"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

"The Secrets of Filming Swallows and Amazons" by Sophie Neville

Sophie Neville was cast as Titty in the 1974 film adaptation of Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome. This book, adapted from her contemporary diaries, describes the filming day by day and then tells what happened afterwards: the actor who played Susan became a film actress but 'John' started an engineering firm and 'Roger' became a hermit. Ms Neville herself has mostly worked on the other side of the cameras but has also written books and been a missionary.

I adored the Swallows and Amazons books, all twelve of which are reviewed on this blog. But a day by day account of the filming has little in it to interest anyone other than a fan. 

Selected quotes:

"We were so lucky, so few inches further and we would have been under the steamer. Anyone could have been killed" (Ch 5: Friday 8th June ~ Twenty-second day of filming)

September 2023

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

The Swallows and Amazon series contained twelve books:

• Swallows and Amazons: Children camping on an island in a lake have sailing based adventures
• Swallowdale: More sailing adventures are threatened when the Swallow sinks
• Peter Duck: The Swallows and Amazons and Captain Flint sail on a big yacht into the Caribbean in search of pirate treasure; pirates pursue
• Winter Holiday: the lake freezes allowing a sledge-based expedition to the 'north pole'; the 'D's are introduced
• Coot Club: The Ds join the Death and Glory kids in the Norfolk Broads but the excitement is just as great when birds have to be protected from rowdies.
• We Didn't Mean to go to Sea: The Swallows accidentally find themselves at sea in a yacht they scarcely know: for my money this is the most dramatic and exciting book of the series.
• Secret Water: The Swallows are joined by the Amazons in an expedition to map some tidal mud-flats
• The Big Six: The Death and Glory kids have to be cleared of accusations of crime; the Ds help.
• Missee Lee: The Swallows and Amazons and Captain Flint are shipwrecked near China and captured by a lady Chinese pirate with a taste for Latin.
• Pigeon Post: The Swallows and Amazons and Ds search for gold in the hills above the Lake; one of my favourites
• The Picts and the Martyrs: The Ds have to hide in the hills when the Great Aunt comes to stay with the Amazons
• Great Northern: The Swallows and Amazons and Ds and Captain Flint are protecting birds in the far north of Scotland

"Homage to Catalonia" by George Orwell

George Orwell's account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War was written in 1938, before the final victory of the Fascists under Franco, so it is necessarily incomplete. But this doesn't matter. It isn't an attempt at history. It is a very visceral account of fighting in a war. It starts with his experiences as a dreadfully ill-equipped militiaman in the trenches following which he goes on leave to Barcelona only to be caught up in street fighting when the different anti-Fascist factions decide to fight among themselves; finally he has to escape from Spain after the socialist organisation with whom he has enlisted are proscribed.

It's an enthralling read. He has passages in which he describes aspects of his experience in which his adjectives are perfectly chosen:

• "My memories of that part of the war - the red flags in Barcelona, the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers creeping to the front, the grey war-stricken towns further up the line, the muddy, ice-cold trenches in the mountains." (Ch 1): Gaunt trains: wow!
• "the atmosphere of that time ... is all bound up with the winter cold, the ragged uniforms of the militiamen, the oval Spanish faces, the Morse-like tapping of machine-guns, the smells of urine and rotting bread, the tinny taste of bean-stews wolfed hurriedly out of unclean pannikins." (Ch 6)
• "Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered with willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen - all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the road of bombs." (Ch 12) Final words. I adore the horses who "browse and meditate". Brilliant!

The only difficulty I had with this book was understanding all the different factions, referred to usually by their initials. I can pardon some confusion: immediately before and during the Civil War, Spain was a chaos of competing political tendencies to the extent that in one day she had three premiers! Orwell does his best to explain things (who was POUM and PSUC and UGT and NCT etc) in Appendix I but I needed this information drip-fed to me through the text. 

 Nevertheless, I don't think I have ever read a book which better captures the experience of soldiering, although Laurie Lee's memoir of the Spanish Civil War A Moment of War and Joyce Cary's Memoir of the Bobotes both come close. 

Selected Quotes:

• "the characteristic smell of war - in my experience a smell of excrement and decaying food." (Ch 2)
• "I never think of my first two months at war without thinking of wintry stubble fields whose edges are encrusted with dung." (Ch 2)
• "It was beastly water, hardly more transparent than milk." (Ch 3)
• "In war all soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm enough. The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae - every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles." (Ch 5)
• "There was a kind of harrow that took one straight back to the later Stone Age. It was made of boards joined together, to about the size of a kitchen table; in the board hundreds of holes were morticed, and into each hole was jammed a piece of flint which had been chipped into shape ... It made me sick to think of the work that must go into the making of such a thing, and the poverty that was obliged to use flint in place of steel. I have felt more kindly towards industrialisation ever since." (Ch 5)
• "No sooner had the fighting started than the hotel filled to the brim with a most extraordinary collection of people. There were foreign journalists, political suspects of every shade, an American airman in the service of the Government, various Communist agents, including a fat, sinister-looking Russian, said to be an agent of the Ogpu, who was nicknamed Charlie Chan and wore attached to his waistband a revolver and a neat little bomb, some families of well-to-do Spaniards who looked like Fascist sympathisers, tow or three wounded men from the International Column, a gang of lorry drivers from some huge French lorries which had been carrying a load of oranges back to France and had been held up by the fighting, and a number of Popular Army officers." (Ch 9)
• "Even a man as tall as I am cannot wear a long Mauser down his trouser leg without discomfort. It was an intolerable job getting down the corkscrew staircase of the observatory with a completely rigid left leg. Once in the street, we found that the only way to move was with extreme slowness, so slowly that you did not have to bend your knees." (Ch 9)
• "The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency." (Ch 10)
• "Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock - no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing." (Ch 10) Orwell's experience of being shot in the neck.
• "No one I met at this time ... failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all." (Ch 10)
• "It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench." (Appendix One)

Other books by Orwell that I have reviewed in this blog:

• The Road to Wigan Pier: a masterpiece of reporting on social conditions in England in the 1930s
• Down and Out in Paris and London

Other books about war reviewed in this blog are here.

Here is a review of Orwell's biography by Michael Shelden

June 2023; 248 pages

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

"Dancing with the Octopus" by Debora Harding

The true story of how, as a fourteen year old girl living in Nebraska, Harding was kidnapped at knifepoint from a church parking lot, raped and left to die in a cattle yard during a severe snowstorm. The book describes Harding's later battle with PTSD, a struggle which is exacerbated by the abusive behaviour of her mother.

And, in the end, the mother's psychological abuse and mental cruelty seem to be worse than the horrific ordeal Harding endured. The kidnap and rape was by a stranger and lasted for a few horrifying hours, the mother's abuse was repeated again and again for years.

A gripping true story, told in tiny snippets, with a backwards and forwards chronology, and the minute attention to detail characteristic of American reportage.

Selected quotes:

• "When Dad was home Mom was as different as a blackbird is to a vampire. Both have wings, but one sucks your blood." (p 25)
• "I'd been having night terrors all the way back to adolescence ... My unconscious strategy for dealing wiht them was to avoid sleep altogether." (p 33)
• "Mom claimed that she was of the 'School of Tough Love', like it was a parenting association that charged membership fees." (p 37)
• "The harder I tried to formulate a coherent thought, the more it eluded me. ... I felt nothing. An emotional lens closed, yet I became acutely aware of any sensory impression." (p 39)
• "These pieces were distinctly layered, as if I could separate one sensation from the other and tape them at different speeds." (p 40) 
• "Every word spoken rang with volume but no meaning." (p 40)
• "The world had gone completely flat" (p 40)
• "I was experiencing sudden paralysis, after which I would collapse. ... I appeared to others to be unconscious whilst being horrifyingly aware that I wasn't. ... I have no way of communicating. After a few minutes, when I feel control coming back, my limbs twitch, my jaw clenches, and if I fight it, the convulsing gets worse. Afterward I am utterly exhausted. ... I felt before these episodes ... emotional detachment, a sense of distance, and maybe fear." (p 90)
•  "Mom said Vivian left him [her husband] because he was cheating on her, which was an act of pure selfishness. Plenty of wives were dealing with cheating husbands in the 1950s, so they took antidepressants." (p 100)
• "These fits of paralysis had similarities to the lucid dream state of night terrors. Instead of being trapped in a dream - terrified and awake, yet clinically asleep - the situation was reversed. I appeared to be unconscious, asleep, even though I was awake and fully aware of my surroundings." (p 113)
• "It made me feel anxious yet affirmed, the way a horrid truth does when it feels right." (p 129)
• "I heard my mother tell whomever was on the other end of the phone that I no longer lived there." (p 162)
• "Charles slept the death of the angels that night." (p 205)
• "I was fifteen minutes late arriving home. Mom was standing at the door, furious. It woulod seem I had been grossly insensitive by worrying her." (p 209)
• "Trying to emotionally connect with Mom for any of us was like trying to fix a broken cup with a glue stick." (p 234)

March 2022; 359 pages

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

"Bad Blood" by Lorna Sage

You might think that a memoir of a childhood in a rural village on the border of Wales would be very like Cider With Rosie and there are similarities in the picture of rural deprivation, although the period of this book is twenty years after Rosie. But the real difference is that this is no rural idyll. It starts by describing her grandfather, the Vicar, and her grandmother, his wife, who hated him, who lived apart from him (in the vicarage) who never went to church and who blackmailed him over his affairs. The tempestuous relationships and the Vicar's philandering cast a long shadow over Lorna's growing up.

It is beautifully written.

She writes beautifully:

• "She was buried in the same grave as him. Rotting together for eternity, one flesh at the last after a lifetime's mutual loathing." (C 1)
• "I thought that that was what a vicar was, simply: someone bony and eloquent and smelly (tobacco, candle grease, sour claret), who talked into space." (C 1)
• "They didn't just 'know their place'. it was as though the place occupied them, so that they all knew what they were going to be from the beginning." (C 1)
• "They were like children, if you consider that one of the things about being a child is that you are a parasite of sorts and have to brazen it out self-righteously." (C 1)
• "My overcoat was at first too big (I would grow into it), then all at once too small, without ever for a moment being the right size." (C 1)
• "Mr Palmer seemed omniscient. He rules over a little world where conformity, bafflement, fear and furtive defiance were the orders of the day." (C 2)
• "All housework is futile in the sense that it always has to be done again." (C 3)
• "When they're not breaking the commandments, anti-heroes are mending their tobacco pipes and listening to the wireless." (C 4)
• "Jolly miserable: that middle-class oxymoron." (C 4)
• "I was still only an apprentice misfit and self-conscious in the part." (C 7)
• "In the land of the 1950s you were meant to be socially mobile, but personally conformist; self-made, but in one of the moulds made ready. You mustn't miss the boat, but you mustn't rock it either." (C 9)
• "Being an air hostess hadn't yet been revealed as waitressing-in-the-sky." (C 10)
• "The particular awfulness of amateur acting is that you can always see through the disghuise to the person underneath." (C 12)
• "'Poetry for the Young' ... was absolutely silent on animal appetites and contrived to confuse love with waving goodbye to one's native land. Its real subject was death: death in infancy, death in the far corners of the empire, death at sea on the way there - and just plain old death." (C 12)
• "More than one of those tweedy spinsters had had an affair with Grandpa." (C 12)
• "He kept a pair of bicycle clips in his pocket in case someone might want to lend him a bike." (C 12)
• "Only when you look  ore closely can you see that this housewife is pathologically scared of food, hates home, is really a child dreaming of pretty things and treats." (C 12)
• "A few intellectual tearaways at the boys' grammar school talked about jazz and existentialism, but they were practising for university." (C 13)

A great read: idyll with attitude. November 2020; 281 pages

Bad Blood won the 2000 Whitbread (now the Costa) Prize for Biography. Other winners reviewed on this blog include:

• 2007 Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore
• 2009 The Strangest Man (Paul Dirac) by Graham Farmelo
• 2015 The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf

Other fictional Costa winners can be found here.

Other memoirs and autobiographies reviewed on this blog can be found here.

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

"The Thief's Journal" by Jean Genet

This is the rambling account of Genet's early years as a thief and rent boy in Spain and France and other places in continental Europe. For a foundling brought up in an orphanage who spent his early years begging, stealing and prostituting himself, Genet is remarkably articulate: it seems that you don't need a great education to write wonderful prose or poetry. 

He has some remarkable insights into the human condition. He discerns tenderness in the sex act but he isn't sentimental: poverty is ugly, the police can be brutal, and a street free of prostitutes means a street full of cops.

• “The glances exchanged by the two friends ... were the subtlest emanation of a ray of love from the heart of each. A ray of very soft light, delicately coiled: a spun ray of love. I was amazed that such delicacy, so fine a thread and of so precious, and so chaste, a substance as love could be fashioned in a so dark a smithy as the muscular bodies of those males.” (p 61)
• “The poor are grotesque.” (p 133)
• “Cops aren't picked from among choir boys.” (p 161)
• “When the whores aren't around, the cops are.” (fn p 220)

There are some wonderful and original descriptions. Who else would describe the choreography of cottaging and how a dog defecates?

• “In the urinals ... the behaviour of the faggots would make matters clear: they would perform their dance, the remarkable movement of a snake standing on its tail and undulating, swaying from side to side, tilted slightly backward, so as to cast a furtive glance at my prick which was out of my fly.” (p 50)
• “The palms! They were gilded by a morning sun. The light quivered, not the palms.” (p 63)
• “He filled out all the space in our bed with his legs open in a wide, obtuse angle, where I would find only a small space to curl up. I slept in the shadow of his meat.” (p 184)
• “The pathetic attitude of a dog shitting. It squeezes, its gaze is fixed, its four paws are close together beneath its arched body; and it trembles, from head to reeking turd.” (p 187)

But I find it really hard to read. It is unchaptered and without any discernible formal structure. It rambles, it wanders here and there; perhaps it is modelled on the picaresque. It reminded me of the work of Kerouac, or perhaps the deliberately cut-up work of William Burroughs (eg The Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, The Wild Boys), although it was first published in 1947 so it cannot have been influenced by them (perhaps the influence was the other way around). Other autobiographical accounts of poverty include John Rechy's City of Night (about being a rent boy in the USA) which has as little plot but a much clearer structure and George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London but Orwell's journalistic style is much clearer and more lucid. 

A substantial part of its appeal must lie in its subject matter: one rarely gets granted an insight into the lives of the low-lives. But the reason for it being a classic has to be the originality and clarity of its observation of the world. Who else would link a riot to the corrosive effect of urine? “During the 1933 riots, the insurgents tore out one of the dirtiest, but most beloved pissoirs. It was near the harbour and the barracks, and its sheet iron had been corroded by the hot urine for thousands of soldiers.” (p 52)

Selected quotes:

• “Though they may not always be handsome, men doomed to evil possess the manly virtues.” (p 5)
• “Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten.” (p 5)
• “Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it. ... [It] smells of sweat, sperm and blood.” (p 5)
• “I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and hankering for danger. It can be seen in a look, a walk, a smile, and it is in you that it creates an eddying. It unnerves you. This violence is a calm that disturbs you.” (p 9)
• “The earth did not revolve: carrying Stilitano, it trembled about the sun.” (p 30)
• “I used to toss my things any old place when we went to bed, but Stilitano laid his out on a chair, carefully arranging the trousers, jacket and shirt so that nothing would be creased. He seemed thereby to be endowing his clothes with life, as if wanting them to get a night’s rest after a hard day.” (fn p 51)
• “Foreigners in this country, wearing fine gabardines, rich, they recognized their inherent right to find these archipelagoes of poverty picturesque” (p 135)
• “Having already been convicted of theft, I can be convicted again without proof, merely upon a casual accusation, just on suspicion. The law then says that I am capable of the deed. I am in danger not only when I steal, for every moment of my life, because I have stolen.” (p 175)
• “He had dared, not unconsciously, to depart from moral rules, with the deceptive ease of men who are unaware of them. In fact, he had done so at the cost of a mighty effort, with the certainty of losing a priceless treasure, though with the furthest certainty of creating another, more precious than the one he had lost.” (p 182)
• “Stealing determines a moral attitude which cannot be achieved without effort; it is a heroic act.” (p 185)
• “I love outlaws who have no other beauty than that of their bodies.” (p 222)

Also read?

• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin is a novel about a homosexual relationship in 1950s France
• At The End of the Sidewalks by Baptiste Thiery-Guilbert, a modern account of gay life in the south of France

More French books reviewed in this blog may be found here

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"City of Night" by John Rechy

 Written in 1963 and with a distinct flavour of Kerouac's On the Road, this novel follows a young gay hustler as he moves from New York to Los Angeles to Hollywood to San Francisco to Chicago and to New Orleans. It describes the underworld of studhustlers and youngmen and scores and queens and vice cops in a time when a transvestite could be arrested for 'masquerading'. It describes the different demands of the clients (for a book centred on gay sex for sale it is, due to the date of publication, cleverly coy about exactly what it describes). There are remarkable and colourful characters that flit through this book but the focus is always on the narrator, a youngman who is compelled to discover the world with as many different people as possible. 

In common with the literature of the time, Rechy is experimental in his language. Often he runs words together into one, as illustrated above, and, for example, when he describes roles played by hustlers in New York: "There are a variety of roles to play if you're hustling: youngmanoutofajob butlooking; dontgiveadamnyoungman drifting; perrenialhustler easytomakeout; youngmanlostinthebigcity pleasehelpmesir." (Part I: p 26) This and the sometimes breathless quality of his prose, as well as the subject matter, is what gives an impression of the works of Kerouac, or, for example, The Book of Cain by Alexander Trocchi.

He can produce spot-on descriptions:

• "The needlepointed dust." (Part I: p 4)
• "Phallic palm-trees with sunbleached pubic hair." (Part II: p 79)
• "In the eery mottled light of a distant lamp, a shadow lies on his stomach on the grasspatched ground, another straddles him: ignoring the danger of detection in the last moments of exiled excitement ..." (Part I; p 50)
• "Along the panel of amber mirrors at Harry's bar, a panorama of searching eyes emerges out of the orangy twilight of cigarette smoke and dimlights: a stew of faces floating murkily in the smoky darkness." (Part II; Skipper-1; p 138)

He is also able to meet someone and understand their inner core. This is his real strength: the perception of character. Many of the 'chapters' of this work are in-depth analyses of some of the memorable characters: scores, dragqueens and studhustlers, he has encountered:

• "There is a consuming franticness about Skipper which seizes you the moment he begins to talk - the words coming often in gasps - his eyes burning - at times as if about to explode with intensity, at times on the brink of closing, giving up. Constantly, he flexes his body, looking down at it, studying it, as if to make sure it is still intact." (Part II; Skipper-1; p 144)
• "When two homosexuals who have no Sexual interest in each other talk in a bar, they seldom look at each other - their eyes scan the bar for a new Available anyone." (Part III; Lance-1; p173)
• "They are the astonished eyes of someone who after years of wearing sunglasses is forced suddenly to remove them in the savage stare of the sun." (Part III; Lance-4; p189)

And there are many other wonderful moments:

• "Later I would think of America as one vast City of Night ... jukebox-winking,rock-n-roll-moaning America at night fusing its dark cities into the unmistakable shape of loneliness." (Part I; p 3)
• "Even Milton, the poet, in his epic poem, was on the side of the rebellious angels." (Part I: The Professor-3: p 68)
• "A franticness to get what the world had offered others and not extended readily to them." (Part I: The Professor-3: p 68)
• "As long as the hustler goes only with queens - and with other men only for scoring ... - he is not himself considered 'queer' - he remains, in the vocabulary of the world, 'trade'." (Part II; Miss Destiny,-1; p 88)
• "Shakespeare, my dears - a very Great writer who wrote ladies' parts for dragqueens in his time." (Part II; Miss Destiny,-1; p 88)
• "I figure: So I make a few bucks working, I blow them - jes like that"! Shoot, I get along jes as good without. Why hassle moren you got to?" (Part II; Chuck-1; p 116)
• "The best way to get there ... is to take it slow." (Part II; Chuck-1; p 117)
• "Once, man, we got so fuckin drunk ... we jes started throwing rocks at the sky" ... jes like, you know, to make sure it's there ... But those rocks, man, they jes kept comin right back at us." (Part II; Chuck-2; p 125)
• "Like - yeah - like you got Heaven roped by the neck." (Part II; Chuck-3; p 129)
• "For the homeless drifters there is also the panic that one day youll wake up to the fact that youre through on the streets, in the bars - that everyone has had you, that those who havent have lost interest - that youve been replaced by the fresher faces that come daily into the city in that shifting wave of vagrants - younger than yo u now (and Youth is at a premium)" (Part II; p 137)
• "People come to Harry's primarily for one of two purposes: to buy or be bought." (Part II; Skipper-1; p 140)
• "Life, perversely, may make one a caricature of oneself, a wandering persistent ghost of the youngman that was, once." (Part II; Skipper-1; p 144)
• "That stud walks more miles in a day than I do all mammy-screwin week long ... but he always ends up where he started from." (Part II; Skipper-1; p 145)
• "The disdain of those who know that beauty rules anarchy." (Part III; Lance-1; p172)
• "For the chorus to claim its victory, the God must admit his fall." (Part III; Lance-1; p174)
• "At the Ranch Market on Vine Street, a cockeyed clock winds it hands swiftly backwards. Longingly I stand before it." (Part III; p 202)
• "I told myself it's wrong to fight yourself when so much is fighting you already." (Part III; Someone-2; p 214)
• "New Orleans is now the Pied Piper playing a multikeyed tune to varikeyed ears." (Part IV; p 270)
• "When Ah first met him, he was re-al masculine ... He turns swish ovuhnight ... swishin like a ballerina. When Ah met him, he was hustlin the Quartuh too - the butchest, straighest numbuh y'evuh laid yuh eyes on." (Part IV; p 273)
• "The ice age of the heart." (Part IV; p 326)
• "I want to tell you something before we leave. Im not at all the way you think I am. Im not like you want me to be, the way I tried to look and act for you: not unconcerned, nor easygoing - not tough: no, not at all. ... Like you, like everyone else, Im Scared, cold, cold, terrified." (Part IV; p 326)

Unconventional but wonderfully descriptive; you feel you know the world of the desperate youngmen for the inside.

August 2020; 363 pages

"A Life in the Theatre" by Tyrone Guthrie

I hadn't heard of this gentleman; I had muddled him up with Tyrone Power the film star (they are cousins). Mr Guthrie was a small-time actor and important theatre director and producer from the 1920s until the early 1960s; he also developed talk radio in the very early days of the BBC, and possibly produced the very first drama serial for Canadian radio. He had an influential life and he worked with an enormous number of much better known people including Robert Donat, Flora Robson ("I ... persuaded Flora Robson to return to the stage. She had quit in despair after a series of wretchedly insignificant parts followed by a long period out of work, and was doing welfare work in a factory."; C 4), Edith Evans, Charles Laughton, James Mason, Laurence Olivier, Robert Morley, Emlyn Williams, Sybil Thorndike, Alec Guinness (as Hamlet), John Mills, Jack Hawkins, Andrew Cruickshank, Ralph Richardson (as Bottom and Othello), Vivien Leigh (as Titania), Margaret Leighton, Anthony Quayle, Leonard Bernstein, and many others. His influence included him working on the first Edinburgh festival. Yet the memoir is modest; he seems genuinely more interested in giving other people credit and in explaining the technical issues involved with staging plays. This was a very interesting memoir from a man who seems unjustly forgotten.

The Old Vic, where, under the management of Lilian Baylis, Mr Guthrie spents several seasons, was opened in 1818 as the Royal Coburg, named after Prince Leopold, the husband of Princess Charlotte, daughter of the Prince Regent and the Heir Presumptive. When she died in childbrith Leopold left Britain (having declined the throne of Greece, he later became the first King of the Belgians)' the theatre subsequently became known as the Royal Victoria after Leopold's niece (and the Queen).

Some delightful moments:

• "My mechanical capacities are a little limited. I can pump a bicycle tyre; switch an electric light on - and off; and, if I count twelve slowly, take a deep breath, and clear the mind of cant, I can recall whether, if you turn it clockwise, you can make a screw go in, or out." (C 3)
• "Who would want caviar if it were not only cheaper and more available than cod, but it appeared at every meal; if it were not merely familiar, but inescapable?" (C 3)
• "A good journalist must discipline himself to write intelligibly and fast ... but I can conceive that in knocking the nonsense out of you, it may knock out much of the sensibility too." (C 5)
• "None of Hamlet's scenes demand a very close rapport between the participants. Most of the psychological material is conveyed in soliloquy." (C 5)
• "Just as doctors prescribe bread pills in Latin and a handwriting totally baffling to every human eye except that of the particular pharmacist with whom they are hand in glove; just as musicians have to say fortissimo instead of 'very loud' so stage-lighting experts like to make use of a highly technical vocabulary" (C 5)
• "Like most ardent young people ... I thought it my duty to make people like what I liked, I even thought that if I tried hard enough the attempt would succeed." (C 5)
• "once God had told Miss Baylis what to do, there was really no point in opposing their joint will." (C 8)
• "Pommer looked agonized but grimly determined, like Prometheus after the eagle had pecked out his gizzard for the millionth time." (C 9)
• "If people say a thing is good for you, it is merely a ruse to induce you to undergo a thoroughly unpleasant experience." (C 10)
• "No one thinks well of a medicine that tastes nice; to be good for you it must taste filthy and if possible smell filthy, and look filthy too; disinfectants must sting; a good book must be a penance to read - one of the reasons why the Bible is printed as it is." (C 10)
• "On the opening night ... one of the actors got lost and flew about in a frenzy through room after room, pre-set on a turntable. The actors on stage, making up lines and pretending to look for their lost colleague in the garden, were startled to see him crawl through a fireplace." (C 11)
• "One of the charms of a tall tale is its tallness." (C 13)
• "Personality - the great euphemism for sex appeal" (C 15)
• "The whole effect was like Chopin scored for military band." (C 15)
• "At its best, grand opera is the greatest experience the theatre can offer to an audience. ... Opera is such a great, grinding, galumphing behemoth n- so much energy goes into battling with the multitude of people concerned, the masses of scenery, the mountainous heaps of coronets, riding boots, fans, goblets, scimitars and rosaries that the purpose of it all gets lost." (C 16)
• "Feeling rather as I imagine some of the less gregarious animals must have felt on the first night in the Ark." (C 17)
• "It is extraordinary to what an extent British life is still dominated by the traditions and opinions of a numerically tiny upper class. ... The Times is the house magazine of quite a small, exclusive, but overwhelmingly influential club. To 'get anywhere' in England ... it is still almost a prerequisite that you subscribe the 'establishment' conventions of speech, manners and morals. If you do not, then you must make your way ... by enacting, rather cleverly, the character role of an Outsider." (C 18)
• "I for one do not subscribe to the belief that there exists a vast body of unproduced masterpieces just because all the metropolitan managers, agents, producers, actors and directors are too dull to know a good thing when they see it." (C 19)
• "She lacked the push, the restless demonic energy which alone lifts a player into the first rank." (C 19)
• "She liked the life of a touring, or provincial, player: knitting and companionable chats in draughty, grimy dressing-rooms, the brightly lit two hours of painted fantasy, then the long trudge through the rain, under the railway arch, past the gasworks, round by the Sacred Heart convent to the digs and cocoa in a Thermos." (C 19)
• "It was a sparrow slum. By day it was comparatively quiet; but towards evening, when the business sparrows came back home, their love life become most obtrusive. Boy sparrow would meet girl and pursue her all over our stage. They were impervious to fear, or for that matter shame. Scenes of unbridled bird sexuality made the life of Richard III seem very anaemic and suburban. These dear little feathered friends would not have hesitated to make away with their nephews. Why, they had no compunction whatever about the death of their own offspring. As the weeks wore on and their eggs hatched, the nestlings fell to their death on the concrete floor below literally by the dozen." (C 21)
• "In schoolmastering or the Church, the labourer is in a seller's market. You can get a job unless you are patently half-witted or have a record blacker than even the hardest-pressed employer can overlook." (C 22)

A fascintating and very readable memoir of A Life in the Theatre. March 2020; 314 pages

"In the Office of Constable" by Sir Robert Mark

Sir Robert Mark was Commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police between 1972 and 1977. Notable events during his tenure included the attempted kidnapping of Princess Anne, the Balcombe Street siege in which three IRA terrorists were eventually captured and the Spaghetti House siege which was an armed robbery gone wrong. Mark was responsible for a reform of the Met, in particular the CID, to root out what was then almost endemic corruption. On a less positive note, he was in charge when a clash between left wing protesters and the National Front led to mounted police charging the left wing protesters and the subsequent death of a protester; Mark notes the incident but points out that the police were exonerated in Lord Scarman's subsequent report (although Scarman notes the unlikely possibility that the death was caused by a police truncheon). He was also Commissioner during the Grunwick dispute when he authorised the deployment of the paramilitary Special Patrol Group against the strikers who were mostly East Asian women whose average weekly pay was less than 40% the national average. His views might best be described as right-wing:

• "The disgraceful behaviour of left-wing extremists at Red Lion Square, at Grunwick ..." (C 19)
• "the Shrewsbury pickets had committed the worst of all crimes, worse even than murder, the attempt to achieve an industrial or political objective by criminal violence." (C 12) Two trades unionists, one of whom was Ricky Tomlinson who subsequently became known as an actor, were convicted of 'conspiracy to intimidate' under the Conspiracy Act of 1875 and imprisoned; their offence had been to organise 'flying' pickets to try to prevent non-unionised workers from accessing a building site during an industrial dispute.
• "We would not let any legal niceties prevent us from dealing with terrorism" (C 13)
• "Stupid people always present much greater problems than the intelligent because they are always so unpredictable." (C 14)
• "The raising of the school leaving age ... with its consequence increase in truancy was followed by a significant increase in burglaries and auto-crime in Inner London." (C 15)
• He feels that women police officers are "an expensive investment, because on average, they serve under four years before leaving, usually on marriage." (C 17)
• "The English judicial system ... is, in reality, effective only for dealing with the compliant, the weak, the stupid, the illiterate and the spontaneous wrongdoers" (C 20)
• "the ghettoes of London, created by the idealist and the inept." (C 24)
• "Police have suffered many casualties in trying to cope with crime and vandalism by black youngsters." (C 24)

He established A10 in Scotland Yard to investigate cases of corruption amongst the Met officers but he resigned over a law which set up external scrutiny of police misconduct. He doesn't appear to understand, despite quoting, Juvenal's 'Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?': who guards the guards themselves? His main argument is that lay people (unless they were part of the 'establishment') would be incompetent to judge police: "If they were non-establishment figures ... they would not, in assessing police misconduct ... know their backside from their elbow." (C 16) But if it is foolish to trust the guards to guards the guards it is little better to expect them to be guarded adequately by their rugby-playing cronies.

He attacks the jury system on the same basis: that jurors might not be as well-educated as he would like: "If the one person in the criminal justice process most fitted by education, training and experience to decide the issue, namely the judge, is to be denied that right, how much more illogical is it to confer it upon any one of twelve random jurymen, least fitted by deafness, stupidity, prejudice, or one of a hundred other reasons to do so?" (C 22) But the jury system was designed so that the ordinary people had a say in the administration of justice precisely as a safeguard against the narrowness of opinion that characterises the judgement of any one group even if they have been trained to judge.

He is writing before the creation of the Crown Prosecution Service and he defends the then right of the police to initiate prosecutions: "there is no conceivable justification for adding to their [lawyers] discretion ion the pursuance or conduct of prosecutions the right to decide whether to prosecute or not. That right is presently exercised by the police on behalf of the people." (C 22) The problem is that the police could prosecute even when there was little chance of a conviction. But then, Mark seems to regard acquittals as a failure to convict, as if anyone presented to trial by the police must necessarily be guilty. Thus, when 29 out of 82 people are acquitted after an expensive trail following the Notting Hill Carnival "the proceedings were a fitting comment on the remoteness of the stipendiary magistracy" rather than suggesting that the police had put forward innocent people for trial (C 17) While he was in Leicester he discovered that 39% of those tried for crimes of violence were acquitted which he describes as "extraordinary"; he concludes that the justice system was a failure (rather than the police). Acquittal, for Mark, means "forensic trickery" or corrupt lawyers, never inefficient or possible corrupt policemen.

He was, of course, writing at a time of increased terrorism in Britain. We today feel threatened by terrorism; in 1976 "in London alone there had been 182 explosive devices and 11 shootings." In England and Wales "58 people had been killed". We seem to have forgotten Irish terrorism.

He has a tendency to use sentence fragments, for example: "Came the great day when the survivors were packed with their kit into a three-tonner en route for Sandhurst." (C 3)

Selected quotes:

• "A poor old woman in a virtually furniture-less hovel In Bradford ... had starved to death. There was one stale crust, a little sour milk, no fire and bare floorboards." (C 2)
• "In Manchester birds and plant life required a real talent for survival." (C 3)
• "It seemed to me wrong in principle that the ability to park in the centre of a city on highways ... should depend on the ability to pay." (C 5)
• "Courts are inclined to generosity in handing out public money, especially if the recipients are lawyers." (C 10)
• "It is a quirk of human nature that jurymen faced with the choice between a pornographer and a do-gooder will usually choose the former. There is nothing less appealing to the ordinary mortal than unattractive virtue." (C 13)
• "Though we were deeply concerned about the safety of the hostages I did not consider for one moment that they were not expendable. I felt ... that human life was of little importance when balanced against the principle that violence must not be allowed to succeed." (C 14)
• "Crime ... monopolizes much ... of what laughingly passes for literature." (C 19)
• "The police are therefore very much on their own in attempting to preserve order in an increasingly turbulent society in which socialist philosophy has changed from raising the standards of the poor and deprived to reducing the standards of the wealthy, the skilled and the deserving." (C 19)

Memoirs are always flawed by the fact that it is difficult to structure reality in the way a novelist can. But this one is also marred by the self-congratulatory smugness and the inability to see anyone else's point of view.

December 2019; 311 pages

Other memoirs and autobiographies reviewed in this blog can be found here. 

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

"Not for the faint-hearted" by John Stevens

This is the autobiography of the Head of Scotland Yard, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police between 2000 to 2005. He started as an PC in London in the days of whistles and truncheons and progressed through detective work to become Deputy Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire, Chief Constable of Northumbria, one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Constabulary, and author of three reports on the policing of Northern Ireland. So he has had a very successful career.

I can't imagine liking him as a man. He glories in the fact that he often worked sixteen to eighteen hour days so his poor wife Cynthia (and three children) can hardly have seen him (especially since, in pursuit of his career, he often took postings far from their family home). Furthermore, he seems to have been a person whose every decision was correct. Nowhere does he suggest that he could have done something better or that he made a mistake; he always excuses himself. I can find no evidence of empathy with those on the wrong side of the law; he appears intractably inflexible in his attitude towards policing. This spills over into his attitude towards public order; he asserts that people have the right to protest but he kettled protestors for seven hours in Oxford Circus; when the court acquits someone he always seems to regard it as a wrong decision (except when he himself was on trial over alleged Health and Safety offences). This is a man who, in his own eyes, is always right. I am a little frightened of men like that.

Selected quotes:

• "Before the pay rises introduced by the Royal Commission of 1960, [police] officers had been going to work at the end of the week with sandwiches that had no fillings." (C 4)
• "There was a party in the office every Friday night ... nobody liked eating on an empty stomach." (C 10)

The problem with memoirs is that they have no plot.

October 2019; 323 pages

Other memoirs reviewed in this blog can be found here.

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