"Three Lives" by Gertrude Stein

Three short stories/ novellas by the famous American ex-pat novelist who also write Blood on the Dining-Room Floor.

Despite Stein's privileged upbringing, the stories focus on ordinary folk. The Good Anna and The Gentle Lena are both servants, Melanctha is a girl of mixed heritage who "liked to wander" rather more than is good for her. Trigger warning: some of the characters conform to racial stereotypes. 

The prose style is not nearly so difficult as in Blood on the Dining-Room Floor. However it does contain some very rambling paragraphs which use recursiveness and quasi-repetitiveness to interesting effect, both in and out of dialogue:

“That certainly is the way always with you, Jeff Campbell, if I understand you right the way you are always acting to me. That certainly is right the way I am saying it to you now, Jeff Campbell. You certainly didn't anyway trust me now no more, did you, when you acted so bad to me. I certainly am right the way I say it Jeff now to you. I certainly am right when I ask you for it now, to tell me what I ask you, about not trusting me more then again, Jeff, just like you never really knew me.” (Melanctha)
“All he knew was, he was an easy now always to be with Melanctha. All he knew was that he was always uneasy when he was with Melanctha, not the way he used to be from just not being very understanding, but now, because he never could be honest with her, because he was now always feeling her strong suffering, in her, because he knew now he was having a straight, good feeling with her, but she went so fast, and he was so slow to her; Jeff knew his right feeling never got a chance to show itself as strong to her.” (Melanctha)

The Melanctha story itself loops back to the beginning and repeats itself, except the third person of Rose Johnson becomes a first person in her dialogue.

Classic stories by a writer with a distinctive (unique?) style.

Selected quotes:

• “The languor and the stir, the warmth and weight and the strong feel of life from the deep centres of the earth that comes always with the early, soaking spring, when it is not answered with an active fervent joy, gives always anger, irritation and unrest.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “The sharp bony edges and corners of her head and face were still rounded out with flesh, but already the temper and the humour showed sharply in her clean blue eyes, and the thinning was begun about the lower jaw, that was so often strained with the upward pressure of resolve.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “Her bearing was full of the strange coquetry of anger and of fear, the stiffness, the bridling, the suggestive movement underneath the rigidness of forced control, all the ways the passions have to show themselves all one.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “It was wonderful how Mrs Lehntman could listen and not hear, could answer and yet not decide, could say and do what she was asked and yet the things as they were before.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “Anna was never daring in her ways. Save and you will have the money you have saved was all that she could know.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “Friendship goes by favour. There is always danger of a break or of a stronger power coming in between.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “Melanctha had not found it easy with herself to make her wants and what she had agree.” (Melanctha)
• “In these next years Melanctha learned many ways that lead to wisdom. She learned the ways, and dimly in the distance she saw wisdom. Those years of learning led very straight to trouble for Melanctha, though in these years Melanctha never did or meant anything that was really wrong.” (Melanctha)
• “It was very early now in the Southern springtime. The trees were just beginning to get the little zigzag crinkles in them, which the young buds always give them.” (Melanctha)

November 2025; 224 pages

First published in 1909

My paperback edition was issued by Renard Press in 2022

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

"Country" by Michael Hughes

 A 2018 Book of the Year in the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement.

The story is the story of the Iliad but transposed to Northern Ireland at the time of the Troubles, just before the ceasefire. The Greeks become Republican gunmen seeking to disrupt the fragile ceasefire; Achilles is their famous sniper Achill (aka Liam O'Brien), Agamemnon is Pig, their commanding officer, his brither Dog is Menelaus, Sid is Odysseus, and old Ned is Nestor. The Trojans are the British, holed up in an army base (called Castle William but some vandals have torn down the W so it had become Illiam), with their various allies including the police and the local Orangemen, Hector is Henry, married to Anna, father of baby Max. Helen is Nellie, married to Dog, but now, having become an informer, she is living with Alex, nicknamed Paris. The Olympian Gods are the Higher-Ups, the untouchable politicians, who make decisions and dispose of men's lives.

It is remarkably faithful to the plot, even including the necessary long speeches and some of the Iliad's hideous descriptions of the effects of violence on the human body. But it works! Written using the contemporary Irish slang, translating meals into fry-ups, chariots into cars and even the funeral games of Patroclus into competitions held between men at a wake. This is a clever and even insightful version of a classic epic.

In fact it is better than that. Yes, part of the pleasure of reading lies in the ability to decrypt it. But its immersion in Irishness and Irishisms give it an utterly authentic feel. 

Selected quotes:

• "Fury. Pure fury. The blood was up. Lost the head completely." (Ch 1; first lines)
• "Told her if she couldn't decide, to just give each of them a number and roll a dice. ... He said you didn't have to do what the dice said, but how you felt when the number came up would show you what you really wanted." (Ch 10) I've advised students to do this in multiple-choice exam papers but not as a way of choosing a boyfriend.
• "She couldn't believe they had a bottle of wine on the table while they were eating. Not that they opened it." (Ch 16)
• "He gave her a wee smiley frown that said, You really don't need to call me sir. And she gave him a wee smiley frown back that said, Och I know, but sure old habits die hard after eight hundred years of oppression. Sir." (Ch 29)
• "Dog hated being wounded. All that sitting around. Fuck all to do. He always ended up thinking. And he really hated thinking." (Ch 34)
• "Thinking gets you nowhere in this game. ... Crack on with the job, and leave the brain-work to the higher-ups." (Ch 35)
• "But like any man who got to be the best at what he did, they promoted him off that job, and sat him in a wee office directing others who weren't half as good." (Ch 37)
• "Death looks like glory to a young man. Get a few more years on you, and glory starts looking a lot like death." (Ch 47)
• "Back at the Ships, Ned was in full flow. He'd seen the like before, many's and many's the time. He'd heard all the pros and cons for and the pros and cons against." (Ch 49)
• "Of all the operations you set in motion, you were lucky if one out of fifty made the news. Most people never appreciated it was hard fucking work. Tedious. Frustrating. Soul-destroying." (Ch 50)
• "You don't listen to what a man says. You watch what he does, and you know who he is." (Ch 58)

Not only is it clever, not only is it well-written, but its transposition  into such a visceral context provides a fresh perspective on the original. Spell-binding.

December 2023; 314 pages

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

"The Nibelungenlied" translated by A T Hatto

A castle in the modern Rhine

The 'song of the Nibelungs' is one of the classic mediaeval prose romances; it is most well-known today for forming one of the key bases from Wagner's Ring Cycle, although much of his tale is actually derived from other mediaeval poems.

The story

Siegfried (arrives in Worms to woo Kriemhilde, the sister of King Gunther of the Burgundians (who rules with his two brothers Gernot and Giselher). Siegfried helps Gunther defeat an army of invading Saxons. He then travels (with Gunther and vassals Hagen and his brother Dancwart) to Iceland so that Gunther can woo Princess Brunhilde, a lady of formidable strength who demands that Gunther beats her in three trials (throwing a javelin, throwing a boulder, and long jump) or lose his life. Siegfried helps Gunther by using a cloak of invisibility, ensuring that Gunther seems to have won. Brunhilde acknowledges defeat but, on her wedding night, refuses access to Gunther, tying him up in her girdle and hanging him from a hook on the wall for the duration of the night. So he again enlists Siegfried’s help who, the next night, using his cloak, subdues Brunhilde (but doesn’t violate her, leaving that to Gunther, after which Brunhilde loses her strength) and steals her ring and the famous girdle which he gives to his bride Kriemhilde.

Brunhilde has the mistaken belief that Siegfried is one of Gunther’s vassals and therefore begrudges him marrying Gunther’s sister Kriemhilde. She doesn’t realises that Siegfried is King of the Netherlands, the Nibelungs, and Norway. So when, after a few years, Siegfried and his queen Kriemhilde return to Gunther and Brunhilde’s court, the two ladies have a fight about who has precedence. Angry  Kriemhilde reveals that she has the ring and the girdle, implying that Siegfried deflowered Brunhilde. 

Hagen, arguing that this scandal has dishonoured King Gunther, and (as a bonus) that this will be a good way to get hold of the fabulous treasure of the Nibelungs, won by Siegfried previous to this story, conspires with Gunther to murder Siegfried, after tricking Kriemhilde into revealing Siegfried’s vulnerability (a patch between his shoulder-blades where a linden leaf landed while he was bathing in the blood of a dragon he had killed, so becoming horny-skinned). Hagen's plot works and Siegfried, a guest, is betrayed and assassinated, and his gold is stolen and then hidden in the Rhine.

After a dozen years or so the still beautiful Kriemhilde (who stayed at Gunther’s court rather than returning to the Netherlands and her infant son) marries King Etzel of the Huns. Later, seeking vengeance for her first husband, she invites her brother, and Hagen, and their men, to her new husband’s court. They go, despite realising that it is probably a trick. Following a lot of fighting, and many dead, finally Gunther and Hagen, the only survivors of the thousands of Burgundians on the trip, are captured by Dietrich, and imprisoned and then murdered by Kriemhilde, though they refuse to say where the Nibelung's treasure is hidden.

The sources

There is an awful lot of fighting in the poem but A T Hatto points out that there is very little technical detail about the fights, suggesting that the anonymous author was not a knight. Nor, given the lack of a Christian message, was he likely to have been a monk. The most likely explanation, especially given the prominence of two minstrels employed as messengers, is that the poet was a literate minstrel.

Hatto dates the poem using things mentioned. The bleeding corpse is a motive in the poem Iwein by Hartmann von Aue which was probably written in about 1198. The fabric from 'Ninnive' probably comes from a version of the Alexander legend written about 1190. Rumold, a minor character, is described as ‘Lord of the Kitchen’ which is a real title dating from about 1201. Etzel’s wedding with Kriemhild in Vienna may be based on the wedding in Vienna of Duke Leopold VI and Theodora Comnena, grand-daughter of a Byzantine Emperor, which took place in 1203. All this suggests a date of composition of about 1203.

Sources for the poem include the Lex Burgundionum (pre 516) and Latin chronicles which mention a Burgundian King called Gundaharius who has a brother called Gislaharius; these are probably the originals of Gunther and Giselher. Etzel is almost certainly Attila the Hun, said to have been murdered in 453 by Germanic wife Ildico. 

Another source, the Waltharius, probably written about 920 by Ekkehard, a monk of St Gall, records the escape of Burgundian princess Hiltgirt, her lover Waltharius, and Hagano, from the court of Attila, after Guntharius, King of the Franks, reneged on a treaty; Hagano and Guntharius conspire to steal from Hiltgunt and Waltharius the treasure they have stolen from Attila. In this story the Franks are described as 'nebulones' (rascals?) which may be the origin of the word 'Nibelungs'.

The Poetic Eddas contain part of a poem in which Brynhild, Gunnar’s wife, accuses Sigurd of deflowering her, perhaps because she is jealous that Gudrun, Sigurd’s wife, is pregnant. Guthorm kills Sigurd, perhaps acting on behalf of a conspiracy involving Hogni. Another poem in the Eddas, the Atlakvida, dated to about 900, tells the story of Atli, King of the Huns, who invites Gunnarr, King of the Burgundians, to visit him. Gunnar consults his brother Hogni: why did their sister, Gudrun, Alti’s wife, send a ring twined with wolf’s hair? Despite this warning Gunnarr goes. The Burgundians are seized (after Hogni kills eight men). Gunnarr refuses to say where his treasure is hidden. The Huns bring him a human heart, saying it is Hogni’s, but he refuses to believe it, saying the heart is too trembly. The Huns cut out Hogni’s heart, who dies laughing. Gunnarr now says that, since Hogni was the only other person who knew there the treasure is, the Huns will never find it. They throw him in a snake pit where he dies, playing the harp. Gudrun then revenges herself on Atli by (a) feeding him with the flesh of their sons at a banquet (b) killing him in bed (c) burning down his house. Many of these items are found in the second part of the Nibelungenlied. 

Poetic form
I read a prose translation into English. The original versions are written in verse. There is variation of form but the fundamental basis is that each stanza has four lines with an AABB rhyme pattern (there are also internal rhymes, particularly for the words just before the caesuras. The first three lines of each stanza have three metrical beats, a caesura, and then three further beats. The final line of each stanza has an additional foot after the caesura. The last word before the caesura is usually an iamb (stress/unstress) whereas the final word of the line is usually stressed. 

Evaluation

Morally speaking, this is a squalid tale. The author is firmly on the side of valiant fighting men and very misogynistic. Thus, the treacherous and indeed thieving and murderous Hagen, is praised for his last ditch stand against impossible odds. Meanwhile Kriemhilde is a she-devil, principally because she outrages the laws of hospitality under which you shouldn’t seek to kill your guests (though that is exactly what Hagen did earlier, prompting this symmetrical revenge). Furthermore, Gunther more or less escapes censure for his part in tricking Brunhilde. But this, of course, is to judge the story in the light of modern-day morality.

Judging it by modern literary sensibility is similarly anachronistic. There is a great deal of action, fighting in particular, and plot, and very little concern for character. Hagen is a villain according to modern sensibilities but is presented by the poet as brave and a great fighter whose morally dubious actions are realpolitik; the bereaved Kriemhilde is derided as a she-devil. Time scales don't work: Giselher is described as young despite being at least fifty, Kriemhilde preserves her charms over a similar period, Dancwart claims to have been a child when he was manifestly an adult. 

Much of the narrative is along the lines of: this happened and then this and then this. 

Selected quotes:

• "Siegfried loved his sister, though Siegfried had never set eyes on her." (Ch 5)
• "Siegfried son of Siegmund stood there handsome as though limned on parchment." (Ch 5)
• "He tried to win her by force, and tumbled her shift for her, at which the haughty girl reached for the girdle of stout silk cord that she wore about her waist, and subjected him to great suffering and shame, for in return of being balked of her sleep, she bound him hand and foot, carried him to a nail, and hung him on the wall." (Ch 10)
• "That evening, while the King sat and dined, many fine robes were splashed with tine as the butlers plied the tables." (Ch 13) This sounds as if the butlers were very clumsy but I think it is meant to show that the courtiers can afford to buy new clothes.
• "One of the warriors then went over to a corpse and, removing his helmet and kneeling over a wound, began to drink the blood that oozed from it and, little used to it though he was, he thought it very good." (Ch 36) Not vampirism; the warrior is very thirsty. But this passage adduces evidence for the partiality of the author: anything the Burgundians do (tricking women, murdering guests, drinking blood) is good but their enemies are continually characterised as evil. 

There was a BBC Radio 4UK 'In Our Time' programme about the Nibelungenlied; click on the link for the podcast.

September 2023; 290 pages

Translated by A T Hatto and first pubslished in 1965

My Penguin paperback edition, with revisions, was issued in 1969

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Passau

The text says: Passau: A literary centre of the High Middle Ages. The Nibelungenlied, a major European epic, was written here around the year 1200, at the court of Bishop Wolfger von Erla (who was bishop between 1191 and 1204). It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2009. The outstanding position of the Bishop's court in mediaeval literary life is also evidenced by the fact that Bishop Wolfger's travel accounts mention 'five long shillings' for a fur coat, which Walther von der Vogelweide received in 2003 as a singer in the episcopal court. This note is the only documentary evidence of this greatest poet of the German Middle Ages.

I'm writing this on a river cruise while the boat is docked at Passau, the town in modern Germany where the Danube meets the Inn and the Ilz. Being at the confluence of three rivers made Passau an important town in the Holy Roman Empire. In Chapter 21, which describes Kriemhild's journey to Hungary where she will marry Etzel (Atilla the Hun), we are told that she travels through a place where there is a cloister and where the Inn flow into the Danube, a place called Passau, where "Bishop Pilgrim" holds sway. Many scholars believe that this is a sort of product placement, or mention of the sponsor, who may have been renowned literary patron Wolfgang von Erla who was bishop in Passau between 1191 - 1204, dates coinciding with the expected dating of the poem. 

Selected quotes from 'An Introduction to the Second Reading':

• “Although the poet wrote on parchment, he was not composing in a vacuum ... but, instead, he was writing and then reciting under the pressure of live and far from unanimous audiences who somehow had to be appeased.” (Introduction to a second reading: the poem as an entity)
• “Various poems about Siegfried’s younger and wilder days must have been circulating in Germany at the end of the twelfth century.” (Introduction to a second reading: inconsistencies, obscurities, prevarications)
• “What ... was the poet going to do with a king who dishonestly married a queen beyond his own wooing and who then connived at the murder of his brother-in-law, but who afterwards fought and died as a hero?” (Introduction to a second reading: inconsistencies, obscurities, prevarications)
• “The trait which explains most of Hagen’s deeds is political clear sightedness followed by ruthless action. ... It is always Hagen who forces the pace when important decisions have to be made.” (Introduction to a second reading: characters)
• “Etzel [ie Attila] ... is far from being a Scourge of God. Rather does he remind us of other great kings of medieval literature, of King Arthur and Charlemagne, in his role of an amiable roi faineant.” (Introduction to a second reading: characters)
• “Although we must assume that the Nibelungenlied was written by a Christian poet for Christian audiences, and that he leaves loose ends for thoughtful Christians who take up if they so please, the mood which the theme induced was not a Christian mood, and the result is not a Christian poem.” (Introduction to a second reading: the ethos of the poem)
• “The old alliterative measure gave way everywhere to rhyme during the ninth century, and so the ancient epic formulae, in which much might have been conserved, were disrupted.” (Introduction to a second reading: the two-fold texture of the poem; footnote)

"The Pilgrim's Progress" by John Bunyan

 

This quiet spot off the River Ouse in Bedford was where John Bunyan baptised people.

This classic allegory is one of the best-selling books ever. It was written in 1678 by John Bunyan, a tinker who had been a soldier with the Parliamentary army during the English Civil War,  while he was in Bedford prison for being an unlicensed preacher during the religious repressions following the restoration of the English monarchy. 

It is presented as a series of dreams. The characters are, as was the fashion of the time, named for the characteristics: thus Christian, Mr Valiant-for-Truth, Mr Standfast, Mercy and so on. In the first part Christian travels through hardships such as the Slough of Despond and the Valley of the Shadow of Death and encounters temptations such as Vanity Fair and monsters such as Apollyon before fording the River of Death. In the second part, Christian's wife Christiana and his four sons form the nucleus of a party making a second pilgrimage in his by-now-famous footsteps. 

The prose is inevitably old-fashioned. There are no chapters but there are marginal annotations which describe which part of the story you are in. Poems, presumably hymns, are interspersed through the narrative.

Some of it is rather tedious theologising - it is, after all, a sermon - but the picaresque story, despite the inevitability of the happy ending, still has its charm.

The book has been hugely  influential, not least to other writers such as George Eliot (for example in Silas Marner). Some of the quotations below have reached the status of proverbs. And, of course, it contains 'Bunyan's hymn': 

"Who would true valour see,Let him come hither;One here will constant be,Come wind, come weather;There's no discouragementShall make him once relentHis first avowed intentTo be a pilgrim.

"Who so beset him roundWith dismal stories,Do but themselves confound—His strength the more is.No lion can him fright;He'll with a giant fight;But he will have a rightTo be a pilgrim.

"Hobgoblin nor foul fiendCan daunt his spirit;He knows he at the endShall life inherit.Then fancies fly away,He'll fear not what men say;He'll labour night and dayTo be a pilgrim."
It has been rated best in the Guardian's top 100 novels of all time.

Selected quotations:

Part One

• "As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a dream." (First line)
• "there is a company of these crazy-headed coxcombs, that, when they take a fancy by the end, are wiser in their own eyes than seven men that can render a reason."
• "He is, by reason of age, and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger days, grown so crazy and stiff in his joints, that he can now do little more than sit in his cave's mouth, grinning at pilgrims as they go by, and biting his nails because he cannot come at them."
• "What you will. I will talk of things heavenly, or things earthly; things moral, or things evangelical; things sacred, or things worldly; things past, or things to come; things foreign, or things at home; things more essential, or things circumstantial, provided that all be done to our profit."
• "at this fair are all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not."
• "to tell you the truth, I am become a gentleman of good quality, yet my great-grandfather was but a waterman, looking one way and rowing another, and I got most of my estate by the same occupation."
• "we are always most zealous when religion goes in his silver slippers; we love much to walk with him in the street, if the sun shines, and the people applaud him."
• "Sin was very sweet to my flesh, and I was loath to leave it."

Part Two

• "Now the seal was the contents and sum of the passover which the children of Israel did eat when they came out from the land of Egypt, and the mark was set between their eyes." 
• "Why doth the pelican pierce her own breast with her bill? ... To nourish her young ones with her blood, and thereby to show that Christ the blessed so loveth his young, his people, as to save them from death by his blood." 
• "the way is the way, and there's an end."
• "I know thou art a cock of the right kind, for thou hast said the truth."
• "Mr. Fearing was one that played upon this bass; he and his fellows sound the sackbut, whose notes are more doleful than the notes of other music are; though, indeed, some say the bass is the ground of music. ... The first string that the musician usually touches is the bass, when he intends to put all in tune."
• "When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the river-side, into which as he went he said, 'Death, where is thy sting?' And as he went down deeper, he said, 'Grave, where is thy victory?' So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side."

April 2022

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

"Tristram Shandy" by Laurence Sterne

 This is a classic of English Literature, written between 1759 and 1767, whose fame rests mostly on the fact that it is so surreal. It is the ur-novel of the 'stream of consciousness' style and is marked by digressions within digressions ("This is neither here nor there - why do I mention it? - Ask my pen, - it governs me, - I govern not it."; 6.6; on the other hand "There is nothing in this world I abominate worse, than to be interrupted in a story." 7.1, but this book is all interruptions!) and by transcending the form of the novel, using blank (and black) chapters, and squiggles; it contains passages in other languages and (a few) footnotes. The Author's Preface is in volume three chapter 20!

It isn't easy to read! The speech of characters is sometimes juxtaposed and interleaved to the extent that it is sometimes difficult to know who is talking. Many of the narrator's digressions (and there are many) deal with philosophical and religious issues current in the middle of the eighteenth century which I needed explaining through the usually excellent notes to the Penguin Classics edition. Similarly, although it is famed as a bawdy book, full of double-entendres, many of these were lost on me; who knew, for example, that 'cabbage-planting' was a rude expression?

Just working out what was going on was a strain. "When a man is telling a story in the strange way I do mine, he is obliged continually to be going backwards and forwards to keep all tight together in the reader's fancy." (6.33) But the continual going backwards and forwards made it difficult for me to keep track.

The plot of the first two volumes revolves mostly around the gestation and birth of the protagonist whose nose is damaged by the forceps used by male midwife Dr Slop and whose name is misunderstood as Tristram because the maid Susannah, taking him to be baptised, can't remember his father's chosen name of Trismegistus. Later volumes include a journey from Calais to Avignon, and the amours of Tristram's Uncle Toby (an ex-soldier who spends most of his time talking about the campaigns in which he was involved before being injured in the groin). 

The characters include Tristram, the (initially not-yet-born) narrator, his father and mother, his Uncle Toby, Dr Slop, Corporal Trim, Obadiah and Susannah. 

It's influences include Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes, The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais and works by satirist Jonathan Swift, poet Alexander Pope, essayist Montaigne, and philosopher John Locke. I have read very few of these authors and so I was unable to appreciate the borrowings (sometimes amounting to plagiarism) or the satire.

The modernist 'stream of consciousness' writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were clearly influenced by Sterne's style.

In New Scientist (26/02/2022, 31), there is a criticism of the film 'Dual' by Riley Stearns which contains the following phrase: “Events unfold in too surreal and nonsensical a fashion to maintain an acceptable level of credibility”. You could say the same about Tristram Shandy. But isn't that the whole point of the book? Nonsense, with gusto, becomes surreal comedy.

To sum up, I found it very hard going. But who says a classic should be easy?

It is rated 6th on the Guardian's 100 best novels of all time and a BBC poll rated it a disappointing 47th best novel ever.

Selected quotes:

• "I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me." (1.1)
• "My mother ... knew no more than her backside what my father meant" (1.3)
• "The idea of duration ... is got merely from the train and succession of our ideas" (2.8)
• "The thought floated only in Dr Slop's mind, without sail or ballast to it, as a simple proposition; millions of which, as your worship knows, are every day swimming quietly in the thin juice of a man's understanding, without being carried backwards or forwards, till some little gusts of passion or interest drive them to the side." (3.9)
• "Wit and judgment in this world never go together, inasmuch as they are two operations differing from each other as wide as east is from west ... so are farting and hickuping." (3.20)
• "Before an affliction is digested, - consolation ever comes too soon; - and after it is digested, - it comes too late" (3.29)
• "The Thracians wept when a child was born ... and feasted and made merry when a man went out of this world; and with reason. - Death opens the gate of fame, and shuts the gate of envy after it." (5.3)
• "The observation of Aristotle, 'Quod omne animal post coitum est triste'." (5.36)
• "Never is my imagination so busy as in framing his responses from the etchings of his countenance" (7.32); Tristram holds conversations with a donkey.
• "There is nothing more pleasing to a traveller - or more terrible to travel-writers, than a large, rich plain." (7.42)
• "My father had such a skirmishing, cutting kind of a slashing way with him in his disputations ... that if there were twenty people in company -  in less than half an hour he was sure to have every one of 'em against him." (8.34)
• "He knew not ... so much as the right end of a Woman from the wrong, and therefore was never altogether at his ease near any one of them." (9.3)
• "Friendship has two garments; an outer, and an under one." (9.23)
• "L--d! said my mother, what is this story all about? - A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick - And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard." (9.33; last words)

March 2022; 588 pages

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

"Dune" by Frank Herbert

 The classic scifi story about the battle for a desert planet. A galactic empire is riven by faction fighting between aristocratic houses. An order of witches controls an aristocratic breeding programme. A young man on a desert planet is taught mind control tricks. This epic story is clearly the influence for Star Wars but, as the biggest-selling scifi novel of all time, it is so much more.

Its major themes include environmentalism, psychedelic drug use, eugenics and religion. There are clear references to the emergence and rapid expansion of Islam from its desert setting. Although religion is fundamental to the motives of the characters, and they experience drug-induced altered states of consciousness which include the ability to see the future, Dune is resolutely secular: there are prophets but no Gods.

Told from a multiple PoV, the plot is a characteristic hero's adventure; in the very earliest pages the hero is tested by and receives advice from a crone. Much of the interest of the book comes from the world-making which is incredible. Each 'chapter' begins with a quote from the works of Princess Irulan.

Selected quotes:

• "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." 
• "A world is supported by four things ... the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valour of the brave." 
• "She went through the quick regimen of calmness - the two deep breaths, the ritual thought." 
• "Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount." 
• "Is it defeatist or treacherous for a doctor to diagnose a disease correctly?"
• "She stared at him, thinking of the Duke's men rubbing their woes together in the barracks until you could almost smell the charge there, like burnt insulation."
• "The day hums sweetly when you have enough bees working for you."
• "As his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes ... that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error."
• "She had succumbed to that profound drive shared by all creatures who are faced with death - the drive to seek immortality through progeny." 
• "When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late."
• "Give as few orders as possible ... Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject."

A hugely influential epic.

February 2022; 485 pages

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

"La Vida del Buscon" (The Swindler) by Francisco Gomez de Quevedo y Villegas

 The father of Pablos is a thief, his mother is a witch, his uncle is a hangman. He becomes the servant of Don Diego, a young gentleman, accompanying him to boarding school where he goes hungry. Eventually he becomes a rogue, making money using any tricks he can: including theft, beggary, and card-sharping. 

This is a classic picaresque, set in 1600s Spain. It is knockabout stuff, frequently scatological, which reminded me of the crude humour of the Carry On films, but without their subtlety and euphemisms. There is no character development, unless you count the gradual learning of new tricks. It presumably provides an insight into the society of that place and time (clothes, frequently threadbare, play an important part and everyone is on the make; he spends some time in prison and the author was at one time a governor of a prison so he must have known what he was talking about) but many of the jokes are too obvious to be very funny and in the end I grew a little weary. The ending is abrupt, as if the author ran out of things to say.

But it had its moments:

• "You are well aware of the price of this book, as you have already bought it, unless you are looking through it in the bookshop, a practice which is very tiresome for the bookseller and ought to be suppressed with the utmost rigour of the law." (To the Reader)
• "They brought in little bowls of a soup so clear that if Narcissus had drunk it he would have fallen in quicker than into the pool." (1.3)
• "I had no right to take anything more out of the house than my shadow." (1.8)

April 2021, 131 pages

This review was written by 
the author of Motherdarling

"The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne"

 A classic of American literature. It has been praised by classic authors George Eliot, DH Lawrence and Henry James. I thought it was dreadful.

It was written in 1850 and is firmly in the melodrama school. As a historical novel it reminded me of Walter Scott. It is full of 'thee and thou' dialogue, with tortured sentence structures:

• "'One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would enjoin upon thee,' continued the scholar. 'Thou hast kept the secret of thy paramour. Keep, likewise, mine!'"
• "'Sayest thou so?' cried the Governor. 'Nay, we might have judged that such a child's mother must needs be a scarlet woman, and a worthy type of her of Babylon!'"

It starts with a long rambling frame narrative in which Hawthorne recounts the tribulations of working in a Customs House and eventually gets round to a discovery he has made of a manuscript. The 'Scarlet Letter' story is based, he claims, is based on this manuscript.

At last we get into the story proper. In the first scene Hester Prynne and her baby girl are on the pillory in a puritan New England town in the early days of settlement: she has been convicted of adultery and sentenced to three hours humiliation and a lifetime of wearing on her clothes a scarlet letter A. There are two mysteries. Who is the hunchbacked stranger who, that very moment, has been brought out of the forest by the Indians? And who is the father of Hester's child? The first mystery is resolved within a few chapters: the hunchbacked stranger becomes a vengeful devil. The solution to the second we are pretty sure of long before the half way mark when it is finally revealed (in so much as a Victorian novelist can reveal extra-marital sex). There is therefore very little dramatic tension in the story. 

The characters are stereotypical. Of course the hunchback is a villain. Of course the accused Hester is an angel. The child is a proto-hippy wild child as a 'natural' child would be in the imagination of a Victorian. There is an old crone who cackles about meeting the devil in the woods. 

There are some redeeming moments in which the author makes some cogent observations about life:

• "Neither the front not the back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the road to Paradise." (Introductory)
• "The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison." (Ch 1)
• "A man burdened with a secret should especially avoid the intimacy of his physician." (Ch 9)
• "Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognise his enemy when the latter actually appeared." (Ch 10)
• "No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true." (Ch 20)

Pointless frame narrative, dreadful dialogue, melodramatic but predictable plot, stereotypical characters. At least it is short compared to other Victorian novels.

April 2021; 287 pages

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