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Book review

Heatwave, by Penelope Lively, 2009

Penelope Lively’s Heatwave is set during the course of a long hot summer in rural Oxfordshire. The narrator, Pauline rents one of a pair of cottages; the other is the home of her daughter Teresa, Teresa’s husband Maurice and their young son Luke. The pair of cottages are somewhat ominously called World’s End, not a reference to the Edgar Wright film but portentous nonetheless. Pauline is a proof-reader; Maurice an author, while Teresa cares for Luke. Maurice is writing what sounds like a very pretentious history of English tourism and as part of his working routine he regularly goes back to London for meetings. He is also visited from time to time by his publisher, James and James’s girlfriend, Carol. The other inhabitants of World’s End also travel up to London from time to time – while secluded it is obviously not that remote, and these are urban, middle class people comfortable with popping off to Paris for the weekend or Venice for a month.

It is obvious from early on that Maurice is a ‘bad un’. Think Martin, the sleazy brother-in-law from Fleabag. He (44) is quite a bit older than Teresa (29) who hero-worships him. Teresa’s archetype, the long suffering wife who accepts her lot without protest, is established early – on the very first page Pauline compares her to a Hardy heroine “betrayed no doubt”. Pauline, long divorced from her philandering husband Harry, recognises the signs of Maurice’s likely adultery well before Teresa does, although the reader is given even earlier clues of his wandering. Pauline is reluctant to tell her daughter of her suspicions, waiting for some concrete evidence. She recalls the details of her own marriage to a serially unfaithful husband, who now writes to her occasionally from America where he is a college professor. Other than the slow passage of the summer and occasional trips out to cheesy tourist attractions as ‘research’ for Maurice’s awful book, the action is slow. Pauline remains watchful towards Maurice but never confronts him, and time is marked by the changing agricultural landscape and the steadily warming weather. Slowly Teresa begins to develop her own suspicions, but is also reluctant to face the issue or even discuss it with her mother. We are offered other relationships for comparison – Pauline’s bookseller friend and his agoraphobic wife, and the author of the book Pauline is proof-reading, stranded in remote Wales. Happy relationships in Heatwave are rare.

The novel opens on a warm May day, with everyone apparently “poised for this agreeable summer of industry and companionship“. Or so they believed, the narrator silently suggests. As summer passes the stresses within Maurice and Teresa’s relationship are exposed and his infidelity becomes all the more obvious. Pauline spends much of her time reminiscing. Some reviewers – in fact most, I think – claim that the damage caused by Harry’s infidelity is inter-generational and is in some obscure way the cause of Maurice’s unfaithfulness, as if Teresa has sought out a father figure for a husband who will repeat his behaviour. I am not convinced we are fated to repeat our parents’ mistakes, but Heatwave certainly seems to suggest it is unavoidable unless a dramatic break with the past is made.

Heatwave reminded me of Howards End in its portrait of a rural idyll threatened by modernisation, the way the characters live halfway between town and country and the novels’ sudden melodramatic ending in which a brutal and arbitrary form of justice is meted out. Another novel I was reminded of was J L Carr’s A Month in the Country which follows a similar structure, but is much more gentle and perhaps even kind in its treatment of its equally flawed characters.

Often, finding a way to end these reviews can be the hardest part of writing them. You can’t just stop (as some novelists do, irritatingly) – you are always on the lookout for a way of summing things up neatly with an appropriate sign-off. Many bloggers end with an invitation to readers to comment and provide their own thoughts. But one option that is not open to us it the deus ex machina out of the blue approach to ending that Lively uses in Heatwave. It was such an abrupt conclusion that it left me feeling a little cheated if I am honest.

Heatwave, by Penelope Lively, 2009

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Book review

What about Men? Caitlin Moran, 2023

What indeed? Caitlin Moran is an excellent columnist. I enjoy her writing; it is usually insightful and broadly progressive. But does her style of writing – pithy, with a punchline every few hundred words – convert well into a book that grapples with the serious question of the crisis of modern masculinity?

There are multiple issues with this book that undermine its overall impact and effectiveness. Stuart Jefferies, reviewing the book in the Guardian, does an extremely good job of identifying these issues and I am not going to try and duplicate his points, almost all of which I support (although re-reading the review at a later date he does give Moran both barrels and doesn’t take much time looking for any redeeming features). While reading the text I constantly found myself disputing Moran’s observations and not in a good way. They were not thought-provoking so much as smugly wrong. To offer one example, when the author uses the term ‘men’ she appears to refer to a very specific sub-set of men, largely defined as ‘blokes I know’. They are almost all in her age group, heterosexual, and British. A chapter about porn-addiction, based on an interview with a twenty-something young man, stands out because it gives a voice to a different group. Claims such as “your T-shirt collection is, to you, as your wife’s lovingly collated wardrobe of second-hand Chanel, designer jeans and Zara brogues is to her” just aren’t funny because they don’t derive from any observable reality. Isn’t that observation only true of Moran’s husband and their mates? Not many women I know have a collection of second-hand Chanel designer jeans and I am reasonably close to Moran’s demographic. I appreciate this is intended as tongue in cheek humour, but it falls at the first hurdle because it is neither funny nor relatable.

Which is a huge pity, because the subjects Moran writes about – the crisis of toxic masculinity in this country – is profoundly serious. It is literally killing men, through suicide, differential life expectancy, and poor health care. Moran addresses all these subjects, but rarely gets to grips with them before a punchline is required.

Perhaps the fault is mine, in reading this book as a text rather than a series of chapters grouped around the same topic. A fine distinction perhaps but what I mean is What About Men might work better if read one chapter a week rather than straight through like a novel. Some of the more

There is, unquestionably, a dialling it in aspect to this book. Her habit of twitter-sourcing content doesn’t inspire confidence that the book has been carefully researched for example. Most of the conclusions she draws about men are simply stating the obvious – the amount of original insight is minuscule. As a quick gallop through the main issues of modern masculinity, a starter text if you like, this would be fine for someone who hadn’t read a newspaper or spoken to a man in the last few years. Perhaps that’s the real audience – teenagers? But the problem with that idea is that in my experience teenagers are profoundly better informed on issues of sexuality and gender that 99.9% of people of Moran’s generation. I think, in fact I am pretty sure, that most teenagers would be appalled if they read her generalisations on sex, gender and masculinity. Her real audience is obviously the people who buy books and give them to one another for birthdays and Christmas without really expecting them to be read. Why would you bother properly researching a book if you know most people are going to skip to the chapters about sex?

What about Men? Caitlin Moran, 2023

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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

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 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

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Book review

Capital, by John Lanchester, 2012

I’ve written quite a bit in the past about different categories of novel – most recently Newgate novels for example, nineteenth century stories about prisoners awaiting trial in Newgate. or the earlier Silver Fork novels about rich Regency people doing rich Regency people things. The problem is – where do you stop? Where do you stop creating ever finer more detailed sub-categories of novel? This problem occurred to me when reading John Lanchester’s 2023 novel Capital.

As well as obviously being about London and its inhabitants, Capital is more specifically a credit crunch novel, a literary response to the financial crash of 2008. It was published in 2012 which makes it a a relatively early response to the crash, when the full impacts of austerity had yet to be played out. In Capital people are still manically developing their houses with basements and loft extensions, even if the early seeds of doubt about the wisdom of this reckless spending are being sown; later post-Brexit crash novels (or are they a separate category?) see that this reckless spending is not without consequence. The worst that happens to a banker made redundant part way through Capital is that he has to sack his nanny and retire to the country with his money, confident that he will bounce back. Where am I going with this point? I suppose I am arguing that instead of simply being an ambitious survey of life in modern-day London, Capital is a more immediate response to political and economic circumstances that might not have the durability and longevity the author was obviously aiming for. It’s also a novel that addresses that very specific problem of gentrification, without having much to say about the issue other than vaguely suggesting it is not a good thing.

Capital follows the inhabitants of a south London street, Pepys Road, over the course of a year. The choice of name is obviously not coincidental – Pepys was a great chronicler of London-life, and it seems Lanchester aspires to do the same. Pepys Road is undergoing dramatic changes as London society responds to a influx of new residents from around the globe. As we are introduced to a series of immigrants – a Polish builder, a Hungarian nanny, a Senegalese footballer and a Zimbabwean traffic warden – one wonders whether these are much more than stereotypes? Their stories are juxtaposed with those of earlier residents, now undergoing their own diaspora as they are forced out of Pepys Road.

“Having a house in Pepys Road was like being in a casino in which you were guaranteed to be a winner. If you already lived there, you were rich. If you wanted to move there, you had to be rich. It was the first time in history this had ever been true”.

Another of the multiple threads of the novel follows stockbroker Roger Yount. Roger and family live a life of excess fuelled by the multi-million salaries and bonuses common in the City pre-Crash. Roger is an entitled and slightly thick public-school boy relying on nepotism to get along in a business he admits he does not really understand. His wife Arabella is a bit of a monster, spending her days shopping for designer nonsense and having long boozy lunches with girlfriends while her children are cared for by a series of nannies. We care little for Roger and Arabella, equally stereotypes in their own way, and celebrate their downfall as Roger first gets a disappointing five figure bonus, and is then sacked and has to rethink his life

Most of the storylines peter out – they have endings of sorts but I was insufficiently engaged with the characters to worry overly if they go on to live long and happy lives. Ends are tied up but with a conspicuous sense of ends being tied up so that the novel could finish rather than narratives being successfully concluded. A good example of this is the young African footballer who comes to the UK to play, suffers as career-ending injury, and goes back home with riches beyond imagination and still able to play football locally – a happy ending of sorts but hard to see where it fits in the overall narrative, other than being just another story of the residents of Pepys Road.

At over 600 pages this was harder work than it ought to have been. The years immediately after the Crash in which this novel is set seem a lifetime ago. If I had read Capital when it was first published it would have had an immediacy that it now lacks given how much has happened since then – it’s almost enough to make me nostalgic for 2012!

Capital, by John Lanchester, 2012

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Book review

The Last Devil to Die: The Thursday Murder Club (4) by Richard Osman, 2023

I confess to being a lazy reader of murder mysteries. What I mean by that is that I am comfortable with learning whodunnit when the author is ready to let me know, and not before. Of course I spot the red herrings, the introduction of what appears to be a peripheral character who is actually a suspect, and so on. But I know that a well-written book – and Richard Osman is an author who takes care with his plot construction – will provide just enough information to make the resolution of the mystery almost impossible to guess in advance, but to appear fairly obvious once it is revealed. I don’t see mysteries as a battle between me and the author to prove who is the cleverest – the contract between us is for the author to entertain the reader, challenge them a little bit, maybe even educate them, while not making them feel inferior or stupid, and never ever cheating (untraceable poisons and the like).

I say this because I worked out ‘whodunnit’ in this, the fourth of Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, fairly early on – avoiding spoilers, it is someone who falls into the category I describe above – and that the mystery we are presented with isn’t the real mystery after all. I explain this a little more in the section marked ‘SPOILERS’ below. But that doesn’t mean the novel wasn’t enjoyable. It is always pleasant to spend time with the club members, who Osman stubbornly refuses to kill off (despite my clear prediction in my review of the original novel in the series that he would do so early on in book two). If anything he has expanded his cast of characters, with other residents of Coopers Chase being introduced into the crime-fighting team, including an older person who knows how to use computers (bit of a patronising portrait I thought – not all old people are clueless when it comes to technology) and another who is the victim of a pretty transparent romance fraud. The relationships of the wider cast, police officers Chris and Donna, builder Bogdan and drug dealer Connie all make little or no progress – there is talk of an engagement, but nothing more. If you haven’t read the previous books in the series, or like me have a poor memory for novels read without the full beam of your attention, then you might struggle a little working out who is who – backstories are very lightly sketched.

I also struggled with the subplot involving former spy Elizabeth and her husband Stephen, as they face his advancing dementia. Again I can’t really write at any length about this thread of the novel without spoilers, so I again refer you to the text below.

As to what happens, well if you have read one Thursday Murder Club you have really read them all. Someone is murdered, other crimes follow, and the four pensioners solve the crime using unorthodox means and a considerable amount of tea and cake. Stereotypes about old age are both challenged and used as a source of comedy, particularly through the well-meaning character of Joyce, who is endlessly curious but a little adrift in the modern world.

It’s not uncommon for authors of long-running series to lose steam – Terry Pratchett being the obvious exception to the rule. I am sure there will be more Thursday Murder Club novels, but in an implicit acknowledgement of the diminishing returns from another outing of the feisty pensioners, Osman is writing about a father-in-law/daughter-in-law detective duo, which sounds sufficiently different to be interesting while in the same wheelhouse. Looking forward to it.

SPOILERS ALERT

Don’t read this unless you have already read The Last Devil to Die or have no intention to do so. Early on we are told that the heroin which goes missing is being carried in a box. The box is not described in any detail, but there’s enough to pique a curious reader’s interest – why smuggle heroin in a box? I suspected this was an example of the wheel-barrow theft operation story (A man works on an building site. Every day he walks off the site with a wheelbarrow full of sand. The security guards are suspicious and look through the sand trying to find if he was stealing anything. When he retired a guard asked him “Alright, how did you do it? We knew you were stealing, what did you hide in the sand?” “I wasn’t hiding anything in the sand, I was stealing the wheelbarrows.”) The box is described as ‘a small terracotta box, made to look old, like a tatty piece of garden junk…a boring ornament’. The obvious incongruity of using a terracotta box to smuggle heroin caught my attention at the time, and while the author works hard to downplay its significance, I was reasonably confident that we hadn’t heard the last of that box.

I am not claiming this as an example of my powers of penetration, simply suggesting that the puzzles in this novel weren’t that hard to solve. Actually, worse than that, they were pretty obvious.

I found the Elizabeth and Stephen subplot difficult, if not even a little distressing. Stephen’s dementia is accelerating and Elizabeth is slowly realising she is unable to cope with him. She is unable to leave him alone for any length of time without him putting himself in danger. He is aware at moments of his decline – at others he barely recognises her. So to cut a long story short, he kills himself with her assistance. This is presented to us as a brave choice, but it felt like patient-assisted suicide to me (because it was) which is illegal. Elizabeth is not one to care about being on the right side of the law, but anyone making a case for euthanasia simply because someone’s memory is failing (Stephen is in no physical pain or discomfort, and while obviously upset at his increasing dementia does not spend his days in acute distress) will find little support from me. It left a bad taste. Osman has given old people some dignity in these novels, revealing their strength and resourcefulness and celebrating the positive aspects of old age, but here, for me, he drops the ball badly. Old people lose their memories, but don’t deserve to die for it. He takes care to tell us that Stephen takes his own life, and is fully aware of the choice he is making, but glosses over the illegality and subterfuge required to achieve this end without prosecution.

Osman also uses Stephen’s dementia as a key point in the main plot – Stephen is the only person alive who knows where the missing heroin that everyone is being killed for is hidden, and somehow through the fog of his dementia manages to tell Elizabeth, albeit in a confused way. Because that’s what people suffering from dementia do, isn’t it – they solve crimes and locate hidden contraband. This was clumsy and a bit distasteful if I’m honest.

The Last Devil to Die: The Thursday Murder Club (4) by Richard Osman, 2023

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Book review

Notorious for being described by one of the 1994 panel of Booker judges* as “crap”, How Late is Was, How Late is a stream of consciousness novel written in ‘Glaswegian demotic’. It spans a week in the life of Sammy, a shoplifter and ex-convict, who gets drunk, fights with the police, and is beaten by them so badly that he is blinded. The assault happens in the opening weekend leaving the bulk of the novel to relate his clumsy and sometimes tragi-comic attempts to come to terms with his condition, to navigate the streets of Glasgow, and make a half-hearted claim for disability benefit. He refuses almost all help despite desperately needing it, and slowly reveals a small amount about his past, including two long spells in prison.

The language of the novel will be a challenge for many readers. Here’s a short extract by way of illustration:

Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can’t ye no do it; the words filling yer head: then the other words; there’s something wrong; there’s something far far wrong; ye’re no a good man, ye’re just no a good man. Edging back into awareness, of where ye are: here, slumped in this corner, with these thoughts filling ye. And oh christ his back was sore; stiff, and the head pounding. He shivered and hunched up his shoulders, shut his eyes, rubbed into the corners with his fingertips; seeing all kinds of spots and lights. Where in the name of fuck…”

You will note how the narrative point of view and tense wanders. Initially the narrative is in the first person, but then the text starts referring to Sammy as “he” – illustrating, I suppose, his sense of alienation – he sees himself as a secondary character. If you read that and thought it was relatively easy to follow, just think of the cumulative impact of nearly 400 pages of its unrelenting incoherence. The 4000 “fucks” weren’t really a problem for me – people do speak that way – but the question was do I want to listen to them? Did Sammy have anything interesting to say, or is he just a confused incompetent?

How Late sat on my bookshelves unread for what was probably decades. I was put off by the extraordinarily dull cover (see above) and more seriously by the ferocious dialect. In truth it really only takes a few pages to understand the conventions Kelman uses, such as “the gether” for “together”, “sodjers” for police, and so on, and to get into the rhythm of the Glaswegian voice.

I was hoping some coherence would be brought to the narrative – that we would find out more about why his girlfriend has disappeared for example. But we never do, and puzzlingly Sammy never makes any attempt to find out. He is anxious to ensure that family and friends don’t find out about his blindness, and even when he eventually consults a doctor there is no serious discussion on whether the condition is temporary or permanent, possible referral to a specialist, or any treatment. Earlier the police arrest Sammy for reasons that are never explained but may be something to do with an associate who has a more substantial criminal record. Any hope that these threads will combine or end up making any sense are left unfulfilled. 

I kept waiting for the book I hoped Kelman was writing to emerge from the shadows, but to my huge disappointment it never did. There is clearly a lot Sammy decides not to tell us – although why he would conceal it from himself is not obvious – and while we do find more out about him over the course of the novel, much is left unsaid. What I expected to happen is that the slow reveal would finally piece together, and that pieces would fall into place, revealing the explanation for the randomness of Sammy’s life, why he refuses to seek help for his blindness, where his girlfriend has gone and why he doesn’t seem that interested in finding out. Late in the novel his teenage son Peter is introduced. He obviously cares for his father and is anxious to help him, but Sammy rejects his offers of help (apart from his money) and lies comprehensively to him, swearing him to secrecy about his sight loss for reasons which seem more to do with pride than anything else. Perhaps it is just middle-class of me to expect Sammy’s like to have some structure or reason, rather than just being the one big mess it is.

Overall this was hard work. Sammy is profoundly unlikeable, showing occasional glimpses of intelligence which are misleading – he quickly reverts to a bovine refusal to accept any assistance or attempt to improve his desperate situation. I appreciate that in creating Sammy Kelman wanted to give a voice to the oppressed working class, and Sammy’s independent streak and refusal to accept assistance is in some ways admirable, but in fact the novel does the working class a disservice. Most working people simply would not behave in the irrational way Sammy does throughout the novel. They accept help when needed, and their relationships are important enough for them to ask after their partner when they disappear. Their lives may be chaotic and disorderly, but they are not without reason.

 

*Julia Neuberger. In a later, generally positive review, the Guardian called the novel “a miserable slog” and in a masterly understatement “unlikely to improve anyone’s beach holiday”!

How Late it Was, How Late, by James Kelman, 1994

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Book review

Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner, 1984

I am sure there are exceptions, but most great novels have great opening lines. “It was the best of times”, “All happy families”, “It was a bright cold morning” and so on. Anita Brookner by contrast chose to open Hotel du Lac with the following:

“From the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey.”

Which won’t be going into any collections of great opening lines any time soon. This self-consciously down-beat opening sets the tone of the novel – this is going to be a mono-chromatic sketch where the reader is going to have to do a lot of the work.Image result for Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner, 198

Edith Hope, author of romantic novels such as Beneath the Visiting Moon and The Stone and the Star, has fled from London to the Hotel du Lac in disgrace. Initially we are not told the reasons for this flight – some sort of scandal is hinted at. It emerges she has been having an affair with a married man, to whom she pens forlorn love-letters. We are initially led to believe that this is the cause of her exile, although it later emerges that it is her decision to leave her groom (another man entirely, naturally) at the altar that has outraged her friends and led to her banishment. Why deciding not to go through with an ill-advised wedding is considered such a cause of outrage is never made clear.

The hotel is a suitable location for Edith’s contemplation of her future:“

“The Hotel du Lac was a dignified building, a house of repute, a traditional establishment, used to welcoming the prudent, the well-to-do, the retired, the self-effacing, the respected patrons of an earlier era.”

“As far as guests were concerned, it (the hotel) took a perverse pride in its very absence of attractions, so that any visitor mildly looking for a room would be puzzled and deflected by the sparseness of the terrace, the muted hush of the lobby … There was no sauna, no hairdresser and certainly no glass cases displaying items of jewellery; the bar was small and dark and its austerity did not encourage people to linger.”

The portraits of the other guests at the hotel provide Edith with illustrations of the choices before her (and, we might reasonably extrapolate, many women in her position) as she considers her next steps. They are all lonely in their different ways. There is the overbearing widow Mrs Pusey, who has made a vocation out of shopping, so empty is her life; her devoted daughter Jennifer, secretly far less docile than her mother believes her to be (the novel hints at sexual liaisons between Jennifer and Alain, the hotel’s waiter, and later Mr Neville); Mme de Bonneuil, who lives in isolation at the hotel, expelled from her chateau, now inhabited by her son and his wife, and Monica, living alone the hotel on the instructions of her husband to fix her “eating disorder” and become fertile enough to bear him an heir.

“She (Monica) hates and fears her husband, but only because he has not protected her, and she sees herself condemned to loneliness and exile. In this she is prescient. I see her, some years hence, a remittance woman, paid to live abroad, in such an hotel, in various Hotels du Lac, her beautiful face grown gaunt and scornful, her dog permanently under her arm. ”

Edith also has a friend back in London, Penelope – “a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years” (one of the novel’s better lines).

“To Penelope, men were conquests, attributes, but they were also enemies; they belonged to the species that must never be granted more than the amount of time and attention she considered they deserved.”

The boorish Mr Neville presents Edith with a final choice: a marriage without love or respect, No matter that he has only known her for a matter of days. Neville is looking for a “safe” wife who will maintain his home and offers to turn a blind eye to any lovers she might take. Possibly the absurdity of this proposal is intentional, although Edith seems close to accepting despite her disastrous engagement itself only weeks earlier.

There is something quite circular about romantic novels about romantic novelists. At several points it is not clear whether Brookner is writing about her character, or about the novel itself. When Mr Neville, in an extraordinarily clumsy attempt at seduction, insults her, Edith

“to contain her anger…tried various distancing procedures..the most productive of which was to convert the incident into a scene from one of her novels”.

In her sad letters to her silent lover Edith adopts the role of narrator of the novel, recounting various scenes of minimal activity by the other guests (indeed this is a novel where so very little happens other than walks being taken and coffee drunk that we might almost be in a Virginia Woolf novel, whom we are constantly told Edith looks like). Later Edith consoles herself with the thought that

“Fiction, the time-honoured resource of the ill-at-ease, would have to come to her aid.”

Is this what we are reading – simply an act of consolation, a distraction for the ill-at-ease? Intended or not I can’t think of a way in which Brookner could have more clearly reminded the reader that this is just a novel, her characters are not real, and all this never really happened, something that other novelists are at pains to conceal. This is not some Brechtian ultra-realistic narrative however, but a story about a woman thinking about her life.

The tone and pace of the novel are consistently grey and slow, but there was one scene towards the end of the novel which jarred acutely. Mr Neville is proposing marriage to Edith. He is essentially a well-groomed thug, and manages to insult her throughout the proposal. (If this is intended to remind readers of the clumsy first proposal in Pride and Prejudice, it doesn’t). Upset, Edith starts to weep, and his response is startling:

“Edith, said Mr Neville. Please don’t cry. I cannot bear to see a woman cry; it makes me want to hit her. “

If that wasn’t bad enough, and it is, a few moments later, while she sobs on his shoulder, he muses:

“You are very thin…I am afraid that I might break you in half”.

It is possible Brookner did not intend the threat of sexual violence explicit in this line, but it is hard to imagine otherwise. Most women would I suspect want to get as far away as possible from this man, but Edith meekly accepts his proposal.

Brookner is not a bad novelist. Her use of language is controlled and precise. The Penguin edition of the novel mentions that Brookner “is the author of 24 novels, many of which are available in Penguin” – that “many” is quite poignant. It is however a puzzle why this novel was considered the best written or published in 1984. It’s not the first unusual decision by the Booker panel, but it is one of the strangest.

 

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Book review

Hogfather (Discworld 20) by Terry Pratchett, 1996

In any long running series, especially where the author produces books with the regularity that Terry Pratchett achieved, one looks out for repetition – recycled material, sometimes ironically self-referential, sometimes disguised. So when I tell you that Hogfather features Death leaving his day job and assuming the role of the missing, presumed dead Hogfather, the Father Christmas of Discworld, it will ring some bells. Didn’t that happen before, in Reaper Man and before that in Mort? (It did). To be fair, that’s a minor quibble, because as I am sure I have said before, with Pratchett it is never about the plot.

Here, Death is not taking a holiday, but covering for the Hogfather, who despite being the titled character makes only the briefest of appearances. Death is driven to do this on the basis that the Hogfather is responsible for the sun rising each morning, and for this to happen children have to believe in him. It’s not as awkward and contrived as it sounds.

Having failed to force Death to retire in Reaper Man, the grim Auditors of Reality, “celestial bureaucrats”, hire an assassin from the Assassin’s Guild to kill the Hogfather, symbol of all that is creative and joyful in the Discworld. A particularly psychopathic assassin, Mr. Teatime, is assigned the job.

“Mister Teatime had a truly brilliant mind, but it was brilliant like a fractured mirror, all marvellous facets and rainbows but, ultimately, also something that was broken.”

He recruits a gang of Ankh-Morpork’s more unpleasant thugs (and that’s saying something) to capture the Tooth Fairy’s kingdom, steal all the collected teeth, and use them to control the children of Discworld, commanding them to no longer believe in the Hogfather. Again, still not awkward, contrived, or even twee. Honestly. Pratchett gets away with this because the narrative doesn’t give us this summary – the reader is left to work most of this out themselves, and the immediacy of the action – we are just shown what is happening in the moment – is realistically portrayed. There’s a darker element to the novel as well – when Mr Teatime kills people they stay killed.

Death, becoming aware (somehow) of the Hogfather’s absence, decides to fill in for him. Along the way he visits his granddaughter, Susan Sto Helit, tricking her into investigating the Hogfather’s disappearance. This is not the first time Susan has been called upon to help Death, although at least this time she is not collecting souls for him. She tracks a missing tooth fairy to the Hogfather’s Castle of Bones, on the way meeting Bilious, the “Oh God” of hangovers (one of Pratchett’s better throw away jokes). I am not going to spoil for you what happens there, but I bet you can work it out!

As well as spending time with Death and his assistants the Death of Rats and the ever-hopeful raven, exploring the Hogswatchnight traditions of Discworld and gently satirising the commercialism of Christmas along the way, we also follow the wizards of the Unseen University as they get ready for their great midnight feast, at the same time try to understand why new minor magical creatures keep popping into existence, such as the hair-loss fairy:

“No sense in being bashful about goin’ bald,” said Ridcully evenly. “Anyway, you know what they say about bald men, Dean.”

“Yes, they say, ‘Look at him, he’s got no hair,’” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

Susan and the Oh God try to work out what has happened to the missing tooth fairy, and why Death is substituting for the Hogfather, while Mr Teatime and his gang ransack the Tower of Bones. It’s all handled flawlessly by Pratchett, and the reader happily suspends disbelief for the duration, not least because all the characters themselves are constantly telling one another how unlikely everything is.

The Discworld version of Christmas is inevitably a much earthier version of our own Dickensian yuletide. The Hogfather’s sleigh is pulled by four fearsome wild boars, Gouger, Rooter, Tusker and Snouter. But even in Discworld traditions are being slowly sanitised. In earlier times the Hogfather gave households pork products, and naughty children a bag of bloody bones; now all the Hogfather brings is soldiers, dolls and noisy toys for that 4.30 am start.

Pratchett as ever is a great moral philosopher, with Death as his most articulate spokesperson:

“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

How’s that for poetry – “where the falling angel meets the rising ape”? I rarely feel the need to justify reading what some people (entirely wrongly) consider children’s books, but here Pratchett provides the answer himself in one elegant, poetic and profound phrase.

 

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