Book review

Lady Susan by Jane Austen, 1794/1871

I confess I had largely written off Jane Austen’s juvenilia as stories that should probably have remained unpublished – largely I think on the basis of a very small sample size taken many years ago – but I was wrong. Lady Susan, written when Austen was 18 – in other words to all intents and purposes an adult and meaning therefore that it is hard to label Lady Susan as juvenilia anyway – is a mature, witty and sophisticated novella. It is written in the epistolary form, which quickly illustrates the shortcomings and disadvantages of the structure and is an important step in Austen’s evolution of the third-person omniscient narrative format which she perfected in her mature novels. Written in around 1794 or so the internet tells me, but not published until 1871, it is a gem!

The plot and characters

The format of the novel means that the reader has to spend time in working out the relationships of the characters. Without a narrator to spell things out for us, the clues in the opening letters give an incomplete picture. Epistolary novels were the default format for novels in the eighteenth century and Austen may have simply been following convention in adopting this style.

The novella’s central character is Lady Susan Vernon, a recent widow in her mid-thirties, (a relatively old woman in other words, for the purposes of a Georgian romantic novel) who sees herself as a liberated, independent woman. We soon find out that many of her wider family see her very differently. The story opens with a letter from our anti-heroine announcing her intention to visit her brother-in-law and his wife, Charles and Catherine Vernon, at Churchill, their country residence. Catherine’s following letter to her mother reveals that she is is far from pleased by this announcement, partly because Lady Susan had tried to prevent her marriage to Charles and partly because her guest has a reputation as a woman of negotiable affections. It is strongly implied that Lady Susan has been having a romantic liaison with the married Mr. Manwaring and is having to leave his household, where she was staying as a guest, in a hurry, the affair having been exposed. Nevertheless Charles accepts this self-invitation, less apprehensive about Lady Susan than his wife and less willing to give any credence to the rumours about his sister-in-law, his brother being Lady Susan’s recently deceased husband. (If at this point it feels like you should be taking notes then that accurately sums up the experience of reading the letters between the characters the first time around).

Catherine’s brother Reginald comes to visit Churchill and despite warnings about Lady Susan begins to be attracted to her. Lady Susan is planning to remarry once a reasonable length of time has passed since her late husband’s demise, but is keeping her options open, considering the attractions of a number of potential suitors. She also factors into her calculations the need to marry off her sixteen year old daughter Frederica to one of the several eligible young men in her sphere of influence, while reserving the choice of the crop for herself. In other words, Lady Susan is something of a monster, in the context of a romantic novel, an appalling mother and an adulteress. She is almost wholly immoral. She is also greatly charming persuasive, at least to men – other women seem to see straight through her. Her letters to her confidante, Mrs Johnson, expose her true nature and immorality, but the face she presents to the outside world is charming. It is unusual for Austen to have as her central character someone so wholly without redeeming features, even if Lady Susan can at times be a charming companion (or so she tells us), and it is obviously a mark of her development as an author that her later heroines are more complex, less two-dimensional characters. (That’s not to say that later Austen novels don’t feature characters that are close to being caricatures, but not her central figures).

The constraints of the epistolary format soon become apparent as the novel develops. Austen uses the contrast between the viewpoints of the different correspondents to allow the reader to make judgments about their trustworthiness, veracity etc, but the novel is effectively abandoned after around sixty pages with a short summary by a narrator much more recognisably Austen in tone and voice. The novella’s characterisations are more straightforward than Austen would later develop – Lady Susan is pretty (“I have seldom seen so lovely a woman as Lady Susan. She is delicately fair, with fine grey eyes and dark eyelashes; and from her appearance one would not suppose her more than five and twenty, though she must in fact be ten years older.”) but scheming and amoral; the novel’s ‘hero’, Reginald, is weak-willed, easily led and rather pathetic. There are very few letters in the novel from him and he is more a plot-device than a well-developed character. Certainly he is no Mr Darcy or Mr Knightley!

But there are many glimpses of the author Austen was to become. The language she uses is complex and nuanced. Many of the themes that dominate her mature work are present, not least a young woman’s need to make a good marriage with a man of an appropriate income. Susan is sexually liberated, immoral, and as such very much ahead of her time. She manipulates those around her shamelessly and very effectively, particularly the men in her life, and the novel’s ending suggests that she lands on her feet in the end, making a match with an impressionable, wealthy and much younger man.

I am glad I revisited Lady Susan. It provides an interesting contrast to Austen’s mature works. I do wonder whether had her health been better if she would one day have revisited the manuscript and fleshed out the narrative? Lady Susan is one of literatures lesser well known villainesses, but a compelling one nonetheless.

Lady Susan by Jane Austen, 1794/1871

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Book review

The Singapore Grip by J G Farrell, 1978

I finished J G Farrell’s The Singapore Grip with a sense of relief, which is not a good sign is it? At over 650 pages it was hard work. I had really enjoyed Farrell’s previous novel, Troubles, which was intelligent and entertaining. I had more mixed feelings about his Booker prize-winning The Siege of Krishnapur, which completely erased the voices of the local residents and portrayed every incident from the perspective of the English settlers. The Singapore Grip suffers from a very similar problem – the story is told almost exclusively from the perspective of the English people living in Singapore, and (with only a couple of exceptions) the Malayans and Chinese residents of the peninsula are there for comic effect.

The novel is set in (as you may have guessed) Singapore, and portrays the final days of British government of the island and the Japanese invasion of 1942. The complacent colonial elite, solely interested in exploiting the land for its natural resources, principally rubber, are represented by Walter Blackett, an imperiously dense rubber merchant, and his daughter Joan and son Monty. Often described as a satirical novel, colonialism is a soft target for a novel written in the 1970s. The Blackett’s privileged lifestyle rests upon their attempting to recreate middle class English society as closely as possible, with tea parties and drinks before dinner, even while the society is collapsing all around them as the Japanese come ever closer. The novel’s conscience is embodied by Matthew Webb, son of Walter Blackett’s late business partner, newly arrived to the island (leaving behind a Europe at war) who has previously worked for the League of Nations. Matthew expresses doubts about the society he finds and believes a better world is possible. He symbolically rejects the colonialists by refusing to marry Joan, an arranged marriage that would have secured the future of the company, and instead pursues a relationship with an Asian woman.

There are a number of reasons why this novel was such hard work. The plot meanders and never surprises – we always know the Japanese are going to invade and conquer the island. Whether certain characters escape before the invasion is not a key plot point, as a reader might expect – some of them have chances to leave and let them pass. Walter in particular is focussed on rebuilding his commercial empire after the war, rather than how to survive it. The large cast of characters is not interesting or attractive enough for us to care greatly what happens to them. The critique of colonialism is heavy handed and repetitive – the absurdity of manipulating the supply of rubber to ensure profit from the estates is maximised is explained more than once. Worst of all, on-English voices are silent, with a few exceptions. The Frenchman, François Dupigny, is thrown in for some contrast, but his character is never really developed. After rejecting Joan, Matthew starts a relationship with Vera Chiang, reputed to be the daughter of a Russian princess and a Cantonese tea merchant. Despite this character’s potential she is largely a one dimensional caricature of a mysterious Eastern seductress, and I don’t think we ever are given an insight into her interests or thoughts, only seeing her through Matthew’s eyes.

There is one chapter that stands out from the parade of mildly inconvenient but still privileged things happening to the Europeans. This chapter is written from the perspective of the members of the invading Japanese force and shows them as reckless and driven by a profound sense of honour and determination. Although this is again a cliche it is at least a new voice and perspective from that of the European voices that dominate the rest of the novel. When we read on the final pages that any local people suspected of collaborating with the conquered English were massacred by the Japanese it is almost said as an afterthought, with no real sense of horror at the scale or brutality of the killings.

The novel’s title is a salacious joke, a single entendre, a reference to a sexual practice said to have originated in Singapore. Matthew is regularly teased by people he meets because he doesn’t understand the phrase, not that it really matters. Attempts to interpret the phrase as a reference to the control exerted by the island or its occupiers on society are well-meaning but redundant.

When the novel was adapted into a television series in 2020 by the BBC, critics complained that “Asian characters are merely heavily accented ciphers, silent chauffeurs, exotic dancers, giggly prostitutes, monosyllabic grunts and half-naked Yogis …. Asian womanhood is represented as lurid temptation and subservient availability.” That seems to me a fair representation of the novel as well. I am glad I finished it as I have a pathological aversion to investing time in a novel and not getting to the end (I’d rather not start in the first place) and the excellent Troubles had given me every reason to try again with Farrell. This was his last novel before a premature death in an accident and a disappointing way to finish.

The Singapore Grip by J G Farrell, 1978

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Book review

Youth (1898) and The End of the Tether (1902) by Joseph Conrad

Youth was first published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1898. Four years later it was republished in novel format in the collection Youth, A Narrative; and Two Other Stories in 1902, best known because one of the ‘two other stories’ is arguably Conrad’s most significant work, Heart of Darkness. These are still published together in the Penguin Modern Classics edition of the collection. The stories are grouped in this way to provide a young/middle-aged/old structure to the seafaring stories, on which more later.

Youth opens with several older merchant navy men sharing stories, very reminiscent of the opening of Heart of Darkness. One of them, Marlow, tells an anecdote about his first voyage to the East on board the Judea. The ship is carrying a load of coal from England to Thailand. The voyage begins to go disastrously wrong almost from the off, with a gale nearly sinking her, followed by a collision with a steamer, which takes weeks to repair. On the next attempted journey another storm hits which almost destroys the ship, leaving the crew having to work at the pumps constantly to keep the ship afloat. After a total refit and a new crew the journey is restarted, and the ship gets as far as the coast of Western Australia, when yet another disaster strikes – the coal they are carrying catches fire and eventually explodes. Although to all intents and purposes destroyed the ship stays afloat. The captain is determined to rescue either some of the cargo, the hulk of the ship, or the ship’s gear to prove to insurers that every effort had been made to save the ship. The Judea is finally abandoned and the crew salvage what they can and decant into the ship’s longboats. Somehow they make it into port and eventually back to England. For Marlow, with the irrepressibility of youth, this has all been an adventure. As such, Youth provides a striking contrast with the ominous, oppressive atmosphere of Heart of Darkness.

The End of the Tether provides the other bookend to HoD, telling the story of an old merchant navy captain, Henry Whalley. He is coming to the end of his career. In his prime he had been famous as ‘dare-devil Harry Whalley’, captain, explorer and adventurer. When we meet Whalley he has just lost all his savings in an unfortunate investment, and is considering his options. A letter from his daughter pleading for help prompts him to sell his ship, sending her most of the money and saving only a modest sum to live on. To provide an income (and I think an occupation) he buys a working share in a steamer, Sofala. This ship’s owner, Massy, is an irascible man who enjoys firing crew members. Massy has a gambling addiction which makes him paranoid, fearing everyone is trying to rob him, but he can’t fire Whalley because of the contract they have signed. However, Whalley begins to lose his sight, and has to hide this fact in case he loses his investment, relying on his knowledge of the route and the help of his crew to navigate safely. When this strategy finally lets him down he faces the most difficult of decisions.

The most difficult of the voyages described in these three stories is undoubtedly that of the Judea in Youth, but Marlow’s youthful fortitude makes it seem a jolly adventure. The journey in Heart of Darkness is for the most part relatively untroubled, but the menacing nature of the setting and the destination is what Marlow finds most challenging. The journey in The End of the Tether is by comparison straightforward and Whalley has made this trip many times before, with the most difficult element being some feats of navigation which he can manage almost literally with his eyes closed. Putting up with the boorish Massy is more difficult, but he can bear it for the sake of his daughter. (Whalley’s strategy for dealing with Massy is to totally and contemptuously ignore him, which of course winds Massy up all the more), These stories form a strong coherent whole and I am really glad that the Penguin Modern Classic series continues to print them together despite Heart of Darkness obviously being the best known stand alone story. Like most works of art, being seen/read in its original context helps with the reader’s understanding of the text. Marlow’s reaction to Kurtz’s descent into madness is easier to understand when seen in this setting.

Originally these stories would have been read as adventure stories of far distant lands and seafaring voyages. While of course they can still be read in this way, on its own Heart of Darkness is an important commentary on imperialism and empire. As a collection however they read in yet another way, as a reflection on age. It is wonderful that texts can be revived simply by reframing (or more correctly by a restoration of the original framing) in this way.

Youth (1898) and The End of the Tether (1902) by Joseph Conrad

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Book review

The Inheritors by William Golding, 1955

The Inheritors is a fascinating, challenging novel by the author of Lord of the Flies, with which it shares some points of similarity. It is set in prehistoric times and follows a community of stone-age people moving from their winter quarters to their summer base. The novel is prefaced by a quote from H G Wells’s Outline of History explaining how little is known about Neandethal man. Although this is presented as a key to interpreting the text that follows, it is somewhat misleading, as the reader comes to learn.

The Inheritors is told largely from the perspective of Lok, one of ‘the people’, a term they use to describe their small group. It is not clear if the people have had contact with other communities before. It is quickly clear however that they are a very primitive tribe. One way Golding illustrates this is that they struggle with most kinds of abstract or conceptual thought. We see this early in the novel, when Lok finds that the log the group has habitually used to cross a river has been removed:

“He shut his eyes and frowned at the picture of the log. It had lain in the water from this side to that, grey and rotting. When you trod the centre you could feel the water that washed beneath you, horrible water, as deep in places as a man’s shoulder. The water was not awake like the river or the fall but asleep, spreading there to the river and waking up, stretching on the right into wilderness of impassable swamp and thicket and bog. So sure was he of this log the people always used that e opened his eyes again, beginning to smile as if he were waking out a a dream; but the log was gone. “

You will note that the author uses the phrase ‘as deep in places as a man’s shoulder’. Elsewhere the term ‘old woman’ is used. So we are subtlety led to understand that these people are men and women, or consider themselves as such. But they have virtually no tools, no clothing, a very limited understanding of the world around them, and are almost completely unable to use abstract ideas (although they are able to control fire). Which prompts the reader to ask – just how primitive are they? – and critically, are they homo-sapiens, the species that went on to inherit the earth (in the terms of the novel’s title), or are they another species entirely? We are initially encouraged – by the novel’s title, the focus on the group, the first person narration and the use of the terms man and woman – to think they are the inheritors, our ancestors, but we come to realise that assumption might not be right. That doubt accelerates or is confirmed when the group comes into contact with the Others. This new group wear clothes, use tools including weapons and boats, and kill the people casually immediately on contact. The people are quickly reduced to two adults – Lok, Fa, a female, and two children, Liku and an unnamed baby. The newcomers kidnap the children and shoot arrows across the river at Lok, who doesn’t understand what is happening:

Suddenly Lok understood that the man was holding the stick out to him but neither he nor Lok could reach across the river. He would have laughed if it were not for the echo of the screaming in his head. The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to full length again. The dead tree by Lok’s ear acquired a voice. “Clop!” His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had grown a twig: a twig that smelt of other, and of goose, and of the bitter berries that Lok’s stomach told him he must not eat. This twig had a white bone at the end. There were hooks in the bone and sticky brown stuff hung in the crooks. His nose examined this stuff and did not like it.

Despite his understanding that the sticky brown stuff at the end of the arrow is unpleasant, (he has a highly advanced sense of smell) Lok is simply unable to conceive of the fact that he is being attacked. Later he again has arrows fired at him and crucially he has learnt nothing from his original encounters with the Others and reacts in a bemused way. The people are so isolated that they are unable to comprehend the danger that the Others represent – without this instinct for self-preservation they are doomed. Although wary of the Others once they have killed four of his group, Lok is also fascinated by them – running away doesn’t occur to him. Fa, more perceptive than Lok, tries to persuade him to flee, but he is focussed on rescuing the children. When Liku, the older child, is apparently killed and possibly eaten by the Others, Fa sensitively protects Lok from this fact. As we see the events of the novel from Lok’s perspective it is some time before we (and he) realise what has happened to Liku. More generally, his limited vocabulary and understanding of the world at times makes the novel hard to follow. The reader has to decode everything – the example given above of the arrow being fired at Lok is straightforward enough, but much of the time things are confused and unclear. This means that The Inheritors is a novel that demands to be read carefully.  Ben Okri’s introduction to the Faber and Faber edition puts it this way:

“It is the kind of novel in which the real reading starts with the second reading. Then the work becomes clearer with every sentence and yet not so clear. In the second half, much has to be pieced together in the highly suggestive writing. Readers have to discover for themselves what is meticulously described. This makes us inhabit the restricted comprehension of ‘the people’, sometimes understanding and sometimes not.”

The novel is redolent with symbolism and particularly Biblical imagery. The group are described as the people of the Fall. In one sense this is literal, as their summer camp is next to a waterfall, but the analogy with the Adam and Eve story, with the people embodying an innocence that has no concept of sin or violence, and the Others representing the violence of Cain. It is relevant that the people have a cultural taboo against killing animals, although they will eat the abandoned or stolen prey of wild animals. The Others have developed an alcoholic drink and the scene where Lok and Fa accidentally get drunk and are completely disorientated by the experience is analogous to Adam and Eve being tempted to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If this sounds a somewhat heavy-handed use of symbolism that is more down to my summary than Golding’s writing which is done with much more sensitivity and lightness of touch.

The novel ends, famously, with two sudden changes of perspective. From the moment Fa is swept away over the waterfall, the narrator steps back, and instead of showing us the world and its events from Lok’s perspective, looks at him dispassionately. He suddenly – mid-chapter – becomes “it” and “the red creature”. We have seen this description used once before, when in Chapter 11 we see Fa from Lok’s eyes and she is described as “red as a squirrel, running mostly on all fours“, but this is the first detailed description of the people’s appearance:

“It was a strange creature, smallish and bowed. The legs and thighs were bent and there was a whole thatch of curls on the outside of the legs and arms. The back was high and covered over the shoulders with curly hair. Its feet and hands were broad, and flat, the great toe projecting inwards to grip. The square hands swung down to the knee. “

The novel’s final chapter sees another switch in perspective, almost as shocking. It is written from the viewpoint of Tuami, one of the homo sapiens group that has brought such destruction into the simple lives of the people. This group are scared – terrified – of the people and are running away from them. Tuami is plotting to kill the group’s leader and replace him. But for now they are fleeing from the strange and dangerous people who they think of as devils. They have with them the Neanderthal baby, adopted as a pet. The Others have been scarred and damaged by their encounter with the people and will carry traces of this meeting for a long time, choosing to avoid the forest where they think they live. These are the real inheritors – and they are us. As he does in Lord of the Flies, Golding exposes man’s true nature. I wouldn’t want to reduce this complex narrative to a simple parable – ‘we are the real monsters’ – but there’s no doubt that is a significant part of the overall theme of the novel.

As Golding’s second novel this is a powerful follow up to Lord of the Flies and a novel that is perhaps not read as widely as it should be. That might in part be because of its perceived difficulty and partly because (slightly surprisingly) it has never been filmed. It is thoughtful and thought-provoking. Highly recommended.

The Inheritors by William Golding, 1955

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Book review

Dr Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party, by Graham Greene, 1980

Graham Greene was arguably the senior British novelist of the post-war period. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature and probably would have won it if not for the objections of a couple of key Swedish judges. But since his death in April 1991 his reputation has faded and faded quite quickly. According to an essay in Prospect magazine this is because ” the world has moved on to another century and other fashions”. Adaptations of his work, such as Neil Jordan’s film of The End of the Affair (1999) and Phillip Noyce’s The Quiet American (2002) only served to emphasis the outdated nature and period settings of his novels rather than keep him in the public eye. I’d struggle to find any concrete evidence for this fading popularity, but my feeling is that his work is read very little nowadays. He certainly is conspicuously missing from many of the ‘100 best novels written in the 20th Century’ lists that pop up from time to time.

So, as always, the question has to be asked, why did I read Dr Fischer of Geneva? The BBC made a television movie of the book in 1984, with Alan Bates, James Mason (in his final screen performance) and Greta Scacchi in the leading roles and with Barry Humphries rather hilariously miscast as the alcoholic womanising film star Richard Deane. The edition I read had a still from this adaptation on the front cover and the impression was inescapably that I was looking at a late version of one of Roald Dahl’s corny ‘Tales of the Unexpected’. (For people of my generation that reference will immediately summon up a lot of memories and meaning – for others please refer to the internet!) Perhaps it was that association, combined with the promising brevity of the novella, that encouraged me to read this text to while away the time on a short journey.

The novella is narrated by Alfred Jones, a translator for a Swiss chocolate company. A note of inauthenticity is immediately introduced – did even the largest chocolate companies have their own in-house translators? It does seem something of a luxury. Jones lost his left hand while working as a fireman during the Blitz and is a widower in his fifties. In Geneva Jones meets the much younger Anna-Luise Fischer, the estranged daughter of the eponymous Dr Fischer and quickly experiences a mutual if unlikely attraction. Her father, Dr Fischer, has become rich after inventing a perfumed toothpaste. He is now known for his notorious dinner parties which attract the rich and famous. Alfred and Anna-Luise are married after a very short courtship and the problem of how to tell her father is one they eventually have to confront.

Jones finally plucks up the courage to go and see Fischer to tell him about the marriage, but Fischer is indifferent to the news. However, he later invites Jones to one of his slightly sinister and infamous dinner parties. Anna-Luise begs him not to go – the suggestion is that the parties will in some way corrupt him – but she relents, and out of curiosity Jones goes to one of the parties. At the party, Fischer sets out the ‘rules’: if a dinner guest does as she or he is instructed they will receives a valuable present at the end of the meal. This is simply a way for Fischer to humiliate his guests. Desperate for their reward they go only with the rules, pretending to find the experience amusing. Jones of course refuses to take part.

This would have been the last of their relationship with Dr Fischer and his ludicrous parties, but Anna-Luise is tragically killed in a skiing accident. Jones is devastated and considers suicide. He tells Fischer about his daughter’s death, but he needs unconcerned. When unexpectedly another party invitation arrives from Dr Fischer he decides to attend to vent his anger at his father-in-law’s indifference to his wife’s death by attending the dinner party and telling him precisely what he thinks of him and his ‘friends’.

This is of course the “Bomb Party” of the novel’s alternative title. Dr. Fischer explains the rules – he has hidden cheques for two million francs apiece within five crackers. Inside the sixth is a small bomb likely to kill whoever opens it. The guests are expected to chose a cracker and open it. A form of Russian roulette in other words. Most of the guests accept the challenge, partly suspecting that Dr Fischer would not really kill one of his guests. Jones, still feeling suicidally reckless, opens several of the crackers. I won’t spoil the ending for you but it was neither surprising nor satisfying.

Greene is quite clumsily discoursing on wealth and morality, but I am not convinced he had anything particularly interesting to say. Fischer is a monster who uses his wealth to abuse his ‘friends’, and they are sufficiently avaricious to allow him to treat them like that. Rich people aren’t very kind to one another. Who would have known? By contrast the romance at the heart of the novel is sweet albeit brief. Jones’s first person narration warns the reader early on that it is not going to last, so Anna-Luise’s death does not come as a shock. But we lose the more interesting character – Jones never really emerges as a convincing persona: having lost his hand in the war he has no expectation of a romance in later life, let alone with someone as exuberant as Anna-Luise. After her death he reverts to existing rather than living.

This was a late Greene novella, not much more than an extended short story. It passed away a short journey, but I doubt it will linger long in the memory, nor encourage me to continue trying with Greene.

Dr Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party, by Graham Greene, 1980

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Book review

Jack Maggs, by Peter Carey, 1997

I can’t tell you precisely how long Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs has sat on my bookshelves waiting to be read, but it is a long time – I was seriously considering abandoning any intent of reading it and regifting it to the charity shop from whence it came. I am so glad that I did not and instead on a whim started this original and entertaining novel.

When I first started it I wasn’t aware that Jacks Maggs was based on Dickens’ Great Expectations and was feeling rather smug when I identified the character Tobias Oates as being a portrait of the young Dickens. Oates is 24 and has had one successful novel published (Captain Crumley, a version of the Pickwick Papers). Oates is married but is already getting bored with his wife and is having a passionate affair with his eighteen-year old sister-in-law. There are close parallels with Dickens’ life here and he doesn’t come out of the novel well at all. Dickens did eventually separate from his wife after she had borne his many children and his relationships with his sisters-in-law don’t stand up to too much scrutiny. This speculative portrait of the early years of his marriage suggest that his affections for his wife were waning even at this stage.

The novel opens with the titular character returning from a life-sentence of transportation to Australia. Whilst imprisoned as a convict his life in Australia was brutally hard, but eventually he was freed and went on to earn a comfortable living and a place in respectable society by becoming a brickmaker. He uses some of this money to trace his young son, abandoned back in England, and provide him with a good education. This of course is essentially the storyline of Great Expectations, but seen from Magwitch/Maggs’s point of view. On returning to England to find his son, leaving a young family back in Australia, Maggs risks the death penalty which faced all those who left Australia after a life sentence. He finds his son’s house empty – he has fled to his club after being forewarned of his father’s intention to come calling – and takes a job as a footman in the household of Mr Percy Buckle, the next door neighbour. His predecessor in the role has recently died by suicide and one of the novel’s mysteries and sub-plots is the background to this death. Maggs is a brutal man, vividly realised by the author, and quite unsuited to the subservient role of footman. In this role he encounters Oates, a dinner guest in the Buckle household, who is intrigued by the rough character who is attending table. Oates offers to hypnotise Maggs to help him with a painful tic that has developed in his face, a result of his being brutally whipped. Oates real intention is to discover Maggs’ backstory, which he quickly does, much to Maggs’s anger when he finds out his identity has been revealed. Maggs only agrees to be hypnotised if Oates will tell him how to find a notorious thief-taker who he believes will help him track down his son.

The novel slightly stalls at this point. The Great Expectations storyline has been left some way behind, and the characters and events repeat themselves while waiting for the deadline by which Oates has agreed to reveal the identity of the thief taker to come around. Maggs discovers his identity has been revealed, and reacts with anger, effectively taking Buckle’s household and Oates along with it hostage. Maggs doesn’t follow a plan or behave in any way strategically – he just uses cunning and the threat of violence to get his way. A trip to Gloucester to find the thief-taker is a wild-goose-chase which doesn’t seem to serve any particular purpose in the narrative (unless it was following a story-line in GE that I have managed to forget!) and puts off the climax in which all the characters come together in a dangerous and potentially violent end to the novel. Dickens was always careful to give his villains an ending that Victorian civic society would approve of, however charismatic they might be, but Carey is less anxious to comply with Victorian morality and (spoiler alert) allows Maggs a happy ending that for much of the novel appears deeply unlikely. Oates on the other hand suffers a painful loss that runs parallel with a similar loss in Dickens’ life, showing that not all immoral behaviour escapes judgment, even if the judgment is delivered on a young woman rather than Dickens/Oates himself.

I thought it would be an interesting to compare this novel with a more recent reimagining of Dickens, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. Google’s AI tells me that the latter novel is the more radical reinterpretation of the two, set as it is in the Appalachians in modern times, and focussing on the opoid epidemic. But it was also in other ways a traditional and fairly close retelling of the Dickens novel, albeit updated, whereas I thought Carey’s novel, while retaining the original setting, was a more imaginative narrative. It uses the Dickens text as a jumping off point but also blends the events of Great Expectations with episodes from Dickens’ life itself. It also uses what I think of as the ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’ technique of showing the events of the novel from an entirely new perspective, revealing depths to the original that were previously unexplored. I think on balance I found the Carey text the more impressive of the two (compared that is with the Kingsolver novel, not the Dickens!) although in terms of critical and popular reaction Demon Copperhead has been far more successful. It is interesting that two very well established authors chose to turn to Dickens for inspiration (of course there are many others doing the same thing) rather than crafting entirely new narratives.

Jack Maggs, by Peter Carey, 1997

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Book review

Aiding and Abetting, by Muriel Spark, 2000

Aiding and Abetting was Muriel Spark’s penultimate novel. It is a retelling of the notorious case of ‘Lucky’ Lucan, a British aristocrat who in the 1970’s murdered his children’s nanny, battered his wife almost to death (she having been his original target) and then went on the run, never to face justice. He is the recurring subject of tabloid stories, being ‘discovered’ living in the Australian outback or South Africa every few years.

Spark tells this story through the unusual lens of Dr Hildegard Wolf, a fake-psychiatrist ‘practising’ in Paris, who is consulted by two men, both of whom claim to be Lucan. They have discovered that she, like them, has a secret – in a previous incarnation she was Beate Pappenheim, a ‘fake stigmatic’ – someone who claimed to experience the wounds Christ suffered on the cross, wounds which mysteriously heal and reappear periodically. Using this story Beate/Hildegard took charitable donations from the faithful and the gullible, and when her fraud (she used period blood to simulate her wounds) was uncovered, fled the country. assuming a new identity.

It’s never clear whether the Lucan claimants are intending to blackmail Wolf – they need the money, their supporters who have kept them secure from the law for decades finally beginning to run out – or whether they enjoy the experience of being able to tell their story free from any risk of exposure. Wolf quickly works out that the men are working together, one being the real Lucan and the other a decoy, helping collect donations of support while leading the police and others astray. But this is all largely a framework within to tell or retell the notorious story of Lucan’s murder of Sandra Rivett, the Lucans’ nanny, and attempted murder of his wife. Lucan sees this as a Shakespearean tragedy instigated by his wife’s legal battle for custody of their children (they were divorcing), made worse by his constant gambling losses. He is the victim in his version of the story. The protection he is offered by friends in escaping justice is his god-given right.

When reading Aiding and Abetting I was left with the impression that it was poorly written, with a lot of repetition and sub-plots that peter out. Poorly written by Spark’s standards that is – she is normally a very intelligent writer with intricate plots, well developed characters and deft control of her material, none of which could be found here. I went back to the text several times to try and find evidence for this impression, but came up empty-handed. Perhaps I was looking for something that wasn’t there? As a reader you have to both trust and challenge your instincts – trust them as first impressions, but nevertheless check them just in case they are prejudices bobbing to the surface. Always give the author the benefit of the doubt (OK- not always; there are some authors who just don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. E L James comes to mind, as do Jeffrey Archer and Dan Brown. But that’s just about it). If you are left with an impression, try and work out why. Well, for a start in Aiding and Abetting Spark doesn’t really have anything new or interesting to say about the Lucan case. She uses it as the structure for her story, but ends up leaning against it lazily. Spark claimed the novel’s theme was ‘blood’ and while there is plenty of blood in the novel, multiple references don’t add up to a theme. None of the novel’s characters are engaging – some are pretty forgettable – and the story doesn’t do justice to the real victim, the children’s nanny, who remains a largely one-dimensional and voiceless figure. (As part of my background reading for this review I was pleased to note that more recently, in 2019, Jill Dawson wrote The Language of Birds which tells the events of the Lucan murder from the point of view of the victim). If I felt ambivalent about the novel, the appallingly predictable and unfunny ending, a tribute of sorts to Evelyn Waugh but with none of the wit and about seventy years too late, left me in no doubt that this was a bit of a dud.

I really hesitate to suggest that Spark, in her early 80’s when this was written, was running out of steam, but I can’t find any other reason why an author usually so careful in her construction and characterisation would not live up to those standards. Perhaps I should read her final novel, The Finishing School, to see if that hypothesis stands up?

Aiding and Abetting, by Muriel Spark, 2000

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Book review

Orwell’s Roses, by Rebecca Solnit, 2021

There is a scene is Stella Gibbons’s near-perfect Cold Comfort Farm where the heroine, Flora, meets the appalling Mr Mybug in a tea shop. She tries to avoid him but he is unshakeable and tries to impress her by talking about his latest project. He is convinced Branwell Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights and in his research has found three letters from him to an aunt in Ireland. These letters are “little masterpieces of repressed passion.  They are full of tender little questions… he asks her how is her rheumatism…has her cat, Toby, ‘recovered from the fever?’ … what is the weather like at Derrydownderry…?’” This portrait, of a pseudo-intellectual taking an obscure fact from the life of an author and blowing it up into a profound insight into their life and work, cannot be bettered, but in Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit gives it a good go.

In the mid-1930’s Orwell rented a small cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire. He ran the local shop from the front room of the cottage and tended the small garden, planting fruit trees, vegetables, and roses. Those roses may or may not be still flowering in the cottage garden, although this seems both improbable and unimportant. In the course of the many thousands of articles, reviews, essays and letters he wrote he inevitably also referenced roses from time to time. But the idea that this scant piece of information can tell us anything significant about Orwell, either as a man or as a writer, is ludicrous. Although sceptical I was genuinely prepared to be persuaded I was wrong. I expected Solnit to have dug up some long-forgotten essay or letter in which Orwell wrote about the significance of roses to his world view, perhaps using their connection to England’s heritage as a metaphor for, well, anything. But of course he didn’t write any such thing and this left the author struggling mightily to make any kind of case. Chapters are devoted to the commercial rose growing industry in Columbia for example, in which unsurprisingly workers rights are undermined and working conditions are tough (although it is hardly a dark satanic mill situation). The author draws clumsy parallels between these hot greenhouses full of roses with Orwell’s exploration of the British mining industry in the 1930’s, but almost any third-world factory or sweatshop would have delivered the same set of comparisons.

A few years ago, shortly after lockdown, I was browsing in my local bookshop with one of my sons. Knowing my admiration for all things Orwell, he pointed this book out. My initial reaction probably seemed a little churlish (I do hope not, but fear it might have been) – that this felt like the scraping of a barrel. All of Orwell’s primary influences – Empire, class, the BBC, literature, politics etc – have been documented and investigated at length, so here was someone writing about his love of gardening. Gardening might have made it into the top ten of a list of Orwell’s interests, perhaps, but did it tell us anything we didn’t already know about the author, his works and his politics? I hazarded that the answer was no, and decided not to invest the £20 or so that the hardback would have cost me. A second-hand bookshop bargain made the decision a lot easier more recently, but my initial judgment – that this was a really tenuous thesis that it would be hard to sustain – was vindicated. There’s no questioning that the author makes a strong effort in arguing that there was some significant connection between Orwell and floristry, but effort doesn’t equal success in this case. See here for example:

“He (Orwell) went on to classify flowers among hobbies, and hobbies among the characteristics of people who valued liberty and private life, but he had opened a door for a room he hadn’t gone into, or perhaps a door onto something much larger than a room. If you do go through this door marked aesthetics and Orwell, you wander toward the very center of his life’s pursuits. (188).

No you don’t. And even if you do, roses are entirely peripheral to that room/area of interest.

Solnit writes at length about the significance of flowers to our lives. There are times where she seems to forget that the book is supposed to be about Orwell, only dragging him back into the text unconvincingly in chapter-ending summaries. But when she does write about Orwell, particularly in the book’s final chapters looking at the extraordinary productivity at the end of his life, she writes well. It is rewarding to spend time revisiting this period of his life, when he took the bizarre decision to move to Jura with his very young son, shortly after his wife Eileen had died, but carried on writing ferociously. The text ends with a chapter on Orwell’s significance today and she rightly points out that the word Orwellian has a resonance in these times that even words like Shakespearean or Dickensian do not. I was expecting the text’s final peroration to see roses drawn back into the discussion, but I was really pleased to see that in the end this didn’t (and probably couldn’t) happen. Solnit writes so much more interestingly about Orwell when she isn’t struggling to tie his work to her poorly-conceived theme.

Orwell’s Roses, by Rebecca Solnit, 2021

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Book review

My Friends, by Hisham Matar, 2024

My Friends is a very personal narrative about the experiences of the narrator, Khaled, a Libyan student who in 1983 goes to study at the University of Edinburgh. There he meets fellow Libyan Mustafa, who becomes a life-long friend. Despite being aware of the risk to both themselves and their families they attend an anti-Gaddafi protest outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984. This was the infamous occasion when Libyan secret police opened fire on the protest from within the embassy, killing Yvonne Fletcher, a Metropolitan police officer.

Khaled and Mustafa are wounded in the attack and spend weeks recovering in hospital under police guard. They realise that as soon as the Libyan authorities discover they were present at the demonstration that not only will they be at risk but so will their families. While the Gaddafi regime survives they can never go back to Libya. Their involvement in the demonstration is kept strictly secret, revealed only to the most trusted, closest friends. Their close-knit friendship is later joined by another Libyan ex-patriate, Hosam, a writer, one of whose anti-Gaddafi poems is read on the BBC Arabic World Service, thus putting a target on his back. This small group of friends share their longing to return to Libya and their families and a life-long fear of retribution by the Gaddafi regime.

For almost thirty years the friends keep in touch, on and off, while Khaled tries to settle in London, teaching and occasionally starting relationships, but never seriously committing to either a job or a partner. Finally, during the 2011 Arab Spring, the friends feel compelled to choose between staying in London or returning to Libya to fight. Mustafa chooses to return to fight – Hossam and Khaled stay in London.

As with all plot summaries, I have evened out the chronology – in the novel itself the chapters jump between time periods as Khaled looks back over his friendships with Hosam and Mustafa. It opens in the present with Khaled saying farewell to Hosam at St Pancras Station. Hosam is leaving for California, and Khaled recognises he is unlikely to see him again. As Khaled wanders through the London streets he reminisces about his friendships, and this walk forms the framework for the novel.

Exile is the central theme of the novel and this is the closest I am likely to ever get to experiencing this sense of loss, of one’s life being almost permanently on hold, never being able to commit to a relationship or a career. But equally the novel is about friendship, particularly the type of friendship forged in crisis and a shared experience of trauma than can endure for decades and through long periods of separation and distance.

Although My Friends won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2024, it is not an overtly political novel. Opposition to the Gaddafi regime forms a backdrop to the exiles’ lives, but it is taken as read, without the need for any overt criticism of the dictatorship. While the Arab Spring saw the end of that generation of political figureheads, a new generation has emerged. Political opposition and protests is as unsafe as it ever was, now in the West as much as elsewhere. This gives My Friends a renewed political relevance, urgency and resonance.

It’s great to see the Orwell Foundation expanding its scope and awarding prizes for a wider variety of writing. The results of this year’s prizes are announced later this month (June 2025) – well worth watching out for.

My Friends, by Hisham Matar, 2024

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Book review

Hard Times by Charles Dickens, 1854

It is probably an exaggeration to put it this way, by Hard Times invoked in me a strange sense of cognitive dissonance. Why? Well, on the one hand it is quintessential Dickens – an industrial setting, light social satire, and a series of over-written comic characters. But there are also some strikingly obvious differences. First, the novel was written for weekly publication, unlike almost all his other works which appeared monthly, and this is often cited as the reason for it being significantly shorter – under 300 pages – than his typical blockbusters.

Secondly, storylines are started and then peter out with either no resolution or an anti-climatic one. An example of this is where a character is adopted having been abandoned by their father. Nope, the father never returns. That’s just it, they are adopted, end of. Third the cast of characters is much smaller than a typical Dickens novel and their story-arcs are all truncated or abbreviated. By way of example, Mr Harthouse, is introduced halfway through the novel. He is a rather two-dimensional comic-book villain and sets out to seduce a married female character. She runs away from him when she realises what is happening. Disgruntled, he leaves. Again, that’s it. This pattern is repeated time after time – storylines start and then are aborted. It’s almost as if this is an outline for a Dickens novel rather than the real thing.

Are these elements – storytelling and characterisation in particular – neglected because Dickens was focussing on other elements of his story? Is Hard Times different from the standard Dickens novel because it is trying to do something different? The book is usually characterised as an ‘issues’ novel in which the author attacks utilitarianism, personified by Mr Gradgrind, school-board superintendent and spokesperson for the theory that all we need in life are facts, and that emotions and imagination are damaging:

“Suppose you were going to carpet a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?” The character Sissy Jupe replies, ingenuously, that she would because, “If you please, Sir, I am very fond of flowers.”

“Fact, Fact, Fact!” said the gentleman. And “Fact, Fact, Fact!” repeated Thomas Gradgrind

“And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?”

“It wouldn’t hurt them, Sir. They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you please, Sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy….. -“
“Ay, Ay, Ay! But you mustn’t fancy,” cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. “That’s it! You are never to fancy.”
“You are not, Cecilia Jupe,” Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, “to do anything of that kind.”

This perspective is established in the novel’s first chapter and maintained throughout the first part of the novel. But once Gradgrind is reconciled with his daughter, it is largely forgotten. It is almost as if having demonstrated that lack of affection and imagination can be harmful to personal relationships, were such a demonstration really necessary, Dickens didn’t really know where to go with the idea – it’s certainly not enough to structure a whole novel around.

Dickens was never reluctant to write caricatures. Few of his characters could be called well-rounded. They usually have clearly identified idiosyncrasies of behaviour or, more commonly, speech, and these are repeated relentlessly long past the point where they are needed to establish the character in the reader’s memory. This pattern is adopted in Hard Times – Mr Bounderby talks relentlessly about the poverty of his childhood for example – but exceptionally a large number of other characters in the novel, not just the central personalities, aren’t burdened with these features. They are just people with a role in the story rather than sources of entertainment themselves.

Stephen Blackpool is an example of the underwritten nature of this novel. He is established as a prototype of the honest working man. He is burdened by an alcoholic wife who he is unable to divorce. He is a hard worker and refuses to join the trade union being formed in the mill at the time. His reasons for not joining are unclear – but nevertheless presented as heroic. Dickens may have had his concerns about the way the working classes were treated by industrialists, but he had no faith in trade unionism as a way to address those problems. Blacklisted and sacked, Blackpool leaves Coketown to find work elsewhere, and apart from a brief melodramatic reappearance at the end of the novel is seen no more. His role in the novel, as a contrast to the pompous and over-bearing industrialists who initially take centre stage, seems perfunctory.

I suppose where I am going with this critique is that short form novels, written for weekly publication, were not Dickens’s strength. He must have realised that the experiment had not worked, because although Hard Times was moderately successful and did the job it was intended for, to improve sales of his Household Words, it was not a format he ever returned to.

Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, 1854

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