"New Grub Street" by George Gissing

The classic late-Victorian novel about those who toil in the "valley of the shadow of books". Rated by Robert McCrum 28th in The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time and by the BBC as the 52nd best ever novel.

New Grub Street is set in a world of impoverished literary men, a world in which it is normal for an author to sell (or hope to sell) all his copyright in a book for a fixed lump sum, in which the alternative of a share in the profits (if any) is frowned upon, a world in which the royalty system is just about to struggle into birth. As a consequence Jasper, a wannabe journalist, can't afford to get married unless it is to an heiress. Edwin, who married on the back of a successful novel, cannot keep up the quality output need to avoid his family sinking into squalid destitution. And Alfred, an experienced journalist with a wife and daughter who just keeps his head above water at the moment, is terrified of losing his sight. Some people make money, for example the man who sets up a prototype literary agency. The rest go hungry.

The plot follows the trials and tribulations of these three main characters and their families and friends.

The theme (the world of literature being merely the context) is the degrading and demoralising effects of poverty:

• “He knew what poverty means. The chilling of brain and heart, the unnerving of the hands, the slow gathering about one of fear and shame and impotent wrath, the dread feeling of helplessness, of the world's base indifference.” (Ch 5)
• “Poverty will make the best people bad, if it gets hard enough.” (Ch 6)
• “They lived in dread of the pettiest casual expense, for the day of pennilessness was again approaching.” (Ch 15)
• “The curse of poverty is to the modern world just what that of slavery was to the ancient. Rich and destitute stand to each other as free man and bond. You remember the line of Homer I have often quoted about the demoralising effect of enslavement; poverty degrades in the same way.” (Ch 15) (When reading this, one must be aware that the writer, with his classical education, is blind to the chattel slavery of the transatlantic trade but is referencing the slavery of the Roman and Ancient Greek worlds.)

The author's purpose may be to condemn poverty but he isn't really worried about ordinary poor people, just the literati. He can be quite snobbish: “Mrs Yule’s speech was seldom ungrammatical, and her intonation was not flagrantly vulgar, but the accent of the London poor, which brands as with hereditary baseness, still clung to her words, rendering futile such propriety of phrase as she owed to years of association with educated people.” (Ch 6)

The author appears to be more liberated in terms of sexual equality. It is made clear that Jasper's sisters and Mr Yule's daughters can all make money at writing, which seems to be the key yardstick (artistic pretensions are limited to Edwin and his even-more impoverished mate Biffen).

It's basically one of those books in the realist tradition in which the plot involves heaping more and more misery onto the characters until they broke (in this sense it reminded me of Germinal by Emile Zola or Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood). The most interesting relationship is between Edwin and his wife who react to his increasing poverty in different ways although their son Willy is treated as no more than a pawn in the battle between man and wife.

Overall the book was a very readable description of the corrosive effects of poverty; thank goodness that we nowadays have some form of safety net in the Welfare State.

Selected quotes:

• “Who is it that reads most of the stuff that's poured out daily by the ton from the printing-press?Just the men and women who ought to spend their leisure hours in open-air exercise; the people who earn their bread by sedentary pursuits, and who need to live as soon as they are free from the desk or the counter, not to moon over small print.” (Ch 2)
• “You understand that ... I mean marketable literary work. The quantity turned out is so great that there's no hope for the special attention of the public and less one can afford to advertise hugely. ...the novel I'm speaking of was practically forgotten a year after its appearance; it was whelmed beneath the flood of next season’s literature.” (Ch 3)
• “His disposition was the reverse of democratic, and he could not make acquaintances below his own intellectual level.” (Ch 5)
• “When already there was more good literature in the world than any mortal could cope with in his lifetime, here was she exhausting herself in the manufacture of printed stuff which no one ever pretended to be more than a commodity for the day's market.” (Ch 8)
• “Scarcely had he done a chapter or two when all the structure fell into flatness.” (Ch 9) As a novelist myself, I know this problem!
• “A charity whose moderate funds were largely devoted to the support of gentleman engaged in administering it.” (Ch 10)
• “Blessed money! root of all good, until the world invent some saner economy.” (Ch 11)
• “She could labour on in the valley of the shadow of books, for a ray of dazzling sunshine might at any moment strike into its musty gloom.” (Ch 14)
• “He thought of the wretched millions of mankind to whom life is so barren that they must needs believe in a recompense beyond the grave.” (Ch 17)
• “She did not aim at intimacy with her superiors; merely at superiority among her intimates.” (Ch 18)
• “Like her multitudinous kind, Mrs Yule lived only in the opinions of other people. What others would say was her ceaseless preoccupation.” (Ch 18)
• “In certain natures the extreme of self-pity is intolerable, and leads to self-destruction; but there are less fortunate beings whom the vehemence of their revolt against fate strengthens to endure in suffering. These latter are rather imaginative than passionate; the stages of their woe impress themselves as the acts of a drama which they cannot bring themselves to cut short, so various are the possibilities of its dark motive.” (Ch 25)
• “Croydon isn't the most inviting locality.” (Ch 25) Plus ca change. On the other hand, Eastbourne is mentioned as a (cheap) holiday destination even back in 1891.
• “A man must indeed be graciously endowed if his personal appearance can defy the disadvantage of cheap modern clothing worn into shapelessness.” (Ch 25)
• “The art of writing for such papers - indeed, for the public in general - is to express vulgar thoughts and feeling in a way that flatters the vulgar thinkers and feelers.” (Ch 28)

September 2024; 551 pages

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

"Americanitis" by Miles Beard

Autofiction. In a book dedicated to his dead wife, Miles Beard, author, writes about the death of the wife of Miles Beard, narrator. 

This is a palimpsest of narrative layers. Much of the narrative is a memoir written for his therapist. Miles the narrator himself has an alter ego called Alazon who acts as an internet troll. Real people such as singer-songwriter Sophie Auster appear. 

There's a version of the 'Hero's Journey' in the structure of this book. It starts in the protagonist's home world of Scotland which he then leaves for a dream-like research fellowship in the US which culminates in a near-breakdown and a nightmarish journey (very On the Road, very Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, also autofictions) from East to West Coast before he returns home. In the US section (from which the novel takes his name: Americanitis being a nickname for neurasthenia, a nineteenth-century psychological exhaustion attributed to the stresses of  urban civilization) he faces trials and ordeals. But the ultimate tribulation assails him back in Scotland. At the end he emerges a wiser and perhaps a better man. 

The question of what happened to his wife is drip-fed through the first three-quarters of the book; it becomes a puzzle for the reader to solve. The narrative shifts into another gear once enlightenment dawns. So for the bulk of the of the book it is the challenges which create a stimulating and engaging read, whilst towards the end I was gripped by the story.

It's not an easy read. The author (who is also the narrator, who is also the protagonist) researches into and lectures on literature. This is reflected in a number of throwaway cultural references, many of which I found obscure. It is also, from time to time, modelled in the prose. But it is beautifully written with characters who were three-dimensional and complex adult humans and a protagonist who is a modern Everyman in his hypochondria, his double standards, and his moral weaknesses. His tortured journey is one with which we can all empathise, if not identify. 

A fascinating and brilliant exploration of some of the darker experiences of life.

Selected quotes:

• "The autobiographies of artists tend to present the quotidian sides of the practitioner as metaphors for their craft rather than deal explicitly with that craft." (Ch 3). I've noticed this. It frustrates me. Sometimes you read a biography of a writer than doesn't acknowledge the fact that they spent perhaps several thousand hours cooped up in a small room sitting at a desk writing each year.
• “Creativity isn't necessarily straightforward in its dealings with the world. To put it another way, no one has ever convinced me that the geniuses who have the lasting human touch we call art are either monsters or role models, or even that they should be. Shamans don't have to be horrible or nice.” (Ch 6)
• “What counts about artists is that they perceive reality differently. In any clinical sense they're not schizophrenics ... because they produce something coherent in its own terms that is valued by their communities.” (Ch 6)
• “Back at the house it was, indeed, cocktail hour, a misnomer they deployed in a casually ironic manner that failed to convey their drink of choice or the typical duration of imbibing.” (Ch 9)
• “Just because you wander in the desert it doesn't mean there's a promised land at the end.” (Ch 10)
• “When someone asks how we're doing we have to say ‘not bad’ because anything more positive than that and you'll get the shit ripped out of you for being so up yourself.” (Ch 11)
• “Sarah went on to talk about the parallax of narrative, how the introduction of distance between what the reader is told has happened and what the characters seem to experience as having happened had undermined not just our ability to tell stories with any objective understanding of what we wanted them to be about, but to tell stories even about ourselves in good faith. It has always been the case, of course, that narrative is a multifaceted thing. But the postmodern turn had submerged us beneath plunging depths of doubt, she said, and, like our expulsion from the Garden of Eden, it was irrevocable.” (Ch 15)
• “I had to inhabit her mind, become her, sink beneath her skin, and then ask myself questions only philosophers should ever have to ask. Questions like: what is the nature of being alive; what is it that makes life worth living; what is the process of death; and on whose timeline of it do we deserve to adhere.” (Ch 23)
• “Our utterances derive value not from their murky, ephemeral Intent but, latterly, their reductive interpretation, a recipient act we could only ever play the smallest of parts in shaping, mainly by attempting to precogitate that reductivity in the first place.” (Ch 23)
• “The key to living is accepting that we are monsters and yet lovable as well.” (Ch 24)
• “Heart is bursting. It's kind of sad that the human body only has so many ways of processing experiences. It feels exactly like I'm about to deliver a conference paper.” (Ch 25)

September 2024; 220 pages

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

Some of those cultural references:

• 'Alazon' is explained as a stock character, an imposter, in Ancient Greek drama, such as the braggart soldier, the Miles Gloriosus. 
• The protagonist's thesis is said to focus on "Nadar, Tennessee Williams and Charles Mingus" (Ch 1) I presume that Nadar is the pioneer of aerial photography (from hot air balloons) who died in 1910 althouygh I'm not clear how he firts with Tenessee Williams and Charles Mingus. In any case, Beard only seems to research Mingus.
• Is "Propp, the old Russki fool" (Ch 1) the writer of 'The Morphology of the Folktale'? 
• Is "Geoffrey Braithwaite" (Ch 4) meant to be the protagonist of Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes? 
• In New York Beard stays in a room on the thirteenth floor of the Hotel Pennsylvania; he believes "it was Frank Olson's room". Olson was a biological warfare scientist who died falling from his room on the tenth floor of the Hotel Statler, later renamed the Pennsylvania; there is a theory that his death was an extrajudicial murder by the CIA. 

Can anyone tell me the title of the essay by Tom Wolfe that the partygoer refers to in Chapter 5?

 

"The Tonbridge Outrage" by John Brookland

The true story of rape and murder in early twentieth century England. 

This is the true crime story of the rape and murder of seven-year-old Frances O'Rourke in the Kentish town of Southborough, near Tonbridge on New Year's Eve 1901. It contains details of the investigation by the newly established Kent detective police, who were hampered by the rudimentary state of forensics at the time and built their case from (a lot of) circumstantial evidence. It details the trial of the accused and the aftermath. 

It was mostly well written although in the first few chapters some of the reconstructed dialogue felt stilted. The author was particularly good at giving a sense of the period and explaining the legal procedures which sometimes felt very alien to modern ideas. I appreciated the provision of maps and photographs to help the reader follow what sometimes felt like a deluge of witness testimony.

Selected quotes:

• "Shafts of sunlight shone diagonally across the court as though to try and brighten the sombre proceedings." (Ch 11)
• "It is a common misunderstanding that someone who can commit such an extremely degenerate and horrific crime must be a monster, but paradoxically many commit such crimes so that they can feel normal in the hope it will remove a sense of impotency." (Ch 13)

August 2024

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

"Stay with me" by Hanne Orstavik

 

“No one at home ever said they loved me. If I'd asked, I know they would have said yes, Mamma and Pappa, of course they loved me. Only I didn't ask, part of the reason being that I didn't want Pappa getting angry. And of course it was such an unquestionable thing. Like god loving mankind. It's something you know. Why couldn't I feel it?” 

So starts this book in which the author, a writer, recounts her relationship with a much younger man, M, from whom she fears violence, and remembers the threat of violence in the family in which she grew up, from which her mother fled. 

There are two interwoven narratives. There is the one above, which sounds like a memoir, and there is the novel that the writer is trying to write. This novel sounds highly autobiographical. Both protagonists are recovering from a bereavement. Both are dating a much younger man. But the frame narrative is the one that has the constant fear of domestic violence, which seems to be the fundamental theme of the book.

What distinguished this book was the quality of the prose. She tended to write long paragraphs, sometimes containing rambling sentences full of comma-separated phrases, such as this one: “It's like we've gone behind a curtain and discovered a hidden place, the pond at the centre of everything, a place where there's no through-wind anymore, where everything that isn't carried along on the whirling current instead loses momentum and is deposited at the side and then just lies there, hesitantly almost, until enough detritus has collected and something else takes over and sort of shoves it into motion, gets it going again, a little bit more, come on, only then, eventually, when it's no longer possible to get any further, when there's nothing else left to come and carry it along, it all just collects at the side again, in the stagnant water.” (p 60) She has an inconsistent relationship with question-marks, as here: “How long does the beginning last. When does the beginning melt into something else, and become a person's days. And when do those days change, and become something else still.” (p 14) The idiosyncrasies were unimportant, what I loved was the way she could write about some transcendent ideas is very simple terms yet at the same time produce prose that seemed full of illumination. Look at that quote about the pond again. Isn't it brilliant? 

Selected quotes:

All extracts and page references are from the 2024 translation by Martin Aitken published by &And Other Stories, Sheffield, ISBN 9781916751088

• “It wasn't leaving the milk out, it was being that sort of person. The sort who's negligent, thoughtless, who never pays heed.” (p 8)
• “All I know is that I was afraid, afraid was a skin beneath my skin that couldn't be shed.” (p 8)
• “Love was something others were doing. I saw it in films and could imitate it. But it wouldn't let me in. I had no idea how to do it.” (p 10)
• “She looks down into the water, as if the water was a membrane and there was another world underneath.” (p 12)
• “The way everything is so big and there's no movement anywhere. As if she's a little girl in an over-dimensioned house surrounded by streets and trees and enormous skyscrapers, the big river rushing its course, and all around, to all sides, the endless prairie. The path leading across the lawns, and there’s such a long way to the cars and to the outside walls of the house. Space between all things.” (p 27)
• “Every moment, no matter if it hurts, no matter if it's terrible, is so intense then, it bursts open, and everything else is shoved out to the edges.” (p 34)
• “There's something we're permitted to see and there's something else for absolutely not permitted to see, and it's the line between those two things that makes the image shimmer.” (p 90)
• “Are we put together from multiple parts, where some of those parts are rudimentary and primitive and small, while others are bigger, older, more grown-up, competent and responsible? Do all those parts rattle around us, and who if anyone knows how they fit together? Is there someone who takes care of it all, who keeps us together, holds us tight and looks after us? Or is it all just parentless chaos in there, a legion of different-aged children, some retreated into the darkness of corners, others running around, boisterous and physical, sometimes at odds, while still others attempt to maintain order, meeting out punishments and keeping the rest in check?” (p 154)

A beautifully written novel, full of epiphanies, about a very troubling issue.

August 2024; 216 pages

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

"The Groote Park Murders" by Freeman Wills Croft

Who murdered the man whose body was found on a railway line in South Africa? A police procedural set in the 1920s, when forensics was in its infancy, bobbies patrolled their beats and the detectives had to book a car if they needed one. The second half of the novel investigates a linked crime in Scotland whose shocking denouement throws new light of the first murder.

A classic whodunnit from the golden days of detective fiction written by one of the masters of the genre in his time, now sadly unrecognised.

As was common in those days, the Jewish diamond merchant is portrayed with the usual anti-Semitic stereotyping; casual racism is also to be found in the portrayal of the 'negro' witness.

August 2024; 254 pages

Freeman Wills Croft was a prolific author. Aldo reviewed in this blog:

• Crime At Guildford

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

"Zeno's Conscience" by Italo Svevo

Zeno is a rich but incredibly ineffectual hypochondriac. 

This novel is set in Trieste in the early years of the twentieth century (1900s) when Trieste, now part of Italy, was the naval base on the Adriatic Sea for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Zeno is a rich man who over-analyses every thing he does, from getting married (to the wrong woman) to taking a mistress to being an immensely unsuccessful businessman. It seemed to me a rather more explicit version of The Diary of a Nobody except that it had fewer laughs and significantly more words. 

Perhaps that was the point. Zeno could not decide on any action unless he had considered it from every perspective. Usually, what he did was embarrassingly inappropriate, at which point he reanalyses everything to prove to himself that he was right after all. I suppose it was meant to be funny but the joke was suffocated under the weight of words. Wearisomely long-winded.

On the other hand, the meditation on Trieste by Jan Morris - Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere - is a superb book. 

Selected quotes:

• “I recall once staying a full half hour in a dark cellar, together with two other boys of whom I remember nothing but their childish clothing. Two pairs of short socks that stand erect because there were once bodies inside them, which time has erased.” (Smoke)
• “In the end, my days were full of cigarettes and of resolutions to smoke no more.” (Smoke)
• "Exercise? No, because experience told him that whatever moved eventually stopped." (My Father's Death) At school. I had a friend who was reluctant to exercise because he believed that one was endowed at birth with a certain number of heartbeats and he didn't want to use them up too quickly.
• "The most intense life is narrated, in synthesis, by the most rudimentary sound, that of the sea-wave, which, once formed, changes at every instant till it dies!" (The Story of My Marriage)
• "Those who have not experienced marriage believe it is more important than it is. The chosen companion will renew, improving or worsening, our breed by bearing children, so she induces us to believe that our wife will also bring about a renewal of ourselves:: a curious illusion not confirmed by any text." (The Story of My Marriage)
• “When I went to that house ... I counted the steps that led me to that upper floor, telling myself as if their number was odd it would prove she loved me, and it was always odd because there were forty-three of them.” (The Story of my Marriage)
• “For all my efforts I achieved the result of that marksman who hit the bullseye, but of the target next to his.” (The Story of my Marriage)
• “Giovanni ... thought at the top of his lungs.” (The Story of my Marriage)
• “I retained those theories and I amplified them by reading Weininger. They never heal you, but they come in handy when you are chasing women.” (The Story of my Marriage)
• “An imaginary sick man was genuinely sick, but more intimately and even more radically than the genuinely sick.” (Wife and Mistress)
• “It was a slightly forced smile: the true look of gratitude.” (Wife and Mistress)
• “The battle with sin in some circumstances becomes very difficult because you have to renew it every day and every hour: as long as the girl remains on that landing, in other words.” (Wife and Mistress)
• “Wine is a great danger, especially because it doesn't bring truth to the surface. Anything but the truth, indeed: it reveals especially the past and forgotten history of the individual rather than his present wish; it capriciously flings into the light also all the half-baked ideas with which in a more or less recent period one has toyed and then forgotten; it ignores the erasures and reads everything still legible in our heart.” (Wife and Mistress)
• “The fact remains that when two people are hugging each other, they are in a position quite different from when one is cleaning the other shoes.” (Wife and Mistress)
• “Men in this world learn only by listening to themselves; in any case, they are unable to learn by listening to anyone else.” (The Story of a Business Partnership)
• “A mistress shared is the least compromising mistress.” (The Story of a Business Partnership)
• “The horrible period in which my children soiled and screamed would pass.” (The Story of a Business Partnership)
• “All organisms extend along a line. At one end is Basedow’s disease, which implies the generous, mad consumption of vital force at a precipitous pace, the pounding of an uncurbed heart. At the other end are the organisms depressed through organic avarice, destined to die of a disease that would appear to be exhaustion but which is, on the contrary, sloth. The golden mean between the two diseases is found in the centre and is improperly defined as health, which is only a way-station.” (The Story of a Business Partnership) An Aristotelian view suggesting that happiness lies in moderation, between the extremes.
• “Natural law does not entitle us to happiness, but rather it prescribes wretchedness and sorrow.” (The Story of a Business Partnership)
• “Nothing is more conducive to meditation than watching the flow of water. You stand motionless, and the running water supplies the distraction needed, because it is never identical to itself, in its colour and its pattern, not even for a moment.” (Psychoanalysis)

August 2024; 437 pages

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

"The Lodgers" by Holly Pester

Homelessness does not necessarily mean living on the streets. 

This novel about transience has two alternating narrations. In one the narrator describes, in the first person, her present life, using the past tense. The other narrative, written in the second person, is an imaginary reconstruction of the life of the person who replaced her in her previous lodging. This 'reconstruction' is clearly based on her own experiences in that house so it refers to the past while being written in the present tense.

In the present life, she is living in a sublet, forever awaiting the arrival of a flatmate. Her flat overlooks her mother's house; she goes round from time to time (she has a back door key) but her mother (called 'Moffa') isn't there. Moffa used to be an actress and was notorious in the neighbourhood for her parties; the narrator recalls being on tour as a child with her mother with all the transience that life entailed; her childhood seems to be mostly one of loneliness and observing others. Even now she is clumsy and socially awkward.

In the past life she lives in a town nearer the coast, where she studies a therapy course based on triangles. She rents a room (weekday evenings and nights only, since it was used as a workroom during the day; she has to make alternative arrangements for weekends) from a woman who lives with her daughter, a badly-behaved little girl. A professor also lodges there and they have occasional casual sex; more transience.

The novel is very good at conveying how much of an outsider a lodger is

• “How we cater for and clean ourselves will be convenient for another person we live with, or not.” (p 29)
• “What else are we except things for whoever we live with to put up with?” (p 29)
• "I learned, like you, to lodge, I mean, adapt and hide my needs rather than dig down, simply hover without much substance, meekly occupy, as the tenant of the tenant, it's how I was born.” (p 85)

The narrator is eternally trying to 'triangulate'. At the 50% turning point, she gives several meanings for this word, from psychology, geometry, and data science. She and the professor form a triangle with the child. In geometry, triangulation is a technique of establishing where something is in reference to two other points; perhaps the narrator is trying to work out where she is psychologically in reference to Moffa's house and the house in which she previously lodged. Triangulation in data science is something similar: it examines findings from different viewpoints in order to test a hypothesis; "it's a process of rigour and caring about truth" (p108). This is exactly what the narrator's competing narratives are doing.

In map-making, triangulation involves using two fixed points in order to locate a third point. But it only works if you have those fixed points. The narrator grew up with the unstable Moffa, and an apparently absent father (who is referred to only thus: “The house is all mother, carpets and bed linen, while the domain, the father, is the reason we can't look in mirrors at night.”; p 44). She has no fixed home. She is fundamentally lost.

This sense of dislocation and rootlessness is repeated time and again:

• “I had journeyed; had been myself in transit.” (p 3)
• “Maybe you also shift it around and email strangers, and move through life trying to be in the right place but keep ending up in slightly the wrong place.” (p 10)
• “I was always spinning around on the hoof of having-just-left and on the hoof of having-just-got-back.” (p 44)

She also conveys, I think, this sense in the words she uses and the sentences she constructs. What she is saying is all about utterly mundane reality, but the way she puts it can verge on the psychedelic. For example: “Having to be impermanent but ready - like an imminent alarm clock, encountering street names and weather, sacrificing one plan and one direction in favour of another, regarding a nice tree, dead tree, common threat, bad design, couples walking together, sunrise, nature in reality against my idea of it - is a socially inherited condition. What I mean is: that same morning I woke up very early and went for a walk in a nearby woods.” (p 148) Lists like this one occur sporadically throughout the book; their apparent grammatical and semantic incoherence jars and disturbs. At least this sentence is followed by its explanation. Others, such as “A child is a moving bloom of orphaned licence. Her world is made of unstoppable radial prompts.” (p 124), or “Something fundamental about men struck me in that instant: they are the inevitable figures of conclusions.” (p 204 - 205), I was unable to translate.

Inevitably, there is little in the way of plot, since a plot implies a purpose. Tenancies do, however, have a beginning and an end and so the narrative does have a shape. This hidden structure uses glimpses of the everyday life of these lodgers to build up a mosaic portrait of the narrator. Not everything is explained, the reader has to fill in a lot of gaps, but in the end one gets a sense of the character. 

Selected quotes:

Page numbers refer to the 2024 Granta paperback edition

There are some phenomenal descriptions:

• “The sandwich ... was still in the box, hardening and weeping humous.” (p 5)
• “I found a sputniky barbecue that was so rusty it made my teeth sing to be near it.” (p 46)
• “As the tap dripped into the steel sink of my sour kitchenette that night ...” (p 163)
• “The sky went a nuclear peach colour. All garden life was pulsing and gasping. Gaseous vegetal trailers and pink-lipped flowers with dark, musky herbs, nightmare-winged little birds dipping towards the light, drips from the leaking water feature, drain smell - I was part of it all.” (p 207)

Other selected quotes:

• “As a bored and nervous young girl I often imagined climbing inside a small case or container, like a piano stool or matchbox, a washing-machine drum or bread bin, and living in there.” (p 1)
• “Your route is one I've taken before, it ends on the riposte of a cul-de-sac.” (p 10)
• “A friend of mine told me once ... that we needed to hyper-empathise with the faceless people who disturb us. For instance we should say to ourselves, that bastard needs to play his music right now at that volume because he's had a terrible nightmare and he suffers from anxiety that’s eased if he dances on the spot. Or, that disgusting slob behind me on this train is eating crisps so noisily because he's hungry, he didn't have time to eat today, he's rushing from work, his name is Nico and he's on his way to the bed size of his sick daughter who is on nil byi mouth and he doesn't want to eat in front of her. Or, that arsehole screams at her cats because she loves them so much, and she’s a war veteran. She’s an alcoholic. Her heating has been cut off.” (pp 72 - 73)
• “I've tried to trick and tempt and triangulate work, love and their materials into an order. it never works. I was more myself living in the margin of Moffa’s house." (p 85) 
• “Life makes horrible door-whackers of us all.” (p 89)
• “A child moves as she thinks, the two of the same, and because she cannot understand who you are, she bangs into you. you do the same when you can't understand what your life is, you bang into things.” (p 124)
• “After everything I still believed that if you transmit both need and warmth into the universe, the universe will send something back.” (p 204)

This novel isn't always easy reading but it certainly has an atmosphere of disruption and displacement which chimes perfectly with its subject matter.

August 2024; 217 pages

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

"Only here, only now" by Tom Newlands

A girl grows up in the squalor of an impoverished town, surrounded by drug addicts and petty criminals. Is there any hope that she can escape?

Cora Mowat is a feisty 14-year-old lassie with ADHD, growing up with her wheelchair-bound mother in 1994 Muircross, an impoverished (and fictional) town in Fife, Scotland, a place she describes in chapter one thus: “It was a manky wee hellhole set out by itself on a lump of coast the shape of the chicken nugget, surrounded by pylons and filled with moonhowlers and old folk and seagulls the size of ironing boards that shat over everything. Chaos and fighting and shite in your fringe, that was Muircross. ... The town looked like a handful of grey gravel chucked up the coast.” (Ch 1)

Right from the start you can hear Cora's distinctive voice and enjoy her unique and eloquent observations of her world. She is a damsel in distress, surrounded by peril. The dangers include getting pregnant, male violence, falling foul of alcohol abuse or drug addiction or a gangster boyfriend, being bullied for being different, getting sucked into a life of petty crime, or just giving up hope. Her only chance seems to be her mum's shoplifting boyfriend.

There's plenty of action in the plot ranging from a hilarious date with a Goth boyfriend whose car is attacked by burgers and shakes outside a fast food restaurant to the terrifying fate of the lad trapped in a phonebox with an ignited box of fireworks. Conflict abounds. There's menace and there's tragedy, there's dancing and there's death. She seems drawn to the damaged and the bullied, like the rollerblading girl at school whom nobody likes. And when she has a chance, Cora is an expert in self-sabotage. All the time I was hoping and praying she'd make it and fearing and expecting she wouldn't. This kept me turning the pages all the way to the end.

Cora is a fabulous character, a first person narrator growing up before our eyes. The peripheral characters are mostly complex and interesting. The stereotype, I suppose, is that kids from these backgrounds grow up damaged and there were certainly some who descended into personal hells. But of course poor people are normal people and despite their circumstances they could be kind and generous, and clever and thoughtful, and honest and decent. These characters are visceral and real. 

One of the characters is Cora's environment. Poverty abounds. Jacket potatoes with oven chips is a healthy meal, noodles in a chicken flavoured sauce is commoner fare. Gunner's signature dish is spaghetti with a sauce made from a can of chicken soup, milk and water with scrunched up crisps toasted under the grill for a topping. When she is given a decent pair of trainers she knows they must have been stolen. Everything in her world has a price and mostly it is too expensive for her. And the streets are litter-strewn, the community facilities are vandalised, and the seaside is a rubbish dump. 

The theme is hope despite this background of post-industrial urban decay. These characters might be weeds in a wilderness but most of them are struggling towards the light. 

This is realism in the tradition of Zola: his Germinal is set among the downtrodden and impoverished inhabitants of a coal mining village. The closest recent novel with which it bears comparison is, I think,  Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. 

Selected quotes:

• “Round here you lived in your town and then you died in your town.” (Ch 1)
• “He was a gangly-looking thing, head like a conker, hair shaved off, nose like a witch from a crap cartoon. just the one eye.” (Ch 2)
• “Round here the options for lassies like me were school or a wean, shelf-stacking or shoplifting, gin on the Shreddies or tongue in the socket.” (Ch 4)
• “Auntie Janine used to say that even wasps wouldn't land on my mam's cooking.” (Ch 4)
• “The smudgy blue evening sky made me feel so calm.” (Ch 7)
• “Most of all I hated the future - anything could happen there.” (Ch 8)
• “All adults ever did was tell you bad news or lies or make you eat things at a certain speed.” (Ch 12)
• “He laughed. ‘Been to the zoo once and think you're a tiger.’” (Ch 15)
• “Music was predictable and it gave me a wee bit control over my surroundings. You could rewind and replay.” (Ch 26)
• “It's like your bones have been crying out for light since the day you were born. Then heroin pulls you inside out.” (Ch 27)
• “Imagine you're a sexy wee delicate plant breaking through the first time. You could be growing anywhere in the world, and you twiddle your petally head round for a look and realise you're stuck for life growing in a crack in the tarmac in Whiteinch. Peeping out of the bit where the wires off a phone box go underground.” (Ch 30)
• “Kira had been right, there does come a point where you have to accept who you are and start living.” (Ch 33)
• “You feel useless through almost every second of school and now you're going out into the adult world with the tomato sauce moustache praying that people won't see the wee fraud you are. Some days you can't remember what’s in your own pockets, you can't hold a conversation without interrupting or humming Wet Wet Wet songs to yourself and you've never once been on time. Now the future you want depends on people thinking you're normal.” (Ch 33) Imposter syndrome before an interview!
• “Shame was just a cheap badly fitting neon ski jacket with a broken zip that you had to go around wearing forever, making you a flat-chested hunchback, reminding you of the past.” (Ch 36)

August 2024; 392 pages

A brilliant bildungsroman with a post-industrial decay realism setting.

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

"Midnight's Children" by Salman Rushdie

By Shiva_as_the_Lord_of_Dance_LACMA.jpg, photographed by the LACMA.derivative work: Julia\talk, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14771931

Winner of the Best of the Bookers: the prize for the best Booker Prize winning novel (1981) in the first forty years of the prize. It also won the 1981 James Tait prize. Rated by Robert McCrum as 91st of the Guardian's 100 best novels of all time. Chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels since Time began. A BBC poll rated it 46th nest novel of all time.

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight, at the exact same time as the nation of India is born (achieving independence from the British Raj on 15th August 1947). At the age of ten he discovers he has telepathic powers; all the children born within the first hour of India's independence have one superpower or another. His story and the story of his family are inextricably linked with the story of India.

Saleem's life does indeed seem to follow the trajectory of the prophecy made shortly before he was born.

It's an epic both in size and in its attempt to "embody the history and aspirations of a nation" (which is part of the definition of epic in the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory). 

It is narrated by Saleem as an older man (therefore past tense, first person) to his paramour, pickle maker Padma, who delightfully critiques his narration (this reminded me of Jeffrey Farnol's The Geste of Duke Jocelyn) and repeatedly switches into Saleem's present. It's discursiveness and the fact that Saleem's birth doesn't happen until the 25% mark, reminded me of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. 

It is peopled by a cast of eccentrics worth of Dickens, The central section of the book was for me the best. It follows Saleem through his childhood, and we meet his mates Eyeslice and Hairoil and Cyris the Great and Sonny and Evie Lilith Burns and the adult neighbours such as (naval) Commander Sabarmati, film magnate (and thus employer of Saleem's uncle Hanif) Homi Catrack, Doctor Schaapsteker ... One of the merits of the book is that there are so many characters and they are all memorable (and many of them pop up later) but they are caricatures, flat characters, who can be summed up in a few lines and who never change despite the contortions of the convoluted plot.

Many of the characters change their names. Saleem himself gets nicknamed Snotnose and Sniffer and Stainface, Baldy and Piece-of-the-Moon; he later becomes the buddha.  His sister Brass Monkey becomes Jamila Singer. His mother was Mumtaz Aziz and is Amina Sinai. Her first husband is Nadir Khan who later becomes Nasir Qasim. Cyrus the Great becomes Lord Kushro Khusrovand. Identity and its ability to change is one of the themes of the book. I loved so many of the characters. 

The only other of the Children of Midnight born as the clock chimed, in the same hospital as Saleem, is Shiva, a Hindu deity often depicted as the four-armed Lord of the Dance, one of whose attributes is as destroyer. But Saleem believes that he himself is the catalyst who brings death on his friends and relatives. The hero as destroyer seems to be another of the themes of this book; this reminded me of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. 

There are other recurrent motifs such as noses (Saleem's is enormous, a "cyranose" and, once cleared, is able to smell emotions) and spittoons.

This is a hugely entertaining book and some moments of great humour.

Selected quotes:

• “Clock-hands joined in respectful greeting as I came” (Book One: The Perforated Sheet)
• “His face was a sculpture of wind on water: ripples made of hide.” (Book One: The Perforated Sheet)
• “I sit like an empty pickle jar in a pool of Anglepoised light.” (Book One: The Perforated Sheet)
• “I wish, at times, for a more discerning audience, someone who would understand the need for rhythm, pacing, The subtle introduction of minor chords which will later rise, swell, seize the melody.” (Book One: Methwold)
• “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.” (Book One: Tick Tock)
• “In those days, Bombay had been declared a dry state. the only way to get a drink or to get yourself certified as an alcoholic; and so a new breed of doctors sprang up.” (Book Two: The Fisherman's Pointing Finger)
• “All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate.” (Book Two: Snakes and Ladders)
• “Children get food shelter pocket-money longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it's a sort of compensation for having been born.” (Book Two: Accident In A Washing Chest)
• “Old people shroud themselves in the past during a war; that way they're ready to die whenever required.” (Book Two: Accident In A Washing Chest)
• “The sad mature wisdom of dirty washing lingered with me, teaching me its philosophy of coolness and dignity-despite-everything and the terrible inevitability of soap.” (Book Two: Accident In A Washing Chest)
• “Maya ... may be defined as all that is illusory; as trickery, artifice and deceit, apparitions, phantasms, mirages, sleight-of-hand, the seeming form of things: all these are parts of Maya.” (Book Two: At the Pioneer Cafe)
• “Cocksure men do terrible deeds. Women, too.” (Book Two: At the Pioneer Cafe)
• “You got to get what you can, do what you can with it, and then you've got to die.” (Book Two: At the Pioneer Cafe)
• “Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.” (Book Two: Alpha and Omega)
• “Unconscious in the night-shadow of a mosque, I was saved by the exhaustion of ammunition dumps.” (Book Three: The buddha)

August 2024; 647 pages

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