"Impress of the Seventh Surge" by Jessica Mae Stover

My sort of novel. It would be wrong to give a plot summary because a large part of the fun of the novel is working out what is going on; I got it about three-quarters of the way through and the triumph of enlightenment was more than worth the earlier puzzlement. 

I also thoroughly enjoyed the stream of consciousness style. Here's an early example:  "think of a place where you feel a sense of calm waving grass bumblebee pale breakfast sun violet bubble tent motionless focused calm calm pepper fountains focused calm breathed focused spitting fountains of pepper spray hazing horizontal smoke choking clinging red-capped waves maskless faces spreading white teeth white hands over steel barricades cheap hoodies patched body armor under pastel fresco canopy window glass under boots crunching hunting through marble halls lawn gallows hanging easy as fairground dunk tanks white dome through orange noose swaying live stream crowd crush air horn". What a wonderful paragraph! The 'sense of calm' is so swiftly replaced by threat and horror.

This makes it sound like hard work. But it is very short (it took me about an hour and a half to read the whole thing) and it gets a lot easier quite quickly. And you can feel the quality in the writing. This isn't just science fiction, this is fine literary fiction. 

Selected quotes:

• "Hey, Shan! Your inhaler came, but I’m going to keep it.⁠— —⁠What, why?⁠— —⁠Because you take my breath away.⁠—"
• "This is the way the world ends, delivery on demand."
• "Sound of chimes, descending. Abandons device on kitchen table. Black blank glass islanded by scrubbed wood. Gloves up, cuts up boxes, cardboard gaping, driveway dust puffing underfoot. Mows yard. Sun dipping. Anger sweating. Mallets one stake in ground, then another. Every hit echoing off hammered hills. Two poles, cables slant."
• "The sotto back-and-forth of birdie meeting strings, soft pings, counting score, pushing doom to margins, disappearing it into grass and blowing it away until it’s eaten by sunset."
• "You can try not to forget all the injustices, the ones we’re going to be powerless to stop, I’m sure a lot of people will try to remember, but memory’s written on the wind: it fades."
• "Lungs fused to ribs like a steak well done."

A great read: high-quality literary fiction.

November 2022

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

The Greatest Gift" by Philip Van Doren Stern

 The short story on which the film It's a Wonderful Life was based.

It's cute, it's feel-good. The protagonist is contemplating suicide because he feels unimportant when a mysterious stranger shows him how much his being alive has changed the lives of others for the best. It's the classic tale of community in small-town America. It's very gentle. There are no grand sweeping passions (I understand that in the film, which I haven't yet seen, there is rather more at stake) and I found it difficult to understand why this ordinary bloke should be contemplating suicide when there was no great tragedy in his life. But I mustn't judge.

But I found the story as a whole rather insipid and pedestrian. Perhaps that's the point.

Selected quotes:

• “I’m stuck here in this mudhole for life, doing the same dull work day after day. Other men are leading exciting lives, but ... I never did anything really useful or interesting, and it looks as if I never will. I might just as well be dead."
• "The place you grew up in was the one spot on earth where you could really feel at home."
• "You had the greatest gift of all conferred upon you—the gift of life, of being a part of this world and taking a part in it."

November 2022, 64 pages (in the print edition, I'm told; I read it on kindle and it seemed shorter than that). 

I've now watched the film 'It's a Wonderful Life' and a stage version of the radio play based on the film. These are both so much better! For a start, they introduce many extra characters, including a bona fide villain. Perhaps more importantly, the suicide scene with which the novella opens is left until the last quarter of the film; the first three-quarters being a slow explanation of the protagonist and his strengths and weaknesses, and the battle between him and the antagonist (clearly inspired by Scrooge from A Christmas Carol), and, quite late on, the actual incident which drives him to the brink of suicide. By making clear this back-story, it adds to the credibility.

The film, despite sometimes lapsing into sentimental schmaltz, had a strong storyline and the central performance of James Stewart, a fascinating mix of hesitation and leaping-before looking, was perfect.

It was also instructive to watch the radio play which I saw staged at the  Grove Theatre Eastbourne on 3rd December 2022 which showed how you can translate a film with a cast of at least fifty not including the extras into a stage show of five performers and a sound effects man and still create a work of art which has its own identity and can be judged as strong as the film. 

They are both miles better than this book.

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

"Troy" by Stephen Fry

This retelling of the story of the Trojan War is a sequel to Fry's Mythos and Heroes, both of which I adored.  It preserves Fry's inimitable style of making his characters thoroughly modern yet telling the story traditionally. There are some delicious moments of humour. 

But the first third of the book, in which Fry attempts to make sense of a hugely complex back story, is very difficult. Only occasionally does a character come to life. As soon as we reach the final year of the war, and the Homeric story and beyond, the story becomes vivid and absorbing. Homer, of course, could assume that his listeners understood the back story; Fry can't. But I did wonder whether the origins of Paris, cast away on the hillside, and the birth of Helen from an egg hatched by her mother who had coupled with Zeus in the form of a swan, and the origins of the House of Atreides would have been better done as footnotes as the action was progressing. Either that, or do it like George Martin and turn the story into a whole series of books.

Nevertheless, Fry's erudition is displayed as is his enormous wit.

Selected quotes: (page references from the Penguin paperback edition)

• "They say a fool and his gold are soon parted, but they ought to say too that those who refuse ever to be parted from gold are the greatest fools of all." (p 11)
• "The moment when flowers and fruits are at their fullest and ripest is the moment that precedes their fall, their decay, their rot, their death." (p 44)
• "As Luck would have it - Luck? No, Faith, Providence, Destiny ... Doom, perhaps, but not Luck, certainly not Luck." (p 53)
• "Antenor was a seasoned courtier. Courtiers do not survive long enough to be seasoned unless they maintain an efficient network of spies and informers." (p 166)

November 2022; 352 pages

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

"When we cease to understand the world" by Benjamin Labatut

 Fictionalised biographies of twentieth century scientists and mathematicians including Wilhelm Scheele, Fritz Haber (responsible both for making poison gas used in World War I and artificial fertiliser used to feed an ever-expanding population), Karl Schwarschild, Werner Heisenberg, Louis de Broglie, and Erwin Schrodinger, and mathematicians Alexander Grothendieck and Shinichi Mochikuzi. These are people who have made incredible discoveries, many of which are immensely difficult for ordinary people (and, in some cases, for top mathematicians and scientists) to comprehend. The theme of the book seems to be that such discoveries require geniuses who are more or less mad, sometimes before or during the making of their discoveries, sometimes afterwards. Some of the biographies include intimate details, such as the masturbatory habits of Schrodinger, which don't normally find their way into conventional biographies. It is only in the acknowledgements that I discovered "This is a work of fiction based on real events. The quantity of fiction grows throughout the book." At this point, the growing sense of unease I had felt as I read towards the end made sense. 

The author's thesis is, I think, that science is fundamentally bad. Scientists are either mad or evil and sometimes both. Scheele and Haber made poisons, and Haber is also to blame for facilitating over-population (without Haber more people would have starved to death so that the world's population would be smaller which might be an acceptable end but the means, for those who starve, might not be so acceptable), I'm not defending Haber, who seems to have felt no moral compunction about making poison gases, but I'm not sure you can extrapolate from one bad man to blame the whole of science, which is really just a disciplined harnessing of man's innate curiosity.  

If science doesn't harm others, the author seems to be saying, it harms the scientists, and the stories of Grothendieck and Heisenberg and Schrodinger are employed as examples. They are mad, or they become mad. But if the biographies have been fictionalised, then the evidence for the author's claims is corrupt and untrustworthy. It's bad data. The thesis is flawed. 

This is a beautifully written book but in the end he is trying to prove the trope of the mad scientist by using intellectual dishonesty.

Shorlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021

November 2022; 188 pages

Added on 27th November

The more I think about it, the angrier I become. By using the trope of the mad scientist - the cliche that genius tips into madness - Labatut implies that advances in science should be resisted lest they make us all mad. But the way he does this is fundamentally intellectually dishonest. He starts with chemists making poisons, and here his book is, more or less, factual biography. But then he moves into the realm of quantum physics and adds increasing amounts of fiction to blacken the characters of Heisenberg and Schrodinger and to caricature them as lunatics. It is only in the acknowledgements at the end that he tells you that the later parts of the book are mostly fiction.

I have no argument about using fiction to tell truths - I write novels - but it seems to me that you should be upfront about this, not seduce your reader into believing that the shocking details you recount are genuine biography.

If a scientist were to falsify his evidence in order to prove his theory he would be condemned. If the only way that Labatut can prove his thesis is by resorting to this kind of trickery, that suggests to me that his thesis is wrong.

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

"The Twyford Code" by Janice Hallett

 The book mostly consists of transcripts of recordings made by dyslexic ex-con Steve as he tries to solve the mystery of what happened to his remedial English teacher after he gave her a book by out-of-fashion children's author Edith Twyford. Steve's quest to crack a secret code he believes to be hidden in the book, is aided by his childhood friends from the same class and librarian Lucy.

It's an uneasy hybrid of the Da Vinci Code with Enid Blyton and for most of the story I was aware of gaping holes in the narrative - How could such a fundamentally simple code be successfully hidden from anyone? Who on earth ever published such tortured prose in the first place? Where did all the deus ex machinas who repeatedly rescue Steve from moments of peril come from? - and the fact that these are neatly resolved by the final twist did not make it easier to suspend my disbelief and enjoy the earlier part of the story. In the final analysis, this book is more a puzzle solving exercise than a novel and, to be honest, I couldn't be bothered to grapple with it.

Selected quotes:

• "Never been in a bookshop before, have I? Second-hand books. Smells like an old person's house. Shelves stacked to the ceiling. Accident waiting to happen." (Audio file 37)
• "When  you get what you want, you lose what you have." (Audio file 148)

November 2022; 388 pages

Winner of the British Book Awards Thriller of the Year 2023

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

"The Patrician" by John Galsworthy

 Miltoun is the son of a Lord (also a cabinet minister in a Tory government) whose attempt to get himself elected to the House of Commons might be threatened by his association with a woman who might be divorced. His sister Barbara, a delightfully carefree young lady, is pursued by the very eligible Lord Harbinger but tempted by Mr Courtier, a writer and political radical. As the elder members of the family rally around to fight these twin threats to their privileges, the story evolves into a class-based Romeo and Juliet for both protagonists. Will the younger generation prove independent or will the pressures of the establishment overwhelm love's young dream (and get rid of the lower orders)?

Written in 1910 (the political battle is between the blue Conservatives and the yellow Liberals; there is no hint of a Labour candidate although there is the brief appearance of a rabble of Socialists) and thus with no conception of the tidal waves of change that will sweep the country in the wake of the First World War, this is very much a period piece. The style of writing (it is by the author most famous for the Forsyte Saga, for which he won the Nobel Prize) is Trollopian. Galsworthy's contemporary H G Wells writes much more lively prose. The first part of the book, in which the various dilemmas are outlined, and in which there is a fair amount of action, made for quite quick reading but I got very bogged down in Part Two during which the moral sensibilities of Miltoun were played out in creakingly slow detail.

I suppose it is a strength of the book that in the end I couldn't decide whether the author was attacking the aristocratic caste, who were so wrapped up in their privileges that they couldn't see any other possibility but their own endless rule, or whether he believed that, as one of them puts it, the country needs leading and can only be led by someone whose has been bred and brought up to be a leader.

The book is dedicated to the intellectual Gilbert Murray who married the daughter of the Earl of Carlisle and, I imagine, is the model for Mr Courtier.

• Selected quotes:
• "There was apparent about all his movements that particular unconsciousness of his surroundings which comes to those who live a great deal in the public eye, have the material machinery of existence placed exactly to their hands, and never need to consider what others think of them." (Ch 1)
• "It was for him - as for the lilies in the great glass house - impossible to see with the eyes, or feel with the feelings of a flower of the garden outside." (Ch 3)
• "The inherited assurance of one whose prestige had never been questioned; who ... had indeed lost the power of perceiving that her prestige ever could be questioned." (Ch 3)
• "Inspired by ideas, but always the same ideas." (Ch 3)
• "A mind which had ever instinctively rejected that inner knowledge of herself or of the selves of others, produced by those foolish practices of introspection, contemplation, and understanding, so deleterious to authority." (Ch 3)
• "The war would save us ... We should get the lead again as a nation, and Democracy would be put back fifty years." (Ch 3)
• "If people hadn't pasts, they wouldn't have futures." (Ch 8)
• "He meditated deeply on a London, an England, different from this flatulent hurly-burly, this omnium gatherum, this great discordant symphony of sharps and flats." (Ch 10)
• "The preservation of our position as a class depends on our observing certain decencies." (Ch 11)
• "High on the wall ... reigned the bronze death-mask of a famous Apache chief, cast from a plaster taken of the face by a professor of Yale College, who had declared it to be a perfect specimen of the vanished race." (Ch 16)
• "Not specially dandified in his usual dress, Bertie Caradoc would almost sooner have died that disgrace a horse." (Ch 18)

November 2022; 352 pages

Books written by other Nobel Laureates and reviewed in this blog can be found here.

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

"Cocaine Nights" by J G Ballard

Shortlisted for the 1996 Whitbread Novel Award.

 Part mystery thriller and part novel of ideas, this book starts with the narrator travelling to the Costa del Sol to try to rescue his brother who has been charged with (and pleaded guilty to) arson leading to five deaths. As he probes into what happened, he discovers that the expatriate community in which his brother lived , unlike the others along the coast which are full of people watching television and taking tranquillisers ("Brain-death disguised as a hundred miles of white cement"; Ch 4), is vibrant with theatre groups and tai chi classes and sculpture workshops and ... and at night the staid and mostly retired residents indulge in sex, including amateur prostitution and making pornographic videos, and drugs and partying. The theory sold to him is that it is transgression that provides the spice that keeps people living a fulfilled life; artistic creation needs rule-breaking to thrive (this is the centuries of peace in Switzerland and all it has produced is the cuckoo clock theory). 

In many ways this is a typical Ballard: a small modern community of well-of middle-class people appears boring on the surface but underneath there are sinful roots. This theme is reworked in Millennium People, in High-Rise, and particularly in The Unlimited Dream Company. It is a compelling vision but it is the quality of the writing that always impresses.

Selected quotes:

• "Behind me a handsome Spanish woman sat at the wheel of an open-topped Mercedes, remaking her lipstick over a strong mouth designed for any activity other than eating." (Ch 1)
• "Near Sotogrande the golf courses began to multiply like the symptoms of a hypertrophied grassland cancer." (Ch 1)
• "Funerals celebrate another frontier crossing, in many ways the most formal and protracted of all." (Ch 5)
• "The retirement pueblos lay by the motorway, embalmed in a dream of the sun from which they would never awake." (Ch 6)
• "The white facades of the villas and apartment houses were like blocks of time that had crystallized beside the road." (Ch 6)
• "Here on the Costa del Sol nothing would ever happen again, and the people of the pueblos were already the ghosts of themselves." (Ch 6)
• "Cloaks of moonlight lay over the furniture like dust-sheets." (Ch 6)
• "Death had arrived at the Hollingers and decided to stay, settling her skirts over the shadowy pathways." (Ch 9)
• "Above my head sounded the leathery flutter of canvas." (Ch 15)
• "The residents of the Costasol complex, like those of the retirement pueblos along the coast, had retreated to their shaded lounges, their bunkers with a view, needing only that part of the external world that was distilled from the sky by their satellite dishes." (Ch 19)
• "You've seen the future and it doesn't work or play." (Ch 19)
• "The Costa del Sol is the longest afternoon in the world, and they've decided to sleep through it." (Ch 19)
• "We're building prisons all over the world and calling them luxury condos." (Ch 19)
• "One obsessive with a PC and a printer, turning out a residents' association newsletter, is worth more than a dozen novelists or boutique operators. It isn't shopping, or the arts, that makes a community but that duty that we all owe to each other as neighbours." (Ch 22)
• "People need to stop thinking about their own bodies and start thinking about other people's." (Ch 22)

I live in an 'independent living' retirement apartment block in Eastbourne. Some of us stay all day on their own inside their apartments. Others have coffee and cake and small talk with the other residents in the owners' lounge. Most only access the outside world through the television, although many walk for exercise. I am one of the few (there are others) who goes to the local theatre or other cultural events and tries to keep my mind exercised. Cocaine Nights certainly rang a few bells with, although so far as I know there is no drug-taking nor sexual deviance practised in our community.

Wonderful writing. November 2022; 329 pages

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

"White Gold" by Giles Milton

 This story of the (estimated) million slaves seized from European ships and coastal towns by Barbary corsairs and enslaved in Moslem North Africa between about 1550 and 1820 focuses on one man: Thomas Pellow from Cornwall, who was captured as a ten year old boy, forcibly converted to Islam, became a house servant of the bloodthirsty ruler of Morocco and later one one of the leading soldiers of one of his armies, was forcibly married and became a father, made several escape attempts, was saved while on the scaffold on one occasion, and finally escaped at the age of thirty-three. It's a brilliant story and it is told with the flair of the author of Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Samurai William, and The Riddle and the Knight, amongst others. 

The Moroccan trade properly got going after 1610, when King Philip III "expelled all one million Spanish Moors from his land" (Ch 1) providing a pool of dispossessed people longing for revenge.

Strangely, the man who ended this trade by leading a British fleet to bombard Algiers, was Sir Edward Pellew who was related to Thomas Pellow.

Selected quotes:

• "The flags on their mainmasts depicted a human skull on a dark green background" (Ch 1)
• "His extraordinary story had just been published in one of the capital's newspapers. Pellow was surprised and asked to be shown the article. ... Almost every detail in the report was wrong." (Ch 12) The standards of accurate journalism are - probably - better nowadays.

October 2022; 280 pages

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

"Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power" by Stephen Greenblatt

In this wonderful book, Greenblatt dissects some of Shakespeare's great tragic heroes (including Richard III, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus) and uses the depiction of the tyrants to draw lessons about the nature of tyranny, power politics and fraudulent populism. This book works both as literary criticism and a forensic examination of how people grab power and what this does to them and those around them.

Brilliant and acute.

Selected quotes:

• “Even those at the centre of the innermost circles of power very often have no idea what is about to happen.” (Ch 1)
• “Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation. The unscrupulous leader has no actual interest in bettering the lot of the poor. Surrounded from birth by great wealth, his tastes run to extravagant luxuries, and he finds nothing remotely appealing in the lives of the underclasses. In fact, he despises them, hates the smell of their breath, fears that they carry diseases, and regards them as fickle, stupid, worthless, and expendable.” (Ch 3)
• “He is not merely indifferent to the law; he hates it and takes pleasure in breaking it. He hates it because it gets in his way and because it stands for a notion of the public good that he holds in contempt.” (Ch 4)
• "Richard’s deformity - or, rather, his society's reaction to his deformity - is the root condition of his psychopathology ... a child unloved by his mother, ridiculed by his peers, and forced to regard himself as a monster will develop a certain compensatory psychological strategies, some of them both destructive and self-destructive.” (Ch 4)
• “The tyrant, Macbeth and other plays suggest, is driven by a range of sexual anxieties: a compulsive need to prove his manhood, dread of impotence, a nagging apprehension that he will not be found sufficiently attractive or powerful, a fear of failure. Hence the penchant for bullying, the vicious misogyny, and the explosive violence. Hence, too, the vulnerability to taunts, especially those bearing a latent or explicit sexual charge.” (Ch 7)
• “Societies, like individuals, generally protect themselves from sociopaths. We would not have been able to survive as a species had we not developed the skill to identify and deal with noxious threats from within as well as without. Communities are usually alert to the danger posed by certain people in their midst and contrive to isolate or expel them. That is why tyranny is not the norm of social organization.” (Ch 10)
• “The elite perceive the poor, and the urban poor in particular, as a mere drain upon the economy, a swarm of idle mouths demanding to be fed. After all, most of the land and what it produces, along with the houses, the factories, and almost everything else, belongs to the patricians. To them, looking down from the top of this mountain of possessions, the poor, who own virtually nothing, seem like parasites.” (Ch 10)
• “It is a perverse but familiar pattern: the party of privilege argues that it needs authoritarian power so that it can preserve order in the state. ... Then when the wealthy are proved wrong - when the state, rich and poor alike, turns out to thrive under a more democratic system - they long for the disorder they promised to quell.” (Ch 10)

October 2022; 189 pages

Other books about Shakespeare reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.

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

"Lessons in Chemistry" by Bonnie Garmus

 I was underwhelmed. Yes, it is a fast-paced, often witty, crisply-written book. Yes, it is perfectly in tune with these PC times, being an expose of some of the dreadful customs practised by the patriarchy in the US (and probably elsewhere) in the 1960s (and other times): this is feminist history writ large. But in terms of characters, this is as simplistic as it gets. Of the women, there is one character who starts off bad but ends up good; all of the others are good and the lead woman, Elizabeth and her daughter Mad, are hugely talented to the point of genius (as is their male dog). There are some good men (though they are usually inadequate) but there are many who are wicked. There is only one character - already mentioned - who actually has a character arc. Not a single character has any mix of good or bad in them. And this, for me, made it a shallow read. I was unable to suspend my disbelief. It was superficial. 

It was an easy read and I read it quickly, but mostly because I was desperate to finish so that I could read something else that might have a little more challenge to it.

Looking through some of the other reviews on goodreads, I notice that a number of people don't like the main character because she makes the other female characters look so weak. There are also those who hate her militant atheism (the Roman Catholic church in particular comes off badly). One review suggested that the attitudes displayed were all cliched. I don't think that it is fair to critique a book because you don't like the main character, or the attitudes espoused (good fiction should challenge one's beliefs) but I did agree with the criticism that the main character was so amazingly clever and so stunningly attractive and so morally strong that she was unbelievable and as for the four year old who read books most of us read in out late teens or later and carried on utterly adult conversations with a priest; she was so ridiculously unbelievable that the book only be satire.

I have discovered that such a character is called a 'Mary Sue'. To quote wikipedia, a Mary Sue is "a character archetype in fiction, usually a young woman, who is often portrayed as inexplicably competent across all domains, gifted with unique talents or powers, liked or respected by most other characters, unrealistically free of weaknesses, extremely attractive, innately virtuous, and/or generally lacking meaningful character flaws. Usually female and almost always the main character, a Mary Sue is often an author's idealized self-insertion, and may serve as a form of wish-fulfillment. Mary Sue stories are often written by adolescent authors. ... As a literary trope, the Mary Sue archetype is broadly associated with poor quality writing."

That seems to fit.

There is an AppleTV+ series based on the book. This is reviewed in New Scientist #3462. Unfortunately the reviewer bases her judgement on whether the show delivers the message that she wants to hear "Thankfully ... the version of Lessons in Chemistry I craved did eventually materialise." It seems to me that the book's popularity has been based on it providing a message which women want to be told, rather than any artistic merit. This seems to be increasingly common with reviews. Even the 2021 Nobel Prize was awarded to Abdulrazak Gurnah for “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents” rather than for his ability to write. This makes me sad.

Selected quotes: 

• "He was like a dog who, after years of trying, catches a squirrel and then has absolutely no idea what to do with it." (Ch 3)
• "Six-Thirty was badly in need of a bath. Tall, gray, thin, and covered with barbed-wire-like fur that made him look as if he'd barely survived electrocution, he stood very still as they shampooed him." (Ch 7)
• "Because while stupid people may not know they're stupid because they're stupid, surely unattractive people must know they're unattractive because of mirrors." (Ch 18)
• "Harriet thought it was wrong not to believe in God. It lacked humility." (Ch 27)
• "Harriet believes if you blow on dice, you'll get better numbers at Yahtzee." (Ch 33) So did my granny!
• "Religion ... let's us off the hook ,,, it teaches us ... that ultimately, we're not to blame for the way things are; that to improve things, we should pray." (Ch 37)

Somehow shortlisted for the 2022 Waterstones Book of the Year and the 2023 debut fiction prize in the British Book Awards. 

October 2022; 382 pages

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

"Lord of the Flies" by William Golding

 After their plane crashes, a group of English schoolboys must find a way to survive on an uninhabited island. There's plenty of fruit and water and beautiful beaches. They organise themselves and hold disciplined assemblies and elect Ralph (the tall, good-looking one) as chief. Piggy (the fat, asthmatic, figure of fun who is nevertheless rather clever) is his wise counsellor and Jack, the leader of a group of choirboys, appoints him and his as hunters. But boys will be boys and, as the days go on, their civilisation slowly slips away, destroyed by rivalries between them and their irrational fears.

This absolute classic might seem somewhat dated now. (it was first published in 1954). There are no female characters, nor any from an ethnic minority; there is an colonialist presumption of British superiority, and there is one use of what has become an unacceptable derogatory insult. The title's reference to Beelzebub, a devil, is unlikely to be spotted nowadays. But the fundamental truth this book demonstrates is that humanity's flaws (tribalism and the instinct for violence) is likely to wreck any paradise. The final scene might be worthy of an ecothriller (indeed, the author was a friend of James Lovelock and is credited with suggesting the name of Greek goddess Gaia as the personification of the Earth).

The book has wonderful descriptions of the island but its impact comes from the way it chronicles the slow, relentless slide from civilisation to barbarism and the horrific happenings at the end.

The pacing is perfect. The first attempt to hunt a pig is at the 25% mark, the discovery of the 'Beast' is at the 50% mark and the first irredeemable sin is at the 75% mark.

There are references to other novels; Robinson Crusoe is obvious, but the key reference, mentioned several times, is to The Coral Island by R M Ballantyne, an 1857 novel still popular with children in the mid-1900s, which describes the adventures of Ralph (the narrator), Jack and Peterkin who have been shipwrecked on a desert island which provides both fruit and pigs.

This was the author's debut novel; he won the Nobel Prize in 1983. 

Selected quotes:

• "The silence was so complete that they could hear the fetch and miss of Piggy's breathing." (Ch 2)
• "They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling, unable to communicate." (Ch 3)
• "They accepted the pleasures of morning, the bright sun, the whelming sea and sweet air, as a time when play was good and life so full that hope was not necessary and therefore forgotten." (Ch 4)
• "The darkness and desperate enterprise gave the night a kind of dentist's chair unreality." (Ch 7)
• "I'm not going to play any longer. Not with you." (Ch 8)
• "Dartmoor was wild and so were the ponies. But the attraction of wildness had gone." (Ch 10)
• "And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy." (Ch 12)

Brilliant writing. The novel at its best. Rated 74th in The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time. It was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels since Time began (1923).

October 2022; 223 pages

LotF was rated in a BBC poll as the 93rd best ever bovel.

Other books written by Nobel Laureates, and reviewed in this blog, can be found here.

Golding won the Booker Prize (for Rites of Passage) in 1980. Other Booker Prize winners can be found here.

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

"How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide" by John Sutherland.

 I bought this expecting to learn how to improve my critical faculties and therefore make the reviews in this blog sharper, better informed, more useful, and perhaps even more entertaining. I didn't. This book is mistitled. It should be called "How to Choose which Novel you are Going to Read." He starts by noting the overwhelming avalanche of novels available to the modern reader. Then he suggests how to cut that number down by considering a wide variety of things such as the author's reputation, the bestseller lists, reviews, the blurb, the title and page 69 (among other things) and more or less concludes that none of these methods is foolproof. So you don't even get helpful advice towards what the title should have been.

Otherwise he is frequently informative, mostly entertaining and sometimes amusing.

Selected quotes:

• "Selecting one's reading matter is less important nowadays than deselecting it." (Ch 1)
• "It is not that life is too short to read carefully: the task is too great to be done attentively." (Ch 1)
• "Reading novels is not a spectator sport but a participatory activity." (Ch 1)
• "One reads, as one dreams, defecates and masturbates - alone." (Ch 3)
• "If, when you're buying a book, you feel a tender hand on your genitals, the other hand is probably feeling your wallet." (Ch 5)
• "Unlike baked beans, loaves of bread, or Fuji apples, books, once consumed, do not disappear. Despite political legend, they are extremely hard to burn." (Ch 6) 

October 2022; 246 pages

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

"The Third Policeman" by Flann O'Brien

 A wonderful novel, a sort of cross between Ulysses by James Joyce and Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. The unnamed narrator, a disciple of a crackpot philosopher whose works are critiqued in a series of footnotes, murders a man in the first paragraph and seeks the box containing his money. He then meets the dead man, then the king of one-legged men, and finally a number of policemen who are obsessed with bicycles. 

The reader is swept along through this apparently ridiculous story (there is a rationale which is revealed in the final pages) by the most wonderfully lyrical prose.

I've been looking out for something different in the way of fiction and this is surrealism at its best.

Selected quotes: (I could have picked loads more!)

• "I was born a long time ago." (Ch 1)
• "It ... was known as 'The Wrastler'. If you drank three or four pints of it, it was nearly bound to win." (Ch 1)
• "Something happened ... It was some change which came upon me or upon the room, indescribably subtle, yet momentous, ineffable. It was as if the daylight had changed with unnatural suddenness, as if the temperature of the evening had altered greatly in the instant or as if the air had become twice as rare or twice as dense as it had been in the winking of an eye." (Ch 2)
• "Never before has I believed or suspected that I had a soul but just then I knew I had. I also knew that my soul was friendly, was my senior in years and was solely concerned for my own welfare." (Ch 2)
• "The live right hand had gripped the pot of tea, raised it very awkwardly and slapped a filling into the empty cup." (Ch 2)
• "It is a curious enigma that so great a mind would question the most obvious realities and object even to things scientifically demonstrated ... while believing absolutely in his own fantastic explanations of the same phenomena." (Ch 4)
• "Nearly every sickness is from the teeth." (Ch 4)
• "Your talk ... is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand." (Ch 6)
• "You are as lively as twenty leprechauns doing a jog on top of a tombstone." (Ch 6)
• "Anything can be said in this place and it will be true and will have to be believed." (Ch 6)
• "It was a gloomy light and looked exactly as if there was a small area somewhere on the mangle and was merely devoid of darkness." (Ch 7)
• "Omnium is the business-end of everything. If you could find the right wave that results in a tree, you could make a small fortune out of timber for export." (Ch 7)
• "He is as crazy as bedamned, an incontestable character and a man of ungovernable exactitudes." (Ch 10)
• "It is a great thing to do what is necessary before it becomes essential and unavoidable." (Ch 10)
• "She now seemed to rest beneath my friendly eyes like a tame fowl which will crouch submissively, awaiting with out-hunched wings the caressing hand." (Ch 11)
• "'Is it about a bicycle?' he asked." (Ch 12)

October 2022; 206 pages

Other books by Irish authors reviewed in this blog can be found here. This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God