"Coming Up for Air" by George Orwell

A novel full of pre-echoes of 1984.

George Bowling is a very ordinary man. He's fat, married with two kids, living a joyless existence in suburbia, earning just enough to keep his head above water. “I'd been a good husband and father for fifteen years and I was beginning to get fed up with it.” (1.1) A chance word prompts a nostalgic reverie as he remembers his childhood in a rural village in Oxfordshire. He decides to take a holiday and revisit this place. Of course it has changed.

There's very little plot. The only character explored in death is that of the narrator-protagonist. And yet the book kept me interested because of its incisive observations. Orwell was at his best in journalism. Not only did he describe the world around him but he also understood the subtext. Bowling describes the street on which he lives thus: “What is a road like Ellesmere Road? Just a prison with the cells all in a row. A line of semi-detached torture-chambers where the poor little five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers quake and shiver, every one of them with the boss twisting his tail and the wife riding him like the nightmare and the kids sucking his blood like leeches.” (1.2) It's a bleak vision. But even bleaker is his predictions of the future. He knows that another war is on the way (he's writing in 1938 and he predicts the next war will start in 1941 so it came even earlier than he thought). But what terrifies him is what will come after the war: “It isn't the war that matters, it's the after-war. The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him ... the food-queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think.” (3.1) 1984.

Twice, he mentions the title. The first time he is going back to Lower Binfield to revisit his past and he is full of hope: “The very thought of going back to Lower Binfield had done me good already. You know the feeling I had. Coming up for air! ... We're all stifling at the bottom of a dustbin, but I'd found the way to the top.” (3.2) The second time is after his dreams have encountered reality: “Coming up for air! But there isn't any air. The dustbin that we're in reaches up to the stratosphere.” (4.5)

On his return to Lower Binfield, he has a “gloomy, Ichabod kind of feeling.” (4.1) Presumably this is a reference to Ichabod Crane, a character in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a short story by Washington Irving, whose more famous character is Rip van Winkle, who went to sleep for twenty years and woke up to a very different world, just like George Bowling.

Trigger warnings: Occasional use of the N-word and stereotypical comments about Jews.

Selected quotes:

• “False teeth are a landmark. When your last natural tooth goes, the time when you can kid yourself that you're a Hollywood sheik is definitely at an end.” (1.1)
• “Sometimes I've stood over their cots ... and watched them sleeping ... and it's given me that feeling you read about in the Bible when it says your bowels yearn. At such times I feel that I'm just a kind of dried-up seed-pod that doesn't matter twopence and that my sole importance has been to bring these creatures into the world and feed them while they're growing. But that's only at moments. Most of my time my separate existence looks pretty important to me.” (1.1)
• “We're all bought, and what's more we're bought with our own money.” (1.2)
• “Do you notice how often they have undersized men for these bullying jobs?” (1.2)
• “Fear! We swim in it. It's our element. Everyone that isn't scared stiff of losing his job is scared stiff of war, or Fascism, or Communism, or something.” (1.2)
• “What's interesting, I think, is that merely because you happen to be a little bit fat, almost anyone, even a total stranger, will take it for granted to give you a nickname that's an insulting comment on your personal appearance.” (1.3)
• “The frankfurter ... burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. ... It gave me the feeling that I’d bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of.” (1.4)
• “You know the smell churches have, a peculiar, dank, dusty, decaying, sweetish sort of smell. There's a touch of candle-grease in it, and perhaps a whiff of incense and a suspicion of mice ... Predominantly it's that sweet, dusty, musty smell that's like the smell of death and life mixed up together. It's powdered corpses really.” (1.4)
• During the Boer war “They were all true-blue Englishmen and swore that Vicky was the best queen ever lived and foreigners were dirt, but at the same time nobody ever thought of paying a tax, not even a dog-licence, if there was any way of dodging it.” (2.1) I love that definition of patriotism!
• “In those days the heroine had to look like an egg-timer and now she has to look like a cylinder.” (2.2)
• “Gravitt’s backyard smelt like a battlefield. Butchers didn't have refrigerators in those days.” (2.4)
• “Killing things - that's about as near to poetry as a boy gets.” (2.4)
• “Joe never read ... The sight of print made him feel sick. I've seen him ... read a paragraph or two and then turn away with just the same movement of disgust as a horse when it smells stale hay.” (2.6)
• “People then had something that we haven't got now ... they didn't think of the future as something to be terrified of. It isn't that life was softer then than now. Actually it was harsher. People on the whole worked harder, lived less comfortably, and died more painfully. ... What was it that people had those days? A feeling of security, even when they weren't secure. More exactly, it was a feeling of continuity. All of them knew they'd got to die, and I suppose a few of them knew they were going to go bankrupt, but what they didn't know was that the order of things could change.” (2.7)
• He remembers his time at Eastbourne: “Those beastly icy Downs ... where the wind seems to blow its you from all directions at once.” (2.8)
• “People who in a normal way would have gone through life with about as much tendency to think for themselves as a suet pudding were turned into Bolshies just by the war.” (2.8)
• “I'm about as likely to end up in the workhouse as to end up in the House of Lords.” (2.9)
• “Old Vincent had retired in 1910, and since then he and his wife had shown about as much activity, mental or physical, as a couple of shellfish.” (2.10)
• “When a woman's bumped off, her husband is always the first suspect - which gives you a little side-glimpse of what people really think about marriage.” (2.10)
• “For hours, sometimes ... I've lain on my bed with all my clothes on except my shoes, wondering about women. Why they’re like that, how they get like that, whether they’re doing it on purpose.” (2.10)
• “She's a great one for public meetings of any kind, always provided that it's indoors and admission free.” (2.10)
• “The classy Oxford feeling of nothing mattering except books and poetry and Greek statues, and nothing worth mentioning having happened since the Goths sacked Rome.” (3.1)
• “We say a man's dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. ... Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.” (3.1)
• “Who’d bother about a chap like me? I'm too fat to be a political suspect. No one would bump me off or cosh me with a rubber truncheon. I'm the ordinary middling kind that moves on when the policeman tells him.” (3.2)
• “A rose still smells the same to me now as it did when I was twenty. Ah, but do I smell the same to the rose?” (4.2)
• “I don't mind towns growing, so long as they do grow and don't really spread like gravy over a tablecloth.” (4.5)
• “At first sight it looked as if the sky had been raining bricks and vegetables. There were cabbage leaves everywhere. The bomb had blown a greengrocer's shop out of existence.” (4.6)

Literary references:
Bowling has periods in his life when he reads avidly. Authors he mentions include Kipling, Galsworthy, Barry Pain, W W Jacobs, Pett Ridge, Oliver Onions, H Seton Merriman, Maurice Baring, Stephen McKenna, May Sinclair, Arnold Bennett, Elinor Glyn, O Henry, Stephen Leacock, Silas Hocking, Jean Stratton Porter, Marie Corelli, Hall Caine, Anthony Hope, Marcel Proust and Henry James. Translations of Maupassant and Paul de Kock which are described by the other boys at school as ‘hot’ I've never even heard of most of these writers.

Books he mentions, with links to their reviews in this blog where appropriate, are:

• The Good Companions by J B Priestley
• The Lives of a Bengal Lancer by Francis Year's Brown
• Hatter’s Castle by A J Cronin
• The Woman Thou Gavest Me by Hall Caine
• Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin
• The History of Mr Polly by H G Wells
• Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie
• Victory by Joseph Conrad
• Sons and Lovers D H Lawrence
• Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• Esther Waters by George Moore

June 2025; 232 pages

First published by Victor Gollancz in 1939

My Penguin paperback edition was issued in 1962, I read the 1980 printing

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

"Miguel Street" by V S Naipaul

A Cannery Row for Trinidad. Or is it Guys and Dolls?

The unnamed narrator is a fatherless young boy growing up and a street 'rab on Miguel Street, playing cricket and learning about life from the antics of the characters around him. He is quasi-adopted by father-figure Hat, whose comments on what is going on are kindly, perceptive and deeply philosophical. 

Each chapter examines one of the neighbours, including Popo the carpenter who is always making the "thing without a name" to Man-man the mystic, to B Wordsworth the poet, to Morgan who makes fireworks, to Mr Titus Hoyt the teacher, to Laura the mother on repeat, to Uncle Bhakcu who is always tinkering with cars which are never quite the same afterwards ... Each story is told with tenderness and compassion and some are very funny indeed. Speech is given in dialect and this builds a picture of a supportive and caring community in which everyone is poor but nobody is starving. We all have dreams and we all need to get on with our fellow men.

On the other hand, there is the domestic abuse. Men seem to beat women in almost all of the households on Miguel Street; sometimes the women beat the men back. The children are beaten for almost every conceivable petty wickedness. It may be a portrait of a community of its time but from this point of view these are anything but the good old days. But this is to criticise the novel for what it says and in this blog I have always insisted that a reviewer should foreground how it is said. Naipaul has an ear for dialogue and an eye for eccentricity and a heart for forgiveness and these are what makes this book exceptional.

Selected quotes:

• “Seeing God was quite common in Port of Spain, and, indeed in Trinidad at that time. Ganesh Pundit, the mystic masseur from Fuente Grove, had started it. He had seen God, too, and had published a little booklet called ‘What God Told Me’. Many rival mystics and not a few masseurs had announced the same thing.” (Man-man)
• “The authorities kept him for observation. Then for good.” (Man-man)
• “B. Wordsworth. ... Black Wordsworth. White Wordsworth was my brother. We share one heart.” (B Wordsworth)
• “He did everything as though he were doing it for the first time in his life. He did everything as though he were doing some church rite.” (B Wordsworth)
• “We ... saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite different from everybody else. Man-man was mad; George was stupid; Bigfoot was a bully; Hat was an adventurer; Popo was a philosopher; and Morgan was our comedian.” (The Pyrotechnicist)
• “Hat used to say, ‘Is a damn nuisance, having that man trying to be funny all the time, when all of we well know that he not so happy at all’.” (The Pyrotechnicist)
• “Mrs Bhakcu was four feet high, three feet wide, and three feet deep.” (The Pyrotechnicist)
• “When he spoke it was in a pecking sort of way, as though he was not throwing out words, but picking up corn.” (The Pyrotechnicist)
• “Hat said, ‘When I was a little boy, my mother used to say, “If a man wants something, and he want it really bad, he does get it, but when he get it he don't like it”.’” (The Pyrotechnicist)
• “I suppose Laura holds a world record. Laura had eight children. There is nothing surprising in that. These eight children have seven fathers. Beat that!” (The Maternal Instinct)
• “For her first six children she tried six different men. Hat used to say, ‘ some people hard to please’.” (The Maternal Instinct)
• “Mrs Hereira said, ‘No, I know Tony. I looked after him when he was sick. It is the war, you know. He was a sailor and they torpedoed him twice.’ My mother said. ‘They shoulda tried again’.” (Love, Love, Love Alone)
• “It sound as though it coming from a gramophone record turning fast fast backwards.” (The Mechanical Genius)
• “What about all those woman and them who was chasing you? They catch up with you yet or they pass you?” (Until the Soldiers Came)
• “Many people stopped minding their business and looked up.” (Hat)
• “Hat’s dog was the only Alsatian I knew with a sense of humour.” (Hat)
• “It does happen to all man. They getting old and they get frighten and they want to remain young.” (Hat)
• “The only people who does complain about bribe is those who too damn poor to have anything to bribe with.” (How I left Miguel Street)
• “The Americans gave me a visa after making me swear that I wouldn't overthrow their government by armed force.” (How I left Miguel Street)
• “I left them all and walked briskly towards the aeroplane, not looking back, looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac.” (How I left Miguel Street; last words)

A lyrical portrayal of a community which seems to live up to the injunction of W B Yeats: "But I, being poor, have only my dreams ...

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

June 2025; 172 pages

First published in the UK by Andre Deutsch in 1959

My paperback edition issued by Penguin in 1971, the 1982 reprint

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

"Shakespeare in Company" by Bart Van Es

What made Shakespeare different from and better than the pack of other playwrights of his age?

This book suggests that the key moment came in 1594 when, after some promising plays, he became a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. He was almost unique in being, at the same time, an actor, a playwright and a sharer in the profits of what was a stable company, soon to become one of only two official acting companies in London. At this point he began to write plays which focused on the relationships between different characters, using the personalities of the other members of his company as models. From this point on he eschewed collaboration (the standard practice among other playwrights) until 1608 when the theatres were closed due to plague. By the time they reopened, Shakespeare had left off acting and moved back to Stratford and his later work is more influenced by other playwrights, especially those with whom he began to collaborate, than his fellow actors. 

It's a compelling argument, no where more convincing than when Van Es considers the company member who provided the comedy lead. Until 1599 this was Will Kemp, a clown, famous for his physical ability and his jigs. Shakespeare wrote the parts of Bottom in a Midsummer Night's Dream, Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, and possibly Falstaff in Henry IV (parts 1 and 2) and The Merry Wives of Windsor. After 1599 the comic character changes completely. Robert Armin, replacing Kemp, was a 'fool' in the old jester tradition. His portrayal of Touchstone in As You Like It signalled a change to a much more reflective humour which, via Feste in Twelfth Night, Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, and Lavatch in All's Well That End's Well, culminated in the Fool in King Lear.

The book also helped me understand why Shakespeare should have been so willing to collaborate in his later plays - Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the lost Cardenio - with John Fletcher. Shakespeare was interested by Fletcher's development of dramatic art, perhaps especially because Fletcher was experienced in writing for indoor spaces (and the Blackfriars Theatre was now in use). Fletcher's 'The Shepherdess' seems to have been a source for both The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. “Ultimately, what the connection with Fletcher amounts to is the embrace of conscious literary artifice.” (Ch 13)

It's also very interesting on Senecan revenge tragedy. 

Selected quotes:

• “Shakespeare's early drama is often spectacularly imitative and as a result his personal voice is much less distinct.” (Ch 1)
• “The phenomenon of the attached poetic playwright (writing for only one company) was initiated by Shakespeare.” (Ch 4)
• “Very likely the role of Starveling was taken by John Sincler, a hired man of the Chamberlain’s company, who was famously emaciated.” (Ch 4)
• “The boys’ theatre had something of a modern arthouse culture” (Ch 10)

An intriguing theory backed up by a convincing argument in a very readable book.

June 2025; 311 pages

Published by the Oxford University Press in 2013

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

"Where Snowbirds Play" by Gina Goldhammer

Real life, and the past, haunt the carefree existences of the super-rich socialites spending the season in Palm Beach, an exclusive island resort in Florida, USA,

Life among the fabulously wealthy sounds easy as they drift from one charity ball to another. The social scene is dominated by three widows: Carlotta Alonso whose family fled (in a forty-foot yacht) communist Cuba, animal-loving Vanessa Vine, an ex-chorus girl and gold-digger, and Louisa Caulfield whose first husband gave her Addison, a lawyer, and whose second gave her Thaddeus, a brilliant surgeon on the verge of discovering a cure for cancer. But all the money in the world can't protect you against some things. Vanessa's adopted daughter Sunny, an alcoholic, was a neglectful parent whose daughter died from an accidental overdose of mummy's powder. Thaddeus has married English Hannah, mother of one of his patients, a terminally ill little boy called Jesse and even his revolutionary new treatment can only make limited progress. And Thaddeus had mortgaged his house and invested everything he had in the company that will manufacture the wonder drug that will make them all rich ... if only it can win governmental approval.

Into this hothouse, steps Philip, a young Englishman who has come straight from Oxford to become the new head (and only, unpaid, employee) of the (newly created) marine life institute. He has discovered among his dead father's papers letters from Hannah telling his father, a world-famous poet, that she is pregnant. Jesse is his half-brother. But that's a secret.

The hurricane season is coming.

I found it difficult to care about these shallow characters, except for poor Jesse. Even he was too good to be true, being the eternally brave little soldier and never once getting depressed or angry. I longed for some real people but the hired help were either shadows (Marta and Jerzy) or anonymous (the Guatemalans). Everyone else was perfect. Philip is not only an Oxford graduate but also incredibly handsome. His father was a world-famous poet. Thaddeus is a brilliant surgeon. I longed for a hard-working but not particularly talented teacher, or for Eduardo to make cocktails that weren't very tasty, or for Jesse to be only a bit ill and really rather fed up about it. Mediocrity was missing. 

It was typical of its genre in that the descriptions were all about high-status possessions, given with the breathlessness of a glossy magazine. There were the fashion notes: “Hannah had changed into a creaseless white linen sundress, ballerina flats and a wide-brimmed straw hat, stylish cat's eye sunglasses shading her eyes." (Part One: On the Nature of Toads) This segued immediately into the House and Home design section: "Bougainvillea petals floated like confetti on the kidney-shaped swimming pool behind her ... sloping gently and without steps, a fiberglass Adirondack chair sitting in the shallowest portion with a wide sun umbrella attached to its high back. From the other end of the pool rose a spacious two-storey pink stucco house with a barrel-tile roof and purple bougainvillea vines climbing the stone pillars of the loggia.” (Part One: On the Nature of Toads) From the cookery  pages we learn that “The poolside bar glinting with a rainbow of bottles and fiesta bowls filled with Meyer lemons, Key limes and three types of Spanish olives." (Part Two: Friends and Neighbours) and how to make a Tootsie Roll cocktail from "vanilla vodka, Kahlua, Cointreau, orange juice and a handful of crushed ice cubes" (Part Two: Friends and Neighbours). There's even product placement: Philip wears "a Turnbull & Asser shirt.” (Part Two: Friends and Neighbours). This style of writing perfectly matched the milieu it was describing but it served to underline the shallowness and made me care even less about these people.

But they played their parts in a narrative that was never dull, if sometimes rather too full, encompassing infidelity, faith healing, insider trading, and pollution along the way. The story was further enlightened by some great descriptions and some sparks of wry humour. 

The obvious comparison is with The Great Gatsby (but that has so much more anger fuelling it). I was also reminded of J G Ballard's Cocaine Nights. 

Selected quotes:

• “The Porch Club [was] founded in 1918 by a group of business moguls too old to fight in the first world war but not too old to build its armaments.” (Part Two: The Big Three) 
• “Philip had met his share of disheveled doctors at Oxford ( mainly of philosophy).” (Part Two: Gethsemane-on-the-Sea)
• “How I wish I could claw that shine [of youth] off him and wear it tonight.” (Part Two: Pearls, pearls and more pearls)
• “The stampeding girls were stopped in their tracks by Mrs Vine’s Silver Shadow blocking the drive. Chugging like a vintage locomotive it proceeded to the outdoor picnic table where the widow, bundled in a diaphanous violet-tinted robe and veiled raffia hat, slid like a dollop of warm butter from the creamy interior.” (Part Two: Julietta rallies the troops) I adore that last phrase.
• “It seemed to Philip that God ought to know what lay in a man's heart without having to hear him talk about it.” (Part Two: State of Grace)

June 2025; 230 pages

A limited hardback edition published by Hay Press in 2025

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

"The Weather in the Streets" by Rosamond Lehmann

 

A bravura literary performance.

This is a sequel to Invitation to the Waltz. Ten years have passed and Olivia and Kate are married, although Kate is now the mother of four children while Olivia has separated from her husband and is living in London, eking out an existence through part-time work for a photographer. Called home because of her sick father, she meets Rollo on the train, son of the posh family in the next village, on whom Olivia had a crush. He is married too, nevertheless they begin an affair. This book chronicles their infatuation and its consequences.

And who is Simon? Why does he creep into Olivia's thoughts at key moments?

But what really sets this book apart is not what is written but how it is written. It's all in the past tense and the point of view is almost always Olivia's (although we are allowed glimpses of her sister's thoughts, at least in section one). 

Parts one, three and four are written in the third person, although there are moments when interior monologue pops in. To start with this is most often as a sort of aside after a snippet of dialogue: 

"'Well ...' She hesitated ... Oh, yes! ... Memory flashed mal a propos, all out of key ... Far back, in the early love-making days with Ivor: so far away, so almost unremembered. And he'd cried too, had needed to be comforted ... But that was to be buried ..." (1.5)

"'I think it will be gay,' she said meekly. ... Nothing you did or conceived of could ever be gay; and do your children know yet  they hate you?" (1.5)

Interior monologue can even slip into full blown stream of consciousness and back again: “How dark, I can't find the road; the wind, what a wind, a gale, I hadn't noticed; the wind from the Atlantic, the equinoctial gale. When it died down for a moment a sound came after it like giant tumbrils rolling and snarling in cabins in the sky.” (4.1) 

Part two, the only section unchaptered, is almost entirely Olivia's first person interior monologue with very little intrusion from the narrator (although it starts “It was then the time began when there wasn't any time.” which could be narrative or memory). 

Throughout, the author also uses sentence fragments and punctuation for effect. For example: “Rollo must have been mad to - Think of the risk! You might at least ... The scandal! Did you ever think of that - for him? What right have you - even if you're prepared to sacrifice your own reputation - to endanger - other people's?” (3.4) creates the impression that Lady Spencer is almost lost for words ... although what she is saying is designed to control, to manipulate, and is cruelly one-sided. These effects can also create ambiguity (as they do in The Turn of the Screw by Henry James) such as towards the end, when she is talking about Simon. 

She also uses fractured narrative in section two and particularly section three, creating a discursive feel that reminded me of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier which made me question the reliability of Olivia as narrator. On the whole, I feel that she is reliable, at least when it comes to what happens, but that she is confused in her attitude towards Rollo. I suspect some readers see him as a cad, especially given his treatment of Olivia towards the end. There is the always vexed question of social class. Lady Spencer is certainly ready to turn from friend to foe when her son's respectability is threatened. In the last book, Olivia has been in awe of Rollo, the 'son of the big house', and this is how she views him at the start, though she is now a little more worldly-wise, recognising that he is “agreeable, easy-mannered, with a kind of class-flavour to his flirtatiousness and wit; friendly: and then not friendly: obstinate, on his guard ...” (2.1); the key phrase here is 'class-flavour'. But for all that she lives in London hand-to-mouth, Olivia is scarcely lower-class. She has a private income and the safety-net of her family, with servants, to fall back on; she can afford to play with employment as a photographer's assistant. When they are in the dilapidated Oxfordshire country inn, at the crisis in their relationship, he describes the publican as a “bloody woman ... God, these British innkeepers ...” and you feel Olivia's instinctive distaste for these words. But immediately afterwards, the narrator says: “Presently a large plump country wench in bedraggled black uniform and cap appeared from another door with cigarettes. She knelt down, put a match to the sticks, blew on it, her hips and haunches swelling out immense as she bent forward.” (4.1) The disdain is inherent in the choice of the words ‘wench’ and ‘bedraggled’ and the repetition of adjectives describing the lady as overweight: ‘large’, ‘plump’ and ‘immense’. It seems to me that Olivia's irritation at Rollo's snobbishness is hypocritical to say the least. As for his caddishness ... I think she entered their relationship with her eyes wide open.

The weather, whether in the streets or not,
There are passages of unbelievably wonderful description in which the weather is the ultimate in sympathetic fallacy. For example, shortly before Olivia meets a man on a train: “Out of the station, through gradually thinning fog-banks, away from London. Lentil, saffron, fawn were left behind. A grubby jaeger shroud lay over the first suburbs; but then the woollen day clarified, and hoardings, factory buildings, the canal with its barges, the white-boled orchards, the cattle and willows and flat green fields loomed secretively, enclosed within a transparency like drenched indigo muslin. The sky's amorphous material began to quilt, then to split, to shred away; here and there a ghost of blue breeze in the vaporous upper rifts, and the air stood flushed with a luminous essence, a soft indirect suffusion from the yet undeclared sun. It would be fine. My favourite weather.” (1.1)

Time and again, the weather seems to control the plot. At the start of the story, her dad has caught pneumonia: “He would go out in that bitter east wind, and he caught cold, and then his temperature went up so very suddenly.” (1.1) At a key turning point, the weather changes. Before: “What a day - dark, sodden, ruined with rain since early morning. ... this infinite thick soup of rain ...” (2.1) After: “The rain had stopped, the day was dark, grey, cold and gusty - one or two tattered blue holes blown into the sky for a moment, then over-blown again.” (2.1) At the end, bang on time: “That night, just before dawn, the thunderstorm broke.” (2.1) Just before her transformative interview with Lady Spencer: “A bad afternoon. The park was airless. The sky was clouding from the west, saffron-tinged: the fine spell would have broken before night. There would be thunder and then the rain would come down.” (3.4) 

A few more examples of the weather:

• “Beyond the glass casing I was in, was the weather, were the winter streets in rain, wind, fog, in the fine frosty days and nights, the mild, damp grey ones.” (2.1)
• “May was wet and cold, June sunny from end to end ... In May the hawthorn hedge was soaking; after a windy night the elm flowers came down in drifted heaps at the end of the garden. ... In May there was a frost, it made the evening strange ... After that frost, the weather softened out, the warm days came.” (2.1)
• “The transfiguring light was gone, and it was dark and cold now, blowing up for rain.” (4.1)

There are other, wonderful descriptions:

• “The smutty window, the brown street blighted with noise and rain; the stained walls; the smell of geyser, of cheese going stale in the cupboard, of my hands smelling of the washing-up bowl, nails always dirty, breaking; the figures on the stairs, coming and going drably, murmured to reluctantly, shunned at the door of the communal, dread, shameful WC on the middle landing.” (1.2)
• Dinner party chit-chat: “Across the table they began to apply a peaceful shuttle between the three of them, renewing, re-enforcing, patching over rents and frayed places with old serviceable thread.” (1.4)
• “A corridor lined obscurely with supernumerary specimens of family portraiture.” (1.5)
• “It was one of those country-town hotels with rambling, uneven passages and shallow staircases winding onto broad landings, with palms in stands, and a coloured print of King Edward, and sets of old prints and warming pans hung up along the passages and stairs, and objects of china and Indian brass and carved wood by the score on every available surface, and stuffed birds and fish in cases and pampas in giant vases, and dark-brown and olive paint, and a smell of hotel everywhere - dust and beer and cheese, and old carpets and polish ...” (2.1)
• “Two swans sailed out around the bend heading for the middle of the river, taking the full, living and dying, light-and-wind-shaken, mid-stream current with round full breasts of peace.” (4.1)

And what of Simon?

Simon

Simon, a character the reader never meets but only hears about, is largely absent in the early part of the book. In section two, when Olivia is in the throes of her affair, blinded by love, he pops up here and there as a sort of counter-balance to Rollo. “It may have been I wanted to assure myself I was in between still, not choosing more patently than I must against Simon ... not that Simon would have ever have known or ever minded in the least whom I chose, what I did ... how surprised he'd be to know he's a sort of mystical private touchstone to me of - of some perfectly indefinite indefinable kind of behaviour ... spiritual, if the word can be whispered ...” And a page later: “I suppose Simon's a happy person; not from trying to be - he never tries to be or do anything ... An inherent quality - a kind of unconscious living at the centre, a magnetism without aim or intellectual pretension ... Simon seems to cause an extremely delicate electric current to flow between people when he's there; they're all drawn in, but he's just one degree removed from it all, he doesn't need anything from anybody ... He’s like Radox bath salts, diffusing oxygen, stimulating and refreshing ... Dear Simon.” (2.1)

At the midway turning point, as Olivia, still in the thick of the affair, is crying, properly realising for the first time what Rollo’s being married will mean for her, he says that he is afraid of losing her. And when she laughs and says that won’t happen he tells her that he is jealous of “That Simon you’re always talking about” and she replies “I could never persuade Simon to want to marry me, I’m afraid.” (2.1)

As she falls out of love, he crops up again: “In contrast with his usual well groomed appearance he [Rollo] looked startlingly disheveled. Everything's comparative: Simon's always disheveled.” (4.1)

Then suddenly, in 4.4, she talks to one of her art-friends about Simon and the sentences become hugely fractured and ambiguous:

“He separated himself ... long ago. I don't see what went wrong, but he chose the other thing. That's why he'd never have been a great man - only a person of genius. There was always something hectic about him, wasn't there? ... hunted. To me he was like a being rapt away in an endless feverish dream. ... He was more was to know him. If you tried to get near him he hated you ... as I found out. He was very dangerous - surely you could see that ... He was only interested in being loved...” 

“His eyes brilliant, vacant ( with that look that made people say, did he drug? - but he didn't), checked again, thwarted in his flight.”
“Compassion itself ...? Was that why he released that warning, delicate current of happy stimulus? - lent people money that would never be paid back? - clowned, as he sometimes did, in that inimitable way? - and all the rest?” (4.4)
“He made me swear to unthink ... that Simon was the sacrifice ... Meaning all the guilt and corruption, the sickness ... Dad, Rollo ... me ... we didn't die - not us: it was Simon, the innocent one ...” (4.4) 

It seems that Simon is a modern-day Jesus.

Other selected quotes:

• “My mother-in-law. ... Give her a really large scale disaster in the morning papers and she's renewed like that bird. Not to speak of private croakings and prognostications of doom.” (1.5) Is the speaker muddling the phoenix and the raven?
• “I like what's uncertain - what's imperfect. I like what - what breaks out behind the features and is suddenly there and gone again. I like a face to warm up and expand, and collapse, and be different every day and night and from every angle ...” (1.5)
• “Do your children know yet they hate you?” (1.5)
• “‘Was it? That was fun, that evening. ...’ Catching each other's eye, not knowing whether to laugh or what, looking away again ... Fun indeed!” (2.1)
• “Thinking how one’s alone again directly afterwards.” (2.1) ie after sex.
• “All the junk around us, the prints, the marble busts, oil-paintings, the negress with the lamp, the plush, the rather murky yellow light, the general stuffiness - all this made an atmosphere of a sort of sensuality and romantic titillation - the kind that looks and lingers in curiosity shops and old-fashioned music halls; the harsh, dark, intimate exhalation of hundreds of people's indoor objects and sensations, unaired, choked up pell-mell for years with no outlet ...”
• “If my wife had a lover I hope to God she wouldn't see fit to tell me so. I call this confession and all-above-board business indecent.” (2.1)
• “There's no solution for a situation like ours. Whatever we try out, the clock defeats us, complacently advancing acknowledged claims, sure of our subservience, our docility.” (2.1)
• “We don't live by lakes and under clipped chestnuts, but in the streets where the eyes, ambushed, come out on stalks as we pass; in the illicit rooms where eyes are glued to keyholes.” (4.1) This is a tricky little passage but it might justify the title: the Weather in the Streets.
• “It does get late early and no mistake, as the saying goes.” (4.1)
• “I don't care for antiques myself - can't see the point. You don't go to make a show of a lot of senile old crocks in bath chairs, so why anything else old?” (4.1)
• “We are born, we die entirely alone.” (4.1)
• “I loathe the young ... Selfish, silly little beasts. I'm damned if I see why they should make one feel inferior.” (4.2)

References to other literary works:

“To be alone, sick, in London in this dry, sterile, burnt-out end of summer, was to be abandoned in a pestilence-stricken town; was to live in a third-class waiting-room at a disused terminus among stains and smells, odds and ends of refuse and decay.” (3.3) This reminded me of T S Eliot. The phrase ‘burnt-out ends of smoky days’ was in his Prelude written in 1910 or 1911; the phrase ‘dry sterile thunder without rain’ comes from The Waste Land (1922) In 1936, T S Eliot would have been working in London (at Faber & Faber, a rival publisher to Lehmann’s William Collins). I imagine they met.

She describes one character as looking “how I always imagined Dr Fell” (3.8) I presume this is Dr Gideon Fell, the sleuth in a series of novels by John Dickson Carr, who is described as “a corpulent man with a moustache who wears a cape and a shovel hat and walks with a cane”; he first appeared in print in 1933 (Hag’s Nook) and, most famously, in 1935 in The Hollow Man, both of which would have been best-sellers while this book was being incubated and written.

In the introduction to the Virago edition, Carmen Callil suggests this book is "our Bridget Jones's Diary". I suspect she is thinking of the subject matter. In terms of literary style, The Weather in the Streets is much closer to Virginia Woolf, eg To The Lighthouse

May 2025; 372 pages

First published by William Collins in 1936.

My paperback edition was issued by Virago in 2007.

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

"The Monogram Murders" by Sophie Hannah

 Can Hercule Poirot solve the three murders in a London hotel, linked (sorry!) by a monogrammed cuff-link in the mouth of each victim?

Clues and red herrings abound in this classic Poirot continuation novel, narrated by a more-than-usually-hopeless sidekick, Inspector Catchpole of Scotland Yard whose personal inadequacies make one question how he ever was appointed as a constable, let alone made it to his rank on the murder squad. But as usual, all the little impossibilities are solved by the man with the moustache though the final solution is possibly more far-fetched (farther-fetched?) than any of those proposed in the interim.

And what does it all have to do with evil happenings fifteen years ago in a village stuffed with more than its fair share of rustic weirdos?

Selected quotes:

"I try to be a good Christian , but I have my weaknesses, as we all do. Mine is the inability to forgive the inability to forgive." (Ch 10)

Sophie Hannah has had the blessing of the Agatha Christie estate to write this novel and its sequels:

1. The Monogram Murders (2014)
2. Closed Casket (2016)
3. The Mystery of Three Quarters (2018)
4. The Killings at Kingfisher Hill (2020)
5. Hercule Poirot's Silent Night (2023)
6. The Last Death of the Year (2025)

May 2025; 373 pages

First published by HarperCollins in 2014

My paperback edition issued in 2015.

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

"This Part is Silent" by S J Kim

한국인

 In a series of short pieces in this "book that is not a novel" (Dear Manchester Chinatown), Kim records her frustration with the British academic system: she doesn't get called 'professor' as she would if she was working in the USA, and she has to produce 'research' (in her case write at least 8,000 words of a novel in two years) in order to pass her probation and be made permanent. Inter alia, she records instances in which she feels threatened or undervalued by men because she is a woman and occasions which she perceives as racist because she is Korean.

Scattered throughout the book are Korean (I presume) characters, sometimes forming blocks of text. As regular readers of my blog will know, this is one of my pet hates. Usually it is authors who use French or Latin either on the assumption that I can read these languages (or can be bothered to use Google Translate) or simply to show off their knowledge. I suspect that, in this book, Kim is using these characters deliberately so that I cannot understand what she is saying.

While I defend the right of an artist to create work purely because that fulfils some creative need within themselves (just as I would defend a religious person to worship before a congregation of themselves only, because worship is about the relationship between the worshipper and the god), they aren't entitled to demand my support. One of the functions of art is to communicate and art that fails to communicate is not as good as art that succeeds. So, for example, when a poet gives a long explanation of what their poem 'means' before reciting it: a better poem wouldn't need the explanation. So, for example, when a piece of work on a gallery wall is accompanied by text telling you what it's all about: a better artwork wouldn't need the text. 

Kim's use of Korean characters seems to be more about making a political point than attempting to communicate with this reader. I persisted reading this book to the end but I neither enjoyed it nor felt anything but alienated.

Selected quotes:

• "A public history seeps into the body, the way tea leaves soak upo the scent of a fridge." (Forgive me my eyeballs)
• "They drove for some time, their headlights cutting white through the strangely tinctured dimness of the tunnel." (Forgive me my eyeballs)
• "In creating his own oeuvre under the declaration of a new language, Komunyakaa provokes participation in the living dialogue of his poetry" (Dear Manchester Chinatown) In creating her hybrid language, Kim failed to provoke my participation in the monologue of her prose.
• "Nearly all of us still recognize the sun as a prickly circle, or a tree as a cloud hanging about two sticks." (Dear Manchester Chinatown) 
• "Sprawled there on the hood was a forest of little handprints in bright orange dust, as if the hands of countless children had been pressed there, sticky with thick pollen dust." (Dear Manchester Chinatown) This is the culmination of a superbly tense little horror story.

This book was longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

May 2025; 172 pages

First published in the UK by And Other Stories in 2025

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

"Heresy" by Catherine Nixey

Christians claim theirs is the true faith but “In the beginning there was not ... one single Christian message.” (Introduction). The form of Christianity we have inherited persecuted all other forms out of existence. The word 'heresy' means choice and the pagan philosophers believed that it was good to choose, rationally, who and how one would worship. But "within the first century of the birth of this new religion, ‘choice’ for Christians had become no longer a praiseworthy attribute but a ‘poison’.” (Introduction)

In this scholarly but always entertaining book, Nixey continues what she had started in her best-seller The Darkening Age which chronicled the violent persecution of the pagans unleashed as soon as Christianity became the officially endorsed religion of the Roman Empire. Now she shows how most of the manifold versions of Christianity which existed in those first few centuries were branded heretical and had their exponents criminalised and killed and their books burned. Nevertheless, some vestiges of them survived. The ox and the ass of the nativity scene only appear in a banned gospel. 

On the journey, we learn about alternative sons of god, born of a mortal virgin woman who healed the sick and even raised the dead, such as Apollonius of Tyana.

We learn that the three 'wise men' should properly be translated as magicians and that Jesus could be seen as a magician too: “In Greek and Roman texts, wands had long been associated with magicians: Circe held a wand when she transformed Odysseus’s men into pigs; Mercury held a wand when he led the dead back to life. ... In early Christian art, Jesus holds a wand when he is performing miracles. In one fifth-century wooden panel, he holds one when he is changing water into wine and when he performs the miracle to multiply loaves; in a third-century image from the catacombs, he holds one when he raises Lazarus from the two ... While the sign of the cross is almost entirely absent from early Western Christian art, wands are widely seen.” (Ch 4)

We learn that our image of Jesus is one of many originals: “In the early years and centuries of this religion ... Sometimes he appears as a bearded old man, at others as a beardless young one; in some images he is shown bare-chested and as macho as a Greek god, while at other times he is depicted as far more sexually ambiguous" (Ch 6)

Our images of Hell are not found in the canonical gospels but in pagan authors and non-canonical writings such as the Apocalypse of Peter  and the Apocalypse of Paul (Ch 7)

We are told that all these non-canonical versions (not 'apocryphal' because they were rarely hidden and were often the most popular accounts) should not be regarded as not important because they can be unbelievable: "that is to miss the point. Such texts matter not because they are believable - but because they were believed and read by Christians for centuries. It is understandable that some Christian historians may have wished to ignore them - but it is intellectually indefensible to do so. Do so and you are not writing history, but theology with dates.” (109)

This is an immensely readable and important book. 

Selected quotes:

• “Most people do not require being a flogged with leaden weights to abandon their ideas; for most, the fear that they might lose their job, or that they might merely lose a friend, is enough to make them change their beliefs - or at least stop talking about them." (Introduction)
• “Things first become unwritable, then unsayable and finally unthinkable.” (Introduction)
• “A great deal of all ancient religion was a little more than healthcare with a halo.” (Ch 2)
• “For all the brilliance of Greek and Roman medicine, doctors nonetheless struggled to identify the difference between the seemingly obvious conditions of ‘being dead’ and ‘being alive’.” (Ch 2)
• “There were spells in the Greek magical papyri that offered a far larger menu than Jesus managed ... not only loaves and fishes but side orders too.” (Ch 4)
• “A Roman gladiator had better odds of surviving a fight than an emperor did of enjoying a peaceful conclusion to his reign.” (Ch 12))
• "Bishops had been consolidating their power for centuries ... Bishops started to command that everything in a church must go through them: baptism without a bishop did not, or so bishops argued, count; Eucharist without a bishop did not count either. Prayers, bishops argued, worked better with a bishop present.” (Ch 15)
• “It was perfectly clear to numerous ancient observers that religions were less separate entities, virgin-born and pristine, than variations on a theme ... The names were different perhaps, but the deities were fundamentally the same.” (Ch 16)
• “It was a common complaint that the church persecuted less from a love of righteousness than from a love of real estate.” (Ch 18)
• “Books are not being burned maybe to bring about controlled today: they are being burned for posterity; they are being burned to control the memory of the future.” (Ch 19)
• “The past is not merely today in togas; it is far odder and more eccentric than we often expect.” (Ch 19)

May 2025; 279 pages

Published by Picador in 2004

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