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Book review

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry, 2024

Enlightenment is very recognisably a Sarah Perry novel. It contains many of the same elements and themes of her earlier novels, The Essex Serpent and Melmoth* although it is probably her most autobiographical novel to date.

It opens in the winter of 1997 in the Essex town of Aldleigh, a thinly disguised version of Chelmsford where Perry grew up. Thomas Hart writes a column for the local newspaper and attends Bethesda, a strict Calvinist church of the kind that somehow survives into the present day in small pockets of Essex. Hart is gay but keeps his private life private, knowing it would be frowned upon by the unforgiving people of Bethesda. When his sexuality is eventually ‘exposed’ he is told that he is “an affront to God” and effectively expelled from the congregation.

The chapel is next to Lowlands House, a crumbling stately home and park, slowly being restored by the local museum. Potters Field, an area of scrub and wasteland is also adjacent to the chapel and provides a metaphorical counterpoint to its order and structure.

One day James Bower, curator of the local museum, writes to Thomas about some correspondence that has been found during the renovations of Lowlands House. James thinks the letters might be a clue to the local legend of the Ghost of Lowlands, who he identifies as Maria Vaduva, an elusive nineteenth-century resident of Lowlands. The pursuit for the mysterious Maria and the truth about what she discovered in the night’s sky forms the central narrative of the novel.

Thomas is also an amateur astronomer and the link he shares with Maria drives him to discover her story, scattered as it is through the novel in the form of long-lost letters, some hidden in the fabric of Lowlands, others in private papers in the museum. The other main character in the novel is Grace Macauley, the pastor’s daughter, who when the novel opens is about to turn 18. Thomas feels paternal towards Grace and one thing keeping him in Bethesda and Aldleigh is his determination to watch over her. Grace starts a romantic relationship with Nathan, a local lad not associated with the church, but Thomas sabotages their friendship, an act for which he is never fully forgiven.

Enlightenment is slow-paced and luxurious and at times almost Dickensian. The sense of place is vivid, no doubt in part due to the autobiographical elements of the story.

“Monday: late winter, bad weather. The River Alder, fattened by continuous rain, went in spate through Aldleigh and beyond it, taking carp and pike and pages torn from pornographic magazines past war memor­ials and pubs and new industrial estates, down to the mouth of the Blackwater and on in due course to the sea. Toppled shopping trolleys glistened on the riverbank; so also did unwanted wedding rings, and beer cans, and coins struck by empires in the years of their decline. Herons paced like white­coated orderlies in the muddy reeds; and at half past four a fisherman caught a cup untouched since the ink was wet on The Battle of Maldon, spat twice, and threw it back. 

Late winter, bad weather: the town oppressed by cloud as low as a coffin lid. A place spoken of in passing, if at all: nei­ther Boudicca nor Wat Tyler had given it a second glance when they took their vengeances to London; and war had reached it only as an afterthought, when a solitary Junkers discharged the last of its ordnance and extinguished four souls without notice.” 

The novel clearly owes a significant debt to A S Byatt’s Possession, but I didn’t find that at all problematic. Some novels are like other novels, and draw inspiration from one another, but that doesn’t mean they are derivative.

Many book bloggers structure their posts around categories such as publication data, information about the author, a plot summary and so on. I’ve never been organised enough to do this, but if I were ever to do so one category I would include would be “How easy was the novel/text to read?” Authors can make their texts easier to read in lots of ways: very short chapters and a large font is the approach adopted by writers such as Richard Osman for example. But of course the reader can make things difficult for themselves – reading late at night, leaving large gaps between each reading session so remembering what is happening gets tricky, and so on. I found Enlightenment a little hard to read. The narrative progression is slow and the events that do happen are often predictable. Some plot devices, such as the finding of very old letters in the fabric of Lowlands House, are a bit too convenient. We were never not going to find out what happens to Maria. Thomas is not a compelling character – he is very introspective and reserved – and while Grace is a more interesting character her life proves aimless until she is able to be reunited, temporarily, with Nathan.

I enjoyed Enlightenment but I can’t resist the feeling that the author’s best novel is still to come.

*Perry also wrote After Me Comes the Flood (2014) which I have yet to read.

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry, 2024

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Book review

We Solve Murders, by Richard Osman, 2024

I think it would have been a reasonable assumption that in moving away from The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman was going to try something a bit different. He strongly implies as much in the acknowledgements to the fourth book in the series. Yet while We Solve Murders superficially inhabits a totally different world from the TMC series, if you scratch the surface we are right back in Coopers Chase.

We Solve Murders introduces the reader to Amy Wheeler, a bodyguard to the rich and famous. Amy is seriously hard-core, totally unafraid of the dangerous life and death situations she regularly finds herself in. She has a long-distance relationship with her husband, who plays only a very minor role in the book, but seems much closer to her father-in-law, retired copper and widower Steve. Steve loves his quiet life – pub, crossword, and chatting to his late wife – and is very reluctant to be pulled away from this retirement when Amy calls for his help. Amy’s client, Rosie D’Antonio, the world’s second most successful novelist forms the unlikely third wheel of this team as they career around the world trying to do what the novel’s title promises they will – solve murders.

Because someone has been killing influencers – young naïve people with small social media followings who travel to exotic locations to promote brands that mysteriously don’t seem to actually exist. This isn’t really one of the novel’s puzzles – we are told by the novel’s criminal mastermind who narrates occasional chapters that these killings are a retaliation for when his money smuggling operation is called into question. While the use of gullible and well-meaning influencers to unwittingly move money around the world is an innovative idea, I am not sure that’s how money smuggling really works anymore, is it? Surely it’s moved around online nowadays? Not that I claim any expertise in this issue I hasten to add. Amy is set up as the fall guy for the murders, which is a really silly choice as she is not going to allow this to happen without putting up a ferocious fight.

While the novel is set in several exotic locations – a private island off the coast of South Carolina, St Lucia, Dubai, and Dublin (!) – there’s no real sense of place in any of them. They could have been anywhere. I had to wonder whether these locations were chosen more for the inevitable film adaptation than the narrative? There’s also no really sense of peril – Amy, Steve and Rosie are held at gun-point and shot at more than once, but I didn’t for a second think they were going to die. Neither did they if the way they respond is to be believed – plot armour is one thing, but characters behaving as if they know they have plot armour is another!

Rosie is a source of much of the novel’s slapstick comedy – she is an archetypical randy pensioner, and being incredibly rich she can conveniently summon up private jets and helicopters at a moment’s notice. She has a sense of adventure which means she can be extremely reckless, in counterpoint to Steve’s deeply conservative instincts. He always yearns to be back home with his cat, Trouble. The novel’s ending is both predictable and to be honest not that interesting – the exposure of the bad guy’s identity is very much a ‘so what?’ moment. But that’s missing the point, because this is cosy crime after all, however badly disguised as a thriller, and it’s the gentle humour that keeps the pages turning, not any sense of adventure. One of the novel’s climactic scenes happens at a pub quiz, which tells you all you really need to know.

The hard-back edition of this novel has a strangely neutral design – it’s definitely moved away from the distinctive Thursday Murder Club ‘branding’ – but to where? The author’s name dominates the front cover, and the portrait of Trouble is the only real ornamentation on an otherwise stark black and red design. I think it reflects some uncertainty on the part of the publishers – whether to market the novel as ‘more of the same’ (the text “Best selling author of the Thursday Murder Club” appears above the title) or a new direction for the author. I can’t blame Osman for staying close to what has been a hugely successful and rewarding formula for him. It may not seem like it but I did enjoy reading We Solve Murders despite my reservations, but I wasn’t challenged by it in any way. Osman is by now such an accomplished novelist that as a reader you can leave yourself in his hands knowing he is going to safely guide you to the conclusion with everyone you care about in one piece, all ends neatly tucked away and the opening lines to the sequel already inked in. (In fact I fully expected the opening chapter of the sequel to appear at the end of this edition – it’s that kind of book – but it didn’t; instead we are neatly guided back towards TTMC).

In conclusion, you won’t be at all surprised to read that if you enjoy TTMC you will enjoy We Solve Murders. I do and I did.

We Solve Murders, by Richard Osman, 2024

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Book review

The Hotel Avocado by Bob Mortimer, 2024

My track record for predicting how celebrity novelists are going to pursue their novel series is poor. I predicted Richard Osman would kill off one of his main characters in the second instalment of the Thursday Murder Club, but after four novels in the series they are still all going strong. Then n my review of The Satsuma Complex I forecast that it would be a one-off and we would hear no more of Gary, Emily and Grace – which was equally off-target!

The Hotel Avocado is the sequel to The Satsuma Complex (are we going to see a series of fruit based novel titles from television’s latest national treasure?) Set almost immediately after the events of Satsuma, Emily has inherited her father’s hotel in Brighton and started to renovate it. Gary remains working in his law firm in London, travelling down to see Emily at the weekends. He has to decide whether to commit to his relationship with Emily and move down to live with her in Brighton, leaving his neighbour Grace to a rather lonely life, or whether he tries to make a long(ish) distance relationship work. Emily seems content with the relationship as it is – she is working flat out on preparing the hotel for opening and has no time in the week for romance or relationships. Her plans for the hotel are greatly helped by Mark her very hard working but socially awkward facilities manager and Pete, her super-efficient painter and decorator. Things are complicated by the fact that Emily and Pete once dated and clearly retain a residual attraction for one another.

Both Gary and Emily flirt with breaking relationship boundaries. Gary invites a work friend, Roma, to sleep over at his flat, and Emily gets uncomfortably close to Pete. While neither are unfaithful the implication is that their relationship is vulnerable. All that becomes rather redundant when the main plot line of The Satsuma Complex resurfaces. The end of that novel left Gary waiting to be a key witness in the trial of several corrupt Metropolitan police officers. He is visited by the menacing Mr Sequence and his equally violent sidekick Brian, and offered money not to testify at the forthcoming trial. It is made very clear what will happen to him if he refuses. He can’t go to the police over these threats and attempts to pervert the course of justice, because the corrupt officers have friends still on the Force. Gary flees to Brighton, but Sequence and Brian track him down – they always seem able to predict his movements – and Emily and her hotel are dragged into the affair.

For a comic novel, the scenes in which Gary and Emily are menaced with increasing ferocity by Sequence and Brian are quite dark and slowly come to dominate the novel. People get hurt with the promise of a lot more to come. The bad guys are convincingly violent and uncompromising and there’s little Gary can do to protect himself and his loved ones other than comply with their threats. The whimsy that dominated the first novel fades into the background as Emily and Gary are bullied, menaced and beaten. In a sub-plot Emily applies for planning permission to hang a massive avocado sign outside her hotel as an advertising feature and bribes the chair of the planning committee to ensure permission is granted. When it is refused she installs it anyway and the sign quickly goes viral.

Surprisingly I actually preferred the crime elements of this novel compared to the quirky comedy. They don’t always sit together comfortably and while we know that Gary and his friends will be OK in the end, there aren’t many laughs in these scenes. But I thought they showed signs of more care and attention from the author – once freed from the burden of trying to make the reader laugh he can get on with telling what became a quite gripping story. The element of peril was real – or as real as it can get in a comic novel. We also see fewer autobiographical elements in the novel (unless the author once ran a hotel in Brighton) as the author moves away from his source material, which helps give the narrative more freedom. Slowly the potential of the author as a serious novelist, rather than (god-forbid) someone cashing in on his celebrity, is emerging.

The Hotel Avocado by Bob Mortimer, 2024

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Book review

Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch, 2023

Wow. Prophet Song is the most impactful novel I have read in a very long time. Some critics have compared it to 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, and I think they are right. At one point I found reading it so traumatic (if you have read it you will know immediately what scene I am referring to) that I had to put the book down for 24 hours. It’s extraordinary.

The novel is set in Dublin shortly after the election of a far-right nationalist Government, the National Alliance Party. No specific timescale is given but everything else in the novel is set in the present. The Government introduces emergency powers that are in effect martial law. A new quasi-military police are given far-reaching powers to quash any dissent or opposition, a classic fascist strategy. Events are told through the Slack family. Larry, a teacher and trade unionist, is arrested and held without charge while attending a protest. He quickly becomes one of the disappeared, a non-person whose existence is denied by the state. Human rights lawyers trying to locate the disappeared are themselves threatened and arrested. Larry leaves behind Eilish, his wife; Mark, their sixteen-year old son son; their daughter, Molly; thirteen-year-old Bailey; and baby Ben. Amnesty International says that “Enforced disappearance is a crime under international law and an insidious practice that not only persists as a relic of past conflicts but also still looms large as a contemporary instrument of oppression used by the states across the world as a tool to silence dissent and instill fear.”

Lynch’s brilliance in setting Prophet Song in Ireland begins to pay off. This is not some distant South American banana republic where human rights have only ever tenuously existed – this is a modern European country. But people were disappeared in the states of the former Yugoslavia – Bosnia, Serbia and others – and there is evidence of this happening in the Ukraine as well. Being European is no guarantee of human rights, and if we think of flagrant breaches of human rights as being something that happens elsewhere, we are wrong. But the Irish setting has an even deeper impact that this, because in Northern Ireland people were ‘disappeared‘ in the 1970’s by masked armed men appearing at their doors in the night, taking them away to be shot in the head in some remote countryside, never to be seen again. (For the avoidance of any doubt, of course I understand that Northern Ireland and Ireland are not the same country – but the experience of the Troubles affected people from both sides of the border, and that shared trauma clearly forms a backdrop to Prophet Song). Lynch also seems to be drawing inspiration from the approach taken Margaret Attwood in The Handmaid’s Tale in which everything that happens in the novel has happened in real life elsewhere in the world.

As well as her family, Eilish cares for her father, Simon, who has dementia. Vulnerable people – the very young and the very old in particular, suffer disproportionately in times of unrest. Simon has occasional bouts of lucidity during which he encourages Eilish to take the rest of her family and leave the country, but she stubbornly refuses, despite being warned that “History is a silent record of people who could not leave“. It is not as simple as that – history is also “a record of those who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to go there, you cannot leave when your children cannot get a passport, cannot go when your feet are rooted in the earth and to leave means tearing off your feet.”

Mark is called up for military service shortly before he turns seventeen. He refuses to support a regime which has captured and possibly killed his father, and goes into hiding. Refusing his mother’s attempts to persuade him to leave the country he joins a rapidly growing force fighting to overturn the regime. At this point Mark fades from the narrative like his father before him. The rebel force make progress and capture parts of Dublin, providing a glimmer of hope, but the fighting intensifies in Eilish’s area, with bombs falling on the houses and streets. Daily life becomes more and more dangerous, with civilian casualties inevitable. The rebel forces are not portrayed as saviours but as equally vicious as the Government forces. Bailey is seriously wounded during a shelling attack. Eilish tries to take him to hospital but it is being bombed and evacuated. She finds another hospital but when she returns the next night to check on him he has also been ‘disappeared’, apparently taken as a suspect rebel soldier despite his age. Finally, in a desperately upsetting and gruesome scene Eilish finds his broken body in the morgue, showing signs of having been tortured before being killed. Initially my instinctive reaction to this traumatising scene was that Lynch had gone too far, that the Government forces would have no reason to torture a young teenager, but a moment’s thought made me realise that such scenes are happening right now across the world, that age is no protection for children in war zones, (the ongoing tragedy in Gaza was brought vividly to mind) they have no special status, and that the idea this could not happen in a Western Europe capital is simply wrong.

Somehow Eilish finds the strength to go on, and she flees with her two remaining children as refugees from the fighting, trying to cross the border into Northern Ireland. This becomes a story of ‘illegal’ immigrants, so stigmatised in the UK and across Europe at the moment. The refugees are exploited by people smugglers and corrupt border crossing guards. Seeing this experience through the eyes of already traumatised people (as of course refugees often are) humanised the refugees in the face of the often heartless headlines we read about ‘economic migrants’ and the rest.

Lynch’s point – that these things could so easily happen to us, as they are already happening to so many people, and we should reject any complacency that ‘it can’t happen here’ – is inescapable. If there were to be any doubt, towards the end of the novel he drives the point home:

“and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore”

Prophet Song is an extraordinary, challenging novel, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It is undeniably a difficult read but an important one, and a very worthy winner of the 2023 Booker Prize.

Gaza

Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch, 2023

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Book review

Julia, by Sandra Newman, 2023

My first review of 2025 is of Sandra Newman’s compelling Julia, a retelling of the events of George Orwell’s 1984 from the perspective of Winston Smith’s young lover, whom he betrays in the novel’s bitter climax in Room 101 “‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!'”

Which poses the very simple question as to whether 1984 needs to be retold from Julia’s perspective. The source novel is told from Winston’s point of view. Through Winston (and bearing in mind his relationship with her is quite short and comprises a few snatched moments and afternoons) we learn a little about her background and childhood, her life as a mechanic in the Fiction Department of the Ministry of Truth, and her living arrangements, sharing a hostel room with thirty other young women.

Julia sent me back to 1984 to try and ascertain how much was the author’s creation, filling in the gaps left by Orwell’s account, and how much was based on the source material. I was surprised at how much the original novel does actually tell us about Julia – she certainly isn’t the two dimensional character some critics would have you believe, and I don’t think she necessarily needed to be re-imagined by this novel to be made more believeable or rounded. Of course the original novel doesn’t contain her full life story or her internal monologue – Winston’s point of view narration precludes this. More honestly, Winston isn’t that interested in Julia’s background or history. Their relationship is not simply one of an older man being sexually attracted to a younger, more independent woman – Winston is genuinely interested in Julia’s ideas and is guided by her in acts of rebellion other than ‘sex-crime’ – “In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, ‘just to keep people frightened’. This was an idea that had literally never occurred to him. She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing.”

A lot of the critical commentary on Julia is based on the assumption or claim that the original novel is in some way unfair to her. The Guardian put it this way: “This ambitious retelling from Julia’s point of view gives Winston Smith’s lover the agency she lacked. ” Is this fair? Did Orwell have a ‘women problem’? And does 1984 underplay Julia’s role, reducing her to a sexual partner and victim, requiring this attempt to rehabilitate her? Certainly women play only minor roles in most of his earlier novels, and the one exception, Dorothy in A Clergyman’s Daughter, is a largely unconvincing portrait used principally as an avatar for Orwell to recycle some of his journalism. But I think there is a case to made for Julia being one of his most fully-rounded female characters. She is independent, brave, forthright, and kind. The Julia we are introduced to in Newman’s novel is very closely modelled on Orwell’s original – Newman has been very respectful to the source material, and only made one significant change. Fairly early in in the novel Julia is recruited into the Thought Police, and in addition to her relationship with Winston she is instructed to seduce a number of other Outer Party members and encourage them to commit thought- and sex-crimes.

The idea that Orwell’s version of Julia lacks agency is unfair and wrong – it is Julia who initiates the affair with Winston, finds them somewhere to go to have sex, and has previously had many other lovers. She is a strong woman who knows what she wants and is perfectly willing to take calculated risks. Newman’s Julia is not significantly more independent than Orwell’s – arguably her early recruitment into the Thought Police actually reduces her agency. From that point she is compelled to follow their instructions and cannot freely pursue her own choices.

Day to day life in Airstrip One is vividly described in 1984. These descriptions would have been painfully familiar to Orwell’s original audience in a Britain only slowly emerging from the hardships of the Second World War. Newman builds upon this portrait, giving more detail on the petty humiliations that young women have to face. She describes the Party’s ArtSem (artificial insemination) programme which is used as cover when women fall pregnant outside of marriage and other aspects of women’s lives which the original novel did not describe or consider. Overall the Airstrip One she describes is vividly recognisable and very faithful to Orwell’s portrait.

As long as Julia remains safely within the guide rails of the source material, the novel remains on track, but the text fails to convince as soon as it goes beyond the undeniably bleak ending of 1984. Newman understandably chooses to omit Orwell’s suggestion that Julia has been lobotomised during her torture and goes on to suggest that the end of Big Brother’s rein of terror is imminent. This is nowhere suggested in the source text – quite the opposite, Orwell suggests that Big Brother is unbeatable (although the appendix on Newspeak implies that one day IngSoc’s rule comes to an end).

Orwell’s handling of Winston’s torture, and in particular the climax of this process in Room 101, is a very hard read. Newman takes this several steps further – the descriptions of Julia’s abuse is really hard to stomach. Orwell would not have been allowed by his publishers to be this explicit, but sometimes less is more. Newman doesn’t blink and follows through with the implication that the ultimate torture conceived for Winston is applied instead to Julia. The horror of this is undermined by the deus ex machina resolution Newman applies, which is that Julia survives the torture because the time each victim has in Room 101 is limited to fifteen minutes, because of the sheer volume of torture candidates. This is a serious misstep – I understand why Newman wanted to show the horrific consequences of Winston’s betrayal and at the same time keep Julia alive, but this resolution is deeply improbable in a world of bitterly realistic situations.

Novels based on and inspired by well-known original texts need to overcome some high hurdles to avoid being dismissed as mere fan-fiction. They need to be respectful to the source material – in most respects Newman does this, with some important exceptions. They need to have a clear reason for returning to the source material, and I think Newman ticks that box as well, giving a clear and recognisable voice to a character who often appears enigmatic in the source text, and exploring what life on Airstrip One would be like for women, a subject Orwell is largely silent on. The tightrope between simply being an attempted impersonation of Orwell’s voice and being faithful to his creation is an awfully difficult line to tread and I think for the most part, with one or two significant exceptions, Newman achieves this. It often felt like I was reading an authentic description of life under Big Brother, chapters that Orwell would have not disowned. For these good reasons alone Julia is definitely worth reading. I did have just one minor complaint – the cover design is awfully drab. It tries to suggest the relationship between the novel and the source text but I am sure there must be better ways of doing it.

Julia, by Sandra Newman, 2023

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Book review

Summing Up 2024, and looking forward to 2025

I reviewed 35 books in 2024, which is about average for me in a typical year, but a little disappointing nonetheless. One book every ten days, read and reviewed, doesn’t sound too bad, and that does include Dombey and Son – but almost all the other books were either average length or shorter. Definitely a ‘must try harder’ year. Likes and views were slightly down on 2023, but still better than any other year. My five most popular posts were my reviews of Bob Mortimer’s underwhelming The Satsuma Complex, Richard Osman’s The Last Devil to Die, fourth in the Thursday Murder Club series, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, and Graham Greene’s The Third Man. The other post in my top five is one in which I discuss Clothing in Jane Eyre, which was posted back in 2016 and which is by some considerable distance my most visited post of all time. I can just about understand why the Mortimer and Osman reviews are popular – these were both huge sellers from the end of 2023 – but the persistent popularity of the other posts are baffling. Not that I am complaining!

My reading in the first quarter of the year is as always going to be focussed on the outstanding selection of books received as presents, including new novels by the aforementioned Mortimer and Osman, as well as a book I am very much looking forward to, the latest Jasper Fforde novel. My 2025 Dickens is going to be his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend. Beyond that I do not have any specific reading targets, but I would like to improve on this year’s total if possible. While I have abandoned my attempt to read all the Booker Prize winning novels – I was left with a small residue which I simply didn’t like the look of – I will be catching up on one or two of the more recent winners this year. Above all I will be trying to recapture the reading bug, that love of reading that is such a blessing and which gives this blog its corny name.

Summing up 2024, and looking forward to 2025

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Book review

The Wager: a Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann, 2023

The Wager is everywhere at the moment. After President Obama listed it as one of his books of the year in 2023 it topped The New York Times best-seller list and stayed in the top ten for six months. The film rights were snapped up by Martin Scorsese and Leonardo di Caprio. It featured in many best books of 2023 lists: as usual I am coming very late to the party. Accordingly my expectations were sky-high and predictably I was a little disappointed – if it hadn’t had this much hype I would have been able to read and appreciate the book on its own terms. Oh well.

The book’s blurb and description on Amazon give this summary (I’ve tried to edit it because it is quite long, but in the end I decided to keep it full-length because the detail actually matters):

“On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then … six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death–for whomever the court found guilty could hang.“

To be fair, this is not just the publisher’s summary – in the book’s opening chapter this version of what it to come is largely the same: this is a story of a shipwreck that leads to mutiny, murder, and finally a form of retribution for the survivors. Except it is not.

For a start there was no real mutiny – no-one was tried for this incredibly serious charge. If the Admiralty had thought there was any risk of this offence being condoned they would have seen to it that people hanged, just in case anyone thought mutiny was acceptable in any circumstances. They took law and order extremely seriously. There was no question a dispute amongst the survivors about how to reach civilisation once the Wager had been shipwrecked on an isolated (but not completely deserted) island. The bulk of the survivors ignored the captain’s wishes to sail north to Chile and instead headed off in the opposite direction – but the Admiralty did not think this constituted mutiny. If the breakaway group had really thought they were committing mutiny they would almost certainly have destroyed the many paper records that they carried with them back to England and for that matter they would have avoided handing themselves in to the authorities by travelling back to England in the first place.

For an event that happened on the other side of the world almost three hundred years ago, there is a remarkable amount of documentary evidence about the wreck of the Wager and the subsequent ordeal of its crew. Many of the survivors wrote extensively about their adventures – the account by the leader of the expedition of which the Wager was a part, George Anson, is still in print – and in addition many of the contemporaneous records including log books and diaries survived and are available to historians (to be completely fair to Grann whether he is an academic historian or not (not) I nevertheless include him in this category; his account is very well researched and evidenced. It’s just not a new or untold story).

There was no trial, no-one was found innocent or guilty, and no-one was hanged. There was an investigation with a very limited scope, but that quickly found that no further action was required. This is all a bit of a damp squib after the long build-up in which the reader is explicitly lead to believe that a trial would decide who was telling the truth about the shipwreck. In fact the introduction suggests this is the whole point of the narrative. Surprisingly there were no significant differences between the survivors as to what happened; broadly speaking their accounts agreed, not least because of the extent of the written record. Whether the actions of the protagonists were justified was disputed, but what they actually did or did not do was not disputed.

So this is not the book we are led to believe it is going to be. It is instead a dramatic but as far as possible accurate retelling the story of the Wager. Much of the book is dedicated to the preparation for setting sail and then the journey to South America and beyond, the challenges of assembling a crew and then the privations once on board and under sail. The Wager was part of a wider expedition which in turn was part of the English campaign against the Spanish that in this period. usually described as the War of Jenkins’ Ear. The shipwreck and the appalling conditions on the island that the survivors experienced (although ironically the diet of scavenged seaweed and sea celery help cure the ravages of scurvy all the men had faced) are brought to life and it is from this point, almost three-quarters of the way through the book, that the ‘slow-motion mutiny’ (as Wikipedia describes it) unfurls.

The Wager has some striking similarities with Batavia’s Graveyard, Mike Dash’s 2002 account of a shipwreck some 100 years earlier, in which the survivors faced a life and death struggle for survival, order quickly broke down and brutality engulfed the survivors. The crew of the Wager behaved in a relatively civilised fashion compared to their East Indian counterparts from the Batavia. To be fair their island was better equipped – they even had friendly natives on hand to bring them food (although the quickly scared them off with their behaviour). If you are looking for books with a similar theme and structure to The Wager, Batavia’s Graveyard is highly recommended.

When a book doesn’t live up to the hype it can be disappointing, but judged on its own merits The Wager was an enthralling read. The book’s epilogue, telling the story of the rest of the fleet which was slowly destroyed, leaving just one surviving ship, which in a ferocious sea battle captured a Spanish treasure ship and made its way home from halfway around the world , is told almost as an afterthought, but it is hard to resist the thought that this was the more compelling adventure.

The Wager: a Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann, 2023

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Book review

The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver, 2016

It’s been a very long time – I am struggling to remember the last time it happened – since a book has haunted me in the way that Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles did. By ‘haunted’ I don’t mean scared (although there is plenty that is scary here), but that the characters and their situation stayed with me when I was not reading the book. The feelings of nervousness and anxiety that it engendered hung over me, so that when I wasn’t thinking about the book I was feeling it. I wasn’t quite stock-piling toilet paper and checking my bank account every five minutes, but it was not far off!

For context, The Mandibles is set in the USA in 2029. The American economy is in the midst of an economic crisis of the kind it narrowly dodged in 2008. Unemployment and inflation soar, law and order begins to break down, and America reneges on its international debts. We experience this crisis through the eyes of an extended middle class American family, the Mandibles. Yes this is a strange name, and no I don’t know if it has any particular significance (it’s possible that the fact it is the only mobile bone in the human body is a reference to the family’s ability to be agile and keep one step ahead of the crisis, but that’s really stretching things!).

In 2029, America has already changed dramatically from the relatively stable economy and political landscape of the year of publication, 2016. In the real world of spring 2016, Trump had already announced his run for the White House and the UK’s Brexit referendum was looming, but it was hard to anticipate the political turmoil that was to follow months after this novel was published, let alone the lockdown and pandemic four years later. In Shriver’s 2029 America is already significantly diminished. Previously the country had temporarily lost access to the internet and as a result all financial transactions now take place either on paper or in hard cash. China is suspected as being behind the cyber-attack, as part of its wider ambitions to replace America and the dominant superpower. Things however are slowly beginning to return to normal when the crash hits. A new international reserve currency, the bancor, (which in real life had been proposed by Keynes in the 1930’s and remains an idea some economists support – for example it was called for as recently as 2009 by the Governor of the Bank of China) collapses the American economy. This is not just a depression or a recession but far worse – money loses most of its value, millions lose their jobs, savings are wiped out and prices go through the roof. The US Government’s disastrous response is to ban American’s from owning bancors (thereby closing down almost all international trade) and sequesters all gold owned by people and business.

Prior to the crash the four generations of the Mandible family are relatively well off and live in expectation of an inheritance from their very wealthy patriarch. His savings and investments are completely wiped out. One son-in-law is an economist who is sacked from his professorship, but who right until the end of the book continues to argue that the crash was avoidable and that he was right while everyone else was wrong. This satirical teasing of economists who are unable to understand the economy or predict its behaviour is one of the gentler aspects of the novel. As the crisis deepens the family move in together and adjust to their straitened circumstances, showering only once a week, stockpiling supplies, and generally having a miserable time. While the adults are to a greater or lesser extent in denial about how bad things are going to get, one of the younger family members, Willing, is the calm centre of both the family and the novel. Willing is able to tell that things are going to get a lot worse and plans accordingly, learning practical skills such as how to pick locks and developing a plan for the family that could see them escaping from the city and to safety.

Three quarters of the way through the novel, with the family homeless and at crisis point, the story jumps forward fifteen years. I can’t lie, I found that decision irritating. It seemed as if the novelist got tired of charting their struggles with the breakdown of society and hit the fast forward button. It might have been because this is quite familiar territory – dystopias in which society collapses aren’t exactly uncommon. The final quarter of the book acts almost like a postscript. Most of the characters have adapted and survived and society is slowly being rebuilt. The United States government has become extremely authoritarian, with everyone being compulsorily ‘chipped’ like pets. A small separatist enclave has been built in Nevada and the remaining family members, lead once again by Willing, set off to see if this new land of the free can be sustained.

The financial crisis of 2008 and the world’s subsequent turmoil have only served to underscore what I think most of us already knew – that civilisation is only skin deep. The American journalist  Alfred Henry Louis put it like this back in 1896:

Those of us who are well fed, well garmented and well ordered, ought not to forget that necessity makes frequently the root of crime. It is well for us to recollect that even in our own law-abiding, not to say virtuous cases, the only barrier between us and anarchy is the last nine meals we’ve had. It may be taken as axiomatic that a starving man is never a good citizen.

While the novel’s portrait of society’s collapse is chillingly believable, The Mandibles is a strangely optimistic dystopia. Shriver said of the novel that “My reading on what happened in 2008 is that we dodged a bullet. I feel as if that bullet is still whizzing around the planet” which is almost completely unarguable. Next time we might not be so lucky. But terrible though the collapse of the American economy may be, the rest of the world is surprisingly immune to its effects – the bancor is not just an attack on the dollar but it is also an insurance policy. Mexico becomes an economic super-power and has to build a wall to prevent American refugees from escaping into the country. As satire that might feel a bit obvious, but the main impact on America is a sense of humiliation rather than anything more punitive. The key point is that the country recovers from near-total collapse, the economy starts to rebuild, and as authoritarian dystopian Governments go this one is relatively benign.

I enjoyed The Mandibles. Shriver is an interesting, iconoclastic writer and I will look out for more opportunities to read her work.

The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver, 2016

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Book review

Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, 1952

Invisible Man appears on many lists of the best novels of the twentieth century. It is a powerful and often disturbing account which challenges many of the conventional ideas of the form and structure of the novel.

It opens with the narrator, an unnamed black man, living in an underground room lit by hundreds of electric lights powered by electricity stolen from the city’s grid. He tells his story in flashback, attempting to explain why he feels socially and sometimes literally invisible.

“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, everything and anything except me.”

Born in the American South, he lives in a highly segregated society, in which black people live in fear and subjugation. He intends to escape the poverty which defines black lives in this community and wins a scholarship to an all-black college. Integrated education in the South at this time was unheard of. He works to support himself by taking a chauffeuring job. One day, while chauffeuring Mr. Norton, a trustee of the college, he makes a series of disastrous decisions. Norton, a white man, is curious about the lives of local black people. The narrator takes him to the old slave-quarters near the college campus. The fact that there even are old slave quarters still standing shows that slavery is still part of people’s lives, despite it formally ending almost a century beforehand. Here Mr Norton meets Jim Trueblood, a notorious local figure who has got both his wife and his daughter pregnant ‘in his sleep’. This is an uncomfortable portrait of black poverty in which people live little better than slaves and ignore social conventions regarding incest. Norton is appalled and asks to be taken somewhere for a stiff drink. Inexplicably the narrator takes him to a local brothel, where a riot breaks out caused by a surreal day-outing of patients from a nearby mental hospital. (There is an echo of this scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, where the patients are taken out for the day, with similarly disastrous consequences).

The narrator is summarily expelled from college. He sees it as an unfair punishment but his principal is appalled that he has exposed the dark side of black people’s lives behind the civilised facade of the campus. The narrator travels to New York and finds work in a paint factory. More chaos ensues – he is a magnet for trouble and has no control over his life. He unwittingly causes an explosion at the factory, is hospitalised and given electric shock treatment. He escapes the hospital and stumbles into the next, decisive phase of his life. Happening across the eviction of an elderly black couple he makes an impassioned speech in their support, accidentally inciting the crowd to attack the bailiffs and triggering yet another riot. His oratorical skills are recognised by a group known as “the Brotherhood” which appears to be a black nationalist movement. He signs up and quickly becomes one of the group’s keynote speakers. Internal politics eventually turns this sour, and he becomes disillusioned with the group. Its message of gradual change and co-operation with whites is challenged from the left by more radical voices, led by a figure known as Ras the Exhorter. The novel reaches its climax with the narrator getting caught up in a race riot in Harlem. He narrowly escapes being lynched by supporters of Ras the Exhorter who perceive him as a traitor to his race.

Invisible Man is vivid, impressionistic, and unconventional. Superficially it follows a traditional narrative structure but the narrator’s adventures and mishaps are chaotic and often appear random. It charts a very specific time in Black American history at the birth of the Civil Rights movement, when many of the debates about how best to combat segregation and oppression were at their fiercest. It’s not a comfortable read but it is an important, unique book.

Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, 1952

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Book review

The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1912

The Lost World is an unashamedly escapist adventure story. Although published shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, there is barely a hint of the looming conflict. There is one brief glimpse of the real world – when celebrating the success of the stories of Malone, the plucky young reporter for the Daily Gazette, his editor tells him “What a three column article for the paper! What a foundation for a career! A correspondentship in the next great war might be within my reach.” As with so many other texts of this period, the inevitability of a future ‘great war’ is accepted as a matter of fact. I also find it interesting that it was referred to as ‘the great war’ even before it had started! – great here is simply a reference to scale rather than the later suggestion that it was glorious in any way.

You will be familiar with what happens in The Lost World because it is the source of many of the tropes of the genre to which it gives its name. Malone, the reporter mentioned above, asks his editor for an assignment to somewhere exotic and challenging in order to impress Gladys, the woman he loves. In rejecting his marriage proposal she tells him that she will only marry a man of action and achievement:

“He must be a man who could do, who could act, who could look Death in the face and have no fear of him, a man of great deeds and strange experiences. It is never a man that I should love, but always the glories he had won; for they would be reflected upon me. Think of Richard Burton! When I read his wife’s life of him I could so understand her love! And Lady Stanley! Did you ever read the wonderful last chapter of that book about her husband? These are the sort of men that a woman could worship with all her soul,”

Malone takes this rejection at face value, and decides to find a way of meeting her expectations. His editor is sceptical as to whether such great deeds and strange experiences can be found any more:

Dear me, Mr. Malone, this is very—very exalted. I’m afraid the day for this sort of thing is rather past. The expense of the ‘special meesion’ business hardly justifies the result, and, of course, in any case it would only be an experienced man with a name that would command public confidence who would get such an order. The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there’s no room for romance anywhere.

The mention of an ‘experienced man with a name to command public confidence’ gives him an idea. He suggests that Malone approaches Professor Challenger for a place on his next expedition. Challenger is a blimpish, cartoon-like figure who challenges to a fist-fight anyone who cast doubt on his account of his recent expedition to the Amazon, where he claims to have discovered a lost world where dinosaurs still roam.

At a rowdy public meeting Challenger announces he is going back to the Amazon, and Malone volunteers to join him, along with Professor Summerlee, a zoologist who has publicly questioned Challenger’s claims and Lord John Roxton, a professional adventurer. It is not long before the Atlantic has been crossed and the party of explorers sets off up the Amazon in search of the Lost World. Their party, along with the ubiquitous native guides, quickly reaches the isolated plateau, cut off from the surrounding countryside, where the prehistoric wildlife is to be found. There’s an economy to the narrative – not much time is wasted with exposition, speculation or character development. The cliffs to the plateau cannot be climbed, but the party is able to scale a nearby spire of rock. Using a tree as a bridge they cross over to the plateau.

A treacherous guide, seeking revenge on Roxton for a grudge held from a previous adventure, pushes the tree-bridge off the pinnacle, stranding the party of four, who have no choice but to set off and explore this lost world. They encounter dinosaurs and other animals, insects and plants previously thought extinct, many of which are highly dangerous. It’s not just the wildlife they have to be cautious about, because while Malone is off one night exploring the plateau’s central lake, his companions are taken prisoner by some ape-men, referred to by Malone (acting as the novel’s narrator) as the missing link. Roxton escapes and with Malone’s help rescues the others, together with some indigenous cave people who are at war with the ape-men. A battle royale ensues in which the white men’s guns tip the bitter long-running struggle in the favour of the cave men, wiping out the ape-men and enslaving their women and children.

Eventually the explorers find a tunnel leading off the plateau and on to civilisation. The novel ends with a rerun of the public meeting in which Challenger’s claims about the lost world are repeated and once again challenged, the difference being when he produces a young pterodactyl as proof, triggering a small riot. The novel doesn’t quite end there. Two final scenes close the show. First, Malone returns to Gladys, who had married a banker in his absence, the very opposite of the man of action she described. I think the reader is meant to conclude women are fickle from this scene, but my reaction was that she was letting Malone down gently. At a private celebratory dinner Roxton then reveals that he has brought back £200,000 worth of diamonds from the expedition, making them all rich. With nothing to keep him in London Malone he decides to accompany Roxton back to the lost world. If this was the cinema the ending would be a great set-up for Return to the Lost World, but Conan Doyle obviously thought better of the idea (Hollywood disagreed, and Return to the Lost World is actually a real film!)

You may be wondering why I am reading Edwardian adventure novels? I think the simple answer is that they give an insight into how people – not everyone of course, but in particular the educated novel-reading and -writing classes – were thinking about the Empire and Britain’s place in the world at the close of the Victorian era. There was a nervousness about a decline in military strength relative to countries like Germany, France and Austro-Hungary. The Boer War had exposed serious weaknesses in the strength of the British army, particularly if conscription were ever to be needed. The trade unions were flexing their muscles and had set up the Labour Party. The world was changing and the extent to which these changes were reflected in the books people wrote and read at the time, and how their feelings about these changes are worked through in the stories, fascinates me. The Lost World is mainly an exercise in escaping the chaos that was about the erupt across Europe – but it doesn’t always succeed. When Malone and companions are fighting for their lives in the decisive battle between ape-men and cave-men, the struggle is a visceral matter of life and death:

For an hour or more after we entered the wood, there was a desperate struggle in which for a time we hardly held our own. Springing out from among the scrub the ape-men with huge clubs broke in upon the Indians and often felled three or four of them before they could be speared. Their frightful blows shattered everything upon which they fell. One of them knocked Summerlee’s rifle to matchwood and the next would have crushed his skull had an Indian not stabbed the beast to the heart….Once our allies broke under the pressure, and had it not been for the execution done by our rifles they would certainly have taken to their heels. But they were gallantly rallied by their old chief and came on with such a rush that the ape-men began in turn to give way… I was emptying my magazine as quick as I could fire, and on the further flank we heard the continuous cracking of our companion’s rifles.

War is brutal and lethal, as Europe (and Conan Doyle) were about to fight out.

The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1912

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