"The Devil's Elixirs" by E T A Hoffmann

This Gothic novel, a classic of doppelganger fiction, is heavy on plot, if you can call this convoluted picaresque a plot, but light on character. Having drunk a wine associated with the relic of Saint Anthony and reputed to be one of the Devil's elixirs, with which Satan had unsuccessfully tried to tempt the Saint, Brother Medardus has an interlude as a highly successful preacher which puffs him up with pride before, as a penance, he is sent by his Abbot to Rome. On the course of this journey he assumes the identity of a Count who he has just seen fall from a cliff, falls in love with a noblewoman and murders her brother, escapes, travels to a Princely court, wins a fortune gambling, encounters his doppelganger, meets a smooth-talking barber, is arrested for murder, escapes, and continues his journey to Rome where he repents of his sins and seeks redemption. I may have missed a few dozen incidents out and confused others. After a while, I stopped paying attention.

All of the usual Gothic tropes are here: 

• the hero is a mad monk (there is even a name check to the English novel The Monk by Matthew Lewis which was published in 1796), 
• there is the usual Protestant hysteria over Roman Catholicism, 
• there is murder, 
• there is a doppelganger, 
• there is imprisonment in a dungeon (and the doppelganger tunnels his way into the cell in what seems like the source of a similar episode in the Count of Monte Cristo which was written by Alexandre Dumas pere in 1846), 
• there is a mysterious painter described as the Wandering Jew, 
• there's a secret trapdoor set in motion by a spring, 
• there is the phrase “odour of sanctity” (2.2) which always makes me wonder what sanctity smells of, I personally imagine a mix of must and floor polish
• there is the phrase "subtle cruelty" (2.2): something in Gothic romances of the time always had to be subtle.
• there is a thunderstorm

It is written in the heightened headlong hysteria common to the genre at the time: “Are you then free from sin, that you dare to look in loss to my heart as if you were the purest man alive, yea as if you were God Himself, whom you despise; that you dare to pronounce the remission of my sins - you, who will struggle in vain for forgiveness, for the blessedness of haven which will always be denied you? Despicable hypocrite, soon the hour of requital will come, and you will be grounded in the dust like a venomous serpent, rising in mortal shame and moaning in vain for release from your unutterable agony!” (1.2) When a writer uses words such as ‘unutterable’ or ‘indescribable’ I always think that, if they had sufficient skill, they would be able to utter or describe it.

Descriptions are equally rococo:

“As the coach moved off there were flashes of lightning in the distance and the clouds which the wind had hurled together and was driving across the sky, became blacker and blacker; the thunder rolled in a thousand echoes, and red lightning rent the heavens as far as the eye could see. The tall pines cracked, shattered to their roots, and the rain poured down in torrents.” (1.3)

Did I enjoy it? Not much. It just went on and on. Madness gets boring quite quickly. I did enjoy the barber who had a joie de vivre he expressed in wonderfully impetuous language, at once similar to and different from the standard prose of the book: “You will see the modern gentleman of fashion in every conceivable refinement - now boldly outshining everyone, now morose and disinterested, now naively flirting, now ironic, witty, ill-tempered, melancholic, bizarre, dissolute, graceful, jovial.” (1.3) He claims he isn't mad but a clown: “Is not a barber of genius inevitably a clown right from the beginning? Clowning is a protection against madness, and I can assure you, reverend sir, that even by north-northwest I can clearly distinguish a church spire from a lamp-post.” (2.2) This is clearly quoting Shakespeare. In Act 2 Scene 2, Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: "I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw".

It had its moments. I wondered whether the Elixirs were a metaphor for drug addiction, whether the Devil was a pusher: “O Brother Medardus, the Devil walks the earth unceasingly, offering his elixirs to men. Who has not at some time or other delighted in his potions?” (2.2) There were some wonderfully wacky moments which often seemed to include owls. But I struggled to finish it.

Selected quotes:

• “Just as Classical forms of architecture have been preserved in the churches, so a ray of light from the joyful age of Antiquity seems to have shone into the dark mysticism of Christianity, bringing with it something of the radiant glory which surrounded the ancient gods and heroes.” (1.1)
• “Satan ... leered mockingly at The Saint and asked him whether he would like to taste the elixirs that were in the bottles he was carrying.” (1.1)
• “Let us climb onto the roof beneath the weathercock, which is playing a merry tune for the owl’s wedding. Up there we will fight with each other, and the one who pushes the other over will become a king and be able to drink blood.” (1.3)
• “You wobbled about like a badly-made skittle.” (2.2)
• “Banished from the church, excluded like a leper from the gatherings of the brethren, I lay in the vaults of the monastery, ekeing out a pitiable existence on tasteless herbs boiled in water, whipping and torturing myself with instruments devised by the most subtle cruelty, and raising my voice in self accusation, in contrite prayer for my redemption from hell, whose flames were already glowing within me.” (2.2)
• “There was a confused rustling and whispering; people I had known before appeared, madly distorted; heads crawled about with grasshoppers’ legs growing out of their ears, and leering at me obscenely; strange birds, ravens with human heads, were beating their wings overhead. I saw the choir master from B — and his sister, who was wildly dancing a waltz while her brother accompanied her by playing on his breast, which had become a fiddle. Belcampo, with the ugly face of a lizard, was sitting on a horrible dragon; he made a rush as if to comb my beard with a red-hot iron comb, but he did not reach me. The chaos became mad and madder, the figures more and more weird, from the smallest ant dancing with human feet to the elongated skeleton of a horse with glittering eyes, its skin a saddlecloth on which was sitting a knight with a shining owl’s-head; his armour was a mug with the bottom knocked out, his helmet a funnel turned upside down.” (2.2)

Hoffmann was also author of The Sandman, which formed the basis for the first act of Offenbach's opera Tales from Hoffmann and the ballet Coppelia by Delibes; another of his short stories formed the basis the The Nutcracker, the ballet by Tchaikovsky. 

First published in 1816

My OneWorld Classics edition, based on Ronald Taylor's 1963 translation was issued in 2008.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Passenger" (Der Reisende) by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

The peregrinations of a Jew trying to escape Hitler's Germany.

Otto Silbermann is a successful Jewish businessman who has left it a little too late to leave Nazi Germany. He is trying to sell his business and home without being too badly ripped off by the Aryan purchasers. But when stormtroopers break down his front door he escapes out of the back to become a fugitive in his own country. He criss-crosses the country on trains, not knowing what to do next, repeatedly changing his mind, doggedly hanging on to his good manners and what is left of his fortune. He is indecisive and bewildered: a typical Kafkaesque hero caught in the arbitrary snares of a monstrous society. It is also written in a Kafkaesque style: straightforwardly describing what is said and done by the characters, with no attempt to analyse behaviours. 

This is a book about hopelessness and how it saps the will. It is a book about the difficulty of evolving one's understanding of the world when one's environment changes, and how those who don't evolve are likely to become extinct. 

Selected quotes:

• "He was struck by the man's sunken face and drooping shoulders. Undoubtedly a miner, he thought. They age quickly. Those people don't get much out of life, although they go through a great deal - they probably don't even realise how much. ... They don't have any youth, these people. The struggle starts when they're fourteen years old and from then on it's a fight for sheer survival, with everything at stake." (Ch 5)
• "I have already emigrated ... I am no longer in Germany. I am in trains that run through Germany. That's a big difference." (Ch 5)
• "One can travel to escape calm. But one can also travel to find calm." (Ch 5)

A masterpiece of nihilism.

December 2024; 255 pages

First published in German as Der Reisende in 2018

English translation by Philip Boehm published by Pushkin press in 2021.

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

"Cat and Mouse" by Gunter Grass

The book is set during world war 2, in a coastal town in Germany, among schoolboys. The narrator hero-worships his friend and fellow Roman Catholic Joachim Mahlke; the great Mahlke, he calls him. When Mahlke learns to swim he joins the schoolfriends on the partly sunken barge, he dives, staying under longer than anyone else, bringing up treasures from the wreck.  Mahlke, slightly older than the others, and significantly better-endowed, is a proper hero, always a step ahead the rest of them in mischief, seemingly unvulnerable due to the protection of the Virgin Mary whom he adores. And when he goes to war ...?

The mouse is Mahlke's prominent Adam's apple; it seems to symbolise his masculinity. The cat attacks it at the start of the book. And perhaps the metaphor is that little mice always get caught by the big cats in the end.

The style is discursive. Sometimes Mahlke is referred to in the third-person, and sometimes in the second person (or is that only when the narrator is addressing the mouse?). The narrative has a more or less straightforward chronology, although there are flash-forwards and repeated hints of what is about to happen (repeatedly baited hooks). There are fascinating descriptions, such as "the screwdriver did dance steps over his quaking collarbones." (Ch 1) Here is a longer extract from towards the end, to illustrate the style:

So then I rowed back. But before rowing back, I threw the can opener in the direction of the dredger, but didn't hit it.

So then I threw away the can opener and rowed back, returned old man Kreft's boat, had to pay an extra thirty pfennigs, and said: 'Maybe I'll be back again this evening. Maybe I'll want the boat again.'

So then I threw away, rowed back, returned, paid extra, said I'd be, sat down in the train and rode, as they say, home.

There are two mentions in the book of a child with a tin drum, recalling the title of the author's first novel.

Selected quotes:

• "A typical swimming teacher with a torso like a lifebuoy and thin hairless legs." (Ch 1)
• "Above him the screams of the gulls substantiated the doctrine of transmigration." (Ch 8)
• "If Mahlke had said: 'Do this and that', I would have done this and that and much more." (Ch 8)
• "But the Great Mahlke had started down a path resembling that tunnel-like, overgrown, thorny and birdless path in Olica Castle Park, which had no forks or byways but was nonetheless a labyrinth." (Ch 12)
• "Ever since that Friday I've known what silence is. Silence sets in when gulls veer away. Nothing can make more silence than a dredger at work when the wind carries away its iron noises." (Ch 13)

A strange and lyrical novella, full of hints, grounded in reality, full of complex characters but with the relationship between the narrator and the Great Mahlke, the most complicated of all.

December 2022; 132 pages

Other books by German authors that I have reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.

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

"The train was on time" by Heinrich Boll

A very short novel set in the Second World War. A German soldier boards a train taking him to the Eastern Front. He becomes convinced that he is going to die soon. The train is carrying him towards his fate. Will he escape it?

I think that this is a novel written on two levels. One is the level of myth. It follows a classic mythic structure sometimes called the Hero's Journey (other books in this blog that also have mythic structures include Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt). In this structure, identified by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and followed consciously by George Lucas when writing the first Star Wars film, the Hero first receives a call which he refuses, he then embarks on a journey, entering a new world, he encounters Guides or Companions who help him find the way, he has opportunities to leave his quest which he may or may not take (these can be seen as trials), and near the climax he descends into the cave. In the case of Boll's book:

• He is an Outsider:
• Andreas is a very strange soldier like Boll (who was a pacifist conscripted into the Nazi army) . Andreas’s best friend, Paul, is a chaplain, and Andreas prays a lot (including praying for Jews). Symbolically, Andreas has forgotten to bring his rifle, which he has left propped up in Paul’s room. 
• At the start of the journey he has the opportunity to Refuse the Call: 
• “‘Get on?’ asked the soldier, amazed. ‘Why, I might want to hurl myself under the wheels, I might want to desert.”
• He is on a journey. 
• Once he boards the train (presumably a metaphor, given that it travels on an undeviating track and you can’t get off until it stops) he realises: “the terrible thing is that I’m going to die … soon!” This word ‘soon’ (“Soon I’m going to die, that’s a certainty that lies between one year and one second”) triggers a process of searching his mind for what bits of the future he can visualise and which bits are a blur, he starts to narrow down the place (and therefore the day and time, he’s on a train whose timetable equates place and time) he believes he is going to die. 
• He has two Companions, one of whom has a Map. 
• Andreas meets two other soldiers on the train: a blonde boy and an unshaven sergeant on leave (who, significantly, lends Andreas a map which he uses to help him pinpoint his place of death). These are his Companions on the train. He is the Outsider, brought into contact with the world: “‘That’s right, mate,’ said the blond fellow. ‘Forget your troubles and join the game.’” They persuade him to play cards (another symbol: card games are governed by the random shuffle but once they are started the outcome of the game is largely fixed).
• These companions offer him a number of opportunities to escape his destiny; he Refuses the first chances but eventually he is persuaded to take the last.
• “I could get out here, go off someplace, any place, on and on, till they caught me and put me up against a wall, and I wouldn’t die between Lvov and Cernauti, I would be shot in some little village in Saxony or die like a dog in a concentration camp. But I’m standing here by the window and I feel as if I were made of lead. I can’t move, I feel paralyzed, this train is part of me and I’m part of the train, this train that has to carry me to my appointed end, and the strange part about it is that I have absolutely no desire to get out here.”
• There are trains going the other way which he has an opportunity to board: “From Lvov we take the civilian express, the courier train, the one that goes direct from Warsaw to Bucharest. It’s a terrific train, I always take it, all you need is to get your pass stamped, and we’ll see to that,’ he guffawed, ‘we’ll see to that, but I’m not letting on how!’”
• Towards the end he is taken by his Companions to a restaurant and then a brothel. I suggest that the brothel is the Descent into the Cave. It is this that gives him the chance to escape his destiny.

But the book also works on a thoroughly mundane level. It is a tale of a German soldier travelling on a troop train to the front. Every detail is kept deliberately mundane (eg “Wherever there are soldiers there’s dirt.”) in order to provide the myth with verisimilitude.

This foreknowledge of death, being supernatural, is asserted: It is also asserted: “To lovers and soldiers, to men marked for death and to those filled with the cosmic force of life, this power is sometimes given.” but the author has to work hard to make the reader believe it and therefore, just as in Kafka, he surrounds the foreknowledge with details that are thoroughly mundane (and at the same time symbolic): “Somewhere in the distance searchlights were raking the sky, like long spectral fingers parting the blue cloak of the night ... those silent, uncannily long, spectral fingers of the searchlights, still groping across the sky. It seemed as if the faces belonging to those fingers must be grinning, eerily grinning, cynically grinning like the faces of usurers and swindlers. ‘We’ll get you,’ said the thin-lipped, gaping mouths belonging to those fingers. ‘We’ll get you, we’ll grope all night long.’ Maybe they were looking for a bedbug, a tiny bug in the cloak of the night, those fingers, and they would find the bug.” 

The prose is everyday and unsensational with a great deal of repetition, not always exact repetition.

Great lines:

• “Those halting, colourless goodbyes exchanged beside trains on their way to death”
• “Soon can mean in one year. Soon is a terrible word. This Soon compresses the future, shrinks it, offers no certainty, no certainty whatever, it stands for absolute uncertainty. Soon is nothing and Soon is a lot. Soon is everything. Soon is death. ... This Soon is like a thunderclap. This little word is like the spark that sets off the thunderstorm, and suddenly, for the thousandth part of a second, the whole world is bright beneath this word.”
• “What a pretty girl, he thought: everyone will think she’s ugly, and she’s pretty, she’s beautiful ...”
• “Everything bad comes from those resounding voices; those resounding voices started the war, and those resounding voices regulate the worst war of all, the war at railway stations.”
• “How terrible, to have to eat just before one’s death. Soon I’m going to die, yet I still have to eat.”
• “It was terrible to look into the drab houses where the slaves were getting ready to march off to their factories. House after house, house after house, and everywhere lived people who suffered, who laughed, people who ate and drank and begat new human beings, people who tomorrow might be dead; the place was teeming with human life.”
• “What a laborious, frightful business it was, this killing time, over and over again that little second hand racing invisibly beyond the horizon,"
• "the silence of those who said nothing, nothing at all, was terrible. It was the silence of those who knew they were all done for.”
• “vast gloomy estates where brooding women dreamed of adultery since they had begun to find their blubber-necked husbands repulsive”
• “Splendid and gloomy and without lightness, those cities, with bloody pasts and untamed back streets, silent and untamed.”
• “Many people are like that, an object suddenly becomes valuable to them because someone else would like to have it.”
• “pale, sad eyes the colour of sand dark with rain; unhappy eyes, much that was animal in them and all that was human,”
• “‘We live on hope,’ Paul had once said. As if one were to say: ‘We live on credit.’ We have no security … nothing”
• “Every turn of the wheels tears a piece off my life,”
• “Corpses are heavy … I’m telling you, the bodies of dead men weigh a ton. Corpses are heavier than the whole world”
• “How crazy for the sun to shine like that, Andreas thought, and a dreadful nausea lay like poison in his blood.”
• “It’s a terrible thing to maltreat a person because that person seems ugly to you. There are no ugly people.”
• “Twelve hours before my death I have to find out that life is beautiful, and it’s too late. I’ve been ungrateful, I’ve denied the existence of human happiness.”
• “It’s always a good idea to start with yes. You can always say no later. If you say no right off, your chances of doing business are nil.”
• “every death in war is a murder for which someone is responsible.”
• “When they have a hangover, all they ever want is sausage.”

Beautifully written, carefully structured and thought-provoking.

November 2019; 108 pages

Books and plays written by Nobel Laureates that I have reviewed in this blog can be found here.

Other books by German authors reviewed in this blog.

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

"Don Carlos" by Friedrich Schiller

Schiller was the best-selling author of The Robbers (1781). This play was first performed in 1787. He thus comes towards the end of the romantic Sturm und Drang movement epitomised by his friend  Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and towards the beginning of melodrama. It is also wonderfully Gothic and includes the (albeit fake) ghost of a monk wandering through the palace cellars on the stroke of midnight and the common Gothic trope of demonising Roman Catholicism as later followed by The Monk (Lewis, 1796).

Don Carlos is a historical play written in blank verse and thus with a huge nod to Shakespeare. Schiller includes rather more detailed stage directions that Shakespeare and clearly believes that whenever one has a change of characters this means one should have a new scene (Act 4 has 24 such scenes) but I guess most modern productions would regard many of these scenelets as run-ins to proper scenes.

I saw the LAMDA production of Don Carlos at the matinee on Saturday 9th Feb 2019 in the Carne Studio theatre. This production highlighted the unstable emotional behaviour of Don Carlos, played as a hysterical neurotic by James Esler, who flung himself across the stage in a very physical performance, and his father King Philip, a paranoid gang leader who raged and collapsed and who could trust no one. This was a superb performance by Colm Gleeson. Supporting characters who impressed were Ivan Du Pontavice as a very correct militarist Duke of Alba, Branden Cook as an utterly cynical Domingo, Chloe McClay as etiquette-bound Olivarez and Olivia Le Andersen as the vengeful and regretful Princess Eboli. The adaptation really brought out the family feud at the heart of the story and managed to keep going through the bits in which Schiller expounds his political theories. It also turned Schiller's stop-start scening into a more contemporary flow. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Don Carlos is loosely based on Spanish history. Crown Prince Carlos, heir to Philip II of Spain, was mentally unstable and died after six months imprisonment by his father. But this was 20 years before the Spanish Armada, a historical fact mentioned in Schiller's play.

This play starts with a problem Before Philip II married the current Queen of Spain he had betrothed this French princess to his son Carlos. They had fallen in love. But then Philip was widowed and decided on a young bride and he himself married the Queen. So Carlos is now in the position of being in love with his stepmother. There are potential homages to Hamlet here (Don Carlos has just returned from studying abroad) and the incest based Jacobean tragedies such as 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. 

His best mate Rodrigues, Marquis of Posa, wants to help Don Carlos in his quasi-incestuous pursuit of love but at the same time he wants to protect the Netherlands, currently in revolt against the Spanish Empire, from the scorched earth policy promised by the Duke of Alva whom Philip wants to send to Flanders as the new Governor. Instead Rod Posa wants Don Carlos to become governor so that the two of them can initiate a far-sighted rule guaranteeing individual liberties and freedom of worship. Very German Enlightenment!

However their ambitions are under attack from the sinister Domingo, confessor to Philip, and the Duke (or in one wonderful misprint in my edition, the Dude) of Alva (described by Posa as "bigotry’s relentless tool").

Also the Princess Eboli has the hots for young Don Carlos. She provides a mysterious letter and a key to let him into her apartments whither he goes under the impression that the letter and key come from his step-mum. This leads to an awkward moments when she discovers that he does not in fact love him and she decides to have her revenge by exposing the dreadful secret and potentially incestuous affair to the king.

The King is an interesting study. He has been told his wife is being unfaithful, it is hinted that his latest daughter is a bastard. But he does not know what to believe and this is the problem of being a king: people lie to you for their advantage:

“I thirst for truth. To reach its tranquil spring,
Through the dark heaps of thick surrounding error,
Is not the lot of kings.”

In the end Don Carlos is brought down not so much by the multiplicity of scheming that is going on at the Spanish court as by a plot of fiendish complexity.

There are some wonderfully romantic/ melodramatic/ gothic moments:

“Like hell's grim furies, dreams of dreadful shape
Pursue me still. My better genius strives
With the fell projects of a dark despair.
My wildered subtle spirit crawls through maze
On maze of sophistries, until at length
It gains a yawning precipice's brink.”

There are some beautifully political points. 

When the villainous Princess Eboli looks forward to going to Madrid she is told there will be an auto da fe but she says that's OK because “‘Tis only heretics they burn”.

The Queen points out that a new monarch can do anything he wants:

“make bonfires of the laws
His father left ...
Drag from his tomb, in the Escurial,
The sacred corpse of his departed sire,
Make it a public spectacle, and scatter
Forth to the winds his desecrated dust.
And then, at last, to fill the measure up
...
“End all by wedding with his mother.”

“Terror alone can tie rebellion’s hands:
Humanity were madness.”

“Far easier is the task
To make a monarch than a monarchy.”

“The monarch’s crown is bright with sparkling gems,
But no eye sees the wounds that purchased them.”

“He reverences the people! And is this
A man to be our king?"

“Thou speakest like a dreamer. This high office

Demands a man - and not a stripling’s arm.”

And there are other great quotes:

“Carlos is not one to yield to must
Where he hath power to will! ...
...
I look on naught as lost - except the dead.”

“In future, let this puppet-play of rank
Be banished from our friendship”

“Whose eye is dry was ne’er of woman born!”

“I am not wicked, father; ardent blood
Is all my failing;—all my crime is youth;—
Wicked I am not—no, in truth, not wicked;—
Though many an impulse wild assails my heart,
Yet is it still untainted.”

“Love is the only treasure on the face
Of this wide earth that knows no purchaser
Besides itself—love has no price but love.
It is the costly gem, beyond all price,
Which I must freely give away, or—bury
For ever unenjoyed”


“There are such things as double-edged swords
And untrue friends,—I fear them both.
'Tis hard to judge among mankind, but still more hard
To know them thoroughly.”

“How poor, how beggarly, thou hast become,
Since all thy love has centred in thyself!”


“Naught but the vilest falsehood!
I'll swear 'tis false! Yet what's believed by all,
Groundless and unconfirmed although it be,
Works its effect, as sure as truth itself.”

“A virtuous name
Is, after all, my liege, the only prize
Which queens and peasants' wives contest together.”

“I ne'er could stoop
To be the chisel where I fain would be—
The sculptor's self.”

“You would plant
For all eternity, and yet the seeds
You sow around you are the seeds of death!”

“He who would be of service to mankind
Must first endeavour to resemble them.”

"All virtue

Is spotless till it’s tried.”

"I have created in my Carlos' soul,
A paradise for millions! Oh, my dream
Was lovely!”


“Oh, bid him realize the dream,
The glowing vision which our friendship painted,
Of a new-perfect realm! And let him lay
The first hand on the rude, unshapened stone.
Whether he fail or prosper—all alike—
Let him commence the work. 

...
Tell him, in manhood, he must still revere
The dreams of early youth, nor ope the heart
Of heaven's all-tender flower to canker-worms
Of boasted reason,—nor be led astray
When, by the wisdom of the dust, he hears
Enthusiasm, heavenly-born, blasphemed.”

“Oh! it hath cost thee much; full well I know
How thy kind heart with bitter anguish bled
As thy hands decked the victim for the altar.”

“This fine-toned lyre broke in your iron hand,
And you could do no more than murder him.”

“I'm nothing now
But a forsaken, old, defenceless man!”

There are some surprisingly modern attitudes and some great writing here. Although I am not surprised that the main influence of this work has been in Opera (which loves a good melodrama) there are some astute character portraits and the some excellent lines.

January 2019

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