"The Devil's Dice" by Roz Watkins

A debut crime thriller.

DI Meg Dalton starts a new job on the murder squad of a police force in the English Peak District. The body has eaten a cyanide-laced cake while sitting in a cave reading stoic philosophy. Is it suicide or murder? And how can there be a picture of the Grim Reaper carved into the cave wall, together with the initials of the dead man, which has been covered by plant growth for years?

A classic mystery with a thriller ending.

Watkins writes some beautiful descriptions of the setting:

• “Fields sprinkled with disgruntled-looking sheep and edged with crumbling dry stone walls. A mist of evidence-destroying drizzle in the air.” (C 1)
• “Georgian buildings crowded around a cobbled marketplace like teeth that needed braces.” (C 19) 
• “A bunch of fluffy chickens marched over and gave me a bit of a talking to. They seemed to have something important on their minds.” (C 8)

She can also encapsulate mannerisms:

• “I noticed my toes were curled in my shoes as if I was clutching the floor with them.” (C 3)
• “I could smell the lie as it slithered out of my mouth.” (C 10)
• “Jai flicked his head around briefly, then reverted to staring forwards in the manner of men forced to get naked near each other.” (C 40)

She has taken a typical group of characters and given them a new spin: 

• The protagonist is a loner who lives off junk food and has demons in her background. She is attacked and injured at least three times during the book. Inevitably she is taken off the case but continues to investigate on her own.
• Her 'partner' cop is Jai. He is a lapsed Sikh going through a divorce. He fidgets a lot. He too has vulnerabilities and he is a dreadful driver. In moments of extreme danger he is in the background but will lend a helping hand (literally) at the last moment.
• Craig is the cop who gives her grief and seems to be angling for her job. He is racist and sexist and generally obnoxious but easily crushed by a witty riposte.

Other great lines:

• “She judged other women according to a formula involving their husband’s earnings divided by their clothes size.” (C 18)
• “It wasn't Imposter Syndrome after all. I really was incompetent.” (C 34)
• “You're sweating like a paedo in a Santa suit.” (C 2)

March 2019; 328 pages

My wonderful wife bought me a subscription to Books and Beer; each month I receive a crime book and some cans of beer. The other titles I have received so far are:

• • Most Wanted by Robert Craik: a fast-paced thriller set in California
  • Only Killers and Thieves by Paul Howarth: a stunning tale of crime and revenge, of temptation and sin, of evil and redemption set in 1880s Queensland and as gritty as only the Australian Outback can get.
  • Snap by Belinda Bauer: a brilliant story about a young lad who, having become a burglar in order to survive, discovers his mother's killer.
  • Resurrection Bay by Emma Viskic: a murder mystery set in Australia in which the PI is deaf
  • The Mongolian Conspiracy by Rafael Bernal: classic Chandleresque Mexican noir
  • The Closer I get by Paul Burston

"Steppenwolf" by Hermann Hesse

Synopsis

Harry Haller (HH like the author) lives in a room in a boarding house with his books. He believes he is a warring mixture of two personalities: a man and a wolf from the steppes (Steppenwolf). “A wolf of the steppes that had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd, a more striking image could not be found for his shy loneliness, his savagery, his restlessness, his homesickness, his homelessness.” Seeing and despairing of the mundanity of everyday life, he is brought to the brink of suicide. Then he discovers a door in a wall. This reminded me strongly of the opening of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In Steppenwolf, the door is labelled: “Magic Theatre. Entrance not for everybody. ... For madmen only!”. Searching for the entrance to this Magic Theatre he discovers a book about himself.

He meets a girl, Hermine, who reminds him of his childhood friend Herman. She teaches him to dance and enjoy jazz. He meets Pablo, a charming and handsome jazz musician, and he begins an affair with a dancer. Then Pablo offers him drugs and the chance to enter the magic theatre.

Is this a novel of magic realism? Certainly strange things occur which cannot be rationally explained. It has some elements that might be described as Kafkaesque. But it also reminded me of Brechtian drama with its insistence on signposting what was unreal.

Steppenwolf is an exploration of what it means to be an Outsider in the Colin Wilson sense. (Wilson uses Steppenwolf as a key text.) Thus: 

• He feels alienated from the everyday world:
• “Wolfishly seen, all human activities became horribly absurd and misplaced, stupid and vain.”
• “It had been just one of those days which for a long while now had fallen to my lot; the moderately pleasant, the wholly bearable and tolerable, lukewarm days of a discontented middle-aged man”
• “There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for those bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure cry out, on which everything only whispers and tiptoes around.”
• “The majority of men day by day and hour by hour in their daily lives and affairs ... without really wanting to at all, pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain ... and indeed it is this never-ceasing machinery that prevents their being, like me, the critics of their own lives and recognising the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead, and the awful ambiguity grinning over it all.”
• Rather than being a lonely outsider he seeks some sort of mystical union with the universe:
• “I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart.”
• “All births betoken the parting from the All, the confinement within limitation, the separation from God, the pangs of being born ever anew.”
• “The intoxication of a general festivity, the mysterious merging of the personality in the mass, the mystic union of joy ... My personality was dissolved in the intoxication of the festitivity like salt in water.”
• The problem seems to be the idea that one's Self is a single self:
• “It appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. ...in reality, however, every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities.”
• “We demonstrate to anyone whose soul has fallen to pieces that he can rearrange those pieces of a previous self in what order he pleases, and so attain to an endless multiplicity of moves in the game of life.”
• “I knew that all the hundred thousand pieces of life’s game were in my pocket.”
• There is an echo of this idea in The Biographer's Tale by A S Byatt

Some great observations:

• “He was brought up by devoted but severe and very pious parents and teachers in accordance with that doctrine that makes the breaking of the will the corner-stone of education and up-bringing.”
• “He who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.”
• “Let every reader do as his conscience bids him.”
• “Jazz was repugnant to me, and yet ten times preferable to all the academic music of the day. For me too, its raw and savage gaiety reached an underworld of Instinct and breathed a simple honest sensuality. ... It was the music of decline.”
• “What we call ‘bourgeois’ ... is nothing else than the search for a balance. It is the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and opposites that arise in human conduct.”
• “It is ...in the middle of the road, that's the Bourgeois seeks to walk. he will never surrender himself either to lust or to asceticism. ... The absolute is his abhorrence. He may be ready to serve God, but not by giving up the fleshpots.”
• “The heroes of the epics of India are not individuals, but whole reels of individualities in a series of incarnations.”
• “‘Supposing you were too obedient to learn to dance when you were young ... what have you been doing with yourself all these years?’
• ‘... ‘studied, played music, read books, written books, travelled -’
• ... ‘You have always done the difficult and complicated things and the simple ones you haven’t even learnt. ... But to do as you do and then say you’ve tested life to the bottom and found nothing in it is going a bit far’.”
• “Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.”
• “You learned people and artists have, no doubt, all sorts of superior things in your heads; but you’re human beings like the rest of us, and we, too, have our dreams and fancies.”
• “Life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and radio music.”
• “Time and the world, money and power belong to the small people and the shallow people. To the rest, to the real men belongs nothing. Nothing but death.”
• “There flared within me a last burst of desire which made me run all over her garden, and I bit once more into the sweet fruit of the tree in paradise.”
• “War is childishness on a grand scale.”
• “From her armpit to her breast I saw the play of a delicate shadow. It seemed that it wished to recall something, but what I could not remember.”

A profound and important book. March 2019; 252 pages

Books and plays written by Nobel Laureates that I have reviewed in this blog can be found here.

Other books by German authors reviewed in this blog.

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

"A Boy's Own Story" by Edmund White

Six episodes in the growing-up of a homosexual. 'Cornholing' a younger boy, working for money to hire a rentboy, living in a hotel with mother and sister, having oral sex at summer camp, adoring the most popular boy at middle school, and seducing and betraying a teacher at boarding school.

There are three things that lift this book high into the stratosphere of literary greats. First there are the character portraits. White describes his mother and father and teachers and fellow students and all the other characters with enormous sympathy, chronicling their strengths and weaknesses, charting their complexities, and never ever descending into caricature. The father, for example, is a businessman who can't quite fit in'to the local social scene, who is easily hurt and a bit of a sissy, but who can talk baseball and do manly things such as building steps, who owns the speedboat but isn't at ease with it because he can't swim. He works all night and sleeps all day. He thinks 'love' is a word to be used by women, men 'like'. He has sex with one of his workers and then dismisses her but when his maid needs help he rushes to assist.

• “We were both afraid of the water, he because he couldn't swim, I because I was afraid of everything.”
• “He throbbed with the pressure to contend, to be noticed, to be right, to win, to make others bend to his will.”
• “Naive and proud at the time of her divorce, she wanted to conserve money but also maintain a good address. She decided the three of us should live in that expensive hotel in one furnished room with twin beds, my sister and I taking turns sleeping on the floor.”
• “My mother was a tedious Penelope weaving her tales and tearing them up.”
• “I, who thought only of survival, had no interest in philosophical questions. The proximate ones were enough to obsess me, not as things I choose to contemplate, but as decisions rushing up at me as out of oncoming traffic. These were the things I thought about: Am I boring Tommy? Mill he mind if I rest my elbow on his shoulder? Should I powder my white bucks or keep the scuff marks? How low should I let my jeans ride?”
• “There was nothing about this actor that couldn't be read from the top balcony.”

The second feature of this book is the insight it offers into the human condition. Some of this is from the perspective of a boy who will grow up gay in a society that considers homosexuality as a disease, a weakness, a failing: “I never doubted that homosexuality was a sickness. In fact, I took it as a measure of how unsparingly objective I was that I could contemplate this very sickness.” But other aspects are more general comments on life:

• “He hadn’t invented another life; this one seemed good enough.”
• “I feel sorry for a man who never wanted to go to bed with his father; when the father dies, how can his ghost get warm except in a posthumous embrace? For that matter, how does the survivor get warm?” 
• “The price of freedom - total solitude - seemed more than I could possibly pay.”
• “That was the secret of the imagination - its creations were feeble only to the maker but stronger than life itself to the observer.”
• “All of our daddy's dollars were casters on which the furniture of our lives glided noiselessly.”
• “Busoni once said he prized the most those empty passages composers make up to get from one ‘good part’ to another. He said such workmanlike but minor transitions reveal more about a composer - the actual vernacular of his imagination - then the deliberately bravura moments.”
• “Someone who seemed not at all eager to confide in me or seek my friendship or even comments, as though he recognised that this life, at least, was worth enduring only if it remained unexamined.”
• “She taught me that the loneliness I felt like a bad burn could be soothed. I most certainly had been lonely. I had ached and writhed with loneliness, twisting around and smearing it on me as though it were a tissue of shame pouring out of my body: shameful, familiar, the fell of shame.”
• “Under my sister's tutelage I learnt that love or at least friendship must be coaxed, that there are skills ( listening, smiling, remembering, flattering) that lure it closer.”
• “When I was growing up I had never glimpsed the underbrush of kid society that lay just behind the topiary of the classroom. .... Nor did I suspect some kids saw each other every day after school, saw and saw each other strolling under a shifting leaf spray of social life and sexual shadows.”
• “Except when he sang. Then he was free, that is, constrained by the ceremony of performance, the fiction that the entertainer is alone, that he is expressing grief or joy to himself alone.”
• “If the Devil were listless, if he were a pale man in his underwear who watched television by day behind closed venetian blinds - oh, if that were the Devil I would fear him.”
• “We were Shadows, like the dead after Orpheus passes them on his way through the Underworld, after this living man vanishes and the last sound of his music is lost to the incoming silence. All my life I've made friends and lost lovers and talked about these two activities as though they were very different, opposed; but in truth love is the direct and therefore hopeless method of calling Orpheus back, whereas friendship is the equally hopeless because irrelevant attempt to find warmth in other shades. Odd that in the story Orpheus is lonely too.”
• “Because I loved her she was opaque to me.”
• “The world is governed by a minority, the sexually active, ... they hold sway over a huge majority of the nonsexual, those people too young or too old or too poor or homely or sick or crazy or powerless to be able to afford sexual partners ... All advertisements and films and songs are addressed to sexuals, to their rash whims and finicky tastes, but these communications cleverly ignore nonsexuals, those pale, penniless, underdeveloped bodies, blue nipples flung like two test drops of ink from a new pen across the blotting paper of a chest, or high, hairless buttocks, unmolded by hands into something lovely, something enticing, left pure and formless like butcher’s lard.”
• “‘Just because you feel something is no reason to act on it’, the priest said. ‘Americans hold up their feelings as though they were ... dispensations’.”

But the feature of this book that simply blew my mind away was the description. White's descriptions of sex and fearlessly honest and yet not in the least tacky. His descriptions of the world are lush and gorgeous and yet precise, like a Caravaggio.

• “Squeals, breathing, a tussle. then release, followed by the sound of two boys just being.” 
• “His breath smelled of milk. His hands and feet were cold. ... His back and chest and legs were silky and hairless ... A thin layer of baby fat still formed a pad under his skin. Beneath the fat I could feel the hard, rounded muscles.” 
• “That such a tough, muscled little guy, whose words were so flat and eyes so without depth or humour, could be so richly taken - oh, he felt good. ... Here he was, pushing this tendoned, shifting pleasure back into me, the fine hair on his neck damp with sweat just above the hollows the sculptor had pressed with his thumbs into the clay.”
• “The night, intent seamstress, fed the fabric of water under the needle of our hull, steadily, firmly, except the boat wasn't stitching the water together but ripping it apart into long white shreds.”
• “A world so sensitive, like a grand piano, that even a step or a word could awaken vibrations in its taut strings.”
• “One opulent drop of water rolled down his high, compact chest into the hollow between his nipples, the right one still small and white from the cold, the left fuller and just beginning to color. The other drops were not so heavy; studying his body impressionistically with light, they didn't move; they slowly evaporated.”
• “As the sun, like life returning to a body, stole over the world, the beam from my father's flashlight grew less and less distinct until it had been absorbed in the clarity of something that was new yet again.”
• “I looked up at a face sprouting brunet sideburns that swerved inward like cheese knives toward his mouth and stopped just below his ginger mustaches. The eyes, small and black, had been moistened genially by the beers he'd drunk.”
• “As the bottle slowly empties, its brown liquid, like kerosene fuel in a lamp, radiates, in words and more words, the intense heat of despair.”
• “Folk songs in need of a pitch pipe.”
• “The sound of a voice choking on its own phlegm.”
• “The path I took girdled the hills that rimmed the lake; at one point it dipped and crossed a bog that looked solid and dry, planted innocently in grasses, but that slurped voluptuously under my shoes.”
• “The sun solemnly withdrew into its tent of cloud, disappointed with the world.”
• “ I could see Tom’s muscles like forked lightning on his taut stomach; here was this boy so handsome and free and well liked and here were we flanking him, looking up at him, at the torso flowering out of the humble calyx of his jeans.”
• “Mr Beattie was brushing his right hand back and forth over his crew cut. He seemed to be concentrating on this job, getting the feel of those soft quills against his palm.”

This is writing as appetising and fulfilling as a carefully crafted meal at a top-class restaurant. I am in awe of someone who can write so beautifully. Wow!

February 2019; 218 pages

"Unleashed" by Peter Laws

This is the second Matt Hunter crime thriller; he debuted in Purged.

Matt, an ex-vicar, lectures in the Sociology of Religion. His policeman friend Larry asks him to advise n a case in which a teacher has been mauled to death by a dog, trapped in a cupboard, whilst being 'protected' by many religious symbols. The teacher, Steph, was involved with a poltergeist when she was a schoolgirl in the town, with her mates Kassy and Jo and Rachel, and Rachel's little sister Holly, who committed suicide. Is this a case of demonic possession? Is someone hunting witches? Or is it related to historic child abuse? Matt investigates in a tale of demons and seances, a spooks and rabbits that go bump in the night, leading to a climax underground.

A well-written cross between a horror and a thriller and a murder-mystery. No, I didn't work out whodunnit.

Laws has a good line is great descriptive lines:

• "A couple of decades ago she was the little pigtailed firework running around here, in cheap clothes even then." (C 1)
• "They'd met on Tinder three months ago, where he'd described himself as 'an entrepreneur wrapped in a mechanic's body'."
• (C 1)
• "All the Finch family members were about as coordinated as a kite in a tornado." (C 1)
• "Our sense of morality springs from little more than the current consensus of the human tribe." (C 2)
• "Let us learn to find the inherent beauty of an essentially incoherent universe." (C 2)
• "One of the top reasons to buy a kid a pet is so that it will die." (C 3)
• "Those boys who kept wandering past them, gawping at their curves like preprogrammed lab mice." (C 9)
• "The overflowing bin with its merry troupe of dancing flies." (C 10)
• "A tree, stroking softly with its fingernails." (C 10)
• "His skin was plague-victim pale." (C 26)
• "Biscuits were the truth drug for Christians everywhere." (C 26)
• "Funny how it's the cheap furniture that often has the most memories. Because you have to build them at home and you need others' help and you don't always get it right. Maybe there was a lesson in that." (C 46)

A great, page-turning read. February 2019; 442 pages

"Write Away" by Elizabeth George

This is a brilliant little guide to the craft of writing novels by the author of the Inspector Lynley series of novels of which she has written twenty as well as seven other fiction books. Clearly a prolific writer she suggests that her success is due to 'bum glue': when she is writing she writes five pages a day on the first draft and fifty (!) pages a day on the second draft.

But this is not an inspirational 'you too can be like me' book; rather it is a manual of tips and techniques. She is superb when she tells how to create characters:

• “Real people have flaws. We're all works in progress on planet Earth ... No one wants to read about flawless characters ... Would anyone want a person like that as a friend, tediously wonderful in every way? ... A character possessing perfection one area should possess imperfection in another.” (p 9)
• “As individuals we're all riddled with issues of self doubt ... So, in literature, we want to see characters who make mistakes, who have lapses of judgement, who experience weakness from time to time.” (p 10)
• “Characters learn something from the unfolding events, and the reader learns something too, has the character is revealed slowly by the writer, who peels away a layer at a time.” (p 11)
• “Make certain you are putting them into conflict.” (p 12)
• “When I'm designing a character, I begin with a name ... it's impossible to create a character without one.” (p 12)
• “You cannot bring a character to life in a book unless he or she is alive before the book begins.” (p 13)
• “The creation of characters allows me to understand how each will talk - what his actual dialogue will be like - as well as how his narrative voice will sound ... The words a character uses, the syntax he employs, and his diction thus become another tool to reveal him to the reader.” (p 14)

She also is careful to distinguish between setting, place and landscape:

• Landscape is “the broad vista into which the writer actually places the individual settings of the novel, sort of like the canvas” (p 34)
• “What I generally do is begin by going to the place ... I consider the land itself ... what grows upon it ... its shape and its texture ... the marks that succeeding cultures have left upon it ... its buildings and how they alter from one area to another.” (p 37) The sky: “clouds ... deep colour ... moisture ... the stars” (p 38) The climate and the weather. “The sounds and scents of a place” (p 38) “Wildlife or the lack of wildlife” (p 38) “What people do there or are not able to do there” (p 38)

She points out that characters have internal landscapes:

• “What a character looks like, how he dresses, the house in which he lives, his office, his car, his bicycle, his boat, his apartment ...” (p 39)
• “The simplest way to achieve landscape of a person is to use specific and telling details.” (p 39) Start with stereotypes and tweak them. (p 40)
• "We all possess emotions, psyches, and souls. We have wants and needs. We engage in reflections, speculations, obsessions ...” (p 41)
• “I’ll attempt to choose an incident or a topic that, reflected upon [by the character], can serve as a metaphor for the state of a character’s soul.” (p 41)

She is also very interesting on plot and offers a number of possible plot maps:

• The Seven-Step Story Line
• The Hero’s Journey
• Gustav Freitag’s Pyramid
• Three Act Structure
• Double Plot: two interwoven plots
• Hourglass: two plots which run separately until they converge in the middle and then separate again
• Picaresque: separate events related by theme and by characters.

There is also a great many really useful practical tips in this superb book. If I can't write after reading this I can't write. For example, she lists "eight ways to wield the hook" and considers the pros and cons of different narrations. Her fundamental attitude is that the writer must "seduce the reader to continue the story.”

It is quite brilliant.

And by the way, “What Agatha Christie did was to fashion her scenes so that the clue was present but so was the red herring. And the scene pivoted around the red herring, not around the clue.”

Other books about how to write include

• The Craft of Fiction by Percy Lubbock 
• Aspects of the Novel by E M Forster 
• On Writing by Stephen King 
• The Art of Fiction by David Lodge

February 2019; 285 pages

"The Double Helix" by James D Watson

The classic account of the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA for which Watson and Francis Crick won a Nobel Prize. This account is a real warts-and-all account of scientific discovery. Watson regularly admits he doesn't understand the maths for some of the work, and that he is a poor experimenter who blew up a Chemistry lab by heating Benzene using a Bunsen burner. He seems to spend most of his time thinking about pretty girls which is a feature he has in common with almost all of the other young men researching science. His sexist and misogynist attitudes make for difficult reading nowadays even if, in the epilogue to this memoir, he concedes that the by then dead Rosalind Franklin was a superb experimenter whom he greatly undervalued and that her behaviour, which he regularly considers unacceptable, might possibly have been a consequence of the difficulty facing women trying to be first class research scientists in those days.

Watson and Crick are neither supposed to be working on DNA (indeed Crick's boss Bragg has angrily told himk to concentrate on finishing his thesis and Watson is misusing the his funding which is for a different problem at a different Uni in another country!) but they keep tinkering with models. Nothing seems to be working. They (and everyone else except, it seems, Franklin) are convinced that the structure is helical but is in one, two, three, four or five strands twisted together. They and the rival groups working on the same problem are convinced that the backbone of sugars and phosphates is in the inside. But when Franklin's photo B clearly reveals helicity Watson starts to develop a two-strand model, which allows replication, and starts to think of the strands as held together by the bases. He assumes the bases are paired and that Adenine is held to Adenine by hydrogen bonds, as are Thymine to Thymine, Cytosine to Cytosine and Guanine to Guanine. Then a chemist friend tells him that the structures he is using are of the wrong isomers. Using the right isomers means that this like-to-like pairing (AA, CC, TT and GG) makes the essential double helix buckle; it would no longer be fundamentally crystalline. Furthermore there would be no reason why experimental results showed, as they did, that there was always the same amount of adenine and thymine and of cytosine as guanine, even though the ratios of A to C or T to G might vary. "Suddenly I became aware that an adenine-thymine pair held together by two hydrogen bonds was identical shape to a guanine-cytosine pair held together by at least two hydrogen bonds." A double helix structure in which the ladder steps are A-T or C-G explained why the proportions of A and T are always the same as well as explaining the X-ray crystallography data. And a quest as exciting as any Hollywood blockbuster is complete.

Other moments:
"One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that ... a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid." (C 2)
After Crick had so upset his boss he had been ordered to stop work on DNA: "News of the upset confirmed the fact that Francis might move faster if occasionally he closed his mouth."
On getting a textbook for a Christmas present. "The remnants of Christianity were indeed useful."
On discovering a co-worker in his room with a girl: "The presence of popsies does not inevitably lead to a scientific future."

Lively and entertaining. February 2019; 128 pages

"Boy, Snow, Bird" by Helen Oyeyemi

This is a strange tale about identity infused with fairy tales, in particular Snow White.

Part One deals with Boy, daughter of a New York ratcatcher, who, in 1953, gets fed up with being beaten by her parent and runs away from home to the New England town of Flax Hill. Here she meets Arturo, Julia's widower, and his impossibly beautiful blonde daughter Snow.

Part Two moves forward in time to deal with Bird, Boy's daughter, who is trying to make sense of her strange family, in particular her estranged step-sister Snow.

Part Three returns to consider the story from the perspective of Boy.

People look in mirrors but can't see themselves. Instead they see an infinity of themselves, or other people, or themselves in the past, or the future. The theme of skin colour and the identity it offers is explored, as is the theme of sexuality. Boy is a girl. Is Snow Snow White, and if she is does that make Boy a wicked stepmother? And how does it affect your life to be irresistibly gorgeous?

Oyeyemi writes some great lines:

• “Insects dropped onto my shoulders tentatively, as if wondering whether we’d met before.” (1.2)
• “One of those women who are corpselike until a man walks into the room, after which point they become irresistibly vivacious.” (1.2)
• “There's something about being chased by a big strong man with yellowish eyes that makes you feel like an antelope in a bad situation.” (1.3)
• “A single shift was like a long day out in dry rain.” (1.4)
• “If you're not afraid of a real night out, hit the town with guys who just got out of jail.” (1.6)
• “It seems that grown-ups just never stop interfering with each other.” (2.1)
• “Grammy Olivia's tone of voice offers you ten seconds to do as she says or the rest of your life to be sincerely sorry that you didn't.” (2.2)
• “Dad drives and Mrs Chen drives but Aunt Mia just gets behind the wheel and hopes it's another of her lucky days.” (2.3)
• “I began to know what dolls know. It felt like I'd been discarded for another toy that was better, more lifelike.” (2.3)
• “Capture all hearts and let none go free, is that the way she wants it?” (3.1)
• “The first coffee of the morning is never, ever, ready quickly enough.” (3.1)

This is a strange book with many layers and I feel I have but scratched the surface. February 2019; 308 pages

"Surprised by Joy" by C S Lewis

In this autobiography, the famous Christian writer explains how his upbringing led to his beliefs. As with all his work, it is written in an amazingly simple style and is full of wonderful insights. Furthermore it is surprisingly, sometimes shockingly, honest. Although his description of his 'loss of chastity' at an early age (thirteen?) does not make it clear whether he lost his virginity in a physical sense as opposed to a spiritual one (the details are sufficiently imprecise), the descriptions of life at his public school leave little room to doubt that homosexuality was widely practised (though not, he says, by him).

What emerges is a picture of an extraordinarily clever young man who is amazingly well-read. This picture accords with those given in the biographies I have read and reviewed in this blog:
C.S.Lewis: A biography by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper
Jack: C.S.Lewis and his times by George Sayer

My brainy sister Jane who teaches English tells me that 'surprised by joy' is is the title of a poem by Wordsworth which deals with his guilt at feeling a moment of joy when mourning the death of his daughter. She says: "It is actually a very good sonnet, using rhythm particularly effectively."

The Joy referred to in the title of this autobiography is an experience of ecstasy or bliss, such as one might experience when walking in a beautiful landscape or hearing a beautiful piece of music or reading a beautiful poem. I have used the adjective beautiful three times; it seems to me that the Joy that Lewis describes is an essentially aesthetic experience which involves beauty. It isn't pleasure : “Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.”He makes the point that it is not sexual desire or lust, that these are debasements, but it is an experience of desire. He seems to be talking about a religious, mystical experience of the transcendental. He has a moment of Joy on a walk. “It seemed to me that I have tasted heaven then. If only such a moment could return! But what I never realised was that it had returned - that the remembering of that walk was itself a new experience of just the same kind. True, it was desire, not possession. But then what I had felt on the walk had also been desire, and only possession in so far as that kind of desire is itself desirable. ... to have is to want and to want is to have.”

He is pretty hard on his pre-conversion self. For example, he castigates himself for snobbery including chronological snobbery: “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find out why it went out of date. Was it refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? ... One passes to the realisation that our own age is also ‘a period’, and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those wide-spread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.”

He is withering about his schooling at what he calls Wyvern but is in fact Malvern College. He describes the fundamental structure with the sporting Bloods at the top and the endless jockeying for position. There was an acknowledged undercurrent of homosexuality. CSL is pretty relaxed about sex. As he says: “Cruelty is surely more evil than lust.”

• “A Tart is a pretty and effeminate-looking small boy who acts as a catamite to one or more of his seniors ,usually Bloods. Usually, not always. Although our oligarchy kept most of the amenities of life for themselves, they were, on this point, liberal; they did not impose chastity on the middle-class boy in addition to all his other disabilities. Pederasty among the lower classes was not ‘side’ or at least not serious side; not like putting one's hands in one's pockets or wearing one’s coat unbuttoned. The gods had a sense of proportion.”
• “The Tarts had an important function to play in making school ... a preparation for public life. They were not like slaves, for their favours were (nearly always) solicited, not compelled. Nor were they exactly like prostitutes, for the liaison often had some permanence and, far from being merely sensual, was highly sentimentalised.”
• “A boy goes to a Public School precisely to be made a normal, sensible boy - a good mixer - to be taken out of himself; and eccentricity is severely penalised.”
• “The whole structure of Bloodery would collapse if the Bloods played in the spirit of play, for their recreation; there must be audience and limelight.”
• “When oppression does not completely and permanently break the spirit, has it not a natural tendency to produce retaliatory pride and contempt? We reimburse ourselves for cuffs and toil by a double dose of self-esteem. No one is more likely to be arrogant that a slave.”

There is humour:

• “My brother ... announced every morning with perfect truth that he had done five sums; he did not add that they were the same five every day.”
• “How a small boy who can neither flirt nor drink should be expected to enjoy prancing about on a polished floor till the small hours of the morning, is beyond my conception.”
• “It took me years to make the discovery that any real human intercourse could take place at a mixed assembly of people in their good clothes.”
• “I am one of those on whom Nature has laid the doom that whatever they buy and whatever they wear they will always look as if they had come out of an old clothes shop.”

He also makes some brilliant observations:

• "They had the talent for happiness in a high degree - went straight for it as experienced travellers go for the best seat in a train.”
• “‘The trouble about insects is that they are like French locomotives - they have all the works on the outside’. The works - that is the trouble. Their angular limbs, their jerky movements, their dry, metallic noises, all suggest either machines that have come to life or life degenerating into mechanism.”
• “There were books in the study, books in the drawing-room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not.”
• “The ugliest man alive is an angel of beauty compared with the loveliest of the dead.”
• “Having once tasted life, we are subjected to the impulse of self-preservation. Life, in other words, is as habit-forming as cocaine.”
• “Those who think that if adolescents were all provided with suitable mistresses we should soon hear no more of ‘immortal longings’ are certainly wrong.”
• “The materialist’s universe had the enormous attraction that it offered you limited liabilities. No strictly infinite disaster could overtake you in it. Death ended all ... The horror of the Christian universe was that it had no door marked exit.”
• “The sword glitters not because the swordsman sets out to make it glitter but because he is fighting for his life and therefore moving it very quickly.”

There is Joy in the elegance of the writing of CSL; in the way that he can pin a feeling with a metaphor or write a description that is so exactly spot on that you can re-experience what he is describing. There is Joy in the unfussy simplicity of his writing: it is like a street of Georgian houses; it is death to the baroque and the rococo. I might not accept his theology but he makes some pretty cogent philosophical points and I am ever charmed by his style.

Other books by this remarkable and prolific writer which are reviewed in this blog:

• His science fiction trilogy
• Out of the Silent Planet
• Perelandra
• That Hideous Strength
• Theology:
• The Great Divorce
• God in the Dock
• The Problem of Pain
• Reflections on the Psalms
• Literary criticism:
• The Discarded Image

Of course he wrote the Narnia children's books as well.

February 2019; 190 pages

Other memoirs reviewed in this blog can be found here.

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

"Paddy Clarke ha ha ha" by Roddy Doyle

A fictionalised memoir of an Irish childhood. Paddy grows up with his ma and da, his brother Sinbad (Francis) and his sisters, and the other boys of the neighbourhood. They go to school, they fight, they play football, they dare one another to steal from shops, start fires, they run down construction pipes. This is no idyll; it is a raw and honest account of childhood. Teeth are lost, a boy dies, friendships are made and broken. And as the narrative progresses a dark shadow grows. Paddy's ma and da begin to argue and fight.

The voice is the authentic voice of Irish childhood. My friend 'Karl' writes stories about Ireland and I could here his voice in the way Doyle uses language. The words and the syntax have an authentic Irish lilt to them.

To capture the essence of young Paddy Clarke, the narrative rambles. Paddy is simply too young, or too clever, to keep his thoughts in a single track. He may be describing the building of a new housing estate but that segues into how the cows were taken from the farm in a lorry and how Uncle Eddie, the farmer's brother, hit a cow with a stick when it slipped in the mud and how he used to run down the road to get the evening paper for his brother. He may be talking about the naming of their football team but this progresses into the boys investigating the first names of their mothers. A dreadful family outing in da's new car (which he hasn't yet learned to drive) in the pouring rain has all the elements of family life including the tension between ma and da, the relationship between Sinbad and Paddy, and the fact the when little Sinbad wouldn't ever smile for his photograph.

It sounds like a nightmare. Just stream of consciousness rambling. But it allows Doyle to explore his characters in all their complexities; it allows him to build a picture of his people from all the possible angles so that we see them as real, with faults and frailties and strengths and needs. There is no shirking the genuineness of the people portrayed. The structure of this book is hidden deep down. It is not so much a narrative as an atmosphere. As childhood progresses the dark clouds slowly gather and innocence becomes maturity.

A stunning portrayal of childhood well worth the 1993 Booker Prize.

It is difficult to select quotations from this book because so much of the brilliance is diffused across the pages but here are a few samples:

• "Jesus had his head tilted sideways, a bit like a kitten."
• "She was Mister O'Connell's girlfriend, although she wasn't a girl at all; she'd been a woman for ages."
• "Kevin turned his back to the sea and the wind and lit the match. He turned and saved the flame by the shield of his hand. I loved the way he could do that."
• "When my da was standing up he stood perfectly still. His feet clung to the ground. They only moved when he was going somewhere. My ma's feet were different. They didn't settle. They couldn't make their minds up."
• "She let go of my leg. She always said nothing when she was being annoyed. She clicked and pointed."
• "He was younger than me, and smaller. Safe smaller; he'd never be able to kill me, even if he was a brilliant fighter."
• "My ma said that you should chew the food well before you swallowed it. I never did; it was a waste of time and boring."
• "I looked for lipstick on his collar ... There wasn't any. I wondered, anyway, why there'd be lipstick on the collar. Maybe the women were bad shots in the dark."
• "They were both to blame. It took two to tango. It didn't take three; there was no room for me."

You will have your own selection when you read it and you must read it because this childish Joycean Odyssey is a masterclass in writing.

February 2019; 282 pages

Other fiction by Irish authors reviewed in this blog may be found here.

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

"Man and the Sun" by Jacquette Hawkes

This book was written in 1962 and is a reasonably authoritative layman's guide to the relationship between man and the sun. She starts off discussing the science and how the sun drives life on Earth but her main interest lies in the realm of myth. Thus she considers the prehistoric representations of sun gods, finding solar disks in burials on Salisbury Plain near Stonehenge, before considering solar gods in the religions of Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Incas and Aztecs, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and the followers of Mithras and Christ.

There are many interesting points she made although she sometimes allows her cultural biases to show (for example when condemning the Aztecs for their practice of human sacrifice). Often her writing is vigorous and she has a way with metaphor that can coin a memorable phrase (“We stand before the chimpanzee’s cage thinking, each one of us, there but for the grace of God swing I.”) Occasionally this can stray into the use of language for reinforcing bias, such as when she describes Neanderthals [I assume] as "less able types of human being". There is sometimes a statement made baldly without any evidence but which she clearly considers fact: “As the individual self-consciousness increased and the conscious and intellectual mind grew further apart from the unconscious, there was an equivalent tendency to set a single male divinity outside and above nature, the world being his creation, sometimes his creation as Logos, the most intellectual of conceptions. It is not easy to distinguish sharply between transcendental and immanent gods.”

This is a book of its time but it is well-written and very readable.

Interesting moments:

• “At two thousand million miles from the Sun its light is still strong enough to allow the reading of fine print - were there readers on Uranus, which orbits at about this distance.”
• “Plants can feed on pure carbon dioxide ... The leaf wantoning in the air is eating away as steadily as a sheep in a field.”
• “It is an all but universally recognised attribute of the inspired person to have bright-shining eyes.”
• “There are people who have developed religious ideas that allow them to be as light-hearted and guilt-free as many of the South Sea Islanders, or as grim and guilt-ridden as the Calvinists, who rejoice in simplicity like the Quakers or in grandeur like the Roman Catholics ... Yet always ... we are inclined to think of the religion shaping the faithful instead of the faithful shaping the religion.” 
• “Satan, Prince of Darkness, and his followers can hardly be distinguished from Ahriman and his demon host.”
• “No more than a bird can build its nest exclusively with its own feathers could the Christian leaders build a faith, rites and church without picking up all manner of extraneous material from the Graeco-Roman environment.”
• Leonardo da Vinci said that “whoever evokes authority for his reasoning is using not his intelligence that his memory.”

February 2019; 240 pages

"Winter" by Ali Smith

This is the second of the 'Four Seasons' tetralogy that Smith is writing about Britain after the Brexit referendum. It follows Autumn.

It was shortlisted for the 2018 fiction book of the year in the British Book Awards.

Smith has a unique way of writing. She doesn’t really narrate a single story. Instead she puts together little snippets of narrative in a sort of collage so that we can build up her characters and at the same time understand her themes. As she herself says in Part Three: “That’s one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once.”This makes her books not simply linear, as most standard narrative fiction is, but two or even three dimensional: there is the story, the characters, the understory. We might never find out what is going to happen next but we have had a glimpse into the lives of some very real people and we understand a little more about the world in which we live. This book is a perfect example of her craft.

Each fragment of the collage is very carefully crafted. She follows Orwell's dictum that 'good prose is like a windowpane'. For example, I know exactly what she means by this description in Part One: “He is here on a communal PC the keyboard of which makes the fingers on his hands feel as inept as some love making sessions he'd rather not recall.” And this from Part Three: “The whole room turns towards her in that unnatural way owls can move their heads right round without moving the rest of their bodies.”

She also has a prose style which feels very intimate in which she sort-of splurges in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way, which draws you in as a friend, and yet is so sophisticated. For example, this is a woman shortly after making love: “Later on her way home, as she walks down a street, there’ll be words again, she’ll be dazed with it, blasted by it, made roofless like a house after a gale with it and the walls all down, made open, maybe such a thing as too pen because this street she’ll be on, it’s a pretty run-down street but it will be vibrant to her, though below her there’ll be nothing but a pavement, but beautiful, the pavement, well get real, pavements aren’t beautiful, and the bus shelter a beauty, buildings, scruffy, beautiful, beautiful fast food place, shockingly beautiful coin-operated launderette full of strangers whose profiles in the late evening sun are, yes, though she knows they aren’t really, but they will be, right then, unbelievably beautiful.”

It might be thought that this means that the structure of the book, its 'plot', is less important to her but this book is structured after the three phases of the Christmas Carol: past (Christmas Eve), present (Christmas Day) and future (Boxing Day). Furthermore there are moments which loop back. For example, one of the first things that Sophie says to Lux is that her "face is full of little holes". At the time I thought this referred to the eye problems that Sophie might be having. But later on we are told that “It would be good to be full of holes ... Then all the things you can’t express would maybe just flow out.” This rather summarises Lux (which Lux says is short for Velux, after the window). Furthermore the vision of the head which Sophie sees at the start of the book is paired with Art's visions towards the end of a section of the coastline falling from the sky.

It starts in a very Dickensian way by adapting the start of a Christmas Carol: “God was dead, to begin with.” It then lists all the other things that are dead in a way which reminded me of the “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” start to the Tale of Two Cities or the “Fog everywhere” second paragraph of Bleak House.

Part One:
In Part One, Sophie, an old lady who was once a successful businesswoman, is hallucinating a head. This reminded me of Scrooge, hallucinating Marley’s Ghost. She goes to the Opticians and the bank and is rather annoyed by what she sees as the rudeness of modern life and, again like Scrooge, the banks closing early when she wants her money. Later, in Part Two, she will be described as miserly. There is also a reminder of Christmas Carol in the way Sophie will remember Christmases from her past. She grew up with a rebellious sister called Iris who later became a peace protestor at Greenham.

We also learn about Art, Sophie’s son, who has broken up with his girlfriend Charlotte and now has to find a woman to pretend to be Charlotte when he goes to his mum’s house for Christmas.

But when Art and the hired girl, Lux, get to his mum’s rambling old mansion (which used to be the squat that Iris lived in) Sophie is unwelcoming and there is no food in the house. In an obvious reference to the Nativity story, she tells Lux to sleep in the barn. Instead, Lux phones Iris to come and help, even though she is told that the two sisters haven’t spoken for thirty years.

Great lines from Part One:

• “The traffic jam congealing in all directions.”
• “Your default to selfishness is not ok at all.”
• “Solstice, she said. You said it. Darkest days ever. There's never been a time like this. Yes there has, he said. Solstices are cyclic and they happen every year.”
• “That's what he is, a language no one else alive in the world speaks. He is the last living speaker of himself. ... He himself is dead as a disappeared grammar, a graveyard scatter of phonemes and morphemes.”

Part Two:
In Part Two there are more memories from Art and from Sophie, which suggest that Iris helped to bring Art up when he was too young to remember, a fact that his mother furiously denies. And there is a wonderful Christmas lunch, which reminded me of the brilliantly horrible dinner party in Smith’s There But For The, in which we explore the play of Cymbeline in which “A play about a kingdom subsumed in chaos, lies, powermongering, division and a great deal of poisoning and self-poisoning.” is a powerful metaphor for Britain after the Brexit vote, and compare ‘No room at the Inn’ with the refusal to accept economic migrants.

Great lines from Part Two:

• “It might be worth it, to re-experience what it's like to be sick, because from what she remembered there was a certain pleasure in it, anarchic force of clearance.”
• “One of those powerful liminal times in a life when death isn't just preferable to being alive, because you feel so lousy, also but that also let you negotiate with the powers that be about your own living or dying.”
• “There was always a furious intolerance at work no matter when or where in history, she thought, and it always went for the head or the face. She thought of the burnt-off scraped-off faces of the mediaeval painted saints on the wooden altar screens in hundreds of churches.”
• “It was meant as a warning. Take a look at what your saints are truly made of. It was the demonstration that everything symbolic will be revealed as a lie, everything you revere nothing but burnt matter, broken stone, as soon as it meets whatever shape time’s contemporary cudgel takes.”
• “None of these things is happening here. They are all happening far away, elsewhere. ... What does here mean anyway, I'd like to know. Everywhere’s a here, isn’t it?”
• “It is the dregs, really, to be living in a time when even your dreams have to be post-postmodern consciouser-than-thou.”
• “Surreal was the word. Above real.”
• “And now for our entertainment when we want humiliation we've got reality TV instead ... And soon instead of reality TV we’ll have the President of the United States.”
• “I'm me all right ... I'm more me than I care to admit.”
• “In real life you seem detached, but not impossible.”
• “But what will the world do ... if we can't sort the problem of the millions and millions of people with no home to go to or whose homes aren't good enough, except by saying go away and building fences and walls? It isn't a good enough answer, that one group of people can be in charge of the destinies of another group of people and choose whether to exclude them or include them. Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We've got to come up with a better answer.”

Part Three
In the third part, which starts with a scene in the future in which Art is reading A Christmas Carol with his son, reconciliations abound and there are parallels drawn between Joseph, father of Jesus, and the man Art thinks is his father.

Great lines from Part Three:

• “Whatever being alive is, with all its pasts and presents and futures, it is most itself in the moments when you surface from a depth of numbness or forgetfulness that you didn't even know you were at, and break the surface”
• “We’re all apocrypha.”
• “It's the ghost of a flower not yet open on its stem, the real thing long gone, but look, still there, the mark of the life of it reaching across the words on the page for all the world like a footpath that leads to the lit tip of a candle.”

Ali Smith is perhaps the most original and innovative writer in England at the moment. Her corpus is astounding. It includes: 

• How To Be Both which contains two linked stories either of which can be read first (indeed, they are printed in a different sequence in different editions with no clue as to which you have bought until you start reading)
• The Accidental
• Artful which interweaves a ghost story with lectures about the art of literature.

February 2019; 322 pages

Thanks to my sister Jane for yet another brilliant Christmas present.

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