"The Other Half of Augusta Hope" by Joanna Glen

Listed for the Costa First Novel Award

"A therapeutic dose of high-strength emotion" (The Guardian)

Augusta and Julia are twins though born on either side of midnight on 31st July, hence their names. They live in grey suburbia with a domestic mum and a dad who is so scared of the world that he never lets them do anything. Julia is the pretty twin, Augusta the clever one who loves words and facts and can't be dissuaded from telling you all the fascinating things she has learned. They grow up. Julia heads for a life as wife and mother with the boy next door while Augusta goes to University and dreams of escaping to Spain.

Parfait is the eldest son of a large family of farmers in Burundi. Inter-ethnic civil war kills his parents and his brother Wilfred's twin; his twin sisters are raped and abducted. He decides to travel to Spain with his little brother Zion in the hopes of a new life.

In the final quarter of the book these two stories, which have been told in alternating chapters (some as short as a single page) come together.

It was a wonderful book. Augusta is smart and funny and wise without realising it; Parfait is good and kind and thoughtful despite the horrible circumstances of his childhood. Of the supporting characters, Augusta's father, a frightened little man who curtails the horizons of himself and his family because he is so scared of what might lie beyond, is superbly drawn. On the fateful holiday to Spain they go every day to his favourite part of the beach, a secluded spot away from the nudists: "This spot was special for him because he could hide his burnt knees and his inadequacies, and he didn’t have to ask for ice creams at the kiosk, pointing furiously, panicking, handing over the wrong money." (p 84) I know that man; I've been that man.

The prose is beautifully constructed in short, sharp sentences, often in single-sentence paragraphs in which the subsequent paragraph either completes or contradicts the previous one. For example:

• "My parents didn’t seem the sort of people who would end up killing someone. Everyone would say that - except the boy who died, who isn't saying anything." (p 1)
• "He always had new dreams up his sleeve. But the truth was that none of them ever seemed to slip out of his sleeve into real life." (p 3)
• "A sign went up saying, ‘Keep your eyes on the road,’ except you had to take your eyes off the road to look at the sign. Sometimes, I thought, adults just don’t think things through." ( p 12)
• "‘Professors at Cambridge University still need to cook,’ said my mother. Which was a perfect example of the knack she had of entirely missing the point." (p 63)

This section of the analysis contains spoilers. The construction is also perfect:

• The rapid swapping of viewpoint allows the two stories to be told together; for most of the book they are joined thematically as, for example, when Augusta's mum talks about roses and Parfait's brother starts a rose farm. This device enables cross-fertilising foreshadowing and the contrast between the boring suburban life of Augusta and the on-the-edge existence of Parfait is rendered deeper without the need for comment. 
• It starts with a great hook: "My parents didn’t seem the sort of people who would end up killing someone. Everyone would say that - except the boy who died, who isn't saying anything." I carried this through almost to the end of the book.
• At the 25% mark Julia and her parents go the the beach in Andalusia without Augusta and something happens; Julia acquires a secret which drives a wedge between the sisters and isn't revealed until the 75% mark. Shortly afterwards triumph meets tragedy when Parfait travels across the sea from Tangier to Spain in a little rubber dinghy and his brother Zion is drowned. The horror of this sea passage is encapsulate in a single sentence in which punctuation is brilliantly set aside for stream of consciousness: "I tried to sound strong and calm, but my breathing was laboured now, and the boat wasn’t handling right, it was being knocked about, side to side, up and down, and I was throwing up again, and the waves were getting bigger and coming into the boat, and our feet were soaking wet to our ankles, lurching lurching in the dark, water bursting over the sides as we rocked and rolled, side to side, back, forward, back forward – and I was more frightened by far, by far, than I had ever been in the whole of my frightening life." 
• At the 50% mark Augusta goes to University and finally loses her virginity; her father's shop goes bankrupt and shortly afterwards he has a stroke. Parfait begins the healing process when he starts to paint and sells his paintings to a local art gallery; Wilfred his brother, bereaved twin and elective mute, starts to speak.
• Two thirds of the way through Julia loses her baby. She tells Augusta her secret: "There was a boy. And I didn’t save him. I didn’t save him." (p 265). She then takes an empty pram and dies, struck by a train on a level crossing. The grieving and the funeral follows: "My mother made more tea. The tea tasted of copper." (p 272)
• At the 75% mark Augusta's family begins its healing by buying and beginning to restore the gypsy caravan she's always dreamed of. But she and Julia's husband Diego travel to Spain where she meets an artist on the beach (Parfait): "There was an artist with his easel beside the beach road, his skin smooth and conker-coloured, his bunch of plaits tied up so that his cheekbones stuck out" (p 227)
• The last quarter of the book is a roller coaster of emotions. I so wanted Augusta and Parfait to have a relationship and so many things seemed to be about to stop them. Parfait wanted to return to Burundi to support his brother Wilfred. Augusta becomes pregnant by Diego. Most of all, of course, there is the discovery that Augusta's parents watched Diego's brother drown.

Selected quotes:

• "Death would come along, and everything we’d found out would be buried with us. Which seemed a terrible waste. Shouldn’t we first be tipped upside down to let all our knowledge out – like when you empty a piggy bank of its coins?" (p 7)
• "Think what a huge word rumour is, positively bulging with stuff, like a massive delusional warehouse." (p 9)
• "My grandmother would sit in the corner of the lounge on Friday evenings and Saturday afternoons, commenting on our lives like a one-woman Greek chorus" ( p 11)
• "‘Unnecessary.’ Which I suppose is what beauty is." ( p 20)
• "I feel my mother’s arms around me, the slight damp of her armpits on my shoulders, the warmth of my cheek against her soft chest and the deep shiver of belonging running down my spine to the soles of my feet." (p 20)
• "I thought of how much I wanted to find it, that thing I couldn’t find, whatever it was." (p 63)
• "She’d died in the spring. As she lay bald and fading to nothing in the English hospice, the apple blossom fell past her window and rotted in the grass." (p 68)
• "‘Or would it be hell?’ said Mr Sánchez. ‘If you found the past, all piled up by the side of the road. All the things you’d ever said. All the things you’d ever thought. All the things you’d ever done.’" (p 69)
• "And I thought how strange language was – one letter turned duck into fuck. Just like that." (p 91)
• "I could feel little specks of anxiety inside me, moving, like bacteria under a microscope." (p 114)
• "The earliest sundials are shadow clocks from Egypt, dated at 1500 BC. I guess human beings have always wanted to tell the time. To know how long is left." (p 141)
• "he opened his mouth, and he started to sing, and his voice split up into strands, fraying, as if there was blood on his vocal cords, or in his heart." (p 168)
• "But don’t we all have experiences all the time that are only ours. None of us can ever imagine being someone else. Isn’t that why being human is lonely?" (p 175)
• "Sometimes I feel bad for all those little half-babies slopping about at the bottom of the condom. Little dead tadpoles, which served no purpose at all. They lost a race. And that was it." (p 176)
• "I painted twilight trembling in the bulrushes at the river’s edge" (p 188)
• "‘Do you think that’s what we all are?’ I said. ‘Pinned butterflies who think we can fly?’" (p 189)
• "Olly’s parents couldn’t, or didn’t, come. He was their fifth child, and I think they were running out of steam." (p 221)
• "I counted the egrets, and got to six hundred, tiny white flames flecking the branches, like an old-fashioned Christmas tree in a European children’s book." (p 226)
• "Our relationship was dead, and the stone would not be rolled away." (p 239)
• "I was out in thatched communities where the graves were fuller than the houses." (p 242)
• "If they put their gloves on, they wouldn’t be frightened of the kinds of things that could happen in life, their lives too. Like when someone tells you they have cancer, and you want to feel more scared for them than you do for yourself." (p 273)
• "I thought, and the fear of it sent me running up the stairs, to our bedroom, where I got into Julia’s cold bed, deep deep down, all of me, under the duvet, which was too tight because my mother always tucked the bedspread in under the mattress. "(p 274)
• "I never knew grief felt so much like fear." (p 277)
• "No matter how many times he’d said Nothing to worry about, there were, in the end, things to worry about, and he couldn’t stop them." (p 313)

A book that made me laugh and cry. Parfait! April 2020

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

"Greenmantle" by John Buchan

Richard Hannay, the hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps, is recuperating from his exploits at the Battle of Loos in the First World War when he is recruited by the Secret Service to go behind the German lines to find out how the Kaiser plans to start an Islamic jihad to save the Ottoman Empire and open up a second front against the British. From this potentially promising start the plot becomes a bizarre succession of opportunities for Hannay and his companions to demonstrate their derring-do and for unbelievable escapes from tight situations.

This is incredibly boys' own stuff and marred by the jingoism and unthinking racism that characterised so many boys' adventure stories of the time. War, for example, is "the only task for a man." More disturbingly, honour and decency are regarded as playing "the white man". The real sourness of these attitudes is that they are so ingrained as to be unconscious.

It also seems to owe a certain debt to The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers which is a much better written book with some very ironic humour. The scene where Hannay meets the Kaiser seems very similar to the scene in which Carruthers (of the Foreign Office) spies on the Kaiser in Riddle.

The only humour in this book derives from a comic American character who is perpetually complaining about his dyspepsia and his "duo-denum" and who demonstrates incredible sang-froid by playing endless games of Patience in the face of death, although when clambering over a roof and suffering from vertigo "I could hear him invoking some unknown deity called Holy Mike." (C 18). I suspect this attributes were enough in Buchan's day to constitute character.

The story is, of course dated, and not just in its breathtakingly chauvinistic attitudes. Technology also dates. In one scene, the hero steals a car and drives off in it. He has to start it ... using a starting handle. When he is fleeing his enemies in it he reaches a dizzying fifty miles per hour.

There are moments when the cliches are so extreme that I wondered whether Buchan was laughing at himself:

• "I may be sending you to your death, Hannay - Good God, what a damned task-mistress duty is!" (C 1)

There was one wonderful moment when the narrator spoke directly to the reader with a gnomic (at least to me) reference to a third party which made the point perfectly: "He was in Swaziland with Bob McNab, and you know what that means." (C 3) Well, no actually, I don't, but I can guess.

Some great moments:

• "Besides, how big is the risk? About one o'clock in the morning, when you can't sleep, it will be the size of Mount Everest, but if you run out to meet it, it will be a hillock you can jump over." (C 2)
• "I was half a head shorter than him to begin with, and a man does not feel his stoutest when he has no clothes, so he had the pull on me in every way." (C 6)
• "He had proceeded to get drunk. ... He had a head like a rock, but he got to the required condition by wild mixing. He was quite a gentleman in his cups, and not in the least violent, but he was apt to be very free with his tongue." (C 6)
• "To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts." (C 8)
• "The woman's face had the skin stretched tight over the bones and that transparency which means under-feeding." (C 8)
• "I had forgotten that winter is pretty much the same everywhere." (C 10)
• "That lady's a very different proposition. The man that will understand her has got to take a biggish size in hats." (C 12)
• "Politics is like a chicken-coop, and those inside get to behave as if the little run were all their world." (C 13)

Ethically challenging for the modern reader: a product of the culture of the time.

April 2020; 343 pages

Books by John Buchan reviewed in this blog:

• My very favourite: a historical novel set in Scotland which proved that Buchan really could write: Witch Wood
• Weird plot, terribly un-PC but with some wonderful characters, a laugh aloud speech, and a real feel for the joys of hunting: John Macnab
• Well written but with the most ridiculously bonkers plot and some horrible classism, racism and anti-semitism: The Three Hostages 
• A wonderful description of the Scottish countryside and some fantastic characters and some brilliant counterpointing: Huntingtower
• Greenmantle: another bonkers plot with weak characters set during the First World War 

"A Start in Life" by Anita Brookner

This was Brookner's debut novel, published in 1981 when she was 53.

Ruth is the daughter of an indolent shopkeeper and an actress mother. She is cursed by believing herself too plain to be attractive to men, which perhaps leads her to attempt the most unsuitable men. Her efforts to escape her stupefying home lead her to a year studying in Paris (Balzac, who becomes her life's work; the author quotes bits of Eugenie Grandet in the original French). Cinderella shall go the ball? Not necessarily.

Brookner has also written the Booker-prize-winning Hotel du Lac (about a very similar subject, an ageing romantic novelist seeking love), and Family and Friends (another mournful old lady looking back).

Brookner's prose is always elegant though sometimes old-fashioned: "She made the gesture all betrothed women make, holding up her hand in front of her, trying to see the ring as a part of it that she would soon take for granted." (C 18) Most people nowadays would say 'engaged' rather than 'betrothed'. In many ways the entire book is old-fashioned and harks back to the Victorian novelists that the protagonist adores: thus Ruth's parents can afford a full-time live-in housekeeper in their London house, even when they have both finished working, and Ruth herself has a legacy which provides her with independent means to some extent.

Brookner uses a multi-perspective point of view ('head-hopping' is something first novelists are often warned against); this is a style she also employs in Family and Friends. Thus, although the frame narrative is that of Ruth, the ageing lecturer in Literature, looking back at her life, parts of the story are told through the eyes of George, her father, Mrs Cutler, the home help (and the only person who engineers a happy ending), and even Molly, a bit part with whom Ruth's parents stay on a holiday to Brighton.

Brookner also allows the authorial voice to intrude and make comments:

• "Ruth woke at her habitual early hour of six and wondered how she was going to fill the day. With anticipation naturally. This is how most women in love fill their day. Frequently the event anticipated turns out to be quite dull compared with the mood that preceded it." (C 6)
• "Like most young people, Roddy hated hypocrites, and did not allow for the fact that he was growing into one himself." (C 19)
• "In the country of the old and sick there are environmental hazards. Cautious days. Early nights. A silent, ageing life in which the anxiety of the invalid overrides the vitality of the untouched." (C 21)

Some wonderful moments:

• "Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature." (C 1)
• "Her appearance and character were exactly half-way between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." (C 1)
• "Pieces of furniture of incredible magnitude in dark woods which looked as though they had absorbed the blood of horses." (C 2)
• "The grandmother knew, and bore the knowledge grimly, that her son was a lightweight and her daughter-in-law a lighter weight still, that each needed the protection of the other, that neither had grown up or would be able to grow old, and that their ardent and facile love-play would damage the child." (C 2)
• "She has the soul of an air hostess." (C 4)
• "Sometimes she kept her make-up on all night in order not to give herself a shock the following morning." (C 10)
• "George knew that he no longer loved his wife. He felt ... extremely sorry for her. As a natural corollary, he felt extremely sorry for himself." (C 10)
• "We shall none of us ever make love again, she thought, and did not much care." (C 10)
• "Life had not been too harsh. The sea would still be there at the end. She was nearly ready. But Helen, she saw, would be taken unawares." (C 10)
• "There are marriage bureaux, of course. ... Why don't you sign on or fill in the form or whatever you have to do, and then you can ask them back here, whoever they are. If anyone turns up." (C 11)
• "She still could not believe that anyone had consigned her to this place when she had committed no crime." (C 12)
• "She studied the couple closely, as if they were an unknown species. They were, in fact, an unknown species. They were happy." (C 12)
• "She perceived that most tales of morality were wrong, that even Charles Dickens was wrong, and that the world is not won by virtue." (C 12)
• "'Is it all a game then?' she asked. 'Only if you win,' was her reply. 'If you lose, it's far more serious'." (C 12)
• "They were right when they said how sharper than a servant's tooth is man's ingratitude." (C 15)
• "An intermittent lover is no use to a person of dignity and courage." (C 16)
• "Ruth still believed that adults adhered to a superior standard of behaviour." (C 20)

Elegant, profoundly sad, and rather old-fashioned. April 2020; 176 pages

"The Mirror and the Light" by Hilary Mantel

Shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for fiction and the 2021 fiction of the year prize in the British Book Awards and longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. It won the 2021 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

This is the concluding part of the trilogy of historical novels whose narrator and protagonist is Thomas Cromwell, the Master Secretary to Henry VIII. It follows Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, both of which won Booker Prizes. It has therefore been extremely well-anticipated and a best-seller even before its publication. It is a hefty tome: my hardback edition is 875 pages long; it took me eight days to read it. The question is: does it live up to the hype?

Mantel is a very talented writer. I loved Wolf Hall, the first in this series, and I have been impressed by Bring Up the Bodies and Vacant Possession although I think my favourite is Beyond Black.

There is no doubt that I found this book a chore to read. I loved the quirky style which, like the first two in the series, is narrated in the present tense and with the first person narrator describing himself as 'he' (or 'he, Cromwell' is 'he' might be ambiguous). There is no doubt that Mantel writes fluent prose. But there was so much of it, so much detail, and I wondered whether it was necessary to give us everything.

The metaphor of the mirror is also used repeatedly as a motif; it felt a little less than subtle.

Sometimes, as in the other books in the series, Thomas Cromwell seems to be the ideal of 'how to be a leader' books:

• "It is important to reward good service with encouragement, as well as a purse." (1.1)
• "That's the point of a promise ... It wouldn't have any value, if you could see what it would cost you when you made it." (1.2)

There are some great descriptions and somehow she manages to describe things in the mind of the times:

• "these gaunt rooms, the ovens cold, the fires ash, the thick walls not so much repelling the cold as encasing it, like a reliquary." (1.3)
• "In the smoke that still lingered, he could see certain shapes, low and slinking. At a distance bot looping closer, the dogs of London." (4.1)

Perhaps the true triumph of this work (all three volumes) is that by so thoroughly immersing us in a world that is a once both alien and familiar (because we are all men and women, with the joys and sorrows of our little lives, no matter what our culture or our age) and emphasising this nearness and strangeness by placing Cromwell in this disruptive third-person narrator, Mantel can offer us perspectives on ourselves as if from afar:

• "He is at home wherever he wakes." (1.1)
• "The darkness falls away from her in flecks and sparks of light, the roofs and gables like shadows in water; and when she studies the net there is no net, only the spaces between." (1.1)
• "The counting house where the units of obligation are fixed and the coins of shame are weighed." (1.2)
• "Go forward, sir. It's the one direction God permits." (1.2)
• "Everyone complains about builders, the time they take, the mounting expense, the noise and the dust, but he likes their banging and thudding, their songs and their chat, their shortcuts and secret lore." (1.2)
• "As a boy he was always climbing about on someone's roof, often without their knowledge. Show him a ladder and he was up it, seeking a longer view. But when he got up there, what could he see? Only Putney." (1.2)
• "'Ladders? I have wings.' 'Then flit into the dusk ... before they melt'." (1.2)
• "Wars begin in man's time, but they end in God's time." (1.2)
• "The dead wander the lanes of the next life like strangers lost in Venice." (1.3)
• "You're as twisty as a skewer." (1.3)
• "She may as well be transparent, for all she has to hide." (2.1)
• "right is what you can get away with, and wrong is what they whip you for." (2.3)
• "You can pray at home. It costs you less, you don't get robbed on the road, and you don't spread diseases or carry them back to your native country." (3.1)
• "The blind man sees, but the faces he knew in his young days are altered; and when he asks for a mirror, he doesn't recognise himself at all." (3.1)
• "None of us can stand anything. Scrape our skin, and beneath it there is an infant, howling." (3.2)
• "Whereas we bless an old soldier, and give him alms, pitying his blind or limbless state, we do not make heroes of women mangled in the struggle to give birth. If she seems so injured that she can have no more children, we commiserate with her husband." (3.3)
• "Nothing protects you, nothing. In the last ditch, not rank, nor kin. Nothing between you and the fire." (4.1)
• "Friendship swears it will stand and never alter, but when the weather changes men change their coat." (4.2)
• "What is fact and what is allegory, what is human and what is divine. Can God be baked into bread? When we consume the host, why do we not hear the cracking of his bones? Is he still God, when he churns in our guts?" (4.2)
• "Hot as a devil's fart, word rattled round Europe." (4.2)
• "Two ageing men in failing light, talking about their past because they have so much of it." (5.2)
• "The law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction to help us move past atrocious acts and face our future." (6.1)
• "We are all dying, just at different speeds." (6.1)

An impressive achievement, a heavyweight tome, a well-told story. April 2020; 875 pages

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

"The Clerkenwell Tales" by Peter Ackroyd

Ackroyd writes both fiction and non-fiction; he is well known for historical novels such as the truly superb Hawksmoor. He is also a great writer of biographies and he has specialised in telling the stories of London and Londoners. This novel therefore combines his passions.

It is a fascinating conceit. Each chapter is about a character who can be described as one of the characters in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; thus we encounter a Wife of Bath (who is a madame so named because she runs a bath-house), a Miller, a Physician etc. But the tale is set in 1399 to the backdrop of the deposition of Richard II by Henry Bolingbroke. At this time (and Ackroyd tells this as if it were historical fact, and so convincingly that I believe him) a group of heretics who believed in predestination were conspiring with a shadowy Freemason-like organisation known as Dominus to create terrorist outrages (including bombing churches) in order to destabilise society. Somehow Ackroyd weaves these tales together with what purport to be historical murders to make a thriller worthy of the Da Vinci code. Where this novel excels, however, is the incredible detail of the setting. The language, the diet, the smells, the noise, the superstitions, the characters, the geography, the buildings, the laws, the customs of old London are meticulously described. In terms of verisimilitude this is a tour de force.

But there are too many characters, not only the 22 characters conforming to Chaucer's characters but many others too. I got so lost about who was who. And the price of the detailed period accuracy was that I could relate to few of the characters. Then again, much as I enjoyed learning about old London, the exhaustive detail was exhausting; sometimes there can be too much research. Becuase of these burdens placed upon me I failed to enjoy reading it as a novel. It was like one of those intricate and rapid Chopin compositions which you can admire for their cleverness and marvel at the musician's dexterity but which don't really speak to your soul.

It did contain many brilliant moments of which these are representative:

• "It was as if he had calculated how many words would lead him through this life, and was determined not to exceed that number." (C 2)
• "It was the smell of humankind, and those who lived in the city had become accustomed to it." (C 2)
• "His hand was moving quickly, as if he were shaking invisible dice." (C 4)
• "It was point and counterpoint taken out of a songbook of smell." (C 16)
• "God may send a man good meat, but the devil may send an evil cook to destroy it." (C 16)

An impressive work of writing. March 2020; 206 pages

Books by Peter Ackroyd reviewed in this blog:
Historical fiction

• The Clerkenwell Tales
• Chatterton
• The House of Doctor Dee
• The Lambs of London
• Milton in America
• The Fall of Troy

Biography

• Wilkie Collins
• Blake

"Turtles All the Way Down" by John Green

John Green is the author of young adult phenomena such as Paper Towns (my favourite) The Fault in Our Stars (everyone's tear-jerking favourite) and An Abundance of Katherines.

He is superb at creating strong young characters and interacting them with superbly witty dialogue:

• Narrator Aza lives in a state of permanent anxiety about her microflora, fearing that she will one day die of sepsis or some other microbial infection. She is so anxious that, having kissed her boyfriend and realised that she gas just imbibed an estimated 80 million of his bacteria, she has to go to the bathroom and drink hand sanitiser.
• Her best friend Daisy writes very popular fan fiction about the romantic life of Chewbacca from Star Wars. She initiates the hero's journey by proposing that the pair of them investigate the mysterious disappearance of a local billionaire so they can get the reward money of 100,000 dollars.
• Daisy and Aza therefore go snooping at the billionaire's house and meet Davis, his son. Aza and Davis begin dating (which is awkward when you don't like kissing).

I loved the idea of you not being you but rather a host to a whole ecosystem of microbes. This raises questions of selfhood: who are 'you':

• The book starts with the narrator realizing "I might be fictional" (C 1) because her life is controlled by her school's timetable: "I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell. ... You think you're the painter, but you're the canvas." (C 1)
• "Humans are approximately 50 per cent microbial, meaning that about half of the cells that make you up are not you at all. ... It often seems like I can feel them living and breeding and dying in and on me." (C 1)
• "If half the cells inside of you are not you, doesn't that challenge the whole notion of me as a singular pronoun, let alone as the author of my fate." (C 1)
• "Self is a plurality, but pluralities can also be integrated, right? Think of a rainbow. It's one arc of light, but also seven differently coloured arcs of light." (C 8)
• "There are all these things living inside of me that eat my food for me ... I'm not a human person so much as this disgusting, teeming blob of bacteria ... Which means that I have maybe, like, no more of a soul than the bacteria do." (C 8)
• Even the outside environment is in control: "You never think much about weather when it's good, but once it gets cold enough to see your breath, you can't ignore it. The weather decides when you think about it, not the other way around." (C 17)

Other great moments:

• "The whole problem with boys is that ninety-nine percent of them are, like, okay. If you could dress and hygiene them properly, and make them stand up straight and listen to you and not be dumbasses, they'd be totally acceptable." (C 5)
• "I have the soul of a private jet owner, and the life of a public transportation rider." (C 5)
• "Wait, oh God, I just said I'm in love. We've been hooking up for under twenty-four hours and I'm dropping L-bombs." (C 10)
• "It's a weird phrase in English, in love, like it's a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don't get to be in anything else - in friendship or in anger or in hope." (C 12)
• "I like short poems with weird rhyme schemes, because that's what life is like. ... It rhymes, but not in the way you expect." (C 12)
• "What I love about science is that as you learn, you don't really gets answers. You just get better questions." (C 14)
• "My whole life I thought I was the star of an overly earnest romance movie, and it turns out I was in a goddamned buddy comedy all along." (C 21)

Great fun to read. Another brilliantly written and thought provoking book from John Green.

March 2020; 286 pages

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

"The Breaking of Bumbo" by Andrew Sinclair

This is Sinclair's first novel, published in 1959. It was based on his experiences doing National Service. It was an instant success, making him famous. He wrote the screenplay and directed the film of the novel in 1970. He is most famous for writing the screenplay and directing Under Milk Wood, a film produced in 1972, based on the Dylan Thomas poem, in which Richard Burton reprised his role of narrator from the 1954 BBC Radio drama. Sinclair was a prolific writer of fiction and history.

The Breaking of Bumbo is a strange book. The first section describes how Bumbo, straight out of Eton, as a very raw (and virginal) eighteen year old, is trained as a National Serviceman and somehow, despite a chaotic night exercise, and an even more chaotic attempt to seduce a Debutante, becomes an officer in the Guards. This section was quite difficult to read: there were in-comments about his Etonian schooldays (which, as an ex-alumni, I understood but I doubt that others would) and extraordinarily callow conversations with a friend. Looking back having finished the book I appreciate how this showed how immature Bumbo was.

The second section describes his life as a junior officer in the Guards. Bumbo has always been a bit of an outsider: having grown up a son of perfectly respectable suburban parents he goes to Eton as a scholar and manages to get accepted by the (mostly much richer) boys because as well as being clever he is also good at sports. But he is fundamentally an Outsider (in the Colin Wilson sense) and this becomes more obvious in the Brigade. He enjoys the ceremonial duties and he likes getting drunk in the Officers' Mess but he feels detached from 'Them'. His social life revolves around an active sex life with a model called Susie and louche parties with speed-talking Jock ("So Jock's spiel babbled on to Babylon"; C 7) whose milieu seems to hint at homosexuality (which would have been illegal in 1959): "we like sex, slumming, and cool jazz too. As Humph said at the Chelsea Palace, a cat can look at a Queen. But don't you worry, Bumboboy, I know a fellow soul when I see one. No codpiece, honest. You just try it out for size chez moi, and if you like it, the door is always wide-open." (C 7)

Then he makes a stand for what he considers to be the 'right' thing to do and 'Their' forces combine to crush him.

There are some brilliant descriptions:

• "Black tongues of fog licked under the spikes of the Traitor's Gate, and the ravens croaked like damned souls." (C 4)
• "The lamp-lights throw wavy-yellow commas in reflection on the water." (C 13)
• "Every blade of hair mowed into place." (C 7)
• "Two birds sat on his eyelids, pecking through to the retina." (C 16) He has a hangover

He is also great at encapsulating ideas pithily:

• "There was something, perhaps, to be learned even among the stupid." (C 1)
• "If equipment did not fit a man, it was the man who was warped." (C 6)
• "Hell, what was memory to a man anyway, except to make him believe his make-believe." (C 8)
• "Nobody in their senses wants the crooked made straight. It's the corkscrew that opens the bottle, ain't it?" (C 9)
• "The moment a man says, I'm one of a crowd, he might as well be dead." (C 12)
• "Everyone's as nice as they can afford to be; it's just the rich who can afford rather more." (C 12)

Other great moments:

• "Each Young Officer was given a private servant, to dress him in the armour of his divinity ... to bend his officer's cap with a wet towel, to brush his bowler, to spit on the pointed toes of his George boots, to polish his engraved sword, to wash his white gloves, and ... to brush the hair of his master's bearskin over his eyes, like a trainer pulling the fringe of the embroidered mat over the arse of a circus elephant." (C 4)
• "He joined the rat-race of the Seasonal men, and strolled among the ragbags of puppy-fat and easy meat, that answered to the names of debutantes." (C 5)
• "The whole racket was a badly-organized, commercial marriage mart, screened by a venial veneer of ex-aristos." (C 5)
• "Bumbo ... could not see any pair of buttocks that seemed to be enjoying themselves." (C 5)
• "Men who loved laughter for the good feeling it gave, like brown ale, in their stomachs." (C 6)
• "They would wash down the mixture with the brown syrup they called tea, that lined their bowels as comfortingly as lime lines a kettle." (C 6)
• "Do you always keep a down-turned horseshoe in your mouth?" (C 7)

A fascinating book which deserves to be better known. I must seek out further books by Sinclair.

March 2020; 200 pages

"Territory of Light" by Yuko Tsushima

The narrator moves into a flat on the top storey of an office block with her two year-old daughter after separating from her husband, the child's father. This book consists of episodes during the next year in which the narrator experiences dreams, memories, problems raising her daughter, and problems with relationships and work. The episodes are presented more or less sequentially, and they are more or less standalone; in one case a subsequent episode refers to a previous one in a way that means one doesn't necessarily have to have read (or remembered) the earlier one.

As with Tsushima's Child of Fortune, the narrator doesn't seem a particularly good mother (one of the differences being that in CoF the protagonist is in the third person rather than the first as of ToL which makes the neglect seem worse in ToL). In one episode she loses her child at the park and after an initial panic more or less gives up looking for her. In another episode she leaves her child asleep in the flat while she goes out and gets drunk. Later she palms the little girl off on a neighbour for free childcare. Perhaps this is normal in Japan.

The prose is very flat. Mostly things happen and there is dialogue; there seems to be little exploration of feelings. In  The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu compares "Chinese brush paintings ... full of blank spaces" with " classical oil paintings ... filled with thick, rich, solid colours." Perhaps the same is true of Japanese literature. Certainly I have that feeling from the Tsushima novels that I have red, as well as The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe. This is not to deny that ToL some wonderful moments of description, such as: "When I lifted my face to the sky, the berries in their grapelike clusters gleamed an opulent red against its blueness." (Red Lights) Fundamentally, Tsushima's technique seems to be to aim for precision and clarity of expression, simplifying as far as can be done, and to allow emotions to be inferred from the actions and speech of each character.

Her prose is certainly elegantly exquisite and this book seems like a carefully crafted miniature. It drops hints rather than overacting.

Some great moments:

• "Why were children the only ones who ever got to melt down." (Sunday in the Trees)
• "Growing up is overrated, if you ask me. If I'd known adult life would be this boring, I'd have had more fun while I could." (The sound of a Voice)
• "The way nightmares vanish and anxieties evaporate when you open your eyes is one of life's pleasures." (Red Lights)
• "Stars! The colder it is, the more clearly they appear." (The Body)

March 2020; 122 pages

"Lucky Jim" by Kingsley Amis

This is the classic story of Jim Dixon, a reluctant historian, in his probationary year as lecturer at a provincial university, who has to negotiate love affairs, mad professors and drunkenness in an attempt to cling on to his job.

I didn't find it very funny. On the whole I find comic novels hard going. There is the incomparable Wodehouse and there are the rest. Perhaps comedy dates quickly. Even Shakespeare's jokes are pretty poor and the only humour comes from the physical stuff and that's often down to the reinterpretation of the actors rather than the script.

This novel has some set pieces. There is the excruciating evening of madrigals at the house of Jim's professor, a classically bad driver. There is the dilemma of what to do when Jim wakes up as a guest in the professors house to find that an inattentive cigarette has burned his bedclothes, a bedside table, and a rug. There is the Summer Ball and the public lecture that Jim delivers, as usual, drunk. The best set piece was the slow bus ride to the station. There were some good bits in these set pieces.

There is, of course, the character of Jim. He gets so bored. And then he starts to pick fights. He imitates people and gets caught in the middle of the mockery. And he gets into hopelessly misunderstood tangles with girls, their boyfriends, and his professor.

But the best thing about this book is that Kingsley Amis actually writes very well indeed. There are some wonderfully original descriptions, especially of awkward social situations.

• "He paused, and his trunk grew rigid as he walked; it was as if some entirely different man, some imposter who couldn't copy his voice, had momentarily taken his place." (C 1)
• "Fury flared up in his mind like forgotten toast under a grill." (C 3)
• "His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum." (C 6)
• "It was clear he was about to blow his nose. This was usually horrible, if only because it drew unwilling attention to Welch's nose itself, a large, open-pored tetrahedron." (C 8)
• "The thin red second hand swung smoothly round the dial, giving the illusion of time rapidly passing. The other hands pointed to five past nine." (C 2)
• "He could only just handle her as a female friend; as her 'lover' he'd be a cowboy facing his first, and notoriously formidable, steer." (C 5)

Selected quotes:

• "I think I had some idea about wanting to have some sort of noise going on while I was ... going off." (C 2)
• "Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way." (C 6)
• "How wrong people always were when they said: 'It's better to know the worst than go on not knowing either way'. No; they had it exactly the wrong way round. Tell me the turth, doctor, I'd sooner know. But only if the truth is what I want to hear." (C 8)
• "Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up ... by a short study of the Middle Ages.  ... Had people ever been as nasty, as self-indulgent, as dull, as miserable, as cocksure, as bad at art, as dismally ludicrous, or as wrong as they'd been in the ... Middle Ages?" (C 8)
• "Dixon reflected firstly how inefficient a bar to wasting one's time was the knowledge that one was wasting it." (C 10)
• "Christine's aim, he imagined, had been to show off the emphasis of her natural colouring and skin-texture. The result was painfully successful, making everybody else look like an assemblage of granulated half-tones." (C 10)
• "Your attitude measures up to the two requirements of love. You want to go to bed with her and can't, and you don't know her very well." (C 12)

March 2020; 251 pages

Selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels since Time began (1923) and by Anthony Burgess as one of the 99 best novels since 1939.

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

"Hereward the Wake" by Charles Kingsley

Kingsley was a Victorian Church of England priest, a University lecturer and a social reformer who wrote a number of novels including Westward Ho!, Hypatia, and The Water Babies. Hereward the Wake was published in 1865, originally in serial form. It had the effect of making Hereward a folk hero along the Robin Hood line. But it seems likely that Hereward was a real figure: he is mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as early as 1071 and the Kingsley novel is mostly based on the Gesta Herewardii which was probably written before 1130, although there are elements of the story that seem folklorish. Kingsley uses the book to promote the Victorian picture (also put forward in Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott) of a noble Anglo-Saxon revolt against Norman oppression and tyranny (although Kingsley is keen to emphasise Hereward as an Anglo-Danish hero; he believed that the English Royal family was descended from Odin, a warrior hero who later became deified). "Hard knocks in good humour, strict rules, fair play, and equal justice for high and low; this was the old outlaw spirit, which has descended to their inlawed descendants; and makes, to this day, the life and marrow of an English public school." (C 34)

The book is a classic example of a Victorian historical novel. Kingsley regularly refers to his sources, including in footnotes, which adds verisimilitude to his narrative but at the same time he hams it up with thees and thous and turns the story into a melodrama. There are fun boys' own adventure style bits and there is an interesting moral aspect (Hereward in later life forsakes his wife and child for a younger woman) but fundamentally this is a celebration of the manly virtues. Hereward is a larger-than-life hero who slaughters many but we can't sympathise with them because they are either weaklings or foreigners or both. There is no sense of irony when we are told "The two women went into the church at Matins and prayed long and fervently. And at early daybreak, the party went back laden with good things and hearty blessings and caught one of Ivo Taillebois' men by the way, and slew him, and got off him a new suit of clothes in which the poor fellow was going courting; and so they got home safe into the Bruneswald." (C 36). It would seem that the piety at the start of the paragraph is more than enough justification for violent and murderous highway robbery by the end of the paragraph. It is little surprise that he supported Edward Eyre, a Governor of Jamaica who had brutally suppressed a peasant rebellion.

Kingsley also, typically for his time, favoured those of good birth. The aforementioned Ivo Taillebois is one of the villains and is repeatedly scorned because his grandfather was a woodcutter. The illegitimate birth of William the Conqueror is also mentioned several times. So much for Kingsley being a social reformer. Hereward, on the other hand, has a noble pedigree.

He was also a social Darwinist: "In the savage struggle for life, none but the strongest, healthiest, cunningest, have a chance of living, prospering, and propagating their race. In the civilised state, on the contrary, the weakest, and the silliest, protected by law, religion, and humanity, have their chance likewise, and transmit to their offspring their own weakness or silliness." (Prelude)

One of its attractions for me was that it was about the area where I lived for more than thirty years; indeed, Hereward was imprisoned in Bedford Castle.I also remember the BBC TV adaptation from 1965 (although wikipedia tells me that no trace of that is left).

Selected quotes:

• "The lowlands of the world, being the richest spots, have been generally the soonest conquered, the soonest civilised, and therefore the soonest taken out of the sphere of romance and adventure, into that of order and law, hard work and common sense, as well as - too often - into the sphere of slavery, cowardice, luxury, and ignoble greed." (Prelude)
• "My lands are the breadth of my boot sole." (C 3)
• "Atheism and superstition go too often hand-in-hand." (C 10)
• "Schoolcraft and honesty never went yet together." (C 15)
• "The devil, as usual, was a bad paymaster." (C 30)
• "The neglect of new roads, the destruction of the old ones, was a natural evil consequence of local self-government." (C 38)
• "Life, to most, is very hard work." (C 41)

This is a novel very much of its time. Its time is not March 2020. 570 pages

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

"The Gauntlet" by Ronald Welch

A children's book from the old days (published 1951); my brother-in-law says it was his favourite children's book and he is aged over 60. I remember reading it when I too was a young boy.

It is a classic boy's adventure story mixed with historical novel. Peter falls asleep on a Welsh hillside under a ruined castle and wakes up to find himself holding a gauntlet. He is transported back to the fourteenth century where he discovers he is the elder son of the castle's Marcher Lord. Over the next few months he learns about mediaeval table manners and diet, how to be a squire, how to handle a falcon and a longbow and a sword, and he goes to a monastery to be taught his letters (he is criticised for not spelling son 'sonne'). Then the castle is besieged by Welsh rebels and Peter discovers what really happened to Peter de Blois, whose brass-plated tomb is in the local church.

A cleverly written book mixing careful research with a simple story.

March 2020; 194 pages

"Men At Arms" by Evelyn Waugh

In the blurb on the back of the book a review from Clive James is quoted in which he compares Waugh's characters with those of Dickens and Shakespeare; Cyril Connolly is quoted saying that this is 'Unquestionably the finest novel to have come out of the war'. I am amazed. The novel somehow won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1952.

I assumed when I started that this was a straight novel but about half way through I imagined it was a comic novel although the comedy is of the light, drawing-room type. It is an account of Guy Crouchback's experiences at the beginning of the Second World War as he trains with an old-fashioned regiment in various locations including a boarding school on the coast of south east England, Scotland, and Cornwall; they eventually see limited action on the West African coast. So far as I could see there is no character development. Crouchback, we are promised at the start, has an emptiness of soul: "Into that wasteland where his soul languished he need not, could not, enter. He had no words to describe it. ... There was nothing to describe, merely a void. ... It was as though eight years back he had suffered a tiny stroke of paralysis; all his spiritual faculties were just perceptibly impaired." He is, of course, a Roman Catholic; later The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene is mentioned but Greene does far better when it comes to spiritually void Catholic characters than Waugh can. Nothing happens in which Crouchback's spiritual paralysis manifests itself in any other way than his passivity, enabling him to be the recorder of and reactor to the events happening around him. The name promises villainy of the order of Richard III but Crouchback only kills once and that is by accident.

The Crouchbacks are, of course, an old Catholic family ("Mr Crouchback acknowledged no monarch since James II"; Prologue 3) who stand in proud and isolated opposition to "the rest of mankind, Box-Bender, the butcher, the Duke of Omnium (whose onetime wealth derived from monastic spoils) ..." (Prologue 3). Waugh loves his exclusivity like any other snob and just like any other snob he despises those outside his charmed circle. One might argue that Waugh's purpose is to satirise the established order. Sentences such as "The discipline of the square, the traditions of the mess, would work their magic and the esprit de corps would fall like blessed unction from above." (1-1) can read like ironic critiques of the idea that the  old ways will win the war. But Waugh repeatedly fails to criticise class and race-based presumptions:

• The regiment that Crouchback joins is the "Royal Corps of Halberdiers" (1-1) and Guy is an officer with all this entails including mess servants and batmen.
• "The porter who should have been at the station was helping hand round drinks in the lounge. 'I'll go just as soon as I can, sir', he said. 'If you don't mind waiting until after dinner'. Guy did mind. He wanted a change of shirt after his journey ..." (Prologue 3) Heaven forfend that a servant doing two jobs should prevent a master changing his shirt.
• "At Crewe the train stopped for an hour. Base little men with bands on their arms trotted about the platform bearing lists." (2-10) The stupendous arrogance of dismissing these people with such unnuanced adjectives is, to today's sensibilities, unforgivable. 
• Equally unforgivable is the acquisition of a "Negro's" head on a raid on the West African coast carried out as an unauthorised prank (3-5). The resonances with the slave trade are unmissable - but Waugh seems to miss them. There is no sense that this senseless murder of a human being is anything more than comic. It is this level of unconscious racism that makes Waugh's 'comic' novel Black Mischief such an unpleasant read.

There are moments of nicely judged metaphor such as when a honeymoon couple, both virgins, are on a cruise: "Later, they joined a yacht at Naples and stealed slowly up the coast, putting in at unfrequented harbours." (Prologue 1)

Selected quotes:

• "He lived too close to Fascism in Italy to share the opposing enthusiasms of his countrymen. He saw it neither as a calamity nor as a rebirth: as a rough improvisation merely." (Prologue - 1)
• "Never can tell a tune till I've heard the words." (1-1)
• "It was like watching the ball at roulette running slower and slower, trickling over the numbers." (1-2)
• "Throughout all the smooth revolutions of barracks life there had been accumulating tiny grits of envy which were now generating heat." (1-6)
• "Guy experienced the classic illusion of an unknown, unsought companion among them." (3-5)
• "Queer bird, the mind. Hides things away and then out they pop. But I mustn't get too technical. It's a hobby horse of mine, the mind." (3-7)

To ex-public schoolboys who underwent similar forms of training this novel might have resurrected memories of the officers' mess but, even allowing for the change in sensibilities since then which, thank goodness, render the snobbery and racism unacceptable, I found this a rather pointless novel which drifted along with dull gleams of weak mostly-weak comedy.

March 2020; 246 pages

Other Waugh novels reviewed in this book:

• Black Mischief: unpleasant racist comedy
• A Handful of Dust
• The Loved One

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

"The Jew of Malta" by Christopher Marlowe

On the surface, this play is stuffed with anti-semitism. Marlowe's Barabas is an ill-used character at the start, who therefore has some sort of motivation for his wickedness, but the delight he takes in his evil and his relatively quick downfall make it much harder for us to sympathise with him than for Shakespeare's Shylock.

The relationship between arch-villain Barabas and his clownish sidekick Ithamore is a little like that between Faustus and Mephistopheles and the delight they take in their murders reminded me of the mischievous wickedness in Dr Faustus. The victims of Barabas and Ithamore are fools and idiots; it was difficult to care that they were being slaughtered. 

The plot is picaresque, one thing after another.

The plot (spoiler alert)

The Prologue is spoken by Macchiavel. He argues against morality and sees the only right as that conferred by might. The play the segues into Barabas, the protagonist, in his counting house; neatly it opens with him in mid-thought. His primary (indeed, almost sole) motivation is money.

The Turks turn up in Malta and demand ten years back-payment of the agreed tribute. Governor Ferzene decides that this can best be achieved by taxing all Jews in Malta at 50% of their wealth ... and when Barabas hangs back he, the wealthiest, is taxed at 100%.

But Barabas has hidden some treasure in his house ... which is being turned into a nunnery. So he has to recruit his daughter, Abigail, to become a nun to move into the nunnery to get his hidden treasure back. This done, she stops being a nun.

Martin de Bosco, a Spanish ship's Captain newly arrived from defeating the Turks at sea, persuades Ferzene and his council to refuse to pay the tribute to the Turks and use the money levied on the Jews to mount a defence against the Turkish invasion that will surely follow.

Two boys fancy Abigail: Lodowick, Ferzene's son, and Mathias, whom she fancies. To revenge himself on governor Ferzene, Barabas and his newly purchased Turkish slave and enthusiastic sidekick in evil, Ithamore, decide to trick Lodowick and Mathias into fighting a duel; both are killed. 

Abigail, realising she has been duped into getting her boyfriend killed, becomes a nun again. Barabas and Ithamore, realising they have to silence Abigail, make a poisoned porridge and kills all the nuns in the nunnery, including Abigail. On her deathbed she confesses to Father Barnardine.

Father Barnardine is bound by the seal of the confessional so he can't tell anyone. But, supported by Father Jacomo, he goes to Barabas and Ithamore and drops hints ... so they strangle him and dupe Jacomo into thinking he has done the deed. They then turn Jacomo in to the authorities and he is hanged.

Local prostitute Bellamira and her pimp Pilia-Borza conspire to get gold from Barabas. She pretends she has fallen in love with Ithamore; he, besotted, blackmails Barabas about the two boys tricked into duelling, the poisoned nuns and the strangled friar. Barabas initially pays up but then disguises himself as a musician and tricks Bellamira, Pilia-Borza and Ithamore into smelling poisoned flowers. 

He is not in time to prevent the three denouncing him to the authorities but before he is found guilty the witnesses are dead. He feigns death using a sleeping draught and governor Ferenze has his body thrown over the wall.

Where he encounters the besieging Turks and shows them a way into Valetta. The Turks defeat the Maltese and, in gratitude, make Barabas governor. But he realises that he cannot rule a people who hate him and decides to rebetray Malta, this time back to Ferzene, for money. He arranges to blow up the Turkish troops in an old monastery and to trick the Turkish leader into having dinner on a platform in the castle which will collapse. But Ferzene double crosses Barabas (keeping up?) and it is Barabas who is on the platform when it collapses and tips him into a cauldron where he is boiled to death.

It looks to me like the plot is merely a device for lots of exciting things to happen on stage: 

• Abigail breaking into her own house to steal back the treasure from Barabas and throwing it down from the balcony to where he waits below
• the swordfight between Mathias and Lodowick, cheered on from the same balcony by Barabas
• the comedy when Barabas is poisoning the porridge and Ithamore is protesting that it is a shame to waste such good food
• the deathbed confession of Abigail ... and the problem with the secrets of the confessional leading to the comedy in which Barnardine and Jacomo try to lure Barabas into confessing without ever being able to accuse him outright
• the strangling of Barnardine and the framing of Jacomo
• the ludicrous love scene between Bellamira and Ithamore
• Barabas masquerading as a musician in order to foist poisoned flowers on Bellamira, Pilia-Borza and Ithamore
• the apparent death of Barabas and the hurling of his body from the battlements
• the collapse of the platform the the cooking of Barabas

Irony and betrayal and critique of religion

What distinguishes the play is the use of an outsider's perspective (principally Barabas but a little of Ithamore) to critique the established order. Almost everything that Barabas says is tinged with scorn and irony; he repeatedly criticises the supposedly superior morality of the Christians. Furthermore, Marlowe's characters are almost all motivated by money: Bellamira the prostitute when she seeks to seduce Ithamore to get him to blackmail Barabas, Fathers Jacomo and Barnardine when they fall out over which of their religious houses will benefit from the fortune of converted Barabas, even Ferenze when he realises that if he defies the Turks the Maltese can keep the tax they have levied on the Jews to pay the tribute.

For example:

“I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.” (Machiavel in the Prologue; doesn't he sound like Faustus?)

“Who hateth me but for my happiness?
Or who is honour'd now but for his wealth?
Rather had I, a Jew, be hated thus,
Than pitied in a Christian poverty;
For I can see no fruits in all their faith,
But malice, falsehood, and excessive pride,” (Barabas, Act 1)

“Some Jews are wicked, as all Christians are:
But say the tribe that I descended of
Were all in general cast away for sin,
Shall I be tried by their transgression?” (Barabas, Act 1)

Marlowe frequently repeats the contemporary myths about Jews (including that they crucify babies) and this seems to be done ironically, as when Barabas (Act 2) himself says:
“As for myself, I walk abroad o' nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls:
Sometimes I go about and poison wells
...
Then, after that, was I an usurer,
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I fill'd the gaols with bankrupts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals;
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.
But mark how I am blest for plaguing them;--
I have as much coin as will buy the town.”

“It's no sin to deceive a Christian;
For they themselves hold it a principle,
Faith is not to be held with heretics:
But all are heretics that are not Jews;” (Barabas, Act 2)

Words, words, words

So is the play redeemed by its words? Marlowe has a special place in English letters as the creator of the 'royal line': the iambic pentameter of blank verse that Shakespeare later used to such effect (although Shakespeare developed it by mixing it with prose and by frequently breaking the strict form to include weak endings (such as the extra syllable in 'To be or not to be, that is the question'). 

There are some great lines:

Prologue

“Many will talk of title to a crown:
What right had Caesar to the empery?”

“Might first made kings, and laws were then most sure
When, like the Draco's, they were writ in blood.”

Act One
“What more may heaven do for earthly man
Than thus to pour out plenty in their laps,
Ripping the bowels of the earth for them,”

"Your extreme right does me exceeding wrong”

“she were fitter for a tale of love,
Than to be tired out with orisons;
And better would she far become a bed,
Embraced in a friendly lover's arms,
Than rise at midnight to a solemn mass.”

Act Two
“Thus, like the sad-presaging raven, that tolls
The sick man's passport in her hollow beak,
And in the shadow of the silent night
Doth shake contagion from her sable wings,
Vex'd and tormented runs poor Barabas
With fatal curses towards these Christians.”

“I learn'd in Florence how to kiss my hand,
Heave up my shoulders when they call me dog,
And duck as low as any bare-foot friar”

“First, be thou void of these affections,
Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear;
Be mov'd at nothing, see thou pity none,
But to thyself smile when the Christians moan”

Ithamore, the Moslem, is also allowed to boast of his evils:
“In setting Christian villages on fire,
Chaining of eunuchs, binding galley-slaves.
One time I was an hostler in an inn,
And in the night-time secretly would I steal
To travellers' chambers, and there cut their throats:
Once at Jerusalem, where the pilgrims kneel'd,
I strewed powder on the marble stones,
And therewithal their knees would rankle so,
That I have laugh'd a-good to see the cripples
Go limping home to Christendom on stilts.”

Act Three
“O mistress, I have the bravest, gravest, secret, subtle, bottle-nosed knave to my master, that ever gentleman had!”

"My sinful soul, alas, hath pac'd too long
The fatal labyrinth of misbelief,”

“he that eats with the devil had need of a long spoon”

"Why, master, will you poison her with a mess of rice-porridge? that will preserve life, make her round and plump, and batten more than you are aware.”

“As fatal be it to her as the draught
Of which great Alexander drunk, and died;
And with her let it work like Borgia's wine,
Whereof his sire the Pope was poisoned!
In few, the blood of Hydra, Lerna's bane,
The juice of hebon, and Cocytus' breath,
And all the poisons of the Stygian pool,
Break from the fiery kingdom, and in this
Vomit your venom, and envenom her
That, like a fiend, hath left her father thus!”

Act Four
“How sweet the bells ring, now the nuns are dead,
That sound at other times like tinkers' pans!"

“Fornication: but that was in another country;
And besides, the wench is dead.”

“To fast, to pray, and wear a shirt of hair,
And on my knees creep to Jerusalem.”

“He sent a shaggy, tatter'd, staring slave,
That, when he speaks, draws out his grisly beard,
And winds it twice or thrice about his ear;
Whose face has been a grind-stone for men's swords;
His hands are hack'd, some fingers cut quite off;
Who, when he speaks, grunts like a hog, and looks
Like one that is employ'd in catzery
And cross-biting; such a rogue
As is the husband to a hundred whores;”

Act 5
“For he that liveth in authority,
And neither gets him friends nor fills his bags,
Lives like the ass that Aesop speaketh of,
That labours with a load of bread and wine,
And leaves it off to snap on thistle-tops”

This is very much a play to be performed rather than read; the spectacle is clear. It is driven by a bitter critique of hypocrisy in religion. But the plot is just one thing after another and the characterisation is weak.

March 2020;

Plays by Marlowe reviewed in this blog also include:
Edward II

Other plays reviewed in this blog may be found here

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