"A Far Cry from Kensington" by Muriel Spark

For a short novel, this book is crammed with characters and plot. Mrs Hawkins, the narrator-protagonist works as an editor at a small publishing house heading towards bankruptcy. She offends a wannabe writer whose malevolent revenge includes getting her sacked, twice, and attempting to make her die. The story also includes poison pen letters, radionics, blackmail, unwanted pregnancy, and suicide. But it takes some time before the meandering threads of this tale are brought together into a tapestry and even afterwards there are loose ends, for example, Isabel. It feels like a real memoir (it is written in the first person and from a perspective of thirty years later) even though the single evil genius presiding at the heart of all the misfortunes is highly unlikely, so full marks for verisimilitude. Apparently it is a roman a clef, Spark's revenge on an ex-lover who trolled her.

But the prose! There are times when it becomes tortuous and I had to read a sentence several times just to understand what it was saying. For example: "But even now when I return to London, to Kensington, and have paid the taxi and been greeted by the people waiting there, and have telephoned the friends and opened the mail, that night I find again my hours of sweet insomnia and know that it is a far cry from that Kensington of the past, that Old Brompton Road, that Brompton Road, that Brompton Oratory, a far cry." (Ch 1) This is ironic when you consider that the narrator-protagonist is supposed to be a respected editor in a publishing house and that the antagonist becomes an enemy because she criticises his writing: "His writing writhed and ached with twists and turns and tergiversations, inept words, fanciful repetitions, far-fetched verbosity and long Latin-based words." (Ch 4) Pot and kettle? 

The first chapter introduces the characters of her rooming house: the narrator, the landlady Milly, Basil and Eve Carlin, Wanda, Kate, Isabel and William Todd. We are also introduced to Mr Twinny, who redecorates, and to the people working at the narrator's office: Mr Ullswater and Martin York, Cathy, Ivy and Patrick. Almost all of these people, and quite a few others, play a significant part in the story to come. Nevertheless, introducing fourteen characters in the first twelve pages seemed a rather steep start for the reader. I was concerned that not only could I not cope but also that the author would not be able to do more than give us silhouette characters, without flesh. However, despite the limitations of space, Spark breathed life into most of the major characters (Wanda, Milly, Hector Bartlett, Isabel ...) and made even the minor characters appear real.

As so often in books of this period, the world is inhabited by posh people. The narrator, Mrs Hawkins, works in publishing. Other inhabitants of the rooming house include a nurse, a medical student, and engineering accountant and Isabel who is decidedly posh. There always seems to be money for eating out and taking cabs even when unemployed: "I always took a taxi to an interview." (Ch 6) Being sacked (twice) doesn't bring on any sort of panic about poverty: "I had some savings and a small pension, so I had no need to find another job immediately." (Ch 5) How she had any savings from her poorly paid job in publishing, her last week's work unpaid, I have no idea. Perhaps life was much, much cheaper then. 

There was one point in which I recognised a fellow feeling. After being sacked the second time, she spends weeks travelling London on buses. When I was depressed, nearing a nervous breakdown, and coming to the end of working as a research assistant, I did the same, taking a bus to wherever it was going, alighting at random, and taking another, crisscrossing London. 

It was pointed out by other members of my reading group that the narrator-protagonist lacks any sort of back story before her (very brief) wartime marriage. Does she have parents? Siblings? In-laws? How and where was she educated? The transition from land girl to editor in a publishing house is unchronicled. She just appears, fully formed.

It is an entertaining novel which reminded me of a light drawing room comedy stage play; one critic compared it to the Ealing Comedy film 'The Lavender Hill Mob'. Witty and charming but somewhat lightweight.

But sometimes it was very funny:

• "I had a sense he was offering things abominable to me, like decaffeinated coffee or coitus interruptus." (Ch 8)

Selected quotes:

• "So great was the noise during the day that I used to lie awake at night listening to the silence." (Ch 1; first line)
• "Basil, by his own definition, was an engineering accountant." (Ch 1) He was. It's a perfectly respectable career. So why the 'by his own definition'?
• "Wanda, the Polish dressmaker, whose capacity for suffering verged on rapacity." (Ch 1)
• "Wanda looks out of the window. ... She sees spies standing at the corner of the road. She sees spies in the grocer shop, following her. Private detectives and government spies." (Ch 4)
• "There isn't an author who doesn't take their books personally." (Ch 6)
• "I concluded that it was better to belong to the ordinary class. For the upper class could not live, would disintegrate, without the ordinary class, while the latter can get on very well on its own." (Ch 7) She works in publishing, an industry which seems unlikely to provide someone with the skills to survive the collapse of civilization.
• "The advice of St Thomas Aquinas had been to rest one's judgement on what is said, not by whom it is said." (Ch 8)
• "One might as well have taken a carpet sweeper to clear the jungle as edit that book." (Ch 8)
• "My advice to any woman who earns the reputation of being capable, is not to demonstrate her ability too much." (Ch 11) She's not exactly a feminist.
• "He can quote chapter and verse, any of my novels. It's amazing. ... He generally gets it wrong, I'll admit. But his dedication to me is there." (Ch 11)
• "It is a good thing to go to Paris for a few days if you have had a lot of trouble, and that is my advice to everyone except Parisians." (Ch 13)
• "Fred talked like the sea, in ebbs and flows each ending in a big wave which washed up the main idea." (Ch 13)

April 2024; 194 pages

Also by Muriel Spark and reviewed in this blog:

• The Ballad of Peckham Rye in which the devil character really, maybe, is.

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

 

 

"The Unconsoled" by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2017, channels his inner Kafka and adds a healthy dose of Lewis Carroll in this fantastical story shortlisted for the 1995 Whitbread Award.

The narrator-protagonist is Mr Ryder, a celebrated pianist, who arrives in an unnamed Central European city where he is due to give a speech and perform at a forthcoming concert. But as soon as he arrives at his hotel, things begin to go wrong. Hilde Stratmann has put together a busy schedule over the next few days but she doesn't share it with him. Instead, everyone he meets makes demands upon his time. The hotel porter Gustav, whose mission is to improve the status of hotel porters, wants him to meet his fellows at a local cafe where they collectively urge him to make a statement supporting their cause.  Stephan, the son of the hotel manager wants Mr R to hear him play the piano and advise him if he is good enough to perform at the concert. Sophie, who seems to be Ryder's wife, wants him to look after Boris, her son, and Boris wants him to go back to their old apartment to find a toy that was left behind in the move. A newspaper photographer wants him to pose before a controversial monument and he agrees, despite being privy to a conversation which makes it clear he is being set-up. He is expected to mend the fractured relationship between an alcoholic orchestra conductor and his ex-wife. Etcetera. 

It seems he cannot say no to anyone and in his endeavours to meet these multiple demands he crisscrosses the town and its surrounding countryside, never quite sure where he is going but often reaching his goal even though the landscape must shrink and twist and buckle like an Escher version of the Mobius strip for him to get there (this reminded me hugely of chapter 2 of Alice Through the Looking Glass when the paths in the garden twist and turn and Alice is advised that if she wants to get somewhere she should head in the opposite direction). And, of course, on each of his travels he meets new characters, including several plucked straight from his childhood, who make fresh and further demands upon him. 

Usually, when he meets people, they treat him with respect and show that they expect great things of him, increasing the feeling that he is subject to demands that it will prove impossible to meet. But sometimes they ignore him completely and at other times he encounters hostility. Some characters discuss him as if he wasn't there. On other occasions he is able to follow characters and listen in to their discussions, understanding their thoughts, even though they are round a corner or inside a building where he cannot possibly have followed them. It's all incredibly surreal.

Doors, as in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, are portals into new places and new areas of experience. Except, perhaps, for the door into the broom cupboard which he opens by mistake even though he is well aware of the comedy trope about people walking into a broom cupboard by mistake. 

It reminded me of the stress I was under when I was a deputy headteacher. I even wrote an article for the Times Educational Supplement (under the pseudonym Chris Jarrett) in which I explained my fear of corridors ... because they were places where doors would open and people would pop out and expect you to do something. It reminded me of how impossible the job was, the repeated demands of others, my inability to delegate (mostly because I didn't have anyone to delegate to) and how my personal life suffered. 

But as well as being a frighteningly accurate portrait of a man under pressure, it also allegorised our dystopian world. Many of the demands were for Ryder to help people solve what was widely perceived as a crisis in the city, to aid the citizens in their attempts to bring about a cultural and consequently economic rebirth of their town. I wondered whether these were a comment on post-imperial Britain.

• "Our city is close to crisis. There's widespread misery. We have to start putting things right somewhere and we might as well start at the centre." (Ch 8)
• "Why don't we resign ourselves to being just another cold, lonely city? Other cities have. At least we'll be moving with the tide." (Ch 9)

Alternatively, some of it seemed to be the torments of a celebrated artist, struggling with the expectations of others and an inner feeling of worthlessness, of imposter syndrome:

• "I have to keep going on these trips because, you see, you can never tell when it's going to come along. I mean the very special one, the very important trip, not just for me but for everyone, everyone in the whole world." (Ch 15)
• "These lovely dreams in the early morning. When the day starts and none of it happens, I often blame myself bitterly." (Ch 28)
• "Even back then you were never a real musician. And you'll never become one now. ... You'll never be anything more than a charlatan. A cowardly, irresponsible fraud ..." (Ch 34)
• "From the beginning I said to myself, I'll tell him tomorrow, we;ll have a proper talk about it tomorrow when they'll be more time. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I kept putting it off." (Ch 35)
• "Leave him be, Boris. Let him go around the world, giving out his expertise and wisdom. He needs to do it. Let's just leave him to it now." (Ch 38)

Is it a five hundred page nightmare? It certainly follows the tangled logic of a dream narrative. Is it an almost endless acid trip? Is it a nervous breakdown? Is this how a newly famous author must feel when the expectations of the world are so out of proportion with his assessment of his own abilities? (In chapter 22, the narrator, realising he hasn't had time to practise the piece he will perform, tells a man who wants him to plays for his dog's funeral: "I've been obliged to attend to too many requests, and as a result I'm now very hard pressed to get done the most important things.") Or is it a rewriting of Kafka's Trial? 

Yes it went on and on but it was fluently written and endlessly inventive and it certainly produced a claustrophobic feeling of  pressure. I had to finish it, I needed to know whether the culminating concert would be a success or not and whether the needs of so many needy people would be satisfied. It was an epic read. I've never read anything quite like it. I think it is probably a masterpiece.

The Guardian called it "difficult, perplexing and uniquely challenging"; I couldn't disagree.

Selected quotes:

• "If she wasn't so beautiful ... she'd have been universally hated." (Ch 9)
• "Until recently, Mr Brodsky was really only ever noticed when he got very drunk and went staggering about the town shouting. The rest of the time he was just this recluse who lived with his dog up by the north highway." (Ch 9)
• "In order to get inside and close the door again I was obliged to squeeze more tightly into a corner and to tug the edge of the door slowly past my chest." (Ch 23)
• "This wall is quite typical of this town. Utterly preposterous obstacles everywhere. And what do you do? Do you all get annoyed? Do you demand that it's pulled down immediately so that people can go about their business? No, you put up with it for the best part of a century. You make postcards of it and believe it's charming." (Ch 26)
• "I was still making my way rapidly along the corridor when I became aware of several figures standing in a line against the wall. Glancing towards them, I saw they were all wearing kitchen overalls and, as far as I could make out, were each waiting their turn to climb into a small black cupboard." (Ch 34)
• "Leave us. You were always on the outside of our love. Now look at you. On the outside of our grief too. Leave us. Go away." (Ch 38)

Surreal and superb. April 2024; 535 pages

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

"The Devil's Footprints" by John Burnside

A woman kills herself and her sons, but not her daughter; did she believe the boys were fathered by the devil? Her brother was killed by the narrator, who was also her former lover; was he the father of her daughter? The daughter runs away, or is she abducted? Another woman is killed by a car driven by the town drunk, one of those who has been persecuting her family for years. Two men are abducted ... but only one is tortured and killed. Has this small seaside town been cursed by the devil whose snow-bound footprints crossed it from the sea to the countryside a hundred years ago?

Beautifully written, with a wonderful hook at the 3% mark: "Even though Moira didn't know it, even though nobody knew it but me, I was the one who had killed her brother, when I was thirteen and he was fifteen, killed him and left him to rot in the old limeroom on a weekday afternoon, when we should have been in school." (The Evening Herald; p 10). I defy you not to read on after that.

It continues, drip-feeding the avid reader with other nuggets. As the narrator says: "I was told this story as a child; or rather, I overheard it. I caught a fragment here, a glimpse there, and I put it together piecemeal, adding details and amendments of my own, making it richer, making it bright and mythical and sure. Making it up." (The Devil's Footprints; p 5) The construction is nearly perfect.

 Selected quotes:

The page numbers refer to the Ulverscroft Large Print Edition of 2008

• "A forceful and crudely handsome boy, manufactured ... on one of God's off-days." (The Evening Herald; p 9)
• "Family is a self-perpetuating mechanism, like a virus." (The Evening Herald; p 20)
• "Out here the stars have always felt closer, the wind a participant in my daily life, giving me the dreams I dream, following me into the house on a blustery day like a familiar dog, snuffling around the hall for a minute or two before vanishing into the kitchen." (The Evening Herald; p 34)
• "His tongue flickered between his lips in soft appraisal." (The Evening Herald; p 60)
• "A forlorn child in a narrow seaside town, a boy among grim-faced adults whose only life was church and work." (The Evening Herald; p 79)
• "She didn't want to live ... like some stain fading slowly on the air" (Le Reniement De Saint Pierre; p 135) This reminded me of The Great Divorce by C S Lewis in which he describes ghosts as "man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air.”
• "Just a man; which was to say: a set of wants, a collection of impulses, a bundle of needs, only half of them visible to his own sorry gaze." (The Dark End of the Fair; p 239)

John Burnside also wrote (reviewed in this blog):

• Glister about another boy in a seaside town damned and doomed by the ruins of the industrial manufacturing plant.

April 2024; 311 pages

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

"Dorian's Journey" by Karena Morgan

This is one of those rarities: a novel set firmly in the real world. No murders, no superheroes, no twisty plots. Just a bunch of people and their relationships. For this it should be applauded. It reminded me of other social realism novels such as Winfred Holtby's South Riding or The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

It is a sort of coming-of-age story that follows its eponymous protagonist well into middle age, a little like Lessons by Ian McEwan. Dorian is orphaned as a girl (she misses her mother terribly but her father not at all, perhaps because he "wasn’t exactly oozing sex-appeal but was uncomplicated and trustworthy"; Ch 3) and grows up in a convent. Following some years as a rather old-fashioned single girl, struggling to find a decent man, she marries Harry and moves into the house he shares with his twin sister, Clare, her husband, Andrew, and their son, Charlie, and daughter, Becky. It's almost a commune. But the introduction of the too-perfect-to-be-true Dorian into such a tight-knit community can only have destructive consequences.

The problem with this sort of fictionalised biography is that it is very much one thing after another. While this adds a huge amount of verisimilitude to the book, there is little sense that the plot is developing themes. It is Dorian's 'journey' but it feels a little like a picaresque. Perhaps Charlie is supposed to be the lovable rogue although I positively disliked him.

In my opinion, the greatest weakness lies in the dialogue. There's a lot of rather stilted dialogue in which people lay bare their emotions, setting out the issues that they or their relationships are confronting with honesty and clarity. I don't think people talk like that (outside therapy encounter groups). I doubt most of us even admit those emotions to ourselves, let alone our loved ones. This reduced the feeling of reality that had been built up by the rest of the story. It made the characters feel wooden. Here's an example: "Don't be shocked at what I'm about to say, but if you need a test-drive to put your mind at rest, you'd be safe in my hands. I've been dating an older woman, I enjoy the warm-up and I know what I'm doing. I promise you that I'd voice any concerns, but my gut feeling is that there's nothing wrong with you. I'm not harassing you, don't worry. The ball is in your court now. But if you took up my offer and we were good together, maybe you could consider me as a 'Plan B' if things don't work out for you? I'll still be around." Perhaps this works as a chat-up technique but I can't imagine anyone saying it straight off like that. 

But the pacing is nearly perfect with major turning-points at the 50% and 75% stage.

And I love a novel to be focused on the characters and in this book the major characters are impressively strong:

• Dorian (Dory) is portrayed as Miss Perfect (has she any flaws?) yet she is the disruptive influence whose entry into the family has devastating consequences for the relationships of the other adults. She's Teflon pure and yet there were times when I wanted to throttle her.
• Harry's only real fault seems to be that he is a serial adulterer. Charlie also has multiple partners, but the difference is that Harry is married while he has affairs and Charlie is single and a serial monogamist.
• Clare is rather dour, banning laughter at the dinner table. She is a close observer of the relationship develops between her son and her sister-in-law and she disapproves. She is described as controlling and manipulative but apart from Harry nobody in the family actually likes her. I think she's a victim.
• At the beginning, Andrew is an extremely liberal and open-minded father. He anticipates that his son will want to sow some wild oats, advises the boy how to have sex with multiple partners and stay safe, and even redesigns the family home so that Charlie can smuggle his girlfriends upstairs surreptitiously. He is portrayed as being under his wife's thumb but he is far more on the side of his children. In the end he becomes an old-fashioned patriarch. "I'm the head of this household now and there's no place here for anyone who's uptight and humourless." he tells his wife in chapter 23. Really?
• Charlie is a strange mixture of childish delight and silliness and incredibly mature understanding. He is the unadulterated life-force. "You've gone from a boy with a cheeky grin to a hunky Love-God with the wisdom of Aristotle" Dorian says in chapter 14. Too good to be true! Charlie is obviously intended to be an unflawed hero but there are lots of things I disliked in him. There's definitely a darker side. Despite apparently caring deeply for the happiness of others, what he says and what he does are always aimed at him getting his own way. He lays down ground rules with his sexual partners to separate the physical from the emotional and to ensure that he is always free in his relationships. He calls his mum controlling and manipulative yet he issues ultimatums to both her and his dad: if you don't do what I want I'll move out of the family home. He's a domestic autocrat. I'm not a fan of Charlie.

But the fact that I am so involved in the rights and wrongs of the characters means that they feel real to me and that is a testimony to the quality of writing of this novel. 

Selected quotes:

• "Jeremy was twenty-seven, single and looking for a particular type of woman. He didn’t believe in equality of the sexes and found many modern women too liberal and individual. They unsettled him and brought his insecurities to the surface." (Ch 3) There are moments when the author tells rather than shows.
• "Dorian had done the equivalent of falling for a movie character and thinking she loved the actor" (Ch 3)
• "Her life was standing still but time was moving fast." (Ch 4)
• "Never abandon a good friendship. Romance is fickle, but a really good friend is very precious." (Ch 5)
• "you look like a millipede that's just been told to buy shoes." (Ch 8)
• "'Relationships are complex though. Even steady ones can have a shelf-life.’ ‘Don’t they have two? One ends before the other and someone gets their heart broken." (Ch 17)
• "he had become brutally honest and he would be unlikely to spare her feelings anymore." (Ch 23) There's an awful lot of brutal honesty in this book. None of the characters can resist telling others what they think of them. It's amazing they managed to live together as long as they did. Perhaps the sequel will be a murder mystery. 

One of the best self-published novels I have read for a long time. April 2024; 

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

"Death Behind Closed Doors" by Jon Neal

This is a classic whodunnit murder mystery, perfectly paced. Private Investigator Stanley Messina, fresh from his triumph in The Other Path, is called in by retired DI Jack Sheppard to reopen Jack's last case, the one he failed to solve. Each of the small group of people who knew the victim are interviewed, new facts are brought to light.  Of course, everyone has a secret. Old tensions are reignited and, as the murderer is exposed, there is a life-and-death climax. 

It might sound like the standard pattern but this author breathes new life into the format. Telling the story in the third person, and from the perspective of most of the participants, he focuses on an acute understanding psychology of the characters. In particular, there is unresolved history between the PI and the DI which provides both another fascinating mystery for the reader to solve and some sizzling tension between the two of them, men with very different approaches to life. We learn something of the back story of Jack and a little more of Stanley's; I hope subsequent books will allow us to uncover the whole of this complex character.

This is a very readable story told with skill and style. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Selected quotes:

• "It was always going to be the tightrope on which they’d have to tread. If there was ever to be a way forward, they would need to tiptoe carefully across the divide, trying to find the right balance." (Ch 1)
• "he still wrestled with memories of who he used to be, with thoughts flashing back when he least expected them. They burst into the present like a rampaging uninvited guest" (Ch 5)
• "He didn’t want to be cynical. Although it was a challenge not to be. Hard not to baulk at how naïve he’d been." (Ch 5)
• "Every dream comes with compromise." (Ch 6)
• "having a child made you more aware of age. That ever-creeping ascending number." (Ch 6)
• "Always better, he found, to be running slightly late for everything. No opportunity then for the devil to make work for idle hands." (Ch 8)
• "She didn’t speak. Just moved her lips in a way that looked as if she was chewing on the words she might once had said." (Ch 10)
• "If life had taught him anything over the last couple of difficult years, it was that change happened whether you liked it or not." (Ch 17)

April 2024; 

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

"Stone Blind" by Natalie Haynes

Shortlisted for the 2023 fiction of the year prize in the British Book Awards.

A retelling of the myth of Perseus killing the gorgon Medusa and rescuing Andromeda, much of it seen from the point of view of Medusa. It confronts the reader with the moralities of the situation - the male Olympians are serial rapists, Medusa is very much a victim, Perseus has no defensible reason for killing her, or cheating the Graiai - and questions the 'othering' of 'monsters'. It does this by narrating things from a very modern perspective although it never seriously questions the hierarchy.

The conceit of portraying the characters as if they were modern men and women (rather as also done by Stephen Fry in, for example, Mythos and Heroes) is frequently delightful and often very funny although I felt towards the end that this was insufficient to carry the whole book. Nevertheless, it certainly cuts the gods and heroes down to size (although the Greek myths already portray the gods as having very human failings; perhaps this exercise should be repeated for gods who are still worshipped or would that be blasphemy?). 

I was not convinced that Perseus was, as the voice of the head of Medusa tells us, "a vicious little thug". He's much more complicated than that. There are times when he is heroic - if heroism is to act despite overwhelming fear - such as when he climbs the cliffs or faces the sea-monster. He is repeatedly humiliated, for example by Athena for not being as clever as she is and by the kleptomaniacal Hesperides when they catch him skinny-dipping. Fundamentally he is a plaything of the gods. When he is wicked it is, perhaps, not because of who he is but because he is burdened with unrealistic expectations and, later, too much power. 

And how does Athena get away without censure for what she does to Medusa? 

Nevertheless, there are some wonderfully funny scenes, such as the conversations between Perseus, Hermes and Athena, and the wonderfully comic Hesperides, and there are some fabulous characterisations. This is, above all, a brilliantly comic novel.

I was disappointed not to find out whether Perseus did, in the end, kill his grandfather.

Selected quotes:

• "Hera and Zeus were ideally matched, at least in terms of their capacity to antagonize one another. There were days when she believed he could scarcely rise from his bed without seducing or raping someone." (1: Hera)
• "Zeus was on the verge of saying he had never seen anything more beautiful unless she was naked, when he caught sight of his wife's eyes ... and decided that perhaps some thoughts were better left unsaid." (1: Hera)
• "Imagine being a god, she thought, and still needing to tell everyone how impressive you were." (1: Medusa)
• "Being afraid of dying must be especially awful, because there was no hope of avoiding it." (1: Danae)
• "Even the birds had stopped singing, as though they knew he was going the wrong way and couldn't bear to watch." (3: The Graiai)
• "He had learned to assess travellers by however well or ill prepared they appeared for whatever was to come. These two looked like what was to come would have to prepare for them." (3: The Graiai)
• "He's just a bag of meat wandering around irritating people." (4: Athene)

A very funny comic novel.

For a totally different modernisation of Greek myth, read Country by Michael Hughes, which updates the Iliad, setting it in Northern Ireland at the time of the Troubles. 

March 2024; 368 pages

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

"Triple Tease" by Tony Flood

This is a fast-paced novel. It uses many short paragraphs which often contain only one or two sentences.The short chapters average four pages. This made it very easy to read.

It is also straightforward about the characters and their motivations. This is not an author who believes in 'show don't tell'. Here is his protagonist's self-assessment of her character: "For all my outward display of confidence, I'm riddled with doubt. There are hundreds of insecurities behind my smile. It's almost as if I've got two different personalities." (Ch 3)

At the start, it seemed to be a thriller about vigilante justice but the hero of this section, Katrina, disappears when the book morphed into a police procedural murder mystery. She bounces back in at the end as a sort of deus ex machina to solve the plot. 

I say 'police procedural' but the police seemed to honour the procedure more in the breach than in the observance. The lead detective uses a civilian as an agent provocateur and conspires to cover up a murder. He also makes a verbal slip which suggests he knows the identity of the main murderer so perhaps he is corrupt as well as indifferent to the rules.

The portrayal of misogyny within the CID as evidenced, inter alia, by puerile penis-jokes was probably accurate. Unfortunately, the sexism spilled over into the rest of the book. The attitudes to women in display through most of this novel were old-fashioned to say the least. The wife of the chief copper is a nagging shrew with a sporadic Scottish accent. Other women are victims or sex-workers. There was a focus on their looks: they were either drop-dead gorgeous or grotesque. Katrina, whose physical assets were repeatedly extolled, has her degree and post-graduate study dismissed as "basic qualifications". I found this problematic, especially when the principal crimes involved sex-based violence towards women.

There is an interesting moment of meta-fiction (or was it a commercial break?) when the author appears as a character. 

There is an audacious twist at the end.

March 2024; 282 pages

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

"The School for Scandal" by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

 I saw a 'Tilted Wig' production of this classic play from 1777 performed at the Devonshire Park Theatre in Eastbourne on the evening of 19th March 2024. It inspired me to read the text.

There a several plots, intertwined. Sir Peter Teazle, an elderly man, has recently married a young wife from the country (shades of William Wycherley's 1675 play The Country Wife with perhaps a dash of the Commedia dell'Arte although Sir Peter is much too nice to be a proper Pantalone; the mastermind who ensures the goodies win in the end is the servant Rowley, which is a very old theme indeed) and she has embraced 'fashionable' society, joining a set led by Lady Sneerwell which enjoys scandalous gossip. Lady Teazle is tempted by thoughts of an affair with Joseph Surface, a hypocrite, who fancies Lady T but has designs (for her money) on Sir Peter's ward, Maria, who herself loves Joseph's profligate and debt-ridden young brother Charles, who loves Maria (and is also loved by Lady Sneerwell, although he doesn't know that). Meanwhile Sir Oliver, the uncle of the Surface brothers, is returning from India where he has been living for so long that the boys don't know what he looks like (despite treasuring a portrait of him painted in his youth). He plans to 'test' them before deciding whether to leave his considerable fortune to them. So he pretends to be a moneylender in order to test Charles and a poor relation seeking financial support in order to test Joseph. The play climaxes with a farce scene which sees both Lady Teazle hiding behind a screen from her husband and Sir Peter hiding in a closet from Charles. In the end, despite scandalous reports of a duel, the evildoers are unmasked and good triumphs.

The play was a critical and commercial success, building on the reputation of Sheridan's debut hit The Rivals. 

The play repeats anti-semitic tropes about Jews and usury; in the performance I saw, the moneylender was rebranded as a black wide-boy (though I'm not sure that replacing one racist slur with another is necessarily an improvement). 

The first scene is a discussion between Mr Snake and Lady Sneerwell that explains the status quo ante to the audience and lays bare some of the characters and their motivations: it's a tell don't show that would be regarded as rather clumsy in modern theatre. The need to set up the situations means that the first half of the play is a sometimes slow build-up. The fun gets going properly in the second half, with the auction scene, the farce, and the wonderfully conflicting reports of the consequent duel. 

Selected Quotes:

• "Wit loses its respect with me when I see it in company with malice." (1.1)
• "'Tis now six months since Lady Teazle made me the happiest of men - and I have been the miserablest dog ever since." (1.2)
• "The fault is entirely hers ... I am myself the sweetest-tempered man alive and hate a teasing temper - and so I tell her a hundred times a day." (1.2)
• "If you wanted authority over me, you should have adopted me and not married me. I am sure you were old enough." (2.1)
• "You had no taste when you married me." (2.1)
• "I hate to see prudence clinging to the green suckers of youth; 'tis like ivy round a sapling and spoils the growth of the tree." (2.3)
• "I don't care how soon we leave off quarrelling, provided you'll own you were tired first." (3.1)
• "There's the great degeneracy of the age! Many of our acquaintance have taste, spirit, and politeness, but plague on't, they won't drink." 3.3)
• "Here’s to the maiden of bashful fifteen;
• Here’s to the widow of fifty;
• Here’s to the flaunting extravagant quean,
• And here’s to the housewife that’s thrifty." (3.3)

A little dated but still good fun.

March 2024; 

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

"Glister" by John Burnside

 The houses of Innertown cluster around the abandoned chemical plant. Many of the people living there are sick and dying, all of them have abandoned hope. A teenaged boy disappears. The policeman knows what happened but he helps the town's richest resident cover it up. Since then another five lads have vanished, one after another.

Leonard thinks he will be the next. Meantime he cares for his dying father, reads voraciously at the local library, fucks his girlfriend, Elspeth, drinks psychedelic tea with the Moth Man, and gets rather too involved with Jimmy's gang.

Chapters of the stunning story are narrated in the third person by the policeman, his wife, his ex-employer, and Elspeth, but the bulk of the story, including a prologue which seems to be written after his death, is narrated in the first-person by Leonard. The story is strange, haunted by themes of avenging angels and guilt and loss and the desolation of decay. The narrating characters are beautifully described: the guilt-ridden policeman ("that dim, self-pitying doormat of a man";  1: The Book of Job: Connections) and his alcoholic wife, the cynical and manipulative boss, needy but loving Elspeth. Jimmy's gang is wonderfully feral, following only the rules of the pack (and provides a hilarious moment when Mickey gets chloroform and chlorophyll confused). Mythic roles are taken by John the Librarian and the Moth Man (a character first met at the 50% turning point and presumably named after the strange folklore supernatural creature from West Virginia). And, central to all, is the doomed Leonard, intelligent and caring, but accepting of his fate. I just wish he'd had the chance to finish reading Proust.

Selected quotes:

• "It's the story that's unreliable, not the narrator - and  I don't believe there's such a thing as 'the author' at all." (Life Is Bigger)
• "A secret, enclosed space where a boy with more imagination than friends might sit out late, playing at wilderness." (1: The Book of Job: Homeland)
• "Compared to a number puzzle, or a complicated jigsaw, people were like those dodgem cars at the fair, going round in circles and bumping into one another noisily to no real purpose." (1: The Book of Job: Connections)
• "When you ignore what people feel and want, when you see them as objects in the fullest sense of the word, they become the most interesting pieces in the most compelling and elegant puzzle of all." (1: The Book of Job: Connections)
• "Nothing in the world is as contagious as the expectation of failure."  (1: The Book of Job: Connections)
•  "The great thing about public money is that it doesn't stay public for long."  (1: The Book of Job: Connections)
• "Mistakes don't happen in a single, decisive moment, they unfold slowly through a lifetime."  (1: The Book of Job: Morrison)
• "Smith didn't ask for favours, he offered them. Nevertheless, it took nothing more than a smile and a friendly handshake for Morrison to know that his soul was being claimed."    (1: The Book of Job: Morrison)
• "He had that air of calculated affability that let you know he didn't give a fuck about you or anybody else."   (1: The Book of Job: Morrison)
• "Being insulted by a navvy in a suit was the least of his problems."  (1: The Book of Job: Morrison)
• "The dead go away into their solitude, but the young dead stay with us, they colour our dreams, they make us wonder about ourselves, that we should be so unlucky, or clumsy, or so downright ordinary as to carry on without them."   (1: The Book of Job: Morrison)
• "Lying on the bed in a tight sleeve of pills and vodka."   (1: The Book of Job: Alice)
• "You find that with teachers: as soon as they have a run-in with somebody, they go straight to the weakest cub in the pack.It's how they restore order."   (1: The Book of Job: Et In Arcadia)
• "That's how the world works. The bad people win and the rest pretend they haven't noticed what's going on, to save face." (1: The Book of Job: Et In Arcadia)
• "Even in the most law-abiding place, what makes the difference is that one man is capable of killing and another isn't." (1: The Book of Job: Et In Arcadia)
• "I think, on the whole, that romance is something that should be saved for later, when you're old enough to deal with it. In the meantime, there's fucking. Kids are better at that than romance and all that difficult shit." (1: The Book of Job: Et In Arcadia)
• "trapped in the slow run of time like a swimmer caught in a current that's too strong to resist." (1: The Book of Job: Et In Arcadia)
• "He's borrowing moments, borrowing looks and smiles and the odd word from people who are luckier than he is." (1: The Book of Job: Rivers)
• "He had a sad look now, a look that took all the disappointments he'd ever had in a whole lifetime and brought them together in one final foregone conclusion." (2: The Fire Sermon: Undoing)
• "like when God sent the angel to kill all the eldest sons of the Egyptians, but spared the Israelite kids. You had to give it to those Israelites, they were hard bastards.  ... Some fucking angel was going to be running through the town killing children, and they just lay down and had a good night's sleep, without a second thought. Me, I'd have felt a bit bad about some of those Egyptian kids. I'd have wanted to tip somebody off." (2: The Fire Sermon: Leonard)
• "Now, faces loom up at her out of the floor, or they come leering out from a wall, dead faces, but mocking, mocking and desperate at once ... Worse still, though, are the noises in her head - not voices, never voices any more, just a noise like furniture being moved, wooden table legs dragging across a floor, or saucepan lids falling and  clattering on tiles, or maybe the sound of piano wires resonating in the dark, where someone is rocking the frame back and forth." (2: The Fire Sermon: Dreaming)
• "That's the twist about hell ... the fact that, in hell, it's not the guilty who suffer, it's the innocent. That's what makes it hell. Some random principle wanders through the world, choosing people for no good reason and plunging them into hell. Grief for a child. Horrifying sickness. Noises and faces coming from nowhere ..." (2: The Fire Sermon: Dreaming)
• "This patient, self-contained man is one of life's watchers ... not possessed of animosity or any other emotion, simply someone who enjoys having power over others." (2: The Fire Sermon: Morrison)
• "People like to look at sadness because it isn't pain, and because it echoes something in themselves."  (2: The Fire Sermon: Morrison)
• "The policeman's offence is too grievous to go unpunished, the most extreme form of an offence the whole town has been mired in for decades: the sin of omission, the act of averting our gaze ... the sin of not wanting to know; the sin of knowing everything and not doing anything about it. ... I'm not saying we should try to help the people in Somalia, or stop the devastation of the rainforest, it's just that we don't feel anything at all other than a mild sense of discomfort or embarrassment when we see the broken trees and the mudslides, or the child amputees in the field hospitals - and it's unforgivable that we go on with our lives when these things are happening somewhere." (2: The Fire Sermon: Heaven)

This is what urban fantasy ought to be: not fairies in the subway but gritty, post-industrial decay with a visit from the angel of death. 

March 2024; 258 pages

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

Also by John Burnside and reviewed in this blog:

• The Devil's Footprints