Tag Archives: fiction

Book review

A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark, 1988

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

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

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

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

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

Hector the man is if anything even more harshly described:

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark, 1988

Aside
Book review

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry, 2024

Aside
Book review

Summing Up 2024, and looking forward to 2025

I reviewed 35 books in 2024, which is about average for me in a typical year, but a little disappointing nonetheless. One book every ten days, read and reviewed, doesn’t sound too bad, and that does include Dombey and Son – but almost all the other books were either average length or shorter. Definitely a ‘must try harder’ year. Likes and views were slightly down on 2023, but still better than any other year. My five most popular posts were my reviews of Bob Mortimer’s underwhelming The Satsuma Complex, Richard Osman’s The Last Devil to Die, fourth in the Thursday Murder Club series, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, and Graham Greene’s The Third Man. The other post in my top five is one in which I discuss Clothing in Jane Eyre, which was posted back in 2016 and which is by some considerable distance my most visited post of all time. I can just about understand why the Mortimer and Osman reviews are popular – these were both huge sellers from the end of 2023 – but the persistent popularity of the other posts are baffling. Not that I am complaining!

My reading in the first quarter of the year is as always going to be focussed on the outstanding selection of books received as presents, including new novels by the aforementioned Mortimer and Osman, as well as a book I am very much looking forward to, the latest Jasper Fforde novel. My 2025 Dickens is going to be his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend. Beyond that I do not have any specific reading targets, but I would like to improve on this year’s total if possible. While I have abandoned my attempt to read all the Booker Prize winning novels – I was left with a small residue which I simply didn’t like the look of – I will be catching up on one or two of the more recent winners this year. Above all I will be trying to recapture the reading bug, that love of reading that is such a blessing and which gives this blog its corny name.

Summing up 2024, and looking forward to 2025

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Book review

The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1912

The Lost World is an unashamedly escapist adventure story. Although published shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, there is barely a hint of the looming conflict. There is one brief glimpse of the real world – when celebrating the success of the stories of Malone, the plucky young reporter for the Daily Gazette, his editor tells him “What a three column article for the paper! What a foundation for a career! A correspondentship in the next great war might be within my reach.” As with so many other texts of this period, the inevitability of a future ‘great war’ is accepted as a matter of fact. I also find it interesting that it was referred to as ‘the great war’ even before it had started! – great here is simply a reference to scale rather than the later suggestion that it was glorious in any way.

You will be familiar with what happens in The Lost World because it is the source of many of the tropes of the genre to which it gives its name. Malone, the reporter mentioned above, asks his editor for an assignment to somewhere exotic and challenging in order to impress Gladys, the woman he loves. In rejecting his marriage proposal she tells him that she will only marry a man of action and achievement:

“He must be a man who could do, who could act, who could look Death in the face and have no fear of him, a man of great deeds and strange experiences. It is never a man that I should love, but always the glories he had won; for they would be reflected upon me. Think of Richard Burton! When I read his wife’s life of him I could so understand her love! And Lady Stanley! Did you ever read the wonderful last chapter of that book about her husband? These are the sort of men that a woman could worship with all her soul,”

Malone takes this rejection at face value, and decides to find a way of meeting her expectations. His editor is sceptical as to whether such great deeds and strange experiences can be found any more:

Dear me, Mr. Malone, this is very—very exalted. I’m afraid the day for this sort of thing is rather past. The expense of the ‘special meesion’ business hardly justifies the result, and, of course, in any case it would only be an experienced man with a name that would command public confidence who would get such an order. The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there’s no room for romance anywhere.

The mention of an ‘experienced man with a name to command public confidence’ gives him an idea. He suggests that Malone approaches Professor Challenger for a place on his next expedition. Challenger is a blimpish, cartoon-like figure who challenges to a fist-fight anyone who cast doubt on his account of his recent expedition to the Amazon, where he claims to have discovered a lost world where dinosaurs still roam.

At a rowdy public meeting Challenger announces he is going back to the Amazon, and Malone volunteers to join him, along with Professor Summerlee, a zoologist who has publicly questioned Challenger’s claims and Lord John Roxton, a professional adventurer. It is not long before the Atlantic has been crossed and the party of explorers sets off up the Amazon in search of the Lost World. Their party, along with the ubiquitous native guides, quickly reaches the isolated plateau, cut off from the surrounding countryside, where the prehistoric wildlife is to be found. There’s an economy to the narrative – not much time is wasted with exposition, speculation or character development. The cliffs to the plateau cannot be climbed, but the party is able to scale a nearby spire of rock. Using a tree as a bridge they cross over to the plateau.

A treacherous guide, seeking revenge on Roxton for a grudge held from a previous adventure, pushes the tree-bridge off the pinnacle, stranding the party of four, who have no choice but to set off and explore this lost world. They encounter dinosaurs and other animals, insects and plants previously thought extinct, many of which are highly dangerous. It’s not just the wildlife they have to be cautious about, because while Malone is off one night exploring the plateau’s central lake, his companions are taken prisoner by some ape-men, referred to by Malone (acting as the novel’s narrator) as the missing link. Roxton escapes and with Malone’s help rescues the others, together with some indigenous cave people who are at war with the ape-men. A battle royale ensues in which the white men’s guns tip the bitter long-running struggle in the favour of the cave men, wiping out the ape-men and enslaving their women and children.

Eventually the explorers find a tunnel leading off the plateau and on to civilisation. The novel ends with a rerun of the public meeting in which Challenger’s claims about the lost world are repeated and once again challenged, the difference being when he produces a young pterodactyl as proof, triggering a small riot. The novel doesn’t quite end there. Two final scenes close the show. First, Malone returns to Gladys, who had married a banker in his absence, the very opposite of the man of action she described. I think the reader is meant to conclude women are fickle from this scene, but my reaction was that she was letting Malone down gently. At a private celebratory dinner Roxton then reveals that he has brought back £200,000 worth of diamonds from the expedition, making them all rich. With nothing to keep him in London Malone he decides to accompany Roxton back to the lost world. If this was the cinema the ending would be a great set-up for Return to the Lost World, but Conan Doyle obviously thought better of the idea (Hollywood disagreed, and Return to the Lost World is actually a real film!)

You may be wondering why I am reading Edwardian adventure novels? I think the simple answer is that they give an insight into how people – not everyone of course, but in particular the educated novel-reading and -writing classes – were thinking about the Empire and Britain’s place in the world at the close of the Victorian era. There was a nervousness about a decline in military strength relative to countries like Germany, France and Austro-Hungary. The Boer War had exposed serious weaknesses in the strength of the British army, particularly if conscription were ever to be needed. The trade unions were flexing their muscles and had set up the Labour Party. The world was changing and the extent to which these changes were reflected in the books people wrote and read at the time, and how their feelings about these changes are worked through in the stories, fascinates me. The Lost World is mainly an exercise in escaping the chaos that was about the erupt across Europe – but it doesn’t always succeed. When Malone and companions are fighting for their lives in the decisive battle between ape-men and cave-men, the struggle is a visceral matter of life and death:

For an hour or more after we entered the wood, there was a desperate struggle in which for a time we hardly held our own. Springing out from among the scrub the ape-men with huge clubs broke in upon the Indians and often felled three or four of them before they could be speared. Their frightful blows shattered everything upon which they fell. One of them knocked Summerlee’s rifle to matchwood and the next would have crushed his skull had an Indian not stabbed the beast to the heart….Once our allies broke under the pressure, and had it not been for the execution done by our rifles they would certainly have taken to their heels. But they were gallantly rallied by their old chief and came on with such a rush that the ape-men began in turn to give way… I was emptying my magazine as quick as I could fire, and on the further flank we heard the continuous cracking of our companion’s rifles.

War is brutal and lethal, as Europe (and Conan Doyle) were about to fight out.

The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1912

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Book review

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, 1915

Is there a better, more striking opening to a novel than this?

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin*. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.

The Metamorphosis is wonderfully enigmatic. Of course the reader is invited to consider the story as an allegory about difference, but everyone will see it from their own perspective. For some it will be about how we treat the disabled, for others about race, gender, sexuality or religion. Its ambiguity is its strength, leaving the reader to interpret and reinterpret it without the constraints of simplistic X = Y parallels.

This is a powerful story in which not a word is wasted. Consider that opening line and the reference to waking from ‘troubled dreams‘ – did Gregor’s transformation cause the troubled dreams, or were the dreams the origins of his transformation?

Gregor Samsa is a travelling textile salesman, bullied by his boss and unable to leave his miserable job because of debts owed by his parents, with whom he lives. We know very little about Gregor other than at one point he was in the army – “On the wall exactly opposite there was photograph of Gregor when he was a lieutenant in the army, his sword in his hand and a carefree smile on his face as he called forth respect for his uniform and bearing“, which is obviously a dramatic contrast with his life as a travelling salesman, and even more so after his metamorphosis. He has made a sad attempt to brighten his room up by cutting a picture from a magazine and framing it: “It showed a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm towards the viewer.” Perhaps this is being fanciful, but could it be that the three-fold repetition of the word ‘fur’ suggests this woman has undergone her own transformation? Change, metamorphosis, isn’t always a bad thing, it implies. We also see this idea at the end of the novel (novel not being the completely correct term – The Metamorphosis is barely fifty pages long) when after Gregor’s death, Grete, his younger sister, begins her own metamorphosis:

All the time, Grete was becoming livelier. With all the worry they had been having of late her cheeks had become pale, but, while they were talking, Mr. and Mrs. Samsa were struck, almost simultaneously, with the thought of how their daughter was blossoming into a well built and beautiful young lady. They became quieter. Just from each other’s glance and almost without knowing it they agreed that it would soon be time to find a good man for her. And, as if in confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions, as soon as they reached their destination Grete was the first to get up and stretch out her young body.

Gregor’s father is also transformed by the end of the novel, changing from the redundant aging tyrant of the opening chapters to something far more respectable and impressive:

He was standing up straight enough now; dressed in a smart blue uniform with gold buttons, the sort worn by the employees at the banking institute; above the high, stiff collar of the coat his strong double-chin emerged; under the bushy eyebrows, his piercing, dark eyes looked out fresh and alert; his normally unkempt white hair was combed down painfully close to his scalp. He took his cap, with its gold monogram from, probably, some bank, and threw it in an arc right across the room onto the sofa, put his hands in his trouser pockets, pushing back the bottom of his long uniform coat, and, with look of determination, walked towards Gregor.

The point of view of the narrator in this paragraph is interesting. The fact that the narrator recognises Mr Samsa senior’s uniform as coming from “probably, some bank” suggests this is Gregor’s perspective – an omniscient narrator would know which bank the uniform is from. This is not the consistent viewpoint, but often we see things through Gregor’s eyes.

His initial reaction to his metamorphosis is quite phlegmatic – he decides to go back to sleep and (despite the fact we have just been told his transformation is not a dream) thinks to himself “How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense” The dawning realisation that this is not nonsense at all, this is happening, is not narrated in the text – the reader is left to work gradually through that process themselves. We wait page after page for some explanation of Gregor’s situation, but it never comes. Instead we read in vivid detail about what it would be like to be a monstrous insect:

Hardly aware of what he was doing other than a slight feeling of shame, he hurried under the couch. It pressed down on his back a little, and he was no longer able to lift his head, but he nonetheless felt immediately at ease and his only regret was that his body was too broad to get it all underneath. He spent the whole night there. Some of the time he passed in a light sleep, although he frequently woke from it in alarm because of his hunger, and some of the time was spent in worries and vague hopes which, however, always led to the same conclusion: for the time being he must remain calm, he must show patience and the greatest consideration so that his family could bear the unpleasantness that he, in his present condition, was forced to impose on them.

Always thinking about his family, he gradually comes to terms with the changed world he is confronted by:

Out of consideration for his parents, Gregor wanted to avoid being seen at the window during the day, the few square metres of the floor did not give him much room to crawl about, it was hard to just lie quietly through the night, his food soon stopped giving him any pleasure at all, and so, to entertain himself, he got into the habit of crawling up and down the walls and ceiling.

The Metamorphosis is a powerful, disturbing book. it is available free online and can be read in little more than an hour. It’s also a great introduction to the dark, troubling world of Franz Kafka, who I think is rightly regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.

*This translation – ‘horrible vermin‘ – is a bit literal for my tastes. Other translations are available. Wikipedia tells me that the phrase “ungeheuren Ungeziefer”, describing the creature into which Gregor metamorphoses, has been translated many different ways. These include:

  • gigantic insect
  • monstrous kind of vermin
  • monstrous vermin
  • giant bug
  • monstrous insect
  • enormous bug
  • gargantuan pest
  • monstrous cockroach
  • monstrous verminous bug
  • a vile insect, one of gigantic proportions
  • some kind of monstrous vermin
  • some sort of monstrous insect
  • some kind of monstrous bedbug
  • huge verminous insect
  • a kind of giant bug

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, 1915

Aside
Book review

Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell, 1938

Homage to Catalonia is Orwell’s memoir of his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Covering the period between December 1936 and June 1937, he tells how he stumbled into the war having originally intended to observe the conflict and ‘write newspaper articles’, but then quickly got caught up in the revolutionary atmosphere in Barcelona and signed up to fight. After some rudimentary training he describes his uneventful but miserable time on the front lines in Aragon and then his involvement in the May Days conflict in Barcelona. Although he returned to the front line after this short break, his time in Spain was brought to a sudden end when he was shot through the throat. A further close shave followed quickly when the political group he was serving in, the POUM, was declared an illegal organisation causing Orwell and his wife to flee for their lives, following closely by the police. The memoir elements of the book are interspersed with Orwell’s commentary on the war and the May Days conflict, in which he is heavily critical of the actions of the Government forces.

This analysis of the May Days conflict is central to this narrative and all subsequent commentary on the book. Orwell saw the May Days as a microcosm of the struggle between revolutionary socialism and communism. This isn’t some obscure metaphorical parallel but a real time playing out of the conflict between Trotskyism and Stalinism , fatally undermining the ability of countries such as Spain to resist fascism. Orwell comes down firmly and unambiguously on the side of revolutionary socialism and against Communism as represented by the Soviet Union and its counterparts in Spain and elsewhere. You could argue that as an almost accidental member of the POUM militia (he joined because it was aligned with the Independent Labour Party) it would have been impossible to imagine him taking any other position – who cheers on the people who are trying to arrest you and who are killing your friends and comrades. all the while telling the world that you are a fascist collaborator?

A common accusation levelled against Orwell’s non-fiction is that it is to a greater or lesser extent made up. He didn’t shoot an elephant, witness a hanging, etc. This accusation is almost never expressed as simple dishonesty – instead critics talk about things being ’embroidered’ and of ‘journalistic licence’ – but that’s what they mean. Homage to Catalonia was attacked on this basis from the moment it was published – instead of being an honest eye-witness account of the six-month period Orwell was in Spain, it is alleged that it is a carefully edited and at times simply untrue portrait of the war, most contentiously the street fighting in Barcelona. One critic who takes this position on HtC is Paul Preston, an academic at the London School of Economics. His Light and Shadows in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia dissects HtC in meticulous detail and gives credit for the book’s vivid descriptions of the conflict, but is assiduous in picking up on contentious issues in the account. To take one fairly minor example, early on in the book Orwell contrasts the food shortages being experienced by the ordinary citizens of Barcelona with the food being wasted in the barracks. Preston observes

“If Orwell’s POUM unit could really afford to waste food, it must have been a rarity among the Republican forces.“

To support this rather snide comment (it is implied that Orwell is lying, but not directly stated), Preston refers an extremely hostile essay on HtC by Bill Alexander called George Orwell and Spain. This essay was part of a collection of critical attacks on Orwell published in 1984 called Inside the Myth (see what they did there?) Why Alexander’s account is considered reliable and Orwell’s dishonest is not explained. But if Orwell was lying about the food shortage situation, Preston implies, his other observations might also be untrue or unreliable.

There’s fundamental category error in many of Preston’s cricitisms of HtC. For example he claims

Orwell’s eye-witness testimony guarantees the inclusion of Homage to Catalonia in any list of important books on the war. However, it would certainly not be there as a reliable analysis of the broader politics of the war and particularly of its international determinants.

Whereas of course it never claims to be a reliable analysis of the broader politics of the war, as a few minutes spent reading it will clearly demonstrate. Orwell goes out of his way to stress the partisan and incomplete nature of his account:

In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period of the Spanish war. (HtC)

Another accusation repeated by both Preston and Alexander is that Orwell was some kind of literary tourist, travelling to Spain simply to collect content and material for future books and articles and was not really interested in the Spanish or their struggles.

“Orwell had no understanding of the world wide significance of the struggle in Spain, he knew little of the national efforts of the Popular Front government to achieve a united front against fascism, he had never seen the Republican flag, he did not agree with the actions of the POUM – he took the rifle in the role of an outsider, a journalist looking for different experiences to figure in a future book.” (George Orwell and Spain, Bill Alexander, 1984).

Again Orwell anticipated this criticism. Initially it was the case that he had gone to Spain to write, but the sincerity of his subsequent conviction – he returned to the fighting despite the betrayal (as he saw it) of the May Days, was shot in the throat and came very close to death – is hard to doubt. In fact Orwell wrote very little about his time in Spain outside of HtC, and the book struggled to find a publisher and was famously a commercial and literary failure. You can question the accuracy of some of his writing, but surely the authenticity of his convictions cannot be questioned.

Some of the other claims made against Orwell, crafted solely to undermine his analysis of the war, are petty in the extreme. For example Preston casts doubt on the record of events at the end of the book when he is at risk of being arrested for his association with the POUM, claiming he (Orwell) couldn’t speak Spanish. There is however unambiguous eye-witness evidence that contradicts this allegation. It is also not disputed that Orwell commanded a group of young Spanish volunteers who presumably had little English. Orwell was a bright man and a quick learner and surrounded by Spanish speakers I can easily imagine he learnt the basics of the language quickly. The alternative – that he did not learn any significant amounts of Spanish during his months there and subsequently invented conversations to fit in with his anti-Government narrative – is surely far less likely?

I don’t want to spend to much time on the case for the defence, because frankly Homage to Catalonia doesn’t need it. It is superbly written and an important snapshot of pre-war European politics. It explains very clearly why Orwell become a convinced socialist and I would argue that it adds significantly to any reading of 1984 in its portrait of Stalinism. I challenge anyone to read his description of revolutionary Barcelona and not be moved, even if you accept that in doing so Orwell was overlooking the bloodshed of the early days of the conflict:

It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. […] And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that
I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.

The book ends with this wonderful and profoundly prophetic description of returning to England, an experience any English tourist will recognise:

“And then England—southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from seasickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage underneath you, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”

Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell, 1938

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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

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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