"The Night Listener" by Armistead Maupin

A cleverly plotted story about truth and fiction.

Gabriel Noone has become famous for reading stories on the radio - he calls them "feel-good penny dreadfuls" (Ch 2) which might be a decent description of this novel. He is contacted by Pete, a boy who has written a book about his childhood hell, sexually abused by his parents, pimped out to men, and forced to make gay porn videos. Gabriel an ageing gay man whose long-term partner has just left him, finds solace in his chats with Pete. But is this telephone relationship quite what it seems to be?

Right from the start, the narrator warns us that he is "a fabulist by trade" and that he embellishes even true stories. He warns Pete against confusing Gabriel's reality with the characters in his radio stories. So the reader knows that Gabriel is an unreliable narrator although the full extent of his duplicity is not revealed until the very end. But how much truth is there in what Pete says? Is lonely Gabriel falling for a hoax perpetrated by an even more unreliable narrator? How much do any of us really know the truth about anything?

That's why I wasn't keen on the Afterword which, rather like the final seven minutes of the film Saltburn, spills the beans with heavy explication. In the case of this book, the justification might be that, by explaining things, it leaves the reader with an even greater realisation that the author has been economical with the actuality. And at least it preserves the core ambiguity.

The plot is nicely woven with the subplot of Gabriel being abandoned by his partner Jess who is trying to 'find himself'. It's nicely paced with clever twists culminating in a snow-bound journey, a sort of Hero's quest in that otherworld Americans call up-state Michigan. I don't think I was ever surprised by a major twist - they were well-signalled and the only twist I missed I felt was an unnecessary way to crank up the tension - but my motivation to keep reading was partly because I was expecting the twist and I wanted to know whether my expectations would be confirmed. At first I was disappointed by the ending: I wanted resolution and I felt its lack was because the author himself couldn't decide which of two possibilities to endorse. On second thoughts, however, I think the ambiguous ending was probably intended from the start and I like the way it finished (though I still have my doubts about the Afterword). 

It is narrated in the first person which makes the uncertainties more visceral and the past tense. I have previously found that this author has an expectation that the reader shares his cultural milieu, for example with references to commercial products, which included, in this novel, Triscuits, the Castro, and a Rocky and Bullwinkle cel. Presumably this is done to maximise verisimilitude for his home audience but, if done too much, it can confuse and alienate those outside that target. However, I felt that in this book these were usually - and unobtrusively - explained.

The narrator-protagonist Gabriel is portrayed as someone perhaps a little too sensitive, and gullible, for his own good. The antagonist, though not in the villain sense, is Pete, whom we only know through his phone calls. He is a brilliant writer, still in his early teens. His debut book is a memoir in which he (apparently, we are given no details of this book) describes having been sexually abused from babyhood. He has had syphilis and now has AIDS. He is a fan of Gabriel, whose work he has heard on the radio, and wants Gabriel to write a blurb for his book. They start to exchange phone calls. All at once they have adopted a father (Gabriel) son (Pete) relationship. Very soon, very fast. There are some strangely intimate moments, such as when Pete wants to rest his head on Gabriel's shoulder, through the medium of the phone conversation. 

This was, for me, the book's downfall. I couldn't believe in Pete as a character. This is a lad who had been raped repeatedly, and pimped out, by his biological father and he immediately seeks to adopt the needy Gabriel as his telephone father. This is a lad who has been subjected to horrendous abuse, whose parents never even called him by his name, and yet who shows no hint of PTSD. He is portrayed as an occasionally vulnerable tough guy making jokes and trading insults. He even offers relationship advice to Gabriel, talking about love. Not only does he have a surprisingly wise head on his young shoulders, but also he sounds like a counsellor. As a character, he reminded me of Kya, the protagonist in Where the Crawdads Sing by Della Owens, another child neglected by her parents who manages to bring herself up, on her own, in the middle of a marsh, even learning to read in a single summer. In other words, Pete and Kya are too good to be true.

It seemed to me that the phone calls with Pete were a fantasy sequence set in what was otherwise a mundane and everyday description of Gabriel's problems with his boyfriend, Jess - a shadowy character whose main function seem to be to leave Gabriel broken-hearted and therefore vulnerable and, at the end of Act One, to advance the plot lurchingly into Act Two - and his wonderfully bigoted and cantankerous father. This is told with a mass of details and seemingly  unimportant incidents which underpin the verisimiltude and the feeling of ordinariness. This was the perfect counterpoint to the fantasy; it grounded and anchored it and made it seem possible.

But I was a jump ahead of the twist. 

It is very much structured in three acts. The first act is about making contact with Pete (at 8%) and the relationship becoming deeper. A big question mark arises at 37% and we move into the second act in which uncertainty is the theme. The third act is mostly the 'hero's quest' with a final twist (which I also saw coming) at the 85% mark.

It was quick and easy to read and very entertaining. The plot was cleverly constructed and I liked the theme although I'm still in two minds about the Afterword. The biggest flaw was in the antagonist.

Apparently it is based on a true story. 

Selected quotes:

• "I know how it sounds when I call him my son. ... I've noticed the looks on people's faces ... It's easy enough to see how they've pegged me: an unfulfilled man on the shady side of fifty, making a last grasp at fatherhood with somebody else's child." (Ch 1)
• "I've spent years looting my life for fiction. Like a magpie, I save the shiny stuff and discard the rest; it's of no use to me if it doesn't serve the geometry of the story." (Ch 1)
• "Most stories have holes in them that cry out for jewelled elephants." (Ch 1)
• "He'd use a ten-dollar word when a ten-cent one would do." (Ch 2)
• "There are moments, I think, when you actually feel your life changing, when all you can all but hear the clumsy clank and bang of fate's machinery." (Ch 3)
• "He'd work my nipples like a ravenous baby ... until I came with a fury, feeling the rough hemp of his chest across my belly, that silken cock against my leg, or in my astonished hand." (Ch 4)
• "His eyes were his most arresting feature: a pale, glowing green that stopped you cold with their sheer unlikelihood. Like those pretty stones you find on the beach sometimes that prove, upon closer examination, to be fragments of a pop bottle, roughed up by the ocean." (Ch 4) Even in this arresting description, the author hints that maybe not all is as it seems.
• "I spent days sifting through the litter that Wayne had left as an autobiography." (Ch 6) When my Aunt Marion died she left a cupboard full of slide transparencies showing scenes from her many holidays. It broke my heart to throw them out. Our most treasured possessions become junk after we die.
• "The heart is measured by how much you love, not by how much you are loved by others. Fuckin' Hitler was loved by others." (Ch 7) Sometimes Pete's feel-good philosophising sounds far too mature for his tender age and untender experience.
• "I had learned to jerk off earlier that year, but the experience had seemed more of a medical emergency than an act of lust." (Ch 9)
• "There were pleasant farmsteads and dark green forests and countless ponds winking through the birches like pocket mirrors." (Ch 20)
• "Is that what it means to get old? I wondered. To revert to the helplessness of infancy without any of the fun?" (Ch 25)

Maupin is famous for writing Tales of the City, a compendium of linked stories about a group of rather superficial characters in San Francisco.

July 2024; 324 pages

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

"Distant Star" by Roberto Bolano

The narrator met fellow poet Alberto Ruiz-Tagle at University in Chile just before the military coup that topples the Allende government. Later, Alberto becomes Carlos Wieder, a lieutenant in the Chilean airforce whose extra-curricular career as a serial killer is facilitated by the murders and disappearances of political opponents to the new regime of General Pinochet. Later still, Wieder goes to ground and is hunted through his contributions to underground poetry magazines in Europe. 

This novel is a curious mixture of politics and literary criticism; it seems to be predicated on the idea that poetry is important. It references inter alia Borges, Georges Perec, Vathek by William Beckford and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. There's an intense flavour of the typical cocktail of South America and students, of youth and disillusion. There are times when the story seems to wander down a sidetrack; there are echoes of the prose and narrative structure of Jorge Luis Borges (such as when the narrator considers the precise translation of the Bible that Wieder might have used for an early performance poem). But mostly, I suppose, it is about evil and our typically inadequate response to it.

Selected quotes:

• "Drifting east, shaped like cigarettes or pencils, the clouds were black and white at first, when they were still over the coast, but as they veered towards the city they turned pink, then bright vermilion as they headed up the valley." (Ch 2)
• "But who, wonders Munoz Cano, have ever seen a dentist's waiting room where the rotten teeth (sic) are standing in line?" (Ch 6)
• "Prisoners are a dead weight in times of civil war." (Ch 7)
• "Every one of them seemed confident and utterly self-assured, immune to ridicule and doubt, a condition which, on reflection, is perhaps not altogether exceptional, given that these were French writers." (Ch 9)

July 2024; 149 pages

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

"Parents and Children" by Ivy Compton-Burnett

Money is running out for the Sullivan family. Fulbert and Eleanor may live an idle life surrounded by maids in the large house owned by their in-laws but their nine children must be (haphazardly) educated so they can enter gainful employment. And Fulbert needs to go to South America to sort out his dad's business interests. 

The story is told almost entirely through dialogue, and the dialogue is very formal; this gives the prose an unnatural feeling. The characters seem to speak their thoughts rather more than most of us. Here's a typical example, from Luce who, to be fair, is an adult and tends to speak more formally than the rest of them: "Mother, I don't think Father much liked my saying that about your money. But it did seem a  fair point to make. I should not have been at ease with myself, if I had not said it." (Ch 1) It gets faintly ludicrous when the sentence is tortured for the sake of formal but archaic grammar: "Father has not a wife who will make things harder for him." (Ch 1) It becomes even stranger when the younger children use 'whom' correctly and terms such as 'polyandry'. 

Bertolt Brecht, the playwright of The Good Person of Szechuan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Mother Courage, and The Threepenny Opera amongst other dramas, asked his actors to narrate their characters rather than impersonate them; he wanted the audience to realise that the drama performed on stage was an artificial construct. This formality of dialogue, added to the almost complete lack of described setting, or characters, and the unlikelihood of the plot, seems Brechtian in its deliberate artificiality. Verisimilitude is repeatedly undermined. As well as creating a barrier between the writer and the reader, ICB's technique makes her prose hard to read, the reader needs to concentrate.  Nevertheless, the attentive reader swiftly builds up the characters. For example, Daniel repeatedly puts his brother Graham down, often making belittling comments in which he refers to Graham in the third person which makes an interesting counterpoint to Neville, the three year old, who refers to himself in the third person. Graham makes comments which suggest that he is perceptive to the undercurrents of emotion running through the novel. The oldest sibling sister Luce is a family peacemaker although she criticises her mother when Eleanor wants to read Isabel's private letter. James is a school-shy rebel who wants to be left alone to read. Isabel is very clever and she knows it. Gavin and Honor are budding rebels. The father Fulbert is flippant and spoiled and very lazy; more than once he is complacent about being ignorant of something. Grandfather Sir Jesse is the patriarch of the family (in the Old Testament, Jesse is the father of David who becomes King of the Israelites after slaying Goliath) and makes his displeasure plain by walking out of family discussions; they all contort themselves to make sure that he is pleased because, ultimately, he holds the purse strings. But the dominant personality is the grandmother Regan. Eleanor the mother is a contradiction; she hates living as a dependent on her husband's family, though it is hinted that in the early days the family only survived because she had money. She has had nine children but has farmed out their care to maids and governesses; the boys go to school or university while the girls are educated, poorly and incompletely, at home. The whole family are indolent parasites. Furthermore, on the estate is a cottage containing a brother and two sisters who are allegedly orphans from South America and they too are supported - though meanly, in their opinion - by patriarch Jesse; one wonders whether they are his children. And there are a family of friends consisting of Paul and his children Ridley and Hope and their stepmother Faith: these four intrude upon the family at the worst of times and say outrageously frank things. 

In the first half of the book almost nothing happens. We are introduced to the family and their nine children who exist in three groups of three: the adults Luce, Daniel and Graham, the two boys both in their final year at Cambridge; the middle three James (normally at school which he hates and survives by repeatedly throwing sickies), Isabel and Venice; and the youngest in the nursery Gavin and Honor - who conspire to give their new governess a torrid time - and 3-year-old Neville. Already there are too many characters and some of them such as Venice never really become more than ciphers while others (Honor and Gavin, Luce and Daniel?) remain enigmas. Perhaps the mystery is deliberate; it is, at least, rather more genuine than the thought-revealing dialogue.

One of the major themes of this book is dependency. The nine children are dependent upon their parents and, as they grow older, they resent this dependency: the young ones such as Gavin and James and Isabella rebel in typically childish ways: they are truculent and disobedient in minor matters. The adult children rebel in their words. Miss Mitford the governess says things that challenge the expectations put upon her to the point of rudeness. But there is also a family of three dependants living in a cottage in the grounds and with them, and in the house, we see how the dependency relation damages the patron as well as the patronised: Jesse, like Eleanor and Regan, is stingy with what he gives and yet expects subservience and gratitude. Those who feel themselves to be superior in this highly stratified hierarchy are not about imposing their will by force, such as when Eleanor reads Isabel's letter or when Gavin is forced to hand over his drawing. 

The book charts the ways in which the pecking order continually readjusts itself. It challenges the status quo. For example, Eleanor employs maids and governesses to care for her nine children and yet she feels she is owed respect for her maternal efforts: "It is more difficult to make other people do things then to do them yourself." But her adult children and others repeatedly challenge her assumptions and presumptions. Furthermore, she is both a bully and bullied. The book starts with her wanting to leave the stately home of her husband's parents and, when the chance comes, she proposes to move out even though this involves leaving her children. But when push comes to shove, she won't sacrifice her creature comforts to do this. Fundamentally all those characters in this novel who are dependent know on which side their bread is buttered and so their rebellions are muted and they toe the line, at whatever costs to their characters. 

It's difficult to read. There is very little description. The dialogue is excruciatingly formal. There is little pretence at verisimilitude. And yet this is a work of literature that creates characters who challenge the reader to think.  I have wanted to read a novel by Compton-Burnett since I read Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader in which Queen Elizabeth II is imagined encountering a mobile library in the grounds of Buckingham Palace and borrowing and reading an ICB book because she has met her. He describes ICB's writing as 'dry'. I'm not sure that ICB would turn anyone on to literature (and I'm not that impressed by Alan Bennet after reading and watching The Madness of King George). But he's right: ICB might be quaint and old-fahioned and mannered and strange but her writing is certainly thought-provoking and I fully intend to give her another go.

Selected quotes:

• "She had loved thirteen people, which may be above the average number." (Ch 1)
• "It was the family practice to economize in materials rather than in time. It seldom struck Eleanor or Regan that a few shillings might be well spent. Shillings were never well spent to them, only by necessity or compulsion." (Ch 2)
• "Hair and clothes disposed in a manner which appeared to be her own, but had really been everyone's at the time when she grew up." (Ch 2)
• "Sir Jesse ... was inclined to refer any subject to himself." (Ch 4)

July 2024; 285 pages

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

An ICB bibliography with links to novels reviewed in this blog:

• Dolores (1911)
• Pastors and Masters (1925)
• Brothers and Sisters (1929)
• Men and Wives (1931)
• More Women Than Men (1933)
• A House and Its Head (1935)
• Daughters and Sons (1937)
• A Family and a Fortune (1939)
• Parents and Children (1941)
• Elders and Betters (1944)
• Manservant and Maidservant (1947)
• Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949)
• Darkness and Day (1951)
• The Present and the Past (1953)
• Mother and Son (1955)
• A Father and His Fate (1957)
• A Heritage and Its History (1959)
• The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)
• A God and His Gifts (1963)
• The Last and the First (posthumous, 1971)

"The Good Companions" by J B Priestley

Three unlikely characters join a touring concert party and give vaudeville shows in mostly bleak towns in the Midlands of England. 

Jess Oakroyd is a laconic Yorkshire carpenter who has dreamed of seeing the world; when he is dismissed from his job he takes the opportunity to walk out on his disapproving wife and her darling adult son. Miss Trant, who likes historical romances such as those by Sir Walter Scott,  has looked after her father for twenty years but now he is dead and she has a small private income. Mr Inigo Jollifant, a talented pianist and rather less talented schoolmaster, rows with his principal's wife and is dismissed. Chance brings them together with a bankrupt group of touring artistes, some talented, others less so.

I think Priestley has modelled the book on the Pickwick Papers but democratised it so that, apart from Miss Trant and perhaps Inigo, the characters are all from the ordinary classes. The settings are all deomcratised too, so that we see an England where some towns are virtually bankrupt, full of the unemployed, while others are thriving thanks to new industries. These democratisations bring verisimilitude and act as a nice counterpoint to the insubstantial wonderland of song and dance; there is a message here that although material comforts might depend upon hard work and wage slavery, happiness - and, if you are lucky, wealth - comes from the much more fragile world of the arts. The touring, the slow descent into a linear plot, and the ultimate need for a happy ending all ape Pickwick but in the end it is only an imitation because the caricatures are less extreme, less fun, and the humour is too gentle.

It is written in the past tense and a fundamentally omniscient third person with occasional authorial interjections but mostly from the perspective of whoever is the subject of that chapter. There are moments when the author introduces spoilers (like Anthony Trollope, eg in Phineas Finn) to reassure the reader that some of the characters will find eventual success. It begins ab ovo, so that the first 40% of the novel consists of the back story of the three main characters, explaining how they came to be part of the troupe. This long introduction was a great way of building up their characters but I found it rather wearisome. This was exacerbated by the long-windedness of some of the prose. For example, in a rather heavy-handed attempt at humour, one minor character is described as "a rather down-at-heel senator from one of the remoter states of those that are united." (1.6) Why not just 'United States'? 

E M Forster in Aspects of the Novel points out that we tend to overvalue long books so that we can justify to ourselves the time we have spent reading them. It felt at times that Priestley agreed with this thesis and was overwriting so that his readers would be impressed.

Nevertheless, this prolixity did mean that the three main characters have greater depth than many of those of Dickens. Miss Trant walks a tightrope between enjoying her new-found freedom and seeking security in the life she knows; Jess is doing the same, although he has less to return to; Inigo has yet to find any purpose in life.

The minor characters were less impressive. Susie, Inigo's love interest, didn't seem to justify her importance to the plot. The only minor character who really intrigued me was Jerry Jerningham, the dancer and singer and light comedian and male lead, who is pursued by girls but never responds because, it is said, he is devoted to his craft: "It was his ambition to be the most graceful lounger, the best of all the idle fops of revue and musical comedy, and to achieve these butterfly perfections he trained like an athlete and toiled like a slave." (2.2) But he is also described as an "Antinous in evening dress and dancing slippers" (2.2); this reference to the male lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian suggests that JJ is gay. Out of the blue, he gets married to an older lady, a widow, an admirer, who becomes his patroness but there are suggestions in the epilogue that the marriage is not a happy one. This mystery is left unsolved; I suppose it had to be since the 1929 publication date was when homosexuality was still a criminal offence in England.

For those who prefer their stories rounded-off with a coda, there is an epilogue which tells you what happened to most of the major characters. 

There are references to 'niggers' and some anti-semitic tropes as is common with English novels of the period.

The book won the 1929 James B Tait Memorial Prize for literature.

Selected quotes:

• "To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink." (1.1)
• "She had long regarded him neither as a friend nor as a partner but as a nuisance, somebody who was always coming in to upset the house, always demanding food and drink." (1.1)
• "There is about him the air of one who is ready to fail gloriously at almost anything." (1.3)
• "He had a deep veneration for literature, so deep that he hardly ever made acquaintance with it." (1.3)
• "Mr Oakroyd ... even tried to mumble some words of thanks, an agonizing task to any true Bruddersfordian, who always tried to arrange his life so that he will be spared such appalling scenes." (1.4)
• "Youth, when it is exiled into the kingdoms of the old, at once turns itself into the strongest of secret societies." (1.6)
• "She looked like a knowing and slightly dishevelled doll." (2.1)
• "A woman who had said goodbye to the easy elasticity of youth." (2.1)
• "The last house on the left was detached from the row, but was yet so close to it,so obviously still a part of it,that Miss Trant felt that this house had been just sawn off, as if it were the crust of a long loaf." (2.3)
• "When you saw people you knew acting with amateur dramatic societies they were merely themselves with parts stuck on to them  ... But with these professionals, you lost all sight of their private personalities; they simply came to life on the stage in another sort of way; and as you watched them, you could hardly believe that you really knew them as people." (2.3)
• "The streets were being slashed with cold rain. One minute a pale sun would creep out and set everything glittering, and the next minute the rain would come sweeping down, up would go overcoat collars and umbrellas, and the streets would be full of people running as if for their very lives. A lunatic city.  ... This tea-shop had the air of still being in the hands of charwomen. There were no charwomen to be seen but the place seemed to smell damply and cheerlessly of their labours ... The waitresses looked as if they had not yet recovered from a bitter reveille that had dragged them out of their little bedrooms ... and brought them sniffing in cold buses and trams and tubes to this tea-shop. Every customer, every order, was to them an affront. Their day had not really begun; they had hardly washed themselves yet; and as a protest against being disturbed so early they banged down sugar-basins and cruets on the little damp marble-topped tables. At close range they used the sniff, and at a distance the yawn." (3.3)

An entertainment rather than a great work of literature. July 2024; 618 pages of small print.

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

"Burmese Days" by George Orwell

 The debut novel by the author of Animal Farm and 1984. 

The plot centres on the relationship between Flory, a lonely sahib who has been too long in Burma, who loves the country and the people, and Elizabeth, a young girl just arrived who needs to get married to avoid poverty and the incestuous advances of her alcoholic uncle. The sub-plot involves the need for the club, against all the instincts of its white members, to elect a native to membership. Villainous magistrate U Po Kyin plots (why is it always baddies who drive narratives, so much so that the word plot both means to conspire and to construct a narrative?) to discredit the good Doctor Veeraswami so he will win the election. Throw in a love rival for Flory, a local rebellion and any amount of racism and we have the making of a great novel with a strong plot, some beautifully developed characters, and an exotic setting.

The discussion at the club in chapter two is an incredible indictment of chauvinism and, as such, there is much use of terribly racist language, and the n-word. But this is the reason why it is necessary to retain uncensored and unexpurgated version of historical texts: it is the intention that matters. This use of the n-word is in order to condemn racism. The purpose of this whole novel, even with one of the indigenous characters being a corrupt villain, is to open eyes to the horrors of racism. It's important to defend the artist's right to say such things. 

Selected quotes:

• "He was a man of fifty, so fat that for years he had not risen from his chair without help, and yet shapely and even beautiful in his grossness; for the Burmese do not sag and bulge like white men, but grow fat symmetrically, like fruits swelling." (Ch 1)
• "His practice ... was to take bribes from both sides and then decide the case of strictly legal grounds. This won him a useful reputation for impartiality." (Ch 1)
• "No European cares anything about proof. When a man has a black face, suspicion is proof." (Ch 1)
• "All his meals were swift, passionate and enormous; they were not meals so much as orgies, debauches of curry and rice." (Ch 1)
• "Poor chap ... regular martyr to booze, eh? Look at it oozing out of his pores. Reminds me of the old colonel who used to sleep without a mosquito net. They asked his servant why and the servant said: 'At night, master too drunk to notice mosquitoes; in the morning, mosquitoes too drunk to notice master'." (Ch 2)
• "The only way I can even keep a servant is to pay their wages several months in arrears." (Ch 2)
• "In my young days, when one's butler was disrespectful, one sent him along to the jail with a chit saying 'Please give the bearer fifteen lashes' Ah, well, eheu fugaces!" (Ch 2)
• "Creeping round the world building prisons. They build a prison and call it progress." (Ch 3) Flory thus characterises the spread of the British Empire, alluding to the Agricola by Tacitus which has a British chieftain rallying his troops to resist the spread of the Roman Empire in the first century AD by saying: "Where they make a desert they call it peace." 
• "Beauty is meaningless until it is shared." (Ch 4)
• "There is a prevalent idea that men at the 'outposts of Empire' are at least able and hardworking. It is a delusion. ... The real work of administration is done mainly by native subordinates and teal backbone of despotism is not the officials but the Army. Given the Army, the officials and the business men can rub along safely enough even if they are fools. And most of them are fools." (Ch 5)
• "Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself." (Ch 5)
• "Her whole code of being was summed up in one belief, and that a simple one. It was that the Good ('lovely' was her name for it) was synonymous with the expensive, the elegant, the aristocratic; and the Bad ('beastly') is the cheap, the low, the shabby, the laborious. Perhaps it is in order to teach this creed that expensive girls' schools exist." (Ch 7)
• "The peasants steamed garlic from all their pores." (Ch 13)
• "Our motto, you know, is, 'In India, do as the English do'." (Ch 13)
• "Blessed are they who are stricken only with classifiable diseases! Blessed are the poor, the sick, the crossed in love, for at least other people know what is the matter with them and will listen to their belly-achings with sympathy. But who that has not suffered it understands the pain of exile?" (Ch 15)
• "His Urdu consisted mainly of swearwords, with all the verbs in the third person singular." (Ch 18)
• "Like all sons of rich families, he thought poverty disgusting and that poor people are poor because they prefer disgusting habits." (Ch 18)
• "What's it got to do with you if he needed kicking? You're not even a member of this Club. It's our job to kick the servants, not yours." (Ch 18) Not even a thought as to whether anyone was justified in kicking another human being!

This is an excoriation of the disgusting racism of the British Empire. Yes, there are flat characters (eg Ellis) but Flory and Elizabeth are drawn with three-dimensional empathy. Orwell at his best is so much better than 1984!

June 2024; 300 pages.

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

Orwell also wrote, (where linked, reviewed in this blog):

• Animal Farm: a novel
• 1984
• Homage to Catalonia: a memoir of the Spanish civil war
• The Road to Wigan Pier: journalism
• Down and Out in Paris and London: journalism and memoir

A biography of Orwell is reviewed here.

"Crime at Guildford" by Freeman Wills Croft

 This was a beautifully written police procedural from the days when constables on the beat noticed men walking late at night, and when the police weren't allowed to pay for information! The days when there were butlers and maids and when even policeman were fearful of unemployment.

A jewellery firm is facing going stony (sorry!) broke. Some of the directors arrange a weekend at the chairman's country house near Guildford. On the Sunday morning the company accountant, who was ill the night before, is discovered dead in his bed. The next Monday morning, all the jewels that represent the working stock of the company have vanished from the safe. Are the crimes linked? Whodunnit? And how?

Inspector French plods through the evidence. One by one the suspects are eliminated. Even, after an ingenious twist (I got it!), the truth is revealed, there is still the need for evidence resulting in a chase into Europe. 

Selected quotes:

• "A girl like that has the ear of the boss ... and so she doesn't know her own size." (Ch 11)
• "When you've no job you get into the way of spending as much time everywhere as you can. There's always too much of it." (Ch 18)

Classic crime fun. June 2024; 252 pages

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

"1541: The Cataclysm" by Robert William Jones

This book is the first in the Micklegate series. It is an entertainingly irreverent romp blend of at least three genres: historical, thriller and fantasy. The tone is set right from the start with an execution described by a narrator with a very dark sense of humour. 

'Lord' Silas, a village idiot, Robert, Lord Mayor of York, two monks chucked out of the monasteries following the Dissolution, washerwomen ex-nun Elspeth and her crippled friend Wynnfrith, farmer Richard Shakespeare (grandfather of the playwright), Edward Fawkes (father of Guy) and assorted others form an impromptu group (the Agents of the Word) led by a talking mouse with a secret (not just that he talks) and an attitude problem. Their purpose is to save Tudor England from a Cataclysm. 

There were moments when the pacing was spot on (the group coheres at exactly the 33% mark, there is a revelation worthy of W S Gilbert as the 50% mark) but there were other moments when the plot seemed to suddenly speed up. Some elements of the quest such as the discovery of the books and the recovery of Abigail seemed rather too easy. I wasn't sure how the Lizzie sub-plot fitted in but I appreciated that not everyone lived happily ever after. Nor am I sure that I fully understood all the clues in the convoluted plot but it was certainly an ingenious climax. There was even a twist in the mouse's tale. 

Selected quotes:

• "Annie was a middle-aged horse with the strength, dedication and attitude of a foal." (Ch 1)
• "Bacteria in all its glorious forms was here and having an all-night party, but simultaneously, completely absent in the imagination of the sixteenth-century public." (Ch 2)
• "He was a crap juggler spending most of the morning chasing his balls around the market, if you’ll forgive the expression." (Ch 5) 
• "We will win because we are good" (Ch 15) A character who understands the rules of fiction!
• "She’d find a better catch in the river!" (Ch 16)
•  "The King has planted a new Bishop there. More a pawn than a Bishop. " (Ch 17)
• "I didn't have an opinion about this. Strange, you think. Is the mouse unwell?" (Ch 18)
• "'What an unfortunate mismatch of miscreants and misfits!’ He annoyingly alliterated." (Ch 23)

An entertaining slice of horrible history with lots of humour. June 2024

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

"Crypt" by Alice Roberts

“Osteoarchaeology, paleopathology and now archaeogenomics are transforming our understanding of the past.” (Epilogue) In this fascinating and utterly readable book, Professor Alice Roberts shows how the study of ancient skeletons can mesh with the sequencing of DNA and, where available, historic documents to give us new insights into our human past.

This book is a sequel to Ancestors, which focused on BC, and Buried which considered the first millennium AD. This book studies burials from 1002 AD until 1545. But as well as learning about archaeology and history and bony anatomy, I also learned about how archaeologists can work out where a skeleton grew up from the balance of strontium and oxygen isotopes in the teeth, a great deal about leprosy - who knew you can catch it from an armadillo? - 

The first chapter analyses skeletons found in Oxford that appear to have been buried after being violently killed. Are they the bodies of people killed on Saint Brice's day (13th Nov) in 1002 after Ethelred the Unready called for a massacre of Danes? The second investigates the graveyard of a mediaeval leper hospital and asks whether leper hospitals originated in pre-Conquest England. Chapter 3 tells the story of the martyrdom of St Thomas a Becket and asks whether a skeleton discovered in 1888 could belong to him. Chapter 4 is surprised by a high incidence of Paget's Disease in a single churchyard. Chapter 5 traces, through osteoarchaeology, the prehistoric lineage of the bacterium responsible for the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death and Bubonic Plague. Chapter 6 considers bone deformities in the skeletons of those drowned when Henry VIII's flagship the Mary Rose sank and Chapter 7 asks whether syphilis found in the skeleton of a mediaeval anchoress can tell us whether the disease came to Europe from the New World in the wake of Columbus.

Seven fascinating stories. History, prehistory, science and even some maths, all told in an engaging style (with some very poor puns, see selected quotes). What's not to like?

Selected quotes:

• “It shows the potential for aDNA from fishbones - which everyone had previously thought would be dead in the water.” (Ch 1)
• “Archaeology explores the past from the ground up, not the top down.” (Ch 2)
• “Henry arranged to have his son, Henry Junior, crowned in preparation, so that he could immediately step into his father's clogs when he popped them.” (Ch 3)
• “Some diseases kill so quickly, there are no traces lift on bones.” (Ch 5)

July 2024; 298 pages

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

"Climbers" by M John Harrison

 Mike the narrator is a young man bitten by the climbing bug who travels north to join a loose community of climbers: Normal and Sankey, Mick and Stox and Andy Earnshaw and Bob Almanac. They are unemployed or in mostly dead end jobs; these form the background as do their wives and girlfriends and sisters and friends. These things aren't important. These lads live for climbing. What really matters is the 'problem': how to get to the top of a challenging climb. 

There's a lot of technical information about climbing, most of it, like the climbers, over my head. It seemed to me that the biggest difficulty, and this could be a metaphor, is that rock surfaces are eroded by the weather so that, far from the solidity that the concept of stone embodies, a rockface is covered with potentially treacherous handholds that flake away when you place your trust in them. This is a paradox.

But an even bigger paradox is that these people can only enjoy and find meaning in their lives when they are risking it. They aspire to climb but they are haunted by the fall. The 'fall' was everywhere; even Pauline's daughter falls from a table and ends up in hospital. Even the sections, labelled Winter, Spring, Summer after the seasons, end with Fall. And one by one the climbers fall, some fatally. Death, or injury, weeds them out. 

It is a complex narrative, jumping forwards and backwards in time and from character to character. It seems to be deliberately fractured. There is a suggestion very near the start that one of the major characters has died; there is a moment of fantasy about children who have been lost from day trips to the moors growing up feral. It starts and ends with reminiscences. 

I'm not sure, after a single reading, I have fully appreciated the narrative. But the quality of the writing was unmistakable. 

There are some remarkable descriptions. They combine forensic exactness and technical terms with some remarkable images.

• "Light poured in over the blackened threshold of the old smokehouse, falling among the eroded beams onto a clutter of broken ladders. A few dry beech leaves blew about in the heap of coal. As he stood there looking in, thunder banged tinnily again over towards Huddersfield." (Winter; 2)
• "As you face the sea the cliff goes up on your left, whitish, dusted with the same lichen you can see on any other limestone crag ... custard yellow, dry and crusty. You get to the top among the yew trees bent and shaved by the wind." (Spring; 7) 
• "The right bank of the cove is a clinted slab overgrown with whin, short turf and hawthorn bushes. From there the tourists can gaze out to sea or at the weed-covered rocks at the base of the cliff like green chenille cushions in the front room of a fussy old woman." (Spring; 7) What a simile, to compare rocks with interior decorating.
• "The sun came down and scraped into the irregular corners." (Spring; 7) Scraped ! 
• "Masses of hawthorn blossom were piled up like exotic buttercream, from which streamed downwind vanilla and corruption intertwined. ... In the evenings the rock seemed to sweat inside. As it grew dark the lupins in front of Sankey's house gave off like tall translucent candles a perfume so delicate it might have been mistaken for a faint white light." (Spring; 9)

Some of the characters, such as Normal and Sankey, have their stories told in shards which the reader must assemble. It's all show don't tell. Other, more marginal characters, are presented with little vignettes or snippets of back story. 

There isn't a conventional plot. It is more of a Bildungsroman, a coming of age novel chronicling the narrator's apprenticeship as a climber, and his becoming an acknowledged member of this self-selecting group (though the suggestions from both the beginning and the ending is that, though still a climber, he now no longer one of them but an outsider looking in). But this book is not about plot; it is about the characters. In this way it reminded me of The Rock Pool by Cyril Connolly. 

One of the delights, as with this author's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, is his ability to disrupt a scene and set the reader's teeth a little bit on edge with an overheard remark, utterly irrelevant in the context of the narrative but somehow adding verisimilitude and colour while giving a slight sense of weirdness:

• "I throw a lot of frombies. ... At least that's what my husband calls them. Frombies." (Summer; 12)
• "Behind him one woman was telling another, 'I get quite passionate about being wrong - I mean really passionate: I hate it!', firmly italicising 'passionate', 'really', 'hate'." (Fall; 17)

Selected quotes: 

• "In weather like that you never quite sleep. Long dreams merge seamlessly with the long days, leaving you entranced and stuporous but somehow restless; hypnotised yet full of ambitions you cannot dissipate." (Summer; 12)
• "The youngest had sponged themselves as clean of life as the sides of a brand-new plastic bath." (Summer; 12)
• "He arranged much of what he said around the hinge of that 'but'." (Summer; 12)
• "You spend Christmas ... surrounded by other people's assessment of you." (Fall; 13)
• "Fossils emerged from the landlady's cheap slaty coal as it split into thin leaves in the smoke." (Fall; 13)
• "Stalybridge itself is compromised, neither town nor country but a grim muddle of both." (Fall; 15)

A complex novel with sufficient challenge for the reader to feel pleased and proud when it is mastered, like a climber reaching the summit of a new 'problem'. Great characters and wonderful descriptions. June 2024; 234 pages

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