My local Waterstone’s (a UK bookstore, in case you were wondering) runs a monthly competition asking readers to identify four books from their opening lines. To make it easier the novelists’ initials are also given. Each month there is a different genre, and the lines this month are from “Early Dystopian Fiction”. The novels’ opening lines are:

a) “The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.” (HGW)

Not one to break sweat over I think you would agree.

b) “Someone must have been spreading lies about Josef K, for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning” (FK)

A fantastic opening line, which I think is even better when the earlier translation for “spreading lies” “traduced” is used.

c) “The handsome dining room of the Hotel Wessex, with its gilded plaster shields and the mural depicting the Green Mountains, had been reserved for the Ladies’ Night Dinner of the Fort Beulah Rotary Club.” (SL)

This line has really grown on me – the accumulated detail of the small-town America it describes seems so deceptively stable and secure.

d) “COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.” (AH)

Once you work out the initials the novel will come to you quickly enough.

My initial impression was that this selection stretches if not abuses the term ‘dystopian fiction’. Sure it has a fairly flexible definition, but are these novels really dystopias?

Dystopian fiction imagines an world in which society is grim and frightening. By that definition The Time Machine certainly meets the criteria. The future in Wells’ novel is one in which man has degenerated into two distinct species, one predating the other.

Kafka is hard to align to a specific genre, but I have never considered The Trial (b) as dystopian. Nightmarish without doubt, but far too strongly rooted in the real world. The Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here, (c) which by coincidence I read and reviewed earlier this month, is set in the immediate future and again is firmly fixed in the real world of American and European politics – unlike say the 2004 Philip Roth novel The Plot Against America which imagines an alternative USA in which the aviator, anti-semite and proto-fascist Charles Lindbergh is elected President, which is more speculative despite the obvious parallels with the Lewis novel.

Finally I am sure you will have worked out that (d) is from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, probably the only purely dystopian novel here, although they have cheated and given the end of the opening sentence only rather than the whole thing, (“A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State’s motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.” Two sentences, I know) presumably on the basis that giving just the first sentence it would have made it much too hard, and the first two sentences too easy.

I don’t think we need to try and squeeze novels into constricting boxes with genre labels on them and I appreciate the quiz was just a bit of fun. If it gets people reading these books then great.

For what it is worth my four dystopian novels would have been:

“It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen” (GO).

Easy I know, but quite possibly one of the greatest opening lines in literature, full stop.

“What’s it going to be then, eh?’ That was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.” (AB)

Not getting any harder are they?

My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. (KI)

This one I think is genuinely tricky but I did review it quite recently.

“All this happened, more or less” (KV)

Good luck! What would be your choices?

It Can’t Happen Here was Lewis’s response to the much-repeated political assertion of the novel’s title, which in turn was a common reaction to the rise of fascism in Europe and the parallel rise of American demagogues. Lewis believed that American complacency about the robustness of its constitution and political institutions was dangerous and issued this novel as a wake-up call.

Set in the (then) very near future, the novel sees charismatic Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, elected President of the United States on a brazenly populist platform. Ostensibly a Democrat, Windrip is uninterested in party politics. He freely promises things he knows he cannot deliver, such as $5,000 a year for each citizen. On election he declares an emergency and effectively suspends the constitution. Following the rapid take-over of all institutions, an approach modelled on that used by the Nazis in 1933, Windrip outlaws dissent, incarcerates his political enemies in concentration camps, and trains and arms a paramilitary force to act as his enforcers. He curtails women and minority rights and removes any opposition by individual states by dividing the country into administrative sectors managed by “Corpo” authorities. The surviving opposition members flee to Canada where a Government in exile is formed.

The events of the novel are told from the perspective of Doremus Jessup, a small-town newspaper editor. Jessup is a familiar archetype – a paternal figure, well-known and respected in his community in Vermont, near the border with Canada. He is a liberal figure instinctively sceptical of the easy solutions offered by Windrup, but equally questioning the communist ideas of a local trade union activist. He is an early prototype of Atticus Finch, determined to do the right thing even at a huge personal cost. He bravely prints an editorial critical of the new President, which quickly leads to him being arrested and his paper seized by the authorities. His son-in-law attempts to intercede on his behalf and is summarily executed, in one of the novel’s most brutal and unsettling scenes.

Jessup’s joins and begins to organise the resistance, printing in secret the “Vermont Vigilance”. But it is only a matter of time before his role is exposed and he is thrown into a concentration camp, beaten and tortured along with many of his friends and companions. Lewis cleverly includes several extracts from articles by European journalists who claim to have inspected these camps and found them harmless centres for the unemployed and homeless, re-education camps, in a chilling echo of the white-washing of the Nazis camps in Germany. He further anchors his narrative in the recent American political landscape by introducing characters from the real world.

Shad Ledue, the local district commissioner and Jessup’s former hired man, is a menacing threat throughout the novel. He resents his employer and menaces his daughter Sissy. However the women in this novel are not just passive victims. She discovers evidence of his corruption and exposes him, leading to his imprisonment in the same camp as her father, where the other inmates waste no time in murdering him. Jessup’s other daughter takes revenge on her husband’s executioner by crashing into his plane in mid-flight.

Windrup’s administration crumbles and he is deposed by his deputy, who in turn doesn’t last long. The novel closes with America in chaos but with the opposition to the Corpo-Government fighting back and Jessup still doing what he can to organise resistance.

In marketing the novel in 2019 the publishers are understandably emphasising the parallels between Windrup and Trump, a populist idiot, “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected.” While their personal qualities are indeed similar, Trump has not yet suspended the Supreme Court, arrested members of Congress or abolished states. (I’m sure he has considered all of these at one point or another!) The point is that It Can’t Happen Here was a response to the rise of 1930’s fascism, and we aren’t quite there yet in the 21^st Century, however scary some of the parallels might be.   Hopefully I won’t look back on this review one day when President for Life Trump is inaugurated, and wonder how I could have been so complacent.

It is incredibly hard to choose a favourite Discworld novel. It’s like choosing a favourite ice-cream (what, only one?!). But if forced to choose it might well be Men at Arms. I have a suspicion I have said the same thing about previous novels in the Discworld series, but I am too lazy to go back and check, and it wouldn’t invalidate the choice in any event.

Men at Arms opens with Edward D’Eath, an assassin becoming convinced that the restoration of the monarchy will cure Ankh-Morpork of its various problems, and restore his family to their rightful place in its heirarchy. He discovers after a suspiciously brief and cursory amount of research that Corporal Carrot Ironfoundersson, recent recruit to the City Watch, is the rightful heir to the AM throne. He charts a course for the restoration of the monarchy by plotting to make the Patriarch deeply unpopular, assuming that the populace will want the intervention of a fairy-tale king to right all the wrongs.

You might reasonably expect this plot line to be central to the novel, but it dwindles away rather quickly, or rather fades into the background, and only comes back when ends need tidying away. I think this is because Pratchett’s real interest is in the men and women of the Watch. Sam Vimes is preparing for his marriage to Sybil and his subsequent retirement from police work, while at the same time dealing with the new recruits to the Watch: Cuddy (dwarf), Detritus (troll), and Angua (female, and we soon discover, also a werewolf). Several murders follow swiftly on the back of D’Eath’s discovery of Carrot’s ancestry, and a standard police procedural begins to unfold, albeit in the bizarre and dangerous setting of Ankh-Morpork. Vimes eventually works out from a trail of clues that D‘Eath has stolen a gun (‘gonne’), Discworld’s first firearm, from the Assassins’ Guild. This being Discworld, this is no ordinary gun – it seems to have a personality all of its own. The investigation’s conclusion is revealed with a flair that suggests Pratchett could have made a lively writing detective novels had he ever tired of Discworld.

So while Vimes and Sybil are eventually married, Vimes’ reluctant plans to retire are foiled as he is appointed Commander of the Watch, to all intents and purposes his old job with a new rank. The temporary changes to the Watch that Vimes and Carrot have improvised during the course of the investigation are made permanent, and by the end of the novel it is on the path to becoming the formidable force that keeps the peace in the world’s most anarchic city.

The debate about the best segment of Discworld novels and the best place to start will always crop up whenever Pratchett fans convene, and of course it doesn’t have a right answer, but if you haven’t read Pratchett before and are worried that the novels might be a little childish (they are, but in the best possible way) then Men at Arms might be the key to a lifetime of wonderful novels.

Long-term readers of this blog, if there is such a thing, will know of my futile quest to find a novel by Stella Gibbons that contains a scintilla of the wit and wisdom of Cold Comfort Farm. I keep buying the lovely Vintage reprints, knowing that it’s not going to happen, but each time hoping to be wrong.

But I’m not. This novel, like all the rest, shows glimpses of promise but would probably not have been printed without the huge affection everyone feels for CCF.

This is standard-fare Gibbons. A sensible, down-to-earth heroine in her late teens or early twenties, in the Flora Poste mould, comes into contact with a group of rather louche bohemians, who are gently poked fun at, with a lot less if any of the suppressed anger and contempt that characterises “Conference at Cold Comfort Farm”.

(‘Has Benedict a beard?’

‘Not so far,’ said Nell cautiously, ‘but they do tend to grow them suddenly, you know.’)

Our heroine, Nell Sely, is uprooted from her comfortable family life when her father, a Church of England vicar, loses his faith. The family moves to a flat in Hampstead provided free of charge by her generous but unappreciated aunt, a nascent radio personality. Said aunt gets her a job as a typist but Nell gives it all up for her remarkably modest dream, a waitress job at The Primula tea rooms. At the same time she falls inexplicably for her cousin John, a scruffy and mildly comic figure who thinks of himself as an artist, but is (depending on how you react to men of this ilk) a privileged, patronising fool or a charming free-spirit. After a lot of tea being drunk and minor incidents to keep the pages turning, the novel fizzles out inconclusively. Nell gets her teashop but not her man, John being called up for National Service after rather pathetically trying to avoid it by hiding from the police (who were sent out to enforce call-ups) in a little old lady’s cottage next door to the family apartment.

This is gentle observational comedy where the interest level never really ticks above medium. We don’t really care what happens to these people – they aren’t engaging or interesting enough. Although Gibbons evokes the grimness and griminess of 1950’s London wonderfully, the plot is paper thin, little happens, and an attempt to inject a little drama as the novel wanders to an ending falls flat. The humour can at times be diverting, even though this world seems very alien from the other side of the millennium, where the worst thing that can happen is for someone to lose their faith or be called up into the Army and where sex is only hinted at as something that only bad girls do.

I won’t stop reading Gibbons, but I will continue to do so with a sense of melancholy that each novel isn’t Cold Comfort Farm, and a sense of delight that at least Cold Comfort is!

James O’Brien is that rarity, a progressive talk radio host. While most of his fellow talkshow hosts seem to actively encourage people to spill their prejudices, O’Brien confronts them. His technique and reasons for doing so are the heart of this book – it’s not really a handbook for being right (I think the structure of the title is self-consciously copying Caitlin Moran’s ‘How to be a Woman‘ and similar works) more a series of essays about current affairs and controversial issues, illustrated by extensive extracts from O’Brien’s many conversations with right-wing callers.

As you would expect, Brexit is front and centre of the book, together with the closely related issue of immigration to the UK. O’Brien cleverly unpicks the prejudices of his callers, exposing their logical fallacies, lack of understanding of the issues, and his command of the facts. Whether he is ever bested in argument – it is what he does for a living after all, and has plenty of time to choose and prepare his field of battle – we don’t learn, I doubt it.

How to be Right is both the Waterstones and WH Smith’s non-fiction book of the month for June (2019), and not surprisingly is selling very well. How to explain the popularity of this book? The sub-title provides a clue – How to be Right – in a World gone Wrong. There is unquestionably an appetite for answers to the question of why the world feels to many people as if it is going wrong, and specifically as if years of progress in which civil and human rights have been taken forward have all of a sudden started to go backwards. We see this most vividly in the USA where women’s productive rights are under open attack, although best not to forget that one of the allegedly moderate candidates in the campaign for the leadership of the Conservative Party underway right now is in favour of more than halving the period within which abortions can be performed.

So the world feels as if it has gone wrong, and people are hungry for answers as to why, and what can be done about it. Which is where O’Brien’s book falls short. Because while it is excellent at pointing out, often using their own words, the weaknesses in the arguments of racists, homophobes and Brexiteers, O’Brien hasn’t any constructive alternative, other than not being racist, homophobic, and staying in the EU. I am aware I am being very unfair here. First, there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with arguing that the best reaction to racism is not being racist, and so on. Although I suspect that few people listening to his programme or reading his book will have said “you know what, I am being a bit of an idiot, James is right, and I will renounce my former unpleasant and regressive attitudes”. It would be nice if they did of course. The other reason for considering this argument as unfair is that O’Brien makes no claims about his ability to articulate a vision for a better world. His book is simply a handbook for winning arguments with idiots, not a manifesto.

O’Brien has done his homework. He has taken time to read all the relevant background issues and understand the difference (for example) between the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. He knows his stuff, and is able to deploy lots of facts and figures to win his case. Would I have enjoyed this book a fraction as much if O’Brien had been a persuasive, charming, well-informed conservative? I doubt it, which means I am still stuck in the progressive Remain echo-chamber. But at least I am better informed than I was before I learned how to be right.

This is an entertaining and straightforward read. O’Brien seems a nice bloke, and he is on the side of the angels. If you want to see how he does it, recommended.