"The Secret Lives of Colour" by Kassia St Clair

This is one of those books which are heaven for the determined trivia collector like myself. Seventy-five different colours from beige to acid yellow, from nude to shocking pink, from dragon's blood  to mauve to Prussian blue to celadon to khaki to pitch black, are included. You learn about their history, how they are made, and their properties such as how well the dye material and whether they are good in oil and if they fade. But best of all you learn the fascinating facts:

• Lead poisoning from cosmetics used to make skin whiter may have been in part responsible for the collapse of the Shogun regime in Japan in 1868. On the other hand the use of Kohl as an eye liner results in a 240% boost to the production of nitric oxide by the surrounding skin which might significantly reduce the risk of skin infections.
• Vermilion was once as costly as gold when it was used as the red in mediaeval illuminated manuscripts; "it was glazed with a revolting mixture of egg yolk and ear wax." Meanwhile the use of minium for red applied by miniators onto early mediaeval manuscripts led to our word miniature."
• Neanderthals have been found with ginger hair.
• No one really knows how Indian yellow used to be made; there is a tale that it comes from the urine of cows fed only on mango leaves and water in Mirzapur, Bengal.
• Beige "could be the concept-colour of the bourgeoisie: conventional, sanctimonious and materialistic." Khaki (from the Urdu word for dusty) was invented by Sir Harry Lumsden in Peshawar, Pakistan, for the uniform for a corps of guides to make them "invisible in a land of dust".
• Despite being up to 2,500 times cheaper than the real thing, artificial ultramarine was initially resisted by artists: "Because the particles were the same size and reflected light in the same way, it lacked the depth, variety and visual interest of the real thing."

This book works both as a reference work and as a dip-in-for-pleasure book. June 2019; 285 pages

"In the Heart of the Sea" by Nathaniel Philbrick

This book recounts the story of the whaleship Essex, from Nantucket, which was sunk by a whale in 1820. The crew subsequently travelled in three whaleboats across the Pacific, many died, some being eaten by their starving shipmates; there was one case in which one of the crews drew lots and one lad was killed by his friend for food (this latter story is adapted for the novel Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch). The account of the voyage by first mate Owen Chase (who possibly unknowingly incited the whale attack: “On the morning of November 20, 1820, sperm whales were not the only creatures filling the ocean with clicking sounds; there was also Owen Chase, busily nailing a piece of canvas to the bottom of an upturned whaleboat.”; C 5) was written in 1821; Herman Melville read it and was inspired to write Moby-Dick. Philbrick speculates in chapter 14 that the theme of Ahab's revenge came via a story told by Ralph Waldo Emerson who in 1834 was told of a white whale, famed for attacking whaling ships with its jaw, which had been hunted and killed by a boat called the Winslow or Essex; Owen Chase, first mate of the Essex, became captain of the Winslow.

This account is based on the account written in 1876 by the cabin boy (he also happened to be at the helm of the Essex when it was rammed by the whale) Thomas Nickerson which was lost until 1960 and only published in 1984.  

It is a tremendous story and beautifully written. Whilst written at a distance and thus able to reflect on the economic and social circumstances surrounding the Nantucket whale industry and the lives of the whalers (which, for example, enables understanding of the fact that those seamen who died first were predominantly African American), at the same time it transports you to the deck of the Essex and into the small whaleboats which attacked the whale. There were times when I was in those whaleboats and I felt hungry. At the end one is left with admiration for the indomitability and the ingenuity of the survivors, as well as deep sadness for those who died.

The story goes on to look at the consequences. Amazingly both Captain Pollard and Owen Chase returned to the sea, although only temporarily. Even more amazingly, when the captain of the Essex took his next command two of the Essex crew served under him again, one being Thomas Nickerson and the other Charles Ramsdell “the boy who had spent ninety-four days in a whaleboat with him” and who had been the one to propose drawing lots to see who should be sacrificed and who would actually kill the victim. (C 13)

Other consequences include, of course, Moby-Dick but also The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe in the early part of which the ship-wrecked hero survives an open boat voyage through cannibalism, the victim being chosen by the drawing of lots.

Selected quotes:

• “Unfortunately, the anger which [the Quakers] are forbidden to express by outward actions, finding no vent, stagnates the heart.” (C1, quoting William Comstock)
• “A sharp-sighted man was a jewel in the estimation of the genuine whaling captain.” (C 1)
• A treatment for seasickness: “The sufferer was made to swallow a piece of pork fat tied to a string, which was then pulled back up again. If the symptoms returned, the process was repeated.” This remedy also appears in Peter Duck by Arthur Ransome. (C 2)
• “Salt beef and salt pork ... was so salty that when the cook placed it in a barrel of saltwater for a day (to render it soft enough to chew), the meat’s salt content was actually lowered.” (C 3)
• “The strong winds and unpredictable currents that boiled in and around these volcanic outcroppings sometimes created the illusion that the [Galapagos] islands were actually moving.” (C 4)
• In both Sperm Whale society and Nantucket Society the males spent most of their lives alone only returning to the female pod to breed. “In their dedication to killing sperm whales the Nantucketers had developed a system of social relationships that mimicked those of their prey.” (C 4)
• “Nantucketers recognized that the positions of captain and first mate required contrasting personalities.” Captains needed to be authoritarians, first mates needed to be more personal. (C 6)
• “The human body, which is 70 percent water, requires a bare minimum of a pint a day to remove its waste products.” (C 7)
• “The act of self-expression - through writing a journal or letters - often enables a survivor to distance himself from his fears.” (C 7)
• “The biological anthropologist Stephen McGarvey has speculated that the people who survived these voyages [the original voyages of the Polynesians to colonise remote Pacific islands] tended to have a higher percentage of body fat before the voyage began and/or more efficient metabolisms, allowing them to live longer on less food than their thinner companions. (McGarvey theorizes that this is why modern day Polynesians suffer from a high incidence of obesity.)” (C 9)
• “Many of the so-called American characteristics ... abounding energy, generosity, optimism - become intelligible as the expected behaviour response of a well-fed people.” (C 10)
• “Anthropologists and archaeologists studying the phenomenon of cannibalism have estimated that the average human adult will provide about sixty-six pounds of edible meat.” (C 11)

A fascinating and most interesting book which has been made into a film.

June 2019; 238 pages

"Rivers of London" by Ben Aaronovitch

A genre fusion novel: a police procedural murder mystery meets Harry Potter. It has a great first line: “It started at one thirty on a cold Tuesday morning in January when Martin Turner, street performer and, in his own words, apprentice gigolo, tripped over a body in front of the East Portico of St. Paul's at Covent Garden.” Then the narrator, a probationary constable of mixed heritage, meets a ghost. Later he becomes an apprentice wizard. Apart from the murders, he also needs to sort out a turf dispute between the rivers north of Teddington Lock, mostly boys under the control of Old Father Thames, and the girl rivers (such as the love interest, Beverley Brook) of the tidal reaches of Mother Thames.

The problem is that murder mysteries require strict rules and allowing magic in disrupts these and demands the formulation of new rules. So time has to be spent explaining why, with his master disabled, Peter Grant the hero can't enter through the front door of The Folly, the magical police station, but can get through the back. And why battery enabled IT devices were destroyed by magic. And I never really understood why Molly's bite led to time travel.

I was bemused, I was bewildered, but I was also bewitched. The novel is saved by a bravura writing performance in which the narrator wise cracks his way to the solution of the mystery and the resolution of the feud. Needless to say, there is a sequel, Moon Over Soho.

Selected wit:

• “Could it have been anyone, or was it destiny? When I'm considering this I find it helpful to quote the wisdom of my father, who once told me, ‘Who knows why the fuck anything happens?’” (C 1)
• “London is the pick ‘n’ mix cultural capital of the world.” (C 1)
• “They were loud to the point of constituting a one-family breach of the peace.” (C 1)
• “He was from Yorkshire, or somewhere like that, and like many Northerners with issues, he'd moved to London as a cheap alternative to psychotherapy.” (C 2)
• “I knew him by reputation, and the reputation was, don't fuck with him under any circumstances.” (C 2)
• “Questions would be asked. Answers would be ignored.” (C 3)
• “It ‘s important not to rush the good things in life.” (C 5)
• "The remnants of ancient villages that had grown together like spots of mould on a Petri dish.” (C 5)
• “Anyone watching would have taken us for a pair of feral estate agents marking out their territory.” (C 5)
• “The Fire Brigade recognise only two kinds of people at a fire, victims and obstacles.” (C 5)
• “Like a car engine turning over on a cold morning, I could sense something catching on my thoughts.” (C 5)
• “I actually used the word ‘groovy’ and she didn’t even flinch, which was worrying on so many levels.” (C 6)
• “The dizzying speed of a bumblebee who’d met his pollen quota and was taking a moment to enjoy the view.” (C 8)
• “The trouble with the old boy network is you can never really be sure whether it's switched on or not, and whether it’s operating in your interest or some other old boy’s.” (C 10)
• “A sudden attack of culture snobbery is a common affliction among policeman of a certain rank and age; it's like a normal midlife crisis only with more chandeliers and foreign languages.” (C 10)

June 2019; 390 pages

"Resurrection Bay" by Emma Viskic

A murder mystery set in Australia with a detective who is deaf. This leads to a sensitivity to gesture and body language:

• “She tapped the arm of her chair, and arrhythmic pattern that involved every finger.” (C 2)
• “He'd taught Gaz how to watch, back when they were kids. How to read people's hands and eyes. How to know when a sideways glance meant he should run, when it meant he should throw the first punch.” (C 2)
• “He edged his chair slightly away as he sat down.” (C 5)
• “She picked up a teaspoon and flipped it between her fingers: fast, slow, fast.” (C 12)

It also has its share of wisecracks:

• “Don't get your dick in a twist.” (C 2)
• “I've been so far up those guys’ arses I know who needs more fibre in their diet.” (C 2)
• “No point in reading the instructions - they were written in a language that looked a lot like English, but clearly wasn't.” (C 5)
• “They'd rented rooms in a soulless tower block in order to attract corporate clients, but the lease was calculated with a complex algorithm, which took into account glass and chrome, but ignored square footage.” (C 5)
• “Men are a simple sex, driven by simple needs. Don't overestimate us.” (C 12)
• “The waitress was around twenty, with a fondness for body piercing that had crossed the line from fashionable into ghoulish.” (C 12)

The detective is, of course, vulnerable following a break up with his long-time girlfriend resulting from his refusal to admit he is disabled. It is his partner who is the recovering alcoholic.

• “Strange how things always hurt more the next day: cuts, break-ups, sorrows.” (C 9)

Fast-paced, exciting and well written. Shortlisted for the Golden Dagger in 2018.

June 2019; 278 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 Crais: a fast-paced thriller set in California
• The Devil's Dice by Roz Watkins: a whodunnit set in the English Peak District
• 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.
• The Mongolian Conspiracy by Rafael Bernal: classic Chandleresque Mexican noir
• The Closer I get by Paul Burston

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

"Death in Shetland Waters" by Marsali Taylor

This is the sixth book in a series of murder mysteries set on or around the Shetlands, and starring sailor Cassandra Lynch. In this one Cass has finally got a job as third mate on a tall ship sailing from Stavanger to Belfast training mostly young people to sail. Is there a stowaway on board and who owns the gun Cass finds? Then shipmates start to disappear. A classic murder mystery with a wonderful background.

The reasons that I love these books include:

• Her characters are more complex and three dimensional and real compared to many in this genre;
• Her descriptions can be taut and compact (for example “The worry’s in your voice, like water finding a pebble in its way.” C 3; “His chest rose and fell in deep breaths of the soft air.” C 5; “I felt a sadness sharp and sudden as standing barefoot on a thistle.” C 15) or lyrical (“It had become a most beautiful evening. The sky was whisked with skeins of teased grey fleece, tinted gold by the sun behind them. The land had taken shape from misty shadows to wooded hills punctuated with white houses, soft and enchanted in the yellow light. The sea was like grey velvet.” C 18; “Gradually, the sky darkened, and the moon thickened from a transparent honesty penny to the colour of old brass, poised in a diamond of rigging.” C 2)
• We include real dilemmas. In this case Cass is torn between pursuing her career on her beloved ships and having a family with DI Gavin Macrae. This dilemma is sharpened by a fellow shipmate who is pregnant by another crew member (who has a wife). There is empathy but there is also a stingingly sharp observation from the Cass (brought up a Roman Catholic): “I couldn't imagine what it must be like to know that your own child was about to be pulled out of its safe womb to die drowning in the air like a fish.” (C 8)

She can also be funny:

• “The one thing I did know about horses was that they believed they were permanently starving.” (C 2)
• “Cat stalked back to the bandstand, obviously thinking poorly of a deity that gave food the unfair advantage of wings.” (C 4)
• “His sour expression suggested a box-of-Rennies-a-day habit.” (C 8)
• “Evening dress aboard this ship is all the thermals and outerwear you've got.” (C 15)

The brilliant books in this series, in order, include:

• Death on a Longship
• The Trowie Mound Murders
• A Handful of Ash
• The Body in the Bracken
• Ghosts of the Vikings
• Death in Shetland Waters
• Death on a Shetland Isle

June 2019; 337 pages

"The Thread" by Victoria Hislop

Kind young Dimitri, native of London but staying with his grandparents in Thessaloniki, is told the story of their lives. The story, starting in the First World War, encompasses the great fire of Thessaloniki, the population swap between Greece and Turkey between the wars, the occupation of Greece by the Nazis, the civil war between the Communists and the Royalists after the end of the Nazi occupation and the military takeover by the Colonels in 1967. Given the frame story it seems clear what will happen in the end.

I liked the competent and clear narration. Given the fifty year span of history there was a lot to get through and it was important not to get confused. The story sped along (the Guardian called it a fast-paced narrative).

However, the need to cram so much into the space of a single novel meant that the story felt a little superficial, as if the characters were skimming the waves of history. There is a concept in creative writing called 'psychic distance' (in The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, John Gardner defines this as “the distance the reader feels between himself [or herself] and the events in the story”) It can also be explained in cinematic terms. Cinematographers use Long Shots which are great for establishing shots and showing the characters in the context of their surroundings, Medium Shots to show how a character acts, and Close Ups to show the reactions and emotions of a character. This book used mostly Long and Medium shots. This meant that I learned about the characters from outside. Often the author discussed their motivations when explaining why a character did what they did. There was a relative lack of Close Up and Point of View shots.

Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction talks about the contrast between what he calls the 'pictorial' way of describing things and the 'dramatic' way. Picture is highly narrator-driven; the reader receives information directly from the narrator; it is much more economical than the scene, being able to take in vast tracts of time and space in a very few words, but it is thinner and much less vivid. In these terms Hislop made much more use of picture than drama; this was probably inevitable given the scope of her book but the result was that it was substantially less vivid than it might otherwise have been.

For example, in chapter five a Greek soldier is  watching a panicking crowd of refugees fighting for a place on a boat before the Turks arrive. If he, a soldier who has partaken in unspecified acts (but we presume to be rape and murder of civilians), is caught he will probably be brutally killed. But he is quite dispassionate about all this, reflecting calmly: “He could not leave. With all the crimes that weighed on his conscience, how could he push in front of any other man, woman, or child? There was not one person here who did not deserve to live more than he. In all those months of the campaign, the soldiers had been swept along on a tide of hatred and self-justification, but now it was self-loathing that tore at his heart.” What he is thinking is what he should be thinking. How he is thinking doesn't work for me. I don't want melodrama but this book seems to have sucked all the emotion out of the characters.

Throughout, the voice was that of the author. This was despite the fact that this was a framed narrative. The voice I should have heard was that of the two grandparents telling their grandson what had happened to them. But their voices were absent.

Dialogue was very formal. Despite the circumstances which one might have thought would lead to extremes of emotion which would be likely to produce incoherence, the dialogue was always articulate. Furthermore, each character almost always responded to what the other character had said which is very rare in natural dialogue.

Character development was almost totally absent. Goodies stayed goodies and baddies stayed bad.  When a good person did something that they became ashamed of it was because they were not strong enough to resist the pressures on them. So there were dilemmas posed but the characters resolved them rationally. Very few characters had a three dimensional personality: they were 'flat' in E M Forster's terms (Aspects of the Novel).

There were some great lines. She sets out her stall on the first page. Thessaloniki, we are told, is “a place of dazzling cultural variety, where an almost evenly balanced population of Christians, Muslims, and Jews coexisted and complemented each other like the interwoven threads of an oriental rug.” (C 1)

There are some very precise observations:

• “Olga stood at the stove stirring her husband's coffee and observed that it took precisely the same amount of time for his anger to reach boiling point as it did for the dark liquid to rise in the briki.” (C 4)
• “What struck her most forcibly was that his walk had virtually broken into a run. He could not get away fast enough.” (C 4)
• “An old man scratched his head as if, somewhere inside his skull, he had vital information.” (C 11)
• “She even managed to provoke sympathy for the lugubrious Esther Moreno, who wore her sourness like a dowdy dress.” (C 15)

Some of these contain a sardonic poke of sarcasm:

• “He greeted each morning with expectation and confidence. Everything seemed to be going his way. He was a giant in his hand-made size five and a half shoes.” (C 16)

The next one is both a perfect observation and a highly symbolic icon:

• “On the table, a vase of flowers. They had been fresh many days ago but dry petals now lay in a circle round the base of the vase. The daisy skeletons were almost sculptural and cast a crisp shadow on the table.” (C 9)

There are some moments when she seems to encapsulate truth in an insight:

• “He found the scent of the city's subculture unexpectedly alluring and wondered how the bourgeoisie could be so contented with dinners in expensive Europeanised restaurants or with soirees in grand houses, when close by was a culture of such emotional rawness.” (C 16)
• “Everyone had a point of view and no one was wrong.” (C 19)
• “She and all the women here had a triple role. As wives, mothers, and elegant shadows.” (C 24)

June 2019; 454 pages

"The Man who broke Napoleon's codes" by Mark Urban

George Scovell was a man of low birth who, having initially trained as an engraver, joined the British army during the Napoleonic wars. This book traces his career from Captain with Sir John Moore at the time of the evacuation from Corunna to his work as an assistant quarter-master general with Wellington where he was initially responsible for a team of guides to reconnoitre and gather information, then taking on the duties of postmaster, running teams of men carrying messages, and finally as Wellington's code-breaker. The book also tells of the Peninsular campaign and includes the British attacks on the great forts of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz and the great victories of Salamanca and Vitorio; Waterloo and the aftermath of his career are included in a post-script.

This is a well-told (plain and clear, rather like the prose of the Duke of Wellington himself) narrative history and it includes some very useful maps. In an original touch there is a friexe above each chapter heading which shows a quotation written in the Great Chiffre Napoleonic code and which is gradually revealed as the chapters go by.

Some of my favourite lines:

• "Captain George Scovell was a Deputy Assistant Quartermaster General ... the title itself seemed to denote 'insignificance'." (C 1)
• "While Massena had kept his mistress at Headquarters ... Marmont, although reputedly one of the most handsome men in Paris, brought no Venus to the field of Mars." (C 7)
• "Sometimes a column of infantry marching across a dusty Estremaduran plain would see the glint of a telescope on a nearby hillside and then catch sight of a silhouetted figure on horseback." (C 7)
• "An intercepted mail ... was taken by Longa, who killed 400 men who escorted it except 12, who, he says, did not show so strong an inclination to leave their bodies there." (C 17)

May 2019; 288 pages

"Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville

This is the great American novel. What makes it great?

My sister was impressed. She called it "magnificently insane", "ridiculously wordy" and described Ishmael, the narrator, as "a Don Quixote figure". By these comments she meant that it was one of the best books she had read.

It is not a modern novel. It makes no sense to criticise in terms of what we expect a novel to be. In a modern novel, in English literature since about the time of Henry James, the characters have driven the novel. It was different in earlier times. Melville published Moby-Dick (the hyphen is only ever found in the title and one presumes was a typo by the printer of the first edition) in 1851; in this year Uncle Tom's Cabin began serialization and Mrs Gaskell published Cranford; Charles Dickens was in between David Copperfield and Bleak House; Balzac had just died. This was a time of big books and epic stories; it was a time of romantic ideas.

So I couldn't expect anything in the way of a character arc. The characters aren't even rounded in the E M Forster sense (see his Aspects of the Novel) While some of the characters debate (Starbuck, Ahab etc) soliloquise from time to time (To do or not to do) they remain flat and fail to progress anywhere. Thus we have the wonderful caricatures of Ahab (monomaniacal throughout: “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.”; C 37)  , Starbuck, Stubb, Flask and Queequeeg as well as minor characters such as Peleg but no characters in the modern sense. As Jane Smiley says in 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel, "Ishmael's own personality and fate are very little explored ... the novel is not about character transformation. ... It is Ahab ... who becomes the main focus of the narrative, but his character is no more transformed than Ishmael's."  In this way Moby-Dick is more of an epic than a novel. Only the narrator, Ishmael, seems to be a character and he disappears almost as soon as he boards ship.

The narration starts from the point of view of Ishmael as he explores New Bedford and Nantucket in his attempt to be hired on board a whaling ship. But the moment the ship sets sail, the narration switches to that of the omniscient narrator. He overhears things people say when they are on their own. He is privileged to record thoughts. He discourses with academic precision on the character of whales, their anatomy, their history. Parts of the narrative are rendered in the style of playscripts. Although he sometimes refers to himself during this narration, he isn't really part of it. He properly returns only for the epilogue.

I agree with my sister Jane that it is wordy. This is partly because Melville packs in his research: there are chapters on the types of whales, and on the anatomy of whales, and on the uses of whale-oil, and many chapters devoted to the business of capturing whales and then extracting their oil. These add verisimilitude and I correctly assumed that Melville had sailed on whalers. But these insertions distract from and slow down the narrative. This novel does not conform to modern notions of form.

But it is also wordy in another sense. Melville excites with his use of language. We are told in chapter seven that “There is death in this business of whaling - a speechlessly quick chaotic bungling of a man into Eternity.”; the word 'speechlessly' reminds us of the silence of death while at the same time acting as an intensifier for the 'quick', being used as a synonym for 'indescribably'; the word 'chaotic' harks back to the chaos of the void before creation; the word 'bungling' both describes the pushing and shoving that will force the living body through the doorway into death and at the same time refers to the errors that might cause the accident that brings about the death. This is beautiful writing.

Of course the novel doesn't really have a plot. Ship commanded by bonkers captain seeks revenge on white whale isn't really a plot. Jane Smiley (13 Ways of Looking at a Novel) again suggests what might be happening. She points out that Melville's problem was to get from the start of the sea voyage to its inevitable end. "The Pequod looks for the white whale for hundreds of pages; the encounter itself takes ... less than 5% of the novel. There is never any doubt about whether the whale will be found or pursued. At no juncture in the novel is there even the illusion of choice by Ahab, nor are there intervening circumstances.” So Melville has to find some way of exciting our interest. She suggests that whaling is inherently interesting. But she also suggests that Melville is seeking to "exhaust the spiritual meanings of obsession" by his use of multiple styles and that the novel should be viewed as analogous to Bach's Goldberg variations in which "much of the pleasure for the reader has to be witnessing the endless but systematic variety of the authors technique.” On this reading the length of the novel was necessary because it takes time to accustom the reader to the idea that the novel is trying to perpetrate.

There are some attempts at foreshadowing (“The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.”; C 3) and the prophecies related by the Parsee in Chapter 117 but these are clumsy and obvious, spoilers rather than bread crumbs. The fact that these prophecies occur so late in the book gives the impression that Melville was making it up as he went along rather than having a structured plot. This impression is reinforced by the virtual disappearance from the narrative of Ishmael once the voyage has got under way. Furthermore there is Bulkington. Ishmael comes across this character in chapter 3. Bulkington has a reputation at the tavern where Ishmael is to stay; he is a favourite of the sailors. He then disappears to reappear as the Peqoud sets sail as its helmsman. He has a whole chapter, albeit only of a page and a half, to himself; but this is to be his last appearance.

The story starts being told from the point of view of Ishmael. But once the ship gets underway the narrator becomes omniscient. Ishmael virtually vanishes. The central character is Ishmael, with Queequeeg also centre stage, but as the voyage gets under way the hitherto invisible Captain Ahab becomes the focus of attention. Moby-Dick is two books.

The language of the book starts robustly but as we move further into the drama, and into Ahab's monomania, it becomes more and more old-fashioned. The last few chapters are melodramatic and full of exclamation marks.

So there is a lot wrong with this book, of which some can be excused by being in the style of its time and others not. But surely it is redeemed by the many moments of magic:

• There are pieces of perfect description:
• “Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist ... had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched.” (C 3)
• “He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them.” (C 28)
• “In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the morning.” (C 79)
• “If you have attentively regard almost any quadruped’s spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls.” (C 80)
• “Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's gurgling track, pushed her on like giants’ palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place, where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.” (C 124)
• There is a first line to die for:
• “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.” (C 1)
• Can there be a better encapsulation of character than those three words: 'Call me Ishmael'. Of course you have to know a bit of Bible. Ishmael was Abraham's elder son, born of his slave-girl Hagar; when Abraham's wife Sarah belatedly gave birth to Isaac she persuaded Abraham to cast Hagar and baby Ishmael into the wilderness. Thus Ishmael refers to an outcast, to one who has been disinherited.
• The character of Ishmael continues to be explored in the early chapters:
• “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote.” (C 1)
• “I love to sail forbidden seas.” (C 1)
• The novel teems with wonderfully astute reflections on the world:
• “Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it?” (C 1)
• “A purse is but a rag unless you have something in it.” (C 1)
• “Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that.” (C 1)
• “The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid - what will compare with it?” (C 1)
• “The Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it.” (C 1)
• “Wherever in your wisdom you may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to enquire the price, and don't be too particular.” (C 2)
• “It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin.” (C 3)
• “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” (C 3)
• “But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.” (C 7)
• “Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness!” (C 9)
• “Higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.” (C 9)
• “What is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous god of heaven and earth - pagans and all included - can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible!” (C 10)
• “But what is worship? - to do the will of God - that is worship. And what is the will of God? - to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me - that is the will of God.” (C 10)
• “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” (C 12)
• “Though seven hundred and seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to make a teenth of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and seventy-seventh part of a farthing is a good deal less than seven hundred and seventy-seven gold doubloons.” (C 16)
• “But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself.” (C 20)
• “But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that was safety! For worm-like, then, oh! Who would craven crawl to land!” (C 23)
• “An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.” (C 26)
• “Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.” (C 29)
• “God keep me from ever completing anything.” (C 32)
• “Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar.” (C 34)
• "What he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in him.” (C 34)
• “The chick that's in him pecks the shell.” (C 36)
• “For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it.” (C 45)
• “Of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order.” (C 46)
• “There are certain times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.” (C 49)
• “Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds.” (C 65)
• “If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die.” (C 72)
• “Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and skin together?” (C 123)
• “Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood.” (C 135)
• There are even moments of humour:
• “There, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter, and tell him to paint me a sign, with - ‘no suicides committed here’, and ‘no smoking in the parlor’; - might as well kill both birds at once.” (C 17)
• “Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery?” (C 25)
• “A mature man who uses hair oil, unless medicinally ... has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality.” (C 25)

The introduction suggests that Melville intended Moby-Dick to be an allegory of America.

But does this novel stand the test of time?

Influences:

• The obvious maritime influence would have been The Antient Mariner, a poem by Coleridge. The story of the Essex, a whaling ship attacked and sunk by a whale, the survivors then enduring a long journey in small boats during which time they resorted to drawing lots and killing and eating the loser, was another inspiration; Melville is known to have read the account of this incident by Essex Mate Owen Chase.
• The Essex incident (told in Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea) has inspired other novels including:
• Dark Water by Elizabeth Lowry
• Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch

But there are other influences too. Andrew Delbanco, in his Introduction to my (Penguin) edition, suggests that the book was written during the congressional debates over slavery which led to the Civil War; he calls Moby-Dick "a sustained meditation on the sectional crisis". It is noticeable that the highly skilled harponeers on board the ship are all non-whites but the officers of the ship are all white.

On 7th December 2017 BBC Radio 4 broadcast an 'In Our Time' programme about Moby-Dick. Host Melvyn Bragg was joined by Bridget Bennett, Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds; Katie McGettigan, Lecturer in American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London; and Graham Thompson, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham. Among the points they made was that:

• Melville had been reading Shakespeare obsessively in the period just before writing M-D and this can be seen in the chapters with stage directions and in the way some characters are given quasi-Shakespearean soliloquies. Other influences include Milton (Ahab partly based on Satan in Paradise Lost) and the King James Bible including Jonah, the start (“Call me Ishmael”) and the ending, referencing Job. The language clearly draws on the KJ Bible. (GT)
• Themes of the novel include: 
• "asking, well which of us isn’t in one way or another a cannibal, who might not be a savage" seen in the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg. (BB) The close male-male relationships; inter-racial male relationships are a feature of US literature including Hawkeye and the Mohicans, and Huckleberry Finn and escaping slave Jim (GT)
• What should a leader do with his legitimate authority (GT) “Also how far authority can actually reach” (KM)
• Political allegories eg Ahab a dictator whose power has been conferred by the crew as in Hobbes Leviathan (BB)
• It is a Voyage and Return narrative (GT)
• M-D “is a novel full of symbols” with multiple meanings (GT) such as whiteness whose meanings Ishmael lists but “whiteness becomes a surface on which you can project” (KM)
• The Quarterdeck chapter where Ahab gets the men on side with his plan is the pivotal chapter in the novel. This is where it becomes epic. (GT)
• Melville’s working method was to write a basic story and then supplement it to add depth. (GT) 

Sales were initially disappointing, perhaps because a review from the Athenaeum called it “disfigured by mad English and absurd” (KM). Then in the 1920s Modernism arrived and Billy Budd published 1924, Benjamin Britten wrote novel (libretto by EM Forster). (BB).  DH Lawrence praised it “as a proto-Modernist text” (KM)

“We might even think of it as post-modernist in terms of the kind of pastiches, the collections of different texts and the kind of cut-and-paste method; so this all makes it quite illegible in some kinds of ways. But that’s precisely what the novel is about, it’s about the limits of meaning, it’s about what can be done with the novel, it’s about the extent of the novel” (BB)

May 2019; 625 pages

It was rated 17th in The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time.

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

"Enduring Creation" by Nigel Spivey

Spivey starts with a visit to Auschwitz. This leads to his reflecting on the maxim of Theodor Adorno that “All culture after Auschwitz is trash". This book is an attempt to suggest that even in these post-holocaust days it is important to continue to produce art. “We are compassionate by habit, not from birth. Pity is something that we learn to feel." he states. So we need art to visit the awful things that human does to human so that we can learn to feel pity. Therefore he has written "a book about horror, fear, death, ghastliness and grievous bodily harm ... about pain lodged at the core of human experience. Pain feared; pain avoided; pain inflicted; pain endured; pain savoured; and pain regarded"

It is a riveting read. And the illustrations, selected from the work of the greats and analysed brilliantly, are sometimes horrifying but always breathtaking. 

For example, one of his suggestions is that the classical statue group the Laocoon was used as a model in later forms so that he shows the same basic figure in, for example, Michelangelo's Haman on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel (a ceiling which El Greco once offered to overpaint to remove the blasphemous mixture of classical/pagan images with Christian ones). He also adapts Alberti's On Painting to create a "pathos formula" 

Some great quotes:

• “Reporters, with notebooks and lenses, thrive in zones of human disaster - scouting and jabbing like crows over carrion. The compulsion to hurry to the view of a kill seems an Instinct in us all.”
• “The early Christians ... did not seek to diminish or deny the existence of human suffering. Quite the opposite, Christianity thrived because it mind for virtue in striations of distress.”
• “Why, when the literature of Christian martyrdom was so adoringly descriptive of fleshly pain and the Hell-quenching conduits of blood, images of martyrs so anodyne, so clean?”
• "The successful institutionalization of cruelty rests upon a rationale of just deserts; also upon the species classification of certain humans as sub-human.”
• “The Damned do not go gently to their fate. Their apprehension of imminent horror is made palpable and panicky. Eager blue-black beaky demons will hustle the process, clawng or shovelling their victims towards flames, or some mouthy tunnel: images of swallowing and regurgitation often prevail.”
• “A painter will gain honour by making pictures of figures which by their attitudes credibly represent extremes of human emotion.”
• “There is a period in the history of Catholic Europe when it seems that no painter’s career could move forward until some graphic scene of martyrdom has been proved as part of his repertoire.”
• “The legend of Caravaggio says he slept every night wearing his Dagger (credible of a artist once charged with using a plate of artichokes as an offensive weapon).”
• “Only in Giorgio Vasari’s bourgeois imagination does the great artist care nothing for cash."
• “The classical ideal of female beauty was firmly but generously fleshed, and Rubens had carried that generosity to new extremes of cellulite celebration: but neither Rubens not any classical artist ever showed a ‘model’ slumped in flabbiness such as Rembrandt drew.”
• “We live in bodies. Each of us is a carcass: made up, in Genet’s words, ‘of blood, tears, sweat, shit, intelligence and tenderness’.”
• Adam Smith argued: “Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers ... iI is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.”
• “Smith was never the champion of completely unfettered market forces, or laissez-faire. Beneath all measures of deregulation lay the groundwork of moral and legal codes that sympathy must construct.”
• “If photography compiles a visual list of everything in the world, it is always a passing permanence. When the lens falls shut the flux goes on. For seconds, or fractions of a second, we clutch at eternity.”
• “It may amount to a gesture of some pardon to remember that One hundred and twenty days of Sodom was composed by a man with no access to carnal extravagance beyond his own imaginary fantasies.”

A fascinating perspective on Art. May 2019; 249 pages

Also read other works by Nigel Spivey:

• The Ancient Olympics
• How Art Made the World

Also read these other books about art:

• Seven Days in the Art World by Julia Thornton: a look at the institutions of the art world such as an auction, a fair, a magazine and the Biennale.
• Think Like an Artist by Will Gompertz which includes such insights as 'artists think big picture and fine detail' and 'artists steal'
• Ways of seeing by John Berger which is particularly good at sexism in art
• The Judgement of Paris by Ross King which is about the rise of the Impressionists
• Leonardo and the Last Supper by Ross King which is particularly good about the techniques of oil painting
• The Story of Art by E F Gombrich, a fascinating historical tour through art

"Reading like a writer" by Francine Prose

The title of this book is a little misleading. True, chapter one explains that you have to read closely (and slowly) to fully appreciate the brilliance of good writers but the purpose of the rest of the book is to carefully analyse extracts from the masters in order to show a wannabe writer like myself how to write.

There were moments of wonder as this book discovered for me how great authors write. There were moments of terror when I realised, with her, that “Some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light.” But I have taken the bait and ingested the gateway drug and I am now hooked. Prose says at the end:  “The compulsion to spend long hours writing can deform a ‘normal’ life.” That should have been written over the doorway to hell. The trouble is that you never quite abandon hope and so you keep on going. Oh well. What else did I learn?

A selection of what else I learnt:

• “In the ongoing process of becoming a writer ... I discovered that writing, like reading, was done one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time. It required was a friend calls ‘putting every word on trial for its life’: changing an adjective, cutting a phrase, removing a comma, and putting the comma back in.”
• “You can assume that if a writer's work has survived for centuries, there are reasons why this is so, explanations that have nothing to do with a conspiracy of academics plotting to resurrect a zombie army of dead white males.”
• “Reading quickly - for plot, for ideas, even for the psychological truths that a story reveals - can be a hindrance when the crucial revelations are in the spaces between words”
• “It's necessary to hold the concept clarity as an even higher ideal than grammatical correctness.”
• “Rhythm is nearly as important in prose as it is in poetry. I have heard a number of writers say that they would rather choose the slightly wrong word that made their sentence more musical than the precisely right one that made it more awkward and clumsy.”
• “It's helpful to consider the parallels to music, the way that, at the end of a symphony, the tempo slows down and chords become more sustained or dramatic, with overtones that reverberate and echo after the musicians have stopped playing.”
• “Considering how frequently people get sick, it's strange that writers don't write about illness more often.”
• “A new paragraph ... lets you quietly change the rhythm ... and ... shows the same landscape from a different aspect.”
• “Paragraphs ... end with little climaxes”
• “A one-sentence paragraph feels like a punch.” “If the writer is going to draw attention to the stand-alone sentence, the sentence had better be worth it.”
• “Most conversations involve a sort of sophisticated multitasking ... We are not merely communicating information but attempting to make an impression and achieve a goal. And sometimes we are hoping to prevent the listener from noticing what we are not saying ... As a result, dialogue usually contains as much or even more subtext as text.”
• “Details are what persuade us that someone is telling the truth” but not too many; “Liars know that it's the single priceless detail that jumps out of the story.”
• “Great writers painstakingly construct their fiction with small but significant details that, brushstroke by brushstroke, paint the pictures the artists hope to portray.”
• “Often a well-chosen detail can tell us more about a character ... then a long explanatory passage.”
• “A true description of nature should be very brief ... commonplaces one ought to abandon ... seize upon the little particulars, grouping them in such a way that, in reading, when you shut your eyes you get the picture.”
• "If a character is going to light a cigarette ... it should mean something.”
• “The wider and deeper your observational range, the better, the more interestingly and truthfully you will write.”
• “As the world drops away in stages, as it does for the dying, we move deeper into its hero’s psyche.”

A superb manual on how to write. May 2019; 268 pages

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

"The Art of Fiction" by David Lodge

Novelist and literary critic David Lodge offers fifty bite-sized chapter, each dealing with one aspect of the art of writing a novel. Each chapter is introduced by a well-chosen excerpt from Lodge's extensive reading.

The only trouble is that there is so much great advice I felt a little overwhelmed. How dare one presume to write a novel when there is so much to think about? The second problem (because when a writer starts a paragraph with 'the only trouble' you can be sure that there is more than one, them coming not single spies but in battalions to misquote Claudius) is that the examples he gives are drawn from the masters (Jane Austen, James Joyce etc) so that one feels that one feels intimidated by the seemingly effortless brilliance displayed.

Even his analyses suggest that an expert reads books at a deeper level than I can. I hadn't realised that “Orwell himself echoes the story of Adam and Eve in his treatment of the love affair between Winston and Julia, secretly monitored and finally punished by Big Brother”. To give another example, Lodge analyses what he calls 'skaz' which is "A type of first-person narration that has the characteristics of the spoken rather than the written word ... an illusion that can create a powerful effect of authenticity and sincerity” and which he shows involves repetition, exaggeration, short uncomplicated sentences, and sentence fragments, and in which "clauses are strung together as they seem to occur to the speaker, rather than being subordinated to each other in complex structures.” !!!

There are so many wonderful pieces of advice that all I could do was make a tiny, representative (I hope) selection of a few:

• “The stream-of-consciousness novel is the literary expression of solipsism ... but we could equally well argue that it offers us some relief from that daunting hypothesis by offering us imaginative access to the inner lives of other human beings, even if they are fictions.”
• “The essential purpose of art is to overcome the deadening effects of habit by representing familiar things in an unfamiliar way.”
• “What do we mean that ... when we say that a book is ‘original’? Not, usually, that's the writer has invented something without precedent, but that she has made us ‘perceive’ what we already ... ‘know’.”
• “All description in fiction is highly selective; its basically rhetorical technique is synecdoche, the part standing for the whole.”
• “Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, the belief that ‘God had planned for practically everybody before they were born a nasty surprise when they died’.”
• “The crucially important last word-space in the paragraph.”
• “One of the difficulties in writing truthfully about working-class life in fiction ... is that the novel itself is inherently a middle-class form, and its narrative voice is apt to betray this bias in every turn of phrase.”
• “A characteristic of comedy in fiction: a combination of surprise ... and conformity to pattern.”
• “It is only superficially paradoxical that most novels about the future are narrated in the past tense.”
• “Popular science fiction ... is a curious mixture of invented gadgetry and archetypal narrative motifs very obviously derived from folk tale, fairy tale, and Scripture, recycling the myths of Creation, Fall, Flood and a Divine Saviour, for a secular but still superstitious age.”
• “There is always a trade-off in the writing of fiction between the achievement of structure, pattern and closure on the one hand, and the imitation of life's randomness, inconsequentiality and openness on the other.”
• “It has been said that all novels are essentially about the passage from innocence to experience, about discovering the reality that underlies appearances. It is not surprising, therefore, that stylistic and dramatic irony are all-pervasive in this form of literature.”
• “The explicit treatment of sexual acts is certainly another challenge to the novelist artistry ... how to defamiliarize the inherently limited repertoire of sexual acts”
• “Classic tales of the uncanny invariably use ‘I’ narrators, and imitate documentary forms of discourse like confessions, letters and depositions to make the events more credible.”

This is a book for every wannabe novelist to keep on the nearest shelf to the writing desk. I will!

It also contains a bibliography so I have another seven books to add to the must-read list.

The Craft of Fiction by Percy Lubbock and Aspects of the Novel by E M Forster are works of literary criticism which also provide a wannabe novelist like myself with guidance as to how to write a novel.

Write Away by Elizabeth George and On Writing by Stephen King are also well worth reading although they are more focused on the craft of story-telling than on analysing literary classics.

May 2019; 230 pages

"Homesick" by Tony Hanania

Jennings meets Lord of the Flies. Toby Shadrach goes to prep school in the South of England while his home country of Lebanon degenerates from political instability into civil war. His boarding school life is a world of inter-dormitory warfare, of 'patrol leaders' (senior boys in charge of each dormitory) who become war-lords and force the juniors to toil for them as slaves, digging tunnels in the chalk hillsides outside the school and acting as infantrymen in the skirmishes. This is a feral world. As time goes on the economy of the schoolboys develops: fortunes are made and lost for highly prized objects such as torches (which can be used for torturing captives both by shining the light in their eyes and by clobbering them with it) or transistor radios; the markets for these possessions are manipulated by theft and bandit raids. Some boys are prepared to pay in 'trademarks' (the marks left after being hit by sticks). The masters seem remote from this anarchy, although they too can be brutal. At each step of the way, with deft flashbacks to the idyllic Lebanon that Toby has lost, parallels are made with the civil war in that country.

This is a carefully written cross between allegory and memoir. It is distinguished in part by its control and in part by moments of descriptive magic. It is Hanania's first novel (written in 1997) and has been followed by Unreal City (1999) and Eros Island (2000). The last is less controlled (sometimes I was confused) but the author has developed the lyricality of his descriptive passages to near-perfection.

A great read.

Selected quotes:

• Prelude
• “Though there was space ahead the traffic was staying clotted together, like clutches of a tune timid of breaking away into noise.” (p 3)
• “This was a capsule built to protect the future, a life hearse.” (p 4)
• “Whenever I returned now it was as a shabby tourist around my friends’ protected breeding programs and their bloodless dinner-tables.” (p 4)
• Part One
• “I had seen the dragon’s footprints in the bay beside the old port, near the little chapel where people left the old gloves, shoe, boots, though never in pairs.” (p 14)
• “ The buildings have that charred and pock-marked complexion common to northern variety theatres and station hotels.” ( p28)
• “The fruit in the wicker baskets is beginning to shrivel and harden. It gives off the same shrunk-fruit scent that hangs around the sideboard in so many other dining rooms of England ... Not a dead smell but a dying one.” (p 92)
• “The Fates are cruel, he says, because unlike the other gods they are deaf to the prayers of men.” (p 109)
• “I am the tyrant’s chef, and must contrive ever more exotic dishes to satisfy the appetites I have depraved.” (p 114)
• Part Two
• “This is a city of foreigners and if they all leave the city will be empty. Most of the natives are only foreigners who arrived early.” (p 177)
• “The rippleless flesh between her bright cotton halter-top and frayed jean-shorts was the colour of milk in shadow - when one can no longer tell whether the surface of the jug is liquid or skin.” (p 214)

Wonderful. May 2019

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