"Vernon Subutex One" by Virginie Despentes

 

A collage of stories, written with no-holds-barred, depicting Paris. Shortlisted for the 2018 International Booker Prize. 

Vernon is a lifelong connoisseur of modern music. He used to own a record shop but that has been shuttered. He has survived by selling off his collections and the generosity of Alex Bleach, a rock star friend. But now Alex is dead, the rent is unpaid, and Vernon is evicted. So begins a picaresque as he sofa-surfs around the city, spiralling down towards the streets. But he does have one marketable asset: three video-cassettes containing the last recorded interview with Bleach. A variety of people are seeking these, for various reasons. So Vernon, unknowing, is being hunted through the streets.

Each of the friends he stays with, and others he meets, and their contacts, has a story; these stories are told in the third-person but from first-person perspectives. But by bit, a mosaic is built depicting ... Is it modern France? Is it Paris? Is it just Vernon's subculture? It would be difficult to claim that all life is shown here. There is a porn actress and a writer and a movie producer and a screenwriter and someone who makes her living by trashing reputations on the internet, for a fee. But there are few 'normal' occupations. One lad works in a clothes shop and one character teaches at a university but where are the secondary school teachers and the policemen, the waiters and the concierges, the market traders and the insurance clerks? So it is not a representative cross-section of society. 

What rather took my breath away was the honesty of the writing. There is no fuss here about trigger warnings. The interior monologues include racist and sexist comments, they even include a wife-beater justifying himself; he points out that if he was of higher class he could feel from time to time good about himself but since he isn't “If I quit being violent, when do I ever get to feel like I'm the master? Come on, who's going to respect a submissive pleb?” (256) These people justify themselves to themselves and the author records their thoughts and presents them without comment, presumably believing that the reader will condemn the characters because of what they are saying. She is challenging the reader. “They have no doubts about anything. They are perfectly aware that no-one agrees about anything, something that might prompt them to wonder what to do in the face of so many contradictory views. Far from it, any challenge seems to reinforce their conviction that they are right.” (p 135) And unless the reader encounters the divergent opinions of the characters, how can the reader be aware that those who disagree with their views are human beings who are part of our democratic society and must be noticed rather than swept beneath a moralist carpet. That works for me.

A meandering plot, powered by the question of whether Vernon's recordings will be tracked down, but a warts-and-all portrayal of some memorable characters.

Selected quotes:

• “Madame Bodard liked to talk about her two sons, she worried about them a lot, regularly took them to see a paediatrician in the hope that he would diagnose some form of hyperactivity disorder that might justify sedating them.” (p 8)
• “Kids of this generation had been raised to the rhythms of the Voice in the Big Brother house, a world in which the telephone can ring at any time to give the order to fire half of your colleagues. Eliminate thy neighbour is the golden rule of the games they have been spoon fed since childhood.” (p 9)
• “The drawback of karma theory was that if there was even a grain of truth in the notion that ‘what goes around comes around’ people would have long since stopped being arseholes.” (p 10)
• “He dressed like a Playmobil figurine in his Sunday best.” (p 21)
• “Vernon does not have the attention span to be a [sic] truly depressed.” (p 84)
• “Arousal is a pulsating in the groin, love is a weakening in the knees.” (p 87)
• “Not only is Sylvie negative like a fine drizzle that can chill you to the marrow, she can quickly become nasty when roused.” (p 130)
• “Infobesity.” (p 137) What a wonderful word!
• “Deborah had a heart like an artichoke - ‘a leaf for anyone, but a meal for no one’.” (p 159)
• “This girl wanted to create a book that would be like a cathedral in the sky, she would probably end up delivering a plywood shed.” (p 178)
• “Success is like beauty, there's no arguing with it, it is what it is. And it strikes where it strikes.” (p 179)
• “Why bother educating people who are surplus to the job market?” (p 197)
• “Preserving one's charm while losing one's looks is an equation that rarely balances.” (p 208)
• “Hetero douchebag type, smug, confident in his opinions, spewing hoary old cliches yet convinced he's just invented the wheel.” (p 220)
• “Facing the toilet, he pauses for a moment, which is more pressing - throwing up or diarrhoea? He has to choose. It has often occurred to him that, in a more civilized world, it would be possible to sit and lean forward, thereby relieving yourself in both senses without having to change position. People who design toilets clearly do not drink enough, they don't take account of crucial everyday situations.” (p 237)
• “He has a sneaking admiration for rockers, the way they managed to go straight from juvenile to senile without pausing at mature.” (p262)
• “After his death, everything imploded. At first, the protagonists remained standing. Dried husks filled with ashes.” (p 275)
• “The enemy was never going to be minimum-wage workers.” (p 307)

This is the first volume of a trilogy. Is it a rewrite of Dante's Divine Comedy?  Is this the inferno? The epigraph "non omnis moriar" means 'not everyone will die'. 

June 2025; 351 pages

First published in French  by Editions Grasset & Fasquelle in 2015

This translation by Frank Wynne issued in a paperback edition by MacLehose Press in 2018

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

"Cakes and Ale" by W Somerset Maugham

Rosie enjoys life and refuses to conform to the austere expectations of the English class system.

Maugham's favourite novel (because it reminded him of the real good-time girl on which he based Rosie) kicks off when Alroy Kear, an author with more ambition that talent, asks William Ashenden, the first person narrator and another writer, for help in writing about a third writer, the recently deceased Edward Driffield, whom Ashenden knew. 

There is a detailed synopsis of the plot under the byline.

It's one of the classic plots: the war between individuality and social conformity, fought on the battleground of sexual love. Romeo and Juliet but with Juliet very much in the foreground and the Montagues and Capulets becoming the disapproval of the so-called higher echelons of society.

On the other hand, it's a bit incestuous: an author writing about authors, one of whom wants to write about an author. And authors don't comes out of it well:

• The wannabe biographer is the improbably named Alroy Kear (whose name is an anagram for Royal Rake). He has worked hard to assume his position of leading novelist: being athletic, hunting and playing cricket when these things were fashionable. When starting out he praised every leading writer of the time and humbly asked for their opinion on his work. He thanked critics who praised him and invited those who condemned him to lunch so he might discuss where he had gone wrong. He is introduced to us in two chapters of vitriolic irony:
• “Than Roy no one could show a more genuine cordiality to a fellow novelist whose name was on everybody's lips.” (Ch 1)
• “Roy has always sincerely believed what everyone else believed at the moment.” (Ch 1)
• “His villains have always been villainous, his heroes heroic, and his maidens chaste.” (Ch 1)
• “Though now and then he pretended to be at a loss for a word, it was only to make it more effective when he uttered it.” (Ch 1)
• “His conversation was not as a rule brilliant or witty, but it was fluent and he laughed so much as you sometimes have the illusion that what he said was funny.” (Ch 2)
• Later we encounter the equally improbably named Allgood Newton who, if possible, is even more pompous than Alroy:
• “The quiddity of bucolic humour is often a trifle obscure to the uninitiated.” (Ch 19)
• Of course, Ashenden himself is a novelist, as is Rosie's husband Driffield. 

In Twelfth Night, Sir Toby Belch, the gourmandising clown, asks Malvolio: 'Dost though think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?' Maugham's book is about how the upper classes attempt to use puritanism to prevent lower-class Rosie forgetting her place; it is about power strangling joy. There are many Malvolios: Ashenden's vicar uncle, Alroy Kear, the second Mrs Driffield etc. On the whole it is the lower orders who sympathise with Rosie: Ashenden's London landlady Mrs Hudson, Mary-Ann, the maid at the vicarage, his father's curate etc.

As for the narrator, he has a long journey to travel. He starts as a pompous schoolboy, infected by his uncle's moralism but tempted by the Driffields joie de vivre. As a young man he is further tempted by Rosie's body but snobbishly rejects her when he realises that her love of life includes promiscuity and why not? But, in the end, older and wiser, he realises: “She wasn't a woman who ever inspired love. Only affection. It was absurd to be jealous over her. She was like a clear, deep pool in a forest glade, into which it's heavenly to plunge, but it is neither less cool nor less crystalline because a tramp and a gypsy and a gamekeeper have plunged into it before you.” (Ch 25)

Selected quotes:

• “His views on marriage were abstract, for he had successfully evaded the state which so many artists have found difficult to reconcile with the arduous pursuit of their calling.” (Ch 1)
• “We know of course that women are habitually constipated, but to represent them in fiction as being altogether devoid of a back passage seems to me really an excessive chivalry.” (Ch 11)
• “Posterity makes its choice not from among the unknown writers of a period, but from among the known.” (Ch 11)
• “No one has ever been able to explain why the Doric temple of Paestum is more beautiful than a glass of cold beer except by bringing in considerations that have nothing to do with beauty. Beauty is a blind alley. It is a mountain peak which once reached leads nowhere. That is why in the end we find more to entrance us in El Greco then in Titian, in the incomplete achievement of Shakespeare then in the consummate success of Racine. ... Beauty is that which satisfies the aesthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only to the dullard that enough is as good as a feast.” (Ch 11)
• “From the earlier times the old have rubbed into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.” (Ch 11)
• “I often think that the purest type of artist is the humorist who laughs alone at his own jests.” (Ch 11)

Trigger warnings:

• The phrase “white nigger” is used with reference to thick lips and broad nose
• The anti-semitism displayed by the protagonist when a rich Jew called Jack Kuyper buys Rosie a fur; Ashenden breaks up with Rosie because he cannot bear that she is accepting gifts, and presumably embraces, from Kuyper.

June 2025; 190 pages

First published by William Heinemann in 1930

My paperback edition was issued by Pan books in 1976.

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

A detailed synopsis of the plot (spoiler alert):

William Ashenden, the narrator, is invited to lunch by a fellow writer, Alroy Kear and quizzed about a third, recently dead, writer Edward Driffield, whom Ashenden had known. Later we discover that Kear has been asked by Driffield’s second wife to write a biography of the great man.

Ashenden remembers meeting Driffield, a man who has had a chequered career and is not trying to write novels, and his first wife Rosie when he was a schoolboy. They were socially unacceptable to his vicar guardian because Rosie had been a barmaid and the awareness of ‘class’ leads Ashenden into behaving snootily and snobbishly; nevertheless, when he lets his guard down, he enjoys spending time with the pair.

The pair then flee Kent owing money left, right and centre; it’s a scandal.

Later, having become a medical student in London, Ashenden again meets Rosie. Driffield is now an established novelist. Rosie has a number of male friends and adds Ashenden to her rota; they start sleeping together. When he discovers that she has accepted an expensive present from a Jew, he can no longer close his eyes to her behaviour and dumps her.

He later hears that Rosie has run off with an old friend from her Kent days, the now bankrupt ex successful merchant ‘Lord’ George, and that they have fled to America. Driffield becomes a respected elderly novelist and, having been ill, marries his nurse.

Ashenden agrees to help out with the biography project but becomes angry when Mrs Driffield #2 insults Rosie (whom she believes is dead). He defends Rosie and fails to divulge that she is still alive in the US.

It's a bit of a roman a clef. The locations in Kent are disguised but thinly:

• Blackstable = Whitstable
• Tercanbury = Canterbury
• Haversham = Faversham
• Ferne Bay = Herne Bay

It is said that the real characters are:

• Edward Driffield = Thomas Hardy. Hardy became estranged from his first wife (but she didn't run off with someone else as in this book) and later married his secretary (rather than his nurse as in the novel) who was much younger than him. 
• Alroy Kear = Hugh Walpole. Given that Alroy is a writer with more talent in marketing himself than in writing his books, Walpole was very angry and, it is said, considered legal action.
• William Ashenden is clearly Maugham himself, who was brought up by his uncle and aunt in the vicarage in Whitstable and spent some years as a medical student; he was primarily homosexual but did have a long liaison with a friend's wife

Other notes:
One of my pet hates is the introduction of an untranslated foreign phrase. There are two moments when Maugham's narrator Ashenden quotes from French writers, presumably because he can, making those of his readers who can't feel stupid. Much of the book is a diatribe against class snobbery but this is intellectual snobbery at its height.

• In chapter 3, describing the beautiful June day, Maugham quotes the first line of a sonnet (Le Cygne, the Swan) written by Stephane Mallarme in 1887. The line reads: “le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujord’hiu” which in my aided translation becomes: 'The unsullied (‘vierge’ means virgin), the everlasting and the beautiful now'.
• “Venus toute entiere a sa proie attache” (Ch ) = 'Venus totally devoted to her prey', a line from Racine’s Phèdre (1677) act 1, sc. 3

Ashenden is the title of a series of linked short stories based on Maugham's experience as an espionage agent during the First World War. 

Other novels by the wonderful writer include the autobiographical (and big!) novel Of Human Bondage, in which the vicarage at Blackstable makes another appearance, and The Moon and Sixpence about a stockbroker who runs away to become an artist. 

"Twist" by Colum McCann

A tale of connection and disconnection.

Journalist Anthony Fennell's latest assignment is to write about a boat which is repairing a broken undersea cable, one of those down which vast amounts of internet traffic flow, a significant element in the connectivity of southern Africa. He becomes fascinated by John Conway, the enigmatic Chief of Mission, a mystery man who has an instinctive connection the the crew. Then Conway goes rogue ... Following the byline, I give a detailed synopsis of the plot.

This is a beautifully written book with repeated echoes of Heart of Darkness, the classic anti-colonialism novel by Joseph Conrad.

The main theme seems to be the currently fashionable idea that the apparent connectivity of the internet actually serves to separate us humans from one another. The author also attacks the environmental destruction that has accompanied the consumer revolution and the neo-colonialist exploitation of the poor, here represented by the poor of Africa, that facilitates the comfortable lifestyles of the rich.

At first I thought that the name John Conway, who reminded me to some extent of Corrigan, the befriender of the destitute in McCann's novel Let The Great World Spin) had been chosen simply because his initials were the same as Joseph Conrad. Then I toyed with the idea that it was a tribute to the mathematician John Conway who was the creator of the Game of Life, a computer simulation in which cellular automaton obeying simple rules can create forms of increasing complexity, some of which can reproduce. Perhaps. Then I wondered whether it was linked to John Connor, the messianic hero of the Terminator film franchise (created by James Cameron, another JC) who leads humanity in its war against artificially intelligent robots. That seemed very likely. But John Conway, JC, and John Connor, JC, could also symbolise the ultimate JC = Jesus Christ. That would explain how Conway is instantly able to connect with people, who show him loyalty bordering on devotion. That would explain why he calls his partner's twins his children, although not his children. In the end he overturns the tables of the moneylenders in the temple. In the end he has to die.

I suspect that the character of Mister Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness is supposed to be Christ.

The theme of connectivity, and the chaos caused when connections are severed, is overt. The purpose of the mission is to mend a broken cable and restore connectivity to southern Africa. It starts in Cape Town, a city still stratified by the social divisions of apartheid. Fennell is estranged from his son, even, at one moment, denying him; his resolution is to write an old-fashioned letter to mend this breach. Conway's partner and her twins leave for England, a separation which is known to be permanent. It could be argued that the play in which she is to appear, 'Waiting for Godot' is about separation. But these disconnections are contrasted with the human communities depicted in the book: the homeless living underneath a flyover in Cape Town, the free-divers (Fennell is determined he won't dive but they eventually persuade him to swim with them), the tight-knit crew of the repair vessel, the scavengers in Accra, even the links Conway makes with the girl in the shopping mall and the hotel receptionist whose name isn't Chantal. Fennel, ever the outsider, can do little more than observe but Conway belongs.

Part One is bookended by quotes about connections. It starts, “We are all shards in the smash-up.” (1.1) and ends, “We are, indeed - you, me, us - shards in the smash-up.” (1.6) 

In the acknowledgements, McCann thanks both Joseph Conrad and T S Eliot. The links to Conrad's Heart of Darkness are multiple:

• The fact that it is the Congo river, the focus of the action in HoD, that causes the cable to snap.
• The bookending in part one echo the frame narrative structure used in HoD
• The extended consideration of Apocalypse Now, a film based on Heart of Darkness. Fennell is obsessed with the character played by Martin Sheen, who is there to neutralise the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Kurtz is the name of the antagonist in HoD), as it could be argued Fennell is, through his journalism, going to tame John Conway, the Kurtz character.
• The fact the operations are directed from Brussels, the capital city (unnamed, mentioned only as the ‘whited sepulchre’ in HoD) of the Empire which exploited the Congo. At the very end of the novel, London stands in for this ‘whited sepulchre’ (a biblical phrase from Matthew referring to a place that is outwardly beautiful but inwardly decaying: “London is sometimes so beautiful that it is difficult to remember that it is built on a whole empire of lies.” (Epilogue)
• The cable repair ship is called the Georges Lecointe. He was a famous Belgian naval commander who was in charge of a ship exploring the Antarctic.
• The final scene is on a houseboat in the Thames as the tide turns ... echoing the beginning and ending of the HoD frame narrative.

The Hollow Men is a poem by T S Eliot which has the epigraph: “Mistah Kurtz - he dead” (a line from HoD). The hollow men are effigies stuffed with straw such as are burned on bonfires as ‘Guys’ on bonfire night; Guy Fawkes, like Conway, was a terrorist who wanted to blow things up but I think that Fennell, alcoholic and adrift, is the archetypal 'hollow' man. The poem ends with the famous lines: “This is the way the world ends ... Not with a bang but a whimper.”

Selected quotes:

• “For the most part, he moved quietly and without much fuss, but his was a lantern heart full of petrol, and when a match was put to it, it flared.” (1.1)
• “Rain on the cobblestones. Exit ghost.” (1.1)
• “The clouds sped away from them. Even the sky seemed segregated.” (1.1)
• “He mentioned a little hole-in-the-wall bar down in the docklands where he said that not a single moment cloned itself.” (1.1)
• “We can only ever locate the middle when we get to the end.” (1.2)
• “It was not a city built for walkers. The pavements were cracked. At times the concrete just disappeared. At the highway underpass shopping trolleys were tethered to the ground by rope and chain. Tents were ranged like mushrooms. A little scarf of smoke came up from a cooking pot. A lean dog slinked sideways. Grey water leaked from a rotted length of gutter pipe. Every now and then a shadow moved among the tents.” (1.3)
• “I paraded around, hair askew, shirt ambitiously undone, waiting for the wine to be uncorked.” (1.3)
• “His physicist friends who were well aware that you could not locate the speed and the position simultaneously, and that the only good answer is the uncertain one.” (1.3)
• “The booze had slowed me down, crawled into my cranium, pulled a curtain across my perception. The bottle does a good job of drinking the mind.” (1.3)
• “There were all the lights that I had blown out in my life. All the times that I'd been the stage actor in the wrong play.” (1.3)
• “I looked east again but there was nothing but the ocean and the ocean and the ocean.” (1.4)
• “Young, I had wanted to be old, and old now, young.” (2.1)
• “Conway's story still reached beyond my ribcage and turned my heart a notch backwards. Each time I thought of him, there was a squeeze of the arteries.” (Epilogue)
• “Envy is a dark ink.” (Epilogue)

June 2025; 235 pages

Published in the UK by Bloomsbury in 2025

McCann also wrote This Side of Brightness.

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

A detailed synopsis of the plot. Spoiler alerts!

Journalist Anthony Fennell travels to Cape Town: his assignment to travel on a cable repair ship. He meets John Conway, the Chief of Mission, who will be in charge of the repair. While waiting for a cable break to occur, he goes to Conway’s home and meets his partner Zanele, an actress, and his twin children. Zanele is about to travel to Brighton in England to star in ‘Waiting for Godot’, the Samuel Beckett play, in defiance of the author’s wishes that the leads should only be played by men. While waiting in port, Fennell also goes with Conway and a group of his friends and watches them free-diving to place grave stones in memory of dead divers at the bottom of the sea. One of the divers, a Polish woman, tells Fennell that Conway has missing years and that Zanele’s children aren’t his. Another of the divers has a PhD for research into fluid dynamics, particularly the point of turbulence.

Then the River Congo floods and the detritus swept out to sea remodels the sea bed and breaks a cable. Fennell is in a shopping mall when this happens and notices first that the shops can’t take anything but cash and the ATMs aren’t working. Then he realises that his phone has no signal. He can’t even check out of his hotel. He rushes to the boat and goes aboard.

He then spends several days being terribly seasick in port and the boat is trapped there by a storm. Finally, the storm abates sufficiently so that it can leave harbour and Fennell starts feeling better. He begins to learn more about the characters on the ship as they slowly crawl up the coast of Africa to where three cables are broken.

Fennell starts to handwrite a letter to his estranged son whom he denied when he talked to Zanele (another Christ motif?). News comes that one of the shipmates has lost his mother; there is a service and they move on. News then comes that Conway’s partner Zanele has been attacked on stage: acid was thrown at her. Fennell tries to find out more about Conway and learns that he had another name: Alastair Banks. Conway restricts Fennell’s internet privileges (the ship has a limited satellite connection) and Fennell gets grumpy about it.

The process of mending the first two cables, deep underwater, is slow and difficult but successful and they head into Accra before going to mend a much shallower cable.

Conway disappears. We learn later that he has gone rogue.

Fennell also leaves the ship to go and live in a beach condo in Accra, writing his story; his cleaner (who has a maths degree) tells him that Conway has salvaged the broken cable and given it to the poor who are breaking it down for its materials.

Conway, in hiding, goes to Alexandria in Egypt and sabotages two internet cables by free diving down to them and using a thermite bomb. He is killed by the second bomb.

After he has died, dummy bombs turn up all over the world.

Fennell goes to talk to Zanele on her houseboat in the Thames.

"Coming Up for Air" by George Orwell

A novel full of pre-echoes of 1984.

George Bowling is a very ordinary man. He's fat, married with two kids, living a joyless existence in suburbia, earning just enough to keep his head above water. “I'd been a good husband and father for fifteen years and I was beginning to get fed up with it.” (1.1) A chance word prompts a nostalgic reverie as he remembers his childhood in a rural village in Oxfordshire. He decides to take a holiday and revisit this place. Of course it has changed.

There's very little plot. The only character explored in death is that of the narrator-protagonist. And yet the book kept me interested because of its incisive observations. Orwell was at his best in journalism. Not only did he describe the world around him but he also understood the subtext. Bowling describes the street on which he lives thus: “What is a road like Ellesmere Road? Just a prison with the cells all in a row. A line of semi-detached torture-chambers where the poor little five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers quake and shiver, every one of them with the boss twisting his tail and the wife riding him like the nightmare and the kids sucking his blood like leeches.” (1.2) It's a bleak vision. But even bleaker is his predictions of the future. He knows that another war is on the way (he's writing in 1938 and he predicts the next war will start in 1941 so it came even earlier than he thought). But what terrifies him is what will come after the war: “It isn't the war that matters, it's the after-war. The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him ... the food-queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think.” (3.1) 1984.

Twice, he mentions the title. The first time he is going back to Lower Binfield to revisit his past and he is full of hope: “The very thought of going back to Lower Binfield had done me good already. You know the feeling I had. Coming up for air! ... We're all stifling at the bottom of a dustbin, but I'd found the way to the top.” (3.2) The second time is after his dreams have encountered reality: “Coming up for air! But there isn't any air. The dustbin that we're in reaches up to the stratosphere.” (4.5)

On his return to Lower Binfield, he has a “gloomy, Ichabod kind of feeling.” (4.1) Presumably this is a reference to Ichabod Crane, a character in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a short story by Washington Irving, whose more famous character is Rip van Winkle, who went to sleep for twenty years and woke up to a very different world, just like George Bowling.

Trigger warnings: Occasional use of the N-word and stereotypical comments about Jews.

Selected quotes:

• “False teeth are a landmark. When your last natural tooth goes, the time when you can kid yourself that you're a Hollywood sheik is definitely at an end.” (1.1)
• “Sometimes I've stood over their cots ... and watched them sleeping ... and it's given me that feeling you read about in the Bible when it says your bowels yearn. At such times I feel that I'm just a kind of dried-up seed-pod that doesn't matter twopence and that my sole importance has been to bring these creatures into the world and feed them while they're growing. But that's only at moments. Most of my time my separate existence looks pretty important to me.” (1.1)
• “We're all bought, and what's more we're bought with our own money.” (1.2)
• “Do you notice how often they have undersized men for these bullying jobs?” (1.2)
• “Fear! We swim in it. It's our element. Everyone that isn't scared stiff of losing his job is scared stiff of war, or Fascism, or Communism, or something.” (1.2)
• “What's interesting, I think, is that merely because you happen to be a little bit fat, almost anyone, even a total stranger, will take it for granted to give you a nickname that's an insulting comment on your personal appearance.” (1.3)
• “The frankfurter ... burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. ... It gave me the feeling that I’d bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of.” (1.4)
• “You know the smell churches have, a peculiar, dank, dusty, decaying, sweetish sort of smell. There's a touch of candle-grease in it, and perhaps a whiff of incense and a suspicion of mice ... Predominantly it's that sweet, dusty, musty smell that's like the smell of death and life mixed up together. It's powdered corpses really.” (1.4)
• During the Boer war “They were all true-blue Englishmen and swore that Vicky was the best queen ever lived and foreigners were dirt, but at the same time nobody ever thought of paying a tax, not even a dog-licence, if there was any way of dodging it.” (2.1) I love that definition of patriotism!
• “In those days the heroine had to look like an egg-timer and now she has to look like a cylinder.” (2.2)
• “Gravitt’s backyard smelt like a battlefield. Butchers didn't have refrigerators in those days.” (2.4)
• “Killing things - that's about as near to poetry as a boy gets.” (2.4)
• “Joe never read ... The sight of print made him feel sick. I've seen him ... read a paragraph or two and then turn away with just the same movement of disgust as a horse when it smells stale hay.” (2.6)
• “People then had something that we haven't got now ... they didn't think of the future as something to be terrified of. It isn't that life was softer then than now. Actually it was harsher. People on the whole worked harder, lived less comfortably, and died more painfully. ... What was it that people had those days? A feeling of security, even when they weren't secure. More exactly, it was a feeling of continuity. All of them knew they'd got to die, and I suppose a few of them knew they were going to go bankrupt, but what they didn't know was that the order of things could change.” (2.7)
• He remembers his time at Eastbourne: “Those beastly icy Downs ... where the wind seems to blow its you from all directions at once.” (2.8)
• “People who in a normal way would have gone through life with about as much tendency to think for themselves as a suet pudding were turned into Bolshies just by the war.” (2.8)
• “I'm about as likely to end up in the workhouse as to end up in the House of Lords.” (2.9)
• “Old Vincent had retired in 1910, and since then he and his wife had shown about as much activity, mental or physical, as a couple of shellfish.” (2.10)
• “When a woman's bumped off, her husband is always the first suspect - which gives you a little side-glimpse of what people really think about marriage.” (2.10)
• “For hours, sometimes ... I've lain on my bed with all my clothes on except my shoes, wondering about women. Why they’re like that, how they get like that, whether they’re doing it on purpose.” (2.10)
• “She's a great one for public meetings of any kind, always provided that it's indoors and admission free.” (2.10)
• “The classy Oxford feeling of nothing mattering except books and poetry and Greek statues, and nothing worth mentioning having happened since the Goths sacked Rome.” (3.1)
• “We say a man's dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. ... Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.” (3.1)
• “Who’d bother about a chap like me? I'm too fat to be a political suspect. No one would bump me off or cosh me with a rubber truncheon. I'm the ordinary middling kind that moves on when the policeman tells him.” (3.2)
• “A rose still smells the same to me now as it did when I was twenty. Ah, but do I smell the same to the rose?” (4.2)
• “I don't mind towns growing, so long as they do grow and don't really spread like gravy over a tablecloth.” (4.5)
• “At first sight it looked as if the sky had been raining bricks and vegetables. There were cabbage leaves everywhere. The bomb had blown a greengrocer's shop out of existence.” (4.6)

Literary references:
Bowling has periods in his life when he reads avidly. Authors he mentions include Kipling, Galsworthy, Barry Pain, W W Jacobs, Pett Ridge, Oliver Onions, H Seton Merriman, Maurice Baring, Stephen McKenna, May Sinclair, Arnold Bennett, Elinor Glyn, O Henry, Stephen Leacock, Silas Hocking, Jean Stratton Porter, Marie Corelli, Hall Caine, Anthony Hope, Marcel Proust and Henry James. Translations of Maupassant and Paul de Kock which are described by the other boys at school as ‘hot’ I've never even heard of most of these writers.

Books he mentions, with links to their reviews in this blog where appropriate, are:

• The Good Companions by J B Priestley
• The Lives of a Bengal Lancer by Francis Year's Brown
• Hatter’s Castle by A J Cronin
• The Woman Thou Gavest Me by Hall Caine
• Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin
• The History of Mr Polly by H G Wells
• Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie
• Victory by Joseph Conrad
• Sons and Lovers D H Lawrence
• Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• Esther Waters by George Moore

June 2025; 232 pages

First published by Victor Gollancz in 1939

My Penguin paperback edition was issued in 1962, I read the 1980 printing

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

"Miguel Street" by V S Naipaul

A Cannery Row for Trinidad. Or is it Guys and Dolls?

The unnamed narrator is a fatherless young boy growing up and a street 'rab on Miguel Street, playing cricket and learning about life from the antics of the characters around him. He is quasi-adopted by father-figure Hat, whose comments on what is going on are kindly, perceptive and deeply philosophical. 

Each chapter examines one of the neighbours, including Popo the carpenter who is always making the "thing without a name" to Man-man the mystic, to B Wordsworth the poet, to Morgan who makes fireworks, to Mr Titus Hoyt the teacher, to Laura the mother on repeat, to Uncle Bhakcu who is always tinkering with cars which are never quite the same afterwards ... Each story is told with tenderness and compassion and some are very funny indeed. Speech is given in dialect and this builds a picture of a supportive and caring community in which everyone is poor but nobody is starving. We all have dreams and we all need to get on with our fellow men.

On the other hand, there is the domestic abuse. Men seem to beat women in almost all of the households on Miguel Street; sometimes the women beat the men back. The children are beaten for almost every conceivable petty wickedness. It may be a portrait of a community of its time but from this point of view these are anything but the good old days. But this is to criticise the novel for what it says and in this blog I have always insisted that a reviewer should foreground how it is said. Naipaul has an ear for dialogue and an eye for eccentricity and a heart for forgiveness and these are what makes this book exceptional.

Selected quotes:

• “Seeing God was quite common in Port of Spain, and, indeed in Trinidad at that time. Ganesh Pundit, the mystic masseur from Fuente Grove, had started it. He had seen God, too, and had published a little booklet called ‘What God Told Me’. Many rival mystics and not a few masseurs had announced the same thing.” (Man-man)
• “The authorities kept him for observation. Then for good.” (Man-man)
• “B. Wordsworth. ... Black Wordsworth. White Wordsworth was my brother. We share one heart.” (B Wordsworth)
• “He did everything as though he were doing it for the first time in his life. He did everything as though he were doing some church rite.” (B Wordsworth)
• “We ... saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite different from everybody else. Man-man was mad; George was stupid; Bigfoot was a bully; Hat was an adventurer; Popo was a philosopher; and Morgan was our comedian.” (The Pyrotechnicist)
• “Hat used to say, ‘Is a damn nuisance, having that man trying to be funny all the time, when all of we well know that he not so happy at all’.” (The Pyrotechnicist)
• “Mrs Bhakcu was four feet high, three feet wide, and three feet deep.” (The Pyrotechnicist)
• “When he spoke it was in a pecking sort of way, as though he was not throwing out words, but picking up corn.” (The Pyrotechnicist)
• “Hat said, ‘When I was a little boy, my mother used to say, “If a man wants something, and he want it really bad, he does get it, but when he get it he don't like it”.’” (The Pyrotechnicist)
• “I suppose Laura holds a world record. Laura had eight children. There is nothing surprising in that. These eight children have seven fathers. Beat that!” (The Maternal Instinct)
• “For her first six children she tried six different men. Hat used to say, ‘ some people hard to please’.” (The Maternal Instinct)
• “Mrs Hereira said, ‘No, I know Tony. I looked after him when he was sick. It is the war, you know. He was a sailor and they torpedoed him twice.’ My mother said. ‘They shoulda tried again’.” (Love, Love, Love Alone)
• “It sound as though it coming from a gramophone record turning fast fast backwards.” (The Mechanical Genius)
• “What about all those woman and them who was chasing you? They catch up with you yet or they pass you?” (Until the Soldiers Came)
• “Many people stopped minding their business and looked up.” (Hat)
• “Hat’s dog was the only Alsatian I knew with a sense of humour.” (Hat)
• “It does happen to all man. They getting old and they get frighten and they want to remain young.” (Hat)
• “The only people who does complain about bribe is those who too damn poor to have anything to bribe with.” (How I left Miguel Street)
• “The Americans gave me a visa after making me swear that I wouldn't overthrow their government by armed force.” (How I left Miguel Street)
• “I left them all and walked briskly towards the aeroplane, not looking back, looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac.” (How I left Miguel Street; last words)

A lyrical portrayal of a community which seems to live up to the injunction of W B Yeats: "But I, being poor, have only my dreams ...

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

June 2025; 172 pages

First published in the UK by Andre Deutsch in 1959

My paperback edition issued by Penguin in 1971, the 1982 reprint

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

"Shakespeare in Company" by Bart Van Es

What made Shakespeare different from and better than the pack of other playwrights of his age?

This book suggests that the key moment came in 1594 when, after some promising plays, he became a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. He was almost unique in being, at the same time, an actor, a playwright and a sharer in the profits of what was a stable company, soon to become one of only two official acting companies in London. At this point he began to write plays which focused on the relationships between different characters, using the personalities of the other members of his company as models. From this point on he eschewed collaboration (the standard practice among other playwrights) until 1608 when the theatres were closed due to plague. By the time they reopened, Shakespeare had left off acting and moved back to Stratford and his later work is more influenced by other playwrights, especially those with whom he began to collaborate, than his fellow actors. 

It's a compelling argument, no where more convincing than when Van Es considers the company member who provided the comedy lead. Until 1599 this was Will Kemp, a clown, famous for his physical ability and his jigs. Shakespeare wrote the parts of Bottom in a Midsummer Night's Dream, Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, and possibly Falstaff in Henry IV (parts 1 and 2) and The Merry Wives of Windsor. After 1599 the comic character changes completely. Robert Armin, replacing Kemp, was a 'fool' in the old jester tradition. His portrayal of Touchstone in As You Like It signalled a change to a much more reflective humour which, via Feste in Twelfth Night, Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, and Lavatch in All's Well That End's Well, culminated in the Fool in King Lear.

The book also helped me understand why Shakespeare should have been so willing to collaborate in his later plays - Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the lost Cardenio - with John Fletcher. Shakespeare was interested by Fletcher's development of dramatic art, perhaps especially because Fletcher was experienced in writing for indoor spaces (and the Blackfriars Theatre was now in use). Fletcher's 'The Shepherdess' seems to have been a source for both The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. “Ultimately, what the connection with Fletcher amounts to is the embrace of conscious literary artifice.” (Ch 13)

It's also very interesting on Senecan revenge tragedy. 

Selected quotes:

• “Shakespeare's early drama is often spectacularly imitative and as a result his personal voice is much less distinct.” (Ch 1)
• “The phenomenon of the attached poetic playwright (writing for only one company) was initiated by Shakespeare.” (Ch 4)
• “Very likely the role of Starveling was taken by John Sincler, a hired man of the Chamberlain’s company, who was famously emaciated.” (Ch 4)
• “The boys’ theatre had something of a modern arthouse culture” (Ch 10)

An intriguing theory backed up by a convincing argument in a very readable book.

June 2025; 311 pages

Published by the Oxford University Press in 2013

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

"Where Snowbirds Play" by Gina Goldhammer

Real life, and the past, haunt the carefree existences of the super-rich socialites spending the season in Palm Beach, an exclusive island resort in Florida, USA,

Life among the fabulously wealthy sounds easy as they drift from one charity ball to another. The social scene is dominated by three widows: Carlotta Alonso whose family fled (in a forty-foot yacht) communist Cuba, animal-loving Vanessa Vine, an ex-chorus girl and gold-digger, and Louisa Caulfield whose first husband gave her Addison, a lawyer, and whose second gave her Thaddeus, a brilliant surgeon on the verge of discovering a cure for cancer. But all the money in the world can't protect you against some things. Vanessa's adopted daughter Sunny, an alcoholic, was a neglectful parent whose daughter died from an accidental overdose of mummy's powder. Thaddeus has married English Hannah, mother of one of his patients, a terminally ill little boy called Jesse and even his revolutionary new treatment can only make limited progress. And Thaddeus had mortgaged his house and invested everything he had in the company that will manufacture the wonder drug that will make them all rich ... if only it can win governmental approval.

Into this hothouse, steps Philip, a young Englishman who has come straight from Oxford to become the new head (and only, unpaid, employee) of the (newly created) marine life institute. He has discovered among his dead father's papers letters from Hannah telling his father, a world-famous poet, that she is pregnant. Jesse is his half-brother. But that's a secret.

The hurricane season is coming.

I found it difficult to care about these shallow characters, except for poor Jesse. Even he was too good to be true, being the eternally brave little soldier and never once getting depressed or angry. I longed for some real people but the hired help were either shadows (Marta and Jerzy) or anonymous (the Guatemalans). Everyone else was perfect. Philip is not only an Oxford graduate but also incredibly handsome. His father was a world-famous poet. Thaddeus is a brilliant surgeon. I longed for a hard-working but not particularly talented teacher, or for Eduardo to make cocktails that weren't very tasty, or for Jesse to be only a bit ill and really rather fed up about it. Mediocrity was missing. 

It was typical of its genre in that the descriptions were all about high-status possessions, given with the breathlessness of a glossy magazine. There were the fashion notes: “Hannah had changed into a creaseless white linen sundress, ballerina flats and a wide-brimmed straw hat, stylish cat's eye sunglasses shading her eyes." (Part One: On the Nature of Toads) This segued immediately into the House and Home design section: "Bougainvillea petals floated like confetti on the kidney-shaped swimming pool behind her ... sloping gently and without steps, a fiberglass Adirondack chair sitting in the shallowest portion with a wide sun umbrella attached to its high back. From the other end of the pool rose a spacious two-storey pink stucco house with a barrel-tile roof and purple bougainvillea vines climbing the stone pillars of the loggia.” (Part One: On the Nature of Toads) From the cookery  pages we learn that “The poolside bar glinting with a rainbow of bottles and fiesta bowls filled with Meyer lemons, Key limes and three types of Spanish olives." (Part Two: Friends and Neighbours) and how to make a Tootsie Roll cocktail from "vanilla vodka, Kahlua, Cointreau, orange juice and a handful of crushed ice cubes" (Part Two: Friends and Neighbours). There's even product placement: Philip wears "a Turnbull & Asser shirt.” (Part Two: Friends and Neighbours). This style of writing perfectly matched the milieu it was describing but it served to underline the shallowness and made me care even less about these people.

But they played their parts in a narrative that was never dull, if sometimes rather too full, encompassing infidelity, faith healing, insider trading, and pollution along the way. The story was further enlightened by some great descriptions and some sparks of wry humour. 

The obvious comparison is with The Great Gatsby (but that has so much more anger fuelling it). I was also reminded of J G Ballard's Cocaine Nights. 

Selected quotes:

• “The Porch Club [was] founded in 1918 by a group of business moguls too old to fight in the first world war but not too old to build its armaments.” (Part Two: The Big Three) 
• “Philip had met his share of disheveled doctors at Oxford ( mainly of philosophy).” (Part Two: Gethsemane-on-the-Sea)
• “How I wish I could claw that shine [of youth] off him and wear it tonight.” (Part Two: Pearls, pearls and more pearls)
• “The stampeding girls were stopped in their tracks by Mrs Vine’s Silver Shadow blocking the drive. Chugging like a vintage locomotive it proceeded to the outdoor picnic table where the widow, bundled in a diaphanous violet-tinted robe and veiled raffia hat, slid like a dollop of warm butter from the creamy interior.” (Part Two: Julietta rallies the troops) I adore that last phrase.
• “It seemed to Philip that God ought to know what lay in a man's heart without having to hear him talk about it.” (Part Two: State of Grace)

June 2025; 230 pages

A limited hardback edition published by Hay Press in 2025

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