"Lazarus Man" by Richard Price

 Days after a five-storey tenement in Harlem collapses, Anthony is dragged from the ruins. His miraculous survival is used to inspire young New Yorkers on the periphery of gangs. Meanwhile Felix, a young photographer who lived opposite the disaster, is seeking paid employment, Royal, a funeral director, is seeking bodies, and Mary, a detective, is seeking a missing person who might or might not have been in the building.

I was spell-bound by the first part of this take of ordinary New Yorkers struggling to survive and make sense of their lives. The characters of Felix and Mary had me hooked, Royal providing a lighter touch. But the book started to become less engrossing from the moment that Anthony, like Lazarus, rose from the dead. I persisted to find out what happened to Mary and Felix, and to solve the mystery that is being woven around the survival of Anthony, but somehow the moment stalled. 

But I loved the gritty authenticity and I hope to read more from this author. 

The author has a particular skill in creating original descriptions, such as "straw-sipping", "weed-poked", and "sitting slump-shouldered". 

There are some super lines such as:

• “When the doors opened at the next stop he bailed like a bailiff.” (Boom)
• “Bobby Hazari, her partner du jour.” (Boom)
• “A lover who was nothing more than a clap-on clap-off dick.” (Boom)

Selected quotes:

• “Maybe-this-time is the drug, you-never-know is a drug.” (Angels)
• “Straw-sipping something peachcoloured.” (Angels)
• “Both left him feeling like a spy in the world; a double agent inside a double agent.” (Angels)
• “The big man in the dark sunglasses sitting slump-shouldered.” (Boom)
• “The street itself, a glittering quilt of daggered glass topped here and there with scatters of mail and magazines.” (Boom)
• “The buckling weed-poked macadam.” (Boom)
• “The sneaker skitter of the small kids randomly running in and out.” (Boom)
• “Nodding like an over excited oil rig.” (Boom)
• “Maybe something could be salvaged if the film editor used a machete instead of a splicer.” (Boom)
• “So oblivious to their surroundings that whenever one of them tried to cross to the other side of Fifth Avenue all the cars had to go into slalom mode.” (Boom)
• “The police would make their periodic sweeps, but it was like pushing a broom without a dustpan.” (Boom)
• “A young lady such as yourself should never have to pay for her own banana.” (Boom)
• “She could hear his heart beating in his throat, sounding to her like one of those plush toy animals you'd put in the crib of a newborn that imitated the swashing sound of a womb.” (Boom)
• “The sexual equivalent of a square meal - hearty and filling.” (Boom)
• “The elevator was a crawler, Royal able to clock its ascent with a calendar.” (Risen)
• “The street can be a brutal sculptor.” (Risen)
• “Doubling his fee, otherwise known as two times zero.” (Risen)
• “If it weren't for genitals, she thought, people could live for hundreds of years.” (Risen)

May 2026; 337 pages

First published in the USA by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in 2024

My UK paperback edition was issued by Corgi in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The House of Spirits" by Isabel Allende

 A family saga doubling as the history of a country. The author Allende was second cousin to Salvador Allende, who, having been elected Marxist president of Chile, was killed during a military coup. The book's last quarter is a description of a military coup and the terror unleashed by the subsequent dictatorship. Until that point, it seems to be a slightly meandering account of three generations of the family of Esteban, a violent man, a right-winger who subsequently becomes a Senator and his clairvoyant wife, Clara. This element introduces significant elements of magic: salt-cellars are moved by psychokinesis, dreamed predictions come true etc. This aspect of the book, together with its intent to tell the history of a nation, make it comparable with Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children which had been published the year before.

It is written in the past tense and mostly in the third person omnipresent, although occasionally a first-person section (narrated by Esteban) intrudes. The Epilogue is another first-person narrative written by the person whom we then discover to have been the narrator of the rest of the book. The chapters are long, averaging over thirty pages, and the paragraphs tend to be long, not infrequently more than a page in length. This can make it heavy going. Nevertheless I finished it in five days.

It was narrative heavy, with a great deal of exposition, which enabled the author to get through a great deal of material. Perhaps this was necessary: the canvas of this book is large. After all, as the author suggests in the Epilogue: “Memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously.” (Epilogue) So there is a lot of stuff to write about. Nor does the narrative skim the surface: this tapestry is richly embroidered. Nevertheless, for all that, it seemed a little heavy on the tell rather than the show, and there were times when I wanted less exposition.

There are, occasionally, moments when the narrator breaks through to hint at what is to come, such as: “This story could not have been written if she hadn't intervened to rescue us and, in the process, our memories.” (Ch 4)

Selected quotes:

• “The only one whose appearance was enhanced by mourning was the church's patron saint, Sebastian, for during holy week the faithful were spared the sight of that body twisted in the most indecent posture, pierced by arrows, and dripping with blood and tears like a suffering homosexual, whose wounds, kept miraculously fresh by Father Restrepo’s brush, made Clara tremble with disgust.” (Ch 1)
• “She had buried him once before, which explained why she had room for doubt with her this time his death was real.” (Ch 1)
• “It seemed that no sooner did he roll in the pasture with the girl than she became pregnant.” (Ch 2)
• “The weed-choked garden where the statues of the Olympian gods stood naked and covered with pigeon droppings.” (Ch 7)
• “She attempted to establish a system of communication with Blanca that would allow them to circumvent the terrible delays of the postal system, but telepathy did not always work and she was never sure how the message would be received.” (Ch 7)
• “Pedro Tercero Garcia holding her in his arms, stroking and kissing her, and eliciting from her the same profound harmony he drew from his guitar.” (Ch 8)
• “That lost gaze often observed in those who eat only vegetables.” (Ch 9)
• “The military's scrupulous honesty for the unimportant.” (Epilogue)

This is the first novel of Allende's I have read and it hasn't awakened in me a longing to read more of her oeuvre. I think I prefer the less  mainstream South American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges (A Universal History of Infamy) or Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Chronicle of a Death Foretold). 

May 2026; 491 pages

Allende's debut novel

First published in Spanish as La Casas de los espiritus in 1981

The first English translation was published by Knopf in 1985

My paperback version (translated by Magda Bogin) was issued by Vintage in 2011

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Fer-de-Lance" by Rex Stout

Rex Stout wrote 33 novels featuring his master-sleuth Nero Wolfe and sidekick-narrator Archie Goodwin and this is the very first. Later Nero Wolfe novels include The Doorbell Rang, listed as 66th in the 100 best crime novels by the Mystery Writers of America, and The Father Hunt which won the 1969 silver dagger award from the British Crime Writers' Association. 

It is a sort of hybrid between the classic English whodunnits of Conan Doyle (in which narrator Dr Watson is the sidekick to mastersleuth Sherlock Holmes) and Agatha Christie (whose first Hercule Poirot mysteries are narrated by sidekick Captain Hastings) and the more hardboiled American thriller-crime novels. There are one or two lines, such as “I don't know what kind of a career she had mapped out, but I could have worn her not to try the stage.” (Ch 8) or “The corner the light doesn't reach is the one the dime rolled to.” (Ch 11) that reminded me of the work of Raymond Chandler, although The Big Sleep was published in 1939, 5 years after FdL.

The gimmick is that Nero Wolfe is an enormously fat man dedicated to orchids who never leaves his New York apartment so Archie Goodwin, as well as being the narrator, must be the investigator who does all the ground work, enabling him also to be involved in the action.

I was disappointed. The elimination of the suspects one by one rested mostly on their alibis and was pedestrian. The killer's identity was obvious with at least 20% of the novel still to go; the remainder depended on extracting sufficient evidence. More thriller than whodunnit, then, and by no means as stylish as the Philip Marlowe novels. Given how much classic work I have yet to discover, I'm not tempted to read any more.

One neat trick I noticed was the way he inserted references to previous cases (even though this is the first of the corpus), thus adding verisimilitude.

Selected quotes:

• “All lawyers look alike. It's a sort of mixture of a scared look at a satisfied look, as if they were crossing a traffic-filled street where they expect to get run over any minute but they know exactly the kind of paper to hand the driver if they get killed.” (Ch 4)
• “To have you with me like this is always refreshing because it constantly reminds me how distressing it would be to have someone present - a wife, for - whom I could not dismiss at will.” (Ch 5)
• “Though it used all the facts without any stretching. anyone could have said that much a thousand years ago when they thought the sun went round the Earth. That didn't stretch any of the facts they knew, but what about the ones they didn't know?” (Ch 5)
• “Anyone may make a mistake, but ... when a man sits himself up as cocksure as Wolfe did, he had always got to be right.” (Ch 5)
• “A yawn that would have held a tennis ball.” (Ch 8)
• “We were putting the soup before the cocktail.” (Ch 13)
• “Saul looked in the kitchen to make a face at me, as if his ugly mug wasn't good enough without any embroidery.” (Ch 16)

May 2026; 285 pages

First published in the USA in 1934

My paperback edition was issued by Bantam in 2008

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Ann Veronica" by H G Wells

One of the 'social' novels of H G Wells, Ann Veronica was his attempt to understand the proto-feminist movement of the early years of the nineteenth century. His eponymous heroine wants to “be a human being; I want to learn about things and know about things, and not to be protected as something too precious for life.” (1.7). But her patriarchal father insists she stays at home: "While you live in my house you must follow my ideas.” (1.7) So she runs away. But living as an independent woman in a man's world seems to be impossible. 

One man assumes he has bought her and tries to force himself upon her, after she has attended, as his guest, a performance of Wagner's opera about transgressive love Tristan und Isolde: “He made it very clear that night that there was an ineradicable discord in life, a jarring something that must shatter all her dreams of a way of living for women that would enable them to be free and spacious and friendly with men, and that was the passionate predisposition of men to believe that love of women can be earned and won and controlled and compelled.” (9.5)

Another worships the ground that she walks on but “she realised she was in fact just a mannequin for her lover's imagination, and that he cared no more for the realities of her being, for the things she felt and desired, for the passions and dreams that might move her, then a child cares for the sawdust in its doll.” (13.5)

She has actually fallen in love with another man ... but he's married.

Her journey takes her to the Suffragettes and to prison. Can she end up fulfilled?

Feminists today usually consider the novel flawed. It was not only written by a man, but a man with a track record of abandoning wives and mistresses  (Wells fathered the novelist Anthony West on his mistress Rebecca West, author of Return of the Soldier; he also has affairs with Dorothy Richardson, author of Pilgrimage: Pointed Roofs, and Elizabeth von Arnim who wrote The Enchanted April); I set this aside because if the character of the author is allowed to taint the work then the corpus of literature will be disembowelled and bowdlerised. Furthermore, Wells ridicules and lampoons the Suffragettes who are often regarded as modern-day saints but this just makes the truthful observation that protest movements may often be led by pompous idiots. But it is true that the ending is a cop out and that does mar the novel both as a work of art and as a political argument. But Wells, it seems to me, was writing a brave novel for his time (indeed, his established publisher rejected it on the grounds that the behaviour of the heroine would shock readers) and his protagonist is a fabulous character, feisty, full of fire, who, even though she blunders, always bounces back. I guess if you write a book that is criticised from both ends of the political spectrum, you've probably done something right.

In terms of its quality, it is true that many of the male characters are only spokespersons for a particular view. The father is the patriarchy, Ramage is a rake, and Manning is a ridiculed caricature of chivalry. Few of the female characters are given much air time except for the aunt. So in terms of the characters, the book's only real success is the protagonist, but in her, I believe, Wells triumphantly succeeds.

The structure of the plot is good; it is well-paced and I kept turning the pages. There are moments of delightful humour, such as the eternal non sequiturs and muddled thinking of Miss Miniver. 

The style is determinedly Victorian - Wells refused to follow Modernist innovations - and he writes in the past tense using third person omniscient: although the action is entirely viewed from the perspective of the protagonist there are authorial interjections along the way. I enjoyed reading this novel and there were some profound thoughts along the way.

Selected quotes:

• “The forces that had modelled her features had loved and lingered at their work and made them subtle and fine.” (1.2)
• “All the world about her seemed to be - how can one put it? - in wrappers, like a house when people leave it in the summer. The blinds were all drawn, the sunlight kept out, one could not tell what colours these grey swathings hid. She wanted to know. ... Dim souls flitted about her, not only speaking but it would seem even thinking in undertones.” (1.2)
• “Shamefaced curiosities began to come back into her mind, thinly disguised as literature and art.” (1.2)
• “His ideas about girls and women were of a sentimental and modest quality; they would creatures, he thought, either too bad for a modern vocabulary, and then frequently most undesirably desirable, or too pure and good for life. He made this simple classification of a large and various sex to the exclusion of all intermediate kinds ... Women are made like the potter’s vessels, either for worship or contumely, and are withal fragile vessels.” (1.3)
• “His instinct was in the direction of considering his daughters his absolute property, bound to obey him, his to give away or his to keep to be a comfort in his declining years, just as he thought fit.” (1.3)
• “Teddy made some confused noise, a thoracic street row; some remark was assassinated by a rival in his throat and buried hastily under a cough.” (2.1)
• “The call Ann Veronica paid with her aunt that afternoon had at first much the same relation to the Widgett conversation that a plaster statue of Mr Gladstone would have to a carelessly displayed interior on a dissecting-room table. The Widgetts talked with a remarkable absence of external coverings, the Palsworthys found all the meanings of life on the surfaces. They seemed the most wrapped things in all Ann Veronica's wrappered world.” (2.3)
• “Was there anything at all in those locked rooms of her aunt's mind? Were they fully furnished and only a little dusty and cobwebby and in need of an airing, or were they stark vacancy, except, perhaps, for a cockroach or so or the gnawing of a rat?” (2.3)
• “I have often felt before that it is only when one has nothing to say that one can write easy poetry. Witness Browning.” (3.1) [I think this is a gross calumny on Browning.
• “Miss Miniver never stated an argument clearly ... she was never embarrassed by a sense of self-contradiction, and had little more respect for consistency of statement than a washer woman has for wisps of her vapour.” (6.4)
• “Miss Garvice ... began by attracting her very greatly - she moved so beautifully - and ended by giving her the impression that moving beautifully was the beginning and end of her being.” (7.1)
• “The biological laboratory, perpetually viewing life as pairing and breeding and selection, and again pairing and breeding, seemed only a translated generalization of that assertion.” (7.5)
• “Life is difficult ... When you loosen the tangle in one place you tie a knot in another.” (11.5)
• “Flesh and flowers are all alike to me.” (14.4)
• “Life is rebellion, or nothing.” (16.1)
• “Mr Stanley was inclined to think the censorship should be extended to the supply of what he styled latter-day fiction; good, wholesome stories were being ousted, he said, by ‘vicious, corrupting stuff’ that ‘left a bad taste in the mouth’.” (17.2)

May 2026; 258 pages

First published by Fisher Unwin in 1909

My paperback Everyman edition was issued in 1993

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Works by H G Wells

• The Time Machine (1895)
• The Wonderful Visit (1895)
• The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
• The Wheels of Chance (1896)
• The Invisible Man (1897)
• The War of the Worlds (1898)
  
When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, revised 1910)
• Love and Mr Lewisham (1900)
• The First Men in the Moon (1901)
• The Sea Lady (1902)
• The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904)
• A Modern Utopia (1905)
• Kipps (1905)
• In the Days of the Comet (1906)
• The War in the Air (1908)
• Ann Veronica (1909)
• Tono-Bungay (1909)
• The History of Mr Polly (1910)
• The New Machiavelli (1911)
• Marriage (1912)
• The Passionate Friends (1913)
• The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914)
• The World Set Free (1914)
• Bealby (1915)
• Boon (1915) (as Reginald Bliss)
• The Research Magnificent (1915)
• Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916)
• The Soul of a Bishop (1917)
• Joan and Peter (1918)
• The Undying Fire (1919)
• The Secret Places of the Heart (1922)
• Men Like Gods (1923)
• The Dream (1924)
• Christina Alberta's Father (1925)
• The World of William Clissold (1926)
• Meanwhile (1927)
• Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928)
• The Autocracy of Mr. Parham (1930)
• The Bulpington of Blup (1932)
• The Shape of Things to Come (1933)
• Brynhild (1937)
• Star Begotten (1937)
• Apropos of Dolores (1938)
• The Holy Terror (1939)
• Babes in the Darkling Wood (1940)
• You Can't Be Too Careful (1941)

Biographies of H G Wells reviewed in this blog:

H G Wells by Lovat Dickson
H G: The History of Mr Wells by Michael Foot

"Introducing Swedenborg" by Peter Ackroyd

 

This is a miniature biography of a complex man, a Swedish mining engineer who became a member of their House of Lords and, following a series of visions, a mystic theologian and philosopher. Swedenborg  frequently travelled to London (he died there) and attended lectures given by Isaac Newton, studied with astronomers John Flamsteed and Edmund Halley. He published Sweden's first scientific journal and was the cousin of Carl Linnaeus. He corresponded with Kant and John Wesley. His conversations with angels remind one of William Blake. He wrote loads of books.

This tiny biography can't hope to do justice to its subject in 64 pages, but it's an admirably well-written start.

Selected quotes:

• "He realized that by breathing slowly he was able to better concetnrate and understand." (p 4)
• "How did the infinite, which is not material and is not defined by time or space, give rise to the finite? He posits the existence of a number of points without dimension, which emerge from the infinite and which are the cause of matter." (pp 8 - 9)
• "He tried to elucidate his thoughts by means of a series of steps from lower to higher which he called 'correspondences'. This was an occult maxim which had been used elsewhere, namely 'that which is above is like that which is below'." (p 13)
• "Writing in the highest heaven consists of curves and distinct forms; good is distributed through the vowels 'u', 'o' and 'a' while truth is conveyed by 'e' and 'i'." (p 34)
• "Some angels are naked because nakedness corresponds with innocence." (p 39)
• "All those in hell 'are ruled by means of their fears' ... Each person believes that they act through their own choice; so it is that a person is the cause of their own evil and so casts themself 'into hell from death'." (p 40)
• "Socinians rejected the divinity of Christ and thus the existence of the Trinity." (p 57)

Peter Ackroyd is a novelist who also writes biographies, particularly of people associated with London.

Novels by Peter Ackroyd

• The Great Fire of London (1982)
• The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) 
• Hawksmoor (1985)
• Chatterton (1987) 
• First Light (1989)
• English Music (1992) 
• The House of Doctor Dee (1993)
• Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994)
• Milton in America (1996)
• The Plato Papers: A Prophecy (1999)
• The Clerkenwell Tales (2003)
• The Lambs of London (2004)
• The Fall of Troy (2006)
• The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008)
• The Canterbury Tales – A Retelling (2009)
• The Death of King Arthur: The Immortal Legend – A Retelling (2010)
• Three Brothers (2013)

Non-fiction by Peter Ackroyd

• Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism (1976)
• Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag, the History of an Obsession (1979)
• Ezra Pound and His World (1980)
• T. S. Eliot (1984)
• Dickens' London: An Imaginative Vision (1987)
• Dickens (1990)
• Introduction to Dickens (1991)
• Blake (1995)
• The Life of Thomas More (1998)
• London: The Biography (2000)
• Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion (2002)
• Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002)
• The Beginning (2003)
• Illustrated London (2003)
• Escape From Earth (2004)
• Ancient Egypt (2004)
• Shakespeare: The Biography (2005)
• Ancient Greece (2005)
• Ancient Rome (2005)
• Thames: Sacred River (2007)
• Coffee with Dickens (with Paul Schlicke) (2008)
• Venice: Pure City (2009)
• The English Ghost: Spectres Through Time (2010)
• London Under (2011)
• The History of England, v.1 Foundation (2011)
• The History of England, v.2 Tudors (2012)
• The History of England, v.3 Civil War (2014)
• Alfred Hitchcock (2015)
• The History of England, v.4 Revolution (2016)
• Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day (2017)
• The History of England, v.5 Dominion (2018)
• The History of England, v.6 Innovation (2021)
• Introducing Swedenborg (2021) 
• The Colours of London (2022)
• The English Actor: From Medieval to Modern (2023)
• The English Soul: Faith of a Nation (2024)
• Forgotten London: Exploring the Hidden Life of the City (2025)

Ackroyd's Brief Lives

• Chaucer (2004)
• J.M.W. Turner (2006)
• Newton (2008)
• Poe: A Life Cut Short (2008)
• Wilkie Collins: A Brief Life (2012)
• Charlie Chaplin: A Brief Life (2014)

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Eyre Affair" by Jasper Fforde

 Literary detective Thursday Next battles Jack Schitt of the Goliath Corporation and master villain Acheron Hades when first a minor character in Martin Chuzzlewit is kidnapped and then disruption is planned to Jane Eyre in a whimsical comedy thriller involving time travel and forays into fiction. 

It was mostly moderately funny and moderately exciting, uneasily straddling the gap between the two genres, with a meandering plot. The highlights were some clever names, including that of the heroine, her colleague Paige Turner and villain Jack Schitt. There were also two very funny set pieces: 

• A performance of Richard III in which the audience repeatedly heckle in a call-and-response manner, such as: "When is the winter of our discontent? Now is the winter of our discontent?"
• Bookworms who emit apostrophes, unnecessary capitalisations and, when really excited, hyphens, leading to mutations in the dialogue of the other characters such as: "You're Upsetting the Wor'ms! They'rer starting the hy-phen-ate!"

An enjoyable romp blurring the boundaries between fiction and fiction; this witty novel reminded me of At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (a work of genius) and The Last Simple by Ray Sullivan (which is much funnier).

Selected quotes:

• "The Goliath Corporation was to altruism what Genghis Khan was to soft furnishings."  (Ch 7)
• "It had been of considerable anguish to her [my mother] that I waqsn't spending more time with swollen ankles, haemorrhoids and a bad back, popping out grandchildren." (Ch 9)
• "As much charm as an open grave." (Ch 12)
• "Don't ever call me mad ... I'm not mad, I'm just ... differently moralled." (Ch 15)
• "the sullen smell of death." (Ch 17)
• "Somehow 'fucked up' made it seem more believable; we all make mistakes ... It is only when the cost is counted in human lives that people really take notice." (Ch 18)
• "Small pockets of fog ... parcels of gloom." (Ch 19)
• "The standard joke about Swindon's morgue was that the corpses were the ones with all the charisma." (Ch 20)

April 2026; 373 pages
First published in 2001 by Hodder and Stoughton

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God