"The Scoundrel Harry Larkyns" by Rebecca Gowers

The subtitle of this biography is "and his pitiless killing by the photographer Eadweard Muybridge" and the cover shows a sequence of photographs, in the style of the famous pioneer photographer Muybridge, which show a man being shot. These are what the author is using to 'hook' the reader. But the killing itself only happens at the 75% mark and the book is already half-over before Muybridge even makes an appearance. In this situation, I sometimes feel disappointed. But this book is an exception because the early life of Larkins/ Larkyns is so interesting.

He was born Harry Larkins in India; his father was in the military wing of the East India Company. Aged 4 months his family went home on leave to England; they left him behind aged three when they returned to India. He never saw them again. Contact was limited to letters: his mother regularly told him to be good. Harry was orphaned at the age of thirteen when his parents were killed during the Indian Rebellion ('Indian Mutiny') of 1857. Almost immediately he was sent to a cheap boarding school in Belgium and later Wimbledon.

With few prospects, at the age of sixteen, Harry pulled a few strings to become an officer cadet with the newly nationalised East India Company army, serving in, eventually, seven regiments. Like most officers, he lived beyond his salary and got into debt. And trouble. He was 'permitted to resign' and returned to London aged 23. 

In London he continued his extravagant lifestyle. Aged 25 he went to Paris, staying in the Grand Hotel, going to the theatre and wooing courtesans. He funded this by buying jewellery on credit or with fraudulent bankers' drafts and then pawning it. He was arrested and throne into prison but at the subsequent court case he managed to persuade his friends to cough up for him and talked himself into an acquittal. He then returned to London ... and more or less repeated the same dodge with the same consequences ... and again talked himself out of trouble. 

Aged 26, Harry returned to France to sign up with the 'franc-tireurs', an international troop of guerrilla fighters who fought for the French during the Franco-Prussian war. This was where he finally shone. He clearly enjoyed the hardships and the dangers and meeting Garibaldi. He ended up with the rank of Major (technically its French equivalent) and the Legion d'Honneur. Harry became the model for one of the young heroes of The Young Francs-Tireurs by G A Henty. 

Harry then went to San Francisco where, following yet another court case over a debt he incurred, probably by fraud, he became a journalist in the town which was still expanding from the aftermath of the Gold Rush (now diversifying into silver and mercury mining). He worked for Henry George, radical economist and author of Progress and Poverty, as a hugely popular theatre reviewer and columnist. He also met Eadweard Muybridge and, more particularly, Flora his wife. He wanted to run away with Flora after she had given birth to a son whom Harry believed to be his but Muybridge discovered the affair and shot and killed Harry. Harry died a few minuted before his 31st birthday. 

Muybridge was then acquitted at the trial by the jury on the (wholly extra-legal) grounds that he was defending his honour.

The story of this young man who packed so much into his nearly thirty-one years is told clearly and with verve; I found it rattled along.

Selected quotes:

• "With notable poetic justice, Bagot had just died on a tiger-hunting expedition after his cook accidentally made breakfast chupatties using the arsenic meant for curing the animal skins." (Ch 4)
• "Frederick Hankey, infamous pornographer, unkindly described as 'a second de Sade without the intellect'." (Ch 7)
• "Pixley was 'furiously sincere', and something of a kangaroo: 'you never know which way he is going to jump'." (Ch 9)
• "When a reporter wrote that Woodhull had made him blush a joke went around that he had been 'promptly discharged' from his job for 'conduct unbecoming to a journalist'." (Ch 13)

Great fun and packed with incident. Names dropped include (as well as those above) Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce and William Gladstone.

October 2023; 310 pages

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

"Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl" by Carl Rollyson

This is a biography of the journalist and novelist Rebecca West. It's one of those biographies that seeks to chronicle every aspect of the subject's life, and it is a literary biography that carefully describes each book she wrote. As a fellow novelist, what really interests me about a writer is not whom they have sex with or where they lived but about how they worked, what they saw as 'good' and 'bad' writing, their literary influences, and how (and why) their art matured as they grew older. This book manages this to a certain extent (more than many others) but I was a little overwhelmed by all the rest of the stories. Though some were fun.

My overall impression of Cicely Fairfield who named herself 'Rebecca West' after a feisty Ibsen heroine is that I wouldn't have liked her very much. She was likened by her niece to a firework: great fun but rather dangerous. This was a woman who took no hostages. She had forthright opinions and was able to express them in pithy and often unforgettable prose but I doubt she was ever very charitable. She believed (and I suspect she took pleasure in the notion) that she rendered some of her lovers impotent. Her relationship with her son (whom she packed off to boarding school when he was three) showed minimal understanding, little kindness and a lot of mutual anger. And yet this is the woman who wrote The Return of the Soldier, a novel that has compassion at its very heart (though not, perhaps, for Kitty). 

One characteristic which is shared, I imagine, with many novelists, is that “Rebecca could not tell a story without exaggerating, or as some would have it, lying.” (Rebecca West: a Portrait)

Her childhood was the classic late Victorian one of genteel poverty. Her father abandoned the family when she was eight or nine and died when she was thirteen after which her mother typed theses for a living but managed to put three girls through school (though Rebecca was clearly a challenging student) although they subsisted on a “dreary diet of bread and butter, porridge and eggs and milk.” 

Politically she was a suffragette and a very early feminist. But her iconoclastic approach meant that she was often regarded as a rather renegade socialist. She believed from its start that the Soviet Union would prove authoritarian and she considered pacificism naive. “Do you believe that you are going to abolish Cancer if you get 100,000 people to sign a pledge that they do not intend to have Cancer?” (Ch 18) Neither view endeared her to the comrades.

She is perhaps best known for her affair with the much older H G Wells which resulted (on the day that Britain joined the First World War) in an illegitimate son who later became the novelist Anthony West. Although HG was a notorious adulterer (at the funeral of one of his mistresses, "Rebecca is supposed to have turned to [another of his mistresses] Odette and remarked, ‘Well, I guess we can all move one up’.”), she seems to have made much of the running and they seemed to have been in love for ten years, even though he never left his wife. She also had affairs with, among many others, Max Beaverbrook and Charlie Chaplin. In  her eighties she responded to Warren Beatty asking her about her sex life by telling him: "I have some time free on Thursday afternoons."

Her husband was an (apparently financially incompetent) banker who had numerous affairs and was, in later life, a really bad driver. 

She travelled in pre-WW2 Yugoslavia; perhaps her best book is a thinly fictionalised account of her travels there. During WW2 she hosted Yugoslav exiles and refugees at her farmhouse. Following that war she covered the Nuremberg trials and wrote a book analysing the nature of treason when covering the controversial trial of Law Haw Haw.

In later life she repeatedly fell out with her son and other members of her family, and with her friends, and with her staff. Given that she was born in the nineteenth century, it was wonderful to discover that she enjoyed watching Star Trek and that she had to be evacuated because she lived next door to the Iranian Embassy when it was occupied by terrorists. She was born before powered air flight, before commercial radio broadcasts and before television. Some lives experience so much change. 

There was much to enjoy in this biography but there was too much detail. I didn't need to hear about every visit she made to her son and his family. I would have preferred a better focused, broader brush approach.

Selected quotes: 

• “She provided vivid portraits of the defendants such as Goering, whose soft, feminine, and sometimes humorous qualities reminded Rebecca of a madam in a brothel.” (Ch 25)
• “Henry thought of himself as a gentleman farmer and liked to give guests the benefit of his agricultural knowledge, which in fact was negligible.” (Ch 34)
• “She was against censorship, but she objected to literature that had no moral standard” (Ch 34)
• “Dr. Stephan Ward, she concluded, represented a society that used women as commodities. Look at the way he had taken home a prostitute simply because he had spotted her standing next to a cigarette machine, Rebecca emphasized, ‘two machines standing side by side, waiting for custom’.” (Ch 34)
• “For her, dialogue, much more than description, revealed character. In her Sunday Telegraph reviews she chided novelists such as Iris Murdoch for talking too much about their characters rather than letting them talk.” (Ch 36)
• “She calmed herself by watching television, finding a ‘nice idiotic’ episode of Star Trek” (Ch 39)
• “On 30 April 1980, at about eleven a.m., April Edwards happened to look out of Rebecca’s big picture windows, which had a view of the back of the Iranian embassy. In the garden, a man was lying on his stomach with a gun in his hand.” (Ch 41)

October 2023

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

"Rip Tide" by Stella Rimington

 Stella Rimington was the Director General of MI5; she now writes spy novels featuring a female MI5 operative. She can hardly be accused of writing about what she doesn't know!

The book is in the classic thriller mould. It uses the past tense with told by an omniscient narrator who adopts multiple-perspectives - I counted fourteen separate characters who acted as a third-person narrator. This enables the author to keep the story moving along; the next bit of the narrative is always available because somebody can tell that segment of the story. However, there are two disadvantages of multi-PoV. Without using an unreliable narrator (which might be regarded as 'cheating' in this genre) the author cannot narrate from the PoV of one of the baddies ... so the reader can cross each narrator off from their list of suspects. The second disadvantage is, for me, more critical: only an exceptional author would be able to create fourteen characters sufficiently distinctive that they can convincingly narrate. 

It was interesting to note that wherever Rimington does describe the traits of a character it is almost always by saying what one of the other characters thinks of them, as if the author believes that the dictum 'show don't tell' can be circumvented by having one of the fictional characters do the telling.

I understand that a novelist isn't obliged to give a balanced account of the socio-political structure of the world . There were moments when Rimington tried to offer a balance, for example when it was explained why Somali pirates were forced into piracy and when the villains were allowed to offer justifications (though these seemed shallow, the platitudes of fanatics, rather than any sort of personal soul-searching) but these were momentary paragraphs, lost in the bulk of the book, and had the appearance of unconvincing tokens. I reiterate that it isn't the function of a novel to offer balance. But the best spy novels (eg those of John le Carre and Graham Greene) are able to be intensely personal accounts of individuals seem from only their perspective and yet can still suggest that the world of espionage (like the world itself) is full of moral ambiguities. This book reverts to a simplistic division between goodies and baddies; the baddies are almost all dyed-in-the-wool villains and the only possible criticism that can be levelled at a goody seems to be that he (or, more rarely she) is incompetent or inefficient. 

But character doesn't really matter in this genre. The plot is everything, and Rimington has constructed a workable if fairly standard plot. It gets off to a slow start with the inciting incident being delayed until the end of chapter two but again that is standard within the genre; there is almost always a little bit of scene-setting first.

Despite the jarring use of the word 'expatiating' in the second sentence, there is little to object to in this book. It was a thoroughly competent example of the genre; the story rattled along in 63 short chapters (averaging less than six pages each chapter).

But if there is little to object to, equally, there is little to celebrate in this book. 

Fundamentally, this novelist can't seem to see that there are always many more than two sides to every story. That's a deficiency for a novelist (and scary in a spymaster) but perhaps it's inevitable if you have fourteen viewpoints.

Selected quotes:

• "He'd be a self-proclaimed 'straight shooter', which really just meant he not only lacked sophistication but was proud of the deficit." (Ch 28)
• "Tall, dark and not entirely handsome." (Ch 55)

The story rattles along, told in 63 short chapters. A perfect example of the genre. Think of it as a burger from a fast food outlet. There's a lot of skill goes into making food that millions of people enjoy. It's cheap and easy to eat and the flavours are unsubtle and utterly predictable, which often adds to the appeal: you know exactly what you will get. But I prefer meals with more complex flavours. Fast food is forgettable; I like memorable meals. I doubt I'll ever read another Rimington.

October 2023; 369 pages

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

"As Starlight Grows Cold" by Conrad Xavier

This is a no-holds-barred account of life in an impoverished town in south-east England in the late 1990s. Karen 'Starlight' McCarthy lives with her alcoholic father; her friends are lesbian Rebecca and stripper Linda. Stalker and his gang of skinheads beat up Asian men and subscribe to Nazi ideologies. At the local hospital, porter Jonboy and manager Peterson (who has a weakness for cocaine and underage girls) vie for the affections of nurse Jenny Jenkins. 

It's raw, it's visceral, it's in your face. There are countless uses of the c-word and the f-words; there are scenes of racial abuse; there is endless misogyny and (mostly abusive) sex. This is not a book for those who are easily offended. 

There's a lot of dialogue which means that it often carries the burden of the narration. This often meant that the dialogue felt stilted and artificial, reducing the feeling of verisimilitude. There were dialogic markers to distinguish some characters (Jonboy, for example, had a distinctive way of talking) but by and large the characters sounded much the same. 

There was a clear distinction between 'goodies' and 'baddies'. This gave a feeling of one-dimensionality. Perhaps the only slightly complex character was Stalker who was a brutal thug but capable of surprisingly articulate argument but his intellectual side was only apparent so late on in the book that, rather than adding to his character it sounded out of character. With this exception, no-one had a character arc. These weaknesses tended to undermine the power of the narrative.

It might have been a better book if the cast of characters had been reduced so that the author could have concentrated on bringing them to life. There was a lot of incident, it was certainly action-packed. I read the book very quickly so it was, for me, a page turner.

Selected quotes:

• "I've walked through the turnstiles of life, seen the match and now I want a bleeding refund." (Ch 1)
• "The once thriving shopping centre had a large number of empty premises whilst those that still traded had worried owners staring out at each passer-by as if willing them to come in." (Ch 7)
• "A bare lightbulb hung precariously from the ceiling illuminating a landscape of broken boxes, castaway furniture, pieces of old piping, chains and a few long blades." (Ch 8)

Although I never quite believed in any of the characters, this is down-to-earth fiction with attitude. It's honest and brutal and packs a punch. 

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

"Sir Charles Dilke: A Victorian Tragedy" by Roy Jenkins

This is one of those biographies which seems to be intended for a select readership: those who are already in the know. Roy Jenkins has written a book which demands at least a working knowledge of the personalities and politics of late-19th century Britain. He's a bit better when his hero goes abroad but he doesn't explain who, for example, the Prince Imperial is. He compounds the mystery by quoting chunks of foreign Language, usually French, without translation. Books should be about communication and I would have thought that Mr Jenkins as a well-known and successful politician would be a great communicator. Perhaps he thinks I read French. Perhaps he doesn't want me to understand. Perhaps he has written this book purely for his own amusement.

Sir Charles Dilke was a Victorian with a baronetcy and a private income who became a Liberal MP, on the radical wing of the party, and soon attained Cabinet rank under Prime Minister Gladstone. He was then named as a co-respondent in a divorce case and, despite his name being apparently cleared, was judged by the establishment to be guilty. He lost his position, he lost his influence, and he lost his seat (although after some time being ostracised by society in general he got another constituency which he represented as a back-bencher to the end of his life).  

Of course it was the scandal that prompted me to read the book and I wasn't prepared for wading through the masses of biographical detail about his early life and his gradual gaining of political influence. As I say above, to properly appreciate what was going on you need to have a decent understanding of late Victorian politics. I don't, so most of the names passed me by in a blur.

Even when I recognise a name, it seems that Jenkins wants to try to keep me in the dark. He mentions Leslie Stephen as a influence on Dilke at Cambridge University without telling us that this man was the father of Virginia Woolf. (He does tell us that Dilke's second wife was, in an earlier marriage, thought to be the model for Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch.)

By now I'm bored.

Then come the court case(s). Jenkins trawls through the testimony. There's a lot of detail. Too much. I drown. More of a blur.

Even when we get to the chapter that suggests there might have been a conspiracy, every little thing is told to us. There is no smoking gun. There's a lot of circumstantial evidence. There are hints that could be used to suggest theories but Jenkins fails to draw out any generalities from the stodgy mass of evidence. He is too serious a scholar to speculate.

What did I learn? Little, except that Queen Victoria meddled in government far more than is generally allowed. 

Selected quotes:

• "He thought a thirty-mile walk the most agreeable way of passing a quiet Sunday afternoon, and he was known on occasion to walk from Cambridge to London during the day, attend a dinner in the evening, and walk back during the night." (Ch 1) It is over fifty miles from Cambridge to London; Google reckons that would take twenty hours. To do it in ten hours would require a walking speed of five miles per hour which is scarcely credible. Has anybody ever checked this 'fact'?
• "He had a horror of 'soft' climates and of the easy, purposeless living to which he thought they gave rise. The banana, the most typical product of such a climate, he regarded with particular horror." (Ch 2)
• "Stanley, the explorer, came on one occasion, but he struck Dilke as 'brutal, bumptious, and untruthful." (Ch 4) This autobiography of Stanley makes it clear that he was exceptionally brutal and a pathological liar.
• "He possessed to an unusual degree the essential ingredients of moral intolerance - he was a puritan fascinated by sex." (Ch 12)
• "The Congo Free State, under the personal suzerainty of the King of the Belgians ... was intended to be a spearhead of civilisation in Central Africa. By the middle of the 'nineties, however, the spear looked somewhat blunted. Slave dealing persisted and the army of the Free State ... had been fed for long periods by means of a system of organised cannibalism." (Ch 18) Another fact that might need checking.
• "In these later years he much enjoyed going to plays in Paris, but however satisfying he found the performance he always left after the first act. He was not bored, but thought that one act of a play was enough." (Ch 19)

Jenkins says that the speeches the Dilke made in the House of Commons were typified by by very long and lacking in oratory but thoroughly thorough, full of facts and evidence. This biography is much the same. There are a lot of facts (though I think some needed treating rather more sceptically) but the overall impression is one of tedium.

October 2023; 418 pages

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

"The Four Just Men" by Edgar Wallace

Royal Courts of Justice, London

The Four Just Men (actually there are only three of them but they have recruited a fourth for the purposes of this particular novel) are self-appointed judges administering a vigilante justice to those who are above the law, such as "a capitalist controlling the markets of the world, a speculator cornering cotton or wheat whilst mills stand idle and people starve, tyrants and despots with the destinies of nations between their thumb and finger". (Ch 7) They threaten to murder a government minister unless he withdraws a proposed law which will enable the extradition of aliens who, in modern terms, have sought political asylum in the UK. Their code of honour requires that they offer repeated warnings so their designated victim has plenty of opportunity to  comply with their demands. Can they carry out their plans when the whole of Scotland Yard's finest are ranged against them?

It's one of those morally dubious books that has you rooting for the killers, for those outside the law, for what would then be called anarchists and now be called terrorists.

It is a simple and short story told (Wallace doesn't really adhere to 'show don't tell') in very simple prose and sentences and paragraphs that are short and punchy. The plot seesaws: both sides have successes and failures. There is a significant reliance on impenetrable disguises and the FJM are incredibly well-informed about the police, though how they know what they do seems to be a mystery. The three core members of the FJM have private incomes and are extraordinarily well-educated, quoting classical authors, and being wonderful chemists: they're a sort of Marty Stu melange of Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, The Saint, Lord Peter Wimsey and James Bond. The new recruit is a sneak thief, a coward, and a potential Judas recruited solely because he has the skills for this one particular job. In other words, no character is at all well-rounded. I would have said that it would be impossible to recreate Wallace's success because the modern public would not be so naive but the continuing success of thriller fiction proves me wrong.

Wallace was one of the most prolific (over 170 novels) and successful writers of the twentieth century; The Four Just Men, published in 1905 when he was just 30, was his first successful novel. Previously he had been a soldier and a newspaperman and his journalistic experience is clear both from the content of this novel and its style (very tabloid). He went on to write Sanders of the River (distressingly racist and colonialist but with a much more interestingly complex protagonist) and the first draft of King Kong. 

Selected quotes:

• "He sat at a little table, this man, obviously ill at ease, pinching his fat cheeks, smoothing his shaggy eyebrows, fingering the white scar on his unshaven chin, doing all the things that the lower classes do when they sudden;y find themselves placed on terms of equality with their betters." (Ch 1) Wallace was an illegitimate child born to an actress and fostered; he played truant from school; and yet he still swallowed wholesale the English class system.
• "Poiccart was a chemist, a man who found joy in unhealthy precipitates, who mixed evil-smelling drugs and distilled, filtered, carbonated, oxydized [sic], and did all manner of things in glass tubes, to the vegetable, animal, and mineral products of the earth." (Ch 9)

October 2023; 108 pages

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

"The Judgment of Paris" by Gore Vidal

 A rich (of course), good-looking (of course) young American boy spends a year in Italy, Egypt and France, mingling with the cream of decadent society. He encounters three women: Regina (Latin for Queen, standing in for the Queen of Olympus) who tempts him with thoughts of political power, Sophie (Greek for Wisdom) who is into amateur archaeology and, from her name alone, tempts him with wisdom, and Anna who is very lovely. Guess who he chooses! In Paris! This concept reminded me very much of a chapter ('The Judgement of Bally') in my novel Bally and Bro in which my (poor, good-looking) eponymous hero has to choose between June (aka Juno) who offers him riches, Sophie who offers to teach him, and lovely Helen who offers him a shag. Guess who he chooses!

Young Philip spends most of his time at parties being wooed by both  men (Europe appears to be crammed with homosexuals) and women. Some of the happenings are weird, such as the enormously obese man who wants to die and the detective novelist who agrees to try and murder him, and the English/ Welsh Lord (there seems to be some confusion here) who enlists Philip in a conspiracy to restore the royal house of Savoy to the Italian throne, and later tries to enlist him in a quasi-religious cult worshipping a hermaphrodite. It's not just funny peculiar, there are also a few funny haha moments. But all this fun isn't enough to leaven the dough of politics and philosophy and posturing in Philip's endless discussions with his playmates. There were more than a few bits I scan-read; towards the end I skipped whole paragraphs. 

The trouble is that Vidal is extraordinarily learned and he doesn't want to waste any opportunities to demonstrate his learning: "The perfect pearl of the Renaissance was misshapen by a rigid manner and the baroque was born of that tension between nature and artifice. Philip wondered if he would have the opportunity to tell Mr Norman that the word baroquie came from the Spanish word barocco which meant a misshapen pearl." (Ch 1) Philip never gets the chance ... but Vidal won't waste it.

It is conventionally written in the third person past tense; there are moments when the author's own voice intrudes, such as: "Part of the pleasure one gets from reading novels is the inevitable moment when the hero beds the heroine or, in certain advanced and decadent works, the hero beds another hero in an infernal glow of impropriety." (Ch 3)

I've read and adored a number of Gore Vidal novels. I love his historical novels: the series starting Burr and continuing with Lincoln, Empire and Washington DC. His Roman novel Julian is also great. I have been less impressed by The City and the Pillar and Myra Breckinridge, and the apocalyptic Kalki has moments of great silliness. This is my least favourite. Mostly boring and pompous.

Selected quotes:

• "His body ... was well-formed and greatly admired by the not inconsiderable company which had, at one time or another (and on some occasions at the same time) enjoyed it." (Ch 1)
• "He could scuttle the bark of others with some torpedo of esoterica ... it was he knew the surest way to total unpopularity in a pretentious age." (Ch 1)
• "'I want to look nice,' he added simply, expressing his philosophy in five words." (Ch 1)
• "For young men ... the body ... gives no trouble and, served properly, can be the best of all possible toys." (Ch 3)
• "Her face was lifted once a year until now it was almost totally expressionless, as though fixed for all time by some Medusa, in a mood mid-way between surprise and doubt." (Ch 4)
• "He did things to a soft-poached egg which Philip never wanted to see done again." (Ch 8)

October 2023; 316 pages

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

"Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro

 

I read this many years ago. At the time, the revelations burst upon me one by one and, having wept near the ending, I considered this a hugely powerful piece of fiction which was nominated for the 2005 Booker Prize, and, almost alone, justifies Ishiguro's 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. A BBC poll rated it the 34th best novel of all time.

Now, re-reading it, I'm not so sure. Knowing the plot from the start, it had less power to surprise me. But what I can appreciate is his development of character. There are three main characters who grow up together in a sort of boarding-school. Kath, the narrator, is extraordinarily perceptive about the emotions and motivations of the people she observes. Tommy is a lonely little boy: he's often bullied and he has tantrums. Ruth's powerful imagination, her determination, and her sometimes bitchy behaviour make her a natural leader. Together with the other members of their peer group, they go through all the pangs of growing up, the shifts of loyalty, the squabbles and the reconciliations. 

It's hugely normal and everyday and this creates huge verisimilitude so that the reader starts becoming aware of what makes these kids different at the same time as they do. Ishiguro adds the oddness in and raises the temperature in tiny increments, so that it becomes natural to talk of donations and carers, of possibles and completion and Madame's Gallery even before you really know what they mean, which is just the way a child would learn.

By the time you realise why these children will never have the opportunities taken for granted in the world at large, you are fully invested in them. You follow the roller coaster, the ups of hope and the downs of despair.

The plot is, of course, important. But it is the skill with which Ishiguro has  shown the reader the world through the eyes of Kath, so that the reader empathises and becomes one with Kath, that makes him worthy of the Nobel. He does the same thing in Klara and the Sun, a later book narrated by an android.

Towards the end there is a long intense speech which sets out the moral options and explains why the dystopian future world the Ishiguro has created is as it is.

But mostly the prose wanders back and forth as Kath narrates her story. For example: "Anyway, to get back to my point, when this sort of talk was going on, it was often Ruth who took it further than anyone." Mostly the narrative is straight-forward but every so often there are phrases like "anyway, to get back to my point ..." that ramp up the feeling that this is naturalistic dialogue. It also deflects attention away from the fact that Kath is both incredibly observant and has an extraordinary memory, repeating conversations, even from childhood, verbatim; the occasional admission that she isn't sure about something makes the reader feel that the rest must be true. This subtly used technique ramps up the verisimilitude without getting in the way of the flow of the story.

And then, again, I wept. Because, in the end, the insoluble problem faced by each of these children, is the one faced by all of us: what's the point in art or anything, or love, when in the end we will die and we will be forgotten.

Some authorities classify it as a Bildungsroman and I would concur.

This book prompted an interesting reading group discussion. Most of us, like myself, were reading the book for the second time and felt this gave us a different appreciation of it; in particular we could admire the author's artistry in the way he delicately dropped in foreshadowings. It was felt that Kath was an unreliable but not dishonest narrator: she has a very good memory for things but she often admits that her recollections do not necessarily conform to those of others. We realised that Kath's superpower (noticing and being able to understand the nuances of human behaviour) was a useful narrative device. 

One of our members suggested that the book belonged to the Gothic genre. She cited the settings: the boarding school as a sort of ruined castle set in its unkempt grounds, the removal to the Cottages (a metaphor for the barns in which farm animals are kept) which are cold and set in a barren landscape, the empty roads along which the mature and isolated Kath drives.

Perhaps Tommy, who has tantrums, is modelled after the conflicted hero of Gothic literature, the young Heathcliff. Is 'Kath' a reference to Cathy of Wuthering Heights? Is she the damsel in distress? Perhaps she is more like the heroine of Jane Eyre, who reunites with her love only after he has been crippled.

There are spoilers in the following paragraph

Or, rather than considering the Brontes, is this a version of Frankenstein? The kids are not normal human beings, looked on with dread by Madame even though she is one of their protectors and advocates; the kids are the monsters. Frankenstein, their creator, never appears, but the moral issues are very similar: even when the guardians do their best to protect to protect them, still they are human cattle exploited for the benefit of society. They leave Hailsham in the same way that Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden, to wander the earth. The difference is that the kids don't rebel against their creators (though I and all the book group were ardently wishing Kath would just run away!). The monster's angry rebuke to his creator, his God - "Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature ... Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends” - does not hold in this version of the myth. 

Selected quotes:

• "It's almost like entering a hall of mirrors. Of course, you don't exactly see yourself reflected back loads of times, but you almost think you do." (Ch 2) Nice foreshadowing
• "We certainly knew - though not in any deep sense - that we were different from our guardians, and also from the normal people outside." (Ch 6)
• "We're modelled from trash. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps. Convicts, maybe, just so long as they aren't psychos. That's what we come from." (Ch 14)
• "She told Roy that things like pictures, poetry, all that kind of stuff, she said they revealed what you were like inside. She said they revealed your soul." (Ch 15)
• "Right from that first time, there was something in Tommy's manner that was tinged with sadness, that seemed to say: 'Yes, we're doing this now and I'm glad we're doing it now. But what a pity we left it so late'." (Ch 20)
• "However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neurone disease, heart disease." (Ch 22)
• "I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold on to each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart." (Ch 23)

Also by this author and reviewed in this blog:

• Klara and the Sun: Klara is an android and this is her interior monologue as she tries to make sense of the human world.
• The Buried Giant: Ishiguro's version of fantasy? An old man and his wife leave their mediaeval village to embark upon a quest.
• When We Were Orphans: Celebrated private detective, Christopher Banks, returns to Shanghai to solve the mystery of the disappearance of his parents.
• The Unconsoled: a Kafkaesque masterpiece

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

"Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier

"Last night I dream I went to Manderley again" is the first line of this book, made famous by being the first (voiceover) line of the Hitchcock film (which, being made just two years after the book's publication, and starring Laurence Olivier, and winning the Oscar for Best Picture, was probably responsible for the book's enormous success but has subsequently coloured many people's reading of the book). 

But it is a much respected book in its own right, being placed as the 6th best crime novel of all time by the British Crime Writers' Association and the 9th best by the Mystery Writers of America. 

The novel is narrated by the never-named protagonist (all we are told, in chapter 4, is that she has "a very lovely and unusual name") in the first-person, past-tense. It is introduced (it's a sort of framing device, excpet that in the end we don't return to the frame) by her living abroad in a hotel with a man for whom she cares. She tells her story. As an orphaned young companion to a wonderfully spiteful old woman, she is staying in Monte Carlo when she meets Maxim de Winter. They fall in love and marry; he then takes her back to England where he lives in Manderley, a stately home. She finds it difficult to assume the role of chatelaine of the manor, especially since she has stepped into the shoes of the first Mrs de Winter, the eponymous Rebecca, a woman whom, it seems, the servants and the local community adored; the narrator assumes her new husband is still in thrall to his deceased first wife. Rebecca's shadow hangs heavily over the house, there are even suggestions that her ghost haunts it. There is tremendous conflict, especially from Mrs Danvers, the uber-competent housekeeper, who is still in mourning for the dead Rebecca. And there is a mystery about how Rebecca died.

The book is powered by the character of the narrator. She is an imaginative woman and this leads her to imagine what people are thinking and sometimes her assumptions are wrong, leading her into wonderful faux pas. She is also, at least in the first part of the book, hugely intimidated by the servants, leading her to do things like concealing little mistakes she makes. But when the chips are down, she becomes a tower of strength, powered by her love. (This character arc reminded me of that of the easily-bullied protagonist of my novel The Kids of God, although that takes a rather darker and, I think, more realistic turn.)

The first chapter provides the hook and acts as a sort of prologue or a framing device (without, however a corresponding epilogue to complete the frame).  The narrator has a dream of her past life; presently she is living with an unnamed male companion in a sort of exile. Then she starts remembering what happened and the next sixth of the book describes how Prince Charming meets Cinderella while Cinderella's employer provides the ugly stepmother who seeks to prevent the blossoming romance. 

The next part of the book, the main part, is a classic Gothic novel. Cinderella becomes the Damsel in Distress, transported to the Big House, whose West Wing is disused. Prince Charming is now the Brooding Hero-with-a-Mysterious-Past and the Housekeeper (described at first sight as "tall and gaunt, dressed in deep black, whose prominent cheek-bones and great, hollow eyes gave her a skull's face, parchment white, set on a skeleton's frame" Ch 7) is the villain who has the Damsel in her power (though this is topsy-turvy in that the Damsel technically employs the villain). The half-ruined house, isolated in a brooding landscape (all those bloody rhododendrons!) is haunted by the memories of Rebecca: there is the classic Gothic trope of the past infecting and contaminating the present. There's even a mad peasant on the seashore who makes cryptic comments which the reader just knows must be crucial to the plot!

Then comes the final quarter of the book which is almost a thriller.

At the heart of the novel, there is a wonderful set piece: the fancy dress balll. It is one of those moments when the reader is ahead of the narrator and understands exactly what the consequences will be. Du Maurier takes her time building up the suspense,  putting in delay after delay: I was reading this section as fast as I could. It was glorious. It is also characteristically Gothic: Ann Radcliffe, who wrote A Sicilian Romance, amongst many other books, suggested that terror was created by suspense.

There is some very cleverly constructed dialogue. In a number of scenes, when there is a secret of which some of the participants are unaware, the conversation is wonderfully one-sided. The innocent blather on about trivialities (the weather, social issues) and sometimes tangentially refer to the secret they don't know, while those in on the secret are restricted to replying almost in monosyllables, eg "'Yes,' I said." This device is repeated several times and works very well.

Like in her novel Jamaica Inn, Du Maurier milks the pathetic fallacy to the max. The weather in Cornwall always seems to mirror the narrator's mood, whether providing sun or (far more frequently) rain and, when needed, mist. Nevertheless, du Maurier gets away with this because of the brilliance of her descriptions of the countryside in all its meteorological moods. In her dream at the opening of the book, the narrator imagines a Manderley without its gardeners, where the tamed nature surrounding it has grown wild and reclaimed it; this is a trope of Gothic fiction.

The only bit that slightly let the novel down, I thought, was the rather over melodramatic scene in which the housekeeper, now apparently a madwoman, tries to persuade the narrator to jump out of the window. But all the best Gothic novels have moments of melodrama. 

Jane Eyre

The parallels between Rebecca and Jane Eyre are obvious. An orphaned young girl with little social standing meets a wealthy man haunted by his past. He proposes. In JE the marriage is interrupted by the news that the first wife is still alive; in Rebecca they marry but the early days of the marriage are haunted by the memories of the first wife. In the end, after the stately home has burned down, the protagonist becomes carer for the physically (JE) or mentally (R) crippled man.

Maxim de Winter
Maxim de Winter, the Prince Charming/ Man with a Past, is  what E M Forster in Aspects of the Novel describes as a ‘flat’ character. Perhaps DdM realised the contradictions inherent in such a character: he is the man who married foolishly and then permitted his first wife to be as unfaithful as she liked until he believed that she had cuckolded him and Manderley, the real love of his life, would be inherited by a bastard at which point he killed and covered up the murder. Then he buggered off to Monte Carlo and (guiltless?) married again, this time to a woman half his age whom he treats as a child. Swanning back home he almost disappears from the pages of the book until he confesses to his new wife that he has murdered his first. Seemingly unafraid of him, she now contrives to cover up his crime, virtually without his help, until they go abroad and he is reduced to a helpless shell of a man. It would be difficult to portray such a man as a ‘round’ character. He is more of a plot device than a character. Some of the book group members suggested that he was a villain and that maybe he exercised coercive control over the 2nd Mrs deW, but it seems to me that he is a helpless victim of his position in the caste system and the responsibilities imposed upon him as owner of Manderley (and the wickednesses of Rebecca and the ongoing schemes of Mrs Danvers whose first act in the book is to marshall the servants in direct opposition to his orders); it is Rebecca and Mrs Danvers who are the villains and it is they who exercise coercive control (and Mrs Danvers also gaslights the narrator).

Is Mrs Danvers in love with Rebecca?
Did Mrs Danvers have a sapphic desire for Rebecca. There is a key scene (ch 14) where the narrator goes to Rebecca’s room in the west wing and is discovered there by Mrs Danvers. Mrs Danvers says: “That was her bed. It’s a beautiful bed, isn’t it? ... Here is her nightdress ... You’ve been touching it, haven’t you? ... Would you like to touch it again? ... Feel it, hold it ... I haven’t washed it since she wore it for the last time ... this is her dressing gown ... Put it up against you ... She had a beautiful figure ... Put your hands inside her slippers.” It’s quite creepy. It is certainly possible to read a (one-sided and latent, unreciprocated) lesbian infatuation into that. 

Another suggestion was that the narrator and Rebecca are mirror images. In the Ch 14 scene, the narrator actually sees herself in Rebecca’s dressing-table mirror, and of course in the pivotal fancy-dress ball the narrator is duped into dressing up exactly as Rebecca had a tear before. In other ways, however, they are contrasts. The narrator is smaller than Rebecca was and has limp hair. The narrator comes from a social class that hasn’t been bred to run a stately home. And, of course,the narrator is in love with, and faithful to, her husband.

Miscellaneous points:

• The poetry book given by Rebecca to Maxim falls open at The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson.
• The medicine Taxol, which Mrs Van Hopper takes in the book, was an effervescent salt similar to Eno's; Taxol is now the brand name for an anti-cancer drug which hadn't been discovered when Rebecca was written.

Major turning points (spoiler alert):

• Max asks the narrator to marry him 15% of the way through the book. In a delightful foreshadowing, she is eating a sour tangerine which leaves a bad taste in her mouth.
• They arrive at Manderley at the 17% mark.
• Narrator discovers Rebecca's room in the West Wing: 25%
• Beatrice explains about Mrs D: 27%
• Narrator discovers the cottage in the cove: 30%
• Narrator meets Jack, one of the villains: 42%
• Mrs Danvers suggests a costume for the fancy dress ball: 53%
• The costume creates a sensation: 57%
• The scene in which a hysterical Mrs D tries to persuade the narrator to jump out of the window: 65%
• Maxim explains what happened to Rebecca: 71%
• They find out about the doctor: 92%

Selected quotes:

• "A lilac had mated with a copper beech, and to bind them yet more closely to one another the malevolent ivy, always an enemy to grace, had thrown her tendrils around the pair and made them prisoners."  (Ch 1) A dreamed metaphor for Mr and the second Mrs de Winter trapped by the malevolent ghost of Rebecca?
• "We can never go back, that much is certain." (Ch 2)
• "Not a single well-known personality. I shall tell the management they must make a reduction on my bill. What do they think I come here for? To look at the page boys?" (Ch 2)
• "I could tell by the way the sauce ran down her chin that her dish of ravioli pleased her." (Ch 2)
• "I remember a well-known writer once who used the dart down the Service staircase whenever he saw me coming. I suppose he had a penchant for me and wasn't sure of himself." (Ch 3)
• "They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word." (Ch 5)
• "The past had blown away like the ashes in the waste-paper basket." (Ch 6)
• "I was not sure what he meant by modesty. It was a word I had never understood. I always imagined it had something to do with minding meeting people in a passage on the way to a bathroom ..." (Ch 11)
• "I had been selfish and hyper-sensitive, a martyr to my own inferiority complex." (Ch 11)
• "I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone." (Ch 13)
• "He went on looking me up and down in his amused way with those familiar, unpleasant blue eyes. I felt like a barmaid." (Ch 13)
• "Now that I knew her to have been evil and vicious and rotten I did not hate her any more. She could not hurt me." (Ch 21)
• "Whoever lived within its walls, whatever trouble there was and strife, however much uneasiness and pain, no matter what tears were shed, what sorrows born, the peace of Manderley could not be broken or the loveliness destroyed." (Ch 26)

October 2023; 302 pages

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

An abbreviated du Maurier Bibliography
Novels:

• The Loving Spirit (1931)
• I'll Never Be Young Again (1932)
• The Progress of Julius (1933) (later re-published as Julius)
• Jamaica Inn (1936)
• Rebecca (1938)
• Frenchman's Creek (1941)
• Hungry Hill (1943)
• The King's General (1946)
• The Parasites (1949)
• My Cousin Rachel (1951)
• Mary Anne (1954)
• The Scapegoat (1957)
• Castle Dor (1961) (with Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch)
• The Glass-Blowers (1963)
• The Flight of the Falcon (1965)
• The House on the Strand (1969)
• Rule Britannia (1972)

Selected non-fiction:

• Gerald: A Portrait (1934)
• The Du Mauriers (1937)
• The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (1960)
• Golden Lads: Sir Francis Bacon, Anthony Bacon and their Friends (1975)
• The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall (1976)