"The Appleby Files" by Michael Innes

 

A collection of short stories, mostly murder mysteries solved by the Commissioner of Scotland Yard, Sir John Appleby. My dad was called John Appleby. But he didn't belong to quite that level of society. Sir John is a connoisseur of claret and takes guests to his London club. He goes trout-fishing. He and his wife, Lady Judith, visit stately homes; one of them usually knows the owners. His son Bobby wrote a successful anti-novel. This sort of thing might have gone down well when the 'Appleby' series started in 1936 (he appears in at least 20 novels), but by 1975 it looks decidedly dated. Furthermore, the stories are mostly too short to allow a proper deployment of clues and red herrings. 

There is a certain amount of nostalgia: I too remember the days when currency restrictions meant that a Briton holidaying in France was only allowed to take £50 plus £15 in cash. Per person but even so it made things tight.

I have read at least one of the novels (Hamlet, Revenge!) but it was a long time ago. 

Michael Innes also write critical books and literary novels under his real name J I M Stewart.

Selected quotes:

• "What the old lady must look out for is and adolescent girl - preferably of worse than indifferent education, and necessarily of hysterical temperament. If poltergeists exist, it's almost invariably when some such young person is around." (Poltergeist)
• "It is well known that poltergeists, in common with other agents of the supernatural, frequently sulk when attracting the attention of persons sceptically inclined." (Poltergeist)
• "'But a philosopher's argosies,' he said a shade pedantically, 'must voyage in distant waters, don't you think? They may return all the more richly freighted in the end.'" (Death by Water)
• "He'd toasted his bottom before the fire of life." (A Question of Confidence)
• "It dates from a time when you put on your warmest clothes to go indoors." (The Thirteenth Priest Hole)

If you enjoy elegant if pompous prose and old-fashioned class snobbery, Appleby is the detective for you.

June 2025; 192 pages

First published by Victor Gollancz in 1975

My edition issued as a paperback by Penguin in 1978

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

"Closed Casket" by Sophie Hannah

 A classic country house murder. Poirot and Inspector Catchpool are guests of Lady Playfair on the night that she changes her will ... and someone is murdered. Whodunnit ... and how ... and why?

The characters are hugely eccentric. Lady Playfair writes children's mysteries which all seem to revolve around wordplay. Her secretary is a fantasist (Munchausen syndrome and then some). The butler carries taciturnity to extremes. Her daughter, whose fiance is a hugely wealthy pathologist who can't stop quoting Shakespeare's King John, is convinced that the world is unfair to her. Lady P's son is amiable but dim-witted, his wife is horrid. The policeman are hopeless: the inspector doesn't want to be there; his sergeant agrees with anything anyone says. 

I'm not sure that the presentation of the puzzle was quite fair, given that a key witness statement is changed moments before the killer is unmasked. 

Selected quotes:

• “She smiled at him, and he had the strange sense he always had - as if her eyes had picked him up, turned him around and put him down again.” (Ch 1)
• “He was of medium height and build, with thinning grey hair and lots of creases and lines around his eyes, but nowhere else. The effect was of an old man's eyes inserted into a much younger man's face.” (Ch 2)
• “An amiable if a distant smile - as if he had felt chipper about something once and had been trying ever since to recollect the cause of his good cheer.” (Ch 4)
• “All those children you never had ... Lucky blighters, I should say.” (Ch 7)
• “Up here, the wind hit the skin like something solid and hard.” (Ch 10)
• “If you had said all that in Ancient Greek and jumbled up the word order for good measure, it would have been no more incomprehensible to me.” (Ch 33)

June 2025; 371 pages

First published by Harper Collins in 2016

My paperback edition issued in 2017

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

Sophie Hannah has had the blessing of the Agatha Christie estate to write this novel as part of this series:

1. The Monogram Murders (2014)
2. Closed Casket (2016)
3. The Mystery of Three Quarters (2018)
4. The Killings at Kingfisher Hill (2020)
5. Hercule Poirot's Silent Night (2023)
6. The Last Death of the Year (2025)

"Proto" by Laura Spinney

The fascinating story of how Proto-Indo-European became the ancestor of the languages, including English, Greek and Urdu, spoken by half the people in the world. 

The Yamnaya were a small group of herders on the Eurasian steppes around 3000 BC. This book brings together the linguistic, archaeological and DNA (and sometimes mythological) evidence to show how their culture, their language and their genes spread out across Europe and Asia. We learn about the Hittites and the Corded Ware people, about how Latin came to dominate Italy, about how loan words can tell us when the Roma, travelling from India to Europe, arrived in Persia and when they left. We learn about the puzzle about the constancy of the Irish gene pool. The triumph of the Yamnaya is not necessarily a story of conquest and genocide - their grave goods suggest they were essentially peaceful. The wholesale genetic replacement of indigenous populations might have been achieved because they were herders who lived with their animals and therefore had acquired a degree of immunity to epidemic diseases such as Bubonic Plague so that their germs might have done the killing for them. 

Each chapter deals with a major section of the PIE language group, such as Indo-Iranian, or Baltic and Slavic, and is preceded by a map showing the distribution of these languages. These were interesting but what was really needed was arrows to show how these languages had spread.

My favourite bits were when we were given words in different languages - some living, some dead, some reconstructed - so that we could see the similarities. The author then went on to show how these words could give us clues about the technologies of the speakers' cultures so you can make deductions about how, for example, chariots spread. 

My least favourite thing about this book was the dating. She essentially uses four methods: giving dates, quoting centuries, saying how long ago something was from the present, and stating how many years separated an event from another, already referenced, event. This leaves the reader doing sums in their head, to try to place all these things onto some common timeline. I understand that this might help the narrative flow better but I found this very confusing. The single timeline as the back of the book was too little too late.

I know that it is fashionable to pepper one's narrative with snippets of modern-day anecdotes, in which one talks about the linguist or archaeologist who made the discoveries she is about to explain, but I found these a slightly irritating distraction. 

But overall this was a fascinating and brilliant enlightenment of prehistory.

Selected quotes:

• “One view ... is that language ... was invented in the deserts of south-eastern Africa around eighty thousand years ago, perhaps by a group of children ... playing a game.” (Introduction)
• “Hotspots of linguistic diversity coincide with hot spots of biodiversity, because these regions can support a higher density of human groups speaking different languages, who don't need to stray.” (Introduction)
• “On average it takes between five hundred and a thousand years for a language to become incomprehensible to its original speakers.”  (Introduction)
• “Indo-European is ... the best documented and in many ways the best understood of all the world's language families, but it also drags the most outdated intellectual baggage behind it. It's like the star patient of a tail-coated nineteenth century doctor, hauled out woozily for public display, underwear slipping off its shoulder, feted and abused in equal measure.”  (Introduction)
• “Languages broadly reflect the cultures with which they are associated, because people tend to have more words for the things that matter to them.”  (Introduction)
• “Migration ... drives a wedge between dialects and brings them into contact with different languages.” (Introduction)
• “Genes and languages are transmitted differently.”  (Introduction)
• “Water rolled over that giant weir with the force of two hundred Niagara Falls, triggering a tsunami that surged through estuaries and lagoons and flooded an area the size of Ireland.” (Ch 1)
• “People who spoke of wheels and wagons could not have lived before 3500 BCE, when that technology was invented.” (Ch 2)
• “Most European men alive today ... carry Y chromosomes that came from the steppe.” (Ch 3)
• “Groups of Indians who speak languages descended from Sanskrit today typically carry more steppe ancestry than those who speak non-Indo-European languages. ... The traditional guardians of the holy texts, the Brahmins have more steppe ancestry than other social groups.” (Ch 6) 
• “The percentage of the Globe population defined as international migrants has remained stable since 1960, at about three per cent. Refugees ... on average ... account for ... ten per cent ... of that three per cent.” (Conclusion)
• “Richard the Lionheart ... probably could not speak English. His mother tongue was Occitan.” (Conclusion)
• “Elizabeth the First ... helped English do away with the double negative ... and replace ‘ye’ with ‘you’.” (Conclusion)
• “Migration has been a constant, ‘indigenous’ is relative. ... The most successful language the world ever knew was a hybrid trafficked by migrants. It changed as it went, and when it stopped changing, it died.”  (Conclusion)
• “The past is a lighthouse not a port. (Russian proverb)” (Conclusion)

Fascinating and enlightening.

June 2025; 275 pages

Published by William Collins in 2025

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

 

"An Imposter in Shetland" by Marsali Taylor

This brilliant book has all the usual hallmarks of a Cass Lynch murder mystery. Cass is now mate on a small training yacht taking a party to remote Hebridean island St Kilda where one of the customers, an influencer, disappears. After the cruise is over, another of the customers is found murdered. There is sailing, Cass is imperilled, and there is a denouement in which she solves the mysteries. We have the usual crowd: Gavin the policeman boyfriend and wise old Magnie who speaks broad Shetlandic, Cat and Kitten and Julie the ketling, pre-school (but no longer peerie!) Charlie, Inga and Freya. There's even a cameo appearance from Anders!

There are the features we have come to expect. One of the many delights of a Marsali Taylor book is the use of Shetlandisms which add a touch of colour to the vocabulary. If you can't guess what they mean, there is a glossary at the back, but usually they are obvious from the context, as in "the benkled nose from rugby in his youth" (Ch 1). See what I mean? What a wonderful word: 'benkled'. So expressive!

Another wonderful feature of the books is the occasional insertion of descriptive passages which make me long to visit Shetland (despite the apparently high crime rate):

• "It was two and a half months since I’d been home. Shetland had gone from the first summer green to high summer, with the wildflower verges flecked orange and yellow, cream and rose-pink, and the lambs ignoring their mothers to charge around like mad things. There was the first tinge of purple in sheltered hollows of the heather hills, and the sky was a beautiful bright blue." (Ch 7)
• "The hills of Clousta and West Burrafirth were hazed blue with the warmth of the day; the cliffs of Muckle Roe shone fire-orange before us." (Ch 9)
• "Here, the only sound was the sea mouthing pebbles on the shore and half a dozen dinner-jacketed shalders peep-peep-peeping in the park above it. The sea reflected the blue sky, the daytime moon wavering in the water, a pale half-disk like a wisp of cloud." (Ch 12)
• "It was a bonny, bonny night. The heavens were spread out above us in their sequin glory." (Ch 18) Sequin!

As usual, each chapter is headed with tide times but in this book we have the additional delight of Shetland sayings as epigraphs, such as:

• "Dir nedder Voar nor Hairst noo. A comment on modern farming practices; there’s neither seed time nor harvest. Sometimes applied to [changing patterns of] weather." (Ch 3)
• "Hit’s no for da kyunnen’s göd ta be ower cosh wi’ whitterets [Literally, It’s not good for the rabbit to be too friendly with stoats]: Innocent people should not become too closely involved with shady characters." (Ch 13)
• "Da auld cock craas an da young ane learns: Youngsters pick up the habits and manners of their elders" (Ch 15)

Same old, same old? Not at all. This is a formula which doesn't grow old and 'Imposter', the thirteenth in the series, is told with such brio that it is one of the best. The pacing is perfect: the murder occurs almost exactly at the 50% mark. The moments of high tension are perfectly interspersed with periods of relative calm, as characters and relationships and developed and scenes are set, but we never lose sight of the story. There are three moments when Cass is in mortal danger, one of which involves an exciting rooftop chase. There is a very humorous chapter when Cass is having a makeover. This is a very well written book indeed.

Selected quotes:

• "Our decorative latecomer might turn out to be the ill-natured cow that breaks up a byre" (Ch 1)
• "There was a French proverb, one who loves, and one who lets themself be loved." (Ch 6)
• "Shetland reality wasn’t floating around in diaphanous dresses, it was putting on a wool gansey and a jacket to go for a sail even in the height of summer." (Ch 8)
• "An otter bobbed up twenty metres off, took a deep breath and bobbed under again. I imagined a starfish refusing to be dislodged from its rock and waited until the round cat’s head reappeared. On the fourth time, the head tilted back with something pale waving in its jaws. A crunch echoed upwards." (Ch 12)

A great read!

June 2025

Published by Hachette in June 2025

I read the kindle version

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

This is the thirteenth novel in a crime fiction series that gets better and better. The books, in order, with alternative names, are:

• Death on a Shetland Longship
• The Trowie Mound Murders (Buried in a Shetland Tomb)
• A Handful of Ash (The Shetland Night Killings)
• The Body in the Bracken (Grave of a Shetland Sailor)
• Ghosts of the Vikings (The Shetland Poisonings)
• Death in Shetland Waters
• Death on a Shetland Isle
• Death from a Shetland Cliff
• The Shetland Sea Murders
• A Shetland Winter Mystery
• Death in a Shetland Lane
• Death at a Shetland Festival

"The Story of the Night" by Colm Toibin

 A gay young man in Argentina at the time of the Generals and the part he plays in his country's transition to democracy. 

After his Argentine father has died, Richard Garay lives with his English mother in a small apartment in Buenos Aires. He's gay but timid and is used by handsome Jorge as cover for Jorge's own heterosexual escapades. After the seizure of Las Malvinas/ The Falkland Islands and the subsequent defeat of the Argentine military, Richard is introduced to CIA operatives Donald and Susan and becomes a sort of political gopher. He begins to grow rich as a political consultant and by enabling fraudulent and corrupt practices. Meanwhile he visits gay bars and bath-houses as well as picking up strangers on the street. He meets Pablo, Jorge's gay brother, and they fall in love. But disaster is awaiting him.

It's a tale about the price that must be paid for the loss of innocence. 

It was written in what seemed like a very staid prose style with short, mostly declarative sentences. It's very realistic and quite addictive: I found myself thinking to the rhythm of Garay's interior monologue. 

The are some complex characters. It's very hard to understand the emotions lying behind how the characters behave and their inconsistencies create a feeling of depth. This is particularly true of the CIA operatives as one would expect - they are professionally Protean - but there are unsolved mysteries throughout. My favourite moment was when Pablo appears to vanish from the sauna. This somehow symbolised the novel: that nothing is quite as it seems, and that no-one can be pinned down.

The plot's a bit like that too. Like life, it seems to be just one thing after another. It ends mid-scene. Like life.

Toibin has also written (reviewed in this blog):

• Brooklyn
• House of Names
• The Testament of Mary

June 2025; 312 pages

First published by Picador in 1996.

My paperback edition was issued in 2024

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

Synopsis of the full plot: spoiler alert

Richard grows up. His (Argentine) father dies and they discover that there is no family money: they can keep the house but his (English) mum has to go to work. His mum takes him to his aunt's place in the countryside; they discover she is very poor. Playing with his cousins they strip and masturbate but when he tries to kiss Jose, Jose rejects him. His uncle refuses to support them and they go home to Buenos Aires. 

At college Jorge, whom he fancies, befriends him, although he too rejects any idea of being gay. He goes on a trip to Barcelona with Jorge. Here they meet Chilean exiles, one of whom has been tortured. Richard pretends to be asleep while Jorge has sex with a girl (and on a later day, another. the one he actually fancies) on the bed next to him. He thinks Jorge takes a long time to come! When they leave, Jorge wants to stay anonymous but Richard, politically innocent, gives his address to one of the girls.

When his mother asks him if Jorge is gay, he comes out to her.

His mother dies. He is now free to meet strangers on the street and bring them home. He goes to gay saunas. He supports Argentina rather than England during the Falklands War. He works as a part-time English teacher.

Following their defeat in the war, the military dictatorship running Argentina is discredited and the country must transition to democracy. Jorge's father wants to stand for president and arranges that Richard works with Donald and Susan, CIA operatives who might help. He acts as a consultant to Donald and Susan and they find him a job escorting economists from the IMF who are suggesting how Argentina can reduce public spending; Richard is brought face to face with public inefficiency and corruption. He then gets involved in the privatisation of the oil industry.

He meets Jorge's brother Pablo and fancies him. They play tennis and skinny dip. On another day, Richard goes to a new gay sauna, a labyrinthine place including a room where gay porn is being screened,  and sees Pablo there but Pablo vanishes.

Richard sets up as a business consultant. Frederico, an oil businessman, offers him an opportunity to make money through a fraudulent contract. Richard refuses twice but on the third time he agrees. He also starts investing in the stock market, becoming rich. 

He works with Susan and Donald with another presidential hopeful, the governor from a remote state. Susan starts having an affair with Jorge.

He has sex with an American and for the first time is required to use a condom: the American fears AIDS. He meets Pablo again and they have sex and fall in love, moving into a posh house. Pablo invites friends from his ten years in California; Matt has AIDS. Richard and Pablo go to a bath-house where Richard has sex with a stranger. Matt and Jack return to California. 

Donald finds out about Susan and Jorge. Donald and Susan return to Washington.

Matt is about to die. Pablo goes to California to help look after him. He starts failing to answer phone calls. Richard is in Miami for work; when he returns he sees that Pablo has moved out.

Richard develops pneumonia and is told he has AIDS. He moves back to his old apartment. At the doctor's surgery, he encounters Pablo; he too has AIDS. They decide to go back to the posh house and live together for mutual support.

"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.