"The News from Waterloo" by Brian Cathcart

After Wellington had defeated Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo, Wellington had to write an official dispatch before sending it, via horse, coach, sailing boat, rowing boat and finally coach again, to London. In London the government and the Stock market worried. Since his escape from Elba Napoleon seemed unstoppable. The Government had raised a loan of an unprecedented £36 million (in the form of a loan called an Omnium, which is presumably where Trollope got his name for the Duke of the Palliser novels) to pay for a new army just days before and many bankers had their fortunes at risk if Wellington lost. But there was no instant communication, even the optical telegraph which the Admiralty had installed during the recent hostilities had been decommissioned after Napoleon's first defeat. It was 16 hours after the result of the battle that the dispatch was handed to Henry Percy at 1 PM on Monday 19th June; he reached London at 11 PM on Wednesday 21st June; it took 58 hours for the news to travel.

This was a time when newspapers didn't have reporters in the field (only Parliamentary correspondents) so the only unofficial sources of news were:

• Mr Sutton who had heard the news of Quatre Bras, the Napoleon Wellington skirmish 48 hours before Waterloo that ended in a draw (and Wellington falling back) which Sutton misinterpreted as an allied victory, telling London on Tuesday morning.
• The Green Knight of Kerry who spoke with Wellington after Quatre Bras and therefore knew the true situation
• The mysterious Mr C who was at the exiled court of the French King in Ghent when he heard the news of Waterloo and rushed to London, arriving Wednesday morning.
• And possibly an unknown informant of Nathan Rothschild who enabled the banker to buy government stock and make a profit

Cathcart, who also wrote even more brilliant The Fly in the Cathedral, tells these stories in an authoritative but fantastically clear and readable way. He debunks many myths. People just didn't use carrier pigeons in those days. Rothschild wasn't on the battlefield. Rothschild didn't start by selling shares causing a massive panic before buying loads up (the stock market records show no such panic). David Ricardo, however, made sufficient money to retire from promoting stocks and, working with his friend Thomas Malthus who also made money, found Economics as a science. The myths debunked, there is a still a remarkably dramatic story.

And one mystery is left: who was Mr C?

Great history. August 2016; 297 pages

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter

I first read started reading this book shortly after its publication in the early 1980s. I gave up. I started it again in the 2000s. I gave up. In 2016 I started and finished it.

Was it worth it?

In 20 chapters Hofstadter attempts to teach the elements of Typographical Theory and therefore to (a) explain Godel's Incompleteness Theorem (b) lay down some rules for developing Artificial Intelligence. Along the way he tries to explore the concept of Strange Loops, recursive propositions that are self referential and paradoxical, such as "This statement is false". In order to help the general reader get anywhere near these difficult ideas he uses the art of Escher, which is full of self-reference and paradox, and the structure of a musical fugue such as those developed by Bach. He also intersperses every heavyweight chapter with a diversion, such as a dialogue between Achilles and a Tortoise (also involving a Crab, an Anteater and the Author) or the Jabberwocky in three languages.

Well I really enjoyed the diversions, which gave me some basic understanding of Hofstadter's arguments, and I enjoyed a lot of the more heavyweight stuff, although I skipped quite a lot too and there were bits that I frankly didn't understand.

A lot of the music stuff was really interesting and I learned about fugues, hemiolas, canons, organ points, strettos and fermatas. 

He made a lot of interesting points such as that "Intelligence loves patterns and baulks at randomness. For most people, the randomness in Cage's music requires much explanation ... whereas with much of Bach, words are superfluous.In that sense Bach's music is more self-contained than Cage's music." (p 175)

A brilliant attempt to make a really hard subject accessible which nearly worked for me and no doubt has enlightened many cleverer than myself.

August 2016; 680 pages



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

"Muse" by Jessie Burton

Odelle from Trinidad has lived in London for five years working in a shoe shop with her best friend Cynth, hating feet and London and the casual English racism and longing to be a writer. Then, in 1967, she gets a dream job in an art gallery and she meets Lawrie who has a painting with a dubious provenance to sell. She falls in love with him, although that path has the usual bumps along the way. But is he honest? Is the painting what it seems?

Interspersed with this narrative is the story of Olive, living in the south of Spain with her neurotic mother and her art dealing father. Olive longs to paint but her father insists women cannot be great painters. They are staying on the Duquesa's farm, being looked after by Teresa whose half-brother Isaac is a wannabe painter himself. But the Spanish civil war is looming ...

I loved Odelle's story, told in perfect dialogue and with a really fresh insight into the time. The mystery of the painting and the strange behaviour of her boss, Quick, was a lovely puzzle. So I found the Spanish bits distracting.

But at the start, she hooked me straight away with her first paragraph:
"Not all of us receive the ends that we deserve. Many moments that change a life's course - a conversation with a stranger on a ship, for example - are pure luck. And yet, no one writes you a letter, or chooses you as their confessor, without good reason. This is what she taught me: you have to be ready in order to be lucky. You have to put your pieces into play."

And, still on the first page, we are introduced to the wonderful Cynth, no more than a bit part but with unmistakable dialogue: "'Girl, you got to pick your face up,' Cynth would whisper. 'Or you working in the funeral parlour next door?" And later, when Odelle puts on airs: "Cynth would say, 'Oh, because I some sheep and you so clever?'"Nevertheless, Odelle decides that she is "not going to to put shoes on sweaty Cinderellas for the rest of my life." Sweaty Cinderellas! What a wonderful phrase!

And when she meets the boy she fancies, her emotions are summed up in the beautiful line: "My kneecaps porridge, jaw tingling, no hope to swallow." Wow!

Odelle was a virgin before she met Lawrie (in Trinidad, as a schoolgirl, she and her circle viewed those girls with boyfriends as strange exotic beasts and disdain: "Sex was beneath us, because it was beyond us.")

The Spain story starts brilliantly, with the image of a woman in bed after a heavy night before, her clothes tumbled everywhere including "stockings like sloughed snakes".

There is just one moment I wasn't so sure of. When Olive is talking to Teresa she uses the word apogee; "Teresa heard the unusual word, and thought Olive had said apology." Using the rule of 'show don't tell' I thought this would have been better done in dialogue.

Aside from that insubstantial quibble, this was a beautifully written book with a strong plot and great characterisation. I wasn't one hundred per cent convinced by the eventual actions of the characters (Odelle loves snooping but is really bad at it, she always gets caught, but the other characters seem to want to leave clues lying around) and it seemed to me that more could have been made of the strange and elusive behaviour shown at times but that might have made it more of a thriller and less of a good read.

A good book with some brilliant lines. August 2016, 441 pages

Written by the author of The Miniaturist, a story with a rather disturbing and ultimately unresolved theme, set in seventeenth century Holland.

Shortlisted for the Fiction Book of the Year in the British Book Awards 2017.

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

"Playing with Fire" by Tess Gerritsen

This thriller starts brilliantly. The protagonist, Julia, a second violinist, finds an unpublished waltz in a Rome junk shop run by "a little gnome of a man with eyebrows like snowy caterpillars." The shop is unnaturally cold and as she reads the music "the hairs suddenly rise on my arms". As she leaves the shop she notices "twin gargoyles perched above the pediment" and a "brass Medusa-head knocker". Spooky!

Back home in America she starts to play the music as her three year old daughter, Lily, plays with the cat. When the music has stopped she discovers that the cat has been stabbed with the garden fork that the daughter is holding. All this happens in the first eight pages and, if you aren't utterly hooked by now, you will be when Julia plays the music again and finds herself stabbed with broken glass. There is mental illness in her family (her mother killed her baby brother) and psychiatrists start testing Lily to see whether there is any reason for her to be doing this. Julia is starting to believe that it is the music that is causing the problems (it uses "devil's chords [which were ] ... considered evil and banned from church music" in the middle ages), perhaps supernaturally, and she starts an obsessive quest for the composer. Julia's husband Rob (he absolutely has to be an accountant so there can be instant and easy conflict between a numbers type and an arty type) is worried by this obsession, convinced of his daughter's sanity (shades here of We Need to Talk About Kevin) and, suspecting that Julia herself might be imagining the attacks, wants to send her to a mental hospital.

This is gripping stuff.

And then we suddenly break from this thrilling tale to go to Venice in 1936 where Jewish violinist Lorenzo is practising for a duet with Laura Balboni, falling in love as the fascist storm clouds gather. Lorenzo is, of course, the author of the music. This is a sweet interlude, with menacing overtones, but the change of pace is so sudden. I was racing along scherzo furioso and suddenly we switch to adagio dolcissimo.

It never really regains the intensity of those first few chapters. We switch back to Julia and thriller mode as she travels to Venice to find the answers and out of the blue she is being shot at by hoodlums and there appears to be a conspiracy against her. Classic thriller territory. Which, given the excitement and the potential of the start, was actually a little bit disappointing.

August 2016; 314 pages

"Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

This influential book analyses what makes people happy. To do this he first divides pleasure (by which Csikszentmihalyi means the satisfaction of biological urges such as hunger, lust, fatigue etc) from enjoyment. Pleasure restores one to equilibrium but enjoyment, for Csikszentmihalyi, develops one. And the 'optimal experience' which gives enjoyment is 'flow'. Flow gives:

• " a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment" (p 3)
• "the best moments in our lives ... when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." (p 3)

Most of us have solved "the basic problems of survival" and have moved up Maslow's hierarchy to try to make meaning of our lives and stifle our "ontological anxiety, or existential dread." (p 12) Flow gives us a purpose.

This is what flow is like:

• "You are totally involved" (p 53)
• "You aren't thinking of yourself as separate from the immediate activity." (p 53)
• "I sort of lose touch with the rest of the world, I'm totally absorbed in what I'm doing." (p 53)
• "one forgets oneself, one forgets everything" (p 63)

In flow "concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems. Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time becomes distorted." (p 71)

A flow activity needs to involve challenge and skill and these need to be matched. If we start off with low skills and a low challenge (in flow) and we work hard we soon arrive at a situation when we have higher skills. We will become bored unless we now raise the challenge. If we raise the challenge too much we will become anxious and will have to work hard to develop our skills to return ourselves to flow. So, by trying to maintain  the  flow state, we develop our skills and challenge ourselves more and more; in short we improve.

Csikszentmihalyi believes that we can all do this. He gives examples of workers in routine, boring jobs who, by turning what they have to do into a challenge and constantly seeking to improve, turn boredom into fun. He quotes paraplegics who see their accident as the thing that gave meaning to their lives ("accepting limitations is liberating" (p 179)) and helped them turn from bored ordinary people to become leaders. He examples blind people and vagrants. Some of these stories are inspirational.

But you have to be active. For example, "Everything the body can do is potentially enjoyable." (p 95) and this means sports and sex. "The body is like a probe full of sensitive devices that tries to obtain what information it can from the awesome reaches of space. It is through the body that we are related to one another and to the rest of the world. ... what we tend to forget is how enjoyable it can be." (pp 115 - 116) But "instead of doing it personally, most people are content to hear about it or watch a few experts perform it." [that seems to equate watching the Olympics on TV with watching porn!] (p 102) "Vicarious participation is able to mask ... the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But ... passive entertainment leads nowhere. Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness." (pp 162 - 163)

You can also just look and listen but again you have to be active: "occasionally people stop to 'feast their eyes' ... but they do not cultivate systematically the potential of their vision." (p 107) "Like a photographer looks at a sky and says, 'This is a Kodachrome sky. Way to go, God. You're almost as good as Kodak.'" (p 108).

Selected quotes:

• "it is very difficult for parents to compensate for the poverty of opportunities in the culture at large." (p 183)
• "What can a strong, vital, intelligent fifteen-year-old do in your typical suburb?" (p 183)
• "How can we expect people who are ill, impoverished, or stricken by adversity to control their consciousness?" (p 192)
• "'When I became paraplegic, it was like being born again ... I had to become part of the environment, and use it without trying to control it.'" (p 194)
• "'The lion, when he runs after a pack of gazelles, can only catch them one at a time." (p 197)

This is an easy to read and life-affirming book. 

August 2016; 240 pages

I came across a description of flow (in the mind of a murderer) in a 1930 novel by C S Forester called Plain Murder.

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

"The Strangest Man" by Graham Farmelo

This is the biography of Paul Dirac, the mathematical physicist whose work, with Heisenberg laid the theoretical foundations of quantum theory, who synthesised quantum physics and special relativity to develop quantum electrodynamics, and who predicted the positron and anti-matter. He shared the Nobel Prize with Schrodinger and was, at the time, the youngest recipient of the Physics prize.

He was famously taciturn; so much so that fellow students invented a unit called the dirac to represent the smallest imaginable amount of conversation, one word per hour.

He was also famously scruffily dressed. I used to cite him as an example whenever people came up with the dictum "Dress smart, think smart."

I was inspired to read this book having read the brilliant The Fly in the Cathedral by Brian Cathcart which explores the background to Cockcroft and Walton splitting the atom. The Strangest Man is a stunning biography. Not only does Farmelo manages to make quantum physics accessible, at least in its generalities; not only does he describes the intoxicating excitement of the early days of discovery with Heisenberg and Einstein and Schrodinger, when Gottingen University was one pole and Bohr's Copenhagen the other; but he also charts the dreadful consequences of the Second World War, when Schrodinger had to hide in Dublin having initially endorsed Nazism, when Dirac's best friend Kapitza was kept in Moscow by Stalin, always fearing that Beria might arrest him and have him killed, when Heisenberg was working for the Nazis and Bohr was in occupied Denmark, and Dirac's sister, an Englishwoman married to a Jew, was in occupied Amsterdam. Then there are the days of McCarthyism when Dirac's left wing politics had him banned from America while his friend Oppenheimer, who had led the atom bomb project, had his security clearance revoked.

And in particular, this biography centred on the human that was Dirac, the survivor of a horrible childhood in which his life and that of his mother who became a slave in her own home and Dirac's brother who killed himself, and Dirac's sister who gave up on life to stay quietly at home until Dirac managed to free her to go to University were all the victims of a terrible father, a bully, an adulterer, a tax cheat, and a man who tried in vain to understand the difficult stuff that his brilliant son was doing.

Then comes Dirac's marriage to a lively tempestuous woman, the polar opposite of the taciturn man he himself was. He acquired two step-children (his step-daughter disappeared in America, her car found abandoned) and fathered two children of his own. His marriage had its rocky patches. They were too different. And he must have struggled not to be like his own father. But the marriage survived.

This was a stunning portrait of a brilliant mind. Read it!

August 2016; 438 pages

There is a BBC Radio 4 In Our Time programme about Paul Dirac; it was broadcast on 5th March 2020

In detail:

Dirac had a dreadful childhood. His father was a disciplinarian teacher who bullied his family. Paul was made to eat dinner with his father and to speak only French (his father was Swiss); he was often sick. Paul's elder brother Felix committed suicide (which devastated the father so he was loving if a bully); his sister stayed at home after being schooled and did nothing; the mother became an unpaid servant for the father, kept on a pittance (although he was clearly a lot richer than he admitted) and was told by him after thirty years of marriage that he had never loved her; she then discovered he had been having at least one long term affair. In short, the father was a nasty piece of work.

Paul was forced to study engineering at Bristol University; he was two years younger than the other students; having graduated Bristol arranged for him to take a maths degree and skip the first year. But he almost never got to Cambridge because his father was unwilling to find the necessary money for Paul to afford to live. It was only once he got to Cambridge as a graduate student that he started to fill in some of the huge holes in his knowledge, partly by taking extra geometry classes on Sunday afternoon in the Arts School when, apart from him and the other students having tea and being taught, and a few cleaners, the building was "as lifeless as a museum at midnight". (p 72)

He cultivated a straight-talking, straight-writing, plain English prose style following George Orwell's dictum that "Good prose is like a windowpane." (p 75)

Even Dirac was subject to failing to see when he was on the trail of something. When he first met de Broglie's idea that a particle such as an electron could act like a wave he "carried out some initial calculations but put the work aside after concluding that he had done nothing worth publishing. Having sniffed the scent of an important problem, he had then lost it; but he would soon return." (p 81)

His first breakthrough was recognising that the rather complex maths in Heisenberg's first formulations of quantum theory, being non-commutative, reminded him of Poisson's brackets: "Fifty two years later, he remembered, 'The idea first came in a flash, I suppose, and provided of course some excitement'" (p 86) Brackets were important to Dirac. Having invented a new mathematical notation for quantum physics which involved two halves of a bracket (which he called the bra and the ket) he later told a discussion at high table in St John;s on neologisms that "I invented the bra". Being taciturn he then relapsed into silence for the rest of the meal. (p 326)

When Oppenheimer was having a nervous breakdown at the Cavendish he tried to poison his teacher, Blackett, by leaving him an apple laced with chemicals. (p 97) Shades of Snow White and Alan Turing! When he defended his PhD thesis to examiners Franck and Born Franck later said: "I'm glad that is over. He was on the point of questioning me." (p 133)

Even Albert Einstein struggled "to understand his [Dirac's] peculiar combination of logic and intuition" telling a friend "This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful." (p 114)

He hypothesised the positron (which he called an anti-electron; a later suggestion from California was 'oreston' because Electra's brother was Orestes) because he "followed the logic of Sherlock Holmes: 'When you have eliminated all which is impossible then whatever remains, however improbably, must be the truth.'" (p 187) (Doyle 1926, The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier). We are still in a world where the imbalance of matter over anti-matter of just one part in a billion after the Big Bang cannot really be explained but "without that imbalance, the matter and anti-matter formed at the beginning of time would have annihilated each other immediately, so that the entire universe would only ever have amounted to a brief bath of high-energy light. Matter would, in that case, never have had an opportunity to discover anti-matter." (p 434)

Farmelo quotes Stephen Spender talking about young Germans after the great inflation: "their aims were to live from day to day; and to enjoy to the utmost everything that was free: sun, water, friendship, their bodies." (p 121)

The big band (OK, that's a typo, but it sounds so much better than the big bang) theory of the universe was first proposed by a Belgian cleric, the Abbe Lemaitre "who believed that the Bible teaches not science but the way to salvation" (p 261)

Despite a long bachelorhood lasting beyond thirty, Dirac flirted with Gamow's wife Rho and later got involved with Wigner's sister, Hungarian born Manci, who became his wife (although he described her as "Wigner's sister" even after the wedding. They had a long courtship conducted often by letter. When she complained he didn't answer her questions he numbered her letters and wrote a table of (often brutally) honest responses leading her to complain that some of the questions he had now answered were rhetorical! (p 262) As he grew closer to marriage his parents' relationship fell apart. His father told his mother he had not loved her for thirty years (predating Dirac's birth) and his mother discovered that his father had been engaging in long-term affairs (after he died she also discovered that he had been systematically cheating the taxman so he wasn't just miserly with her). But Dirac's marriage to Manci, though often tempestuous (at least on her part, he greeted her moods with indifference which must have infuriated her even more) did last. "She once snapped at him when he was eating his dinner, 'What would you do if I left you?' only for him to reply - after a half-minute pause - 'I'd say "Goodbye dear"'" (p 366)There is a photo of him on the beach at Brighton on his honeymoon in his suit "pencils still protruding from the pocket of his jacket" (p 284)

He was intrigued by the coincidental ratios of force strengths to one another and to the dimensions of the Universe and hypothesised that this might be because the strength of gravity is inversely proportional to the age of the Universe (which would explain why it is expanding but rather upsets the standard estimates of such things as the age of the Earth). (p 290)

He became Fred Hoyle's supervisor "partly because he was amused at the prospect of a relationship between a supervisor who did not want a student and a student who did not want a supervisor" (p 295)

He disliked the idea of electrons as point sources because that would involve infinities in such things as electric field strengths. But I would have thought that quantum mechanics does not allow points; they are forbidden by Heisenberg; a particle that was a point would have an infinite momentum,

He believed mathematical beauty was more important than experimental evidence.

As he got older he was more often challenged by "the drawn sword of youth". (p 321) As Oscar Wilde said in 1887 "In America, the young are always ready to give those who are older than themselves the full benefit of their inexperience." (p 332)

During the Second World War he worked on the separation of the fissile U-235 isotope from its chemically identical and much more abundant non-fissile U-238; he invented a series of methods including centrifuges. (p 321)

After Einstein's death, Dirac became "the most famous loner in theoretical physics, an elderly rebel with a cause that no one else could quite understand." (p 355) He then developed a primitive version of string theory.

Page references refer to the 2010 Faber and Faber paperback edition

"The Secret Agent" by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad was a Pole who joined the British Merchant Navy as a young man, learnt English and became one of the greatest of English Novelists. His short novel Heart of Darkness is a searing indictment of colonialism and was adapted into the film Apocalypse Now.

The Secret Agent is Adolf Verloc who runs a small shop in Soho selling pornographic books and pictures; he lives above the shop with his wife Winnie, her mother, and Winnie's brother Stevie who is a 'degenerate', a 'special lad', a lad with special needs, perhaps on the autistic spectrum. But Verloc also works for the Embassy as agent Triangle; he infiltrates revolutionary groups (England was a haven for many European political dissidents including Karl Marx and Lenin) and informs on their activities. He also gives information to Inspector Heat of the Special Branch.

The first chapter is full of fabulous descriptions and beautifully laid breadcrumbs delivered with savage irony. Verloc is "a protector of society"; he "had an air of having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed"; "he found at home the ease of his body and the peace of his conscience"; he is "a very nice gentleman" with a "kind and generous disposition". By marrying Mr Verloc, Winnie reflects, she has ensured that Stevie "was pretty safe in this rough world" even though Stevie lost his job as an office boy after "he was discovered one foggy afternoon ... letting off fireworks"; persuaded to do so by two other office-boys.

Chapter two starts with a brilliant description of Mr Verloc walking through the streets of London. Here we find words littered such as "peaceful slumber", "harmoniously", "sedately", "benign vigilance" and "a town without shadows". "The only reminder of mortality was a doctor's brougham arrested in august solitude close to the kerbstone." And Verloc reflects that "all these people had to be protected ... the whole social order"; "his mission in life being the protection of the social mechanism". But devilish Mr Vladimir calls Verloc into the Embassy, attacks him as fat and complacent, requires action not information, and insists that he plants a bomb to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, the symbol of time.

Chapter Three describes the ineffective and lazy revolutionaries that Verloc has collected around him: Ossipon the ex-medical student who has a taste for the ladies (as they do for him); Karl Yundt, full of hate; Michaelis who has spent fifteen years in prison, is now released on parole, is a favourite of a certain elderly peeress, and is about to depart for the country to exchange a prison cell for a hermit's cell and to write a book about the religious experiences he has in jail. None of these will ever take the action Mr Verloc now needs.

Then, after just a quarter of the book has gone, we jump forward to the time when the bomb has exploded. The bomber has blown himself up in Greenwich Park, probably after stumbling over a tree root. We are treated to a sordid description of the remains in the mortuary: "the gruesome detail of that heap of mixed things, which seemed to have been collected in shambles and rag shops ... the by-products of a butcher's shop" including the details that there is gravel mixed in with the remains because bits had to be scraped off the ground with a shovel and that the first thing the wonderfully stoic constable collected was the bomber's feet. The Assistant Commissioner becomes involved, intent on taking Heat down a peg or two, and goes to the address found in a label in the overcoat, the address of Mr Verloc's shop.

We hit the fifty per cent mark, half way through, and we lurch back again in time. Winnie's mother goes into an almshouse leaving Winnie and Stevie with Mr Verloc. But Winnie and Stevie are with mum on the final trip in a cab, and Stevie is much impressed with the character of the cabbie who declares "This ain't an easy world ... 'Ard on 'osses, but dam' sight 'arder on poor chaps like me" which awakens Stevie's social conscience; he tells Winnie on the way home that it is a "Bad world for poor people". But Stevie believes that "Mr Verloc was good. His mother and his sister had established that ethical fact on an unshakeable foundation. They had established, erected, consecrated it ... Mr Verloc was obviously yet mysteriously good." I am getting those little shivers crawling over my skin as I recognise that I am in the presence of a literary genius. 

Religious symbolism in the book

Verloc is God. Stevie is Jesus. Winnie (who has not given birth to Stevie nor has she had children of her own) is the Virgin Mary. Stevie knows the world is bad and has an "unshakeable" belief that Mr Verloc is good; this belief has, ironically, been instilled in him by his mother and his sister. And Mr Verloc has chosen Stevie and taken him from Winnie and has sacrificed Stevie. Stevie has died, the innocent victim of self-sacrifice.

And Conrad hammers home this point. Beautifully breadcrumbed is the triangle symbol by which Verloc is known, the Trinity (and of course is twas forbidden to pronounce the name of the God of the Old Testament unless you were a prophet). Immediately after we discover that Stevie thinks Verloc good, Verloc becomes restless and goes out to wander the streets, despite the fact that "it was no earthly good going out". He has a terrible decision to make. He comes back and goes to bed with Winnie who asks:
"'Shall I put the light out?'
Mr Verloc snapped at his wife huskily.
'Put it out.'"
Oh that is genius.

And the next chapter starts. Verloc is back from the continent and Stevie continues to look at him "with reverence and awe", taking his bag with "devotion" and carrying his hat "reverently". Winnie, watching, tells her husband that Stevie "would go through fire for you ... that boy just worships you." As they walk down the street together she thinks that they "might be father and son".

Verloc takes Stevie off 'to stay with Michaelis'; when he returns alone, the boy having stayed there, he is shaking and his wife is concerned he has a cold. Then the police come. This is the point in the book where it is revealed that Stevie is the victim; Heat realises it and Winnie suddenly discovers what has been going on. Heat takes Verloc into the back room and Winnie listens at the keyhole. Heat advises Verloc to "clear out ... there are some of them ... who think you are already out of the world."

And then Winnie and Verloc are left. This is the best part of a wonderful book. Because we discover that Verloc has no understanding at all of how Winnie feels. It is as if Conrad is saying that God is so high that he cannot possibly understand the sadnesses of us humans.

Verloc is obsessed with his own troubles. He has been exposed, he will go to prison, he might face retribution from all the comrades he has betrayed in the past. And he is so wrapped up in himself that he cannot understand Winnie's point of view at all.

Conrad achieves this by using the everyday banal aphorisms that people use in times of grief. "Can't be helped," says Verloc. It wasn't after all his fault: "I didn't mean any harm to come to the boy." "Do be reasonable, Winnie," he says and "Don't be a fool, Winnie." "The eventuality he had not foreseen had appalled him as a humane man and fond husband. From every other point of view it was rather advantageous. Nothing can equal the everlasting discretion of death." "You'll have to pull yourself together, my girl" Verloc says, "What's done can't be undone ... You go to bed now. What you want is a good cry." She tells him she had thought he had a cold and he says "It was nothing ... I was upset. I was upset on your account." And later: "By heavens! ... I ran the risk of giving myself away to find somebody for that accursed job. And I tell you again I couldn't find anyone crazy enough or hungry enough. What do you take me for - a murderer, or what? The boy is gone. Do you think I wanted him to blow himself up. He's gone. His troubles are over ... Don't you make any mistake about it: if you will have it that I killed the boy, then you've killed him as much as I."

But she can't get over the fact that "This man took the boy away to murder him."

This is the awful climax of the book. After, Winnie hears the ticking of the clock, but she thinks the clock has stopped, and we are reminded that the bomb was an attempt on Greenwich, the source of time; the hearts stop beating; that God is eternal. Winnie seeks the help of Ossipon who, when he discovers that it is Stevie not Verloc who has died, says "The degenerate - by heavens!"

Right at the end, Ossipon meets the bomb-maker in a bar. Ossipon "could face no woman. It was ruin. He could neither think, work, sleep, nor eat. But he was beginning to drink with pleasure, with anticipation, with hope. It was ruin." And the last sentence is left to the bomb maker, the anarchist who goes about with a bomb under his coat so he can blow himself up is the police come to catch him. The bomb maker is (in our allegory) Death himself. He walks through the crowd. "He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men."

Wow!

Breathtakingly brilliant.

July 2016; 249 pages

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

Mike Blamires points out to me that there are alternative interpretations of this great and classic text. He referred me to Joseph Conrad: Married to the Devil: The Secret Agent's Critique of Late-Victorian Gender Roles By Brandon Colas. This suggests that Winnie is the pivot around which all the characters are brought to destruction and puts her in the role of the Devil, the Serpent in the Garden (and in this regard quotes Ossipon who "saw the woman twined round him like a snake ... she was nor deadly. She was death itself - the companion of life" and, two paragraphs later when Winnie says: "Tom, you can't throw me off now ... Not unless you crush my head under your heel").

I agree. I think Conrad, like all novelists, was deliberately weaving several levels into his tale. Certainly there is a political aspect and there is the idea that if you fight terrorists with violence you are playing into their game, and there is a very sarcastic portrayal of the revolutionaries as lazy men who were parasites on women. Women again. The BBC have emphasised the terrorist thriller aspect of the story (by adding a lot of extra writing that is not in the original). The fact that there are alternative interpretations does not, I think, invalidate mine. Criticism should be a multi-dimensional game.

"How to connect with nature" by Tristan Gooley

I was a bit dubious about this book to start with. Within a few pages it had won me over. It is brilliant. Not only did it make me want to read it outdoors, so I could feel the fresh air on my skin and listen to the birds and feel at one with nature and at peace, but also it had some brilliant writing and some fascinating information. I made a note on almost every page!

After all, as Gooley points out, nature is a struggle for existence and "we are programmed to find conflict interesting. Movies, soap operas and boxing matches all rely on conflict." (p 13). So remember, "that's not a pretty flower you are looking at. It's a sex machine, whoring itself to the bees." (p 14)

He recommends eating nature. "People were up to 15 cm taller before agriculture, because 10,000 years ago their diet contained up to five times more plant types." But take care. "Boiling [water] does the best job of reducing the need for toilet paper in the subsequent hours." (p 37)

He has loads of helpful advice about how to notice nature more deeply. Don't do too much "It takes a certain immaturity to walk over twenty miles in one day and not feel your head overload with sensual input." (p 49) [I like the sensual rather than sensory!] The more you know, the more you notice but "a focused interest is a two-edged sword: it allows us to notice many things that pass others by, but it narrows the spotlight of our vision." (p 54) But the key thing is to be still. 'Still-hunting', practised by native Americans, is "picking a spot and waiting silently for prey to find you." (p 59) and works for observers as well as hunters. Every sound provides "information about time of day, time of year, local animals, present and future weather, navigation clues [including motorways!] and human behaviour." (p 57) And notice what doesn't move: "Our brains have learned to notice things that move, so if we make a special effort to look for things that are still we see a subtly different world." (p 57)

He gives lots of clues for understanding the landscape including knowing about rock types therefore soil types therefore prevailing plants, looking at tree shapes to determine direction (they bend away from the wind which in England tends to come from the south west and their branches are more horizontal on their south sides than their north) and to age conifers, and using both crescent moon to determine south and the Plough to determine north.

He doesn't neglect the human environment. After all, pigeons follow the lines of motorways and satellite dishes (in the UK) point south east. Plants that tolerate salt used to thrive at the coast but may now be found lining major roads that have salt spread on them in winter. And humans even have their own built in clocks: "Physiology students at Imperial College London are taught about circadian rhythms with the help of a rectal thermometer." (p 123) These clocks mean that 10 PM is "the most common time for lovemaking" (p 125) and our inbuilt calendars mean that "male testosterone levels peak in October ... more babies are born in the late summer months when there is more food around" (p 125)

He explains old wives tales, sometimes a little irreverently: "It was once believed that a childless woman could walk out naked to pick the St John's wort flower, and this would lead to her conceiving within the year ... walking about naked in midsummer might have been a good way of introducing new mates." (p 84)

Finally he shows how nature is good for us:

• Surgical patients in hospital recover faster if they can see trees from the window
• "People become more generous after they have seen pictures of nature" (p 128)
• "The more green spaces in a neighbourhood, the lower the average body mass index of the children who live there." (p 128)

A brilliantly written and fascinating book. I wish I could recognise more trees (I can do Christmas trees, holly trees and weeping willows!) and bird songs (OK I can do cuckoo and cock crow).

July 2016; 144 pages

Thank you Dr Danny for lending it to me.

This review was written by
the author of Motherdarling

"Dolphin Island" by Arthur C Clarke

This is a (Puffin) kid's book that I read years ago. Johnny, an orphan living with an unsympathetic aunt, stows away on a hover cruiser that then sinks in mid-Pacific; he is saved by Dolphins taking him to an island where Professor Kazan (brilliantly characterised as "he had a kindly but rather distant expression, as if he wanted to be friends with everyone, yet preferred to be left with his own thoughts") is researching into Dolphin language.

This is a classic boy's adventure story (the ease with which the boy is disencumbered of parents and indeed any family at all is so typical, think Swallows and Amazons and hundreds of orphan sagas) that reminded me strongly of the Adventure stories of Willard Price. There is a lot of fact about coral reefs and the Pacific Ocean drip-fed in through the medium of talking about Johnny's swimming trips with his mate Mick. At the same time, Clarke builds the story around science that, at the time of writing (1962) looked promising: the hovercraft had just been invented and Behaviorism reigned supreme in Psychology from which Clarke mined details of computer-run education via learning programs and animal control using electric shocks to either the pain or pleasure centres of the brain.

And at the end, of course, Johnny has to be a hero in the aftermath of the hurricane, when the Professor is dying and there is a race against the clock to get help with the aid of those friendly dolphins.

Beautifully written: July 2016, 156 pages

"Naked Lunch" by William Burroughs

Naked lunch? William Burroughs remembers Jack Kerouac as coming up with the title and he himself didn't understand it at first but now he says that it is "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork". Jack Kerouac remembers it as being entitled when Allen Ginsberg was reading it aloud and misread 'naked lust' (which never made the final text).

This book starts well, with an account of a junkie evading capture by the Narcotics police by jumping on a subway train. But the text at the start is pocked with explanatory notes woven into the text. Nevertheless, some of Burroughs razor sharp images come through.

But then the book degenerates. It becomes a procession of rude remarks about women, black people, Arabs, religions: Burroughs seems to be trying his hardest to offend everyone he can. He is obsessed with shit, there is the usual smattering of gay sex (reprising the idea in the Soft Machine that men ejaculate when they are hanged), and as with the soft machine he has a morbid fascination with insects and crustacea. And after the first few pages, the crystal observations seem to have deserted him, although there is a late stand. "It's a wildly unpretty spectacle" (p 177)

This is the book in which Steely Dan makes an appearance (there are three of them, they refer to robust metal dildoes). In this part, Burroughs becomes interested in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and I wondered with John Livingstone Lowes would have made of Burroughs had he analysed his work rather than that of Coleridge in his study of the imagination, The Road to Xanadu.

Although Naked Lunch is hailed as a prime example of the Burroughs 'cut-up' technique, where he supposedly wrote narratives and then chopped them up so that scenes and characters recur, this book has this technique less obviously than The Wild Boys, my favourite Burroughs so far, and The Soft Machine though it is done with rather more effect than in The Ticket that Exploded. Rather, it is assembled into vignettes in which one character or one theme is briefly explored. In the book, Burroughs claims that "You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point" (p 187)(although the book is structured in that the cop chase at the beginning is mirrored by a similar scene very near the end) and "There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing ... I am a recording instrument ... I don not presume to impose 'story' 'plot' 'continuity'" (p 184). I thought the book was summed up in another quote: "Vast adolescent muttering." (p 98)

Nevertheless, the book does have some fascinating moments. Burroughs had a vivid if diseased imagination and there are some ideas that make me want to write a story about them. Here are some other moments where the observation was acute, or the concepts original, or he was just funny:

• "Fingers of rotten ectoplasm" (p 5)
• "You know how old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them?" (p 6)
• "I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants - a body" (p 8)
• "mosaic of sleepless nights" (p 9)
• "Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat. The Mark Inside ..." (p 11) 
• "the threat of torture is used to induce in the subject the appropriate feeling of helplessness and gratitude to the interrogator for withholding it. And torture can be employed to advantage as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punishment as deserved." (p 21)
• "Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand ..." (p 56)
• "Guess he can make his own penicillin" (p 60)
• "ribs you could wash your filthy overalls on" (p 85)
• "Sucking terror from needle scars" (p 194)

But when all is said and done, it wasn't his best. July 2016; 196 pages

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

Page references refer to the paperback of the restored text edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles and published by Fourth Estate in 2010

Books by Burroughs which are reviewed in this blog include:

• The Soft Machine which shares some of the same characters and themes as The Wild Boys 
• The Wild Boys
• Naked Lunch.
• The Place of Dead Roads
• The Ticket that Exploded

"Sanctuary" by William Faulkner

The story starts with a stand off between Horace Benbow, a lawyer, and Popeye. Popeye has a pistol in his pocket, Horace has a book. Popeye takes him to Lee Goodwin's bootlegging place where Horace meets Lee's common law wife (who admits to prostituting herself to get a lawyer to get Lee out of jail once) and her baby, and Tommy. Popeye is a complex character who, Tommy says, is the "skeeriest durn white man I ever see", who is spooked by owls and by a little dog he once shot dead. As Tommy says, Popeye is "skeered of his own shadow" and as Benbow replies: "I'd be scared of it too ... if his shadow was mine."

The next day Horace (who is separated from his wife Belle and his step-daughter Little Belle) is with his respectable family in Jefferson discussing his widowed sister's new toy boy, Gowan Stevens, who learnt to drink at college and thinks that made him a gentleman.

Now the main action starts. Gowan meets Temple Drake, a young college girl, who is playing hookey, and they drive off but Gowan is drinking and he crashes the car. They are taken to Lee the bootlegger's house. And this starts a strange, dream-like (nightmare-like) sequence in which Temple, terrified by the threat that these people represent (Tommy the negro, the psychotic Popeye, Lee, even Lee's blind old dad) runs around from one place to the next but never actually does what Lee's woman advises her to, which is to run away from the house and keep running. Gowan gets drunker, has a fight with Lee's man Van, spends the night asleep and in the morning walks off, finds a town, arranges for a car to collect Temple, and then keeps moving, ashamed of himself but unable to return. Then Popeye shoots Tommy to get to Temple and Temple screams "Something is happening to me!" It is only much later that we discover precisely what.

Horace is now defending Lee who is accused of Tommy's murder. At the same time Horace is looking after Lee's wife but his sister refuses to let him look after her in the house they jointly own so he puts her into a hotel until she is run out of that by the church-going ladies of the town who are spreading rumours that Horace is sleeping with Lee's wife; the woman and her baby take refuge in the prison where Lee refuses to tell anyone about Popeye because Lee is scared that Popeye will seek him out and kill him. Feeling is running against Lee. Horace quotes the local preacher as suggesting "that Goodwin and his wife should both be burned as a sole example to that child; the child to be reared and taught the English language for the sole end of it being taught that it was begot in sin by two people who suffered by fire for having begot it." This is a grisly breadcrumb.

Meanwhile Popeye has taken Temple, who is bleeding heavily, to a brothel in Memphis (where there is "a line of office buildings terraced sharply against the sunfilled sky") where the madam, Miss Reba, moving "heavily from thigh to thigh", fat and short of breath, with two little pet dogs who know to be sacred of her when she returns from the cemetery where her man is buried (a wonderful character; she says that "you have to be born for this [prostitution] like you have to be born to be a butcher or a barber, I guess. Wouldn't anybody be either of them just for money or fun".) arranges for a doctor to help with the blood still coming from Temple's loins.

Suddenly, almost exactly half way through the book, we have a comic interlude. Two young lads, innocents, impoverished freshmen, arrive in Memphis and take lodgings at Miss Reba's brothel, thinking that it is a hotel. When they visit a brothel, one complaining that the experience costs three dollars and "ain't nothing worth three dollars you cain't tote off with you") elsewhere they have to sneak back in to their 'hotel' where all the ladies are married in case the proprietress discovers they have been naughty and throws them out! These lads are the reason that their uncle, a wonderfully venal state senator who dispenses cheap cigars to patronise poor people (they see right through him; they distrust him and dislike him), discovers the whereabouts of Temple, selling the information to Horace (and presumably elsewhere as well). When Horace finds her she tells him what happened although it is written to keep the reader guessing about the exact details: "It made a kind of plopping sound, like blowing a little rubber tube wrong-side outward.  ... I could feel the jerking going on in my knickers ahead of his hand..."

The twist comes in the courtroom and we discover exactly what happened to Temple in the subsequent lynching.

This is a fabulous book.

The plot is gripping, starting tense, becoming tenser, and the aftermath playing out in detail, with that wonderful comic interlude at almost exactly half way through.

The characters are perfect. It is only right at the end that we understand what has crippled Popeye's moral senses; we can pity even this personification of evil. Temple is a victim who, to some extent, colludes in her own victimhood, but at the same time she can be lustful and vengeful and cruel; she can be wicked but she is destroyed by what happens to her. Miss Reba is a brilliant madame with a wonderful love hate relationship with her dogs. And Senator Snopes is a perfect cameo.

There are some brilliant lines, including:

• Perhaps it is on the instant that we realise, admit, that there is a logical pattern to evil, that we die.
• Time's not such a bad thing after all. Use it right, and you can stretch anything out, like a rubber band, until it busts somewhere, and there you are, with all tragedy and despair in two little knots between thumb and finger of each hand.
• The smoke-colored twilight emerged in slow puffs like signal smoke from a blanket.
• People don't break the law just for a holiday
• God is foolish at times, but at least He's a gentleman [says the lawyer but the ex-prostitute replies] I always thought of Him as a man
• It does last ... Spring does. You'd almost think there was some purpose to it.
• Night is hard on old people.
• like a thin coating of tortured Tchaikovsky on a slice of stale bread

But the power of this book comes from the portrayal of society. The respectable people condemn the criminal underclass while at the same time using them. But it is when the two societies meet that tragedy occurs.

Stunning. July 2016; 219 pages

Books and plays written by Nobel Laureates that I have reviewed in this blog can be found here.

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

The Fly in the Cathedral" by Brian Cathcart

From its very beginning, relating the 1909 discovery of Rutherford alpha particle scattering in which a final year undergraduate named Ernest Marsden saw something that contradicted all previous theories of the atom, Cathcart manages to capture both the tedium of live research science (Marsden has to follow a procedure including sitting in a darkened room for 20 minutes before taking observations; when he sees the 'wrong' thing he spends a week checking and rechecking every part of his apparatus before becoming certain of his results) and the excitement of discovery.

From there, Cathcart explains how Ernest Walton arrived at the old Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge where the world famous Rutherford resided (I had lectures there when an undergraduate in a lecture theatre which James Clerk Maxwell designed but most of the building at the time had been sealed off because it had been contaminated by the experiments of Rutherford and his team). This was 1927 when the laboratory was not as fertile as the glory days before the first world war and there was a certain pressure on all involved to make more ground-breaking discoveries. But to attack the nucleus would need particles moving extraordinarily fast so that they could overcome the electrostatic repulsion of the nucleus, so Walton, working with John Cockcroft, started to build a particle accelerator. Given that the National Grid was in its infancy, using transformers to up ac to the hundreds of thousands of volts they believed they needed and then building rectifiers and vacuum tubes capable of standing these high voltages without either bursting or electrocuting the experimenters (Walton had to crawl across a wooden floor to approach the wworkign apparatus) was a formidable technical challenge made possible mostly by Cockcroft who, having served with distinction in the war,  had previously worked with Metropolitan Vickers the electrical engineering company in Manchester (where my wife's gradnfather worked).

A number of other experimenters in the US were working on the same ideas, notably Tuve using a static generator designed by his friend Van der Graaf, and Tuve's childhood friend Ernest Lawrence who was building a cyclotron. Nuclear disintegration was also being studied by Joliot and Curie (the daughter) in Madame Curie's lab in Paris, and by Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in Berlin.

And the quantum theorists were kicking off. The 1920s were the glory days of Rutherford's old buddy Nils Bohr in Copenhagen, and Werner Heisenberg and Max Schrodinger in Germany. Louis de Broglie's 1924 theory of wave particle duality was being discussed and an amazingly enterprising Russian named Gamow turned up one day at Bohr's lab in Copenhagen. Bohr was busy and Gamow was given an appointment in a few days time but after he explained he only had money to survive a single day the secretary took pity on him and he saw Bohr that afternoon who immediately arranged for him to stay. Gamow then worked out that wave function particles could penetrate the nucleus at much lower energies.

But Walton and Cockcroft toiled at their apparatus, evacuating tubes that leaked and sealing the leaks with Bank of England sealing wax (they later found that plasticine did a better job) for several years.

At this stage everyone knew that the atoms was composed of electrons orbiting (in set orbits) a very tiny nucleus which had protons in it. But the nucleus must also have either neutrons (Rutherford's theory) or electrons. The electrons were the favoured theory because beta radiation involves electrons leaving the nucleus; neutrons were purely speculative and scarcely mentioned in polite circles. So when Curie and Joliot discovered radiation flowing from a beryllium target that had been bombarded with radiation from polonium, everyone assumed that the neutral rays must be gamma rays even though they packed much more of a punch than seemed possible for gamma rays. But Chadwick, Rutherford's deputy at the Cavendish, revived the neutron theory and showed that they radiation was a stream of neutrons. This was in February 1932. Almost immediately a grumpy Rutherford told Cockcroft and Walton that they had better stop tinkering with their apparatus in an attempt to improve it and use it to fire protons at something. They set up a lithium target, fired the protons in and immediately discovered, still using the scintillation technique that Marsden had used, alpha particles.

Over the next few weeks they frantically repeated their results and worked out the implications whilst sworn to secrecy (Walton told his girlfriend, Cockcroft his wife, Rutherford told Bohr). The disintegration was caused because the protons were absorbed into the lithium nucleus which then spolit into two alpha particles. This was happening at a far lower energy than they had expected, partly because protons do the 'quantum tunnelling' described by Gamow at significantly lower energies than alpha particles but also because the quantum tunnelling is a probabilistic effect and they were generating millions more protons than had been available with the old techniques of relying on radium sources to emit alpha particles. Another 'problem' was that the alpha particles had higher energies that the energies of the incoming protons but this was resolved when it was realised that two alpha particles have a lower mass than a lithium nucleus and a proton and than this mass loss was being converted into energy through Einstein's most famous equation: E=mc2. They had split the nucleus.

This is a wonderful tale of impoverished graduate students in a worldwide fraternity working with string and sealing wax to do cutting edge research. Cathcart writes brilliantly, the tale fairly bowls along, and gives full play to the human stories behind the geeks.  The excitement of the times is vividly captured as is the hard work necessary and the oddness of the characters.

This is a fabulous book. It appears to be out of print. Why??????

July 2016; 274 pages

Cathcart also wrote The News from Waterloo about how the news of the Battle of Waterloo reached London. 

Another brilliant book about this time is The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo which tells the story of quantum theorist Paul Dirac.

Other books about the history of science or scientific biographies, which are reviewed in this blog, may be found here.

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

The Waves" by Virginia Woolf

This book was rated by the BBC as 16th in their list of best novels of all time. 

"The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it." But the waves is the whole damn point.

Six characters, three boys and girls, are revealed to us using the formula of a direct quotation and then 'said Bernard' or 'said Susan'. Always 'said' although these are their thoughts. Their very first statements are descriptions of what they see and hear: rings, slabs of yellow; these are soon turned into objects perceived. Shortly Louis hides from his friends and Jinny finds him and kisses him and Susan sees and is angry. Bernard begins to tell stories; Rhoda wants to be Jinny or Susan; Neville (I wonder whether Mr Neville in Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac is named after him?) becomes religious, Bernard develops a crush on another boy; Susan hates boarding school and counts the days until she is allowed home.

This is poetry dressed up as prose. It is very hard to read. I need to spend many more days reading it very slowly: there are some books which are meant to be read fast and loose and dome which you are meant to study line by line. But I read this book fast and loose for a first impression and, despite the density of the imagery and the difficulty I found on getting a good grip on the individual life stories, I gained a surprising amount. This is like glancing at an impressionist painting: you see the sea and the sky and the trees, you feel the moving of the wind, yet you know that a careful scrutiny will yield dividends. But on a first, furious reading I got an impression of every character and how they developed differently from the others. I understood some (I doubt all) of the things they did and the things that happened to them: who got married, what their jobs were (still no idea about Neville), who had children. Almost the best bit of the book was Perceval. They (at least some of them) had been at school with Perceval. He is the sort that everyone admires. As they approach 25 they hold a dinner to which he comes (late) to celebrate his departure for India. Shortly after, they hear the shocking news of his death. This affects each one of them in different ways; they remember him for the rest of their lives; it is a bit like remembering the day when Kennedy/ Elvis/ John Lennon/ David Bowie (choose your generation) died. In many ways the book is about Perceval and yet he is the one who doesn't appear on stage.

Some moments of liminality: "we have invented devices for filling up the crevices and disguising these fissures."

Some moments of unintended self-parody: "The only people in the streets are poor people hurrying."

I was overwhelmed by the brilliance of Woolf's To the Lighthouse. The Waves is a stunningly good book but, being so much more difficult to read, cannot have had as much impact. But I must read it again.

July 2016; 256 pages

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God