"The Personal History of Samuel Johnson" by Christopher Hibbert

 Samuel Johnson left Pembroke College without a degree (much later in life he received an honorary LLD and is therefore known as Doctor Johnson) and did hack-work in Fleet Street in the 1740s and 1750s. He is most remembered for compiling an early English dictionary and for the biography written by Boswell. He was the centre of the coffee-house culture of the time and was often to be found at a coffee house or a tavern engaged in ferocious argumentation with his friends, who included the actor David Garrick (a friend from Lichfield whom Johnson had once taught) and the novelist and playwright Oliver Goldsmith. 

The biography shows Johnson to have been a domineering boor. He was arrogant and often insulted those who disagreed with him. He was greedy, eating up to sixteen peaches a day and drinking up to twenty-five cups of tea at a sitting. He frequently sponged off his friends; he rarely showed gratitude and seems to have taken the attitude that they were lucky to pay for the pleasure of his company. Nevertheless, they seemed to adore him for his eloquence and (sometimes rather heavy-handed) wit; he was a conversational genius (but at the same time a prima donna). 

He does seem to have suffered from something that might be akin to bipolar syndrome and might have similarities with Tourettes (he constantly fidgeted although he seems to have been in control of his language).

This a well-written warts-and-all portrait of a rather unpleasant man. 

Quoted from Johnson:

• "Sir, your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves." (C 7)

Quotes from the book:

• "Sam's knowledge was not gained easily, for he was incorrigibly, constitutionally lazy." (C 1)
• "The impression of idiocy he made upon some strangers was emphasised by his convulsive restlessness." (C 1)
• "Edward Cave ... was ... the son of a cobbler, he had been expelled from Rugby Grammar School for robbing the headmaster's wife's hen-roost." (C 2)
• "He had never liked vapid women with no opinions of their own; they had softness, he agreed, but so had pillows. Being married to such a sleepy-souled woman would be just like playing at cards for nothing. Honeysuckle wives were, after all, creepers at best, and commonly destroyed the trees they so tenderly clung to." (C 2)
• "He delighted in the use of difficult or antiquated words." (C 3)
• "He enjoyed being in a coach because he was assured of companionship there, the other passengers were shut in  with him and could not escape as they could out of a room." (C 10)
• "He strongly denied that some scoundrels made a lot of money by begging; the trade was far too overstocked for that." (C 13)
• "When asked if he did not really think he would start just in the way that Garrick did if he saw a ghost himself, Johnson had immediately replied, 'I hope not. If I did, I should frighten the ghost'." (C 14)

August 2021; 315 pages

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

"From the Holy Mountain" by William Dalrymple

 In the mid 1990s, Dalrymple sets off from Mount Athos, the autonomous theocratic collection of monasteries in Greece, to follow the route of John Moschos a Byzantine monk who, in 587, travelled through the Byzantine empire, through Anatolia and the Syrian-Lebanese-Palestinian coast into Egypt.

The modern journey, set before the more recent Syrian civil war, chronicles the plight of the Eastern Christians of a variety of persuasions (including Armenians, Maronites and Copts), a community with roots dating back to the Apostles, who are persecuted by the more recently introduced inhabitants of the various lands: the increasingly Islamist Turks, the non-Maronite communities following Lebanon's civil war, the Israeli government and the West Bank settlers, and the increasingly Islamist Egyptians. The complaint throughout is of neglect from governments and persecution from religious terrorists leading to mass emigration and dwindling communities facing extinction.

Clearly things have changed. Dalrymple's Lebanon is newly recovering from civil war, Syria, the country in which Dalrymple finds most harmony, has fallen in war and anarchy, in Egypt Mubarak has been toppled. Yet one suspects that the beleaguered communities, many of them making the point that they were inhabiting their villages before the arrival of the Ottomans, or the Moslems, or the Jews, are probably still persecuted. If they still exist.

He repeatedly makes the point that there was (usually) more tolerance in the past. In the monastery of Mar Gabriel, in Tur Abdin, a 1600-year-old Syriac monastery in Turkey close to its border with Syria, he witnesses Christians worshipping prostrate, as Moslems do now: "exactly the form of worship described by Moschos in The Spiritual Meadow ... the Muslims appear to have derived their techniques of worship from existing Christian practice." (2)

It is rather depressing. But the sadness is offset by some wonderful descriptions, some bizarre characters (especially many of the monks encountered) and by incisive observations. 

Many, many memorable moments:

• Descriptions:
• "I ate breakfast in a vast Viennese ballroom with a sprung wooden floor and dadoes dripping with recently applied gilt. The lift is a giant baroque birdcage, entered through a rainforest of potted palms." (2)
• "The yellow glow of the sulphurous streetlights silhouettes the city's skyline" (2)
• "When you think of the French Romanesque ... you are left with an impression of teeming life: biting beasts entwined around capitals; tympana crowded with the Twenty-Four Elders of the Apocalypse busily fiddling on their viols; angels blowing the Last Trump; the dead resurrecting, emerging like uncurling crustaceans from their sarcophagi." (3)
• "A cortege of elderly priests conducted the service, accompanied by a string of echoing laments of almost unearthly beauty, sinuous alleluias which floated with the gentle indecision of falling feathers down arpeggios of dying cadences before losing themselves in a soft black hole of basso profundo." (3)

• Observations:
• "As the Byzantine writer Cecaumenus put it: 'Houseparties are a mistake, for guests merely criticise your housekeeping and attempt to seduce your wife." (1)
• "What has most moved past generations can today sometimes only be tentatively glimpsed with the eye of faith." (2)
• "Those who are content to live in sin do not suffer from the temptations of the Devil so badly as those who try to live with God." (4)
• "Just as it is impossible to see your face in troubled water, so also the soul ... It is like two lovers. If they want to discuss their love they want to be alone." (4)
• "Being a hermit was like being a fire. At first it smokes and your eyes water, but ... after the smoke disperses, the light and the heat comes." (4)
• "I am the policeman of my soul. Demons are like criminals. Both are very stupid. Both are damned." (5)
• Others
• "Three years ago, in the middle of winter, some raiders turned up in motorboats ... They had Sten guns and were assisted by an ex-novice who had been thrown out by the Abbot." (1)
• "The hotel has a policy of naming its bedrooms after distinguished guests, which has unconsciously acted as a graph of its dramatic post-war decline: from before the war you cab choose to sleep in Ataturk, Mata Hari or King Zog of Albania; after it there is nothing more exciting on offer than Julio Iglesias." (2)
• "Relics were holes in the curtain wall separating the human from the divine." (2)
• "Gregory the Great always used to recommend making the sign of the cross over a lettuce in case you swallowed a demon that happened to be perched on its leaves." (2)
• "The dust from his clothes was more powerful than roasted crocodile, camel dung, or Bithnyian cheese mixed with wax - apparently the usual contents of a Byzantine doctor's medicine chest." (2)
• "Theodore, the seventh Archbishop of Canterbury, was a Byzantine from Tarsus who had studied at Antioch and visited Edessa; his surviving Biblical commentaries, written in England, show the extent to which he brought the teaching of the School of Antioch and an awareness of Syriac literature to the far shores of Anglo-Saxon Kent." (2)
• "You don't understand the police here. You think they are like the English policemen we see on the television, the fat man with the blue hat, the little stick in his hand and the old bicycle." (2)
• "It was from the Nestorian school of Nisibis - via Morrish Cordoba - that many of the works of Aristotle and Plato eventually reached the new universities of medieval Europe." (30
• "Yezidis ... and iraqi sect ... they're devil-propitiators ... They call Lucifer 'Malik Yawus', the Peacock Angel, and offer sacrifices to keep him happy. They believe Lucifer, the Devil, has been forgiven by God and reinstated as Chief Angel, supervising the day-to-day running of the world's affairs ... they get on with the Nestorians ... very well ... Some people believe that the Yezidis were originally a sort of strange Gnostic offshoot of the Nestorian church." (3)
• "The Fount of Knowledge [by John Damascene] contains an extremely precise and detailed critique of Islam, which, intriguingly, John regards as a form of Christian heresy closely related to Arianism (after all, like Islam, Arianism denied the divinity of Christ)." (5)
• "Sounding sincere in one's appreciation of the monks' culinary abilities was a task that needed advanced acting skills." (5)
• "In all the Byzantine sites excavated in Palestine and Jordan only two lavatories have ever been discovered, and one of those was located directly over a monastic kitchen." (5)
• "It was the custom in [early CE] Egypt to bury those who could afford it in mummy cases onto which were bound superb encaustic (hot wax) portraits of the disease ... the oldest icons in existence are to be found in St Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai ... they are painted in the same encaustic technique." (6)
• "There are an extraordinary number of otherwise inexplicable similarities between the Celtic and Coptic Churches which were shared by no other  Western Chruches. In both, the bishops wore crowns rather than miters and held T-shaped Tau crosses rather than crooks or croziers. In both the handbell played a very prominent part in ritual." (6)
• "Since the Second World War it has rained only once in Kharga, for ten minutes, in the winter of 1959." (6)

A wise and beautifully written travelogue.

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

I have also read the following books by William Dalrymple:

• In Xanadu
• City of Djinns

"Robert Peel: A biography" by Douglas Hurd

 Hurd traces the life and career of the first 'Conservative' Prime Minister, a man whose career started in the days of Rotten Boroughs and a monarch (George IV) who played an active part in government to the beginnings of the party system with mostly-contested elections and manifestos and a monarch (Victoria) who was soon sidelined after her initial meddling. And on the way he helped ensure that Roman Catholics could become MPs, he created the first organised police force, he reformed a chaotic penal code, he sorted out the US-Canada border, he helped the Whigs bring in the Great Reform Act, he reformed working conditions for women and children in mines and factories, and, during the Irish famine, he repealed the Corm Laws which imposed tariffs on imported corn, keeping the price of bread artificially high. In order to get this last piece of legislation through he had to battle against his own right wing; he split his own party and carried the vote with the help of the Whigs and Radicals in opposition. He was therefore remembered in two ways: as a turncoat who twice (Catholic emancipation and the Corn Laws) abandoned earlier principles and the self-interested principles of his own party and as a man who put the well-being of the ordinary people, particularly those who had no vote, before the interests of faction.

Unfortunately, Hurd is writing in 2007. He assumes that the Tory hard right (the 'Ultras' as Peel called them, the 'sour right' as Hurd labels them) are a self-destructive lot who will never win power as mainstream Conservatives; in the aftermath of Brexit we now know that to be wrong. He also assumes that Peel's repeal of the Corn Laws, a unilateral abandonment of a key tariff, was the first step in an unstoppable journey towards globalisation and free trade. In the aftermath of Brexit this is another conclusion that now looks unsupportable.

Some great moments:

• "The Conservative Party will always include within its ranks those who in Peel's time were called the Ultras - men, and now women too, who instinctively resist change and pine for a golden age that never was." (Introduction)
• "If a man was clever and not ashamed of it, then it was thought almost certain that he was using his cleverness for manoeuvres and deceits from which decent men should recoil." (Ch 7)
• "Croker though Canning should be Prime Minister, but believed 'he could hardly take tea without a stratagem'." (Ch 7)
• "The second and smaller group of Ultras are the sour Right. There is nothing warm or nostalgic about their politics. Many of them are intelligent and sincere; but there appeal is to the prejudices and cruelty which are part of human nature." (Ch 7)
• "Politicians are often in a state of outrage. They find it a convenient condition for a day or two. They usually recover quickly and get on with the other pleasures of life." (Ch 9)

A well-written and eminently readable biography of a politician whose multiple achievements deserve to be better known.

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

July 2021; 397 pages

"Reflections on the Psalms" by C S Lewis

The Psalms are a mixture of poems in the Bible. They contains praises, laments, and curses. C S Lewis provides a series of non-scholarly reflections on them. As usual, there are moments where he makes contentious statements without backing them up (because the only evidence he needs is what is for him self-evidence: that his version of Christianity is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth) but in this volume they are more than balanced by the very real insights he gives.

He points out that the Psalmists concept of God as Judge is different from that of nowadays: a modern Christian tends to see himself as the defendant in a criminal court being judged for his sins whereas the Psalmists see themselves as self-righteous plaintiffs in a civil case, calling on God to judge in their favour: “The Psalmist is the indignant plaintiff. He is quite sure, apparently, that his own hands are clean. He never did to others the horrid things that others are doing to him.” (C 2)

Many Psalms involve curses. For example, Psalm 137 which starts with the lament “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and wept; when we thought about Zion” goes on in verse 9 to say to the Babylonians “Happy be they, who shall take hold of thy little children; and hurtle them against a stone”. Lewis points out that the writers of the Psalms are “much more vindictive and vitriolic than the Pagans” (C 3) and explains this by suggesting that the Psalmists feel more deeply and are thus morally ‘higher’: “It is great men, potential saints, not little men, who become merciless fanatics.” (C 3) It seems to me that this argument not only endeavours to excuse hatred but to do so by expressing contempt for (a) ordinary people and (b) pagans.

He points out that the Psalmists accepted death as the end, in stark contrast to many of the religions around them, eg the Egyptians who saw life as a preparation for the afterlife.

When he list the many times when the Psalmists tell their listeners to shun wickedness, Lewis points out an interesting moral conundrum: "How ought we to behave in the presence of ... very bad people who are powerful, prosperous and impenitent. If they are outcasts, poor and miserable, whose wickedness obviously has not ‘paid’, then ... Christ with the woman taken in adultery ... is our example.” (C 7)

Finally he asks whether God's demands that we should praise him reveal a weak character: “We all despise the man who demands the continued assurance of his own virtue, intelligence or delightfulness; we despise still more the crowd of people round every dictator, every millionaire, every celebrity, who gratify that demand.” (C 8). He points out that “The world rings with praise - lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game - praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars.” (C 8) He concludes that praise adds to our pleasure: “I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.” (C 8) So God commands us to praise him because he wants us to enjoy him to the full. “In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.” (C 8)

This is a thought-provoking book ... but it hasn't converted me from atheism.

Special moments:

• “Our generation was brought up to eat everything on the plate; and it was the sound principle of nursery gastronomy to polish off the nasty things first and leave the titbits to the end.” (C 1)
• “The humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds, praised most, while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least. The good critics found something to praise in many imperfect works.” (C 8)

July 2021; 115 pages

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

CS Lewis was also the author of: these books 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

Literary criticism:

• The Discarded Image

Autobiography:

• Surprised by Joy

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

Biographis of C S Lewis reviewed in this blog:

• Jack: C S Lewis and his times by George Sayer
• C.S.Lewis: a biography by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper

"The Cave" by Richard Church

 A young lad, staying with his doctor uncle and ex-nurse aunt during his summer holidays, discovers the entrance to a system of caves and, with four friends, decides to explore them. It must have been written in a time when such breath-taking foolhardiness was tolerated, even the uncle merely gives advice. But the character of each of the lads is tested to the full as they get into difficulties. 

Memorable moments:

• "It was the kind of fear which seldom takes you in everyday life. It comes in dreams, in those nightmares when desperate things happen and you are the last living creature in a world that is breaking up and the fragments falling into bottomless chaos. Fear like that is something solid. It is made of steel, and has a razor's edge. At the same time it is cast and vague, shapeless as fog, and it smothers you with its horror. It is shameful, too; it breaks your pride and makes you crave to hide yourself away from your fellow men like a leper." (Ch 8)
• "He seemed to have got so far beyond the stage of being sorry for himself, that other people had to be sorry for him." (Ch 14)

This is a boys' adventure story which is very strong on describing the cave system and very good at showing the interactions of five young lads and pretty good at talking about some very fundamental human emotions.

An interesting historical note: In Chapter 16 John talks about the Piltdown skull and clearly considers it authentic. It was exposed as a forgery in 1953 but this book was published in 1950.

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

"Klara and the Sun" by Kazuo Ishiguro

My wife's favourite book, shortlisted for the 2022 fiction of the year prize in the British Book Awards and longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize.

The narrator, Klara, is a robot, designed to have empathy so that she can be an Artificial Friend to a child. The narration is straightforward and matter of fact, enabling Ishiguro to emulate Kafka (as he also seems to in his novel The Unconsoled), who told the strangest tales as if they were everyday occurences. 

Not only is Ishiguro emulating Kafka, by using a non-human narrator he can adopt a 'Man from Mars' approach, observing human social interactions. For example:

• "She ... held Josie in an embrace that seemed to go on and on, until the Mother was obliged to introduce a rocking motion to disguise how long it was lasting." (Part Two, p 92)
• "I saw more insects hovering before me in the air, nervously exchanging positions, but unwilling to abandon their friendly clusters." (Part Three, p 156 - 157)

At the same time, by endowing Klara with a (perfectly subservient) personality, he is exploring the ethical relationships between humans and such created artefacts. For example, in the first part, when Klara is in the Store waiting to be purchased, there are notes not only of an orphanage, whose inmates hope for adoption, but also a pet shop and a slave market. 

Klara is solar powered, so she has a key relationship with the Sun, a relationship which begins in the first paragraph. She superstitiously conceives of the Sun as a divine being, able to grant the gift of life, to whom she can address prayers. Ishiguro seems to be saying that a quasi-conscious robot would have a spiritual side to it. This aspect of the book reminded me of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and Ishiguro's The Buried Giant. 

Ishiguro's Klara perceives the world through pattern recognition software, which seems to resolve the world into a cubist painting, all disconnected shapes which sometimes fuse into a more rounded portrait than a conventional perception. At times of stress, or when the nscene is changing rapidly or the lighting is poor, her visual field seems to become divided into boxes, some of which contain the same image but with subtle variations, suggesting either that the image has changed with time or that there are layers of meaning. For example:

• "The sky from the bedroom rear window was ... capable of surprising variations. Sometimes it was the color of the lemons in the fruit bowl, then could turn to the gray of the slate chopping-boards. When Josie wasn't well, it could turn the color of her vomit or her pale feces, or even develop streaks of blood. Sometimes the sky would become divided into a series of squares, each one a different shade of purple to its neighbor." (Part Two, p 52) 
• “Josie was near the middle of the room talking with three guest girls. Their heads were almost touching, and because of how they were standing, the upper parts of their faces, including all their eyes, had been placed in a box on the higher tier, while all their mouths and chins had been squeezed into a lower box. The majority of the children were on their feet, some moving between boxes. Over at the rear wall, three boys were seated on the modular sofa, and even though they were sitting apart, their heads had been placed together inside a single box, while the outstretched legs of the boy nearest the window extended not only across the neighboring box, but right into the one beyond. There was an unpleasant tint on the three boxes containing the boys on the sofa - a sickly yellow - and anxiety passed through my mind.” (Part Two; p 70)
• “Soon the scenes were changing so rapidly around me I had difficulty ordering them. At one stage a box became filled with the other cars, while the box immediately beside it filled with segments of road and surrounding field. I did my best to preserve the smooth line of the road as it moved from one box into the next, but with the view constantly changing, I decided this wasn't possible, and allowed the road to break and start afresh each time it crossed a border.” (Part Two; p 97)
• “The mother leaned closer over the table top and her eyes narrowed till her face filled eight boxes, leaving only the peripheral boxes for the waterfall, and for a moment it felt to me her expression varied between one box and the next. In one, for, her eyes were laughing cruelly, but in the next they were filled with sadness.” (Part Two; p 104)
• “We drove past a large creature with numerous limbs and eyes, then even as I watched, a crack appeared down its center. As it divided itself, I realized it had been, all along, two separate people - a runner and a dog walk woman - moving in opposite directions who for an instant happened to be passing one another.” (Part Four; p 217)
• “The figures became more simplified, as if constructed out of cones and cylinders made from smooth card. Their clothes, for instance, were devoid of the usual creases and folds, and even their faces under the streetlight appeared to be created by cleverly placing flat surfaces into complex arrangements to create a sense of contouring.” (Part Four; p 235)

This technique lends the narrative verisimilitude and enables Ishiguro to create strikingly original descriptions and also maintain that robotic matter-of-fact voice that makes the futuristic and other-worldly aspects of the narrative more credible.

The way that Ishiguro drips clues into the story, so that the reader has to piece together what is happening, is fantastic. (He does much the same in Never Let Me Go). For example, we learn quite quickly that Rick has not been 'lifted' but it is only much later in the book that we understand what this means. The significance of an incident in the first part of the book only becomes clear much later.

Selected quotes:

• "My cello-playing, even at its glorious best, sounded like Dracula's grandmother." (Part Two, p51)
• “The grass was tall in all three fields, and when the wind blew, it would move as if invisible passers-by were hurrying through it.” (Part Two; p 52)
• "What was becoming clear to me was the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom." (Part Three, p 113)
• "It became normal for me to remain during Rick's visits, even though he sometimes looked towards me with go-away eyes" (Part Three, p 117)
• "Not only was her voice loud, it was as if it had been folded over onto itself, so that two versions of her voice were being sounded together, pitched fractionally apart." (Part Three, p 179)
• "Mr Capaldi believed that there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn't be continued. He told the Mother he'd searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn't inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her." (Part Six, p 306)

A beautifully written book by a master. Shortlisted for the 2021 Waterstones Book of the Year

I am a little bemused by the use of American spellings. My copy of the book was published in London, UK in 2021. 

Also by Ishiguro and reviewed on this blog:

• When We Were Orphans
• The Remains of the Day

Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in 2017. Other Nobel Laureates reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was originally written in July 2021 and updated in May 2026; 307 pages
First published by Faber and Faber in 2021

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

Spoiler alert: a summary of the plot

Klara is remarkable in her powers of observation. While at the store she notices, outside, Beggar Man and his Dog. They spend a whole day so immobile that she thinks they are dead but the next day they have revived. She attributes this apparent resurrection to the healing powers of the Sun. One day, her view of the sun is marred by a road-mending machine with Cootings written on its side which belches smoke into the air. After some time, Klara is sold to Josie and her mum, after she has demonstrated to the Mother that she imitate Josie's idiosyncratic walk successfully.

At Josie's house, Klara learns how to be a successful AF. She also discovers that Josie is ill. She enjoys looking out across the fields at the evening sun which seems to set into Mr McBain's barn. Klara meets Rick, Josie's friend, who lives with his mum in a neighbouring property. He has designed some drones. There is a dreadful teenage party in which other friends of Josie come to socialise: they are all 'lifted' except for Rick. Josie becomes too ill to go on a promised trip to a nearby waterfall, so the Mother takes Karla instead.

There was another daughter, Clara, who died. The implication is that both Clara and Josie were lifted, an operation on their genetic makeup that has risks; that this is what killed Clara and this is why Josie is ill. Rick's mother decided not to risk it for him and therefore doomed him to dead end jobs and a second-class status.

Josie becomes even more ill and Rick starts to come round regularly and they play a game where she draws a picture with empty bubbles and he fills in the words. Rick's mother wants him to try for a college which still accepts non-lifted kids. Josie and Rick argue. Klara decides to go to the barn to ask the Sun to give his special healing rays to Josie but it's a long way and she has to be piggy-backed by Rick. There, she promises the Sun that in return for his help, she will destroy the polluting Cootings machine.

A trip to town. Josie and the Mother are going to see Mr Capaldi, who is making a 'portrait' of Josie. At his studio, Klara discovers that the portrait is a sculpture, a doll, and the plan is that Klara will learn to imitate Josie exactly and then inhabit the doll, so that if and when Josie dies the Mother will have another 'Josie'. The meet the Father, who is a talented engineer who has been supplanted by robots and now lives in a commune which is seeking to defend itself. The Father takes Klara to find the Cootings machine and helps Klara immobilise it, but it needs a significant amount of fluid from Klara's 'brain' which Klara sacrifices. Rick's mother takes him to see her ex-lover Mr Vance, a tutor at the college, hoping Rick will gain some favouritism, but the meeting ends disastrously as Mr Vance recalls all his resentment against Rick's mother from when their relationship broke down.

Josie gets worse and becomes very ill, dangerously close to death.. Klara has discovered that there are more than one Cootings machines. She goes to the barn and apologises to the Sun. On this occasion, she seems to have hallucinations, mingling what she observes with memories of the Mother's house and the Store. 

Josie recovers.

Josie goes to college; Rick meets up with friends in town, accepting his reduced possibilities. Klara, no longer wanted, retreats to a store cupboard.

Our last glimpse of Klara is in a scrap yard.

"A change of seasons" by Khurram Elahi

This review has been published in Kent Bylines: https://kentbylines.co.uk/book-review-a-change-of-seasons-by-khurram-elahi/

So many books nowadays are fantasy or scifi or thrillers that it is refreshing to read a novel that, like Love on the Dole, is grounded in the drama of everyday life.

In the first half of the book, recently divorced warehouseman John is awaiting, with dread and nightmares, a heart bypass operation. The book explores the stories of others in the ward: fellow patients and two of the nurses. We also learn about John’s early life.

But if the story is a commonplace one, its treatment is not. Lyrical descriptions colour the narrative. The author is not afraid to tackle the less rational aspects of normality. The prologue is John’s dream of heaven which segues into a ‘memory’ of being punished by his headteacher at school by being hanged in the stationery cupboard. Furthermore, John has been haunted since childhood by a voice in his head called The Jester whose teasing goads - “Oh, you’ve found time to give yourself a sauna, Johnny. Cause you’re gonna be roasted alive tonight young man.” - are my favourite moments of the book.

The irrationality is ramped up In the second, post-op, half of the book. As the seasons change (it is no coincidence John’s surname is Winters), John experiences strange symptoms in his body and exhibits even stranger behaviours, culminating in a shocking act of violence.

It is a very atmospheric book. There is good use of foreshadowing techniques. I thought perhaps the first half had too many characters to keep focused; the author is always ready to explore another person’s point of view. The rich use of an extensive vocabulary gives a suitably baroque texture and I enjoyed those occasions when the author added playful twists to cliches:

• “He walked towards his maker, or taker, helpless, with every step lasting a lifetime.“ (Prologue)
• “If there was a sandwich on a table comprising life and death, John would most certainly lift up one half of the bread to see what was inside, no doubt expecting it to be off.” (C 1)
• “That’s what they say when you’ve had a heart operation of this nature. You’ll feel a new man when you get out. Well, he certainly felt a new man, just not one he could not recognise.” (C 26)
• “The peripheral hum of local factories expelling pollution with productivity” (C 39)

This is a promising start by a new author whose website can be found here: https://www.khurramelahi.com/

This review has been published in Kent Bylines: https://kentbylines.co.uk/book-review-of-a-change-of-seasons-by-khurram-elahi/

July 2021; 304 pages

Khurram has also written The Group.

Thank you to The Conrad Press for giving me a free review copy of this book.

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

"The Second Sleep" by Robert Harris

A well-written, pleasurable yarn.

The plot is almost impossible to describe without a spoiler alert. The first words are "Late on the afternoon of Tuesday the ninth of April in the Year of Our Risen Lord 1468" which makes one assume that it is a historical novel set in the mediaeval period. Towards the end of chapter three I learned, with a wholly unexpected shock, that this was the 'second sleep', the second mediaeval period following the apocalypse (later dated to about 2025 when all the computer driven infrastructure failed and society across the world collapsed, with mass starvation). This is therefore a post-apocalyptic novel and, predictably, the church is on top having forbidden 'scientism' and antiquarianism as heresies. Christopher Fairfax, a young priest, rides to Adcot to conduct the funeral of the parish priest. But while there he discovers that the late incumbent had a taste for antiquarianism and was, perhaps, on the verge of a (forbidden) archaeological discovery when he was, perhaps, murdered. Throw in a seductive widow in a decaying stately home and a thrusting, ruthless mill-owner always alert to the possibility of profit and wooing said widow, and two antiquarians and we have the makings for a slightly strange dystopian fiction.

It is definitely better than the much lauded Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel which has the ridiculous premise that, following a global pandemic, not only do most of the cast of an acting troupe coincidentally survive (must be the luvvie genes) but also they benefit the world by touring the countryside offering plays and concerts which is so much better than the benighted heathens nearby who believe that the most useful cultural knowledge to preserve is a knowledge of physics so that they can reassemble electric motors and engineered civilisation again. But if you like dystopia I would recommend:

• The Book of Dave by Will Self, a similar concept in which the world has reverted to mediaevalism following global warming
• Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley, a sex-obsessed fantasy following a nuclear holocaust
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, a 'last human' novel 

Memorable moments:

• "The corpse was long and thin, packed in sawdust and bound up tight in a papery white linen shroud, like a chrysalis ready to hatch." (Ch 2)
• "How grief ages us, he thought, with sudden pity; how vulnerable we are, poor mortal creatures, beneath our vain show of composure." (Ch 2)
• "Not for him the fanaticism of some of his fellow younger clergy, with their straggling hair and beards and their wild eyes, who could sniff out blasphemy as keenly as a water hound unearths truffles." (Ch 3)
• "ragged, skinny, weather-coarsened country folk, drably dressed, with an ugly scattering of disfigurements that told of hard births, heavy work and poor diets." (Ch 4)
• "Thirty years ago, the average British household contained enough food to last eight days; today the average is two days. It is no exaggeration to say that London, at any time, exists only six meals away from starvation." (Ch 6)
• "All civilisations consider themselves invulnerable; history warns us that none is." (Ch 6)
• "He wished he could unsee what he had read, but knowledge alters everything, and he knew that was impossible." (Ch 6)
• "History was a patchwork of voids." (Ch 8)
• "The forge was set back from the road at a crossroads. A horse in the forecourt stood tied to a wooden pole that was perhaps twelve feet high, from the top of which, suspended by chains, hung a large yellow plastic scallop shell of great antiquity, battered and much-repaired." (Ch 9)
• "‘So Church and state should be separate?’ ‘It would be best for both.’ ‘Then surely we would arrive at a place where the Church would have morals without power, and the state would have power without morality." (Ch 11)
• "It’s your Church I don’t believe in, sir. Your God I treat with respect." (Ch 18)
• "Faith that cannot withstand the truth is not a faith worth holding." (Ch 19)
• "Fairfax took his hand. It was hard and calloused, a cudgel of flesh." (Ch 19)
• "Quycke spread his hands – an overly emphatic gesture, Fairfax thought, such as might be made by an actor on the stage to convey sincerity." (Ch 22)

A quick easy read, which kept me turning the pages without being hooked.

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

Also by Robert Harris and reviewed in this blog:

• Conclave

"American Dirt" by Jeanine Cummins

 The book starts when eight year old Luca hears bullets, the sound of gunmen belonging to one of the drug-trafficking cartels in Acapulco murdering his entire family except for him and his Mum, Lydia, who manage to hide. 

Then Lydia and Luca, still in shock from the grief of their bereavement, are on the run from the cartel. It is difficult even getting out of the state. They can't fly - Luca has no id and neither of them had time to collect a passport - and they can't use cash machines, mobile phones or anything that might be traced. Mexico has no long distance passenger trains so they hitch illegal rides on freight trains with migrants from other central and south american countries. They join the long procession of migrants.

There are some good people who spontaneously help, feed, shelter and protect them. There is danger everywhere. The police, especially the migrant police, are corrupt and some of them are likely to be in the pay of the cartels. They join other migrants, all heading for the desert border with the US.

Every step of this appalling journey is brilliantly chronicled.

• "Luca's eyes feel like sandpaper and he still can't find a way to loosen the joints of his body, but at least he's breathing again." (Ch 5)
• "Her expression is one Luca has never seen before, and he fears it might be permanent. It's as if seven fishermen have cast their hooks into her from different directions and they're all pulling at once." (Ch 5)
• "Newton's Third Law can resonate in a place like this: for every wickedness there is an equal and opposite possibility of redemption." (Ch 32)

One of the tensest books I have read in a long time. Two characters with whom one cannot not empathise. Gritty reality. Every moment there is the possibility of disaster. This is hugely emotionally involving. A gripping read. The pacing is perfect. A quarter of the way through Lydia learns about La Bestia, the freight trains that can take her and Luca to the border, if they can survive the incredible dangers involved with the ride. Exactly half way through, Lydia discovers the true motive for the cartel boss's murderous assault on her family. And exactly three-quarters of the way through the encounter the people smuggler. You can't get more perfect pacing than that,

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

"Erebus" by Michael Palin

 Palin follows the voyages of HMS Erebus, the ship that, with HMS Terror, took James Clark Ross on his voyage of exploration in the Antarctic in 1839 - 1843 before taking Sir John Franklin on his doomed search for the North-West Passage 1845 - 1848.

My biggest problem with books of this kind is that I find it difficult to follow the journeys without reference to a map. There are several maps in this book: most of them are adequate but I found great difficulty when it came to the quite intricate details of the North-West Passage, especially when Palin was describing the multiple searches for Franklin. Repetition of eg Lancaster Sound and Bering Straits (especially as the latter didn't seem to be marked on the maps) and all the islands that might have been promontories just left me confused.

Some great moments:

• "I love the idea of a medicine for hypochondria." (Prologue)
• "In classical mythology Erebus, the son of Chaos, was generally taken to refer to the dark heart of the Underworld, a place associated with dislocation and destruction." (C 1)
• "Boothia ... the only peninsula in the world named after a brand of gin." (C 2)
• "the tallest wave ever recorded in the southern hemisphere ... was measured at 78 feet high." (C 6)
• "Of all God's creatures, they [whales] seemed the least prone to hurrying. Their lives seemed to be the human equivalent of taking very long baths." (C 6)
• "This description of a penguin 'walking away upright as a dart ... looking like an old monk going to mass'." (C 10)
• "National confidence is precarious and needs to be fed a constant diet of achievement." (C 12)
• "In Waterloo Place ... is a memorial to Captain Scott. His failure was to be beaten to the South Pole. Franklin's was to be beaten to the first sea crossing of the Northwest Passage. The man who beat Scott to the Pole was Roald Amundsen. The first man to cross the Northwest Passage by sea was Roald Amundsen. He has no memorial in London." (C 17)
• "The shower in the bathroom is one of those where you have to run around to get wet." (Epilogue)

This book was great on the Antarctic explorations but for the North-West Passage I think Barrow's Boys and Ninety Degrees North, both by Fergus Fleming, are much better.

July 2021; 310 pages

Other books on exploration and explorers, and travel, which are reviewed in this blog, may be found here.

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

"The Book of Malachi" by T C Farren

Malachi, who has no tongue, is recruited by an organisation which is growing in and harvesting organs from prisoners convicted of murder. They sit naked in their cages; he trims their fingernails and toenails. His reward after six months will be a tongue transplant. Of course, he can't talk to them ... but they can to him and he begins to appreciate the horror of the prisoners' plight. But should he help them? His dilemma is exacerbated by flashbacks to the moment he lost his tongue and the terrible survivor guilt he suffers.

Set on a lonely oil rig in the middle of the ocean with a cast of morally-flawed people, both prisoners and their exploiters, this novel is a powerful exploration of ethical issues. But it is also gritty and hard-edged. Malachi's back story is carefully drip-fed so that the reader often has to puzzle out what happened. It is perfectly paced: important turning points happening around the 33%, 48% and 72% marks. The climax had me rushing through the pages; the jeopardy continued to the very end. And the descriptions were wonderful.

Some magical moments:

• "The mirror has the skin disease mirrors get in gloomy rooms." (p 2)
• "I have seen decapitation. The head disengages as if the spine is nothing. A mere rumour." (p 3)
• "The agent's cinnamon breath disguises her predation." (p 5)
• "It's like Jesus saying he has Weet-Bix for breakfast." (p 203)
• "Jesus would never have had to fight off an erection, would he? But perhaps these are carnal truths the censors burnt." " (p 205)
• "Even his dreadlocks lie down as if chastised, creating the beaten silhouette of a bedraggled thief." (p 206)
• "Money is just paper with some ugly president's face on it." (p 206)
• "One side of her parting looks like she has stuck her finger in a plug, the other half is the good twin, clinging and meek." (p 216)
• "The yellow man lies loosely, like someone cut him from a cross." (p 320)

Thought-provoking and exciting. Brilliant.

July 2021; 324 pages

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

"Venice" by Jan Morris

 Jan Morris writes beautiful prose. This hymn to Venice, from someone who has lived there, is, as you would expect, a lyrical and haunting evocation of the beauty of one of the world's most visited tourist destinations, and a fascinating history of a city state that was a republic and maritime empire throughout the middle ages, but it is also shrewd and practical and funny. 

This isn't a tourist guide. I have been to Venice as a tourist and I would not have packed this book. This is a piece of the best sort of travel writing, the sort where the traveller becomes part of an alien landscape and has deep interactions with the inhabitants and begins to struggle to an understanding of what it must be like to live in such a place. This is that perfect sort of travel book ... except that it focuses on a single place and it is all the better for that.

There are some fascinating bits about the Venetian language. The word 'Arsenal' which was the name for the Venetian shipyard which used assembly-line techniques (celebrated by Dante in the Inferno) to produce, at peak, a fighting galley every day, comes from the arabic 'dar es sinaa' which means 'house of art'. The Arabic word 'sikka' (a die) became 'zecca' (a mint) and thence 'zecchino' (a coin) which is the origin of the Venetian unot of currency, the sequin. (The City: 17)

It is enlivened with historical anecdotes:

• "One bishop playing a double game with such conspicuous ineptitude that he was simultaneously excommunicated both by the Pope and by the Oecumenical Patriarch."  (The People: 9)
• "The Grand Canal ... follows the course of a river known to the ancients as Rivo Alto - the origin of the Rialto." (The City: 11)
• "The earliest of all state banks, the Banca Giro, was opened on the Rialto in the twelfth century." (The City: 19)
• "The fashionable eighteenth-century priest who, though courted by the greatest families of the Serenissima, chose to live in a rat-infested garret, and collected spiders' webs as a hobby." (The Lagoon: 26)
• "St Nicholas of Myra ... was particularly revered by the Venetians, if only because at the Council of Nicaea he had soundly boxed the ears of the theologian Arius, from whose very heresy, adopted by the Lombards, some of the earliest Venetians had fled into the lagoon." (The Lagoon: 30)
• "The silver reliquary of St Nicholas [in Bari] ...has for nine centuries consistently exuded a liquid Holy Manna of such purity as to be indistinguishable from the purest spring water."  (The Lagoon: 30)

But the most remarkable thing about this book is the writing. The prose is like wonder washing over one:

• There are stupendous descriptions:
• "A mesh of nets patterns the walls of a fisherman's islet, and a restless covey of boats nuzzles its water-gate." (Landfall)
• There are utterly original metaphors:
• "An air of home-spun guile and complacency, as of a man who has made a large fortune out of slightly shady dealings in artichokes." (The People: 2)
• "The gondolier ... utters a series of warning cried when he makes a manoeuvre of this sort, throaty and distraught, like the call of an elderly and world-weary sea-bird." (The City: 12)
• "Other Venetian waterways ... have an average width of twelve feet, and the average depth of a fair-sized family bath-tub." (The City: 12)
• "The modern Venetian ... examines the world's delights analytically, as a hungry entomologist might dissect a rare but potentially edible spider." (The City: 17)
• "Sometimes a layer of snow covers the city, giving it a certain sense of improper whimsy, as if you were to dress a duchess in pink ruffles." (The City: 18)
• The are profundities:
• "It is a difficult world, is it not, and heavy with disillusionment?" (The City: 18)
• "Do we not know them well, whenever we live, the aesthetic conservers on the one hand, the men of change on the other? Which of these two philosophies is the more romantic, I have never been able to decide." (The City: 22)
• And there are other, unclassifiable, moments of joy:
• "You will hardly ever see a girl dressed for pottering, in a sloppy sweater and a patched skirt, or in that unpressed dishabille that marks the utter emancipation of the Englishwoman."  (The People: 5)
• "The lanes of Venice often have lovely names - the Alley of the Curly-Headed Woman; the Alley of the Love of Friends Or of the Gypsies; the Filled-In Canal of Thoughts; the Broad Alley of the Proverbs; the Furst Burnt Alley and the Second Burnt Alley ... the Street of the Monkey Or of The Swords; the Alley of the Blind." (The City: 13)
• "It is astonishing to me how so drab a frame can contain so glittering a masterpiece." (The Lagoon: 26)
• "No history seems to be attached to these places - they are not even surrounded, as an estate-agent once said to me of a peculiarly repellent half-timbered house, 'by the amenities of tradition'." (The Lagoon: 29)
• "London has her own 'Little Venice, in Paddington, where a notice on one irreverent householder's gate warns visitors to 'Beware of the Doge'." (The Lagoon: 30)
• "Other cities have admirers. Venice alone has lovers." (The Lagoon: 30)

This is a book of magic with enchantment on every page.

Jan Morris also wrote about the neighbouring Italian city of Trieste

Many thanks to my wonderful friends Danny and Mary for buying this book (and Trieste, above) for me. Other selections from the 'Mary and Danny' book club include:

• Watling Street by John Higgs
• Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor
• How to Connect with Nature by Tristan Gooley

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