"Copenhagen" by Michael Frayn

Why did Werner Heisenberg visit Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941? This three-hander play, first performed at the National Theatre in London, England in 1981, explores this meeting.

It was, of course, the height of the Second World War and both Nazi Germany and the Allies were trying to develop the Atom bomb. Heisenberg was working on nuclear fission in Germany, Bohr, with a mixed Jewish ancestry, was living in Denmark under Nazi occupation (he escaped to Sweden later in the war). Did Heisenberg ask Bohr whether it would be morally wrong for a physicist to create a bomb? When, later, he asked Speer for money to pursue his research he,  possibly deliberately, asked for less than he would need. 

The meeting was complicated by the fact that Bohr, one of the father's of the quantum atom, had been Heisenberg's mentor in the 1920s when quantum physics was experiencing revolutionary new ideas almost monthly. This was the period when Heisenberg, seeking solitude on a rocky island in Heligoland, invented the matrix-maths solution to quantum mechanics which would later be superseded by Schrodinger's wave mechanics. It was also when Heisenberg announced his Uncertainty Principle and when they together created the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics.

The play mostly explores the relationships between the two men, and Bohr's wife Margarethe. Inevitably it involves some quantum physics. I used to teach Physics and I have always struggled to understand quantum mechanics (as did most of the scientists of the time, one of the reasons why the Copenhagen Interpretation was needed to explain what the mathematics and experiments 'meant'). So this play was always going to be difficult. There were times when it managed slightly over-simplified but nevertheless very clear explanations and there were times, for example when mentioning Complementarity, when it seemed to duck the issue entirely.

Here is my understanding of Complementarity. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (better called his Indeterminacy Principle) is a mathematically proved conclusion that some system's (for example an electron) have paired properties (for an electron, its position is paired with its momentum) which are linked in that the more precisely you measure one of these properties the less precisely you are able to measure the other. In the play, Heisenberg explains it thus: “You can never know everything about the whereabouts of a particle, or anything else ... because we can't observe it without introducing some new element into the situation, an atom of water vapour for it to hit, or a piece of light - things which have an energy of their own, and which therefore have an effect on what they hit.” (Heisenberg, Act 2) But the principle is more fundamental, it isn't simply an experimental error that could somehow be circumvented but a property of nature. Nevertheless, the Uncertainty Principle is one aspect of Complementarity. Another is the fact that an electron can behave both as a wave or as a particle ('wave-particle duality') and which behaviour it adopts appears to be determined by the way it is being observed. Thus Complementarity seems to be the idea that there are two versions of truth and both are true although neither can be true at the same time.

Selected quotes:

• “If you don't know how things are today you certainly can't know how they're going to be tomorrow.” (Heisenberg, Act 2)
• “If it's Heisenberg at the centre of the universe, then the one bit of the universe that he can't see is Heisenberg.” (Margarethe, Act 2)
• “If you are doing something you have to concentrate on you can't also be thinking about doing it, and if you’re thinking about doing it then you can't actually be doing it.” (Margarethe, Act 2)

March 2025; 96 pages

Published by Methuen Drama in 1998

I saw this play at the Grove Theatre in Eastbourne on Wednesday 9th April 2025

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

"The Heat of the Day" by Elizabeth Bowen

This book was rated 69th by Robert McCrum on The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time. It was selected by Anthony Burgess as one of the best 99 novels since 1939.

I think I was misled by the publisher’s blurb which characterised this book as a spy novel set in World War II. This led me to expect something like a Graham Greene novel, perhaps a hybrid between The End of the Affair and The Ministry of Fear, perhaps with a touch of John Le Carre, although his books are set later. This isn’t a spy novel in those terms. Yes, it plays with themes of patriotism and betrayal. Yes, it uses the trope of ambiguity. But at the heart, this is a Kafkaesque investigation into the nature and limitations of narrative truth. Therefore, the reader must not expect the narrative clarity of the thriller.

Even the core of the plot is left for the reader to infer. Harrison, a mysterious figure who claims to be working for counter-intelligence, tells Stella, the main protagonist, that her boyfriend Robert is spying for the enemy. Stella seems to assume that, if she agrees to sleep with him “to form a disagreeable association” (Ch 2) in her words, Harrison will not inform on Robert. She spends most of the novel deciding what to do and whether she should tell Robert.

The novel is set in wartime London, a time and place of liminality. “War at present worked as a thinning of the membrane between the this and the that.” (Ch 10) The blitz as such is over, the second blitz (of the V1 and V2 rockets) has not yet begun. The present is seen as the no-man’s land between the past and the future: “vacuum as to future was offset by vacuum as to past.” (Ch 5) Although time seems to be set and fixed - the novel starts precisely on “the first Sunday of September 1942” (Ch 1); other key events of the novel are tied to specific events during the war - and despite the plethora of clocks, time is actually fluid. For example, it seems to move more slowly when we leave London. In Robert’s family home "the grandfather clock ... must have stood there always - time had clogged its ticking." (Ch 5). In Cousin Nettie’s care home the owner “Mrs Tringsby ... does not know what time it is unless she looks at the clock” (Ch 11). Meanwhile, at the Irish estate of Cousin Francis, “by travelling west you enter longer days; this hour ... seemed to be outside time - an eternal luminousness of dusk in which nothing but the fire’s flutter and the clock’s ticking out there in the hall were to be heard ... she could have imagined this was another time, rather than another country, that she had come to.” (Ch 9) Characters regularly look at clocks (when we first meet Stella she is hearing her clock strike eight, chapter 14 ends with Robert looking at a clock etc) but even they are unreliable: Louie’s alarm clock fails to go off in the morning (Ch 13), and when Stella first meets Robert their wristwatches do not show the same time which comes to symbolise their relationship “by never perfectly synchronizing” (Ch 5).

Although place seems, like time, to have a strong connection to reality, in fact the places mentioned are, as they can be in wartime when the ebb and flow of armies redraws the map, fluid. Thus, Stella lives in more than one flat. Similarly, Robert’s family has lived in a number of homes, and the one they are in at present was put up for sale almost as soon as they moved in. Harrison says he lives in three places. Cousin Francis leaves his estate in Ireland and comes to England where he dies and is buried; when Robert visits the graveyard he cannot locate the grave (the stone is not up yet). In particular, London is seen as a place which is in flux (because of the bombing) and contrasted with the estate in Ireland which represents permanence and continuity between the past and the future.

This liminal fluidity and instability applies to the characters. “It was a characteristic of life in that moment and for the moment’s sake that one knew people well without knowing much about them.” (Ch 5) Robert and Harrison are spies who, by their nature, are not what they seem; both characters also have physical asymmetries, Robert with his limp (and even that “inequality” changes: “at times he could control it out of existence, at others he fairly pitched along with an impatient exaggeration of lameness”; Ch 5) and Harrison with his eyes, one of which appears to be higher than the other. Cousin Nettie is feigning madness. Louie, orphaned by a bomb and her husband fighting abroad, lurches from lover to lover. Few of the characters have complete histories. We know next to nothing about Harrison and not a lot more about Stella and they are antagonist and protagonist! Stella herself describes her relationship with Robert in terms of impermanence: “we are friends of circumstance - war, this isolation, this atmosphere in which everything goes on and nothing’s said.” (Ch 10)

Much of the dialogue is ambiguous. No-one ever says anything definite. A major driver of the plot is Harrison suggesting to Stella that, if she sleeps with him, he won’t arrest Robert but he never actually puts it in those terms. The nearest we come to it is Stella saying “I’m to form a disagreeable association in order that a man be left free to go on selling his country” (Ch 2). And when she says “A friend is out of danger” this seems to be as close as she gets to agreeing to Harrison’s proposition. Perhaps the most straightforward speakers are Cousin Nettie (who is mad) and Donovan, both of whom give answers to Roderick’s questions as though they were oracles, despite being outsiders.

And the ultimate outsider is, of course, the ever-elusive Harrison, who is puppet-master, controlling how the others behave, as if he were the author herself, or a god, the creator of the drama, omniscient (he can tell from Robert’s behaviour not only that Stella has told him he is suspected but also when she told him) but himself utterly unknowable. Robert asks Stella “is he anybody?” (Ch 10) Louie looks for Harrison in the park but “as she feared was probably, failed to see him.” (Ch 8) Or perhaps he isn’t God but the Devil, sent to tempt Stella only to reject her when she at last agrees to be tempted.

This book seems to be about the nature of truth, in particular narrative truth. Louie reads the newspapers and seems to construct her identity, or measure it, by reference to what the newspapers tell her. There are ironic references to the manipulation of the facts presented in the newspapers: “Once you looked in the papers you saw where it said, nothing was so bad as it might look. What a mistake, to have gone by the look of things! The papers knew Britain had something up her sleeve - Britain could always, in default of anything else, face facts.” (Ch 8) Meanwhile, in Germany, “I was told how they swallow anything they are told ... they do have papers, but not like our ones with ideas. It said how to get them through the war they have to kid them along, but how the war makes us think.” (Ch 8) And there are repeated references throughout the book to the telling of stories: “One could only suppose that the apparently forgotten beginning of any story was unforgettable; perpetually one was subject to the sense of there having to be a beginning somewhere.” (Ch 7); “Where, at the start, the story came from I don’t know. ... Whoever’s the story had been, I let it be mine. ... It came to be my story, and I stuck to it ... then it went on sticking to me: it took my shape and equally I took its.” (Ch 12); “What story is true? Such a pity, I sometimes think, that there should have to be any stories. We might have been happy the way we were.” (Ch 11)

Truth, then, depends on how we see it. One of the other motifs of the book is reflection; we can see ourselves (and others) by means of a mirror and also by means of a photograph. In chapter 2, Harrison, in Stella’s flat, searching for an ashtray, comes “face to face with the mirror and photographs”, one of which is of Stella’s son Roderick and the other of Robert. When Roderick goes there, seeing the reflections of the lights in the glass of pictures, he reflects “This did not look like a home, but it looked like something - possibly a story.” (Ch 3) When Stella goes to the funeral in chapter 4 she sees Roderick’s father’s people reflected in a “tarnished mirror”. When she sees Robert’s room in his family home there are “sixty or seventy photographs ... hung in close formations on two walls. All the photographs featured Robert ... he was depicted at every age.” Robert describes these as a “pack of his own lies”. (Ch 6) Louie writes to her absent husband Tom that she looks at his photograph daily which is “one more misrepresentation of love’s unamenable truth” since she only picks it up and dusts around it. (Ch 8) At the ancestral home in Ireland “By anyone standing down by the river looking up, sky was to be seen reflected in row upon row of vast glass panes ... reflections up from the river prolonged daylight.” Stella looks “from mirror to mirror, into misted extensions of the [drawing] room.” (Ch 9). Meanwhile Cousin Nettie doesn’t have a photo of her family home: “why should I want a picture of anything I have seen?” (Ch 11)

It’s rather heavy-going. I have previously quoted from chapter ten in which Stella says “war, this isolation, this atmosphere in which everything goes on and nothing’s said.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Even when facing an existential crisis, Bowen’s characters can’t resist discussing everything, in long-winded, often ambiguous sentences whose syntax is sometimes twisted almost beyond recognition. I didn’t really get into the book until I’d read half. Part of the problem is that it isn’t realistic and there aren’t sharply defined characters (despite all those mirrors I have little idea what any of the major characters actually looked like). There is, I think, a huge amount of symbolism to find and I think my discussion above has only touched the surface of what is a multiply-layered, deep and complex novel. Fascinating ... but hard work.

Does Stella visit Hell? Spoiler alert!

One of the key scenes comes in chapter 12. In chapter 10, Stella has told Robert that Harrison thinks he is a spy; Robert has denied it, angrily accused Stella of not trusting him, and then proposed marriage to her. In chapter 11 Roderick visits the slightly barmy Cousin Nettie. Chapter 12 then returns us to Stella who is with Harrison. He takes her to an underground “bar or grill which had no air of having existed before tonight.” Those eating at the counter, seen from the back, are described in detail; a member of my U3A described this as like an Otto Dix painting of decadent cafe life during the Weimar Republic. “Not a person did not betray, by one or another glaring peculiarity, the fact of being human” except, presumably, the dog with the studded collar and the unreadable brass nameplate. These people talk incessantly but inaudibly. The room has “more the look than fact of overpowering heat”. Stella describes it as a “lie-detecting place”. They eat a lobster salad. They discuss the fact that Roderick has just discovered that his parents divorced because of his father’s infidelity, rather than his mother’s as she has always told him; she has been lying to him all these years. Harrison then tells Stella that she has been “naughty”, she has been less than frank with him, because she has tipped Robert off that Harrison knows he’s a spy. “What do you think I’m for?” asks Harrison. She looks at the diners again and wonders who they are; he says they are the “usual crowd”. But Stella notices that one of them (Louie) recognises Harrison; he tries to avoid looking at Louie. Harrison says that, thanks to Stella, there is no more reason to leave Robert “loose”, things will have to “take their course”. The dog is now bothering them and Harrison tries to kick it away. Stella realises she will have to make a decision about whether to “buy out Robert” (presumably by having sex with Harrison). But now Louie approaches the table, claiming (with transparent dishonesty) that the dog belongs to her, or her friend. Harrison tells Louie “you’d better beat it home. You’ll only be landing yourself in more trouble.” Louie reveals that she met Harrison in the park and pushes the dog away “as though it would be safest as far away as possible”. She says she is surprised that Stella is with Harrison who she describes as “wicked”. Stella hints that she will surrender herself to Harrison at which point he tells them both to go away together. Stella asks what he intends to do and he says, “Pay the bill. Do you think a bill pays itself?”

I think that in best ‘Hero’s Journey’ manner, this is intended to be the visit to hell. It is underground and hot. There is a hell hound, though it only has a single head and doesn’t guard the entrance. The inhabitants are as grotesque as those inhabiting Dante’s Inferno. Harrison is either Mephistopheles, bring Stella to the cusp of signing away her soul (represented here by her chastity) or Lucifer himself, presiding over this scene. But Louie somehow redeems Stella, perhaps by admitting her own unchasteness, her own infidelity to her absent soldier husband, excusing herself as just trying to be friendly, no worse than the dog. This is the trigger that seems to release Stella from the devil’s clutch.

Selected quotes:

• “She had found all men to be one way funny like Tom - no sooner were their lips unstuck from your own than they began to utter morality.” (Ch 1)
• “A scale or two adhered to the fishmonger's marble slab; the pastrycook’s glass shelves showed a range of interesting crumbs; the fruiterer filled a longstanding void with fans of cardboard bananas and a ‘Dig for Victory’ placard; the greengrocer’s crates had been emptied of all but earth by those who had somehow failed to dig hard enough.” (Ch 4)
• “One thing he should do at once is take the roof off the house, or they’ll be popping nuns in before you can say knife.” (Ch 4)
• “The dead, from mortuaries, from under cataracts of rubble, made their anonymous presence - not as today’s dead but as yesterday’s living - felt through London. Uncounted, they continued to move in shoals through the city day ... drawing on this tomorrow they had expected.” (Ch 5)
• “The wall between the living and the living became less solid as the wall between the living and the dead thinned.” (Ch 5)
• “If I’d seemed to dream I saw a chap at the foot of my bed going through my pockets, I’d take a look through my pockets first thing next morning.” (Ch 7)
• “Whatever has been buried, surely, corrupts? Nothing keeps innocence innocent but daylight. ... how can any truth not go bad from being underground?” (Ch 12)
• “Anne, if you keep saying ‘I know’ you will have to go back to bed immediately. As it is, you will go back to bed at once.” (Ch 14)

March 2023; 389 pages

First publsished by Jonathan Cape in 1949

My Vintage Classics paperback edition was issued in 1998

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

"V2" by Robert Harris

 Dr Graf is a senior member of the team launching V2 rockets to bomb London in World War Two, but he doesn't believe in the Nazi attempts to win the war. Kay Caton-Walsh is one of the number-crunchers who are trying to pinpoint the rocket launch site so that the RAF can bomb and destroy them. This is a thriller immersed in its history, with plenty of statistics for those who like watching Top Gear and reading Jane's Encyclopaedias.

Selected quotes:

• "I have spent the last ten years of my life by the side of the sea, he thought, always with the smell of pine in my nostrils and the taste of salt in my mouth, listening to the seagulls and straining my eyes at a wide sky." (Ch 7)
• "In Germany now there are three choices ... You are shot by the SS, you are imprisoned by the SS, or you work for the SS." (Ch 17)

September 2022; 307 pages

Robert Harris is the author of many many books, some of them reviewed in this blog:

• The Second Sleep
• Conclave
• The Ghost

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

"Pegasus to Paradise" by Michael Tappenden

 A fictionalised memoir of the author's parents. Ted Tappenden was the radio operator who sent the 'Ham and Jam' message reporting the capture of the bridges outside Caen in the 'Pegasus' operation, the first in the allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day. Like many men after the war, he suffered from his memories. Florrie, his wife, was a feisty individual who probably suffered from bipolar syndrome. Much of the book is taken up with the strains imposed on the marriage by these two psychologically damaged individuals.

The trouble with memoirs is that they deal with what happened and struggle to conform to the conventions of a novel; for example, the pacing may be uneven and the cast of characters may become unwieldy.  But in this book the author has selected incidents which enable the characters to develop in all their real-life complexity. There are some wonderfully detailed descriptions - a strength of the author - which both add depth and advance the story. And, of course, there is incredible verisimilitude.

All of human life seems to be here. Not only is there the thrilling wartime exploits of Ted but also the frustrations of peacetime. Florrie gets involved in cub scouts, in charity concerts and in an allotment. There is the difficulty of communication between two people even when they are deeply in love. There is a wedding and a funeral, and the slow, sad decline into old age that those of us who do not die too early must face. All is told with love and respect. And, often, humour.

It reminded me of Patrick Gale's Notes From an Exhibition.

Selected quotes:

• "She had fled with her family from the poverty and hopelessness of County Cork for the poverty and possibilities of the East End of London." (C 1)
• "The brown ribbon of road that struggled upwards and sped downwards." (C 1)
• "Pitch-black pain from somewhere so deep, poured out of him." (C 4)
• "in the mirror, she could still see Scarlett O’Hara. Unfortunately, Cyril frankly didn’t seem to give a damn." (C 6)
• "Challenge strode there defiant, knuckle-dustered and dangerous. A swaggering sip of things to come, saturated in a crazy palette of colour like a degenerate peacock." (C 6)
• "It was that time when the day had slowed down its urgency and yawned and stretched before being covered by night." (C 8)
• "Even more alarming was the knowledge that the centre forward was known to have the unusual ability of being able to kick the ball in the direction that he intended." (C 9)
• "Not being normal was such bloody hard work." (C 10)
• "At the window, the spider moved quickly from the shadowy corner to the centre of its web and started to bind a hapless fly." (C 10)
• "‘Come on now Patrick Kellagher. Get down on yer knees an tank God dat you’re still on yer feet.’" (C 10)
• "The stage so full of drama now seemed very empty. Just shadows where the players had been; applause, an uncertain echo." (C 10)
• "Now she looked around her garden. Where were her gleaming jewels? Her wonder? Who had switched off the blazing light and crunched her world into a small, terraced back garden?" (C 11)
• "The mad confusion of plants and hotchpotch collection of figures before her, she had wanted to represent a sanctuary; a place of freedom and choice. Now, she saw they were none of those things. Now, in horror, she saw a heaving mass of tormented vegetation: some strong, some weak; some throttling; some suffocating silently, and some pale with approaching death, but all struggling for survival." (C 11)
• "In front of the plants, stood her figures: plastic, cement and plaster, mute, staring, imprisoned. She had ignored their ugliness, their kitsch-ness, their garish coats and their shocking disfigurements, and had offered them a refuge. But she hadn’t understood, she’d been selfish. They had stood there mutely, frozen by ice, faded by the sun, displaying their disabilities for all to see, to be mocked and scoffed at, to suffer everlasting pain, just to satisfy Florrie. And why did they all seem to have Ted’s face?" (C 11)
• "It was like standing in front of a fridge full of tears." (C 11)
• "Stiff upper lips were notoriously difficult to treat." (C 12)
• "The old people applauded slowly, as if it was an effort. As if they were now running out of applause, running out of everything." (C 13)
• "Maybe he carried the Bible just in case there really was a God. But he’d seen no sign of him." (C 14)
• "The odour of old people hung in the air." (C 17)
• "A number of elderly people sat slumped in plump armchairs that almost enveloped them. They might have been small children sitting on adult’s chairs, except that a small child would be bursting full of tomorrow, and these people were in danger of disappearing forever down the gap between the seat and the back." (C 18)
• "It was a silent drive to the cemetery. Inside the car, the air was thick with thoughts that even the open window could not whisk away." (C 19)

A beautifully written family saga.

Michael Tappenden has also written A Long Dark Rainbow.

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

"Miracle at Sant' Anna" by James McBride

 It's World War II. The Americans are fighting their way up Italy. Four soldiers (three African Americans and one Puerto Rican) get lost in the mountains. They find a traumatised Italian orphan in a destroyed church and seek refuge in an Italian village. The partisans are in the hills and there are Germans all around.

And in the midst of the distorting horrors of war, miracles occur.

There is no sentimentality about this book. The soldiers, and the Italians, and the partisans are all fully rounded characters, with strengths and weaknesses. There are moments of brutality and moments of comedy and many moments of great honesty.

Some great moments:

• "There is a saying in Florence that Florentines don't agree on anything. They simply say no to everything and continue saying no again and again ... Fourteen centuries of continually getting their asses kicked ... have, if nothing else, taught Florentines the value of silent virtue and cautious negativity." (Ch 5)
• "I think your cheese slid off your biscuit." (Ch 6)
• "When they pulled out their pistols, they touched the trigger and told the hammer to hurry." (Ch 7)
• "Put down that heavy sack and come over here, 'cause Somebody Special wants you. And He don't have no anger. He don't know no pain. He don't give no orders. He's a pain-getting-rid-of-er. That's His job. To get rid of your pain faster than this lemonade can do down your little red lane. Why? Ain't no why! He ain't gotta explain Hisself! He'll hurl your enemies down to low stones like he hurled Satan outta heaven, 'cause He's mighty. He's the baddest kitty kat in the firmament! He's got the mojo and the sayso. He knows truth. He knows justice. He knows your pain. And He will heal your pain right now, for free, if you just trust in Him. Ain't no cost to it! Ain't no buy-now-pay-later to this." (Ch 7)
• "I want your soul. You got an appointment to keep and I'm the secretary!" (Ch 7)
• "White folks own the world, goddammit. We're just rentin'" (Ch 12)
• "Chasing tail like they couldn't wait to get back to the womb." (Ch 14)
• "Everything he did had an error in it. He was a mistake, as his father used to say, a mistake that made more mistakes that were followed by still more mistakes." (Ch 20)

James McBride also wrote Deacon King Kong

This review was written by the 
author of Motherdarling

"The Shadow King" by Maaza Mengiste

 Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020.

Written in the present tense. The bulk of the narrative set during the invasion of Ethiopia by Italian troops in 1935 but framed by a related narrative set in 1974, when Haile Selassie, who had spent five years in exile between 1936 and 1941, was finally overthrown. Aside from this framing the story is sequenced in chronological order. The story is told by multiple narrators, both Ethiopians and Italians.

Protagonist Hirut is servant to Aster, wife of local landowner Kidane. When Kidane leaves to join the army fighting the invading Italians, Aster and Hirut accompany him and train up a fighting force of women. After being defeated in battle, they form a guerrilla resistance in the mountains. To encourage the local people to support them they dress a peasant called Minim (which means Nothing) as the (shadow) Emperor, fostering a legend that Haile Selassie has returned from exile to lead his troops.  Their main enemy is a force led by Carlo Fucelli, the antagonist, an evil man who throws prisoners over a precipice to their death, having these executions photographed by 'Foto', Ettore, an Italian of Jewish descent. Fucelli's mistress, an Ethiopian named Fifi, acts as a spy for the guerrillas. After a skirmish, Aster and Hirut are captured by the Italians.

One of the intriguing characters is 'the cook', a woman who deliberately refuse to be named, who has been a servant of Aster's from before her marriage, and who becomes a servant of Fifi.

There are some beautifully lyrical passages in the book. It is divided into many small unnumbered chapters. It takes time to explore the characters and the situations. As well as the sections narrated by one of the characters, there are sections narrated by the 'chorus' and there are sections which describe a photograph.

The characters are carefully crafted with all their complexities. Carlo, the Italian devil, has paternal feelings towards Ettore who is threatened because of his Jewish ancestry; Carlo the commander has terrors; he is fond of Fifi though he must suspect her treachery. Ettore, complicit in the terror, photographing the victims. Hirut, a stubborn servant and a thief; Aster, almost hysterical and jealous as Kidane's wife, from whom Hirut steals and with whom she shares imprisonment. 

Some of my favourite moments

• "She is in that small box of a room that Hirut shares with the cook, that place where they go at night to shed their usefulness and sleep." (p 11)
• "You still think this world was built around you? she asks. You were born to fit into it. That's your fate." (p 41)
• "They have done their best to hide from those glinting large windows as frightening as the open eyes of Satan." (p 94)
• "If you turn to your side during battle, Aklilu told her, if you look at just the right time, you'll see angels running beside you, flicking bullets away with their wings." (p 394)
• "There are those born to own things, and those brought forth to keep those things in their rightful place." (p 417)

It's not a page turner or a thriller. It took me a long time to read and I sometimes found it heavy going. But it is beautifully crafted. January 2021; 426 pages

The writer of this review, Dave Appleby, 
is author of the novel Motherdarling

"Men At Arms" by Evelyn Waugh

In the blurb on the back of the book a review from Clive James is quoted in which he compares Waugh's characters with those of Dickens and Shakespeare; Cyril Connolly is quoted saying that this is 'Unquestionably the finest novel to have come out of the war'. I am amazed. The novel somehow won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1952.

I assumed when I started that this was a straight novel but about half way through I imagined it was a comic novel although the comedy is of the light, drawing-room type. It is an account of Guy Crouchback's experiences at the beginning of the Second World War as he trains with an old-fashioned regiment in various locations including a boarding school on the coast of south east England, Scotland, and Cornwall; they eventually see limited action on the West African coast. So far as I could see there is no character development. Crouchback, we are promised at the start, has an emptiness of soul: "Into that wasteland where his soul languished he need not, could not, enter. He had no words to describe it. ... There was nothing to describe, merely a void. ... It was as though eight years back he had suffered a tiny stroke of paralysis; all his spiritual faculties were just perceptibly impaired." He is, of course, a Roman Catholic; later The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene is mentioned but Greene does far better when it comes to spiritually void Catholic characters than Waugh can. Nothing happens in which Crouchback's spiritual paralysis manifests itself in any other way than his passivity, enabling him to be the recorder of and reactor to the events happening around him. The name promises villainy of the order of Richard III but Crouchback only kills once and that is by accident.

The Crouchbacks are, of course, an old Catholic family ("Mr Crouchback acknowledged no monarch since James II"; Prologue 3) who stand in proud and isolated opposition to "the rest of mankind, Box-Bender, the butcher, the Duke of Omnium (whose onetime wealth derived from monastic spoils) ..." (Prologue 3). Waugh loves his exclusivity like any other snob and just like any other snob he despises those outside his charmed circle. One might argue that Waugh's purpose is to satirise the established order. Sentences such as "The discipline of the square, the traditions of the mess, would work their magic and the esprit de corps would fall like blessed unction from above." (1-1) can read like ironic critiques of the idea that the  old ways will win the war. But Waugh repeatedly fails to criticise class and race-based presumptions:

• The regiment that Crouchback joins is the "Royal Corps of Halberdiers" (1-1) and Guy is an officer with all this entails including mess servants and batmen.
• "The porter who should have been at the station was helping hand round drinks in the lounge. 'I'll go just as soon as I can, sir', he said. 'If you don't mind waiting until after dinner'. Guy did mind. He wanted a change of shirt after his journey ..." (Prologue 3) Heaven forfend that a servant doing two jobs should prevent a master changing his shirt.
• "At Crewe the train stopped for an hour. Base little men with bands on their arms trotted about the platform bearing lists." (2-10) The stupendous arrogance of dismissing these people with such unnuanced adjectives is, to today's sensibilities, unforgivable. 
• Equally unforgivable is the acquisition of a "Negro's" head on a raid on the West African coast carried out as an unauthorised prank (3-5). The resonances with the slave trade are unmissable - but Waugh seems to miss them. There is no sense that this senseless murder of a human being is anything more than comic. It is this level of unconscious racism that makes Waugh's 'comic' novel Black Mischief such an unpleasant read.

There are moments of nicely judged metaphor such as when a honeymoon couple, both virgins, are on a cruise: "Later, they joined a yacht at Naples and stealed slowly up the coast, putting in at unfrequented harbours." (Prologue 1)

Selected quotes:

• "He lived too close to Fascism in Italy to share the opposing enthusiasms of his countrymen. He saw it neither as a calamity nor as a rebirth: as a rough improvisation merely." (Prologue - 1)
• "Never can tell a tune till I've heard the words." (1-1)
• "It was like watching the ball at roulette running slower and slower, trickling over the numbers." (1-2)
• "Throughout all the smooth revolutions of barracks life there had been accumulating tiny grits of envy which were now generating heat." (1-6)
• "Guy experienced the classic illusion of an unknown, unsought companion among them." (3-5)
• "Queer bird, the mind. Hides things away and then out they pop. But I mustn't get too technical. It's a hobby horse of mine, the mind." (3-7)

To ex-public schoolboys who underwent similar forms of training this novel might have resurrected memories of the officers' mess but, even allowing for the change in sensibilities since then which, thank goodness, render the snobbery and racism unacceptable, I found this a rather pointless novel which drifted along with dull gleams of weak mostly-weak comedy.

March 2020; 246 pages

Other Waugh novels reviewed in this book:

• Black Mischief: unpleasant racist comedy
• A Handful of Dust
• The Loved One

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

"Invasion 1940" by Peter Fleming

A historical study of Hitler's plans to invade Britain in the summer and autumn of 1940 and why they never came to pass; the author was the brother of Ian Fleming of the James Bond novels and the organiser of the planned British Maquis in Kent.

This book is wonderful is an almost endless store of anecdotes about those days, some belonging to the urban myth type which are rapidly debunked (for example, the discovery of hundreds of German corpses in the sea, clogging up some south coast harbours) and others being wonderful new tales (the Austrian mountain regiment which, upon reaching the coast, decreed that every man should practise swimming at 9 AM only to find on the second day that the sea had 'moved'). It is these anecdotes which make one wonder how it is that anyone ever wins any war:

• “It was Hitler's unpractical custom to rely upon the tete-a-tete rather than the inter service conference when dealing with his commanders-in-chief ... He intensely disliked being disagreed with.” (C 3)
• “The bigger a gun the slower its rate of fire, the shorter the life of its barrel, and the less, after every round, the accuracy of its performance.” (C 4)
• “People switched their suspicions from the strangers or half-strangers on the fringe of their community to those hitherto esteemed its backbone. In Britain the churchwarden or the local philanthropist attracted that searching scrutiny which in the First World War had been reserved for the bearded vagrant or the nocturnal collector of moths.” (C 5)
• “Many a humble Dr Watson was promoted, by the access of self-importance which comes to patriots in an hour of crisis, to the status of a Sherlock Holmes.” (C 5)
• “Flashing lights, poisoned sweets, bridges blown too soon or not at all, punctured tyres, cut telephone-lines, misdirected convoys - in whatever went amiss the hand of the fifth column was detected, never the normal workings of muddle or mischance, confusion or plain cowardice.” (C 5)
• “The removal of signposts and milestones raised a ... problem ... what should a citizen do if a motorist asked the way? The short answer was the motorist should be requested to produce his identity card. But ... everyone had been warned never, in any circumstances, to show his identity card to persons not authorised to see it.” (C 5)
• Identity “cards were all but valueless, since no photograph was affixed to them.” (C 5)
• “Several instances occurred of motorists ... who disobeyed, or perhaps misinterpreted, the Volunteers’ signals to stop and were shot dead.” (C 5)
• “In war, as in other human affairs, it is a mistake not to be single-minded.” (C 6)
• “It is surprising that there should, throughout the summer [of 1940], have been something like 1,000,000 unemployed. The total in early September was 800,000, of whom 300,000 were women.” (C 7, footnote)
• “It was ... widely believed that the best way to render petrol not only useless but harmful to the user’s vehicles was to pout sugar in it. But ... who, on whose recommendation, would authorise the issue of a ‘supplementary’ sugar ration?” (C 7)
• “The nation’s reactions might well have proved an alloy in which much was base: conceit, stupidity, xenophobia, fecklessness and wishful thinking - these, amongst other flaws, might have been found in the gleaming brass of its self-confidence.” (C 7)
• “Less than 5,000 children between the ages of five and fifteen sailed for the Dominions, less than 2,000 for the United States.” (C 7)
• “Hotel advertisements of the period serve as a sad, gentle reminder of the sanctuaries which many elderly people of the more prosperous sort felt obliged, or were prevailed upon, to seek. Though they were sometimes called ‘funk-holes’.” (C 7)
• Churchill regretted the restricting of church bells to the announcing of an invasion saying “I cannot help feel that anything like a serious invasion would be bound to leak out’.” (C 7)
• “When a bomb scored a direct hit on the kennels of the East Kent Hunt ... the hounds, though blown far afield by the explosion, were all recovered, unhurt, in the course of the next two days.”  (C 7)
• “The unidentified white substance floating down from the sky was thought ... to prove poisonous ... It was in point of fact gossamer, which at this season of the year is discharged by spiders while mating in mid-air.” (C 7)
• “Broadcasting House received a direct hit during air raid on 16th October 1940, seven members of the staff being killed. The announcers who were reading news bulletins at the time ... continued to do so with commendable imperturbability, and listeners were not aware until later that anything was amiss.” (C 7)
• “The days of looking forward used to pass slowly and heavily because they had merely to be lived through, for the sake of others to come, but now the days are all lived for their own sake.” (C 7)
• The Germans used terror-propaganda “as in the revelation that German airborne troops were being provided with ‘fog-pills’, which enabled each soldier to conceal himself in a small cloud.” and electro-magnetic rays. (C 8)
• “ Churchill ... remained the servant of the House of Commons. In this role he never scamped his duties, showing always a jealous regard for the rights and susceptibilities of Parliament.” (C 9)
• “On a clear day it was possible, with the help of binoculars, how to tell the time by the clock-tower in Calais from the battlements of Dover Castle.” (C 11)
• “One of the main tactical problems in jungle warfare had proved to be the extreme difficulty of accurately locating the enemy’s automatic weapons in dense cover ... A temporary officer in the RAF, who in happier Times had been enthusiastic water-diviner, claimed to be able to solve this problem ... A form of martial arts hunt-the-thimble was organised, but the machine-gun-diviner failed in every instance to locate his quarry.” (C 11)
• One German spy was unmasked when he tried to buy cider for breakfast. Another was unable to speak English. (C 12)
• “The total available stock of rifles in the country was believed to be 70,000; these were supplemented by a miscellaneous collection of 20,000 firearms handed into police stations as the result of an appeal.” (C 13)
• “Pronunciation-tests for suspects were issued - Soothe, Wrong, Wretch, Rats, Those.” Not quite Shibboleth. (C 13)
• “At Margate it had been hoped to block the advance of German tanks through the town by means of bathing machines filled with sand.” (C 13)
• “A sixty-three-year-old Zulu whose father had led one of Cetewayo’s impis against the British ... was among the first volunteers in a coastal district of Glamorganshire where it was hoped that, if the invaders landed, his appearance on the foreshore might suggest to them a serious error in navigation had been made.” (C 13)
• “Goering alone had Hitler's ear and could perhaps have recalled him from his dreams. He made nothing of these duties and these chances. He played a lone hand, he played it badly, and he sometimes played in fancy dress.” (C 14)
• “In the beginning we tried to get the girls to leave those rooms in which ... radio telephonic communications was broadcast from the aircraft during air fighting - for the language was terrible ...The girls refused to leave their jobs and said they didn't mind the language as much as we thought. They added that it was nice to think of their being like that, all the same.” (C 15, footnote)
• “Two Mountain Divisions, raised in the highlands of Austria and Bavaria, were allotted to Army Group A in a cliff-scaling role. The commander of one of them, reaching his training area on the Channel coast, decided that his men must learn to swim ... swimming instruction would take place daily at 0900 hours. On the first day, at the appointed time, the battalions jogged smartly down to the sectors of beach allotted to them and swam or floundered according to their lights. Breasting the sand-dunes at 0900 hours on the second day, they were astonished and dismayed to find that the sea had moved; it was much further away than it had been the day before. A naval liaison officer explained this phenomenon.” (C 16)
• “Somehow it is generally a junior officer who does night-duty at the week-end.” (C 19)
• “Bisected by a river spanned by too few bridges, dotted with railway termini and criss-crossed by thousands of acres of permanent way, its subsoil laced with tunnels, drain and cables, its heart sheltering the seat of Government, its port indispensable to the island’s survival and its residential areas to the continued presence at their posts of the men and women who made the metropolis work, London offered not so much one huge unmissable target as a congeries of interrelated bull’s eyes.” (C 19)
• “On the continent, the RAF dropped leaflets in German, French and Dutch; they took the form of a phrase-book ... ‘Was that a bomb - a torpedo - a shell - a mine?’ ... ‘We are seasick. Where is the basin?’ ... ‘How much do you charge for swimming lessons?’ ... ‘See how briskly our captain burns!’ ... ‘Why is The Fuehrer not coming with us?’” (C 19)

There is humour and insight in this beautifully written study. It was a joy to read.

October 2019; 284 pages

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

Books about war in this blog can be found on this page

My parents were members of the Readers Union Book Club. They must have had a great person to choose the books. This is one of the many I have enjoyed and reviewed in this blog. Here is a list:

• Life with Ionides by Margaret Lane: about a man catching snakes in East Africa
• The Golden Isthmus: the history of Panama from its discovery by Europeans
• The Incredible Mile by Harold Elvin: the travelogue of a journey on the Trans Siberian express
• A Pattern of Islands by Arthur Grimble: the memoir of a Colonial Officer on the Gilbert and Ellice Islands
• Invasion 1940 by Peter Fleming: an account of Britain's unpreparedness and preparation for a Nazi invasion
• Bus Stop Symi by William Travis: three years lived on the sometimes less than idyllic Greek island of Symi
• A Memoir of the Bobotes by Joyce Cary: a memoir of time spent in the Balkan Wars (before the First World War)
• The Great Trek by Oliver Ransford: a history of the formation of the Orange Free State and Transvaal by Boer farmers trekking from the Cape Colony

"A detail on the Burma front" by Winifred Beaumont

In 1943, during the Second World War, London nurse Winifred Beaumont, known as Beau, volunteered to join the Second Front. This book is a memoir of her training, her travel, and her time nursing in British-held Burma (now Myanmar).

It has some great moments, haggling and wheeler-dealing for essential supplies, travelling along jungle roads which have been washed away by heavy rain, dealing with tropical diseases, insects and reptiles, preventing soldiers from taking advantage, and, inevitably, putting on a concert. She writes well. It reminded me of that great sitcom MASH.

Selected quotes:

• "Loss of free will meant also a loss of my sense of responsibility. Decisions and tomorrow belonged to authority. Today was mine. My spirits rose. I was light-hearted and light-headed. If I'd known how to whistle, I'd have whistled." (p 10)
• "I stared at the dark, resentful sea. It rose in lascivious, spittle-flecked hillocks to seek out its prey" (p 15)
• "The rain sluiced down our head and shoulders but our feet and the roadway remained dry. The ground was so hot it turned the rain to steam as it fell and we moved in a knee-high mist." (p 55)
• "Disgrace, like smallpox, was an infection avoided by the wise." (p 61)
• "Tall slender trees flanked the road on either side. They swayed slightly backwards, as if each had a foot poised to stamp across the road and obliterate man and all his works." (p 144)

Well worth a read. September 2016; 160 pages

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

Other memoirs reviewed in this blog can be found here. Other books about war can be found here.