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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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Book review

The British Museum is Falling Down by David Lodge 

This novella is a comic pastiche of James Joyce’s Ulysses. That makes it sound more substantial than it actually is. Lodge was flexing his literary muscles as a professor of English literature here, and he did so by inserting throughout the novel a series of literary references. Ten distinct sections of the novel are written in the style of a range of authors including Conrad, Woolf and Kafka. I would argue that these actually add little to the novel overall. In other words there’s an element of showing off here, where the reader might be vaguely aware that the novel’s style has shifted and that they should be getting the joke, (the Kafka and the Joyce sections are unmissable; the others less so) but uncomfortably aware that they are failing the test being set by the much cleverer than them author.

Strip away the contrived literary references and this is simply a straightforward mid-sixties comic novel on that most sixties of themes, sex. Adam Appleby, a father of three and a student of English literature spends a single day failing to do any work at the British Museum (not) researching his thesis “The Structure of Long Sentences in Three Modern English Novels”. Instead he gets into a series of what it is hard to avoid calling ‘scrapes’ familiar to anyone who watched British sitcoms (especially those, ironically, from the 1970s) – he accidentally calls the fire brigade out to a non-existent fire at the museum, he is the subject of an attempted seduction by a frustrated seventeen year-old virgin (a common experience for the male subjects of English post-war comic novels), he gets drunk at a cocktail party, and his scooter bursts into flames. The scene where he tries to buy some condoms but can’t do so because his priest enters the medical appliances shop at precisely the wrong moment is appallingly cliched. Throughout the novel Appleby, a thinly disguised avatar for the author, is haunted by the fear that his wife is pregnant with their fourth child, because being Roman Catholics and this being before the widespread availability of the pill, they are forbidden from using any but the most unreliable methods of contraception. This leaves Appleby permanently frustrated and at the same time petrified that their personal complicated game of Vatican Roulette has been lost once again.

As well as the explicit references to other authors, there are some strong echoes of Kingsley Amis here. The ‘seduction’ scenes is an obvious example. Appleby’s persistent worries about money and the way these are resolved by the intervention of a wealthy American at the end of the novel was strongly reminiscent of the way Amis concludes Lucky Jim. The getting inappropriately drunk at a party scene, the ‘seduction’ scene, and the many petty minor frustrations of academic life, all echo the earlier Amis novel. So yes, in a nutshell, this is heavily derivative, so much so that by the end their is no attempt to disguise Lodge’s borrowing, and it is simply chalked up as pastiche.

In many ways this is a very typical mid-Sixties comic novel, but what sets it apart are Lodge’s literary pretentions. And in case you were wondering, no, the title doesn’t make sense – Lodge explains in an afterword written for a 1980 reprinting that he had originally wanted to call the novel “The British Museum Had Lost Its Charm” but as this is a quote from a Gershwin song and he couldn’t get permission to use it, the alternative title had to be used. There is a clearly late addition to the text to explain the alternative title he ended up using, with its reference to London Bridge, which Lodge may have got away with if he hadn’t written about the original title in the afterword.

The British Museum is Falling Down, by David Lodge, 1965

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Book review

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, 2023

I really enjoyed reading Birnam Wood, until the end, when I didn’t, which retrospectively spoiled the whole novel for me. Don’t you hate it when that happens?

First. just to get one thing out of the way, this novel has nothing to do with Macbeth. You could work hard at trying to find some parallels, but they won’t work. Which is just one of those minor disappointments that could have easily have been overlooked if the novel’s ending worked, which it didn’t, as I may have mentioned.

The author invites us to believe that a New Zealand community gardening project, with the mildly amusing name of Birnam Wood, is covertly a much more subversive, radical project threatening the status quo – or so some of its members believe (others just like gardening). For wildly complex and improbably reasons, this group gets involved with Robert Lemoine, an American billionaire, who decides to sponsor and support the group. He’s a psychopath, so the reasons he gives for sponsoring BW are nonsensical, but we are invited to accept them anyway because billionaires spend their money on whimsical projects as the fancy takes them. don’t they.

“I know how easy it was,’ said Lemoine. Mira didn’t follow. How easy what was?’ All of it,’ he said, shrugging. Getting rich. Staying rich. Winning. It was all so easy. I just took what I wanted, and it was mine. I said what I wanted, and people got it for me. I did what I wanted, and nobody stopped me. So simple. And if it was easy for me, then it could be easy for anybody, and that’s a very frightening thought. Apart from anything else, it would be untenable, Everyone can’t be on top, or it wouldn’t be the top any more, would it? That’s just a fact. And I’ve been in the citadels of power,’ he added. I’ve eaten at the high tables; I’ve seen behind the doors that never open. Everyone’s the same. You reach a certain level and it’s all exactly the same: it’s all just luck and loopholes and being in the right place at the right time, and compound growth taking care of the rest. That’s why we’re all building barricades. It’s in case the rest of you ever figure out how incredibly easy it was for us to get to where we are. 

Lemoine invites the group to start gardening in the grounds of an estate he is considering buying and of course they accept, the whole deal sweetened by the promise of much more money to come once the garden is established and he gets to know them better. No, that doesn’t make any sense, does it? Obviously I have summarised the ‘logic’ behind his investment unfairly, because I am irritated by the fact that a central plot point in the novel makes no sense, but it gets worse. Because secretly this one-dimensional evil genius is drilling for rare earth minerals in the national park around the home he is about to buy and having a group of hippies on site is just what any illegal covert mining operation needs.

Despite all of the above, I enjoyed at least three quarters of the novel. It was well-paced, the non-billionaire characters were well-sketched, and I was interested to find out what happened to everyone. As the remaining pages dwindled and the multitude of plot lines remained stubbornly unresolved, I wondered how the author was going to bring everything together. At one point I genuinely thought we were going to be set up for a sequel, there was so much left incomplete. Instead, Catton totally blows the ending. She uses a crude device to bring to a sudden halt some of the plot lines, and leaves a few dangling uncertainly. One central character, Shelley, seems to be forgotten entirely. The climax is rushed, unconvincing, and the reader is left to sketch in most of what happens themselves, with little to go on. Most of the dramatic events happen off-screen (as it were) with the reader left to join the dots from scattered clues. Imagine Hamlet from Fortinbras’s perspective and you get a rough idea of how the potential drama of the climax is thrown away.

Birnam Wood aspires to being a thoughtful novel of ideas, and there are prolonged sections in which characters discuss the decline of late stage capitalism, mostly in a millennial argot in which the word ‘like’ is sprinkled through the speeches every other sentence, in a redundant attempt at authenticity.

“Shelley said “I was just thinking about it. Like, no one ever actually knows that the right thing to do is. I mean, you can think that you know what’s right, and you can tell yourself that you know, but at the point that you make your choice, like, in the moment, you’re never really certain. Yu just hope. You just act and you hope for the best…But, like, the wrong thing to do, that’s often much clearer. Wrong is, like, easier to se than right, a lot of the time. It’s more definite – like, this is the line I know I will not cross. “

I get it that some people do speak like that and I understand that it is just the twenty-first century equivalent of um’s and er’s, but on the page it is wearisome. The ideas being discussed never really come into focus and are quickly forgotten when the action sequences in the novel kick in.

In a promotional interview the author said that she aspired to write a twenty-first century equivalent of Jane Austen’s Emma. I don’t think I have ever read a more absurd comparison in a very long time. It’s like Dan Brown comparing the Da Vinci Code to Middlemarch. Austen is the most precise, careful writer – Birnam Wood is ultimately a soggy mess. Which proves one thing – that thrillers are not as easy to write as you might think.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, 2023

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Book review

Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde, 2024

Red Side Story is the sequel to the wonderfully imaginative Shades of Grey (2009), which I should stress straightaway has absolutely no connection with the book with ’50’ in its name. Fifteen years is a long time to wait for a sequel (unless you are George R R Martin) and I was worried that the author had lost interest in the fascinating world of chromatacians (bear with me) that he had created, or couldn’t work out where to take the story. But all our patience has definitely been rewarded.

As we know from Shades of Grey, the story is set in a version of the UK (more specifically, Wales) where every aspect of your position in society depends on your ability to perceive parts of the colour spectrum. Colour vision is extremely limited in this society. Some people – ‘Greys’ – have no colour vision at all and are the equivalent of untouchables; others are divided into the colours they can see with more senior roles given to those with the better colour sensitivity. Society is governed by an extremely rigid set of rules set out in Munsell’s ‘Book of Harmony’. Technology is largely forbidden, with a few exceptions. It is a bizarre, but at the same time recognisable world. It is also quite brutal – people are killed (by being shown a shade of green which acts like a deadly poison) for any small infraction of the rules. There are signs of the civilisation that came before the Something that Happened’ five hundred years earlier, but very little understanding of that society.

The novel picks up where Shades of Grey left off. IN East Carmine on the fringes of Red Sector West, Eddie Russett and Jane Grey, having discovered that there is something profoundly wrong with their society, have determined to do something about it. But first they have to escape the trumped-up murder charges they are due to imminently face. Eddie has also recently found out that his perception of the colour red is very high, meaning he is highly valued in the marriage market. But once his seed has been sown any protection he derives from his colour perception will be gone. Slowly Eddie and Jane piece together clues that show them their society could possibly be a vast social engineering experiment, monitored by drones that they have been taught to think as swans. Everyone carries a bar code imprinted on their fingers, allowing the ‘swans’ to locate them at any time – hence the reason wearing gloves is not allowed.

The novel’s parables aren’t hard to unlock – they aren’t meant to be. Treating people as unequal simply because of their physical characteristics is bad. Dogmatic adherence to out of date rules of dubious authority is stupid. We should be able to love who we want to love, not have to trade our fertility like cattle. And so on. But the novel is at no point preachy – this is just Eddie and Jane’s world, and they are heroic in their struggles to find the truth, risking their lives over and over again. I don’t think there’s ever any doubt they will succeed.

Red Side Story can be read as a standalone novel, but I would recommend reading Shades of Grey first. Not because you really need it to work out what is going on in the later novel, but because it is a great story. Fforde is a unique author – comparisons to Pratchett (in the Independent’s review below) for example are wide of the mark. Possibly the nearest in terms of imaginativeness would be the wonderful Douglas Adams and there really is no higher praise. The inventiveness of Fforde’s stories is just the start – what is really impressive is the way he manages to sustain an idea and populate a believable universe without drawing on folk tales or mythologies as most fantasy authors do. This makes him instantly recognisable as an author. Add to this mix his consistently progressive narratives and some great jokes (and there I will accept a comparison with Pratchett, because some of the puns are a bit painful – for example the menacing Undertoad) and you have an author in superb control of his material and a wonderful, whimsical and at the same time brutal story.

The internet seems to think there will be a third novel in the series – I do hope so, and that we don’t have to wait 15 years!

What other reviews have said: a selection

‘Fforde is one of literature’s most enjoyable visionaries, and his long-awaited Shades of Grey sequel will be eagerly seized upon by his admirers… The jokes are excellent, the pacing breathless and the last line a classic’ ​Observer

‘Fforde’s books are more than an ingenious idea. They are written with buoyant zest and are tautly plotted . . . and are embellished with the rich details of a Dickens or Pratchett’ ​Independent

‘No summaries can do justice to the sheer inventiveness, wit, complexity, erudition, unexpectedness and originality’ ​The Times

Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde, 2024

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Book review

Changing Places, by David Lodge, 1975

Although Changing Places was written in 1975, it is set in 1969, and those six years are significant. The events of the novel take place in parallel on campuses in England and America, and the spirit of the sixties is abroad in both. Protest and counter-culture are in the air. By 1975 Nixon was out of the White House, the Vietnam War was coming to an ignominious end, the Beatles had split up and flower power was a distant memory.

To an extent this made Changing Places anachronistic even when it was published. It was looking back nostalgically at a period in time which was very close but also gone for good. That anachronism has inevitably widened over time. Professors sleeping with their students and one another’s wives may have been the height of liberation in the sixties – today it just looks creepy.

The novel is a classic trading places situation comedy. Two English professors, mild-mannered Philip Swallow, and charismatic American Morris Zapp, swap roles in their respective universities, thinly disguised versions of Birmingham, UK and Berkeley, California. They find themselves in very unfamiliar territory both academically and socially and much of the novel’s humour derives from their struggles in their new environments in traditional fish out of water manner. Both men almost inevitably have affairs while on their academic sabbaticals; more surprising is their involvement in the student protests that sweep their campuses. While Swallow finds himself accidentally involved in the demonstrations, Zapp is well-suited to his role as mediator between students and faculty.

Lodge has fun with the format of the novel, at one point continuing the narrative through news headlines and stories and later using a screenplay format. This serves to keep the story fresh and moves it along at pace. A significant time jump two thirds of the way through, moving quickly past some of the events that had been sign-posted and are now seen in hindsight, adds to the sense of pace. The novel ends with the two couples convened in a New York hotel room trying to decide their fates. The author has fun with the idea first articulated in Northanger Abbey that the reader knows the novel is coming to a close (and therefore a resolution of any outstanding plot points) by the “tell-tale compression of the pages” but chooses instead to leave issued unresolved – until the sequel of course.

The acid test for any comic novel has to be ‘is it funny?’. The quote on the front cover of the edition I read (shown above) has a comparison to Lucky Jim, a novel that I think has largely fallen out of fashion in recent years and is now equally anachronistic. There was a time when the Kingsley Amis novel would have been in my top ten novels list, but it hasn’t aged well. I think a more interesting comparison would be with Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man which was published in the same year as Changing Places and which takes a much more unblinking, less affectionate look at British academic life. Is Changing Places funny? It’s mildly amusing, nothing more; the satire is so gentle as to be hardly noticeable. I now need to decide whether to read the sequel, with a nagging suspicion that it might simply be more of the same. Only one way to find out I suppose.

Changing Places, by David Lodge, 1975

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Book review

A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark, 1988

Muriel Spark is on my auto-buy list. When browsing in second hand bookshops I have a few authors I always buy if I can find them. As long as the book is reasonably priced, in decent condition, and I don’t already have it, I will always buy novels by, among a small number of other authors, Muriel Spark. Her novels are always interesting and worth reading, and A Far Cry from Kensington was no exception.

Set in 1955, A Far Cry is narrated by the no-nonsense Mrs Hawkins, a thinly disguised semi-autobiographical portrait of the author. It centres on a “rooming house” in (you guessed it) Kensington – a large house divided into separate one room apartments – where a diverse set residents live under the care and supervision of the landlady, Milly. It is a comfortable community of people in transit, typical of post-war London, settled by individuals and couples looking to establish themselves in London and in life.

Mrs Hawkins works in publishing. Some of her reminiscences (the narrative is told in flashback, some thirty years later) are based on Spark’s own time working in this field. Initially she works for the Ullswater and York Press, a chaotic publishing house that is heading for bankruptcy. I haven’t researched the novel sufficiently to say this for certain but I would put good money on the fact that Ullswater Press has a real-life equivalent that went bust in the mid-1950s, causing something of a scandal at the time as the proprietor was subsequently jailed for fraud.

The novel’s villain is Hector Bartlett, a bad writer who has influential friends who try to secure publication of his writing. Hector takes to accidentally-on-purpose bumping into Mrs Hawkins on her daily walks in the park near her office, attempting to leverage this casual relationship into an introduction to her boss. Hector the writer is described thus

“Hector Bartlett, it seemed to me, vomited literary matter, he vomited and sweated, he excreted it…His writings writhed and ached with twists and turns and tergiversations, inept words, fanciful repetitions, far-fetched verbosity and long, Latin-based words.”

Hector the man is if anything even more harshly described:

“Red hair en brosse, brown corduroy trousers, tweed coat with leather patches on the sleeves, a yellow tie, and a green check shirt….with a pronounced stoop of the shoulders which made him seem older than he was… His face was round with a second fat chin”.

Mrs Hawkins describes him to his face as a ‘pisseur de copie” a urinator of journalistic prose, and never backs down from this undeniably confrontational phrase. Spark denied that Bartlett was a portrait of anyone specific in post-war literary London, which I suppose must be right given how libellous it would otherwise have been!

Bartlett uses his influence with Emma Loy, a successful novelist, to have Mrs Hawkins sacked from Ullswater Press and subsequently from another job in publishing when she continues to use this description of him and also refuses to rewrite his copy to make it acceptable for publication. This doesn’t have a significant impact on her career and even if it would have done she is not the kind of character to back down, even in the face of a direct plea from Ms Loy. She can’t stand him, and her instincts prove spot on when there are further revelations about his damaging behaviour towards other women in the novel.

A Far Cry isn’t just a series of anecdotes about the publishing world. While the residents of the boarding house all have their brief moments centre stage, Wanda, the Polish emigre seamstress, has a defining role when she receives a threatening letter, which leads to a downward spiral that, we eventually find out, was caused by the vengeful pisseur de copie.

Central to the novel is the bizarre practice of ‘radionics’.  Radionics is a form of quack therapy that survives to this day (There is a Radionics Association that awards three-year diplomas and sells crystal pendulums). It claims that diseases and other medical conditions can be diagnosed and treated by applying electromagnetic radiation such as radio waves to the body from an electrically powered device. It ‘works’ only through the placebo effect. Mrs Hawkins has no time for it and it is no surprise that Hector Bartlett is an enthusiast proponent of the concept, using it to manipulate other characters in the novel. People undoubtedly do fall prey to this sort of scam, and while radionics may have faded out somewhat, certainly in the UK, other forms of manipulation have of course taken its place. Initially I found this all a bit clumsy, but on reflection the fact that there are many modern forms of the same pseudo-science that people fall prey to every day made me reconsider and feel more charitable towards the idea as a plot device.

This is a complex and rewarding novel in which Mrs Hawkins’ narration, even with the benefit of thirty years of hindsight, reveals only glimpses of what is ‘really’ going on – for example the identity of the anonymous threatening letters to Wanda is only revealed in passing at the end of the novel, the revelation pivoting on the spelling of the word “organisers”. The reader sees the events of the novel through the eyes of 1955 Mrs Hawkins as she experiences them in real time, with only occasional reassuring interjections by the 1980’s narrator. I have enjoyed other Spark novels more, but I could admire the artistry of A Far Cry without being blown away by its sophistication.

A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark, 1988

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Book review

Uproar!: Satire, Scandal and Printmakers in Georgian London by Alice Loxton, 2024

Uproar! is a jaunty look at the work of the golden era of satirical printmakers in Georgian Britain. These are names you will have heard of – Cruickshank, Rowlandson and Gillray, you will definitely have seen some of their work, such as the famous and much copied sketch of Pitt and Napoleon carving up the world like a plum(b) pudding (below).

While writing the previous sentence I wondered whether this sketch would work if the characters were replaced with more contemporary figures such as Trump and Putin – and viola:

Previously I knew very little about these caricaturists, although many of their sketches were very familiar. Loxton charts their rise as important influencers of public opinion in the context of the technological changes (which allowed the prints they produced to be published quickly and cost effectively) and the political upheaval occurring at the same time – the loss of the American colonies, the French revolution, and the rise of Napoleon. It’s a compelling story briskly told alongside brief biographies of the main characters.

Being picky, I found the author’s attempts to make the account relevant by a liberal sprinkling of contemporary culture reference a bit annoying. The X Factor, Carry On films and The One Show are all referenced. (“If joining the Royal Academy under Sir Joshua Reynolds was the chance to get a five-minute interview on The One Show, studying with Pigalle in Paris was the equivalent of being sent to Hollywood” and later “Much like the X-Factor starlets staying at Simon Cowell’s LA Mansion”). Do these images really add to the point being made, or do they feel like an author slightly desperate to make boring old history relevant? I could have done without them, particularly because most of the references are so out-of-date – would the average Millennial even know what the Carry On films were?

However, with this qualification, the author makes a compelling case regarding the importance of printmakers to Georgian politics and society. The comparison to Spitting Image is equally strangely old-fashioned, but for readers of my generation it works – Spitting Image definitely had a impact on late-twentieth-century politics. Arguably that impact was zero – politicians used to love being in the limelight by being portrayed in grotesque latex – but that’s the nature of satire; you can never be certain whether it influences political events. Certainly the image of a stone-grey John Major eating his peas has stayed with me!

The final chapter, in which the author attempts to summarise the impact and importance of the Georgian caricaturists, felt a bit confused. Their significance at the time did not outlast the Georgian period. Once Gillray, (Isaac) Cruickshanks and Rowlandson had died, all around the same time as George 3rd and the end of the Regency, society was ready to move on to a new era of Victorian conservatism, in which the extravagance of the caricatures was considered indecent and disrespectful. But to say they were ‘cancelled’ is to misuse a phrase from the era of social media. Reputations rise and fall but the work of these printmakers and satirists has definitely survived and remains relevant, as the Trump/Putin examples above demonstrate. Loxton I think fairly describes their influence as ” undeniably one of the most powerful forces in Georgian Britain; their prints not only reacted to world events, but propelled political change, they shaped public opinion; they built up careers; they shredded reputations.” She even goes so far as to claim that these printmakers were the reason Britain didn’t see its own version of the French Revolution, which seems quite a stretch, and argue they had a direct influence on artists as varied as Blake, Lewis Carroll, and even Salvador Dali.

One false note was the author’s claim that ‘Victorian commentators’ were responsible for inflating the reputation of William Blake above those of his contemporary illustrators. This is bizarre. Blake’s reputation rests largely on his poetry, which isn’t mentioned, and his art is as far from the satirical cartoons of Gillray etc as can be imagined. But that aside this is a really useful summary of the politics and history of this I think unfairly neglected art form and its impact on social change in Georgian Britain.

Uproar!: Satire, Scandal and Printmakers in Georgian London by Alice Loxton, 2024

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Book review

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry, 2024

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Book review

We Solve Murders, by Richard Osman, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Solve Murders, by Richard Osman, 2024

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