"The Comforters" by Muriel Spark

In this clever meta-fiction, Caroline is haunted by the sound of typing and voices repeating her thoughts to her; she realises she is a character in a novel. The absurd plot (Laurence believes his gran is involved in a gang of criminals smuggling diamonds) and devices such as including the conventional warning “At this point in the narrative, it might be as well to state that the characters in this novel are all fictitious.” in the text at chapter three and lampooning the use of repetition (eg “The way you notice absurd details, it's absurd of you.”; Ch 1; and “His mother told him repeatedly, ‘I've told you repeatedly, you are not to enter the maids’ rooms.’”; Ch 1) add to the Brechtian feel: as readers we are both immersed in the story and observing the narrative from a distance. 

Other games with narrative include a moment right at the beginning when Laurence's grandmother tells the baker he doesn't eat white bread and he, he overhearing her, says this isn't true. It's a tension between fact and fiction, reinforced when the Baron, a bookseller, tells Caroline: “I hear everything in this shop but my informants always exaggerate. They are poets on the whole or professional liars of some sort, and so one has to make allowances.” (Ch 7) thus reminding the reader that they are reading untruths. 

There's also a clever ambiguity  in chapter eight when Lawrence asks Caroline how her book is going; he means her book she is writing on the form of the novel. When she replies it's nearing the end, she means the book that she is living in.

Religious, specifically Roman Catholic, overtones suggest that the meta-fiction is a metaphor for the relationship of humanity with a deity. For example, in chapter five, when Laurence and Caroline are debating whether to travel by car or by train, she wants to go by train because the narrative suggests they go by car. “It's a matter of asserting free will.” (Of course destiny dictates that in the end they go by car.)

We also play with the ideas of whether, for example, a tree exists if it is unobserved. In philosophy, one solution of this problem is to say that God observes everything all the time, thus giving the tree a continuous existence and simultaneously acting as a proof for God. In this novel, villainous Mrs Hogg vanishes when the author doesn't need her:  “As soon as Mrs Hogg stepped into her room she disappeared, she simply disappeared. She had no private life whatsoever. God knows where she went in her privacy.” (Ch 7) God knows is more than just a cliche, here it is meant to reinforce the idea of God seeing Mrs Hogg when she is alone. Later, in chapter nine, when Mrs Hogg falls asleep in a car, she becomes invisible to the other occupants of the car.

Living as characters in a novel is a literary version of living as avatars in a simulation, as popularised in the movie The Matrix.

I really enjoyed these games. But you can also read this as a simple, if rather far-fetched, cosy crime novel about a smuggling gang. Spark's simple and direct writing makes her stories more accessible than other meta-fictional joys, such as Flann O'Brien's glorious At Swim-Two-Birds, Alasdair Gray's Lanark, and The Last Simple by Ray Sullivan.

Selected quotes:

• “At seventy-eight Louisa Jepp did everything very slowly but with extreme attention, as some do when they know they are slightly drunk.” (Ch 1)
• “Her form resembles a neat double potato just turned up from the soil with its small round head, its body from which hang the roots, her two thin legs below her full brown skirt and corpulence.” (Ch 1)
• “Mrs Hogg stuck in the mind like a lump of food on the chest which will move neither up nor down.” (Ch 2)
• “The demands of the Christian religion are exorbitant, they are outrageous.” (Ch 2)
• “It was a recitative, a chanting in unison. It was something like a concurrent series of echoes.” (Ch 3)
• “There is no more exquisite sight than that of a woman taken unawares with a rosary.” (Ch 3)
• “She ... pulled the belt tight as she did always when she wanted to pull her brains together.” (Ch 7)
• “The kitchen garden gone to seed and stalk.” (Ch 8)

July 2026; 188 pages
First published by Macmillan in 1957
My paperback edition was issued by Virago in 2009

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Muriel Spark novels:

• The Comforters (1957)
• Robinson (1958)
• Memento Mori (1959)
• The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
• The Bachelors (1960)
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
• The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
• The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
• The Public Image (1968) – shortlisted for Booker Prize
• The Driver's Seat (1970) – shortlisted for Booker Prize
• Not To Disturb (1971)
• The Hothouse by the East River (1973)
• The Abbess of Crewe (1974)
• The Takeover (1976)
• Territorial Rights (1979)
• Loitering with Intent (1981) – shortlisted for Booker Prize
• The Only Problem (1984)
• A Far Cry from Kensington (1988)
• Symposium (1990)
• Reality and Dreams (1996)
• Aiding and Abetting (2000)
• The Finishing School (2004)

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey

 

This great but morally dubious novel was later made famous by an Oscar-winning movie starring Jack Nicholson.

Selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels since Time began (1923).

It is set in a psychiatric ward containing both chronic patients, some in a more or less vegetative state, and acute patients which is run with fearsome efficiency by the autocratic Nurse Ratched. Randle McMurphy is a new patient who has feigned mental illness in order to avoid the harsh prison conditions of a work farm. He is a natural rebel and refuses to fit in with the rules of Ratched, even after he realises that he had been Committed and will never get out unless she endorses his sanity. So he and Big Nurse lock horns. She is for order and control and he is for laughter and gambling. She keeps the patients bullied and downtrodden; he tries to free them. The battle for dominance between these two drives the plot and enables the author to explore questions relating to human freedom.

The novel is narrated in the first person present tense by a mixed-race Native American, 'Chief Bromden', who is thought by the rest of the ward, including the staff, to be deaf and dumb. This narrative trick enables Chief, who repetitively cleans the ward, to be present at staff meetings to which patients would not be admitted, and patient discussions in the absence of staff. 

One of the strong points of the novel is the dialogue. Randle speaks in a free-wheeling slang, Billy Bibbit has a nervous stutter, Harding is refined, educated and articulate (enabling him to explain many of the concepts of psychiatric care to newcomer Randle). 

The plot is structured mostly around set pieces such as the fishing trip.

One of the themes is the idea of the emasculation of men in society. The novel was written in 1962, in the USA, which in hindsight seems a very patriarchal time and place. Indeed, McMurphy's attitude towards women is that of the sexually promiscuous rake. Billy Bibbit is a 31 year old virgin whose timidity with women is a result of a domineering mother who has colluded with Nurse Ratched - a symbol of overbearing womanhood - to have Billy incarcerated, presumably so he doesn't leave her for a woman of his own. The climax of the book comes when McMurphy rips Nurse Ratched's uniform to expose her breasts and then attempts to strangle her. 

There is an element of critique of McCarthyism. Although the book was first published in 1962, after the 'red scare' of the late 1940s to mid 1950s, McCarthy's use of supposition and innuendo, unrevealed 'evidence' and character assassination was still fresh in the public mind. So, for example, Scanlon tells McMurphy regarding the way that Nurse Ratched uses the therapy sessions: "If you don't answer her questions, Mack, you admit it just by keeping quiet. It's the way those bastards in the government get you." (part 1). The battle between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched in a supposedly democratic ward can be seen as an extended metaphor for the individual trying to assert their rights to freedom against an authoritarian government.

Selected quotes:

• “He's hard in ... the way a baseball is hard under the scuffed leather.” (part 1)
• “This world ... belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the week.” (Part 1)
• “You are strapped to a table, shaped, ironically, like a cross, with a crown of electric sparks in place of thorns.” (A patient's description of ECT)
• “How come they treat this new guy different? He's a man made outa skin and bone that's due to get weak and pale and die, just like the rest of us. He lives under the same laws, got to eat, bumps up against the same troubles.” (Part 1)
• “Being lost isn't so bad.” (Part 1)
• “Nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.” (Part 2)
• “The glass came apart like water splashing.” (Part 2)
• “It wasn't me that started acting deaf; it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.” (Part 3)
• “You could read the dates of the coins in her Levi pockets, they were so tight.” (Part 3)
• “We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you?” (Part 3)
• “You have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just keep the world from running you plumb crazy.” (Part 3)

It is a beautifully constructed book with clearly distinguished characterisations. The theme of David against Goliath, the rebellion of the little man, the individual, against the establishment, is universal and eternal. BUT it contains a tremendous amount of misogyny, perhaps typical for its period. Nurse Ratched is described as a "ball-cutter"; she is characterised as an emasculator of men. Almost the only other female roles are prostitutes. McMurphy's response to rules is violence. It could be an ur-text for the manosphere and, as such, leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth.

Synopsis: (spoiler alert)

A new patient, McMurphy, arrives at the lunatic asylum. But he's not mad. He's faked madness to get out of a prison sentence. He immediately begins a psychological battle with the woman who runs the ward, Nurse Ratched. He tried to persuade the other patients to stand up for themselves, the ward is supposed to be run on democratic lines. His rebellion includes gaining permission from a pliant doctor  to use a room that is otherwise locked for a card school, and forcing and winning a vote to allow the patients to watch the World Series on TV. When he wins a battle, the Nurse practises passive rebellion (she switches the TV off during the World Series matches); when McMurphy loses a battle he resorts to violence, such as thrusting his hand through the pane of glass that separates the nurses' control station from the ward. 

The individual against the system is a key theme of the novel. Much of McMurphy's focus is on gambling: when he bets that he can pick up a large piece of machinery and throw it through a window, he fails, but walks away saying "But at least I tried." The Chief extrapolates this outwards from the ward into the external world, hallucinating that what he calls The Combine are turning humans into robots and remembering how his tribe were defeated by government bureaucrats who wanted to impose a hydro-electric power scheme on tribal land. 

About half way through the book, McMurphy organises a fishing trip, another symbol of macho independence: the only woman to participate is a prostitute of McMurphy's acquaintance. Subsequent to this taste of freedom,, McMurphy and the Chief get involved in a fracas which results in them being sent to the Shock Shop for  electro-convulsive therapy. 

McMurphy organises an unsanctioned party on the ward, bribing the night porter, partly with the aim of helping Bibbit lose his virginity and partly to enable him to escape from the ward in the early hours. But he falls asleep with his own prostitute and the morning shift discovers him and Bibbit in flagrante, together with the mess of the party. Bibbit, finally loses his stutter, answers back to Nurse Ratched ... until she threatens to tell his mother. He slits his throat. McMurphy blames Nurse Ratched and attacks her, stripping her of her uniform and trying to strangle her. He is moved to the Disturbed ward. When he returned, he has been lobotomised and is in a vegetative state. In the night, The Chief smothers McMurphy with a pillow, throws the hydrotheraphy machinery through the window and escapes.

First reviewed in April 2012; revised in July 2026; 310 pages

First published in the US by Viking in 1962

My Picador paperback was issued in 1973

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Beasts They Turned Away" by Ryan Dennis

In the depths of rural Ireland, as a traditional way of life sputters towards it end,  remarkably stubborn old man, Iosac Mulgannon, stands firm, defending a nameless and voiceless (and ungrateful) child, who wears, over his head, the skull of a cow. The child is believed to be a cursed jinx by the rest of the village. Certainly, in the child's presence, strange things happen, including violence to the old man. Things go missing - religious items from the church, even goal-posts - and the child gets the blame but is seems more likely to be a marauding pack of Viking raiders, possibly from Dublin (originally a Norse settlement) or from Iceland. At one point seven teenagers rise from a pool, later fish leap from a river. There is a confrontation in which the old man's hurl "scratches a spit in the sky" from which ash falls (this is later explained as an Icelandic volcano). The village is gradually cut off: the last bus service departs, the road is overwhelmed by a landslide: "The crumbled road like a fallen ribbon, lost in the grass." (The Bog Slide). Extreme weather plays a part towards the end of the book. 

The occurrences lend the book a mythic air. Is the cow-headed child the minotaur? The third horseman of the apocalypse (famine), who rides the dark horse with the scales of justice in his hands, is referenced. I was reminded of the work of Alan Garner, such as The Owl Service, or Treacle Walker, but also of James Joyce's Ulysses. 

The villagers and others - a brave woman representing child welfare, the foul-mouthed priest who attempts to exorcise the child - are constantly trying to separate the old man and the child. The old man resists all such efforts. He also refuses to open letters sent to him - "Letters can say all manner of things, but he has known them only to harm" (The Bog) - including bills and legal letters, which means that he is pursued by the bank who want to take the farm away. He meets all threats with violence. 

I think (but I don't know it well enough to be sure) that there may be a number of references to the Irish legendary hero Cuchulainn, who as a young man played hurling (an Irish version of hockey although it might be more true to say that hockey is a tamed version of hurling), who was a protector of cattle - the old man is a dairy farmer and the book is full of descriptions of cows, usually suffering or dying or dead - and a great fighter who fought from his chariot (or Ford tractor in this case). 

The old man's superhero skill is to "stand" or to endure, perhaps echoing Cuchulainn's death when, facing overwhelming odds in battle, he tied himself to a standing stone so he could die upright. His principal adversary, young John Allen (who seems a rather decent chap for an antagonist), is described thus: "He is not a man tested and tried, and therefore not worthy. He does not struggle as good men do, does not feel the hunger, pain inside. He is not a man called, but to which it is given." (The Old Man Disks) The implication is that the old man is the antithesis of these traits: "The old man has stood. He is the rock they turn the ploughs around." (The Old Man Disks)

The story is narrated in the present tense from the third person omniscient perspective. Most of the sentences are direct, short and simple; there are very few sub-clauses. This meant that meaning was densely packed; I had to read slowly and not infrequently had to read a paragraph more than once. 

I often found it difficult to understand. I had to google Irish words such as geansai (a 'Guernsey' jumper), hurl (the stick used in hurling), sliotar (the hurling ball) and peist (an Irish monster, worm or dragon). 

Furthermore the way the story is told in fragmentary episodes, often no more than two or three pages long with matter-of-fact headings such as "The Old Man Ploughs", meant that I struggled to assemble a coherent whole. Towards the end, there were moments when light dawned, but for at least the first half of the book I was more confused than intrigued which meant that I was less motivated to read on; this in turn made it more difficult for me to pick up the pieces when I returned to the book.

But it is not about the narrative. Even with the matter-of-fact sentences, the prose is lyrical, if dark, and its earthy texture made me feel as if I was stomping across a peaty bog in a pair of muddy wellies and a tattered geansai. There is a mythic feel to the book. But it certainly isn't an advert for dairy farming.

Selected quotes:

• “Young John's face collects gullies of shadows as it frowns.” (The Standoff)
• “He had extinguished himself into an early sleep" (The Visit)
• “The curse as much the child as the skin he was born in.” (The Rooks)
• “A field is a lifetime. So it is by natural law that when the headlands are reached a man who gives himself fully would not be measured as he was on the first thorough.” (The Old Man Ploughs)
• “It comes a point that you’re the last one standing then that's who you measure yourself.” (The Midges)
• “Clouds seal over the sky and dampen the moon. Everything in degrees of shadow and the idea of things and not the things themselves.” (The Old Man and Child Walk in the Dark.)
• “The past floods into the present until it's a struggle to keep them in different corners.” (The Old Man and Child Walk in the Dark.)
• “Night-birds flutter between branches. Lift into flight as tittering shadows.” (The Icelanders)
• “Town is an invention born of fear ... First man came and then man farmed, and then those who couldn't farm drew together and put their houses close to one another so as to not have the space to be of anything themselves.” (The Town Goes Dark)

July 2026; 228 pages

Published by epoque press in 2021

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Lodger" by Drew Gummerson

This is a charming and joyous book which affirms the pleasure that can be found in the simple routines of life. There were moments when the style reminded me of 'kitchen sink' novels from the 1950s and 1960s such as The Lowlife by Alexander Baron and a couple of slim novels by Wolf Mankowitz: Make Me an Offer and A Kid for Two Farthings.

Honza, a gay man, a writer and wannabe novelist, takes a lodger to help with the bills. Andy moves in. Andy is childlike in his simple pleasures: he eats baked beans on toast, watches telly, drinks beer. Together, they look after Nicholas, Honza's little nephew: there are delightful descriptions of the innocent fun to be found entertaining children. But there are clouds on the horizon. Nicholas's mother plans to take him to London with her. Then Andy announces he has killed a man.

The plot is a slow burner. Gummerson takes his time to build up the characters. Nevertheless, I found it a page turner because of the way the author drops in little clues to keep the reader trying to solve the enigma that is Andy. It even flirts towards the end with thriller genre.

Much of the writing is unaffected and innocent. There is a significant amount of explicit gay sex, but I found that too to be (most of the time, when it was good sex) joyous.

I hardly ever laugh aloud, but there were one or two moments in this book when I could not restrain an audible chuckle. Such as when, in chapter seven, four-year-old Nicholas, having told his Mum: "Andy's having a piss" is reproved with the word: "manners" and replies "Please. Andy's having a piss. Thank you." Or, in chapter eight, when teenager Martin, having been taught how to put on a condom on a carrot and told to practise, asks to borrow a carrot because his Mum only using tinned ones. "'I didn't mean on the carrot,' says Andy." Or when in chapter fifteen, Andy goes to A&E to have a cork removed from his rectum. "'How long?' said the nurse. And held up his thumb and middle finger indicating a distance. ... 'No,' said the nurse. Deadpan. 'How long ago did it happen?'" 

Selected quotes:

• “I was beginning to realize how cold it was. I had goosebumps on my arms, legs, and was starting to suffer from cryonics of the balls.” (Ch 1)
• “This wasn't a voice that was easily mistakable. It was an inharmonious mix of Leo Sayer practising scales and a seventeenth-century castrato mid-op.” (Ch 1)
• “Queues are good places to meet people. Even the corniest of lines in a queue smacks of the naturalism of a sentence in a novel by Emile Zola.” (Ch 7)
• “As a stripper Dark Angel wasn't bad. He had the body of a gladiator, the moves of a ballerina suffering from steroid abuse. It was Schwarzenegger doing Swan Lake for the Swedish soft porn industry.” (Ch 7)
• “Showers are the casual sex of washing. No foreplay is required, no expensive offerings. You just dive in there, get what you want and then leave with barely a thankyou. Baths however require commitment.” (Ch 12)
• “Graham worked for a local newspaper. Cliches were his bread and butter.” (Ch 16)

Delightful, well-written, entertaining and heart-warming.

Drew Gummerson has also written:

• Me and Mickie James
• Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel
• Saltburn

July 2026; 331 pages

Published in 2002 by GMP

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God