"AD After Disclosure" by Richard M Dolan and Bryce Zabel

 This book is a mixture of fiction and speculation; it suggests possible future scenarios for a world after the 'Disclosure' that UFOs exist, that they carry aliens to this world, and that there has been a decades-long inter-governmental programme of secrecy to hide these facts from the general public.

Whether UFOs do actually exist and whether there has been a cover-up are questions that the book doesn't really address. If either of these assumptions are false, their arguments collapse. So let's look at the evidence that they do present.

• They cite "thousands of professional witnesses, such as law enforcement, military pilots, and even astronauts.” (Ch 1) It always seems important for these sorts of books to establish the credibility of what is almost always anecdotal evidence by describing the witnesses as 'professional' or by giving job titles that suggest their reliability. In later chapters they cite senior politicians. Other examples include: "higher level military and Intelligence personnel" (Ch 1); one of the Roswell witnesses (as a child of twelve) is described as “a woman with impeccable credibility and decency” although the ‘decency’ is irrelevant and there is no evidence proffered to support the ‘impeccable credibility’ (Ch 2); “Serious researchers of UFOs agree that these craft appear to negate the Earth's gravity.” (Ch 5) in which presumably those who do not agree with the point they are making are relegated to the category of 'unserious researchers'. 
• “Most people now reject the theory that all sightings can be explained away” (Ch 1) But truth isn't a democratic choice by which what 'most people' believe is true. Once, most people believed the world was flat. But it isn't. (At the same time they often argue that minorities can be right; that even if 99% of UFO phenomena can be explained, the ones that can't should be sufficient to lead to a paradigm shift in our thinking.)
• Another classic rhetorical device that they use is to give alternatives that are to be rejected before concluding in favour of your own thesis. Having swept away manifest untruths, they conclude that their solution  must be true. But there are always alternatives that they don't put forward.
• When they state their thesis, they often downgrade it so that is becomes acceptable, as in the phrase "Some UFOs appear to be ...” (Ch 1)
• They often ask questions, such as "can we really believe that a secret such as the presence of an alien intelligence on Earth can continue to remain hidden and undisclosed?” (Ch 1) Note that this question also includes the unchallenged assumption that there is “the presence of an alien intelligence on Earth”. 
• When they discuss what they assert is a culture of secrecy in the US, the implied syllogism is this:
• There are some things that are classified secrets.
• The evidence for UFOs might be a classified secret.
• Therefore UFOs have been discovered but are being kept secret.
• Clearly this argument is flawed. Nevertheless, they build on it to the extent of asserting that there exists “A significant ‘built-off-the-grid’ infrastructure, partially underground, that affords them a high degree of secrecy and independence of action.” (Ch 2) with no evidence for this claim whatsoever. 
• When they discuss the infamous Roswell incident, they assert "authentic wreckage was swapped out for a weather balloon” (Ch 3); I would rewrite this as ‘allegedly authentic’ and ‘allegedly swapped’ unless evidence was to be presented. 

A readable book but it contains a number of examples of rhetoric replacing reason.

Selected quotes:

• “It is always the nail that sticks out that gets hammered.” (Ch 2)
• “Humans are a very adaptable species. When our living conditions change, whether it involves going to prison or winning the lottery, we alter our attitudes and expectations.” (Ch 5)
• “Humanity needs a post-oil economy; humanity fears a post-oil economy.” (Ch 5)
• “Scientific conclusions are always provisional. They are subject to change when new evidence is presented. This may be an emotional drawback for those who demand certainty in their lives, but ... it is an advantage over the long term.” (Ch 7)

June 2024; 315 pages

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

"The English Teacher" by R K Narayan

Krishna teaches English at the College he was taught at. He has w ife and a daughter and a life of domestic harmony. Until it all goes wrong. Once again, Narayan explores the life of a very ordinary person and finds the transcendent in the everyday.

The first half of the book is firmly rooted in mundane reality, although sometimes Krishna finds lyrical beauty in his surroundings. But in the second half (and the turning point, almost exactly half way through, is a key moment) the sacred and the spiritual are foregrounded. But this is India and you can never be quite certain that a holy man isn't a con artist. 

It has a well-paced plot, structured after the four Ashramas (life stages) of Hindu tradition. The first stage is the 'chaste student'; although Krishna is already married and a father  teaching when we first encounter him, he is still living as a bachelor in the college accommodation where he was a student. The second stage, that of householder, describes his married life, and the everyday adventure of domesticity. This ends exactly half way through the book; the second half chronicles the third stage and ends on the brink of Krishna embarking on the fourth. The plot contained several developments which I hadn't expected at all but nevertheless could be seen to develop naturally, a classic Aristotelian reversal. I found the ending deeply satisfying.

It is narrated in the first person and the past tense by the protagonist, Krishna. He's a very ordinary man, fumbling and bickering his way through life, who only really discovers how deeply he loves when it's too late. He feels terribly real. His character is developed by his history and his circumstances. The other characters are drawn from the ranks of the ordinary and perfectly observed; even the visionary Headteacher, saintly in some respects, is fleshed out through the way he treats and is treated by his wife and children. This a drama of people you might meet down the street.

The language is careful, measured and grammatical; I felt that every word was carefully chosen. Despite it being a first person narrative, there was a lot more show than tell. There are moments of glorious description:

• "I was going to write of the cold water's touch on the skin, the cold air blowing on chest and face, the rumble of the river, cries of birds, magic of the morning light, all of which created an alchemy of inexplicable joy." (Ch 1) 
• "As the dusk gathered around us, utter silence reigned. I too sat, not knowing what we waited for, The casuarina murmured and hushed, the ripples splashed on the shore. A bright star appeared in the sky." (Ch 5)
• "As I sat in the sands of Sarayu, a late moon rose in the east, and the flowing water shimmered with it." (Ch 7)

If you, as reader, finds that the story is so ordinary that it seems a little dull, if you feel that it drags a little at the start, keep going. Your perseverance will be rewarded. It's never a page-turner but the events of the middle and the second half are well worth the wait. 

It also acts as a commentary on colonialism. Krishna is employed to teach the delights of the literature of a colonising people; the headmaster, Brown, has never bothered to learn any Indian language despite living in the sub-continent for thirty years. Krishna's wife, Susila, has spent years trying to read Ivanhoe and Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare but can't get past page fifty. Explicitly: "I could no longer stuff Shakespeare and Elizabethan metre and Romantic poetry for the hundredth time into young minds and feed them on the dead mutton of literary analysis and theories and histories ... This education had reduced us to a nation of morons; we were strangers to our own culture and camp followers of another culture, feeding on leavings and garbage." (Ch 8)

Selected quotes:

• "House-keeping was a grand affair for her. The essence of her existence consisted of the thrills and pangs and the satisfaction that she derived in running a well-ordered household." (Ch 2)
• "I have the feeling of a crow flying in a storm." (Ch 5)
• "It was a street within a street, and a lane tucked away into a lane. There was every sign that the municipality had forgotten the existence of this part of town. Yet it seemed to maintain a certain degree of sanitation, mainly with the help of the sun, wind and rain. The sun burned so severely most months that bacteria and infection turned to ashes. The place had a general clean up when the high winds rose before the monsoon set in, and whirled into a column the paper scraps, garbage, egg-shells, and leaves. ... And it was all followed by a good wash-down when the rains descended in November and December and flushed the streets." (Ch 6) Man proposes but God disposes. The municipality, if it is good for anything, should look after sanitation in the city but in the neglected areas such as the liminal district where the Headmaster lives, nature takes over the job and performs it efficiently enough. This is a key step on Krishnan's road to enlightenment. 
• "The street was littered with all kinds of things - wood shavings, egg shells, tin pieces and drying leaves. Dust was ankle deep." (Ch 6)
• "The memory of my own young days. Most of us forget that grand period. But with me it has always been there. A time at which the colour of things are different, their depths greater, their magnitude greater, a most balanced and joyous time of life... And then our own schooling which put blinkers on us; which persistently ruined this vision of things and made us into adults." (Ch 6)
• "It was as if a person lost in an abyss found a ladder, and the ladder crumbled." (Ch 7)
• "The kitchen is the deadliest arsenal a woman possesses." (Ch 7)
• "Success must be measured by its profitlessness, said a French philosopher." (Ch 8)

A slow burner but, once it gets going, it grips. June 2024; 184 pages

By the author of The Guide and The Painter of Signs and a host of other novels set in the fictional Indian city of Malgudi.

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

"From cleaner to crusader" by Matthew Birch

An easy-to-read minimalist action thriller.

Carl cleans up the evidence from government sanctioned assassinations. But the next corpse he discovers is his mother's. He tries to find out why she was killed and uncovers the murky secrets of the government agency for which he works. This leads to a climactic confrontation.

This book is written in the present tense, which gives it a sense of immediacy, and in the first person so that the reader sees everything from the perspective of the narrator. There's a lot of exposition and this extends to the narrator describing his dilemmas and moral choices in very clear terms. This has the effect of making him seen coldly dispassionate. This fits with the cold, almost totally loveless life he describes in chapter one and I suppose that a scene of crime cleaner has to bottle his emotions but Carl really doesn't appear to feel anything. He says that he feels upset by his mother's death but he seems totally in control. Perhaps he's a psychopath who doesn't feel emotions but knows how to fake them so as to appear normal.

The book is written in a staccato, stripped-down style. There's a lot of conflict but very little description. I'm not sure what any of the characters look like. This minimalism and focus on a narrated plot makes the story quick and very easy to read.

Characterisations tend to rely on archetypes. Although the protagonist arcs from being a pliant tool of the state to a rebel, this seems to be accomplished with very little difficulty or pain. Few of the other characters experience much development.

In chapter two, which, in a neat touch, starts with a near repetition of the starting of chapter one, there are several details that confused me. I had assumed that the second phone call came on the evening of the first day but we are told it was "last night"; it seemed odd that Carl didn't recognise the details of the address he was sent to; in chapter one he appears to be working solo while in chapter two he is part of a team. I thought at first that these were hints of an unreliable narrator - a postmodern touch - but there were no other suggestions of this except close to the end when the chronological sequence doesn't quite fit. There is also an interesting melding of USA details (senator, congressional inquiry, the word 'normalcy') and UK details ('a pint in the pub', the word 'mate' rather than 'pal'). 

Given his job, for which he would surely have had training, Carl seems unbelievably naive about what the 'agency' might be up to ... but given what is at stake he seems to be able to discover the truth with remarkable ease. Perhaps more description, even if it slowed up the story, would have led to greater verisimilitude.

Selected quotes:

• "Her voice, a lullaby in the harsh symphony of my existence, brings me a comfort that’s hard to come by in my line of work." (Ch 1)
• "The realisation that I truly am on my own in this fight settles in, a chilling companion in the darkness." (Ch 5)

June 2024

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

"This Good Book" by Iain Hood

Matthias Grünewald, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A beautifully written book about art and religion; it was also very funny.

 Susan Alison wants to paint the most perfect Crucifixion and when she encounters fellow art student Douglas she realises she has to have her as her Christ. He models for her over the next fourteen years, as the pair of them try different poses, different perspectives and different techniques. Meanwhile his career as a conceptual artist - he exhibits bags of his urine - progresses by leaps and bounds. 

I thought this was an incredible book. In one sense it is about the platonic but deeply loving  relationship between these two young people, but which reminded me of that in One Day by David Nicholls. But it is also about different understandings of God and Jesus, asking questions like: exactly how much did Jesus love his mother? and how does God experience the passage of time? There were moments when I wondered whether Douglas, a child prodigy in a number of fields, was supposed to represent Jesus. Susan Alison has quasi-epileptic 'absences' in which she says things that later seem to foretell the future so she must be some sort of prophet? But mostly it is about art and the varieties of art and the price that has to be paid for art.

I'm not sure I have ever experienced a book that was so immersed in visual art. Right from the first page when the narrator, Susan Alison, catches a glimpse of the belly of Douglas and reflects: "His flesh was yellow ochre and burnt siena and raw umber and there was a halo of pale blue-white fluorescent light around his head and shoulders. The light around him in the darkness of the hallway formed a circle, and the door frame formed a square. He moved his legs into an isoceles of reflected light from the fake while and blue diamond tile linoleum floor. Eight heads high. The perfection of the proportion of him. The luminousness of him." (Ch 1) Susan Alison and Douglas have repeated discussions about art. We are in the mind of Susan Alison every step of the twisted way as she explores the terrain in which she will create her masterpiece. This is art, art, art; the only comparable books in which art is so foregrounded that I can think of are My Name is Asher Lev (which is also about a painting of the Crucifixion) and its sequel The Gift of Asher Lev by Chain Potok. My novel Bally and Bro is also about an artist. 

TGB alludes repeatedly to paintings of the crucifixion, for example: "Matthias Grunewald's lip-smacking relish at twisted the emaciated body of Christ as he tortures the paint and makes Christ bleed near-solid gobbets of blood. Or Nikolai Ge's hideously terrifying and terrified Christ screaming at the top of his lungs to the sky and a God who cannot be there as his bedraggled rags soak with blood-red paint." (Ch 1) Fabulous descriptions which made me long to see these paintings: I have subsequently found many of them on the internet.

The first-person narrative voice, very Scottish and full of colloquialisms, is very strong in this novel and both the principal characters are fully realised in all their complexities; the narrator's stereotyping of Douglas is repeatedly confounded. The plot is perfectly paced (there's a huge climax almost exactly at the 75% turning point), and nicely twisted towards the end, and it was not till about 60% that I had my first hint of how the book might end. There's a surprising amount of humour, mostly around the idea of Douglas as a "don't say 'piss artist' because everybody says that." (Ch 2) There's also a lot of profound thinking about both art and religion. And the descriptive prose (such as in the paragraph above) is sometimes breath-taking.

Selected quotes:

• "Like all good Christians, she wanted good paintings of suffering and torture and death and rape and incest and child sacrifice and bestiality. Good Bible stories. Good paintings." (Ch 1)
• "Jesus needed to be beautiful, because if he's not beautiful then what is he? Jesus as God had to be the most beautiful man and the perfection of man, because if he's not that then what is he?" (Ch 2)
• "What else? Oh yes, he could drive and had a car. I know! Who would have thought?" (Ch 3)
• "Can you make your jokes funny so that I can identify them." (Ch 3)
• "Genuine is better than authentic." (Ch 6)
• "He was peeing into bags to pay for those meals. Scotland's shame!" (Ch 7)
• "The biggest arse that ever came off the arsehole production line." (Ch 8)
• "Like throughout history, all that the art owned by the Church proved is that it was the Church that had stolen the money from the peasants to pay for the bloody art." (Ch 9)
• "A turbulent mess of fleshy waves that was yellow ochre and burnt siena and raw umber and blackened blue and sickly , yellowing white and blood vermillion." (Ch 10)
• "The first failure of art is to not name a piece Untitled, because to need to title it means that the image or sculpture or installation or whatever it is cannot explain itself.  ... it's like a kid making a line drawing and then writing underneath it 'A DOG'." (Ch 14) I always think this is true when a poet at a poetry reading tells you what their poem is about before they read it: if you need to do that, it isn't good enough. I also felt this very strongly when looking at the Turner Prize entrants at the Towner Gallery in 2023 - 2024; in some cases (mostly downstairs) I would never have guessed what the artist intended without the text telling me. And that to me means that the artwork has failed. 
• "The two great traditions in crucifixion paintings: humiliation and exaltation." (Ch 14)

This superb book worked for me on every possible level. A strong narrative voice, a great plot, a deep relationship between two utterly believable characters and a great deal of food for thought. Six stars out of five! June 2024; 200 pages

Other books about art reviewed in this blog can be found on this page.

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

"The Geste of Duke Jocelyn" by Jeffery Farnol

 In the days of Merrie England, a Duke Jocelyn rides forth disguised as a jester to woo Yolande. His problem, and the reason for his disguise, is that he has been injured and is facially disfigured and he wants Yolande to love him for himself rather than for his Dukedom and wealth. He is accompanied by his best friend, disguised knight Sir Pertinax, whose favourite oath is "Par Dex" On his journey he encounters an outlaw named Robin, an old witch and her grandson, a cudgel swinging dwarf named Lobkyn Lollo and a variety of baddies. Adventures include a spell in the castle dungeons and a jousting tournament.

It was written in 1919 and it sounds like a romantic-historical potboiler of the worst type. Indeed, it is peppered with 'quoth' and 'forsooth' and such like. There are twelve chapters which are called 'fyttes' and each is introduced with a rhyming couplet as its argument. But it isn't nearly as dreadful as I'd feared. 

It is written in rhyming verse (usually couplets) and blank verse and prose; the author seems to swap from one to the other almost randomly except for the dwarf Lobkyn who has been cursed and has always to speak in rhyme. My heart sank as I saw all the verse because I find that slower and more difficult to read; in fact Farnol's facility with easy rhyme made it quite fun. This wasn't high class poetry but it was decent narrative verse. It was made even more entertaining by Farnol making jokes about this which came close to self-parody. For example, Robin frequently has passages which torture words - "Which is, Witch, that wich none but witch the like o' thee might do ... Thus, but for they witch-like witcheries the which, Witch, witch do prove thee ..." 

It also becomes meta-fictional when the author's daughter Gillian (who has a nice line in inter-war slang words such as 'corking' and 'top-hole') interrupts him at frequent but irregular intervals to argue with him about the characters and plot. Naively, Gillian thinks that the author is in control of his characters: "You've made her all of pen and ink./ So you, of course can make her do/ Exactly as you want her to." To which he replies: "Dear innocent! You little know/ The trials poor authors undergo./How heroines when they break loose/ Are apt to play the very deuce,/ Dragging their authors to and fro,/ And where he wills - they will not go."

There are also humorous details. For example: "For 'neath the gate lounged lusty fellows three/ Who seldom spoke yet spat right frequently." (Fytte 1) I can just see the three layabouts, the same in mediaeval days as in 1919 and as now, leaning up against the gateposts spitting on the ground. (Some of the humour is unintentional, such as when heavy drinkers in a tavern are correctly described as 'tosspots' which has changed its meaning since 1919.) I also enjoyed the witch who stage-managed her spells so that her audience believed they were seeing magic when in fact ... A nice touch of the Gothic 'explained supernatural' there. 

This isn't great literature but it was entertaining nonsense; it was fun. The characters were caricatures done with Dickensian verve, the plot was just a tweak or two cleverer than standard and it was clearly written by a wordsmith with a love for language. And the meta-fictional aspects added that extra something.

May 2024; 253 pages

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

"The Diary of a Nobody" by George & Weedon Grossmith

First published as a serial in  the satirical magazine 'Punch' and then turned into a short novel, this Victorian classic pokes gentle fun at Mr Pooter, a middle clerk Victorian working as a clerk in a London office. It records the trials of working with unreliable tradespeople - the laundress loses socks and bleaches coloured handkerchiefs, the eggs from the grocer aren't fresh etc - and the antics of a wayward son who loses his job almost as often as he falls in love. Despite what Michael Irwin says (in the Introduction to my edition, a Wordsworth Classics paperback) the humour is essentially fuelled by snobbery: we are invited to laugh at Mr Pooter's pretensions and pomposity as he is regularly brought down to earth ("I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat."; Ch 12) or discovering a tradesman at the Lord Mayor's Ball or being snubbed at a dinner party. He is fundamentally a social climber and we are invited to mock him. He is like a diluted version of Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced Bouquet) in the BBC TB sitcom 'Keeping Up Appearances'. Perhaps it was funnier back in the days but I have laughed far more at The Diary of Adrian Mole or Nobody's more or less exact contemporary Three Men in a Boat.

The funniest things are the dreadful jokes, mostly based on word-play, such as: "I hoped it would not be long before I knew Mr Short. He evidently did not see my little joke, although I repeated it twice with a little laugh." (Ch 19)

I was disappointed at the ending which seemed to arrive like a bolt out of the blue brought about by a deus ex machina.

George Grossmith was the leading man in the first productions of many of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas playing, among other roles, The First Lord of the Admiralty in HMS Pinafore, the Major-General in The Pirates of Penzance, and the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado. 

May 2024; 169 pages

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

"A Greek Misadventure" by Elaine Collier

 Two best friends, Donna and Fiona, nearing the big five-oh, decide to take a holiday in Greece to resurrect memories of their student days.Within days of their arrival they are locked up and accused of smuggling drugs. They are released from jail to protective custody on a luxury yacht from which they are then kidnapped. Can the police find them and rescue them before they are murdered?

If you like simple thrillers in which the goodies do battle with the baddies in classic holiday locations with a bit of romance thrown in, this may be the book for you. It was easy to read and quick, I suspect, to write. 

It took a long time to get going. A lot of the first quarter was concerned with the mechanics of going on holiday. In some books this might have been an opportunity for character and theme development but it was mostly about expounding the back stories. I failed to see the point of some chapters, for example chapter 11.

Even after we had finally started the main story, there is very little tension. We are told the identity of the man seen unloading the boxes within pages, as if the author herself is immune to spoiler alerts. 

The characterisation lacks nuance and is mostly delivered through 'tell don't show'. We are told the lead villain "had the swagger of a cocky little shit." (Ch 21) He lacks any saving grace. Fiona's husband, another baddy, is similarly one-dimensional: "The man was a total self-obsessed arse who just wanted a trophy wife." (Ch 42) One presumes Fiona married him either through extreme stupidity or extreme cupidity. Only one character, a minor villain, had any sort of character development. As for the owner of the yacht, he was extraordinarily handsome, charming, a multi-millionaire and so nice he was prepared to get himself shot just to help out. Such people must exist but I've never met them.

There was some humour. Of a member of the air crew, we are told: "His training programme flew by and before he knew he was working on a real aircraft". (Ch 13)

May 2024

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

"Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont" by Elizabeth Taylor

This exquisite little book was shortlisted for the 1971 Booker Prize. It was number 87 is Robert McCrum's hundred best novels of all time.

Mrs Palfrey, widowed, becomes a long-term resident of London's Claremont hotel, a place where old people, mostly women, eke out their lives in as much gentility as they can afford, obsessed with the menu and fighting the twin evils of boredom and decrepitude.

Mrs P's place in the pecking order is threatened by the fact that nobody ever visits her, despite the fact that she boasts of a grandson living nearby. So after a chance encounter, she pretends that Ludo, a penniless writer, is the grandson. Just over half way through the book the inevitable occurs.

The sub-plot, concerning Ludo the wannabe novelist, offers a little hint that there is cultural change coming with the next generation: this novel is set in London in the 1960s.

This short novel rivals Jane Austen in its elegance of prose style: her punctuation, her word placement and the occasional use of discordant but perfectly aimed adjectives are delightful, and very much in line with the context. There are also meticulous, sometimes laugh-out-loud observations and some wicked asides, such as: "The backs of hotels, which are kept for indigent ladies, can't be expected to provide a view, she knew. The best is kept for honeymooners, though God alone knew why they should require it." (Ch 1) 

There are times when the narrative reeks of loneliness, wistful memories and ennui like the mingled smells of urine and over-cooked cabbage The prevailing tone is one of gentle sadness. 

• "I must not wish my life away, she told herself; but she knew that, as she got older, she looked at he watch more often, and that it was always earlier than she had thought it would be." (Ch 1)
• "Menus offered a little choosing, and satisfactions and disappointments, as once life had." (Ch 2)
• "He had a glass of wine on the table beside him, but did not touch it. He sat patiently still, with his hands on his knees, as if waiting for the drink to drink itself." (Ch 2)

The characters are beautifully drawn. Mrs Arbuthnot fears bending up in a cheap nursing home, the inevitable end of her crippling arthritis. Mrs Post wants to be noticed. Mr Osmond wants a friend. Ludo, also lonely, woos not-so-hard-to-get Rosie and dutifully visits his mother. One of the things that makes this book stand out is that the characters could so easily be caricatures but they never do, even when Taylor is having fun at their expense. There are no goodies and baddies; there is sympathy for those who behave badly; after all, Mrs Palfrey, as well as being strong and stoical, has been weak enough to lie.

Selected quotes:

• "She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked as Lord Louis Mountbatten might in drag." (Ch 1)
• "Her face had really gone to pieces, with pouches and dewlaps and deep ravines, as if a landslide had happened." (Ch 2)
• "One can always read a good book twice ... In fact one always should read a good book twice." (Ch 3)
• "'Well, another Sunday nearly gone,' Mrs Post said quickly, to cover a little fart. She had presence of mind." (Ch 5)
• "As they aged, the old women seemed to become more like old men, and Mr Osmond became more like an old woman." (Ch 6)
• "The callous traffic swept down Cromwell Road." (Ch 7) There are some fascinating adjectives.
• "As one becomes older, life becomes all take and no give. One relies on other people for the treats and things. It's like being an infant again." (Ch 13)
• "When one's old, Mr Osmond suddenly marvelled, no one calls you by your Christian name. You might just as well not have it." (Ch 15) This would have been an interesting and astute observation, but the use of the verb 'marvelled' really highlights it.
• "There is always the one who offers the cheek and the one who kisses it." (Ch 15)

It would be difficult to find a novel more perfectly written.

Elizabeth Taylor also wrote A View of the Harbour

May 2024; 193 pages

My (Virago paperback) edition has an introduction by Paul Bailey who claims to be the inspiration if not the the model for Ludo.

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

"One Woman Crime Wave" by Bee Rowlatt

This book will probably appeal to reading groups who are looking for a light, easy read with a contemporary feel. 

Ashleigh is the babysitter that the posh mums recommend to one another, never realising that, when they are out for the evening, she is searching through their possessions, ferreting out their secrets and taking souvenirs.

It's a great premise for a book and it opposes poor Ashleigh, the intelligent kid from the single-parent home, against rich Tara, the wife who has it all and yet has nothing, who hates the empty chatter at dinner parties and yet turns vicious when standards of service aren't exactly as she expects them to be. These are two great characters and the tension really builds up in the first half if the book.

But then it all falls apart. After the inevitable discovery, the tight drama degenerates into a thriller. Suddenly we have a drug dealer and an attempted child abduction, and another child under threat, and somehow in all this noise the original plot is lost in the muddle and the resolution is, at best, partial. Either the author didn't know how to resolve the plot, or she didn't trust herself to keep the reader's attention through the resolution, or she felt the need to spin the story out into a longer one.

There seems to be a common belief with some novels and a lot of TV 'drama' series that excitement equals action when the opposite is often the case.

The structure of the book was further undermined, in my opinion, by the prologue. A lot of modern novels like to start with a few pages taken from the middle of the action. Of course these pages are intended to hook and to tantalise but they mustn't give too much away. I suppose they are there because the main story takes a little time to get going. In fact this book would have been a lot better if the prologue had been scrapped (and not just because it was taken from the poor second half of the story). If you want to start 'in media res', start with Ashleigh in Tara's house, going through her possessions. That was chilling. And now that you have my attention, backtrack a little and explain what's going on.

Nevertheless, Ashleigh was a wonderful character and gave a real insight into the mind of someone who is hugely intelligent, badly damaged by life, and whose behaviour is at best obsessive stalking and at worst borderline psychopathic. And Tara was another villain who was also a victim, someone deserving of sympathy until you realised just how much emotional vandalism she could cause. Of the other characters, Ludi was a little one dimensional and Giles was a total stereotype. Such a caricature may appeal to the target audience but it felt lazy.

The pacing is nearly perfect with the major turning point almost exactly at the 50% mark. The narration is principally from the PoV of Ashleigh and Tara but other chapters are narrated by other more minor characters.

There is also a wonderful satire of the dinner party from Hell which acts, together with the reading group and the school gate mums, as a powerful indictment of the exclusive clique of privilege to which Tara - poor Tara - belongs. 

Selected quotes:

• "Tara's voice was full of exclamation marks and her eyes and mouth were big." (Ch 1)
• "The conversations were already beginning to self-select by gender." (Ch 2)
• "Certain truths applied everywhere ... They all wanted to show some things and hide others." (Ch 3)
• "He was the dry nightmare to her wet dream." (Ch 4)
• "These things were like the honesty of people's bodies, the ultimate give-away, the physical truth. They made everyone the same." (Ch 5)
• "Breaking the ice - no fucking way. It was her life's mission to maintain the permafrost and keep people out of her business." (Ch 7)
• "He expanded on the subject for the rest of the walk home while Tara felt like her side of the conversation could have been maintained by a face drawn on to a paper bag." (Ch 10)
• "Those hate-smiling school-gate mums." (Ch 15): 'Hate-smiling' is a wonderful phrase.
• "These people, they parent so hard it's not even funny. Success at any cost. She'd often heard parents say it, 'We just want the best for them.' She heard that and thought, go on - finish the sentence: the best for them at any price. No matter what." (Ch 17)
• "They'd probably think she was trying to be Robin Hood. Stealing from the rich to give to the poor? No. They had no idea. That was so basic. ... How about forget the poor and infiltrate the rich, penetrate them, eat them from the inside." (Ch 35)
• "Dads weren't anywhere, not even as an insult. Even bloody Christmas was around a mum holding a baby. Joseph in the background like a mug." (Ch 37)

May 2024; 238 pages

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

"Orwell: The Authorised Biography" by Michael Shelden

 A biography, authorised by the literary executors, of Eric Blair who, under the pen name of George Orwell wrote, among other works:

• Animal Farm
• 1984
• Down and Out in Paris and London
• The Road to Wigan Pier
• Homage to Catalonia

Eric Blair was born in Bengal where his father was involved in selling opium under the auspices of the Indian Civil Service, an administrator for the British Raj. He went to a prep school in Eastbourne and then Eton College; he then joined the British Empire as a policeman in Burma, hated working for imperialism, and embarked on a career as a novelist and journalist for the political left wing. To further these goals he became a tramp in London and a dishwasher in Paris, he joined the republican army to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and lived in a cheap lodging house in Wigan. He adopted a baby, ran a village store in remote Hertfordshire, and lived on the Scottish island of Jura 25 miles from the nearest shop. This enormously readable biography not only chronicles the remarkable life of this unusual individual but also gives an insight into his work, both fiction and journalism. 

As with many biographies of this sort, some of the delight is in encountering other people were touched by the life of the principal. Thus, Orwell knew Cyril Connolly both at Eastbourne and Eton and in later life. He was at Eton with Steven Runciman who became an expert in the history of Constantinople. As a young man, Orwell worked as a private tutor to, among others, Richard Peters who became Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of London, one of my alma maters. His second wife had been the lover of Lucian Freud. I love this sort of thing: within seven steps I can link myself to Sigmund Freud ...

Selected quotes:

• "St Cyprian's appears to have been a prison camp cunningly disguised as a top-notch, expensive preparatory school." (Ch 2)
• "He regards the loss of self-respect as a fate worse than poverty. In his eyes beggars are contemptible only if they come to share society's contempt for them." (Ch 9)
• "It is clearly past any hope of reform when the empire-builders are reduced to fighting over who has the right to kick the butler - completely ignoring the question of whether anyone should have that right in the first place." (Ch 10)
• "What Orwell is describing is ... the use of a dual perspective to bring into intimate contact two normally separate worlds." (Ch 10)
• "'Every book is a failure', he remarked in later years, but as soon as one 'failure' was complete, he could not wait to go on to write the next, always unsatisfied, always in doubt about his talent but always intent on doing his work better." (Ch 10)
• "A shilling was deducted from the man's pay whenever a fellow miner was killed - the money was contributed to a fund for the widow - but this deduction, or 'stoppage' occurred with such grim regularity that the company used a rubber stamp marked 'Death stoppage' to make the notation on the pay checks." (Ch 12)
• "The poor in Marrakech ... are, of course, all too visible, with their rags and outstretched hands, their physical afflictions, their corpses. But Orwell knows that these conditions exist because the colonial powers who could improve them have chosen not to see them." (Ch 15)
• "The one serious defect in the novel [Coming Up For Air] is Orwell's attempt to be the voice of his narrator-protagonist. He does not make a convincing middle-aged, overweight, suburban-dwelling, low-brow insurance salesman." (Ch 16)
• "Orwell finds numerous examples in Dickens's work of significant flaws - the cloying sentimentality, the over-reliance on character types, the superficial understanding of commercial and industrial work, the hopelessly unrealistic endings, the avoidance of genuine tragedy." (Ch 16)
• "Connolly wrote a short piece about a love affair between a young man and a woman in a totalitarian state headed by 'Our Leader', whose face looks down on people from neon signs high above the streets. The young man is arrested for treason, tortured by officials from the Censor's Department and forced into approving his death sentence." (Ch 17)
• "For most writers the use of slang or other informal expressions creates dangerous pitfalls, tempting them to be too casual in the construction of sentences." (Ch 18)
• "There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin." (Ch 18)
• "The philistines are determined to deny the independence of artistic vision, while it defenders are just as determined to exalt it beyond the reach of criticism." (Ch 20) Orwell wanted to be able to defend an artist's art while still admitting that the artist themselves might be an obnoxious specimen of humanity.
• "He wanted to establish just the right tone for the novel, and he wanted to show in the very style of his own prose how much would be lost in a future world dominated by the impoverished vocabulary of Newspeak." (Ch 22)
• "There must be time for wandering among old churchyards and making the perfect cup of tea and balancing caterpillars on a stick and falling in love. All these things are derided as sentimental and trivial by intellectuals ... but they are the things which form the real texture of a life." (Ch 22)

That rare biography which is at once comprehensive, and easy-to-read and offers a good insight into its subject. May 2024; 489 pages

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