"The Spire" by William Golding

Chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of the best 99 novels since 1939.

 A Dean in the Middle Ages is inspired by a vision to add a spire to his cathedral. Opposition includes the master builder he hires to supervise the work. Will his monomaniacal determination win the day or will his dreams come crashing down? 

The wikipedia page on this novel has a detailed account of the plot (with spoilers), the characters and the symbolism.

For me, the best thing about the book is the carefully constructed gappy stream of consciousness narration (all from Dean Jocelin's perspective) which is a masterclass in how to hook and beguile the reader into piecing together what is going on from the sometimes disjointed clues. 

The key turning points are at the one-third mark and the two-thirds mark.

Captain Ahab meets Leopold Bloom?

Selected quotes

• “The most solid thing was the light. It smashed through the rows of windows in the south aisle, so that they exploded with colour, it slanted before him from right to left in an exact formation, ... Everywhere, fine dust gave these rods and trunks of light the importance of a dimension.” (Ch 1)
• “He had a tariff of knees. He knew how they should be after this length of kneeling or that.” (Ch 1)
• “Once more, the windows were coming together. the Saint’s life still burned in them with blue and red and green; but the spark and shatter of the sun had shifted.” (Ch 1)
• “The master builder often looked at things without seeing them; and then again, he would look at a thing as if he could see nothing else.” (Ch 2)
• “When the rain drizzled, then time was a drizzle, slow and to be endured.” (Ch 3)
• “When the wind came, it ... cuffed the air this way and that.” (Ch 3)
• “A workman fell through the hole above the crossways, and left a scream scored all the way down the air which was so thick it seemed to keep the scream as something mercilessly engraved there.” (Ch 3)
• “A midday without sun and therefore blasphemously without hope.” (Ch 3)
• “Some of the gargoyles seemed diseased, as they yelled their soundless blasphemies and derisions into the wind, yet made no more noise than death in another country.” (Ch 4) “no more noise than death in another country.”: what a phrase!
• “He was helpless ... as a girl herding too many geese.” (Ch 4) A nice mediaeval simile.
• “There comes a point when a vision’s no more than a child’s playing let’s pretend.” (Ch 4)
• “The earth is a huddle of noseless men grinning upward, there are gallows everywhere, the blood of childbirth never ceases to flow, nor sweat in the furrow, the brothels are down there and drunk men lie in the gutter. There is no good thing in all this circle but the great house, the ark, the refuge, a ship to contain all these people and now fitted with a mast.” (Ch 5) Earlier in the book, the cathedral is compared to a man lying on his back which makes the spire an erect penis.
• “There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.” (Ch 10)
• “Life itself is a rickety building.” (Ch 10)
• “His thoughts went trotting away like a horse unharnessed from the cart.” (Ch 11)

William Golding was a Booker prize winner (1980) and the 1983 Nobel Laureate. He wrote poetry, drama and these novels:

• Lord of the Flies (1954)
• The Inheritors (1955)
• Pincher Martin (1956)
• Free Fall (1959)
• The Spire (1964)
• The Pyramid (1967)
• Darkness Visible (1979) (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize)
• To the Ends of the Earth (trilogy)
• Rites of Passage (1980) (Booker Prize winner)
• Close Quarters (1987)
• Fire Down Below (1989)
• The Paper Men (1984)
• The Double Tongue (posthumous publication 1995)

My copy has a delightful cover by John Piper, an artist who designed a large opus of ecclesiastical work, including stained glass windows.

August 2025; 223 pages

Published by Faber and Faber in 1964

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

"Offshore" by Penelope Fitzgerald

Winner of the Booker Prize in 1979.

An exploration of the liminal lives of a group of houseboat owners on Battersea Reach in the tidal Thames in the early 1960s, as Swinging London gets underway. Richard, retired from the Royal Navy, lives with his wife (who longs for a normal house) on a converted minesweeper. Maurice lives on his own on a dutch barge and most nights he brings home a customers from the local pub; his boat is also used by Harry to store stolen goods. Willis, a 65 year-old artist, is trying to sell his leaky boat before it sinks. Nenna's boat is home to herself and her two daughters, 12 and 6; her hopeless husband can't bear living abroad and has left her to cope alone. Woodie and Mrs Woodie are an elderly couple who support the others through the various crises.

The constant reference to leaks, to the need for continual maintenance, and the rats, certainly put paid to any romantic notions I might have had about living on a boat.

The book refers several times to "the short uneasy period between land and water" (Ch 7) and the characters do seem to be living in a kind of limbo. The epigraph is taken from Dante and there is a reference to the river that souls must cross to enter the classical underworld: "Rat-ridden and neglected, it was a wharf still. The river's edge, where Virgil's ghosts held out their arms in longing for the farther shore, and Dante, as a living man, was refused passage by the ferryman ... there, surely, is a place to stop and reflect." (Ch 1) There are a lot of endings, from the three drowned sailors seen by little Tilda, to a sinking ship, to the death of a marriage, to an attempted murder. All the characters seem to be betwixt and between, living lives of transience, and those who live on land in proper houses, such as the priest, disapprove. I suspect that the author is saying that life itself is impermanent and that places that remind us of this are indeed places to "stop and reflect". 

This feeling of liminality is reflected in the chronology. The book seems to be set in late 1961 (the spring of 1962 is said to be in 6 months time and Nenna married in 1949 and her eldest child in 12) but Heinrich wants to see "Swinging London" which is generally agreed to have started in 1964. This anachronism seems appropriate when you live on the threshold. And Nenna is asked (in an imaginary court trial), "'Look here, is it Wednesday or Thursday?' 'I don't know, Ed, whichever you like'." (Ch 3). Time is unimportant in a liminal space. Again, in chapter 5, the author describes the old mother of Willis as "perdurable" which means imperishable but later in the sentence we discover that the woman has died of cancer; this seems to be a deliberate oxymoron.

It is, however, paced just like a classic novel: the key turning point comes almost exactly in the centre of the book.

 Have I ever mentioned how much I hate it when authors write in a foreign language? This novel's epigraph (that's the quotation at the start to you and me) is "che mena il vento, e che batte la pioggia/ e che s'incontran con si aspre lingue" which are two lines of mediaeval Tuscan taken from Dante's Inferno (canto 11) which mean "those whom the wind drives, and those whom the rain batters, and those who encounter one another with such bitter words." 

Selected Quotes:

• "Duty is what no-one else will do at the moment." (Ch 1)
• "It's not the kind who inherit the earth, it's the poor, the humble, and the meek. ... the kind ... get kicked in the teeth." (Ch 6)
• "It was like one of those terrible sights of the racecourse or the battle field where wallowing living beings persevere dumbly in their duty although mutilated beyond repair." (Ch 7)
• "It's my last chance. While I've still got it I can take it out and look at it and know I still have it. If that goes, I've nothing left to try." (Ch 7)
• "I can't for the life of me see why, if you really feel something, it's got to be talked about." (Ch 8)
• "He disliked comparisons, because they made you think about more than one thing at a time." (Ch 8)
• "All distances are the same to those who don't meet." (Ch 10)
• "The James family seemed to have few possessions. Mrs Woodie felt half inclined to lend her some, so as to have more to sort out and put away." (Ch 10)

The plot might be minimal but this is a book of beautifully drawn characters in a very special world.

February 2024; 181 pages

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

"The Promise" by Damon Galgut

Winner of the 2021 Booker Prize. For other winners of the Booker see here.

The Swarts are a white South African farming family, clinging on to their way of life through the political changes marking the end of apartheid and the birth of the new majority-rule  country. At the start of the book the mother of the family dies; on her deathbed she makes her husband promise to gift to the maidservant the house in which she (the servant) lives with her son. The refusal to honour this promise seems to act as a curse. 

The parallels with the decline of the nation are obvious. Swarts?

This beautifully written book is told through multiple interior monologues (though the thoughts are usually fairly well-formed and there seemed to be more tell than show; the author-in-character sometimes speaks directly to the reader), head-hopping in a 'PoV tag' sort of way that reminded me of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. 

Selected quotes:

The page numbers refer to the Chatto & Windus 2021 hardback edition.

• "Some of the other girls say Miss Starkey is a lesbian, but it's hard to imagine her doing anything sexy with anyone. Or maybe she did once and has been permanently disgusted ever since." (p 3)
• "Tannie Marina is always baking things and trying to feed them to people. Her sister Astrid says it's so she doesn't have to be fat alone." (p 5)
• "She is prone to paranoid fears like these, suspecting sometimes that her mind can be secretly read by people around her, or that life is an elaborate performance in which everybody else is acting and she alone is not." (p 24)
• "No need to dwell on the image of the old woman with her knickers around her ankles and her finger up her fundament, at such moments she feels very far from God. " (p 46)
• "You don't think about sex, you suffer it. A scratchy, hungry thing going on in the basement." (p 54)
• "It is not always possible to please two white people simultaneously." (p 66)
• "Survival isn't instructive, just demeaning." (p 94)
• "Oh, yes. When you've claimed a man's gun, you claim the man too. Law of the frontier. Oh, balls, Anton, who scripts these thoughts for you?" (p 145)
• "Not every chance is an opportunity. Sometimes a chance is just a waste of time." (p 157)
• "When white people fight, her mother declares without a scrap of rational evidence, it is always over property!" (p 252)
• "No love left, only kindness, which is maybe stronger. More durable, anyhow." (p 257)
• "Fornication rates all over the country rise dramatically on the night of Zuma's resignation." (p 271)
• "She has been harbouring a secret hope that her husband's life work might just turn out to be a masterpiece. Who knows, even better than Wilbur Smith. Imagine!" (p 279)
• "And when the storm finally passes, in the small hours, it leaves a dripping calmness behind it. Snails unfurl themselves in the undergrowth and push forth, little galleons on a dark green sea, trailing their little silver wakes. From the soil, musky pheromonal odours twine up like tendrils on the air." (p 291)

April 2022; 293 pages

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

"Losing Nelson" by Barry Unsworth

 Charles is obsessed with Nelson. He hurries home to his basement to re-enact Nelson's battles on their anniversary ... to the minute. He believes that his life runs in parallel with Nelson's; that he is Nelson's dark shadow. He sees Nelson as the perfect hero. The only thing that worries him is Nelson's behaviour in Naples when he may have tricked some rebels into surrendering and then executed them. That and his new secretary, to whom he is dictating his book on Nelson, who prefers her men to be gentle and thoughtful and kind and sees Nelson as a vain serial killer, crippled psychologically as well as physically. Her opposition will bring Charles to a crisis in which he is forced to confront the truth about heroism.

It is a fascinating book, dissecting both obsession and the nature of heroism (which is a type of obsession). There are some amusing incidents, such as when the protagonist meets a writer who can be no other than a portrait of the author himself (and sees him as an obsessive). The characters of the protagonist and the antagonist (and can there ever have been a gentler antagonist?) are brilliantly written as are the settings of the book. The plot is perfectly paced: the talk Charles gives to the Nelson society is pivotal and half-way through the book. 

And not only did I learn a lot about Nelson but also my probable ancestor, Alexander Davison, Nelson's prize-agent, is mentioned in the book!

Great moments:

• "Timing is the key to control and control is the key to concealment." (Ch 1)
• "My father was a master of concealment, he kept it up so well that nobody knew just when he died" (Ch 1)
• "I will say what I think angels are. They can be dark or bright, but they all have the gift of spontaneity, of creating themselves anew." (Ch 1)
• "What else would an angel seem, out of his element, portrayed by mediocre men, but grotesque?" (Ch 13)
• "The path of the hero cannot be smooth; he must show disregard for all restraints of prudence." (Ch 13)
• "The quintessential act of heroic insubordination, the ultimate rejection of half-measures." (Ch 13)
• "By this time I had begun to experience the usual symptoms of rage: a sense of impaired vision, a feeling that the skin of my face was too tight." (Ch 14)
• "I had no friends at all. But of course it was the price one paid for being on the shadow side." (Ch 19)
• "Many were crucified, but there is only one cross." (Ch 19)
• "Nelson ... was always so ready to get people killed. If you look at it one way, he was a sort of serial killer." (Ch 21)
• "He looked like a god glutted with sacrifice." (Ch 23)

Barry Unsworth won the Booker Prize in 1992 for Sacred Hunger.

May 2021; 313 pages

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

Quoting Nelson:

• "If a man considers whether he is to fight, when he has the power in his own hands, it is certain that his opinion is against fighting." (Ch 13)

"My sister the serial killer" by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for fiction and long-listed for the 2019 Booker Prize. Winner of the 2020 crime/thriller prize in the British Book Awards.

"Ayola summons me with these words - Korede, I killed him. I had hoped I would never hear those words again."

It is the last word on this, the first page, that hooks. This is not the first killing. And thus the book immediately lives up to the promise of its title.

Korede immediately hurries over to the flat with bleach to clear the mess and to help her sister remove the corpse.

Korede is a nurse, the elder sister, practical and efficient but not blessed with beauty. Ayola is stunningly attractive, full of a beauty that makes normal sane rational men become obsessed. The two sisters were physically abused by their bullying father, almost as a by-product of his making a fortune (he is contemplating exploiting Ayola's beauty in the marriage market for his own financial gain when he dies). He has bequeathed to Ayola a knife with which she dispatches her boyfriends. Then, one day, the handsome doctor for whom Korede lusts, meets Ayola and falls under her spell. Should Korede denounce her sister to save the doctor's life?

A book whose theme is the unfairness of genetics in a world where the beautiful always get more than their fair share of everything. Korede has learned to be cynical about a cynical world where the cops are always open to bribery, where men are invariably predatory ("When you have money, university girls are to men what plankton is to a whale." p 107), where you have to play dirty to survive. In some ways Ayola is the supreme feminist, exploiting her beauty on Instagram, and ruthlessly murdering boyfriends when she is tired of them ... and Korede's protective instincts help her little sister get away with murder. But how long can this last before it all comes tumbling down?

Some great lines:

• "It takes a whole lot longer to dispose of a body than to dispose of a soul." (p 10)
• "It was a shame to think that death would whittle away at his broad shoulders and concave abs, until he was nothing more than bone." (p 10)
• "He had hoped his generous act and his artistic talents would secure him a place in her heart, or at the very least a place in her bed, but he was short and had teeth that were fighting for space in his mouth. So all it got him was a pat on the head and a can of coke."
• "She is beached on the sofa in the downstairs living room, reading a Mills & Boon novel - a tale of the type of love she has never known." (p 41)
• "When he is not singing, he is humming, and when he tires of that, he whistles. He is a walking music box." (p 46)
• "Her mother twists her wedding ring with her finger, as though contemplating taking it off." (p 49)
• "Chichi will spread the news before I have finished telling it." (p 73)
• "I know better than to take life directions from someone without a moral compass." (p 82)
• "He had several girlfriends in various universities across Lagos. ... He once told me you had to feed the cow before you slaughtered it." (p 107)

A fast-paced (tiny chapters) but beautifully written novel.

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

August 2017; 223 pages

A review by  Nic James for Thanet Writers makes some interesting points: "Korede’s need to protect her sister is such a compulsion that I wanted some more exploration of exactly why she continued to act in such a way for a person who clearly cared about no one but herself." He also suggested that the narrator had "very few endearing qualities. Her crush on Tade seemed pretty shallow, and her inner monologue was full of constant scorn for the people around her. As a result it was difficult to care about either sister."

"Paddy Clarke ha ha ha" by Roddy Doyle

A fictionalised memoir of an Irish childhood. Paddy grows up with his ma and da, his brother Sinbad (Francis) and his sisters, and the other boys of the neighbourhood. They go to school, they fight, they play football, they dare one another to steal from shops, start fires, they run down construction pipes. This is no idyll; it is a raw and honest account of childhood. Teeth are lost, a boy dies, friendships are made and broken. And as the narrative progresses a dark shadow grows. Paddy's ma and da begin to argue and fight.

The voice is the authentic voice of Irish childhood. My friend 'Karl' writes stories about Ireland and I could here his voice in the way Doyle uses language. The words and the syntax have an authentic Irish lilt to them.

To capture the essence of young Paddy Clarke, the narrative rambles. Paddy is simply too young, or too clever, to keep his thoughts in a single track. He may be describing the building of a new housing estate but that segues into how the cows were taken from the farm in a lorry and how Uncle Eddie, the farmer's brother, hit a cow with a stick when it slipped in the mud and how he used to run down the road to get the evening paper for his brother. He may be talking about the naming of their football team but this progresses into the boys investigating the first names of their mothers. A dreadful family outing in da's new car (which he hasn't yet learned to drive) in the pouring rain has all the elements of family life including the tension between ma and da, the relationship between Sinbad and Paddy, and the fact the when little Sinbad wouldn't ever smile for his photograph.

It sounds like a nightmare. Just stream of consciousness rambling. But it allows Doyle to explore his characters in all their complexities; it allows him to build a picture of his people from all the possible angles so that we see them as real, with faults and frailties and strengths and needs. There is no shirking the genuineness of the people portrayed. The structure of this book is hidden deep down. It is not so much a narrative as an atmosphere. As childhood progresses the dark clouds slowly gather and innocence becomes maturity.

A stunning portrayal of childhood well worth the 1993 Booker Prize.

It is difficult to select quotations from this book because so much of the brilliance is diffused across the pages but here are a few samples:

• "Jesus had his head tilted sideways, a bit like a kitten."
• "She was Mister O'Connell's girlfriend, although she wasn't a girl at all; she'd been a woman for ages."
• "Kevin turned his back to the sea and the wind and lit the match. He turned and saved the flame by the shield of his hand. I loved the way he could do that."
• "When my da was standing up he stood perfectly still. His feet clung to the ground. They only moved when he was going somewhere. My ma's feet were different. They didn't settle. They couldn't make their minds up."
• "She let go of my leg. She always said nothing when she was being annoyed. She clicked and pointed."
• "He was younger than me, and smaller. Safe smaller; he'd never be able to kill me, even if he was a brilliant fighter."
• "My ma said that you should chew the food well before you swallowed it. I never did; it was a waste of time and boring."
• "I looked for lipstick on his collar ... There wasn't any. I wondered, anyway, why there'd be lipstick on the collar. Maybe the women were bad shots in the dark."
• "They were both to blame. It took two to tango. It didn't take three; there was no room for me."

You will have your own selection when you read it and you must read it because this childish Joycean Odyssey is a masterclass in writing.

February 2019; 282 pages

Other fiction by Irish authors reviewed in this blog may be found here.

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

"Lincoln in the Bardo" by George Saunders

Another recommendation from my mate Fred.

President Lincoln's son Willie dies and is put into a crypt. The ghosts in the cemetery are concerned that he has not swiftly moved on. They fear that, like them, he will be trapped by the failure to accept that they are not lying in sick-boxes in their sick-forms waiting to be revived from their illness. Trapped by regret.

Then the President comes into the crypt and takes his son's body from the coffin and embraces it.

This book is built of snippets, sometimes garnered from the extensive historical literature about this period in the Lincoln presidency. The rest is snippets of conversation between some very strange ghosts.

The whole book, shortlisted for the 2017 Waterstones Book of the Year and winner of the 2017 Booker, is beautifully written but fundamentally weird. I can't decide whether to be overwhelmed by its brilliance or to be amused by its strangeness. Both, perhaps.

@maxpuffins has written a super review on his 'The Great Wild Word' blog.

Nice lines which give us much to ponder about life and death and regret:

• "I was on the brink of squandering a wondrous gift, the gist of being allowed, every day, to wander this vast sensual paradise" (C 9)
• "Their warm flesh, steaming breath, moist eyeballs, chafing undergarments." (C 24)
• "We had been ... loved. ... Our departures caused pain. ... remembering us, even many years later, people would smile, briefly gladdened at the memory." (C 25)
• "You are a wave that has crashed upon the shore." (C 29)
• "A train approaches a wall at a fatal rate of speed. You hold a switch in your hand, that accomplishes you know not what: do you throw it? Disaster is otherwise assured. It costs you nothing. Why not try?" (C52)
• "Time runs in only one direction, and we are borne along by it, influenced precisely as we are, to do just the things that we do ... and then are cruelly punished for it." (C81)
• "The king-types who would snatch the apple from your hand and claim to have grown it." (C 94)
• "He was an open book. An opening book. That had just been opened up somewhat wider." (C 96)

An extraordinary book by a skilled story-teller. September 2018; 343 pages

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

"A Horse Walks into a Bar" by David Grossman

A retired judge, grieving the loss of his wife, watches a stand-up comic, once a childhood friend, perform a routine in a cabaret bar in Israel. As the evening progresses the stand-up turns the act into a confessional. One by one the audience leave as the jokes run dry and the comic becomes serious.

This book, which won the Man Booker International Prize in 2017, has a single scene (the cabaret bar); it starts when the comic enters on stage and it ends when he finishes his routine. It is narrated by the judge who observes the whole thing unfold. 

To what extent does the judge's bereavement foreshadow the climax of the story? “I saw for real that he wasn't worth anything without her, and that all his power in life came from her being with him. He turned into half a human in that one instant.” (p 193)

Questions:
What's it all about?
Is it actually about writing? “I quickly discovered that exaggerations were warmly welcomed: no pin pricks would deflate my hot-air balloons, and it turned out that I could and should tell each story over and over again with embellishment and plot twists, some that were real and others that could have been.” (p 39) Is Grossman reflecting on the art of the storyteller?

Is it about the holocaust? There are several key metaphors here. Firstly, the crime that the Judge commits in the army camp is one of witnessing something bad happening and failing to do anything about it, perhaps from fear. It could be argued that this alludes to the way people who knew about the death camps did nothing to stop the crimes being committed there. This crime, of course, takes place in an army camp, and could equally allude to those who witness crimes committed against the Palestinians (or anyone weaker than you) and do nothing. Another metaphor is that of the choice which the comic feels he made, as a lad, which brings to mind the selection at the camps into those who would live and those who would die. A third metaphor could be found in the way that the comic keeps a tally of those who walk out of the show.

Is it about Israel? The comic with his puny scarred body could represent the Israeli nation. The small Medium keeps telling him that he was a good boy when he was young; perhaps he is no longer. He was bullied when he was small; his aggressive stand-up routine might symbolise the nation's way of standing up to the bigger nations that surround it. And the way that the show lurches into self-destruction might also reflect on the writer's perception of Israeli history.

Why the three characters? The protagonist is the stand-up comedian. The narrator is the retired Judge. Having a narrator is important, I think, because it allows Grossman to observe the reactions to the comedian and because it allows us not to know where the comedian is going. Their childhood friendship, during which the Judge betrayed the Comic, adds an important note of tension because, as the Comic tells his long story, we are unsure whether he will reveal what the Judge did. The third character, the small Medium who regularly defends the Comic, saying what a nice boy he used to be, is more difficult to understand in terms of her role within the story.

How is the plot structured? It seems a rambling account in which the Comic starts by telling jokes before embarking on the long confessional story of his childhood. But is there a skeleton? In film writing scriptwriters are exhorted to use a three act structure (I think of this as a four act structure because the middle act of the three is twice as long as the others and often divided into two parts). To ascertain whether this book was analysable in terms of a four act structure I looked at what happened around pages 50, 100, and 150:

• Around page fifty the small Medium contributes, revealing that she knew the Comic when he was young telling the audience that he was a nice boy who walked on his hands. 
• Around page 100 the Comic starts telling the audience about his experience in an army training camp and the Judge believes that this is where he will be outed as a betrayer.
• Around page 150 the driver Jokerman has a realisation and starts to treat his passenger as a person.

I'm not sure if these are the major turning points. I suspect that the most important moment is about page 103 when we start to realise what the Comic's long story might be about.





Great moments:

• “‘But I have seen you before’, I reminded him. ‘It's been years’, he said immediately. ‘I'm not me, you're not you’.” (p 63)
• “You were such medicine for me, such medicine for the dry bachelorhood that had closed in on me ... and for all the antibodies to life that had built up in my blood through all the years without you” (p 69)
• “Being. ... what an amazing, subversive idea.” (p 72)
• “A little boy trapped between the table and the wall as his father lashes him with a belt.” (p 79)
• “I’ve long ago forgotten if it's my dignity I've lost or my shame.” (p 133)
• “Be nice ... Remember that every person only lives for a short time, and you have to make that time pleasant.” (p 138)

A tour de force. One of the few books liked by all the members of my book group. June 2018; 198 pages

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

"Hotel du Lac" by Anita Brookner

The book starts with the protagonist, a romantic novelist called Edith Hope, staring out of the window of her room in the eponymous Swiss hotel on a world of greyness, shrouded in mist. She has been 'sent' to the end-of-season hotel as some sort of penance for the exposure of her long adulterous relationship with a married man called David.

In its early stages the book is full of beautiful observations about the predominantly female guests: the woman  who feeds her meal to her badly behaved dog, the greedy woman and daughter combination who love spending their money and who take Edith under their wing (ostensibly because she is alone but actually so they can talk at her and patronise her), the Comtesse who his in the hotel as a sort of retirement home having been put their by her son acting under the orders of his wife.

Into this grey world comes Mr Neville, a man dressed in grey. Disconcertingly, he knows Edith as her nom de plume. Later he seems to be able to read her mind and to know her better than she knows herself. Already slightly sinister, at the half way point of the story he reveals his moral code: "You cannot live someone else's life. You can only live your own. And remember, there are no punishments. Whatever they told you about unselfishness being good and wickedness being bad was entirely inaccurate. It is a lesson for serfs and it leads to resignation. And my policy, you may be surprised to hear, will ensure you any number of friends. People feel at home with low moral standards. It is scruples that put them off." (p 96) This is a man who lives up to the evil in the middle of his name (which makes me wonder about Miss HOPE and the very HotELduLac).

Following this very frank courtship, Edith goes on the last silent boat across the grey lake. This is a chapter reeking in mythic metaphor, to the extent of describing Mr Neville as a "curiously mythological personage". When Edith regrets joining Neville on the boat ("Ships, she knew, were often used by painters as symbols of the soul, sometimes of the soul departing for unknown shores. Of death, in fact. Or, if not of death, not of anything very hopeful.") she reflects on the inappropriateness of the adage that the devil finds work for idle hands: "One cannot even rely on Satan to fulfil his obligations." Mr Neville tells her that "as to vice, there is plenty to be found if you know where to look" and when she replies that she never seems to find it he suggests "that is because you do not give yourself over wholeheartedly to the pursuit. But ... we are going to change all that." And then he proposes. And as they prepare to disembark he says in two beautiful double entendres: "We must get off, Edith. Give me your hand." This, the penultimate chapter, is beautifully written.

The whole book is beautiful. A gentle comedy of manners, well observed, has become a wonderfully Mephistophelean temptation.

Other brilliant lines:

• "everything that Mrs Pusey had said so far was of the utmost triviality. Clearly there were depths here that deserved her prolonged attention." (p 40)
• "The beautiful day had within it the seeds of its own fragility: it was the last day of summer." (p 67)
• "There is something quite heartening about ... simple greed." (p 96)
• "Do me a favour ...I do not have any plans. I never have any plans. I should have thought that was fairly obvious by now. I thought you were supposed to be a writer. Aren't you supposed to be good at observing human nature, or something?  I only ask because you sometimes strike me as being a bit thick." (p 144)

This novel won the Booker Prize in 1984. Other prize winners can be found on this page. 

A fabulous book. July 2016; 184 pages

A detailed review of this book can be found here: https://www.thearticle.com/a-study-of-anita-brookners-hotel-du-lac

Anita Brookner has also written

• Brief Lives, a beautifully written devastatingly sad memoir narrated by a childless widow growing old
• Family and Friends

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

"The Narrow Road to the Deep North" by Richard Flanagan

The life story of Dorrigo Evans, youngest child of a railwayman living on a smallholding in Tasmania who grows up to become a surgeon, the commanding officer of Australian Prisoners of War slaving for the Japanese on the Death Railway. It tells in graphic detail of the suffering of the starving men as they toil to build a railway in the jungle. It tells of his love, his marriage and his infidelities and the difficulty he and the other PoWs faced when they returned home. We find out what happened to the Japanese and Koreans who guarded them and treated them brutally. Some lives end quickly and some live for a long time but in the end we all live, we suffer, we love and we die.

And through it all men are helped to survive by art. Dorrigo learns poems by heart; he favours the classics: Homer and Catullus. The Japanese quote haikus. Early on, Dorrigo reads about a Japanese poet whose death poem was a simple circle. Is life a cycle or is it a line like the railway: the narrow road to the deep north.

This is a remarkable book. I toiled at first. It jumps around, flashing forward and backwards, sometimes swapping to the perspective of different characters. Right from the start there is a hint of a master at work in the fresh descriptions: page 4 has "verandah-browed wooden cottages". And the mixture of Dorrigo's beautiful, if adulterous, love affair and the horrors of the jungle makes one read on. But the book really took me towards the end, when it detailed the inabilities of so many of the survivors to find peace when they got home. Then it ends in great drama, with a most unexpected twist and a tremendous bush fire.

By the end I knew that I had been reading a masterpiece. And I suspect that it has taught me something important about life and survival and love and suffering and death.

January 2015; 448 pages

This book was shortlisted for the 2014 Waterstones Book of the Year and won the 2014 Booker Prize. Other Booker winners in this blog can be found here

I have just watched the TV series starring Jacob Elordi. Scarily, I could remember almost nothing of the book's plot but on re-reading my blog I discover that what the TV concentrated on - his love affair with Ella and the horrors of the prison-camp - were not really what impressed me about the book. 

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