"The Changeling" by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley

 This play was probably first performed in 1622 and is often regarded as Middleton's best play (Rowley is thought to have written the first and last scenes and the 'madhouse' subplot). Middleton may have collaborated with Shakespeare on Timon of Athens.

Spoiler alert: the paragraph below describes the whole plot

Alsemero, visiting Vermandero's castle in Valencia, Alicante, Spain, falls in love with the daughter of the house, Beatrice (also sometimes called Joanna). She falls for him which is awkward since her father has engaged her to marry another man, Alonzo de Piracquo. So B-J commissions Vermandero's servant Deflores, a man she cannot otherwise stand, to murder her betrothed. Because he is in love with her, he agrees to do this. But afterwards he is offended when she seeks to pay him. He doesn't want her money, he wants her maidenhead. Reluctantly, she agrees. Deflores deflowers her. Then, realising that Alsemero might discover she isn't a virgin on their wedding night, B-J persuades her maid Diaphanta (also a maid) to sleep with Alsemero in her place - a version of the 'bed-trick' - which Diaphanta eagerly agrees to do because she fancies Alsemero. Afterwards, B-J is jealous and persuades Deflores to murder Diaphanta. In the showdown, the AdP's brother demands to know what has happened to AdP (who has disappeared). Initial investigations offer up two servants who have been hiding in a local madhouse (because they want to have sex with the madhouse keeper's wife - this is the comedy subplot) but then Deflores confesses, implicating Diaphanta. They are locked in a closet from which are heard groans. Are they having sex? No, they are stabbing one another to death.

Production:

I saw this play performed by the Lazarus company at the Southwark Playhouse on Saturday (matinee) 7th October 2023. It was a tremendous production, in the round, with superb performances from Alex Bird playing Alonzo, Jamie O'Neill playing Deflores, Henrietta Rhodes playing a superbly sexy and saucy Diaphanta, and Colette O'Rourke playing Beatrice Joanna. The lighting, sound and effects worked perfectly. It included three songs (Mikko Juan had a brilliant voice) which replaced the sub-plot of the lunatics; otherwise (except for some necessary alterations consequent upon the gender swap of Vermandero to Vermandera and the addition of one or two modern words) the text was fully respected. My full review is here.

The dating of the play:

• It refers to the Battle of Gibraltar between the Spanish and the "rebellious Hollanders" (1.1) which was in 1607; it therefore post-dates this. 
• The testing of Beatrice-Joanna's virginity probably refers to the scandal involving Frances Howard (whose virginity was examined prior to her being allowed to annul her marriage to her first husband on the grounds of non-consummation) and Robert Carr; they were 'in the news' when they were imprisoned in 1616 (for murdering Sir Thomas Overbury) and again when they were released from imprisonment in 1622.
• Middleton was buried in 1627, so the play must pre-date that.

Selected quotes:

"We have but two sorts of people in the house ... that's fools and madmen - the one has not wit enough to be knaves, and the other not knavery enough to be fools." (1.2)

"Every part has his hour: we wake at six and look about us, that's eye-hour; at seven we should pray, that's knee-hour; at eight walk, that's leg-hour; at nine gather flowers and pluck a rose, that's nose-hour; at ten we drink, that's mouth-hour; at eleven lay about us for victuals, that's hand-hour; at twelve go to dinner' that's belly-hour." (1.2)

"A capcase for one's conscience." (3.3)

"Do you place me in the rank of verminous fellows

To destroy things for wages?" (3.3)

"You forget yourself:

A woman dipped in blood and talk of modesty?" (3.3)

"Look but into your conscience, read me there -

'Tis a true book, you'll find me there your equal.

Push! Fly not to your birth, but settle you

Into what the act has made you, you're no more now;

You must forget your parentage to me -

You're the deed's creature." (3.3)

"Can you weep Fate from its determined purpose?" (3.3)

"Murder, I see, is followed by more sins." (3.3)

It's certainly easier to understand on a first reading than a typical Shakespeare: the language is less convoluted, perhaps. The scansion of the iambic pentameters may have worked with the pronunciation of the day but there are many occasions when it doesn't work today; the verse seems more blank than free.

October 2023

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

"Rabbit, Run" by John Updike

The first in a tetralogy, written once every ten years, featuring Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom. The sequels are Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest.

This is a chronicle of a mid-life crisis, experienced early. When Harry Angstrom was at high school, he was a basketball star who achieved record scores. Now (1959), aged 26, he has a job demonstrating a kitchen appliance at department stores. Returning home one night, he discovers his pregnant alcoholic wife watching TV: she tells him to pick his car up from When he's asked to pick their two-year-old son up from his mother's and the car from her mother's. He collects the car and drives south and west all night. Next morning he returns to his hometown but not to his wife. Quitting his job he shacks up with another woman. Can Harry be persuaded to return to his wife and, if he does, what will be the consequences.

It's a more-or-less honest portrait of a man who is disillusioned with life: "after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate." (p 92); "What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots." (p 232). But as the author says in an afterword: "Jack Kerouac's On the Road came out in 1957 and, without reading it, I resented its apparent instruction to cut loose. Rabbit, Run was meant to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road - the people left behind get hurt." As Reverend Eccles tells Harry: "Right and wrong aren't dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably ... misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often not at first our own." (p 240)

Rabbit is on the run from the realities of life after the first bloom of youth. "The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks." (p 194) Getting old sucks, and Rabbit, unable to come to terms with this, runs. But he doesn't know where he's going. Other men, perhaps acting the part of the wise sage encountered on the journey, give him advice. "The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there." (p 26) he is told, early on. Later: "All vagrants think they're on a quest. At least at first." (p 110) Nevertheless, he can't settle down.

In part, the book is about the relations between the sexes. Sex and marital infidelity are frankly reported (though it is by no means explicit, judging by today's standards). Rabbit, as the nickname suggests, uses women: he abandons his wife and persuades another woman to have sex with him for money; he slaps the vicar's wife on the bottom; he sees sex as a biological relief, trying to penetrate his wife days after she has given birth. He is, according to an obstetrician "just another in the parade of more or less dutiful husbands whose brainlessly sown seed he [the obstetrician] spends his life trying to harvest." (p 173) But the reader is made aware of the fundamental misogyny of the protagonist (and other men). Rabbit's mistress has almost the last word, and she berates him. In a key symbolic scene, Rabbit is taking leave of an old widow who has employed him to care for the rhododendrons her husband loved. In her house are two paintings. One is a portrait of the woman when young, of which she observes: "Why did he have to make me look so irritable? I didn't like him a whit and he knew it. A slick little Italian. Thought he knew about women." (p 191) The other is a painting of Leda and the swan, a reference to Zeus, king of the Olympian gods and a serial rapist, who disguised himself as a swan and forced himself on Leda. I think Updike is saying that male mistreatment and subjugation of women is timeless. He might have a male protagonist but Rabbit is by no means a hero.

The story is told in the present tense, which was very unusual at the time (the author says he only encountered it in Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson), mostly, but not entirely, from Rabbit's perspective. There are passages of internal monologue bordering on stream of consciousness:

"Brown legs probably, bitty birdy breasts. Beside a swimming pool in France. Something like money in a naked woman, deep, millions. You think of millions as being white. Sink all the way in softly still lots left. Rich girls frigid? Nymphomaniacs? Must vary. Just women after all, descended from some old Indian-cheater luckier than the rest, inherit the same stuff if they lived in a slum. Glow all the whiter there, on drab mattresses." 

There are also lists. American novelists seem to love lists. For example, when Rabbit is driving through the night, there is a long paragraph listing what he hears on the radio: titles of song after song, commercials for plastic seat covers, and TVs, and cream rinse, and clothes, and table napkins, and wax ... news about Eisenhower and Macmillan and the Dalai Lama ... I suppose the purpose is to anchor the story in a specific time and culture. Since it doesn't record Rabbit's reaction to these stimuli, it doesn't tell us anything about his character, but it offers a context for his life, so that we might more clearly understand what is driving him.

These things, and the frank discussion of sex, made it disruptive and avant garde in its time, launching the career of the author as a novelist, although the prose style and narrative would nowadays be regarded as very conventional. Today we are more shocked by the use of the c-word and the n-word and Rabbit's fundamental misogyny. And, of course, today's society offers many more opportunities to both men and women than were available then. So it can seem dated. Nevertheless, the fundamental issue of how you cope when youthful dreams are wrecked against the rocks of reality, remains the same.

And one thing you can't take away from the book is how well it is written. It is full of incident, from the inciting moment when Rabbit starts his quest to the final scene and those last words: "he runs. Ah: runs. Runs." (p 264) And there are moments of glorious description:

• "In the top of the windshield the telephone wires continually whip the stars." (p 30)
• "Eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men sitting in zippered jackets in booths three to a girl." (p 30)
• "A slash in a window blind throws a long knife of sun on a side wall." (p 40)
• "An airplane goes over, rapidly rattling the air." (p 97) They used propellers in those days.
• "His eyebrows jiggle as if on fishhooks." (p 203)
• "In the street under glaring hardtops drivers bake in stalled traffic." (p 231)

Other selected quotes:

• "You become like to these kids just one more piece of the sky of adults that hangs over them in the town" (p 7)
• "Naturals know. It's all in how it feels." (p 7)
• "If you have the guts to be yourself ... other people'll pay your price." (p 129)
• "His sins a conglomerate of flight, cruelty, obscenity, and conceit; a black clot embodied in the entrails of his birth." (p 169)
• "He lacks the mindful will to walk the straight line of a paradox." (p 203)
• "The sight of his parents makes him wonder why he was afraid of them." (p 250)

Page numbers refer to the 2006 Penguin Classics edition

October 2023; 264 pages

Chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels since Time began (1923)

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

Other books by John Updike reviewed in this blog include:

• Brazil
• Terrorist

"The Golden Droplet" by Michel Tournier

 Idris is a goatherd living in a remote oasis village in the Sahara. One day a blonde woman leaps from a Land Rover and takes his photograph, promising to send him a copy when it is printed in Paris. It's non-appearance awakens a wanderlust in Idris and he travels to the coast and thence to Marseilles and finally Paris. 

The narrative is punctuated by folk stories, from the tale of Khair-ed-Din, known as Barbarossa, to the legend of the portrait of the Blonde Queen, and the story of a folk singer,

Photos and photography are a running theme, usually presaging disaster. Immediately after Idris has had his photo taken, his best friend is killed in an accident. The only photo in the oasis is that of his Uncle and two friends from the army ... taken the night before they were killed. Old Lala wants to adopt Idris because he resembles a photograph of her son, who died. Idris has a photo taken for his passport ... but it is of another man, with a beard. In Paris he goes to what he thinks is a bookshop and sees lots of porno magazines with images of naked men and women. When he finds the woman who took his photo there is a scene in a bar and he is arrested ... having his mugshot taken. A collector of (male child) shop mannequins takes photographs of the parties he holds with them. Even when he earns money as an extra in a film and forms a friendship with the director, going to his flat to look through an album of photographs, Idris is subsequently mugged by the pimp of the boys who normally go with the director. 

If it isn't photos, it is the making of images: 

• Khair-ed-Din's portrait painter says "I am a painter of the depths, and the depths of a human being are transparent on his face once the agitation of day-to-day life ceases." (p 36).
• Idris sees his first TV on the ferry to Marseilles: it shows adverts and the news of a riot in Paris.
• Another job he gets is to have a plaster cast made of his body to be turned into display mannequins.
• Idris learns calligraphy

And there is the theme of the golden droplet, a jewel found by Idris before he leaves the oasis and lost by him when he loses his virginity to a whore in Marseilles at the midpoint of the book. 

Selected quotes:

Page numbers are from the Barbara Wright translation published by Methuen in paperback form in 1988

• "These men had become impalpable, colourless, odourless and insipid, because they had been reduced to figures, to signs, to abstract shapes." (p 71)
• "A defence against the maleficent power of the image, which seduces the eye, might be found in the acoustic sign, which alerts the ear." (p 171)
• "And there, poor among the poor, he did what the poor have an inexhaustible vocation for, he waited, motionless and patient." (p 79)
• "If what you have to say is not more beautiful than silence, Then keep quiet!" (p 177)
• "There is more truth in the ink of scholars than in the blood of martyrs." (p 177)
• "The faculty given to the calligrapher to lengthen certain letters horizontally introduces silence into the line, zones of calm and repose, which are the desert itself." (p 178)
• "The hand must be a ballerina and dance lightly over the parchment, not weigh down on it like a farm labourer with his plough." (p 179)
• "The sculptor's chisel; liberates the girl, the athlete or the horse from the block of marble. In the same way, signs are all prisoners of the ink and the inkwell. The reed pen liberates them, and releases them on the page. Calligraphy is liberation." (p 179)
• "The image is always retrospective. It is a mirror turned towards the past." (p 178)
• "The image is endowed with the power to paralyse, as for instance the head of Medusa, which turned to stone all those who came within its gaze." (p 185)

A short little book, delightfully written and full of incident. Idris ia a great Everyman. There are some very strange and very funny moments. Above all, it is thoughtful and challenges the reader to think. I'm not sure I understand it fully; I will probably need three or four more reads to get much from it. But it is beautifully constructed and works even if only on the level of a good story, well told.

'Moni Boni', another reviewer on goodreads, points out that the Idris finds only "visual fictions of himself" and that the book critiques the "Western world's cultural obsession with images."

Other books by French authors which have been reviewed in this blog can be found here.

September 2023; 198 pages

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

"The Beekeeper of Aleppo" by Christy Lefteri

Nuri , the eponymous protagonist, and his blind wife Afra, are in a bed & breakfast in a seaside town in England, asylum seekers applying for refugee status. Each chapter begins with their life now (told in the first person, present tense) until a single word triggers memories (past tense) of their life in Syria and the journey they have taken. They are traumatised by their experiences and bit by bit through the accounts of their sufferings we come to realise their strengths and weaknesses, and the psychological adaptations they have been forced to adopt in order to endure. 

It starts with a literary paragraph but very quickly it becomes a simply told narrative, with a strong plot. I read it quickly, turning the pages rapidly, because I wanted to know what had happened (there was just the right amount of foreshadowing) and what would happen to them (would they be granted the right to remain?). Nevertheless, even though much of the story was plot-driven, it was fundamentally about these two characters, and it was their psychological development that was at the heart of the book. The deft skill shown by the author in bringing the reader to learn about these two people was tremendous and lifts this book into the five-star category.

The book promoted a lively discussion at my reading-group. There was a (minority) view that the book was ‘propaganda’ since the novel failed to incorporate any discussion of the wider social ramifications of immigration. I disagreed. While an academic social-political study should seek balance, that is not the job of a novelist. The novel as an art form is fundamentally focused on individuals. War and Peace is an acknowledged attempt to understand the processes of history (there is a section of about fifty pages that considers this) but fundamentally it is a story focused around a small (relatively, compared with the length of the book) cast of characters. Sartre's Roads to Freedom trilogy is also focused on individuals. Moby-Dick is fundamentally about Captain Ahab, despite the chapters on whales. Many novels seek to develop social, political, or moral themes but they do so by telling individual stories . I don't believe the failure to provide 'balance' is a relevant or legitimate criticism of any novel. 

Furthermore, this novel resolutely refuses to provide any form of closure. You don't know whether Nuri and Afra will be granted leave to remain. Not finishing stories was a hallmark of the book (what happened to the twins?). I assume that this was a stylistic choice of the author and I feel that it might be a metaphor for the transience of relationships developed when fleeing conflict and the fact that on such a journey you will never know what happened to most of the people you encounter. But it also meant that the author was asking questions rather than providing answers and that does seem to be a function of a novel.

There was also a comment that the characters weren’t fully developed. This is true. Generally, I like character and dislike plotline and this book has a strong narrative thread and a lot of the characterisation is left to the reader. I think this is a stylistic feature and a strength of the book. This author specialises in hinting rather than expounding. Nevertheless, there is clear psychological character development within the narrative, and I felt this was a strength of the book.

My only point of comparison is with American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins which is a meticulously researched thriller. The BoA is equally well researched but gentler. You know from the start that they will reach the end of their journey, that they will survive physically. This book is more psychological, about understanding the damage caused to them by their experiences. That made it even better.

Selected quotes:

• "I am scared of my wife's eyes. She can’t see out and no one can see in. Look, they are like stones, grey stones, sea stones. Look at her. Look how she is sitting on the edge of the bed, her nightgown on the floor, rolling Mohammed’s marble around in her fingers and waiting for me to dress her. I am taking my time putting on my shirt and trousers, because I am so tired of dressing her. Look at the folds of her stomach, the colour of desert honey, darker in the creases, and the fine, fine silver lines on the skin of her breasts, and the tips of her fingers with the tiny cuts, where the ridges and valley patterns once were stained with blue or yellow or red paint. Her laughter was gold once, you would have seen as well as heard it. Look at her, because I think she is disappearing." (First paragraph)
• "She cried like a child, laughed like bells ringing, and her smile was the most beautiful I’ve ever seen." (Ch 1)
• "But in Syria there is a saying: inside the person you know, there is a person you do not know." (Ch 1) A foreshadowing of the theme of the book.
• "She won’t live very long like this – she’s been banished from her colony because she has no wings." (Ch 2) The crippled bee symbolises exiles.
• "O Allah keep me alive as long as is good for me, and when death is better for me, take me." (Ch 2)
• "People are not like bees. We do not work together, we have no real sense of a greater good" (Ch 3)
• "I don’t like their queues, their order, their neat little gardens and neat little porches and their bay windows that glow at night with the flickering of their TVs. It all reminds me that these people have never seen war." (Ch 6)
• "the right side of the picture was left without colour. Strangely this reminded me of the white crumbling streets once the war came. The way the colour was washed out of everything. The way the flowers died." (Ch 8)
• "and I can’t go back. I am a dead. I want to leave from here. I want to find work. But nobody want me." (Ch 9)
• "I thought about Sami. First his smile. Then the moment the light fell from his eyes and they turned to glass." (Ch 9)
• "I look at her eyes, so full of fear and questions and longing, and I had thought it was her who was lost, that Afra was the one stuck in the dark places of her mind." (Ch 12)
• "And there we both stand, battered by life, two men, brothers, finally reunited in a world that is not our home." (Ch 14)
• "Sometimes we create such powerful illusions, so that we do not get lost in the darkness." (Ch 14)

A delightful book, full of compassion, yet at the same time with a strong story. September 2023

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

Question I was left to ponder:
Do all novels focus on individuals. Are there examples of those that don't?

"I Capture the Castle" by Dodie Smith

Lewes Castle really does have a house built into it; you can see the shadow of the main keep.

This novel is coming-of-age story done in the form of an epistolary novel, written in the form of a journal, although a journal irregularly kept and with very long entries. This means that, despite being narrated in the first person by the protagonist and in the past tense, the reader never knows what the outcome might be . It enables the narrator to comment on the action (eg: "Dancing is peculiar when you really think about it. If a man held you hand and put his arm around your waist without its being dancing, it would be most important; in dancing, you don't even notice it - well, only a little bit."; 2.8) and it allows the reader to sometimes feel that they are 'one step ahead' of the narrator, such as when the reader realises that Stephen is (slavishly) in love with Cassandra before she does.

The book starts by describing the cast of eccentrics that make up the Mortmain family:

• Father is the author of a critically successful experimental novel who now suffers from writer's block.
• Step-mother Topaz is an ex-model, devoted to her husband, who loves sunbathing nude. Cassandra pokes fun at her for her art and for her consciously artistic views but Topaz holds the family together: "The real Topaz is the one who cooks and scrubs and sews for us all. How mixed people are - how mixed and nice!" (3.14)
• Elder sister Rose hates being poor and is prepared to do anything for money, even proposing to become a prostitute or at least marry a rich husband.
• Cassandra, the narrator, is a dreamer; she starts as a naive young girl and the book chronicles her passage to maturity.
• Thomas, younger brother, is a schoolboy yet he can be very perceptive when necessary.
• Stephen is the orphaned family retainer who lives with them and goes out to work and gives them all his money; he is desperately in love with Cassandra but he can't tell her because he feels inferior to her.

Minor characters include Miss Blossom, a dressmaker's dummy, who acts both as a source of maternal consolation to the sisters (Topaz, though fulfilling the role of a stepmother in all practical ways, could scarcely be called motherly) and acting as a sort of conscience and advisor to Cassandra.

They all live in a partially ruined castle in the poorest of circumstances. This is genteel poverty as depicted in so many Victorian books; they have zero income and they've sold their jewellery and most of their furniture ("All we really have enough of is floor."; 2.10) but it doesn't seem to occur to any of them (except the family retainer) to go out and work. Escape from their circumstances depends on Father starting work again, or marrying a rich husband, or living off the earnings of the one working-class member of the household. The local villagers also support and tolerate them in a quasi-feudal relationship. Not only is there no trace of feminism, the class complacency in this book, of penniless aristocrats nevertheless lording it over the uncultured but hard-working peasantry is staggering. Though, to be honest, this is another faithful reflection of the Austen oeuvre. 

A fanfiction mashup?
Towards the end of Chapter 2, the narrator, Cassandra, is discussing with her sister Rose, the re-opening of the nearby stately home and Rose’s desire to marry a man with money (almost any man) and they realise that they are in a position similar to the start of Pride and Prejudice. Rose wants to live in a Jane Austen novel and Cassandra would rather be in a Charlotte Bronte novel and they decide that 50% of each would be perfect.

Cassandra was the name of Jane Austen’s sister in real life.

Almost immediately after meeting the two (somewhat estranged) brothers who are the new owners of Scoatney Hall, Cassandra overhears prickly Neil and easy-going Simon discussing her and Rose in very unflattering terms; one warns the other about gold-digging girls. This is almost a copy of the scene in Pride and Prejudice where protagonist Lizzie overhears stand-offish Mr Darcy disparage her and her sisters to more easy-going Mr Bingley.

Cassandra’s father spends most of his time in the Gatehouse, reading, just like Mr Bennett spends most of his time in the library. But both fathers are perceptive and offer words of wisdom.

Stephen is a poor and stunningly handsome boy who is in love with Cassandra (she gets a funny feeling when she thinks of him but doesn’t think it’s love) and who works for the family (he lives with them and they exist on the wages he earns from the nearby farmer). He adores Cassandra but he knows his place. There is a wistful scene in chapter 7 when she tells him that “gentlemen are men who behave like gentlemen” and he replies that “you can only be a gentleman if you’re born one, Miss Cassandra”. Here are the makings of Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights (admittedly an Emily Bronte novel rather than Charlotte). Stephen is being tempted by a lady photographer to model for him and to act in the movies. Heathcliff, too, had to go away to become rich. Perhaps Stephen/ Heathcliff's return in a vengeful mood might form a sequel to this novel.

There's a hint, too, of Austen's Sense and Sensibility in which one sister thinks you should marry for money, but ends up marrying for love, and the other sister takes the opposite course. 

But if the set-up is a Bronte-Austen mashup, the development of the plot suggests alternative outcomes. Nevertheless, the open ending - which is foreshadowed: in chapter eleven Cassandra says that she doesn't really like "a novel with a brick-wall happy ending - I mean the kind of ending where you never think any more about the characters." - allows one to speculate on what the sequel might have been.

The least Austenish of the characters (except for Stephen, the Bronte intrusion) is Topaz. She's like Mrs Bennett only in the she conspires with Ruth to get her married to a wealthy man and that Cassandra pokes fun at her in the early stages of the novel. But there is a very real side to Topaz. Yes, she used to be a nude model (who still occasionally goes up to London to pose) but her daily life is the usual mother's grind of cooking and cleaning and mending clothes and her relationship with her husband becomes very real when she suspects that he might be committing adultery, if only in his mind. I thought Topaz was a super character who transcended all her stereotypes.

Selected quotes:

• "I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring." (1.1)
• "I told her that she couldn't go on the streets in the depths of Suffolk." (1.1)
• "Anyone who could enjoy the winter here would find the North Pole stuffy." (1.3)
• "The last stage of a bath, when the water is cooling and there is nothing to look forward to, can be pretty disillusioning. I expect alcohol works much the same way." (1.4)
• "I know all about the facts of life. And I don't think much of them." (1.4)
• "She was wearing her hand-woven dress which is first cousin to a sack." (2.7)
• "Long prayers are like nagging." (2.8)
• "I love owls, but I wish God had made them vegetarian." (2.8)
• "This desire for solitude often overwhelms her at house-cleaning times." (2.10)
• "How moons do vary! Some are white, some are gold,this was like a dazzling circle of tin." (2.10)
• "As if our moat took any notice of sunshine! It is fed by a stream that apparently comes straight from Greenland." (2.10)
• "Happy ever after ... What I'd really hate would be the settled feeling, with nothing but happiness to look forward to." (3.11)
• "Surely it isn't normal for  anyone so miserably in love to eat and sleep so well? Am I a freak? I only know that I am miserable, I am in love, but I raven food and drink." (3.13)
• "As I never gave the Church a thought when I was happy, I could hardly expect it to do anything for me when I wasn't. You can't get insurance money without paying the premiums." (3.13)
• "I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness." (3.13)
• "The Vicar and Miss Marcy had managed to by-pass the suffering that comes to most people - he by his religion, she by her kindness to others.  And it came to me that if one does that, one is liable to miss too much along with the suffering - perhaps, in a way, life itself. Is that why Miss Marcy seems so young for her age - why the Vicar, in spite of all his cleverness has that look of an elderly baby?" (3.13)
• "I don't like the sound of all those lists he's making - it's like taking too many notes at school, you feel you've achieved something when you haven't." (3.15)
• "No sunrise I ever saw was more beautiful than when the thick grey mist gradually changed to a golden haze." (3.16)
• "Even a broken heart doesn't warrant a waste of good paper." (3.16)

A beautifully written page-turner with an eccentric cast, pervaded with a wry observational humour. Delightful. 

September 2023; 408 pages

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

Other books which have 'castle' in their title include:

• In Bluebeard's Castle by George Steiner (literary criticism)
• The Glass Castle by Jeanette Wold
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
• The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro (short stories with a linked, memoir theme)
• The Castle by Franz Kafka (a classic novel)
• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick (dystopian future novel; also an Amazon prime series)
• The Castle of Adventure by Enid Blyton (a children's novel)
• King of the Castle by Susan Hill (a novel)
• The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (a classic gothic novel)
• Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth (a gothic novel from Jane Austen's time)
• Hatter's Castle by A J Cronin: a novel about a megalomanical bullying patriarch set in Scotland

"River Kings" by Cat Jarman

 This is a book explaining how the trade networks of the Vikings enabled a carnelian bead to be found in Repton. It is written by an archaeologist.

Leif Eriksson's statue in Reyjkavik

The Vikings were traders, as well as raiders. In some ways they epitomise free enterprise: they made money by trade, by theft, by looting, by threat and extortion, by kidnap and ransom, by kidnap and slavery. Enterprise when it is truly free, without any bureaucratic red-tape (or even any laws). That's entrepreneurship!

Cat Jarman's book is a well-written and interesting addition to this developing perspective on the Vikings. I was particularly impressed with how clearly she explained:

• How the DNA analysis available from 'ancestry' websites matches you with matching populations in the places where they live now (which doesn't necessarily correspond with where they lived back in the days).
• How Y-chromosome DNA and mitochondrial DNA can throw light on the different fates of men and women (in Iceland 75% of modern Icelandic men had ancestry compatible with present-day Scandinavian populations but 62% of women had ancestry matching modern populations in the British Isles including Ireland and Scotland which suggests that in the early population of Iceland Scandinavian men interbred with (possibly slave) British women; slave women are more likely to breed than slave men).
• How radio-carbon dating of skeletons may throw up anomalous results for those on a heavy fish diet.
• How bone isotope analysis can suggest where somebody grew up.

The blurb suggested that this book would "transform the way you think about the Vikings." Not for me. I knew they were traders as well as raiders. I knew they had travelled extensively in Russia and that they had reached Constantinople. These things have been known for decades. My only surprise was the extent to which they were slave traders. So I wasn't enthralled (which word, we are told in chapter 2) comes from the Viking word 'trell' or 'thrall' which means a slave). 

But, quite apart from the science of archaeology mentioned above, there were many things that I did learn from this book. For example:

• Monasteries were targets for armies because they stored food which they collected as taxes (‘feorm’ = ‘food rent’) from the local population. Armies need feeding. (Ch 3)
• The first Viking attack recorded in the AS Chronicle was not Lindisfarne but at Portland on the south coast, not far from the 'emporia' (trading station) of Hamwic, now Southampton. (Ch 4)
• For fallen warriors who didn’t make it to Valkyrie, they might be picked by Freya (actually she got first pick) to go to Sessrumnir, her hall in Folkvang (= Field of Folk). (Ch 4) I wondered whether Freya’s Field of Folk made its way into Piers Plowman to become the fair field of folk that Langland spied at the beginning of his poem.
• “The only accounts we have of Asgard, the world of the Norse gods, come from sources written down from the eleventh century onwards, many of them even later.” Some of the buildings may have been influenced by what the Vikings saw in Byzantium etc. (Ch 9)
• ‘Alexander’s wall’ was the Great Wall of China (Ch 9)
• Analysis of DNA from ancient specimens suggest that smallpox originated in about 600.  It may have been spread through north-western Europe as a result of the widespread travelling of Vikings. (Ch 8)
• The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions in the entry for 883 CE "an embassy sent to the shrine of St Thomas in ‘India/Indea’ by none other than Alfred the Great ... both St Thomas and St Bartholomew, who is also mentioned in the entry, appear to have been martyred in India ... There are documented Christian communities in India from the fifth century.” (Ch9)

So, despite not being astonished and amazed, this book was an enjoyable read, with plenty of interesting facts.

Selected quotes:

“Tracing the objects and materials that went back and forth, the routes they travelled on, and the people who took part in the transactions, is a bit like watching a drop of water running down an uneven windowpane: flowing downwards with gravity, changing path and direction if it uncovers a flaw in the glass, stopping when it reaches an insurmountable obstacle until its path is taken up again when joined by further drops that add the necessary momentum.” (Ch 9)

September 2023; 300 pages

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

"The Sword in the Stone" by T H White

Wart is a fatherless lad who lives with foster-father Sir Ector and foster-brother Kay in a castle near the Forest Sauvage; Merlin comes to tutor him. His lessons include turning into a fish and a hawk and a snake and a badger; there are some adventures, one involving a witch and another involving Robin Hood and the Anthropophagi. There are other adventures, in which Wart is turned into an ant and a goose, which were not included in the original but were later added when the single book was turned into a tetralogy called The Once and Future King.

This is a traditional boy's adventure story set in a nostalgic world that mixes Merrie England and the Age of Chivalry with the customs and manners of early twentieth century aristocrats of the hunting, shooting, fishing country set. It's full of anachronisms, which emphasise its status as fantasy, whilst being underpinned by what it presumably immense knowledge and understanding of the mediaeval world (there are a lot of outdated words and some didacticism) which seems designed to add verisimilitude. 

It is told it 'traditional' style as a third person omniscient past tense narrative; there are moments of authorial intrusion when White becomes didactic. 

The message, if there is one, seems to be that we should respect nature while at the same time hunting and eating it. Providing nature doesn't eat you! There is a rather distasteful war against the 'Anthropophagi' who are deformed creatures (straight out of the pages of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville) who are cannibals and seek to eat Dog Boy and Wat; after these monsters have been slaughtered (one by Wart), Kay asks to take home the head of one of them and it becomes a trophy in the castle: this whole episode reads a little like the triumphalism of a colonial war against dehumanised 'savages'. White wrote TSitS in 1938, having retreated from teaching at Stowe to living in a cottage in the woods (perhaps he thought he was Merlin!). Some of the later books in the tetralogy express White's distaste for the Nazi regime and there have been suggestions that White was a pacifist but the war against the Anthropophagi and the hunting episodes don't bear this out. What seems not in doubt is that White was a social conservative who was very much in favour of maintaining the traditional class structures which kept the English aristocracy in power.

My main criticism of the novel is that the hero, Wart, never changes. I think the purpose of his education is that he should develop into the sort of King that Arthur is but he's a nice lad at the start, he's nice in the middle and, despite the way he is treated, he's still nice at the end. As a bildungsroman, TSitS leaves a lot to be desired.

We had a lively discussion about this book in my U3A 'The English novel' group; we watched a BBC interview with the author from 1959 in which T H White came across as a rather angry old man longing for the ways of a previous age. But he had a dreadful childhood, being unwanted and then used as a pawn by his ever-warring parents before being sent to live with grandparents and then sent to boarding school which he hated. If the character of Wart, a parentless boy, reflects the author, he seems to have forgotten the anger and bitterness he showed in a poem he once wrote. 

Our discussion was complicated by the fact that there are two versions of TSitS. Most of us had the original, 1938 version, most often sold nowadays as a stand-alone, but some of us had read the 1948 version which was revised in order to fit in with the Once and Future King tetralogy. There are aspects of this later version, such as its message bewailing the futility of war and promoting internationalism, that simply don't appear in the original. Mostly I learned that THW wanted us to return to a benevolent feudal system with strong predetermined classes , overseen by a kindly patriarch. This was born out by the interview.

Selected quotes:

• "Oh, my own random, wicked little lamb." (Ch IV): Wart's nursemaid seems to have inherited the persona of Nanny Slagg in Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake. 
• "He had the glee of the porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas." (Ch V)
• "A face which had been ravaged by all the passions of an absolute monarch, by cruelty, sorrow, age, pride, selfishness, loneliness and thoughts too strong for individual brains." (Ch V)
• "Love is a trick played on us by the forces of evolution." (Ch V)
• "He did say it, pushing the words out as if he were breathing against water." (Ch VI)
• "I believe Sir Ector would have been glad to get a by-our-lady tilting blue for your tutor, that swings himself along on his knuckles like an anthropoid ape." (Ch VII) The traditional academic's dismissal of sporting types. 
• "It just goes on to the end, you know, and then stops - as Legends do." (Ch XIII)
• "Each realised how beautiful life was, which a reeking tusk might, in a few seconds, rape away from one or another of them if things went wrong." (Ch XVI) The justification for boar hunting: that it gives an adrenaline rush; that you are never so alive as when you are risking your life. 

September 2023; 286 pages

This novel is the first in the Once and Future King tetralogy which was selected by Anthony Burgess as one of his 99 best novels since 1939.

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

"The Secrets of Filming Swallows and Amazons" by Sophie Neville

Sophie Neville was cast as Titty in the 1974 film adaptation of Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome. This book, adapted from her contemporary diaries, describes the filming day by day and then tells what happened afterwards: the actor who played Susan became a film actress but 'John' started an engineering firm and 'Roger' became a hermit. Ms Neville herself has mostly worked on the other side of the cameras but has also written books and been a missionary.

I adored the Swallows and Amazons books, all twelve of which are reviewed on this blog. But a day by day account of the filming has little in it to interest anyone other than a fan. 

Selected quotes:

"We were so lucky, so few inches further and we would have been under the steamer. Anyone could have been killed" (Ch 5: Friday 8th June ~ Twenty-second day of filming)

September 2023

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

The Swallows and Amazon series contained twelve books:

• Swallows and Amazons: Children camping on an island in a lake have sailing based adventures
• Swallowdale: More sailing adventures are threatened when the Swallow sinks
• Peter Duck: The Swallows and Amazons and Captain Flint sail on a big yacht into the Caribbean in search of pirate treasure; pirates pursue
• Winter Holiday: the lake freezes allowing a sledge-based expedition to the 'north pole'; the 'D's are introduced
• Coot Club: The Ds join the Death and Glory kids in the Norfolk Broads but the excitement is just as great when birds have to be protected from rowdies.
• We Didn't Mean to go to Sea: The Swallows accidentally find themselves at sea in a yacht they scarcely know: for my money this is the most dramatic and exciting book of the series.
• Secret Water: The Swallows are joined by the Amazons in an expedition to map some tidal mud-flats
• The Big Six: The Death and Glory kids have to be cleared of accusations of crime; the Ds help.
• Missee Lee: The Swallows and Amazons and Captain Flint are shipwrecked near China and captured by a lady Chinese pirate with a taste for Latin.
• Pigeon Post: The Swallows and Amazons and Ds search for gold in the hills above the Lake; one of my favourites
• The Picts and the Martyrs: The Ds have to hide in the hills when the Great Aunt comes to stay with the Amazons
• Great Northern: The Swallows and Amazons and Ds and Captain Flint are protecting birds in the far north of Scotland