can also undermine a character when they take time out from the story to discourse on the history of chopsticks like a professor in a lecture hall.

My fundamental problem was with the protagonist. I found him obnoxious. He is determinedly misogynistic. He seems to see women purely in terms of whether they are physically beautiful or not. They are either Aphrodite or an ogress. He is horrible about women who get in his way. Cynthia is described as "the once handsome woman withering on the vine of life ... [with] the frigidly anaphrodisiac effect of a sexless maiden aunt." (Ch 15) who is "maliciously creating mischief because she thinks we are responsible for Robert's suicide" (Ch 16) Cynthia has just lost her husband. Chris’s wife is a "hysterical vixen" (Ch 17); Chris manages to sound peeved when “conjugal services of ironing and laundering and some meals were curtailed.” She has just discovered he is committing adultery.

Even the woman he professes to love is considered almost purely in physical terms. His first impression of Fong is her “thrilling mouth with lips enticingly proud asking to be kissed ... the landscape of her blouse” (Ch 1). When he hears of her marriage, is he sympathetic to the compromises she has been forced into? No. He has visions of “this randy taxi driver prising Fong open night on night, fucking her every which way, cackling with lust as he mauls and defiles her body beautiful.” (Ch 23) When he imagines her growing old the description is again primarily in physical terms (“all images too ghastly to be willingly conceived”; Ch 27) and only afterwards does he talk, briefly, in a single sentence, about her personality.

It is really difficult to believe Chris when he professes to love Fong, given that he deceives her repeatedly in the first half of the book. All he wants is sex. He repeatedly reminisces about his pre-marital lovers. He has sex at every opportunity, even after a cremation and again before the burial of (different) ashes.

He’s never sorry, except for himself. Nothing is ever his fault. He excuses his adultery: "I was lonely ... Most of the men I know have had affairs ... I've been faithful for six years of marriage. After the previous decade acting a Lothario I'm deserving some sort of credit ... Monogamy is an artefact of religious doctrine and cultural conditioning." (Ch 17) Both in his inner mind and in dialogue he blames his wife.

His shallowness extends to his career: “I admit to not being a natural salesman ... I was seduced by the regalia of swish suits and current model company cars and the prospect of a better life.” (Ch 1) 

It's not that I mind that the protagonist is misogynistic and unlikeable. I've used unpleasant anti-heroes myself, even as narrators. The problem comes with his superficiality. Because it is difficult to build a three-dimensional character if all the reader is told is the surface. It's possible. I think that Ivy Compton-Burnett achieves this in Parents and Children, using little more than (very formal) dialogue but she uses a third-person perspective. Having a non-empathetic narrator means, I think, that the only character who can take on solidity is the narrator themselves. And in this novel, while Chris does take on a life as a character, as you can see from my rant above, the others, even Fong, appear to be puppets. They didn’t feel real.

This is a shame because there were a lot of good things about this book, such as the incident-stuffed plot and the pacing. It’s entertaining. The settings are well-described and, as the selected quotes show, the author has a way with words. But the flimsiness of the characters made it hard for me to care what happened in the second half of the book.

Selected quotes:

• "Stooped raincoats with upturned collars and downturned heads scurried past, candidates to model for the last Lowry painting." (Ch 1)
• "A half-mug of cocoa had died waiting to be drunk, the thick skin its body bag." (Ch 2)
• "I rocked from foot to foot as if waiting for a bus on a cold day" (Ch 5): the protagonist's attempt to dance a waltz.
• "Motes from the bedding surfed on the sunrays streaming across the room." (Ch 6)
• "Her head was drooped like the bloom of a rain burdened flower." (Ch 16)

July 2024; 266 pages

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

"Pastors and masters" by Ivy Compton-Burnett

 Mr Herrick owns a boys' prep school but he wants to be remembered as a writer. This tiny novel is a social comedy explores the cloistered world of academics and teachers and lays bare its endemic pretensions and hypocrisies.

There are over a dozen important characters which is quite a lot for a book of fewer than a hundred pages. Sometimes but not always they are introduced. To help me, I constructed a cast list which I offer for the assistance of the reader:

• Mr Merry is a senior teacher at Mr Herrick's school, despite having no qualifications (other than he gets on very well with the boys and even better with the parents; Mr M is the perfect salesman for the school).
• Mrs Merry aka 'Mother' is his wife who runs the catering and teaches Scripture by reading the text book. 
• Miss Basden is matron; she teaches French and English; she's a very clever lady, far more widely read than any of the others, and quite militant in terms of women's rights.
• Mr Burgess: teaches the senior boys
• Nicholas Herrick, aged 70, is the owner of the school, putting in a ten minute appearance every day to read prayers. He used to be a university don. He desperately wants to be a novelist so that he can say that he has done something with his life but so far has only been able to be a critic.
• Emily Herrick is Nick's sister and lives with him. She thinks herself better than those of a lower social class.
• Richard (Dickie) Bumpus is a university don who once wrote a book but "caused a manuscript to be put into the grave of a friend" (Ch 2); he's now trying to write a second (or is it to rewrite the first?). He is witty and sarcastic with one-liners highlighting the daft things others say.
• William Masson is another university don. 
• Revd Peter Fletcher, who is invited to spread at Prize Day, is about to retire. He has old-fashioned views about women.
• Mrs Theresa Fletcher is his wife.
• Miss Lydia Fletcher, Peter's sister, lives with them and, having a private income, is charitable
• Revd Francis Fletcher is Peter's nephew
• Mr Bentley, twice a widower, is the father of two boys at the school, John and Harry, and a daughter Delia.

It's written, as is typical of ICB novels, mostly in quite formal dialogue (for example: "Shouldn't he not have written?"; Ch 2 and "Then I may betake myself with a clear conscience to the solid pursuits which must be my portion, I fear"; Ch 6), almost like a playscript. Some people speak their mind but others hide, using euphemisms such as 'nice' and omissions and downright distortions. "How good we all are at talking without ever saying anything we think!" one of the characters exclaims in the final chapter. What this means is that the reader must pay close and careful attention to exactly what is said. It isn't easy and I'm not confident I understood all the subtleties of plot, let alone the nuances of character. It is clear that this technique was deliberate so that ICB was able to explore issues that were probably tabu in 1925 within her social circle, if not in the wider literary world. Here are some examples:

• She shows sympathy with the unemployed: "The man has struggled to get work until he is hopeless, just to get work, just that, poor soul!" (Ch 3) 
• She can be cutting about the social classes. There is a sardonic edge when she considers the relative positions of Mr Herrick who profits from the school despite only putting in a daily ten-minute appearance and Mr Merry and his team who actually do the work: the Herricks find the sight of Merry doing his duty upsets them: "The sight of duty does make one shiver ... The actual doing of it would kill one, I think." (Ch 2) Emily in particular seems to think she is doing Mr Merry a favour in employing him and, when she discovers that he has a Christian name, says: "How simply and kindly of him it seems to have one!" (Ch 7) Emily also says: "It must be so dreadful to be a servant ... and do the important work of the world. That sort of work, so ill paid and degrading." (Ch 7)
• There is the suggestion that William Masson is gay. Masson and Bumpus "had meant romance for each other in youth." (Ch 2) Emily says of Masson that he wants to marry her "as much as he wants to marry anyone. Anyone who is a woman. And that is not very much." (Ch 3) But then she also suggests that she is a lesbian: "I might tell you it is that way with me too." (Ch 3)
• There are comments about god that could be seen as blasphemous. "He always seems to me a pathetic figure, friendless and childless and set up alone in a miserable way. ... And he had such a personality ... Such a superior, vindictive and over-indulgent one. He is one of the best drawn characters in fiction." (Ch 2) 
• Miss Basden fights for the rights of women. She points out that "women often equal and surpass men in literary achievement" (Ch 7) When Francis says that "it is my inclination to put women on a plane of their own, and to regard them as coming down from it, when they take upon themselves the things that might have been held fitter for men" she responds: "There is the usual kind of contempt in that sentimental exaltation of women." (Ch 7) 

Selected quotes:

• "Mrs Basden stepped forward and quickly cut the string, in the manner of one tying gunpowder to a friend at the stake." (Ch 1)
• "If a book is a whole in itself, why is its length any matter?" (Ch 2)
• "His peculiar smile, in which he stretched his lips without parting them, so that his teeth were not displayed." (Ch 3)
• "We miss what we give most to, the most." (Ch 3)
• "Some people never know how nice it is to help ... We ought to be sorry for them. Because it is so nice. It is so nice." (Ch 3)

The characters are created through their styles of speaking as well as what they say. Out of their own mouths they are condemned and their world is condemned but the reader has to follow subtle clues and hints and nuances to spot the condemnation. This means that it is hard work to read but in the end it is very worthwhile.

July 2024; 96 pages

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

"Invitation to the Waltz" by Rosamund Lehmann

A coming-of-age novel about a romantic young girl going to her first ball.

Seventeen-year-old Olivia is the younger daughter of a well-to-do middle-class family in the depths of the English countryside shortly after the end of the First World War. She has been invited to her first dance at the nearby stately home. The first half of this novel explores her preparations for this coming-of-age event, her hopes and her dreams; the second half chronicles the big night itself.

There's not really any plot. Instead, we experience Olivia's inner monologue in an almost stream of consciousness way as she encounters a strong of eccentric characters including poor relative Uncle Oswald, name-calling village children, a lady who makes dresses (poorly), a potentially lascivious colonel, a wannabe curate and, at the dance itself, a self-obsessed radical poet, a blinded ex-soldier, another lascivious old man, and the man of the house with whom she discusses literature. It's almost a picaresque. Meantime her sister falls in love.

The characterisation of the protagonist, Olivia, seen from inside, is faultless; despite the fact that the timeline is compressed into just over a week, her character learns and develops. The elder sister, Kate, is a more mature counterpoint. Most of the other characters are eccentric caricatures, unimportant in themselves, but each one teaches Olivia something about life.

It is set firmly in its social class, a world of big houses run by servants (one described as having "the flat strong heels of service"; 3.15), of mostly subservient villagers, and of the patronage of genteel persons less fortunate than oneself. Olivia has a moment of realisation about the plight of the woman in the village who makes dresses for her: "For the first time, Mrs Robinson's life rose up objectively and faced her. Olivia saw it with dismay, with guilt. She made frocks for other girls to dance in." (1.3) On the other hand the tribe of sweep's children are experienced as if they are from another species: "Their eyes were sharp, bright, hard, rats' eyes above high sharp cheekbones, their lips long, thin and flat, their skulls narrowed and curiously knobbed. They didn't look like other people's children. They had hardly any hair; and undersized frames with square high shoulders, almost like hunchbacks, and frail legs." (1.5) But there is no thought at the ball that all these people are fundamentally parasites, living on the backs of those who labour on the land they own.

The prose is beautiful. The social setting and the writing style reminded me strongly of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway which was published seven years earlier so may well have been an influence. Another story with a similar heroine, set in the world of genteel impoverishment (but much funnier) is Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. 

Selected quotes:

• "She felt the quiver of the warm sun-drained air like the swim and beat of pulses in soft nervous agitation. Roses and leaves breathed in the window; and the evening bird voices seemed to circle with exultant serenity down the sky." (1.2) Beautiful? Or over-ornamented, trying too hard? I rather like evening as 'sun-drained' but I am not sure if pulses 'swim' or leaves 'breathe'.
• "Bournemouth was a gay place in those days. I dare say it still is." (1.2)
• "She wouldn't get a husband; she hadn't a chance now. She was thirty. Letting I dare not wait upon I would, youth had gone by." (1.3) In Shakespeare's Macbeth, Lady M says to the eponymous antihero "Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'. Like the poor cat i' the adage?" (Act One Scene 7) in order to encourage him to commit murder and treason.
• "Custom could never stale the Brighton gentleman" (1.3) Hard on the heels of one Shakespearean quote comes another, this time from Antony and Cleopatra, in which Enobarbus, describing Cleopatra, says: "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety"
• "He died of softening. I'm sorry for anyone who has to nurse softening. Dreadful - so disgusting." (1.3)
• "There in the distance was Mrs Wells-Straker, widow of widows, flowing, streaming towards the church in all her crepe." (1.4)
• "The camel face of Mr Blenskinsop (university coach), his mingling of subacidity, sawdust wit and cowering defensive bachelor ceremony." (1.4)
• "Boys and girls had dropped ink on the faded carpet, puppies had contributed yellowish maps." (1.9)
• "It was a certain sign of growing up that one no longer loved the snow; no longer wished to rush out and stamp in it and throw it about." (1.10)
• "He was not exactly ugly, they thought; but one might be alone with him on a desert island for ten years without ever being able to bear to kiss him." (2.1)
• "Fumble about a bit, I expect - you know, feel your muscle and mess about with your hands pretending he's a fortune-teller, and meaure how tall you were against him - that sort of feeble pawing. It's a sort of disease old men get." (3.14) Almost every old man in this novel, as seen through a young girl's eyes, is inappropriate and lascivious.
• "Everything's going to begin. A hare sitting up in the grass took fright, darting ahead of her into the ploughed land. The rooks flew up in a swirl from the furrows. All the landscape as far as the horizon seemed to begin to move. Wind was chasing cloud, and sun flew behind them. A winged gigantic runner with a torch was running from a great distance to meet her, swooping over the low hills, skimming from them veil after veil of shadow, touching them to instant ethereal shapes of light. On it came, over ploughed field and fallow. The rooks flashed sharply, the hare and his shadow swerved in sudden sunlight. In a moment it would be everywhere. Here it was. She ran into it." (3.25; last sentences).

July 2024; 232 pages

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