"Vernon Subutex" 2 by Virginie Despentes

The sequel to Vernon Subutex 1, the middle volume of the trilogy.

Spoiler alert. Having lost his record shop, Revolver, and his home, Vernon is still living on the streets of Paris, although this time by choice. His friends from VS1 have all offered him shelter (the Hyena even joined him in the shower to clean him up) and now meet him every evening, in the park and the nearby cafe-bar, to feed him and buy him drinks and look after him. There is a sense of a guru and his disciples: Vernon has dissociative hallucinatory moments and hugs even his enemies, bringing them inner peace, stripping away their alienation and bringing them into the group. Sometimes he acts as DJs and they all lose themselves in the dance.

Meanwhile, we discover what is on Alex Bleach's tapes. It's a revelation that persuades some of Vernon's followers to take direct action in a #MeToo subplot (although VS2 was written in 2015, two years before the #MeToo hashtag began to be used on social media). This subplot gives the book a more coherent narrative structure. Both VS1 and VS2 have a bricolage construction being made from a tag-team of internal dialogues, often rants, but while what appeared from VS1 was a collage portrait of Paris, VS2 has a sense of a story with a purpose.

The sequel inevitably has less shock value than the original, and this defocuses some of the energy, but this increased sense that we are going somewhere  has made me eager to read the final part of this fascinating and original trilogy. 

This is definitely a contender for my book of the year.

Selected quotes: (page numbers from the English ppbk edition)

• “No-one likes old people, not even their own children.” (25)
• “Men are supposed to just put up with things and not bleat about being sensitive. Everyone proceeds from the assumption that they're obviously up for it. No-one bothers to ask whether they mind having their balls busted all the time, same as no one gives a damn whether they are not they want to be fathers.” (63)
• “Just because you're prepared to sell your arse on the streets, doesn't mean you'll make your fortune doing it.” (65)
• “A lot of people claim that they grow wiser with age. The truth is that they shrivel, they slow down. They lose their importance. They get trapped in quicksand and sink in good faith.” (79)
• “What was he thinking, back then, that stopped him talking to his last friend when there was still time to grab his arm, shake him hard and say, let's make the most of it, mate, let's make the most of it while we're still alive.” (108)
• “We entered into rock music the way you enter a cathedral ... there were so many saints everywhere we didn't know who to worship ... we didn't give a fuck about heroes, all we cared about was that sound.” (109)
• “Money is much better than drugs. It's the same basic principle, but overwhelming. And people say there are no side effects.” (118)
• “Compliance quickly becomes the ability to look the other way when you walk past the slaughterhouse.” (120)
• “A mind like hers should not be denied books, nor prevented from embracing complexity on the pretext of following some obscurantist mumbo jumbo.” (137)
• “It's hard not to feel a bit sorry for old people. They act like they're still young. Except they’re shriveled and mouldy. ... They’re still living in the steam age when everyone else has moved to touch-screen.” (182)
• “She had thrown herself at him, like a third-world country at a sack of rice.” (198)
• “It is not a cock that makes a man but the impetuousness of his desire.” (220)
• “Gaelle feels like a light bulb on its last legs, when it starts to sputter, to warn that it is about to fail.” (226)
• “How does a guy who's likeable enough but a bit short of change when it comes to charisma turn himself into the Messiah of the Buttes-Chaumont? The guy is homeless, stinks of sweat and wears trailer trash boots, but everyone treats him like he’s baby Jesus if he'd skipped the bit with the cross, he's surrounded by dozens of Magi who bring him gifts every day.” (232)
• “When urban hipsters start dabbling in spirituality, you know shit’s going to get real.” (233)
• “To be happy in love, you have to make do with what’s on offer.” (258) 
• “Penelope ... she’s a girl. Which means she takes everything hyper-seriously. If he makes one of his dumb jokes, she goes ballistic. It's like she's paid by the PC brigade to make sure no one has any fucking fun.” (259)
• “He died for me too, didn't he? You think I get lumbered with my sins just because I'm a blowjob goddess?”

July 2025; 334 pages

First published in French by Editions Grasset and Pasquelle in 2015

My paperback edition, translated into English by Frank Wynne, was issued by Maclehose Press in 2018

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

Spoiler Alert: a detailed synopsis of the plot of Vernon Subutex 2
Vernon has been very ill. He had a high temperature. He was terrified that he would die. He has been cared for by Charles, a retired alcoholic who has won the lottery and uses the money to drink with the down and outs living, like Vernon, in the parc de Buttes-Chaumont in north Paris. 

Following his illness, he regularly experiences moments of hallucinatory dissociation.

Vernon's friends (Xavier, recovered from his coma, Patrice, Emile, Lydia Bazooka, tranny Daniel and porn star Pamela Kant) have all offered him a place to stay but he prefers living outside with fellow down-and-outs Olga and Laurent. For the moment he has disappeared again. 

Pamela Kant visits Emilie who realises at last that the tapes of Alex Bleach's last interview that Vernon left with her might be valuable but before she can hand them to the group they are stolen by the Hyena who has been working for Laurent Dopalet, the film producer. However, the Hyena (who is now having a lesbian affair with Dopalet's assistant Anais) decides to play the tapes for recently-found Vernon and his friends (including the Hyena's friend, devout moslem Aicha) and at last we discover what is on them. Alex claims that his ex-girlfriend, porn star Vodka Santana, Aicha's mother, had been raped by Dopalet and that when she threatened to expose him he had her murdered. Alex himself has been threatening to expose Dopalet (and now Alex too has died 'from a drug overdose'). 

Vernon goers back to the park but now his friends regularly meet him there and take him for a few drinks at the nearby bar-cafe. New disciples join, such as Aicha's father Selim, and have their angers and sadnesses and frustrations eased; they become reconciled within the group. Not all are certain. Xavier, who now owns a rescue dog, a poodle called Joyeux, has his doubts, but Vernon seems to lift the weight from his shoulders. Celeste the barmaid who also works as a tatooist (and met Vernon in VS1 when she told him she used to go to his record shop Revolver with her dad, a cop) is sceptical. 

But Celeste is recruited by Aicha to go to a lecture given by Dopalet's son, Antoine, and disrupt it by coughing. Celeste takes more direct action, going home with Antoine, sleeping with him, and scrawling graffiti over his walls before she leaves. But Antoine hates his father. When Dopalet dismissed Anais in front of him, Antoine follows her to the nightly meeting with Vernon (via a meeting with Gaelle who seduces Anais away from her lesbian affair with the Hyena) and is recruited to the group, telling Aicha and Celeste how to gain access to Dopalet's apartment. 

The girls go to Dopalet's apartment and terrorise him, tattooing his back with 'RAPIST' and 'MURDERER'. His interior dialogue reveals that he arranged for Vodka Santana, Aicha's mum, to service other powerful men and then, when she threatened to expose them, looked the other way when she was murdered. “She had no idea of the gravity of the threats she was making. Certain situations necessitate extraordinary solutions, there are brilliant careers that cannot be derailed over some vulgar sex scandal. He warned her. She persisted. She had left him no room to maneuver: he had to let his friends know what was happening. But, honestly, when some minor bigwig had said ‘alright, then, she's left us no choice,’ he had not understood. ... He had thought they might ask some Chinese gangster to break her leg. ... She had to be made to see reason. ... When they had asked him to arrange to meet Vodka Satana, he did so, and when he saw the suave playboy they had sent to chat her up ... he had felt reassured ... She had been found dead the next morning. Accidental overdose or suicide. There was nothing to prove it was anything other than a terrible coincidence.” (247)

Loic, the neo-Nazi who put Xavier in a coma, is heart-broken that his best friend Noel has broken up with him over a stupid joke he made. He has contacted Xavier to apologise (he adores the one film Xavier made; he even loved going to Revolver, Vernon's record shop). He becomes reconciled with Xavier and is taken to meet Pamela Kant (he adores porn too) and, despite himself, starts dancing as Vernon DJs. But the next day he is ambushed in the Metro by Noel and the other neo-Nazis. his ex-mates, and beaten to death.

The Hyena, afraid of Doplaet's power and revenge, has arranged that Celeste and Aicha disappear. She knows she will have to flee too. 

They all meet at Loic's funeral but few of them actually enter the church. Instead they end up in the bar opposite, toasting Loic with champagne, and starting an impormptu dancing session. 

The Vernon crowd is now in Corsica. They travel around France arranging 'ceremonies'. As for Vernon: “He is making them all dance.”

"Sweet Thursday" by John Steinbeck

The sequel to Cannery Row.

The intervention of the Second World War has changed things. Gay is dead. Lee Chong has sold the grocery (and, Mack fears, the deeds to the Palace Flophouse) to crooked Joseph and Mary. Dora has died and bequeathed the brothel to Fauna; a new girl called Suzy has joined the team of girls. Doc wants to contribute something to science but can't write the paper and his dissatisfaction with life casts a gloom over the Row. The general diagnosis is that he needs a dame. Is Suzy the one?

The characters are all there, the wise observations are all there, it is as funny as Cannery Row. Perhaps the main difference is that the plot is more prominent; the interchapters that made Cannery Row such an anarchic pleasure are fewer and further between. There seems to be less observation and more device. It's not such a great book as Cannery Row but that is like saying that Ben Jonson is not such a great writer as William Shakespeare. Sweet Thursday is hugely entertaining and the main newcomer, Suzy, is one helluva dame.

Selected quotes:

• “Mack could tell a ghost how to haunt a house.” (Prologue)
• “How few men like their work, their lives - how very few men like themselves.” (Ch 3)
• “The end of life is now not so terribly far away - you can see it's the way you see the finish line when you come into the stretch - and your mind says, ‘Have I worked enough? Have I eaten enough? Have I loved enough?’All of these, of course, are the foundation of man's greatest curse, and perhaps his greatest glory. ‘What has my life meant so far, and what can it mean in the time left to me ... What how I contributed in the Great Ledger? What am I worth? ... Men seem to be born with a depth they can never pay, no matter how hard they try. It piles up ahead of them. Man owes something to man.” (Ch 3)
• “What can a man accomplish that has not been done a million times before?” (Ch 3)
• “Doc threw himself into his work, hoping, the way a man will, to smother the unease with weariness.” (Ch 3)
• “It's always hard to start to concentrate. The mind darts like a chicken, trying to escape thinking even though thinking is the most rewarding function of man.” (Ch 6)
• “She had a fine walk, thigh and knee and ankle swinging free and proud, no jerk and totter the way so many women walked as they fell from step to step.” (Ch 6)
• “You never feel real good if you never been a sucker.” (Ch 7)
• “There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn't necessarily a lie even if it didn't necessarily happen.” (Ch 8)
• “I want to take everything I've seen and thought and learned and reduce them and relate them and refine them until I have something of meaning, something of use.” (Ch 10)
• “It's a fact that if he's left alone a guy practically always marries the wrong kind of dame.” (Ch 11)
• “The injustice in the theory of private ownership of real estate was descending on them.” (Ch 14)
• “The delphiniums were like little openings in the sky.” (Ch 19)
• “There aren't many days like that anyplace. People treasure them. ... Old people sit looking off into the distance and remember inaccurately that the days of their youth were all like that. Horses roll in the green pastures on such a day and hens make a terrible sunny racket.” (Ch 19)
• “There ain't never been no dame went out first time with a guy she liked that wasn't scared.” (Ch 22)
• “You look back at every mess you ever got in and your find your tongue started it.” (Ch 22)
• “They ain't nobody was ever insulted by a question.” (Ch 22)
• “The nicest thing in the world you can do for anybody is let them help you.” (Ch 22)
• “Thing people like most in the world is to give you something and have you like it and need it.” (Ch 22)
• “He probably knows more secrets than any man in the community, for his martinis are a combination of Truth serum and lie detector. Veritas is not only in vino but regularly batters its way out.” (Ch 23)
• “S-l-o-w-ness - It gave meaning to everything. It made everything royal. She remembered how all the unsure and worried people she knew jumped and picked and jittered. Just doing everything slowly, forcing herself, she felt a new kind of security.” (Ch 23)
• “Of all our murky inventions, guilt is at once the most tedious, the most comic, the most painful. Was it planted by the group pressure of the tribe to keep the potentially dangerous individual off balance?” (Ch 30)
• “He watched life as a small boy watches a train go by - mouth open, breathing high and light, pleased, astonished, and a little confused.” (Ch 30)
• “Mack ... considered life hardly worse than a bad cold.” (Ch 30)
• “She has all the convictions of the uninformed ... not only sure for herself, but sure for everyone.” (Ch 33)

July 2025; 206 pages

First published in 1954 by William Heinemann

My Pan paperback edition issued in 1958

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

Books by Nobel Laureates reviewed in this blog can be found here.

A detailed synopsis of the plot

Doc is dissatisfied with life. He is experimenting on octopuses but he’s finding it impossible to write his paper. The other residents of the Row reckon he needs a dame.

There;s a new girl in town. Suzy joins the brothel, now run by Fauna, even though she isn't really cut out for that kind of job.

Fauna does Hazel's horoscope and predicts that his inescapable destiny is to become President of the United States. Eddie offers: ‘We’ve weathered some pretty bad ones.’ 

Mack realises that the Flophouse belonged to Lee Chong and then Lee Chong sold his business to Joseph and Mary who perhaps doesn’t realise that he owns the Flophouse but when he gets the tax demand for it he will at which point he will want to collect rent from Mack and the boys. Even if they kill Joseph and Mary, someone will inherit their house. Mack comes up with the plan to raffle the Flophouse to buy Doc the big new microscope he needs and make sure that Doc draws the winning ticket.

Every time Doc and Suzy meet, they end up shouting at each other. Nevertheless, Fauna persuades them to have dinner together (she'll pay) at Sonny Boy's. She also persuades Mack that the raffle will also be an engagement party with a fancy dress (Snow White) theme.

The Night Out: When Doc sees Suzy, whom Fauna has decked to the nines, he scarpers back home to put on a next-tie. Doc and Suzy dine at Sunny Boy’s. Sunny Boy has been primed, the table is ready, laid perfectly, the cocktails ready mixed. The menu sorted. Fauna has organised everything and they fall in love.

At the party Doc wins the Flophouse ... and then reveals (but only to Mack) that Mack already owned it. Lee Chong deeded it to Mack and paid ten years tax on it. He didn’t tell Mack because he was afraid Mack would sell it. Mack asks Doc never to tell anyone and to hold on to the house because otherwise Mack would sell it. Doc agrees to rent the house to Mack. 

DSuzy makes her appearance as Snow White, the bride. Doc tries to react well but Suzy reads his face and runs off. Fauna follows and Suzy reveals she loves Doc.

Suzy goes to the Golden Poppy and asks Ella for a job, she’ll work for free. She buys some furniture and moves into the boiler that Sam Molloy and his wife used to live in.

Hazel consults everyone he can to try and get Doc and Suzy back together. Suzy says she wants no part of Doc unless he gets sick or busts a leg. 

Joseph and Mary decides to 'have a whack at' Suzy but she slams the door on him, catching his hand in it. Doc fights him and almost throttles him to death. J&M and Doc have a drink and then they gather flowers. Doc dresses smart and pays a formal call on Suzy. They talk and she tells him she is over him. He says he’s going to La Jolla to collect specimens.

Hazel realises what he must do. He gets a base ball bat. Doc wakes up with a broken arm.

Suzy offers to drive Doc down to La Jolla. She goes to Mack for emergency lessons on how to drive.

Mack presents Doc with the scientific apparatus bought with the takings from the raffle ... but instead of a microscope it is a telescope. 

Doc and Suzy drive away from Cannery Row.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Under the Greenwood Tree" by Thomas Hardy

 A romance set amongst the comic antics of the rural peasantry. This is the first of Hardy's Wessex novels but much lighter in tone than most of them.

There are two plots, connected only by personnel. Music at Mellstock church has been traditionally provided by a group of string players and singers who call themselves the quire or choir, but a new young vicar has decided that henceforth they will accompany hymns with an organ. The second story is a love story: the nominated organist, schoolteacher Miss Fancy Day is being wooed by Dick Dewy, the carter's son and violinist in the quire, Mr Shiner, the grumpy churchwarden who is pushing for the quire to be replaced, perhaps because they woke him up on Christmas Eve with their carols, and Parson Maybold the new vicar himself. Will she marry for love or for money or for position in society? 

The quire plot roars into life but it never properly develops and it peters out after about 40% of the novel. This was disappointing because it had all the hallmarks of a theme: should tradition or innovation prevail? When, on Christmas day, the school girls sing as loudly as the quire, the latter are appalled: “Brazen-faced hussies! ... ’Tis the gallery have got to sing, all the world knows ... Why, souls, what’s the use o’ the ancients spending scores of pounds to build galleries if people down in the lowest depths of the church sing like that at a moment’s notice?’” The old folk think the old ways must be respected (this theme returns right at the end when a bride has to choose between old ways and new ways for her wedding). On the other hand, the old Parson is revealed as shamelessly hands-off, pocketing the income from the living without doing anything to put himself out, while the new one is stated, approvingly, to have reduced the stigma of being a witch for old Elizabeth Endorfield. It would have been nice to see this conflict developed through the novel but Hardy seems to give up. Instead we are left with a rather predictable and very standard 'who will she wed?' plot.

The characters are fundamentally one dimensional caricatures of the Dickens type (Dickens died two years before this novel was published so he would have been the benchmark at the time Hardy was writing). Not one of the characters has any sort of arc. Fancy is the only character who faces a moral choice. Dick the protagonist the the boy with the heart of gold whose trials and tribulations are all external challenges. Reuben, Dick's father, the leader of the choir and a 'tranter' (a man with a van, or rather, given the period, a cart) The rest of the characters contribute to the colourful and comedic background, particularly Thomas Leaf, a simpleton.

Thomas Leaf, a somewhat shaky gentleman, is an example of Hardy's use of charactonyms of which the most obvious is Fancy though Dick is somewhat Dewy behind the ears and Elizabeth Endorfield is blatantly named for the Witch of Endor who conjures up prophecies for King Saul in 1 Samuel 28.

Dick's courting is set against the marriages of, particularly, his parents Reuben and Mrs Dewy and Fancy's father and step-mother. There are also mentions of the Penny marriage. These allow the author a number of reflections about marriage, almost always seen from the male point of view:

• "She d’belong to that class of womankind that become second wives: a rum class rather.” (2.6)
• “wives be such a provoking class o’ society, because though they be never right, they be never more than half wrong.” (2.6)
• “When you’ve made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand—she’s as good as any other; they be all alike in the groundwork; ’tis only in the flourishes there’s a difference.” (2.8)

There are some wonderful descriptions. Hardy's descriptions of scenery as illuminated and shadowed is almost cinematic:

• “Having come more into the open he could now be seen rising against the sky, his profile appearing on the light background like the portrait of a gentleman in black cardboard.” (1.1)
• “They were all brightly illuminated, and each was backed up by a shadow as long as a steeple” (2.2)
• “The landscape being concave, at the going down of the sun everything suddenly assumed a uniform robe of shade.” (4.2)

He's also very fond of the pathetic fallacy: whether it is raining or sunny, windy or calm, the weather always reinforces the plot point perfectly.

Fundamentally, this is a pastoral comedy. There are a couple of moments of farce (when the Parson drops his pen, and when Fancy is stung on the lips) and some delightful set pieces, particularly when the characters are in conversation, such as Dick's first dinner eaten with Fancy's dad and his strange wife. There are also some brilliant one-liners:

• “Marrying a woman is a thing you can do at any moment; but a swarm o’ bees won’t come for the asking.” (5.1)
• “‘’Tis my belief she’s a very good woman at bottom.’/ ‘She’s terrible deep, then’.” (5.2) OK, that's a two-liner involving a straight man's set up and a withering riposte.

It's the humour, derived from a scrupulous observation of life that reminded me of Cannery Row, that lifts this book out of the ordinary.

Other selected quotes:

• “Having grown so very fast that before he had had time to get used to his height he was higher.” (1.2)
• “That sort o’ coarse touch that’s so upsetting to Ann’s feelings is to my mind a recommendation; for it do always prove a story to be true. And for the same reason, I like a story with a bad moral. My sonnies, all true stories have a coarse touch or a bad moral, depend upon’t. If the story-tellers could ha’ got decency and good morals from true stories, who’d ha’ troubled to invent parables?” (1.8)
• “did you ever hear too—just now at supper-time—talking about ‘taties’ with Michael in such a work-folk way. Well, ’tis what I was never brought up to! With our family ’twas never less than ‘taters,’ and very often ‘pertatoes’ outright” (1.8)
• “That was very nice o’ the man, even though words be wind.” (2.5)
• “Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed: kings must be managed; for men want managing almost as much as women, and that’s saying a good deal.” (2.5)
• “Then the music is second to the woman, the other churchwarden is second to Shiner, the pa’son is second to the churchwardens, and God A’mighty is nowhere at all.” (2.5)
• “watching the damp slopes of the hill-sides as they streamed in the warmth of the sun, which at this unsettled season shone on the grass with the freshness of an occasional inspector rather than as an accustomed proprietor.” (2.6)
• “If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single, we do.” (2.6)
• “I think I can manage any vicar’s views about me if he’s under forty.” (2.7)
• “That there maid is taking up thy thoughts more than’s good for thee, my sonny. Thou’rt never happy now unless th’rt making thyself miserable about her in one way or another.” (2.8)
• “This is how a maid is. She’ll swear she’s dying for thee, and she is dying for thee, and she will die for thee; but she’ll fling a look over t’other shoulder at another young feller, though never leaving off dying for thee just the same.” (2.8)
• “if you can’t read a maid’s mind by her motions, nature d’seem to say thou’st ought to be a bachelor.” (2.8)
• “For without money man is a shadder!” (4.2)
• “you have enough in you for any society, after a few months of travel with me!” (4.6) The vicar arrogantly reassures the woman he is wooing that she'll be good enough if she succumbs to his tutelage.
• “Well, if you make songs about yourself, my dear, you can’t blame other people for singing ’em." (5.1)

July 2025; 186 pages

It was first published by Tinsley Brothers in 1872

My Penguin paperback edition was issued in 1978 and reprinted in 1982.

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

A summary of the plot. Beware of spoilers!

On Christmas Eve, the Mellstock church quire (including some string musicians) gather at Reuben's house for a few drinks and then go round the parish singing carols whether they are wanted or not.

Dick sees the new schoolmistress, Fancy Day, and falls in love.

On Christmas morning the quire go to church and are distressed when other members of the congregation sing as loudly as they do. They blame the new vicar.

Later they gather at Reuben's house for a meal and, after midnight, dancing. Dick is desperate to dance with Fancy. But churchwarden Shiner escorts her home.

The quire meet at Mr Penny's shoemaking shop to discuss the new vicar who wants to change things such as not letting men put their hats in the baptismal font (it's cracked so it won't hold water; the old Parson used to spit on his finger to christen babies). And to replace the quire with an organ. Played by Fancy.

They go to see the vicar, trying their best to keep in step (you'd think a choir ought to be able to manage that!) They win a reprieve until Michaelmas. 

That's more or less the end of the 'quire' plot. 

Soon after Easter, Dick visits Fancy at her father’s house. He realises the rivals to her love include Farmer Shiner and Parson Maybold. He mismanages an opportunity to declare his love. His father advises him to go and get her. He writes her a letter, tears it up and writes another. 

He meets Fancy by chance at Budmouth-Regis and drives her home. They become engaged. But they don't tell anyone and when, finally, Dick speaks to her father he says Dick isn't good enough. 

Fancy consults a local witch who tells her how to win her father over. Fancy goes off her food. Her dad caves in immediately. But the engagement is still not widely known.

Fancy debuts as church organist on a day when Dick is pall-bearing elsewhere. Parson Maybold is smitten by Fancy and proposes, offering her a posh life. She accepts.

Next day Parson Maybold meets Dick be chance and Dick tells him he is engaged. Parson M writes to Fancy offering to break the engagement; she writes to him breaking it off. He advises her to tell Dick and be forgiven.

Fancy and Dick marry. Dick still doesn't (and will never) know.

"The Flanders Panel" by Arturo Perez-Reverte

 

A murder mystery set in the art world in Madrid. With a large dose of chess.

Julia is an art restorer working on a Flemish painting showing two men playing chess as a woman at a window reads. An X-ray of the painting reveals a hidden inscription: who killed the knight? She consults her ex-lover Álvaro, an art historian, the woman who is arranging the sale of the painting Menchu, her 'guardian', the gloriously camp César, an antique dealer, and shabby down at heal chess genius Muñoz. They start investigating the painting. Then Álvaro is found dead.

By reverse-playing the game shown on the painting, Muñoz works out who captured the knight. This part of the mystery is solved by the 50% turning point. Then Julia keeps finding cards with chess moves written on them and she realises that Álvaro's killer is playing the game (as black) on from the position shown in the painting and that more deaths must occur before either white or black's king is check-mated. The murder mystery must be solved before Julia, the white queen, becomes another victim.

I love this sort of murder mystery with added historical puzzles and it was a classic example of its kind. The chess problems were explained so even a layman like myself was able to understand. But I expected more than I received. I was disappointed that the characters were such stereotypes: all the art world people were elegant and cultured and bitchy and the others included a dumb gigolo, a stupid policeman and the chess expert who was the classic private investigating loner in his shabby dress and his diffident manner. It was also disappointing that the historical mystery was solved in the first half, and so easily. There was a certain amount of what felt like padding in the middle as the characters talked of chess in Freudian terms and considered layers of meaning in terms of chess, and Bach (the owner of the painting was, wouldn't you know, an ex-conductor), and recursiveness: the influence of Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter was acknowledged in the epigraphs to chapters 9 and 11. 

A fun murder mystery but I was expecting more.

Selected quotes:

• “Life is like an expensive restaurant where, sooner or later, someone always hands you the bill, which is not to say that you should deny the joy and pleasure afforded by the dishes already eaten.” (Ch 1)
• “He had the unmistakable air of someone defeated before the battle has even started, of someone who, when he opens his eyes each morning, awakens only to failure.” (Ch 8)
• “Chess is all about getting the king into check, you see. It's about killing the father.” (Ch 9)
• “An exception doesn't prove anything; it invalidates or destroys any rule. That's why you have to be very careful with inductive reasoning.” (Ch 11)
• “In all businesses, unimpeachable honesty is the surest route to death from starvation.” (Ch 15)

July 2025; 295 pages

First published in Madrid by Alfaguara SA in 1990

My edition, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, was published by Harper Collins in 1994

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

Detailed summary of the plot: spoiler alert

Julia is an art restorer restoring a picture of two men playing chess as a woman watches. X-rays show a hidden inscription, in Latin: Quis necavit equitem: Who killed the knight? 

She goes to see art historian (and ex-lover) Álvaro; he identifies the people in the picture and points out that one was already dead. Art dealer Menchu tries to negotiate herself a larger percentage of the sale on the basis that this discovery will increase the value of the painting. She and Julia, with Julia's ex-guardian César, are trying to work out who killed the knight and waiting for Álvaro but he sends documents instead.

César and Julia go to a chess club and recruit expert player Muñoz who proposes to play the game shown in the painting backwards to discover who captured the white knight.

The police interview Julia in connection with Álvaro's death. Was it accident? But he died before he sent the documents. Suspicious!

César gives Julia a gun to defend herself.

Muñoz solves the mystery of who killed the knight. But now Julia discovers a card giving a further move and she and Muñoz realise that the game is now being played forward and that 'capturing'; a piece means a murder. And Julia, the white queen, is under threat. And she seems to be followed by a blue Ford.

While she is at the antique market, Julia's car is tampered with and another card is left. She and César see the blue Ford and attack it, Julia with the pistol. It’s the police. They have been tailing her 

The card Julia found has further moves in the game which they analyse with Muñoz.

Menchu has got wasted in a night club. Julia collects her in a taxi and takes her back to her flat. Next morning Julia goes out and while she is away from the flat, Menchu is murdered (there's another card left by the body, with yet further moves) and the painting stolen. 

The police arrest Menchu's boyfriend, gigolo Max, who tells Julia that Menchu planned to steal the painting but it was obviously taken by the man who murdered her.

Julia is working late in the restoration area of the Prado when she gets a phone call telling her to go to Room 12 and look at the painting by Brueghel the Elder called The Triumph of Death. There’s another card with more moves.

Julia and Muñoz go to confront the murderer. Muñoz plays against the murderer to the end of the game; he wins. The murderer explains how (and why) the crimes were committed. 

"A Place Called Winter" by Patrick Gale

 

Can Harry, a gentleman with an independent income, reinvent himself as a farmer in the Canadian prairies?

Harry Cane is living off his inheritance when he meets and marries Winifred. But after his affair with another man comes to light he is forced to make all his money over to his wife and young child and leave them to start a new life in the Canadian wilderness where a government scheme means that he will be given 160 acres if he lives there and farms it for three years.

That sounds difficult enough but to add challenge there is Troels, a villain if ever there was one, who crops up from time to time.

This story is alternated with another in which Harry is receiving psychiatric therapy in a community of other mental patients, most who seem to be thus diagnosed because of their homosexual tendencies including Bruno a "mannish" woman and Ursula a cross-dressing Cree Indian. This story is clearly in the future of the other but Harry's mental state means that no spoilers are given ... until the half-way point when, in a dramatic twist, we discover something that sent me back to the other story agog to discover what precisely had happened.

This, and something else that happens in the 'Bethel' part of the story, both of which are revealed through either psychic ability or via a hallucinogenic drug, are, it seemed to me, the only reason the plot needed the Bethel part of the narrative. The novel would have been more streamlined if that had been eliminated. I understand it offered an alternative perspective on non-hetero-normative sexualities and also introduced the thematic target of early twentieth century psychiatry but this cluttered the narrative.

Both stories are told in the third person and the past tense and exclusively from Harry's point of view. The pacing is classic four-part with turning points at the 25% mark (Harry is exposed as homosexual and forced to quit England), the 50% mark (the dramatic revelation mentioned above) and the 75% mark when the villain does something unspeakable. But there's plenty of excitement elsewhere and the reader is in for a roller-coaster of tension and emotions, especially towards the end.

There are some great characters. It is necessarily a well-rounded portrait of protagonist Harry but Petra and Ursula/Little Bear were complex and well-developed. There were delightful cameos of the minor characters such as Jack, Winnie, and Mrs Wells. Troels was perhaps a bit too bad to be true but he too had his complexities which were fascinating to explore.

However, the climax was marred by a deus ex machina; although this was subsequently explained (in the aforementioned hallucination) it felt as if the author had played a 'get out of jail free' card.

It's also one of those historical novels which use multiple details to immerse the reader in the period. If you want to appreciate the problems involved in farming virgin prairie, this will inform you. This creates a great deal of verisimilitude which helped me to believe that soft, leisured Harry just might have a chance at becoming a farmer so I was eager to keep reading. 

And it's based on the true story of the author's great-grandfather!

Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Prize

Selected quotes:

• “A cuckoo clock, surely chosen in irony, was chirping ten in the hall.” (Ch 1)
• “God, being English, meant everything for the best, and the life He gave us was full of rewards if only we buckled under and did our bit.” (Ch 2)
• “Pomposity. Severity. Snobbery. They were all masks for various sorts of fears.” (Ch 4)
• “Theirs was an urban tribe whose busy physicality ... could leave him feeling rebuked in his idleness, even as it drew his gaze.” (Ch 6)
• “Musical comedies were Harry's idea of Hell. He disliked ... the tension induced in him by knowing that at any moment a character would burst into song. He liked plays, proper plays, in which you could lose yourself and believe that real things, important things, were happening. He liked bold plays by Shaw, Pinero or Ibsen. He liked his audiences silent and his theatres small.” (Ch 7) Me too! And it's great to meet a gay character who actually dislikes musicals (a far cry from Hilary, the protagonist of Gale's Kansas in August, who spends his life as if he were in a musical). But Harry hasn't yet discovered, or acknowledged, his homosexuality.
• “Slim-hipped, ostentatiously flexible creatures who inexplicably chose to ape girls rather than exploit as men the advantages fate had awarded them. ... They gave every impression having emerged, fully formed, from eggs, as brittle as the waxy shells they had discarded.” (Ch 7)
• “The suggestive seaside smell ... in which something was added to the usual musk of a man and not yet clean.” (Ch 8)
• “His progress was as slow as forgetfulness.” (Ch 15)
• “She believed the key element to patriotism was display; that it was all about being seen to support a cause, being seen to wave a flag.” (Ch 28)

The epigraph for the second section is: “England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.” This comes from E M Forster's  Maurice, the novel he suppressed until after his death because of its blatantly gay themes.

July 2025; 350 pages

First published in 2015 by Tinder Press

My paperback edition issued in 2015

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

Patrick Gale's novels:

• The Aerodynamics of Pork (1985)
• Ease (1985)
• Kansas in August (1987)
• Facing the Tank (1988)
• Little Bits of Baby (1989)
• The Cat Sanctuary (1990)
• The Facts of Life (1996)
• Tree Surgery for Beginners (1999)
• Rough Music (2000)
• A Sweet Obscurity (2003)
• Friendly Fire (2005)
• Notes from an Exhibition (2007)
• The Whole Day Through (2009)
• A Perfectly Good Man (2012)
• A Place Called Winter (2015)
• Take Nothing With You (2018)
• Mother’s Boy (2022)

A detailed synopsis of the plot: spoiler alert!

It opens in a mental asylum where Harry is being forced into a bath to 'calm him down'. But then he is selected by Dr Gideon Ormshaw to go to his house in the country to live in a therapeutic community with other mentally ill (?) patients including Mabel, Bruno “a mannish woman”, Samuel, a black man “Harry assumed was someone’s servant”, a tall Indian woman and other men who look like “the gentlemen of the Gaiety chorus, in London.”

We flashback to Harry's childhood. His father was a self-made man, earning his fortune from four horse-drawn omnibus routes which he then sold to retire to Nice. His mother died giving birth to Harry’s brother Jack when Harry was 4. The lads were packed off to boarding school first on the south coast and then Harrow, when they were five. Jack thrives, being handsome and sporting, Harry is bullied.

After school, Jack decides to become a vet. They live together in bachelor lodgings in London. When Harry dies he inherits all the money (except for a house in Nice left to a Frenchwoman) but supports Jack through college.

Jack and Harry meet two sisters, Georgina and Winifred Wells, daughters of a now deceased solicitor, who live with their mum and four younger sisters and two of their three brothers, Robert and Frank. Harry falls in love with Winifred.

Winifred and Harry are living in Herne Bay with a baby, Phyllis, (and a nursemaid) having had a honeymoon in Venice where she admitted that she had previously been in love with Tom Whiteacre whose father had owned a department store (so he was ‘in trade’ so the family prevented it).

Frank comes to see Harry. Having advised him to invest in a ‘sure thing’ he now admits it has crashed. Harry has lost a third of his money. 

Jack elopes with Georgina. Everyone is okay with it.

Third daughter Pattie comes back from her Belgian convent (because of the family’s financial problems) and joins the chorus of the Gaiety Theatre, acquiring a rich ‘admirer’ called Notty (because he’s not quite an earl, being the third son).

Harry meets the gentlemen of the chorus and rather despises their effeminacy. But one of them, a masculine man, Hector Browning, offers him lessons in elocution to cure his stutter. But when he goes to Browning's house he ends up in bed with him.

They are lovers for a year before Robert finds out. Harry is told to make over his property to Winnie and leave the country. Harry decides to emigrate to Canada taking advantage of the Canadian government's offer of 160 acres of free land to farm in return for partial residency and working the land.

On the ship, surprisingly not seasick, he meets Troels Munck, a Dane.

A single chapter in which Harry realises that the Cree Indian woman called Ursula is a young man dressed as a woman. The Cree respect 'two-souls': men who identify as women and vv. Christians don't. 

Troels and Harry travel to Moose Jaw where Harry will learn how to farm by becoming farmhand to Mr Jorgenson, a relative of Troels. On the night before they reach the farm, Troels rapes Harry.

Harry learns to farm and slowly the Jorgenson's start to respect him. 

Winnie writes to ask for a divorce (on the grounds of desertion) so she can marry her first love. Harry agrees. 

He gets a letter from Jack who has found out why Harry went abroad. Jack breaks communications. 

After a year as a farm hand he travels to Winter with Troels and registers his claim for a parcel of land. 

Back in Bethel, Harry drives into town with Ursula who dresses as a young Cree Indian man called Little Bear. Littel Bear is psychic and asks Harry about “the man you killed.” This revelation is at the 55% mark.

Harry buys supplies then drives out with Troels to his new farm. They meet Petra Slaymaker, the neighbour. She knows Troels: small world! It’s clear she doesn’t like him.

Harry works hard and makes some progress, planting wheat. Then he develops a fever. Petra, who trained as a nurse, and her brother Paul look after him on their farm. He gets better. Paul and Harry go skinny-dipping and have sex.

Petra tells Harry Paul, back in Toronto, had an affair with Edward ‘Teddy’ Crosbie who then attempted suicide but was discovered by Troels. Hence their flight into the prairies.

The threshing gang arrives, Troels among them. Troels rapes Petra.

Petra takes Harry to the Cree encampment to tseek an abortion. Harry, learning that Petra is pregnant, proposes marriage. They marry and the baby, a girl called Grace, is born. 

War is declared. As farmers they are an essential industry and protected workers but at the railway, Paul and Harry encounter a recruiting sergeant: Troels. Shortly afterwards, Paul receives a package addressed to ‘Paul Slaymaker Esq, Coward and Bugger’ and filled with white feathers.

Paul runs away and enlists. Petra  receives notice that he is missing in action. 

At the homecoming parade, Harry meets Troels again who was ‘retired early’ because of illness. When he gets home to Petra and Grace, he finds Troels already there, eating at his table, Grace on his lap, Petra, terrified, in the corner.

Harry and Troels fight. Troels is on top and tells him he is going to kill him, then rape and kill Petra and then ‘your daughter’. He starts to strangle Harry. Then Troels collapses on top of Harry. Harry takes advantage of the unconscious Troels, drags him to the pond and drowns him.

Going back inside, Petra tells him that Grace has the Spanish influenza.

Grace dies. Harry buries her on the farm and Troels in a shallow grave off the property, next to the road.

Back in Bethel

Dr Ormshaw tells Harry that he was “apprehended on a train heading west from Winter” displaying “lewd behaviour towards a group of returning soldiers, and uncontrollable weeping” and asks whether he mistook a soldier for Paul; Harry can’t remember.

Ursula takes Harry on a walk to a place where sometimes Cree camp, she lights a fire and gathers a plant which they chew. It is a hallucinogen. He remembers the railway carriage and thinks he sees Jack and Paul. He hugs them but it isn’t them. Then he hears Troels explain that he had a fever which weakened his heart which was why he was recruiting rather than fighting.

When he awakes, Ursula has disappeared. He finds her. She has hung herself from a tree. Her cuts her down and revives her. He carries her back to Bethel.

Gideon sends Ursula back to the asylum and, declaring Harry cured, gives Harry the money to go home.

Winter is busy, although the war and the flu have removed many of the men and women, leaving children and grandparents. At the store he meets Paul. Paul lost a foot and was taken prisoner and treated by the Germans. He had returned home about a week after Harry, having buried Petra with Grace, had left. That was ten months ago but Paul has been keeping the farms going.

They go home together.

"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