J, shortlisted for the 2014 Booker Prize, is set in a dystopian(ish) future after a catastrophic event known only as ‘WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED’. Later in the novel different variants of this expression are used, such as WHAT HAPPENED (that is, without the qualifier) indicating the speaker’s distance from the orthodox view of this event. Precisely what ‘the event’ was is never made explicit, but enough is revealed towards the end of the novel to suggest that it was a mass killing of a minority in society in which ordinary citizens participated. Several decades have passed since this event, but society is still haunted by it, seeking ways of restoring balance to an increasingly violent and disordered world.
The central narrative of J is on the surface a traditional romance. Kevern, a woodworker, and Ailinn, an artist, begin a rather sweet love affair. Kevern is socially isolated and finds it hard to make friendships. He is rather neurotic and exhibits symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder – for example he repeatedly returns to his front door to make sure it is locked and that his hallway is arranged as he needs it to be. The reader comes to realise that he has been taught to do this by his parents as a way of ensuring that he can tell if his house has been broken into. In other words it is a security measure, although precisely who or what he needs to be worried about is initially unclear. Kevern was also taught by his father to place two fingers over his lips when using any word beginning with the letter J. This we can conclude was a way of training his son never to acknowledge his Jewish identity – the words Jew and Jewish are never used in the novel and illustrate how Jewishness has been effectively extinguished by WHAT HAPPENED. The letter J becomes in the novel a symbol of the near complete erasure of Jewish people in this society and also points to the hidden identity of any Jewish survivors. The novel’s true title is actually the letter “J” with two lines struck through it – this double-crossed “J” (see above) evokes the anti-Semitic trope of the “double-crossing Jew,” serving as a visual reminder of the deep-seated prejudice that exists even in a society that claims to have addressed this prejudice. Ironically the government has since WHAT HAPPENED forced all citizens to take Jewish-sounding surnames in a twisted attempt to illustrate that anti-Semitism no longer exists. But this attempt to rewrite history and deny the existence of anti-Semitism is not working – society remains violent and troubled. We eventually come to realise that Kevern and Ailinn’s relationship has been engineered as a social experiment to see if the reintroduction of Jews to society may help rebuild society by providing a scapegoat for society’s ills. When they find this out the impact on them is devastating.
Jews are not the only people who have seen their identity reduced to simplified markers in this society: “A compliant society meant that every section of it consented with gratitude – the gratitude of the providentially spared – to the principle of group aptitude. People of Afro-Caribbean origin were suited by temperament and physique to entertainment and athletics, and so they sang and sprinted. People originally from the Indian subcontinent, electronically gifted as though by nature, undertook to ensure no family was without a functioning utility phone. What was left of the Polish community plumbed, what was left of the Greek smashed plates.“
The publisher of J compared the novel to the dystopias written by Orwell and Huxley. So far there is no evidence that the comparison has stood the test of time – for example J has an average score on Goodreads of just under 3 (on a scale of 1-5). I understand the reservations many reviewers have expressed about J on this site and elsewhere. Jacobson really makes the reader work hard – the point of view narration from members of a society where forgetting WHAT HAPPENED is a national preoccupation means we are only given glimpses of the past and have to piece things together slowly. (The ending of the novel is also unforgivably bad, but we shouldn’t define a novel just by how it ends). This is a thought-provoking novel that I suspect will be read in years to come when other Booker prize shortlisted novels have long been forgotten. It is hard for me as a non-Jewish person to fully appreciate the issues Jacobson discusses, but I believe that this portrait of being Jewish in a society in which the whole concept of Judaism has been effectively eradicated will resonate with many Jewish people.
My deep dive into Orwell continues with the Penguin Modern Classics collection of his essays, edited by Bernard Crick, one of Orwell’s earlier biographers.
In the extremely unlikely event that someone asked me to edit a collection of the great man’s essays, the first task I would set myself would be to understand what is an essay? Which of the many articles Orwell wrote would qualify for inclusion, and which would be excluded? There is a simple textbook definition of the term ‘essay’, ‘a short piece of writing on a particular subject’ but that isn’t particularly helpful – a letter of complaint to the council would fit that bill. He published different collections during his lifetime, and since then they have been republished in multiple different formats. Some collections of Orwell’s essays have over 240 items (for example the Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics edition – to get to this high a number they must have included the weekly columns that Orwell wrote for Tribune from 1943 to 1947). This Penguin Modern Classics edition has 41 essays, which tallies with the count in Orwell’s bibliography on Wikipedia.
The next thing I would do is try to decide how to group the essays? Would I present them chronologically? That would have the benefit of showing Orwell’s progression as a writer, although some of the essays were published long after they were written, such as his account of his days at his prep school, St Cyprians, Such, Such Were the Joys, which was considered so libellous that publication had to wait until the 1950’s when everyone mentioned was safely dead. I think I would instead group the essays thematically. Memoirs such as A Hanging, Shooting an Elephant, Marrakesh, Bookshop Memories and so on would form one category. Another would be literary analysis – Dickens, Kipling, Cervantes, etc. A third would be popular culture including Boy’s Weeklies and The Art of Donald McGill – and finally a politics section.
When Orwell initially wrote these essays they were published in a wide variety of magazines including: Tribune (which is still in print) where he was literary editor after he left the BBC, Horizon, a magazine edited by his old schoolfriend Cyril Connolly, the Evening Standard, for years the principal London evening paper, as well as a number of more obscure and short-lived publications, such as Polemic, which only managed eight issues and Gangrel which only ran to four, but published his seminal essay “Why I Write”. It is fairly obvious from this wide spread of magazines and papers that Orwell wasn’t enormously fussy (or couldn’t afford to be fussy) about where his work was published – although of course he would have had red lines in terms of pro-Communist and pro-fascist publications.
The reason why I have made this point at such length is that I have no idea why this collection was printed in this particular order. It’s not chronological, thematic, alphabetical, or any other structure or design that I can discern. Perhaps I am missing something but the random nature of the collection, if intentional, did not work at all. The changes in tone from whimsical to academically serious were often jarring. The editing of the text did not help either because the date of publication of each essay was only included as an endnote. The date of publication matters – something written in 1942 about what the world might look like after the end of the war lands completely differently from the same topic written in 1946. But you have to check the end of the essay to find this out, even though it is information needed up front. Crick’s introduction to the selection is also really rather strange. At times it seems that he doesn’t particularly like Orwell’s work. At one point he comes close to calling Orwell dishonest, claiming “One can tell lies or spin stories in monosyllables and simple sentences.” and later “Orwell himself seemed to believe that it is more difficult to lie in monosyllables than in polysyllables, but like many people he confused meaning with truth”. This is leading up to his suggestion that A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant are stories rather than essays, and therefore do not belong in this collection. Which begs the simple question, if Crick did not think these are essays, why include them?
Which is all a pity, because the essays themselves are (of course) outstanding. I have some personal favourites. The Burma essays, A Hanging (1931) and Shooting an Elephant (1936), are comparatively early but exceptional, very concise masterpieces that speak to the human condition and the impact of imperialism. In many ways they would be more impressive if they were entirely fictional. The Art of Donald McGill introduced me to the idea that popular culture (in this case, comedic holiday postcards) can be looked at seriously and tell us something about society. His essay Boys’ Weeklies had the same impact (criminally, this edition does not include the response to Orwell’s theory that the author of the Greyfriars stories must be a collective identity, which explained why the stories themselves were so heavily stylised; Frank Richards’ reply to Orwell can be found here, and it is a serious oversight that it was not included in this collection.) Orwell the man always shines through in his work but never more so when he is writing about the simple but very English pleasures of life such as what makes a great pub, how to make a cup of tea (neither of which are included in this collection) or his thoughts on the common toad. And of course Orwell’s political insight and perspective are a guide to both the politics of the period but more importantly provide us with tools to navigate our own troubled times.
This isn’t a book to be read from beginning to end straight through (although you could) but rather it is to be dipped into and referred back to as occasion demands.
George Orwell, A Life in Letters, edited by Peter Davison, 2010
A Life in Letters is a fascinating collection that took me an inordinately long time to read, simply because of the multiple ‘side quests’ it sent me on. A great example of this is Orwell’s exchange with Anne Popham (pages 293, 307 & 321). Anne was Orwell’s downstairs neighbour in Canonbury Square, and one of the many young women that Orwell propositioned after his wife’s death. (“I wonder if you were angry or surprised when I sort of made advances to you that night before you went away“) According to Anne there was nothing ‘sort of’ about it. In an interview in the Guardian on her 100th birthday she recalled the incident as follows:
“In his flat there was a table, the baby, and its nurse. We had strong Indian tea, with brown bread and treacle. After tea, he told the nurse to take the baby away, and then he said, ‘Come and sit on the bed’. So I went and sat on the bed in the corner, and he came and sat beside me.” She laughs in disbelief at the memory. “In no time at all, his arms were round me, and he was kissing me. I was shocked. I said, ‘What are you up to ?’ and I pushed him away. Later on, I decided this must be how Old Etonians got on with girls, as if no one could resist them. He said, ‘I’m sorry’ and asked about my work, and I said, ‘I’m governing Germany’.”
Anne had an extraordinary life (the interview in the Guardian linked above is a good start) of which the encounter with Orwell played a minor part, but it does tell us a lot about his state of mind following the death of his wife the previous year. It is in this exchange (Orwell’s letter 18th April 1946) in which he makes the claim that “What I am really asking you is whether you would like to be the widow of a literary man?” One can never be completely certain of the extent to which this is being said seriously or is simply a ‘line’, but I am reasonably sure that Orwell himself would not have been able to answer that honestly either – he knew his health was poor and he was looking for a mother for Richard, his adopted son, but at the same time he was making plans for the future and did not have a terminal diagnosis. As a sexually frustrated bachelor in his early forties he would hardly be the first man to chance his arm with a young women with a tragic sob story, on the basis that sooner or later he might be lucky. It is in this same letter that Orwell claims that he did not suffer from jealousy: “I don’t much care who sleeps with whom. It seems to me what matters is being faithful in an emotional and intellectual sense. I was sometimes unfaithful to Eileen and I also treated her very badly, and I think she treated me badly too at times.”
This collection would make a superb companion text to any biography of Orwell. It can be read on its own of course, but combining it with a biography would work really well, with Orwell’s own words accompanying narrative about the events of his life. It would reveal his tendency to downplay things in a very British stiff-upper-lip way, such as his health problems, his distress at the death of his wife (“I don’t know whether you will have heard from anyone else the very bad news. Eileen is dead” opens a letter to Lydia Jackson, one of Eileen’s close friends, dated 1 April 1945, Eileen having died two days earlier. This isn’t Orwell being uncaring or brutal, it is him trying to cope with his grief and carry on doing the right thing.) and his pride in the success of his later books.
Another thing that shines out of the pages of this collection is Orwell’s entirely unsentimental love of the countryside. Very few personal letters go by without lines on the progress of his garden, how many pounds of potatoes have been harvested, how many eggs the hens have laid, and so on. This was more than a hobby, it was a part of his life and he clearly found the loss of gardening when he was laid up in various hospitals and sanitoriums (or away in Spain or Morocco) highly frustrating. It does make me think that the short period he was on Jura, enjoying living off the land, was one of the happiest of his life, even though it was tinged with sadness as he was having to make this home without Eileen, who seemed to have shared his dream of escape to the Hebrides.
Over half of the letters in this collection date from 1945 or later, that is to say the last five full years of his life (he died in January 1950). In part this must be a reflection of the fact that by 1945 Orwell was increasingly well known, so recipients of his letters were much more likely to have kept them. He may have also kept copies himself, certainly of business letters. I don’t have access to the 20-volume Complete Orwell that Davison edited, so I can’t be sure, but this edition doesn’t contain any letters from Orwell’s five years in Burma, which suggests either that he didn’t send any, which is profoundly unlikely, that none of the letters from that time have been found, (quite possible) or that none of them have anything particularly interesting to say. Whatever the reason it does mean that this aspect of his life is unrecorded in this collection, which is a gap. If I am being pedantic I would also say that this collection contained just a few too many letters from Orwell to his literary agent arranging details of publication, distribution, translation and so on – this aspect of his life as an author could have been illustrated just as clearly with fewer examples. But the scholarship of this collection is formidable, with detailed and clear footnotes to every letter, an extensive set of biographical notes of the main recipients of Orwell’s letters, every typo that was Orwell’s not the editor’s marked clearly and of course a detailed index. Even though I have read all the biographies of Orwell I still learnt a lot about his life and work from this collection. Just to offer one example, I previously thought of Jura as a remote and wild place, which it was, but assumed it was madness to decamp there with Orwell’s health so precarious and it being so hard to reach. But he only summered there, spending winters in the Canonbury Square flat in London that he retained the tenancy of (often letting others stay there) and the island had a mild climate. It also seems they ate better there than on the still rationed mainland, with access to fish, lobsters and crabs from the sea, rabbits and venison from the land, eggs and meat from the chickens they kept, and vegetables from the garden. It was also easier to keep warm on Jura compared to London, because there was plenty of natural fuel – peat and wood – available, compared to the capital where everything was scarce and rationed. It does seem rather idyllic and it is not surprising they had so many visitors, at one stage having to set up a tent in the garden to accommodate the overflow.
Davison enriches this collection enormously by interspersing letters from Orwell with those from others such as his childhood sweetheart Jacintha Buddicom. Most revealing are those from Eileen to her friend Norah. These letters are full of impish humour and provocation and were the basis of the 2023 book Wifedom. The author of Wifedom took everything Eileen says in these letters as gospel, when it is plain as anything that she is invariably joking, usually by way of comic exaggeration. Letters between Eileen and Orwell are few and far between. Obviously that is because husband and wife tend not need to write to another. Eileen’s last unsent letter to her husband (29/3/45) is heartbreakingly sad. She was a much more interesting and lively correspondent than Orwell, and the fact that her letters are often interrupted and written over several days, if not longer (instead of throwing away a mislaid draft she would resume writing with an apology for the delay) adds to their charm. The exercise of compiling a complete edition of Orwell’s letters is one that may never end – very recently more letters were discovered by relatives of his correspondents. Last year Darcy Moore, a great Orwell scholar, discovered another lost letter from 1942. I doubt it will be the last.
Sadly the editor of this collection, Peter Davison, who was also the editor of the twenty volume complete Orwell, died in 2022 – I do hope that the Orwell Society or his literary agents appoint someone to continue Davison’s work. The Society has introduced a Peter Davison award for Orwell scholarship, which I suppose goes some way towards this aim. While mentioning the Orwell Society I should also recommend this excellent review of the Collected Letters on their site.
The final year of Orwell’s life was spent a sanatorium and then a hospital where he seemed to have received little by way of actual medical treatment, spending the time just resting, surrounded by growing piles of books. Resting for Orwell still meant undertaking a lot of correspondence, as well as a little journalism and book reviewing. He obviously knew he was very seriously ill but at the same time held out hope for a recovery that might give him a few more years. He had lots of visitors, many of them members literary aristocracy and was clearly much loved – many people expressed concern for his health and the need to ‘do something’ to save him. Forty-six is a ridiculously early age to die, especially for a writer who in Animal Farm and 1984 had fully discovered their own voice. These two novels alone have sold over forty-one million copies. This achievement is not the end of the story. Earlier this month I was watching the television show Countdown. Someone used the word “unperson” without reference to Orwell even though he coined the word in 1984. This to me just emphasises (albeit in a very minor, incidental way), the extent to which Orwell’s thoughts and ideas have permeated Western culture and language; they are just now part of the way we think rather than something that needs to be referenced or explained. Sales of 1984 spike every time world events seem particularly Orwellian such as when Trump’s press spokesperson coined the phrase ‘alternative facts‘. That more than anything else was his contribution.
(If you say the title of this novel out loud (or in your head) does the line continue “now, entertainers”? i.e. the refrain from Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit? Or is it just me?)
Here We Are is set in the late 1950’s, and tells the story of three characters: Ronnie Deane, a stage magician, Jack Robins (stage name, Jack Robinson) a singer and comedian, and Evie, Ronnie’s assistant. Having been friends since doing National Service, Ronnie and Jack are performers in the summer season show on Brighton pier. Jack is the show’s main host, and secures a spot for Ronnie on the bill, encouraging him to get an assistant to provide some glamour to his act. Ronnie is a talented magician who evolves his act steadily with ever more sophisticated illusions. Jack is a literal ‘Jack the Lad‘ handsome and with a succession of young women on his arm. Evie joins Ronnie as his glamorous assistant.
Having established this context, the narrative then gives us the characters’ back stories. Ronnie was evacuated at the beginning of World War 2 from the London slums to a large house called in Oxfordshire. He loved it there and blossomed under the love and care of the Lawrences, a childless couple who came to treat him like their own son, the one they never had. His lifestyle improved dramatically, as did his self-confidence. He was taught magic by Mr Lawrence (stage name ‘Lorenzo’) and this becomes an passion for him.
We learn less about Jack and Evie’s background, perhaps because it is less important to the novel’s turning point. The narration jumps forward almost fifty years and picked up by Evie, now 75 years old, looking back on the events of the summer on the pier. We find out that although she was engaged to Ronnie that summer, becoming close as they worked together on the increasingly complex magic show, when he went to London to visit his dying mother she slept with Jack. Ronnie easily finds this out when he returns – she really makes no attempt to hide what happened. But there is no big explosion of anger from Ronnie, who continues to perform their act.
The summer season is coming to an end and Ronnie’s magic show is becoming ever more complex and sophisticated, attracting ever larger audiences. The reader is told that Evie has no idea how the illusions are performed, although the inner pedant in me would insist that magician’s assistant are a key part in performing most illusions. At the fateful final show Ronnie performs some breath-taking, unbelievable illusions, then disappears, never to be traced again. Jack marries Evie and goes on to have a very successful career in television and film. After Jack’s death Evie makes one final attempt to find Ronnie, travelling to Evergrene, the house in Oxfordshire where he was evacuated to, but it is abandoned and empty.
And that’s it. This is quite a slight (I could say flimsy) novel. The portrait of Ronnie as an evacuee, who found his life immeasurably improved by the experience, was interesting. The description of the dying days of the end of the pier show being overtaken by television and film has been done many times before – there were echoes of Archie Rice in the portrait of Jack for example. The novel’s key moment depends on the suggestion that Ronnie’s magic trick was more than an illusion, an act of genuine magic, almost supernatural, which was unnecessary. The nostalgia for a bygone age of simple post-war pleasures isn’t overdone. Evie has few regrets at the end of her life, looking back over the events of that summer in Brighton with a certain fondness, even if what happened to Ronnie is never resolved. These components were all individually fine, but the sum of the parts was underwhelming. I suspect in 12 months I won’t recall what happened to Ronnie and his friends, perhaps because in the end not much did.
I think most readers would expect a decapitation to feature at some point in a novel with the title A Severed Head. Murdoch plays with that expectation throughout the novel, giving us several false alarms. Early on, a passenger in a car puts their head out of the side window to help navigate through thick London fog, and “we proceeded for a while with our heads hanging out on opposite sides. Honor Klein’s body sagged and jolted beside me like a headless sack, and I could feel again the rough material of her coat grazing my hand. Great orange flares at Hyde Park Corner showed us the way into Knightsbridge, and by their light I stole a glance at my companion. I saw only her hunched shoulders;”
False alarm, Honor has not been beheaded by a passing bus. Later it is revealed that Honor, described by the narrator as moving ‘like the animation of a corpse”, owns a samurai sword, and has been trained in its use, which she demonstrates theatrically. Is Honor going to be this novel’s biblical Judith who in the Bible beheaded the Assyrian general Holofernes to save her people? But again, all is good, only a napkin is harmed in the display. Towards the end of the novel another character sends the narrator a box through the post. When he opens it he finds “A lot of dark stuff inside. I stared at it with a sort of puzzled revulsion, wondering what it was. I stood up and moved the box to the light to see it better. I felt I did not want to touch it. At last I did very gingerly touch it, and as I did so I realised it was human hair.” Worry not, this is not an early version of the final scene in Se7en. This is just hair, sent by a very troubled former lover as a sign of her psychological distress. Disappointingly, no head is ever actually severed from anyone’s shoulders. Instead the severed head is a metaphor. Honor Klein explains: “Because of what I am, and because of what you saw, I am a terrible object of fascination for you. I am a severed head, such as primitive tribes and old alchemists used to use, anointing it with oil and putting a morsel of gold on its tongue to make it utter prophecies. And who knows but that long acquaintance with a severed head might not lead to strange knowledge.”
But there are worse things than decapitation…
The novel revolves around the complex love lives of some appalling middle-class people in 1960’s London, Oxford and Cambridge. The novel is narrated by Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a 40-something wine merchant. Martin is married to Antonia and is having an affair with the much younger PhD student Georgie. Georgie is defined by her lack of catering and housekeeping skills which mark her out as an unsuitable partner for Martin in any long-term relationship.
One day out of the blue Antonia announces that she has been having an affair with her psychoanalyst (and their mutual friend), Palmer. This is conveyed as a piece of minor bad news, like a missed dental appointment or a head cold, nothing to get upset about. Martin at first refuses to accept this affair means the end of their marriage, but is very easily persuaded by Antonia and Palmer to behave gracefully and accept the new status quo. This decision is aided by Martin’s man-crush on Palmer.
Martin then visits his brother Alexander. Antonia has already written telling him about the divorce. Alexander is a shadowy character – we learn very little about him other than that he is a sculptor who has been working on a bust of Antonia (another severed head?) and that Martin believes, accurately as it turns out, that he always steals his girlfriends. At this point in the novel the final main character is introduced, the katana wielding Honor Klein, a lecturer in anthropology at Cambridge University, who comes to visit her half-brother, Palmer. Martin is unable to charm Honor and their relationship is at best uncomfortable. Honor seems to have no social skills and makes clear her dislike of Martin. She rapidly becomes his enemy by finding out about his affair with Georgie and revealing it to Antonia, who has the gall to act hurt. Honor also introduces Georgie to Alexander, which Martin feels threatened by.
Martin is a bully and a drunk, although of course he does not see himself as such. He describes himself as “a very tall, reasonably good-looking man. I used to be a good boxer, and passed when I was younger as a raffish, quarrelsome and violent fellow“. The choice of language here is arresting – to pass as a ‘raffish fellow’ is to fool people into believing you are such, even though you do not believe yourself to be so. This is in other words false modesty along the lines of ‘some people though I was gorgeous, but I couldn’t possibly comment’. But passing as violent and quarrelsome, and boasting of his boxing ability? You don’t need to ‘pass’ as violent, you either are or you aren’t. This is Martin telling us he is violent but believing it is part of his charm rather than a confession. He is also a pseudo-intellectual, writing a monograph on obscure historical events but never quite getting round to finishing it and of course a wine-snob.
Martin’s relationship with Honor deteriorates and he soon gets into a drunken physical fight with her in which she is strangely passive. He hits her (having done the same to Georgie earlier) and comes dangerously close to raping her. He apologises but confesses in the narration that this apology is insincere. Despite the violence and betrayal, Martin abruptly decides he is now madly in love with Honor. Of course he is. If he can be in love with Georgie and Antonia, what is to stop him falling for a third woman – this was the 1960’s after all? He follows her to Cambridge, breaks into her house, and discovers her in bed with Palmer. Yes, that Palmer, her half-brother. If anything the bewildering merry-go-round of partnerships, couplings and affairs now begins to accelerate, and many readers will have to resort to taking notes to keep track of who is sleeping with who. Antonia breaks things off with Palmer and returns to Martin. Alexander gets engaged to Georgie even though they have known each other only a few weeks. Georgie attempts to kill herself. Martin confesses his love to Honor who is not particularly interested in this news. Antonia confesses to a long-term and continuing affair with Alexander which was one of the few pairings left unannounced. At one point I began to fear for the family parrot. Only Rosemary, Martin’s sister, remains aloof from all this random coupling and uncoupling.
These are appalling people who never do a day’s work, drink like fish, and will sleep with anyone, while all the time presenting themselves as noble and sophisticated. Translate these relationships to a different class and they would appear utterly sordid. The characters all speak in sweeping abstractions which are meant to sound profound but to me were empty:
“Your love for me does not exist in the real world. Yes, it is love, I do not deny it. But not every love has a course to run, smooth or otherwise, and this love has no course at all . . . But that is remote from love and remote from ordinary life. As real people we do not exist for each other.”
“It was for me a moment of great peace. I did not know then that it was the last, the very last moment of peace, the end of the old innocent world, the final moment before I was plunged into the nightmare of which these ensuing pages tell the story.”
So what on earth was Murdoch thinking? Or to put it yet another way, what am I missing? I have read a lot of reviews on this novel online, and no-one seems to agree on this point. Some critics describe it as a satire – on 1960’s sexual mores I suppose, although in 1961, the year of its publication, the swinging sixties hadn’t really got going. Others point out the biographical elements of the novel, of which enough said. Some see it as a comedy, which if that’s right then the humour hasn’t aged well. I have also seen the novel compared to a Jacobean tragedy, but the elements of tragedy are largely missing, unfortunately. This is a consequence free environment in which no-one gets hurt seriously – even Georgie’s suicide attempt ends well. Perhaps the closest genre comparison is farce – Carry on Beheading?
Yet there is obviously considerable depth to the text, even if I was unable to see it clearly. For example Murdoch sprinkles the novel with references to the philosophies of the Far East, contrasting their ways of thinking with Western ideologies. She uses the characters’ clothing to portray their personalities and relationships in a manner that is far more detailed than just about any other twentieth-century writer I can think of. When we first are introduced to Georgie, Martin boasts of her eclectic and sexual appearance – she wears “peacock-blue stockings, barbarous necklaces and velvet pants and purple underwear and black openwork tights which drove me mad.” By the time she is introduced to Antonia and Palmer, she is transformed, wearing a “shabby brown short, blue pullover, and black stockings looking like a child”. Antonia on the other hand is defiantly flamboyant and sophisticated, wearing “a striped silk blouse and cinnamon coloured skirt….normally Antonia put on different clothes three or four times a day” (clearly someone with a lot of time on her hands!). Murdoch uses Martin’s recognition of Antonia’s clothing to also signal the varying distance of their relationship, so when he sees her for the first time in open association with Palmer she is wearing “a brown cashmere pullover and a string of pearls, neither of which I had seen before” and later at the meeting with Georgie “a dark green dress of light Italian wool which I had bought her in Rome”. Palmer is equally flamboyant in his choice of clothing. His dress of choice is a “cream coloured embroidered robe of Chinese silk” and more often than not he is naked underneath. Martin’s attraction to Palmer is always simmering near the surface of his focus. Alexander appears first in costume, a “creamy white smock, self consciously old-fashioned….dressed to represent a miller in an opera.” The one character whose clothing is never described, to any degree, is Honor. She remains a complete enigma, with only Martin’s repeated focus on her ‘Jewish’ facial characteristics as any sort of description (he writes about her “sallow Jewish mask,” “curving Jewish mouth”, “waxen Jewish face” and that “only the curve of her nostril and the curve of her mouth hinted, with a Jewish strength, a possible Jewish refinement) which he feels is important but it is hard to see why.
My point is that Murdoch spent a lot of time working on the detail of this element of the narrative, and I am sure similar points could be made about other aspects of the text. For me, that is some compensation for the simply irritating behaviour of the protagonists, but not enough. The review I finally found myself agreeing with was in the New York Times when the novel was first published (god bless the internet) which called it “clumsy and unconvincing”, which just about sums it up.
If you had to guess what a novel by tv’s lexicographer Susie Dent would be about I think most people would assume that it would be a) in the cosy crime genre, b) feature a main character who is a lexicographer, or a related profession, and c) involve word puzzles and clues that lead to the resolution of the mystery. And the author obviously hates to disappoint her audience, because that is exactly what she has produced. I was expecting the novel to be a lazy, genre-driven cash-in on the author’s public persona (of which there are many out there at the moment) but I am delighted to say it was so much better than that. There are still some predictable elements, of course, including the loving descriptions of academic Oxford, the word puzzles, and the short chapters that keep the pages turning. But these are more than compensated for by the high quality writing and the well constructed plot.
Set in Oxford and featuring a team of lexicographers working for the Clarendon English Dictionary, the setting and structure of Guilty by Definition also provides the author with plenty of opportunities to weave into the text anecdotes about the origins of words and phrases, keeping the fans of Countdown and Dictionary Corner satisfied. These word-related anecdotes are sometimes rather obviously shoe-horned into the narrative (often something about a word or phrase will just occur to the narrator and have to be explained) but I think Dent just about keeps on the right side of this not being irritating or distracting.
The plot follows Martha Thornhill, senior editor of the Clarendon English Dictionary. She and her team seems to have gloriously relaxed jobs tracing the origins of words and phrases. Also working for the CED but not part of Martha’s team is Jonathan Overton, a Shakespeare expert who has published widely on the bard’s coinages and who is a minor media celebrity. One day they receive a letter from an anonymous correspondent who signs themself ‘Chorus’. This letter contains a word puzzle, which when solves leads to the answer 2010, which is the year that Martha’s sister, Charlie, went missing. Thus begins a reopening of the investigation into Charlie’s disappearance. This moves along at a fair pace, with new developments and discoveries about Charlie’s past every few pages. Further letters and puzzles from Chorus move the action along every time the investigation begins to lose focus. It is revealed that Charlie was on the trail of a literary discovery, which as well as being hugely valuable would rewrite much of what we know about Shakespeare’s invention of new words. In lexicography terms this could be up there with the Rosetta Stone or the double helix structure of DNA.
Guilty by Definition is well plotted and well written. The final reveal of what happened to Charlie and what she had discovered hits exactly the right balance between not being too obvious but at the same time not too obscure. I was able to work out ‘whodunnit’ fairly early on, the list of possible suspects being quite small, but this didn’t spoilt the read for me in any way. The novel has lots of independent women characters who are not defined by their appearance or sexuality and who are not traditional stereotypes, which was a refreshing change from much genre fiction. The three main lexicographers, Safi, Martha and Alex form a strong team that would translate very well onto the television screen (with Oxford as a photogenic background) and I would be astonished if they do not reappear in further word-based mystery sequels. I look forward to them.
I must admit I am a little jealous of Oliver Lewis. I have pointed out in previous reviews of Orwell biographies that he was relentlessly nomadic, never living in the same place for more than a handful of years. I’ve also been to several of the places he lived – Marrakesh, Southwold, Paris, London, and nearby Wallington in Hertfordshire – but with the exception of the last location I have never made the effort to seek out the blue plaques recording where Orwell lived, however briefly. (Wallington is an exception to that rule, because apart from the Stores, Orwell’s house there, and the prototypes of Manor Farm, there is very little in the village at all). Lewis had the inspired idea of visiting as many of Orwell’s homes as possible, with the thought that they might individually or collectively tell us something about the man, his background, influences and experiences. I wish I had had the same idea.
Knowing where to draw the line in terms of the places Orwell ‘lived’ is not always straightforward. For example, did he ever live in Stockton-on-Tees? We know his wife Eileen’s family owned a house there and she and Richard (their adopted son) decamped there after they were bombed out of their London flat. But did Orwell visit or stay for any length of time? There are so far as I am aware no letters from him to anyone carrying this address. D J Taylor, author of one of the best biographies of Orwell, (Orwell, the New Life) says (page 432)
“The first of the V1 flying bombs, known as ‘doodlebugs’, had been launched across the channel on 13 June, a week after the Normandy landings. On 28 June one of them fell on Mortimer Crescent; no one was hurt, but the house was uninhabitable and would remain so for some time. Orwell and Eileen’s whereabouts for the next few months are far from certain. One temporary landlady may have been Inez Holden, at her new flat in George Street, Marylebone, although a note in Inez’s diary records their going to stay with the Dakins in Bristol. If so, this could only have been a short-term arrangement as Orwell was needed three days a week at Tribune. Eileen and Richard certainly spent some time at Greystone, the O’Shaughnessy family home twenty-five miles south of Newcastle, and there were short visits to Wallington…but the likelihood is that Orwell himself joined the vast floating population of displaced wartime Londoners with no fixed abode, moving on from one spare room or camp bed to another as the opportunity arose”.
I have quoted this at length to illustrate the point that the question of where Orwell ‘lived’ is often far from straightforward and until such times as letters from or to Orwell, or any other evidence emerges, will remain unclear. There is a similar issue with Orwell’s residence at the Stores in Wallington. He held the lease to this cottage from 1936 to 1947, but the plaque on the wall states he lived there from 1936 to 1940. Even during that period he spent six months in Spain, as recorded in Homage to Catalonia, six far less interesting months in a sanatorium in Kent and a further six months recuperating in Marrakesh. After 1940 he lived in various addresses in London and in 1946 he moved to Jura. The Stores were (from what I can tell) sub-let at various points, but the record also indicates he and Eileen, occasionally joined by friends, would spend some weekends at Wallington during the war. Does this mean he lived there then? (If so, the plaque would be far more complicated!) Probably not, but again the point is that the question of where this ultra-nomad lived at any one time is not straightforward, and eventually requires us to make judgment calls about these issues.
There are a few omissions from what is otherwise a comprehensive review of the many places Orwell lived. He attended Wellington College for a single term before going to Eton. St Cyprian’s School in Eastbourne, East Sussex where Orwell went to prep school for five years as a boarder, is mentioned but not visited, possibly because the building in which it was housed has since burned down, so there would be little to see. Having said that these were key formative years for Orwell, recorded in his essay Such, Such Were the Joys (which is a grimly ironic quote from Blake). Freys College, where he taught for a term in 1933, is also mentioned but not visited. Orwell seems to have spent quite a lot of time at his wife’s brother’s family home in Greenwich, which might have been worth visiting, and was certainly close enough. Any attempt to visit every location ever associated with Orwell is probably futile, but these all seemed easy enough locations to tick off and may have been worthwhile additions to this account.
There are a few errors here as well which are less forgivable. The chapter on the Blair’s early years back in the UK after India is entitled Henley-on-Thames, Berkshire, whereas Henley-on-Thames is in Oxfordshire, as the text makes clear. The error is important because it makes more sense of Orwell’s decision to be buried in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire – otherwise he had no particular association with this County, rather than it being the place of his early childhood. The description of Southwold as being “a small port clinging to the extremity of the East Anglian coastline” is technically correct, but misleading. Southwold is predominantly a Suffolk seaside town, pier and all, and the fact that as with all ports and seaside towns it is on the coast means the description of it ‘clinging’ to the coastline (rather than sloping gently down to the sea) is redundant.
I don’t think there is any doubt that we can learn more about an author by visiting the places where they lived. Orwell’s lack of interest in home comforts is summed-up vividly by the dilapidated cottage in Wallington, even if over the years it has been vastly improved, not least by the addition of a thatched roof and indoor plumbing and heating. Manor Farm just a short walk away conjures up images of the revolutionary animals of Animal Farm. I am sure the conditions in Burma could tell us a lot about Orwell’s time in the military police there. The wildness of Jura doesn’t seem to have changed a great deal since his time there in the 1940’s – anyone seeking out that remoteness and isolation must have wanted to escape something and will have paid little regard once again to the lack of home comforts.
Lewis makes some small but fascinating discoveries in the course of his journey: gravestones from the Limouzin family, Orwell’s mother’s side of the family, are found in a half-abandoned church in Burma; his measurements can still be seen in his tailor’s records in Southwold from when he ordered a suit almost 100 years ago; his name is still to be found in the visitors book in his neighbour’s house on Jura. Orwell left footprints everywhere, but at the same time he is elusive – famously, there is no known recording of his voice, which is extraordinary given that he worked in broadcasting for two years in the the 1940’s – and there are many small mysteries about his life which researchers are diligently chipping away at.
Lewis makes it clear in his introduction that this is not another biography, of which there are plenty, but it is not simply a travelogue either. It is a different way of looking at a remarkable life, and therefore a valuable contribution to the growing scholarship about the great man.
Nostromo, A Tale of the Seaboard, by Joseph Conrad, 1904
I came perilously close to abandoning Nostromo and it was only sheer bloody-mindedness that kept me going. This was a result of a combination of Conrad’s prose style and his poorly defined characters. I found the prose wooden and the characters spent far too much time pontificating about abstract concepts:
“Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates”
or
“There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.”
The novel’s cast of characters is wide, but many of them were often hard to differentiate from one another, especially given the frustrating practice of giving them multiple, interchangeable names (so for instance, the central character, Nostromo, is also known as Giovanni Battista Fidanza or Capataz de Cargadores). Conrad also adopts a narrative structure which eschews traditional chronology and tells some of the story in retrospect, some in the present. None of these techniques are objectively wrong or even particularly challenging, but Conrad’s execution of them is leaden. Although the novel is only 450 or so pages long it took me several weeks to read. You know you are struggling when you start to count the number of pages to go, and 20 pages read was a good day. To what extent this is my failure as a reader and Conrad’s as an author I cannot be sure.
The first two hundred pages (almost half the novel) are a meandering build-up to the point in the story at which the action properly begins, revolving around the struggle over ownership and control of a silver mine in the fictional South American country of Costaguana. Costaguana is an archetypal South America banana republic, with a long history of political instability. Charles Gould owns Costaguana’s primary natural asset, a silver mine, near the port of Sulaco. Revolutionary force invade Sulaco with the aim of capturing the mine. Nostromo, the head longshoreman of the port, escapes with the mine’s recently retrieved cargo of silver. Nostromo, an Italian expatriate, is a leading figure in Sulaco, with influence among the wealthy Europeans who control much of the city, but also widespread support from the working people of the town. Accompanied by a journalist, Martin Decoud, Nostromo smuggles the silver out of Sulaco, but is only able to make it as far as a small island at the head of the harbour, where he and Decoud hide the silver. The revolutionaries and the resident townspeople all believe the silver has been lost at sea and after Nostromo swims back to shore he does nothing to make them think otherwise. He avoids capture by the revolutionaries and rides out to seek help from the Government forces.
A jump forward in time shows the reader that Nostromo’s intervention has led to the creation of the independent state of Sulaco, which is now prospering. He has kept the location of the silver a secret. His partner, Decoud, left stranded on the island with only the silver for company, eventually lost his mind and drowned himself weighed down with some of the silver ingots. Over time Nostromo slowly grows rich, ostensibly because of his successful trading, but mainly because he collects the silver a little at a time so as to not arouse suspicion. But wealth does not bring happiness. Several years pass, and the independent Government decides to construct a lighthouse on Great Isabel. Nostromo fears this will lead to the remaining silver being discovered, but there is little he can do other than keep a close eye on the construction. He recommends an old friend, the widower Giorgio Viola, as the lighthouse keeper. The novel concludes dramatically with the resolution of these plot lines, but I won’t give away the ending.
I have read that Nostromo was originally conceived as a short-story, but over time the novel expanded in scale and scope. This could have had something to do with the publication in instalments of course, but also explains its rambling unfocussed structure. Conrad apparently found writing it almost as difficult as I found reading it, saying “it is like a kind of tomb which is also hell where one must write, write, write.” Nostromo was not very popular or successful when it was first published, with many finding the plotting byzantine and over-elaborate. Online you can find many people praising the novel as the best ever written, but this is surely hyperbole. When I did eventually finish it was with more of a sense of relief than anything else.
In his summary of The Proof of My Innocence, Jonathan Coe tells us that ” I felt like writing something contemporary, ironic and harder-edged. I wanted to return, if possible, to the tone of What a Carve Up!, with some kind of metatextual crime story which would also reflect on the current political situation.” If we judge the novel by these criteria, then I think that while certainly the metatextual crime story box can definitely be ticked, I would struggle to describe this as ironic or harder-edged. I will try to explain why in this review, but the good news is that the lack of a hard-edge is not a serious problem nor does it detract from the overall enjoyability of the novel.
Coe’s well-established method is to use contemporary real-life political events as a backdrop to his stories. The Proof of My Innocence follows this pattern by being set in the tumultuous period of Liz Truss’s premiership in the autumn of 2022. It opens with her election and ends with her resignation just seven weeks later, the shortest term of office of a British Prime Minister by some considerable distance.
The novel opens with a woman detective following a suspect on a train. Just as she is about to arrest him she is interrupted by a See It Say It Sorted announcement. Being infuriated by these announcements and then making a plot point out of them, is the kind of thing an observational stand-up comedian might ‘notice’, and pretend to get worked up about, when they really aren’t that obtrusive. This scene is then swiftly followed by an apparently unrelated story-line in which Phyl, who has recently graduated from university, works in a minimum wage job at a sushi bar at Heathrow Airport. She lives with her parents and misses the freedom of university life. Phyl watches old episodes of Friends as a means of reducing the anxiety caused by the lack of direction in her post-graduate life. The friction between millennials and their Boomer parents is one of the sources of humour in the novel. Coe is unquestionably one of the latter and I am not sure his portrait of the younger generation is entirely accurate, but the Friends obsession (or insert comedy programme of your choice – another favourite is the US version of The Office) seemed spot on.
The arrival of a guest disrupts the family dynamic. Christopher Swann, a friend from her parents’ time at Cambridge University in the 80’s, writes a blog on contemporary political issues. He is planning on attending TruCon, a conference organised by a dubious right-wing group pressure group. The conference is being held at a nearby stately home, Wetherby Hall. Chris is joined by his adopted daughter, Rashida, who quickly bonds with Phyl over a shared frustrating experience with the lifts at terminal 5. Phyl is toying with the idea of writing a novel, and in discussion with Rashida about this idea she jots down three possible genres for her work: cosy crime, dark academia (such the The Secret History) and auto-fiction. The bulk of the remainder of the novel is written in the form of these three genres. The reader can’t immediately tell whether these are fictions written by Phyl or by Coe, although this is eventually revealed.
The cosy crime third of the story is set at Wetherby Hall, the venue for the TruCon conference, which opens on the day Liz Truss becomes prime minister. This section opens with a parody of this genre which is somewhat over the top:
“Christopher Swann carefully steered his car between the yellowing drystone walls of the quaint old bridge that carried the road over the brook….Just a few hundred yards after crossing the brook he entered the village of \Wetherby Pond itself. At the sound of his engine (even though he was driving a quiet, hybrid model) the ducks on the eponymous body of water took flight with a volley of complaining quacks. Christopher followed the road around the edge of the pond, his eyes taking in every unlikely detail of the old post office, the red telephone box standing outside the village shop, the row of trimly thatched cottages and an elderly resident reading a copy of the Times while sitting on a weathered oak bench.”
I genuinely can’t tell if this is deliberately bad genre writing or not, but I will give Coe the benefit of the doubt and assume it is part of the parody. I particularly liked the description of his Swann’s ‘eyes’ taking in every detail as if any other body part could have fulfilled the same function! Swann is treated as an outsider by most conference delegates, which of course he very much is. Rather than keeping a low profile he goes out of his way to antagonise the various right-wingers present, all of whom feel jubilant at Truss’s appointment, feeling this is their moment. The conference is interrupted by the news of Queen Elizabeth 2nd’s death, quickly followed by Christopher’s brutal murder. Coe is treading a fine line here – he is incorporating all the cosy crime tropes he can think of – the rural setting, a locked room mystery, secret passages, a cryptic note from the victim, etc etc – and at the same time telling the underlying story of Swann’s forty-year pursuit of the far right in the UK and their plans for the day they finally take power, which seems to have arrived.
The next section of the story is told as an example of the ‘dark academia’ genre and is based around a manuscript memoir of one of Swann’s friends at university in the 1980’s. This section continues the delicate balancing act between parody – the author’s memories of his days at Cambridge in the 80’s include love affairs, glamorous young women, hidden identities, secret societies and a sinister conspiracy to support the Thatcher Government – and advancing the narrative, leaving clues about the present-day mystery. The final section written as auto-fiction completes the murder mystery element of the novel but leaves some loose ends dangling. These are picked up in what is in effect the novel’s postscript, which reveals that much of the preceding story has been a fiction within the fiction – hence the sound of the metatextual box being ticked.
The Proof of My Innocence is full of things that the reader is encouraged to notice for themselves, the novelists equivalent of Easter eggs. Clues to the identify of the murder form part of these things we are encouraged to notice, but there’s much more – references to contemporary culture, running jokes (the laboured joke about whether an Cambridge don had a harpsichord or a clavichord in his rooms is repeated about a dozen times) wordplay, and so on. Each time we spot one of these we get a small hit of dopamine – ‘clever me!’ – that keeps us reading. And The Proof of My Innocence was eminently readable – I got through it in just over two days. By way of example, the murder mystery element of the story has the victim surviving his attack just long enough to write a few cryptic symbols before expiring (this trope goes back to at least A Study in Scarlet. The message is “r 8 / 2.” Is this a reference to someone staying in room 8 (2)? Or something happening on 8th February? Or possibly even something happening on 2nd August (those pesky Americans with their different conventions for writing dates). Or something else entirely? (Clue, it’s something else entirely). Earlier a pub Swann visits is called theFresh Lettuce, a wry reference to the tabloid joke that haunted (haunts?) Truss as to whether her premiership would last longer than a lettuce (it didn’t). I was patting myself on the back when I spotted the fact that a plot point would revolve around a novel within the novel called My Innocence and changes made to the proof copy (hence, the Proof of My Innocence, a clever play on words). Is the enjoyment of these ‘noticeables’ a feature of the genres Coe parodies, or of his writing more generally?
Sadly, the novel slightly fizzles out. The big conspiracy Swann is planning to expose, the far-right’s plan to privatise the NHS, never sees the light of day. A memory stick with details of the plan is stolen and back up copies are quietly forgotten after his death. An alternative right-wing plan revealed within the 1980’s memoir, to defeat a strike by the NUM, is also forgotten (this was hardly a secret plan, more a statement of the obvious). Coe’s portrait of the far-right of British politics, and the extent to which it is influenced by the American right, is usually spot on, but the absence of any reference to Farage or Reform was puzzling. Wagstaff, a Tory politician who plays the role of villain in the novel, is the nearest we come to a portrait of Farage, but he is a Cambridge graduate and a life-long Tory, so not anywhere near an equivalent. Reform need the Jonathan Coe treatment. Once the meta-fictions end and the novel switches to the principal storyline we find out that the murder-mystery narratives were Phyl’s attempts at making sense of Swann’s death in a car crash before he even reached the conference. Not a particularly sensitive way of processing someone’s death I would have thought.
Coe is an author I have been meaning to read for some time. He is quite prolific having published 15 novels, roughly one every three years. His writing style is engaging and accessible. So I will definitely be reading more of his work in future. I enjoyed TheProof of My Innocence and look forward to reading Coe’s thoughts on Starmer’s Labour.
England, 1939. Grace Allingham, a young, affluent Englishwoman is engaged to be married to Hughie. But when she meets Charles-Edouard de Valhubert, a French Air Force officer, she is swept off her feet, Hughie is dumped unceremoniously and Grace and Charles-Edouard quickly marry. After a brief honeymoon he returns to the war, leaving Grace pregnant but content to wait out the months and years of war for his return. Seven years pass, and when he finally returns to England it is to collect his wife, son and the family nanny and take them back to France, to finally begin married life.
Life in France is not without its challenges. The principal characters of the novel, with the exception of the nannies who look after the children before they are sent off to boarding school, are all upper class if not aristocratic, independently wealthy, who don’t have to work, have multiple houses, staff and spend their summers in Italy. But their relationships are a mess. The comedy of the novel derives largely from stereotypes about English and French aristocrats and their very different lifestyles. The main difference between the countries is their attitude towards infidelity. The French have a ‘laissez-faire’ approach, where affairs are seen as a private matter rather than a moral failure, and even accepted as part of long-term relationships. Charles-Edouard’s problem is that he is a enthusiastic adulterer who seems untroubled by being caught in the act. Eventually Grace realises he is never going to change. She returns to England and divorces him. He is remarkably untroubled by this, continuing with his long-term affairs, confident that his wife will sooner or later see sense and return to him.
As Charles-Edouard is a man-child driven by his libido above all else, it is hardly surprising that his son, Sigi, easily outwits him. Sigi likes his parents being separated – it means that all the potential new husbands and wives in their lives have to seek his approval, and approval means treats. He is spoilt rotten and frustrates Charles-Edouard’s lacklustre attempts to woo his wife into returning to France by simply not delivering his messages. Potential suitors for his mother’s newly available hand are equally easily disposed of given Sigi’s veto over their selection. Balls are attended, afternoon tea is drunk, French properties left unlooted by the Nazis are toured, and of course assignations are conducted more or less in the open. The comedy is dated, and I suspect it felt so even in the early 1950’s when the novel was first published, being more suited to the carefree times of the 20’s and 30’s. I even wonder whether this might have been a returned-to manuscript from the 30’s, updated with scant details of the slightly longer second world war?
The only indication we are in post-war Europe is a short discussion on homosexuality. Dexter, an obnoxious American, (it is almost a given that Americans in novels of this kind are obnoxious) is ranting about the link between homosexuality, which he calls ‘perversion’, and communism. Hughie, who by this point in the novel has overcome his break-up with Grace and is courting Albertine, who is one of Charles-Edouard’s mistresses. replies “But, old thing, they’re not sick. They just happen to like boys better than girls. You can’t blame them for that, it’s awfully inconvenient, and they’d give anything to be different if they could…I probably know more about them than you, having been at Eton and Oxford“. The revelation towards the end of the novel, that Dexter was a Russian spy and life-long communist, further undermines his credibility as a judge of public morality. Other than this brief defence of ‘perversion’ the social attitudes prevalent throughout the novel are those of earlier decades, when the Mitford’s had some relevance beyond historians of English class identities.
The Reading Bug 