"Ethan Frome" by Edith Wharton

This tiny little novel feels a bit like a miniature Wuthering Heights, without the ghosts and the romantic hero. It is set on an isolated farm in a wintry New England, as bleak and occasionally beautiful as the Yorkshire moors. The eponymous hero is trapped with a demanding invalid wife and becomes obsessed with the vivacious poor relation who lives with them. Will Ethan get a second chance at happiness? 

It's a classic novel of despair. The emotions are intensified by the claustrophobic settings and the fact that the inarticulate protagonist cannot voice his desires. And it has a stupendous twist at the end. 

It’s a story in a story. The unnamed, first-person narrator of the frame confesses to constructing “this vision of his story”. The main narrative is written in the third-person from Ethan's perspective; his is the only interior monologue we have access to.

One of the one-star reviews on goodreads describes the characters as shallow. It's a valid point. There are three main characters:

• Ethan is a classic tragic hero. Aristotle, in his Poetics insists that a tragedy must evoke both pity and fear which means that the reader must, to some extent, empathise with the tragic hero and I could certainly put myself in Ethan's place. Schreiber in chapter 8 of his Introduction to Literary Criticism, asserts that the hero must “contribute to his own downfall” but only by making a mistake of judgement rather than being morally unsound. This is also true, at least if you accept the contemporary morality in which divorce was possible. Ethan’s tragic flaw is that he has glimpsed a better world, so like Adam and Eve after they had tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge, he cannot remain content on his unproductive farm and in his loveless marriage. Aristotle would have approved of what he called peripeteia and we would call the twist at the end: it meets his criteria of both being unexpected and yet inevitable. 
• But if Ethan is an interesting and complex character, Zeena is as flat as they come, a stereotyped old shrew. Beautifully written but one dimensional. A classic villain in the sense that most plots are driven by the baddie's nefarious schemes. Whether you believe or not in Zeena's character arc is up to you. I accept that it is plausible. Nevertheless, Zeena is a car with only two gears: fast forward and reverse.
• Mattie is even more sketchily drawn. She's the love interest, pretty and vivacious and, for some reason, head over heels in love with Ethan, despite the fact that when we first see her she is flirting with Dennis Eady (but she can't have any interest in him because that would represent an escape route and she has to be trapped).

As for the central symbolism of the pickle dish, even the Guardian describes that as overly portentous. It was a wedding present for Zeena, ergo a symbol of her marriage. But she hid it away and never used it as if to symbolise her refusal to enter fully into her marriage (I presume that Ethan and her don’t have sex which is why they have no kids). It is broken (by the cat) immediately after Ethan and Mattie touch hands while eating together while Zeena is away from home, symbolising how their adultery (in their hearts if not in actuality) shatters the Frome marriage. There’s even a hint of ‘while the cat’s away the mice will play’!

There are some moments of stunning description, the plot is an absolute classic and the despair of Ethan's marriage is wonderfully portrayed. But I would have preferred more time spent on the characters.

Selected quotes

• “The storms of February had pitched their white tents about the devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to their support.” (Prologue)
• “The Frome farm was always ‘bout as bare’s a milkpan when the cat's been round.” (Prologue)
• “His father got a kick, out haying, and went soft in the brain, and gave away money like Bible texts afore he died.” (Prologue)
• “In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.” (Ch 1)
• “His father's death ... had put a premature end to Ethan's studies; but though they had not gone far enough to be of much practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.” (Ch 1)
• “‘We never got away - how should you?’ seemed to be written on every headstone.” (Ch 2)
• “His dread was so strong that, man-like, he sought to postpone certainty.” (Ch 2) Not sure about the 'man-like'. Unless it means 'human-like'. 

Wharton also wrote The Age of Innocence

August 2025; 181 pages

First published by Charles Scribner's Sons in the USA in 1911

My Penguin paperback was issued in 1987

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

Potted plot: spoiler alert

Ethan wanted to go to college and learn stuff but his father’s illness brought him back to manage the farm. After his father died, his mum became ill and he brought in Zenobia to help nurse her; subsequently he married her. But the marriage was a disaster. Zeena took the ‘invalid’ route forever complaining that she is ill. So they bring Mattie, a poor relation of Zeena’s, to help around the house for her board and lodging. Ethan, disappointed in marriage, falls in love with Mattie and she with him (although the love is unconsummated and inarticulate). Zeenie, suspecting this liaison, announces she is now so ill that they will have to bring in a hired girl to replace Mattie. Ethan has to take Mattie to the station but instead they decide to go skiing, making a suicide pact to deliberately steer into a tree to kill themselves. But they only injure themselves, Mattie being permanently crippled. They return to the farm where Zeena resumes the role of carer, no longer having time to invent her own illnesses. Ethan lives with these two women in a loveless, mostly silent and resentful, triangle of resentment.

"An Introduction to Literary Criticism" by S M Schreiber

Written as a series of lectures to sixth formers seeking to go to Oxbridge, this is old school literary criticism. It starts by insisting that literary creations should be compared to a canon of classics that have stood the test of time which immediately creates a prejudice against modern literature. It goes on to consider poetry and why poets write in verse (“piece of writing in which the syllables are so arranged as to produce a recurring rhythm.”; Ch 2) and how “the perfect union of sound and sense” (Ch 3) is achieved using imagery.

Needless to say, I was spitting feathers through most of this book. Repeatedly ageist, he managed at least once to be unthinkingly racist as well. Furthermore, he regularly made statements which I thought false. Nevertheless, I persisted, because he obviously knew the technical aspects of eg poetry and playwriting and he made a number of good points.

For example, he asks why we enjoy watching tragic drama, which often contains "that which would cause us unmixed pain in real life" (Ch 4), and suggests that the only way a dramatist can get away with this is by avoiding realism. But when he goes on to propose that this is why all great tragedy is written in verse, my eyebrows started to life. He also claims that tragic heroes must “tower above common humanity” so Hedda Gabler is too petty and limited to "move us to the depths of our being" (Ch 4). At this point I parted company with Schreiber.

He also suggests that the key difference between comedy and tragedy is that while tragedy makes us feel, comedy engages the head rather than the heart. Because it we had any empathy at all we wouldn't laugh at Malvolio: “the painful humiliation of a rebuffed social climber". (Ch 5) The only way in which we can laugh at people we also pity (he gives the example of Bottom) is if the setting is “the real world with the evil left out.” (Ch 5) That made me think! For example, Steinbeck's Cannery Row is funny and tender but a friend recently criticised it because, as he said, all the whores have hearts of gold and Mack isn't a nasty piece of work which is unrealistic. So I think Schreiber might have a point here. I'm not so sure when he goes on to say that this makes The Merchant of Venice a failure as a comedy because Shakespeare was seduced into making Shylock a character with depth and suffering rather than a sawdust villain. But on the other hand this justifies Peter Saccio (in a lecture in The Great Courses: 'William Shakespeare Comedies, Histories and Tragedies': https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/william-shakespeare-comedies-histories-and-tragedies) in his assertion that Merchant is fundamentally a fairy tale, ie not a real world or else a "real world with the evil left out" in Schreiber's phrase.

Schreiber goes on to consider the difference between classical and romantic in chapter 6, suggesting that the key difference is that classic literature seeks perfection within limits while the romantic seeks to transcend boundaries by rejecting rules.

Finally he considers the novel. He defines the difference between the traditional novel and the modern novel as the former's fundamental concern to tell a story. But he also distinguishes between good and bad in novels as whether, in the end, "it enriches us" or leads to “nothing but debilitation”: “The ultimate test of the quality of a novel lies, not in its ‘readability’, essential though this is, nor in a well-constructed plot, nor in its literary style, but simply and solely in the degree of truth which it embodies ... in the characters themselves, then in the picture of the world in which they are placed, and, finally, in the novelist’s sense of values” (Ch 7) I started spitting again. This seems to suggest that a trashy thriller in which the goodies triumph is a better novel that a work of art which leaves the reader questioning. I wasn't surprised that all his 'good' novels are from long ago. He particularly adores Jane Austen.

He finishes with notes on Aristotle's Poetics.

I'm glad I read it. It was easy to read and had some very interesting points, even those that I disputed. 

August 2025; 196 pages

First published by Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press in 1965

My edition was issued in 1969

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

"Basilisk" by Matt Wixey

Purporting to have been sent as an attachment to an anonymised email, the narrative is interspersed with comments from 'Holly Soames' who appears to be a law enforcement officer. The main story, told by protagonist Alex Webster, describes how she and her friend and colleague Jay Morton, both pentesters (computer hackers who are hired to seek out the vulnerabilities in a computer system in order that the hiring company can put safeguards into place), start playing a computer game in which they have to answer puzzles set by a shadowy character called The Helmsman; each puzzle solved is rewarded with a chapter of The Helmsman Texts - part autobiography, part philosophical treatise - the final chapter of which will be the basilisk, a cognitive hack which may drive a person insane.

The Helmsman Texts interrupt the novel narrative. To some extent it feels as if the purpose of the book was to present the philosophy in a way that a reader of horror, or speculative fiction, would tolerate. The first chapter considered Plato's Allegory of the Cave, the second described a cockroach invasion and discussed the possibilities of subliminal influencing, the fourth suggested that things such as religion and language could be considered a virus and the fifth promises the basilisk. We are never given the final chapter. The Texts include email chains, bibliographies, and playlets; the author has certainly been innovative. There's even a cryptic crossword (as a connoisseur I was a little disappointed in this). 

It's fundamentally an attempt to update the horror novel (“A long slow river leading to Kurtz.”; Ch 9) to the world of the internet. This was, for me, where it was weakest. The opposition, referred to only by a blanked out piece of text, were strange people with huge fixed smiles, half religious missionaries, half 'Men in black' clones. Their fundamental mission is for people to be happy which meant persuading them to stop playing the Helmsman's game, if necessary by killing them. Of course Alex and Jay, addicted to curiosity - rather like the teenagers in a horror film who, one by one, go down into the cellar - ignore the warnings. Much is made of the allegory of Eve plucking the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

The epigram is "ceci n'est pas un livre", French for 'this is not a book', a play on the famous Magritte painting of a pipe with the caption 'ceci n'est pas une pipe'. Presumably this is an example of the type of cognitive hack mentioned in the Helmsman Texts; the idea that if you can subvert a person's understanding of reality, you will drive them mad.

A book for someone who likes puzzles. Plot and style are much more important than character. It reminded me very much of another book which it quotes several times: Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hoftstadter.

I learned a great deal about hacking, including too many initials. I also realised, I think, why the Helmsman was called the Helmsman, something neither Jay not Alex seemed to fathom. The ancient Greek word for helmsman, or navigator, is κυβερνήτης, transliterated as kŭbernḗtēs, from which we derive the word 'cyber', cybernetics having been originally a science studying systems and their control.

Selected quotes:

• “On learning that we are being fucked, three questions present themselves: What am I being fucked by? Who is responsible for the fucking? And can I ameliorate the situation so that I am fucked as minimally as possible, and ideally not at all.” (Ch 1)
• “To be a hacker is to dance to hidden tunes ... It is to rewrite the song and repurpose the instruments. make a piano sound like a guitar; disguise a vuvuzela as a clarinet to get it past security; redesign a flute so that it produces the flatulent bellow of a tuba. All because we can.” (Ch 2)
• “There is precious little good fiction which concerns itself with hacking.” (Ch 4)
• “A significant amount of human effort ... is spent attempting to control the minds of others.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 3)
• “The argument that religion is a virus has been made before ... It is often hereditary, but also transmitted through friends and acquaintances. It causes marked and bizarre changes in behaviour, including, but not limited to: changes in diet; an inability to consider certain things rationally; a sometimes fanatical adherence to arbitrary codes of morality; the mutilation of children's genitals; an irrational hatred of people infected by a slightly different strain; and, in its most extreme forms, violence, murder, and suicide.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 3)
• “Convincing a person to cause significant harm to themselves or others is difficult ... Cassius uses astroturfing to convince Brutus to assassinate Caesar .... Lady Macbeth plays to Macbeth’s ambition to persuade him to kill Duncan ... Satan uses ‘perswasive words, impegn’d with Reason’ to convince Eve to consume the fruit of the tree of knowledge.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 3)
• “Human behaviour can be drastically altered as a consequence of ingesting new knowledge.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 3)
• “I find myself thinking whether there are ever glitches in reality, strange loops that repeat like records skipping forever. Little pockets of time that replay constantly while the world moves around them.” (Ch 7)
• “I've often thought that Otto is the human equivalent of vanilla - that if you cut him he would bleed beige, and it would congeal to look and smell like cold Ready Brek.” (Ch 7)
• “If we were to be arrested for our thoughtcrimes the overwhelming majority of the human race would be in handcuffs.” (Ch 7)
• “Thought experiments ... have changed the world, particularly in the field of physics (Einstein chasing a beam of light; Newton’s cannonball, etc)" (The Helmsman Texts chapter 4)
• “How we all fall! Slowly and then all at once!” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 5)
• “The world is a cacophony of noise, and deep underneath the waves is the occasional signal. Only a few penetrate. The world screams in your face, all the time, desperate for your attention and love!! Most of the time we give our attention to the things that scream the loudest.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 5)

August 2025; 

Published in July 2025 by Titan Books, London

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

"Falling Animals" by Sheila Armstrong

 A man is found dead on a beach near a small town in Ireland. He seems to have died of natural causes; he's riddled with cancer. No-one knows who he is: there are no identifying papers, even the labels have been cut from his clothes. 

The narrative works towards a solution to this mystery by telling the stories of the members of the community, from their perspective but in the third person. It is like a collage or a mosaic. Some of the stories interlink but, in the end, it is up to the reader to assemble them to see the whole picture. It's a clever device which reminded me of The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan, another book set in the fallout from the Irish financial crash of 2008. But I am encountering so many collage-style narratives that I have decided to include them in a page on this blog. 

Another dimension to this mystery is the feeling that a number of the narrators have of some supernatural presence on board the boat.

The title comes from a memorial built to commemorate those who have died at sea, and those who have lived at sea but died elsewhere, such as the body on the beach. A plaque on the memorial says: “For those fallen at sea and those still falling.” (3: the dead)

The final section is entitled 'the dead' in what I presume is a homage to James Joyce whose final story in Dubliners is also entitled The Dead.

There are some wonderfully lyrical descriptions, such as “The sunsets smear themselves across the sky and drown themselves in the temperamental sea.” (2: the artist) 

Selected quotes:

• “Out over the deep water, the dawn light is stretched out and thin ... Further out, the tent pole of a lighthouse props up the sky.” (1: the collector)
• “There are leapers and creepers, he once told her: those who get it over with in one go, and those that creep into the water, step by step, letting each part of their body adjust.” (1: the witness)
• “There will be another argument between them this evening, as inevitable as the rising sun, and like the sunlight, it will touch on everything but move nothing.” (1: the doctor)
• “There was something about him, as if the landscape was there to frame him instead of the other way around.” (1: the son)
• “At the edge of the village, land meets air meets sea, and a handful of buildings shy away from the cliffside to cradle a half moon of grass.” (2: the cook)
• “It's silhouettes that are unique - the shadow the person casts, what they look like behind the window, the shape they make against the backdrop of the landscape.” (2: the artist)
• “Even in an industry where people are treated as things, there are some who manage to treat them as less than that.” (3: the priest)
• “She is as proud as a cat and as untidy as a dog.” (3: the daughter)
• “We watch the others who come now, hidden away in too-small boats, seeking refuge. They pay dearly for hope, but bodies are money and money is bodies; this has always been the way of it.” (3: the dead)

August 2025; 226 pages

First published in GB by Bloomsbury in 2023

My paperback edition issued in 2024

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

Spoiler alert: The story told section by section

Part One:

• the collector describes a man retrieving for incineration the carcase of a seal from the beach.
• the witness is Oona, who discovers the body and later talks about it in the bar.
• the doctor, the pathologist, who is puzzled by why the man died.
• the son is Mitchell, an American living in the village with his mother who has MS. He saw the man, still alive, sitting on the beach.
• the driver, Darragh, drove the bus on which the man arrived at the village. He remembers he had a purple backpack.
• the wanderer is Yousef who found the backpack in a bin and took it.

Part Two:

• the seaman is a Filipino crew member on the boat that was shipwrecked in the bay.
• the cook was galley chef of the wrecked ship. She stayed in the village to run the cafe. 
• the firestarter, Donal, went out the the wrecked boat and lit a camp-fire. This ignited the remaining fuel and the wreck burned.
• the diver, Robert, has a panic attack swimming down the the wreck.
• the artist is Mitchell's mum. She has MS but is trying to paint what she thought she saw creeping to shore as the wreck burned. She prmoises to paint the cook's memory of her dead daughter.
• the barman is Matias. His father expelled him from his home in Colombia because he was gay and he wandered the world. An inheritance meant that he could buy the bat and he hopes to marry his live-in boyfriend Donal.

Part Three:

• the widow is a Polish madwoman who claims that the man whose body was found was her husband. He wasn't.
• the guard has worked on this case for years. He takes Donal's confession of starting the fire but rips it up.
• the priest works at the Seaman's Mission. He took confession from the man whose body was discovered.
• the fallen. Gunnar worked on the ship when it was bought by Iceland from the Russians to patrol their waters during the Cod War. He died trying to stop the anchor chain from rattling while the man whose body was found looked on, unable to help.
• the daughter is the doctor's daughter. She fancies Mitchell.
• the dead are those on the memorial.

"All the Colours of the Dark" by Chris Whitaker

 I was hooked from paragraph two, when we are told that protagonist Patch "lay dying in the woodland" which was a little (= massively) misleading because he survives. Nevertheless, I was hooked.

I fell for the will-they-won't-they romance between two kids growing up together in small town America. One-eyed Patch wants to be a pirate. Saint, being raised by her grandmother, wants to be his friend. So when he encounters posh Misty, another kid in their year at school, being abducted, and fights for her, and gets stabbed, and then himself kidnapped and imprisoned in a dark cellar, Saint turns detective to find where he is. But after she rescues him, his head is full of the girl who was in the cellar with him and he can't rest, not even as an adult, until he finds her. 

The path of true love never did run smooth.

I gobbled the pages. At times it was very hard to read because I feared something dreadful would happen. I haven't felt so involved in a character since Chris Whitaker's Duchess in We Begin at the End and even Duchess wasn't as heartbreaking. Whitaker put me through the wringer with this book. I couldn't consume it all at once, although I wanted to, because it is 576 pages, but I wanted to. I found it difficult to sleep because I was so worried for fictional characters. Whitaker is a magician.

And afterwards?

The author is a conjurer who misdirected my attention so I didn't focus on the sheer implausibility of the story he is telling. In many ways, this is the cliched small-town America of the cosy movies. Sammy, the town drunk (and art gallery owner and serial adulterer) has a heart of gold and bankrolls Patch on his mission to discover all the lost girls of America and reunite them (or their bodies) with their grieving loved ones. Patch also becomes a bank robber (a sort of pirate) and can't be captured until Saint joins the FBI. A one-night stand makes Patch a parent, a fact he only discovers after serving time. And, most strange, the friendly 'I'll look after everyone' Chief of Police for this little community participates in a miscarriage of justice involving a victim, a friend of his, who refuses to speak on his own behalf and who doesn't tell his best friend a crucial secret until he is on death row. In hindsight, the whole plot is ridiculous but Whitaker is so good at doing what he does that I didn't notice until afterwards.

By the way, Patch doesn't need to become a bank robber because he is such as supremely talented artist that his paintings are in demand with collectors but he refuses to sell them because they are paintings of abducted girls and he'd rather get a criminal record. He scarcely needs to eat or sleep. Everyone adores him.

By the way, Saint is the only law enforcement officer who can make sense of the cryptic messages encoded in what the girl in the cellar, who is incredibly knowledgeable, said to Patch which he has remembered word-for-word and which has enabled him to paint his pictures so they are the very spit of what has been described.

But I loved it.

Part of his technique with which he spun the web that captivated me is to hardly ever tell the reader anything. Instead the narrative is made of fragmentary gnomic sayings which flash like broken diamonds and make the reader struggle to piece together what the hell is going on. It's very clever. The reader never knows what crucial pieces of evidence say. Even after the denouement, it is not possible to be really certain. It is a masterclass in telling a story by what is not said.

And, of course, he makes you fall in love with the characters from the very start.

Selected quotes:

• “He stole only what he needed and not ever what he wanted.” (Ch 8)
• “A girl who looked to books for answers to questions that would never be asked of her.” (Ch 17)
• “Saint wanted to ask what it was like, to lose the thing that defined you. But perhaps she knew: it left you someone else. A stranger you had no choice but to tolerate, and see each day and feel and fear.” (Ch 28)
• “Death when it came was not light or confession, forgiveness or peace or fire. It was that cold piece of time before you were born, that glance into history books that told you the world went on before and would go on again, no matter who was there to witness it.” (Ch 39)
• “At ten years old he realized that people were born whole, and that the bad things peeled layers from the person you once were, thinning compassion and empathy and the ability to construct a future.” (Ch 39)
• “People talk about falling in love like a fall is ever a good thing.” (Ch 40)
• “God is a first call and a last resort, from christening to deathbed. In between is where faith is tested. The mundanity. Anyone can drop to their knees when they're facing crisis, but doing it when everything is steady ...” (Ch 96)

August 2025; 576 pages

It was first published by Orion in 2024.

My paperback edition was issued in 2025.

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

"Vernon Subutex Three" by Virginie Despentes

In this final volume of the epic trilogy, the parallels between Vernon and Jesus become more explicit as Dopalet seeks revenge for the attack upon him.

Vernon is the DJ for a series of 'Convergences' (dance-festivals) organised by his disciples in which the participants experience mystical revelations. But wino Charles has died and his last wish is to leave half his lottery win to Vernon and his followers. The prospect of money causes dissension and accusations and Vernon runs off in anger. Meanwhile Alex Bleach's first manager Max has tracked down Celeste, one of the girls responsible for the attack on Dopalet, who takes his revenge. The whole story is heading for inevitable tragedy. But of course there's a twist in the tail.

There's a little more narrative in this volume compared with the first but the style is still the same: we head-hop and each of the interior monologues is some sort of rant. The energy is unabated but the sense of doom pervades the final chapters. It's almost perfect.

Except for the very last chapter of all, which swirls into the future to provide a sci-fi dimension which I felt totally unnecessary. 

Nevertheless, this is a wonderful final act in a triptych masterpiece.

Selected quotes:

• “This is one of the things that happens on nights when there is a convergence ... A gentle, luminous confusion that makes you want to take time and keep silent. Epidermises lose their boundaries, everybody becomes every body; it is a boundless intimacy.” (p 17)
• “You leave a space for imagination. Kind of like storytelling by leaving gaps.” (p 24)
• “For old Charles, the cold hard truth of humanity was savagery. It was simply a matter of knowing who had the right to be cruel to whom. Everything else ... was poetry - a way of masking the stench of the corpse that follows man wherever he goes.” (p 36)
• “Good things come to an end, usually prematurely.” (p 36)
• “When it came to talking shit, he could open his big gob not once but several times a day.” (p 41)
• “It's amazing how enormous things seem when you’re expected to put them in your mouth. ... When girls give blowjobs, do they feel like they're sucking off the Empire State Building?” (p 55)
• “Human beings were morons. You really had to be two clowns short of a circus to worship a god that could create such a shower of shits. Liars thieves poseurs and predators.” (p 58)
• “The poor invariably resent the rich for succeeding where they have failed. There you have it. It's all about jealousy.” (p 74)
• “No one is solid. ... That is the hardest thing to learn. That we are tenants of a situation, not landlords.” (p 96)
• “Can someone explain to him why clothing manufacturers sew on labels so that they itch around the waist?” (p 119)
• “He loves the heat because it ... poses serious fashion problems: ridiculous hats, hideous sunglasses, short shorts, repulsive footwear.” (p 121)
• “When he was young, common people would walk along the marinas and stop to gaze at rich people's yachts. They were symbols of travel, of the exotic, of true luxury. These days the poor don't stop and stare anymore. Wealth is something they experience like a slap in the face.” (p 121)
• “The left wing refuses to admit that Christians and Muslims can't live together for long without killing each other. That said, deep down, there is a fundamental agreement: exclude the impure, the unclean, prevent them from expressing themselves. Create a category of massacrables. The frontiers might shift but the attitude of the border guards remains the same. You get out. I don't want that sort of thing in my country. The only variable is who gets put in the camps. Who is torturable, exterminable. Who deserves to be excluded.” (p 124)
• “That's the only difference between the sociopath and and the political militant - the sociopath doesn't give a shit about being on the side of the just. He just kills without the foreplay, without wasting time turning his victim into a monster.” (p 124)
• “Fifty years ago, the church should have built cathedrals in the middle of every deprived banlieu. And sent out their best preachers. It wouldn't matter if they cuddled a few choir boys as long as they understood their mission. To help those most in need. To occupy the territory. Instead of which ... the dumb fucking Christians congregated in rich neighbourhoods so they could celebrate the mass in Latin.” (p 125)
• “The root of the problem is that my worth as a white guy is your worthlessness as raghead. My high life makes you lowlife.” (p 128)
• “You’re either the butcher or the cattle.” (p 198)
• “Where men are concerned, ‘to desire’ is conjugated in the imperative.” (p 245)
• “Paris has become a dystopian piece of concept art, a gallery of atrocities, a daily display of all the things man can deny his neighbour.” (p 278)
• “He had that delicate politeness of people who know that evil truly exists.” (p 293)
• “The grenades the AK-47 the bullets. Manufactured objects.... They are churned out in factories for precisely this purpose. To kill dismember burn. ... We know what they will be used for. ... A grenade does exactly what it is supposed to do. Like an AK-47. Like the gun. The only variant in the equation is: did you know the people before they became corpses?” (p 353)

August 2025; 362 pages

First published in Paris by Grasset & Fasquelle in 2017
My English translation by Frank Wynne issued in paperback in the UK by Maclehose Press in 2021

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

Spoiler alert: Chapter by chapter detailed synopsis.

• Vernon has toothache and travels back to Paris for dental work. He stays with Kiko who has plans for writing Vernon's story: “I'm thinking about hiring a female novelist, someone talented enough to knock it into shape, but not too successful, otherwise she’ll do what the fuck she likes and three months down the road she'll be busting our balls with ideas we don't want to listen to.” (p 26) Metafiction!
• Charles is dead. His wife, Vero, also an alcoholic, has discovered that he has left her his lottery win with instructions to share half with Vernon.
• Vernon goes to see Charles, discovers he is dead and learns from Vero about the money.
• Dopalet is having a tattooist cover up the words that Celeste and Aicha tattooed on his back. He wants revenge.
• Vernon returns to the camp, bringing Vero with him.
• Stephanie, a new character, has met Marie-Ange, Sylvie and Penelope at a Convergence. She is going to Barcelona with them for a break; her ex-husband Max is tagging along.
• Xavier, Marie-Ange's husband, is with the girls in Barcelona. 
• Max, who was Alex Bleach's first manager, is trying to pump Xavier for information about the Convergences. Then, by chance, Xavier meets Celeste.
• Pamela, tired of doing the admin for the group, challenges Vernon and asks if he intends to keep the lottery money for himself.
• Vernon, angry and ashamed for his disciples, leaves the camp and, with girlfriend Mariana, goes on tour doing DJ sets.
• In Paris, Sylvie and Emile are going to a Madonna concert in the wake of the Bataclan terrorist attacks. Sylvie has lost all her money.
• Dopalet is having a breakdown. He is unable to work and spends all his time watching zombie movies. Max contacts him and tells him he knows about “Bleach’s confession. Subutex. Celeste. Aicha. The Hyena.”
• Vernon, DJing in Belfast, meets Max and realises that he knows too much. He sends a warning message to The Hyena.
• Aicha is hiding out as an au pair in Germany. She is having an affair with the husband of the family. The Hyena turns up, tells her that her cover may have been blown, and takes her away.
• Celeste is in Barcelona. The Hyena stashed her in Zaragoza but she grew bored so ran away to Barcelona. She works as a sous-chef and lives in a house-share. She has started tattooing again and has made an facebook page to advertise. Some of her previous friends have ‘liked’ it. A man has asked her to tattoo a wolf on his shoulder. He has asked that she comes to his home.
• Max was the man who arranged the tattoo. He took Celeste to a remote house. There things got out of hand. He had hired two thugs who beat Celeste to a pulp and then raped her. She is then put into the cellar and handcuffed to the bed. Dopalet arrives and arranges for one of the thugs, Franck, to inject Celeste with an OD and to dump her body.
• The Hyena has tracked down Celeste to where she lived in Barcelona but she finds that she’s vanished. Pamela has been to see Max, pretending to be interested in his idea of professional Convergences. She has surreptitiously checked his phone and pinpointed the house where Celeste might be.
• Franck didn't kill Celeste but kept her in the cellar as his sex slave, raping her repeatedly. She is rescued by the Hyena and Olga.
• The team have relocated to Paris where there are repeated demonstrations, many led by Olga who has turned herself into a demagogue, in the Place de la Republique. Vernon has returned. Antoine has learned that his father Dopalet ordered Celeste’s kidnap, beating and rape. And that Max was involved.
• They move to a house in the countryside It rains incessantly. Selim has met Aicha in Greece, she's pregnant. The news makes Celeste scream, giggle and attack Vernon: “Celeste turns around, and her smile has transformed into a mask of hatred, she stares into his eyes and says, this is all your fault, all of it, from the very beginning, you were the one who started it.” (p 322) I am the alpha and the omega!
• Solange lives with her binge-watching father and her mother who used to be a postie and a wino but lost her job and became addicted to anti-depressants instead of booze. The only talent Solange has is sharp-shooting. Max gets in touch with her.
• Leonard is in mourning for Antoine, his boyfriend, who was among the dead massacred at a dance in Rennes-le-Chateau. Everyone was killed. Leonard makes contact with Dopalet, Antoine’s grieving father, who, devastated by his loss, proposes that Leonard and he should script a mini-series about the people who were killed.
• Vernon turns up in Paris. Somehow he escaped the massacre. He is living with Marcia who found him sleeping rough. She tells him that a mini-series based on his life, a sort of allegory of Christianity with him as Jesus and Alex Bleach as John the Baptist, is a huge success. The creators, Dopalet and Max, are “the business double-act of the year.” (357)
• Aftermath: Into the future
• Vernon dies, 72, in Greece with Aicha and her daughter Sabra. Holidaymakers who saw him and recognised his remarkable resemblance to the character in the manga series of his life start talking about the “resurrection of the prophet”.
• Convergences have been happening, without him, all over Europe. In 2085 “music was banned from all civilisations administering the Great Territories.” By 2100, “groups gathering for clandestine convergences were persecuted and executed.” Europe is still inhabited in parts despite nuclear catastrophes. The Subutex cult moves off-grid and hides in deep forests and in cellars in cities. Eventually they are forced to flee Europe to move to the Great Territories. The cult of the Convergences grows. “It was not until the development of kinesics and time travel that the phenomenon could be truly understood.” (p 361)
• “People continue to dance in the dark” (p 362)

"Blue Ruin" by Hari Kunzru

The hook: During a pandemic, protagonist Jay is a gig economy zero-hours driver. He delivers groceries to a posh house in its own estate in the countryside. At the door is Alice, an old girlfriend, who left him for his best friend, with whom she is still living. Jay is sick and collapses, so Alice hides him in a barn on the land until he gets well.

As Jay recovers, he reminisces in an extended flashback and we learn about how he studied art in London and became a performance artist and how he met, loved, lived with and lost Alice to Rob, his friend, a fellow student who is now a successful artist.

As the book progresses, we start to discover more of Jay's story and exactly why he is no longer making art. And the pressures of both the pandemic and the art world combine to bring things to a frightening climax.

It's an fascinating exploration of a subculture that spans everything from starving in squats to multi-millionaire collectors. There is a huge amount of verisimilitude in the descriptions of the drug-fuelled lifestyle associated with that world. Sometimes, the narrative seems a little plot heavy, although it doesn't seem to actually go anywhere (which is perfectly consonant with the theme). There are intimate portrayals of the personalities within it, vulnerable and insecure like the rest of us, but obsessed by the idea that making marks on a piece of canvas (or videoing a performance, or building a sculpture, or ...) is perhaps more important than anything else. 

The narrator-protagonist is quite an impressive person for a casual worker in the gig economy. Not only is he a legend on the internet (and totally unaware of the fact, rather like the eponymous hero of Vernon Subutex 1) but he is an art-school graduate qualified to crew and navigate ships whose interior monologue is full of learned references, not just concepts with art (which suffuse the book):

• The ship of Theseus: a concept in classical philosophy (p 25)
• The (un)examined life: a concept from Socrates (p 30)
• The science of metabolism (p 33)
• Marlowe's Faust (p 123)

Blue Ruin is a painting of a "giant white cruise ship disgorging passengers into a semi-submerged city ... In the foreground, crowded into the frame, were the tourists, horrific semi-human figures, all wearing orange life vests." (p 230)

The pandemic context, the feeling that we are living in a dystopia, perhaps nearing an apocalyptic end of times, and the theme of  rootlessness and anonymity in a world (of art) where reputation is crucial, are the primary colours in this bleak portrait of the pointlessness of life.

Selected quotes: (page numbers refer to the Simon & Schuster 2024 edition)

"If people viewed me in a certain way because I was cleaning a toilet or picking up trash, that was on them, not me." (p 4)

"My beard is turning white and my eyes are sinking into their sockets like pebbles slowly dropping down a well. ... if I catch sight of myself in a mirror, on a good day I'm reminded of a piece of driftwood. Knotted, ground down by sand and water." (p 5)

"It's a fiction we seem to demand, that a person be substantially the same throughout their lives - human ships of Theseus, each part replaced, but in some essential way unchanging. We are less continuous than we pretend. There are jumps, punctuations, sudden reorganizations of selfhood." (p 25)

"Surrounded by students signaling distressed bohemia, all patches and thrift store irony." (p 29)

"Maybe she could live the unexamined life. Mine presented itself as an endless decision tree, a constant steeplechase of exhausting and difficult choices." (p 30)

"Later I would discover Rob's sponge-like quality, his ability to metabolise culture, efficiently and rapidly, to break down its sugars and use them to grow." (p 33)

"As I stepped inside, my feet sank into the deep-pile carpet of the vestibule and something metaphysical closed all around me, a feeling that my reality had just forked and the life in which I hadn't crossed that threshold was now utterly irretrievable." (p 97)

"If technique or craft wasn't what made someone a good artist, what did? The conventional answer was that a good artist was someone who had good ideas." (p 106)

"We smoked weed from the moment we woke up in the morning, moving about our pale green undersea world like unquiet ghosts. Occasionally the real world would intrude, but usually it felt as if we'd slipped through the cracks, the difference between inner and outer space collapsing until reality was purely a function of what we'd ingested that day. At first it seemed exciting, as if we'd found an illicit truth, a doorway in to a place that was inaccessible to normal people, but gradually the returns diminished, and instead of beauty and wonder, our artificial paradise began to feel like a trap." (p109)

"I looked at the face that had launched a thousand of my twenty-something ships." (p 123)

"It was as if I'd come upon a portal, a point where the world was touched by some other nearby reality. The birch glade had been sliced up like a vertical louvre, the filigree of branches and dappled light superimposed on another near-identical version of itself, segements of splinters of a second forest transposed or rhymed with the first, or - that was it - reflected." (p 130)

"I've worked alongside men for weeks, sometimes months, withouyt finding out a single piece of personal information, or being asked one question about myself." (p 145)

"The work of all artists - was an alibi for the desire to put a frame around a certain part of life, to declare that inside the frame was art, and outside was not." (p 161)

"Only in the system we have, where everyone is expected to be an entrepreneur of the self, is anonymity a kind of death." (p 180)

"But I've been travelling for years. ... going somewhere isn't the point. The point is finding somewhere to stay." (p 213)

July 2025; 257 pages

Published in the USA by Knopf and in the UK by Simon & Schuster, 2024

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

The Guardian review suggested that both characters and plots were stereotypes. 

Other books about art and artists reviewed on this blog:

• Literary fiction:
• My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
• The Gift of Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
• The Masterpiece by Emile Zola
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
• Murder mysteries
• The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte: set in the world of art restoration.
• The Brutal Art by Jesse Kellerman: set in the world of New York art galleries.

And, unreviewed here but utterly brilliant in my eyes, is my own novel with an painting protagonist: Bally and Bro which only costs £1.99 on kindle.

"Long Island" by Colm Toibin

 This sequel to Brooklyn starts with a huge and brilliant hook when Irish Eilis is told by a cuckold that her husband has impregnated his wife and he intends to abandon the baby on her doorstep. Determined that she will not bring up the child of another woman, Eilis returns to her hometown in Ireland for the first time in twenty years and encounters Jim Farrell,  the man she abandoned. He's still single though having an affair with now widowed Nancy who had been best friend to Eilis. Will Jim and Eilis get together again? Or will she return to Long Island where her Italian-American husband, Tony, is waiting?

The situation is full of tremendous tensions. In Long Island Tony's family (parents, brothers and sisters-in-law) all live on the same street, making Irish Eilis an outsider. The Irish setting is even more claustrophobic: everyone seems to know the everyone else; it is difficult to keep secrets and the past is always there to haunt you. It's a recipe for emotional turmoil.

Perhaps because it would be so easy to slip into melodrama, Toibin plays it cool. Close to the end, someone tells Jim Farrell: "You seem very matter-of-fact for a man who's just got engaged." (7iii). In fact, every character seems to treat their predicament as an intellectual exercise: their options are carefully delineated. But no-one seems to feel anything. Their heads are engaged but not their hearts. 

For example: "And how would he live knowing that he had betrayed Nancy? How could he coldly inform her that he did not want to be with her? That was one side of the scales. The other was a question that was starker and more pressing: how could he let this chance to be with Eilis slip by?" (5iii)

New writers are told to 'show, don't tell' but Toibin's characters tell you everything they are thinking about, in simple, declarative sentences.

Looking back at my review for Brooklyn, I see that I said: "Eilis had a very pedestrian inner life as well. Every dilemma she faced was spelt out clearly. This actually was a brilliant feature of the book because it made you follow her uncertainties. Did she love the boy or not? Even at the end you're not exactly sure but isn't that the way we all are? We weigh up our options (perhaps a little less cold-bloodedly than Eilis) based on our perceptions (which are perhaps a little less clear than Eilis) and we come to a conclusion which we will never know is right or wrong and which we might in any case change later on down the line. This was a tremendous strength of the book." I'm revising that opinion. The words 'cold-blooded' and 'clear' are key. All three of the main characters - Eilis, Jim and Nancy - saw things too clearly (except for what the plot didn't permit them to see at all) and weigh up their options too cold-bloodedly. I was alienated by their levels of detachment. I was unable to empathise with the main characters and consequently I was bored. It was obvious that the plot was slowly - so slowly - leading up to a showdown but rather than waiting for the crisis with bated breath, I was wishing to get it over with. 

Toibin has also written (reviewed in this blog):

• The Story of the Night: A gay man grows up in an Argentina under the rule of a military dictatorship. I noted "a very staid prose style with short, mostly declarative sentences. It's very realistic and quite addictive"
• House of Names: A version of the Oresteiad. I thought the plot had been "emasculated" but thought it "beautifully written"
• The Testament of Mary: the elderly Virgin Mary reflects upon her life: I loved this and noted "the perfection of the prose".

So I'm inconsistent! Mostly,  like Toibin's style. But not this time. It was just too much. I wasn't engaged. I was bored.

July 2025; 287 pages

Published by Picador in 2024.

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