"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

"Look Who's Back" by Timur Vermes

Adolf Hitler, Rip van Winkle style, wakes up in Berlin in 2011. Still dressed in his uniform and instantly recognisable, he is assumed to be a comedian on the satire circuit: he soon gets a TV show and a huge You Tube following. But he plans to revive his political career.

As a book, this plot enables the writer to make lots of 'man from Mars' style observations about modern German culture. This, for me, was a major part of the humour of the book (regular readers of this blog will know I am not an aficionado of 'funny' books). 

It is more difficult to discern a structure to the plot. Initially I thought I could see a classic four-part structure. He is 'discovered' one-seventh of the way through and his first 'comedy' rant is 40% of the way through, so close to the classic half-way turning-point. He receives hate mail just over half the way through, which suggests a possible serious turn, again appropriate as a turning point. But after that I felt that things meandered and the 'not with a bang but a whimper' ending felt as if the author had run out of ideas, or was positioning himself towards a sequel. 

There were, however, some funny bits, one or two of which make me chuckle out loud.

Some of the best bits include:

• "We all know ... what to make of our newspapers. The deaf man writes down what the blind man has told him, the village idiot edits it" (Ch 3)
• "Political parties existed again, with all the infantile, counter-productive squabbling this entails." (Ch 3)
• "I had also noticed the occasional passer-by whose Aryan ancestry was questionable, to put it mildly, and not only four or five generations back, but right up to the last quarter of an hour." (Ch 5)
• "I detected barely any correct syntax; it sounded more like a linguistic tangle of barbed wire, furrowed with mental grenades like the battlefields of the Somme." (Ch 11)
• "As far as I can make out press photographers seem to wear the ragged cast-offs of television cameramen." (Ch 17)
• "They shrieked with laughter and tried to say something, but a lack of consonants rendered their babble unintelligible." (Ch 31)
• "Some of these young pupil-like characters wore expressions of such intellectual frugality that one could scarcely imagine what useful activity they might one day be able to perform for society." (Ch 11)

March 2021; 365 pages

Other books by German authors reviewed in this blog.

This review was written by
the author of Motherdarling

"Catch 22" by Joseph Heller

A novel that is at once both very funny and very sad, an anarchic romp through the absurdities of war, a bitter anti-war message dressed up in farce.

A very well written novel indeed.

Yossarian, the hero, is a lead bombardier. Following a raid in which Snowden dies in his arms, he decides that he doesn't want to die and begins to devise ways in which he can no longer be sent on bombing missions. One of these is the idea of being declared insane. But there is a catch, Catch-22: “There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions.” (C 5) Meanwhile Yossarian's colonel keeps raising the number of missions he has to fly before he can be sent home.

With one or two exceptions, the forty two chapters are each named after an officer in Yossarian's bomber squadron (although the ensuing chapter may only refer tangentially to that officer who may in fact feature more strongly elsewhere). Thus the narrative of the book is far from in chronological sequence. In this way we are prevented from knowing key facts until the end: what was Snowden's secret, communicated to Yossarian as he died in his arms; why did a whore repeatedly whack Orr over the head? This also means that we have to piece together the time sequence while reading: the first scene in the book is Yossarian in the hospital (not for the first nor last time) which fits somewhere in the middle of the chronology. It also means that we learn about some of Yossarian's comrades when they are already dead. 

The other stylistic feature of this novel is Heller's tendency to narrate in long sentences which start off in one place and, passing through a number of absurdities, arrive at a different destination. For example: “McWatt crinkled his fine, freckled nose apologetically and vowed not to snap the cards anymore, but always forgot. McWatt wore fleecy bedroom slippers with his red pajamas and slept between freshly pressed colored bed sheets like the one Milo had retrieved half of for him from grinning thief with the sweet tooth in exchange for none of the pitted dates Milo had borrowed from Yossarrian. McWatt was deeply impressed with Milo, who, to the amusement of Corporal Snark, his mess sergeant, was already buying eggs for seven cents apiece and selling them for five cents. But McWatt was never as impressed with Milo as Milo had been with the letter Yossarian had obtained for his liver from Doc Daneeka.” (C 7) It makes you feel breathless to read it but it perfectly expresses the anarchy of war (and, by extension, with the commercial activities of Milo the mess sergeant, the entire capitalist system).

Some of these long rants are chilling:

• “They couldn't dominate Death inside the hospital, but they certainly made her behave. They had taught her manners. They couldn't keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady. People gave up the ghost with delicacy and taste inside the hospital. There was none of that crude, ugly ostentation about dying that was so common outside the hospital. They did not blow up in mid-air like Kraft or the dead man in Yossarrian’s tent, or freeze to death in the blazing summertime the way Snowden had frozen to death after spilling his secret to Yossarrian in the back of the plane. ... They didn't take it on the lam weirdly inside a cloud the way Clevinger had done. They didn't explode into blood and clotted matter. They didn't drown or get struck by lightning, mangled by machinery or crushed in landslides. They didn't get shot to death in hold-ups, strangled to death in rapes, stabbed to death in saloons, bludgeoned to death with axes by parents or children or die summarily by some other act of God. Nobody choked to death. People bled to death like gentlemen in an operating room or expired without comment in an oxygen tent. There was none of that tricky now-you-see-me-now-you-don't business so much in vogue outside the hospital, none of that now-I-am-and-now-I-ain't. There were no famines or floods. Children didn't suffocate in cradles or iceboxes or fall under trucks. No one was beaten to death. People didn't stick their heads into ovens with the gas on, jump in front of subway trains or come plummeting like dead weights at the hotel windows with a whoosh!, accelerating at the rate of sixteen feet per second to land with a hideous plop! on the sidewalk and die disgustingly there in public like an alpaca sack full of hairy strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry.” (C 17) 

That last sentence alone is a masterpiece.

This rant is blasphemous and angry but at the same time funny:

• “And don't tell me god works in mysterious ways ... There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. or else he's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about - a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who found it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when he robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain? ... Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead? Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn't he?” (C 18)

Yossarian also is angry about the sadnesses inherent in life as well as death:

• “What a lousy Earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people?” (C 39)

But as well as rants there are some exquisite brief insights into the human condition:

• “Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers.” (C 1)
• “He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up whilst to come down alive.” (C 3)
• “Huple thrust his jaw out defiantly to let Hungry Joe know he couldn't be pushed around and then did exactly as he had been told.” (C 6)
• “Yossarian was laid up in the hospital with a burst of clap he had caught on a low-level mission over a Wac in bushes on a supply flight to Marrakech.” (C 6)
• “He had lived innocuously for a little while and then had gone down in flames over Ferrara on the seventh day, while God was resting.” (C 6)
• “He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.” (C 8)
• “She was never without a good book close by, not even when she was lying in bed with nothing on her but Yossarian.” (C 8)
• “Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskopf had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times. Such men were dangerous.” (C 8)
• “To Yossarian, the idea of pennants as prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.” (C 8)
• “Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.” (C 9)
• “Since he had nothing better to do well in, he did well in school.” (C 9)
• “He had observed that people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful then people who did not lie.” (C 11)
• “‘What makes you so sure Major Major it is a communist?’ ‘ You never heard him denying it until we began accusing him, did you?’” (C 11)
• “Our purpose was to make everyone we don't like afraid.” (C 11)
• “It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.” (C 12)
• “The enemy ... is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.” (C 12)
• “There were millions of conscientious body cells oxidating away day and night like dumb animals at their complicated job of keeping him alive and healthy, and every one was a potential traitor and foe.” (C 17)
• “His credo as a professional soldier was unified and concise: he believed that the young men who took orders from him should be willing to give up their lives for the ideals, aspirations and idiosyncrasies of the old men he took orders from.” (C 21)
• "Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage.” (C 41)

A masterpiece. Rated 80th in The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time and selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels since Time began (1923). 

I have been watching the television adaptation of Catch-22, currently (July 2019) showing on British terrestrial television. It has done a marvellous job of telling the story in a more or less linear fashion, so making the narration understandable, but in so doing it seems to have lost the flair of the original. Because the novel constantly loops back to key themes, such as Nately's whore's little sister, and Snowden, the effect on Yossarian of what happens to Nately and Snowden is magnified. The chronological narration of this series has not allowed for these repetitions (there would have to be a lot of repeated flashbacks) so the impact of these events is diminished. Furthermore, without the fragmentation of the narration some of the madness and craziness exhibited by the book is lost. Finally, of course, the film version has lost those marvellous endless sentences and paragraphs, that style so reminiscent of Kerouac, as if Proust had been accelerated to hypersonic speeds, which celebrate the joy of being alive even in the face of death. And somehow the TV version seems to have lost the humour.

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

Books about war in this blog:

• Invasion 1940 by Peter Fleming
• Memoir of the Bobotes by Joyce Cary: A memoir of a Red Cross worker on the front in the Balkan Wars
• The End by Ian Kershaw: A history of the last few months of Nazi Germany
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque: an antiwar novel by a world war one soldier
• Bridge on the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle: a novel about a Japanese Prisoner of War camp
• The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
• A Detail on the Burma Front: a memoir of a nurse working in Burma during World War Two
• Berlin by Antony Beevoir: A history of the last few months of the Nazi regime
• A Moment of War by Laurie Lee: about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. Stunning.

"Beautiful people" by Simon Doonan

A memoir previously published as 'Nasty'.

Doonan was born in 1952 in Reading; his childhood was spent in poverty in one of the grimmest and most joyless decades in recent history. Child care was in the local orphanage. Family life was spent in the company of schizophrenic truth-telling granny who, when Simon was five, told him there was no Santa Claus and that he would one day die, schizophrenic Uncle Ken and a weird assortment of lodgers including blind Phyllis whose skull Simon fractured.

And he was gay.

This story veers between the bleakness of his childhood surroundings and the camp fabulosity of his later life living with an assortment of men including drag queen Biddie. The characters are unbelievably brilliant and the descriptions original and exact. This is the observational comedy of an accomplished stand up comedian (he is a window display designed). It reads like Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals on speed.

There are some haunting moments:

• Trying to flee from justice by running, in platform heels, across Blackpool's sandy beach
• Being arrested for drunk-driving while wearing bondage gear by two LA cops who couldn't stop giggling
• Teddy's birthday
• Butlins: holiday camp.
• Blind Aunt Phyllis
• His boyfriend dying from AIDS

A few of the ab fab darling lines:

• “She sneezed and her dentures flew out. They hit the kitchen door with a sharp clack! and then rattled sideways across the linoleum floor like a fleeing crustacean.” (p 1) 
• “In Reading, our industrial hometown, there was no shortage of dreary here and nows.” (p 6)
• “From an early age, I was excessively focused on obtaining the freedom which comes with having a bit of extra cash in my pocket, and was prepared to do whatever it took to get it.” (p 9)
• “we were suffering from a unique mixture of high and low self-esteem.” (p 16)
• “She was not one of the Beautiful People. She was one of the unsavory people.” (p 24) 
• “Edvard Grieg’s ominous, throbbing anthem ... gave our morning gatherings a distinct feeling of impending folkloric genocide.” (p 40)
• “The message was simple: the more grim life is, the more character building will be it effect.” (p 40)
• “Entering a room as if one was entering a room was so much more amusing and exhilarating than just entering a room.” (p 86)
• “We had so much more fun because we were behaving as if we were having fun.” (p 86)
• “life is a stage set, a really tacky, faded stage set.” (p 92)
• “our house resembled a crack den a full fifteen years before the advent of crack.” (p 136)
• “‘Scrape’ is the accumulated, lard-infused, crunchy material which coagulates in the frying pan during the course of cooking other items.” (p 149)
• “Being incarcerated is such a vile experience that it is impossible to understand the whole concept of career criminals.” (p 209)
• “There is no such thing as a young fart.” (p 264)

December 2017; 284 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

"Espresso Tales" by Alexander McCall Smith

This is the sequel to 44 Scotland Street.

Bruce embarks on a career as a wine dealer, knowing little about wine. Pat gets invited to a nudist party (“A nudist? In Edinburgh? Does he realise what parallel we're on?” p 188) Matthew's dad has a girlfriend and Matthew thinks she is after his dad's eleven million pounds. And poor Bertie, forced to wear pink dungarees, is sent to primary school when all he really wants to do is get on the train the Glasgow and play cards against a Glasgow gangster.

Another whimsical and affectionate set of stories from Edinburgh.

Some great lines:

• “September was not far off, and after that, as was well known to all but the most confused, was October - and darkness.” (p 1)
• “Scottish weather ... made one thing abundantly clear: you paid for what you enjoyed, and you usually paid quite promptly. ... That vista of mountains and sea lochs was all very well, but what was that coming up behind you? A cloud of midges.” (p 1)
• “How very few are the human bonds that lie between us and the state of being completely alone.” (p 7)
• “I think it's marvelous the boys have all those different things to choose from at the chemist’s these days. Hair things and shaving things, that is.” (p 29)
• “People often fundamentally misread American society and assume that decisions articulated by men are male decisions - a serious mistake.” (p 31)
• “The problem with missing socks was that the rational interpretation seemed quite inadequate” (p 84)
• “He liked Scotland exactly as it was: unfussy, cold, and half-visible.” (p 116)
• “The problem ... is that the cost-cutters are in control ... They are the ones who are insisting that everything be cheap and built to the nearest specifications.” (p 185)
• “I've never understood the objection to hypocrisy ... There must be some circumstances in which it permissible to be hypocritical.” (p 284)
• “Like every author, he knew that he had to guard jealously the spare hours in which he could write.” (p 289)

September 2017; 342 pages

"Let's explore diabetes with owls" by David Sedaris

Another collection of Sedaris' wry comments on life (also see my review of When you are engulfed in flames). If this is a memoir, Sedaris has lived a sometimes surreal life. He talks about his bringing up: the father who never encouraged him (“Our artwork did not hang on the refrigerator or anywhere near it, because our parents recognised it for what it was: crap.” p 14), always praising other more athletic boys, his best friend (“With Shaun, though, I could almost be myself. This didn't mean that we were alike, only that he wasn't paying that much attention.” (p 60; “What brought us together was a love of nature, or, more specifically, of catching things and unintentionally killing them.” p 59). He writes about the contrast between doctors in the US, who pander to the neurotic hypochondriac in each of us, and those in Europe who point out that a fatty lump is not a tumour (“Either you can live in the past as a lonely, bitter paraplegic, or you can live in the present as one.” p 119). He talks about being so lonely that he moons over heterosexuals: “Johnny didn't strike me as gay, but it was hard to tell with alcoholics. Like prisoners and shepherds, many of them didn't care who they have sex with, the idea being that what happens in the dark stays in the dark.” (p 125) He talks about buying a stuffed owl as a Valentine's Day present for his boyfriend.

Life, he tells us, is like a four-ring stove. The rings are your family, your friends, your health, and your work. If you want to succeed you have to switch off one of the rings. To really succeed you have to switch off two. (pp 89 - 90)

Funny, in both senses of the word: September 2017; 275 pages

"Reaper Man" by Terry Pratchett

A Discworld novel. Other reviewed in this blog include

• Carpe Jugulum in which Lancre is invaded by a family of vampires
• Going Postal in which Moist has to reform the postal service for Lord V.

But there are lots of others and all those I have read have been great.

In this DEATH, wj=ho always speaks in CAPITAL LETTERS, is retired. This causes an unfortunate disruption to normal services. In other words, Ankh Morpork is in chaos.

Pratchett maintains his usual blend of twisted metaphysical insight with jokes ranging from wonderful to brilliant:

• "seconds, endlessly turning the maybe into the was."(p 8)
• "there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fibre and, in some cases, backbone." (p 11)
• "gently slicing thin rashers of interval from the bacon of eternity." (p 15)
• "It's the difference between morning dew on a cobweb and actually being a fly." (p 33)
• "If you could do a sort of relief map of sinfulness, wickedness and all-round immorality, rather like those representations of the gravitational field around a Black Hole, then even in Ankh-Morpork the Shades would be represented by a shaft." (p 47)
• "Mrs Evadne Cake was a medium, verging on small." (p 73)
• "Doing it without the right paraphernalia is like taking all your clothes off to have a bath." (p 101)
• A funeral is "a reverential form of garbage disposal". (p 122)
• "that long nasal whine which meant that folk song was about to be perpetrated." (p 168)
• "JUST BECAUSE SOMETHING IS A METAPHOR DOESN'T MEAN IT CAN'T BE REAL." (p 194)
• "Cities - big sedentary creatures growing from one spot and hardly moving at all for thousands of years. They breed by sending out people to colonise new land." (p 202)

But this is just a taste of the brilliance. He can by funny and wise, and funny and touching at the same time. Wonderful. August 2017; 285 pages

"When you are engulfed in flames" by David Sedaris

This is a book of short, humorous, essays which reflect on the oddnesses in the way we humans interact with one another. In some ways these are like the scripts for a stand-up comedian of the 'observational humour' variety. There aren't many jokes, the humour depends on a slow build. I heard Sedaris read one of these stories on the radio and I laughed aloud several times. Although so far as I can tell what he read was word for word identical with how it appears, I only laughed aloud once or twice at all the other stories in the book. I guess it is the way he tells them. Or perhaps reading is different.

Given the nature of the stories it is difficult to select single lines that give any idea of how funny Sedaris can be but here are a few:

• "A bow tie announces to the world that you can no longer get an erection." (p 57)
• "I wanted my first time to be special, meaning that I would know the other guy's name" (p 65)
• "Mess with me, and I'll stick my foot so far up your ass I'll lose my shoe." (p 79)
• "'Most people, most humans, receive a present and say thank you', I told her
•        'Not when they get garbage like that, they don't'" (p 95)
• "here the pathologists used hedge clippers to snip through rib cages." (p103)
• "It's funny the things that run through your mind when you're sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers." (p 113)
• "One gets an idea of the tireless, hardworking immigrant who hits the ground running - or, more often, driving." (p 162)
• "Take the crows that descend each winter on the surrounding fields and pluck the eyes out of newborn lambs." (p 170)
• "If it played non-stop in a skanky-smelling dorm room, he's got it." (p 173)
• "I could light a cigarette without thinking. Now I don't light it and think so hard about what I'm missing that there isn't room for anything else." (p 283)

"I can't make out the list of ingredients, but they taste vaguely of penis" (p 287)

July 2017; 22 stories; 310 pages

I have also read Let's explore diabetes with owls by the same author.

"The Horologicon" by Mark Forsyth

A 'book of hours' in which every hour is illustrated with weird words from the farthest shores of the English language. But what makes this book special is intimate scrutiny of everyday life and the number of words for things you didn't know you needed a word for. Thus he lies awake before dawn and worries (uhtceare); dawn can be low (the sun on the horizon) or high (when it first appears later, above clouds) and the first sun is the dayening, lightmans, day-peep, or early bright.

There are far too many interesting words to list them all in a blog entry. Even keeping track of all of Forsyth's little jokes would be exhaustive. For he is an extremely witty man. Therefore I disagree with the critic  who suggests he was tempted to read this book in a single go. On the contrary, I found it extraordinarily putdownable. And then pickupable. This is a book that demands that you read a few pages every day until, the end. It is brilliant, eccentric, hilarious and wonderful, but like a damn good meal you need to take your time to allow your digestion to work. Otherwise you would feel stuffed instead of satisfied.

Below are just a few of the many moments of brilliance:

• "The world is, I am told, speeding up. Everybody dashes around at a frightening pace, teleconferencing and speed-dating ... like so many coked-up pin-balls." (p 2) 
• "Any slipper than can double up as a weapon with which to spank godlings has to be a good idea." (p 20)
• The word 'bumf' meaning paperwork is a short version of 'bumfodder' meaning toilet paper! (pp 24 - 25)
• "Of the seven deadly sins only three are enjoyable: gluttony, sloth and lust balance their lethality with fun." (p 96) 
• "Sinhala ... means 'blood of a lion', which is odd as there are no lions in Sri Lanka." (p 131) 
• "In the ancient Near East ... if you sat down to have a nice supper with a sinner, that made you a sinner too. It is this ... that makes Jesus' sitting down with the wine-bibbers and tax collectors such a prickly point in the gospels. A man could be judged by the company he kept at table." (p 149) 
• "If you drink alone it is much harder to avoid buying your round." (p 176) 
• "The tongue is often merely the thin end of the wedge." (p 210)
• And a wonderful story about philosopher A J Ayer, heavyweight chanmpion Mike Tyson and supermodel Naomi Campbell

Wonderful. February 2017; 238 pages

What is it with my mate Fred? Doesn't he read any books which are bad or even average? This is the latest in a strong of fantastic recommendations which have included:

• A Time of Gifts: a wonderful travel book about a man walking through Europe between the wars; beautifully written 
• The Mighty Dead: a superb analysis of the Iliad but an authro who writes like a dream 
• Dynasty: the story of the first Roman emperors by the wonderful historian Tom Holland 
• The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller 
• Defying Hitler, a superb memoir written by a German about the period between the first and second world war

"A Man Called Ove" by Fredrik Backman

I wasn't that impressed by the last quirky little novel from a Swede, The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed out of a Window and Disappeared. I adored Ove.

Ove is a grumpy old git. He is a practical man. He has a routine. He used to be head of the Residents Association until the coup d'etat after which he fell out with his best friend. Ove is the Swedish Victor Meldrew. Everyone, and everything, conspires to annoy Ove: the pregnant Iranian woman with the DIY-challenged Lanky husband and their two girls, seven and three; the enormously fat jogger who lives next door; his ex-best friend Rune and his wife Anita; Blonde Weed and her mutt; the stray cat; the illiterate postman and his eyeshadow wearing friend ...

In between Ove rants we discover Ove's back story. He was orphaned at 16. He fell in love with and married Sonja but she died six months ago. Yesterday he was made redundant.  We learn why Ove wants to fix that hook and why, if he does it at night, no one knows when the lights will be turned off. We learn the sources of Ove's anger. And we discover the real Ove.

Right from the first page, the writing was amusing and original. The following is a very scant selection of brilliant epigrams:

• The iPad box is "a highly dubious box, a box that rides a scooter and wears tracksuit trousers and just called Ove 'my friend' before offering to sell him a watch."
• Ove knows that the kitchen chairs in the attic "didn't creak at all. Ove knows very well it was just an excuse, because his wife wanted to get some new ones. As if that was all life was about. Buying kitchen chairs and eating in restaurants and carrying on."
• Of Ove and his wife: "He was a man of black and white. And she was colour. All the colour he had."
• His wife's laughter made him feel "as if someone was running around barefoot on the inside of his breast."
• "It was always like that with women. They couldn't stick to a plan if you glued them to it."
• "They say the best men are born out of their faults and that they often improve later on."
• Anita is "determinedly driving sorrow out of the house with a broom."
• Jimmy the fat jogger wears "a fiercely green tracksuit that's so tight around his body that Ove wonders at first if it's in fact a garment or a body painting."

But this book is so much more that a list of clever witticisms. There are 40 chapters. On chapter 5 I write 'Wow! What a tearjerker." On chapter eight I wrote "Wow". Chapter 22 had me laughing out loud, chapter 23 had me in tears. I read the last ten chapters in exquisite agony, trying to laugh with a really big lump in my throat, pretending my hayfever was so bad that I had to keep stopping to blow my nose. I knew what was going to happen. The plot is as transparent as a window that has just been cleaned. There were a couple of little surprises on the way but I was ready for the grand finale. But I can't even reread the damn thing without getting tears in my eyes.

This is a book about today, about growing old, about doing the right thing, about love. It is very funny but at the same time it is incredibly poignant. READ IT!

June 2016; 294 pages

"The Great Pursuit" by Tom Sharpe

A literary agency receives a manuscript from a novelist determined to remain anonymous and persuade one of their unpublishable authors to pretend they wrote it for the US book tour. With arson, serpentine Southern services and sex and skulduggery in Oxford, this is a classic farce.

There are some brilliant lines: the fat agent Frensic stuffs himself with food because his "appearance tended to limit his sensual pleasures to putting things into himself rather than into other people." (p3) And near the end, when someone suggests that the epithet 'late' shouldn't be applied to a man who is still alive the riposte is that it scarcely seems suitable for one who is dead. But it was originally published in 1977 and some if the stereotypes, such as the gay publisher with a boyfriend called Sven, seem predictable and laboured.

November 2015; 380 pages

"On the Edge" by Edward St Aubyn

This novel follows a group of people as they travel to California for a week of meditation and new age workshops culminating in Tantric Sex.

It is wickedly funny in many places although I found myself uncertain as to whether St Aubyn was just poking fun at these people or whether he actually believed some of the nonsense they spouted. Certainly he seemed to be in agreement with at least some of the long lecture given by Adam towards the end of the book. And clearly the Tantric Sex worked for a number of the characters.

My favourite moment came when one character asked why God doesn't "alleviate our suffering" and answers that it is "because he doesn't see it as suffering" to which the other character replies: "Clearly he's less bright than one imagined." Another good moment came when the split between body and soul was dismissed as being analogous to the distinction between a rose and its scent.

But I found the first few chapters extremely difficult. Each chapter stared with a new set of characters and the second chapter is an eighteen page description of an LSD trip in the American desert. I found it very difficult to care about any character when they were introduced and dismissed so quickly, especially when their purpose seemed to be so that the author could mock them. The book didn't really hit its stride until we met the sceptical Peter who is just going through the mystical experiences in order to track down a woman he had sex with for three days and then we meet the equally sceptical Julian. (Why were the only real sceptics the two English men?)

In part I was reminded of Evelyn Waugh. The wit is caustic and can be very funny, the descriptions and observations sometimes lyrical and poetic but wit and poetry don't make a novel and I found the format too fragmented to be able to enjoy to the full the stories that were developing. In the end I didn't really care enough about the people.

August 2015; 278 pages

"Going Postal" by Terry Pratchett

A Discworld Novel.

Conman Moist von Lipwig is recruited by Ankh-Morpork's Tyrant Lord Vetinari to run the defunct Post Office which has lost the competition with the semaphore towers to transmit messages across the Discworld.

This with Pratchett's usual verbal brilliance with at least one joke on every page, this is another fun fantasy novel. Pratchett is on a par with Wodehouse for style.

My favourite moments:

• The hanging of Moist at the start.
• When Lord V offers Moist a choice: either take the job or step through the door behind "and you will never hear from me again" (there is nothing beyond the door and that includes a floor)
• When Moist asks Miss Dearheart "Would you like to have dinner tonight?" and she replies "I like to have dinner every night."
• When Moist explains he was offered a "job for life".

But it's all brilliant really.

April 2015; 488 pages

"How I won the yellow jumper" by Ned Boulting

Boulting is an ITV sports' commentator who has specialised in the Tour De France since 2003. When he started he knew nothing about cycling racing which is more or less the position I am in now. Desoite having read his book. He writes for the army of sports fans, and cycling fans. It is a little sad that the bookwas published before Bradley Wiggins shot to national prominence by actually winning the TdF for Britain and before Lance Armstrong admitted using drugs; this makes the book outdated already.

Most of the book is a good-natured romp through France. He celebrates the courage of riders who fall off their bikes into barbed wire fences and then get back on again, still bleeding, to race eighty miles. He celebrates the dogged endurance of those who toil up mountains. He celebrates the madness of the army that follows the tour: the caterers and organisers, the lorry drivers, the journalists, the fans. He chronicles the difficulties of finding accommodation when an army has come to town, of getting your laundry done, and of holding TV interviews in multiple languages. A lot of this is wry humour and most of it is enjoyable although it got somewhat tedious towards the end. There is only so much you can brag about the life of a sports reporter. But mostly I enjoyed it.

My main problem with the book is that he seemed to assume that I, the reader, would have a similar level of knowledge to him. I suppose this is fair in a book aimed at the fans. I imagine his face and name are known to a lot of people. But I thought it was a little strange given (a) that he knew nothing about the TdF when he started and (b) his job is to communicate.

For example, it was cute to find that he comes from Bedford which Is where I live. But he talks about Stanley Street and Tavistock Street as though the whole world will know what he is talking about. Again, he regularly talks about the peloton ; this is something to do with the how the cyclists group together on the race, I think, but he never explains it and I don't really know what it is. A classic statement is "No Bastille Day! No Richard Virenque!" I know what Bastille Day is but I have no idea who Richard Virenque is. Time and again I was left in the dark; I think by the end I realised how little I cared.

His lack of explanation is all the more ironic when I think of the things I know (Wiggins winning and Armstrong doping) that he doesn't at the time of writing. So there is a curious, unsettling mismatch between what he knows and what I know.

The classic example is when he laughs at himself for saying in his very first TdF commentary that a certain rider has "kissed goodbye to his chance of winning the yellow jumper." He recalls this moment with shame. It took me another fifty pages before I realised what his mistake had been: apparently maillot jaune should be translated as yellow jersey.

At which point I realised that I didn't really care. I'm just not a fan.

Mildly amusing. June 2013; 376 pages

"Mud, sweat and gears" by Ellie Bennett

My favourite travel book of 2013!

Ellie and her mate Mick cycle from Land's End to John O' Groats. But unlike my stepson Simon who, with his friend Josh, cycled the 'official' way in 13 days, Mick and Ellie go the pretty route over 23 days and via as many real ale pubs as they can possibly fit in.

MS&G is one of the funniest travel books I have read since Round Ireland with a fridge by Tony Hawks. I raced through reading it. It has a delightful combination of self-deprecating wry humour with close observation of the foibles of others that make Bennett a natural comedian. For a first book it is brilliant.

Fabulous fun. June 2013; 291 pages

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

Links to other books on travel, exploration and explorers, reviewed in this blog can be found here.

"Grammar for Grown-Ups" by Craig Shrives

This comprehensive little book has lots of advice about punctuation and grammar. The second section goes through easily confused words such as 'weather, whether and wether'; some of these are less easily confused than others and there were very few that I needed advice on. The first section was better.

The advice is clear and unpatronising but the best bit of the book is the use of wonderful quotations from wags and wits such as Oscar Wilde, Groucho Marx and Homer Simpson. For this alone it is a treasure.

Keep it on the shelves. February 2013; 235 pages

"Three men in a float" by Dan Kieran and Ian Vince

Two writers for The Idler magazine decide to pay tribute to former Idler writer Jerome K Jerome, best known as the author of Three men in a boat, by driving an electric milk float from furthest East (Lowestoft) to furthest West (Lands End). Clearly they can't do it by themselves so they recruit as third man Indian holy man and electrician Prasad.

Given their almost total lack of organisation (they forget to buy insurance until the day before the trip) it kis amazing they make it to the start. But that, tautologically, is only the beginning. Although they have some planned stops they are mostly reliant on strangers who will (a) give them a bed for the night and (b) provide the milk float with a free charge.

It was a mostly charming book extolling the delights of slow travel. In keeping with their muse, Kieran and Vince lengthily expound their views on the world. They hate supermarkets which is a little churlish given that their float is charged by both Morrison's and Tesco. They also hate Cornwall, monasteries (they get free bed and board in one) and regimented camp sites. They trumpet the green virtues of electric vehicles and deplore cars. They are opinionated but unlike Jerome, their views are rarely humorous.

Nevertheless this book keeps you going because of the eccentricities they meet along the way. 

January 2013; 276 pages

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

Other books on travel, exploration and explorers, reviewed in this blog, may be found here.

"The hundred year old man who climbed out of a window and disappeared" by Jones Jonasson

100 year old Allan runs away from his nursing home. Theft and murder ensue. He meets new friends. Parallel to this picaresque adventure we are told the equally picaresque story of Allan's life, involving world travel, Truman, Churchill, Stalin, Mao and de Gaulle and explaining Allan's pivotal if unacknowledged role in many of the major events of the twentieth century.

The century (and Allan's life) start in 1905. I don't think it is coincidence that this is when Albert Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity. Indeed, Einstein's dim half-brother and the atom bomb are both central to Allan's tale.

So in some ways this novel is a satirical view of the events of the twentieth century. In other ways it seems to be an ironic version of Voltaire's Candide. Whilst Candide features violent (apparent) death and resurrection,   The hundred year old man features violent death and (apparent) resurrection. Where Lisbon is destroyed in Candide, Vladivostok is destroyed in The hundred year old man. Both describe near-impossible events in mundane, matter-of-fact prose. In Candide the motto of Dr Pangloss is 'All is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds'; this is Voltaire's most sarcastic irony as he piles disaster on disaster. Allan's motto is 'Things are what they are, and whatever will be will be' which enables Allan to endure castration, repeated incarceration and several death penalties with Panglossian sang froid.

But although this book is equally entertaining it does not have the philosophical depth which makes Candide great literature.

"Lyttelton's Britain" by Iain Pattinson

Pattinson is the man who wrote Humphrey Lyttelton's scripts for I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue and this book is a compilation of the descriptions of towns with which Lyttelton would introduce the programme.

Humph was a master of the double entendre and this book has a great selection of those. It also slags off every town. But somehow, reading the same basic joke time and again just gets boring. As a minute long introduction to a weekly programme this humour is often laugh aloud but in a book it gets a little boring.

Disappointing.

March 2012; 221 pages

"Mock the Week's Funniest Book of All Time"

Disappointing.

Mock the Week is a brilliantly funny television programme. It contains Andy Parsons who looks smug and  comments on current events in an angry voice ending up with the catchphrase: "Well. That's a load of crap isn't it?" and Frankie Boyle who makes a lot of jokes about sex, especially masturbation. There are also four funny comedians on the show.

This book contains a lot of jokes about sex, especially masturbation; it seems to have been mostly written by Frankie Boyle. To be honest, they get rather boring. There are a few funny nuggets but they are hidden amongst the rest.

For example:

• Unlikely names for skyscrapers have six of 14 with sexual connotations;
• Bad titles for love songs (p144) manages 11 out of 14 sexual titles 

It just got boring. It seemed that they had run out of jokes so they just filled in with childish smut.

Disappointing.