"Strange Angel" by George Pendle

 This is a biography of American rocket pioneer Jack Parsons, whose actual first name was Marvel.

Inspired by science fiction, Parsons dreamed of constructing a rocket that would travel to the moon. But this was in the 1930s, after his wealthy grandparents had lost their fortune in the Wall Street crash and his privileged upbringing on Orange Grove Avenue ('millionaire's row') in Pasadena had come to an end. And, at the time, when aeroplanes were still in their glamorous infancy, rocketry did not exist outside a handful of amateur eccentrics. 

Not being able to afford a university education, Parsons began working in explosives for mining companies. Then he teamed up with schoolfriend Ed Forman, who was an engineer equally lacking in tertiary qualifications, and maths graduate Frank Molina, to persuade CalTech professor Theodore von Karman (an aerodynamicist who had explained the collpase of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge) to let them use CalTech facilities to test rocket motors, although they still had to fund the experiments themselves. They began working with the military who wanted to add jets to help bombers achieve take-off speeds on shorter runways. But they had problems with the powder fuel: there were always cracks between the clumps of powder grain so burning was uneven. After watching workmen laying molten asphalt on a road, Parsons made his breakthrough and turned the powder into tar which could be poured into the rocket engines. The 'Suicide Squad' founded NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the company Aerojet which still sends rockets into outer space.

Parsons was increasingly interested in magic and became the leader of the Agape Lodge in LA, a group following the Thelema teachings of occultist Aleister Crowley (whose biography Do What Thou Wilt by Lawrence Smith I read recently). Parsons moved the group to a large house on Orange Grove Avenue which he had bought and began performing sex magick ceremonies. According to this book, L Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, moved in and stole Parsons's girlfirend (but Parsons, psychologically dominated by Hubbard, put up with it). In the end it all went wrong and Parsons, having lost most of his money in a failed business venture with Hubbard, went back to making explosives. He blew himself up.

This was a brilliantly written book. I loved the way it clothed its story, by telling us the background: LA in the 1920s, a mix of “evangelists like Aimee Semple McPherson ... performing exorcisms over the new medium of radio ... while the social campaigner and writer Upton Sinclair was arrested for reading the First Amendment of the United States Constitution (the right to freedom of expression) in public." (Prologue). The core rocketeers, a group of young men, working like dogs and risking their lives for their passion, seem just like the young geeks who founded Google and facebook and Microsoft and the other IT start-ups of the internet revolution, or like rock musicians hoping to be big. And the 'also starring' cast has a host of other names such as Suicide Squad members Apollo Smith whose father had given his sisters the names Diana and Athena, his brothers the names Hermes and Orpheus, and the dog was called Cerberus and Tsien who “was descended from the tenth-century emperor Qian Liu Tsien", science fiction writers like Robert Heinlein, E E 'Doc' Smith, L Sprague de Camp and L Ron Hubbard, Jack Cornog who first isolated tritium, and  rocket pioneer Robert Goddard who lived in Roswell, New Mexico, 

Selected quotes:

• “John Whiteside Parsons had gone from being a young genius dead before his time to the most overworked, hackneyed, science fiction cliche of them all." (Prologue)
• “The world is drowning - that is exactly why it will clutch at a straw.” (Ch 6, quoting Crowley)
• “Magic, like science, was an attempt to control events by performing technical acts.” (Ch 6)
• “Bob Cornog remembered stumbling into Parsons’ room one morning to find Hubbard and Betty entwined, ‘like a starfish on a clam’.” (Ch 11)
• “The Parsonage, as it had come to be called, had briefly been an adult playground saturated with philosophical hopes and pungent romanticism, fruit brandies and fencing, bohemians and scientists, poetry and rockets.” (Ch 11)

A fascinating story told by a born storyteller.

June 2026; 307 pages
First published in the USA by Harcourt in 2005
My paperback edition was issued in the UK by Weidenfield and Nicholson in 2006

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Lazarus Man" by Richard Price

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

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

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

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

There are some super lines such as:

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

Selected quotes:

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

May 2026; 337 pages

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

My UK paperback edition was issued by Corgi in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Stranger on a Train" by Jenny Diski

This delightful travel-book-cum-autobiography won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the J R Ackerley Prize for Autobiography  in 2003. 

It has some awesome moments but structurally it rather rambles. For example, it starts with her travelling on a cargo ship to America. Then she embarks on a train journey from Savannah to Tucson, Arizona where she is meeting a friend. Then she has another journey from New York in a counter-clockwise circle around America back to New York, although the account of this journey peters out on the final leg somewhere in South Carolina. Throughout, her account of the journey (mostly the characters she meets in the smoking carriage) repeatedly lurches into autobiography.

Nevertheless, the book is enjoyable because of the things she discusses, such as a friend dying of cancer which prompts her to compare the non-existence of before birth with the non-existence after death and find both equally horrid. She also discusses politics (she is far more left-wing than most of the Americans she meets), mental handicaps and illnesses, the solipsism of sleep, and smoking (a lot). She has the ability to make the reader since old ideas from a new perspective. 

There are also some very funny moments, such as when a teenager complains about the notice warning about "live tracks" on the ground that tracks can't be alive: “I mean, like, live tracks. What's that supposed to mean? ... do they think people would really believe the tracks were alive? Like, how stupid do they think people are? You know, like rails are made of metal, how can they be alive? Only people and animals are actually living. Everyone knows that. Live tracks. Isn't that incredible?” (Journey Two: Live Tracks)

Selected quotes:

• “I hate neat endings. I have an antipathy to finishing in general. The last page, the final strains of a chord, the curtain falling ... living happily ever after; all that grates on me. The finality is false, because there you still are, the reader ... left out of the resolution of the story that seduced you into thinking yourself inside it.” (Circles and Straight Lines)
• “A great-bellied man entirely at the mercy of gravity. Everything about him tended downward: his belly, his chin, his jowls and the corners of his eyes and mouth.” (Journey One: Magic Monotony)
• “I found myself thinking a good deal about the condition of not yet having been born ... a state of non-existence which we had all already not-experienced. ‘So you've already not been. How was it for you?’ ... ‘It didn't bother me at the time.’ ... But the more I thought about it, the more I tried to use the time before my birth as an idea to make death more tolerable, the angrier I became at having been excluded from the events that occurred in history, which is what we call the period before our personal arrival on the planet.” (Journey One: Magic Monotony)
• “We may try to console ourselves that death is not the end of the world, but it's the fact that it isn't the end of the world that is so blindingly difficult to cope with.” (Journey One: Magic Monotony)
• “America might look vast on the map, but for many people it's as small as their local town, beyond which is an uncharted wilderness inhabited by monsters.” (Journey One: Only the Lonely)
• “The humiliation of being caught is what has kept me relatively docile and law-abiding all these years, because although the desire to transgress rules simply because they exist no longer amounts to a compulsion, I still experience an innate and unresolved dislike of authority in any form.” (Journey One: When You’re Strange)
• “The sky is vast and vacuously blue, the empty deserts at sunset threaten the spirit with theirs scrubby grey-green dying light, the rivers wind from bare trickles in parched Earth to thunderous rushing torrents, the canyons dismay and dizzy you as you stare down into them and try to make out the bottom, the mountains loom in anthropomorphic shapes of things seen best in dreams, the grasslands and wheatfields wave like an endless syrupy ocean tickled into motion by the breeze.” (Journey One: Too Much To Ask)
• “Life on a train, in a circumscribed space with a group of others all with our lives on hold ... is also the way of the boarding school, the convent, the prison and the psychiatric hospital.” (Journey One: Too Much To Ask)
• “The ghost of good-looking on his wrecked features.” (Journey One: Too Much To Ask)
• “You're the wrong kind of retard.” (Journey One: Too Much To Ask)
• “When you've lost everything because of the booze, you only have the booze left to comfort you.” (Journey One: Too Much To Ask)
• “The blue, we like to believe, is a place apart from life, a separate realm where the discontinuities exist, queuing, or more likely jostling, for their moment to drop on an unsuspecting world. The bolts from the blue manifest themselves in unscheduled knocks on the front door, the phone ringing late at night ...” (Journey One: By the Time I Got to Phoenix)
• “How strange it is during childhood that we are told it is rude to point, that is, to point out what is pointedly different, to remark on the remarkable, to notice the noticeable. Don't look, my mother used to say, whenever there was anything worth looking at.” (Journey Two: Live Tracks)
• “What you discover, when you first spend the night with someone else, is that, whatever the quality of togetherness the sex might bring you, the quality of separation and utter aloneness when the one of you that isn't you is asleep it's unlike anything else in the world. People sleep alone, no matter that you are in their arms or they in yours. They go away when they sleep to a private place surrounded by overgrown briars and walls of unconsciousness as impenetrable as stone. ... It's a private truth. There are some between people. The solipsism of sleep is one of them.” (Journey Two: Live Tracks)
• “Even those you live with are alone sometimes and retain momentary secrets. You can't watch all the time.” (Journey Two: Live Tracks)
• “He sank his teeth and most of his face into one of the most evil-smelling microwaved hotdogs it was ever my misfortune to have waft my way.” (Journey Two: Expending Nerve Force)
• “When I was growing up in the centre of London, I never saw young people sleeping on pavements. It didn't happen until Margaret Thatcher was elected.” (Journey Two: Expending Nerve Force)
• “A tired-looking woman with a body that had broken free of its youthfully contained voluptuousness.” (Journey Two: Expending Nerve Force)
• “Silence and food in company is a very bad combination in my view. ... the only thing I managed to think at these monkish meals was how no one was talking and however everyone had their own special, and increasingly disgusting, way of shovelling food into their faces.” (Journey Two: Just Like Misery)
• “So far as I could see it [baseball] was rounders but so slow it made cricket look like an extreme sport.” (Journey Two: Just Like Misery)

January 2026; 280 pages

First published by Virago Press in 2002

My paperback edition issued in 2004

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Ethan Frome" by Edith Wharton

This tiny little novel feels a bit like a miniature Wuthering Heights, without the ghosts and the romantic hero. It is set on an isolated farm in a wintry New England, as bleak and occasionally beautiful as the Yorkshire moors. The eponymous hero is trapped with a demanding invalid wife and becomes obsessed with the vivacious poor relation who lives with them. Will Ethan get a second chance at happiness? 

It's a classic novel of despair. The emotions are intensified by the claustrophobic settings and the fact that the inarticulate protagonist cannot voice his desires. And it has a stupendous twist at the end. 

It’s a story in a story. The unnamed, first-person narrator of the frame confesses to constructing “this vision of his story”. The main narrative is written in the third-person from Ethan's perspective; his is the only interior monologue we have access to.

One of the one-star reviews on goodreads describes the characters as shallow. It's a valid point. There are three main characters:

• Ethan is a classic tragic hero. Aristotle, in his Poetics insists that a tragedy must evoke both pity and fear which means that the reader must, to some extent, empathise with the tragic hero and I could certainly put myself in Ethan's place. Schreiber in chapter 8 of his Introduction to Literary Criticism, asserts that the hero must “contribute to his own downfall” but only by making a mistake of judgement rather than being morally unsound. This is also true, at least if you accept the contemporary morality in which divorce was possible. Ethan’s tragic flaw is that he has glimpsed a better world, so like Adam and Eve after they had tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge, he cannot remain content on his unproductive farm and in his loveless marriage. Aristotle would have approved of what he called peripeteia and we would call the twist at the end: it meets his criteria of both being unexpected and yet inevitable. 
• But if Ethan is an interesting and complex character, Zeena is as flat as they come, a stereotyped old shrew. Beautifully written but one dimensional. A classic villain in the sense that most plots are driven by the baddie's nefarious schemes. Whether you believe or not in Zeena's character arc is up to you. I accept that it is plausible. Nevertheless, Zeena is a car with only two gears: fast forward and reverse.
• Mattie is even more sketchily drawn. She's the love interest, pretty and vivacious and, for some reason, head over heels in love with Ethan, despite the fact that when we first see her she is flirting with Dennis Eady (but she can't have any interest in him because that would represent an escape route and she has to be trapped).

As for the central symbolism of the pickle dish, even the Guardian describes that as overly portentous. It was a wedding present for Zeena, ergo a symbol of her marriage. But she hid it away and never used it as if to symbolise her refusal to enter fully into her marriage (I presume that Ethan and her don’t have sex which is why they have no kids). It is broken (by the cat) immediately after Ethan and Mattie touch hands while eating together while Zeena is away from home, symbolising how their adultery (in their hearts if not in actuality) shatters the Frome marriage. There’s even a hint of ‘while the cat’s away the mice will play’!

There are some moments of stunning description, the plot is an absolute classic and the despair of Ethan's marriage is wonderfully portrayed. But I would have preferred more time spent on the characters.

Selected quotes

• “The storms of February had pitched their white tents about the devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to their support.” (Prologue)
• “The Frome farm was always ‘bout as bare’s a milkpan when the cat's been round.” (Prologue)
• “His father got a kick, out haying, and went soft in the brain, and gave away money like Bible texts afore he died.” (Prologue)
• “In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.” (Ch 1)
• “His father's death ... had put a premature end to Ethan's studies; but though they had not gone far enough to be of much practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.” (Ch 1)
• “‘We never got away - how should you?’ seemed to be written on every headstone.” (Ch 2)
• “His dread was so strong that, man-like, he sought to postpone certainty.” (Ch 2) Not sure about the 'man-like'. Unless it means 'human-like'. 

Wharton also wrote The Age of Innocence

August 2025; 181 pages

First published by Charles Scribner's Sons in the USA in 1911

My Penguin paperback was issued in 1987

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

Potted plot: spoiler alert

Ethan wanted to go to college and learn stuff but his father’s illness brought him back to manage the farm. After his father died, his mum became ill and he brought in Zenobia to help nurse her; subsequently he married her. But the marriage was a disaster. Zeena took the ‘invalid’ route forever complaining that she is ill. So they bring Mattie, a poor relation of Zeena’s, to help around the house for her board and lodging. Ethan, disappointed in marriage, falls in love with Mattie and she with him (although the love is unconsummated and inarticulate). Zeenie, suspecting this liaison, announces she is now so ill that they will have to bring in a hired girl to replace Mattie. Ethan has to take Mattie to the station but instead they decide to go skiing, making a suicide pact to deliberately steer into a tree to kill themselves. But they only injure themselves, Mattie being permanently crippled. They return to the farm where Zeena resumes the role of carer, no longer having time to invent her own illnesses. Ethan lives with these two women in a loveless, mostly silent and resentful, triangle of resentment.

"Where Snowbirds Play" by Gina Goldhammer

Real life, and the past, haunt the carefree existences of the super-rich socialites spending the season in Palm Beach, an exclusive island resort in Florida, USA,

Life among the fabulously wealthy sounds easy as they drift from one charity ball to another. The social scene is dominated by three widows: Carlotta Alonso whose family fled (in a forty-foot yacht) communist Cuba, animal-loving Vanessa Vine, an ex-chorus girl and gold-digger, and Louisa Caulfield whose first husband gave her Addison, a lawyer, and whose second gave her Thaddeus, a brilliant surgeon on the verge of discovering a cure for cancer. But all the money in the world can't protect you against some things. Vanessa's adopted daughter Sunny, an alcoholic, was a neglectful parent whose daughter died from an accidental overdose of mummy's powder. Thaddeus has married English Hannah, mother of one of his patients, a terminally ill little boy called Jesse and even his revolutionary new treatment can only make limited progress. And Thaddeus had mortgaged his house and invested everything he had in the company that will manufacture the wonder drug that will make them all rich ... if only it can win governmental approval.

Into this hothouse, steps Philip, a young Englishman who has come straight from Oxford to become the new head (and only, unpaid, employee) of the (newly created) marine life institute. He has discovered among his dead father's papers letters from Hannah telling his father, a world-famous poet, that she is pregnant. Jesse is his half-brother. But that's a secret.

The hurricane season is coming.

I found it difficult to care about these shallow characters, except for poor Jesse. Even he was too good to be true, being the eternally brave little soldier and never once getting depressed or angry. I longed for some real people but the hired help were either shadows (Marta and Jerzy) or anonymous (the Guatemalans). Everyone else was perfect. Philip is not only an Oxford graduate but also incredibly handsome. His father was a world-famous poet. Thaddeus is a brilliant surgeon. I longed for a hard-working but not particularly talented teacher, or for Eduardo to make cocktails that weren't very tasty, or for Jesse to be only a bit ill and really rather fed up about it. Mediocrity was missing. 

It was typical of its genre in that the descriptions were all about high-status possessions, given with the breathlessness of a glossy magazine. There were the fashion notes: “Hannah had changed into a creaseless white linen sundress, ballerina flats and a wide-brimmed straw hat, stylish cat's eye sunglasses shading her eyes." (Part One: On the Nature of Toads) This segued immediately into the House and Home design section: "Bougainvillea petals floated like confetti on the kidney-shaped swimming pool behind her ... sloping gently and without steps, a fiberglass Adirondack chair sitting in the shallowest portion with a wide sun umbrella attached to its high back. From the other end of the pool rose a spacious two-storey pink stucco house with a barrel-tile roof and purple bougainvillea vines climbing the stone pillars of the loggia.” (Part One: On the Nature of Toads) From the cookery  pages we learn that “The poolside bar glinting with a rainbow of bottles and fiesta bowls filled with Meyer lemons, Key limes and three types of Spanish olives." (Part Two: Friends and Neighbours) and how to make a Tootsie Roll cocktail from "vanilla vodka, Kahlua, Cointreau, orange juice and a handful of crushed ice cubes" (Part Two: Friends and Neighbours). There's even product placement: Philip wears "a Turnbull & Asser shirt.” (Part Two: Friends and Neighbours). This style of writing perfectly matched the milieu it was describing but it served to underline the shallowness and made me care even less about these people.

But they played their parts in a narrative that was never dull, if sometimes rather too full, encompassing infidelity, faith healing, insider trading, and pollution along the way. The story was further enlightened by some great descriptions and some sparks of wry humour. 

The obvious comparison is with The Great Gatsby (but that has so much more anger fuelling it). I was also reminded of J G Ballard's Cocaine Nights. 

Selected quotes:

• “The Porch Club [was] founded in 1918 by a group of business moguls too old to fight in the first world war but not too old to build its armaments.” (Part Two: The Big Three) 
• “Philip had met his share of disheveled doctors at Oxford ( mainly of philosophy).” (Part Two: Gethsemane-on-the-Sea)
• “How I wish I could claw that shine [of youth] off him and wear it tonight.” (Part Two: Pearls, pearls and more pearls)
• “The stampeding girls were stopped in their tracks by Mrs Vine’s Silver Shadow blocking the drive. Chugging like a vintage locomotive it proceeded to the outdoor picnic table where the widow, bundled in a diaphanous violet-tinted robe and veiled raffia hat, slid like a dollop of warm butter from the creamy interior.” (Part Two: Julietta rallies the troops) I adore that last phrase.
• “It seemed to Philip that God ought to know what lay in a man's heart without having to hear him talk about it.” (Part Two: State of Grace)

June 2025; 230 pages

A limited hardback edition published by Hay Press in 2025

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

"James" by Percival Everett

 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain retold from the point of view of runaway slave Jim. Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

It seems that retelling classic stories is in vogue. I enjoyed Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys which took the character of Bertha Rochester nee Mason from Jane Eyre and used the change of perspective as a feminist critique. I adored Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead which relocated David Copperfield to Appalachia. She developed a much stronger voice for her protagonist than Dickens had for his and the theme of drug addiction gave her novel urgency. 

Similarly, Everett's theme is the despicable crime against humanity that is slavery and the associated denial of human dignity to people of African ancestry. His strategy for highlighting this is to make James and his fellow slaves far more articulate than their stereotypes as found, for example, in Twain's novel. They use the slave patois as a disguise so the white folks don't realise that the slaves are intelligent; this would scare the whites, endangering the slaves. As James says: “Safe movement through the world dependent on mastery of language, fluency.” (1.2) 

It's a clever trick. But it seems to be Everett's only trick, apart from the change in perspective from Huck to James. After a while, he seemed to be repeating the same joke in case the reader hadn't cottoned on earlier. Otherwise this is a straightforward novel. Inevitably, given that Twain's original was a picaresque, this one has to be loosely structured which made it feel disorganised. This made some of the resolutions feel coincidental and contrived. 

The most interesting part, for me, revolved around Huck's changing relationship with James and how his experiences matured him, leading him to the statement “‘I don't like white folks,’ he said. ‘And I is one.’” (1.5) while still leaving his behaviour warped by the deep-seated subconscious attitudes he had developed through his childhood.

It was an easy read and an entertaining one but somehow it always stayed, for me, as a shadow of Huckleberry Finn rather then blossoming into a work of literature in its own right. 

I suspect that the reason I was underwhelmed by a book that others rate so highly is that this is a book that relies for its power on what it says (a perceptive condemnation of slavery and racism) but was less innovative than I had been led to expect in how it said it.

Selected quotes:

• “Those boys couldn't sneak up on a blind and deaf man while a band was playing.” (1.1)
• “Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.” (1.2)
• “If’n ya gots to hab a rule to tells ya wha’s good, if’n ya gots to hab good ‘splained to ya, den ya cain’t be good. If’n ya need sum kinds God to tells ya right from wrong, den you won’t never know.” (1.12)
• “Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ‘em.” (1.21)
• “Even in hell, were there such a place, one would know where the fires were just a little cooler, where the rocks were just a little less jagged.” (3.5)

May 2025; 303 pages

First published in 2024 in the USA by Doubleday

My paperback edition issued in the UK in 2025 by Picador

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

"Rabbit Redux" by John Updike

Ranked 88 in the Guardian's 100 best novels.  

In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, Updike's 'Everyman', Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is ten years older and still trying to cope, like the USA, with the difference between life and reality. 

As the novel starts, Apollo 11 is launched in its historic mission to land the first man on the moon. But back on Earth the Vietnam War is still in full swing, there are antiwar protests and race riots, and the values that conservative America took for granted are under attack. Harry's home town of Brewer is in economic decline, dying from the inside, leaving the suburbs. His mum is dying of Parkinson's, his wife is having an affair, and his son is about to become. 

It's a challenging novel, with racism and misogyny, including multiple uses of the n-word and the c-word. Some of the worst racist prejudices are articulated. There are scenes of physical domestic abuse. At the outset, Harry is rabidly conservative, staunchly defending American values on Vietnam and fearful of blacks. His wife says he is "silent majority ... but he keeps making noise." whereas Charlie Stavros calls him "a typical good-hearted imperialist racist." (Ch 1) But deep down he has no solid core and one wonders whether he believes in anything; this makes it easy for others to push him around and take advantage of his fundamental good nature.

Harry, from the lower middle-class, represents an America that has lost its way. It can land a man on the moon but it is fighting an unjustifiable war abroad and it is fighting itself at home. Horrid things are said, horrid things happen, but this is a realist's portrait of an ugly world, 'warts and all'. Harry Angstrom is no hero and there are things that he thinks and says and does that are awful, but he is capable of learning, of improvement, of redemption.

The characters are about as real as any I have met on the page. There are some extraordinarily vivid descriptions. This masterpiece must be a contender for the title of the Great American Novel.

Selected quotes:

• “A world where inches matter. Putts. Fucks. Orbits.” (Ch 1)
• “The minds gone dry as haystacks rats slither through.” (Ch 1)
• “Rabbit turns from the window and everywhere in his own house sees a slippery disposable gloss. It glints back at him from the synthetic fabric of the living room sofa and a chair, the synthetic artiness of a lamp Janet brought that has a piece of driftwood weighted and wired as its base, the unnatural-looking natural wood of the shelves empty but for a few ashtrays with the sheen of fairground souvenirs; it glints back at him from the steel sink, the kitchen with its whorls as of madness, oil in water, things don't mix. The window above the sink is black and opaque as the orange that paints the asylum windows.” (Ch 1)
• “Fat-fried food and a diet of dough that would give a pig pimples.” (Ch 1) Noy only is it funny, it has a three alliterations in fourteen words!
• “All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.” (Ch 1)
• “From this low chair the view is flung out of sight and becomes all sky. A thin bright wash, stripes like fat in bacon.” (Ch 2)
• “In a room obliquely off the main room, a pool table: colored boys all arms and legs spidering around the idyllic green felt.” (Ch 2) Spidering!
• “Her eyes are green. The dry tired green, yet one of his favorite colors, of August grass.” (Ch 2)
• “Usually I try to rise above eating ... it's one of the uglier things we do.” (Ch 2)
• “Billy is gruesome, with his father's skinny neck and big ears and his mother's mooncalf eyes and the livid festerings of adolescence speckling his cheeks and chin.” (Ch 3)
• “Put enough rats in a cage the fat ones get more frantic than the skinny ones ‘cause they feel more squeezed.” (Ch 3)
• “Coloured fragments pour down toward him through the hole in the ceiling. Green machines, an ugly green, eating ugly green bushes. red mud pressed in patterns to an ooze by Amtrac treads. The emerald of rice paddies, each plant set there with its reflection in the water pure as a monogram.” (Ch 3)
• “When one of them unfriendly mortar shells hits near your hole it is as if a wall were there that was big and solid, twenty feet thick of noise, and you is just a gushy bug.” (Ch 3)
• “Gangsters are puritans. They're narrow and hard because of the straight path you don't live.” (Ch 4)
• “Pay for what you get because anything free has a rattlesnake under it.” (Ch 4)

September 2024; 233 pages

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

"The Overstory" by Richard Powers

This ecolit novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018 and the 2019 Pen Faulkner Award. It is about trees and the people who love them.

It starts with 'Roots': potted biographies, including, where appropriate, family histories, of the characters who will come together in the main part of the book (called Trunk). Nicholas, an artist, grows up on a farm in Iowa in the shadow of one of America's last chestnuts. Mimi Ma's father is an engineer who escaped China just before the communist takeover. Adam is a strange lad who is fascinated by behaviour. Ray and Dorothy are a courting couple who come together during an amateur performance of Macbeth. Douglas is a Vietnam vet drifting through life. Neelay is a young lad with the dream of becoming a computer programmer. Patricia is a scientist whose paper on how trees communicate is met with widespread scorn. Olivia, my favourite character, is a dissolute student who electrocutes herself by accident.

Their lives, at least to some extent, interconnect. I knew that was going to happen because that's the way these sorts of books are structured; had the stories remained separate I would have been disappointed. After all, we are told time and time again that trees act collectively. But it takes nearly a third of the book before there is any sort of linkage.  Five of these characters become part of a group of eco activists trying to halt deforestation in the United States. Their story has a plot arc which climaxes just after the two-thirds mark. The other four characters don't really become involved in the main plot, although they are also connected in some way to trees.

The final section of the book only occupies that last 5%, by which time the consequences have already been spilling over the narrative.

The story is told by head-hopping from character to character but always in the third person and in the present tense. After the Roots section, in which each character gets the whole chapter, the narrative is fragmented and sometimes it took a few paragraphs for me to work out whose perspective we were now exploring; the fact that the eco-activists adopted tree noms de guerre did not help my confusion.

It's quite preachy; there were times when it seemed to be an issue-driven novel; I would have preferred more story and less lecturing. Not that the story wasn't shocking, both in terms of the scale of the ecocide practised by the logging industry and the terrible way in which the police acted as a private army for big business. There was a lot of stuff about trees; in this way it was a bit like Moby-Dick. Perhaps Powers hoped that his book would do for trees what Melville's did for whales. 

Powers also wrote The Gold Bug Variations

Selected quotes:

Page numbers refer to the 2022 Heinemann London UK hardback edition 

• “Always the animals. First the dogs - especially the three-legged one, half wild with affection every time Nick's family pulled into the long gravel drive.” (Roots: Nicholas Hoel)
• “Humankind is deeply ill. The species won't last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.” (Roots: Adam Appich)
• “Humans carry around legacy behaviours and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seemed like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We're all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.” (Roots: Adam Appich)
• “There is, of course, no freedom. There are only ancient prophecies that scry the seeds of time and say which will grow and which will not.” (Roots: Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly)
• “It's Douggie's growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.” (Roots: Douglas Pavlicek)
• “The forest from its first day of creation. But it turns out Gilgamesh and his Punk friend Enkidu have already been through and trashed the place. Oldest story in the world.” (Roots: Douglas Pavlicek)
• “Photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation’s entire cathedral. All the razzmatazz of life on Earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act.” (Roots: Patricia Westerford)
• “For the first time, she realizes that being alone is a contradiction in terms.” (Trunk, p158)
• “She remembers what Jesus said about the flowers, and not worrying about tomorrow. Once the nuns made every student memorize a Bible passage; she chose that one to irritate the teacher, who was big on personal responsibility. She liked the Jesus who would appall every law-abiding, property-acquiring American Christian. Jesus the Communist, the crazed shop-trasher, the friend of deadbeats.” (Trunk, pp 160 - 161)
• “Myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.” (Trunk, p162)
• “There comes a moment ... when you must turn your pretty backwater sector of the universe into a revenue stream.” (Trunk, p191)
• “As with running a business, the point is to keep playing for as long as possible.” (Trunk, p193)
• “Large men with legible biceps.” (Trunk, p199)
• “The person in your life's passenger seat? Always a hitchhiker, to be dropped off just down the road.” (Trunk, p199)
• “She's no warier of him than a lake’s surface is wary of the wind.” (Trunk, p200)
• “The hour smells moist and loamy, and the soil hums under his bare feet.” (Trunk, p362)
• “A Midas problem. Everything’s dying a gold-plated death.” (Trunk, p377)

September 2024; 502 pages

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

"Freedom" by Sebastian Junger

This book is framed by a travelogue. The author, with three friends and a dog, walked for a year (although not all in one go) along the railroad lines in the American east, sleeping rough. It is in many ways a classic American journey: the men are emulating the pioneers, they are practising the cherished American ideals of self-sufficiency and freedom from authority.

They are a macho bunch. Four men, all experienced in warfare (Junger is a journalist and war reporter, and the friends are a conflict photographer and two veterans from the Afghan campaign), who anticipate trouble: “We were always worried about the locals and on a weekend night it seemed like a good idea to sleep at a place that was hard to find and easy to leave. If they came up one side, we’d go down the other. If that didn’t work, we’d stay on top and see how badly they wanted this.” (Book Two: Fight) Indeed, they are shot at more than once.

As they walk, Junger muses over that classic American ideal: Freedom. He and his friends feel free (“most nights we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. There are many definitions of freedom but surely that is one of them.” ; Book One: Run) but this is a mirage because their existence is marginal and precarious. Freedom is "first and foremost ... the absence of threat. A person who can be killed without any consequences for the killers is not free in the most important sense of the word” (Book One: Run) There must be a trade-off between autonomy and security. Junger and his friends may have no obligations to outsiders but to stay safe they have to become tightly interdependent, ceding personal freedom to the needs of the group. In the same way, the American pioneers as a group were tightly bound by a code of obligation to one another because each might need the other to help when the Indians (Native Americans) attacked. This is the same bargain as that made when joining a street gang: "The inside joke about freedom ... is that you’re always trading obedience to one thing for obedience to another.” (Book One: Run) 

But surely hunter-gatherer societies are freer than others. Movement from place to place is, he suggests “subversive for the development of authority ... Adults of either sex can readily, if they choose, obtain enough food to feed themselves and are potentially autonomous.” (Book One: Run). His group of friends are like nomads but although they feel free he realises that “everything we needed—food, clothes, gear—came from the very thing we thought we were outwitting. ... Few people grow their own food or build their own homes, and no one—literally no one—refines their own gasoline, performs their own surgery, makes their own ball bearings, grinds their own eyeglass lenses, or manufactures their own electronics from scratch. Everyone—including people who vehemently oppose any form of federal government—depend on a sprawling supply chain that can only function with federal oversight, and most of them pay roughly one-third of their income in taxes for the right to participate in this system.” (Book One: Run) 

Most people live as citizens of a nation state and have surrendered a part of their own freedom in return for prosperity within that state. Junger realises that, counter to the opinion that freedom means the freedom to make money, a society with a great discrepancy between the poor and the rich must have limited freedom for the poor (a wage slave is still a slave). “An important part of freedom is not having to make sacrifices for people who don’t have to make sacrifices for you.” (Book Three: Think)

 Similarly, nations are prepared to bargain away some of their sovereignty in exchange for prosperity (as brought by mutual trading alliances) or security (achieved through common defence systems). Junger believes that in human societies the powerful cannot always prevail against the powerless, citing examples (eg Afghanistan) in which insurgencies have defeated powerful armies. He sees this as key to the development of international human rights which may curtail freedom but are essential to ensuring the freedom of citizens within societies. 

The book is also a meditation on walking. I have done some long-distance walks (though much shorter than this one - up to 100 miles - and not sleeping rough but deliberately seeking out towns, hotels and restaurants as part of the experience) and I enjoyed this aspect of the book.

Selected quotes:

• “The ancient Celtic measurement of a “league” was defined as the distance a man could walk in an hour—roughly three or four miles.” (Book One: Run)
• “The poor have always walked and the desperate have always slept outside.” (Book One: Run)
• “One of God’s great oversights is that dogs don’t live as long as men” (Book Three: Think)
• “Rightly or wrongly, society tends to value women’s survival more than men’s, and that makes machine-gunning them problematic.” (Book Three: Think)
• “History is littered with fascist leaders who have rigged elections and tortured or killed critics, but their regimes are remarkably short-lived—especially considering the obsession these men usually have with holding power.” (Book Three: Think)

Freedom is an interesting, if very personal, exploration of an important philosophical concept. It's also a fun read!

August 2023

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