"The Mile End Murder" by Sinclair McKay

 A well-written account of a murder that happened in 1860. A wealthy but miserly widow, landlord of a mostly slum properties in London's East End, was battered to death, leading to a potential miscarriage of justice that, forty years later, attracted the attention of Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. The author of this account offers his own solution to the crime.

It was well-told, beautifully paced, easy to read, and fascinating: it certainly had me turning the pages. It left me thankful that today the police have forensic evidence and that successful prosecutions require a rather higher standard of proof than in those days.

There were some nice comparisons between then and now:

"Part of the reason for social tensions in 1860 was the resentment felt by previously well-paid manual workers (many now casualised) for the new generations of poor incomers who were thought to be bringing fown streets by being prepared to live in squalid and even dangerous housing" (Ch 1)

It referenced the Ratcliff Road murders in 1811 which are the subject of The Maul and the Pear Tree by P D James and T A Critchley and the Road Hill House murders which are written about by Kate Summerscale in her book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.

I also wondered whether the Irish portion of the career of prime suspect Mullins might have inspired Conan Doyle to write his late Holmes novel The Valley of Fear and whether the description of the Chancery battles might have inspired Charles Dickens while writing Bleak House.

I noticed that The Mile End Murder received a favourable review from my old school mate Craig Brown, author of:

• One on One: 101 mini-biographies
• One Two Three Four: the story of the Beatles

A very enjoyable true crime book.

May 2023; 299 pages

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

"A Theatre for Dreamers" by Polly Samson

It is 1960. The protagonist, Erica, and her brother, Bobby, leave their abusive father following their mother's death and take the beatnik trail to the Greek island of Hydra where they join the artist's colony there for a glorious summer. We're talking sun, sand, skinny-dipping, ouzo and lots of sex. There is work going on: typewriters up and down the island are being hammered by wannabe writers who talk about their muses while those muses cook and clean and carry ice to the ice-store and water to the cistern. This point is made repeatedly: that the women are propping up the men. This is particularly true of the key relationship in the book: the marriage between Charmian Clift and George Johnston: he has TB and sweats buckets trying to write books which will keep them solvent while she juggles housework, the demands of three young children, keeping him inspired and motivated, and never has enough time for their own writing. He treats her abominably. 

Very few of the men are anything other than baddies. The mad Swede Axel is horrible to his wife Marianne, blatantly and cruelly having an affair as if he expects to have his cake and eat it (but then Marianne hops back and forth between Axel and Leonard). The narrator's boyfriend, about whom we know little apart from his physical beauty, repeatedly betrays her. Her brother is surly and truculent and her father back in London is a wife-and-child beating villain straight out of melodrama: if he had possessed moustaches he would have twirled them; I was just surprised he wasn't called Sir Jasper. Encountering such a caricature so early on almost made me give up on the book. The narrator gives reasons for male bad behaviour: father changed after the horrors of the retreat to Dunkirk and George was a journalist reporting on the horrors of famine in China during the war; both these men clearly have a form of PTSD but it is only their wives who seem to understand. Similarly, Erica realises (rather belatedly) that Bobby has depression but doesn't seem to connect this with his physically abused childhood or his recent loss of his mother. Perhaps this is the narrator 'in character': a young woman with all the self-centredness of the young translated into wilful blindness. But even after she returns from Hydra to nurse her derelict father, even as the narrator turns into a wise old woman, there seems no understanding let alone forgiveness.

More and more I find that the best books are those in which the author empathises with the villains.

I couldn't decide whether the narrator believed that her summer on Hydra was the most wonderful time of her life or the most dreadful. Yes, living in a primitive community required hard grind. But the aforementioned sun, swimming and sex seemed pretty much like paradise for young people. And Erica and her young friends didn't have to work for a living (unlike the indigenous islanders, who are very much in the background, and George).

Charmian and George were real people, as are many of the other characters in the book, including Leonard Cohen the singer-songwriter who appears as a sort of guru-like figure, always ready to resolve a conflict (and there are plenty, mostly to do with the incorrigible bed-hopping of these promiscuous outsiders) with wise words. The second key relationship is between Marianne Ihlen and Axel Jensen, with Marianne leaving Axel after having Axel's baby and moving in with Leonard.

I found it a very interesting book, as a sort of fictionalised multi-person biography. Its biggest failing was the huge cast-list. As well as the characters above there are Jimmy, Erica's boyfriend, and Edie, Bobby's girlfirend, and Trudy, later Bobby's wife, and Dinos,  and Chuck, and Gordon, and Patrick Greer (who is almost always, anomalously, surnamed), and Goran, and Jean-Claude Maurice (another with a surname), and Janey, and Charmian and George's children Martin and Shane and Booli, and Nancy, and a playwright called Kenneth and his wife Janis, and Angela and David, and Bim and Robyn, and Demetri and Carolyn, and Greg Corso, and Patricia, and to be honest I lost track of most of them. The trouble is that so many of them are real people so I suppose that the author didn't feel that she could cull any of them. But then the trouble is that they can't all be given any more than the most rudimentary characters: they are little more than spear carriers. And this extended to the central cast. The only characters that were developed with any complexity were Charmian and George, and, perhaps, Marianne. Even the narrator was little more than an observer. Other major characters were fundamentally one-dimensional: Bobby was depressed, Jimmy was beautiful and unfaithful, Leonard was, as already said, a guru and guide. 

This failure to create complex characters undermined the novel. The problem with using real characters is that there is very little plot: real life is rarely neatly crafted. So it was more an examination of the relationship between Charmian and George (which was paralleled by the relationship of the narrator's parents) and the Axel, Marianne, Leonard triangle. Given this, I felt that the superfluity of other characters distracted me and blurred the focus.

It's mostly well-paced, with the trip up the mountain to worship the sun god at the 25% mark, the transfer of Marianne from Axel to Leonard at the half-way mark and the disappearance of unfaithful Jimmy at the 75% mark. However the last 10% of the book, which acts as a sort of extended epilogue after Erica has returned from Hydra, and in which so many of the books revelations are concentrated, seems cramped and rushed to the extent that her husband and her son are not even named. It felt as if the author was saying: let's get it over with. This badly unbalanced the book.

The key real characters are:

• Charmian Clift, a memoirist, novelist and essayist, who, as foreshadowed extensively in this novel, committed suicide when her husband's best novel Clean Straw for Nothing contained a barely-disguised account of her infidelities (although in this book it is suggested that she wrote the key scene as a fantasy)
• George Johnston, a successful journalist and later award-winning novelist, who died of TB shortly after the death by suicide of his wife
• Leonard Cohen, best known as a singer-songwriter although this was subsequent to his career as a poet and a novelist; he is most famous for the songs Hallelujah and Bird on the Wire
• Axel Jensen, an experimental novelist
• Marianne Ihlen, married to Axel and later the muse of Leonard Cohen who wrote So Long, Marianne about her
• Göran Tunström, a prolific novelist and poet
• Greg Corso, a beat poet who was friends with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac

Selected quotes:

• "The typing pool where I worked was a torture in triplicate of clattering keys, pinging bells and bottom pinchers." (Ch 1) When she relocates to Hydra, Erica discovers a whole island of typewriting bottom pinchers. Is this a foreshadowing? 
• "The skin of his face appears three sizes too big for him." (Ch 3)
• "You're children. You should have fun in the playground while you;re young." (Ch 9)
• "I have no idea who I am. I seem to have hatched while no one was looking." (Ch 9)
• "Leonard gave off an unmistakable air of a man who has always been there before you." (Ch 13)
• "Decolletage jellying from cabbage-green ruffles" (Ch 21)

It's great fun reading about young people frolicking and writing poetry in paradise but there are too many characters and the ending is rushed.

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

May 2023; 343 pages

"The Cold Dish" by Craig Johnson

When Walt Longmire, the Sheriff of the fictional Absaroka County in Wyoming, USA (well, Americans always say 'London, England' or 'Paris, France'), first hears of a body, he assumes it's a dead sheep. But a boy has been shot, a boy who recently completed a minimal sentence for raping Melissa, a Cheyenne girl. He fears someone is out for revenge. 

I really enjoyed this classic whodunnit. It hit all the tropes of the genre with style and it did more. I felt it brilliantly evoked the neo-wild-west feel of Wyoming's open spaces where everyone has at least one gun and some have many. The sheriff even wins a gun as a prize in a raffle for the library! And the hero-narrator-protagonist is a wonderfully self-deprecating lawman.

There was wise-cracking of the finest calibre with Ruby the lady who runs the office, Vic, Walt's lady deputy, and in particular Henry Standing Bear, his best buddy from school and Vietnam who, as Cheyenne, must be under suspicion. When Walt's ear is frost-bitten the female characters all tell him off for fiddling with the bandage while the men lay bets on whether it will need to be amputated.

The supplementary characters are also brilliant: Lonnie, Melissa's legless father, Vonnie, the poor little rich girl love interest, Dorothy who owns the diner, ex-sheriff Lucian, George Esper who escapes more often than Houdini, and Al the alcoholic.

The dialogue is witty. One of the best bits of the book is the way so many of the characters have their own distinctive way of speaking. Henry never uses a contraction such as won't or didn't or I've. Lonnie ends almost every statement with 'umhmm, yes it is so'. George, who has the excuse of a broken jaw, melds his words: 'othwe montan' = on the mountain, 'yhew kan'tsopthm' = you can't stop them. 

Selected quotes:

• "I looked at her, looking being one of my better law-enforcement techniques." (Ch 1)
• "The fuses of desire are blown black windows, and I'm gone with no pennies to save me." (Ch 1)
• "The mechanics of death ... of taking that final step from being a vertical creature to a horizontal one." (Ch 2)
• "There was more noise from the kitchen, and whistling. Unless I missed my guess, it was Prokofiev's Symphony Number One, sometimes in D, and it was being butchered." (Ch 3). Henry Standing Bear is not just an ex-marine and bar-owner but a cultured gentleman with gourmet tastes and the chef skills to match.
• "I think there was an awful lot about him that I thought I knew, but the truth was that I was just colouring in the missing parts with colors I liked." (Ch 3)
• "My clammy sweatpants were now rising up the crack of my ass." (Ch 4)
• "All the women in town chase after you now. Can you imagine what it would be like if you were good-looking to boot?" (Ch 4)
• "I had been raised as a Methodist where the highest sacrament was the bake sale." (Ch 6)
• "She always called me Trouble, even though I am sure she had caused more than I ever would." (Ch 7)
• "The rest of the cabin was made of lean-tos, which leaned to with such ambition that the outer perimeter of the cabin lay on the ground. I wasn't sure what Al did for a living, but it was a safe bet it wasn't carpentry." (Ch 9)
• "I always wondered about men who spent their time trying to anticipate and know a fish in a world where men's knowledge of each other could only be called scarce." (Ch 9)
• "In my experience, smoke usually indicated smoke and nothing more." (Ch 11)
• "It was some sort of supposed egg matter that I'm sure had never seen the rear end of a chicken and two greyish meat patties that had never oinked." (Ch 13)
• "It's department policy to only shoot people once a day; it's a budgetary thing." (Ch 16)

An exceptionally well-written police procedural whodunnit. I understand that there are now nineteen books in the series. I've fallen in love with the characters and I'd love to read some more but there are so many books in the world .

May 2023; 354 pages

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

 

"Star of the Morning" by Kirsten Ellis

 This is a biography of Lady Hester Stanhope. Not only was she an amazing woman but also she knew everybody there was to know in the Regency worlds of England and Lebanon. She was born into power and privilege, her father being an Earl and her grandfather being Pitt the Elder; after her uncle Pitt the Younger died she was granted a government pension of £1,200 (worth over £120,000 today). But she was also born a woman in a patriarchy where she couldn't even vote (although having lovers was very much less of a problem than it became in the more puritanical Victorian days; Hester had a number). She must have been very intrepid to travel abroad as she did into the Ottoman Empire which, despite its nominal unity, seemed to be composed of endlessly conflicting warlords and bandits. She suffered shipwreck and plague and was regularly exposed to risk (although we should realise that England pre-sanitation wasn't a very healthy place and life, especially for child-bearing women, was frequently cut short; furthermore, Hester didn't exactly travel solo but with guns and a retinue of servants including her own private doctor and she always ensured she had a male companion).

The book is brilliantly paced. Her early life in England fills the first quarter of the book, Egypt the second and Lebanon the third and fourth which are divided almost equally between her political machinations in the third quarter and her decline into religious madness in the fourth.

She went on a treasure hunt after finding a "curious manuscript" (the treasure chest turned out to be empty but she found a wonderful statue ... which she had smashed to pieces so she would leave no trace of her excavations). She was party to a plot to liberate Napoleon from exile in St Helena using a submarine. She described using a bezoar (a 'serpent stone') in an attempt to cure the plague and preparing Mandragora to be used as an aphrodisiac. She visited the city of Palmyra, the desert city of Queen Zenobia, later immortalised as Semiramis. She joined in with mystic rites in some of the sects whose beliefs fused Christianity, Judaism, Islam and more ancient tribal religions. She could have inspired the plot for a whole series of novels.

The only problem with this book was that I kept wanting to find out more about the other characters in the stellar cast list:

•  She acted as hostess for the unmarried Prime Minister Pitt the Younger, living with him in 10 Downing Street when he was PM and Walmer Castle when he wasn't.
• Her father was an Earl, notorious for siding with the French revolutionaries. He became an eccentric inventor. Family life must have been difficult and all the kids had to escape when they got older (on one occasion using knotted sheets from their bedroom window), Hester's sister by eloping with the local apothecary. 
• Her brother, who became an heir, tried to adopt (perhaps because he fancied him) Kaspar Hauser, the 'wild boy' who may have been the heir to the Duke of Baden; he was granted guardianship; there are suggestions that he might have sought to send the boy abroad into Hester's custody and he was later accused of involvement in Kaspar's assassination./
• Horne Tooke, a radical politician who spent time in the Tower accused of seditious treason
• Richard Brothers, a crazed millennial prophet, who predicted that Hester would ride into Jerusalem as 'Queen of the Jews' in a sort of apocalyptic end-of-days scenario
• Lord Byron, the poet, whom she met (with his Greek boyfriend) in Greece which he was trying to liberate

Among the men who were or might have been her lovers were

• Sir John Moore, who died during the Peninsular campaign and is nowadays best remembered for a poem about his funeral
• The Earl of Camelford, whose Scarlet Pimpernel type activities included an attempt to assassinate Napoleon
• General Miranda, a South American revolutionary who liberated Venezuela with Bolivar
• Michael Bruce, grandson of an explorer, who, after Hester, went on to smuggle a Bonapartist out of a France ruled by a restored (and vindictive) Bourbon government and spent time in a French jail for this
• John Lewis Burckhardt, the man who rediscovered Petra
• Vincent Boutin, archaologist and probably Napoleonic spy
• Almaz, her Arab gardener

This is a well-written biography about an amazing woman. Why is it out of print?????

April 2023; 394 pages

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

"Monday Morning" by Patrick Hamilton

 Eighteen-year-old Anthony is a complete innocent (he doesn't even know how to dance at the start) living in a private hotel in Kensington and dreaming about the wonderful things he will do with his life. He intends to start writing a novel on Monday morning. He falls in love with a young girl also staying at the hotel and writes poetry and love letters but she doesn't really seem to be in love with him. He tries for journalist jobs on national papers but his utter lack of experience always results in a recommendation (studiously ignored) to start with the provincials. An acquaintance with an actor lands him a job as an assistant stage manager but he doesn't even know what a prop is; nevertheless he gets a small part as an actor and goes with the company on tour. He avoids prostitutes and travels to Paris. 

It's quite funny in places and an amiable narrative of an inexperienced and utterly gauche lad trying to fall in love. 

Selected quotes:

• "He had a one-reading acquaintance with a few of the best-known works of the best-known authors of today" (Ch 1)
• "It transpired later (indeed it never failed to transpire sooner or later) that the first Braynes settled in Sussex somewhere about 1600." (Ch 7)
• "Twilight may turn London to purple beauty but never Sheffield." (Ch 8)
• "In the dark, feeble hours of the morning Anthony pulled himself to pieces, and that done conscientiously erected something of himself more handsome and sturdy than he had ever erected. Though he decided not to employ that erection until he had returned from Paris." (Ch 13) I had to read this twice. Not exactly subtle. 

April 2023; 252 pages

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

"The Plains of Cement" by Patrick Hamilton

 This book is part of the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky. It is about Ella, the barmaid who works with Bob the waiter at The Midnight Bell public house; Bob's story is told in The Midnight Bell.

Ella is being courted by an elderly customer, Mr Eccles. Ella doesn't love him but she is considering marriage because he says he is comfortably off. He woos her (there is a great deal of comedy in this), taking her to the theatre, and soon, because she can't but be polite, so that she never has the opportunity for telling him how she feels, or even asking him a direct question about his intentions, he assumes that they are engaged. Soon they are eight weeks away from marriage and Ella is desperately seeking escape routes.

Hamilton is great at dialogue. He replicates perfectly the patterns of everyday speech and shows how the inherent flaws in interpersonal communication can lead to assumptions and misunderstandings. There are moments in this book that are really very funny; it is the only Hamilton novel I have read so far (four) that contains humour.

Selected quotes:

• "She was neither startlingly attractive, not startlingly ugly. She could attract no attention at first sight; she could therefore never hope to attract much attention." (Ch 1)
• "There is a great deal of the tomb in a bedroom; all passions, delights, schemings, ambitions, triumphs, must be taken back at night to these caves of cold arbitration." (Ch 5)
• "As an old man he was barely responsible for his rage. Old men were known and allowed to be irritable and to go into rages about nothing. ... Because they were old there was not extracted from them the same duties of self-control towards their fellow-beings as there was from others." (Ch 6)
• "He had an extraordinary way of even opening a door as though he was slamming it." (Ch 14)
• "It was Sunday. By ten o'clock Ella was busy at her tasks in the bar, wondering what it was, breathing in the air, which made it so overwhelmingly, all-permeatingly Sunday - so that she would have known it was Sunday if all the almanacal evidence in the world had spoken to the contrary." (Ch 21)
• "Sunday sunshine served to intensify rather than remove her depression of spirits ... making her think of God - a subject which she could still not get the hang of and which always dejected her." (Ch 21)
• "He had lost much of his self-consciousness, and talked less about her and more about herself - his likes and dislikes, his approvals and disapprovals - rather with an air of giving her a Short Course in himself for her present convenience and future reference." (Ch 21)
• "The innumerable, irrelevant, base, rebellious, unscrupulous, egoistic thoughts and impulses springing up on all sides from her subconscious mind." (Ch 23)
• "In addition to Lying Down, and Taking it Easy, and being Helped, there was a vitally important sentimental rule that people in these circumstances should, periodically and with great ostentation, be Left." (Ch 23)
• "Sometimes she wished she could give up thinking altogether." (Ch 23)
• "It seemed ... that the gods had at last convicted human nature of its crimes and thrown them all into a vast cold dungeon away from the light of day forever." (Ch 27)

Hamilton is so good at drilling down into the minutiae of human interaction and showing how far our behaviour is from our internal life. 

April 2023; 184 pages

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

"Small Things Like These" by Claire Keegan

 This short novel (shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize) is set in a small Irish town suffering economic depression where the Catholic Church is very much in charge. It is written in the third-person past tense but seen through the eyes of the hero-protagonist, Billy Furlong, the owner of a fuel merchants and father of five girls. He's a nice bloke in a happy marriage, a kind boss with a loyal workforce, and in the run-up to Christmas he delivers coal and logs around the town, extending credit where needed, and giving a little fuel to those who can't afford any. When he is asked about his employment of foreigners, he replies "Hasn't everyone to be born somewhere" and this is not followed by a question mark (Ch 5). 

But he discovers that the local convent is mistreating the girls who, having had a baby out of wedlock, and having been 'rescued' by the nuns, are being forced to work for their board and lodgings. Billy himself is illegitimate but was fortunate enough to be brought up in the local big house where his mum was a servant, treated almost as one of the family, so the plight of these unmarried mothers touches him. He is warned not to get involved by his wife, who believes that charity should begin at home, and by the local villages, who point out the power of the church in their small society. Christmas approaches and Billy's conscience struggles with his self-interest.

The book is beautifully told in  exquisite prose. At times, there is the feeling that you are in a modern myth, as you encounter characters like the old man slashing thistles at the side of the road who answers Billy's "Would you mind telling me where this road will take me?" with "This road will take you wherever you want to go, son." (Ch 4) A sense of foreboding, a growing sense of menace, creeps up on the reader. I was torn between wanting to savour the moment and wanting to rush to the end to find out what would happen. 

A miniature masterpiece.

Selected quotes:

• "Keep the enemy close, the bad dog with you and the good dog will not bite." (Ch 7)
• "The snow was building so that the footprints of people who had gone before and after him in both directions stood out plainly and not so plainly, too, on the footpath." (Ch 7)
• "Was there any point in being alive without helping one another?" (Ch 7)

April 2023; 111 pages

Other books by Irish authors reviewed in this blog are on this page

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

"The Siege of Pleasure" by Patrick Hamilton

 Part of the Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky trilogy, this little novel explores how Jenny, the antagonist in The Midnight Bell, became a prostitute. 

Patrick Hamilton has been compared to Dickens, presumably because his novels are set in the pubs and among the poor people of London but Hamilton's characters are much less exaggerated and believably real. Hamilton was also a playwright and his descriptions of settings are like the descriptions of a set on stage, with the scenery and the props and the entrances and exits. There are many moments of authorial voice but much of this book is narrated through the eyes of Jenny, as she struggles with temptation. 

Selected quotes:

• "Paradoxically, at no time of life is existence so intensely physical as in old age.  ... It is not with beauty and seemly abstractions, but with pills and digestive expedients, that the superannuated await release in death." (Ch 1)
• "They were seen as hideous old women without past or future, and it was imagined that they were this because they had somehow decided to be so." (Ch 1)
• "In fairness to his waistcoat, which would otherwise have shared his supper, it was necessary to tie a large napkin around the Doctor's neck." (Ch 1)
• "To make people good it is advisable not to tell them to be good, but to tell them that they are good." (Ch 1)

April 2023; 114 pages

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

"Mr Norris Changes trains" by Christopher Isherwood

 One of Isherwood's classic 'Berlin' novels ... but rather different from much of his work in that, although still told in the first person, the narrator is not 'Christopher'; however he is still principally an observer and, despite his different name, recognisably the author.

The narrator observes the action, tolerating and accepting the various characters, none of whom are upstanding moral citizens. For most of the book it is a bit of a mystery how Mr Norris makes money but it is clearly through immoral and probably illegal means; he is an intriguing mixture of camp and nervousness. He enjoys being dominated and whipped by Anni, whose 'protector' is Otto. The severely monocled but "fishy" Baron 'Kuno' van Pregnitz has a predilection for young men; at one point the narrator goes on holiday with him and the suggestion is that they share a bedroom. They become involved in the struggles of the communist party against the growing power of the Nazis. 

I think what makes this book so good is the the way the author explores the complexity of the main characters and the empathy he shows. There is no judgement. This extends to the poverty-stricken environment. We're in a world in which anything goes and people do what they can to survive. The reader is seduced by the seediness of the society. And, of course, you keep reading because you too, like the narrator, want to understand exactly how Mr Norris makes his living. 

Selected quotes:

• "An unpleasant thought seemed to tease him like a wasp; he moved his head slightly to avoid it." (Ch 1)
• "Anni's beauty is only sin-deep." (Ch 3)
• "I was as hurt as a spinster who has been deserted by her cat." (Ch 8)
• "Like most people who still contrived to earn a living in those bankrupt days, she was a woman of numerous occupations." (Ch 8)
• "And morning after morning, all over the immense, damp, dreary town and the packing-case colonies of huts in the suburb allotments, young men were waking up to another workless empty day to be spent as best they could contrive; selling boot-laces, begging, playing draughts in the hall of the Labour Exchange, hanging about urinals, opening the doors of cars, helping with crates in the markets, gossiping, laughing, stealing, overhearing racing tips, sharing stumps of cigarette-ends picked up in the gutter, singing folk-songs for groschen in courtyards and between stations in the carriages of the Underground Railway." (Ch 8)
• "His voice stopped like a gramophone from which the needle has been lifted." (Ch 11)
• "I tried to look Arthur in the eyes. But no, this time-honoured process didn't work. Here were no windows to the soul. They were merely part of his face, light-blue jellies, like naked shell-fish in the crevices of a rock." (Ch 12)
• "My throat had gone dry. I tried to clear it and made an absurdly loud, grating sound." (Ch 14)
• "I think you'll find that the soft ones object to being cheated even more than the others." (Ch 14)
• "Remorse is not for the elderly. When it comes to them, it is not purging or uplifting, but merely degrading and wretched, like a bladder disease." (Ch 15)

April 2023; 191 pages

Other novels by Christopher Isherwood reviewed in this blog:

• Goodbye to Berlin: a sort of companion to this book, which introduces the fabulous Sally Bowles
• Prater Violet

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

"Snakes and Ladders" by Morton R Leader

 A window cleaner and his brother become burglars at night. One of their victims teams up with a wannabe psychopath to track the burglars down. Her Russian oligarch father instructs his henchman to go after them. They all converge on a mysterious abandoned manor house at which point the whole story turns very dark indeed.

This action-packed short novel is a real page-turner.

Selected quotes:

• "Julian wondered how he had been manipulated into a plan to follow the thieves with Kira one night. The answer was obvious, she was sleeping with him; empty balls equal an empty head." (Ch 6)
• “'Seven hundred so far, another five on top when it’s finished.'   Danny tutted. Thirteen hundred quid." (Ch 9) I thought Danny's failure with arithmetic was a clever way of exploring his character.
• "Diseases such as monkey-pox, myxomatosis, SARS and bubonic plague were all man-made; when would the people in white coats think enough was enough?" (Ch 23) Not the claim of one of the characters but a  somewhat controversial authorial intervention. I hadn't realised that the conspiracy theorists attributed even bubonic plague, a disease dating back at least to the fourteenth century, to "people in white coats". I understand from the author that this is a reference to a song by the rock band New Model Army.

Morton R Leader has written a number of books including the very different Demons Are Forever. I enjoy the way this author weaves stories from the lives of very ordinary men and women, rather than the middle and upper classes who dominate so much of literature. 

April 2023

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

"South Riding" by Winifred Holtby

My heart sank when I approached this book. It's big, it's about local government in Yorkshire in the 1930s, and it has a cast list stretching to five pages.

But I enjoyed it. And it won the James Tait Black memorial prize in 1936.

It's an ensemble novel with several protagonists whose stories, told from their perspective by an omniscient narrator in the past tense (so stylistically a very conventional 'Victorian English' novel) interweave. There is Sarah Burton, the new headmistress of the local girls' school, who is determined to shake things up. There is Alderman Mrs Beddows the wise old woman who has seen it all before and who sympathises with the plights of her fellow humans. There is Councillor Carne, a conservative farmer, who married the daughter of a Lord and whose punishment is impending bankruptcy. There is Lydia, a clever girl who dreams of university but who is doomed to look after her little brothers and sisters in the railway carriage in a field in which they squat. There is Alderman Snaith, the lonely rich man who plots and schemes and pulls the strings. There is Huggins the councillor and Methodist minister whose sexual adventures leave him open to blackmail and whose money-making schemes make him corruptible. There is Lily Sawdon, dying of cancer, unable to tell her husband. These are the flawed materials through which, somehow, the county must find a way out of the harsh economic depression towards a promising future.

It has been called a 'blatant socialist tract' and some characters, especially at the end, are given speeches which call for progress, for change, even for revolution. But the minutely detailed descriptions of some of the poverty endured by the poor members of this society, some of whom have been disabled through their service in the trenches during the First World War, put these things in context. This is the England of the essays of Orwell, of The Road to Wigan Pier, an England of deprivation and social injustice. This is the world of Love on the Dole, and of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, an England of cocktails for some and misery for many. Furthermore, the arguments are balanced. Carne, the face of the old Squirearchy, is a hugely sympathetic character. The new housing estate is built through the machinations of Snaith whose intentions are a fine blend of self-interest and altruism. Huggins, forever preaching of God, is hugely flawed. There is, at the end, a final showdown between Sarah Burton and Mrs Beddows in which the idealistic headteacher, in despair and racked with guilt, has things put in perspective by the old lady: none of us are perfect but we all have a part to play, but remember to cherish not just the glittering successes but also those who will always fail in the race of life. This is a superbly balanced novel, full of empathy. But yes. It breaks with what it calls "The Shakespearean tradition of finding the lower classes funny, whatever tragedy touched the kings and nobles, outraged his humanity." (5.6) And thank goodness. There aren't enough stories written from the perspective of a working man.

There are a number of characters who embody alternative positions. For example:

• Snaith is depicted as sterile and rational and calculating, a sort of Apollonian Satan; he is the chief adversary of Huggins the womaniser
• Huggins himself is the man of god who is at war with his own earthy lusts
• Modernisers such as Sarah Burton are against the forces of conservatism such as Carne and Mrs Beddows
• The generosity of Mrs Beddows conflicts with the parsimony of her husband
• Snaith wants to build: he is the force of the town against carne the traditional famer, the voice of the country

Is this a feminist book? In many ways it is anti-male. Male characters are either evil or feckless. Thus, Snaith is a manipulator, Huggins is a hypocrite whose one attempt to make money by fraud is a failure, moreover he can't keep his trousers on, nor can the virtually unemployable Mr Holly who literally kills his wife by foisting yet another pregnancy on her, Carne is sliding into bankruptcy, as is his extravagant younger brother, Mr Mitchell can't make any money from his job. Mr Beddows is a skinflint, and Tom Sawdon drinks heavily as his wife wastes away from cancer and his pub heads for failure. On the other hand, the female characters are either talented (Sarah and Lydia) or long-suffering (Mrs Beddows, Lily Sawdon, Mrs Holly). Madame Hubbard's dancing school keeps the Hubbards afloat as her husband's drapery shop fails. The only negative female characters are Agnes Sigglesthwaite, the keen scientist who can't hack it as a teacher, and Mrs Carne, the flighty wife who goes mad.

But is it feminist? Although, in the final pages, it imagines a world in which married women won't have to give up their jobs, it has spent most of the novel is apparently passive acceptance of this fact. When Mrs Holly dies there is no suggestion that Mr Holly might care for his children: the caregiver must be Lydia, in the first instance, and then the widowed Mrs Brimsley. Mrs Beddows can carve a joint better than her husband and she knows it but she lets him carve because, as she says' "I prefer to see a cock crow on his own dunghill." (5.2)

Furthermore, Holtby is very prepared to emphasise the physical beauty or otherwise of her female characters (although you could argue that she is seeing them through the eyes of male characters, and that she also emphasises the physical beauty of Mr Carne).

One of the main themes of this novel is the love that Sarah Burton feels for Mr Carne. This seems to come straight from the pages of Jane Eyre. Sarah is, like Jane, a strong-minded (some might say stubborn) intelligent woman whose profession is education; she teaches Carne's wayward daughter. Carne is a local landowner of great physical beauty, just like Mr Rochester, with a mad wife who has been locked away (though in a nursing home rather than the attic). In their second (though effectively the first) encounter he is on a horse and Sarah explicitly thinks of "the memory of Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester". The climax of the affair is an aborted night of passion, resembling the aborted wedding in the Bronte novel. It is only the ending of the two stories that differs.

A Spanish proverb is much quoted, in the dedication and several times throughout the book. "'Take what you want,' said God. 'Take it - and pay for it'." This is what Sarah says to the senior girls at her school (3.6) But when Sarah quotes this to Mrs Beddows (4.2) this lady's response is "But who pays?" This is repeated again at the end of chapter 4.2 (more or less exactly half way through the book) with the subtle change that instead of God saying 'take and pay. this is now Sarah saying it (and Mrs Beddows asking, again, 'who pays?'. And, in the Epilogue, Sarah remembers what Mrs Beddows asked and realises: "And suddenly she felt that she had found the answer. We all pay, she thought; we all take; we are members one of another. We cannot escape this partnership. This is what it means — to belong to a community; this is what it means, to be a people."

I think that what lifts this novel above others is the compassion and empathy shown by the author to all her characters, even when they are improvident or foolish or downright wicked. This feeling permeates the text. For example, when Sarah meets her arch-enemy Carne and helps him with a difficult calving (a necessary prelude to falling in love with him) she sees the portrait of his wife and has an epiphany; "She had thought of Carne's story as an entertaining and rather cruel fable of snobbery punished by its own achievement. She realised now that it was something more." (3.6)

It also knows the lives of its characters from the inside. Here is a description of Lydia's days of drudgery:"Quarter to five, wake father. Put on the kettle, get his breakfast, the cocoa, the margarine, r the bread. Tidy the living-room; go and wake the children; get their break- fast. (Why isn’t there no bacon? Lyddie, can’t we have treacle?) See them off to school; look after Lennie and baby; tidy the bedroom, peel the potatoes, get the dinner ready, feed the hens, the pig — if they could keep one; give the children their dinner when they came home from school, noisy and ravenous. Lennie still needed his food shovelling in with a spoon; he was a slow eater; the baby would want a bottle. Wash up the dinner things; then do the shopping, pushing the pram along the dull road into Maythorpe; get the tea ready, the children are coming shouting across the fields; Daisy has fallen and cut her knee; Gertie is sick again. Bert back. Lyd, what’s for tea, old girl? Bacon cake? I’m sick of bacon cake. Can’t we have sausages? Washing the children. The heavy shallow tubs, the tepid water. Where’s the flannel gone? Don’t let Lennie eat the soap now! The tap stood up two feet from the ground on a twisted pipe twenty yards from the door. The slops were thrown out on to the ground behind the caravans and railway coaches. Rough weeds grew there; darnel and dock and nettle soaked up the dingy water, drinking grossly. Broken pots splashed in it. Rimlets of mud seeped down from it. The rusting tubs were heavy. Lydia’s strong arms ached from lifting, carrying, coping with the clamorous, wriggling children." (4.1)

Selected quotes:

• "Like most of her generation and locality, Elsie was trilingual. She talked B.B.C. English to her employer, Cinema American to her companions, and Yorkshire dialect to old milkmen like Eli Dickson." (1.1)
• "The Mitchells, a young couple from Kingsport, had married on hope and found small substance for it." (1.3)
• "She sympathised with his reverence for the aristocracy. She herself set great store by breeding. She, was far from 44 thinking Jack good as his master and explained failure in plebeian upstarts by saying with suave contempt: 'Well, what can you expect? Wasn’t bred to power.' " (1.4)
• "Some people ... are so full of the milk of human kindness that it slops over and messes everything." (1.4)
• "Pretty little painted sluts minced on high tilted heels off to the pictures or dogs or dirt-track race-course." (1.5)
• "Sixteen of them, there were — all plain as cod-Ssh, and thirteen out of the sixteen wearing spectacles. Adenoids, curvature of the spine, anaemia and acne afflicted them — no, they were not afflicted; they simpered like beauty queens and patted soiled puffs against their pinched pink noses, quite complacent." (1.6)
• "It occurred to Sarah that the songs about drunken home-comers and bullying wives which she had found so gross dealt after all with commonplaces in the lives of these young singers. Was it not perhaps more wholesome to be taught to laugh at them ... Jokes about ripe cheese and personal hygiene — (“Take your feet off the table, Father, and give the cheese a chance!”), about child-birth and deformity and deafness — were not these perhaps necessary armaments for defence in. a world besieged by poverty, ugliness, squalor and misfortune?" (1.7)
• "She knew that the dead are most needed, not when they are mourned, but in a world robbed of their stabilising presence." (1.7)
• "Fear is a fire which burns without consuming." (2.2)
• "White bedstraw sprinkled the grass like fallen powder. A field of rye grass brushed lightly by the wind wore the bloom of half-ripe peach." (5.2)
• "The one commodity with which he was prepared to be completely generous was his unasked opinion." (5.2)
• “Sacrifices? Champagne lunch? Two shillings for car park, half a crown for the grand stand? Don’t talk to me of sacrifices. Do you know what we did yesterday? Cut down one chap’s benefit from thirty-three and three- pence — for man, wife and five children, mark you — to ten shillings — because he had a disability pension of two pounds a week. He lost his leg in the war." (5.2)
• "These rumours of Hitler’s Nazi movement in Germany? There swam before her tired mind the memory of that summer holiday in the Black Forest, of tables outside a vine- wreathed inn, and Ernst, lean, brown and eager, in the khaki shirt and shorts worn by hundreds of young Communists — drinking her health in beer after a long strenuous walk. Ernst, who wanted peace and comradeship and a mystical unity of like-minded youth — Ernst whose mother had been a Jewess . . . Ernst, who had disappeared, and who had, some said, been beaten to death at the Dachan concentration camp. These things happened to one’s friends." (5.3)
• "As an estate agent Arthur Thomas Drew did business round about Kiplington jn a small way, but he did moral censorship in quite a large one. He was on the Kiplington Watch Committee, and he watched indeed." (5.4)
• "his lean rapacious wife, trained like a greyhound for the vigorous athletics of social climbing" (5.5)
• "committees to cut down the meagre grants by which society staved off the scandal of coroner’s verdicts: Death from malnutrition" (5.6)
• "cake cut in bits no bigger than a tit’s arse-hole" (6.5)
• "It was Christmas Eve. Once she had really thought that the angels came and, singing, announced the birth of the Son of God. As if any birth could be a matter for rejoicing!" (7.2)
• "And I? thought Snaith. Between Came who lived by instinct and Astell who lived by an idea, he felt that he was nothing— -a stream of water, cold, metallic, barren, without colour or form, moving along its self-chosen channel till the sand sucked it up and it disappeared. Unfecund, flavourless, formless — a direction — a flow — a nothing.’ Here lieth one whose life was lived as water. It has evaporated; it no longer exists." (8.1)
• "He was showing off with the splendid self-assurance following three whiskies" (8.2)
• "The strongest things in life are without triumph. The costliest things you buy are those for which you can’t even pay yourself." (8.6)

April 2023; 448 pages

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God