"The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" by John Le Carre

 The classic Cold War espionage story written by a master of the trade.

Following the collapse of the spy network that he has been running, Alec Leamas retires from the British Secret Service. His life spirals downhill through a succession of meaningless jobs, his disillusionment numbed with whisky. Even new girlfriend Liz can't reach him. After he hits rock bottom, in prison, he is courted by the East Germans and agrees to tell them his secrets. But things aren't as they seem. This is a game of bluff and double bluff, of trick and be tricked. And as things collapse towards a disastrous conclusion, there is still one more twist to the story.

It is narrated in the 'omniscient' third person past tense (with occasional authorial glosses) but the reader only has access to the thoughts of the principal characters, Leamas and Liz. This keeps the narration tightly focused.

But I think the main reason why this novel stands head and shoulders over most of its genre is that Le Carre takes time to build up the characters and the settings and that he keeps everything so everyday and therefore so believable. Despite his vast experience and his repertoire of skills, Leamas is no James Bond (although Ian Fleming's original Bond is more vulnerable and grittier and credible than his film alter ego). This is real world spying and the reader can imagine themselves in the role and identify with Leamas without falling into fantasy. 

The other separation between this and its many imitators is the morality question. I compared this with Rip Tide by Stella Rimington (in real life a spymaster) in which the action is performed against a backdrop of 'us' and 'them': whatever we do is good and whatever they do is bad. But Leamas operates in a world where he can scarcely justify his actions even to himself (he seems mostly motivated by anger and hate). It's a seedy, sordid world of deception which corrodes the souls of the often pathetic actors who play in it. And it is perfectly matched to the background: the pathetic fallacy reigns supreme.

This makes this novel is one of the greatest spy stories of all time. The film starring Richard Burton is superb too.

Stylistically, it fits well with its near contemporaries: the work of Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow and John Osborne etc: the 'kitchen sink' dramas and novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

It won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1964 and the CWA Golden dagger in 1963. It was selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels since Time began (1923). The Crime Writers' Association named it the 3rd best crime novel of all time; the Mystery Writers of America ranked it 8th.

Selected quotes:

• “He developed small dishonesties, borrowed insignificant sums from secretaries and neglected to return them, arrived late or left early under some mumbled pretext. At first his colleagues treated him with indulgence; perhaps his decline scared them in the same way as we are scared by cripples, beggars and invalids because we fear we could ourselves become them.” (Ch 3)
• “Liz wanted to weep at the crabbed delusion of their dreams.” (Ch 5)
• “They hated him because he succeeded in being what each in his heart longed to be: a mystery.” (Ch 6)
• “Ashe was typical of that strata of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resistance, retreat.” (Ch 6)
• “He had the drunkard’s habit of ducking his mouth towards the rim of his glass just before he drank, as if his hand might fail him and the drink escape.” (Ch 7)
• “Liz made a rather exaggerated shrug, the kind of overstressed gesture people do make when they are excited and alone.” (Ch 16)
• “It was like mid-week evensong when she used to go to church - the same dutiful, little group of lost faces, the same fussy self-consciousness, the same feeling of a great idea in the hands of little people.” (Ch 19)
• “What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.” (Ch 25)
• “It's far more terrible, what they are doing; to find the humanity in people, in me and whoever else they use, to turn it like a weapon in their hands, and use it to hurt and kill ...” (Ch 25)

October 2024; 240 pages

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

"Agnes Grey" by Anne Bronte

 Anne Bronte's first novel was originally published as part of a three volume novel in which Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte made up the first two-thirds. As a result it received faint praise from the critics at the time, as being not so shocking as WH but having nothing like the bestseller status of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, another governess novel published shortly earlier.

I think the early critical response is justified: it is a very pale version of her sisters' works.

It is told in the first person (with a strange lurch into the third person at the end of chapter 7, when offering herself a character reference) and the past tense. At the start and the end, as if to frame the narrative, the narrator addresses the reader directly. 

Specifically, Bronte tells us from the start that this is a work of instruction. She says: "all true histories contain instruction” and she hopes that her history “might prove useful to some” (Ch 1) Then, in chapter 4, she says “My design, in writing the last few pages, was not to amuse, but to benefit those who might concern ... if a parent has, therefrom, gathered any useful hint, or an unfortunate governess received their slightest benefit, I am well rewarded for my pains.” In fact, Agnes is a bit of a goody-two-shoes. She rarely refrains from preaching a moral lesson. For example, in chapter 5 there is a debate about whether "creatures were all created for our convenience" and whether that means we have the right to "torment them for our own amusement". (This is in the context of the governess killing a brood of nestlings rather than letting her young pupil torture them to death; Anne doesn't seem to extend the argument to fox-hunting.) 

Later chapters have more moralising: 

• “He that loveth not, knoweth not God ... He that is born of God cannot commit sin.” (Ch 11)
• “If you cannot feel positive affection for those who do not care for you, you can at least try to do to them as you would they should do unto you; you can endeavour to pity their feelings and excuse their offences.” (Ch 11)
• “It is foolish to wish for beauty. Sensible people never either desire it for themselves or care about it in others. If the mind be but well cultivated, and the heart well disposed, no one ever cares for the exterior.” (Ch 17)

There's a certain amount of similar sermonising in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and I suspect Anne was a bit too fond of pointing out where her acquaintances strayed from what she saw as the true Christian message. 

Part of the problem is that Agnes suffers badly from the PLOMS, the ‘poor little old me syndrome’. She sets almost impossibly high standards of conduct for others. She is forever taking offence and then suffering in silence, only to pour our her grievances on her readers. As one of her pupils says: “Do, pray, try not to be so touchy! - there’s no speaking to you else.” (Ch 14)

I felt the plot lacked an overall structure; it was a bit memoirish (I understand it was based on Anne Bronte's real experiences). Penniless girl becomes a governess in a family where the children are spoiled rotten. She lacks any authority and finally, in an attempt to assert herself, is dismissed. She now goes to another family of spoiled brats but does a little better, having learned lessons. We're nearly half-way through before the possibility of escape appears, in the shape of a marriageable man, and now one of the spoiled brats has to jeopardise her chances. The second part actually unfolds as a plot; the first part seems to be merely introductory.

The characters are almost all one-dimensional. The rich families who employ her are almost all spoiled or selfish or tyrannical or inconsiderate. The clergyman she falls for is perfect in every way, if a little uncommunicative (he plays his cards so close to his chest that they seem to be inside his shirt). As for Agnes herself, she was meek to the point of toothlessness, long-suffering and patient and much too good to be true. Only Rosalie had anything approaching a character arc and they was straight from the stereotype and therefore as predictable as sunset.

The prose had its moments. Bronte was afraid of neither irony (“Mr Robson, the scorner of the female sex, was not above the foppery of stays.”; C 5) nor metaphor (“Then, ordering his sister to hold the reins, he mounted, and made me stand for ten minutes, watching how manfully he used his whip and spurs.”; Ch 2) nor using the pathetic fallacy. Describing the journey to her first governess appointment, the narrator says: “I looked back again: there was the village spire, and the old grey parsonage beyond it, basking in a slanting beam of sunshine - it was but a sickly ray, but the village and surrounding hills were all in some sombre shade ... I saw the sunshine departing, and I carefully avoided another glance, lest I should see it in gloomy shadow, like the rest of the landscape.” (Ch 1) She started her second job in the same way, on “a wild, tempestuous day; there was a strong north wind, with a continual storm of snow drifting on the ground and whirling through the air.” (Ch 7)

But the book does have perhaps the best last line I have ever read: “And now I think I have said sufficient.”

Selected quotes:

• “Her husband was a retired tradesman, who had realized a very comfortable fortune, but could not be prevailed upon to give a greater salary than twenty-five pounds to the instructoress of his children.” (Ch 1)
• “I had never been above twenty miles from home in all the course of my twenty years sojourn on Earth.” (Ch 6) The book records that some places were beginning to be linked by railways (Ch 7). Until the railways arrived, the vast majority of weddings in England were between two people from the same parish; within a few years after the railways had arrived the vast majority of weddings in England were between two people from different parishes.
• “The human heart is like india-rubber, a little swells it, but great deal will not burst it.” (Ch 13)
• “Who ever hung his hopes upon so frail a twig?” (Ch 21)
• “Alas! how far the promise of anticipation exceeds the pleasure of possession!” (Ch 21)

October 2024; 190 pages

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

"The Man of Feeling" by Javier Marias

 A tenor, appearing in Verdi's Otello in Madrid, becomes friendly with Natalia Manur, wife of a rich man; they are staying, with their companion, in his hotel. Slowly, their relationship develops. 

The story is told in the first person from the point of view of the tenor and we are deep inside his head, treated to his interior monologue as he observes, and as he vacillates. He flicks between then and now, four years later. His thoughts are very discursive; he is rarely straightforward. In this, it is a spot-on successor to classics such as Tristram Shandy and Knut Hamsun's Hunger. Sometimes I found myself rather confused - and I think that might have been intended - in the long paragraphs which frequently stretch over more than a page. I don't think I would have finished it had it not been such a short book.

Although, given that the narration is buried so deep inside the narrator's consciousness, and given that he tells you the minutest detail, a lot happens.

Selected quotes:

• "the impression ... of a person quite prepared to smile for decades whether or not it was appropriate to do so." (p 3)
• "If you ever see a young man wearing a scarf around the end of June or the beginning of September, you can be sure that he's a singer." (p 27)
• "For the last person is the one who counts, thus, for example, it will be our last widow who will have to be consoled, and any inheritance we leave will almost always go to those who did not know us when we were young." (p 112)

September 2022; 133 pages

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

"Blonde Roots" by Bernardine Evaristo

I am rather at a loss to understand how I should judge this book. It is not a novel in the sense that the works of Dickens or Conrad or Chinua Achebe are novels. Rather, it seems to be an extended satirical rant. I don't really know a comic novel quite like it.

Essentially, it is a story about slavery in a world where Africa is the dominant culture whose wealth is based on the labours of European slaves (this is presented as satire but there really were raids by North Africans to capture Europeans from European coastal regions including Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, England, and even Iceland). The protagonist is a whyte woman slave who seeks to escape cruel bondage.

In books in which a fundamentally different world to our own is to be described, such as in most science fiction, the author is obliged to do what is called 'world building'. This means that time and writing must be spent describing the world. This can get in the way of developing the characters or progressing the narrative. Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid's Tale, builds the world of Gilead by drip-feeding us with information do that we are not faced with too much too soon. I felt that in this book, there was more world-building than there needed to be and that this was at the expense of developing the characters. The author had a lot of fun depicting the whyte europanes as cabbage-eating peasants ("We were taught how to cook: cabbage soup, cabbage pie, fried cabbage, pickled cabbage, skillet cabbage, scalloped cabbage, cabbage and turnip bake, cabbage and potato casserole, cabbage and spinach cake"; 1.2) living in a northern serfdom and emphasising their backwardness compared to the cultural and technological superiority of the Aphrikans. She had a lot of fun describing the Aphrikan capital of Londolo and all its constituent parts: Kanada Wadi, Dartfor City, "the arsenal town of Wool Wi Che, famous for manufacturing the finwest spears, shields, crossbows, poison darts, muskets and cannons in the world." However, I found the humour rather heavy handed, perhaps because the same joke was repeated again and again.

The characters, as befits a satire rather than a novel, were fundamentally stereotypes. The vast majority of the blak characters were evil: as slave owners and the wives and sons and daughters of slave owners they were viciously selfish, greedy and lustful and violent, and unredeemed by any suggestion of good. By contrast, most of the whyte characters were slaves and the salt of the earth.

The narrator of sections one and three, the protagonist Doris Scagglethorpe, was from peasant stock who had been enslaved. The descriptions of the slave voyage was terrible, the conditions in which she lived were awful, she has been raped and abused ... and yet she didn't seem angry or bitter. Early in the book she complains that her Mistress insists she wears her hair in the 'Ambossan' fashion: "My long blonde hair was threaded through with wire and put into plaited hoops all over my head. I wanted to protest that we whytes just didn't have the bone structure to carry it off." (1.1) Bone structure? This woman who has been abducted and enslaved and raped and abused worries about bone structure. She sounds more like a sulky teenager than an angry woman. Much of the book is energised by outrage but then you find moments of bathos, such as when the rag dolls are modelled after Aphrikan ideals of beauty which "was so bad for our self-esteem" (1.1) When reading a novel one has to suspend one's disbelief and these were moments when, for me, that suspension was made difficult.

I suppose that my fundamental problem was that this is a novel about slavery. Slavery is like the Jewish holocaust of the Second World War. They are huge topics. Unbelievably horrible things happened to people; the people doing these things were unbelievably evil. Except that they were normal people, people who, within the context of their societies, were respectable. To tackle that subject in a novel is extraordinarily difficult. A traditional, character driven novel would explore these issues in depth.  There would be room for moral ambiguity (because humans are defined by moral ambiguity). Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which not explicitly about slavery, was an attempt to do this. (There is one moment when she appears to quote from Heart of Darkness: "What can I say, Dear Reader, but the horror, the horror ..." (2.4; as a further clue to the identification, the chapter is entitled Heart of Greyness).

Blonde Roots is not a traditional character driven novel. It seeks to mine humour from slavery. That is a hard challenge and risks trivialising the horror. So Blonde Roots tries to remind you of all the awful things that happened during slavery. My problem was that because I found the characters stereotypical and because the protagonist was upset at the trivialities leaving little room for her to be outraged, I did not invest in the characters and so, ultimately, I did not care about their terrible experiences as profoundly as I should have done.

There were moments when I worried about the editing:

• "Our shack was constructed out of corrugated iron which was boiling in summer nights." (1.1): It must have been hot if the iron boiled!
• "When I asked for chilli pepper to spice it all up, my gracious host retorted that his palette could no longer take it." (2.5); palette should be palate.

There are some wonderful moments:

• "Dreams and disappointment were inseparable bedfellows." (1.1)
• "Such was the demand for sugar, the price of a sweet tooth was a toothless smile. Such was the demand for coffee, the price of caffeine was addiction, heart palpitations, osteoporosis and general irritability. The price of rum was chronic liver disease, alcoholism and permanent memory loss. The cost of tobacco was cancer, stained teeth and emphysema." (1.1)
• "In this life there were 'fairy-tale castles' and 'peasant shit-houses', and wasn't it a pity not to have a choice." (1.2)
• "I could see he needed a drink now because he kept twitching ... as if flies were landing on different parts of his anatomy." (1.4)
• "Their eyes were flint in the act of ignition." (1.6)
• "The humid air draped itself languorously over the surface of my lungs so that I could barely breathe." (3.4)
• "Real men were so damned sexy women got wet just looking at dat fine-lookin hunk-a-beef ova dere. Women cried, fought, poisoned, even killed over them, but when their real men let them down, they complained about having to put up with dat bastard filandara and dere iz no good man in-a dis place. But the good men - not tall enough, broad enough, well-endowed, sexy, handome, confident, cocky, muscular or sweet-talking enough - weren't real men so they didn't count." (3.6)
• "I had put my childhood in its rightful place, as history to be revisited but not relived." (3.7)

If you want a book to chronicle the effect of colonialism on African society then read the trilogy of novels starting with Things Fall Apart and continuing with No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe. Each one is a great book. If you want a book in which white and black swap places read Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman (but don't watch the TV version which castrated itself by changing the ending). Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is another book about slavery. Sins of the Fathers by James Pope-Hennessey is a slightly old-fashioned history of the slave trade.

July 2020; 261 pages

"The Craft of Fiction" by Percy Lubbock

This is a thickly written book of literary criticism which considers a few classic novels (by Tolstoy, Henry James, Flaubert, Balzac, Dickens and Thackeray) and tries to understand some general principles. It was written in 1921 and therefore before many modernist novels were written.

He starts with a few general principles:

• Novels are about creating characters. He points out that we do this all the time in everyday life, piecing together impressions of the people around us "from a series of glimpses and anecdotes". 
• One key way of judging a novel is in terms of its verisimilitude. “A novel is a picture of life, and life is well known to us; let us first of all ‘realize’ it, and then, using our taste, let us judge whether it is true, vivid, convincing.” 
• On the other hand: “A novel is a picture, a portrait, and we do not forget that there is more in a portrait than the ‘likeness’. Form, design, composition, are to be sought in a novel, as in any other work of art.”
• A key artistic rule should be for an artist, any artist not just a novelist, to allow him or herself no more latitude than necessary

He then goes on to the main thrust of his argument. He discerns two techniques which a novelist may use (although he later points out that most novelists don't pick and chose these according to the book but tend to stick with what they find "most congenial"). “In one case the reader faces towards the story-teller and listens to him, in the other he turns towards the story and watches it.” These techniques are the pictorial in which the narrator has a direct relationship with the reader, describing what is going on, a panoramic technique which can encompass large swathes of place and time but is relatively thin and the scenic in which the reader views the action as if viewing a play so that the characters speak for themselves, which is far less economical of words and which is constrained to the actual time and place, but which is much more vivid, so vivid that he suggests that the scene is used sparingly and is well supported (by the pictorial sections of the novel) in order that drama be not dissipated.

A key problem with the dramatic is that characters are only seen from the outside. (Lubbock was writing before the great 'stream of consciousness' novels such as Ulysses by James Joyce and Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.) Lubbock recognises that: “Somewhere the author must break into the privacy of his characters and open their minds to us.” but he makes the point that: “Haphazard and unnecessary plunges into the inner life of the characters only confuse the effect, changing the focus without compensating gain.” It also means that the narrator themselves, if one of the characters, may the one least well-realised, since a narrator “is always in danger of seeming a light, uncertain weight compared with the other people in the book - simply because the other people are objective images, plainly outlined, while the seer in the midst is precluded from that advantage, and must see without being directly seen.” So, for example, he suggests that in David Copperfield the narrator “is but a shadow compared with Betsy Trotwood and the Micawbers and the Heeps.” 

Furthermore, the dramatic scene has to prepared for. The famous scene of Becky's downfall in Vanity Fair “has an artificial look, by comparison with the flowing spontaneity of all that has gone before” because Thackeray is not a natural theatrical writer and this is a theatrically dramatic scene and Thackeray failed to prepare for it which he could have done had he gone into more detail for the “great scene of Becky's triumph” which would have enabled a contrast; then “there would have been no necessity for the sudden heightening of the pitch, the thickening of the colour, the incongruous and theatrical tone.” In Anna Karenina (Lubbock is not shy at confronting what great art with its inadequacies) “there is no adequate preparation; Anna is made to act as a deeply stirred and agitated woman before she has the value for such emotions. She has not yet become a presence familiar enough, and there is no means of gauging the force of the storm that is seen to shake her.”

“Inevitably, as the plot thickens and a climax approaches - inevitably, wherever an impression is to be emphasized and driven home - narration gives way place to enactment, the train of events to the particular episode, the broad picture to the dramatic scene.”

These techniques depend on the subject of the novel: “The less dramatic, strictly speaking, the subject may be - the less it is able ... to express itself in action and in action only - the more needful it is to heighten its flat, pictorial, descriptive surface by the arts of drama.”

Furthermore “There were times when the dramatic method is too much ... it leaves the story to speak to itself, but perhaps the story may then say too much to be reasonably credible. It must be restrained, qualified, toned down, in order to make the best effect.”

Other points made:

• “What was the novelist’s intention? ... If it cannot be put into a phrase it is no subject for a novel ... The form of the book depends on it, and until it is known there is nothing to be said of the form.”
• Tolstoy’s characters “are never less than absolutely true to themselves ... and yet changing and changing ... under the touch of time.”
• “Many a novelist, making a further and fuller acquaintance with his subject as he proceeds, discovering more in it to reckon with than he had expected, has to meet the double strain.”
• “The way in which nine novels out of ten begin - an opening scene, a retrospect, and a summary.”
• “Flaubert is generally considered to be a very ‘impersonal’ writer, one who keeps in the background and desires us to remain unaware of his presence; he places the story before us and suppresses any comment of his own.”
• Dickens’ later novels have this shape: “Beginning with a deceptive air of intending mainly a novel of manners and humours ... he insinuates a thread of action that gradually twists more and more of the book around itself.” This is a form “which he elaborated and made his own.”
• “The use of the first person ... composes of its own accord ... for the hero gives the story an indefeasible unity by the mere act of telling it.” In autobiography “ the writer is not expected to guide his ordinary design, but to let it wonder free. Formlessness becomes actually the mark of right form in literature of this class.”
• The epistolary technique which avoids presenting the action as a retrospective ... but it does mean that one’s correspondents must always be at a distance so that one is forced to correspond with them.
• “The Ambassadors, then, is a story which is seen from one man's point of view, and yet a story in which that point of view is itself a matter for the reader to confront and to watch constructively.”
• “He is tremendous, his taste is abominable - what more is there to say of Balzac?”
• “Wherever ... his subject requires to be lodged securely in its surroundings, whenever the background is a main condition of the story, Balzac is in no hurry to precipitate the action; that can always wait, while he allows himself to leisure he needs for massing the force which is presently to drive the drama on its way. Nobody gives such attention as Balzac does ... to the setting of the scene.”
• “Where Balzac takes in hand the description of a town or a house or a workshop, he may always be suspected, at first, of abandoning himself entirely to his simple, disinterested craving for facts. There are times when it seems that his inexhaustible knowledge of facts is carrying him where it will, till his only conscious purpose is to sit down on paper everything that he knows. He is possessed by the lust of description for its own sake, an insatiable desire to put every detail in its place, whether it is needed or no ... and yet the result is always the same in the end; when he has finished his lengthy research among the furniture of the lives that are to be evoked, he has created a scene in which action remove as rapidly as he chooses, without losing its due emphasis.”
• “Nobody knows how to compress so much experience into two or three hundred pages as Balzac did unfailingly.”
• “Dickens’s way of dealing with his romantic intrigues was to lead gradually into them, through well-populated scenes of character and humour; so that his world is actual, its air familiar, by the time that his plot begins to thicken.”
• “Bleak House is a big survey of a quantity of odd and amusing people, and it is only by degrees that the discursive method is abandoned and the narrative brought to a point. Presently we are in the thick of the story, hurrying to the catastrophe, without having noticed at all, it may be, that our novel of manners has turned into romantic drama, with a mysterious crime to crown it.”
• “The process of writing a novel seems to be one of continual forestalling and anticipating; far more important than the immediate page is the page to come, still in the distance, on behalf of which this one is secretly working.”
• Tolstoy’s strength lies in the way he turns each little glimpse of a scene into a vignette: “The lightest trifle of an incident ... becomes a poetic event ... It suddenly glows and flushes, and its effect on the story is profound ... and so the half page is not a diversion or an interlude; it speeds the story by augmenting the tone and the value of the lives that we are watching. It happens again and again; that is Tolstoy’s way of creating a life, of raising to its full power by a gradual process of enrichment.”

There is much more to this fascinating book ... and he has made me want to read and reread all of the classic novels he describes. Ars longa vita brevis!

June 2019; 137 pages

Other books on literary criticism and writing novels:
The Art of Fiction by David Lodge
Aspects of the Novel by E M Forster

"Les Miserables" par Victor Hugo

Notre Dame in Paris

LM is a huge work. It divided into five parts and each of these parts is divided into up to fifteen books, each of which is further divided into chapters. In some ways it resembles Tolstoy's War and Peace. Just as Tolstoy spends perhaps fifty pages of his epic in discussing his theory of history, Hugo inserts into his epic his views on Waterloo, the Paris sewers and a number of other topics. However, while W&P is a family saga with a huge number of characters and a multiplicity of plots, LM focuses on a few characters who are tightly interlinked. This is typical of novels of the time but in my view it rather undermines pretensions to realism. There is no need to make Gavroche the son of Thenardier or to have Thenardier's other two sons passed off as Monsieur Gillenormand's sons. Nor does every policeman have to be Javert.

The plot is a fine one. Jean Valjean is a freed convict. However, his crime follows him around in the shape of a yellow passport which means that he has to report to the police at every town. There is no sense of having served his time. There is no thought of redemption. But this is exactly what Valjean achieves. After an encounter with a saintly Bishop (one of the most affecting moments in literature which always makes me want to weep: “Don’t forget, don’t ever forget, that you promised me to use this silver to make an honest man of yourself. ... Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you".), Valjean breaks the terms of his release by taking on a new identity and, as an enlightened businessman, redeems himself. This redemption continues when he cares for the daughter of one of his sacked workers. But his past, in the shape of suspicious Inspector Valjean, haunts him; if the Inspector catchers him he will be sent back to the galleys for life. At the same time the principal baddy, Thenardier, poses a constant danger to Valjean's chance for happiness. And then Valjean's adopted daughter falls in love with the son of a Napoleonic general who is himself manning the barricades with his insurgent friends.

To modern taste, the book is undermined by the black and whiteness of the characters. Although Jean Valjean himself is represented as oscillating between good and bad, and the fallen woman is doing her best to be good, most of the characters are fundamentally one dimensional. Thus Javert, the policeman, represents the inflexibility of unquestioning duty which is not undermined until the very end, at which point his conversion seems unlikely. Cosette, the loved adopted daughter is the ultimate in goody-two-shoes, a virginal maiden pure in every possible thought. Her boyfriend, Marius, is likewise virginal and upright and honorable and altogether too good to be true. Thenardier is an out and out rotter, the blackest of black villains, even though his daughter Eponine sacrifices herself for love and his neglected boy Gavroche sacrifices himself to help his friends. These characters just don't stand up for themselves.

The second flaw is Hugo's taste for philosophising. His description of the battle of Waterloo takes up nearly the whole of a book with only the final chapter having any relevance to the plot. His description of the Paris sewers takes a whole book. We can't have a wedding speech without Hugo giving us his views on marriage; we can't have the students at the barricades without endless sermonising from the revolutionary leader. I am not surprised that LM is possible to adapt into only six hours of TV drama; at least one third of the book could be pruned without any effect on the story or the characterisation.

Another difficulty with the book is that Hugo seems to start several times. Most authors would start the story with the arrival of the convict JV in town for his transforming encounter with the Bishop. This is a hook and a half. But Hugo spends the first book describing the character of the Bishop and doesn't introduce JV until book two. JV's convict experiences, which is the starting point for the musical, is told in flashback. Then, after the drama of JV, we switch to a romantic interlude (for a whole book) with four young men and their girlfriends and it is almost as if Hugo is frightened of keeping the momentum going. The story of Fantine than merges with that of the reformed JV and we meet Javert who becomes the nemesis for JV through the sacrificial act of the Champmatheiue Affair. In all of this the story bumps along and in book 7 Hugo shows a genius for forcing JV to make a difficult decision time and time again as every obstacle is thrown in his way. But then Part Two begins with almost an entire book devoted to the story of the battle of Waterloo and, when we get a little plot in the final chapter, it is a detail not yet connected with anything in Part One which actually happens before most of the events in Part One. After that the story gets going again although in book 7 Hugo treats himself to a rant about monasticism (at one point, oblivious to the potential self-reference, he declares: "What’s wonderful, too, is the ease with which people spout hot air."). Then in Part Three Hugo does it again. The first book is an essay on street children. Then Hugo begins another story, this time that of Marius, with a book-long essay on the Parisian street-urchin. And Part Four starts with an essay entitled 'A Few Pages of History'. Even after the excitement of the insurgency (and the discovery that JV is a crack shot) Part Five has to contain a long discussion of the Parisian sewer system. Cut it, Victor!

Nevertheless, Hugo (or possibly the translator) is brilliant at writing ordinary people. The exchanges between a gardener and a gravedigger in the exciting burial scene of Part Two and the wonderful character of street-urchin Gavroche are moments of joy.

Furthermore, despite my struggles with the structure, particularly given Hugo's tendency to speechify, he often comes up with witty or insightful comments:

Part One: Fantine
Book 1

• "True or false, what is said about people often has as much bearing on their lives and especially on their destinies as what they do."
• “Man is made of flesh and that flesh is both a burden and a temptation to him. He drags it around with him and he yields to it."
• “To be a saint is the exception; to be a just person is the rule. Err, stumble, commit sin, but be one of the just." 
• “Sin as little as possible—that is the law of mankind. Not to sin at all is the dream of the angel. All earthly things are subject to sin. Sin is like gravity.”
• “The sins of women and children, domestic servants and the weak, the poor and the ignorant, are the sins of the husbands and fathers, the masters, the strong and the rich and the educated.”
• “Those who are ignorant should be taught all you can teach them; society is to blame for not providing free public education; and society will answer for the obscurity it produces. If the soul is left in darkness, sin will be committed. The guilty party is not he who has sinned but he who created the darkness in the first place.”
• "Prosperity presupposes Capability. Win the lottery and you are a clever man. The winner is revered. Be born with a silver spoon in your mouth, that’s all that counts. Be lucky and the rest will fall into place. Be fortunate, and you’ll be thought great."
• "There’s nothing wrong with being an arriviste as long as you’ve arrived."
• "They mistake the constellations of the cosmic void for the stars made by ducks’ feet in the soft mud of the bog."

Book 2

• "People who are overwhelmed with troubles never do look back. They know only too well that misfortune follows in their wake."
• "laws that look on man with anger"
• "prisoners, those eternal enviers of flies and birds."
• "Release is not the same as liberation. You get out of jail, all right, but you never stop being condemned."

Book 3

• "If a girl wants to remain virtuous she can’t be too soft on her hands."

Book 5

• "books are remote but reliable friends."
• "There is no such thing as a weed and no such thing as a bad man. There are only bad cultivators.”
• "No one pries as effectively into other people’s business as those whose business it most definitely is not."

Book 7

• "To travel is to be born and to die at every instant."
• "Probity, sincerity, candour, conviction, a sense of duty, are things that, when they go wrong, can become hideous."

Part Two: Cosette
Book 2

• "The ultimate smile is God’s alone."
• "It does not appear that the devil had the wit to invent gunpowder before Roger Bacon"

Book 4

• "It is possible to conceive of something more terrible than a hell where one suffers and that is a hell where one is bored."
• "Wherever a railway station has been set on the edge of a capital city, it has spelled the death of a local neighbourhood and the birth of a township."

Book 5

• "It must be remembered that, at the time, the police were not exactly at ease; they were hampered by a free press. The song and dance over a few arbitrary arrests, denounced by the newspapers, had been heard all the way to the Chambers and made the prefecture timid. To attack the freedom of the individual was a grave matter. The officers were afraid of getting things wrong, for the prefect put the blame on them; a mistake meant dismissal."
• "Before you grab a stick with thorns, you put gloves on."

Book 6

• "To brush your teeth lies at the top of a slippery slope at the bottom of which lies: losing your soul."

Book 7

• "Monastic communities are to the broader social community what mistletoe is to the oak, what warts are to the human body."
• "The Spanish convent was the Catholic convent par excellence. You got a whiff of the East there. There, the archbishop, Aga Khan of heaven, locked up and spied on this seraglio of souls reserved for God. The nun was the odalisque, the priest the eunuch. In their dreams, the fervent females were chosen by and possessed Christ. At night, the gorgeous naked young man came down from the cross and became the ecstasy of the cell."
• "Claustration, castration."
• "You will feel yourself shudder before the habit and the veil, those two shrouds of human invention."

Part Three: Marius
Book 1

• “In today’s civilization, still so incomplete, it is not so unusual to see such breakdowns, with families falling apart in the shadows, parents having little idea of what has become of their children and spilling their guts on the public highway. Hence dark destinies.”
• “A touch of Egypt and Bohemia in the lower orders accommodated the upper spheres and suited the purposes of the high and mighty. Hate-filled opposition to the education of lower-class children was a dogma. What was the good of “a little learning”? That was the catchcry. Well, the stray child is the corollary of the ignorant child.”

Book 2

• “The peculiar thing about prudery is that, the less the fortress is under threat, the more it puts sentries around.”

Book 3

• “You may be old, you may be a prude, you may be devout, you may be the aunt; but it is always nice to see a lancer step into your bedroom.”
• “The lancer gave the complacent grin of a pickpocket praised for his probity.”

Book 4

• “To err is human, to stroll, Parisian.”

Book 7

• “Evil starts with dead eyes. Faced with someone whose eyes see nothing, think carefully and be afraid.”
• “The first form elegance takes is idleness; and the idleness of a pauper means crime.”

Book 8

•  “They are rare, those who have fallen without being damaged on the way down”

Part Four: The Idyll of the Rue Plumet and the Epic of the Rue Saint-Denis
Book 1

• “The bourgeois is the man who now has time to sit down.”

Book 2

• “That blue hour of the evening when dreamers are at their saddest,
• "That indefinably frightened and pathetic look that a stint in jail adds to misery.”

Book 3

• “There are meditative states that we might call vertical; when you are at the bottom, it takes time to come back up to the surface.”

Book 5

• “The shadow was assuredly not a ghost. Ghosts hardly ever wear round hats.”
• “The old are made for going out at the right moment.”

Book 6

• “Growing plays such tricks on you. Your skirt becomes too short the moment your nakedness becomes indecent.”
• “It’s raining again! God Almighty, if this continues, I’m cancelling my subscription."

Book 9

• “What devastates Othello is water off a duck’s back to Candide.”

Book 10

• “For everything there is a theory that proclaims itself “common sense”; ... the offer of a compromise between the true and the false; explanation, admonition, a somewhat arrogant mitigation that, because it is mixed with blame and excuse, believes itself to be wisdom yet is often only pedantry. An entire school of politics, known as the happy medium, has emerged from this.”
• “The same stoical men die at twenty for their ideas, at forty for their families.”

Book 11

• “The four corners of old age—decay, decrepitude, ruin, and sorrow.”

Part Five: Jean Valjean
Book 1

• “Equality has an organ: free and compulsory education.”

Book 4

• “Thinking always involves a certain amount of inner revolt.”

Book 7

• “When you are old, you feel like a grandfather to all little children.”

Book 9

• “Nature divides the living into those on the way in and those on the way out.”
• “Just because you don’t like the way things are ... that’s no reason to be unfair to God.”

A classic, but immensely flawed as a work of literature.

January 2019

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

“Aspects of the Novel” by E M Forster

The writer of classic novels including A Passage to India, Howard's End, Room With a View, Maurice, and Where Angels Fear to Tread, eloquently explains his understanding of this art-form.

He professes difficulty in defining the novel, citing works as diverse as Tristram Shandy, Emma, War and Peace, Moby-Dick, and The White Peacock. This is a man who has read widely! He settles for the novel being “a fiction in prose” of at least 50,000 words. (p 25)

“The novel tells a story. That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist.” (p 40) “A story is a narrative of events arranged in time-sequence.” (p 44) The secret is to keep the reader turning the pages. “Scheherazade avoided her fate because she knew how to wield the weapon of suspense - the only literate tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.” (p 41) Therefore a story “can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.” (p 42) “Telling a story ... shock-headed public gaping around the camp-fire and only kept awake by suspense ... storyteller needn't pick up loose threads. As long as he keeps his shock-heads excited he needs no plot.” (p 160) However, a novelist aspiring to be an artist should “Interest the reader in people - not in what happens next.” (p 174)

Novels are about characters. But here he distinguishes fiction from memoir or biography or history because “A historian ... is quite as much concerned with character as a novelist, but he can only know of its existence when it shows on the surface.” (p 55)

He points out that novelists tend to ignore many of the facts of life such as " birth, food, sleep, love and death.” (p 57) In novels most babies “come into the world more like parcels than human beings. When a baby arrives a novel it usually has the air of having been posted ... one of the elder characters goes and picks it up and shows it to the reader, after which it is usually laid in cold storage until it can talk or otherwise assist in the action.” (p 60) “The treatment of death, on the other hand, is nourished much more on observation, and has a variety about it which suggests that the novelist finds it congenial. He does, for the reason that death ends a book neatly.” (p 61) Furthermore “Food in fiction is mainly social. It draws characters together, but they seldom require it physiologically, seldom enjoy it, and never digest it unless specially asked to do so.” (p 61) Sleep is useful when dreams can be recounted but a character “is never conceived as a creature, a third of whose time is spent in the darkness.” (p 62) And novels are obsessed with relationships. “The constant sensitiveness of characters for each other ... is remarkable, and has no parallel in life, except among people who have plenty of leisure.” (p 62) Thus “Homo Fictus ... is generally born off, he is capable of dying on, he wants little food or sleep, he is tirelessly occupied with human relationships. And - most importantly - we can know more about him than we can know about any of our fellow creatures, because his creator and narrator are one.” (p 63)

He distinguishes between flat and round characters. “Flat characters were called ‘humours’ in the seventeenth century, and are sometimes called types, and sometimes caricatures ... They are constructed around a single idea or quality ... Really flat characters can be expressed in one sentence.” (p 73) “One great advantage of flat characters is that they are easily recognized ... they never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere.” (p 74) “A second advantage is that they are easily remembered by the reader afterwards.” “Dickens’s people are nearly all flat ... Nearly every one can be summed up in a sentence ... Part of the genius of Dickens is that he does use types and caricatures, people whom we recognise the instant they re-enter, and yet achieves effects that are not mechanical and a vision of humanity that is not shallow.Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He ought to be bad. ... His immense success with types suggests that there may be more to flatness than the severer critics admit.” (p 76)

He is sceptical about the idea of point of view pointing out that both Dickens in Bleak House and Tolstoy in War and Peace shift viewpoints “A novelist can shift his viewpoint if it comes off ... Indeed this power to expand and contract perception ... this right to intermittent knowledge - I find it one of the great advantages of the novel-form, and it has a parallel in our perception of life.” (p 83)

He explains how plot can be distinguished from story: “A plot is ... a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” (p 87) And what is essential about a plot? “This element of surprise or mystery - the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called - is of great importance in a plot ... Mystery is essential to a plot ... To appreciate a mystery, part of the mind must be left behind, brooding, while the other part goes marching on.” (p 88) However, “Nearly all novels are feeble at the end. This is because the plot requires to be wound up.” (p 93 - 94) “Incidents and people that occurred at first for their own sake now have to contribute to the denouement.” (p 94)

Some plots have patterns eg: the shape of an hour-glass in a cross-over plot or the shape of a circle or a chain which binds “the scattered incidents together with a thread woven out of their own substance.” (p 136) However, he warns that "A rigid pattern ... may externalise the atmosphere, spring naturally from the plot, but it shuts the doors on life, and leaves the novelist doing exercises, generally in the drawing room. Beauty has arrived, but in too tyrannous a guise. ... tyranny as it grows powerful grows petty.” (p 145) He cites Henry James.

He has many more insights, beautifully (and sometimes confrontationally) expressed:

• “Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain.” (p 30 - 31)
• “The world of beauty was largely closed to Dickens, and is entirely closed to Wells.” (p 34)
• “We move between two darknesses. Certain people pretend to tell us what birth and death are like ... but it is all from the outside.” (p 57) 
• “Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.” (p 58)
• “Food the stoking up process, the keeping alive of an individual flame, ... taken over by the individual himself, who goes on day after day putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his face without becoming surprised or bored.” (p 58) 
• “When human beings love they try to get something. They also try to give something, and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep.” (p 59)
• “One of the illusions attached to love is that it will be permanent. Not has been - will be.” (p 63) 
• “All our experience teaches us that no human relationship is constant, it is as unstable as the living beings who compose it, and they must balance it like jugglers if it is to remain.” (p 63) 
• “All this we know, yet we cannot bear to apply our bitter knowledge to the future; the future is to be so different; the perfect person is to come along, or the person we know already is to become perfect. There are to be no changes, no necessity for alertness. We are to be happy or even perhaps miserable for ever and ever.” (p 63)
• “If God could tell the story of the universe, the universe would become fictitious.” (p 64)
• “You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.” (p 87)
• “For two inquisitive people to be friends must be impossible.” (p 88)
• “Perhaps our subject ... has stolen away from us while we theorize, like a shadow from an ascending bird. The bird is all right - it climbs, it is consistent and eminent. The shadow is all right - it has flickered across roads and gardens. But the two things resemble one another less and less, they do not touch as they did when the bird rested its toes on the ground.” (p 101)
• “The saying of St Catherine of Siena that God is in the soul and the soul is in God as the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea.” (p 122)
• “The fantasist ... manipulates a beam of light which occasionally touches the objects so sedulously dusted by the hand of common sense, and renders them more vivid than they can ever be in domesticity. ... It characterizes these novels and gives them ... roughness of surface.” (p 124)
• “As a rule, evil has been feebly envisaged in fiction, which seldom soars about misconduct or avoids the clouds of mysteriousness. Evil to most novelists is either sexual and social, or something very vague ... they want it to exist, in order that it may help them on with the plot, and evil, not being kind, generally hampers them with a villain.” (p 128)
• “Immediate Past is like a stuffy room, and the succeeding generation waste their time in trying to tolerate it. All they can do is to go out leaving the door open behind them. The door may be spacious, witty, harmonious, friendly, but it smells, and there is no getting around this.” (p 161)
• “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.” (p 165)
• “H.J. in The Turn Of The Screw is merely declining to think about homosex, and the knowledge that he is declining throws him into the necessary fluster.” (p 171)
• “Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.” (p 171)
• “Time bears all its son's away unless they look sharp.” (p 173)

Stupendous and eye-opening. October 2018; 187 pages

Another similar book of literary criticism is The Craft of Fiction by Percy Lubbock

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

"Peter Abelard" by Helen Waddell

This novel is based on the true-life story of Peter Abelard, a Scholastic philosopher who became famous as a rabble rousing teacher in the early 12th Century, then famous as the lover of Heloise and, after being castrated by Heloise's outraged family, again famous as a heretic forced to burn his book and finally famous again as a scholar and teacher. Some cv.

This novel was first published in 1933. It faithfully reflects that rather gentler age. There are no graphics details, the conversation of many characters breaks off into quotations and snippets of poetry (as presumably the academics of the 1930s did, and the pace of the book is gentle and refined.

It is an interesting book but of its period and therefore rather dated and somewhat slow.