"The Wedding People" by Alison Espach

This funny, well-observed and sometimes profound novel opens with a stunning hook, when Phoebe, the only guest at the hotel not to be part of a week-long wedding party, announces to the bride that she is there to kill herself: “‘This is the most important week of my life,’ the bride pleads. ‘Same,’ Phoebe says.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)

Just before this was a very clever section in which two at first anonymous characters, guests at the wedding, are gossiping. Phoebe, the third person narrator, overhears them and thus the scene is set. It reminded me of how Shakespeare often has an early scene using two citizens chatting, but it seemed much more natural and integrated with the narrative.

But then there is a section of back story which (a) dampens some of the curiosity aroused - I wondered whether it would have been even better to have drip-fed many of these details into the story later - and (b) interrupted the narrative drive. 

The book then continues with a frankly unbelievable juxtaposition of two characters although I, as reader, forgave the unlikeliness because of my fascination with the ensuing cage fight.

And the book, like the wedding, continues, the author forever highlighting the contrast between the shallow consumerist extravagance of the celebrations and the real emotions of the people doing the celebrating. We soon become aware that not all is as perfect as it seems. We explore at least some of the characters. Some, like High Bun and Neck Pillow, are primarily there as foils and to provide comedy; they are what E M Forster calls 'flat' characters. But we explore the principals such as the bride and her mother, and the groom and his daughter, and Phoebe, and these characters are developed into complex and real-feeling persons. 

The plot is basically a set of opportunities to put these characters together and see what ensues. The reader than wants to know what will happen and this tension turns the pages. Did I anticipate the end? To some extent. But there are details left unresolved even on the last page.

It is told in the present tense and the third person from the sole perspective of Phoebe.

There are some moments of pure comedy, such as the delightful scene in which Phoebe, driving, is loaned a mobile phone from someone in the car so she can use sat nav ... only for sexts from the woman’s boyfriend to keep popping up.

The are some interesting discussions of literature (Phoebe teaches Victorian literature) and the book neatly parallels  Mrs Dalloway, another novel in which a party clashes with a suicide.

I learned other things as well. I learned that the Cubists “believed if you aren't seeing something from all sides, you aren't seeing fully.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party) And there are a lot of interesting thoughts about Life. 

Detailed analysis: spoiler alert

This is an old-fashioned comedy. There is a pair of lovers, who actually fall for one another on first sight (in the initial hot tub scene) and then must overcome a whole series of obstacles (principally the man being about to marry another woman) before they can be together.

Towards the end there’s even the introduction of a second set of lovers. I explain below the need for this.

But there is a fundamental problem. A different interpretation of the story is that Phoebe steals the groom from under the bride’s nose, after the bride has befriended her. And the bride, though spoiled, is fundamentally a nice person. So the reader might hate Phoebe. And we want the reader to love Phoebe, even though she is a man-stealer.

So a lot of work has to be done to convince the reader not only that Phoebe and Gary are perfect for one another, and that this will be a destined marriage made in heaven, but that Lila and Gary are not right for each other. This is why, in the end, it has to be Lila that jilts Gary, not the other way around. And that is why we have to introduce the second set of lovers when, quite late in the narrative, we discover that best man Jim is in love with Lila. This will give the bride an opportunity for happy ever after.

The subplot is the rebuilding of Phoebe, from someone who wants to take her own life, to someone capable of rebuilding it. To juxtapose a suicide with a wedding party may be one hell of a hook, and it introduces a gripping conflict between the life-affirming joy of a wedding and the death-drive of self-slaughter, but it also poses another problem.

The tone of this book (it is a comedy) is fundamentally light. The protagonist starts off suicidal. This is a real problem. Potential suicide can’t be allowed to cast too gloomy a shadow. Hence the means of death being cat sleeping tablets which may well be ineffective anyway; it’s a sort of comedy suicide attempt. I’m not sure that this doesn’t leave one with a bad taste in the mouth.

Somehow, this author gets away with misdirecting the reader’s attention. It’s a bit like a typical ABBA song: they were incredibly successful through adding jaunty upbeat tunes to potentially depressing lyrics, such as “I've been cheated by you since I don't know when ... Mamma Mia, Here I go again!” The very first line is about betrayal, a primal downer. Let’s celebrate! The rather desperate singer of ‘Take a Chance’ begins: “If you change your mind, I'm the first in line” suggesting rejection. The preamble to ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’ is “Half past twelve/ And I'm watching the late show in my flat all alone/ How I hate to spend the evening on my own/ Autumn winds/ Blowing outside the window as I look around the room/ And it makes me so depressed to see the gloom.”

The misdirection starts the moment the bride walks into Phoebe’s room in the fourth section of the first chapter. (Sections two and three have explored Phoebe’s back story, grounding her character, exploring her motivation, her reasons to kill herself; these have been fundamentally downbeat moments which, as I noted above, somewhat jar with the breezy start.) This juxtaposition is itself fundamentally unbelievable but the author gets away with it by focusing on the bride, exploring her essentially spoiled character and her air-headedness. The reader is swamped by the gush of words Lila utters.

There’s one final scene, when Phoebe takes the pills after eavesdropping from her balcony on the wedding party. She chickens out and makes herself sick. And from there on we can start the rebuilding.

We are immediately (this is the 25% turning point) introduced to Gary, the groom, who will be Phoebe’s love interest, in the guise of an anonymous man in a hot tub with whom Phoebe falls in love (or at least lust: this is a twenty-first century updating of the classic tropes) at first sight. This love is unrequited (it has to be to create conflict) and immediately followed by another dip into Phoebe’s history. Then the bride invites her to the sailing party in the afternoon, where Phoebe discovers who the man in the hot tub really is, and plunges into the maelstrom that is family and friends.

We’re now into the middle section of the book. Here the author has to step by step convince us that Phoebe and Gary are a perfect match and that Phoebe will be able to get on with her future in-laws, especially a new step-daughter. This is done principally by showing that Phoebe can hit it off with Gary’s disaffected teenage daughter, who is mourning her dead mother. All this is done so that the happy ever after resolution can be achieved without blame.

Lila the bride actually is instrumental in getting Gary and Phoebe together:

• She sends Gary to find Phoebe when Phoebe is on the cliff walk at the start of Wednesday.
• She gets Phoebe to substitute for her at surfing, a threesome with Gary and Juice, symbolically recreating Phoebe’s new family.
• She pairs Phoebe with Gary at the start of the third act as they drive around town to prepare him for his wedding

Lila the bride tells Phoebe, near the end of the middle section, that she doesn’t want to marry Gary.

The end section, as it approaches the climax, reiterates the ‘don’t blame Phoebe’ theme. On page 275, so almost exactly at the 75% turning point, Jim reveals to Phoebe that he is in love with Lila and sacrificed himself for his best mate Gary’s happiness. At which point the reader realises that if the marriage goes ahead, four people will be unhappy and if it is stopped four people have a chance to find happiness. This is the ultimate get-out-of-blame card.

The end also throws in a complication, a final twist, in which Phoebe’s ex turns up and they sleep together (but this prompts her to realise that whatever else happens their relationship is over) which might make Gary think twice.

At the climax, it will be the bride who refuses to get in the car to her own wedding, another get-out-of-blame card.

But after the climax of stopping the wedding, we have to move to the resolution. We actually echo the inciting incident with another hot tub scene in which Phoebe and Gary discuss things. They don’t go off into the sunset (this is a modern novel) but the potential is there. At the same time, Jim knows that Lila has gone to Canada and we feel sure he will follow.

The sub-plot
At the same time, we have to see Phoebe recovering from her thoughts of suicide. For example, on p 159, Gary says that when he met Phoebe “you struck me as a person who was fully alive”. On p 182, the more-or-less-exact midpoint of the book, she is standing on a cliff fighting the urge to throw her phone into the waves (because of a phone call from her ex reminding her that the cat is dead) when Gary comes upon her and he says: “Is this the moment when the protagonist throws her phone into the ocean to symbolize how she’s ready to begin a new life?” And it is!

Selected quotes:

• “The hotel ... sits on the edge of the cliff like an old and stately dog, patiently waiting for her arrival.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “Wasn't that the point of clothing? To prove that you were normal?” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “Cinderella never would have been at the centre of the novel if her mother had lived. (Neither would Jane Eyre ...) The mother had to die so that the girl started in a place of desperation.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “It made her feel silly, fighting over her husband with a female colleague who had her arm wedged in drawer five, like she was about to help birth a document.” (Tuesday: the opening reception) Neat image.
• “Seems more plausible that Hell is some revenge fantasy concocted by unhappy people so they could punish all the happy people in their minds.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “My father owned landfills. Gary is a gastroenterologist. totally different jobs, but ... they're both in waste management.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “The professor is always tempted to say something wise that will get the student to reflect on their own words.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “Don't even bother telling me you have plans, because I know you are planning on being dead right now.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “Bridesmaids need the same kinds of stories soldiers do, stories that justify why they do what they do.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “They are a classic older man and younger woman combo. Gary is the stage and Lila is the song.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “I'm not a monster, Phoebe. I would care if a woman died at my wedding. I have feelings.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “If everybody in my life is always telling me I can be anyone I want, but then whenever I do one thing they don't like, they act like I ruined myself.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “Maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “Her face is too stiff, the way people's faces look when their abs are slightly clenched.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “I’m like Rapunzel. Except nobody wants to abduct me.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “Do you know what a talker Lila really is? ... As a little girl, she was even worse. Total stream of consciousness. Like living with a little Salinger novel.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “I fell in love with what Henry gave me. And he gave me so much. He truly did. But loving someone like that doesn't make you a better woman. Only losing them does.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “She always imagined getting older as a narrowing street that got darker as you walked.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “We’ve only been sexting since Tuesday and I've already run out of ways to describe my vagina.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “You are a thousand different people orbiting around a pole. ... Aren't we all that pole? ... Though sometimes I'm not sure there is even a pole.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “I don't think about what I want. I just worry about what might happen to me and then figure out how to keep those things from happening.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “Nobody can take care of you the way you need to take care of yourself. It's your job to take care of yourself like that.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “That's the point of art, isn't it? ... Artists look at the world and see opportunities for creating meaning.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “She is drawn to the exhaustion of a lived life.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “Good writing is driven by a question ... And the essay is the writer's best attempt at answering that question.” (Friday, the Blending of the Families.)
• “How are we not supposed to talk about the slow decay of our bodies?” (Saturday, the Rehearsal Dinner)
• “To collect is to care more than most. But it is also to hoard. To take things out of the world and make them only yours.” (Saturday, the Rehearsal Dinner)

August 2026

First published in the USA by Henry Holt in 2024

My paperback edition was issued by Phoenix Books in 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Land in Winter" by Andrew Miller

Set in Devon in the great winter of 1962-3, when many villages were cut off from the world by blizzards and snow-drifts, when trains were forced to abandon journeys, when the sea off the Kent coast had pack ice and some of the upper reaches of the Thames froze, this is a historical novel. It focuses principally on four characters: Eric, a GP who is having an affair with one of his patients, and his pregnant wife Irene, and Bill, a novice dairy farmer and his pregnant wife Rita, a former show girl in a nightclub who has a passion for science fiction and hears voices in her head. The story is told, in the past tense (with the occasional flash forward into the future), from the perspective of each of these characters.

As someone who remembers that winter, I am not sure that historical fiction ought to be set within living memory. It made for an interesting experience. I remember the milkman bring the milk on a sledge!

It starts from the PoV of another person, a patient in the local asylum, who finds the dead body of another patient, who suicide has been facilitated by the unusually large quantity of drugs prescribed by Dr Eric. It ends with total weirdness: a descent into madness or a strange occurrence which might have been foreshadowed by the following lines: “At the edge of the field, by the shadow-line of the hedge, a dog, or something like a dog, raised its head into the light, studied them a moment, the two women upright in the field, then dropped out of sight again, soundlessly.” (Part Two: Saturday, 5th January)

In fact many of the characters' thoughts hover on the cusp of the bizarre:

• “The time? He sifted it from the air, from the many small clues it gave.” (1.1)
• “Time would level it out, for that, he had learned (quite recently), was what time did.” (1.2)
• “This was something else she had learned, that drop into the fever of not knowing, except it’s not confusion exactly, more a case of one part of you not yet ready to accept what the other part knowns perfectly well.” (1.3)
• “She imagined the bull in his pen, the night moving like a river through the big sack of his head. The world, the fog world in its brittle glass sheath of now, was aching for an arrival. Stare long enough, hard enough, and it might be happening already.” (1.10)
• “Each secret meeting tied another thread and tautened the ones already there.” (14th December 1962; 1)
• “He thought of the expression ‘to collect oneself’, of what it meant and how it might be done.” (Part Two: Thursday 10th January)
• “My mind, thought Bill, is like a fly in a matchbox.” (Part Two: Thursday 10th January)
• “The dexamyl was starting to work, the first threads. For a few hours the voices would lie on their backs, frozen, beaks wide but silent.” (Part Two: Thursday 10th January)
• “The other's body, with its lumps and strappings, its terrible softness, was an animal you meet in a dream and must placate with songs and silences; a wicked witch who turns out to be a middle aged woman with poor circulation and some unsheddable grief you are free to look away from.” (Part Two:Saturday 12th January)

I suspect that the theme of families being isolated by the world is a metaphor for the lockdown imposed by the Covid pandemic, which must have been around the time that Miller was writing the novel.

It is one of those novels that take a long time to get going. We are half way through before the snow descends. But this means that it can establish its characters thoroughly in their complexity and with all their background. These feel like real people! And that in turn means that when they think strange thoughts, the reader accepts them. In the second half of the novel, things, even violent things, happen and again, because the build-up had been so painstaking, they do not seem forced or jolt the reader from the suspension of disbelief. Even the final chapter can be credited, although different readers will develop different interpretations. 

There are also some deft touches, such as when Eric draws the sheet over his face, mirroring his action  when his father died ... in the same bed. Beautiful mirroring! This care with the brush strokes suggest an author at his most skilled. 

In 2025, the novel won the Winston Graham Historical Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Selected quotes:

• “The wireless, lost between stations, hissed like escaping gas then suddenly spoke, posing a question in a language he did not know.” (1.1)
• “In retrospect he seemed, like most of the other masters, a man in despair, who gave expression to it - got some relief from it - by being violent towards children.” (1.4)
• “His wellingtons ... were spotless, and one imagined them to have their own faint pattern of pinstripe.” (1.8)
• “It was a child's bed - she was too big for it, an imposter, an alien.” (Part Two: Thursday 10th January)

August 2026; 371 pages

First published by Sceptre in 2024

My paperback edition was issued in 2025

Andrew Miller has written a number of novels including Pure, also historical fiction, which I reviewed in 2012.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Scotland's Merlin" by Tim Clarkson

Clarkson, an "independent researcher and historian", claims that the figure of Merlin, the wizard in the Arthurian legends, may in part have been based upon a man called Lailoken.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote Historia Regum Britanniae, the best-selling (there are still over 200 extant manuscripts of this work written c 1136), work which popularised the legends of King Arthur and introduced 'Merlin' to the Arthurian court, also wrote a later work Vita Merlini in which the subject of the biography was involved in a battle, on the side led by Peredur K of Gwynedd, allied with Rodarch, k of Cambrians against Guennolous, K of Scottish forces. He went bonkers following the battle, seeking solitude in the forest. When discovered he was made captive by Rodarch. Here he noticed that the King’s wife had a leaf in her hair and correctly deduced that she had been committing adultery. This got him returned to the forest. Geoffrey also says that Merlin came from Carmarthen.

The Black Book of Carmarthen, compiled c1250, includes poems by a first person narrato called Myrddin) without trappings of Arthuriana but mentioning a battle in which he fought at Arfderydd in northern Britain and subsequent flight in madness to Coed Celyddon; the forest of Celyddon. One of his prophecies concerns a battle fought in 1198 and therefore it can be concluded that the poem was composed after that.

So the hypothesis is that there was a chap called Myrddyn whose name Gdeoffrey changed to Merlin possibly to avoid the Norman-French connotation of 'merde' = 'shit'.

These tales about Myrddin/ Merlin seem to echo tales about a chap called Lailoken who fought in a battle fought in a plain between Lidel and Carwannock and then fled into the wilderness. Lailoken foresees a threefold death in which he is stoned by shepherds, falls into a river and is impaled on a stake which keeps his head below water so he drowns. Another theme is that he sees that the King’s wife has a leaf in her hair and correctly deduces she has been committing adultery.

The battle of Ardferydd which is mentioned three times by 'Merlin' in the Black Book of Carmarthen was a historical battle fought in 573. The battlefield has been identified (though this is still under dispute) as near the modern Carwinley, a hamlet at the confluence of the rivers Esk and Liddel.

Rhydderch Hael aka Roderc was a historical character associated with Alt Clut - the Rock of Clyde = Dun Breatann = Fortress of the Britons = Dumbarton. He had a palace at Pernech = Partick where dwells a madman called Laloecen.

So there seems a sufficient number of similarities to dismiss the possibility of coincidence and accept that thesis that Merlin and Lailoken are the same character.

Coincidentally, there is another 'wild man' of the same period, in the Irish chronicles, called Suibhne (pronounced Sweeney). He too went mad and vanished into the woods, wandering naked following a battle. He literally flew from the battlefield. At one point he went to Britain and met another wild man of the woods called Alladhan (is this Lailoken?). The poetry romance that tells this story was used as the basis for some of the poems allegedly spoken by Mad King Sweeney, a character in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds; ‘Swim-Two-Birds is the English version of the name of a ford in the River Shannon that Sweeney allegedly visited.

Like many of the books of this genre, this is liberally padded and the final conclusion has to be that there is too little evidence to be certain whether the tale told is true or false. However, there was sufficient evidence for me to accept the thesis. And I enjoyed the read: the material i much better organised than many similar books and ther author avoids preposterous claims. 

August 2026; 136 pages and three appendices

Published in 2016 by John Donald

Novels and books about Magic and Magicians reviewed in this blog.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Love in a Cold Climate" by Nancy Mitford

If you like 'Downton Abbey' and similar work set in the world of the English aristocracy between the First and Second World Wars, you might enjoy this light comedy. Or you might be interested by the glimpses it gives into the attitudes of an unpleasant minority. I suspect some might defend it on the grounds of satire, but if it is, it has a toothless bite and the narrator - and, I suspect, the author - clearly shares some of the nastiest views. “‘I love being so dry in here,’ as Lady Montdore put it, ‘and seeing all those poor people so wet.’” (1.8) might indeed be satire but when the narrator says “The front door was opened by a slut.” (2.1) the satire slips and the sneers are seen for what they are. This is entitlement writ large: “Since I had as yet no servant, I was obliged to get up very early and cook Alfred's breakfast.” (2.1) cuts little ice with those of us who have never had servants. It was difficult to remind myself that this was written as recently as 1949. 

It is also tolerant of paedophilia. One of the most sympathetic characters feels quite sorry for a man who likes interfering with little girls when he is hoist by his own petard and virtually entrapped by one of his victims: “He can't be expected to guess that because he strokes the hair of a little girl when she's fourteen she's going to insist on marrying him when she grows up. Bad luck on a chap I call it.” (1.13) The vengeance of grooming.

And the second half of the book is dominated by a portrait of an extravagantly gay man who embodies all the stereotypes of that role.

There was one moment which seemed inconsistent. In 2.2, Lady Montdore says:“I hope he's not an artist. well, if he is we shall simply have to get him out of it - he must learn to behave suitably.” (2.2) But in 1.7, we have been told that she and her husband are always“occupied ... with what they called ‘their art’, producing enormous portraits, landscapes and still lifes by the dozen.”

There are some amusing moments, but on the whole this was a novel which left a bad taste in my mouth, when it wasn't plain boring.

Selected quotes:

• “That was where her charm lay. ... the charm of a purring puma.” (1.3)
• “Charm allied to riches and position is almost irresistible.” (1, 6)
• “‘All this’, on her lips, meant position allied to such solid assets as acres, coal mines, real estate, jewels, silver, pictures, incunabula, and other positions of this sort.” (1.6)
• “Oxford is a place where social life ... is designed exclusively for celibate men ... the whole tradition is in its essence monastic, and as far as society goes wives are quite superfluous.” (2.1)
• “It seemed to me quite plain and uninteresting except for the label in its lining, and they long to put this on the outside so that people wouldn't know where it came from.” (2.4) She’s wearing a Schiaperellii dress. Nowadays, of course, designers do put their labels on the outside so that vain people can brag about their clothes.
• “You are so fortunate not to be a beauty, Fanny, you'll never know the agony of losing your looks.” (2.5)

August 2026; 166 pages

First published by Hamish Hamilton in 1949

My edition was issued with The Pursuit of Love in 1980.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Pursuit of Love" by Nancy Mitford

 Anyone who knows the much-publicised history of the Mitford family will know that this is a fictionalised version of that. (And sanitised; there is no mention of the fact that one of the Mitford sisters married the leader of the British fascists and another was an ardent supporter of Hitler who attempted suicide in Germany when the Second World War started; presumably in 1945 when this novel was published these issues were still hot potatoes so Nancy Mitford decided to avoid them.)

It purports to follow the romantic career of Linda, best friend and cousin of the narrator, Fanny. Linda, whose father is a bigoted Earl with a large country house, loads of servants, and a lot of land, falls in love with the son of a nouveau riche banker, with predictably dreadful consequences. She then has an affair with an upper-class communist, leading to her divorce and second marriage. Finally, returning from the south of France having realised that her second husband is in love with someone else, she meets and becomes the mistress of a wealthy Frenchman, finally finding love, although they are parted by the Second World War.

This fairy tale of romances is backed with what purports to be social satire, although it is clear that the narrator (the author wearing a disguise only very slightly less transparent than some of the characters) is very much on the side of the upper-classes: 

• “Planes was a horrible house ... The garden which lay around it would be a lady water-colourist’s heaven, herbaceous borders, rockeries and water-gardens were carried to a perfection of vulgarity, and flaunted a riot of huge and hideous flowers, each individual bloom appearing twice as large, three times as brilliant as it ought to have been and if possible of a different colour from that which nature intended.” (Ch 12)
• “I have seen too many children brought up without nannies to think this at all desirable.” (Ch 21)

As a result, the humour is gentle and whimsical rather than cutting: a few wry smiles rather than a single belly-laugh. If you want comic fiction of the upper-classes from this period, read P. G. Woodhouse who piles on the absurdities rather than taming them. For me the funniest line, purely because it is tautologous, came as late as chapter 21: “Once a foreigner always a foreigner in my opinion.”

That the author is writing for her fellow subscribers to Tatler is evidence from the fact that she gives passages, and sometimes whole conversations, in untranslated French. When one cannot understand the punchline, the joke falls flat. But I suspect that the point is that Mitford has thereby demonstrated her superiority to those born without her advantages.

Nevertheless, she has a few memorable characters although the strongest, such as Uncle Matthew, are Dickensian caricatures. 

Many people are impressed by the vanished world of the upper-classes in their country houses. These are the fans of Upstairs Downstairs, Downton Abbey, and keen visitors of National Trust properties. This is a book for them. I'd rather read literature.

Selected quotes: 

• “Over the chimney-piece clearly visible in the photograph, hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out.” (Ch 1)
• “The behaviour of civilized man really has nothing to do with nature, ... all is artificiality and art more or less perfected.” (Ch 5)
• “His hair seemed to be slipping off backwards, like an eiderdown in the night.” (Ch 6)
• “That fella, what's ‘is name, Romeo, might have known a blasted papist would mess up the whole thing.” (Ch 6)
• “He was in his last year at Oxford, a member of Bullingdon, a splendid young man with a Rolls Royce, plenty of beautiful horses, exquisite clothes, and large luxurious rooms, where he entertained on a lavish scale.” (Ch 7) Not today’s typical undergraduate.
• “‘We must keep our ends up,’ said Linda uncertainly. ‘O,h dear,’ I said, ‘the thing about me is, I always feel much happier with my end down.’” (Ch 7)
• “A Moses basket full of wails.” (Ch 10) Description of a baby.
• “His general attitude to what he called the man in the street was that he ought constantly to be covered by machine guns: this having become impossible ... he must be doped into submission with fiction that huge reforms, to be engineered by the Conservative Party, were always just around the next corner.” (Ch 11)
• “The Alconleighs were obliged to face the fact, as parents must sooner or later, that their children had broken loose from control and had taken charge of their own lives.” (Ch 13)
• “It would never have occurred to the Alconleighs to visit the continent for any other purpose than that of fighting.” (Ch 15)

August 2026; 151 pages

First published by Hamish Hamilton in 1945

My edition, together with Love in a Cold Climate, was issued in 1980.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Biographies written by Nancy Mitford and reviewed in this blog:

• Madame de Pompadour
• The Sun King

"The Iceman Cometh" by Eugene O'Neill

 This classic play is  set in a bar in New York in 1912; the characters are all failures in life, such as a bent policeman drummed out of the force, two combatants from either side of the Boer war, a card sharp from a circus, and an ex-socialist. The barman has a couple of prostitutes working for him but he denies he is a pimp because he doesn't best them up and a pimp wouldn't have another job; he sees himself as an agent for the girls. He still takes their money (and slaps them but that isn't the same as beating them ...) The owner of the bar and associated rooming house in which many of the characters live is Harry, who hasn't been outside for twenty years, since his wife died. They are waiting to celebrate Harry's birthday. A young man, Porritt, unknown to the rest, arrives to talk to Larry, an ex-anarchist who has given up causes to become a "grandstand philosopher"; Porritt is clearly troubled about the fact that his mother, an anarchist, has been arrested and may be facing a life sentence in jail. Hickey is expected to come any moment; the deadbeats look forward to his arrival because he always buys them drinks and cheers them up.

But when he does arrive, they discover he is on a mission. He wants to improve them. He wants them to face up to the fears that have paralysed them, that has caused each one of them to put his life on hold, awaiting a better tomorrow. He wants them all to be free.

I became convinced, in Act Two, that there was a religious dimension to this play. One of the key characters is the "grandstand philosopher" Larry, described by O'Neill thus: “He stares in front of him, an expression of tired tolerance giving his face the quality of a pitying but weary old priest’s.” (Character description of Larry Slade). Hickey had lines that made him sound like Jesus, for example: “I saw I couldn't do what I was after alone. Not in the time at my disposal. I knew when I came here I wouldn't be able to stay with you long. I'm slated to leave on a trip. ... Why, if I had enough time, I’d get a lot of sport out of setting my line of salvation to each of you all by my lonesome.” (Act 2: Hickey) The furniture which is cabaret style in the first act is rearranged in the second to form a single long table: the Last Supper, I thought, and Larry's comment: “By God, it's a second feast of Belshazzar, with Hickey to do the writing on the wall!” (Act 2: Larry) reinforced the religious vibes. Meanwhile, Parritt is a Judas-like betrayer. And, true enough, Hickey is preaching a gospel of salvation from the curse of tomorrow to slightly more than twelve disciples. Even the ending (spoiler alert) in which Hickey is led away by the police to be condemned to death and executed, follows the story of Christ.

The play has a lot of words; it is a very wordy play which needs nearly four hours to be performed in an uncut version. Each of the characters has an arc and there are a lot of characters. They all have their individual issues and most of them have a number of speeches. The final act is dominated by some very long speeches from Hickey.

The play has very specific descriptions for each character. Not all of these were obeyed by the production I saw - Hickey, described as having "a stout roly-poly figure" was played by a slender actor. The stage settings are also minutely described. Sometimes the playwright instructs the actors how to speak. O'Neill didn't seem to want to leave much to the discretion of the director!

I read this as a playscript but at the same time I watched a brilliant (if black and white and grainy) 1960 American TV movie production starring Jason Robards as Hickey (he played the role in the second theatre production, in which TIC was recognised as a classic of American theatre) and featuring a young Robert Redford. The production I watch cut more than a few lines to trim the play into two feature-length halves; the original must have run for at least 3h 30m excluding intervals.

It may be a marathon but it is an extraordinarily wonderful play.

Eugene O'Neill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. 

Selected quotes:

• “I saw men didn't want to be saved from themselves, for that would mean they'd have to give up greed, and they'll never pay that price for liberty.” (Act 1: Larry)
• “I took a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall asleep observing the cannibals do their death dance.” (Act 1: Larry)
• “No one here has to worry about where they're going next, because there is no further they can go. It's a great comfort to them.” (Act 1: Larry)
• “I was born condemned to be one of those who has to see all sides of a question. When you're damned like that, the questions multiply for you until in the end it's all question and no answer. As history proves, to be a worldly success at anything ... you have to wear blinders like a horse and see only straight in front of you. You have to see, too, that this is all black, and that is all white.” (Act 1: Larry)
• “I know all about that game from soup to nuts.” (Act 1: Hickey)
• “I've watched many cases of almost fatal teetotalism, but they all came out of it completely cured and as drunk as ever.” (Act 1: Mosher)
• “You can't be too careful about work. It's the deadliest habit known to science.” (Act 1: Mosher)
• “He has to be punished, so he can forgive himself.” (Act 2: Hickey)
• “She just had to keep on having lovers to prove to herself how free she was.” (Act 2: Parritt)
• “Honour or dishonour, faith or treachery are nothing to me but the opposite of the same stupidity which is the ruler and king of life, and in the end they rot into dust in the same grave.” (Act 2: Larry)
• “The Iceman of Death.” (Act 3: Larry)
• “It was like a game, sizing people up quick, spotting what their pet pipe dreams were, and then kidding ‘em along that line, pretending you believed what they wanted to believe about themselves. Then they liked you, they trusted you, they wanted to buy something to show their gratitude. It was fun.” (Act 4: Hickey)
• “I could see disgust having a battle in her eyes with love.” (Act 4: Hickey)
• “I'd get so damned lonely. I'd get thinking how peaceful it was here, sitting around with the old gang, getting drunk and forgetting love, joking and laughing and singing and swapping lies.” (Act 4: Hickey)
• “Go, for the love of Christ, you mad tortured bastard, for your own sake!” (Act 4: Larry)

The play was first performed in New York by the Martin Beck Theatre in 1846.
The script was first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape in 1947
The script I read was for the Royal National Theatre production and published by Nick Hern Books in 1993.
I read it, and watched it, in August 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Escaped Cock" by D H Lawrence

This novella about Jesus (never actually called Jesus) after his resurrection was published, after Lawrence had died, as 'The Man Who Died', a title Lawrence had resisted. 

Trigger warning: blasphemy. As you might expect from such an iconoclastic author, much of the content would be deemed shockingly heretical by orthodox Christians. Jesus survives crucifixion because he has been cut down too early, rather than through any divine intervention. He rejects his calling: “How good it is to have fulfilled my mission, and to be beyond it. Now I can be alone, and leave all things to themselves, and the fig tree may be barren if it will, and the rich may be rich. My way is my own alone.” (p 26). He wanders off to 'find himself' part of which involves losing his virginity. Guess what he means when he says "I am risen!" (p 62). Some people would think that was blasphemous.

He also pities Judas: “I know I wronged Judas, my poor Judas.” (p 18) This might also be considered blasphemy, or heresy, but as the Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar points out, without him there would have been no crucifixion (and therefore no resurrection) and if God is really all-powerful then Judas can at best be seen as a puppet and a scapegoat.

There are many other phrases taken from the Bible, for example: “And last, the eyes opened. On to the dark. ... Yet perhaps there was a pale chink of the all-disturbing light, prising open the pure dark. ... And again it was finished.” (pp 6 - 7)

The very Lawrencian theme is the fierce forcefulness of life:

• “The young cock crowed. ... It was the necessity to live, and even to cry out the triumph of life.” (p 13)
• “The man who had died looked nakedly on life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flee itself up in stormy or subtle wave-crests, foam-tips emerging out of the blue invisible, a black and orange cock or the green flame-tongues out of the extremes of the fig tree. They came forth, these things and creatures of spring, glowing with desire and with assertion.” (p 14)
• “The destiny of life seemed more fierce and compulsive to him even then the destiny of death.” (p 15)

It is written in the past tense and the third person and mostly from the PoV of "the man who died". 

It starts with the story of a young rooster who is cocksure and proud but whose peasant master fears might escape so the cockerel is tethered by a strong to his leg. Following his escape from the tomb, the man who died takes refuge with the peasant family and empathises with the bird. When he leaves to go on his travels, he takes the cock with him.

In the second part of the narrative he meets a priestess of Isis on the Levantine coast.

The prose is splendidly muscular. Could anyone but Lawrence write “She stood among the dry trunks of the outermost pines, on the rocks under which the sea smote and sucked, facing the open where the bright sun gloried in winter.” (p 33)? "The sea smote and sucked" Wow!

He is unafraid of repetition. His prose is already as strong as the torso of a boxer but with these repetitions it punched the reader into submission. But the repetitions are perfectly consonant with the original source, the Bible (although the Testaments probably used repetitions because they were principally delivered orally and this technique aided memory).

I was a little surprised at the number of exclamation marks Lawrence uses! In this way he is a little closer to the Victorians than to modern fiction writing.

But mostly I just gloried in the brilliance of Lawrence's prose.

Selected quotes:

• “At the same time, at the same hour before dawn, on the same morning, a man awoke from a long sleep in which he was tied up. He woke numb and cold, inside a carved hole in the rock.” (p 5)
• “Who would want to come back from the dead?” (p 6)
• “And in the safety of the yard, the young cock was dear to him, as it shouted in the helpless zest of life, and finished in the helpless humiliation of being tied by the leg.” (p 22)
• “In the tomb he had slipped that noose which we call care.” (p 26)

August 2026; 68 pages

Originally published in 1929 by Black Sun Press

My paperback edition was issued by Renard Press in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Missing Person" by Patrick Modiano

 A short novel by a French Nobel Laureate.

A list of other winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature can be found here.

A private investigator leaves work when his boss retires, to dedicate himself to tracking down his own past, which he has forgotten because of amnesia.

It's a great book for two reasons: one is the way the investigator assembles truth, the second is the way the novel explores identity.

The concept which enables the author to create a sort of Noir mystery novel. The PI follows clues to track down people who might have known him in the past, although they often say they don't recognise him, or if they do, they give ambiguous or conflicting testimonies. He uses photographs, government records and eyewitness accounts to try and piece together a coherent narrative for himself. But is he joining the jigsaw pieces together correctly? “Until now everything has seemed so chaotic, so fragmented ... Scraps, shreds have come to light as a result of my searches ... But then that is perhaps what a life amounts to ...” (Ch 40) he asks himself, and then immediately worries: “Is it really my life I'm tracking down? Or someone else's into which I have somehow infiltrated myself?” (Ch 40) That's a question that I, as reader, had been asking for some time.

When he finally begins to remember - at which point the memories arrive with startling clarity, so vivid that they might almost be illusory reconstructions, just like a fiction itself - he remembers himself trying to escape France during the Nazi occupation of World War Two.

This allows Modiano to explore the idea that one's identity depends on one's memories, and one's memories can be fuzzy, imprecise and equivocal if not downright false. He repeatedly returns to an image of evanescent vapour, from the very start to the finish:

• “I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the cafe terrace, waiting for the rain to stop.” (first lines)
• “Strange people. the kind that leave the nearest blur behind them, soon vanished. Hutte and I often used to talk about these traceless beings. They spring up out of nothing one fine day and return there, having sparkled a little. Beauty queens. Gigolos. Butterflies. Most of them, even when alive, had no more substance than steam which will never condense.” (Ch 8)
• “We were gradually becoming invisible. Even our town clothes ... melted into this fog. Who knows? Perhaps we would end up evaporating altogether. Or we would merge with the mist which covered the windows, this stubborn mist you could not wipe off.” (Ch 37)
• “A little girl is returning from the beach, at dusk, with her mother. She is crying for no reason at all, because she would have liked to continue playing. She has already turned the corner of the street, and do not our life dissolve into the evening as quickly as this grief of Childhood?” (last lines)

He counterpoints the essential indistinctness and confusion of his narrator with crystal clear descriptions of the external world, of which these are just a few examples:

• “A veranda which overlooked a pond. To the left, a small hump-back bridge, in the Chinese style, led to another bungalow, on the other side of the pond. The French windows were brilliantly lit up and I could seek couples moving behind them. They were dancing. Snatches of music reached us.” (Ch 2)
• “Everything about him was round. His face, his blue eyes and even the thin moustache, cut in an arc. His mouth too, and his plump and dimpled hands. He made me think of those balloons children hold on a string and which they sometimes release to see how high they will climb.” (Ch 7)
• “No furniture, except for an old divan, covered in worn red velvet upholstery on which we sat. He took a pipe from his pocket and lit it calmly. The stained glass windows gave the daylight that filtered through a pale blue tint.” (Ch 11)
• “We were standing before a lawn like the one I had tried to cross to reach the chateau, but here, the grass was not nearly so high. To my astonishment, the back of the chateau did not conform at all with its facade: it was built of gray stone. The roof was not the same either: on this side it was more elaborate, with cut off corners and gables, so that a house which at first sight looked like a Louis XIII chateau, from the back looked like one of those late-nineteenth-century seaside resort mansions.” (Ch 11)
• “The cigarette and pipe smoke irritated my eyes and made me cough a little. There was a smell of lard in the air.” (Ch 17)

It's a bit like the way Kafka makes us believe in his fantastical worlds by describing them in terms of everyday reality. I suspect that, without the opposition of his detailed descriptions, the ambiguities of identity would be less obvious.

A classic, worthy of a Nobel laureate.

The English title makes a lot of sense, although perhaps 'Missing Identity' might be more accurate, but is in no way a translation of the French title, Rue des Boutiques Obscures which I translate as 'The Street of Strange Shops' and which itself seems to derive from what the author describes as "my old address in Rome: Via delle Botteghe Oscure" (Ch 47)

Selected quotes:

• “He stared as though the light of a projector had been turned on his face.” (Ch 7)
• “The Eiffel Tower generally so reassuring, looked like a hulk of oxidized scrap-iron.” (Ch 7)
• “In the end, we were all ‘beach men’ and that ‘the sand’ ... ‘keeps the traces of our footsteps only a few moments’.” (Ch 8)
• “I've just returned from the Golden Tripe Competition ... I was one of the judges. We had to swallow a hundred and seventy pieces of tripe over a period of one half days” (Ch 10)

August 2026; 180 pages
First published in French as Rue des Boutiques Obscures in 1978 by Editions Gallimard
My English translation by Daniel Weissbort was first published by Jonathan Cape in 1980. I read the Penguin paperback version of this which was issued in 2019.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Other novels by Modiano reviewed in this blog:

• In the Cafe of Lost Youth
• The Black Notebook

Other novels by French authors which I have reviewed in this blog may be found here.