"Saltburn" by Drew Gummerson

In terms of sheer invention, this might be one of the most creative books I have ever read. Saltburn is a set of six overlapping stories in which the weird and wonderful is everyday. Except for Stick of Rock, each story is a surreal bildungsroman of a young boy (at least to start with) involving poverty, parental loss and sexual awakening amid a series of ever more extraordinary adventures.

There are some links between the stories, such as that the medical services in Saltburn are short of money so that the doctors and nurses have musical instruments attached to their clothing which they are always trying to sell to raise cash. The fishermen are a randy and promiscuous lot. There is a nuclear power station - or is it? - across the bay, a card sharp school based in a former prison, aquaria, a monopolistically-minded local businessman called Evans, a gift shop that sells an almost endless selection of tat, mermaids and amusement arcades and a terrific amount of anal sex.

There are a lot of lists, such as when the owner of Delicious Gifts remembers what he has to sell, with prices. That list extends for nearly two pages. Others are shorter. The lists lend the narrative a breathless quality as well as anchoring what would otherwise be a bizarre set of fantasies in some sort of verisimilitude.

A Piece of Ass has a clever frame in which the narrator intrudes, starting with: “Back then, this time I’m thinking of, Corey’s mum ...”

I struggled to think of other narratives I have read with which to compare Saltburn. The blurb suggests the books of Charles Bukowski but I haven’t explored his work. Seagulls and Seances by Robin Drown paints a picture of a similar seaside world with oddball elements but it doesn’t have the sustained jet-flights of fantasy of Saltburn. Don Quixote? But there the madness is firmly within the mind of the protagonist and here it resides in the external world. The books of William Burroughs (eg The Wild Boys) with their science fiction elements and the recurring themes of gay sex? But Saltburn is far more extravagantly surreal. It’s much more bonkers than Voltaire’s Candide. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M John Harrison is another weird landscape but more controlled. Road Kill - The Duchess of Frisian Tun by Pete Adams relies more on word-play. The maniacal The Unlimited Dream Company by J G Ballard is tame by comparison with this. Hints of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark? But that has real world components. At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien? Angela Carter’s works such as The Magic Toyshop and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffmann? Alice in Wonderland on speed?

Saltburn is endlessly entertaining, sometimes exhaustingly so. I look forward to a period of recuperation but I hope I will soon be ready for another encounter with Drew Gummerson’s feverish imagination.

Selected quotes:

• “In the distance, out at sea, the seals churned, joyous for the spring tide, tossing their heads both in and out of the waves. And it was beautiful, but sad, because, as with all beautiful things, they hold within their hearts a notion of their own transience.” (Meltdown - The Spectacular Death of a Bearded Socialist)
• “The hotel seemed to let bedbugs stay for free.” (The Aquarium - Trouble)
• “Corey’s feet took him inside, whatever his mind may have wanted.” (A Piece of Ass - All the French Singers Have Bum Postcards)

Drew Gummerson has also written:

• Me and Mickie James
• The Lodger
• Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel

April 2025; 249 pages

Published by Haywood Books, a Renard Press imprint, in 2025

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

"1541: The Cataclysm" by Robert William Jones

This book is the first in the Micklegate series. It is an entertainingly irreverent romp blend of at least three genres: historical, thriller and fantasy. The tone is set right from the start with an execution described by a narrator with a very dark sense of humour. 

'Lord' Silas, a village idiot, Robert, Lord Mayor of York, two monks chucked out of the monasteries following the Dissolution, washerwomen ex-nun Elspeth and her crippled friend Wynnfrith, farmer Richard Shakespeare (grandfather of the playwright), Edward Fawkes (father of Guy) and assorted others form an impromptu group (the Agents of the Word) led by a talking mouse with a secret (not just that he talks) and an attitude problem. Their purpose is to save Tudor England from a Cataclysm. 

There were moments when the pacing was spot on (the group coheres at exactly the 33% mark, there is a revelation worthy of W S Gilbert as the 50% mark) but there were other moments when the plot seemed to suddenly speed up. Some elements of the quest such as the discovery of the books and the recovery of Abigail seemed rather too easy. I wasn't sure how the Lizzie sub-plot fitted in but I appreciated that not everyone lived happily ever after. Nor am I sure that I fully understood all the clues in the convoluted plot but it was certainly an ingenious climax. There was even a twist in the mouse's tale. 

Selected quotes:

• "Annie was a middle-aged horse with the strength, dedication and attitude of a foal." (Ch 1)
• "Bacteria in all its glorious forms was here and having an all-night party, but simultaneously, completely absent in the imagination of the sixteenth-century public." (Ch 2)
• "He was a crap juggler spending most of the morning chasing his balls around the market, if you’ll forgive the expression." (Ch 5) 
• "We will win because we are good" (Ch 15) A character who understands the rules of fiction!
• "She’d find a better catch in the river!" (Ch 16)
•  "The King has planted a new Bishop there. More a pawn than a Bishop. " (Ch 17)
• "I didn't have an opinion about this. Strange, you think. Is the mouse unwell?" (Ch 18)
• "'What an unfortunate mismatch of miscreants and misfits!’ He annoyingly alliterated." (Ch 23)

An entertaining slice of horrible history with lots of humour. June 2024

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

"Babel" by R F Kuang

 If you are seeking a novel that tells you how to think, this may be for you. But I prefer a book that challenges me to think for myself.

In some ways this is 'Harry Potter goes to University'. It even starts with Robin, the boy who lived, being rescued by a magician after his mother dies. Once he arrives at Oxford, the arcane rituals, such as wearing gowns, are told with Rowlingesque relish. And there is magic in amongst the scholarship. The biggest difference seems to be that spells are worked not only in Latin but by evoking the mismatch in the translation of a word between one language and another. Perhaps the only part of this novel that I enjoyed were the moments when the author explains the etymology of words. These nuggets were absolutely fascinating but they did nothing to enhance the plot, the characters or the setting.

The plot involves a struggle between the University, who make magical bars of silver which power industry at home and warships abroad, fostering the domestic inequalities of capitalism and the horrors of colonialism, and a secret society of rebels. It is fundamentally a thriller plot with the usual tropes; I don't think there were any twists that I failed to see coming. The blurb quotes the Guardian: "an ending to blow down walls." But by the time I neared the ending I was bored with the book and I didn't care for any of the cardboard characters, so I skim-read just to get to the end.

Intensely didactic, this book is set in the first half of the nineteenth century so that it condemn the horrors of colonialism with no need for nuance. Issues are presented as black and white; the goodies are always right and the baddies are always wicked. At the same time, it is an alternative history so that its protagonists can have thoroughly modern attitudes and viewpoints, such as "The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state" (Ch 17). Such anachronisms are made possible by the genre but drain verisimilitude from it.

To hammer its point home it uses footnotes to give the appearance that this is a work of history. Somehow these are even less nuanced than the main text. Some of these footnotes are factual, others are clearly set in the world of the novel. There are also many authorial insertions. RFK may believe that Percy was less talented than Mary Shelley or that William IV was "an eternal compromiser who pleased no one" but it would be more honest to place these opinions in the mouth of a character so they can be seen as opinions.

There is not a single white male character who is good, apart from the obviously named Abel Goodfellow. Skin colour seems to be shorthand for character. "I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy," says one character in chapter 23 and the only example suggested that breaks this rule is almost immediately shown to be a Judas. Such stereotyping is shallow. I prefer my fiction to have more depth. 

There are plenty of villains. Almost none of the baddies had any saving grace whatsoever. This rendered them caricatures. It's very easy to set up such straw men and knock them down. But I prefer antagonists who feel human, who seem real, who have wants and needs and failings and strengths. They're more authentic, they feel more dangerous, and they can pose emotional and intellectual challenges to the protagonists (and to the readers). 

Sadly, apart from Robin and Griffin, none of the goodies had any complexity to their characters and of these two only Robin had what might be called a character arc, although it was difficult to see how the Robin at the end could have evolved from the Robin of the early pages. These characters weren't flesh and blood, they were puppets clothed to represent aspects of an argument.

Somehow, in a book about young students at university, there was almost no sex. There were some romantic moments and there was a moment when the lead protagonist felt a physical desire for his best buddy but when the lads were offered a prostitute they reacted like maiden ladies from an old novel. Maybe this caters to a new puritan readership but it certainly didn't help the verisimilitude.

I suppose you might regard the novel as a satire, such as Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (from whom Robin takes his surname) but I prefer my novels to have more interesting plots, characters with more than two dimensions, and a deeper appreciations of the problems facing human beings living in an imperfect world.

Selected quotes:

• "He's got the personality of a wet towel: damp and he clings." (Ch 7)
• "The translator dances in shackles." (Ch 8)
• "The thick dawn mists had just given way to blue sky when the horizon revealed a thin strip of green and grey. Slowly this acquired detail, like a dream materializing; the blurred colours became a coast, became a silhouette if buildings behind a mass of ships docking at the tiny point where the Middle Kingdom encountered the world." (Ch 16)
• "The public merely wanted all the conveniences of modern life without the guilt of knowing how these conveniences were produced." (Ch 27)

June 2024; 544 pages

Winner of the 2023 fiction book of the year in the British Book Awards

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

"Silver on the Tree" by Susan Cooper

 In the final instalment of 'The Dark is Rising', all the characters from the previous books come together to defeat the powers of darkness. Will and Bran (whose true nature is divulged) have to travel through time to the Lost Land where they will undergo a series of tests in order to win a sword. Simon, Barnaby and Jane have rather more minor roles. Great Uncle Merriman acts as guide and controller. The most important scene is given to a bit player, the ordinary human sheep farmer John Rowlands.

The book is the opportunity for the author to display her descriptive powers:

• "Grasshoppers skirled unseen from the grass, chirruping their solos over the deep summer insect hum" (1: Midsummer’s Eve)
• "Oak and sycamore and Lombardy poplar reached high on either side; houses slept behind hedges fragrant with honeysuckle and starred with invading bindweed." (1: Black Mink)
• "the face was fine-boned, kindly yet arrogant, with clear blue eyes that shone strangely young in the old, old cobweb-lined face." (2: The Bearded Lake)

She also delightfully captures the rhythm and structure of spoken Welsh.

Many weird and wonderful things take place; it is clear that the author possesses .considerable powers of imagination. This, I suspect, is this book is loved by so many.

But the fact that Will is able to do magic, and immortal, and the promise repeatedly made by Merriman that there is no mortal peril, undermines the tension of the book. We know things are going to be all right so that the monsters and the horrors fail to terrify. And, as with the other books, no test is ever failed. Everything is too straightforward.

At the end there are two decisions made that could go either way and these stand out for me as the moments when the book escaped from being no more than a decorative fairy tale and nudged its way towards being a myth.

The initial relationship between Bran and a newly pubescent Jane also produced some moments of edginess, although the rift between Will and Simon which was a feature of book 3 had healed. The character of the King of the Lost Land was also one of the strengths of the book.

Of course, this is a children's book and I am judging it by adult standards. But for my money this book, though prettily written, was too tame.

Selected quotes:

• "it cures the toothach being snift up into the nosethrils, especially into the contrary nosethril." (1: Midsummer’s Eve)
• "For all times coexist, you said, and the future can sometimes affect the past, even though the past is a road that leads to the future." (1: Black Mink)
• "The mindless ferocity of this man, and all those like him, their real loathing born of nothing more solid than insecurity and fear . . . it was a channel. Will knew that he had been gazing into the channel down which the powers of the Dark, if they gained their freedom, could ride in an instant to complete control of the earth." (1: Midsummer Day)
• "If you have seen the raising of fear, and the killing of love, and the Dark creeping in over all things, you do not ask stupid questions. You do what you are intended to do, and no nonsense." (2: The Bearded Lake)
• "there was more than a mood invading her mind; this was a strangeness she could not define, had never known before. A restlessness, a half-fearful anticipation of something part of her seemed to understand and part not . . ." (2: The Bearded Lake)
• "Maybe because the Dark can only reach people at extremes – blinded by their own shining ideas, or locked up in the darkness of their own heads." (3: The Rose-Garden)
• "For ever and ever, we say when we are young, or in our prayers. Twice, we say it, Old One, do we not? For ever and ever . . . so that a thing may be for ever, a life or a love or a quest, and yet begin again, and be for ever just as before. And any ending that may seem to come is not truly an ending, but an illusion. For Time does not die, Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time." (3: Caer Wydyr)
• "my useless life is the empty cawing of a crow, and any talent I once may have had is dead. Let the toys that it made die with it." (3: The King of the Lost Land)
• "Boy, callow boy, do not speak to me of life that you have not lived. What do you know of the weight that drags down a king who has failed his people, an artist who has failed his gift? This life is a long cheat, full of promises that can never be kept, errors that can never be righted, omissions that can never be filled. I have forgotten as much of my life as I can manage to forget." (3: The King of the Lost Land)
• "despair, which is the tomb of all your hope" (3: The King of the Lost Land)
• "‘Cowardly it is,’ he said in a cold adult voice, ‘to shelter behind those who love you, without giving love in return.'" (4: The Train)
• "Every human being who loves another loves imperfection, for there is no perfect being on this earth." (4: One Goes Alone)
• "The future cannot blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past." (4: One Goes Alone)

January 2024

The previous books in the series are:

• Over Sea, Under Stone
• The Dark Is Rising
• Greenwitch
• The Grey King

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

"Greenwitch" by Susan Cooper

The third in the 'Dark Is Rising' series of five books aimed at children.

We return to Cornwall, scene of the first book (Over Sea Under Stone). The grail that  Simon, Barney and Jane discovered has been stolen from the museum and they have a week of Easter holiday with Great Uncle Merry to search for it. Tagging along is Will, the hero of the second book (The Dark is Rising); unknown to the other three kids, Will is one of the Old Ones, magicians who fight for the Light against the Dark. 

I was a little disappointed that the opportunities for jealousy and resentment are not really exploited but this is, after all, a children's book. The mood of the book has returned to the light, carefree atmosphere of the first book - these are Cornish holidays - and I missed the dark, threatening mood of the start of the second book, set in a wintry Thames valley. But the arousal of Wild Magic, independent of either Light or Dark, partly made up for this.

One of its strengths is that it did have some excellent descriptions which I have included among the selected quotes below. The best chapters were those featuring Jane: making the Greenwitch and the night of chaos.

It's a very short and simple book which would probably appeal to well-behaved middle-class kids aged about ten.

Selected Quotes:

• "Under the sunset sky the sea was glass-smooth. Long slow rollers from the Atlantic, rippling like muscles beneath the skin, made the only sign of the great invisible strength of the ocean in all the tranquil evening." (Ch 3)
• "Her horror came not from fear, but from the awareness she suddenly felt from the image of an appalling, endless loneliness. Great power was held only in great isolation." (Ch 3)
• "In a little while the mist covered all the sky, so that the sun hung there familiar and yet strange, like a furry orange." (Ch 4)
• "They were moving slowly, the old man still hobbling on a stick; Jane could sense the suppressed impatience in the boys’ deliberate pace." (Ch 6)
• "This was a region of fear and treachery, where every fish ate every other fish, where life was made only of fierce attack and the terror of desperate flight." (Ch 7)
• "They huddled in the dark warehouse doorway, watching. No wind blew now, and the sudden stillness was unnerving, broken only by the rumbling waves. The murmur of passing motor-cars came now and then from the main road higher in the village, but the children did not heed them. Nothing in the world seemed to exist but this thing that loomed before them, rising higher each moment out of the swaying sea." (Ch 9)
• "gently but urgently" (Ch 9)
• "in the darkness, wherever she looked, Jane could see things moving." (Ch 9) As with so many horror films, this statement was more powerful than when the author actually described the moving things.
• "this is why he wanted us to sleep. Safe and empty with a blanket over our minds" (Ch 10)
• "Long grass rose lush and new round rusting pieces of farm equipment left in the yard: a skeletal old plough, a harrow, the remnants of a tractor with its great tyres gone, In the pen of a deserted pig-sty, nettles grew tall and rank." (Ch 12)
• "They lay in variously abandoned attitudes in the sunshine on the beach, recovering from an enormous picnic lunch." (Ch 13)

December 2023

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

"The Sword in the Stone" by T H White

Wart is a fatherless lad who lives with foster-father Sir Ector and foster-brother Kay in a castle near the Forest Sauvage; Merlin comes to tutor him. His lessons include turning into a fish and a hawk and a snake and a badger; there are some adventures, one involving a witch and another involving Robin Hood and the Anthropophagi. There are other adventures, in which Wart is turned into an ant and a goose, which were not included in the original but were later added when the single book was turned into a tetralogy called The Once and Future King.

This is a traditional boy's adventure story set in a nostalgic world that mixes Merrie England and the Age of Chivalry with the customs and manners of early twentieth century aristocrats of the hunting, shooting, fishing country set. It's full of anachronisms, which emphasise its status as fantasy, whilst being underpinned by what it presumably immense knowledge and understanding of the mediaeval world (there are a lot of outdated words and some didacticism) which seems designed to add verisimilitude. 

It is told it 'traditional' style as a third person omniscient past tense narrative; there are moments of authorial intrusion when White becomes didactic. 

The message, if there is one, seems to be that we should respect nature while at the same time hunting and eating it. Providing nature doesn't eat you! There is a rather distasteful war against the 'Anthropophagi' who are deformed creatures (straight out of the pages of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville) who are cannibals and seek to eat Dog Boy and Wat; after these monsters have been slaughtered (one by Wart), Kay asks to take home the head of one of them and it becomes a trophy in the castle: this whole episode reads a little like the triumphalism of a colonial war against dehumanised 'savages'. White wrote TSitS in 1938, having retreated from teaching at Stowe to living in a cottage in the woods (perhaps he thought he was Merlin!). Some of the later books in the tetralogy express White's distaste for the Nazi regime and there have been suggestions that White was a pacifist but the war against the Anthropophagi and the hunting episodes don't bear this out. What seems not in doubt is that White was a social conservative who was very much in favour of maintaining the traditional class structures which kept the English aristocracy in power.

My main criticism of the novel is that the hero, Wart, never changes. I think the purpose of his education is that he should develop into the sort of King that Arthur is but he's a nice lad at the start, he's nice in the middle and, despite the way he is treated, he's still nice at the end. As a bildungsroman, TSitS leaves a lot to be desired.

We had a lively discussion about this book in my U3A 'The English novel' group; we watched a BBC interview with the author from 1959 in which T H White came across as a rather angry old man longing for the ways of a previous age. But he had a dreadful childhood, being unwanted and then used as a pawn by his ever-warring parents before being sent to live with grandparents and then sent to boarding school which he hated. If the character of Wart, a parentless boy, reflects the author, he seems to have forgotten the anger and bitterness he showed in a poem he once wrote. 

Our discussion was complicated by the fact that there are two versions of TSitS. Most of us had the original, 1938 version, most often sold nowadays as a stand-alone, but some of us had read the 1948 version which was revised in order to fit in with the Once and Future King tetralogy. There are aspects of this later version, such as its message bewailing the futility of war and promoting internationalism, that simply don't appear in the original. Mostly I learned that THW wanted us to return to a benevolent feudal system with strong predetermined classes , overseen by a kindly patriarch. This was born out by the interview.

Selected quotes:

• "Oh, my own random, wicked little lamb." (Ch IV): Wart's nursemaid seems to have inherited the persona of Nanny Slagg in Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake. 
• "He had the glee of the porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas." (Ch V)
• "A face which had been ravaged by all the passions of an absolute monarch, by cruelty, sorrow, age, pride, selfishness, loneliness and thoughts too strong for individual brains." (Ch V)
• "Love is a trick played on us by the forces of evolution." (Ch V)
• "He did say it, pushing the words out as if he were breathing against water." (Ch VI)
• "I believe Sir Ector would have been glad to get a by-our-lady tilting blue for your tutor, that swings himself along on his knuckles like an anthropoid ape." (Ch VII) The traditional academic's dismissal of sporting types. 
• "It just goes on to the end, you know, and then stops - as Legends do." (Ch XIII)
• "Each realised how beautiful life was, which a reeking tusk might, in a few seconds, rape away from one or another of them if things went wrong." (Ch XVI) The justification for boar hunting: that it gives an adrenaline rush; that you are never so alive as when you are risking your life. 

September 2023; 286 pages

This novel is the first in the Once and Future King tetralogy which was selected by Anthony Burgess as one of his 99 best novels since 1939.

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

"Lapvona" by Ottessa Moshfegh

Lapvona is a fantasy book. Marek is the crippled son of shepherd Jude, his mum Agata is missing presumed dead. There are peasants in the village, bandits in the mountains, and a lord in his castle on the hill.

But the prose style is very different from most fantasies. Lapvona is mostly written in short, declarative sentences: "They boiled lamb's milk and covered the pot with a cloth to keep the flies away while it cooled. Marek picked the bugs off some potatoes and plunged them and a few apples in the fire. They were old apples from the fall harvest. Jude had eaten only lamb's milk, bread, apples and potatoes, and wild grasses his entire life. Like the rest of Lapvona, he didn't eat meat. Nor did he drink mead, only milk and water. Marek are what Jude ate, always saving a few bites for Go: he knew that sacrifice was the best way to please him." This simple third person past tense narration included the explication of characters and their motives. There is very little left for the reader to infer.

Furthermore, the narration was done as a sequence of events: first this, then this. There seemed very little connection between the events; any causal connections were straightforward. There was never any nuance.

I quickly found this monotony of style extremely irksome; I was swiftly bored. It seemed to me that the only way the author could keep my interest was to ramp up the weirdness. The story is full of bizarre, frequently grotesque and horrible occurrences. 

Yo be charitable, one could argue that the style suited the content. It reminded me of how Kafka narrates Metamorphosis ("As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”). It had a fairy tale feel to it. Perhaps a deadpan, direct narration is the best way of recounting weird stuff, as if the plainness of the style is the only way to add verisimilitude to what would otherwise be unbelievable. And a lot of fairy tales are full of violence and childish, crude, cruel humour. So to write as if one is writing for young children (although the content is frequently adult, with sex, starvation, mutilation, death, cannibalism and spontaneous lactation) is perhaps the only way to persuade the reader to suspend their disbelief.

It didn't work for me. I began to long for a difficult word or even a subjunctive clause. I didn't care about the characters, I didn't believe the setting, I had no involvement. I did wonder why the author was so keen on the word 'pubis' but this was the most interesting aspect about this book.

Having read a selection of other one star reviews on goodreads, I find that most of them condemn the book for its focus on things likely to cause disgust. I prefer to review a literary work on its style rather than its content.

Selected quotes:

• "A puddle of ink had pooled under the pen." (Summer) A rare moment of metaphor.
• "Flesh was mortal. God was not. Got was not alive. God was life itself." (Summer)
• "One stray germ and the Second Coming wouldn't come." (Winter)
• "Should I put the horseman in the stockade?" (Winter) I think the author means 'stocks'.

August 2023; 304 pages

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

"Titus Groan" by Mervyn Peake

Chosen  by Anthony Burgess as one of his 99 best novels since 1939, this remarkable novel in the Gothic tradition may be regarded as a progenitor of the fantasy genre.

 An heir, Titus,is born to Lord Sepulchrave, the seventy-sixth Earl of Groan, in the castle of Gormenghast, a place in which every day is governed by tradition and ritual. An ambitious, ruthless and clever seventeen-year-old scullion, Steerpike, leaves his place in the kitchen determined to disrupt and destroy so that he can gain power. Despite the title of the book, it is Steerpike who is the protagonist-villain, who encapsualtes “The hatred of the young for the authority vested in age.” (The Un-Earthing of Barquentine)

It is difficult to find parallels for this work. It has been described as Gothic but I think this is on account of the setting (a castle) and the consequent feeling of claustrophobia. Classic Gothic literature involves the present being haunted by the past and in many ways this novel is its inversion: the present, in the shape of Steerpike, is destroying the present-as-shaped-by-the-past. It has been described as fantasy but there is no magic and very little in the way of supernatural happenings. There is a strong feeling of Lewis Carroll about it (among Peake's most critically acclaimed illustrations were those for Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and The Hunting of the Snark) and the characters are classic Dickensian grotesques. The creation of such a complete world is reminiscent of science fiction (and Peake's novella about Titus was published together with science fiction stories by William Golding and John Wyndham). 

It is a masterpiece of description. Peake's day job was as an artist and he describes things so that they can be seen. A member of my U3A group who read this book said that Peake often describes a scene in detail and then homes in upon the character in the scene who will carry that part of the story; this is a little like the way a camera sometimes zooms in upon a character in an establishing shot. The descriptions are detailed and rich and wonderful (and they reminded me, again, of Dickens, but they're better). “This is the most painterly form of literature imaginable" although it is true, in the beginning, before the story gets going properly, that the book seems "to move from set tableau to set tableau, more like a series of paintings than like a fluid narrative” (reference here) But I think it is because of these descriptions that Peake convinces us, reading a story about an impossible place, to suspend our disbelief. Anthony Burgess, writing in the introduction to the Penguin edition,  says “It is difficult, in post-war English writing, to get away with big, rhetorical gestures. Peake manages it because, with him, grandiloquence never means diffuseness; there is no musical emptiness in the most romantic of his descriptions; he is always exact.” It is that precision of description that creates verisimilitude, even while you know that what is being described is unreal. (Kafka achieves the same in a very different fashion, by being utterly matter-of-fact about the madness he is describing.)

Written during the second world war, I imagine that the writer, a talented artist and illustrator with a taste for the grotesque, would have seen how Hitler had come from obscurity to smash traditional Germany; he might have seen the battle between the old and the new reflected in the Spanish Civil War, in the consequences of an overthrown Empire in the China where he grew up, in social changes in England following the First World War, and in the impact of Futurism and Vorticism in art. 

It is followed by the sequels Gormenghast, which is perhaps even better, and Titus Alone, which is rather different (perhaps because it was being written while Peake, still in his forties, was struggling with early onset dementia). A fourth novel, written by Maeve Gilmore, Peake's widow, based on the notes he left, has recently been published.

Selected quotes:

Some of those brilliant descriptions:

• “The Tower of Flints ... patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven.” (The Hall of Bright Carvings)
• “Like a vast spider suspended by a metal chord, a candelabrum presided over the room ... long stalactites of wax lowered their pale spilths drip by drip.” (Tallow and Birdseed)
• “Where the dust was like pollen and lay softly on all things.” (Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap)
• “Seven clouds like a group of naked cherubs or sucking-pigs, floated their plump pink bodies across a sea of slate.” (Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap)
• “To her right was an enormous crumbling organ. Its pipes were broken and the keyboard shattered. Across its front the labour of a decade of grey spiders had woven their webs into a shawl of lace.” (The Attic)
• “The moon slid inexorably into its zenith, the shadows shrivelling to the feet of all that cast them, and as Rantel approached the hollow at the hem of the Twisted Woods he was treading in a pool of his own midnight.” (Knives in the Moon)
• “His Lordship is dressed in black. His knees are drawn up almost to his chin. His long, fine white hands are curled slightly inwards as they hang over his knees, between which, and his supported chun, the wrists are wedged. But it is the eyes that strike a chill to the centre of those who watch, for they have become circular. The smile which plated across his lips ... is gone forever. His mouth is entirely expressionless.” (Early One Morning)
• “The first descent of the rain ... is falling from they sky in long upright and seemingly motionless lines of rosy silver that stand rigidly upon the ground as though there were a million harp strings strung vertically between the solids of earth and sky.” (A Bloody Cheekbone)
• “Summer was on the roofs of Gormenghast. It lay inert, like a sick thing. Its limbs spread. It took the shape of what it smothered. The masonry sweated and was horribly silent.” (In Preparation for Violence)
• “Rolls of lard-coloured fat filled in the space between the chin and the clavicles.” (Blood at Midnight)

There are also some very funny moments:

• “In the dimness he flung his arms apart so that the buttons of his tunic were torn away, one of them whizzing across the room and stunning a cockroach on the opposite wall.” (Swelter)
• “As this was the first joke she had made for over a year, she tried to smile, but her facial muscles had become, through long neglect, unusable.” (The Room of Roots)
• “Seeing an Earl as an owl on a mantelpiece, and having part of one’s face removed by a cat, both on the same morning, can temporarily undermine the self-control of any man.” (The Twins Again)
• “The navel, that pivot for a draughtsman’s eye, that relic whose potentiality appears to have been appreciated only by the dead Swelter, who saw in it a reliable salt-cellar, when that gentleman decided upon eggs for his breakfast.” (Barquentine and Steerpike)
• “The Doctor showed about as much sign of having a pair of hips as an ell set upon its end, while Irma ... had ... a pair of hips capable of balancing upon their osseous shelves enough bric-a-brac to clutter up a kleptomaniac’s cupboard.” (By Gormenghast Lake)

Other selected quotes:

• “Their sole passion was directed, once their days of love had guttered, on the production of this wooden sculpture” (The Hall of Bright Carvings)
• “The air between them was turgid with contempt and jealousy.” (The Hall of Bright Carvings)
• “He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.” (The Great Kitchen)
• “The attacked the bungs as though unweaned.” (The Great Kitchen)
• “He was lost in a labyrinth of stone corridors, lit here and there by candles sunk in their own wax.” (The Stone Lanes)
• “Even the bed was at an angle, slanting away from the wall and crying out to be pushed back flush against the wallpaper.” (Tallow and Birdseed)
• “To have asked him of his feelings for his hereditary home would have been like asking a man what his feelings were towards his own hand or his own throat.” (Sepulchrave)
• “Her dressing became interrupted between the addition of each garment by dance movements of her own invention.” (Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap)
• “She appeared rather to inhabit, than to wear her clothes.” (Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap)
• “It was as though she enjoyed the artist telling her something quite fresh and new. Something she had never thought of before.” (The Attic)
• “She [Fuschia] said, dear, that she’d burn down the whole place, burn down Gormenghast when she was the ruler and she’d live on her own, and I said she was wicked, and she said that everyone was - everyone and everything except rivers, clouds, and some rabbits.” (Keda)
• “The Countess never entered it, preferring those parts of the castle where the lights and the shadows were on the move.” (First Blood)
• “The negative dignity of the room threw him out in relief as a positive scarecrow.” (First Blood)
• “I, as part of my work here, deliver the new generation to the old - the sinless to the sinful, ha, ha, ha, the stainless to the tarnished - oh dear me, the white to the black, the healthy to the diseased.” (Assemblage)
• “‘It’s power we want,’ lady Clarice repeated. ... ‘Yes, that’s what we want’, echoed Cora, ‘lots of power. Then we could make people do things’.” (Assemblage)
• “He knelt on the windowsill and then, turning around, slowly raised himself to his feet and stood outside the window, the hollow twilight at his shoulder-blades.” (Means of Escape)
• “He only knew that his throat was parched and beneath his belt a tiger was clawing in his stomach.” (A Body by the Window)
• “He was not the artist. He was the exact imitation of one.” (Soap for Greasepaint)
• “Prunesquallor and his sister both felt a certain delight in making the acquaintance of a young gentleman with brains, however twisted those brains might be.” (A Gift of the Gab)
• “Steerpike’s gallantry had for a moment taken the chill off her heart.” (A Gift of the Gab)
• “His face remained like a mask, but deep down in his stomach he grinned.” (A Gift of the Gab)
• “Gormenghast. The long, notched outline of her home. It was now his background. ... He stood against it, an intruder, imposing himself so vividly, so solidly, against her world, his head overtopping the loftiest of its towers.” (The Grotto)
• “He was holding her; she was in his arms; in his power.” (The Grotto)
• “‘Equality’, said Steerpike, ‘is the thing. It is the only true and central premise from which constructive ideas can radiate freely and be operated without prejudice. Absolute equality of status. Equality of wealth. Equality of power.” (The Sun Goes Down Again)
• “‘There should be no rich, no poor, no strong, no weak,’ said Steerpike, methodically pulling the legs off the stag-beetle, one by one, as he spoke. ‘Equality is the great thing. Equality is everything’.” (The Sun Goes Down Again)
• “But don’t you think it’s wrong if some people have nothing to eat and others have so much they throw most of it away? Don’t you think it’s wrong if some people have to work all their lives for a little money to exist while others never do any work and live in luxury?” (The Sun Goes Down Again)
• “To wear rich and becoming apparel no doubt engenders a sense of well-being in the wearer, but to be draped, as was Sourdust, in a sacrosanct habit of crimson rags is to be a world above such considerations as the price and fit of clothes and to experience a sense of propriety that no wealth could buy.” (The Burning)
• “The long shelves surrounded them, tier upon tier, circumscribing their world with a wall of other worlds imprisoned yet breathing among the network of a million commas, semi-colons, full stops, hyphens and every other sort of printed symbol.” (The Burning)
• “The old man would be complete, if not homogenous. He would not be headless, and his funeral would be no slipshod, bury-as-you-please affair.” (Sourdust is Buried)
• “Why must one try and be respectful to old people when they aren’t considerate?” (Sourdust is Buried)
• “‘I am not your father’, he replied. ... ‘I am the death-owl’.” (Half Light)
• “There are great pearls upon his forehead, and in each pearl is the reflection of a candle flame.” (A Change of Colour)
• “Five claws rip out a crimson wedge from his cheek immediately below the right eye.” (A Bloody Cheekbone)
• “You will be as fit as the most expensive of fiddles.” (A Bloody Cheekbone)
• “What use are books to anyone whose days are like a rook’s nest with every twig a duty?” (The Reveries: Reverie of Gertrude the Countess of Gormenghast)
• “He now moved his bulk across the earth as silently as the passing of a cloud through the dusk.” (Here and There)
• “A few feet above his head a spider scrawled itself across the ceiling.” (Presage)
• “The most disgusting sound - as of some kind of low animal with gastric trouble. Mr Swelter was laughing.” (Blood at Midnight)
• “Something was changing - changing in a world where change was crime.” (Blood at Midnight)
• “You don’t matter. You’re not going to be anything.” (The Earling)
• “What were problems for if not to be solved.” (The Earling)

Wonderful. February 2023; 506 pages

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

"Vurt" by Jeff Noon

 This is a brilliant and hugely original urban fantasy with hints of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney.

The narrator/ protagonist Scribble and his mates Beetle, new girl Mandy, shadowgirl Bridget and The Thing-from-Outer-Space are the Stash Riders; they buy and use feathers which provide shared hallucinogenic experiences akin to playing computer games. Pink feathers are pornovurts, blue feathers offer safe desires, black are bootleg vurts, "one sliver beyond the law" and yellow feathers are the most extreme, offering experiences you can't jerk out of: "if you die in a yellow dream, you die in real life." Scribble is searching for his sister Desdemona, who got left behind in the vurtual (sic) world; he needs to find the right feather and re-enter the world to bring her back. 

So the story is a classic hero's adventure in which Scribble, a superbly flawed hero, aided by his friends, must enter another realm, presided over by Game Cat, perform tasks, build up knowledge, win things of value, rescue the princess and return to the real world. Perhaps there is a bit of Orpheus going down to the underworld to rescue Eurydice. It's a story of heroism and sacrifice. There are twists. (To be honest, I got a little bit lost in the middle of the book: it;s a complicated plot.)

The world-building is gradual and brilliant. The streets of Manchester form a real backdrop to a world people by 'pure's and hybrids between humans and shadows and robots and dogs and vurts. There's a lot of action. There are cops and robocops and shadowcops, there is sex and there are drugs and there is rock'n'roll, there are car chases and shoot-outs and The Thing-from-Outer-Space. There is 'dripfeed' (state benefits) and 'droidlocks' (dreadlocks on a robocrusty) and The Haunting (a sort of deja-vu which muddles rality with vurt) and Cortex Jammers and pedheads (pedestrians) and jerkouts and Karmachanics.  It is a vivid combination of the real and the surreal, the everyday and the fantastic. It works superbly.

Selected quotes:

• "You know how a fly flies? At the top speed always, and yet dodging obstacles instantaneously? That was how The Beetle drove." (1, Stash Riders)
• "I can hardly breathe. Let me tell you: hardly is enough." (1, Sleepless)
• "My bed is warm and wide ... and life is short." (1, Jam Mode)
• "Sometimes ... life is just a wet kiss on glass." (1, Jam Mode)
• "I knew that The Beetle had the gift of seeing beauty in ugliness. It's just that I'm more used to ugliness than he is, seeing it every day in cruel mirrors, and in the mirrors of women's eyes." (1, Down the Bottle)
• "The men had that death warmed-up look so popular with the younger robogoth: all plastic bones shining proudly through tight, pale skin." (1, Down the Bottle)
• "Real life, like yellow feathers, has no jerkout facility." (1, Down the Bottle)
• "The flowers were pollen-heavy, and so was I." (2, Heavy Losses)
• "Then I slipped inside of her ... feeling the walled garden close in the caress my penis, until the sap rose to the top, and the garden was flooded. The air was heavy with pollen; the whole world was copying itself, over and over, through the act of sex. And we were enfolded in the system, sucking where the bee sucks." (2, Heavy Losses)
• "The van skidded on a wet bend and I could feel paintwork being peeled off, as the struts of a fence clawed into us." (3, Ashes to Ashes, Hair to Hair)
• "Dozens of boats were tied up along the bank; the floating families selling off stuff, just to make a small life. Some were selling food from barbecue boats. Some were selling love, the downmarket version; cheap sluts and rabid studs on deck." (3, Gun Stroke (suffering from))
• "To be pure is good, it leads to a good life. But who wants a good life? Only the lonely." (3, Game Cat)

August 2022; 325 pages

Also reviewed in this blog by Jeff Noon:

• A Man of Shadows

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