"The Spire" by William Golding

Chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of the best 99 novels since 1939.

 A Dean in the Middle Ages is inspired by a vision to add a spire to his cathedral. Opposition includes the master builder he hires to supervise the work. Will his monomaniacal determination win the day or will his dreams come crashing down? 

The wikipedia page on this novel has a detailed account of the plot (with spoilers), the characters and the symbolism.

For me, the best thing about the book is the carefully constructed gappy stream of consciousness narration (all from Dean Jocelin's perspective) which is a masterclass in how to hook and beguile the reader into piecing together what is going on from the sometimes disjointed clues. 

The key turning points are at the one-third mark and the two-thirds mark.

Captain Ahab meets Leopold Bloom?

Selected quotes

• “The most solid thing was the light. It smashed through the rows of windows in the south aisle, so that they exploded with colour, it slanted before him from right to left in an exact formation, ... Everywhere, fine dust gave these rods and trunks of light the importance of a dimension.” (Ch 1)
• “He had a tariff of knees. He knew how they should be after this length of kneeling or that.” (Ch 1)
• “Once more, the windows were coming together. the Saint’s life still burned in them with blue and red and green; but the spark and shatter of the sun had shifted.” (Ch 1)
• “The master builder often looked at things without seeing them; and then again, he would look at a thing as if he could see nothing else.” (Ch 2)
• “When the rain drizzled, then time was a drizzle, slow and to be endured.” (Ch 3)
• “When the wind came, it ... cuffed the air this way and that.” (Ch 3)
• “A workman fell through the hole above the crossways, and left a scream scored all the way down the air which was so thick it seemed to keep the scream as something mercilessly engraved there.” (Ch 3)
• “A midday without sun and therefore blasphemously without hope.” (Ch 3)
• “Some of the gargoyles seemed diseased, as they yelled their soundless blasphemies and derisions into the wind, yet made no more noise than death in another country.” (Ch 4) “no more noise than death in another country.”: what a phrase!
• “He was helpless ... as a girl herding too many geese.” (Ch 4) A nice mediaeval simile.
• “There comes a point when a vision’s no more than a child’s playing let’s pretend.” (Ch 4)
• “The earth is a huddle of noseless men grinning upward, there are gallows everywhere, the blood of childbirth never ceases to flow, nor sweat in the furrow, the brothels are down there and drunk men lie in the gutter. There is no good thing in all this circle but the great house, the ark, the refuge, a ship to contain all these people and now fitted with a mast.” (Ch 5) Earlier in the book, the cathedral is compared to a man lying on his back which makes the spire an erect penis.
• “There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.” (Ch 10)
• “Life itself is a rickety building.” (Ch 10)
• “His thoughts went trotting away like a horse unharnessed from the cart.” (Ch 11)

William Golding was a Booker prize winner (1980) and the 1983 Nobel Laureate. He wrote poetry, drama and these novels:

• Lord of the Flies (1954)
• The Inheritors (1955)
• Pincher Martin (1956)
• Free Fall (1959)
• The Spire (1964)
• The Pyramid (1967)
• Darkness Visible (1979) (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize)
• To the Ends of the Earth (trilogy)
• Rites of Passage (1980) (Booker Prize winner)
• Close Quarters (1987)
• Fire Down Below (1989)
• The Paper Men (1984)
• The Double Tongue (posthumous publication 1995)

My copy has a delightful cover by John Piper, an artist who designed a large opus of ecclesiastical work, including stained glass windows.

August 2025; 223 pages

Published by Faber and Faber in 1964

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

"Pilgrimage 1: Pointed Roofs" by Dorothy Richardson

This little novel, the first of a novel sequence of 12 further volumes, has a place in literary history as the first novel in English to be described as 'stream of consciousness' in a review by May Sinclair (author of Uncanny Stories) in the Egoist in April 1918. It is a fictionalised (not autofiction because the name of the narrator is changed) version of Richardson's 1891 experience as a 17-year-old student teacher at a finishing school in Hanover in Germany. The rest of the novel sequence closely follows the events of Richardson's life.

It wasn't what I would describe as 'stream of consciousness'. Although the narration is entirely from the perspective of protagonist Miriam Henderson, it seemed more of an interior monologue. There were moments when the prose departed from standard grammatical structure or when we experienced raw sensory impressions or when memories interrupted the conscious thought, but most of the time Miriam's thought processes were quite orderly and the narration normal. I suppose that it was a first attempt at SoC, but it showed how quickly the technique advanced: Ulysses by James Joyce began serial publication just 5 years after Pointed Roofs and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway was published ten years after PR. But certainly PR is written from a perspective inside the skin of its narrator and there are certainly elements of SoC.

Unfortunately, the events described in the book are really rather mundane. I suppose that a day in the life of an insurance salesman, or the hour-by-hour account of a lady planning a dinner party are also mundane but perhaps they are forgivable because of their tight time-frame, while PR's time period is months. 

It does evoke a feeling of the claustrophobia of an all-girls finishing school with its strained relationships. Towards the end there is a thunderstorm to which most of the schoolgirls (and the head teacher) react with hysteria. The headteacher is also liable to sudden storms and is memorably condemnatory when she discovers that the girls have been talking about boys which is impure! Although up till that point the attitude towards this sort of thing seemed to be relaxed.

The portraits of the headteacher Fraulein Pfaff and the informal Head Girl, confident Australian Gertrude, were well-developed. Otherwise there were probably too many characters for me to understand any of them in depth.

Selected quotes:

• “Lilla, with her black hair and the specks of bright amber in the brown of her eyes.” (1.1) I loved that detailed study of eye colour. Eyes are something the narrator repeatedly notices.
• “The polished floor was uncarpeted save for an archipelago of mats and rugs.” (3.4)
• “Perhaps that was how it was with the English. They knew, but they did not dare.” (3.8)

August 2025; 146 pages

First published in the UK by Duckworth in 1915

My paperback version was issued by Zinc Read in 2023.

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

"Invitation to the Waltz" by Rosamund Lehmann

A coming-of-age novel about a romantic young girl going to her first ball.

Seventeen-year-old Olivia is the younger daughter of a well-to-do middle-class family in the depths of the English countryside shortly after the end of the First World War. She has been invited to her first dance at the nearby stately home. The first half of this novel explores her preparations for this coming-of-age event, her hopes and her dreams; the second half chronicles the big night itself.

There's not really any plot. Instead, we experience Olivia's inner monologue in an almost stream of consciousness way as she encounters a strong of eccentric characters including poor relative Uncle Oswald, name-calling village children, a lady who makes dresses (poorly), a potentially lascivious colonel, a wannabe curate and, at the dance itself, a self-obsessed radical poet, a blinded ex-soldier, another lascivious old man, and the man of the house with whom she discusses literature. It's almost a picaresque. Meantime her sister falls in love.

The characterisation of the protagonist, Olivia, seen from inside, is faultless; despite the fact that the timeline is compressed into just over a week, her character learns and develops. The elder sister, Kate, is a more mature counterpoint. Most of the other characters are eccentric caricatures, unimportant in themselves, but each one teaches Olivia something about life.

It is set firmly in its social class, a world of big houses run by servants (one described as having "the flat strong heels of service"; 3.15), of mostly subservient villagers, and of the patronage of genteel persons less fortunate than oneself. Olivia has a moment of realisation about the plight of the woman in the village who makes dresses for her: "For the first time, Mrs Robinson's life rose up objectively and faced her. Olivia saw it with dismay, with guilt. She made frocks for other girls to dance in." (1.3) On the other hand the tribe of sweep's children are experienced as if they are from another species: "Their eyes were sharp, bright, hard, rats' eyes above high sharp cheekbones, their lips long, thin and flat, their skulls narrowed and curiously knobbed. They didn't look like other people's children. They had hardly any hair; and undersized frames with square high shoulders, almost like hunchbacks, and frail legs." (1.5) But there is no thought at the ball that all these people are fundamentally parasites, living on the backs of those who labour on the land they own.

The prose is beautiful. The social setting and the writing style reminded me strongly of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway which was published seven years earlier so may well have been an influence. Another story with a similar heroine, set in the world of genteel impoverishment (but much funnier) is Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. 

Selected quotes:

• "She felt the quiver of the warm sun-drained air like the swim and beat of pulses in soft nervous agitation. Roses and leaves breathed in the window; and the evening bird voices seemed to circle with exultant serenity down the sky." (1.2) Beautiful? Or over-ornamented, trying too hard? I rather like evening as 'sun-drained' but I am not sure if pulses 'swim' or leaves 'breathe'.
• "Bournemouth was a gay place in those days. I dare say it still is." (1.2)
• "She wouldn't get a husband; she hadn't a chance now. She was thirty. Letting I dare not wait upon I would, youth had gone by." (1.3) In Shakespeare's Macbeth, Lady M says to the eponymous antihero "Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'. Like the poor cat i' the adage?" (Act One Scene 7) in order to encourage him to commit murder and treason.
• "Custom could never stale the Brighton gentleman" (1.3) Hard on the heels of one Shakespearean quote comes another, this time from Antony and Cleopatra, in which Enobarbus, describing Cleopatra, says: "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety"
• "He died of softening. I'm sorry for anyone who has to nurse softening. Dreadful - so disgusting." (1.3)
• "There in the distance was Mrs Wells-Straker, widow of widows, flowing, streaming towards the church in all her crepe." (1.4)
• "The camel face of Mr Blenskinsop (university coach), his mingling of subacidity, sawdust wit and cowering defensive bachelor ceremony." (1.4)
• "Boys and girls had dropped ink on the faded carpet, puppies had contributed yellowish maps." (1.9)
• "It was a certain sign of growing up that one no longer loved the snow; no longer wished to rush out and stamp in it and throw it about." (1.10)
• "He was not exactly ugly, they thought; but one might be alone with him on a desert island for ten years without ever being able to bear to kiss him." (2.1)
• "Fumble about a bit, I expect - you know, feel your muscle and mess about with your hands pretending he's a fortune-teller, and meaure how tall you were against him - that sort of feeble pawing. It's a sort of disease old men get." (3.14) Almost every old man in this novel, as seen through a young girl's eyes, is inappropriate and lascivious.
• "Everything's going to begin. A hare sitting up in the grass took fright, darting ahead of her into the ploughed land. The rooks flew up in a swirl from the furrows. All the landscape as far as the horizon seemed to begin to move. Wind was chasing cloud, and sun flew behind them. A winged gigantic runner with a torch was running from a great distance to meet her, swooping over the low hills, skimming from them veil after veil of shadow, touching them to instant ethereal shapes of light. On it came, over ploughed field and fallow. The rooks flashed sharply, the hare and his shadow swerved in sudden sunlight. In a moment it would be everywhere. Here it was. She ran into it." (3.25; last sentences).

July 2024; 232 pages

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

"Berg" by Ann Quin

One of the best opening lines: "A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father..."

But the simplicity and straightforwardness of this opening belies the rest of this novel. It uses a 'stream of consciousness' technique in which the narrative is supplied by the main character's internal monologue which includes, without formal distinction, his thoughts, his memories, his observations, events that happen, and the dialogue of the other characters:

• "Alistair Berg, alias Greb, commercial traveller, seller of wigs, hair tonic, paranoiac paramour, do you plead guilty? Yes. Guilty of all things the human condition brings; guilty of being too committed; guilty of defending myself; of defrauding others; guilty of love; loving too much, or not enough; guilty of parochial actions, of universal wish-fulfilments; of conscious martyrdom; of unconscious masochism. Idle hours, fingers that meddle. Alistair Charles Humphrey Greb, alias Berg, you are condemned to life imprisonment until such time you may prove yourself worthy of death."
• "Oh Lor’ I’m sorry, have I hurt you Aly? Aly there now, what is it? You are a funny chap. Oh dear I nearly trod on it, I mean him. Of course he’s very possessive, I mean was possessive, I couldn’t even look one-eyed at another man and he’d threaten to slit the poor chap’s throat."

 This usually worked very well: I could always distinguish the dialogue of others but sometimes I got confused. I also found it difficult to believe that Berg's lower middle-class upbringing and education would have furnished him with the extensive range of literary allusion (from Sophocles to Milton to Shakespeare and beyond) that clouded his thoughts; eg: 

• "He drew a circle in the mirror and wrote NON OMNIS MORIAR."
• "To take his father’s corpse back home to Edith—the trophy of his triumphant love for her! In a Greek play they’d have thought nothing of it"
• "George into ‘Georgina’, the exchange of sonnets, in remembrance of Michelangelo, Rimbaud, Valéry, Whitman, occasionally Milton; you, Lycidas sleeping in the river valley, head cradled only by grass and the wind; body lulled by sunlight."
• "Because he’s not coming back, he’ll never be back, because he’s full fathoms five. For why should he intrude now when he was never there when the blades of corn struck the wind, and the trees whispered go home, go home, the hour of play is over, away from the tree’s trunk with its skin of a toad, the bees swarming below; bees with ruby eyes that would fly in after the goodnight kiss and the door closed."

The point about stream of consciousness, I suppose, is that it is a stream, and Quin represented this by using very long sentences with multiple phrases separated by commas. This sometimes led me to becoming confused. There were also moments when Berg's thoughts became either obscure or pretentious:

• "Threading experience through imaginative material, acting out fictitious parts, or choosing a stale-mate for compromise. Under this fabrication a secret army gathers defeating those who stalk the scaffolding of comparisons. Yet they still haunt with their pale perplexities, and resentful airs."
• "Squatting furniture—senators in conference."

One of the obscure elements revolved around Berg's sexuality. In his memory, there are suggestions that he might have been sexually abused by a man when he was a boy, there are hints of of childish fumblings with girls, there are suggestions of humiliation (through impotence?) in a heterosexual encounter. At one stage he dresses up like a woman. Fundamentally, Berg is like Oedipus: not only does he want to murder his father but he listens through the thin walls of the boarding house to his father having sex and longs to replace him ... but the women is not his mother but his father's mistress.

The first half of the plot seems to be based on Hamlet (there are suggestions that Hamlet is based on the story of Oedipus). Berg's aim is to kill his father, an intent motivated, perhaps, by revenge but also by jealous disgust as he listens to his father making love to his mistress (as Hamlet is motivated in part by disgust at the incest of his mother and his uncle). Berg, like Hamlet, repeatedly hesitates.

The turning point comes at the 50% mark; from there on Hamlet is abandoned and the plot mutates into farce. For most of the second half, Berg is under as misapprehension; I don't know whether Quin intended the reader to be aware of Berg's mistake (I certainly was) or not.

Berg was Quin's first novel, published in 1964. She was at the forefront of contemporary avant garde fiction of the time, together with others such as Eva Figes, William Burroughs (eg Naked Lunch, The Wild Boys, The Soft Machine), and Alexander Trocchi (Young Adam, Cain's Book). She lived in Brighton, the seaside town on the south coast of England, dying there at the age of 37 by drowning, possibly suicide (she had a long history of mental health issues). 

Selected quotes:

• "She was, without doubt, a good deal younger than his father, attractive, he supposed, in the artificial style, and who would wish to go beyond the surface in a woman anyway?"
• "Can one compare a landscape that remains, though the evolutionary surfaces suffer unlimited contradictions?"
• what is gained by delving into such linguistic labyrinths?
• "He placed the razor against his neck—not there you fool, the wrists, the wrists."
• "that’s what is always so unforgiveable, the fact that everything will go on with or without my existence."
• "How separated from it all he felt, how unique too, no longer the understudy, but the central character as it were, in a play of his own making."
• "the problem arose from that store house in the mind, where all things unpleasant are wrapped up for a time, until something—a self-imposed injection—perhaps makes it react, or a knock hardly at the time felt, but later confronted by the bruise."

It's a very short book but the experimental style can make it difficult to read and, fundamentally, the stream of consciousness seemed to be that of the author rather than the character.

September 2023

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

"Hunger" by Knut Hamsun

 "It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania [now Oslo], that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him." This is the start of a strange novel about an anonymous penniless writer with nothing left to pawn, who can't pay his rent and cannot afford to eat. He gets so hungry that he even tries wood shavings and bites his own finger. His only source of income is from selling unsolicited articles to newspaper editors, but when he is hungry and homeless he finds it difficult to concentrate enough to write: "I had noticed distinctly that every time I went hungry for a long time it was as though my brain trickled quietly out of my head, leaving me empty." (part one). To add to this vicious circle he has an unquenched pride which makes it impossible for him to accept charity; fundamentally self-destructive (eg the finger-biting incident), he lies to protect himself from the humiliation of poverty, he insults those who try to help him and then further impoverishes himself by giving money and possessions away when he has them. As Paul Auster (1970) says in the Afterword: "Order has disappeared for him; everything has become random. His actions are inspired by nothing but whim and ungovernable urge, the weary frustration of anarchic discontent."

In one section, the protagonist invents a new word but cannot think of what it means, although he knows a lot of things it doesn't mean. Somehow this epitomises the meaning of his life. 

The protagonist echoes Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (with the inner monologue, teetering on the edge of insanity, of the narrator in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground). 

Published in 1890, Hunger heralds modernism. The style is early 'stream of consciousness' and the motif of a protagonist wandering around a city would later be echoed in mature 'stream of consciousness' novels Ulysses by James Joyce and Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, though in both of these the timescale is collapsed into a single day. The no-frills narration reminded me of Kafka (eg The Trial). Perhaps the closest parallel I have read are the four novellas by Samuel Beckett: The Expelled, The Calmative, The End, & First Love.

One interesting style feature is that some paragraphs switch tense between past and present:

• "Flies and gnats stuck to the paper and disturbed me; I blew on them to make them go away, then blew harder and harder, but it was no use. The little pests lean backk and make themselves heavy, putting up such a struggle that their thin legs bend They just cannot be made to budge. Having found something to latch onto, they brace their heels against a comma or an unevenness in the paper and stand stock-still until they find it convenient to take off." (part one)
• "The sea stretched away like blue mother-of-pearl, and small birds flew silently from one place to another. A policeman is patrolling his beat some distance off, otherwise there is not a soul to be seen and the entire harbour is quiet." (part two)
• "The darkness had taken possession of my thoughts and didn't leave me alone for a moment. What if I myself were to be dissolved into darkness, made one with it? I sit up in my and flail my arms." (part two)

This confusion between then and now, and the meandering of the protagonist through the city, and the way his attention is always being distracted, seem to represent the way we think.

This sort of book isn't easy to read. As Paul Auster (1970) says in the Afterword, "it is a work in which nothing happens". There is no obvious plot and the skeletal structure seemed to be a spiral into which the protagonist plunges; there was little character development except for the protagonist; the end was abrupt; much of the 'action' seems meaningless and repetitive. Nevertheless, I think it will be one of those books which I will remember for a long time.

Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. A list of other laureates, many of whom have books reviewed in this blog, can be found here.

Selected quotes:

• "Over by the door, where my room was papered with old issues of Morgenbladet, I could see, very clearly, a notice from the Director of Lighthouses, and just left of it, a fat, swelling ad for freshly baked bread" (part one)
• "Autumn had arrived, that lovely cool time of year when everything changes colour and dies." (part one)
• "Where am I to go? I had to be somewhere, after all." (part one)
• "A brooding darkness was all around me. Everything was still, everything. But up aloft soughed the eternal song of wind and weather, that remote, tuneless hum which is never silent. I listened so long to this endless, faint soughing that it began to confuse me; it could only be the symphonies coming from the whirling worlds above me, the stars intoning a hymn ..." (part one)
• "My hunger pains were excruciating and didn't leave me for a moment. I swallowed my saliva again and again to take the edge off, and it seemed to help." (part two)
• "The intelligent poor individual was a much finer observer than the intelligent rich one. The poor individual looks around him at every step, listens suspiciously to every word he hears from the people he meets ... He is alert and sensitive, he is experienced, his soul has been burned ..." (part three)
• "I didn't want to torture her but did so anyway." (part three)
• "And so too my own conscience bids me ..." (part four) is a sentence he never manages to finish.

 A challenging but incredibly worthwhile read.

July 2022; 217 pages

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

"Tristram Shandy" by Laurence Sterne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selected quotes:

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

March 2022; 588 pages

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

"Some Do Not ..." by Ford Madox Ford

This is the first book of the Parade's End tetralogy. It is written by the author of The Good Soldier and it contains some of the same themes: the Catholic wife married to the Protestant husband, adultery, and the motivation of keeping up appearances.

Some Do Not ... was published in 1924, after Ulysses (1922) but before Mrs Dalloway (1925). As with these other novels, it foregrounds thought. Each chapter starts with a situation, and then rambles backwards and forwards. In this way the narrative technique resembles that of The Good Soldier (although it is less extreme, confining the rambling to within each chapter rather than allowing it to spread across the whole book as in TGS). In addition some of the chapters are told from within the head of one of the characters. Thus, Part One Chapter Six is a stream of consciousness in which Tietjens walks through the countryside following Valentine and thinks (and falls in love with her).

The protagonist if Christopher Tietjens, younger son of the owner of Groby, a stately home in Yorkshire, who is the ultimate in know-all geeks and the last of the stiff-upper-lipped old-style noblesse-oblige upper-class. The story opens in a railway carriage where CT and Vincent Macmaster (a Scott of very humble beginnings who has been supported through his education by CT's father and who is the soul of ambition) are discussing whether CT should forgive his wife who is asking to be taken back after running off to Europe with another man (leaving CT with a child whom he doubts is really his; in a brilliant pathetic fallacy we are told that CT is “interested in the domestic affairs of the cuckoo”). We progress through an attack on a golfing party by Suffragettes, a breakfast party with a clergyman suffering from some sort of religious Tourettes (at which VM falls in love with the clergyman's wife), to CT falling into unconsummated love with one of the Suffragette girls, Valentine Wannop (a wonderfully liberated woman who, to make ends meet after the death of her Professor father and to keep her brother at Eton works as a maid and later as a gym mistress). Part Two opens three years later during World War One. CT has been injured and is slowly recovering the use of his memory. Although everyone around him has been committing adulteries and he and VW are the only sexual innocents the rumours suggest he has made her pregnant; society (and particularly the guiltiest) is beginning to turn its back on him. CT is recalled to the front. Given that he may very well be killed, and given that he has already lost his reputation, should Christopher consummate his love for Valentine?

A wonderful novel exposing the double standards behind society. As the book points out, those who don't go to the front to fight resent those who do and therefore do their best to blacken their names. Those who are guilty hate those who are innocent.

There are some great moments in which the socio-historical situation is laid bare. It is difficult to say whether the comments reveal the attitudes of the author, or of the character, and to what extent the author is writing these things in order to criticise them.

• “I am offered the job—of course it’s an order really—of suppressing the Ulster Volunteers . . . I’d rather cut my throat than do it . . . ’ Sandbach said: ‘Of course you would, old chap. They’re our brothers.”
• “And policemen to go round the links with Ministers to protect them from the wild women .”
• “The wangle known as shell-shock was cynically laughed at and quite approved of. Quite decent and, as far as she knew, quite brave menfolk of her women would openly boast that, when they had had enough of it over there, they would wangle a little leave or get a little leave extended by simulating this purely nominal disease, and in the general carnival of lying, lechery, drink, and howling that this affair was, to pretend to a little shell-shock had seemed to her to be almost virtuous.”
• “charity begins surely with the char!”

There are many other brilliant lines:

• “As Tietjens saw the world, you didn’t ‘talk.’ Perhaps you didn’t even think about how you felt.”
• “Disasters come to men through drink, bankruptcy, and women.”
• “His life had necessarily been starved of women and, arrived at a stage when the female element might, even with due respect to caution, be considered as a legitimate feature of his life, he had to fear a rashness of choice due to that very starvation.”
• “If you swat flies enough some of them stick to the wall.”
• “What finally separated the classes was that the upper could lift its feet from the ground whilst common people couldn’t.”
• “dagger . . . sheath!”: This is a wonderful metaphor (full of sexual innuendo) in which the narrator compares his wife with the woman he loves:
• “Heroines are all very well; admirable, they may even be saints; but if they let themselves get careworn in face and go shabby . . . Well, they must wait for the gold that shall be amply stored for them in heaven.”
• “No woman should wear clouded amber, for which the proper function was the provision of cigarette holders for bounders.”
• “The devil of course is stupid and uses toys like fireworks and sulphur; it is probably only God who can, very properly, devise the long ailings of mental oppressions .”
• “Actually, this mist was not silver, or was, perhaps, no longer silver: if you looked at it with the eye of the artist . . . With the exact eye! It was smirched with bars of purple; of red; or orange; delicate reflections: dark blue shadows from the upper sky where it formed drifts like snow . . . The exact eye: exact observation: it was a man’s work. The only work for a man. Why then were artists soft: effeminate: not men at all: whilst the army officer, who had the inexact mind of the schoolteacher, was a manly man? Quite a manly man: until he became an old woman!”
• “But why was he born to be a sort of lonely buffalo: outside the herd?”
• “when she entered the room every woman kept her husband on the leash.”
• “He had come in like a stallion, red-eyed, and all his legs off the ground: he went down the stairs like a half-drowned rat, with dim eyes and really looking wet,”
• “she was sure her butler would get to heaven, simply because the Recording Angel, being an angel—and, as such, delicately minded—wouldn’t have the face to put down, much less read out, the least venial of Morgan’s offences .”
• “they hate the French for being frugal and strong in logic and well-educated and remorselessly practical.”
• “Perhaps the complete study of one woman gave you a map of all the rest!”
• “The poorer helots of great cities hearten their lives by dreaming of material beauties, elegance and suave wealth,”
• “The staff officers who came to the Tietjens were not of the first vintages; still they had the labels and passed as such.”
• “proficiency of the body calls for chastity, sobriety, cleanliness and the various qualities that group themselves under the heading of abnegation.”

The book explores social mobility. Tietjens, though an old Tory with the most privileged background, is utterly at home with all classes. Valentine was forced by her father's death to leave her privileged world and become a maid but this experience has not in the least coarsened her. Her bother, in contrast, who went to Eton at the expense of his skivvying sister, embraces communism and becomes a conscientious objector during the war, which involves working on a mine sweeper after a spell in prison, and is depicted as a drunk, coarsened by his rather privileged upbringing just as Valentine has been purified and refined by her descent into the working class.

Mrs Duchemin, the long-suffering wife of the manic preacher, who has an affair with Macmaster, and whose return for the protection and discretion of Tietjens is to shun him and blacken his name.She and Macmaster are from the poorest classes and successful social climbers; their Friday salons are a perfect example of evolving pecking orders.

Modernist writing at its best. June 2018

The tetralogy continues with No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and Last Post.

The Parade's End tetralogy is rated 57th in the BBC's best 100 novels of all time.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Mrs Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf

This stream of consciousness novel  is a sort of halfway house between the extremely poetic but fiendishly difficult to read The Waves and the much easier to follow and slightly more structured To The Lighthouse, both by Woolf. In The Art of Fiction, David Lodge points out that Mrs Dalloway herself appears also in Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out in which "a traditional authorial narrative method is used to give a very satirical and prejudicial portrait of Clarissa Dalloway"; the stream of consciousness creates more sympathy with the character.

The activity of following a hero through the hours as she wandered round London reminded me of Leopold Bloom's journey around Dublin in Ulysses a book which Woolf had read but thought was "An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating.". Comments like this suggest that Woolf was a massive snob; isolated from reality by her privileged upbringing in Bloomsbury. But she attempts to empathise with the working class in the tragic arc of Septimus Smith, the shell-shocked war hero whose day intersects and contrasts with Mrs Dalloway's.

The major difference between the telling of Bloom's journey through Dublin and Dalloway's through London is that Woolf keeps shifting her focus, frequently introducing a character only for that character to become the narrator, as though we were all somehow telepathically linked; not so much a stream as an ocean of consciousness in which we all swim.

There are themes that run through the book. The most obvious is the hours struck by Big Ben and other church clocks("The leaden circles dissolved in the air)", a repeated motif. Peter Walsh hears them on page 36 and thinks of this image. Clarissa hears clocks striking and has exactly the same thought on page 135, having heard of the death of Septimus, as she watches the old lady in the window opposite preparing for bed ("Fear no more the heat of the sun"; quoting Cymbeline). Other motifs include:

• Hats: On page 5 Clarissa Dalloway "felt very sisterly and at the same time oddly conscious of her hat" whilst Septimus Smith's wife Rezia makes hats for people: "'It is the hat that matters most,' she would say" (p 65). When she first met Septimus "his hat had fallen when he hung it up" (p 106): forecasting doom! And after Septimus has died, as she is in shock, sipping sherry , Rezia has a memory of when "she put on her hat, and ran through cornfields" (p 109) Peter Walsh, in his hotel room, thinks "Any number of people had hung up their hats on those pegs" (p 112). 
• Gloves: Clarissa has "a passion for gloves" (p 8); Hugh and Richard collect "yellow gloves from the bowl on the malachite table" after visiting Lady Bruton on page 81; Elizabeth, Mrs Dalloway's daughter, who doesn't care for gloves on page 8, runs back upstairs because she has forgotten them on page 91.
• Self consciousness: as with the hat on page 5, Clarissa realises on p 8 that "half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew ... for no one was ever for a second taken in" On the other hand Rezia hears an old woman singing for money in the street: "And if someone should see, what matter they?" (p 62)
• Caring "not a straw"; On page 8 Elizabeth, Clarissa's almost-adult daughter "cared not a straw for either" gloves or hats. Peter Walsh "cared not a straw - not a straw" for what the Dalloways and others think of him on page 37. Richard "didn't care a straw what became of Emigration" on page 83. 
• Horror: Maisie Johnson, observing Septimus and Rezia, thinks "Horror, horror!" on page 20; Mrs Dalloway says to herself "Oh this horror!" on page 27; both are a clear reference to Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
• Peter Walsh's motif is to play with a pocket knife
• Shakespeare: The England of Septimus seemed to be very Shakespearean.
• Shakespeare and sex: Richard Dalloway believes that "no decent man ought to read Shakespeare's sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes (besides, the relationship was not one that he approved)." (p 56) But Septimus Smith went to France as a soldier "to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays" (p 64); it is not until he is mad, presumably with some sort of PTSD following his experiences in the trenches, that he decides that "Love between a man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare. The business of copulation was filth to him before the end." (p 66). Does this mean Septimus is gay? He hero-worshipped his commanding officer Evans; they used to "share with each other" which I have been told was code for homosexual behaviour in the 1920s (E M Forster used 'share' in this sense in Maurice). There is also a clear hint of lesbianism in Clarissa's relationship at school with Sally. 
• Shakespeare and death: There are two key quotes:
• "if it were now to die 'twere now to be most happy", a line from Othello is remembered by Mrs Dalloway on page 26; she remembers it again on page 134 when she hears that Septimus has killed himself.
• "Fear no more the heat of the sun" which Clarissa reads in the window of the bookshop at the start of the book and remembers them in the last paragraph; Septimus also thinks how hot the sun is just before killing himslef. These words are from the funeral song in Cymbeline; the refrain of the song is "Golden lads and girls all must/ Like chimney sweepers come to dust" which is also yet another reference to clocks and time because 'chimney sweepers' were another name for dandelion clocks in Shakespeare's days.
• Thread. Is this a reference to the Fates, Clotho who spun, Lachesis who measured and Atropos who severed the thread of a human's life? On page 83 Millicent Bruton "let the thread snap"; Richard imagines a "spider's thread of attachment between himself and Clarissa" on page 84. Rezia, making a hat, puts down her scissors on page 103, minutes before her husband ends his life. 
• Time. We hear the clocks striking at regular intervals throughout the book (Big Ben often, St Margaret's two minutes afterwards). Mrs Dalloway "feared time itself ... the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced ; how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching ... Narrower and narrower would her bed be." (p 23) Though "Life had a way of adding day to day" (p 49), one day it will all end and then "how unbelievable death was! - that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant ..." (p 89). One day far into the future archaeologist will start digging through the ruins of what was once London, finding nothing "but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth." (p 13) (Smith already thinks of his wife as "a piece of bone"; p 12). Woolf uses this image of the archaeologists to suggest that "greatness was passing" (p 14); the "sick transit of Gloria Monday" as Stephen Fry puts it in The Ode Less Travelled. 
• Religion: "Religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their feelings" (p 9) thinks Mrs Calloway but shell-shocked Septimus Smith has a religious mania which has set his nerves on edge (though he is self-obsessed and blind or indifferent to the suffering of his wife). But Mrs D too can feel like a religious: "as the maid shut the door to, and she heard the swish of Lucy's skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions." (p 22) though "not for a moment did she believe in God" (p 22)  Mrs Dalloway doesn't like religion: "Love and religion! thought Clarissa ... how detestable they are! ... Love destroyed too. Everything that was fine, everything that was true went." (p 92) The soul is described as "This leaf-encumbered forest, the soul" (p 9)

Woolf uses these motifs to show how feelings are shared between all of us, and she uses the run-on stream-of-consciousness technique, with the point-of-view flowing from one person to the next, as if her characters can somehow understand what others are thinking. Because feelings, she asserts, can be passed on from one person to another: Septimus Warren Smith has "eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too." (p 11)

There are other moments of magic, of poetry, of acute observation:

• And sometimes, through some accident, "like a faint scent, or a violin next door ... she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt ... the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores." (p 24)
• "She made as if to hide her dress, like a virgin protecting chastity, respecting privacy." (p 30)
• Mrs Dalloway thinks of "a Queen whose guards have fallen asleep and left her unprotected ... so that anyone can stroll in and have a look at her where she lies with the brambles curving over her" (p 32) in an obvious reference to Sleeping Beauty.
• Egotism is "the river which says on, on, on; even though, it admits, there may be no goal for us whatever, still on, on" (p 33) Septimus Smith, of course, decides to kill himself.
• Sycophantic Hugh goes "snuffing round the precincts of the great" (p 125)

This book is harder to read than most but the insights into the human condition, the acuteness of the observations and the poetry of the prose make it worth the effort.

September 2017; 141 pages

Mrs Dalloway was rated 50th by Robert McCrum on The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time. Selected by Time magazine as one of the best 100 novels since Time began (1923) and awarded 3rd place in the BBC's best novels of all time.

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