Carpe Jugulum" by Terry Pratchett

A family of modern vampires arrive to take over Lancre. The witches try fighting back.

A cast of wonderful characters includes Agnes who is always in two minds one of which is called Perdita, a handsome young vampire called Vlad, Nanny Ogg, the sluttiest slattern that every was a real witch, and the wonderful Igor, the vampires' coachman, who is a self-made man in that he has sewn himself together from bit of old family members because there's no point wasting good organs.

But there are so many fantastic jokes that it is almost impossible not to miss some. When a frontal attack on the castle fails they try a backal attack and then a sidle attack. This is another brilliant novel from the discworld stable.

Too many brilliant moments to record all of them but here are some of my favourites:
"Those who are inclined to casual cruelty say that inside a fat girl is a thin girl and a lot of chocolate. Agnes's thin girl was Perdita." (p 18)
"Witches always lived on the edges of things. She felt the tingle in her hands. It was not just from the frosty air. There was an edge somewhere." (p 35)
"Lancre operated on the feudal system, which was to say, everyone feuded all the time." (p 42)
"She did feel ... unusual, ill-tempered and snappish, as if she'd put on a vest that was too tight." (p 63)
"We'll all be murdered in one another's beds." (p 83)
"There was some sort of chemistry here, although it was the sort that results in the entire building being evacuated." (p 110)
"I didn't know buoys had glass balls." (p 120)
"What a waste of skin." (p 145)
"It was as if, just because they'd got the label which said 'mother', everyone else got a part of the label that said 'child'..." (p 177)
"knowing when to say nothing ... left a hole in the conversation that the other person felt obliged to fill." (p 202)
"He'd found knowledge and knowledge hadn't helped." (p 232)
"the seeker after truth had found truths instead." (p 232)
"Sin ... is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That's what sin is." (p 314)
"There was a moment of discontinuity, a feeling of sliced time." (p 399)

April 2017, 425 pages

"Hazell and the Menacing Jester" by P.B.Yuill

Hazell the wise-cracking cockney private eye makes his third appearance after Hazell plays Solomon and Hazell and the Three-Card Trick. Can he work out who has been playing pranks on Mr Beevers, the businessman with the posh wife who lives in a swanky mansion flat and tips from a big roll of banknotes? Sex, violence and some cheeky cockney chatter.

There are some good lines as always:

• "They had that look you always see on hospital visitors, glad it's them coming out on the street again but a bit guilty about being glad." (p 15)
• "The darling sounded a bit forced, as if he had to remind her whose side she was on." (p 23)
• "He pecked at a cheek that didn't exactly offer itself." (p 24)
• "His tongue was busy making sure his beard hadn't fallen off." (p 24)
• "Your educated now, they're taught early on to shop everybody for thegood of society. I expect it makes sense if it's your society." (p 38)
• "I don't know what it is with me and women, when I'm feeling low I call it loneliness and when I'm flourishing I call it freedom." (p 50)
• "That's what it is about London, millions of us passing through and hardly leaving any mark at all. ... Your Londoner's got to make his own luck because if he lies down to die there's not a lot will stop to ask what's wrong." (p 58)
• "All the glamour of a honeymoon in a gravelpit." (p 58)
• "Driving was a duel to the death the way he went at it." (p 62)

April 2017; 189 pages

"Hazell plays Solomon" by P. B. Yuill

The south London wisecracking ex copper alcoholic no longer married private investigator James Hazell is working for a mother who believes that her baby was mixed up with another at maternity hospital.

A fairly standard PI story but well-written with a perfectly timed plot and, just for a moment, a true moral conundrum at the heart of it that has the potential for a stunning story.

This book comes before Hazell and the Three-Card Trick.

• "On the seventh floor I took a couple of deep breaths to remind my lungs who was supposed to be the guvnor." (p 6)
• "Today's lie is tomorrow's trouble" (p 8)
• "If life was all down to theory I'd be king." (p 8)
• "That year most kids were pinning up boy canaries with Lolita faces" (p 12)
• "he couldn't even mention God without taking a quick look over his shoulder." (p 15)
• "From the way she dealt with the porter I could see that the words please and thanks had been lost somewhere along the line." (p 36)
• "At that speed he should have been done for illegal parking." (p 41)
• "Her lips tightened as if she thought that an outright smile would be bad form." (p 81)

April 2017, 171 pages

Also in the series: Hazell and the Menacing Jester

"Hazell and the Three-Card Trick" by P. B. Yuill

Hazell is a Londoner, ex copper who, after losing his girlfriend and alcoholism, sets up as a very sleazy 'enquiry agent' and sets about tracking a three-card trick gang from Oxford Street who were involved in an altercation with a man who fell in front of a London Underground train. There are links to a previous case trying to find out how a cruise ship casino was cheated.

This somewhat overused format is given fresh life by the London patois and the wise-cracking, although too many of the expressions are explained. And there is a brilliant angry dad who sounds like Alf Garnett: "'Wot's got into you woman?' roared the old man." The dialogue is written in right cockney innit innit.

It did remind me slightly of the Saint books. I think it was trying to be Raymond Chandler.

This is the middle Hazell book. It was preceded by Hazell plays Solomon and succeeded by Hazell and the Menacing Jester.

There were some great expressions:

• "It was one of those damp February afternoons when the sky is like dirty dishwater and the brick walls are sweating old grease." (p 5)
• "A conga line of chanting Hare Krishners was jigging happily along the northside kerb." (p 5)
• "A mournful stare that made your average bloodhound seem like Woody Woodpecker." (p 5)
• "right under the useless empty road under the useless empty skyscraper" (p 5)
• "I'm like the weather forecast, only bright in patches." (p 30)
• "One sniff of bother and they're off quicker than a bride's nightie" (p 44)
• "the flash of blue fivers brought the sheep to the barbers" (p 60)
• "For some reason [at night] things stand out better in peripheral vision." (p 71)

A fun comedy thriller. April 2017; 204 pages

"Tehanu" by Ursula Le Guin

This is the fourth of the Earthsea books about a fantasy archipelago where wizards rule over an idyllically rural people and dragons still fly. The three previous books have been:

• A Wizard of Earthsea which introduces Sparrowhawk, a young lad who trains to be a wizard and battles death
• The Tombs of Atuan which introduces Tenar, a young girl in training to be a priestess of a silent world underground
• The Farthest Shore in which an old Sparrowhawk and a young prince voyage to the end of the world to find out what is causing wizards to forget their magic

Tenar, now a widow living on Gont, has taken under her wing a child, Therru, who was raped and burned by her father. They hear that wizard Ogion is dying and go to him. Then Sparrowhawk flies in on a dragon. But he has lost his magic. Evil forces chase Tenar and Therru and Ged seems powerless to help.

A strange story that feels a little like the tying up of lost ends. There are still some beautiful and remarkable phrases:

• "The little ruined butterfly came shivering from her cocoon" (p 646)
• "There was nothing she could do, but there was always the next thing to be done." (p 682)
• "There seemed always a great deal to be learned." (p 691)
• "A good deal of her obscurity and cant ... was a mere ineptness with words and ideas." (p 692)
• "Wanting a man got me into awful troubles more than once. But wanting to get married, never!" (p 694)
• "to drive the cart without the ox." (p 744)
• "Nine of us wet ... and one of us happy." (p 796)
• "a den of infamy and chickens" (p 818)
• "to spin thread with the whirlwind" (p 819)

April 2017; 251 pages

"The Ticket that Exploded" by William Burroughs

Again Burroughs uses the cut-up technique to scatter images of gay sex, hanging, drug addiction, poverty, warfare, telepathy, and insect and crustacean life through what you might call a plot. Again we meet some of his favourite characters, including Carl, and Agent Lee.

For several pages the cut-up technique involves cutting out a few words of the lyrics of a variety of love songs, some inevitably used more than once, and splicing them together. This causes some interesting curious such as "Got you under my skin on my mind." (p 35) and I suspect there are some who will celebrate the postmodern irony that makes love look so repetitive and yet so unique at the same time ... or is it trying to tell us that the creative process is merely remixing and that originality is dead? Hmmm.

"(ironically the format is banal to its heart of pulp ambivalently flailing noneffectual tentacles of verbal diarrhea)" (p22). Quite.

The plot seems to revolve around the potential of tape recordings played in some sort of synchrony to cause people to hang themselves but it is also mixed up with an intergalactic virus that seems to take the form of street boys. Or have I got that wrong? It was difficult to work out what was going on and even harder to care.

Despite Burroughs being an American author Agent Lee meets 'Genial' a drug addicted gay assassin, in Boots the Chemist in Piccadilly London; Boots of Piccadilly was famous in the 1960s as being the all-night chemist where addicts could fulfil their scripts; I wonder if it still is?

More than with any other Burroughs book (the others I have linked to from this post are quite good) the reader needs to tolerate a certain amount of being taken for a ride for the occasional nuggets of poetic beauty: either a perfect phrase, or an interesting idea, or a wonderful image:

• "it was across the table raw and bloody as a fresh used knife." (p 1)
• "who am I to be critical few things in my own past I'd just as soon forget." (p 2); Burroughs has a nice way of subverting grammar while leaving the sense entirely clear
• "Winds of time" (p 5)
• "The two beings twisted free of human coordinates" (p 6)
• "You can run a government without police if your conditioning program is tight enough but you can't run a government without bull shit." (p 15)
• "The dreamer with dirty cheeks" (p 52)
• "These our actors bid you peaceful opaqueness in this monument of tiredness." (p 135)
• "John stood there with a cup of coffee late morning sunlight in his eyes." (p 143)

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

April 2017; 168 pages

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

"The King Must Die" by Mary Renault

Mary Renault also wrote :

• The Persian Boy told from the point of view of the Eunuch who becomes the lover of Alexander the Great: an absolutely outstanding read.
• The Last of the Wine (reviewed in this blog) narrated by a young man growing up in the war-torn Athens of Socrates and Alcibiades: another brilliant book.

A little princeling grows up in a court on the Isle of Pelops in Ancient Greece. He is quite naughty, taming wild stallions, mucking about with bulls, fighting other lads and impregnating girls. Then he discovers that his father is a king in Athens. He must travel to find him. On the way across the Isthmus he has to slay a famous robber. He then fights a sacred king in Eleusis, kills him and takes his place, to enjoy night after night with the Priestess, but doomed to be killed after a year in his turn.

This is the story of Theseus.

After Athens he is part of the 7 boys and 7 girls sent as tribute to the court of King Minos in the Labyrinth in Crete where he has to learn and perform the bull dance with his team. He meets the Minotaur and Ariadne and Phaedra. But can he escape? The collection of the tribute (by lot, but Theseus then volunteers) reminded me strongly of the scene in The Hunger Games when the heroine does exactly the same, volunteering to take part in deadly games on behalf of someone who has been chosen by lot.

There is a moment where Theseus, meeting his father for the first time and simultaneously escaping being poisoned, a moment of the highest drama, looks out of the windows. This is a masterclass for writers. At the very moment when everything is keyed up to the highest point, describe the scenery in detail. Keep the reader waiting. Don't waste drama.

There are two fundamental problems with this book. The first is that I know the legend of Theseus (more or less). I never thought the hero was going to die or be captured and spend the rest of his days as a slave or mouldering in some foreign gaol. So the only mystery was in seeing how Renault could translate the mythic elements of the tale into historical reality. The second problem was that Theseus had little psychological growth. There were man management problems he had to master, being a very young man pretending to be a King. But he is a hero. This meant that he was (a) a king (b) handsome (c) a phenomenal lover (d) a great athlete (e)m a wonderful warrior. There was very little self doubt. There were no problems he had to overcome. So while the story was fun the central character never grew.

• "All Triozen to a mouldy fig, I got this the way he hid it! At that I laughed. But it was angry laughter." (p 52)
• "My anger twisted, like a caught beast in a cage." (p 53)
• "Your mouth is robbing your ears. Be quiet ... and attend to what I am saying." (p 56)
• "I rose at daybreak ... and washed in the stream; a thing my hosts beheld with wonder, having had their last bath at the midwife's hands." (p 75)
• Man "grows up and seeds like grass, and falls into the furrow." (p 77)
• "Clothed in their expectation, I felt not myself but what they called me to be." (p 77)
• "A look of hate strikes cold when one is naked." (p 112)
• "A boy is youngest when he thinks himself a man." (p 113)
• "For a moment the laughter slipped from his face, like a mask when the string is broken." (p 223)
• "Your own bull will always have you, he is born knowing your name." (p 241)
• "A slave made my garment; but All-Knowing Zeus made me. Shall I be ashamed [to be naked]?" (283)
• "She was like a young salamander meeting flame; afraid at first, and only ewhen flung in knowing its own element." (p 295)
• "Love is like a barbed arrow that cannot be pulled out. When you try, you drive it deeper." (p 296)
• "No woman likes to hear you hold forth about another." (p 318)
• "There is truth and truth. ... It is true after its kind." (p 388)
• "A bound is set to our knowing, and wisdom is not to search beyond it. Men are only men." (Last two sentences; p 391)

The labyrinth must be solved, the Minotaur slain. This is a very clever 'historical' interpretation of myth with lots of colour and lots of action and a fair amount of subtly written sex but in the end Theseus was too good to be true.

April 2017; 391 pages

"The Rites of Passage" by Arnold van Gennep

This classic anthropological work was first published (in French) in 1908 and so some of the content seems a little old-fashioned to our modern sensibilities. It was the first work to discuss rites of passage and the origin of that phrase. Van Gennep believes that all rites of passage can be divided into three phases: separation, transition, and re-incorporation. He then goes on to list a huge number of examples of rituals of birth, puberty, marriage, and funerals, and many others. As such it is a quaintly old-fashioned but nevertheless interesting source of a lot of information. I don't know how much is still believed to be true.

• "As we move downward on the scale of civilizations ... we cannot fail to notice an ever-increasing dominance of the secular by the sacred." (p 2) Leaving aside the potentially racist assumptions inherent in any scale of civilizations, I was reminded of Bettany Hughes in The Hemlock Cup when she pointed out that in ancient Athens (which some people regard as the pinnacle of civilization even though slaves were regarded as non-humans) "Life itself was thought to be a religious experience."
• "The life of an individual in any country is a series of passages from one age to another and from one occupation to another." (pp 2 - 3)
• "Rites of passage theoretically includes preliminal rites (rites of separation), liminal rites (rites of transition), and postliminal rites (rites of incorporation). (p 11)
• "Except in the few countries where a passport is still in use, a person in these days may pass freely from one civilized region to another." (p 15): I didn't know this was true in 1908!! On the other hand: "Today, in our part of the world, one country touches another; but the situation was quite different in the times when Christian lands comprised only a part of Europe. Each country was surrounded by a strip of neutral ground which in practice was divided into sections or marches. These have gradually disappeared, although the term 'letter of marque' retains the meaning of a permit to pass from one territory to another through a neutral zone.  Zones of this kind were important in classical antiquity, especially in Greece, where they were used for market places or battlefields." (pp 17 - 18)
• He suggests there is "an almost universal association between landmarks and the phallus" (p 16)
• "A society is similar to a house divided into rooms and corridors. The more the society resembles ours in its form of civilization, the thinner are its internal partitions and the wider and more open are its doors of communication." (p 26)
• "Exchanges have a direct, constraining effect: to accept a gift is to be bound to the giver." (p 29)
• "If the Jews had linked themselves with Yahweh by perforating the septum, how much fewer would have been the errors in ethnographic literature?" (p 73)
• The Mysteries of Eleusis "included: (a) a voyage through a hall divided into dark compartments which each represented a region of hell, the climbing of a staircase, the arrival into brightly illuminated regions, and entrance into the megaron, where sacra were displayed; and (b) a representation of the rising of Kore" (p 91)
• The initiation into the rite of Attis included the initiate going into a pit "and the blood of a sacrificed bull covers his entire body; then he comes out of the pit bloody from head to foot ... like the newborn child emerging from its mother's body." (pp 92 - 93)
• The veil as a symbol of separation. "In worship, sacrifice, and marriage rites, for example, the veiling is temporary. ... in Catholicism, to pass from a liminal stage (novitiate) to the stage of permanent incorporation into the community is to 'take the veil'. ... Among certain peoples a widow may wear a veil ... Socrates covered himself with a veil after drinking the hemlock, thereby separating himself from the world of the living." (p 168) Once you start going, veils are everywhere. The hood a hangman uses to cover a man about to be hanged. 
• Among the Mylitta "every girl must once offer herself to a stranger and receive a coin from him" (p 170)
• "In Dalmatia ... to have good fortune in the house, one should have intercourse with a goat, collect the sperm, and rub the door of the house with it." (p 173)
• "There is a popular saying that only the first time counts; it is an interesting fact that this idea is truly universal" (p 175)

Interesting. March 2017, 194 pages

"We are all completely beside ourselves" by Karen Jay Fowler

Wow. This book starts with a row in a cafeteria. Immediately you are gripped by the narrator and by characters who are created so easily and yet so perfectly. And as the novel moves along and the narrator reveals more and more of the secret history of her dysfunctional family I became captivated by the voice. 

The first quarter was fed on tiny breadcrumbs, perfectly dropped. What was the mystery of Rosemary's sister? Where had her elder brother run away to? What is contained in Rosemary's mother's diaries which she was given and put into her airline luggage which has now been lost (what a clever plot device!)?

Then, at the 25% mark, a major disclosure is made. Still there are mysteries, but now the options are strictly limited; in the end it can only go one of two ways. The book now runs largely on the charm of the wonderful characters of Harlow the drama queen friend, Ezra the caretaker and Lowell, the mysterious but oh so charismatic brother. We find out more about Rosemary's unreliable memories and there is quite a lot of psychological monkey study stuff which got a bit wearing. A bit preachy perhaps.


Selected quotes:

• "At twenty-two, I had the callowest possible definition of interesting and, by the measure of my own calipers, was far from interesting myself." (p 7)
• "My brother might very well go to jail ... but he would never ever call." (p 15)
• The words behind the prison call phone read "Think ahead. I thought how that was good advice, but maybe a bit late for anyone using that phone." (p 15)
• "their marriage had become the sort Inspector Javert might have had with Jean Valjean." (p 18) Could that be more perfect?
• "Grandma Fredericka was the sort of hostess who believed that bullying guests into second and third helpings was only being polite." (p 19) I know people like that. Me!
• "Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability." (p 20)
• "thinking less of him is my job, not yours." (p 20)
• "Will Barker thought you mother hung the moon" (p 20): I came across this phrase for the first time last month in Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread; perhaps it is a common American expression.
• "No more politics, Grandma Donna had said as a permanent new rule, since we wouldn't agree to disagree and all of us had access to cutlery." (p 21)
• "Dead, but then that's also part of God's plan." (p 24)
• "The lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail." (p 25)
• "He'd applied for a job in the CIA ... I still gave him the best recommendation I could make up on the spot. 'I never see the guy ... unless he wants to be seen.'" (p 32)
• "And that right there is the difference between me and my brother - I was always afraid of being made to leave  and he was always leaving." (p 54)
• "Our parents ... never reminisced about the time they had to drive halfway back to Indianapolis because I'd left Dexter Poindexter, my terry-cloth penguin (threadbare, ravaged by love - as who amongst us is not) in a gas station restroom, although they often talk about the time our friend Marjorie Weaver left her mother-in-law in the exact same place. Better story, I grant you." (p 57) I adore the way the narrator's slightly cynical voice is dripped in with such perfect precision.
• "If you told Lowell, this is where we draw the line, you could count on him stopping instantly over it." (p 111)
• "If you do believe ... that morality starts with God, then you have to wonder why he simultaneously hardwired us against it." (p 151)
• "The black magic around me, each streetlamp wrapped in its own bubble of mist, my bike-light briefly igniting the puddles on the black streets as I passed." (p 159) What a poetic description of an urban street at night!
• "Harlow hadn't given me a gateway drug. More of a slammed-door drug. I would never ever take it again." (p 177)
• "The smoke alarm went off and had to be beaten into silence with a broom handle." (p 177)
• "I said to myself, self, there's a person you want to know better." (p 193)
• "You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. Though no one admires you for it." (p 197) 
• "Can't complain, I said. ... Don't be so modest. I bet you can complain for days." (p 199)
• "I'm speechless, my mother told me. Which wasn't remotely true." (p 234)
• "The only reason I'm the one telling this is that I'm the one not currently in a cage." (p 304)
• "No Utopia is Utopia for everyone." (p 306) This last one can be compared to "Better never means better for everyone ... It always means worse, for some." in The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Attwood.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2014 and winner of the Pen Faulkner Award in 2015.

March 2017; 308 pages

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

"The Hemlock Cup" by Bettany Hughes

This is a biography of Socrates, a man who lived through political upheaval, war and civil war, and was a contemporary of Euripides, Xenophon, Sophocles, Plato, Herodotus and Alcibiades to name but a few. Part of the excitement of this book is the way it suggests how our own grasp on civilisation might be so tenuous. The Hellenic "population appears largely to have lost the power of literacy between about 1100 and 800 BC." (p 10) If the ability to read and write can be lost by a while people, what can we rely on? Athens, in its concern for democracy, but in its vulnerability to political turmoil via populism, might echo Trump's US; Sparta in its rigidly communist ideals enforced by militarism suggests the pre-1989 Soviet Union or modern North Korea. And Sparta ended up conquering proud Athens.

I suppose this story of Socrates is more importantly the story of Athens. After she had suffered under the Persian invasion and then defeated the Persians, Athens and her famous fleet of thalassocrats, became the leading light in the Delian league. Inexorably Athens became too big for her own boots. She began to treat her allies as subjects, wreaking horrific revenges (such as killing all men and enslaving all women and children) on those who wished to defect from the league. She exacted tribute which, with the silver coming from mines excavated by slave labour, made her rich; this is why the citizens, supported by at least two slaves each on average, were able to spend time talking philosophy and making their bodies beautiful. The slaves were  non-persons, Hughes mentions that "slaves' evidence was thought admissible in fifth-century Athens only if obtained under torture" (p 345). But slowly Athens was poisoning the rest of Greece against her. The long agony of the Peloponnesian war against Sparta enfeebled Athens; the Spartans regularly raided the Athenian countryside. Then Alcibiades led a naval expedition against Sicily; after the democrats recalled him to stand trial (he fled to Sparta) the incompetent leadership led to the total loss of all ships and perhaps ten thousand men (which would have been about ten per cent of the population). Athens struggled on until at last the Spartans conquered them, forcing them to demolish their city walls and abandon the democracy in favour of an oligarchy of quislings. Now civil strife started and terror ruled the new police state. Eventually Athens was reduced to a size of one third of her former glory. It was then that

One of the things that must have been so exciting about this time was that Socrates rubbed shoulders with so many incredible people. They're all here in this book:

• Democritus, the man who named the atom: "A bit of a local celebrity up north, 'in the streets of Athens', Democritus would say, 'no one knows who I am'." (p 66)
• "One of the rogue philosophers in Athena's city, Anaxagoras, would soon amuse others with his crazy theories - that the stars and planets were not heavenly creatures but rock-hot masses." (p 67) [Not 100% sure about rock-hot: hotness is not a quality I associate with rocks.]
• When Socrates was just 19 he met 65 year old Parmenides and his young pupil/ lover forty yo Zeno: "Although the two alien philosophers Zeno and Parmenides were staying in the low-rent motel-strip of the ancient city, they had brought with them something priceless. A new book. Imagine the impact. The leather pannier opening, the papyrus unwrapped, the words, inked black with oak-gall and charcoal, marking out a fresh landscape of ideas." (pp 75 - 76)
• "It is a half-Spartan boy, with a Spartan name and nursed at a Spartan breast, who will from here on in be Socrates' earthly love. A boy who will bring him much trouble. A boy called Alcibiades." (p 99)
• "Aspasia would have been considered a 'leaky' being, someone who oozed pollution from her genitalia, her mouth, even her eyes. Hippocrates (the Greek medical expert from Cos whose lifespan almost exacly matches Socrates' own) explains that menstrual blood accumulates in the female body because this sex is organically porous. One of the reasons such a sump-residue gathers is because of women's 'sedentary' lifestyle." (p 117)
• Alcibiades was believed to be "a direct descendant of that sage old hero of the Trojan war, King Nestor." (pp 143 - 144)
• "In about 454 BC a group of Pythagoreans had gathered together as per usual in their meeting house in Croton, one of the Greek cities in Magna Graecia, southern Italy. Their conversation would perhaps have been about the stars, mathematics, the nature of the universe, the nature of society, the nature of love. This think-tank engaged with the world around them in the most vigorous of ways. But others were there too, in the shadows. As the radical group of thinkers settled down to business, the door was barred - from the outside - and a torch put to the tinder. All the Pythagoreans were burned alive." (p 217)
• As well of course as the members of Socrates' circle: Plato, Xenophon, Meno, Phaedo, Lysis etc; excitingly Hughes records their archaeological existence as well. He was also satirised in the comedies of Aristophanes.

Other fabulous moments:

• "The Ancient Greeks believed something remarkable about men. They believed that each had been given, by the gods, an equal portion of dike, justice, and aidos, shame or concern for their fellow man." (pp 3 - 4)
• "As with other troubling, slippery, nebulous concepts (nemesis - retribution; themis - order or divine right; peitho - persuasion), she [demokratia - democracy] was personified as a woman." (p 15)
• "Life itself was thought to be a religious experience." (p 29)
• Athenians called a quickie with a prostitute "middle-of-the-day marriages" (p 72)
• "Prostitutes could confidently ply their trade by slipping on customised little hobnail boots and casually strolling up and down the alleyways. In the dust their shoe-nails would spell out akolouthei - 'this way' or 'follow me'" (p 84):  Prostitutes are often associated with boots but not hob-nails!
• "Kynosarges - 'White Bitch' gym, - was designated for the half-castes of the city. As ever, Socrates does not just inhabit the 'showcase' venues of the 'violet-crowned', 'show-city' Athens, but can alos be found in its more mongrel spots." (p 108)
• "in male-dominated European societies to date there has never yet been one that did not sponsor talented, charismatic, intelligent women in their private salons." (p 121)
• The Isthmian games in Corinth commemorated "the death of a child-hero called Melikertes, who drowned at sea buit whose body was brought back to shore by a kindly dolphin. Priests wore black robes and crowned victors with wreaths of wild celery - the plant that was thought to grow so freely in the Underworld." (p 133)
• "The Greeks knew just how dangerous Eros really was. Naturally, Love and Lust destroyed men. Eros brought the great and the weak alike to their knees. Socrates himself compared the kisses sponsored by Eros to the venom injected by a lethal scorpion." (pp 144 - 145)
• "Socrates lived through an information revolution. By the time of his trial, a huge swathe of Athenians right down to the artisan class had become literate ... It was in Athens in the fifth century BC that the written word - which gives all of us so much - took flight." (p 170)
• "Zeus himself first appeared as a small bronze from Sumeria (made in the third millennium BC) before thetre was any mention of him in records west of the Bosporus. Dionysos too danced swung and lurched his way over from Central Asia at just about the moment that written records in what we now call Greece began." (p 185)
• "The philosopher's dying words ... remember another divine hero new to the city: the healer Asclepius." (p 186)
• "Socrates grew up with theatre beating its juvenating rhythm out to his city." (p 212)
• "Men often joked about the honesty of an empty belly." (p 230)
• "Socrates' love is literal: the point of life is to love it. He is erotic. He states that if Eros passes you by in life, you are a nonentity." (p 240)
• "book-burning begins in Athens as soon as 'the book', as a popular art-form, arrives in the city state." (p 277)
• "Like most goddesses, the goddess of persuasion, Peitho, and Pheme, the goddess of rumour, could be irrevocably unkind." (p 309)
• "Athens was no longer a state you wanted to arrive at, it was a place from which you tried to escape." (p 314)
• "From 404 through to 403 BC, Athens was stifled in an endless nightmare. Fists and wooden clubs pounded on doors. Citizens turned slaughterers to avoid their own messy deaths. ... Just 10,000 lived within the walls of Athens itself. This was Balkan-village atrocity. Neighbours turned on neighbours, sometimes brother against brother." (pp 319 - 320)
• "Democracy has a very light hold on history. In antiquity it lasted just over 180 years." (p 359)

This is a brilliant book, beautifully written, which records so much about Socrates' life, from the written records (not just Plato!) to the archaeological evidence. It navigates perfectly through the confusions of the Peloponnesian war and the roller-coaster career of the charismatic Alcibiades. Fascinating reading.

March 2017; 371 pages

A brilliant fictionalised account of the Athens of Socrates is Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine.

"Vinegar Girl" by Anne Tyler

Kate is a forthright young lady with a 'take me or leave me' attitude. She lives with her scientist father and her flirty schoolgirl sister Bunny in a joyously bizarre household governed by dad's scientific 'systems' (such as making a nutrient balanced meat mash one day and eating it throughout the week). Her dad is reaching the end of many years research; his foreign research assistant Pyotr Shcherbakov is nearing the end of his three year immigration visa and dad is frantic that he will be deported. So he concocts a scheme in which Kate marries Pyotr for the immigration status. Which mortifies and infuriates Kate as much as Pyotr intrigues her.

The plot is (loosely) based on The Taming of the Shrew. The problem is that Petruchio in the original 'tames' his Kate as a man might break a horse and takes pride in being rough with her. Tyler has to make Pyotr at least a little bit likeable so that a modern reader can believe that Kate might come to like Pyotr and she doesn't have Shakespeare's expedient of making Kate 'shrewish' and 'unwomanly' so that his male patriarchal audience could despise her and root for Petruchio. That Tyler does such a great job is cause for celebration although she necessarily has to leave a lot of the old story behind.

Although both books share an acute observation of the little domestic routines of everyday life, this book is quite different from the other Tyler I have read: A Spool of Blue Thread. But they're both great in their own way. Vinegar Girl is much funnier though. There were moments of genius comedy, mostly found in the interaction of two people, especially Kate's reactions to the pre-schoolers she cares for. I loved it.

Two girls chatting:
"I could tell he wanted to ask me," one was saying, "because he kept clearing his throat in the way they do, you know? But then not speaking."
"I love when they're so shy," the other said
Perfectly observed dialogue including the 'you know' and 'I love when' rather than 'I love it when'. And perfect observation of courting men. Tyler really does have a soft spot for how hard it is to be a man. (p 4)

Pyotr's lunch: "two eggs and then a banana" a lover breadcrumb of his intentions. (p 9)

"She mistakenly kicked a tuft of grass instead of the bottle cap, and a child waiting for his turn at the swings looked startled." (p 78) This has nothing to do with advancing the plot and it doesn't really help character either but it is such a human moment that it adds more verisimilitude than a list of what is in Kate's pockets.

"this morning one of my boys sharpened his index finger in the pencil sharpener" (p 79) I was expecting Adam, who says this, to have more of a role, perhaps turning up at the church to announce that he loved Kate so she realised what a mistake she was making. I must stop writing my own plots.

"Inwardly he was formulating thoughts every bit as complicated and layered as her own." The moment when Kate realises this rather comical sounding foreigner who can't speak English very well is actually a person in his own right. This works at every level. (p 104)

"vulnerable-looking bare neck" (p 137) In A Spool of Blue Thread the character Stem is nicknamed after his vulnerable-looking neck. Is this something in Tyler?

"Kate almost looked behind her for someone else; it seemed so unlikely that she could be 'our' Kate." (p 180)

"I've always had a very good relationship with my mice"
"Well, better with them than with no one, I suppose" 
(p 243)

March 2017; 263 pages

"The Taming of the Shrew" by William Shakespeare

Baptista's younger daughter Bianca has many suitors but the father decrees that the older daughter Katherina, a notriously bad-tempered woman with a sharp tongue, shall marry first. So when Petruchio comes along, seeking a rich wife, he determines to marry Katherina and then to tame her like one of his falcons and break her like a horse. Which, in Shakespeare's monument to male chauvinism, he proceeds to do. Meanwhile the other suitors do their best by trickery, guile and most of all disguise, to get into Bianca's good books while at the same time persuading her father to part with a substantial dowry. To do this Hortensio pretends to be music teacher Cambio while Lucretio pretends to be a philosophy teacher, Lucretio's servant Tranio pretneds to be Lucretio and a passing Merchant pretends to be Lucretio's father Vincentio. Meanwhile Gremio, a rich but old suitor for Bianca is all too easily confused, at least on the page, with Grumio the servant of Petruchio. Add a lot of what the Elizabethan's would have thought to be side-splitting word play and you have a farce with a massively sexist subtext.

Bizarrely, the Taming of the Shrew begins with a two scene 'Induction' in which a drunken tinker named Christopher Sly is pranked by a Lord who persuades his servants to treat Sly like a Lord when he wakes and to tell him he has been asleep for fifteen years and been lunatic believing he is not a lord but a poor tinker named Christopher Sly ... A company of wandering actors are persuaded to put on a play for the 'Lord'. Unfortunately after the Induction, and a brief comment after Act One Scene One, Shakespeare forgot about these characters! This is an indication the Shrew is a very early play while the Swan was still honing his craft. The Induction also starts with two references to the Elizabethan box office smash The Spanish Tragedy which also uses a structure in which characters from an introduction comment on the play throughout.

"Think you a little din can daunt mine ears?

Have I not in my time heard lions roar?

Have I not heard the sea, puff'd up with winds, 

Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?

Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,

And heaven's artillery thunder in the skies?

Have I not in a pitched battle heard

Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets' clamg?

And do you tell me of a woman's tomgue

That gives not half so great a blow to hear

As will a chestnut in a farmer's fire?

Tush, tush, fear boys with bugs!"

It is interesting to see how Shakespeare's early verse had lots of end-stopping, little enjambment, and almost no caesuras nor weak endings. Perhaps Shakespeare didn't feel weak (also called feminine) endings were appropriate in a play devoted to the supremacy of the male!

"What, is the jay more precious than the lark

Because his feathers are more beautiful?"

I saw this at the Globe with an all woman cast. Not an easy play to perform to modern audiences.

March 2017; 113 pages

Other Shakespeare plays reviewed in this blog van be found here.

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

"Dangerous Reality" by Malorie Blackman

Blackman is the author of the stunningly brilliant Noughts and Crosses trilogy; she writes books for children.

Dominic's mum has invented a robot controlled by virtual reality which goes berserk when being demonstrated to potential investors. It has been sabotaged, but by whom? As things develop and the robot becomes more dangerous, can Dominic and his mum and mum's new fiancee Jack find the saboteur and save the project?

A light, easy to read, young-teen novel with some fun characters, a nice take on step-parenting, and some witty dialogue. My favourite was:

'I've changed my mind.'
'Let's hope your new mind works better than the old one.'

March 2017; 192 pages