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Book review

This Boy, by Alan Johnson, 2013

It’s traditional for politicians to write their memoirs after the end of their Parliamentary career. Alan Johnson was a senior figure in the Blair administration, but nonetheless This Boy had to be something special to stand out from the host of other post-Blair/Brown government autobiographies, diaries and memoirs. And it is. What makes this narrative so exceptional is its unsentimental portrait of a childhood of quite profound poverty and deprivation. That fact that the scenes Johnson describe date from the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, not some Dickensian nightmare, make them all the more extraordinary.

How bad was it; just how poor was his family? He regularly went without meals; his social housing in North Kensington, now considered part of trendy Notting Hill, was condemned; he didn’t have an indoor toilet or bathroom until he was in his teens. He faced the daily humiliation of free school meals (when everyone knew who received the free meals and who didn’t) and having to ask shop owners for ‘tick’ (credit). Coal was bought one day at a time because it couldn’t be afforded any other way and the Johnson household was usually bitterly cold, especially during the harsh winters of the early 1960’s.

But despite all that, this is not a misery memoir. These facts are recorded honestly but Johnson doesn’t dwell on them unnecessarily, and rarely seems to feel sorry for himself. (I think his older self feels sad for his younger self, but recognises that at the time he was often happy, especially when his father wasn’t around). Growing up in the 60’s Johnson sees and feels a small part of the immense social change that swept the country as it emerged from a post-war period and the 1964-70 Labour Governments introduced a host of progressive legislation.

Racism disfigured society of the period and Johnson also witnessed more than his fair share of that, as North Kensington saw terrible scenes of abuse of the Windrush generation. It’s not hard to trace the roots of the Labour politician Johnson became in the childhood of this boy.

You often see debates in the media and online about the definition of poverty. Lots of families live in households where the family income is below 60% of the median national income, the most widely used statistical definition, without suffering anything like the deprivation Johnson faced. Some of these families, it is sometimes claimed, are relatively affluent – they don’t go without daily necessities, can afford holidays and things that the middle class might consider luxuries such as mobile phones, cigarettes and flat screen televisions. So what we mean by poverty changes over time, it is relative, and the situation Johnson faced as he grew up was perhaps not as dire as that of the previous generation. The threat of eviction never seems present, social housing however poorly constructed is almost always available (including on several occasions the offer of new housing in the suburbs, most often declined) and jobs seemed to be extremely easy to walk into. If Johnson’s father had contributed to the family finances then a reasonable standard of living was within reach – certainly Johnson describes other family members and friends living in relative comfort. The safety net of the welfare state may not have protected everyone, but it did a pretty good job compared to the absolute poverty of fifty years or so earlier. That aspect of the narrative – that Johnson’s story is one of exceptional hardship, rather than a typical West London boyhood – was often lost in many of the reviews of the book at the time it was originally published. Johnson has corrected this narrative to some extent with his subsequent memoirs covering his early years as a postman, when life was comfortable by comparison.

Johnson’s sister Linda and mother Lily emerge as the heroines of this memoir. Lily worked numerous part-time jobs to keep the family afloat both before and after her husband Steve left, despite her serious health issues which took her life in her early forties. Linda, just three years older than Alan, kept the family together after Lily’s death and showed a remarkable maturity in dealing with the challenges of being orphaned and looking after her younger brother.

This book is written with a refreshing honesty and simplicity. It is obvious from the first page that it is not ghost-written, and the clumsiness of the text is easy to excuse when set beside the rawness of the content. It’s a hard read at times, although knowing that things turn out well for Johnson and his sister helps at lot.

This Boy, by Alan Johnson, 2013

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Book review

The Bachelors, by Muriel Spark, 1960

Muriel Spark’s The Bachelors revolves around a group of single young(ish) men in 1950’s London. The plot centres on a case of fraud against a bogus spiritualist Patrick Seton. Seton, a leading member of spiritualist group, The Wider Infinity, is accused (and is clearly guilty of) forging a letter from his landlady, to explain his embezzlement of £2,000. Barrister Martin Bowles is prosecuting Seton, and friend Ronald Bridges, a handwriting expert, is going to be an expert witness in the trial. Other minor characters have bit-arts including an art-critic, a journalist and a teacher.

While the story is ostensibly about the men in the novel, the women play an equally central role – the novel could easily have been called ‘The Bachelors and the Spinsters’. I suspect the choice of title reflects the women’s apparent lack of agency – they are usually subservient to and manipulated by the men, in particular Alice, Patrick’s pregnant and vulnerable girlfriend. The novel takes a sinister turn from the mildly comic when it becomes apparent that he is planning to kill her by depriving her of the insulin she needs to stay alive.

And I will release her from this gross body. He looks with justification at the syringe by her bedside, and is perfectly convinced about how things will go in Austria (all being well), since a man has to protect his bread and butter, and Alice has agreed to die, though not in so many words.

Worse, one of his fellow bachelors suspects his plot but does little to prevent it. Patrick is something of a psychopath – his murderous intentions are not really financial but sadistic, possibly triggered by Alice’s refusal to abort the baby she is carrying. She gullibly believes Patrick’s assurances that they will marry as soon as his divorce is made final. Elsie, her friend, distrusts Patrick, and seeks to secure his conviction in the forgery/fraud case to help Alice escape his malign influence.

Modern (that is to say, 1950’s) spiritualism is a central theme of the novel, and it doesn’t come particularly well out of it, as you can probably imagine. It is a means to manipulate and defraud the simple-minded. Seton, an obvious villain, is protected his supporters within the Society, who are convinced he is a genuine medium, and his trial is the satisfying climax of the novel, where just desserts are granted.

The Bachelors is a quite dark novel, despite the overall jaunty tone. Ronald’s epilepsy is presented as a parallel to the spiritualists’ attempts to contact the ‘other side’ (they use the same drugs for example) in a way I couldn’t quite understand. I appreciate epilepsy as a condition was looked at very differently in the 1950’s compared to the way it is now – it was still under the shadow of the idea of possession, more part of the middle ages than a twentieth century attitude.

This wasn’t one of Spark’s stronger novels. The characters, especially the minor ones, are not clearly defined, and I think most readers will share my experience of struggling at times to work out who is speaking and what there relationships are to the other characters present. The reader has to do a lot of the work, and while sometimes that is justified, here is simply felt frustrating. The humour doesn’t always land and the portrait of living with epilepsy as if it were a curse was depressingly out of date.

I remain convinced that Spark is an under-appreciated writer who is always worth the short time it takes to read her very condensed novels, but overall this was a miss for me.

The Bachelors, by Muriel Spark, 1960

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Book review

Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens, 2002

This extended essay on the continuing significance of Orwell as a writer and thinker is a tour de force of analytical writing by the late, great, Christopher Hitchens. Orwell has been seconded to a wide range of causes over the years, by cold warriors, reactionaries and revolutionaries, but I don’t think anyone has written as clearly nor as intelligently about his work as Hitchens does here.

There’s an immense but loosely worn scholarliness about this analysis. Hitchens has not only read and remembered virtually everything Orwell ever wrote, (and in case I haven’t mentioned it before that was an enormous, prodigious amount), but he seems also to have read everything written about Orwell. What is wonderful is that this isn’t an account bogged down in footnotes and irrelevant detail. Heavyweight critics of Orwell from left and right are batted away with ease. If I found some of the debates about Orwell’s legacy hard to follow at points, due to the arcane academic language used by some critics, (in complete contrast to Orwell’s one writing of course) I nevertheless felt in safe hands in Hitchens company.

A lesser critic would have been tempted to call this text ‘Why Orwell was Right’ but Hitchens is a far subtler writer than that. He appreciates that the idea of Orwell having a fixed set of ideas that never changed throughout his life and which can be tested by later critics as either correct or otherwise is facile – Orwell changed his mind constantly, as any human being will, particularly as he lived through the political turbulence of the 1930’s and 40’s. Orwell was at heart a journalist, and he frequently opened his articles with provocative statements intended to engage the reader rather than as statement of positions he genuinely felt. Orwell’s early anti-Semitism and later attempts to address the issue within himself is charted fairly here, as is his more troubling and apparently life-long homophobia. Orwell the flawed but ultimately heroic author and man emerges more clearly from these pages than from most of his biographies.

Hitchens is very good on Orwell’s novels, and their relationship to the rest of his work. The earlier works before Animal Farm are considered fairly but also I think accurately as a minor contribution to his work. He describes (page 186) Coming Up for Air, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Burmese Days wonderfully thus: “These four pre-war efforts constitute a sort of amateur throat clearing” which is exactly how I have always thought of them – like an orchestra warming up discordantly before the symphony begins. Hitchens writes of Orwell’s final masterpiece (page 190) 1984 “It is the first and only time that his efforts as a novelist rise to the level of his essays”. That might be , in fact almost certainly is, hyperbole, and is totally unfair with regard to Animal Farm, but the essays are much under-appreciated, beyond one or two pieces such as Shooting an Elephant and A Hanging which are still taught in schools.

Despite this very positive reaction I still found something to disagree with on almost every page. That’s going to happen with polemical writing and is part of the fun! Some points of fact were I think missed (for example Hitchens claims Orwell was right to deduce (in his essay, Boys’ Weeklies, published on Horizon) that the Greyfriars/Billy Bunter stories were written by more than one person, whereas Frank Richards’s wonderful response to Orwell’s essay is rightly cherished and to my knowledge never disproven) but equally Hitchens invites disagreement and I suspect would have relished it. Perhaps he was not being deliberately controversial, but it is clear he never backed down from a fight either.

For Orwell enthusiasts this is a must-read. For anyone looking for an introduction to Orwell this might be quite advanced – it assumes a fairly extensive knowledge of Orwell’s life and works – but there are many far worse places to start.

Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens, 2002

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Book review

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens, 1846-1848

Any reader of Dombey and Son is presented with a puzzle – why isn’t it any good? I knew before I started it that the novel was one of Dickens’ ‘lesser’ works: not lesser in length, unfortunately – it runs to nearly 1000 pages – but poorly thought of, by both critics and general readers alike. It is not widely read any more (it has 1,000 reviews on Goodreads, but Great Expectations has 22,000!) doesn’t appear on many academic reading lists, and has never been filmed. Even Andrew Davies abandoned an attempt to turn it into a television series despite having made successes of less obvious material. So as I read I was looking out for the flaws or weaknesses that would explain this lack of popularity. I didn’t have to look far.

(Incidentally, I am aware that this might seem a very negative way of reading any novel. Surely it would be better to be positive, to look for the novel’s strength and good points? Of course. But I’d make two points about this: a) I can’t unknow what I know about the novel and b) I am simply being honest about my mindset – this blog is not about presenting myself as some kind of idealised reader, burning their way through the classics, but an honest description of the books I read and what I think about them. I did look for the positives in Dombey and Son – nothing would have given me more pleasure than to have discovered an overlooked Dickens masterpiece, but that isn’t what happened. Because it isn’t.)

The plot is very limited despite the novel’s length. Not much happens, and the small number of events that do occur are heavily telegraphed. For example: Walter, an office boy sent to work overseas by his company (Dombey and Son) goes missing when his ship capsizes in a storm. There can’t have been a reader on the planet who did not expect Walter to re-emerge – the only surprise was just how long it took Dickens to bring him back. Similarly when Walter first meets the novel’s proto-heroine, Florence, his uncle Sol and his uncle’s friend Captain Cuttle both predict what will happen – that one day Walter and Florence will marry. And guess what?

Everything you expect to find in a typical Dickens novel is present. A huge cast of characters (over 50), long rambling plot lines that are sewn together conveniently at the end, comic scenes of extreme behaviour, all set in a foggy London that is undergoing rapid change due to the arrival of the railways. In fact the parts of the novel describing the arrival of the railways are some of the most interesting in the book:

“The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene. Boiling water hissed and heaved within dilapidated walls; whence, also, the glare and roar of flames came issuing forth; and mounds of ashes blocked up rights of way, and wholly changed the law and custom of the neighbourhood.

In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement.”

This is Dickens giving it both barrels, over-writing to the extreme, but just about getting away with it. Despite this characterisation of the railway as a destructive phenomenon, later descriptions show the positive benefits of the coming of rail – in particular the Toodles family prosper from its construction. Later still the railway is to have a decisive role in the fate of the novel’s principal villain, Mr Carker.

The plot centres on the hubris of the industrialist, financier and merchant Paul Dombey. Dombey wants a son to continue the family name and business. He is obsessed with this ambition and as a result neglects his daughter simply because her sex, particularly once his second child, a son, is born. However Paul junior is a weak and sickly child who eventually dies a characteristically Dickensian death, fading away slowly but inevitably. Having lost his wife in Paul’s birth Dombey disastrously remarries. His second wife, Edith, is effectively sold by her mother on the marriage market, and can’t stand her new husband, and refuses to make any pretence at doing so. We can safely assume their marriage is loveless and unconsummated. He uses Carker to act as a go-between between himself and his new wife, to disastrous effect. As a villain, Carker is a failure. He plots and schemes and positions himself at the heart of Dombey’s business, but then has no real plan other than adultery, and that fails miserably. If he is driven by passion rather than a Machiavellian cunning then there is no sign of it.

Dombey is a deeply unpleasant character, proud and arrogant, and devoid of any love or affection. He doesn’t have a convincing redemption story – he is eventually reconciled with his daughter, and is shown being affectionate towards his grandchildren, but for the reader this is far too little too late. His second wife, Edith, is equally proud and unrelenting, and her (step)maternal bond with Florence is all too brief. Both characters are brought low by their pride.

The novel’s principal sub-plot tells the story of Walter Gay and his uncle Solomon Gills, owner of a profoundly unsuccessful nautical instruments shop, and Sol’s friend, an old seaman named Captain Cuttle. Walter and family act largely as a counterpoint to the emotionally sterile Dombey household, but also provide most of the comedic scenes of the novel. There is another, lightly sketched and under-developed sub-plot involving Mr Carker’s older brother, his sister, and one of Carker junior’s former lovers. This sub-plot fizzles out with a resolution, of sort, but not one the reader feels in any way invested in. It is clearly intended as a counterpoint to the main Dombey/Edith storyline, but fails to do anything other than simply echo it.

Were there any redeeming features in the novel, anything to recommend it? The minor characters are entertaining, including those already mentioned, to which I would add the endearing Mr Toots and the indefatigable Susan Nipper, who almost alone amongst the novel’s characters is prepare to give Mr Dombey a piece of her mind. The railway descriptions are interesting records of the first flourishes of the age of steam. But that’s pretty much it. There are unquestionably many better Dickens’ novels and I can really only recommend Dombey for completists. Its reputation is unfortunately justified.

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens, 1846-1848

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Book review

All books are themselves the product of earlier books, however original they may be. I’m not suggesting that all books are copies of earlier works, but they all have dna, texts which have influenced them and without which they couldn’t exist. Some reveal their origins more obviously than others. Unruly makes very little attempt to disguise its sources and influences, which are a fairly straightforward combination of Horrible Histories and the ladybird books that gave you one king per page, with an illustration summarising the one thing you needed to remember about him or her. Add in a little 1066 and All That and a lot of swearing (and I will come back to the swearing), and there you have it.

Which as always begs the inevitable question – why? What made David Mitchell think that writing a book about the queens of England from Anglo-Saxon days to the end of the Tudor period, a pretty long span of history in anyone’s books, was a good idea? Certainly there is a very well established tradition of celebrities writing books. And Mitchell studied history at Cambridge, albeit quite a while ago. My hunch is that this is a lockdown book, something the author filled his hours with when going out or recording game shows wasn’t an option.

There’s not much original research here – none in fact – and anyone with a reasonable grasp of English royal history won’t learn a great deal. A canter through six hundred years of royal history was always going to be somewhat superficial. Even if Mitchell’s reasons for writing the book can be surmised, that in itself doesn’t explain why anyone should read it. There are a few reasons, although whether these justify the whole exercise I am not so sure.

Firstly, there’s the swearing. For someone who has developed a whole comedic persona around being posh, here Mitchell swears freely and extensively. For example, writing about King Stephen and Queen Matilda, he says: “They were both twats. They may not have been able to help being twats – the mores and values of their times and of their class may have made them twats. But they were twats and terrible things happened as a result.” (This is a more family-friendly example). The comedy here derives from the repetition of the word twat rather than its shock value – just in case you hadn’t spotted that. Despite his best efforts not much comedy is wrung from the humour of King Cnut’s name sounding a little like a spelling mistake. But it lightens the tone and makes it clear that Mitchell isn’t taking the exercise all that seriously.

The main interest and where the text really comes alive is in Mitchell’s observations about the nature of monarchy. He argues compellingly that monarchs aren’t in any way special people:

“Ultimately the reverence shown to monarchs is a mockery, a joke. It’s pretending they’re something they are not. This is a bitter and clear reduction of kingship to its essentials: an office accepted only because an unjust hierarchy is preferable to anarchy. Out of the gangsterism of the lawless post-Roman land of Britannia, a few local bigshots emerged, their power gradually coalescing into kingship.” (396).

That’s the book’s thesis in a nutshell – once the Romans left Britain there was a period of lawlessness, local thugs took control of small areas, slowly killed one another and grew in power and influence until the concept of ‘king’ was invented. That power was then cemented with “ceremonial and religious elements giving kingship an aura of legitimacy and sanctity. But it was just made up. At some point someone with a sociopathic dislocation from the truth had to start asserting it, like the first conspiracy theorist who said that 5G masts spread Covid”. All of this is rather brilliantly summarised in the book’s final chapter, Bookends. This final chapter also contains a rather remarkable few paragraphs about Shakespeare. Mitchell writes with passion about Shakespeare’s brilliance, and concludes “He’s where this book has been heading, it turns out…Shakespeare is a good reason to stop writing about kings, because his brilliance makes them seem silly.” I wish he had come to that realisation a few hundred pages earlier and turned his intelligence and learning towards a subject that obviously interests him far more than kings and queens, and one on which has some valuable insights.

The book ends by making it clear that although the exercise could be repeated for the Stuarts, Hanoverians etc, it won’t be. The excuse offered is that kingship had by the end of Elizabeth’s reign become less important and therefore less interesting (tell that to Cromwell). I’m not buying it for an instant. I hope Mitchell’s next book is about a subject he obviously has a real passion for and which according to this book he shares with his wife – if she were to help him out with it all the better!

Unruly, a History of England’s Kings and Queens, by David Mitchell, 2023

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Book review

The Girls of Slender Means, by Muriel Spark, 1963

Utterly wonderful. Truly superb and written with extraordinary economy, so that even every word of the title is working hard. I haven’t read anything close to this this good in the novella format since J L Carr’s A Month in the Country.

That’s the short review: the full review is going to be a bit longer. I’ve written before about how when one summarises ‘what happens’ in a novel the tendency is to present it as a chronological sequence of events, a straightforward ‘this happens then that happens’ narrative. But of course many novels simply aren’t like that at all and such summaries while useful in some respects do the novel a disservice. They undermine the complexity of the structure and in this case the extremely clever way Spark slowly reveals her plot. It’s so well done that this is one of those novels that you immediately turn to the opening pages once you have finished (which doesn’t take long, this is less than 140 pages) and start again, looking at the text in a completely different light. I don’t want to spoil that experience for you, so if you have any intention of reading this one I’d avoid the section of this review marked ‘Spoilers’ – but it would be great if you would come back once you have read it and see if you agree with what I have said.

Muriel Spark is one of those writers whose books I always buy if I come across them in second-hand or charity stores. She is always interesting. The Girls of Slender Means was her next novel after The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and I am convinced it is its equal – perhaps Jean Brodie gets the accolades because of the exceptional film version. It is set in the May of Teck Club, a hostel for young women, just after the end of the war in Europe in 1945. It follows the adventure of the residents of the hostel, young women navigating life in a suddenly changed world, in which the carelessness and danger of the war years is being replaced by something less clear. The election of Attlee’s radical Labour Government is mentioned and forms a backdrop to the novel, but it’s not just politics that is changing. The role of women in society changed radically during the war years – young women went out to work and had romantic adventures – but it is not obvious whether these changes will be sustained or whether things will go back to the way they were. Against this backdrop the small dramas of the women’s lives unfold and come to a crisis point focussing on, of all things, the bathroom window that leads to the secluded rooftop shared with the hotel next door. Only the slenderest of girls can manage to wriggle through this window onto the rooftop but this seemingly insignificant fact goes on to become a key turning point in the story.

This is a gem of a novel, perfectly formed and full of interesting things to say about the changing role of women in society, religion, sex, and so much more. I can’t recommend it highly enough, and it definitely has found its way into the top ten or even five best novellas that I have read. Admittedly not much happens before the crisis that it has been leading up to and arguably some of the characters are only lightly sketched, and well, those are the only minor negatives I can come up with! Against that the novel sparkles with wit and interest and humour.

Spoilers

I wanted to talk about some of the techniques Spark uses to draw the reader into the novel. It opens with a description of the club and some of its residents. There’s some heavy foreshadowing in the opening paragraph:

“The streets of the cities were lined with buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bomb-sites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity. some bomb-ripped buildings looked like the ruins of ancient castles until, at a close view, the wallpapers of various quite normal rooms would be visible, room above room, exposed, as on a stage, with one wall missing; sometimes a lavatory chain would dangle over nothing from a fourth or fifth-floor ceiling”.

It’s no coincidence that the narrator notices a lavatory chain dangling from a fourth floor – the key moments of the novel happen in just such a room. Later, on the novel’s second page, there is more ominous foreshadowing:

The May of Teck Club stood …in one of a row of tall houses which had endured, but barely; some bombs had dropped nearby, and in a few back gardens, leaving the buildings cracked on the outside…but habitable for the time being.

Although we are encouraged to see this as a slightly flippant comment on life in post-Blitz, war weary London, the threat of unexploded ordnance was very real, even in the time of the novel’s publication (1963) and was to be for a long time afterwards. (Unexploded bombs still crop up from time to time, especially during construction and tunnelling works.)

Once the scene is set the text is then broken by that most cryptic of punctuation marks, the asterisk. The following paragraph starts thus:

*

“‘I’ve got something to tell you’ said Jane Wright, the woman columnist.” (Interesting that she is the woman columnist, not just the columnist, suggesting that women in these roles is still something of a novelty.) Jane speaks on the telephone to a friend, Dorothy “owner of the flourishing model agency” (again, ‘the’ not ‘a’) about a third friend, Nicholas Farringdon, who has been killed while on a missionary mission in Haiti. They knew him when he came to the May of Teck Club “just after the war“. A careful reader will put some pieces together at this point and conclude that the asterisk marked a time jump, and that this conversation is being held years after the setting of the first paragraphs. Another asterisk takes us straight back to 1945, and an announcement by the club’s management about the new wallpaper in the drawing room, setting off a faint echo of the exposed and torn wallpaper mentioned in the description of the bombed buildings that the novel opens with.

At one point a pretentious poet, commenting on the end of the war, quotes the Greek poet C F Cavafy:

“Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.”

We are invited to mock the young man with his now rather redundant copy of Peace News and his condescending manner, but the point is actually a very serious one – the war against the Nazis did give the country a purpose, a ‘kind of a solution’ and the future was uncertain at that moment after the certainties of total war.

We are introduced to a series of characters in the opening chapters, and it’s easy to just assume we will get to know these characters better as the novel progresses. Another interpolated paragraph marked by asterisks records a phone call from Jane, this time to ‘Anne’, repeating the news about Nicholas. Anne asks if ‘Selina’ has been told the news, but “You know what Selina is like these days, she won’t answer the phone personally, you have to go through thousands of secretaries or whatever they are“. So whoever Selina is, and we will meet her in 1945 shortly, she has done well for herself.

Amongst the detailed description of the Club we are told about the top floor of the house:

“Nothing but the rooftops lay above this floor, now inaccessible by the trap-door in the bathroom ceiling – a mere useless square since it had been bricked up long ago before the war after a girl had been attacked by a burglar or a lover who had entered by it – attacked or merely confronted unexpectedly, or found in bed with him as some said“. The fact this closes off an escape route is noticed: “‘If there was a fire we’d be stuck'” said Selina Redwood who was exceedingly beautiful.” Selina and the others are reassured that there is a fire escape, so the bricked up trap-door is left closed.

The last quarter of the novel is compressed into a few minutes, as the returns on all this development – the unexploded bombs, the bricked up trapdoor and the bathroom window so narrow that only the slenderest of girls can squeeze through – come together in an unlikely yet breathlessly dramatic finale.

You will have worked out by now that I loved this novel. It’s intelligent, interesting, daring, and challenging. I will definitely be looking out for more of her novels.

The Girls of Slender Means, by Muriel Spark, 1963

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Book review

The Fraud, by Zadie Smith, 2023

I have the whimsical notion that Zadie Smith was one day reading a novel combining two plot lines across different time scales (Possession, perhaps, or Alias Grace) and thought “hold my coat”. Because The Fraud combines three different plot and time lines. Firstly and centrally we have the fascinating story of the ‘fraud’ of the title, also known as ‘the claimant’ or ‘the Tichborne heir’. This is Arthur Orton, who in 1866 came forward to claim to be the missing heir to the Tichborne baronetcy and the estate that came with the title.

Roger Tichborne, heir to the family’s title and fortunes, went missing after the ship he was travelling in in South America was shipwrecked with the loss of all on board. His mother refused to believe her son was dead, and after hearing rumours that he had survived and somehow travelled to Australia, she advertised for him in Australian newspapers, offering a reward. Years later a butcher from Wagga Wagga came forward claiming to be Tichborne. He was accepted by Lady Tichborne as her son, although other family members were unconvinced. Imposters claiming to be long lost nobility are nothing new, but this story had just the right combination of elements, at just the right time. It quickly because a case people identified with, a battle between the ‘common man’ and ‘the establishment’. This is of course bizarre, because if Orton was Tichborne as he claimed he was a quintessential part of the establishment, but then again that hasn’t stopped Donald Trump portraying himself as an outsider or Nigel Farage as a man of the people. (In the additional material provided in the Waterstones edition of the hardback, Smith specifically mentions Trump as a source of inspiration for the novel, and while she isn’t explicit about this it is surely in the hysterical way people support Trump/Tichborne no matter how outrageous his lies). Because the striking things about the Tichborne claimant was the profound unlikelihood of his claim. He was strikingly different from every report of the heir including in his dramatically different appearance, the languages he spoke, and his knowledge of his early life and family. His claim in other words was laughably implausible, but that didn’t stop thousands of people believing in him utterly, donating large amounts of money to his cause, travelling to his public rallies, and agitating on his behalf. The more his lies were exposed the more people believed in him, seeing every bit of evidence against him as further proof of a grand conspiracy to deprive him of his legacy. As well as the comparisons with Trump there are also similarities with the flat-earth conspiracy theorists who see every photograph of the curvature of the earth as proof of NASA’s far-reaching ability to control ‘fake news’.

The story of the Tichborne case is told from the perspective of Mrs Touchet, a regular attendee at his two, long-running trials, first to hear his original claim to the baronetcy, and subsequently his criminal trial for perjury. This is our way into the second storyline, following the history of the family of the (real) Victorian novelist William Ainsworth. Ainsworth was a contemporary of Dickens, Thackeray, Disraeli, Walter Scott and a host of other figures from Victorian literary society. Mrs Touchet is his cousin, housekeeper and occasional lover. By the time of the trial Ainsworth is a forgotten figure, still churning out worthless novels (he had over 40 published in his lifetime). Mrs Touchet portrays him as rather pathetic by this stage, even though authors such as Thackeray wrote large numbers of novels largely for the income they provided without becoming a figure of ridicule. Several extracts from his novels are held up to the reader for examination with the implication that they are terrible. This felt unfair – taken out of context this is not a difficult trick to play on just about any author. Every generation will have their jobbing writers whose work fades away quickly after their death, and sometimes before. But you would never know from reading Mrs Touchet’s account that Ainsworth remains in print to this day and first editions of his better known works are available from booksellers for thousands of pounds. Not the cringingly bad literary failure she describes him as, a judgment in which Smith seems to concur – nothing is ever offered by way of corrective to Mrs Touchet’s criticisms.

Mrs Touchet is a widow, and sees in the Tichborne trials (although she is convinced Orton/Tichborne is a fraud) some reflections of her own, rather diminished situation, always in the shadow of her child-like cousin. Mrs Touchet is a political radical and a passionate supporter of the anti-slave trade movement, which continued to campaign long after slave trading was abolished across the British Empire (initially slave trading was abolished, and it was not until several years later that slave ownership was criminalised). One of the Claimant’s long-standing advocates was a former slave and then manservant working for the Tichborne family, Mr Andrew Bogle. Mrs Touchet takes him for lunch and slowly persuades him to tell his story, which becomes the third element of the novel – an account of slavery on a Jamaican plantation in the years either side of abolition. This segment of the novel felt a bit disconnected from the main narrative, dropped into the central storyline as an extended cutaway – and I did wonder if this was a separate work that the author decided to include in this novel simply in order to use it?

Apart from the extended diversion into the Jamaican section of the novel, the other narrative threads are woven tightly together. The novel jumps lightly from one time period to another and back again. If there is a ‘now’ it is the 1870’s and the time of the criminal Tichborne trial, by which time Mrs Touchet is a slightly cranky widow, often looking back nostalgically on the times when Ainsworth was a much more successful and popular novelist (we are reminded more than once that his novel Jack Shephard in its day outsold Oliver Twist) and could afford a higher standard of living. She also suffers with forbearance his new and much younger wife who is very common and a source of some slapstick comedy. Her internal monologue drives most of the narrative – she is cynical and more than a little embittered, frustrated by the lack of opportunities available for women, especially those such as herself on the brink of independence, but never quite ready to take that final step (she has an additional inheritance of £100 a year, doubling her income, which she never claims unless to finally give it away).

The novel ends on something of an anti-climax. Ainsworth dies never really having expressed any further feeling for his cousin who has loved him for decades without hope or expectation, watching his literary talents dwindle away without him ever realising it. The novel portrays him as a failure compared to his literary peers, which as I have said felt unfair. The trial ends in the claimant’s conviction for perjury, a long prison sentence, and an ignominious death in poverty. Of the protagonists it is probably Bogle who lives the most rewarding life, ironically given his origins as a slave.

That’s what happens, but the question you probably came her for is whether the novel is any good? It’s not a demanding read – there’s never much doubt as to who is narrating, what’s happening, who is sleeping with who and so on. The storyline moves on quickly enough and the writing is unobtrusively good, without ever being demonstrative or flashy. I didn’t warm to Mrs Touchet, which would have helped, and her cynical digs at her cousin, Dickens, Cruickshank and the whole Victorian literary circle seemed mean spirited. Perhaps it was a boy’s club that never really confronted the main social issues of the day, but the idea that there was therefore no literary merit in their work (as is suggested) is uncharitable. The claimant himself remains an elusive presence in the novel, barely speaking and only ever described through his supporters or companions. There may well still be a novel to be written about Tichborne/Orton that centralises his story and tries to understand its strange grip on Victorian England rather than just using it as background ‘colour’.

The Fraud, by Zadie Smith, 2023

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Book review

Orwell – the New Life by D J Taylor, 2023

It was a real pleasure to spend some more time getting to know the genial, flawed and very human genius that was George Orwell. I was broadly familiar with the structure of Orwell’s life – India, prep school, Eton, Burma and so on – but Taylor draws these events together into a coherent whole. So when I say this, it needs to be seen in that context: Orwell remains as much a mystery to me now as he ever was. This edition quotes John Sutherland on the dust-jacket as saying “He (Taylor) presents the ‘living’ Orwell as well as anyone will be able to”. That may be the case, but to me Orwell remains enigmatic, hidden, and incomplete. I’ll try and explain why.

There are so many aspects of Orwell’s life that remain puzzling to me. Some of the things we don’t really know about him include:

Why didn’t he go to university?

Why did he leave his post in the Burmese Imperial police, after more than five years of service?

Why didn’t he get a conventional job and write in his spare time?

What did he do for money – was he living off his parents, figures who also don’t really emerge into the light in this book.

Almost everything about his relationship with his first wife, Eileen

Let’s take those in order. The traditional explanation of his decision to join the Burmese Imperial Police instead of going to university is that his grades at Eton weren’t good enough. Certainly he wasn’t a star pupil and financial pressures to get a proper job, one following in the family traditions of Imperial service, would have been compelling. But that’s just speculation – we don’t really know for certain what led him to this decision. Having made it he stuck at the job for several years (five and a half) – this wasn’t just the equivalent of a brief period of national service – but on returning to the UK he made the key decision in his life – to become a writer. Where did that decision come from? Were there any signs prior to this that Orwell aspired to the life of an author? Had he been writing out in Burma? If so there’s no record of it. And what a strange way to start the life of a writer – instead of using the five years of experience in Burma (which he was later to use of course) he instead decides almost out of the blue to go tramping? Why? Even in the context of going ‘undercover in the under-classes’, something earlier writers had done, this still seems such a sudden and mysterious choice. Collecting material is something some writers feel compelled to do, but there seems few less promising areas to mine for content for a novel than tramps. Orwell did of course use this content, both in essays and in A Clergyman’s Daughter, but it still seems a very random choice.

When asked later in life about his decision to quit the Burmese police Orwell always cited his opposition to imperialism, and texts such as A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant certainly support that idea. I can’t suppress the suspicion that this was a simplification of his reasons (which is fair enough, most life decisions are complex and when explaining them to other people we often reduce them to one or two elements).

Orwell did have conventional jobs, lots of them. He worked in Parisian kitchens and hotels, he sold books, he was a tutor, briefly a headmaster (in a private school with a teaching staff of two, where his CV as an Old Etonian would have helped) and during the war he worked for the BBC. I think he never stayed in a job for much more than two years. Was this because he couldn’t settle at a job for any length of time, getting bored and disenchanted with the value of his work very quickly, or was it because work was always supplementary to his writing, something that paid the rent and kept the bailiffs away, always secondary to his ‘real’ work? Once again we simply don’t have any definitive evidence that explains this nomadic lifestyle which was reflected in his relentless moving from address to address, never staying in the same place for more than a year or two – a full list of Orwell’s residences would fill an address book.

Despite making a reasonable income from his journalism, his publishing, and his various jobs, I suspect Orwell often relied on his parents and wealthier friends for financial support. I admittedly have no real evidence for this, just another suspicion – he did keep going back to his parents’ house in Southwold when he first started out as a writer. Certainly he had that middle class carelessness with money, putting up with considerable hardship when necessary and always assuming that something would come up to help out. You really can only live that life if you know there is always some support available as a last resort – Orwell was never going to find himself homeless.

And finally there is the closed book that is his relationship with Eileen. They married in 1936 after a relatively brief courtship (their very modest wedding was held in Wallington, the hamlet where Orwell ran the village stores), she went with him to Spain to support him in the civil war, and she died in 1945 just after the end of the war in Europe, and very shortly after having adopted their son, Richard. Taylor speculates the marriage was reasonably happy although hints at affairs on both sides – other biographers have been much more categorical about their infidelities, and certainly Orwell left some deeply incriminating letters. Lots of people who knew the couple wrote about them, but none seem to have understood the real dynamic of the relationship, what attracted one to the other, what made them tick as a couple. Why did Eileen put up with being a junior partner in the relationship despite her many talents, indeed why did she put up with living in the cottage in Wallington for so long with its outdoor privy, no heating and cramped rooms.

What is all the more extraordinary about this mysteriousness of the real Orwell is that he was a journalist, was famous after Animal Farm, was interviewed many times and had many writers as friends who left memoirs. A surprising number of people he wrote to preserved his letters, even when he asked them not to. Yet no recording of his voice exists, and I believe there is no film of him either, despite his working for a year and half at the BBC!

Another point that comes across vividly in this text is the tragedy of Orwell’s early death. He published his first novel, Burmese Days, in 1934, and was dead less than sixteen years later. In that time he did an extraordinary amount of work, and living, for a man in such poor health. He published six novels and three full-length pieces of non-fiction, got married, fought in the Spanish Civil War, worked at the BBC, served in the Home Guard, wrote a prodigious amount of journalism, reviews, diaries and journals, essays, opinion pieces, and letters, finding the time somehow to adopt a child and then remarry in the final weeks of his life. Dying aged 46, it is striking just how incredibly truncated his life was – cramming all those novels and experiences into little more than a decade dominated by the rise of fascism and the second world war.

If you are not a fan of Orwell you probably won’t become one on reading this biography. Taylor is honest about Orwell’s shortcomings and flaws. What doesn’t emerge clearly from these pages is Orwell the politician. There’s no real account of Orwell’s personal political journey from Old Etonian and imperial policeman to avowed socialist. The Spanish Civil War was obviously a turning point, but the transition was much more complex than just changing his views after being shot at (and of course, shot). His membership of the Independent Labour Party, a left-wing off-shoot of the Labour Party, is barely mentioned, and although his friendships and acquaintances within the Attlee Government are referred to there is no sense of Orwell the political animal, which was such a central part of his identity.

The chronological narrative is broken up from time to time with short thematic chapters – Orwell on faces, rats, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and so on. These essays felt like a way of using left-over material (and many of them did appear in the original version of this biography) and felt strangely out of place. If I was editing this book I would have put a line through all of them and suggested they be sent to the Orwell Society for publication.

The attempt early on to draw comparisons with St Cyprians, Orwell’s prep school (a private, fee-paying school where the middle classes sent their children to prepare them for public school examinations) and Oceania are absurd. Similar ill-thought through comparisons could have easily been made between Oceania and the BBC or Eton or the Burmese Imperial Police Force – the idea that an author’s literary ideas must all have their origins in childhood experiences or institutions is as ridiculous as it is demeaning, undermining the ability of an author to – you know – make things up.

There were a couple of other things that bugged me about this book and should really be fixed in the next edition:

a) Eileen’s war-time job. See if you can spot why this paragraph irked me? Chapter 20 ‘The Melting Iceberg’ describes Orwell’s account to find a role in the overall war effort. On page 366 Taylor, quoting a letter from Orwell to his literary agent, tells us that

“The letter to Moore notes ‘my wife has already got a job in a government office’ as if Eileen’s rapid deployment were the most natural thing in the world. But it might be wondered just exactly how, in the paranoiac conditions that prevailed in Whitehall corridors circa 1939, the wife of a writer regarded as an ‘extremist’ by the India Office, suspected of importing contraband material and already on MI5’s radar, could have fetched up in such a sensitive part of the wartime bureaucracy”.

I reread this sentence several times thinking “What sensitive part of the wartime bureaucracy”? What was her job, and why was it such a matter of surprise that she was given it. It’s not until page 375 that we learn what it was – she worked in the Censorship Department. An editor should have caught this omission and made the minor changes required for the narrative to make sense. A similar thing happens in:

b) Chapter 26 ‘Pain in Side Very Bad’ is prefaced by two quotes dated 1948. The text itself then starts with this sentence:

“The Blair party left for Jura on the afternoon of 10 April, went by overnight train to Glasgow, and then flew on to Islay. By the evening of 11 April they were back in Barnhill.”

What year is this? We are in the closing years of Orwell’s life – every year matters. The previous chapter is one of the rather irritating filler essays – this one is on Orwell and anti-Semitism – so the reader can be forgiven for not knowing or remembering that Taylor is picking up where he left off the preceding chapter. It’s just unnecessary and irritating, when a year after the first reference to April would make everything clear.

These are minor, fixable points.

I opened this review with a comment on one of the observations from critics quoted on the book’s dust-jacket, so I am going to close with one as well. Hilary Spurling from the Daily Telegraph apparently wrote

“A persuasive and profoundly moving exploration of the ways in which Orwell’s work was constructed from the stones of a ruined life”.

I know he had health issues, died early, and lost his first wife, but despite all that I never thought of Orwell’s life as ruined. There are sad moments in his story but it is not a tragedy – he lived, wrote and achieved more in his 46 years than many of us manage in 70. And while his early works draw upon his life experiences, the idea that Animal Farm and 1984 are in any way autobiographical (or ‘constructed from the stones’ of his life) is preposterous. This instinct, to try and find the seeds of a writer’s creativity in their life stories, actually ends up diminishing their ability to tell stories and work with ideas. That’s one reason why Orwell was so dismissive of his early novels in later life, to the extent of not allowing them to be republished on the back of the popularity of Animal Farm in particular. What led to that late blooming of creativity and inventiveness remains yet another mystery about this extraordinary author.

Orwell – the New Life by D J Taylor, 2023

Aside
Book review

How They Broke Britain, by James O’Brien, 2023

How They Broke Britain comprises ten essays on familiar characters from early twenty-first century British politics, constructed round the framing device that all of those portrayed have contributed to the degradation of political life in the UK. Some are very well known – it is surprising that O’Brien found anything new to say about Rupert Murdoch for instance – others much less so, for example the recently ennobled Matthew Elliott.

Very little of what O’Brien writes will be new to anyone who has been paying attention to the news over the last thirteen years. That’s not to say it is not convenient to have so much detail collected together in this way – in some respects this will probably work better as a reference book than as an attempt to change anyone’s mind. Conservative supporters will either not read this in the first place, or will do so with the specific intention of finding flaws and weaknesses. The Telegraph review, for example, described it as a ‘wild polemic’, both weak and childish, and hilariously finds fault that O’Brien has not correctly understood the hierarchy of the English aristocracy (“He’s wrong: the rank below an earl is viscount.”)

O’Brien’s style invites disagreement, so here goes. Firstly, the breaking of Britain (and it is really difficult to argue with the proposition that the country has been deeply wounded in recent years) is not the result of the behaviours and characters of ten or so individuals. There are systemic, structural flaws in the way our nation is constructed and organised, and basing his analysis on the ten people in question means O’Brien doesn’t really have to address those structural issues. In fact there’s no real attempt at all to understand or identify what’s gone wrong other than through the characters of the people portrayed. But without an understanding of these issues then any attempt to address them is doomed – there’s every chance we will end up with another set of chancers and crooks running our country and its institutions, even if we were to clear out the existing cabal.

Second, keeping a modern political commentary up to date is admittedly really difficult, because O’Brien is charting something that is happening right now. There’s never a right time to end the analysis, never a point at which he or any other commentator can say (along with Andrew Lincoln) “enough”. This was really driven home to me when I read that Matthew Elliot, Chief Executive of the TaxPayers Alliance and latterly the Vote Leave campaign, the subject of chapter three of this book, has been nominated for a life peerage by Liz Truss in her ‘I’m no longer Prime Minister’ honours list.

Third, O’Brien argues that the bad behaviour he records, the lying, bullying, abuse of power, is all the more egregious because by and large the people doing it got away with it unpunished. This is clearly wrong. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss were both hounded from office and Johnson had to resign from Parliament when found guilty of breach of parliamentary procedure by the Privileges Committee. Johnson was also fined by the police over Partygate, as was Rishi Sunak (who doesn’t, yet, merit his own chapter, although I suspect later editions may remedy that omission). Johnson may have behaved as if he was above the rules that the rest of us had to comply with and some of his more egregious behaviour may have still to be addressed (by, for example, the Covid enquiry), but the idea he got away with everything without consequence is demonstrably incorrect. Jeremy Corbyn is a surprise inclusion in the text, perhaps thrown in for ‘balance’, but more likely because O’Brien holds him personally accountable for the Brexit referendum outcome. Corbyn never really came close to power during his five years as leader of the Labour Party, and now sits as a independent backbencher having been thrown out of the Parliamentary Labour Party – again hardly the best example of someone getting away with bad behaviour.

This is not a book for reading at one sitting. Take it a chapter at a time and allow yourself plenty of breaks to absorb the detail and for your blood pressure to reset. The piling on of fact upon fact in intense detail can at times be hard to absorb and at moments almost becomes incoherent. The overall effect can feel like being shouted at by someone almost desperate to convey their point but struggling to overcome the weight of detail and present compelling evidence and argument. History won’t be kind to Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Nigel Farage, all of them currently a long way from the levers of power and likely to stay that way (even though Rishi Sunak was reportedly flirting with the idea of returning Dominic Cummings to Number 10 to run the election campaign, a truly bizarre idea if ever there was one), and history may use How They Broke Britain as a reference work when judgment is being passed and obituaries are written. Until then I would recommend this book to anyone looking to get their heads around how this country has so badly lost its way, even if it won’t really help in finding any answers on how we find out way out of this mess.

It’s worth noting that the hardback version of this book uses a large picture of O’Brien on its front cover, and a supportive quote about the author rather than the book (“The conscience of Liberal Britain” – the New Statesman). It wouldn’t have been difficult to have come up with a cover that used mugshots of the ten people featured in ‘Usual Suspects’ style (just for example – the kind of thing Private Eye front covers do so well). This approach exposes O’Brien to criticisms that this is just an ego trip, preaching from a public pulpit while unprepared to accept the same level of challenge in return, other than to rage bait callers to his LBC show. But the ‘O’Brien brand’ sells well, and How they Broke Britain will have sold by the lorry load over Christmas.

How They Broke Britain, by James O’Brien, 2023

Aside
Book review

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, 2020

The Midnight Library is a very explicit anti-suicide book. So if it saves a single life, then it is worthwhile. Any reviewer of the novel therefore needs to make a simple choice – should the novel be treated as a work of literary fiction, or should it be considered as a self-help book, intended as therapy and advice for those in need? Of course it can be both things at once, and in the main does so successfully, but these are two very different yardsticks by which to evaluate the book. (Note to self – yardstick = dead metaphor. Presumably there sticks a yard long were once in common use to measure things, but despite them no longer being widely used, the phrase persists).

Anyone contemplating suicide must feel that life is not worth living. Haig’s mission in this novel is to persuade them otherwise. He attempts this through the story of his central character, Nora Seed (I assume the surname Seed was chosen because seeds are full of potential life). But when we first meet her, Nora feels anything but. Her cat is dead, she is alienated from her family, she has lost her job. She has recently separated from her fiancé, having changed her mind at the last minute about marriage. Her life, once full of promise and possibility, seems empty. Late one evening, she tries to kill herself.

Nora wakes up to finds herself in a library. Each book on the infinite shelves tells the story of an alternative version of her life. The core of the novel sees Nora briefly living these multiple lives. In each she is given the opportunity to change one decision she regrets making, and see how it would have affected her life. In one she becomes a rock star, having decided not to leave her brother’s band; in another she wins Olympic medals having kept up her promising swimming career; in yet another she on an Arctic research vessel studying global warming and has a close encounter with a hungry polar bear. Each version of her life is better – more interesting, more fulfilled – than what she refers to as her ‘root’ life, but every one is also in some way unsatisfactory, so she keeps doom-scrolling through endless ‘what-ifs’ searching for a version of her life in which she has not taken a wrong turn, and is happy.

If I were suicidal, being told that the choices I made in life had prevented me from becoming an Olympic athlete, a rock star, or an artic explorer might not convince me that I had nothing to regret, even if in each of these alternative lives there were also things that were not perfect. A common cause of dissatisfaction with Nora’s new lives is that in each a family member or close friend has died – her brother from an overdose, her mother from cancer, a friend in a road traffic collision, and so on. None of these deaths were a result of her choices, so seeking a life in which she took a different route and kept everyone alive seems a futile search.

The novel’s conclusion – that life is worth living, and regret at the choices we make is foolish – comes as hardly a surprise. Is this life affirming? it’s unquestionably intended as such, and literature as therapy is undoubtedly worthwhile. The popularity of this novel suggests that people find it helpful, so any dissent from me would probably be churlish. One yardstick (see what I did there?) of a novel’s success I often find useful is to ask whether you want to spend more time with the characters, to find out how their lives span out. Who would turn down the chance to read more about Elizabeth Bennet or Mr Pickwick? Sadly I can’t say the same of Nora Seed. I am glad her story ended on a positive note – but it could hardly have ended any other way in the circumstances!

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, 2020

Aside