Book review

The New York Times called Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead ‘a close retelling of Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield,”’, concluding that this was ‘either a baffling choice or an ingenious manoeuvre’. That’s the question I am struggling with: why use Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield as the outline structure for your novel? Was this in some undefined way a form of ‘cheating’, a tribute to Dickens, or simply a case of an author using the well-established technique of borrowing a structure to provided an outline for the events of the novel?

First I need to overcome the vague sense of unease that using someone else’s plot outline is against the ‘rules’ of novel writing. Of course there are no such rules, and while plagiarism is something else entirely, this is nowhere near that level of imitation. Authors have used the plots from other authors from the year dot – Shakespeare’s plots are virtually all borrowed from earlier (or even contemporaneous) texts, and the practice continues to the present day, Ian McEwan’s Nutshell being a very successful adaptation of Hamlet for example. But while borrowing someone’s plot structure and characters may not be against any rules, the author still needs to have a reason for doing this, some original approach that respects the source text but does something new with it – if not that that’s still just copying! There’s a further complication here in that Copperfield is a very personal novel in which Dickens drew upon elements of his own personal life story. David is Charles in some respects, in the way Demon certainly is not Barbara! So does Demon Copperhead does something new with the material of David Copperfield while respecting the original text? I think it does, although I have some reservations, which I will come to.

“You know, sometimes you hear about these miracles, where a car gets completely mangled in a wreck. But then the driver walks out of it alive? I’m saying you are that driver.”

Kingsolver’s hero and endearingly honest narrator is Damon Fields, known as Demon and nicknamed Copperhead for his red hair. Demon is the living definition of trailer-trash, born to a drug-using teenage single mother in Virginia. Lee County is in the heart of the Appalachians, a community of largely white folk who are the butt of all American jokes about rednecks and hillbillies. Wikipedia says this of the stereotyping of Appalachian people:

“Appalachian individuals are perceived largely to be impoverished, white, rural, lazy, and rough around the edges. Appalachians are also stereotyped to be hillbillies. NPR describes the stereotypical portrayal of Appalachians as “children in sepia-toned clothes with dirt-smeared faces. Weathered, sunken-eyed women on trailer steps chain-smoking Camels. Teenagers clad in Carhartt and Mossy Oak loitering outside long-shuttered businesses.” Other common Appalachian stereotypes include inbreeding, poor dental hygiene, and wearing no shoes.”

Kingsolver clearly finds this stereotype offensive and empathises with Demon and his community, but she does little to challenge the oversimplified portrait – the novel is full of people who fit this description! Not everyone is an ill-educated redneck, of course, but there are more than enough. Demon is from a sub-category of this community – he identifies as a Melungeon, a dark-skinned ethnic group specific to this region and descended from Europeans, Native Americans, and sub-Saharan Africans originally brought to America as indentured servants and slaves. His life is blighted by poverty and discrimination. His early childhood follows the template of the source novel quite closely: an ineffectual mother, a long-dead father and a violent stepfather. When his mother dies of an overdose, he is taken into the ‘care’ of the authorities who do an appalling job of looking after him, putting him into foster homes where he suffers neglect and abuse in equal measure. Finally he tracks down his grandmother who helps him find a home with Coach Winfield and his daughter Agnes. He becomes a successful American football player until he suffers a career ending injury. This injury is the catalyst for the next phase in Demon’s life as he struggles with a crippling opioid addiction. Almost all his peers succumb to the same addiction and several of their lives are destroyed by this new plague. Kingsolver writes powerfully about the impact of this drug and the responsibility of the pharmaceutical companies for engineering the crisis, seeing the issue from the perspective of those involved and affected rather than sitting in judgment from outside the issue:

“What’s an oxy, I’d asked. That November it was still a shiny new thing. OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance. The tree was shaken and yes, we did eat of the apple.“

In most of his novels Dickens championed ideas of social justice. He led specific campaigns against child labour, baby farming, money lending and the various other ills that blighted Victorian England. Kingsolver uses the same basic narrative and setting of the source text to address more recent social issues in the United States – the appallingly underfunded social care system, the failing education system, racism and of course the opioid epidemic. In this respect the ‘borrowed’ narrative is effective, although it could be argued that a novel about these issues and in this place and time didn’t really needed the overlay of a Dickensian narrative.

I mentioned earlier I had some reservations about the author’s reimagining of the source material. One issue is in the portrait of the modern-day Micawbers, Kingsolver’s McCobbs family. Micawber may be a weak and ineffectual man, but he is also kind-hearted. The McCobbs on the other hand are just plain unpleasant. Steerforth is a much more nuanced character than his Kingsolver equivalent, the sporting bully Fast Forward. There’s a wider issue with the Dickensian origins of the novel – sometimes it becomes a distraction. I found myself trying to recognise scenes, characters and parallels with the source material rather than focussing on the novel itself. This isn’t a big issue – because I don’t know Copperfield that well I was able to just read Copperhead on its own terms, as an American novel about an orphan who struggles to find a safe home in the world.

I am still not sure the Copperfield parallels were entirely necessary. With or without them this is a powerful story about an American underclass that so far as I know has not previously had a champion. The novel ends on a positive note for Demon and his relationship with Agnes, which suggests the author is also positive for the rednecks, hillbillies and trailer trash she vividly humanises, rescuing them from the ignominy of being the butt of the endless incest and poor dental hygiene jokes.

”

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, 2022

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Book review

Most dystopian fiction is set after the collapse of civilisation. In some instances it is set a long time in the future, where science has helped rebuild society (see Brave New World, for example). Other works imagine a society where social order has broken down and a new world has yet to emerge. Often the collapse of society is envisaged as happening very quickly – a virus breaks out and before you know it people are killing one another over fresh water and food. John Christopher’s 1950’s novel The Death of Grass is an early example of this genre. But occasionally novelists conclude that the disintegration of society is going to take a little bit longer. Parable of the Sower is one such novel.

Parable of the Sower is told by Lauren Olamina, a fifteen-year-old girl living in the greater Los Angeles area in 2024. (Incidentally that’s a similar time gap – just over thirty years between the date of the novel’s publication and its setting – that Orwell used in 1984 – 1949-1984. This gives the novel a sense of immediacy and recognition that a setting centuries in the future would lose.) Lauren’s father is a pastor and is one of the few remaining people in their society with a paid job – he teaches at a nearby college. Her family live in a walled community and the residents go outside its walls only rarely. Outside public order is breaking down, fuelled by poverty, an indifferent privatised police force, ecological collapse and widespread drug abuse, in particular ‘pyro’, which turns users into pyromaniacs. Lauren concludes that the regular attacks on her community will get worse – while they are armed and willing to defend themselves, the desperation and recklessness of those outside the walls means that sooner or later their community will fall. Lauren studies the skills needed to survive in the outside and prepares resources to take with her. She develops a plan to go north where there are jobs and better social conditions, but doesn’t have time to put this plan in place before the inevitable happens and their compound is destroyed.

A further complication is that Lauren has a condition called hyperempathy, caused by a drug her mother took when she was carrying her. She feels other people’s pain (and pleasure) as if it is her own. She keeps this condition as secret as possible, knowing that it will be seen as a weakness and exploited by others, She keeps a journal – this novel – in which she slowly develops the basis of a new religion she calls ‘Earthseed’. Earthseed is a variation of eastern mysticism that is predicated upon the idea that God is Change. What makes it different from other ‘mother nature’ forms of religion is the idea that the eventual future of humans is to explore the stars. This seems a quite redundant idea given the challenges people face in the present and while the last remaining space exploration programmes are being cancelled by the newly elected President. At least for now the country has a elections and a President.

The torture and murder of Lauren’s brother Keith is a clear warning sign that the end is imminent. Keith had run away from home and joined a gang, but this is a wildly dangerous life and he obviously ran out of luck at some point. Months later Lauren’s father goes missing, another unavoidable sign, but still the community trusts that its walls and guns will protect them. It’s no surprise when the narrative jumps forward to the point when the pyro-addicts attack and almost everyone is killed. Lauren escapes with Harry and Zahra, two community members who she didn’t know very well before but who now become her sole surviving ‘family’. They decide to trek north to find work and safety – although while travelling they are extremely vulnerable to marauders and pyromaniacs, they have a handgun and enough money to survive. On the road others join their group, finding strength in numbers. Lauren tells the group about her nascent new religion and her plans to start a community. They head for a property owned by one of their group and despite several attacks by addicts and the many dangers of the road, they finally reach their new home, which they call Acorn. The novel ends at this point, with key members of the group concluding that they have only a slim chance that their new community will survive.

At some points Parable felt in ‘Young Adult’ territory, particularly the empathetic teenage narrator and the vague eco-religious themes. But the violence (including rape and cannibalism) is pretty graphic, and there’s not much in the novel’s marketing to suggest that it was specifically aimed at a young adult audience. (Having said that the front cover’s quote from John Green (obviously a very popular young adult author) recommending that the novel “pairs well with 1984 or the Handmaid’s Tale” feels like a strong hint to readers looking for companion texts to these standard A level novels.) This is probably a case of the publishers covering all possible market bases.

Butler was primarily a science fiction author, but this isn’t really a science fiction novel, despite the setting. It’s an eminently recognisable portrait of the USA facing ecological and social collapse, with a number of interesting ideas in play. Lauren is the sower in this novel and the parable label encourages the reader to interpret the novel metaphorically – despite the hyper-realism of some scenes. The parable of the sower from which the novel draws its title always interested me, because it is often misunderstood. If you are not familiar with the parable itself the Wikipedia article on it is here. It appears in three of the four gospels and includes a careful explanation from Christ – god’s message is the seed, and we are the ground upon which it falls. Whether the seed prospers or not depends on us. So little possibility of ambiguity? And yet the parable is often understood to be a message of acceptance – whether we prosper or wither away is a matter of chance, depending on whether we (the seed) land on rich or barren soil. You can see why people would be encouraged to read the parable that way – accept your fate in life, the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate etc.

Parable is an entertaining, highly readable version of the very familiar end of the world story. Lauren is an erudite guide to events even if she sometimes makes silly mistakes. Not having a designated meet-up point if everything goes wrong once is daft, but to do it twice is unforgiveable. She convictions about Earthseed are something we just have to accept rather that it being an logical conclusion drawn from her observations about the world. The final third of the novel is rushed – people join the group quickly and there’s little time to introduce them before the next gunfight. Late in the novel Lauren also finds out that her condition is not as rare as she thought it was – it is hinted that it is being deliberately spread to make modern slavery more easily reintroduced. The author doesn’t do much with the concept of hyperempathy – it’s just a condition Lauren has to put up with. There are other interesting ideas within the narrative – corporate takeovers of coastal communities for instance – which also peter out. But despite these qualifications I enjoyed the novel enough to immediately order the sequel as soon as I finished, which is a pretty good sign!

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, 1993

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Book review

Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Lessons, opens with a disturbing scene in which a young boy’s piano lesson suddenly becomes intimate and distressing. When he repeatedly makes the same mistake with his piece, his (female) teacher responds by first pinching him, then turning the gesture into something more ambiguous:

“her fingers found his inside leg, just at the hem of his grey shorts, and pinched him hard. That night there would be a tiny blue bruise. Her touch was cool as her hand moved up under his shorts to where the elastic of his pants met his skin. he scrambled off the stool and stood, flushed.”

At first he doesn’t properly understand what these touches mean, but he quickly comes to appreciate their sexual intent. This confuses him – he both avoids and seeks out further opportunities for intimacy with his teacher, until eventually three years later their relationship becomes sexual. The narrative is told in flashback by Roland several years after the event. The confusion of his feelings of both shame and at the same time the urgency of his sexual feelings is, in so far as I can possibly tell, conveyed well. This moment is to have a significant and lasting impact on Roland’s life. It haunts him, until many years later he is finally able to confront his abuser and come to terms with what happened to him. Instead of him following the academic path set before him by his parents and his boarding school, his life becomes very disjointed: he doesn’t go to university and never settles to a particular career. He moves from job to job – but this is not necessarily a sign of failure: these jobs are individually rewarding, Amongst other roles he plays the piano professionally, (albeit in a hotel lounge rather than on a concert stage) and teaches tennis. There are worse fates.

Another key moment in Roland’s life occurs when his German-born wife, Alissa, leaves him and their baby son to pursue her ambition of becoming “Germany’s greatest writer”. At first he has no idea where she has gone, and the police are suspicious that his responsible for her being missing, but once he receives postcards from her – simply saying sorry – their suspicions dissipate. It takes a very long time, almost a lifetime, but he finally comes to terms with her decision to leave and recognises her reasons for doing so. It would be going to far to say he supports her decision, but he understands her reasoning, and agrees that the work she produces is very worthwhile. He is puzzled and feels a little rejected when he doesn’t appear in her work in a fictional form, and then when he does feature – as an unsupportive aggressive husband he is equally upset.

Roland’s long and eventful life plays out against the backdrop of “momentous global happenings” from the Cuban missile crisis to the fall of the Berlin Wall, from 9/11 to the Covid lockdowns, events that obviously stand out in McEwan’s own personal memory as landmarks in his life. Even the Blair years and the storming of the Capitol get a mention. There’s a gentleness to the whole thing. We come to care about Roland and want to see him settled and happy, but things never quite pan out the way he hopes, and while some critics have found the lack of resolution to the storylines frustrating, for me their incompleteness gave the novel an authenticity. Roland has a good life, blessed by fortune to be born in England after the war, rather than the many different lives lead by others in twentieth century Europe:

“His accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell – a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife – was by comparison a luxury suite. If his life so far was a failure, as he often thought, it was in the face of history’s largesse.”

This isn’t a novel you read to find out what happens but to read about the ‘lessons’ that can be drawn from life’s experiences. At 74 McEwan is obviously in a reflective mood, and while Lessons is not as impactful as some of his other novels it succeeds on its own terms. It’s also, incidentally, beautifully written, which alone was enough to keep the pages turning even when the main plot lines had petered out:

“Wasted time in beautiful places, lingering joyfully just inside the gates of paradise with the world’s colours aflame, always regretting the setting sun and the call home, the Edenic expulsion into the next day and its usual concerns.”

I was fortunate enough to attend an interview with McEwan last year in Norwich. He was being interviewed by Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent. The interview focussed on the process by which Lessons came to be written rather than the wider discussion of his career and novels that to be honest I was hoping for, but I did come away with some signed copies of his works, which made the journey more than worthwhile.

Lessons by Ian McEwan, 2022

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Book review

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, by Eimear McBride, 2013

I read Eimear McBride’s extraordinary first novel, “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing” in summer 2022, but have struggled over several different drafts to do it justice in the form of a review. It is in some respects a traditional family story – of a young Irish woman whose life takes a dark turn when she is raped by her uncle. She is thirteen when this happens, and despite the narrator not describing it as a sexual assault she clearly does not give consent to what happens (appallingly the Guardian’s 2013 review of the novel talks about this as being a sexual ‘encounter’; the New Yorker review uses the term ‘sexual relationship’, seemingly ignoring her age and their family relationship). This response has echoes of the way Lolita is sometimes referred to as a teenage seductress or other, similar terms, when she is simply a child sex abuse survivor. Just because the character doesn’t see herself as a victim it doesn’t mean she isn’t one.

Within this conventional framework, the novel is daringly original. All the characters are unnamed, and the narrative takes place in an Ireland devoid of dates and obvious historical context. But this is a minor issue compared to the narration. The novel is told by the “half-formed” girl of the title, and begins when she is two years old. It is presented in a barely recognisable version of the English language, taking stream of consciousness to a new level. It is intense and fractured, full of invented words and phrases and old words used in new ways. I initially assumed this was the author’s (successful) attempt to mimic the disordered thought patterns of a young child, and that the text would soon (as she grew older) settle down into more familiar patterns and structures. Oh no! If anything the disorder increases as the narrator grows up and experiences the world in more complex ways. It is usually possible, with care, to work out what is happening at any particular point. This example, chosen at random, is fairly easy to follow:

“We were moving off now. From each other. As cannot be. Helped. I didn’t want it from that time on. You know. All that. When you said sit with me on the school bus. I said no. That inside world had caught alight and what I wanted. To be left alone. To look at it. To swing the torch into every corner of what he’d we’d done. Know it and wonder what does it mean. I learned to turn it off, the world that was not my own. Stop up my ears and everything. Who are you? You and me were never this. This boy and girl that do not speak. But somehow I’ve left you behind and you’re just looking on.”

Almost conventional, no? Some complete sentences, and a vague says of who is saying what, to whom. But when the narrator is agitated, drunk or upset, or when her identity is breaking down, the best the reader can hope for is to just derive a general sense of the narrative. Any detailed deconstruction of whose speech is being reported and who is doing what is almost impossible:

“Puk blodd over me frum. In the next but. Let me iar. Soon I’n dead I’m sre. Loose. Ver the aIrWays. Here. mY nose my mOuth I. VOMit. Clear. CleaR. He stopS up gETs. Stands uP. Look. And I breath. ANd I breath my.”

Far too the narrative features episodes of distressing sexual violence, which I won’t quote here but needs a trigger warning for virtually all readers I would have thought. McBride is unflinching in her descriptions of her character’s search for degradation as a form of self-harm. This can make the novel a difficult read especially when combined with the complex narration, and arguably there’s just one too many instance of brutal sex with a random stranger. But experimental literature is by definition transgressive – maybe one day this will seem quite conventional?

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, by Eimear McBride, 2013

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Book review

The Marriage Portrait opens with the following ‘Historical Note’:

“In 1560, fifteen-year-old Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici left Florence to begin her married life with Alfonso II d’Este Duke of Ferrara.

Less than a year later, she would be dead.

The official cause of death was given as ‘putrid fever’, but it was rumoured that she had been murdered by her husband”.

This note is followed by a quote from Robert Browning’s chilling poem “My Last Duchess‘. Although only a few lines from the poem are quoted, together with the introduction on the hardback edition’s cover they are sufficient breadcrumbs for the reader to have a clear understanding of the novel they are about to read, one in which the finale has, apparently, already been spoiled for them by the author themselves. So either these clues are actively misleading, or this is a novel where the interest lies not in what happens, but how it comes to happen.

Most reviews of this novel mention these items of context, but ignore the quote from Boccaccio’s Decameron that comes immediately after the Browning:

“The ladies…are forced to follow the whims, fancies and dictates of their fathers., mothers, brothers and husbands, so that they spend most of their time cooped up within the narrow confines of their rooms, where they sit in apparent idleness, wishing one thing and at the same time wishing its opposite, and reflecting on various matters…”

This quotation manages our expectations effectively – as well as a murder story, (if not a mystery) this is also going to be about a world where young aristocratic women are traded like livestock between the houses of their parents and their prospective husbands, with the clear expectation that their role is solely to produce offspring. They will have little individual liberty, and while they will want for nothing in the way of material things, freedom will be unattainable. Sex will be a matter of duty with the sole aim of procreation, practiced in Lucrezia’s case under the advice of a doctor with strange ideas about fertility and conception. (“No excitement, no dancing, no music, no creative endeavours, no reading, except for religious texts”). Uxoricide is a very real threat if they misbehave or fail to produce any offspring.

The novel is narrated by Lucrezia and opens one year into her already strained marriage. She has a sudden realisation that her husband intends to kill her. While this feels implausible from a historical perspective – Alfonso would have abandoned any attempt to conceive after just a year as well as risked conflict with the powerful Medici dynasty, when sudden death was a fact of life for all medieval people, irrespective of their status (Lucrezia’s sister dies suddenly from a chill early in the novel) – but we are not invited to question this conclusion. Lucrezia is treated as her husband’s disposable possession and we are invited to think it entirely possible that he would kill her if she did not meet his requirements. Much of the rest of the novel is told in flashback showing us her pampered but constrained childhood and the early days of her marriage.

O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet was one of the best things I have read in a very long time, so my expectations for The Marriage Portrait were very high. The hardback edition is beautifully illustrated with a brightly coloured jungle scene full of birds, flowers and snakes. The tiger that plays an important symbolic role in Lucrezia’s childhood tiptoes off the side of the page, and the inside is illustrated with another wonderfully real and dangerous snake. O’Farrell’s prose is sumptuous and she handles the suspense and atmosphere of Renaissance Italy with authority.

But the Guardian’s review expressed some serious and (partially) valid concerns that need to be addressed:

“high production values cannot disguise the fact that this is melodrama reworked to appeal to a progressive 21st-century audience. The book’s evil deeds are committed by evil people because they are evil. No one acts unpredictably or without foreshadowing….I couldn’t help marvelling at how a novel that’s so richly descriptive could feel so limited in its range of expressiveness.”

This review is not an outlier – a number of critics has similar reservations about the novel’s structure and plausibility. Let’s look at these comments:

“Melodrama” – “a sensational dramatic piece with exaggerated characters and exciting events intended to appeal to the emotions”? I’ve got to concede that some characters were two-dimensional, particularly the evil Duke Alfonso, who switches quickly from being an attentive husband to being a brutal tyrant, and who has his chief of guards strangled to death for having an affair with his (the Duke’s) sister. There’s no real attempt to understand Alfonso’s motivation, the difficulty of ruling over a troubled country threatened on all sides by enemies, menaced from within by assassins, and all the time under pressure to produce an heir when he feels much more comfortable in the company of his male friends. No I’m not hinting he is presented as gay – he’s not really presented at all, other than a sinister villain. But there are many other characters with a lot more depth to them, not least the painter brought in to produce the marriage portrait that gives the novel its title, and his fascinating crew of assistants, including one, Jacopo, who everyone assumes is mute but just stays silent because no one speaks his native dialect. Alfonso’s sisters – Elisabetta and Nunciata – are admittedly straight out of Cinderella, but other secondary characters including Lucrezia’s caring maids are brought to life more fully.

“Reworked to appeal to a progressive 21st-century audience”? This charge is unconvincing. Audiences from most centuries would surely support the young woman sold into marriage and suffering an early death over her husband. This is not a politically correct novel. Renaissance people are convincingly imagined and their different ways of looking at the world are recognised and acknowledged. At the same time they are still people with fears and ambitions like our own.

“No-one acts unpredictably or without foreshadowing”? If foreshadowing is done in a heavy-handed way I completely accept it can be irritating. But I didn’t feel that was the case here, It’s hard to accuse a novelist of foreshadowing (which isn’t automatically a bad thing – we need to understand why people make the choices they make and do the things they do) when we have been told the novel’s outcome on the opening page. Yes we know the likely outcome from the start. This is not a novel of many plot twists or surprises, but it never pretends or aspires to be.

“Limited in its range of expressiveness”? I’m not entirely sure what this means to be honest, but if the critic is suggesting that O’Farrell’s writing is in any way dull or repetitive then that is absolutely not the case. This was an enjoyable read. At moments it is slightly over-written, but arguably this was necessary to describe the opulent of aristocratic renaissance life. Here for example we experience Lucrezia’s discomfort in her fantastical wedding dress:

“The gown rustles and slides around her, speaking a glossolalia all of its own, the silk moving against the rougher nap of the underskirts, the bone supports of the bodice straining and squealing against their coverings, the cuffs scuffing and chafing the skin of her wrists, the stiffened collar hooking and nibbling at her nape, the hip supports creaking like the rigging of a ship. It is a symphony, an orchestra of fabrics, and Lucrezia would like to cover her ears, but she cannot.”

Any suspense in the novel was admittedly deflated by the author’s spoiler – I think we would have ben a lot more engaged as readers if we were left wondering what happens to Lucrezia – but this gives the novel’s surprise ending an even greater impact. The novel is lushly illustrated throughout with vivid imagery. We have already met the tiger that seems to prowl through the novel’s pages, but there is also for example the use of embroidery as a metaphor for Lucrezia’s ability to see beyond the world as it is presented to her:

“She has always had a secret liking for this part of the embroidery, the ‘wrong’ side, congested with knots, striations of silk and twists of thread. How much more interesting it is, with its frank display of the labour needed to attain the perfection of the finished piece.”

I’d also like to acknowledge what I think O’Farrell is trying to do here and in Hamnet: to give a voice to women who while not forgotten by history, have not been able to tell us their version of events. We know very little about Anne Hathaway other than in relation to the works of her husband, and we know even less about Lucrezia de Medici other than the rumours about her death. She – and the class of brave women she represents – are brought to life in the Marriage Portrait. This is much more than the conventional novelisation of historical events, it is a vivid recreation of those events through the eyes of its participants.

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell, 2022

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Book review

There was some controversy about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time when it was first published, a controversy which has died down but rumbles on to this day. The central character and narrator of the novel is Christopher Boone, a 15-year-old young man who has ‘some behavioural difficulties’. This is a deliberate understatement – Christopher struggles with the everyday world, despite his obvious acute intelligence, and when he suffers from sensory overload he starts screaming, hitting out at people, and losing control of his bodily functions. This is not a flattering portrait of this condition, whatever the condition may be. Christopher’s exact medical diagnosis is never made clear in the novel, although the book’s blurb (when it was first published – later editions have corrected this) refers to Asperger syndrome (which the internet reminds me today would be described as an autism spectrum disorder). Some years after publication Haddon attempted to correct this perception, writing “The Curious Incident is not a book about Asperger’s…if anything it’s a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way. The book is not specifically about any specific disorder”. Subsequently he further wrote about his regret that the term was used in the blurb at all.

In this ambition – to show the word in a surprising and revealing way – I think he undoubtedly succeeds. Christopher is a compelling guide to the incidents that form the core of the narrative – the ‘murder’ of his neighbour’s pet dog, and the unexpected fallout from that crime. His different way of experiencing the world and the challenges he faces in doing so does reveal events unlike that of any conventional narration. It is also a source of humour, although this is mostly kindly done – Christopher is laughed at by some characters he meets, but not by the reader. If the situations he finds himself in are potentially amusing they are also potentially tragic, not least the disintegration of his family who he depends on so completely. At the same time I can understand the concerns people have about the portrayal of autism – Christopher is violent and aggressive towards people who try to help him, including menacing them with a pocket knife (even if Haddon blunts this threat somewhat by making it the saw blade of a Swiss Army knife). The portrait of autism is also inconsistent – Christopher is at pains to explain that he cannot understand any language that is indirect or uses imagery – “metaphors are lies” but he also uses imagery in his narrative. And of course there is a fundamental contradiction in the idea of a novel written by an autistic person who claims “this is another reason why I don’t like proper novels, because they are lies about things which didn’t happen and they make me feel shaky and scared. And this is why everything I have written here is true” – when clearly it is not.

The mystery element of the narrative is a parody or pastiche of the Sherlock Holmes stories, suggesting that Holmes and Christopher share some of the same ways of looking at the world. Christopher is certainly intelligent and he remembers virtually everything he sees (the myth of eidetic memory is incredibly strong) although elsewhere in the novel Christopher accurately describes how people don’t actually’ see everything all the time – our eyes aren’t video recorders, and our brains have limited storage, which contradicts this aspect of his characterisation. Like Holmes Christopher has substantial gaps in his knowledge and his understanding of the world, particularly in relation to people and human behaviour, and is extremely scornful of others who have a different interests and views.

Sympathetic portraits of people (especially children) with learning or behavioural difficulties, which present the world from their point of view with the intention of helping the reader understand that different perspective, are few and far between. So I think we can forgive Haddon for any mistakes (or vagueness) in his characterisation of this condition. Sometimes the pressures of the narrative require Christopher to be able to do things (such as travel on the tube) when this would clearly have been beyond the abilities of the character a few chapters earlier. (To be fair, he does find this extremely difficult, but he’s not alone in that!) But a flawed autistic hero is still a hero, achieving things far beyond the expectations of others (for example he is the first person at his school to pass an A level).

The novel ends on a positive note – Christopher’s family situation settles down and he appears to be coming to terms with his father’s decisions that have caused him so much distress. Adult readers will no doubt empathise more closely with Christopher’s parents and the difficulties they faced in raising him, while younger readers will be supportive of Christopher himself. He is given a puppy, passes his Maths A Level, and has a plan for the next few years of his life – he will take two more A levels and go to university. Young readers will cheer him on and be hopeful that this can happen – older readers will worry for Christopher, knowing the hurdles he faces and the demands this will put on his already worn down parents.

The Curious Incident won several prizes including the Whitbread Book Awards for Best Novel and Book of the Year, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. It has also been adapted as a very successful stage play. Although it was originally published in separate editions for both children and adults, I think it ideal audience would be young adults, who will be charmed by Christopher’s unique way of looking at the world and recognise in themselves some of the same challenges such as how to navigate their way through a complex, noisy world. If Christopher can make it, with the support of his parents, perhaps we all can?

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, 2003

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Book review

“Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?“

Going Postal

In some ways A Life with Footnotes is really two books. The first few thousand words are based on autobiographical notes dictated by Sir Terry during the final years of his life, as a side project between the completion of his many other activities, principally the last few Discworld novels. This part of the book is a very traditional autobiography, with lots of focus on Sir Terry’s early years, his family, his adventures in reading which lead to his becoming the author of the wonderful Discworld series, and his early jobs in local newspapers, reporting on funny vegetables at village fetes etc.

The second part of the book is written in a somewhat different style and is more of a a memoir. While the whole book is by Rob Wilkins, this section is obviously him alone rather than him plus STP. Wilkins was Sir Terry’s long time assistant, amanuensis, and business manager and was the obvious person to choose to write this biography – Rob was beside him every step of the way throughout the last fifteen years of his life, probably his most productive period as an author, He cared for him following his diagnosis and was the co-author (with Pratchett’s daughter, Rhianna) of the extraordinary tweets that announced Sir Terry’s death, which can still bring a lump to my throat. He also became ‘keeper of the anecdotes’ as Terry’s memory began to falter, and read for him at public events. Few people can ever have had the privilege of being this close to such a successful author, and this book is a respectful and comprehensive account of their time together.

The one thing that you won’t find here is anything salacious or revealing. I doubt whether this is this kind of material in STP’s personal life exists anyway, but there’s no hint of any revelations – this is not that kind of book. Rob does reveal that STP was occasionally a bit grumpy if things didn’t go well – a badly arranged book reading for example – but that’s about it. His private life remains a closed book, and his long and happy marriage only provides a backdrop to his career as an author,

One of the many good things about this book is that it describes in some detail the books that influenced STP’s career – the books he loved and which stayed with him over the years. So it makes a great, slightly off-beat reading list, full of recommendations for science fiction and fantasy authors and books, some of which I had beard of but many which were entirely new to me.

I think I knew some of the background to STP’s career already, having been buying his books since the 80’s. For years he didn’t fully commit to his writing. He worked for the Central Electricity Generating Board in a media role long after The Colour of Magic was published, (1983). Becoming a full time author (which of course isn’t just about writing – it’s about book tours, conventions, merchandising, and all the rest, virtually a full-time business in itself) was something he held back from for a long time. It must have been obvious at some point that having administrative assistance – someone to open and reply to all the fan letters, requests for interviews etc – would allow him to focus on the actual job of writing, but it wasn’t until he heard the author Jilly Cooper talk about her invaluable PA that Pratchett was filled with ‘staff envy’ and hired Wilkins.

Inevitably the latter section of the text is dominated by what became know as ‘the embuggerance’, his diagnosis of a rare form of young-onset Alzheimer’s disease, posterior cortical atrophy. Over time he needed more and more assistance, and Rob was there every step of the way to step up and provide this support, at first just “tidying up” pages of text (was this just dealing with layouts and fonts?) to taking dictation and towards the end guiding him through his last explorations of Discworld.

Another well-known fact about STP is covered in additional detail here. He left clear instructions that there were to be no authorised further Discworld novels or books and that the hard drive from his computer containing all his work in progress be run over by a specific steam engine at the Great Dorset Steam Fair. (Whether this was backed up or not we may never know). Wilkins gives a painful glimpse of what was lost, including ideas for novels such as The Lost Incontinent; a police procedural based on the goblin characters in Raising Steam called The Feeney (leaving us groan-inducing puns to the last) and Cab’s Well – the story of the creature at the bottom of a well whose job it is to make wishes come true. What a loss.

The other painful element to this account is a personal one – all those years I was a STP fan, but I never once took the time to go to one of his readings, book-signings, or any of the conferences or other events he attended and spoke at. Why not? What a missed opportunity. It made me resolve not to make this mistake again, and to make sure I take the opportunity to go and listen to living authors while I still have the chance. There was a recent thread on twitter you may have seen where an author complained that no-one came to one of their book signings, and a whole host of extremely well know writers chimed in to say ‘me too’. Neil Gaiman kindly wrote: “Terry Pratchett and I did a signing in Manhattan for Good Omens that nobody came to at all… We were meant to have been there for 2 hours. After an hour of nobody in the store we told the store manager that we were going back to our hotel and that we would be in the bar, and if anyone came to get a book signed to send them there to us. Nobody came.” (Margaret Atwood had a similar experience, tweeting: “Join the club. I did a signing to which Nobody came, except a guy who wanted to buy some Scotch tape and thought I was the help.”) Let’s make sure no-one sits through that indignity again, even if they are a local author with a self-published vanity project and you really don’t want to buy their book!

I’ll end this post with a variation of the way I end all my posts on Terry Pratchett – read him, You won’t regret it.

Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes by Rob Wilkins

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Book review

The Satsuma Complex, by Bob Mortimer, 2022

If someone told you the engagingly daft comedian Bob Mortimer had written a novel, what would you expect? Wonder no more, because the answer is The Satsuma Complex. It is impossible to find a review of this novel which doesn’t use the word quirky, so let’s get that out the way up front – this is a quirky, funny crime novel full of the surreal humour which is Bob’s trademark. The challenge the author must have faced when sitting down to write this was whether this humour could be sustained over the length of a novel, or whether the more serious elements would be seen as ‘padding’.

The Satsuma Complex (possibly a reference to A Clockwork Orange?) is narrated by Gary Thorn, a lonely, 30-something solicitor’s assistant drifting through life. His only friends are his irascible next-door neighbour, Grace, and a squirrel he talks to in the park. Work is boring and unengaging, and he has only been on two dates since he moved to London. Anyone who has read Mortimer’s autobiography, And Away will recognise this description of a less than happy period of Bob’s life, pre-comedy, down to the cheap shiny suit and the spartan flat. Write what you know is the template being used here.

The novel opens with Gary getting out of his depth when an innocuous drink with a work acquaintance gets him entangled in an investigation into police corruption and organised crime. The acquaintance goes missing, presumed dead, but not before he has told Gary that he is investigating police corruption in their patch of South London. Shortly thereafter Gary meets and is smitten by Emily, who, it turns out, is also involved in the crime operation and is also out of her depth, being coerced into following him to find out what he knows about the investigation. Details of the police corruption are recorded in a memory stick which comes into Gary’s possession, making him a target of both the criminals and the corrupt police. (I think Mortimer drew inspiration from the Daniel Morgan murder case for this element of the narrative – some details have been changed but there are plenty of similarities as well).

This is not a particularly promising or original set up for a crime novel, even a comedy crime novel – the ‘someone goes missing and a memory stick with key details of the case needs to be kept safe by our unwitting hero’ scenario has been done before. When the police call round to tell Gary his friend is dead, he is ill-equipped for his part in what follows. Mortimer stresses the fact that Gary has no heroic elements to his character – and this isn’t going to be a situation where any hidden heroism emerges either. When threatened by the criminals who want the memory stick he is quite ready to hand it back, even though he knows it means his friend’s murderers will escape unpunished. His focus is really on pursuing a developing relationship with the fragrant Emily, undeterred by revelations about her involvement with the aforementioned gang,

The plot may be deeply unoriginal, but Gary is an engaging anti-hero. His comedic asides and internal monologues (especially the conversations with the friendly local squirrel) are pure Mortimer. You would have thought that absurd comedy and hard-boiled crime novels are an uncomfortable combination unlikely to work, but Mortimer just about pulls it off. If you aren’t a fan of Mortimer’s carefully judged silliness then you won’t find much to entertain you here. The crime novel element of the book is quite heavily cliched, from the femme fatale to the hyper-violent but well-spoken villain. The charms of the book are elsewhere – in the banter between Gary and his irascible neighbour, the surreal descriptions such as the cologne ‘Electricity’ by Seb Longcoq being ‘on the banana-y side of road-works’ or dogs named Zak Briefcase and Lengthy Parsnips.

Would this have been published if the author was not a celebrity? Honestly, I doubt it. The characters aren’t strong enough and the plot is predictable. Is the humour strong enough to compensate for these weaknesses? Yes – but only because we know and love Bob and appreciate his sense of humour. Without that context it would have struggled.

I think the good news is that there’s unlikely to be a series here. I am sure Mortimer’s publishers will be pushing his for more of the same to capitalise on his current high profile and the considerable success of this novel. But a career investigating crime doesn’t seem in store for Gary Thorn – perhaps he will discover the world of stand-up comedy, which I think will be much more his kind of thing.

The Satsuma Complex, by Bob Mortimer, 2022

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Book review

(NB I’ve tried to avoid spoilers in this review but I am not sure I have succeeded, so if you are planning to read The Bullet that Missed and want to have a spoiler-free experience, best not to read on.)

Any author setting out to construct a crime novel will need to decide fairly early on in the process the amount of peril they want to include. Are the characters going to be at serious risk of harm or death, or will they be able to slip away from danger effortlessly? Authors writing for children will usually avoid anything where their characters come to ‘real’ harm, and any deaths are usually ‘off-screen’ or reversed very quickly – I know I have said this before, but I have a theory that you can work out the age group a film is targeted out by the number of seconds between the moment a character ‘dies’ and then suddenly coming back to life. When J K Rowling kills one of her characters in front of us – Cedric Diggory of course – and he doesn’t come back to life, we know she is now writing for a new, more mature audience, even if it is the same one that initially read Philosopher’s Stone three years earlier.

Richard Osman seems to have made a different choice and gone in the opposite direction, ratcheting up the ‘cosy’ element of the Thursday Murder Club series and removing all sense of peril whatsoever. At no point are his senior citizen investigators under any more threat than the Jigsaw Club. Highly skilled assassins can be persuaded not to go through with their threats over a cup of tea, a chocolate biscuit and a nice little chat with someone telling them they really didn’t want to kill anyone, did they? A hardened gang-leader in prison for murder can be persuaded to help the gang investigate the current crime simply through being asked nicely. Another lonely gangland crime boss trades secrets for another game of snooker.

Which makes it hard to take the novel at all seriously. Osman introduces several new characters in this latest incarnation of the Thursday Murder Club, which it goes without saying will sell in its millions. There’s a Swedish crypto-billionaire money launderer who tries to do his own easily-foiled assassinations (even though he has a crew to conduct kidnappings for him). He shows Elizabeth, retired spy, around his baronial lair in Staffordshire (why Staffordshire – is it home to many Swedish crypto-currency billionaires?) and the only thing missing is a white cat being slowly stroked for the Bond villain caricature to be complete. Victor is the ubiquitous retired Russian KGB colonel who always turns up in this kind of novel and would be played by Brian Cox (the actor, not the astronomer) in the inevitable film adaptation. He is also a complete sweetie and wants to join the gang, moving into the retirement community from his lonely luxury apartment in a tower block with it’s own suspended swimming pool.

The novel’s whodunnit puzzle – the gang are investigating a mysterious death of a reporter ten years earlier – is not that interesting. The red herrings are capitalised, in bold, and underlined to remove the risk of them being missed, and the resolution is, unusually for this series, a bit messily handled. The clues include some clunky anagrams which are hard to avoid – because arch-criminals obviously disguise their bank accounts anagrammatically, don’t they?

The element of pathos in the novel, the recognition that these are the last years of the characters’ lives and that death and infirmity come for us all, remains a theme, but is kept firmly in the background. Stephen, Elizabeth’s husband, is suffering from rapidly deteriorating dementia, but remains lucid enough most of the time to be able to assist with the investigation. Overall old-age is presented as rather pleasant golden years rather than those of infirmity, poverty and loneliness.

That’s the negative aspects of the novel – the cosiness is dialled past 11 and any sense of peril is entirely absent. Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron and Ibrahim (and Victor?) are going to all live to 100 and run out of cases before they run out of time. But the 400+ pages pass by pleasantly enough nonetheless. Joyce remains the star of the show, navigating her way through the complexities of the modern world including Instagram and losing her savings by investing them in BitCoin and Etherium. Her murder mystery story, submitted to the local paper as a competition entry and included in full as a bonus item in the Waterstones edition of the novel (but I am sure available online) is hilarious and shows just how hard it is for crime-writers to avoid cliché. The humour in the novel is cleverly done. I particularly enjoyed the observation that “he eats salmon and broccoli now. He eats so much broccoli he can spell it without looking it up” given how hard it usually is to get this one right. Jokes about technology also land well – one character admits “I got so desperate I even used Bing, but the results were the same, if a bit slower.” There are plenty of quotable nuggets of wisdom scattered through the text – Victor in particular is wise in the manner of most Russian spies in this genre:

“It’s the people, in the end, isn’t it?” says Viktor. “It’s always the people. You can move halfway around the world to find your perfect life, move to Australia if you like, but it always comes down to the people you meet.”

There are enough points of entertainment to keep the pages turning and one’s interest engaged. The extra-large font the novel is printed in tells you everything you could want to know about Osman’s target readership, if that was ever in any doubt! I just wonder if perhaps Osman is losing focus and interest, and whether diminishing returns are beginning to set in? Eventually all long-running series run the risk of self-parody (a risk Osman explicitly acknowledges in the short story Joyce writes). He will need to find a new element or character in the inevitable Thursday Murder Club 4 due out this autumn this series becoming oppressively comfortable and we all doze off. This is a book to listen to while doing an uncomplicated jigsaw. There is a place in the world for that kind of book and I am sure I will read TMC4 when it comes out – but I can’t avoid thinking that Osman could do better than this.

The Bullet that Missed by Richard Osman, 2022

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Book review

My most popular post in 2022, for the second year running, was the supplementary post I wrote on clothing following my review of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Which is strange, because it was very much an incidental almost throwaway post on a subject that had caught my eye rather than something I have any particular interest or expertise in. Other popular posts include the comparison between Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility and my review of H G Wells’ The Invisible Man, the most popular post in 2020. The clothing post is not particularly long, has only a few illustrations, and a handful of comments. So why so popular? My best guess is that entirely by coincidence this is a topic sometimes set for examination or essay questions, and as such it provides a useful if accidental resource for students. If that’s right then you are more than welcome, random stranger.

Given that I went into a serious reading slump at the end of the year, my overall output of nearly 50 novels read isn’t that bad at all considering, especially as one of these was Vikram Seth’s very long (over 1000 pages) A Suitable Boy. My annual Dickens was Great Expectations, which was an important novel to tick off the list, although I am a little daunted at just how far I have to go to finish his novels. I also reviewed Persuasion, the last of Austen’s major novels (I have no plans to read her minor works such as Sanditon, although happy to hear the case for the defence if you think they are worth reading). I also read a few non-fiction works, of which my favourite was probably Michael Slater’s biography of Dickens. Looking at my reading plans for 2022 which I set out in a post at the beginning of the year, I read all but one of the novels on my list. Overall not a bad year’s work – although I am brought back to earth by the realisation that I have only read (and not yet reviewed) one of the Guardian’s best fiction novels of 2022.

In 2023 I have immediate plans to read the wonderful and diverse range of books I received as presents, three of which I have already completed and am working on their reviews. These will keep me busy for some time but later in the year the challenge will be to retain my reading mojo – it is easy once something knocks you out of the pattern of reading to just doom scroll and/or watch box sets rather than using the time wisely. I haven’t chosen this year’s Dickens, but I am tempted by Our Mutual Friend, of which I have only the dimmest recollection from a read more than 40 years ago.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to read more wisely in 2023.

Looking back at 2022 and forward to 2023

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