"A Room with a View" by E M Forster

This wonderful book was voted in a BBC poll as the 32nd best novel of all time.

I though for the first 100 pages that it was an elegantly written light comedy. There were some delightful characters; chiefly the unbearable Miss Bartlett who is Lucy's chaperone and is that sort of spinster who sets more store on respectability than life and who manages to selfishly control everyone and get her own way all the time by the device of always insisting that she lives her life for the benefit of others.

The book is written as a two act play: the first act is Florence and the second act is the Surrey village of Summer Street where all the main characters coincidentally meet. Here Lucy, who encountered and was kissed by George near the end of act 1, is engaged to the hideous Cecil who sneers at the humble considerations of the simple folk of Summer Street because they are not so prententious as he is.

Charlotte Bartlett and Cecil Vyse are wonderfully written characters; perhaps it is easier to write bad people than it is to write good. Certainly the muddling clergyman Mr Beebe, Lucy's mother Mrs Honeychurch, Lucy's nemesis George, her brother Freddy, and George's father are all less well written. 

There are a number of wonderful passages:

"George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice." (Chapter Two)

"Mr Beebe was, from rather profound reasons, somewhat chilly in his attitude towards the other sex, and preferred to be interested rather than enthralled." (Chapter Three) is a beautifully discreet way of saying that Reverend Beebe is gay. Later Mr Beebe suggests that Cecil, Lucy's erstwhile fiance, is also gay; he is quoted by Freddy as saying "Mr Vyse is an ideal bachelor ... He is like me - better detached." (Chapter Eight). Still later, George (Lucy's squeeze) himself says of Cecil: "He should know no one intimately, least of all a woman." Forster, a gay man when to be so was illegal, writes a pivotal scene of Freddy and George, "radiant and personable" young men, and Reverend Beebe, bathing naked in a pool and being surprised by the women: at least Mr Darcy kept his breeches on!

"For all his culture, Cecil was an ascetic at heart, and nothing in his love became him like the leaving of it" (Chapter Seventeen, beautifully misquoted from Macbeth).

Another aspect of Forster's craft is his ability to show the substance behind the stereotype. Both Mr Vyse and Miss Bartlett, though never engaging the reader's sympathy, redeem themselves by actions which show their essential humanity. Thus they escape being caricatures. And the whole scenario of the careful manners in the Florentine pension and the bloodlessness of the Edwardian village Anglican scene is mitigated by the boys who do not want to go to church (nor does the parson's neice) and the vicar whose passion is tea, and Lucy's mother who transcends the 'silly little mother' character by being quite forthright when she detects cruelty and pomposity, and the details such as the 'horrid' little cottages that are constructed by a builder who makes them ugly because he is following the dictates of Ruskin and the ugly house that Lucy's father built on the proceeds of being a solicitor and the fact that George works as a clerk in a railway office (at least he isn't a porter!).

But after the elegant writing and the delicate characterisation and the tres amusante drawing room comedy I was suddenly gripped by the apprehension that Lucy, having chucked one fellow, would NOT go on to marry her true love but allow society's manners to make her into an old maid. The last sentence of Chapter Eighteen states "The night received her, as it had received Miss Bartlett thrity years before." That I was so distraught at the possibility of a sad ending to the novel shows how much I had entered into the life of these characters.

And in a lovely endpiece written fifty years after the publication of the novel, Forster speculates about his characters as they progress through World Wars One and two in which George discovers that "away from his wife he did not remain chaste." This is the glory of Forster, he understands the weaknesses that are human beings.

Brilliant

Also read Howards End and Where Angels Fear To Tread and Maurice.

February 2010; 230 pages

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

"Dickens" by Peter Ackroyd

This is the paperback, abridged version of Ackroyd's biography of Charles Dickens and there were times when I was grateful for the free flow of the prose and there were times when I wanted a little more detail. So I suppose that means that Ackroyd got the mix about right.

I don't know which was most interesting: the childhood; the early working life when, all at once, he became a household name; the early novels when he was writing two at the same time whilst simoutaneously editing magazines; the later novels when he had developed his craft much more highly.

Books like Pickwick, Twist and Nickleby (the last Ackroyd describes as Dickens funniest book) were written as monthly serials. Dickens wrote prodigious amounts each day. He wrote using a quill!!! He was writing comedy and tragedy simultaneously (it seemed to help him) and he was writing even when he was in rooms with other people. His energy was fantastic. He did not seem to need a plan to his writing; he relied on his invention.

For the later books he had established a writing routine and he was massively well organised and disciplined, usually knowing exactly how many words he had to write. He would write for hours in the morning and then do other things in the evening. As well as writing a lot of massive novels he also edited (and contributed to) magazines for most of his working life. Some of the later books were serialised in weekly, rather than monthly, parts; this was the way he wrote; he never seems to have indulged in the liuxury of writing a novel entire and then publishing it, even when he was getting massive advances. He always seems to have been desperate for money.

One of his themes was clearly the virgin: little Nell, little Dorrit etc. Having married his wife he went into an extended morbid mourning when her 17 year old sister died. Much later, having separated from his wife, he seems to have had a Platonic affair with an actress called Ellen Ternan. He was a bit weird about young women.

He also saw life a s a perpetual battle against illness and time and ... He struggled with obsessive energy (in this he reminded me a little of myself) to escape his poverty stricken background.

His speciality was always creating characters. It was only in the later books that he learned to plan and his fiction began to mature.

I have never read Our Mutual Friend or Martin Chuzzlewit (or the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood). I must.

A superb biography. I wish I had the energy and drive (and the organisation) of Dickens.

February 2010; 578 pages

Peter Ackroyd is a prolific author: he writes both fiction and non-fiction; he specialises in London. I adore some of his books such as the brilliant Hawksmoor and I have found others (such as Thames) very tedious. If you enjoy Dickens then I recommend his biography of another great Victorian novelist and friend of Dickens: Wilkie Collins. Alternatively you could read Claire Tomalin's excellent biography of Dickens.

"Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck

This is a beautiful book.

I have now read 4 Steinbecks: The Pearl, a book I read too soon at school and never appreciated; the blockbusters East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath, both of which I read in my early twenties; now this. He is a wonderful writer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

Lenny, big and stupid, and George, small and clever, make a most unlikely pair but George is Lenny's protector in the world, getting him out of all the trouble Lenny gets into. The other characters: self-possessed and astute Slim, the mean little feller Curly, Curly's wife (jailbait), Candy the old fellow, Crooks the crippled negro stable buck make a perfect cast. Men who have no future; men who only dreams. The writing is lean and elegant; the descriptions poignant and placed so that there are breathing places in the thriller dance. There is nothing in the plot that doesn't contribute to the terrible climax.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Mice_and_Men) points out that every character has a dream (although as Burns said "The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley"). They have these dreams because they are lonely: "Candy is lonely after his dog is gone. Curley's wife is lonely because her husband is not the friend she hoped for —- she deals with her loneliness by flirting with the men on the ranch, which causes Curley to increase his abusiveness and jealousy. The companionship of George and Lennie is the result of loneliness. Crooks states the theme candidly as "A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. Don't make no difference who the guy is, long's he's with you." .... The author further reinforces this theme through subtle methods by situating the story near the town of Soledad, which means "solitude" in Spanish."

Of Mice and Men reads like a play and is structured in 3 'acts' each of two 'scenes': certainly the first pages are like stage directions, first describing the scenery before the two mian characters appear on stage.

Tiny but perfect.

February 2010; 121 pages

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Also reviewed on this blog the tiny but perfect, haunting and elegiac Cannery Row by the same author.

"The Owl Killers" by Karen Maitland

A Norfolk village in 1321 is ruled by the church, the manor and the Owl Masters. Nearby is a beguinage (a sort of cross between a commune and a convent). The climate is poor, disease and famine destroy the village. The gay vicar and the manor and especially the owl Masters take battle against the beguinage. Who will win?

The plot is a bit predictable and a bit of a pot boiler through which I struggled but there are a host of enjoyable characters:

• Agatha the lord of the manor's raped daughter who becomes a beguine and uses her intelligence to question even the sacrament;
• Servant Martha, the head of the beguinage, who feels the weight of her responsibilities;
• Healing Martha, the nurse; (and Kitchen Martha, the cook, and Merchant Martha, the saleswoman, and Tutor Martha, the teacher, and Shepherd Martha, the shepherdess, and another Marhta I've forgotten because there are supposed to be seven)
• Beatrice, a beguine whose married life ended after a string of still-births and whose bitterness eats away at her;
• Pega, ex trollope, now a beguine, very free with love;
• Father Ulfrid, who has been exiled to this miserable village after being caught with his boyfriend. Father U is one of the more interesting characters because he is sometimes a goody, very much on the side of the down-trodden villagers, and sometimes a pathetic weakling, besotted by his lover and scared of discovery, and sometimes the blackest of black-hearted villains;
• as opposed to Phillip, nephew of the Lord of the Manor, who is supposed to be the blackest of black-hearted villains but who is so black he is reduced to caricature.

It was all right but I'd rather have read something else.

February 2010; 550 pages

"Engleby" by Sebastian Faulks

Wow!

The start was spooky. Mike Engleby who surname is mine except for the first three letters, went to grammar school, as I did, and then to boarding school, as I did, where he got put up a year because he was clever, as I did, and then went to Cambridge, as I did. Other items in the biography are not the same: the story is set four or five years before me, his father has died, he steals and sells drugs, he is a loner. He becomes obsessed with a girl student who disappears; he is quizzed by the police. We presume he is in some way responsible. He goes to London and becomes a journalist. Then the girl's body is discovered.

He has a phenomenal memory enabling him to recite large pieces of text (including the diary he has stolen) verbatim which is one hell of an asset for a novelist's narrator! But he is utterly lonely. The first time he talks about sex is in his late twenties. Even his intelligence serves only to isolate him from others.

He has a bleak view of humanity. He believes the speciating moment at which humans split themselves off from the apes is the arrival of consciousness. This he likens to the moment that Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and became self-aware. They were expelled from paradise. Consciousness is self-awareness; that faculty which means that men cannot be blissful in ignorance like animals.

“Homo sapiens, this functional ape with the curse of consciousness – that useless gift that allows him, unlike other animals, to be aware of his own futility. The story of Adam and Eve put it with childish but brilliant clarity: Paradise until the moment of self-awareness and then … Cursed. For ever cursed. (Christians call it ‘fallen’, but it was the same thing: the Fall was the acquisition of consciousness.) …. Miguel de Unamuno …. ‘Man, because he is a man, because he possesses consciousness, is already, in comparison to the jackass or the crab, a sick animal. Consciousness is a disease.’”

chapter 10 p256
At the same time Jen, the student he stalks, enjoys life in a "funny low euphoria" brought on by just being 19 and alive and living in a Cambridge of "dirty brick of the miniature terraces and the mist from the river and the cold mornings .... and then the sudden huge vista of a great courtyard ..."(p217).

An enthralling book which took me into the mind of a very strange person and made me realise how similar I am to him.

"Company of Liars" by Karen Maitland

As the Black Death strikes England a group of travellers (a relic-seller, a magician, two runaway lovers, a story-teller, a mid-wife, two musicians and weird wyrd rune-casting albino girl) flee before it. They all have a secret (they are all liars) and before their journey is through some will pay for it with their lives...

A very well-written historical ensemble novel with a bit of magic in the mystery. The characters are well drawn and the plot keeps moving. The details of the journey are engrossing, especially the shrine of John Shorne at North Marston which is a real place in Buckinghamshire just south of Winslow; the holy well is still there. The other places mentioned are also real.

I enjoyed the book and was interested to see how deftly she sketched the characters. I think the secret is to know the back story inside out and then the characters will begin to speak and interact for themselves; the plot then drives them through situations but they respond as real people.

"Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar" by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Why anyone would want to be a Politburo member given that most of them spent every day and most nights terrified that the KGB would take them, torture them and murder them and if not them their wives. Whenever they talked to Stalin there was a risk they would say the wrong thing. Amazingly, many of them did dare to disagree and some of those got away with it. But many of them were terrified much of the time. Is power really that alluring?

How on earth they got any work done given that Stalin would invite them night after night to dinners which went on till the early hours in which they all got drunk. But at the same time they were running huge ministries and fiefdoms.

Some times they competed for Stalin's approval beyond decency. His chef de cabinet was so proud when his daughter was chosen to present a bouquet to Stalin on his seventieth birthday, despite that fact that Stalin had murdered the girl's mother, the chef's wife. The little girl, now an old woman, still admires Stalin.
 
This book is a fascinating description of the courtiers of power, those who are willing to debase and humiliate themselves, to lie, cheat and kill, and do anything to stay close to the centre of power. Stalin's court was a gangster mob of brutal thugs who were terrified of him and yet unable to stop themselves looting, stealing, having orgies.
 
It is also an amazing chronicle of the madness of torture and the gullibility of those who believed that there might have been smoke behind fire. One KGB boss, arrested and tortured, confessed to having sex with his son and his daughter, and his KGB boss, and breaking into the British Embassy and having sex with the Ambassador!
 
I hadn't realised that Stalin's secret police used the crude torture method of beating people until their eyes popped out. I thought they were sophisiticated a la Darkness at Noon.
 
As well as all the evil, the book is a tribute to the endurance of people. Men and women who slaved in labour camps for ten years. Soliders who were tortured and then called back during the war to fight alongside their torturers.
 
And survivors. Molotov survived Stalin, Khruschev and Brezhnev, dying after Gorbachov had gained power. Stalin's daughter Svetlana spent some time in sheltered housing in Bristol. Mikoyan, who had carried Lenin's coffin, attended JFK's funeral.
 
But my favourite is Lenin's chef who had previously cooked for Rasputin and later cooked for Stalin. He became Vladimir Putin's grandfather!

"Hideous Kinky" by Esther Freud

Hideous Kinky is a charming short novel published in 1992 but clearly set in the days of the Hippy Trail to Marrakesh. Perhaps the author, who was 5 in 1968, was the little girl who tells the story. Esther Freud is the daughter of Lucian Freud, the painter (and thus the neice of Clement Freud and the great granddaughter of Sigmund Freud); she travelled with her Mum until she was 16 and then went to drama school.


The girl travels with her mother and her sister, Bea (and John who owns the van, and Maretta, John's mad wife who doesn't talk, and Danny who does magic) to Marrakesh. Danny jumps ship in Tangiers and very quickly John and Maretta go home. Following a magical interlude with the fabuolously wealthy Luigi Mancini (who claims to know her father who wore silver and gold waistcoats; Mancini's house later vanishes in the manner of the Arabian nights) Mum shacks up with Bilal. Running out of money (they are clearly living on maintenance but it is irregular and, given the Moroccan postal service, extremely irregular) they move to a lodging house. They become poor and hungry. Bea goes to school and starts to learn Arabic. They holiday by a lake, sleeping in the open. They hitch or travel by bus. They are dirt poor (at one stage they are reduced to begging) but there is a lot of life that is magical and colourful and exciting. Mum is utterly irresponsible (at one stage she leaves Bea with friends for months; when she returns the friends have gone and they have to search Marrakesh for Bea) but she never seems short of a boyfriend.

The main delight of the story is the reconstruction of the sights and sounds and smells of Marrakesh. My picture was taken in the main square at night when it turns into a bustling market with many food stalls: the narrator often ate there when Mum's money had arrived. But my favourite line is when Mum has joined a religious community; the circle of men and boys around the holy man sing hymns "in a chorus that rose to a violent crescendo and then sank to a sigh ... leaving a soft silence hanging in the air with no noise but the whisper of perspiration trickling down the walls."

A lovely story; it has been made into a film starring Kate Winslett.

January 2010; 186 pages

"The Fatal Englishman" by Sebastian Faulks

This is a collection of "three short lives"; short in the sense that each is less than 110 pages long and short in the sense that none of the three men lived past 32.

Christopher Woods was a promising young English artist who knew Picasso and Cocteau whilst living in Paris in the 1930s. Whilst developing his art he travelled round Europe with his sugar daddy. He painted a portrait of Constant Lambert who named his son 'Kit' (Christopher's nickname). With Ben Nicholson he discovered Alfred Wallis at St Ives and decided to set up an artists' colony there (although he never actually settled there himself, preferring Brittany. Back in London and contemplating marriage he threw himself under a train.

Richard Hillary was a pilot in the Battle of Britain. Having been horribly burned in a crash he was given plastic surgery, wrote a book about his experiences, then talked his way back into RAF flying, crashed again and killed himself and his navigator.

Jeremy Wolfenden was the brilliant son of Jack Wolfenden, a headteacher and civil servant who became famous for chairing the Committee which recommended the repeal of the law against homosexuality. Jeremy was a Colleger at Eton and then, after National Service, went to Oxford. He lived a promiscuous gay life whilst it was still illegal; his friends included Kit Lambert who later managed The Who. He became a reporter for the Times and subsequently the Moscow reporter for the Telegraph. In Moscow he got mixed up with the Secret Intelligence Service (he was friends with and later married the maid who worked for the embassy couple who ran spy Godfrey Wynne who ran Russian Oleg Penkovsky) and the KGB (following a honey trap with a Polish boy or possibly a Russian waiter or possibly both). Later he went to Moscow; after the FBI reactivated him as a spy he drank himself to death.

On Green Dolphin Street by Faulks (also reviewed in this blog) is clearly based on Wolfenden's life.

Faulks writes beautifully and I found this a fascinating book.

"What I talk about when I talk about running" by Haruki Murakami

Murakami is a Japanese writer whose works (Kafka on the shore; Norwegian wood) I have often seen in shops but never read. This must change. Witawitar is a beautiful read. He reflects about his life as a long distance runner (it even gets quite exciting towards the end when he is wondering whether he will complete the New York Marathon and a Japanese Triathlon) and his life as a novelist.

His prose is simple and sparse and elegant but there are moments of real beauty:

• "The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky. The sky both exists and doesn't exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn't. And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in." page 17

There are also moments of true thought-provoking philosophy:

• “When I saw the Charles River again, a desire to run swept over me. .... Time had passed, students had come and gone, I'd aged ten years, and there'd literally been a lot of water under the bridge. But the river remained unaltered. The water still flows swiftly, and silently, toward Boston Harbor. The water soaks the shoreline, making the summer grasses grow thick, which help feed the waterfowl, and it flows languidly, ceaselessly, under the old bridges, reflecting clouds in summer and bobbing with floes in winter - and silently heads toward the ocean."  page 13
• "The end of a race is just a temporary marker without much significance. It's the same with out lives. Just because there's an end doesn't mean that existence has a meaning." page 115

I loved this little book.

January 2009; 180 pages

"The Age of Wonder" by Richard Holmes

Richard Holmes is well known (though not by me)  for his biographies of Shelley and Coleridge and here he moves from the romantic poets to the scientists of the romantic era. He endeavours to trace the ancestry of our modern image of "the scientist": he examines the point at which the natural philosopher at home with both the arts and the sciences (eg Herschel, musician turned astronomer; Davy, poet turned chemist; Coleridge, dilettante scientist turned poet) was replaced by the two persons of Snow's Two Cultures; he describes the genesis of the myth of the mad scientist in Victor Frankenstein; and he charts the growing atheism inherent in the discoveries that made a Creator more and more remote.

But best of all the book has vivid stories and personalities which Holmes brilliantly brings to life (even though he quotes far too much from Davy's poetry!)

He starts with Joseph Banks with Captain Cook savouring the delights of that Pacific paradise, Tahiti. We then move onto the story of William Herschel and his discovery of Uranus. Ballooning comes next, then Mungo Park explores Africa; Sir Humphrey Davy invesitigates Laughing Gas; Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein; Davy invents the Safety Lamp and then falls out with everyone including his wife and Michael Faraday and finally the era closes with Charles Babbage and young Sir John Herschel leading towards Charles Darwin.

Here is a selection of my favourite bits which I marked.

p83: In 1772, William Herschel, having decided to grind his own lenses to make a reflecting telescope in Bath (where he conducts concerts in the Pump Rooms) buys grinding and polishing tools from John Michel, "a Quaker astronomer who had retired to Bath nursing some strange, unacceptable ideas - such as the existence of 'black holes' in space from which light itself could not escape".

p94: Perhaps there is room for a History of Scientific Error which could show that mistakes in Science are at least as influential to the progress of right ideas as the triumphs. In a footnote, Holmes points out that Romantic Science created three myths: the lone scientific genius, the Eureka moment and the Frankenstein nightmare.

p101: In 1781, Herschel having discovered Uranus he went to London to meet "wealthy Deptford astronomer Alexander Aubert" and to dine with Sir Joseph Banks at the "Mitre Club, a tavern much favoured by Dr Johnson." NB: Herschel used lenses made by Dollond whose company, founded in the 1750s, later grew into Dollond and Aitchison!

p106: The publisher Joseph Johnson of St Paul's Churchyard not only published an influential History of Astronomy by Bonnycraft but also published William Blake, William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

p111: On 31st July 1782 the Herschel's went to live in Datchet. Later they moved to Slough.

p113: In 1811 Keats won A History of Astronomy by Bonnycraft as a school prize; he then went on to compose On looking into Chapman's Homer in 1816 in which he describes Herschel's discovery of Uranus: "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken"

p132 On 1st December 1783 (ten days after the Montgolfier hot air balloon) the first hydrogen ballon was launched by Dr Charles from the Tuileries in front of a crowd estimated at 400,000; Benjamin Franklin, US ambassador in Paris watched it and was asked what use it was: he replied: "What's the use of a newborn baby?" I previousl;y believed this to be something Faraday said.

p152: Jean-Pierre Blanchard, the first man to cross the English Channel by balloon in 1785, later founded a "Balloon Academy on the Stockwell Road in Vauxhall".

p156: Napoleon took 4 balloons with him to Egypt in 1798 but they were destroyed by Nelson at the Battle of Aboukir.

p198 Pierre Laplace who, in 1799, used Herschel's nebula theory of star formation to explain the formation of the solar system, was asked by Napoleon where God was in his work and replied "Citizen First Consul, I have no need of that hypothesis."

p199: Herschel also discovered infra-red light in 1800.

p250: In 1797 Gregory Watt, son of James, lodged with Grace Davy, mother of Humphrey. Later Gregory would pass Humphrey's name on to his dad who i n turn recommended him to Dr Thomas Beddoes of Cliftonm near Bristol who then employed Humphrey as lab assistant at his (slightly quackish) pneumatic hospital in which Humphrey investigated the treatment of diseases using gases including Carbon Monoxide (which nearly killed Davy) and Laughing Gas (which made his reputation).

p291:  By 1803 Davy had moved to London and was giving incredibl;y popular science lectures at the Royal Institution (one included the concept of the carbon cycle). These were so popular that Albemarle Street became the first One-Way street to control carriage congestion.

p295: Humphrey Davy gave 5 Bakerian lectures at the Royal Society between 1806 and 1810. These lectures had been founded in 1775 by Daniel Defoe's son-in-law. In the first lecture Davy argued that the different forms of electricity (in Leyden jars, and generated by Voltaic piles, stormclouds, electric eels, and by friction) were all the same and were a form of bipolar (postive and negative) energy.

p308: surgeon John Hunter dissected bodies in Great Windmill Street in Soho.

p328-330: Victor Frankenstein may have been based on Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776 - 1810) who invented the dry-cell storage battery and discovered ultra-violet light in 1803 worked at Jena using huge Voltaic piles to galvanise animal corpses. He then moved to Munich to continue experiments that were described as "most convincing" and "disgusting"; abandoned his wife and three children and died penniless and insane in 1810 aged 33.

p338: Humphrey Davy married Jane Apreece who, during her lonely 1st marriage, went to Geneva and made friends with Madame de Stael becoming the heroine of Corinne.

p383: Greenland pack-ice melted in 1815 and was believed to be a precursor of climate change.

p420: Andrew Crosse, who lived at Fyne Court in the Quantocks, had installed in his ballroom an "'extensive philosophic apparatus' with which he later claimed to have generated spontaneous life forms .... It contained large, gleaming electrical condensers, which were linked to a network of copper wires strung through the trees .... designed to pick up massive charges of static or 'atmospheric' electricity. The largest condenser was marked with a blasphemous warning notice: Noli Me Tangere - that is,m 'Do not Touch Me' .... the risen Christ's first words to Mary Magdalene".  So he could have been the original of Dr Frankenstein.

p441: Sir John Herschel wrote a philosophy of natural science in which he reckoned the scientific method to be tripartite: the inductive gathering of facts, the emergence of a general hypothesis and the testing of that hypothesis.

p448: Coleridge, aged 60, attended the third meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Cambridge in 1833.

p460: David Brewster, more famous for his work on polarisation, invented the kaleidoscope.

A brilliant book.

Januray 2010; 469 pages.

I have now read Holmes' biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: also worth a read!

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

"KIng Rufus" by Emma Mason

This is a biography of William II. It is well written if not riveting and the print is rather small.

She is clearly on his side. Generally protrayed as a bad king in both senses of the world (not to mention a sodomite), she suggests that he was very capable, a good military leader (though he never actually fought a pitched battle) and competent administrator who successfully prevented rebellion until his murder. He is likely to have had illegitimate children although he never married and we do not know any names of any sexual partner male or female.

His favourite oath was "By the (Holy) Face of Lucca" (or once, "By the Face at Lucca") but, to my immense frustration, Ms Mason NEVER tells you who or where Lucca was and what the face was. This is symptomatic of a slightly too scholarly history. Wikipedia does!

I came across a bumper of interesting bits: the king of Scotland, Malcolm Canmore, ambushed and killed by the earl of Northumberland who later rebelled against Rufus and got imprisoned for life; Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester, defending Worcester against rebels; Rufus using English mercenaries to fight his brother, Duke of Normandy; Edgar Aethling, Saxon hope for the crown, working with Rufus and the King of Scotland; Ranulf Flambard, the flamboyant chief minister, who was imprisoned by Henry I after the death of Rufus only to escape the Tower; Gundulf who worked on the White Tower and Rochester Cathedral (it cost £60 to build) and then on the walls around the Tower; Rufus also had Westminster Hall built; Westminster was a dodgy place for a palace because criminals claimed sanctuary in the Abbey and then used it as a base to mug courtiers arriving at the Palace. Much fascinating stuff!

Rufus extended Norman rule into the north, defending his realm against Malcolm Canmore of the Scots. He built a New Castle on the north bank of the Tyne and settled Cumbria, refounding Carlisle (it had been devastated by Scottish scorched earth) and rebuilding its Castle.

Finally, his death. He was shot with an arrow by Walter Tyrrel who fired at a stag in the New Forest but hit the king "by mistake"; he then left the scene and the country and became quite pally with the King of France who clearly had reason for wanting Rufus dead (Rufus was a much wealthier and more powerful king who was threatening to take over lands adjoining the tiny Kingdom of France). Was it an accident or was it murder? The best evidence for the accident was the total lack of people who claimed it was murder at the time ... but given that Henry I hot-footed it from the scene (the New Forest) to Winchester to claim the treasury and the throne he might have silenced those who claimed it was a killing. The best evidence against the accident is the fact that the King's nephew was killed by an arrow in a hunting accident in the New Forest a few months before. Dodgy or what!

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

"Valley of the Dolls" by Jacqueline Susan

Perhaps the original bonkbuster this book follows three impossibly beautiful and talented women as they move from young girls about town in 1945 through incredible success to married despair, pills (the "dolls" in the title are sleeping and slimming pills) and booze. Neely, the Irish singer, becomes a film star (Garland?). Jennifer, a nobody from small town America, is first met married to an Italian prince, then marries a singer and film star (Sinatra?), then becomes a star in French sex films and finally dates a senator. Anne, the all time heroine, is engaged to a millionaire within six weeks of arriving in New York and taking a secretarial job; she later dates the impossibly handsome author and later becomes a model and TV star.

The writing is almost entirely dialogue and action and is as improbable as the plot.

Trash.

December 2009, 467 pages