I’ve read some obscure books over the last few years, but N F Simpson’s A Resounding Tinkle, is up there! The play is a striking example of English Absurdism. This was always a bit of a niche genre and reading ART you can see why.
The Theatre of the Absurd was a relatively short-lived genre widely thought to have been inspired by Albert Camus’s description of the human condition as absurd and devoid of purpose. Firmly rooted in the post-war period as humanity recovered from the horrors of the Holocaust, absurdism was expressed on stage by plays devoid of the structures of traditional theatre. There is little dramatic conventional action – the characters find things to do, but they are invariably pointless. These plays have little that could be described as a plot. Language breaks down, is disjointed, and revolves around repetition, misunderstandings and a focus on trivialities. Through this fractured dialogue, broken by occasional bursts of eloquence, the characters express their psychological distress. The plays also often use comedic routines and traditions from vaudeville, and music hall.
I think it would be fair to argue that there is no grand absurdist tradition in English drama – the genre quickly evolved more complex forms and moved away from its origins. Which is why A Resounding Tinkle is an important text, albeit a very obscure one – it perfectly encapsulates these absurdist conventions. There is not even the semblance of a plot. Characters repeatedly break the fourth wall addressing the audience directly. At the end of the play a group of critics sit around discussing the performance they have just seen, anticipating the audience’s bemused reaction, followed by closing comments by ‘the author’. Two characters, Mr and Mrs Paradock, discuss the elephant they have been given as part of an annual celebration of some kind, and in the end exchange it with their neighbours for a very small snake in a pencil box. This scene would not have been out of place in a Monty Python sketch – and it could be argued that the absurdist genre in English theatre was quickly redirected into comedy having itself been influenced by the loosely structured surrealism of shows such as The Goons.
Perhaps not surprisingly, A Resounding Tinkle is rarely performed today. It is very much of its time, and I can imagine on stage it would appear dated. But the absurdist tradition has never really gone away, and lines such as “You remind me of a cormorant with a beak a yard long tapping out a manifesto to the cosmos on a second-hand typewriter” are reminiscent of the work of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. Perhaps a revival is overdue?
I started Anna Funder’s Wifedom, her 2023 book about George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, with a considerable sense of unease. I had read reviews of the book when it came out which raised some concerns about the methodology used and the conclusions reached; the book’s blurb heightened the sense that I was likely to be reading a hit-job on one of my favourite authors. At the same time I wanted to try and keep an open mind – after all I knew that Orwell was hardly a saint, and if the author had something new to say about his life, his relationships and his work, then I wanted to learn.
The first puzzle to unpick was – what kind of book is this? It’s not a biography – it seemed obvious to me that Funder had originally been working on a conventional biography of Eileen, but that her fox had been thoroughly shot by the publication in 2020 of Sylvia Topp’s Eileen – the Making of George Orwell.Wifedom is also not a novel, although at one point Funder claims she considered making it one. It’s not a memoir, but there are several points at which the author discusses her own personal circumstances, her memories, her status as a wife and mother and her dissatisfaction with the sharing of household tasks within her marriage. In fact the book is all of the above, and more. Helpfully Funder uses the term ‘counterfiction’ to describe the text. The internet defines counterfiction as “a story or narrative that challenges dominant views, mainstream beliefs, or official accounts by presenting an alternative, often marginalized, perspective, aiming to disrupt established realities or norms through fictionalized elements”. This concept was key to me understanding what Funder was trying to achieve. The fictionalised elements in Wifedom are Funder’s attempts to ventriloquise her subject, creating diary entries for Eileen as she drafts the letters to Norah Myles that serve as the author’s inspiration for this account.
Initially this approach – essentially ‘making things up’ – only served to exacerbate my unease. But I quickly realised that was the point – the author wants to challenge the reader and the recreated internal monologues, the streams of consciousness that record Eileen’s private thoughts and ideas as she goes about her day and writes her letters are acts of imagination, attempts to construct Eileen and George’s married life in the absence of more direct, first-hand evidence. As long as the reader remembers that – this is just Funder’s best efforts at imagining what Eileen might have thought – then the intention is successfully achieved. A conventional biography would rarely be so bold as to creatively reconstruct a subject’s thoughts and feelings, but Funder is not constrained by such conventionalities. If these exercises help us see the hidden Eileen more clearly, then the job is done.
The question then is whether this is the case – whether the Eileen and George created by the author here is plausible and convincing? There is of course plenty of evidence that tells us about this couple’s married life. Letters, diaries, and a whole catalogue of personal memoirs by the people who knew them. These accounts are fairly unanimous – this was an unconventional but surprisingly happy marriage. Both George and Eileen said as much over and over again and despite various infidelities, suspected and actual, there is no suggestion they ever considered separation – and of course they adopted a baby in 1944, a signal of the strength of their bond.
Funder presents a very different account of their marriage. Her evidence rests heavily on two primary sources – the accounts of Eileen’s friend, Lydia Jackson, who it would be fair to say never looked kindly on Orwell (she once told an interviewer “I was always sorry that Orwell married Eileen”) and the ‘Norah’ letters. These six letters written from Eileen to a university friend, Norah Myles, who so far as I can tell never met Orwell, and whose replies did not survive, were not “newly discovered” as claimed in the paperback edition of the book’s blurb (I recognise that the author almost certainly did not write the blurb, and may not even have approved the text, but they are part of the book nonetheless.) In fact these letters were ‘discovered’ in 2005, almost 20 years before Wifedom was published, and appear in Peter Davison’s supplement to his collected works, The Lost Orwell. As a number of critical reviews have pointed out, Funder notices every time the passive voice is used to erase Eileen’s contribution to Orwell’s work, but uses it here to imply or suggest that the discovery of Eileen’s letters was by herself. At one point she actually uses the phrase “I found the letters” – from the context the reader will be unclear whether this is the original discovery or whether she simply means “I came across…”.
But to return to the question I posed earlier, is Funder’s recreation of Eileen’s life and marriage plausible and convincing? To consider that question let’s look at the first letter to Norah, written during a visit to Orwell’s parent’s home in Southwold, a rather lovely coastal town in Suffolk, six months after the couple married in 1936. In it appears the following now rather famous line:
“I lost my habit of punctual correspondence during the first few weeks of marriage because we quarrelled so continuously and really bitterly that I thought I’d save time and just write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished”.(My emphasis)
Most critics take that comment to be a joke. To me that’s so obvious as to not need stating. It’s a pointed joke, of course, but unquestionably an attempt at humour. In her biography of Eileen, Sylvia Topp calls it ‘banter’. Richard Blair, George and Eileen’s adopted son, thought it was “obviously tongue in cheek”. Funder is not so sure – for her this comment is to be taken seriously, a sign of the immense distress Eileen must have been experiencing, her letter a cry for help. And as a result the version of Eileen Funder imagines regrets her decision to marry, resents the burden of domestic work, and is constantly irritated by George. I think the reader can decide for themself which is the more plausible interpretation.
Funder’s overall thesis, summed up in the book’s subtitle, Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, is that Eileen’s contribution to Orwell’s life and work has been erased by the patriarchy and in particular by Orwell himself and his cabal of all-male biographers. Her task therefore is to bring Eileen back into the light and if some imaginative reconstruction of what probably happened is required to achieve that result, then so be it.
As an example of this erasure, the “wicked magic trick” by which Eileen has been made to disappear, Funder takes a careful look through Orwell’s memoir of his time in Spain during the Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. She starts with the surprising statement that
“I had read Homage twice and never registered that Eileen was in Spain. No-one I have ever asked remembers her.”
To which the only possible response to this confession is “Really!!??” Given the centrality of Eileen’s role in the key events of Homage (she even visited him at the front, an event captured on camera (see below)) and the multiple references to ‘my wife’ throughout the text, this is surprising. If Orwell was genuinely trying to avoid letting people know that Eileen was in Barcelona for most of the time that he was in Spain, he did a poor job of doing so. Granted, he does not refer to her by name, for reasons that could be as banal as it being conventional not to do so, or the more serious security reasons some suggest, but as Eileen typed the manuscript (and according to Funder, and others, contributed extensive editorial suggestions) it would have been a job of moments to have added or reinserted her name. Later, attempting to explain why she never noticed Eileen was in Spain, Funder claims (with traces of bitterness?) that the word “wife” is a “job description” (181) rather than a way of describing a relationship. Eileen is “in this story only in a way no one will ever see, like scaffolding, or a skeleton, something disappeared or covered over in the end result”. It reflects poorly on Funder as an Orwell scholar and more broadly as a reader that she did not notice (on either reading) the multiple references to Eileen in Homage – the scene when her hotel room is being searched and she hides documents under her bed, avoiding them being found because the Spanish soldiers were being overly polite towards her, is tragically comic, and one of many very memorable scenes from the book.
The phenomenon of women’s erasure from history is undeniable and there is a convincing case to be made that Eileen suffered from just such an experience. She has been a shadowy, lightly-sketched figure in many Orwell biographies. Sylvia Topp’s work was an important start at correcting that failure. But was the erasure of Eileen a mass conspiracy instigated by Orwell and supported by his biographers and the patriarchy? Perhaps Eileen is not a clear example of this phenomenon, or perhaps Funder’s counter-fictional approach is not the best way of revealing Eileen’s role in Orwell’s life and work.
As an aside, I found the author’s use of unnumbered endnotes, referenced only by page number, really frustrating, particularly when they were used for important content such as her thoughts on the Topp biography. An endnote is simply a list of additional notes on the text, mainly sources, listed by page number. When reading Wifedom you cannot tell whether the author has included a source or comment on the text without constantly checking the endnotes, which of course you quickly stop doing. Why she chose this approach I found baffling.
After finishing Wifedom, but before putting pen to paper to record my thoughts, I read some reviews of the book online. Most of the reviews in the broadsheets were broadly positive. The Guardian called it “a brilliant reckoning with George Orwell to change the way you read”. The review on the Orwell Society website asks more serious questions. But then I came across (‘discovered’) Matthew Clayfield’s cleverly titled ‘She Can’t Tell Norah That’ which makes a compelling case that Funder’s methodology and central thesis is flawed. He argues that the ‘recently discovered’ letters to university friend Norah, although relied on by Funder as a springboard for the text’s speculative counterfiction episodes, do not support any of her conclusions. Funder’s explanation for this is that the letters have to be read creatively, looking for the things Eileen wanted to say but could not. In other words, she could not ‘tell Norah that’. The obvious alternative explanation is that she doesn’t tell Norah things in these otherwise frank and revealing letters is because she didn’t believe them or they didn’t happen. I commend this analysis to anyone interested in reading more about the issues with Wifedom. It is so comprehensive that I was tempted to abdicate any attempt to review the book and just leave the link here, but I don’t think in all honesty I can do that. Crucially, this article also contains in postscripts details of emails from the son of Georges Kopp (Orwell’s commander in Spain, a long term friend of the couple, and according to many biographers, Eileen’s lover) and from Richard Blair himself (George and Eileen’s adopted son) expressing serious concerns about the accuracy and intentions of the author (Funder). Richard writes to Clayfield about Funder’s “(deliberate) misplaced understanding of the dynamic between Eileen and George.”
Another finely detailed critical review can be found here.
Why the hostility towards Wifedom from this group of reviewers? I think the answer is simple, and no it is not ‘the patriarchy’! It is that the Orwell Funder presents us is never given the benefit of the doubt. If there is any explanation of his behaviour offered, any interpretation of his work or his actions, it is always the most critical, the most damning. Orwell emerges as a crude monster, an attempted rapist who abuses his wife, constantly and callously betrays her, takes her ideas and contributions to his work without giving her any credit, contributes if not causes her early death, and avoids every responsibility in their marriage. He is totally unrecognisable from the man that emerges from his novels, letters, essays and journalism. At every turn Funder sits in judgment waiting for Orwell to do something horrible or unthinking. Any love or affection in their marriage is ignored. Rather than the complex, flawed man many of us respect and admire, we are left with a travesty which not only diminishes Orwell but also Eileen as well.
Or to quote one final review which again makes the point far more cogently that I ever could:
“Wifedom is more intent on condemnation than comprehension. With no interest in Eileen’s life before Orwell, the book focuses on Eileen solely as an example of “how a woman can be buried first by domesticity and then by history.” Funder enlists her to buttress her assertion that there “is not one place on the planet where women as a group have the same power, freedom, leisure or money as their male partners.” That may well be true, but the uniqueness of Eileen O’Shaughnessy Blair disappears amid the abstraction of “wifedom.” Appropriating her merely as an exhibit in a polemic against patriarchy is the same as erasing her.”
I think I am going to try and read, and review, more plays this year, even though I remain steadfast in my view that plays are for watching not reading. Sure you can read them, but in doing so you could easily miss much of the nuance and subtlety of a play that would be brought out in performance.
Just to explain the dates above, the internet tells me that The Dumb Waiter was written in 1957 but not performed until 1960. Either way that makes it one of Pinter’s earliest works. It is a short one-act play in which two men, Ben and Gus, wait in a basement. Ben, apparently the senior member of the two, reads a newspaper, while Gus fusses around nervously. Tea is mentioned but never quite made. As their conversation progresses it emerges that they are hit-men, waiting for an assignment and instructions on who to kill. Their conversation is dominated by mundane, everyday nonsense such as the difference between the phrase ‘light the kettle’ and ‘put on the kettle’. There is almost a vaudeville, back and forth element to their conversation, but at the same time there is a sinister undertone.
Pinter’s stage directions are very detailed and one of the reasons for this emerges when the men realise that at the back of the room is a dumbwaiter, a small lift for carrying food between floors. The waiter starts to deliver a series of food orders, as if to a restaurant kitchen – at first for plain café food – soup of the day, liver and onions, jam tart – and then for more complex orders – macaroni pastistsio, ormitha macaroundada, and scampi. Ben and Gus are dumbfounded by this turn of events, but are so used to doing what they are told that they send up what food they have – milk, biscuits, crisps and chocolate – in a pathetic attempt to comply. . In production I can imagine that this part of the play would be essentially comic, but on the page the tragic element also comes across – they are unable to understand what is happening to them, but still try to do their best. Next to the dumb waiter is a speaking tube which they try to use to communicate with whoever is sending down the orders, but to no avail.
In a break from the dumb waiter’s interruptions, the men start to rehearse the impending assassination, which complies with a strict sequences of events. In doing so they casually but shockingly reveal that their last ‘job’ was to kill a girl.
The impact of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot on this early work by Pinter is immediately obvious – two anonymous characters waiting in a remote location for something to happen, passing time with inane chat that reveals their concerns about their purpose in life. There is no conventional narrative or storyline (although in Pinter’s play there is a dramatic denouement) and absurd and unexplained events challenge the characters’ ideas. Long periods of silence allow space for the claustrophobic tension of the setting to develop. The Dumb Waiter is often produced alongside another of his one-act plays, but I can’t help wonder whether a contrasting text – something by Joe Orton for example – might work as effectively? If you want to read more British post-war plays then The Dumb Waiter is an excellent starting point. Pinter was a key figure in post-war British drama and went on to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005, being cited for work that “”uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms”.
I have a theory: I suspect that early drafts of The Long Shoe were planned as a sequel to The Satsuma Complex (2022) and The Hotel Avocado (2024) – in all probability with a fruit-based title. But this plan had to be abandoned, because The Long Shoe‘s plot needed the central female character, Harriet (Emily in the first two novels) to have a job that runs the risk of her being kidnapped, and Mortimer just couldn’t make the plot work within the constraints of her ‘legacy’ occupation.
So a new context and setting was required. Apart from the change of occupation the novels are strikingly similar, with the protagonist Matt (Gary) a rather feckless character drifting through life (he is a recently unemployed bathroom salesman) living in a London suburb, taking walks in the park, drinking coffee, talking to his pet cat/pigeon/quirky animal of choice, and enjoying a casual relationship with his girlfriend while taking her commitment for granted. The novels’ themes are also similar – mysteries involving organised crime, a violent villain who is physically menacing and a bit disturbed, and a climax in which Gary confronts the bad guys in a clumsy, endearing manner.
This theory would also explain the irrelevance of the novel’s title. The long shoe referred to here is a comically long wooden model of a shoe, purchased from a market stall specialising in quirky conversation pieces. It could have easily been swapped into the novel on a find and replace basis for a whimsical fruit-based object of a similar scale.
Having said all that, it really doesn’t matter if this theory is right or not. The Long Shoe works well enough as a standalone novel, just one that will feel very familiar if you have read the author’s previous two. The premise is simple, if familiar: Matt’s relationship with Harriet is in trouble, as she questions whether they have a long-term future together. She leaves him for a short break to consider her feelings. While she is away Matt is offered out of the blue a caretaking job. which comes with the benefit of a heavily discounted flat in Satsuma Heights, (a little nod to novel one, of course). The new job and flat are all the more welcome as they were having to leave their existing flat in a few weeks. Harriet’s farewell note is ambiguous and Matt is not sure if she has left him for good, or is just taking some time out. Improbably she has also neglected to tell her employer, the Crown Prosecution Service, that she is taking leave, and she stops answering her phone. Instead of reporting her absence to the police, Matt tries to track her down.
The novel’s minor characters include Carol, a deeply unpleasant neighbour who has designs on Matt, Hot Dog, one of Matt’s new neighbours in Satsuma Heights, and a very underwritten waitress who never really emerges as a distinctive character at all (in my alternative version of this novel this character has a more fleshed out role but with all the old plot elements stripped from her she is left hollowed out(.
Around halfway through the novel we discover that Harriet has been kidnapped and over the course of the rest of the novel her predicament is revealed and her rescue effected. The mystery – who has kidnapped her, and why – is well-managed, and the novel’s rather violent climax is genuinely exciting. The novel’s humour is more whimsical than laugh out loud – with Bob I think much of the charm of his humour is in the performance, so on the page the jokes are wryly amusing rather than belly laughs. So overall this novel is amusing and a pleasant enough read, but will not linger long in the mind.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1985
Love in the Time of Cholera is a dense and complex meditation on love and the process of aging. It also contains some very troubling content, of which more later. It is not an easy read and I am still unsure whether it merits the adulation it receives in many quarters.
Set at the end of the nineteenth century in an unnamed but volatile country in the Caribbean, the novel tells the decades long love story of Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza. As a young man Florentino falls in love with a young woman who lives with her possessive and suspicious father. So far so Romeo and Juliet. After secretly wooing Fermina for months Florentino finally secures her promise to marry him.
But the ‘affair’ is discovered. Fermina’s father refuses to consider the marriage, considering Florentino unsuitable for his daughter and takes her on a years’ long trip through the country’s interior, hoping that this will make her forget him. During the journey scenes of the long-running civil war and the ravages of cholera simply form a background to everyday life and are considered normal. When they finally returns to the city, Florentino attempts to resume the relationship, having continued to write to her using his contacts in the telegraph service. But Fermina suddenly realises that their relationship was just a childish infatuation. Shortly afterwards she marries a local doctor, Juvenal Urbino, and lives a long and moderately happy life with him, raising a family and surviving the normal traumas of married life, until his tragically comic death in old age, a death with which the novel opens.
At the funeral, Florentino, now in his seventies, renews his affection claiming he has never stopped loving her. At first she is not interested – more than fifty years has passed – but gradually he wears her down. Much of the body of the novel consists of the story of how Florentino has spent his time while waiting for Fermina to be free. His career with a riverboat company is the background to his all-consuming passion, seduction. Florentino is a prodigious and undiscriminating lover of women of all backgrounds, ages and class. He has no problem in squaring this lifestyle with waiting for his true love.
Although Florentino is the novel’s central character and sees himself as man of principles, a tragic lover waiting all his life for his one true love, in reality he is simply depraved. He sleeps with over 600 women, many of them vulnerable. One is killed by her husband after he discovers her affair. Later, he conducts an abusive relationship with a 14-year-old girl who is his ward. The author’s portrait of this abuse is as disturbing as anything written by Nabokov:
“She was still a child in every sense of the word, with braces on her teeth and the scrapes of elementary school on her knees, but he saw right away the kind of woman she was soon going to be, and he cultivated her during a slow year of Saturdays at the circus, Sundays in the park with ice cream, childish late afternoons, and he won her confidence, he won her affection, he led her by the hand, with the gentle astuteness of a kind grandfather, toward his secret slaughterhouse.”
He has no insight into how wrong this relationship is – she is a child, he is more than fifty years older than her and in a position of parental responsibility – and when he ends the abusive relationship she commits suicide. In short, he is a scumbag. The novel ends with a reconciliation between the two ‘lovers’. A boat trip into the interior of the country, ravaged by industrialisation, war and disease, provides the novel’s ending and a metaphor for aging and loss.
The novel’s title suggests this is a book about love, but it is not (any more than Lolitais a love story). Two people spend their lives apart and eventually come together in a facsimile of elderly, incontinent married love. Florentino thinks of himself as one of the courtly knights of old who would love his lady from afar, sacrificing all for just one smile. In reality he is a disturbingly lascivious paedophile, a dirty old man whose idea of love is distorted in the extreme. I finished Love in the Time of Cholera with a sense of disquiet that has only worsened the more I think about what actually happens in the book. I accept I am probably missing something, but I am keen to move on as quickly as possible to something that isn’t full of bodily functions slowly breaking down, of sexual abuse, and death.
The Impossible Fortune – The Thursday Murder Club 5, by Richard Osman, 2025
The Impossible Fortune was the best selling novel in the UK in 2025. It is therefore proof from any criticism I can level at it. More to the point if you have read the previous four novels in the series you will have long ago decided if this is your cup of tea – if it is then again any criticism will be moot and if it isn’t then you will almost certainly be skipping this review. Nonetheless, I shall press on, because surely the novel deserves more than the unthinking adulation it seems to have received thus far? Equally the ‘read it, review it’ rule will continue to apply in 2026!
Osman has reached the point in the series where recaps of the cast and setting are not required – it is assumed that the reader will be familiar with the context. Also, very few readers will start the series on book 5 and were they to do so (it could happen – I started the Harry Potter series on book 4, Goblet of Fire) there are enough summaries available elsewhere to help them find their feet. We are back at Coopers Chase, the retirement home for active and prosperous pensioners, with Joyce, Elizabeth, Ibrahim and Ron, the founder members of the Thursday Murder Club, and a large and growing cast of secondary characters. A new investigation presents itself on cue, although it is not clear whether it actually is a case of murder or not. The gang don’t worry about this of course – the mystery is what matters. Some valuable crypto-currency is missing – or rather the codes to access it are – and the challenge is to find them before some of the other potential claimants do so.
Still grieving former spy Elizabeth is not at the top of her game and doesn’t provide the insights that usually comes to her so easily. Former trade unionist Ron is worried about his family but finds a way of combining his role in the investigation into the missing crypto with a means of protecting them all, including his precocious grandson, Kendrick. Joyce is a continuing delight and the main source of humour in the novel, especially her relationship with her daughter Joanna, who as the novel opens has just married new character lecturer Paul. Paul has two friends Holly Lewis and Nick Silver (Osman not over-exerting his name giving skills here) who together run a high security ‘cold storage’ business. This is presented as something innovative and shadowy, slightly mysterious, but to me it seemed remarkably similar to the safe deposit box services offered by many banks. Several years ago Holly and Nick were paid for their services in Bitcoin; this has increased in value exponentially over the years and they have now decided to cash it out. But as soon as they have decided to do this Nick finds a bomb attached to his car and very shortly thereafter Holly’s car is blown up, with her in it. Nick cannot be traced and mysterious text messages exchanges with Paul suggest he might have been killed.
This is a problem because to access the crypto-currency a 12 character code is required, half of which is held by Holly and half by Nick. So multiple puzzles present themselves – who tried to kill Nick, who actually killed Holly, where is Nick and how can the crypto-currency be saved?
In the event either of them dies, Holly and Nick have left their access codes with a solicitor, so the final problem in this list is fairly straightforward. Nevertheless the murder club devote most of their efforts to finding the codes which Holly and Nick have also hidden in plain sight. This is where the mystery element of the novel begins to break down somewhat – it is not clear why they have done this. Please note spoilers follow at this point. Just before she is killed by the car bomb, Holly dials a phone number, which eventually turns out to be a disguised form of her code. (Hiding personal number codes, PIN’s etc, in a fake phone number is quite common – so if I wanted to write down my PIN number 1234 in case I forgot it I would create a fake contact Bill’s Pizza and write it down as 07770 001234.) But there is no plausible reason why Holly would dial this number just before she dies; worse still there’s no reason why she would write it down at all as she has memorised it for so long, and no reason why she would dial the number rather than save it as a contact. In other words this is a very poorly constructed attempt to mislead the reader looking to ‘solve’ the mystery. Nick’s code is disclosed in an even clumsier manner, hiding it in text messages to Paul (so for example “I have written a hidden number in this sentences” disguises the number ten) that depend entirely on Paul sending the right replies in the thread. It also depends on Paul showing the messages to Elizabeth and her being able to decipher the code. Again it is totally unclear why he does this, other of course than to provide a simple puzzle for the reader looking to ‘solve’ the novel.
All of which it to miss the point – the mystery element of this series has always been secondary to Osman’s celebration of the liberation of old age. Unencumbered by jobs or responsibility, the Thursday Murder Club members are able to enjoy the later stages of their life by doing pretty much whatever they want. Rules are for other people. Osman also recognises they are so much more than just old people – they all have a lifetime of skills and experience to draw upon. This is a combination that is highly effective when deployed in the solving of murder. Recognising the value and worth of older people rather than seeing them as in god’s waiting room, decrepit or infirm (there’s even a reference to Coopers Chase residents getting frisky in the community hot tub) is at the heart of this series, and it is to be celebrated for that fact.
The Impossible Fortune has a number of sub-plots that are arguably more interesting than the central mystery. Ron’s daughter finally escapes an abusive relationship and in doing so exposes her whole family to a dangerous revenge plot. Connie, the drug dealer imprisoned earlier in the series has been released from prison but continues her unlikely relationship with former therapist Ibrahim, which in this novel finally solidifies into a friendship and even, potentially, a partnership. Joyce enjoys finally being a mother-in-law and her relationship with her daughter is drawn with skill and sensitivity. The novel has lots of good jokes – Joyce coming to terms with technology is a sub-section in its own right:
Joanna has recently introduced Joyce to Rightmove. It’s a website where you can see houses for sale. You click on them and they let you look inside! Thousands of strangers’ houses! Twenty, thirty, sometimes forty pictures. You can see their sofas, their kitchen cabinets, where they’ve put their wooden LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE signs, what they’ve done with their gardens and so on. And this site is free! Joyce doesn’t believe in all progress, self-service checkouts, for example, but she is certainly happy that somebody invented Rightmove.”
A visit from Prince Edward is mined for all it is worth; references to David Tennant and Pierce Brosnan jokingly call back to the 2025 film adaptation of The Thursday Murder Club (and its controversial casting decisions).
Osman knows his audience. The Impossible Fortune is printed double spaced with very large font – the largest I can ever recall seeing. Chapters are a few pages long at most. Nothing is too demanding or difficult. At times it seems he is falling into the trap the books warn against – under-estimating the old. The cosiness factor is kept in check, and the moments of genuine peril, particularly when Jason (Ron’s son) and Kendrick are being shot at are uncomfortably worrying. But we are quickly back to jigsaw puzzles, bourbons and sherry before you know it. The author continues to stubbornly refuse to kill off any of his main characters in defiance of my prediction that he would do so in book 2, but I refuse to back down and have faith that one day this prediction will come true. Osman is the king of cosy crime and you can’t help but feel happy for him. Let’s just hope that if they film the later books that they get the casting right this time round!
Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip by Simon Hart, 2025
Simon Hart was a relatively minor figure in the appalling melodrama that was the 2019-2024 Conservative Government – he was Secretary of State for Wales for a couple of years, a post of minimal significance since devolution, but came with a place at the Cabinet table, and then Chief Whip for the duration of the Sunak Government (2022-24). He now sits in the House of Lords, despite having consistently poured scorn on the aspirations of his fellow MPs for the same privilege. Nevertheless, he undoubtedly had an insider’s perspective (the proverbial ‘front row seat’) on the chaos that engulfed the Tories during the 2019-24 Parliament and his heavily redacted diaries of that period give enough juicy details to keep the pages turning, even if the ‘real’ story remains elusive.
A feature of most political diaries is the temptation to remove references that make the author look like he or she had no idea what was going on, but at the same time to also leave sufficient minor ‘gaffes’ to make the account convincing. What do I mean by that? Well, if these diaries were to include glowing predictions of how wonderful Liz Truss’s premiership was going to be, Hart would lose any credibility as an observer of the political scene. On the other hand if every prediction proves unerringly accurate then the reader would be sceptical as to their authenticity. So when Hart says of Rishi Sunak in June 2022, “He is compelling and will be a contender for PM one day“, his editor would have been keen to keep this prediction in the final edit despite the fact that Sunak was to become Prime Minister only four months later – ‘one day’ being a stark understatement. In other words Hart was wrong, but in a mildly entertaining way rather than totally misjudging the situation. It was for the purposes of this category of memoir the ‘right’ kind of mistake. Most of his political predictions that survive the edit are reasonably accurate – for example as the process to replace Johnson as Prime Minister gets underway Hart pondered “I dread to think what a Truss Government would look like, or if it will even last”.
Looking back now over the 2019-2024 Government it really is quite breath-taking how bad it was. The rot started at the top of course and Hart is a frank observer of Johnson’s flaws as well as his abilities. Knowing how things ended we can see how entirely unsuited he was to senior office, even if that wasn’t glaringly obvious much earlier, but Hart, like the rest of the Conservative Party, was swept away by his Etonian bluster. He finds his performances in Parliament ‘brilliant’ and is charmed by his Woosterish schtick. Hart’s decision to join the eventual flood of Ministerial resignations which swept Johnson from office comes late and is done with much regret rather than in recognition of the Prime Minister’s arrogance and incompetence. His subsequent appointment as Sunak’s Chief Whip was intended to introduce some stability to the political process, but on every other page there is scandal, from the infamous ‘tractor porn‘ incident to a succession of entries about serious sex offences (allegedly and in some cases actually) committed by MPs, special advisors (SpAds) and others.
Hart himself emerges as an affable, hard-drinking One Nation Tory, a remainer who was often out of his depth, like so many of his colleagues. If you want to know why the Tories went from a comfortable 80+ majority in the December 2019 General Election to an ignominious wipe-out five years later, there is plenty here both between the lines and directly from Hart himself. A good example of his lack of understanding as to just how existentially serious the crisis the party was facing comes in his entry for Friday 17 December 2021
“The North Shropshire by election goes against us and in favour of the Lib Dems with a 5000 majority. It’s the first time this seat has ever been held by a non-Conservative. This is manageable but serious and should probably be reversed at a General Election, but it has opened up the whole question of whether the BoJo electoral ‘magic’ has lost some of its potency.”
Is some ways it this is the most egregious of all Hart’s political miscalculations. In the 2019 General Election Owen Paterson won this seat for the Conservatives with a majority of over 20,000 (the chaos over Paterson’s breach of Parliamentary standards and the Government’s blatant attempt to subvert Parliamentary processes to avoid him having to face the consequences of his actions is a whole other story – readers of Hart’s account will need to turn to Wikipedia for the detail). The Lib Dems had come third in this seat in 2019 with fewer than half the votes of the Labour candidate, then leapfrogging Labour to beat the Tories comfortably at the by-election. At the 2024 General Election the Lib Dem incumbent increased her majority to over 15,0000, making North Shropshire a relatively safe LD seat. The arrogant assumption that the by-election result was simply a protest vote rather than part of a generational movement away from life-long Conservative hegemony reveals how little Hart understood what was really going on as the Johnson administration slowly but inevitably imploded.
Although the 2019-24 government was obviously deeply flawed and chaotic, it would be wrong to overlook the two significant external events that would have been challenging for the most competent of administrations – the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Both had dramatic impacts on the economy which we will be paying for for years to come. Boris Johnson was totally unsuited to running the serious type of Government required to manage the UK’s response to the pandemic (for example his early demonstration of his incompetence and bravado by ignoring medical advice and continuing to shake people’s hands) but it would have been difficult for any government. None of which justifies the casual indifference to economic stability demonstrated by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng of course.
Does Ungovernable tell us anything we didn’t already know? The detail of the collapse of the various administrations is already in the public domain. Central characters including Johnson have already published their memoirs and accounts of the period. Frustratingly, the really juicy gossip that Hart was privy to – the drunken calls from MPs in the middle of the night, one claiming to be stuck in a Bayswater brothel with a woman he thought was a KGB agent, or the reports of orgies and someone going to a party in a Jimmy Savile costume and having sex with a blow-up doll – is all sadly but inevitably anonymised. Anyone who starts this book with a positive opinion of politicians, as hard working and basically decent, will find themselves closing the pages at the end wondering just how wrong one can be!
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