Achebe, Chinua
Things Fall Apart (1958)
Rating:- ****
His first novel - included on our syllabus of '50s writing. The theme is the approach and gradual intrusion of Western civilization. The comparative serenity but extremely limited scope of the 'native' way of life begins to be torn apart by progress. The narrative is even-handed in that the Africans are shown as being understandably attracted (some of them anyway) by the prospect of wider connections with the outside world. It can be seen as being 'about' the paradoxes attendant upon change. Disruption and/or Emancipation. It is quite beautifully told without noticeable didactic comment. The final paragraph gives some indication of the general tone:
"The Commissioner went away, taking three or four of the soldiers with him. In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learnt a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting down a hanged man from a tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book he planned to write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new material. The story of this man who killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm about cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: "The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger"."
For once the reviewers quoted on the cover seem to have it right. Admiring but still with their feet on the ground: "... The story is the tragedy of Okonkwo, an important man in the Obi tribe when the white man was first appearing on the scene ... very simple but excellent novel tells of the series of events by which he, through his pride and his fears, becomes exiled from his tribe and returns only to be forced into the ignominy of suicide to escape from the results of his rash courage against the white man ... He handles the macabre with telling restraint and the pathetic without any false embarrassment." MP
After not getting on with ‘Anthills of the Savannah' thought I'd have another go at Achebe in view of MP's praise. And it certainly is an improvement; better written, more clearly focussed - the author obviously knew what he wanted to say and did it in an economical and attractive manner. Having said that, it is only 150 pages long and one has no wish for it to be longer. The first half I found a little tiresome to go through and more like an extract from some 50-year-old National Geographic Magazine. When Achebe moved things along in the second half, there was a definite improvement resulting in the final and best paragraph which MP quoted. An excellent finish and you are left initially with the feeling that you've been reading something special. But unless you are interested in the customs and culture of 19th century native Nigerians there is little ‘novelistic' merit for much of this book. SJG
On the other hand, how else do you write so economically about this immense subject: the death of centuries-old tribal culture? Achebe succeeds in the first part in showing how the tribal culture cohered even though there is much about it that is abhorrent, eg the way women are abused, and the "throwing away" of twins. It felt like a ripe fruit in front of colonising white culture and Christianity plays a shameful - or totally predictable - part, largely because there is a group of disenfranchised tribesmen to build on. SRG

Ackroyd, Peter
Hawksmoor (1985)
Rating:- ****
Have avoided Ackroyd because I can vaguely remember reading something ('Chatterton'?) which was written in a difficult-to-read mock 18th century style. That style, or something similar, reappears here, but only in alternating chapters. This means you get some relief and hence I was able to appreciate it more. Indeed, however accurate or not it may be, it does feel authentic to this reader. The pastiche tells the story of an architect, Nicholas Dyer, (whose name in real-life was Hawksmoor) who designed seven churches in London in the 1710s. Ackroyd has created a character who, affected by the Great Plague and the dark side of London life, holds views which are the antithesis of the then fashionable beliefs of the Royal Society and his former boss, Sir Christopher Wren. For Ackroyd, Dyer is a real figure of the night who ends up as a serial murderer. These murders are echoed in the second, contemporary, part of this novel, where Hawksmoor(!), a detective, finds himself with a number of virtually clueless murders. The writing is strong, the characterisation good and the atmosphere truly sinister, but the real strength of this novel is in the structure where characters, names, incidents etc are echoed backwards and forwards between the 18th century and the contemporary sections. It really works and knits the two halves of the novel, rather than in many novels where the two halves are brought to a conclusion only in the final chapter(s). I felt though that Ackroyd did have some problems bringing the whole to an end, and it all gets rather frantic and less considered. Nevertheless this is easily a recommended read. SJG
Clever without being precious or impenetrable; intriguing; good, dark atmosphere kept up; resonant detail like the use of snatches of children's songs and street cries. SRG

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi
Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)
Rating:- ****
Title refers to the emblem of the brief (1967-70) African nation of Biafra when the Igbo (or Ibo) tribes attempted to break away from Nigeria. The story is unashamedly told from the point of view of the Igbos: mainly of the ruling and middle classes, although one of the leads is a house-boy and another a white British sympathiser. (This lack of balance is a little disappointing but, considering that both Adichie's grandfathers were killed in the war, quite understandable. Whether intentional or not on the author's part, the Igbo do have more than a touch of arrogance in the earlier part of the book, and one can start to see how they may have upset the other tribes, although as the author quite reasonably makes plain it was Britain's fault in lumping them altogether in the first place.) Like in her previous book ‘Purple Hibiscus' Adichie is clearly in complete control of her writing and can structure a story with consummate ease. Indeed this is a greater achievement than her first novel. However I can't say that I enjoyed it as, being aware of the massacre of many of this ‘nation' and still being able to visualise the famous pictures of starving children with bloated bellies, I read the first two-thirds with a dread of the details that I would find in the war section. As it happens they were not so horrific as they could have been. Most of the main characters make it through (physically if not mentally), and Adichie avoids sentimentality and most of the explicit details of the gore and the suffering. Also storytelling rather than characterisation is her forte so one doesn't become too involved with individuals. In lots of ways this is an excellent book, it's just that, like in Holocaust novels, I have an aversion to stories where the signalled climax is going to clearly detail man's inhumanity to man. SJG
The main strength in Adichie's telling of this tragic war is in keeping her characters' reactions to events personal and therefore realistic. In other words she does not let them behave stereotypically as ‘war victims'. They all go on living, trying to make sense of what is happening to them and finding the small adjustments they can make to maximise their ability to go on hoping in a hopeless situation. She also shows the same human failings in the Igbo as in the Nigerian side that lead to soldiers committing gang rape and using bullying tactics, civilians stealing from one another, lying, cheating etc. The portrayal of the war is never ‘top-down', in terms of gains or losses, but seen in the arbitrary ways it affects the main characters. SRG

Allende, Isabel
Portrait in Sepia (2002)
Rating:- ****
Very enjoyable and quite a surprise. The blurb describes this as a ‘family saga' but fortunately the author has more than enough wit and imagination to transcend that stultifying sub-genre. Indeed for the first half/two-thirds she intelligently piles in characters and incidents to create a world that was reminiscent of the South America of Joseph Conrad. No doubt this analogy came to me as the majority of this novel is set in Chile at the end of the 19th century but I would be surprised if Allende was not familiar with ‘Nostromo'. Unfortunately she is unable to maintain the full momentum towards the end. The density of the storytelling halved as we became more involved with the feelings of Aurora del Valle - a young woman of mixed Chilean/Spanish/American descent - whereas previously Allende had been giving the reader a lot of back-history and it was here that she excelled. There appear to be some other novels featuring the same characters as found here. Probably worth investigating. SJG
There's a bit of everything here to lend colour and depth to what is basically a family saga: sex, love, violence (Chile v Peru and civil war in Chile, Chinese community gangland revenge in San Francisco), religion, women's liberation and art. It is all worked in well and the book is most enjoyable. SRG

Amis, Kingsley
The Old Devils (1986)
Rating:- ****
Thought I ought to get round to reading this novel which MP consistently praised. Whilst I cannot award it the ‘five stars' that no doubt he would have given it, it is extremely well done. Amis has set himself a difficult task to write a largely dialogue-based story with virtually no plot. Its success therefore depends on the quality of the writing and the character development. Fortunately this is where the author's strengths lie - I felt that ‘Lucky Jim' was rather let down by the rather contrived plot. I also felt that this was a lot more humorous than ‘LJ' which barely raised a smile with me. Here, whilst I never laughed out loud, I had much amusement at the sharp comments. For reference the novel revolves around a relatively short period in the lives of a smallish group of late-middle-aged Welshmen. Most of them are boozers and most of the action takes place in a pub or at small social gatherings in their homes. Must say that I felt that MP could easily have fitted in as a character in this novel. All in all, like with MP, it was a pleasure and great fun to be in their company. SJG
I found it uncannily reminiscent of MP's turn of phrase and humour. Here were shades, too, of Anthony Powell's ‘Dance to the Music of Time' which was another of MP's all-time favourites. The humour is on the savage side about people and their sacred cows/Wales/the Welsh, softened only by the fact that the author clearly puts himself into the same box as his characters: he takes the same licence as football fans running down their team. SRG

Amis, Martin
Money (1984)
Rating:- ****
Re-read for Reading Group. 15 years ago I thought that this was the bee's - knees: very contemporary and lively. It was the first novel that I'd read that was highly critical of Thatcherism and its worship of money. The yuppie first-person street-wise narrator came off as a vibrant 'voice' and it was often very funny. It was one of those books that made me delve more thoroughly into modern fiction and I thought of it as a benchmark. So how has it worn since then? It's still funny, clever, well-structured and damning of the attitudes we have come to associate with that time. On the negative side I've now read quite a bit of this sort of stuff and it has lost its power to surprise me. And at 400 pages it seems awfully long. Does my age mean that I need a plot? Because there's certainly not one here. This time I was still impressed but by no means overawed. I think that, historically, this is an important novel but on reflection it's not that special a read. SJG

Amis, Martin
Experience (2000)
Rating:- ****
Nearly five stars. A brilliantly written account of his life with father, mother, step-mother, two wives, daughter he didn't know about, cousin who was victim of Frederick West. He generally steers an acceptable course between honesty and too much revelation. He makes no attempt to excuse or explain or account for the failure of his first marriage. The book covers the 2/3 years which involved this: the row with his agent over the 'Information' transaction, the cousin Lucy Partington was a West martyr, the discovery of a daughter and the death of Kingsley in a painful manner. He complains that many intimate matters were dealt with in a mean way by the media but doesn't try to justify things - more to express various forms of angst and occasionally joy. It is compelling reading - going back to his teens when he was only just rescued from being a complete drop-out by his step-mother, Elizabeth Jane Howard. Though most affecting and sympathetic most of the time, a certain self regard and arrogance does keep showing through. All his friends and contacts are so clever: Christopher Hitchins, James Fenton, Saul Bellow, Ian McEwan, Salman R*shd** etc etc. Better to read, perhaps, than to meet (cf Cyril Connolly, endlessly entertaining on the page; ruiner of many dinner parties if not in the mood!). But the writing!
"It began with the news of a fall. I wasn't alarmed when I heard about it. For the simple reason that Kingsley fell over all the time. Falling over (as I used to say to him) was all he ever did. There were the slow and majestic subsidences, such as the one I had tried to manage in the middle of the Edgware Road. And there were the other sorts of trips, tumbles and purlers, usually performed in his rooms at home and monitored by my mother and step-father in the garden flat below. To hear my mother tell it, some of these collapses sounded like a chest-of-drawers jettisoned from an aeroplane. "Absolutely deafening. But you're not supposed to mention it. It happens so often that we don't even go up. Unless he's wedged. Then he bangs on the floor and I send Ali." So there was nothing alarming about the news of the fall: nothing 'per se'."
Further on (p 338): "On a traffic island in the middle of the Edgware Road (that eternally disreputable thoroughfare) ... thirty years ago ...Kingsley fell over. And this was no brisk trip or tumble. It was a work of colossal administration. First came a kind of slow-leak effect, giving me the immediate worry that Kingsley, when fully deflated, would spread out on both sides of the island, where there were cars, trucks, sneezing buses. Next, as I grabbed and tugged, he felt like a great ship settling on its side: would it right itself or go under? Then came an impression of overall dissolution and the loss of basic physical coherence. I groped around him, looking for places to shore him up, but every bit of him was falling, dropping, seeking the lowest level, like a mudslide." Perhaps should be five stars? MP

Arnim, Elizabeth von
The Enchanted April (1922)
Rating:- ****
Terrible cover (a still, from a BBC production, that suggests that the book is possibly a text on fairies or similar) and a fairly dire plot ( four unconnected and unhappy' women spend a month together in a small Italian castle with the result that everything ends up sunshine and roses - yuk!) Nevertheless it's all saved by the authoress' wit and joy in humanity. I see she had an affair with H.G. Wells (who didn't?) and her writing is reminiscent of his social comedies. Not as attractive as ... German Garden' because of the appalling storyline, but still worthwhile reading. How many more of these are there? SJG
Some great one-liners on the great institution of husbands again. The gentle humour puts the dear things firmly in their place - necessary and rather capricious children. I enjoyed it. SRG
(Read directly after American Tabloid') Here are all the nice bits that James Ellroy leaves out! It is an ironic approach to sentimentalism which comes off somehow. If American Tabloid' "sure beats the hell out of Anita Bookner" (Jonathan Coe), what does it do to this? Satire perhaps? But it is too warm and affectionate for that. It has a place with Dornford Yates' Berry and Co' (1920), two years earlier, where we read of the blithe doings of insouciant rich young things. The cast of this are of slightly different type. E. von A.'s writings are characterised by great wit and charm. She transforms her situations with a kind of verbal alchemy. (Writing this under the spell of three pints of Marston's Pedigree at The Archers' refugees' sanctuary The Village Tavern.) In any other hands the plot would be real dross. As it is we sink into her pastoral mood. An escape? But what are we escaping to? (Discuss.) MP

Arnim, Elizabeth von
Mr Skeffington (1940)
Rating:- ****
It is criminal that this was last taken out of my library in March 1983, and it doesn't help that this, her last book (written 40 odd years after Elizabeth and her German Garden'), is dismissed by my reference book ( Reader's Companion to 20th Century Writers') thus: The last novels were tired exercises ...' I can't disagree more. It was thoroughly enjoyable, full of life and wit. On many occasions it reminded me of MP's current favourite, Barbara Pym, only a little more upfront. "Well, Jim had never given her pearls or other gems, so that was all right. His presents, made only at Christmas and on birthdays, were either copies of the poets - nicely bound, but not in Russia leather, which might, she supposed, have been suspicious, or fountain pens - not gold ones, which again might have been suspicious, but decent, plain black. Once he gave her a trowel. That was the low-water mark of his presents, and, if her cousin was right, the high-water mark of his single-minded devotion. He must have been completely faithful, in every nook and cranny of his slightest thought, to give her a trowel; and she had received it with an enthusiasm which surprised him." The plot concerns a beautiful divorced society woman who, turning 50, has lost her looks. Trying to redefine herself she meets again lots of her old beaus. Indeed the only criticism I have of this work, except for an over-sentimental ending, is that the list of her ex-lovers is a little too long - she meets and is deflated by one too many. However I can forgive her that when she can produce: "Manby had been with her so many years that she had witnessed all her stages, from the Really Young and Exquisite one, through the Lovely as Ever one, to the one she was now in, which was called, by her friends, Wonderful. "Darling, you really are wonderful"- that's what they said now, whenever she appeared; and she didn't like it one bit ... Not that she had reached the Lapland night condition yet; it was only quite lately that she had got into the Wonderful class, and in it, she supposed, she would stay some time. Unpleasant as it was to be called Wonderful, and dripping with horrid implications, it was better than being a Lapland night, which, however serene and calm it might be, would be sure to be cold. Let her keep out of the cold as long as she could, she thought, shivering a little. On the whole, perhaps, she ought to be thankful that her friends would probably go on saying for some time yet, though a little more stoutly, of course: "Darling, you're a perfect marvel."" This author is in need of a radical re-assessment. SJG
A favourite theme of E.vonA.'s is husbands, and this heroine's comes back to haunt her in an amusing way. There is also the familiar resolution of selfishness by self-sacrifice. In between times there is an understated wit and some almost Dickens-like characters whose physical quirks are used to delineate personality. Certainly worth trying to find. SRG

Aubrey, John
Brief Lives (1693)
Rating:- ****
Lively and heterogeneous mixture of anecdote, first-hand observation, folklore and erudition. "A valuable, open-minded, entertaining (if at times inaccurate) portrait of an age." (Drabble) MP

Austen, Jane
Persuasion (1818)
Rating:- ****
Unlike most of Austen's other heroines who are barely into adulthood, here Anne Eliot is in her late twenties and past her initial bloom. Felt rather the same about the book. It's still an excellent read but somehow the writing has lost some of its (for want of a better word) bloom. It is considerably shorter than 'Mansfield Park' and 'Emma' but it didn't leave me wanting more. Why? Unlike her other heroines Anne has few faults: possibly just one - that of being 'persuaded' not to marry a fortune-less sailor many years earlier. It's nice to read about an almost perfect character, but it's slightly boring too. Secondly there are none of those awful (and highly entertaining) characters like Elizabeth Bennet's parents or Miss Bates. Here the embarrassing characters were not embarrassing enough although Anne's father came close. Similarly the 'baddie' Mr Eliot was undeveloped and a little tedious. Thirdly the scenes at Lyme Regis and Wentworth's relationship with Louisa (in particularly how he escaped her) were not especially convincing. However a fall in Austen's standards is still a better read than the vast majority of authors. SJG
I had a sense that this novel came too close to Austen's own life, touching on her relationship with Lefroy, and perhaps her regrets that there was no return at a later date. She also uses Anne to show what must have been frustrating to her too in a status as least-regarded unmarried sister: decisions taken without her leave, acquiescence to plans suiting others assumed etc. Anne came across as a bit too much the martyr, without the personal wit to counteract this as in 'Emma'. SRG

Badami, Anita Rau
Tamarind Mem (1996)
Rating:- ****
Hardly any plot to this. Indian mother (now living alone) and daughter (who has left to live in Canada) - each tell story of first 15 years of family life. It's obviously written by the daughter' as a first novel and is in part a way of understanding her own family life and coming to terms with guilt, love and various conflicting family emotions. It could easily have been quite tedious but is actually done very well. Not a great novel but very satisfying and a little gem. Try it. SJG
It does succeed in taking you through the transition where, from blaming your parents for seeming to have chosen to be as awkward as they are, you realise that their own personalities are the final outcome of setbacks and conflicts which have been hidden from you. The portrait of the relationship mother-daughter is bitter-sweet; the author conveys her acceptance of who her mother is and mocks her own self-contradiction in wanting to escape the family home and then not being able to leave her mother to get on with her own life. SRG

Baines, Jocelyn
Joseph Conrad (1993)
Rating:- ****
This is the biography we've been using to accompany our chronological read through Conrad's fiction, and as such there's little to fault here. Baines provides the necessary biographical detail and introduces and comments on each piece of Conrad's fiction in an authoritative manner. Finally there is a brief attempt at synthesis which brings out some interesting points: "...he was not primarily interested in character, and certainly never for its own sake. ... the significance of characters lies in what they reveal within the context of a certain predicament, not in what they are." "The essence of his art lies in the construction of a setting where a complex state of mind can be presented with the fullest emotional and dramatic effect." "... the emotional and moral isolation of the individual. This is the theme that unites all Conrad's major works.." "It is not too bold to claim that Conrad has presented more dramatically and profoundly than any other artist the anguished conflict between man's innate isolation and his yearning for human solidarity." What this biography does not do is speculate or try to build up a psychological portrait of Conrad. And for this one must, I suppose, praise Baines for far too often do biographies end up going into realms of fantasy which have more to do with the biographer than the subject. Nevertheless after reading this biography and x number of Conrad's works, I don't really ‘know' Conrad as a person, and this is a bit of a disappointment. With that proviso this biography can be heartily recommended. SJG
It was heartening to find that Baines had the same reactions as I/we did to many of the works of Conrad. His thumbnail sketches of the (often vague) plots were useful ‘revisions', and having the novels laid out chronologically, embedded in Conrad's life and letters, gave a strong developmental insight. Conrad ‘himself' remains an enigma. SRG

Barnacle, Hugo
Day One (1998)
Rating:- ****
A goodie! Story of two male friends - one doing a boring office job, the other working for MI5 (or similar) - in London with a backdrop of the Argentinian's invasion of the Falklands. It starts more as a look at office manners/backchat etc and ends as a quite exciting thriller. The story is virtually all told through dialogue and, while it is often difficult to get to know who all the characters are in the first half, it does give the story an immediacy and I like the way the characters develop out of their speech. He has a sharp writing style and an ability to convey contemporary social relationships. Intelligently done and recommended. Why don't books like this win, or at least get short-listed for, the Booker? SJG
He gets the modern pace of life and preoccupations very well. Wisely he doesn't put in too many girls-only scenes. (The one there is fails to communicate any reason why girls would ever want to go out together without the matching accessory of a man.) The portrayal of the female boss is amusing, if extreme. Barnacle is convinced of her frightening effectiveness even if it is achieved by reducing the men who work for her to schoolboys. He works his serious' themes well. There are tiny paragraphs slipped in amongst the London trivia in which the tragedy/farce of the early Falklands conflict is freeze-framed and the Irish story is the best de-mystification of the self -styled Ulster freedom fighters' that I've seen. SRG

Bayley, John
Iris. A Memoir
Rating:- ****
A truly modern classic. Read it because man in the pub lent it to me but have since bought own copy. It is not intrusive in any objectionable way but tender and amusing. The author writes with great modesty and is unsparing about his own shortcomings and failures. He makes the situation painfully real but doesn't wallow or indulge in self pity. A large part (two-thirds?) is about Iris Murdoch before her final illness and how they met, early days in Oxford, their extremely makeshift arrangements - all most absorbing. Of course it helped this reader to enjoy it when discovered that the author liked several of his own favourite writers (Pym, Powell etc). Since reading, the subject has, of course, died. It seems strangely distressing that such a quicksilver mind should end her life in a mental fog but John Bayley manages to convey that there was something special about those last years. MP

Bennett, Arnold
The Grim Smile of the Five Towns (1907)
Rating:- ****
Lively collection of short stories which includes the masterpiece, ‘The Death of Simon Fuge', quite a long story about the visit of a cultured southerner to the Potteries and what he makes of it. It is good at revealing Bennett's own mixed attitude which the story cleverly illustrates. The famous painter Fuge has just died. There have been various legends about him and his amorous adventures but on examination it does not come to very much. Though the Potteries may give Fuge his due to themselves they are not prepared to sound impressed. They must pretend to ignore him. But the man from the south reflects, as his train pulls out that Fuge can afford to wait. His art though it is represented in the local art gallery by only one minor canvas will speak for him. "And one day the Five Towns will have to give it best." MP Recently seemed to have been reading an indifferent set of novels with fairly dispiriting themes. First time I've been near Bennett for four or five years and this jolly collection of short stories reminded me of the pleasure I got from books like 'The Card'. Light and undemanding but very professionally done. Not to be taken as a constant daily dose but provides a great pick-me-up on an occasional basis. Standard of the stories is fairly consistent although there is at least one complete duffer, and, as MP states, the novella length 'The Death of Simon Fuge' ranks as one of Bennett's best works, getting close to 'Riceyman Steps' in quality. TDOSF will also have been a favourite of MP, not only for its quality but also for its hymn of praise to folk who live in the Potteries. Could easily have been cloying but it catches the right, if rather sentimental, note. SJG
I enjoyed Bennett's affectionate, teasing portrayal of the strengths and weaknesses of character found in the Five Towns (and no doubt in other provincial communities). His turns of phrase are almost Dickens-like. In 'Baby's Bath' there is considerable tongue-in-cheek about the apple of Mrs Blackshaw's eye: "As for the baby, except that it was decidedly superior to the average infant in external appearance and pleasantness of disposition, it was, in all essential characteristics, a typical baby ... It was utterly selfish ... It didn't know the date of the Battle of Hastings, but it knew with the certainty of absolute knowledge that it was the master of the house, and that the activity of the house revolved round it." SRG

Bennett, Arnold
The Old Wives Tale (1908)
Rating:- ****
Reading for Lit. Class. A repeat after a lifetime. I'd forgotten his sensitivity and ability to depict women. Written as a historical novel of very recent past or, perhaps because of our particular circumstances (ie just having returned to the area), retains feeling of cyclical life, but not regeneration. BP
Not perhaps dedicated to the great cause of cheering us all up because the outlook is a bleak one. We all end up in the same boat in the end. But plenty to enjoy en route. He has some of Trollope's narrative skill, though his lesser works are not in the same class I feel. MP
Not quite a great' novel, the attempt to make it answer questions about life and destiny doesn't quite come off, but an excellent novel. He really captures the process of interpersonal and inter-generational relationships. I very much enjoyed it. SRG
So did I! Taken paragraph by paragraph it's a great' novel, but the sum of the parts is far greater than the whole. It was excellent when two characters (eg the two sisters, Constance and husband etc) interacted but it seemed to fall down when the focus was only on one character. At times reading it was like watching a TV series. I'm not really sure what the writer's basic flaw is - too much attention to detail and not enough on the soul? (I have the same problems to a greater degree with Graham Greene.) I've read four or five now and only Riceyman Steps' transcends. SJG

Bennett, Arnold
The Card (1911)
Rating:- ****
First read 30 years ago. Recently tried again and thought it perfect in its way. Don't think this is necessarily caused by local patriotism. It doesn't seem to have dated much at all.
"And yet", demanded Councillor Bates. "What's he done? Has he ever done a day's work in his life? What great cause is he identified with?"
"He's identified," said the speaker, "with the great cause of cheering us all up." MP
Very nice! The scale is just right for Bennett to achieve his best. An affectionate portrait of character and place. SRG
Great stuff! Nearly every novel that you read is doom/gloom/angst etc so that when one like this comes along, you feel a great relief. A real pleasure, though I suspect that if you read three or four more of the same ilk, the pleasure would quickly dilute. On an additional carping note - the chapter on Switzerland was poor and should have been cut. SJG
Funny, sense of place good again. Not as good as Old Wives' but the best of his funnies. BP

Bennett, Arnold
Elsie and the Child (1924)
Rating:- ****
This is a 60 page novella/short story more or less a sequel to Riceyman Steps'. Elsie gets employment with her husband as servants of the Doctor who attended Mr & Mrs Earlforward. The story is about the relations between the Dr's daughter (who gets a mention in Riceyman Steps') and Elsie. I thought it extremely well done though it was criticised at the time as an attempt to cash in on the success of R. Steps'. MP
It has an enormous breadth, understanding and feeling. Bennett's ability to empathise with a woman's feelings in this, as in Old Wives Tale', quite extraordinary. BP

Block, Lawrence
Hit Man (1998)
Rating:- ****
Having read and thoroughly enjoyed the sequel, thought I would try the first in the series. And it's just as good - just as funny. To see whether it's your sort of thing, try the following where the 'hero' (if that's the right word for a contract killer) has just walked into the bar of some one-horse town in the American Mid-West:
"On the jukebox, Barbara Mandrell sang a song about cheating. When she was done, a duo he didn't recognise sang a song about cheating. Then came Hank William's oldie, 'Your Cheating Heart'.
A subtle pattern was beginning to emerge."
It's an obvious dig to make at country-and-western music but it's nicely put. If you want something a little more highbrow he's quite prepared to quote Dr Johnson, and if you wondered why home shopping channels are so mesmerising there's even an attempt at an answer here. Any complaints? Well, it's not really a novel, more a collection of ten medium-length short stories with the same characters. But that's a minor gripe. Recommended. SJG
As I said about the sequel, there is something here quite deep about morality in modern civilisation. This hit man kills people for a living but finds it shocking when he is taken in by a client and asked to kill 'total strangers' for their social security money. What he does professionally is part of a great pattern - if he wasn't employed, someone else would be - and who is he to interfere with fate? There is an uncomfortable parallel here with our own professional lives. We can be very moral about how we go about our job at the behest of our employer, but what is the big picture? The system we prop up is 'causing' the death of millions in the third world. SRG

Bowen, Elizabeth
To the North (1932)
Rating:- ****
This novel is very much influenced by Henry James of whom she said: "he writes at once with the detachment of a spectator and the close-upness of someone under a spell." The same could perhaps be said of her Anglo-Irish outlook. Leaving Ireland aged seven, she spent her adolescence in Kent with her mother. In ‘Pictures and Conversations' (1975) she writes: "Possibly, England made me a novelist ... I arrived young into a different mythology - in fact one totally alien to that of my forebears, none of whom had resided anywhere but in Ireland for some centuries. From now on there was to be (as for any immigrant) a cleft between my heredity and my environment ... because I disliked being at a disadvantage, it became necessary to probe ..." One is grateful to Hugh Haughton for his introduction to the recent re-print where he goes on to say:- "‘To the North' is not only one of the best Irish novels about England but, like F.M. Ford's ‘The Good Soldier' (1914), it is one of the best French novels ‘in English' bearing the marks of the author's contemporary immersions in the novels of Stendhal, Flaubert and Proust." We are, it can be seen, involved with a very self-conscious piece of writing. There are the ghosts of the two Henry's permeating the book. In addition to the author of ‘Portrait of a Lady' the book refers back to the recently deceased Henry Summers, brother of Emmeline and late husband of the dominant Cecilia. Things are never really the same after Henry's death. Emmeline forms an unsuitable relationship with Mark Linkwater (known as "Markie"!) and Cecilia moves gradually towards a second marriage to (this time) Julian Tower (if not passionless he is at least not passionate either). Disaster results. The worm in the bud of this society has its way. Masterly with stunning last twenty pages. Rather dated style? Perhaps a bit mildewed. Hence not all ‘five stars'. Not necessarily suitable for SJG and SRG! MP

Bowles, Paul
The Sheltering Sky (1949)
Rating:- ****
A bit of a find. Author previously unknown to me but it seems he wrote other things and was a composer too. Story tells of a young estranged American couple journeying south into the Sahara from North African coast. They criss-cross with a few other travellers, and eventually illness and death come. Doesn't sound that thrilling but the writing is superb. Firstly he is able to provide characterisation through dialogues and actions, and develop tensions with consummate ease. Secondly the sense of place is excellent; one can feel the heat, the cold and the sand, see the desert stretching endlessly away, hear the local musicians and smell the garbage. Sort of reminded me of a Freudian version of Camus, but that may be just the geographical connections. In some ways it could be considered a piece of travel writing until things start to take a nasty turn. After killing off one of the main characters, the last section goes off in a strange, certainly not politically correct, direction. I'm not sure that this is altogether successful but it certainly adds to the overall effect and gives the novel an extra edge. Recommended. SJG
'L'étranger' meets 'Heart of Darkness' meets 'Voss' meets T.E.Lawrence. I couldn't believe, however, that it was written over 50 years ago, because its exposure of 'civilisation' is up to the minute. The void at the heart of materialism is exposed by the timeless and unforgiving desert. SRG

Boyle, T. Coraghessan
World's End (1996)
Rating:- ****
Now this was a pleasant surprise! It's one of those modern historical novels' (eg Oscar and Lucinda', Flaubert's Parrot', An Insular Possession') that have come into vogue over the last 15 years. Quite a few of them are weighed down with research, but here it's not intrusive. The main thread concerns several Dutch families who are colonizing the area to the north of New York in the latter half of the 17th century. There's a parallel story dealing with some of their descendants in the 1940s and 1960s. It's very well structured so that similar situations are reflected back and forth between the two threads. Fate plays a large hand and a lot of the main characters come off badly, but I didn't find it depressing like, say, Hardy. It's well written and has no serious faults. Recommended. SJG
A very subtle exploration of the question who owns the USA. Dutch landowners are set against their frontiersmen tenants and both against the Indians; modern WASP patriots are set against "kikes, niggers and wops" and all against the Indians. The book plays out the threads of philosophy, fate and heredity and rounds off with an ironic twist which balances history. SRG

Boyle, T. Coraghessan
The Tortilla Curtain (1995)
Rating:- ****
My third novel and another goody. This one can be neatly summarised as The Grapes of Wrath' meets A Bonfire of the Vanities'. Set in California it tells two interlinking stories of the year in the lives of a reasonably comfortable middle-class white family, and a couple of illegal Mexican immigrants. Boyle may not be the world's greatest writer, but he knows how to tell an intelligent well-structured tale. It's possibly not up to the standard of World's End' but it's most readable. There's a nice pervasive sense of doom that's similar to the one I remember from reading Steinbeck's book. One could carp and say that from time to time the differences between the Mexican and the WASPs are too polemic and that he makes the WASP with his "tofu kebabs with honey-ginger marinade" (cf the Mexican's garbage left-overs) too easy a target. In the second half the pace picks up quite considerably and it almost turns into a thriller. Recommended. SJG
Yes. Poignant and even painful in its stark treatment of developing racism. It makes a neat parallel between the way introduced' species like starlings, and wild species like coyotes, encouraged by human waste and mistaken feeding, become pests just as the wetbacks' do. The author does not quite succeed in standing above his moral battleground. As SJG says he spikes the outcome by ridiculing the WASP world a bit. However, he does construct an even playing field of blame and guilt between the individuals. Very good. SRG

Bradbury, Ray
Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
Rating:- ****
Had never read this before so there was no reconsideration to make. Was pleased to be encouraged to read it. Another 50s publication, American of course, but included (in Reading Class) because of its theme. Thought the book imaginative. Possibly better written than 1984'. Don't suppose Pieter would necessarily see what was wrong with burning books. Would like to read more Ray Bradbury - the sort of writer have never really got into. A good writer perhaps in the same class as the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". Expect you devoured many years back? The problem is that there is not much to discuss' as with interesting complicated failures like Angus Wilson's Anglo-Saxon Attitudes'. MP
Read for first time after MP's positive comments. Was intrigued and interested but can't agree with MP's feeling that it was well written. Thought it was a bit of a mess, the writing being very uneven and the plot having too many holes in it. Might have been biassed after reading intro which stated that the novel emerged gradually from several stories all on the same theme. Finally, to get it published, Bradbury had to double the length. Knowing this I became aware of which bits had been brought in as ‘padding'. Probably wouldn't have been so critical if had not read the intro first of all. Am quite surprised it's considered a classic, though thought it far superior to Wyndham etc. There are some excellent set-pieces, haunting imagery and some surprisingly successful prophetic ideas - Walkmans, large TV screens etc. I think that the atmosphere will stay with me, but just wish that, as a writer, Bradbury was a better craftsman. SJG
Yes - an important idea about how mass culture develops to exclude real learning and wisdom, and even to mock it. Bradbury gets his point across, but there were times when his skill was not up to fully involving the reader, eg the ‘crisis' of the hero when he turns on his boss was a bit clunky. SRG
Haven't read much science fiction but this seems pretty good to me. Straying recently into a TV shop was amazed by the size of some of the TV screens not so far from Bradbury's wall-to-wall horrors; and how about the dreaded ‘interaction' as the viewer gets sucked into the ersatz drama with a robot part. Good too is some of the descriptive writing: "The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and the copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs on the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently its eight legs spidered under it on rubber-padded paws." More scary than ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles' but our Hero, Montag, - he of the books - is more than a match for it. Good too is the description of the garage mechanic-type men who come to clean out his wife's blood, like an oil change after she has absentmindedly swallowed all her sleeping pills at one go. On the run another Hound comes after him: "Would he have time for a speech? As the Hound seized him, in view of ten or twenty million people, mightn't he sum up his entire life in the last week in one single phrase or word that would stay with them long after the Hound had turned, clenching him in its metal jaws, and trotted off into the darkness, while the camera remained stationary, watching the creature dwindle in the distance - a splendid fade out! What could he say in a single word, a few words, that would sear all their faces and wake them up?" MP

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth
Lady Audley's Secret (1862)
Rating:- ****
Surprisingly didn't come across this when I was in my 19th century 'phase'. Surprising especially as it's very good. Time-wise it followed fairly closely on from Wilkie Collins' 'Woman in White' (to which she at one point refers) and, according to the Introduction, it was considered to be one of the best-known examples of sensation fiction and was never out of print during her lifetime, during which she wrote more than seventy(!) novels. Presume the quality wasn't maintained because she does a really good job here. It's not just plot as she takes plenty of opportunities to ruminate on the meaning of life and so on; in particular I liked the way that the villainess was likened to one of those harsh Pre-Raphaelite portraits. Great similarities to Sheridan Le Fanu: well-plotted storyline, threats of being incarcerated in a madhouse and a really strong female lead character (Eat your heart out, Charles Dickens.). Excellent. Perhaps I should give up trying to find nuggets in the literature of the last twenty years and instead concentrate on long-forgotten stuff from the later Victorian period. SJG
A good read in terms of plot unfolding and interest being sustained by small set-backs and twists. It doesn't bear too much detailed scrutiny by modern 'realists', being based on a whopping coincidence tying in the past of Lady Audley with the family of her new husband via a boyhood friendship of the husband's nephew. However, we can suspend such anachronistic judgements to enjoy the vigour and charm of the story. In common with the best detective fiction of today, there are philosophical reflections woven into the story, and these are interesting. The very economic dependency of women is seen as a force which can be used (by the women themselves) to subvert the lives of men or spur them on to a noble destiny. Men are victims to this as they are emotionally dependent on women. The author stacks up evidence of cruelty, deceit and violence against the main character but there is an interesting detachment from condemnation. We might even suspect that her child was better off being abandoned by her, than subjected to the kind of person she knows she is. The author hints that we might have been a little like her ourselves in similar circumstances. SRG

Brierley, Walter
Means Test Man (1935)
Rating:- ****
A week in the life of an unemployed Derbyshire miner, wife and 7-year-old son. The routine of life and feelings of all three are described with minute attention to detail. The result is an extremely powerful novel about dependence on the dole and the barbarity of the means test. Derbyshire dialect is used throughout, accurately. The author came from a background in the Derbyshire pits. As the work of a self-educated man it is astoundingly good. Harrowing, though. SRG
Two positive points. Firstly the author succeeds admirably in what he sets out to show. Secondly I lived within a few miles of the fictional setting and he seems to have the dialect/people/place just right. However overall I'm not so enthusiastic as SRG. It doesn't transcend beyond the realism it portrays. There is craft here but no Art. The story has a tired linearity and lacks any sort of interesting framework. So no D.H.Lawrence or Flaubert here. Nevertheless this is a fascinating document, showing in particular the demeaning effect of unemployment in the 1930s. SJG

Bronte, Emily
Wuthering Heights (1847)
Rating:- ****
"Dazzling masterpiece by tyro writer. Unbelievable technical virtuosity with sophisticated time shifts and narrative chinese box' construction. Scenes of extreme sadism and physical cruelty by the spectacular rebel Heathcliff will ensure its success with the public though it may take time to overcome some prejudices. Might well make excellent rock musical." MP Haworth Echo 1847.
Actually you can't really lampoon 19th reviewers of this work as it probably wasn't really seriously overpraised until the following century. I didn't much enjoy reading it this time around (for Lit. Class). The viciousness of Heathcliff when he returns after three years from his mysterious exile is truly dreadful. He is last seen as a rough but on the whole acceptable stable boy. Returns as a gentleman psychopath. His subsequent brutalities are graphically recorded. It is all very nasty. Memories of Cathy and H. skipping through the long grass, rushing across the moors hardly exist in the book. They are stock in trade of films and visits to Haworth and environs. It is all very well described in Is Heathcliff a Murderer?', the title essay of John Sutherland's Puzzle in 19th Century Fiction' (see later). MP
Thirty-odd years since I last read this and by no means did I remember it to be such a shocking and disturbing read. No doubt at that time I was used to 'Cathy Come Home' and 'The Wednesday Play' on TV along with an array of contemporary literature that was trying to push the boundaries. Since then I've become more familiar with 19th century literature and in that context, this novel stands out as something quite unique. The level of violence and the lack of humanity in all but the last 30 pages took me quite by surprise. Heathcliff of course stands out for his unrelieved blackness, but I don't think that I want to meet any other of the members of these dysfunctional families. I note that in her preface Charlotte Bronte tries to make a case out for the servants like Nellie and even Joseph (for his "humour"), but I found the former a selfish figure who kept and spilt secrets at exactly the wrong moment, and the latter was a religious bigot of the worst kind. The two Cathys were spoilt and self-centred, and all of the less aggressive figures were so wet that I could feel no sympathy. No doubt this is a truly original piece of work but I can't say that I enjoyed reading it. The writing was very variable: sometimes excellent but often quite clunky. Similarly the plotting veered between the inspired and the fairly awful. (Where did Heathcliff go to change from sulky boy to demonic and assured man?) But what really put me off was the sheer unrelieved despair and hatred that these characters generated. Most certainly not a book to be started if the reader is feeling a little low. SJG
Read for third time after gap of 15(?) years. For some reason I had remembered it as 'difficult' to follow in language and structure. I had also allowed my memories to become hijacked by popular images of Heathcliff and Cathy calling to each other on the moors. My impressions this time around were of the clarity of structure and the mind-blowing (especially for the time) perceptions of the roots of personality. It is not just about Heathcliff's passion for Catherine. It is about the evil wreaked by damaged personalities and the way in which such damage becomes a vicious circle that can be broken by unselfish love. Now living in the area so inspiring to E. Bronte, I felt the power and character of the landscape much more keenly than I did on first or second reading. It is disappointing that the popularly-visited 'Top Withens' is a con in that it couldn't be Wuthering Heights in a thousand years from the description we are given of it. However there are lots of potential Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Granges about the countryside. In Charlotte Bronte's note at the beginning she writes of how infrequently Emily used to go out into the village/town or among people. I am all the more impressed by her insight into personality and the results of abuse. SRG

Brooke, Jocelyn
The Orchid Trilogy (1948 to 1950)
Rating:- ****
Collection of three fictionalised autobiographies: The Military Orchid', A Mine of Serpents' and The Goose Cathedral'. I don't know how the book Private View' MP read fits in with these three. It isn't mentioned in the Penguin résumé of his works and I have a feeling that it may have been extracted from this trilogy. It does cover identical ground to that which MP mentions, although that doesn't necessarily mean a great deal as Brooke seems to be not immune to ploughing very similar furrows. Most of his work appears to be fictionalised autobiography within this collection the emphasis being on autobiography (with the names of contemporaries being changed or their personalities combined). MP was cautious with his praise and knowing his penchant for this era I was not expecting a great deal. However I was extremely impressed, in particular the first of the three books is a work, albeit short, of the highest order. It comes as a great relief when trawling through a lot of recommended, but ultimately disappointing literature, to find an unexpected gem like this. It reminded me of when I found Elizabeth von Arnim's Elizabeth and her German Garden' and it is of a similar quality. Indeed there are common features - both fictionalised autobiographies and both written by interesting, intelligent, self-deprecating authors who you wish were in your circle of friends. The subject material here is not superficially exciting: childhood in Folkestone and the Kent countryside, difficult school days, failed attempts at writing, tedious jobs, soldiering in WWII etc but the expertise with which it is approached is such that the seemingly dreary content comes alive. I never thought that anybody could interest me in botany or fireworks, but Brooke did. The books are not written in any time sequence and he darts about here and there with the result that the first volume has the choicest bits. Thereafter the standard falls a little, particularly in third volume, but the whole still comes highly recommended.
PS The non-treatment of his homosexuality reminded me very much of Isherwood's in Goodbye to Berlin' and Mr Norris ...' - all of it in the spaces between the lines.
PPS The introduction by Anthony Powell is very poor. Not his forté? SJG
Very Proustian in style, though he never quite gets off the starting blocks. Some very good descriptions and the childhood bits are very evocative. Perhaps it is a mistake to read all three in the trilogy as they do overlap each other's material and you get that same feeling you have with people who tell you the same anecdote again and again. Anthony Powell's intro was very fair, I thought. I liked: "The war was certainly uncomfortable, but not to be compared with the horrors of an English prep school." SRG

Brooke, Jocelyn
The Dog at Clambercrown (1955)
Rating:- ****
Nice title (it refers to a pub) and excellent book. Brooke writes exceptionally well; able to convey his enthusiasms and depressions, tell a humorous anecdote (his meeting with the Mafia is top-class high comedy) and pass on some of his considerable knowledge. He discusses both Lawrence and Joyce, and, to me, seems remarkably sound on both. There are other literary references including this minor hit on Hardy: "Yet I have always wanted to be a novelist, and have long cherished a secret ambition to write a novel which begins 'On a dark and stormy November evening, some fifty years ago, a bent figure might have been seen ...' etc. Novels which really do begin like that I find irresistible - at least for the first few pages; usually, alas, the initial spell wears off all too quickly - as, for instance (at least as far as I am concerned), with most of Hardy. Which is perhaps a good enough reason for not embarking on such a work myself." Brook calls this book an "excursion"; the blurb calls it an 'autobiographical novel'. There are two basic themes/paths: one of a trip to Sicily , the other about his youth in the south-east of England. At the end is a seemingly unrelated chapter concerning his experiences in the army. And this is where I have a problem with Brooke. A lot of the bits about his youth and time in the army I've met before in his other 'autobiographical novels'. His lack of ability to conjure up new ideas leads to him being a heavy recycler. It's a great shame because I'm sure if he had been more imaginative then his reputation would be far greater today. Nevertheless what's here is great stuff and I would encourage anybody to give him a go - there's a great deal of sheer pleasure to be had from reading him. SJG
This time I have to disagree. I found much of the book self-conscious and even twee. He was obviously trying to follow in the footsteps of Proust in his obsessional memories of childhood and I didn't find anything appealing about these self-absorbed maunderings. The journey in Italy was equally marred by his obsession with his own body and the sheer lack of anything interesting to talk about. (Yes, his imagination is too poor to conjure anything from nothing.) The only time the book perked up for me was when he wrote about Joyce and Lawrence. I quite liked the bits about the army - except that this type of thing has been done better by Waugh and A. Powell. SRG

Brown, Malcolm
Lawrence of Arabia, the Life, the Legend (2005)
Rating:- ****
Beautifully illustrated coffee-table book which was written to accompany an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. Perfectly timed, I came across it just as I'd finished 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom'. The photographs in my edition of that book are rather poor so it was wonderful to have contemporary photos, including those of and by Lawrence, in glorious A4 and even A3. Also there are some excellent paintings/drawings, in particular those by Augustus John. These illustrations are worth the recommendation although, to really benefit, SPOW has, of course, to be read first. In addition Brown's work also includes a brief whiz through Lawrence's life before and after the famous bit, and, more rewardingly, extracts some prose from SPOW. Away from the sometimes dense narrative of that work, it really does stand out. Overall a treat and worthy to grace any coffee-table. SJG
It whets the appetite for 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom' and further biographical material about this complex man. SRG

Bryers, Paul
The Prayer of the Bone (1998)
Rating:- ****
I collect recommendations for novels from various sources mainly in the media. Quite a lot of them are disappointing but I keep working through them in the hope of finding an occasional jewel'. The hit-rate' has been surprisingly high in the last couple of months: Shyam Selvadurai, Ahdaf Soueif and this one, arguably the best of the lot. Superficially a detective whodunit' set on the east coast of contemporary USA with added overtones of early 17th century settlers in the same area, and in particular in their relationships with the local Red Indian tribe. Put like that it doesn't sound especially unmissable, but there's an authority and intelligence in the writing from this unknown-to-me English author. If the rest of his output is anything like this, then one can only suggest that his publishers and agent are doing him a great disservice by not pushing him into the limelight more. Even if you're not particularly a fan of detective stories (and here the emphasis is more on character than plot, even though the latter would have been strong enough alone to carry the book through), do yourself a favour and read this; there will be few books that you'll enjoy more this year. SJG
The author is a historian, but he uses his material well rather than shoving it down your throat. The plot turns on the manipulation of historical facts for modern economic/political ends. The intersection of different peoples - Quaker settlers, travellers, Indians, WASP Americans - gives added dimensions to the story. Intelligent and enjoyable. SRG

Bujold, Lois McMaster
Barrayar (1991)
Rating:- ****
At the moment I seem to be ploughing through a lot of contemporary so-called ‘literary' novels which usually have worthy themes and are widely praised in the press, but which in fact are, at best, second-rate and which no doubt will be totally forgotten in the time since this book is written. ‘Barrayar' is science fiction so will be tucked away in a section of the bookshop well away from the ‘acceptable' ‘literary' novels. The title and even author's name are quite strange, and it has a terrible cover picture that is in no way redolent of the story. Consequently any reader unfamiliar with science fiction would steer well away from this title. Which would be a great shame because this is a thoroughly good adventure story the like of which we rarely get in contemporary ‘literary' fiction. It's got interesting characters - Bujold is especially good at ballsy lead females - a solid storyline and the writing is more than adequate. The science fiction ‘aspects' are not especially intrusive but add a welcome dimension. Problems? This is a direct sequel to another novel, ‘Shards of Honor', which, I'm sure, it would have been beneficial to have read first. Also both novels are part of a series of at least 14 titles. Working my way through that lot would probably reduce my enthusiasm considerably. However I most certainly intend to try a few more. A further note of caution. This did win a Hugo Award, which is the science fiction equivalent of the Pulitzer or Booker Prizes, so the quality of some (all?) of the others may not be so high. Recommended, especially to those who want to dip their toes into SF. SJG
A thoroughly involving read with some witty asides on the male chauvinism of the Barrayaran society which might equally apply to some corners of more familiar lands. SRG

Burdett, John
The Last Six Million Seconds (1997)
Rating:- ****
Page-turner set in Hong Kong 6,000,000 seconds before the transfer to China. Excellent stuff - everything a thriller should be - tight, convoluted plot written with sufficient quality and plenty of detail. A minor carp is that it seems necessary for thriller-writers to outdo each other in the grisly nature of the murders, but at least here the murders are only perpetrated on minor characters, so the horrors are not close' to the reader. Apart from that great stuff with interesting and perceptive comments on the differences between English and Chinese rulers. As a by-product I learnt a lot about Hong Kong and Southern China. Recommended. SJG
Pretty horrible, but we are in the middle of Triad wars, Mob/Triad negotiations and the gargantuan clash of Communism with Capitalism. The corrupt General Xian, about to come into his own (having anticipated the handover by buying 60% of the corporations in Hong Kong) justifies his draconian methods:
"Where has American money come from? Westerners work no harder than Chinese, but they make a thousand times more money, because of the start they have on us. What did it consist of, this start?... Slaves and narcotics. After the slaves and narcotics phase of capitalism, who knows, we might even have democracy in China." SRG

Burn, Gordon
The North of England Home Service (2003)
Rating:- ****
Like Douglas Coupland, Burn is very good on social observation but not so hot at producing an interesting storyline. However I can forgive them both for their fault when they produce their apposite prose which neatly sums up contemporary images and life-styles. Not that this novel is as good as the best of Coupland or Burn's superb (and now seemingly largely ignored) 'Alma Cogan' as the plot is non-existent and there are fewer first-rate 'quotable' phrases/sentences. Also there's a fair amount of nostalgia (mainly about Jack Solomons and the 1950s London boxing scene) which is of less interest than his comments on life in the 21st century. Nevertheless there's more than enough here to interest and enjoy. For example, the main character is an ageing comedian who runs a club (Bobby's) dedicated to nostalgia: "... the hundreds who came to Bobby's every week to be reminded, when the circumstances of their lives sometimes seemed to be conspiring to make them forget it - the ninety-five channels, the call-waiting, the multi-tasking, the compound interest accruing on the credit-card bill - that they came from a specific place with a long history and a unique identity and were not in fact unrooted particular individuals free-floating in finite space." Or another brief scene in the directors' suite at a premiership football match: "Most of those assembled in the Marcus Price Suite on Saturdays were working. It was work, everybody either planning a deal, hatching a deal or looking for a deal. More deals get done in an afternoon at the football than in an week at the office. But for many people in the new climate of global-branding exercises and fleeting entertainment experiences, working was their fun; work was their recreation ... working hard at convincing themselves and each other that their hard-boiled, transactional, buyer-supplier relationships were a species of friendship." It's also particularly good on the recent Foot-and-Mouth outbreak. Indeed you can almost open a page at random and find something like: "Ray's first job of the day was going to be to introduce the five members of the latest pop group to be voted into existence by viewers of a reality-television show." Recommended but try and find 'Alma Cogan' first. SJG
The observations sometimes came too thick and fast for this reader's comfort - there is a breathlessness about them. However, they do amaze in their astuteness and ability to summon up an era and its characters. These are real people. SRG

Camilleri, Andrea
The Shape of Water (1994 tr 2002)
Rating:- ****
One might think that with Donna Leon and especially Michael Dibdin that the market, for a series of detective novels detailing the bizarre antics of the Italian law enforcement agencies, was exhausted. But no! A newcomer - Italian for once - comes along and instantly competes with Dibdin with the "First Inspector Montalbano Mystery." Set in Sicily, which, I suppose, increases the possibilities in upping the level of the machinations, it is pared down, witty, zippy and not over concerned with providing the normally requisite last page twist(s). True there is one but it doesn't dominate as so often is the case in this genre. Overall great fun and a joy to read. This, it seems, is the first of five such 'mysteries' that Camilleri has written and I look forward with pleasure to the others being translated, as promised by the publisher. SJG
The story is largely delivered through dialogue between the Inspector and his colleagues/witnesses etc and the tone of this is racy and witty. There are all sorts of corny things which would undermine anything more pedestrian but really don't cause a problem here: the Inspector is honest in a sea of dishonesty; two women throw themselves at him but he remains chaste for his real love; he engineers a payout of reward money for a man with a sick baby and he even keeps the 'real' truth about who-dun-it to himself to serve the interests of a greater good. Surprisingly Camillerei's skill is such that all these just make it upbeat and more fun. SRG

Camilleri, Andrea
The Voice of the Violin (1997 tr 2003)
Rating:- ****
Fourth in the 'Inspector Montalbano Mystery' series and a return to form after the rather disappointing third - 'The Sneak Thief'. All the complaints I made about that work - confusing characters and plot, characters turning into caricatures - have been addressed. The plot is more linear and carefully thought out and I could actually hold all the characters and the plot details in my mind, although it did help that I read it in one day. You do, though, have to be familiar with 'TST' to appreciate/understand one minor plot strand. Anyway a welcome return to form and an enjoyable book to stand alongside the best of Michael Dibdin's similar Italian police stories featuring Aurelio Zen. SJG
Enjoyable, though I was left wondering at the end why the beautiful blonde had to be murdered when the murderer could have just organised a burglary. SRG

Camilleri, Andrea
Excursions to Tindari (2000 tr 2006)
Rating:- ****
Fifth in Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano series and as good as, if not the best of, any of them, (although I still have to find a copy of the second.) Sometimes the plotting is a little ludicrous, for example, there is an unbelievable bit involving a casual photograph, taken on a bus, picking up the number plate of a following car. However it's great fun and is totally distinctive even in the crowded market of Italian police procedurals eg Michael Dibdin and Donna Leon. Read it at one sitting and thoroughly enjoyed the process. SJG
The Inspector is humanised by his gourmet passion for good cooking, his on-and-off relationship with his girlfriend and his unusual relationships with his subordinates. (He deals with them as a mother dog deals with her pups.) An enjoyable read. SRG

Capote, Truman
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958)
Rating:- ****
This was very nice. Somehow I'd missed out on it - indeed I haven't seen the film either. Short, sharp and amusing - basically it's a character sketch of a society girl in New York during WWII written by a platonic male (homosexual?) friend. If you think there are echoes of Isherwood's Sally Bowles from Goodbye to Berlin', you'd be spot on. As Capote uses twice the length of Isherwood he's able to flesh out the details a little - also the girl's sexual behaviour and language are more explicit. Looking at the reference book, I note that Anita Loos' Gentlemen prefer Blondes' was written in 1925 so both the above probably cribbed the idea of the single, sparky, amoral, young society girl - or perhaps there were a lot of them about. Whatever - all three books are great fun, not great books because their short length precludes any real character/plot development. Recommended. PS There's an additional three short stories in the Penguin edition - all of them unsatisfactory. SJG
Very much the equivalent of the genre painting of the late 19th century and early 20th century, where the aim is to describe the everyday as if it is extraordinary, thus ennobling it. The Holly Golightly society girl character is sparkling enough to sustain the treatment. The other tales are more mundane and fall flat. SRG

Cather, Willa
My Antonia (1918)
Rating:- ****
This was the last book on our Realist Fiction Course and it was very well liked by all members of the Class. It is in the first place about Eastern European immigrants to America at or before the turn of the century. "Antonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade - that grew stronger with time." They are not only immigrants but they end up in Nebraska which is described as "land which has not been turned into a country". They are right up against the forces of nature. It is all done in a series of linked episodes, full of indirection (ie one person commenting on another rather than first person or omniscient narration). An evocative sense of childhood and a wonderful feel for landscape and the seasons. It must, at least, be sampled!! MP
Evocative portrait of farming life in Nebraska. The narrator, slightly more well-to-do than his neighbours, grows up on grandparents' farm where neighbours are Bohemian immigrants whose daughter is the eponymous Antonia. Her character and story give the only structure the book has - excused by the fact that it is a memoir of her. Successfully captures a way of life and a country. The author had a similar life to the narrator. She becomes a 'he' - Jim Burden - which works as Cather obviously has a male-like appreciation of women, while knowing more of their ways than a man of the times ever would. SRG
Yes, this was fine. One can feel the emerging country of America 'growing up' as the book develops. Ranks nearly as highly as the Henry Roth series as a formative novel and is exceptionally good on immigrants and their language. The writing though is by no means as inventive or erudite as Henry Roth but one gets pleasure from its simplicity and feeling of genuineness. Main fault is that like many similar books, the novel is merely a sequence of loosely connected episodes - the finish could have come after just a 100 (of the 300+) pages, or it could have gone on meandering to double its length. But this may be carping for the sake of it. SJG

Chabon, Michael
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)
Rating:- ****
Admirable rather than enjoyable. There's 630-odd pages of fairly small font here and it takes quite a lot of reading to get through. Not that it's badly written. Indeed it's intelligently done and one can see why it won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but one wonders how many of the judges felt in awe of it rather than, say, considered it was a ‘good read'. The story tells of two New York-based Jewish cousins who in 1939 create a successful comic strip that features a Nazi-busting super-hero. Considering that on the blurb one reviewer says that no novel "has made me cry more", I found the whole emotionally flat and un-involving. I never really cared about the main characters and their problems, and this is an awfully big book to get through without feeling any real sympathy. On the other hand it is very well done, an often fascinating read and there's little else you'll need to know about the history of American comics by the time you get to the end. One of those books that'll probably stay with me, but which I won't bother recommending to anyone. SJG
I responded more to this. It is densely written and you have to let the author dictate the pace, but it is intricately themed and worthwhile. For example, the theme of ‘escape' is one that takes in the literal escape from Czechoslovakia of Joe Kavalier, his magic escapes (he is an amateur magician) and the escapes of Clay from the inhibitions that bind his sexuality. Houdini had said that a particular lock could only be overcome with love and this story illustrates that in many ways. SRG

Charyn, Jerome
The Isaac Quartet: Marilyn the Wild (1976), Blue Eyes (1974), The Education of Patrick Silver (1976), Sweet Isaac (1978)
Rating:- ****
Read these in the mid-80s when they were published together. Must admit that at the time the writing blew me away. Here was somebody who had brought Raymond Chandler up-to-date and then extended the boundaries. So does it still work fifteen or so years later? As usual the answer is yes and no. The writing is still vivid, alive and excellent, but after reading the later James Elroy stuff it's lost quite a bit of its ability to surprise. Additionally the structure is a disappointment and at times the novels ramble on to little purpose. Characterisation, as in nearly all crime novels, doesn't go beyond the two-dimensional. However this is not really a problem as Charyn's characters help provide a flat, pictorial quality rather similar to Dickens. So, in summary: still pretty good and recommended, but not quite the ‘five star' rating I would have given them in the first place. Rather similar to my reaction to Martin Amis' ‘Money' - initially stunned but once you've been impressed by the fireworks, they don't seem so fulfilling on repeat performance. Incidentally if you do ever find this collection try ‘Blue Eyes' first as ‘Marilyn the Wild' (first in the chronology of the Quartet but written second) is easily the worst. Interestingly, in the last, ‘Secret Isaac', Charyn makes a lot more effort to explain what's going on (in the others the plot, like in Chandler, can be incomprehensible), but it loses something in the process. Still, despite the carping, these are worth seeking out. SJG
The style is very odd. The characters never fail to begin dialogue with the name of the person they are speaking to: "Isaac, blah, blah, blah." The sentences are short, too, so there is a naive semi-literate feel. The portrayal of the NYPD is extreme and I don't know how real or mythical. There is wholesale corruption and even the hero cop Isaac Sidel, while not actually corrupt, is unconventional in his methods to the extent of committing murder and his actions are driven by his personal agenda. The issues are constantly drawn in tribal and personal terms: Irish or Jewish ancestry have a real bearing on identity and relationships. Strangely disturbing, but always alive. SRG

Chatwin, Bruce
On the Black Hill (1982)
Rating:- ****
About two twin brothers who lived and farmed on the border between England and Wales. Yet another family saga, but this time (unlike Kate Atkinson et al) a good one! The problem with family sagas is that they become episodic; the physical characteristics of the people change BUT there is seldom any real character development. OK, people become friendly/meaner etc but in a saga it seems that time is responsible for this, rather than it being a psychological development. Anyway, although it sags a little in the middle, this author manages to steer away from the saga problems'. I m not sure how he does this except that many of the episodes' that he writes about are of a trivial nature and hence just contribute to the character development. Also there's quite a bit of (good) nature writing and this provides a theme and hence gives the novel a feeling of unity. Recommended. SJG
Yes, it's good. I found it a bit sad: the inevitable question cannot be avoided - Is this what we're all here for?' SRG

Chekhov, Anton
Selected Stories (originally ‘Stories of Russian Life') (various dates in 1880s tr 1918)
Rating:- ****
Earlier stories than the ‘Lady with the Lapdog' collection we read a few years ago. Just confirms my belief that along with ‘Dubliners' and Kipling, Chekhov is as good as it gets in short story writing. Quality is variable of course, some seeming to work far better than others. Also I think it's a mistake to read the twenty-odd stories through in just one or two sittings like I did; like chocolates these are probably best rationed out to one or two a day after meals. Cannot find any reference to a translator in my (cheap) Wordsworth edition which is most unjust as he/she certainly deserves some plaudits. SJG
Some very good and haunting. Some indifferent and lacking discernible point. I read these over a long period in the ‘box of chocolates' fashion recommended above. It helped me savour the best ones and they all lived on in my mind afterwards. Chekhov is very successful in getting you right into the landscape and among the characters in a very short time in spite of the fact that both are very unfamiliar ‘types' - snowbound landscapes and feudal society. SRG

Chopin, Kate
The Awakening (1899)
Rating:- ****
Ms Chopin was an American writer and this novella (150pp) was sheer pleasure to read. Another 90s text on our Course. From this story it seems possible that feminist stirrings were finding expression over there' earlier than in Europe. Certainly Kate Chopin herself and her heroine here are expressing clearly anarchic views about the situation of women. The protagonist is married to a perfectly nice chap with lovely children. Admittedly he says rude things about meals and rushes off in protest to his club to eat there more satisfactorily. He expects his wife to do all the things that women at that time generally, apparently, did. She does not like this. She cannot develop her own personality, she wants to be an artist, to live a freely intellectual life, to love other men! Really not on, sorry, in the America of that time. The Lit. Class were pretty unanimous in their enjoyment of this tale. Things are neatly touched in. She was a real craftsman/person. A four-star read. The ending, not given away here, may cause unease, surprise, criticism. She is worth following up - though there is not much to follow. My copy is The Awakening and Other Stories'. I am looking forward to the Other Stories'. MP
Read on MP's recommendation. At first I wasn't sure whether I was going to enjoy it. and found the writing a little clunky. However by the end I was seduced by both the writing and the story. Throughout was reminded of Madame Bovary' and although the author treated her heroine a little more kindly than Flaubert did, she can hardly be said to have portrayed her that sensitively or sympathetically. Not really sure where Kate Chopin is coming from; if she was trying to open out discussion on the situation of women', you would have expected the heroine to have far more endearing characteristics. The edition I read had some contemporary reviews which were universal in condemning Chopin's subject material, with the resulting disappearance' of the book for 50 odd years. Interesting stuff. SJG
This is certainly interesting as an early move in the direction of feminism. What bothered me about it was that the idea of freedom seemed to be equated with the idea of following one's moods'. This offended my puritan susceptibilities, quite unfairly, I'm sure! It brought back memories of Jules et Jim' and I had the same urge to subject the heroine to something unpleasant like being put over someone's knee or being abandoned to her own survival skills in a wilderness. We cannot have the "right" to be free drones, as men or women! SRG

Clark, Alan
The Tories (1998)
Rating:- ***
There are indications that this is not a work of fiction. In actual fact the late A. Clark seems to have been, as well as a great contributor to the gaiety of nations, a considerable historian. His reputation seems to rest on The Donkeys' on the battles and commanders of the B.E.F. in 1915 and Barbarossa' the "classic account of the Russian-German conflict 41-45". Thus war seems to be his forté and he brings his interest in this to a lively appreciation of the warring tribes of the Right. His point of view seems to be highly critical of Conservative politicians and their highly unpredictable and unbalanced goings on while at the same time never considering any alternative group as preferable. To him the Conservatives seem to have been Politics incarnate. Following the Art of the Unpredictably Possible without ever managing to make anything of it! "Clark portrays not a party united in its pursuit of power, but a snake-pit of ambition in which principles, policies and electoral tactics were inseparable from personality." Here for a flavour of most of the rest is a classic section, where near-relations of the Buchan hero (from Greenmantle' see earlier) play rather more unsavoury games albeit with similar dash and bravado.
"Lloyd George was not the leader of the party with the largest number of seats in the House of Commons. That advantage was enjoyed by the Conservatives. Their leading lights, men of distinction and achievement, warily eyed each other across the dinner table, and sideways along the green leather of the front bench of the House of Commons. There was Austin Chamberlain top-heavy with gravitas - "he always played the game and always lost it", Winston Churchill, nominally a liberal but "more conservative than a Conservative" and ceaselessly manoeuvring for personal advantage. F.E. Smith, now Lord Birkenhead but referred to always by his initials ".... tall, dark slender and a little overdressed. His eyes and hair were lustrous: the first from nature, the second from too much oil ... a fox-hunting man who could swear elegantly in Greek ..." And a walking illustration, it must be added, that there is such a phenomenon as an over-endowment of charisma. No one trusted F.E. although many loved his company. While others in the party, denied that pleasure, were unforgiving. A back-bench colleague later observed that:
"...these two political adventurers (Churchill and Birkenhead) are anathema - they sold the principles of Unionism to LlG and they possess no principles of their own. They are out to have the plums of office for themselves - nothing more and nothing else - but they have brains and brains are power - especially when their game is to beat your opponents by any means that are possible, however dirty and unprincipled - The Headlan Diaries."
"As good as a novel" -Alan Massie. "Holds the reader like a novel" M. Portillo. MP

Coe, Jonathan
What a Carve-up (1994)
Rating:- ****
A good who-dun-it with depth and echoes given by parallels with film and events in Britain 1970-90 (mostly). Some of the political points a bit heavy-handed but some good light touches. SRG
Overall I agree with above but it doesn't stay with you' and is not really worthy of the recent very positive reviews. SJG
Re-read after about five years. Still think there's nothing special about the writing and the attacks on the Thatcher administration are almost too heavy-handed, although on second thoughts that, I suppose, is impossible. However, this time I was really impressed with structure and, having seen the film just before the reading, I appreciated how well that was integrated into the story. Also at the time of the second read, Bush was threatening to invade Iraq so it made all the stuff about British firms supplying Saddam with arms, chemicals etc more pertinent. Additionally the NHS bits about the lack of beds and doctors doesn't seem to have changed much. Got me thinking how little has been righted by New Labour, but that's another issue. Great feeling of time and place. Innovative on being based around a film, rather than vice versa. In some ways an important book despite a lack of literary merit. Sort of late 20th century Disraeli. SJG

Coe, Jonathan
The House of Sleep (1997)
Rating:- ****
I'd been lukewarm about Coe's previous (see above), so was wary about this one, but it's much superior. Leaner and everything that's introduced is apposite. There are two narrative strands (one set in 1996 and the other twelve years earlier) concerning a small group of students and an institute that researches into sleep - there's a bit here on different sleep disorders but the author's researches don't get in the way. The characters and standard of writing are not that much above average, but the pleasing thing is that the whole is put together in such a professional way. Towards the end there are a couple of set-pieces (concerning incorrect footnotes to a report, and a psychologist's conference) that are laugh-out-loud-funny. As in his previous work there are a lot of references to films including a collection of bad jokes which I will append here so that I can torment PVD with them:
(1) "The Third Man. It's quite famous. Directed by Carol Reed."
"I didn't realize they had women directors in those days."
(2) "Don't you think that Welles is rather over-rated?"
"Definitely. I went with Dad last month and Bath's a lot nicer."
(3) "Are you found of Pasolini?"
"Actually I was just going to have a burger."
(4) "Do you like tortellini?"
"Sure I do. Especially those early black and white ones."
(5) "Can you even imagine the history of the cinema without Wenders?"
"No, I can't. I mean, someone's got to sell you the Coke and the popcorn."
Be reassured the novel isn't a collection of bad jokes - just a small aspect. Recommended. Treat yourself. SJG
Some good play with ideas of what is most real, dreams or reality and there is a significant book within the plot called The House of Sleep'. The self-references and twists in the plot create echoes which are themselves dream-like. A professional piece of work, but with a light touch. SRG

Coe, Jonathan
The Rotter's Club (2001)
Rating:- ****
Very nice. Coe writes simply but this is well-structured, funny and nostalgic. Nostalgia that the Stoke-on-Trent brigade (and most of the rest of the world) may not get anywhere the same amount of pleasure from, as the book, which deals with a group of grammar school kids, is concerned with Birmingham in 1970s - a time, of course, which we spent in that city. So copious references to familiar pubs, art galleries, roads, Brew XI, bus routes, surrounding countryside etc. All rather like looking through an old photograph album. Even more so than that, it seems Coe was almost following us around as there are significant sections on British Leyland, where I'd previously been working, The Tavern in the Town bombing, in which some of our students were hurt, and, unbelievably, the holiday scenes are in the Lleyn Peninsula which we visited annually. To quote Dame Edna Everage: "Spooky or what." So take all those connections away and is the book any good? Difficult to say. I found it amusing and, as with most successful comedy, there was an occasional bitter edge to it. Faults? Initially difficult to separate the characters out, maybe too undemanding a read, and, disappointingly, this is only half the story: there is a follow-up being written. I say disappointingly as, although I will no doubt enjoy the next one, it means that I will have to wait a couple of years to find out what happens in all the various storylines. By which time I will have forgotten all the details in this one. A series of books is all very well (eg Rabbit, Barchester etc) if you can read them continuously, but not when you have to wait for each one to be published. Still, great enjoyment here and would be interested to know what non-Brummies made of it. SJG
I thought the schoolboy humour would be too much to take at first, but I got into it and certainly laughed out loud a few times. The ‘history' is woven well into the lives of the characters, though I agree they do merge into each other. The author varies the style by using diary, excerpts from school magazine and other techniques like stream of consciousness. The ‘voice' remains the same, however, and, to nit-pick, this weakens the literary value. SRG

Coetzee, J.M.
Elizabeth Costello (2003)
Rating:- ****
The initial omens are not good. Coetzee has taken some previously written material, mainly philosophical pieces, and then repackaged them with the ‘jacket' of an ageing female Australian author, who seems to have given up writing and who now goes round giving lectures (the aforesaid pieces) at academic conferences, on cruise ships etc. In any character interaction there is little ‘real' dialogue, merely the spouting of philosophical points. All this should be really dry stuff, but Coetzee, as ‘Disgrace' has shown, is an author with great ability. Indeed with Ishiguro etc in seeming decline, it is difficult to think of anybody who at the moment is producing better stuff. I must investigate his back-catalogue. To return to this book, it is rather bitty to read but I did love the tetchy, grumpy ‘heroine' who, despite being able to argue convincingly on a wide range of topics such as the nature of evil and animal rights, doesn't real know where, after a lifetime of writing, her thought processes have taken her to: "Must one be too creaky to join the dance before one can see the pattern?" And Coetzee conveys the world-weariness of old age very well. Quite a lot of things I like here including: "‘The English novel,' she says, ‘is written in the first place by English people for English people. That is what makes it the English novel. The Russian novel is written by Russians for Russians. But the African novel is not written by Africans for Africans. African novelists may write about Africa, about African experiences, but they seem to be to be glancing over their shoulder all the time they write, at the foreigners who will read them. Whether they like it or not, they have accepted the role of interpreter, interpreting Africa to their readers." He then goes on to make the point that the Australian novel has only recently been successful after a proper Australian readership grew to maturity, something that happened in the 1960s. "The novel the traditional novel, she goes on to say, is an attempt to understand human fate one case at a time, to understand how it comes about that some fellow being, having started at point A and having undergone experiences B, C and D, ends up at Point Z. Like history, the novel is an exercise in making the past coherent. Like history, it explores the respective contributions of character and circumstance to forming the present. By doing so, the novel suggests how we may explore the power of the present, to produce the future. That is why we have this thing, this institution, this medium called the novel." SJG
This work is very rich in philosophy, which is accessible through being personalised to the character Elizabeth Costello. I found it disturbing in a positive way as it raised the kinds of questions I am turning over in my mind at the end of a professional career which, like Costello's, had something to do with shaping the values of others. The novelist espouses any set of values with a passion appropriate to the character they portray or the issue they illustrate. The teacher espouses a particular set of values to make education possible within a given institution. Both end by doubting that they have any personal values that matter to them as individuals rather than functionaries. SRG

Collins, Wilkie
The Woman in White (1860)
Rating:- ****
Confession: Had not to my knowledge knowingly read anything by this author so felt it was about time. Greatly enjoyed and very impressed. This kind of story was all the rage apparently in the 1860s. This first Collins book of this kind came out in 1860 and was followed by Uncle Silas' (1864) House by the Churchyard' (1863) Moonstone' (1868). It is ahead of Le Fanu in the organisation of the story which he keeps afloat over 600 pages without really flagging with great ingenuity. Le Fanu perhaps better at the more macabre effects. Must try The Moonstone' next. MP

Compton-Burnett, Ivy
A Heritage and its History (1959) (& Manservant and Maidservant)
Rating:- ****
Another on our Syllabus. This is around the Top Class. I had only read one Ivy Compton-Burnett previously, Manservant and Maidservant' which was sure at the time was Top Class. A H. and its H.' is not as funny as M and M'. It looks as if I.C-B. got progressively gloomier and more macabre. The style is almost all dialogue which takes time to get the hang of and some of which remains opaque, but there is something impressive there. She can get atmosphere very well and the structure impressively. I think she is a writer worth taking trouble with. Try Manservant and Maidservant' first. MP
I would have put good money on it being Edwardian in a blind test. I found it a very difficult read, indeed I gave up three times before page 10. It was only above praise that kept me going. However at about page 70, the clouds parted and I fair romped through the next 150 pages, only to lose enjoyment again in the last chapters. It's a most peculiar read - nearly all dialogue with people standing around making meaningful sentences' as in some rather dated stage play. When it didn't work for me, these meaningful sentences' seemed to bear no relation to each other. When it did work for me, it acquired a distinctive charm that was unlike anything else I've read. However now I've read one Compton-Burnett I think I'll consider her done' - I'm not sure I could face starting another one. SJG
It was like reading a translation from the Slav or something - stilted and with clumsy double negatives. The concept of telling a story was modern' and bold but the sense of drama was lacking. The characters' (few developed) spent most of their time making assertions about each other or forbidding each other to speak further on a taboo topic. For 1959 there was a lot of incredible feeling about place' and heritage. No-one seemed to possess autonomy apart from the new wife Marcia who rejects the house. I thought she might be the author. SRG

Connelly, Michael
Angels Flight (1999)
Rating:- ****
Nothing more than a police procedural. The writing isn't exceptional. There are no quotable sentences here. Neither is there any discussion of the meaning of life or similar. It's just a straightforward tale of a cop solving a crime in downtown L.A. in the mid-1990s - a time when the LAPD were trying to get out of the mess of being labelled 'institutionally racist' after the Rodney King affair. Having said all of that, this is a minor piece of art, excellently constructed and crafted. I was tempted to give it 'five stars' but resisted as Connelly is not taking the genre anywhere new, just providing a near-perfect instance. Thoroughly recommended. SJG
The main detective (Bosch) has to pick his way through a homicide case with IAD, the FBI and his own superiors (who have a paranoid eye on the media) scrutinising his every move. It is hard for righteousness to prevail but natural justice is done in the end. SRG

Connelly, Michael
A Darkness more than Night (2001)
Rating:- ****
After the superb 'Angel's Flight' thought I'd try another. Not quite up to the same standard but still a pretty good and highly readable police procedural. Couple of faults. Firstly it didn't get out of second gear for the first 100 or so pages; (after that no complaints though). Secondly this is one in a series of books that features LAPD detective Harry Bosch, who is a great fictional character. Unfortunately there isn't enough Bosch - a lot of time being spent with one of Connelly's other main characters, Terry McCaleb, who I found a little tedious. Thirdly, a main strand of the plot which revolves around Bosch's painting namesake is a little thin when/if you stop to think about it. Nevertheless a thoroughly enjoyable read. SJG
The plot is very complex, involving the use of a set-up to discredit the main witness in a murder case. Additional tension is given by the parallel progress of the trial and the investigation into the set-up. As with the best police/crime thrillers, there is a take on morality - reflections on the evil of monsters who commit violent crimes. This is given depth by the comparisons with the visions of the artist Hieronymous Bosch. I found the book totally enthralling. SRG

Connelly, Michael
The Last Coyote (1995)
Rating:- ****
Yes! Well worth reading. He tells a compulsively interesting story. How does he manage it? Hard to put your finger on as there is no really interesting use of words or original story-line. First of all he has constructed an interesting, sympathetic story-teller: the suspended (in this book) LAPD cop Detective Bosch who, though full of serious faults, is an OK Guy the reader can feel comfortable with. This Quixotic figure is at large under a dubious flag amongst a sea of crooks and incompetents, along with others it is hard to ascertain as either cops or robbers. A complicated but, unusually for this reader, largely understandable plot, beautifully constructed. An excellent craftsman with the desire to show off kept generally under control. He is a front-line candidate ready to take his place among those pleasure-givers who exhibit more talent than ‘genius'. Textual Note. In my edition there are two chapters/sections numbered 49. They are separated by section 50. Not being a regular reader of thrillers/who-dunnits felt might be in the presence of untold subtleties/complexities. I would argue that the second 49 comes after the first one and should perhaps be 51. I take: "When you find the one that you think fits, then grab on for dear life. Bosch didn't know if she was the one but for the moment he held on with everything he had left." This looks (to me the uninitiated) further on than: "There's a woman in the bed. She looks like she's been dead about a week." As Connelly is apparently not a genius I feel mistakes in pagination are actually mistakes. But the question lurks. Have I missed the whole point? For advanced textual analysis section 50 starts: "Why didn't you reveal she was your Mother's killer? Why did you lie??" MP

Connelly, Michael
The Black Echo (1992)
Rating:- ****
Maybe it's just because recently I've been reading two very poor 'literary' novels, but I thought that this was a real cracker. It's the first of the author's 'Harry Bosch' series which I've decided to go through after finding, and eulogising about, 'Angel's Flight' which is sixth in the series. They are no more than police procedurals but Bosch - an LAPD detective who breaks many rules and who constantly antagonises authority - is such a superb lead character. Add to this some tight writing and an excellent structure and you can't go wrong. What makes this one that bit special is that there is a lot of back-history about the Vietnam War and the way that it affected the hero. Particularly amazing is that this won the 'Edgar Award for the Best First Novel' as there is not the slightest sign that this is a first novel. Connelly has immediately started writing as a fully mature, fully competent novelist. Very impressive. Why don't they have things like this short-listed for the Booker? SJG
Very tightly-plotted and only just a bit contrived right at the end. Bosch has to surmount obstacles thrown in his path by the FBI, his own department and an internal enquiry into his conduct. Unbelievable but wonderful stuff. SRG

Connelly, Michael
The Poet (1996)
Rating:- ****
Had previously decided that, while Connelly's Harry Bosch series was generally excellent, his other stuff was less than essential. Consequently this novel - a non-Bosch one - had been ignored. However in a more recent novel, ‘The Narrows', I see that Bosch's adversary is the villain from this one, so thought I'd better do some preliminary reading. And it is an excellent police-procedural/thriller ranking alongside the best of Connelly's work, eg ‘The Black Echo' and ‘Angel's Flight'. I consider the word ‘unputdownable' is vastly overused by book reviewers and blurb writers, but in this case it is entirely appropriate. Exciting, well-plotted, interesting characters especially the main baddie Gladden. (I'm not giving anything away here as he is signposted from early on.) Was almost tempted to give it ‘five stars' but felt that the twists at the end over-egged the pudding and seemed over-contrived. Nevertheless rivetting entertainment. SJG
Yes, the end was rushed. However, in spite of this and the unpleasantness of the criminal area it centred on, I enjoyed it and admired Connelly's skill in crafting the plot. SRG

Connelly, Michael
The Narrows (2004)
Rating:- ****
Another excellent ‘Harry Bosch' police-procedural. Bosch is still a P.I. but is, as usual, just as busy upsetting the F.B.I. as he is with solving the crime. As I think I noted in a review of another of this series Connelly is having a few difficulties with Bosch as a P.I. as he has very restricted access to information etc, and here Connelly has set the scene so that in the next book Bosch can rejoin the LAPD which is clearly Connelly's forte. A word of warning. The book is a sequel to Connelly's ‘The Poet' (which doesn't feature Bosch) and the earlier book really needs to be read first. This is no problem though as both are of an extremely high standard. The only quibble is the unnecessary twist at the end. Read and enjoy. SJG
We also need the cut and thrust of Bosch falling foul of his superiors while solving crime; maintaining his mission-inspired approach versus bureaucracy. That said is was a good read and a welcome resolution to its predecessor. SRG

Connelly, Michael
The Lincoln Lawyer (2005)
Rating:- ****
With his, mostly excellent, Harry Bosch series slowly dying on its feet Connelly has acted positively and started with a new character, Mickey Heller, and a change in emphasis - no longer a LAPD detective or P.I. but a defence lawyer. Bit of a crowded market, defence lawyers, especially as the courtroom provides s ready-built framework for ramping up the tension. Nevertheless at his first(?) go Connelly takes to it like a duck to water with a story that is virtually un-put-down-able. The carpers will say that the character of Haller is very similar to Bosch, complete with friendly ex-wife and young daughter to dote upon, but I'm not complaining. The change in situation/character seems to have breathed new life into Connelly and this is one of his best. Recommended. Two trivial side issues. Firstly this is the first time I've come across an iPod having a use, albeit minor, in a novel. Secondly a verse from a rap song is quoted: "to live & die in l.a./it's the place to be/you got to be there to know it/ev'ybody wanna see". In order to allow that specific quote, the following has to be incorporated in the credits: "'To Live and Die in L.A.' words and music by Quincy Jones, Tupac Shukar and Val Young © Copyright 1966 IQ Music Limited (25%)/ Full Keel Music Company, USA (25%). Music Corporation of America Incorporated (12.5%)/Joshua's Dream Music (12.5%)/Deep Technology Music (25%). Universal Music Publishing Limited (12.5%)/IQ Music limited (25%)/Universal/MCA Music Limited (12.5%)P and P Songs Limited (50%). Used by permission of Music Sales Limited." SJG
A thoroughly involving read; intricately plotted and well-paced. A treat! SRG

Conrad, Joseph
Victory (1915)
Rating:- ****
Classic Conrad. Not quite one of his best ( Nostromo', Heart of Darkness', Secret Agent') but close. The sinister characters are better than in Under Western Eyes', but tremble on the edge of the ridiculous, perhaps. They come to seek out the hero' on his deserted island, under the impression he has vast funds stored away. Made more complicated by presence of woman he has recently taken under his wing. Memorable for feelings of menace and macabre humour. Some of Heart of Darkness' feel about isolation etc. MP
Yet another tale - this time a full length novel - set on the seaboard of the eastern oceans. Reading his works chronologically one notices how Conrad dots about for his geographical settings; for a few years around this time he seems relatively stuck in this area. I'm not complaining as he does seem most comfortable here. In general I agree with MP's comments. The first hundred or so pages are excellent - Conrad on his best form as he introduces us to three wonderful characters: the amenable part-narrator Davison, the bombastic hotel-keeper Schomberg, and the rather strange figure of the ‘hero' Axel Heyst. Unfortunately as the plot develops one of Conrad's ethereal two-dimensional women appears along with two rogues, who spend far too much time second-guessing each other rather than being rogues. The result is something rather silly and which didn't contain the right amount of sustained brooding atmosphere. Nevertheless there's a lot of great Conrad here: "The world of finance is a mysterious world in which ... evaporation precedes liquidation." SJG
I felt it took a bit too long to get going but did set up a mystery, based on character and geography, that ended by being fascinating. The rogues were a bonus and Conrad's introduction informs us that all the characters (even the women) were based on real models glimpsed in his travels. SRG

Conrad, Joseph
Lord Jim (1900)
Rating:- ****
While this is, as one would expect, a ‘great' work, it is flawed by just a bit too much padding. As usual the author shows himself to be a master of description, both of the sea and character. The book sets as a ‘problem' to be worked out, the character of the eponymous Jim. His fate is the result of that character reacting to events in the life of a mariner and exile from home. Jim is ‘one of us' and ‘the right sort' but he suffers from a romantic and imaginative isolation which serves to paralyse him at crucial moments of action. His principles are too absolute, and Conrad shows how they fail to serve him either in making him fully competent or able to be satisfied in his chosen career. The story is told by Marlow, another mariner who takes a fatherly interest in Jim. He brings in side stories about other seafaring characters whose fate and methods stand in contrast to Jim's. These sometimes ramble on a bit too much and we risk losing the thread of Jim's story. However the subtlety of Conrad's suggestion that it is not possible to be a ‘romantic hero' is breathtaking. SRG
Have the same problem I had when I first read it many years ago and that is, can't make up my mind whether it is a truly ‘great' novel, or merely(!) just an extremely ‘good' one. (The ‘great' ones certainly include ‘Nostromo', ‘Heart of Darkness', ‘Secret Agent'. ‘Youth', ‘Typhoon' , ‘The Secret Sharer' and probably others which I've forgotten.) The further away from this novel I get, the better it seems. I remember the grotesques, the anecdotes, many of the vivid scenes. I was more fascinated by Jim this time around; rather felt that Conrad was using him to satirise the Edwardian ‘Boy's Own' type hero that John Buchan and company were putting forth at that time - the type of ‘hero' who got us entrenched (in both senses of the word) in WWI and who then managed to get several million people killed for no real reason. On the debit side actually reading the book I found a bit of a chore - on a number of occasions I felt he was about to stall the engine. Wonderful writing and imagery of course, but like cream-cakes there are times when you can have too much. In many ways would have been better as two long novellas. Whatever, still essential reading. SJG
Not Conrad's greatest book but good enough in parts to rate as shown. One of the main reasons why he was typed as a writer of Sea Stories despite his major achievements, ‘Under Western Eyes', ‘The Secret Agent', ‘Heart of Darkness' and ‘Youth', not being so. There is a close stylistic similarity with Henry James, his precursor - "historians of finer consciousness". This is surely Jamesian from ‘Jim':- "Such was the history of the man whom I had come to consult on Jim's case, without any definite hope. Simply to hear what he would have to say would have been a relief. I was very anxious but I respected the intense almost passionate absorption with which he looked at a butterfly, as though on the bronze sheen of these frail wings, in the white tracings, in the gorgeous markings he could see other things, an image of something as perishable and defying destruction as these delicate lifeless tissues displaying a splendour unmarked by death." Even Proustian? Conrad himself thought that he had dragged out a short story theme to inordinate length. It is hard not to feel that the "further ventures of Jim" go on too long, but there are riches which make clinging onto this sometimes wallowing vessel worthwhile. Conrad was perhaps a strange type to be in charge of a ship, with his sensitivity and his neuroses. All the same, in a jam, one might prefer to see him at the helm rather than, say, Henry James. An excuse to ‘jump' without any compunction. MP

Conrad, Joseph
Almayer's Folly (1895)
Rating:- ****
In the past have read a fair proportion of Conrad's work but thought the time had come for a more or less sequential read through whatever is available through libraries/bookshops, although will probably give the fairly recently read 'Lord Jim' a miss. To structure this I'm also reading Jocelyn Baines' biography 'Joseph Conrad' alongside. Anyway 'Almayer's Folly' is Conrad's first, written less than 20 years after he had first set foot in England. Although initially fluent in Polish and French he had never tried to write novels in those languages. In this book Conrad's style emerges fully formed straight out of the box. What I mean by 'style' is probably best summarised in the Introduction to my Wordswoth Edition: "His use of a narrator, particularly in his later novels, who comments on the action in the manner of a Greek chorus, his skilful disruption of the time-sequence, his impressionistic manner of communicating action, images and emotions through each character's individual consciousness, and his employment of powerful irony of tone were striking and influential." Add to this Conrad's own contemporary comments: "You must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every thought, every image, mercilessly, without reserve and without remorse: you must search the darkest corners of your heart, the most hidden recesses of your brain, - you must search them for the image, for the glamour, for the right expression. And you must do it sincerely, at any cost ...", and: "Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world." 'AF' isn't perfect, not one of his very best, as the story is a little unfocused, the heroine, Nina's, character is not developed sufficiently and there's a really tedious love affair that she's involved in. Nevertheless it has a great sense of place (in this case harking back to Conrad's time in Borneo), some excellent characters and some sections that rank with his finest writing. Great start. Wonder if I will be so enthusiastic by the time I get to the end of his works. SJG
Conrad must have been a lone voice of cultural relativism in his own day. His own experience as a Pole unable to return home because of the imperialist demand of Russia that he should be drafted into the Russian armed forces enabled him to see European colonial power for what it was and to recognize the veiled hate in the subjugated peoples. Sense of mystery and complexity evoked well. SRG

Conrad, Joseph
An Outcast of the Islands (1896)
Rating:- ****
This was Conrad's second novel although the first, Almayer's Folly', is its sequel in point of narrative and plot. Three star Conrad but better in some ways than other writers' five, but you can't go giving him five for everything. It is powerful early Conrad though he was criticized by one of his great admirers for using "too many adjectives" in this and in Almayer'. It is hard not to feel that Dr Leavis had a point but it is possible to get into the swing of the sporadic overwriting and enjoy the Conradian mood. We are up river where the Outcast is trapped. He does not reach the stage of Kurtz's "horror, the horror" but things are not too good. He has gone adrift from his secure and respected secretarial/business world of influence and connections due to financial corruption. He has fallen under the grip of Almayer who hates him. There are echos of Victory' and it is easy to identify with his sense of isolation even if one is never likely to experience its location. If you find the style overwritten so be it but if read fairly quickly as I did (quickly for me that is) than it was a powerful and overwhelming experience. It is another of Conrad's dramas of how easy it is to slip off the edge of so-called civilization into the uncontrolled savagery and desolation of the wrong man in the wrong place. MP
Conrad's second novel. Despite being twice the length of 'Almayer's Folly', it came out only a year afterwards. With just a few personnel changes it deals with the same group of misfits and natives living by a river in Borneo, but in true Conrad (who often likes retreating backwards in time in his novels) fashion, it is a prequel rather than a sequel. I was amazed how close to a 'mature' Conrad novel his first one was and now, by the following year, this is totally the real thing. Indeed I thought the first quarter to be close to the perfection of 'Heart of Darkness' or the first third of 'Lord Jim'. After that I found several parts - particularly when describing the love affair - that I had to struggle through, but even these were interwoven with excellent evocative scenes. Even after reading Jocelyn Baines' biography I am completely bemused where this sudden outpouring of incredible talent came from. SJG
Some of the descriptions are magical. The plot and pace falter in places and some of the characters are a bit too inscrutable. However, a really good feeling for the outposts of the empire and the factors in identity. SRG

Conrad, Joseph
Tales of Unrest (1898)
Rating:- ****
Written after the dense atmospheric stories of the Malayan Archipelago ('Almayer's Folly, and 'An Outcast of the Islands') it comes as a sudden start to read the opening of 'The Return': "The inner circle train from the City rushed impetuously out of a black hole and pulled with a discordant, grinding racket into the smirched twilight of a West-End station. A line of doors flew open and a lot of men stepped out headlong." Quite another Conrad altogether. This short story - one of five gathered here - soon settles down to a tale of marital breakdown, but, as with his discussions of love in the previous novels, is long-winded and not altogether satisfying. More disappointing is 'The Idiots' which even Conrad dismisses out of hand in his introduction. He's on much safer territory with 'The Lagoon' and 'Karain: A Memory' where he returns to Malaya and the quality of earlier novels is maintained. Best of the lot is 'An Outpost of Progress' - set in Africa and a definite precursor to 'Heart of Darkness'. This is 'five-star' stuff and only let down by not being allowed to continue past its 27 pages. Altogether an interesting collection and one worth being read by any Conrad fan. SJG
It is interesting seeing him trying different things - like 'The Idiots' which is very much after Maupassant, and 'The Return' which reminds me of H.G. Wells social stuff. However, Conrad as explorer of the operators of conquest and Empire continues to be the best. SRG

Conrad, Joseph
Typhoon and Other Stories (1901-1903)
Rating:- ****
A small jump in my chronological reading of the Conrad oeuvre. Read 'Lord Jim' relatively recently so missed that. As for 'The Inheritors', this was a collaboration with a young, relatively inexperienced Ford Madox Ford and seems to have largely disappeared as neither of the two library systems, to which I have access, have a copy. By the sounds of it, it is no great loss and seems to have been largely written by Ford with encouragement/bullying by Conrad. The above collection of four stories published together in 1903 is not that much easier to get hold of as an entity, as various publishers have broken up this group in order to make other themed collections such as 'Sea Stories' or whatever. 'Typhoon' itself is another excellent 'five star' novella that, like 'The Nigger of the Narcissus' and 'Youth', deals with potentially fatal disaster at sea. Indeed the storm here is 'better' than the one in 'TNOTN':
"It was something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath. It seemed to explode all round the ship with an overpowering concussion and a rush of great waters, as if an immense dam had been blown to windward. In an instant the men lost touch of each other. This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one from one's kind. An earthquake, an avalanche, overtake a man incidentally, as it were - without passion. A furious gale attacks him like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seeks to rout his very spirit out of him."
However it doesn't quite have the extra dimensions found in the 'TNOTN'. Several other aspects though do make it stand out. Namely the captain who is a fairly unperceptive, shallow figure but who is able to remain calm, steadfast and decent in the worst of circumstances. Also Conrad's style comes in for a bit of a change here, bringing in at times a witty, sardonic Dickensian flavour. As a side issue I was wondering why (apart from the obvious sheer writing talent) I found Conrad's short stories/novellas so successful, as I usually have little time for this medium. One possible answer comes in Conrad's letters: "For ... in the light of the final incident, the whole story in all its descriptive detail shall fall into place - acquire its value and significance ... (It depends) upon the reader looking back upon my story as a whole." 'Falk: A Reminiscence' is of the same novella length as 'Typhoon' and, whilst it still constitutes a 'recommended read, it is of lesser quality than that story. Two problems. Firstly there is a Marlow-type framework that starts superbly but which Conrad seems to lose interest in, rendering it slightly pointless. Secondly the main theme is a sort of social comedy involving various characters based at a far eastern port. And then suddenly a tale of cannibalism is tacked on at the end. Conrad does his best to make this work but it lay uncomfortably for me. The other stories, 'Amy Foster' and 'Tomorrow' are much shorter - 20-odd pages - and less satisfactory. The main interest in the former is that it deals with a man who nowadays would be called an asylum seeker and many of the details are just as relevant today. Also this person, like Conrad, is a Pole so there must be a considerable personal element to it, even though it didn't feel that personal to me. 'Tomorrow' is a piece of froth about a man awaiting and then rejecting the return of his son. Along with 'The Idiots' from 'Tales of Unrest' it is the weakest Conrad to date, and has been excluded from nearly all the collections of Conrad's short stories that I was able to find. SJG
The 'sea yarns' 'Typhoon' and 'Falk' are both successful in bringing the natural/merchant seaman life vividly to the reader while pointing up the way in which character and experience interact. Captain MacWhirr in 'Typhoon' is almost a caricature of lack of imagination and extreme literalness. His 'pig-headedness' of not believing impending weather until he's experiencing it has brought the ship into the worst of a storm that might, at the risk of time and money, have been avoided. He can do nothing to help the ship, which survives in spite of this, but his dogged attention to near irrelevant detail serves to maintain the thread of faith and professionalism that, put into effect by the first mate, keeps the crew united in endeavour and prevents an outbreak of social mis-rule to rival the natural conditions. 'Falk', again somewhat sardonically shows us the driving force of two characters - Falk himself and a captain who is about to retire to take his shipboard family home. Falk behaves in a peculiar, obsessional way which is explained by his desire to marry the niece of the captain while overcome with self-knowledge of a past episode of cannibalism. I disagree with SJG about the role of the narrator. He is essential to the plot which would never be resolved without this outsider who needs Falk to get his wish so that he will attend to his job as tug-boat master to get the narrator's boat out of the silted river estuary. SRG

Conrad, Joseph
The Secret Agent (1907)
Rating:- ****
This was an important book in my life. At the age of about 14, after working my way through all of the James Bond novels and several Ernest Hemingways, some teacher at my school gave me this in a reading period (Don't suppose any school has reading periods nowadays.) to see what I could make of it. Of course I found it 'difficult' (even now by Conrad's standards it is 'difficult' in parts) but I felt a complete sense of wonder - an Aladdin's chest being opened - and from then onwards I moved to Sartre, Camus, Hesse etc and was, for all intents and purposes, hooked to the novel for life. Under these circumstances a re-read (like for example my last re-read of 'Ulysses') was bound to be something of an anti-climax. It's a good, probably great, novel about anarchists in London at the turn of the century but there are some serious flaws. Conrad's conservatism comes out as he unmercifully portrays the group of anarchists as detestable creatures with no saving graces. The political statement he is making is too polemic for a satisfying belief in them as rounded characters. I also found the structure a little unsatisfactory as at times the story seemed to consist of cameo sketches of the characters rather than being a cohesive whole. Nevertheless a book to be read, particularly by anybody with the slightest interest in Conrad. SJG
Not only have these anarchists and revolutionaries become soft and dependent on the creature comforts supplied by others, but it is an excess of domesticity that wrecks the plot to blow up Greenwich Observatory. Also, in his criticism of Britain's policy of acceptance of foreigners, Conrad doth protest too much. He, too, benefited from this policy. SRG

Conrad, Joseph
'Twixt Land and Sea (pub 1912)
Rating:- ****
A collection of three long short stories or short novellas. (Never quite sure where the dividing line is.) After the, to me, disappointing 'Under Western Eyes', it was a real welcome to go back to one of Conrad's most fertile grounds: the seaboards of the islands etc of the eastern oceans. 'The Secret Sharer', which we've discussed at an earlier time, is superb and surely one of the highpoints of Conrad's oeuvre. The most disappointing here is 'A Smile of Fortune' which, after starting well, degenerates as the first-person narrator becomes obsessed with a withdrawn and isolated teenage girl. (I must say that nowhere in Conrad's fiction have I, to date, found a satisfactory description of romance when he is writing in the first person.) The third story, 'Freya of the Seven Isles: A Story of Shallow Waters' also has an unfulfilled romance, but here the (excellently drawn) narrator is discussing the relationship between two other people. Not up to 'TSS' standard but pretty damn good. In his Author's Notes Conrad comments that these stories were well received both publicly and from a publisher's point of view. I'm not surprised as his writing had recently developed a clarity and simplicity not really found before. It means that certain Conradian effects are lost, but they are more 'readable'. SJG
I'm not entirely comfortable with Conrad's women or his male character's views about them, so I had reservations about 'ASOF' and the better 'FOTSI'. He idealises them in a way that actually detracts: they are put on a pedestal and therefore outside the realm of real life. However, the idea behind 'FOTSI' was well conceived and sad. 'ASOSW' is the best. SRG

Costello, Mark
Big If (2004)
Rating:- ****
This is so beautifully written that for the first hundred pages or so I thought Costello was going to be one of those American (rarely British) authors - like Jerome Charyn, Douglas Coupland, James Ellroy, William Gaddis, J. Robert Lennon, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Russo - who I keep coming across every couple of years and who may/should rank alongside established greats like Roth and Updike. The attention to detail and the mirror Costello holds up to contemporary society is superb, as he covers a short amount of time in the lives of a group of people including a successful estate agent, a computer games programmer and, most importantly, the protection crew for the Vice President as he runs for top office. However, despite my 'Recommendation' I did have a significant problem with the novel's structure. Admittedly there is a minor climax at the end and this sort of joins up a few threads, but for the most part the story just drifted from character to character with little purpose. I accept that Costello can drift magnificently but I would have appreciated more direction - a little more backbone. SJG
I did find backbone in addition to the excellent portrayal of place, time and the people detailed above. The themes (ie backbone) were perhaps rather too subtle to sustain the body of the work but they were definitely there: how the work done by the 'worker ants' of society can have meaning to them; whether it can be 'right' if it does not eventually serve a righteous end; how far the individual counts in society; whether democracy is real or a con. Important questions, no answers. SRG

Cotterill, Colin
The Coroner's Lunch (2004)
Rating:- ****
One sometimes wonders if publishers know what they are doing. Although the author was born in England this was originally published, according to the blurbs, in the USA and Australia, and it's taken three years for it to find an English outlet. Yet, with the right publicity, it should be a little goldmine. It is written with a considerable sense of humour and features a very interesting character: Dr Siri Paiboun who, in 1976 just after the communists have taken over Laos, has been appointed the country's only state coroner at the age of 72. There then follows the usual (too?) dense series of clues and red herrings that seem to be obligatory in police-procedurals. But it is all done with great charm and this reader is quite prepared to spend a lot of time in Siri's company. I was even accepting of the one or two interferences from the Laotian version of the spirit world. And for the first time in my life I have an interest in Laos itself. The cover suggests this is the first of a series and hopefully Cotterill can remain as inventive as here. I've been wondering where we were going to get a replacement for Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen and this might be it. SJG
There is real humour and a lightness of touch that is not often found in this genre. The image of the country that emerges feels authentic, not that I knew anything about Laos before starting the book. There are some well-drawn minor characters including one of the coroner's assistants who has Down's syndrome. I enjoyed this. SRG

Coupland, Douglas
Miss Wyoming (2000)
Rating:- ****
A proof copy had been sent to the local Reading Groups and I managed to get my mitts on it - something almost illicit about reading a book before it's been published. At least you don't have to ignore the received opinions from the professional reviewers. His previous, Girlfriend in a Coma', was a Book of the Year and this, while not up to the same distinguished standard, is still of high calibre. The basic plot concerning two American movie stars, and its soft-centred denouement, is fairly irrelevant. Where Coupland seems to improve, is in his ability to structure a novel - this one has a number of threads, moving both backwards and forwards in time, and they work a treat; just sufficient variation to move the plot along and keep you intrigued, but not that complicated so that you need to keep referring back. In the past Coupland's great strength has been his comments on how mass culture impinges on the lives of contemporary Americans. TV, advertising, current affairs etc play a significant part in these lives and no other present day author that I know has the same ability to interweave them meaningfully into the fabric of the novel. There's even a hint of the surreal when, for example, somebody is killed by a talking Coke machine and the heroine is trapped inside a skip containing half-eaten MacDonalds. At one point a character is making "a list of the things which would astound somebody a hundred years before him" and this produces some typical Coupland thoughts:
"No 63. You can get almost any food you want at any time of the year ...
No 65. Anybody on the planet can have a crystal-clear conversation with anybody else on the planet pretty well any time they want to ...
No 68. You pretty well never see or smell shit ...
No 74. You almost never see horses." etc.
A few other random quotes:
"... just another American town that bought Tide, ate Campbell's soup and generated at least one weird, senseless killing per decade."
"... she was without credit cards, cash, a driver's license or any other link to the national economy."
"... (a large house), surrounded by dense evergreens that absorbed noise like sonic tampons."
"... she left for her job processing spreadsheets ..."
"If he'd learned one thing - it was that loneliness and the open discussion of loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics or religion. Or even failure. Loneliness is what clears out a room."
I've got a soft spot for this sort of stuff. Coupland has become the Kurt Vonnegut of the 1990s. Highly recommended. SJG
Morally more low key than Girlfriend in a Coma', but a nice insistence on our responsibility to re-make ourselves. Some quotes that appealed:
"People lose the ability to make friends somewhere around the time they buy their first expensive piece of furniture."
"... a mid-life crisis pony tail ..." (On a male)
"... once somebody's got your Visa number, they can pretty well clone you ..."
"... drag-and-click people ..."
SRG

Coupland, Douglas
Eleanor Rigby (2004)
Rating:- ****
On the cover the publishers have dug out a quote from Nicholas Blincoe with which I heartily agree: "Coupland's last four novels are so good and so distinctive that they seem to me a genuine seismic shift in the literary landscape." Well, to those four (‘Girlfriend in a Coma', ‘Miss Wyoming', ‘All Families are Psychotic" and ‘Hey, Nostradamus!'), this one can be added. In flavour it's nearest to ‘GIAC': there are hippie-like bits (particularly the ending) and close attention is paid to the thoughts and feelings of a central female character. Whilst never being depressing or making me feel uneasy (both of which could happen here as the book's main theme is loneliness.), Coupland has the ability to comment on and summarise contemporary life. A thoroughly recommended read with its fair share of quotes:
"It carried me back two decades ... it was the era of acid rain - a subject that seems long forgotten. The skies of Europe showered battery acid back then."
"I curled myself into a ball and cried quietly, doing that thing that only young people do, namely, feeling sorry for myself. Once you're passed thirty, you lose that ability; instead of feeling sorry for yourself, you turn bitter."
"... part of me was also enjoying a sense of inner freedom that I now know evaporates after about the age of twenty-five."
"The best thing about being young is being stupid. Or rather, the best thing about being young is being too stupid to know how stupid you really are."
"Jeremy's handwriting was appalling - a scrawl, really, not that mine's much better. Penmanship has gone the way of typewriters and vinyl records."
"(Talking of dealing with loneliness.) Books always tell me to find "solitude", but I've Googled their authors, and they all have spouses and kids and grandkids, as well as fraternity and sorority memberships." SJG
The only flaw is that the story needed a female character as narrator but Coupland could not quite keep up the right voice for a female, and male psyche showed through the veneer from time to time. However, this is a minor quibble. Coupland's strength is to show life as it is with warts and all, but save it from being depressing by his wry humour and gentle suggestion that as we're all in the same boat we may as well make the best of it. SRG

Coupland, Douglas
Jpod (2006)
Rating:- ****
Nice to have an author who, given an occasional hiccup, shows a steady improvement in his ability to craft a novel. (Unlike many - taking Ishiguro as just one example - who seem to be all over the place so that you just don't know whether the next novel is going to be good, bad or indifferent.) Coupland has always had the ability to write about the generation born in the 1970s (for whom he coined the term ‘Generation X'), and additionally has always been able to pepper his novels with excellent, pertinent phrases/sentences:
(Visiting his mother's home) "... I once found a pile of cleaning products that predated bar-coding on a hallway shelf.";
(About a plane's passenger information screen), "And do we really need to know that the outside temperature is -59 degrees Fahrenheit? Does this information comfort us with the knowledge that should we crash and somehow survive, death by exposure will be swift and merciful?"
Here Coupland has revisited a scenario previously used in his ‘Microserfs' - a small group of IT workers, in this case programmers working on a computer game. But here we have a far more mature work which takes more chances: the author is himself a character in the novel and he is now prepared to analyse the characters' situations perceiving them as autistic and arguing the case well. The book is also peppered with typographical quirks - eg listing ‘pi' to several thousand decimal places - which could have been a real turn-off, but which adds to the flavour of time and place. The only downside is that if the reader has no knowledge of computer games and is unaware of computer jargon then a lot of the jokes/perceptions could be lost. With that proviso it comes highly recommended. SJG
The author has an superb awareness of the jargon and trammel of modern, global life and reflects it back at the reader so that it nearly seems comprehensible, cutting through it to the cultural structures and morality that support it. It is light-hearted, even farcical in parts, with a mother who has a business growing pot and has an embarrassing time disposing of the corpse of a ‘business' associate who tries to cheat on a deal. The characters are all ‘sub-autistic' but there is great affection in the way that they are portrayed and interact. It is also good on parents and grown-up children with the latter being somewhat exasperated by the waywardness of the former. SRG

Crace, Jim
Quarantine (1997)
Rating:- ****
If my memory serves me correctly (which is not a given), this won the Booker Prize. And, albeit not knowing what the competition was, a worthy winner I should say. Here Crace does for Jesus' 40 days in the Wilderness, what T.S. Eliot did for the Wise Men in The Journey of the Magi'. OK, not quite up to that standard, but at 240+ pages Crace doesn't have the advantage of poem's brevity which, of course, allowed Eliot to mull over every word. Along with Jesus there's a motley collection of six misfits sharing the same area of caves in the wilderness. The emphasis is very much on realism and he's particularly good on the arid scrubland and its natural history. (From my experience bird-watching in Israel, he can't be faulted on his ornithological comments.) Of course I bring to the novel my agnostic/atheist baggage, and I suppose someone of a more religious inclination may object, but I doubt it - I think Jesus was portrayed with respect and a certain amount of awe, unlike the rest of the men here who are enough to turn one into a rabid feminist. These characters, including the far more sympathetically drawn females are all interesting. The writing is good. Nothing to complain about. Recommended, and not that far off the ***** accolade. SJG
Crace includes at the start a medical quote which puts the limit of human life deprived of food and drink at 30 days. Historically we don't know whether Jesus fasted completely (after all most fasts are dawn to dusk affairs). Crace has Jesus fasting completely, and suffering the very real consequences. However he also succeeds in conveying how singular a person Jesus was. He already had a strange charisma and a careless way of healing others but was somewhat gauche and even naive. The experience of the total fast begins to refine him - to pure Spirit? We are left with questions: Did he die? What if he had died? The latter are fascinating as I suppose it raises all the issues around the crucifixion and the resurrection, the idea of being born again in the spirit and the necessity of faith/belief for real change to occur in people's lives. SRG

Davies, Norman
Europe: A History
Rating:- ****
Large (1300+) dense pages and very successful. His main point is that when we talk of Europe' we usually mean just Western Europe. Here there's a lot of stuff about Poland, Rumania, Ukraine etc. The core of the book is a bog-standard history full of kings/queens, battles and religious changes - straight-forward, well-written but uninspiring. However added to this are lots of excellent maps/diagrams and a large number (over 100) of mini-articles. These can be about anything - choosing three at random - A Brief History of Jewish Ghetto', El Cid and the Cult of National Heroes', The Codpiece'. These articles are excellent and raise the book beyond the level of the mundane. PS. It's very heavy to read in bed. SJG

Davies, Robertson
The Lyre of Orpheus (1988)
Rating:- ****
Firstly this book cleared up an age-old query. In Elizabeth von Arnim's ‘Mr Skiffington' there is a lovely paragraph that I've quoted elsewhere, where the author discusses the various ages that a woman goes through - ‘Young and Exquisite', ‘Lovely as Ever', ‘Wonderful' and, finally, ‘the Lapland Night condition'. Regarding the last phrase, I knew what von Arnim meant but didn't know where the reference came from. Now I do, courtesy of the present volume where he quotes an extract from Wordsworth's ‘To a Young Lady who had been reproached for taking long walks in the country':
‘Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,
Nor leave thee, when grey hairs are nigh,
A melancholy slave;
But an old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.'
Thank you, Mr Davies. Now on to this book. Third volume in ‘The Cornish Trilogy'. The previous two had been categorised in the ‘Enjoyable' category, but this one is the best of the three and deserves a ‘Recommendation'. But to get the most out of it you will need to read the previous two - indeed am not sure how a newcomer to the Trilogy would react if plunged in here as many of the characters have been fully established in the earlier volumes. The plot - the writing and production of a new opera in Hoffman's 19th century style - is excellent, the characters are interesting and, best of all, Davies does not dazzle us (see review of ‘What's Bred in the Bone' elsewhere) with his erudition and writing skills. Not that there isn't plenty of erudition and interesting writing, it's just that they seem less up-front and better fitted into the overall scheme of things. For example, all the research about King Arthur and the Round Table is seamlessly integrated. After a slightly shaky start with ‘The Rebel Angels' this trilogy certainly picks up and indeed the whole is certainly greater than the sum of the parts and thoroughly deserves a ‘Recommendation'. SJG
I enjoyed the academic conversations, which have every right to be in here as the main characters are connected to a university. The main character - Simon Darcourt - is attractive and full, making up for some rather sketchy others. SRG

De Bernières, Louis
Introduction to The Book of Job
Rating:- ****
This is sharp witty erudite - great pleasure to read - example:-
"That phrase about the patience of Job' could not be further from the mark. Job is, for all but three of the forty-two chapters, exasperated by his comforters, reduced to abject misery by his afflictions and disillusioned and furious with God. The defiance of Job' would have been a far more apposite figure of speech to have passed into the language. His comforters have all the usual inane, pious platitudinous, facile morsels for God-wisdom at their fingertips but it is Job who has all the passion and all the grasp of the real paradoxes implicit in the idea of theodicy." So he can write and some say that one or two of his earlier - not so well-known novels - are much better than C.C.M. MP

Desai, Kiran
The Inheritance of Loss (2006)
Rating:- ****
2006 Booker Prize winner and a distinct improvement over the disappointing fare of the last three years (Banville, Hollinghurst, Pierre). I think I read that, in terms of sales, the Booker winner has been less of a blockbuster recently, but given the aforesaid quality, one wonders whether it'll ever regain its former prestige. This one is a nice safe choice going back to an Anglo-Indian author - a species that has had one deserved winner in the past (Roy), and should, by rights, have produced several more (Seth, Mistry etc). Desai writes well, can structure a book and presents interesting characters. Not knowing the other contenders, I can see this as a committee-type choice and few critics will be able to carp at its competency. However here's a couple of moans to start them off. Firstly there is no character development. Secondly the ‘plot' (insurrection of the Nepalese community in north-east India in the 1980s) doesn't really start until halfway and there is too much back-history with the result that the novel lacks forward momentum. Finally having been in awe of the Anglo-Indian novel in the 1990s I must say that now I feel that I want something different - feel that I've already got the t-shirt. SJG
I was more impressed by this novel. It is successful in throwing into relief the complex human causes and consequences of small and large-scale inequality between people and nations. This is done without didacticism, just through the setting, characters' lives and telling phrases. It is fairly bleak but not quite Hardyesque because the author shows all the time how people can change their own fate at least to some extent and, though generous, loving actions are in short supply, they are the only ones that lead to any happiness. SRG

De Vries, Pieter
Slouching towards Kalamazoo (1983)
Rating:- ****
De Vries is a ‘five star' writer in my book who never (except possibly ‘The Blood of the Lamb') wrote a ‘five star' book. He is, for me, a master of comic episodes. Sometimes they build up quite well into a whole but they remain episodes, gloriously funny at best but not with the cumulative resonance as in such masters as Waugh and Amis (the father). None of this reduces my pleasure in reading him for his stance/outlook or whatever is completely sympathetic. One sometimes thinks like him, if only one could write so! In this book great play is made of the set book, ‘The Scarlet Letter' being taught to the eighth grade by Maggie Doubloon: "At last it can be told! The sex revolution actually began in North Dakota when the thirteen year old under-achiever Anthony got his teacher in trouble." Example: "It was Spring, and she had on what must have been a new Easter outfit. It consisted of a dusky pink linen suit and a hat like a shot fowl. It was tilted down one side of her face at an intendedly jaunty angle, but recalling rather something plunging to earth in the autumn weather. This image to be linked with that of men crouched in duck blinds or taking aim from rowboats in the pitiless weft of things: predators themselves predestined prey in the immemorial Necessity; kin together not only with the poor feathered thing plummeting earthward in the gray dawn, but with all sentient life locked forever in communal doo. That kind of hat." Martin Seymour Smith sums it up so well. "His main interest is to let his comic vigour fly to the best effect. Surrealism has influenced him, but he is not a surrealist: it is the things his characters say that are surrealist - and they are the kinds of things that ‘ordinary' people do say. A careful reading of his large output reveals that he has a more serious theme than may at first seem apparent: he wants to demonstrate that a religious scepticism is a better attitude than a puritan or an atheistic. He is a superb satirist." (Novels and Novelists: A Guide to the World of Fiction. (1980)) Poetry and fiction obviously meant a lot to de Vries. He wrote for the ‘New Yorker' and was editor of ‘Poetry' magazine, but he treats it all with a blithe irreverence and no "superstitious veneration". "She spoke a patois which on closer hearing turned out to be correct English; "Had I but been she" she would say and "anyone's else" (Could that be right?)" (‘Comfort me with Apples') De Vries appears to be seriously out of print though hopefully is still to be discovered lurking on the shelves of distant West Yorkshire libraries? MP

Dibdin, Michael
Cosi Fan Tutti (1996)
Rating:- ****
Subtitled "An Aurelio Zen Mystery", of which this seems to be the fifth. Aurelio Zen is a laid-back Italian police detective who, no doubt for reasons contained in an earlier book in the series, finds himself transferred to Naples, which gives Dibdin the opportunity to bring to our attention the problems and pleasures of that city. I must really read another in the series to see if this one is typical as I have the feeling that it isn't. It is unlike any police procedural that I've ever read. From a realistic perspective the plotting is ludicrous with a twist/development every two or three pages, with characters that are true caricatures, and the whole has a frenzied, chaotic pace. Surely he hasn't kept up this for all the other books in the series. I have my suspicions that, in terms of style, this is a one-off. The title, of course, comes from the Mozart opera and Dibdin nicks that unbelievably silly story-line from that work. I think that what the author is trying to do is create a novel which has the same feeling and tone to the opera, complete with big finale as all the idiotic misunderstandings are made clear. As such I think that Dibdin has been very ambitious in using the police procedural genre and, I believe, has been extremely successful in doing so. Overall quite unexpected, quite amusing and much appreciated. SJG
Having read the 1990 'Vendetta' I think Dibdin is just developing Aurelio Zen to his logical conclusion. Not so much laid-back as studiously indolent, having been roasted for doing his job conscientiously before, he throws himself into a determination to do as little as possible. Through a series of most enjoyable farcical shifts, he ends up solving outstanding crimes between gangsters completely without intention. The Da Ponti plot provides a real tongue-in-cheek framework. Good fun. SRG

Dibdin, Michael
Ratking (1988)
Rating:- ****
Another Aurelio Zen police-procedural. This really is a very good series. Not only a reasonable plot, and an excellent (and flawed, naturally) hero but also great slices of humour and irony. And, although this can be considered one of the better ones in the series, the consistency of all of them is perhaps their greatest strength. The only fault here is that the ending, as is common in police-procedurals, is a little rushed. Ends don't have to be tied up in the last ten pages: I'm quite prepared to let an author take 50 or so pages about it. The story, incidentally, is set in Prague and Dibdin has some great fun pointing out the foibles of the locals. SJG
Again, there are clever approaches to Italian corruption which Zen plays at its own game, and there are some sideswipes at England. The weakest aspect of the end is that Dibdin resorts to telling the story from ‘inside the heads' of the main suspects. A bit more time and trouble could have maintained the perspective from Zen while still conveying the wonderful foibles of a dysfunctional family. SRG

Dickens, Charles
Journalism 1833-1839
Rating:- ****
Really at £12.99, this is an expensive way of buying Sketches by Boz'. Having said that, the additional things about the Mudfrog Association are good, the introduction and notes are clear and helpful, and the glossary is excellent. After recently reading a lot of modern stuff, this was a welcome relief. It's by no means perfect - it's very bitty as any collection of short stories' spread over 500 pages would be, and some of the writing is pretty uninspired. However at its best it's very funny and reminiscent of Pickwick Papers'. Most of the writing comes from 1834-1836 and what's especially interesting is to see how dramatically Dickens improved his skills over this period. I'm pretty sure I could blindfold' date most of these pieces within six months. SJG

Dickens, Charles
Selected Short Stories (Penguin English Library)
Rating:- ****
Four stories: (i) The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton, (ii) The Baron of Grogzwig, (iii)A Confession found in a Prison in the Time of Charles II, (iv) To Be Read at Dusk. All these are nothing more than anecdotes but they are vivid and engage the interest at once. More substantial is The Signalman' which had read before in a collected English Short Stories'. Really eerie about life in the signal box. Where the line runs through a ravine. The Impressionistic Sketches' are from Sketches by Boz' and The Uncommercial Traveller'. There is a section on Dramatic Monologues and then the really fine George Silverman's Explanation' which bears an odd similarity to Great Expectations' and was written at about the same time, and was the reason why I got hold of this collection in the first place. MP

Dickens, Charles
Great Expectations (1861)
Rating:- ****
Third book in our Literature Class: "Nineteenth Century Literature and Society". Our learning objectives are said to be: "To achieve an overview of the century's preoccupations through its writers. To gain an understanding of the major issues/themes presented by the texts. To create links between the texts and the social and philosophical upheavals of the times. To continue developing analytical skills and articulating in written and oral forms." Not all class members are too keen on following all these, no doubt, quite blameless goals. Student X, his book-mark in page 3, comes in with (Dec 1st) "Do you know? I have just received my first Xmas card", and Student Y was only narrowly prevented from explaining to us the difference between oral sex and other kinds. She has majored also in Princess Di Studies. But we do have a fresh import - a real live literary critic/analyst (not the Tutor) recently given up on a Keele Univ. Masters degree in American Lit. due to it not being up to scratch. Student Z gives the class more width - pulls the defences of the irrelevant apart. Talks about the feminist text', the sexual text' - has been developing analytical skills in spades and articulating them on a regular basis. I will say little of G. Expectations except that curiously we approached it from the book/film angle. Z is not interested in the connection (if any) between Book and Film but only (where the film comes in) in the Theory of Film eg its connection with Stagecoach', influence of John Ford, camera angle etc. I missed some of this so was unable to gauge effect on X and Y though they do have to concentrate their minds on not agreeing with him. MP

Dickens, Charles
A Christmas Carol (1843)
Rating:- ****
I broke off a novel by Charles Palliser to read this. Palliser seems to be aiming to emulate the plot and style of the Dickensian novel in the late twentieth century. And while his plots hold up in comparison, you have only to read a few pages of Dickens to see the unbridgeable gulf between in the quality of writing: "They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have been run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again." Of course anything by Dickens is a joy to read, and in particular to re-read, but I find the Christmas books', along with Edwin Drood', pretty near the bottom of his oeuvre. My vision of Christmas is closer to Scrooge's than Dickens', and I find the sentimentality, which I usually have no trouble with in Dickens, to be loaded on in too many shovelfuls. And as for Tiny Tim ... Ugh! SJG
I was struck this time around (?tenth) by three things. Firstly the tone of addressing the reader as if telling the story round the fire in the face of interruptions as people get settled: "Marley was dead, to begin with ... There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate." Secondly, the tongue-in-cheek jokes, eg about door nails versus coffin nails, and the use of American bills of exchange to exemplify worthless items. Thirdly, Scrooge's wit - scoring off those who came for donations and observing to Marley that "there's more of grave than gravy about you." I think it's a gem of its kind - moral tales - and Dickens does not take it too seriously either: "He had no further intercourse with Spirits but lived the Total Abstinence principle ever afterwards." SRG
This is a case of a book becoming a myth - the story being known by everyone' quite apart from whether they've read it, seen it on TV or if it's any good or not. It is not one of Dickens' masterpieces but its power has caused it to be universally known among the literate. The figure of Scrooge (like the very different Widmerpool) will live for longer than most. The first feature to note then is the parable which Dickens has fleshed out. The second is the extraordinary energy which Dickens has put into some of his descriptions. Mr Fezziwig's Ball is wonderful example:- "In came a fiddler with a music-book, and up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach aches. In came Mrs Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin the baker. In came the cook, with her brother's particular friend the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, who was suspected of not having board enough from his master; trying to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who was proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress. In they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling; in they all came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they all went, twenty couples at once; hands half round and back again the other way; down the middle and up again; round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping;" etc, etc. The words, the rhythm of the words as they pour out seem to convey the energy of Mr Fezziwig's Ball in themselves. I don't know if Dickens read this passage at his public performances but one can imagine him doing so! MP

Dickens, Charles
Hard Times (1854)
Rating:- ****
It was the best of Dickens, it was the worst of Dickens. Wrong book to mis-quote from but it sums it up. Written during his ‘best' phase - ‘Dombey & Son', ‘Little Dorrit', ‘Bleak House' - it contains some stunning writing: funny, perceptive and innovative. Unfortunately most of this is in the first half and after that the nuggets are fairly well spaced out. The attack against Utilitarianism comes over well, though towards the end you feel like you are being hit over the head with it by one of Coketown's steam-hammers. On the negative side some of the plotting is excruciating, he bottles out of having a real go at some of the social conditions, and his young women are as ever (with the honourable exception of whatshername in ‘Our Mutual Friend') angelic unearthly figures. Even worse, the central male working-class character, who Dickens meant us to revere, is a sanctimonious long-winded bore. That said, there's stuff here - for example, Mr Bounderby going on about his roots (which is clearly a precursor of Monty Python's ‘I was born in a paper bag in the middle of the road') - that is unmatched in English Literature. When he's on form, there's no one to touch him. SJG

Dickens, Charles
A House To Let (1858)
Rating:- ****
Not just Charles Dickens, as this was written by Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and a poetess, Adelaide Anne Proctor, as well - and it's less than one hundred pages long. Careful perusal of the footnotes (Why no proper introduction in a new edition that costs £6.99? - shame on Hesperus Press.) tells you that this story was written in six sections by the above for a Christmas edition of Dickens' magazine, ‘Household World'. The poetry section I could well have done without but the rest is excellent Victorian story-telling. One section by Dickens is clearly his work and the Gaskell is noticeably different but for the rest I found it impossible to separate Dickens and Collins. The story contains many of the staples of the time: sentimentality, a will dictating the course of events, fascinating and potentially evil minor characters, family betrayals, a mystery etc. It's been some time since I read any Victorian literature but this brief dose makes me wonder why I just don't ignore the modern stuff and continually re-read the works of Dickens, Collins, Thackeray, Gaskell etc. SJG
An engaging read which celebrates the art of story-telling for its own sake. SRG

Doyle, Roddy
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993)
Rating:- ****
Plenty of stars for this. The comedy is not as ebullient perhaps as in The Barrytown Trilogy' being eaten away at by the matrimonial distress/unrest. Some wonderful moments eg when they have been stealing the butcher's sawdust:
"He went in to the fridge and came back with an animal's leg. It was over his shoulder. He was wearing a white coat. I thought it was a cow's, the leg.
- Over here.
We followed him behind the counter to the wooden block. It was clean. I could see scrape marks from the brush. I'd seen him with the brush before. It was the same shape as a brush but instead of bristles there was metal. He got the leg from his back to the block with just barely a flick of his hand. It slapped the wood. He let us feel it.
- Now, lads.
His knife was in a scabbard on a hook above the table. He took it out. It made a swish. He let us look properly at it.
- That cost me hundreds of pounds, lads, he said.
- Don't touch it.
We weren't going to.
- Now look here he said.
He slid the knife over the meat - just slid it - and it came away: a chop. He made no effort; he leaned the edge on the leg, that was all. No noise, no tension. He was sweating though. He broke the chop's bone with a different knife, a cleaver. He thumped it onto the bone, once, twice and the chop fell flat on the block.
- Now he said - That's all there is to it. And that's what I'll do to you feckers the next time I catch you robbin' my sawdust.
He still looked nice and friendly
_ Sprinkle it all back on the floor on your way out. Bye, bye lads.
He went back to the fridge. I made sure that all my sawdust was even all over the floor."
The passage, as elsewhere in this book, depends on exact pacing and description. Like another wholly different comic writer - Barbara Pym. Some short blurb to agree with:- "Truthful, hilarious, painfully sad." Tom Shone. Spectator. MP

Dreiser, Theodore
Sister Carrie (1900)
Rating:- ****
American Realist, end of the 19th century. He is extremely clumsy writer. It may be something to do with the German genes/origins but the grammar is now and then hilariously back to front. No one seems ever to have proof read this book. Carrie is a poor Chicago girl who lives what was then regarded as a completely amoral life in which she lives with one man and is then more or less abducted by another who is a thief and eventual drop-out. She rises above her social condition' and becomes a successful actress. This was seen as quite unacceptable at the time and this novel only got published after huge parts were cut out. There are now several versions around but the Penguin Modern Classics edition is the fully restored text. The book is impressive in its clumsy way though it has been said that the decline of Hurstfield the thief is almost as painful to read about as to have experienced. The essence of the book seems to me to lie in the convincing background of life in Chicago and New York in the 1890s. You feel he really knows about the kind of life that went on and how people felt and thought. MP
A new author to me and read on your recommendation. Thoroughly enjoyed it and will no doubt seek more. You can see where Updike et al come from. I love the attention to things' - "the materialist conception of individual behaviour". Also unlike you and seemingly everybody else, I had no problem with the grammar/language - something I'm usually fussy about.
"People in general attach too much importance to words. They are under the illusion that talking effects great results. As a matter of fact, words are, as a rule, the shallowest portion of all the argument."
Nice one! SJG
I think it's an important book in that it deals with the way in which city life forces people to be pragmatic about morality. Whatever his finesse for grammar, Dreiser uses language extremely well to take you blow by blow through actions of characters which should' be shocking, but which refuse to be so. Kurt Vonnegut's "So it goes" (from Slaughthouse 5') is foreshadowed here in the morals surrounding sex, leaving the way clear for him, Vonnegut, to deal with those surrounding death. SRG

Dubus III, Andre
House of Sand and Fog (1999)
Rating:- ****
Rather good. American story of two groups of people fighting over possession of a cheap home. On one side: 35-year-old female ex-drink/drug addict with policeman boyfriend. On the other: fairly recently arrived family of Iranians, having only just escaped from homeland when Shah was toppled. Characterisation is top-drawer, in particular the Persian family. (Interesting how a lot of the best American fiction deals with the immigrant experience - no doubt there's a thesis about it somewhere.) Writing is very good and the structure deserves praise. Problems? Well it could have done with being less thriller-ish, Dubus' art is too good to be wasted on a novel that tends to rush you through to its climax. And the climax was a real problem to me. The blurb, quite fairly, speaks of ‘a gut-wrenching tragedy'. You want to stop the characters walking into disaster, but like in Hardy or ‘King Lear' you know the worst is going to happen. I may be getting soft but I can't willingly watch ‘Lear' and I will be quite happy if I never have to go near another Hardy. Like some good things to dilute my tragedies. No chance here. With that proviso, a very good book. ‘Three stars' from me. SJG
‘Three stars' is too mean for this novel. It is excellent in every way. However, it is just too harrowing a read. When gross tragedy feels like relief, you know the author has succeeded in establishing an unbearable tension! The fact that it is about a house and that none of the excellent characters are evil, just trying to live, gets you empathising straight away. But there is more. The house was left to the woman by her father. It is all she has after losing her husband and opportunities, partly through drink and drugs. The Iranian family fled Iran to save their lives but they are looking for a pay-off in a country they, at bottom, despise. As people, both sides can recognise each other's needs and show compassion. But their interests as citizens are dramatically opposed: they each want different things from the same (house) country. There can be no conciliation. SRG

Durrell, Lawrence
The Alexandria Quartet: Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), Clea (1960)
Rating:- ****
I'd just started reading this when I overheard someone talking about it and complaining that it was "all surface". Can't say I disagree, but what a wonderful surface: full of colours, smells and set-pieces. This is a re-read after about forty years and from that first read I could still recollect some of the imagery. Thought I might be disappointed this time around but no. Took me quite a bit of 'Justine' to get into the fairly dense writing style, but then thought 'Balthazar' and 'Mountolive' 'five-star reads. The big let-down is 'Clea' where he seems to be tying up too few loose ends and hence including an unnecessary amount of padding, and where he virtually repeats one of the set-scenes from earlier in the Quartet. What will of course always stay with me is Lawrence's sense of place (I really wish I could have visited Alexandria at that time.), and his ability to conjure up brilliantly coloured scenes in the mind's eye - scenes that often reminded me of colourists like Matisse. What I had forgotten was the comedy, especially whenever Scobie - dead or alive - appeared on the scene. Granted there were times when I was faced by a mass of words that seemed to be saying very little, but this was a small price to pay for the many highlights. Is this the most significant piece of British fiction to be written in the quarter of a century following WWII? Such a pity that he seemed to run out of steam at the end. SJG
I first read it at the age of about 13-14. This was too young to get the full benefit, and I also have the feeling that I read the novels in separately-bound volumes out of sequence - which cannot have done much to increase comprehension! However, the colours and atmosphere of Alexandria struck me and stayed with me over the years. There was a sense of coming home this time. I agree with SJG about the relative strength of Mountolive and weakness of Clea, but the whole is impressive. SRG

Edgeworth, Maria
Castle Rackrent & The Absentee (1800 & 1812)
Rating:- ****
Combined available for £1. The former is only 50 pages long and concerns the downfall of an Irish family told by one of its servants. Well written, very funny and a little gem. Essential stuff and written in 1800! The latter alas is a bitter disappointment. It's four times longer and she simply hasn't got the skills to go on this long. The writing is poor and the structure and ideas blindingly obvious. Difficult to believe both novels were written by the same person. SJG
I'm not so scathing about the second given the period it was written. It just overdoes the moral point. Amazingly modern' feel to both. Who was this woman? SRG

Eliot, George
Silas Marner (1861)
Rating:- ****
Our Syllabus (from Lit. Class) lists this as Silas Mariner which has caused amusement and gives our new Post-Modernist/Structuralist class member, Z, some ammunition for textual jokes. After all Auden wrote a poem with the line: "and the poets have names for the sea" which was misprinted as "and the ports ... " etc. He thought this was better and allowed it to stand. This book has been received with enthusiasm by the Class. It has enabled Z to point out to the less sexually aware of us that when Silas locks his door and gets his gold coins out and fingers them lovingly, this is a masturbation fantasy. George Eliot, however didn't need to know this. It was about the third time of asking for me and had not liked it too much before but found it much warmer and funnier and less morbid than expected. She is particular good at the humourous pub chat and the way a particular drinker is set up by the group and how folk come out with their obsessive tales. She must have spent a few hours sitting in a quiet corner listening in. MP

Ellroy, James
White Jazz (1992)
Rating:- ****
This is OK. Son of Dashiell Hammett and James Cain - hard-nosed cops and robbers. Although set in L.A. in the late 1950s (complete with minor parts for Howard Hughes, Joan Crawford etc) it's much more 1990s in feel - lots of sex, violence and many more dead bodies. Like Hammett it's often difficult to follow exactly what's going on (although I'm not sure how important that is). Writing is good - very tight. Sometimes it causes confusion and you have to re-read a paragraph to get the gist. However it is very effective. Overall it's a rather bleak novel but I enjoyed its energy and will certainly look for more by this author. SJG
I had to re-start this but I'm glad I made the effort. Hint: read slowly at the start and let the book dictate the pace or you get totally lost. Very well plotted. Violence on a revolting scale. However, a very up-market detective novel. SRG

Ellroy, James
L.A. Confidential (1990)
Rating:- ****
I'm not sure how many people are going to get through this one for our Book & Film Club. As much as any (if not more so) of this author's works, this is jammed full of violence, brutal attacks, murders, appalling rapes and many references to hard and soft porn. Not my cup of tea at all, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and think it's a great book. On the basis of this, White Jazz' and American Tabloid', I believe we have here one of the truly original voices of the late 20th century. He takes the American pulp fictional world of P.I.s and detectives in the 1930s and'40s - best personified by Chandler, Hammett and Cain - and reworks it into something new and vibrant. The writing is dynamic and exciting, and never falters for any one of the (almost) 500 pages. Apart from some of the subject material, criticism could be made against the structure which is so complex that I defy anybody to stay with the machinations of the plot on a first read. But I found that this didn't really matter and instead helped to enhance the overall effect. Indeed, on reflection, what this book reminded me of was the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch - a vast kaleidoscope of grotesque images splattered all over the canvas. I took one *' off my rating as this book has neither the scope nor the ambition of American Tabloid' - it is after all just a tale of LAPD's success and failure in solving a number of interrelated homicide cases. Also the last couple of pages are fairly corny Hollywood-type ending stuff. Provided you can stomach all the sex and violence (which is written in a very dispassionate manner and thankfully not lingered over), this comes highly recommended. SJG
His no-verb' sentences contribute to a punchy, spare style which takes you along faster than you can reflect, thus giving you the feel of being in the action: Hill Street Blues' for another visual parallel. The world portrayed is post-moral; people go to incredible lengths to build and preserve images which play to a conventional morality, but all of it is propped up, like a film-set facade, with a crude and, in this case, rotten framework. There is no pretence that politicians are virtuous or policemen straight. I suspect that this is realistic, but still cling to some hopes! Even the hero', Ed Exley, is not squeaky clean - just clever. I'm afraid the women are adjuncts and are only properly valued as (dead) mothers. However we can't have everything. SRG

Ellroy, James
The Cold Six Thousand (2001)
Rating:- ****
Another novel that confirms my view that Ellroy is a major novelist. For all intents it's a sequel to ‘American Tabloid' moving the story of corruption, FBI, mobsters, politicians into the 1960s. Here we have Vietnam, the fallout from JFK's death and a build-up to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. The writing is powerful and totally distinctive coming in a straight line from Raymond Chandler. It is however, like in Chandler, difficult to understand what's going on and the reader is torn between reading slowly to eke out the exact meaning and reading quickly to appreciate the power and pace of the novel. One improvement over earlier works is that while there is still a fair amount of violence, Ellroy tends to glorify it less here. All that said, he doesn't quite reach the heights of ‘American Tabloid'. Perhaps the sheer novelty of reading that novel first, has taken some of the edge off this one. More likely I think that the writing here is less inventive, the scenes not built up as dramatically as in the former work. At 650+ pages this felt about 150 pages overlong; there were times when the forward momentum seemed to have been lost. Nevertheless ‘recommended' but read ‘American Tabloid' first. SJG
Written in very short sentences, usually with proper noun rather than pronoun. This makes it seem like a child's reader. It works however as a way of keeping logical pathways clear and allowing the reader to understand at least some of what is going on in a very complex scenario. The violence is vile but the style keeps it at a distance - goings on in the butcher's shop. An impressive work. Could reality be this corrupt? SRG

Erdich, Louise
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001)
Rating:- ****
The majority of Erdich's novels - this is her ninth - seem to be set, like this one, on the same (American) Indian reservation and revolve around broadly the same set of characters. So not only are the themes - gradual destruction of the culture and environment, Indian spirit world competing/co-existing with the Catholic church - similar to my previous Erdich read, ‘Tracks' , but additionally many of the individuals re-appear. The focus of this novel is a Catholic priest who spends over seventy years at the reservation, in general fitting in with the natives and doing surprisingly good work. The ‘unique selling point' of the book is that the priest is a woman living as a man. Like with ‘Tracks' I was surprised how much I enjoyed this novel and how consistent and believable the imagined world is. There are faults however. The structure is on the point of collapse at times, especially when Erdich inserts one of her previously published short stories. Secondly there is a surprisingly poor sense of place, and she does little to help the reader visualise most of her characters. Nevertheless this is intelligent, dense storytelling. It is an improvement over ‘Tracks', one can feel the author taking a delight in her work and is very enjoyable. SJG
She is particularly successful in showing how the dogma and tenets of the Catholic faith become like water running into sand when they meet the ‘primitive' faith of the Indians. The central priest character is shown to be a convincing Christian if a heretic Catholic, and the issue of saintliness is examined by the comparison between him/her and a local nun who appears to be the author of miracles. I very much enjoyed reading this book and did not want it to end even though the structure in the last quarter gets rather messy. SRG

Farrell, J.G.
The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)
Rating:- ****
Worthy Booker Prize winner. Excellently written with a good eye for detail. Krishnapur holds a complacent British community in India until, in 1857, the Mutiny erupts, wreaking havoc on their lives. Quite clearly Farrell has undertaken a vast amount of research and is largely successful in integrating it, although at times it gives the novel an episodic feel. Couple of other minor faults. First of all I would have liked him to have spent more time before the siege getting to know the main characters - we no sooner learn who they are than they are battling for their lives. Secondly Farrell has a sardonic streak and he is only too happy, particularly in the early stages, to show the British community as comprising largely of fools and egoists. One doubts that such people would have been generally able to maintain control of the locals given the overwhelming odds. The vast majority of people out there must surely have been conscientious and capable for the whole thing to work for so long. But let me not carp. This is a splendid book and there's little excuse for anybody not to read it. SJG
The characters, quite amusingly and unrealistically wrestle with the philosophical questions of the place of the church, materialism versus spirituality and women's place, while they man their siege positions. This adds to the impression that Farrell is using the characters to give us Farrell's hindsight on the times rather than simply plunging us into them empathetically. This sardonic distance is well-handled and gives the book its unusual flavour which only occasionally irritated and which succeeded in making even the most grisly scenes nearly farcical. SRG

Faulks, Sebastian
Bird Song
Rating:- ****
Starts with 100 pages of developing sexual relationship c1910, then moves onto WWI interspersed with bits from 1970s. Well written and powerful stuff. A lot of the war writing is not for the squeamish - descriptions of the mess bullets/bombs etc can make of a man's body. Added to this, quite a bit of the novel is set in tunnels which were burrowed under the German tenches - claustrophobia and all that. It's not a great book though - the story carries it along rather than the moral framework. Also there's a climactic ending in the war bit and this falls flat - his writing skills can't cope. However it's very good on the futility of war and just about scrapes a recommendation. SJG
I'm much more impressed than that and believe the moral/spiritual framework is very strong. The novel is about' a search for meaning by the hero in the face of the most extreme pointlessness the world has yet invented - trench warfare. Faulks succeeds in showing how the drive for life is simply one of reasserting itself through carrying on the line - (not necessarily biologically, as one of the most moving lines goes from a miner whose child has died to the great grandson of the hero) - and looking for meaning in human love. Faulks is a master of description of the physical - sex, fear, injury. The structure is satisfyingly crafted to contain the ideas - ending with two very different sort of births/rebirths and re-affirmation of life. SRG

Fischer, Tibor
The Thought Gang
Rating:- ****
Heavily influenced by Martin Amis. It's about' two bank robbers: one a one-legged-handed-eyed French criminal and the other a Cambridge philosophy don. Lots of strange things happen, lots of bits of philosophy (non-didactic), all bound together with a sharp writing style and many rather good one-liners. A couple of criticisms: firstly it's a bit too derivative of Amis and secondly some of the humour is a little undergraduate' - you feel he could do with maturing. Nevertheless - Recommended.
"Those who spout concern for others, the welfare n' solicitude fiends are the ones who bully waiters, neglect their children and who pay their gardeners pittances."
"The one big drawback to speaking German is that, by and large, you can only speak it with Germans." SJG
It reminded me more of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide' and I did find the smart remarks a bit 6th Form magazine-ish. However, well put together and worth the effort. SRG

Fitzgerald, Penelope
The Beginning of Spring (1988)
Rating:- ****
Short novel of an English family in pre-revolutionary Russia. The first contender for Book of the Year, although it can't really be counted as it's 13 years old. Simply written with a fair amount of dialogue, I suppose it can be regarded as a comedy of social manners, albeit a slightly quirky one. The historical context provides a background but is not over-dominating. It has a particular charm and you're never quite sure what's coming next. Perhaps its greatest strength is that she manages to keep the whole thing going at the same high level for the novel's entire length. I must find more of this author. B+. Recommended. SJG
I agree. The characters are nearly caricatures, but move round one another so elegantly, being true to themselves but ending up in situations they didn't expect. Delightful. SRG

Fitzgerald, Penelope
Human Voices (1980)
Rating:- ****
Wonderful. Possibly the most enjoyable P. Fitzgerald to date. Only 140 pages - it's about a group of eccentrics working for the BBC at the beginning of WWII. Constantly amusing/charming/quirky, it does for early broadcasting what Cold Comfort Farm' did for agriculture. Not to be missed.
"Annie was brought to her present excellent state of health entirely on fish and chips and tins."
" ... the scrupulously fair intonations of Selly Oak." SJG
Again, you can smell the atmosphere - bomb dust and rationed food. Very good. SRG

Forster, E.M.
Howards End (1960)
Rating:- ****
One of those books I must have read 30 years ago as the story was familiar at odd moments - other than that, had no memory of it. I got very enthusiastic over the first 100 pages and thought it would be an addition to my Top 50 books if such a thing ever comes to be compiled. There were interesting characters in a well-structured environment, an overseeing author acknowledging his presence with asides (a device I'm particularly fond of) and lots of sharp, interesting writing with oodles of quotable bits.
"Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken."
"... those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy." etc.
Well... It may have been love at first sight, but then the relationship started to break up, and little things started to annoy me. There were times when I could have strangled both of the sisters as their hectoring tones got on my nerves - my sympathies did move across to the Wilcox family as they had to put up with these two women, and I'm sure that wasn't Forster's intention. The plot started creaking, the incisive phrases/sentences seemed to miss their targets, and there was far too much pretentious, patronising and chauvinistic stuff:
" Yes, yes, but what has Leonard got out of life?'
Perhaps an adventure.'
Is that enough?'
Not for us. But for him.'"
(On people working in the country.) "Their hours were ruled ... by the movements of the crops and the sun. They were men of the first type only the sentimentalist can declare. But they kept to the life of daylight. They are England's hope." He's not being ironic is he? - I didn't come away with that impression. I'm probably being a bit harsh and overall there's a lot of good stuff and it certainly deserves a recommendation'. But there are major flaws. SJG
I did' Howards End for A' level and, returning, realise how much I took on board its philosophy lock, stock and barrel! I feel it is a jewel in its way - working its themes about the importance of personal relationships, the way death makes sense of life, the need to have a sense of I' and the ability to connect actions to their consequences in the lives and feelings of others. All are embedded yet available and little is superfluous. It is not a novel about character', but about human nature and the way society impinges on that. I can understand how its necessary didacticism might get quite under the skin of SJG. I don't think E.M. Forster is holding Margaret Schlegel up as an ideal - he is just pointing to the need for natures such as hers (and the previous Mrs Wilcox) to balance the single-minded obtuseness but necessary practicality of the Wilcoxes. SRG
What to say about this well-trodden track? Still recognisable as a distinguished classic. The Schlegels are beautifully done'. You feel Forster is on home ground. With the Wilcox family the author is pulling out all the stops to get them right and indeed to be sympathetic about them to a certain extent - but do they really convince? And Leonard? Very well done in many ways - but no. The gap between Bloomsbury and the Working Man looms too much in the background for Forster to paint. Only connect' - the admonishment is well meant but does he manage it himself? So what's so good about it? Where is the classic element? It is surely in the structure of the story/plot. Though he cannot always bring his characters into wholly believable life he does generally bring them into believable situations and conflicts. Nor is there is any doubt about this: he can generally bounce us (at least while reading) into believing. Beyond and behind all this is the quality of the novelist's mind, the delicacy of his perceptions. There are some weak passages when the author is speaking (generally where a touch of whimsy is found) but they are greatly outnumbered by the strong interventions where his grasp of the vital is so impressive. The Edwardian Age's structure of feeling' now looks a shade faded and remote, hardly surprisingly, but Forster still inspires respect. Betraying your country rather than your friends' has taken a few knocks through the Philby period but Forster's keynote of defiant individuality stands up well after nearly a century. MP

Forster, E.M.
A Passage to India (1924)
Rating:- ****
I was surprised that the themes in the book still resonate even though the setting has disappeared. That is Forster's genius - the analysis of the way people relate. There is more of the political here, rather forced on the book at the end as a plea for Indian self-rule, than in ‘Howard's End'. But the way in which people's assumptions about each other, and the nature of truth, get in the way of harmony remains valid. As in ‘Howard's End', we have an un-worldly character who seems to have the power to bring different people together, (Mrs Moore cf Mrs Wilcox). This one's death, too, signals the end of the possibility of concord. ‘The Indian Question' gets in the way of the novel being a masterpiece. However its exposure of herd morality still has much to teach us. SRG
Quite a disappointment after ‘Howard's End'. Nicely written but, with the climax in the middle, the structure is a bit of a mess. After reading Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry et al I felt his descriptions of, and perceptions about, the people and the culture of the sub-continent to be weak - rather like a tourist's view. And what is the point of most of the final section? Given the date of publication I accept that it is an important book that may have helped to change people's perceptions about the role of Empire, but it lacks a lot of edge of the afore-mentioned authors, and hasn't got the scope or power of the Paul Scott Quartet. I don't feel that it has aged very well. SJG
What is a Classic? Seymour-Smith gives this oldie the maximum 20 stars, letting four or five stars drop out of his ratings for ‘The Longest Journey' and ‘Howards End'. Of course the whole question of literary merit or whatever tends in this case to be obscured by the fact that this book caused something of a political furore if not scandal. Forster's angle on his material was the consideration of human motivation. Not himself attached to any creed or belief of a group he, with others of the Bloomsburies, believed in "personal relations". They were or should be sacrosanct. In India he saw that the British Raj was wholly at odds with this kind of feeling. He considered that he was being even-handed in his picture. After all he wasn't all that kind to the Indians who were full of contradictions. This gave grave offence to the British who found errors in his description of The Club and of the legal procedures as he showed them. The book took on a political role because it came at a time when colonial rule was beginning to be doubted at home and it hastened, with other factors, to bring questions of our rule and its continuance. A classic can be seen as a work that survives its contemporary success and continues to be printed and read. In the latest edition (2000) of the ‘Oxford Companion to English Literature' the novel is selected among the few which have had their plot summarised. MP

Francis, Dick
Twice Shy
Rating:- ****
Needed something for a quick fix. Read first about 10 years ago. Highly recommended despite Bingley thumbs down. About two brothers, (almost two books), expertise in guns and computers - racing only as means of betting. Straight forward writing, but tension intense. Do try. BP

Franzen, Jonathan
The Corrections (2001)
Rating:- ****
Highly praised novel. Franzen uses a middle-class family from hell to provide a searing indictment of modern American style, values and culture. Excellently written with characters that are so awful they make you squirm. There's even a climax when they are ‘forced' to be together at what I consider to be the worst time of year - Christmas. I have a suspicion that on another day I might have thought very highly of this. And indeed I admired it this time and can see exactly what the fuss is all about. But! I was glad to finish it. The characters came with virtually no redeeming features. The sledgehammer was just too big to crack this particular nut. Everything was remorselessly awful. Additionally, in telling the stories of five different characters I felt that he hadn't quite got the structure right. He spent too long with each person at a time and lost forward momentum - it became a wrench to move back in time when he moved onto the next character. Totally admirable but not totally enjoyable. ‘Three stars.' SJG
I can't agree about the negative points above. I did not feel that the characters were particularly/abnormally awful or that American culture was being criticised. The author's thesis - in the title - is carefully worked in various fields both personal and economic. The children fall over themselves to ‘correct' the effect their parents have had on them in their own lives and in bringing up their children. They make as big a mess of their lives as a result of the ‘correction' as their parents did. What we do see is the nature of the human condition - perhaps with too many of its warts. The advancing senility of the old father is pretty depressing but there are some moments of near farce. The insight of the author into the thoughts, actions, dialogue etc of the old, the women and different personalities is utterly admirable. The blurb mentions Mann's ‘Buddenbrooks' and this is not far-fetched. SRG

Frost, Robert (1874-1963)
Poetry of
Rating:- ****
Here again (cf Poetry of Edith Sitwell) trouble if you try to look at his poems as Twenties' objects/artifacts. He came to England from rural USA and became friendly with Edward Thomas whom he resembles to some extent. They could perhaps be defined as Georgians (they wrote about the 'country') who were aware of 'modern' rhythms - (ie other Georgians were supposedly not aware of 'modern' rhythms - too fond of beer and cricket and weekends in country houses - arch priest: Edward Marsh). To cut the cackle here is a poem we were given:

FIRE AND ICE (1923)
Some say the world will end in fire
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.

But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

The reference book says: "He established himself as one of the most popular of 20th century American poets (not a lot of competition for that title?) ... admired for the blend of colloquial and traditional in his verse ... But beneath the country lore and wisdom, his 'simple woodland philosophy' lay a more troubled, combative at times destructive spirit, both in his life and work, expressed in such poems as the one quoted and 'Bereft' (1928) which led to praise of him as a 'poet of terror':-

Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west were massed.
Out in the porch's sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Must have gotten abroad.
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.

No smart interbred inconsistencies here (Sitwell) or intellectually indirections (possibly false clues) as made fashionable in the 1920s (Eliot) but complex states of mind expressed with economy. A genuine poet - though one in a minor key? MP

Gaddis, William
A Frolic of His Own (1994)
Rating:- ****
Recently MP was writing about Samuel Beckett and he grouped him with writers such as Proust, Henry James and later Joyce where significance and boringness rub shoulders'. Well, here's a modern addition to your list. I rather rushed it - reading a 600-page hardback is uncomfortable in bed and it's too heavy to cart about on public transport - and hence got irritated by its incessant franticism and its dwelling on the same themes. Taken more slowly I'm sure that it would have been a more satisfying read - the boring bits' would have repaid more close scrutiny. Nevertheless a lot of writing is superb - it's nearly all dialogue and he has a wonderful ear for the spoken language:
" - You been to the theatre lately Mister Crease?
- Me? God no. Wad up your coat and jam it under the seat you've paid sixty dollars for where you can see exactly half the stage, hot as blazes and you can't cross your knees, the curtain goes up on a torrent of obscenity or some burntout star who's decided a revival of an old chestnut like your O'Neill there's his vehicle for immortality the minute he staggers onstage the audience explodes in applause and goes to sleep till intermission for the cigarette in the alley and that watery five dollar orange drink. End of the limited engagement the investors grab their tax breaks and status as patrons of the arts one thing you can be sure of, they're having a better time up there on the stage than you are."
Gaddis doesn't always make it quite so user-friendly' as above - there are no sections/chapters and few natural places to break off reading. Also he never says who's speaking at any one particular time, although with only a small cast of characters it soon becomes obvious. The story centres around the American middle-class obsession with money and especially the farcical lengths to which they are prepared to take litigation. It's a very black comedy, sometimes too black, but it is a comedy and he is not averse to the odd joke or two:
"she's not too reliable about movies, they showed that old Laughton picture once and she got quite confused, thought it would be about football, the halfback of Notre Dame ..."
(American host on TV game show asks:) "What breed of African antelope is named after an American car?"
Gaddis has written four novels in forty years, this is my second. On the evidence so far he is one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th century. Take a deep breath and give him a go. SJG
I think I read him more slowly - but it is difficult when there are no chapters and no paragraphs. However, he builds some almost Dickensian characters through dialogue; Oscar, the hero', who is obviously unkempt and is always convinced everyone is going to great lengths to thwart him. His sister, Christina, whirls around like a dervish, impatiently sorting everyone out (their problems are by definition trivial in comparison to the importance of her own) and peppering every sentence with anxieties about what people should be eating/shopping for/cooking. Very good, though I feel I need a holiday to bring my blood pressure down now! SRG

Gaiman, Neil
American Gods (2001)
Rating:- ****
Despite the fact that there's a lot here that's not exactly my cup of tea, I was very impressed by this long novel. Difficult to summarise: set in contemporary USA, and populated by humans, many of whom are gods - some native Indian-Americans but most, for example, like Odin that have come over with the settlers. For most of the time these gods potter around and act like humans but they also operate on an additional level and have the ability to communicate through the subconscious. The basic plot is that these old gods are being threatened by a new breed more associated with America's present-day materialism. OK, that precis has probably put you off this novel for ever, especially if I add in that there's some rather self-indulgent writing and a few too many dream sequences. But what makes this work fascinating is that Gaiman manages to create a credible world - the hallmark of any decent science fiction writing (if this is science fiction). Add to that a decent sense of humour and some very visual writing and you have a winner. Regarding the visual writing I note Gaiman has a background in graphic novels (in particular the renown ‘Sandman' series) and it certainly shows here. Recommended for the broad-minded. SJG
Gaiman dips into philosophy/theology enough to give depth to what is otherwise a fantasy. The gods exist and draw strength from human belief in them and vice versa: the ideas around death and sacrifice are aired well. SRG

Gardam, Jane
The Queen of the Tambourine (1991)
Rating:- ****
Long time ago was very impressed by Gardam's ‘The Hollow Land' which, if I remember correctly, would be loosely classified a ‘young teenage fiction'. I followed that up with a couple of other works of hers and was disappointed, and proceeded to label her as a ‘one-novel author'. Recently I was looking through the list of Booker Prize winners, saw this and decided to give her another go. Pleased to say that Ms Gardam has moved up in status to at least a ‘two-novel author' for this indeed is very good. The first-person narrator, Eliza Peabody, is an unfulfilled, childless 50-year-old wife of a successful diplomat whose life largely centres around observing the neighbours and washing the pots at the local hospice. As the novel progresses the reader realises that all is not right in the mind of Mrs Peabody when, for instance, metaphors suddenly take on a literal manifestation. Things get more off-centre until we are faced with the terrifying possibility of her drowning a small child. Surprisingly for the subject material, the writing is gentle, humorous with more than a touch of Barbara Pym. This unusual combination of story and style works excellently together, and the whole is a little gem. One of those not-too-frequent occasions when the Booker committee got it right. SJG
It takes you on the same journey as the narrator - into increasing dottiness and then out again. It is very uncomfortable when it's not clear what is happening and what isn't. Very skilful. SRG

Gardam, Jane
Old Filth (2004)
Rating:- ****
When on form both Gardam and Penelope Fitzgerald are highly entertaining and, despite having won a clutch of prizes between them, largely unregarded writers. (It is of note that neither has figured on the lists from my reading groups whereas minnows such as Drabble, Dunmore etc seem to be obligatory.) Whilst this is not quite up to the standard of Gardam's Whitbread Prize winners ('The Hollow Land' and 'The Queen of the Tambourine') I think it would be churlish not to give it a 'Recommendation'. The story concerns 'Raj orphans', in particular one Edward Feathers who rises to be a judge in the Far East and who earns himself the nickname Filth (Failed In London Try Hong Kong). Delightfully told, moving backwards and forwards in time, and full of good old English eccentrics. There is a sort of plot, dealing with hidden secrets going back to childhood, that was largely unnecessary as the excellent writing carries you through this book with great pleasure. SJG
Robert Harris et al could take an object lesson from Gardam in how to use research material in novels. These are light brush-strokes and points of inspiration rather than heavy-handed re-creations of the past. Gardam's Malaya and the Inns of Court are atmospheric and, I have no doubt, authentic enough for her purposes. They don't intrude and the main character remains centre-stage. Very enjoyable. SRG

Gautreaux, Tim
The Clearing (2003)
Rating;- ****
Impressive stuff. Story of a couple of brothers from Pittsburgh who run a logging company in the Louisiana wilderness in the mid-1920s. Life here is brutish, unpleasant and, quite often, short. Virtually all the novel is restricted to the camp and Gautreaux does a superb job of capturing the atmosphere. Added to this is the fact that one of the brothers, and a couple of minor characters, bear deep mental scars left over from WWI. Just in case that wasn't enough gloom the brothers fall out with the local mafia, who run the local drinking and whoring outfits, and this results in shoot-outs, vendettas and a rapidly increasing body-count. (Being the age I am?) I would have liked a few more upbeat moments as a release from this gloom. One could indeed argue that they are provided by the wives and a young orphan, but these are minor figures sometimes used as a subject of the vendetta. I must, however, say that this is wonderfully written, has interesting characters and Gautreaux develops a brooding tension which he sustains for virtually all the 370-odd pages. Similar in ways to Jeffrey Lent's 'Lost Nation' but perhaps not quite up to that quality, it is still well worth reading. SJG
I thought it was excellent, succeeding in creating a micro-world in the isolated lumber-camp, but also placing it within the forces of the natural economy and shot through with the effects of the Great War. It is deepened by considering the effects on people of doing violence on each other, whether within or outside of an army, and on reflection about the possibilities of recovery and salvation. SRG

Gibbons, Stella
Cold Comfort Farm (1932)
Rating:- ****
Hardest thing in the world to write a truly comic novel. A paragraph, a page, a chapter, yes; even a longish short story, but to a novel length nothing comes to mind. ‘Barney's Version' and ‘Pickwick Papers' get pretty close and after that some early Wodehouse and this novel. It's just that no novelist can sustain the level of comic invention for, say, 200-odd pages. The effects are repeated and hence lose their humour. Gibbons does a pretty good job and most certainly produces a ‘feel good' novel of quality, and they are few and far between. This was a re-read after 25 years, instigated by a biography of the Brontes which had alluded to some satirical comments on Bronte biographers contained within. They are here and excellent but unfortunately last less than a page and leave one wanting more. Disappointingly in this book for the last half, the plot, such as it is, tends to take over and the level of comic invention falls. Pity because there's some wonderful stuff in the first part. SJG
I had forgotten (over 20 years or so!) how much Gibbons sends up the precious literary establishment. For instance, she indicates by asterisks those passages which are of particular poetic merit (and which are, of course, totally over the top) for the convenience of reviewers. Then there is the character of Mr Mybug who is earnestly proving that Branwell Brontë wrote all the Brontë works while his sisters were the worse for drink. The setting itself, a farm with a family rife with dark secrets, mental illness and sex, is also a deliberate jibe at romantic fiction such as Wuthering Heights. The Starkadders are rescued from their imprisonment in romantic fiction by their cousin Flora brandishing her copy of "The Higher Common Sense". In a tongue-in-cheek forward to the novel Stella Gibbons writes in mock homage to "Anthony Pookworthy Esq" excusing herself as a mere journalist in the "meaningless and vulgar bustle of newspaper offices" before such a "master-craftsman": "You, who are so adept at the lovely polishing of every grave and lucent phrase, will realise the magnitude of the task which confronted me when I found, after spending ten years as a journalist, learning to say exactly what I meant in short sentences, that I must learn, if I was to achieve literature and favourable reviews, to write as though I were not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible." A very amusing, light read. SRG

Gibson, William
Virtual Light (1993)
Rating:- ****
I'm sure that MP remembers William Gibson. His 'Neuromancer' would seem to be the only book that I recommended to him that he failed to finish. And this one's not quite so good, so no doubt you'll feel well able to give it a miss. Nevertheless it deserves a recommendation- if not to MP! Parted from the 'science fiction' baggage it's a fairly straight-forward chase thriller with a clever denouement. Would make the basis of an exciting film in the 'Bladerunner' mould. Indeed there's a lot of the 'Bladerunner' feel in the writing. What raises Gibson above the bog-standard level of SF writing are two great strengths. Firstly he understands contemporary technology and is able convincingly to extrapolate its progress and implications into the medium-term future, often by introducing new ideas and new words. It's this that MP probably found off-putting; whereas I find it a major contributing factor in producing an interesting and novel style. Secondly his ability to produce evocative scenes is outstanding. For example, a lot of this novel is set on the Oakland Bridge which has been colonised, by a large number of estranged persons, in the manner of a gigantic version of the original London Bridge. The effect is Dickensian and comes across most vividly. Compared to the 'Neuromancer' trilogy, this novel doesn't reach those heights but nevertheless recommended (for those people who like this sort of thing). SJG

Glass, Julia
Three Junes (2003)
Rating:- ****
This National Book Award winner just about deserves a ‘Recommendation'. Like a lot of my recent favourites there's little plot here, the story being mainly driven on by character interaction. The structure - three months of June each separated by five years - is quite successful especially as the main focus each June is on a different character; two to whom, up to that point, there had been relatively little attention paid. Although the main family is Scottish, one of their three sons is based in the States and the large central portion of the book is based there. (This at least meant that some of the inappropriate Americanisms - for example, people in Scotland eating cilantro rather than coriander - soon disappeared.) Some of the characters seemed fairly dreary or obvious on first acquaintance but Glass was able to slowly give them an extra dimension. Whilst having no great literary quality the writing is more than adequate for the purpose, although I could have done without the detailed descriptions of the food at nearly ever meal. Overall this is a novel about coming to terms with loss but it isn't mawkish and feels real. As a first novel it is an impressive achievement, if not of the quality of, say, Richard Russo's ‘Empire Falls'. SJG
The book draws you in, partly by the fact that the characters ruminate on their pasts in between doses of their present. Gradually pictures grow up of interesting relational situations and the way that the characters have learned about life and themselves through them. A life-affirming and very readable novel. SRG

Greene, Graham
The Human Factor (1978)
Rating:- ****
I do not like this author at all. (See above and comments on Michael Sheldon's rivetting biography.) His outlook on life seems to be akin to the adolescent's excitement at the thought of sin making life more interesting and dramatic. A sort of tin-pot imitation Conrad. So it is an effort to admit that this book is brilliant. The hero, Castle is trapped inside a world of bewildering codes and loyalties. He has been conditioned to control his emotions and value caution. But the Human Factor' cannot be left out. He has worked in South Africa and falls in love with a black woman, marries her and adopts her son. Conrad's "he who forms a tie is lost" is the epigraph to the book. The threat of disaster hangs over the hero' from the start. The tension is kept up as we wonder where the axe will fall. All about the Cold War and the mentality that thrives on suspicion. There are too many traps waiting for hero' and reader and we fall together into them. Seen by many as an explanation/exculpation of Philby's defection. But surely not. Castle in the novel is not a communist. He is a Liberal who resists the system. The Human Factor' is what deflects him. Don't expect SJG to be convinced that the dreaded Greene has written a good/enjoyable book. But have a Go. Go on - Try it! MP
Not quite at the top of my pet-hate list, but not that far below Hughes and Rushdie. Greene writes wonderfully but I always find the result to be vacuous, cold and pointless. This novel, being a spy story, works better than most, because spy stories often benefit from being vacuous, cold and pointless. In MP's comments he highly praised this work and urged me to Give it a Go. Duty duly done. Readable but no more. Don't see why MP was so enthusiastic. Am fairly confident I can safely continue to avoid this author, although no doubt he will turn up on some Reading Group book list. Have read a few Ian McEwan books recently and after coming back to Greene for the first time in ten(?) years, I realised how closely they are related - a small pathway in literature that I have no wish to further explore. Any more recommendations like this and I will insist that MP finishes a William Gibson novel. SJG
It's OK, but not nearly as good as modern U.S. crime thrillers, most of which are better at weaving moral sub-texts into the tale. What makes Greene's efforts sub-standard is the environment of men in suits at clubs eating roast beef and gravy. Not in 1978. As usual, too, one doesn't believe his relationships. He can use the word love, but he is incapable of portraying it happening. Not enough "Human Factor" to make sense of the plot. SRG

Guterson, David
Snow Falling on Cedars (1995)
Rating:- ****
I wasn't expecting that much from this best-seller'. However it is very good, B+ at least. Not quite Book of the Year but certainly the best thing so far. It's a sort of cross between Lee's Native Speaker' and Proulx's Shipping News'. The blurb describes it as a who-dun-it but this is only of minor importance. It's about relationships between Americans and Japanese living in America after Pearl Harbour and more especially in the mid-50s. It's intelligently written and is an easy read with no obvious faults. However I'm trying to put my finger on why it's not an A+ novel - possibly because it's not challenging enough (the writing and ideas are perhaps too much under control) - the reader really has to do little work. Nevertheless, unreservedly recommended. SJG
Read this when in bed with bronchitis and feeling pretty low. It held my attention completely. Top class story-telling - a really great read. It is perhaps rather cavilling to say that one sometimes wished that it was more serious. The thriller' genre (exceptionally well-done) pulled it away from the serious theme of ethnic tensions. You could turn this into a block-buster film with no trouble at all. It was an element of playing to the gallery which took something away from its theme. But you might say that a more serious' approach would not have been as rivetting which this certainly was. MP
He does capture very well how ready people are to think the worse of minority ethnic groups (in this case Japanese) and to feel justified in this after Pearl Harbour. The traditional Japanese inscrutability is employed by the victimised as the only response consistent with honour, and this in turn becomes a symptom of their 'slyness' for the host community. Country and weather used as mood-creating background very successfully. SRG

Hamilton, Jane
A Map of the World (1994)
Rating:- ****
American. Unpromising material - wife in Mid-West is supposed to be looking after neighbour's two year-old, who then goes off and drowns in local pond. Stuff of nightmares - and it gets worse as wife is thrown into jail after being accused of sexual abuse. All this puts a strain on family/finances/friends etc. I didn't really want to read it, but it's so well done I stayed to the end. It builds to a climax and becomes a page-turner. However what you read it for is its perceptions re human nature and the very intelligent way it's put together. Writing of a high quality and recommended if you are prepared to live through the narrator's angsts. SJG
I nearly couldn't go through with it - it reverberated with my middle-age angst and dragged me nearer to the edge of the pit. However, teeth gritted, I stuck it out long enough for the redemption to work. It's a great book for the pinpoint accuracy in conveying emotional confusion in the midst of normal life. Read it if you can bear to. SRG

Hardy, Thomas
Jude the Obscure (1896)
Rating:- ****
Read again for Lit. Class. Hadn't read it for 10/15 years during which time attitudes to marriage, feminist ideas seeping into general currents of feeling have changed our point of view/angle of vision. Different things stand out. The whole attitude to marriage in the book hangs on the question of its being a contract which in fact destroys genuine love. Something like that anyway. The whole thing is tangled up with doubt and dismay. If it can go wrong it will go wrong. But very powerfully driven along. Hard not to think that Jude's feelings of hatred for Arabella for having trapped him into marriage are not the expression of Hardy's own feelings about his first wife. It has been pointed out that his poem After a Journey' is one of bitter regret at having lost her but writers are just as entitled to be inconsistent as anyone else. MP

Hardy, Thomas
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891)
Rating:- ****
Read several times in the past only to discover once again that the President of the Immortals had not only not finished his sport with Tess but that the whole thing was starting up all over again in Chapter One where Angel Clare fails to spot the angelic Tess among the dancing village girls until it is too late to dance with her. So begins the series of incidents which make her dependent on the rascally Alec D'Urberville, subsequent seduction etc which confessed to Angel Clare causes her to be hypocritically abandoned and, of course, finally hanged. The novel is more about Fate it seems than Inheritance though the latter comes in a good second. Tess is plagued by Murphy's Law: If it can go wrong it will go wrong'. Post a letter and if it is important it will certainly get stuck under the carpet. It seems to be characteristic of Hardy though writing about the same times as Zola to be concerned, not so much about the effect of economic conditions as about the tricks which circumstance has up its sleeve. It might not be wholly unfair to say that this is where he gets his kicks, where his artistic inspiration finds its source - what, in fact, he enjoys, in his gloomy way, writing about. In support of this these lines from The Convergence of the Twain' on the sinking of the Titanic can be quoted:

"And as the smart ship grew
In statue, grace and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too."

And the last rather clumsy stanza:

"Till the Spinner of the Years
Said NOW!' And each one hears,
And consummation, and jars two hemispheres."

- a consummation, if not exactly devoutly to be wished, then at least acting as an inspiration to the Hardy genius. MP

Hartley, L.P.
The Go-Between (1953)
Rating:- ****
Minor classic. Narrator in his sixties looking back on incidents in 1900 when he was 13 staying with school-friend at his parents' fairly stately home. Surprise packages in the bushes, undercover love affair, secret messages seething about in the adult world ending in suicide. All this has disturbing, disabling effect on his growing awareness and causes his subsequent repressions. Very Freudian. Very readable. Excellent construction. "In my eyes the actors in my drama had been immortals, inheritors of the summer and of the coming glory of the 20th century." In fact they are, of course, all too mortal. Very well thought of film, directed by Joseph Losey, screenplay H. Pinter. One for our Group? It is really a 'five-star' contender. Have held back because it lacks linguistic variety and is a derivation from Henry James and Proust. Some similarities to Jocelyn Brooke. '4½ stars'. MP
Thought I was going to enjoy this more than I did. It was a perfectly acceptable read, just that it didn't come up to my expectations. Perhaps it was because I saw the film first, even if it was 30 years ago. I can still remember some of the visuals and I consequently found it difficult to make my own ‘pictures'. Although written mid-20th century, it has a Victorian, or perhaps Edwardian, feel to it, but the addition of 20th century psychological analysis didn't, I feel, help matters. It was softer, less edgy, than the better Victorian stuff. I found there were too many obvious signposts - deadly nightshade, playing around with the shotgun etc - that told you exactly what was going to happen. Also I never had any real interest in any of the characters and I would have been quite happy to shoot the young narrator after 50 pages. Nevertheless it was professionally crafted and the hot summer and the carefree life of the upper class pre-WWI came across well. SJG
I can see why it makes a ‘classic' for study purpose and the essay titles form themselves effortlessly: ‘Discuss the role of weather in the novel', or "It has been said that the events of the novel mirror the narrator's transition from child to adult. Explain and discuss this view' or ‘To what extent is the narrator a pawn and to what extent a controlling force in events'. This happens because we are told things that are going to be useful later on. We are expected to believe the boy Leo's naiveté in noticing things, but only being able to interpret them later. At the same time he is incredibly sensitive to emotional nuances. The reader feels a tad manipulated. However, there is much to admire in craftsmanship and the book cries out to be made into a film with screenplay by Pinter ... SRG
Checking back on recent comments I see that I was partly responsible for this to be chosen for the Book and Film Group. Found this a great pleasure to read as Hartley was reader-friendly and his story-telling skill keeps this reader's attention going despite advanced knowledge of the ending or endings. Of course the presence of mild(?) amnesia gives a helping hand. Martin Seymour-Smith in his essential ‘Novels and Novelists' (1980) gives this novel the maximum number of points (ie 5 each) for readability, characterization, plot and literary merit. He says: "Hartley makes a distinctive contribution to the English novel in the Jamesian tradition; and he had, like Henry James, a keen insight into the psychology of women... He entirely lacked robustness but compensated for this ... by his extreme delicacy of style and ability to portray the weak and vulnerable in a sympathetic light." I think this is about right. The novel is a favourite of mine but don't feel too sure how good it is! MP

Haut, Woody
Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction (1999)
Rating:- ****
Recommended, but apart from myself, I'm not quite sure who I'm recommending it to. I've more than a soft spot for modern American crime fiction of the last 30 years and think there's some excellent writing in this genre. This work gathers the most significant players - James Elroy, Elmore Leonard, Jerome Charyn (my own particular favourite) etc - and attempts successfully to pull some cohesive strands together.
"Dependent upon a lack of definition and a degree of urban chaos, crime fiction - from flaneur to stalker, from gumshoe to TV surveillance man, from speed-freak to lingo addict, from melting pot to balkanisation, from political sensibility to gangster romanticism - remains an accurate representation of the city's ever-changing landscape."
"... future noir fiction would note the (Vietnam) war's lack of resolution, and, in their texts, concentrate on the investigative process rather than on the tidy resolutions and the spreading of false hope."
"Neon noir fiction would also be affected by the Reagan-Bush era's obsession with deregulation and privatisation of the genre, as well as its investigative processes."
There's also a nice lot of quotes from the books he's discussing:
"Living out there with the great silent majority. I know why they're silent, they don't have a fucking thing to say. I got into shoplifting, just for something to do." etc.
In the past I've tripped over by accident some of the authors mentioned. Now I'll have this book (when I actually get round to buying my own copy) to guide me to new names. I think I'll also need to purchase Haut's previous work Pulp Fiction' which does a similar job with the authors such as Chandler, Hammett, Spillane etc of the 40s. SJG
Enjoyable in itself - the quotes give you something to get your teeth into even if you can't remember the books. SRG

Hazzard, Shirley
The Great Fire (2003)
Rating:- ****
There are very few novels that I've wanted to read again as soon as I finished them, but this one is in that select band. Possibly one reason was that it took me the first quarter before I became seduced by its charms. It is noted on the cover that this work was twenty years in gestation, and this has resulted in a little structural unevenness and at times the author seemed to be trying too hard: "to watch, some moments, the small white departing ship, elderly, simple and shapely". These soon became minor qualms though, for once I had settled into the writing style and story-line I was completely captivated. It did remind me of someone and I've been racking my brains as to who. The only answer I can come up with is Michael Ondaatijie. The feeling and subject material are both similar to those in ‘The English Patient' as they both deal with love and loss in the aftermath of war. And like Ondaatijie's ‘Anil's Ghost' this is on the verge of being a great book. As far as I'm aware ‘The Great Fire' didn't receive the same public adulation as ‘TEP' and disgracefully it failed to win the Orange Prize for which it was short-listed. However the more reliable National Book Award did at least make it the Book of the Year. A treat and something to search out. SJG
The best aspect of this novel is the mood that the author succeeds in sustaining throughout. It is one of yearning, both for a particular significant other and for a life that can become whole again after the horrors of war. There are weaknesses: the lack of full characterisation of the main protagonists and the over-brief way in which the main love affair begins. However, these are outweighed by the strengths. A satisfying read. SRG

Hemingway, Ernest
Fiesta aka The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Rating:- ****
I am in line with what appears to be the received opinion about Hemingway. Early success with his non-style newly minted. Someone (F.M. Ford) said: "as if they were pebbles fetched fresh from a brook." (See under Carlos Baker for full quote.) Later turns into a Public Figure whose legend is too heavy to carry happily. 'Old Man and the Sea' which went some way towards getting him the Nobel Prize shows his immediacy had run dry. All seems declaratory and comparatively dead. One later work (of those read) stands out with the old original panache: 'A Moveable Feast'. Looking back at glamorous Paris days of the thirties 'Fiesta' is the real thing. It still seems new. The sense of 'being there' is miraculous. The pleasures of drinking wine on the bus open top deck. The excitements of the bull-fighting. The recklessness. The fun and companionship. The boredom. The tensions between the group. The hangovers. Almost as bad as being there. This is the literature of emancipation. "Après la guerre there'll be a good time everywhere." Repressive values are shed, Europe is a very long way from his puritanical parents (who thought 'Fiesta' a completely disgusting book). There are excitements, yes, but are these artists, poets and novelists happy? Well, no, not really. Rather weary with so much upheaval. Relationships come and go with a predictable pattern. Things break up for apparently little reason. MP

Hemingway, Ernest
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
Rating:- ****
Still the 'real' Hemingway, based on his adventures in Italy as an ambulance driver in 1917. He contrived to get seriously wounded driving cigarettes to the front line, only being under fire very briefly. Nevertheless, though badly hurt, carried man to safety before collapsing. As you might expect he had an intense affair with a nurse which figures fictionally here - to the detriment of the book as he is rather mawkish/sentimental about the whole thing. As BP has said in these pages: "His attitude to women leaves much to be desired." You could arguably have such an attitude and still be a good novelist but not, one would agree, in Hemingway's case (ie good novelist but not when writing about women). MP

Hemingway, Ernest
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1941)
Rating:- ****
Nostalgia time. Forty years since I've read this. Then I was completely bowled over by it. My first 'real' novel and it turned me on to reading. Had previously only worked my way through the various James Bonds which even then were leaving me unsatisfied. So how has it fared? Fairly predictably, not that well. The last 75 pages are exciting stuff, some of the writing, in particular the dialogue and the taut and evocative descriptions, is excellent. The two main guerillas - Pablo and Pilar - are interesting and well worked-out characters, and I believed in the tensions and camaraderie of the guerilla group. To my surprise I could still remember great chunks of it - quite amazing as I've usually forgotten what I've read last week. But. Like a lot (all?) of Hemingway it badly needs an editor. At 500 pages it's at least 150 too long. I appreciate that he's trying to get as many aspects of Spain and the Spanish Civil War as possible into a story which only encompasses three or four days, and I applaud the ambition, but he simply hasn't the skills to provide the necessary structure - not enough prior planning went into it. From time to time I just lost interest and wished that they'd hurry up and blow the damned bridge. Also it didn't help that I didn't take to the tall-in-the-saddle-all-American-hero Robert Jordan about whom virtually all the action revolves. And as for his relationship with the sexually scarred 19-year-old, the less said the better. Overall I accept that taken scene by scene it's impressive stuff but I felt that the whole was a long way short of the sum of the parts. SJG
I must have read this before, but long enough ago to have forgotten what happens. Although set in a relatively small part of Spanish Sierra during the Civil War, the novel takes in all aspects of that war. This is done through the memories of Pilar, an ex-bull-fighting 'moll' who recounts trouncing the fascists brutally in her village, via the reflections of the American central character Robert Jordan and via the action and skirmishes in the story. Much is told through the thought processes of Robert Jordan as he works out his plans for carrying out Republican orders to blow up a bridge and reflects on his role, predicament and the blossoming love between him and a 19-year-old girl saved from the fascists by the guerilla band led by Pablo and Pilar. Relationships in the band are slippery; Pablo has lost his courage and this factor plus unseasonal snow, gypsy forebodings and the bureaucracy of the command structure which prevents an important message getting to the front line, contribute to high tension through the three days Jordan is with the band. Having been led to expect that Hemingway glorifies the male preserve of warfare and sees women as an ornament, I was surprised to find things were not that simple. Certainly the men did what they had to, but they were often reluctant and lacked meaningful alternatives. The older woman, Pilar, was as much a 'man' as any of the males and young Maria had recently been the victim of gang rape so had an excuse not to weald a machine gun. The stilted transliteration of the Spanish was annoying at times, particularly when the wrong case of 'thee/thou' was used. However, something of the tradition of the people was thereby conveyed. SRG

Hewson, David
Semana Santa (1996)
Rating:- ****
First novel by a Sunday Times writer. Thriller set in Granada at Fiesta time. Basically cops v. psychopath but it's very well done. The first half is exceptional and the standard of writing is excellent. One of the things that lets it down in the second half is that there are too many clichés about Spain in it. More importantly the medium he has chosen to write in, ie the thriller, takes over in the later stages as the story builds to a climax. (It's a fault inherent with this genre that a lot of an author's style goes out of the window when the pace of the story increases.) Not quite book of the year, but most certainly Thriller of the Year. Not to be missed. SJG

Hill, Susan
Strange Meeting (1971)
Rating:- ****
Another book I wouldn't normally have read, as haven't been impressed by the little I've read of this author and secondly I didn't need another WWI novel. However it came recommended by a reliable source so ... It's a straightforward story of two very young officers coming up against the futility of trench warfare. Their relationship develops through the tedious boring bits of waiting around for something to happen, and gradually builds to the inevitable final battle scene. All very obvious but it's well written with great clarity and power, and can surely leave no one in doubt re the total pointlessness of wiping out a generation of young men. She has done the research but this never intrudes. Overall a very emotional work, and although her objectives in writing this book were limited, she has clearly succeeded in fulfilling them. Recommended. SJG
It does succeed in carving a human slice out of the inhumanity of the carnage and the waste. The relationship is portrayed well and benefits from the feminine imagination which sees the emotions of these young men clearly, un-obscured by the Emperor's New Clothes' of approved soldierly demeanour. SRG

Hill, Peter
Stargazing: Memoirs of a Young Lighthouse Keeper (2003)
Rating:- ****
Not sure about the title. When I put it into the local library's database it came up with a lot of stuff by Patrick Moore et al. At least the sub-title pretty well summarises what we have here. Reason I was looking for this was that the BBC had serialised it on 'A Book at Bedtime' and I could remember, through my semi-conscious state, being amused by it. Hill was a Scottish art student in the early '70s who only served for a few months as a relief lighthouse keeper in some obscure parts of the Western Islands, but he certainly manages to convey the flavour of this now-defunct profession. Indeed one of the charms of the book is that, as the blurb says, it is "a fine commemoration of the first profession ever to be made totally redundant." The best bits are the descriptions of his fellow workers and the working practices. When he strays back to the mainland and life with his mates from art school, it is less interesting. Also it's not that well-written and a more professional writer would have brought a sharper edge to the humour. Nevertheless it has great charm and, as he was only five years younger than me, a lot of the references to then contemporary music and news (especially Watergate) brought back lots of memories. Am not sure whether a different generation would extract so much pleasure from it. My 'recommendation' probably comes as much from nostalgia as it does from the details of being a keeper. Hopefully this book will come out in paperback when the publishers can correct several typos including noting that 'oystercatcher' is one word and not two. SJG
Most enjoyable and upbeat. The characters came over well and Hill was obviously a skilled listener for his years. SRG

Hill, Tobias
The Love of Stones (2001)
Rating:- ****
Excellent. The reason why I keep wading through the sludge of contemporary fiction is that you occasionally (very occasionally) come across a little (for want of a better word given the title) gem like this. Actually it's not that little, coming in close to 400 pages. I was impressed when he had kept a good standard up for 50 pages and was astonished when he reached the (satisfying) conclusion without faltering. Characterisation is a little weak (and no doubt my better half will say that the 'voice' of the female narrator sounds distinctly male) but apart from that it's all good news. The structure is an object lesson in how to write two parallel interlocking strands, ie don't just produce two stories and then place them as alternating chapters. The writer is lively and intelligent, and makes the reader do some work, eg at one point there is a reference to 'Bladerunner' but you wouldn't know it unless you were familiar with the film. The story incidentally centres around a search for some medieval jewellery, and hence brings with it the worrying 'author's research', but never fear: Hill shows how to integrate it into the narrative without distracting from the onward momentum. A final point. Novels either seem to be obsessed with computers and technology or totally ignore them. It's nice to read a book where they are used on a few occasions as a relevant tool - just like 'real' life. Overall, highly recommended. It's only July but this may well be my Book of the Year. SJG
No, it isn't a woman. However, the story is strong enough for this not to matter. The staccato sentences contribute to the atmosphere of calculating obsession and to the tension which is kept up throughout. An unusual and fascinating thriller. SRG

Hill, Tobias
The Cryptographer (2003)
Rating:- ****
Highly promising author. The interesting 'Underground' and the excellent 'The Love of Stones' had little in common and this is as different again. Not as polished as 'TLOS' and in some ways not so satisfactory, but far more ambitious. As I got into it, it more and more seemed like an attempt to update F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby'. The blurb makes no mention of this, so I began to think I must be imagining it, until I noticed the credit to the American author in the acknowledgements. It takes a lot of brass neck to update a classic but by and large Hill gets away with it. Gatsby becomes a Bill Gates-type figure who has devised a secure form of electronic money which replaces national currencies. (All this takes place 20 or so years in the future.) This makes him incredibly rich. Like Gatsby he throws big parties and then remains aloof from them. The story is told through the eyes of an Inland Revenue tax inspector(!) who has a crush on him. The writing isn't of Fitzgerald quality, the story - though not long - does sag from time to time, and the ending is a little too enigmatic for my taste. However there's something special here - the atmosphere and the haunting quality of 'TGG' has been replicated in a new environment. Sort of book I'd be quite happy to sit down and read again almost immediately. If Hill keeps up the standard of this and 'TLOS' he will be a major figure in this decade. SJG
Fascinating and cryptographic! I read it fast, trying to keep hold of the threads of the story. I was aware of a clumsiness in the writing that made it less than a stylistic masterpiece, but became aware also that tiny clues were being dropped in the conversations that explained what was going on. Like the heroine, who "misses nothing given time", the reader is encouraged to review the clues: here is a situation in which the trust people have in all-important money actually resides in one person (the man who invented the code for "soft gold"). The Revenue's business is always to doubt the 'truth' people maintain about money. Anna, representing the truth, investigates a 'discrepancy' in the accounts of the creator of money. She finds that "it is beyond him to tell her the whole truth". She finds that he makes his money for his son, that the son has cracked the code and the knowledge of imminent disaster is absorbing both of them to the detriment of any kind of happiness. The crash occurs and the cryptographer loses everything. However, his inability to tell the truth continues to preclude love and he loses Anna as well. SRG

Hugo, Victor
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831)
Rating:- ****
With a lot of modern novels you start off by thinking that they are very good and your expectations are raised. However the author has often written him(or her)self out by about page 50. From then onwards the novel gradually slides down from a ‘**** rating' to just one or two. Things were obviously different in France in the early 19th century. After 50 pages I was ready to give this up. It was only after I'd waded through a 20 page description of the topography of 15th century Paris that things started to build. Perhaps it took me that long to tune into the style and pace. It certainly helped when I imagined myself reading it aloud by candlelight to my children, because this is a true Gothic novel. Most of the characters, even the goodies, come to an unfortunate, and often spectacular, end. Add to this a crazed priest, a walled-up woman, sorcery, civil unrest etc and stir vigorously with the author's very positive attitudes to the architecture of the late 15th century. No wonder the book was so favourably received by the Romantic Movement. By the end I thoroughly enjoyed it - a great book. The title is a little misleading; Quasimodo doesn't play a more significant role than many other characters. The real ‘lead' is the Notre Dame. Book & Film Group? SJG
A Paris peopled with grotesques, propelled by passions. Although the setting is painted in with historical references, events have the logic of an opium dream. Hugo makes an interesting thesis of the suggestion that printing took over from architecture the embodiment of thought and the hope of immortality for men and ideas. The time in which the novel is set is still dominated by architecture, with print in its earliest stages. Certainly worth reading. SRG

Reading this for the second time I found more in it and was more patient with the leisurely 19th-century approach complete with philosophical reflection. What struck me forcibly was how Shakespearian it is and it reminded me of the importance of Shakespeare to French contemporaries of Hugo such as Berlioz. There is drama, there are ‘mechanicals' and there is witty play on words (often with Latin thrown in here.) I also noticed this time how Romantic Hugo's theme is in being a portrayal of how destructive love can be. The only character whose love is selfless is the eponymous hero. His tragedy is that nobody can love him because he is so hideous. Hugo reveals a cynical view of human love in this and almost a relish in the end of the book that all Quasimodo loves (including the Notre-Dame) comes to destruction. SRG

Hulme, Keri
The Bone People (1984)
Rating:- ****
New Zealand/Maori magical realism version of Shipping News'. I found it totally absorbing: a deep and horrible exploration about what people can do to one another when they haven't found a way of living with themselves. A healing end. SRG
1985 Booker Prize Winner and (not knowing what the competition was like) probably a worthy winner. 10 out of 10 for effort and a good attempt at the chaos/rebirth plot (like eg Midsummer's Night Dream'). Not a total success though because at times it becomes a little pretentious and there were sections where I lost interest. Nevertheless highly recommended. SJG

Hustvedt, Siri
The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996)
Rating:- ****
Very good indeed. I know I've said this before but I keep ploughing through recommended contemporary fiction and most of it is pretty lame. Only about 5% makes it really worthwhile and the ones that do come into this bracket are usually those that seem initially to have little potential. Here the blurb mentions "erotic adventure" and "mysterious acts of madness" so I was reluctant to start, but once commenced it was un-put-down-able. The plot is not that important: a few months in the life of a 19-year-old spunky waitress in small-town USA. But this character, along with all the ‘bit players', comes right off the page. Even better is the atmosphere - with fairly straightforward prose Hustvedt is able to conjure up a place which seems completely ‘right' and in which this reader could immerse himself. As a bonus she weaves in a nice sub-plot around the local amateur dramatic society's version of ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream', which echoes some of the themes of the main plot. Sort of book that restores my faith in modern fiction. Highly recommended and a possible contender for Book of the Year albeit six years too late. SJG
I wasn't so impressed, but this is where the subjective respects intervene. I get my diet of books carefully sieved, so all real dross is removed. Therefore, for a novel to stand out, it has to be a masterpiece. This one is certainly good and has a quality that stays with you, but I found its dream-like atmosphere a bit off-putting. SRG

Hustvedt, Siri
What I Loved (2003)
Rating:- ****
I'll stick my neck out and say that Hustvedt will be one of the most important young novelists of the present generation. (I probably thought/said something similar about Ishiguro after he had written ‘Artist of the Floating World' and ‘Remains of the Day', and then he went on to write turkeys like ‘The Unconsoled' and ‘When We Were Orphans'.) Anyway we shall see when her next novel comes out. I was entranced by Hustvedt's ‘The Enchantment of Lily Dahl' and in lots of ways this is better - better written, more complex and thoughtful, and the only novel I've read that deals intelligently with the contemporary art scene. Having said that, I didn't enjoy it as much as ‘TEOLD', in fact I couldn't say I ‘enjoyed' it at all. The world presented is claustrophobic, death comes at the most unwanted moments leaving permanent grief behind, and insanity is never far round the corner. A deeply uncomfortable read but superbly done. For once the blurb has it right: "Intimate in tone, dazzling in its scope, ‘What I Loved' combines a sense of mounting unease with a superbly observed portrait of an artist and, above all, of relationships - parental, mental, erotic and fraternal. Moving seamlessly from inner worlds to outer worlds, from the deeply private to the public, from mental to cultural illness, it is a beautifully written exploration of love, loss and betrayal.". Also I must remember these quotes from the novel: "nagging is a strategy of the powerless", "love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separation to continue". Recommended but make sure that you are in an upbeat mood before you start. SJG
I suppose the thing that makes it so gruelling is that all the different types of love that are portrayed are unrequited in the last analysis. For all the characters there is an emptiness at the heart of the loved one, whether imposed by death or endowed by personality. The true human tragedy is the capacity to love; it brings deep joy and deep unhappiness but it is the essence of being human. The excellent portrayal of the child, who grows up without this capacity (a sociopath) reveals the mad antithesis. Hustvedt links this absence of empathy in with the most violent aspects of cult art and rampant materialism. The world is reminiscent of the nightmarish Bladerunner landscape. SRG

Huxley, Aldous
Brave New World (1932)
Rating:- ****
Re-read after 40 years or so and found it lived up to expectations of the remembered Huxley sparkle. After three novels satirising modern ‘smart' life he produced this science fiction classic. In the first 100 pages he sets up his exposé of Wellsian ideas of utopia which would arise from eugenics. All very cleverly and amusingly done. The book came alive for me on this reading when we visit the Savage Reservation in New Mexico where everything is not so orderly and a copy of the works of Shakespeare has survived - "Oh Brave New World"! But the worry here is that John, his passion stimulated by Shakespeare, finds Lemina's sexual availability revolting and symbolic of social madness. He sets this from ‘Romeo and Juliet':-
"Oh the white wonder of Juliet's hand may seize
And steal immortal blessing from her lips,
Who, even in pure and vestal modesty,
Still blush, as thinking their own kisses sin."
against:- "The hands of all the four thousand electric clocks in the Bloomsbury Centre's four thousand rooms marked twenty-seven minutes past two. "This hive of industry" as the Doctor was fond of calling it was in the full buzz of work. Everyone was busy, everything in ordered motion. Under the microscopes, their long tails furiously lashing, spermatozoa were burrowing head first into eggs; and, fertilized, the eggs were expanding, dividing, or if bokanooskified, budding and breaking up into whole populations of separate embryos." The richness of the Shakespearian language serves effectively to subvert the Wellsian concept of the scientific future. Huxley followed the direction this book was taking and emigrated to the USA where he developed his mystical ideas. The book puts all this over well enough but it lacks the drive and personal vision of the Orwell dystopia, ‘1984'. MP
Like MP it must be getting on for 40 years since I first read this, but unlike MP I'm not particularly enamoured by it. Several reasons. Firstly the two main characters (and they are the only characters here - the rest with possible exception of the Controller are just ciphers - are, novelistically, deeply flawed: Bernard, the alpha-plus psychologist, seems to change personality mid-way through without any real cause and moves from being a 'goodie' to a 'baddie' in the blink of an eye. The other, the Savage, having learnt to read from "The Chemical and Bacteriological Conditions of the Embryo. Practical Instructions for Beta Embryo-Store Workers", then immediately moves onto the complete works of Shakespeare which he tediously quotes at every available opportunity. Even Huxley, in a later Preface, admits that this is a little dodgy. For the second reason I'll quote the Introduction by David Bradshaw: "Whilst writing it he was unsure in his own mind, whether it was a satire, a prophecy or a blueprint." This gets even more problematic when one learns that at the time Huxley was speaking in favour of stability (a driving concept behind the book's totalitarian government) and eugenics (ditto). Most confusing. As always a science fiction story tells you more about the circumstances at the time of writing than about the future, and David Bradshaw makes a reasonable argument that: "Brave New World was shaped by the (post-Wall Street Crash) economic muddle, political inertia and social unrest which affected life in 1931." Certainly this book is an interesting period artefact but it's not worthy of the excessive praise heaped upon it. SJG
Perhaps it is inevitable that a book iconic just for its central concept of a world society controlled to produce happiness fails to fulfil the hope that it is also a literary work of art. It is very pedestrian in its expression. The characters are problematic, partly because individualism is a crime anyway. However, Huxley could have made his points more subtly by a real contrast between the conditioned 'civilised' characters and the more naturally-produced 'savage'. We are told that there can be no high art without tragedy, but the implications of this are not worked out. Similarly the ideal of a bland, conditioned happiness is not contrasted with a fought-for happiness. SRG

Ibsen, Henrik
Ghosts (tr 1881)
Rating:- ****
A good read. Discovered while reading around the subject that Ibsen, most of the time, wrote his plays to be published to be read as novels generally to come out for the Christmas trade. This was largely because in Norway at that time the number of actual stage performances he could expect were few. A really long run was not on. The first stage production of Ghosts' was somewhere in the USA done in Norwegian in an area of Chicago before an audience of Scandinavian immigrants. The play caused a huge scandal in his home country despite Ibsen's eminent reputation. The main objection was the introduction of syphilis into the plot: "Ibsen's contemporaries saw Ghosts' primarily as a play about physical illness, just as they had seen A Doll's House' as a play about women's rights ... they failed to realize that the true subject is the devitalizing effect of a dumb acceptance of convention." (Meyer) The whole question on the passing on of the disease to the son seems to me to be a confusing element of the plot'. It seems to be to some extent a symbol or objective correlative' in T.S. Eliot's phrase for the dead hand of ancestral conformity.
Act 2 Mrs Alving: "I'm haunted by Ghosts. When I heard Regina and Oswald out there, it was just as if there were ghosts before my very eyes. But I'm inclined to think we're all ghosts. Pastor Manders; it's not only the things that we've inherited from our fathers and mothers that live on in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and old dead beliefs, and things of that sort. They're not actually alive in us, but they're rooted there all the same, and we can't rid ourselves of them." (Cf inability to slough off habit of supporting Stoke City F.C.)
As far as readability is concerned I found all the dialogue absorbing particularly between Mrs A. and Manders. But when it rises to its true dramatic heights it needs live performance - Judi Dench on TV as Mrs A. superb experience. An extended read of his plays worth a go? MP

Ishiguro, Kazuo
Never Let Me Go (2005)
Rating:- ****
Never sure what one is going to get from Ishiguro these days. After two crackers ('An Artist of the Floating World' and 'The Remains of the Day') came two disappointments ('The Unconsoled' and 'When We Were Orphans'). In some ways I'm not sure if this is a cracker or a disappointment. It's narrated by 31-year-old Kathy who goes back over some of the minutiae of her life in a bland, often irritating, voice that at times makes the book seem more than its 260-odd pages. The story however is fascinating: dealing with a group of children who are specifically cloned so that in adult life they can become organ donors. The combination of the sinister story-line and the bland voice of the narrator reminded me a bit of James' 'The Turn of the Screw'. It has a similar haunting quality which I'm sure will stay with me when many novels I've been reading recently will be long forgotten. And this and the consistency of the 'voice' (Ishiguro's speciality) are just about enough to warrant a 'recommendation'. SJG
The book appears as bland as John Wyndham in style but is neater and more masterful in encapsulating theme into execution; the central question being asked by the guardians of the clones is "Have they got souls?". A positive answer to that obviously throws the programme into doubt. The clones themselves do not ask the question and they are complicit with their fate it would seem. I began to wonder whether they were a metaphor for all of us, or at least any oppressed groups. SRG

Isler, Alan
The Prince of West End Avenue (1994)
Rating:- ****
A first novel and a very good one. It falls apart at the end when he tries to cram too much in and also fails to tie up quite a few of the loose ends, but this seems to be quite a common fault of first novels and he certainly doesn't make a spectacular mess of it, as per Zadie Smith. A lot of the rest is excellent - it's witty, funny, intelligent, well-structured and full of lovely cameos from a variety of characters. The story is told by an 83-year-old living in a Jewish home in New York. Sounds off-putting but don't be. The home is a lively place with lots of in-fighting amongst the ‘characters', most notably about a forthcoming production of ‘Hamlet' where the youngest actor will be well in their seventies. At the same time the main character reminisces about his earlier life in Europe, when he was peripherally involved with Dada movement, briefly met Lenin, went to the Cabaret Voltaire etc. And then of course anti-Semitism and the Holocaust begin to loom large. I must emphasise that this is not a depressing read by any means. For example whenever the doctor at the old people's home is faced with any sort of illness his prescription invariably contains stewed prunes. Read and enjoy. SJG
I didn't laugh out loud but there were plenty of smiles. The characters most brought to mind were George's parents in ‘Seinfeld' - feisty Jewish Americans so earnestly involved in their own perspective that they nearly have the last laugh on us. There is a core of mystery and poignancy kept up with regard to the narrator, who has some shameful secrets which are slowly revealed. The accidental way in which the narrator assists at the birth of Dada is nearly farce. Life-affirming! SRG

James, Henry
The Europeans (1878)
Rating:- ****
Starts, unsurprisingly, with a five-and-a-half line sentence but this, for James, is a fairly easy read which is helped by being less than two hundred pages long. Story tells of a worldly brother and sister who descend from Europe onto a prim-and-proper Boston family of cousins etc. I was expecting the pair, at the end, not to be cousins but charlatans, but this was not James' intention and we are simply left at the end with who will marry who. My reactions to James vary between total admiration for his stunning writing to 'Oh, for goodness sake, get on with it'. Fortunately I was in the mood to let the author dictate the pace and reaction was far more of the former. Even so I do have concerns. Felix's "capacity for taking rose-coloured views was such as to vulgarize one of the prettiest of tints" is clever but perhaps too self-consciously so. Throughout, one feels that James knows he is clever and mentions himself on occasions in the first-person just to remind the reader of his presence. Not quite the 'Master' for me, but admirable stuff. SJG
His clarity in conveying the nuances of interpersonal exchanges is breathtaking at times. If Colm Toibin's fictionalised biography can be taken as truth (and I'd sooner believe that than many academic attempts) James mixed his own, his family's and friends' personalities thoroughly for 'raw material' and there are at least two facets of himself represented here (as the brother and sister of the Young family from Europe), with aspects of his sister too in the sister and in Gertrude. It must have been painful for him and for those around him that he was so socially observant but also so detached and able coldly to use the material! SRG

James, Lawrence
Raj. The Making and Unmaking of British India. (1997)
Rating:- ****
To my relief, I was able to read this weighty tome 'easily', ie I did not feel all the time that I had to take notes but could follow through like a story. The author has, I think, succeeded in steering a clear course through some shark-infested waters without succumbing to the dangers of waterlogging with detail, being blown off-course by propaganda or whatever. He uses sources to enlighten rather than feeling compelled to offer them up undigested to the reader, and keeps a thoroughly credible line of argument going. I particularly liked the critical use of literature, art and journalism. I think the author is successful in explaining how the phenomenon of the Raj came into existence, without falling back on the kind of nonsense about British character etc that was used to justify its existence once established. He also shows convincingly how the seeds of its demise were present at the inception, and brings to mind, as so many other historians fail to do, the pressures on Britain from other arenas of involvement. I like James' treatment of 'famous men' in history. While these have their place in policy and events, they are never assumed to be single-handedly driving history. A few 'icons' like Clive, Gandhi and Mountbatten are de-canonised, and others, with less glittering persona, are shown to have been significant. SRG
Sorry, didn't get on with this. Despite the potential of the subject material, found it rather tedious. It just seemed to me like one gigantic exercise in cut-and-paste. Lots of research and little synthesis. Too much 'such-and-such a Rajah fought a battle in 1825 at such-and-such a place'; neither the Rajah nor the place meant a dickey-bird to me. No attempt was made to explain who/where they were and hence the information was meaningless. And there's pages and pages of this sort of thing. Quite enjoyed the bits where he brought contemporary novels in, but this was his only attempt at mentioning 'Culture'. At least now I know where the phrase 'Bobs your uncle' comes from. Lots of reading to find that out, though. SJG

Jerome, Jerome K.
Three Men on the Bummel (1900)
Rating:- ****
Last of our Course's end of the century' texts. Greatly amused by the best of this. Really a long monologue by the narrator bringing in anything he wants to write about in a garrulous free-booting kind of way. If you find him good company then OK. The ostensible subject/theme is a cycling holiday on the continent (mainly in Germany) with Harris and George - the same as the crew of the boat they were in (and out) of. In actual fact though there are a lot of digressions on national characteristics (mainly English as seen by foreigners and Germans as seen by the narrator). There is really very little about the cycling holiday or the Bummel itself (a holiday of indeterminate length without purpose - or something like that). Jerome has apparently patched together bits of this and that, cf his "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow". Never mind. At least one reader was grateful that he had done so. He was a great favourite of mine in my late teens, and came up to scratch to the extent that when reading this book in The Museum' (name of pub selling Draught Bass) I kept laughing out loud, which drew reproving looks from morbid Bass drinkers crying gently into their tipple. Reminded of the book about Penge SJG gave me. Jerome was born in Walsall. Was talking to a friend recently who said that there was a Jerome K. Jerome Society going strong in that area and that his son-in-law attended their Annual Dinner. The glories of great Staffordshire writers have apparently, no real limits. MP
Read this on MP's recommendation and, possibly for the first time ever, I've raised his rating. The reason is that I rarely find anything nowadays that more than mildly amuses me on a couple of occasions - Mordecai Richler's ‘Barney's Version', some pre-WWII Wodehouse and a lot of Dickens being the notable exceptions. In this case I laughed out aloud a number of times, and spent a considerable proportion of my reading with a smile. Quite a rare thing. Be warned though, if you don't find it funny, there's not a lot else here. The main exception to this statement being Jerome's observations on the Germans: "I should not be surprised to hear that when a man in Germany is condemned to death he is given a piece of rope and told to go and hang himself. It would save the State much trouble and expense, and I can see that German criminal taking that piece of rope home with him, reading up carefully the police instructions, and proceeding to carry them out in his own back kitchen." Written of course well before WWI and WWII. It not just the Germans who take the knocks from Jerome. "A German, comparing it with his own language, where every word in every sentence is governed by at least four distinct and separate rules, tells you that English has no grammar. A good many English people would have seemed to have come to the same conclusion; but they are wrong. As a matter of fact, there is an English grammar, and on one of these days, our schools will recognize the fact, and it will be taught to our children, penetrating maybe even to the literary and journalistic circles ... English spelling would seem to have been designed chiefly as a disguise to pronunciation. It is a clever idea, calculated to check presumption on the part of the foreigner ..." SJG
Yes, I too found it a tonic to depressed spirits, and was able to imagine MP's mischievous mirth when he read it - a dear legacy. SRG

Jones, Edward P.
The Known World (2004)
Rating:- ****
This Pulitzer Prize winner is impressive by any standards and outstanding as a first novel. Located in Virginia in the mid-nineteenth century it is a tale of a slave community with an interesting twist, as some of the slave owners are actually ‘free' black people. One of its main strengths is that, despite the subject material, this is not a campaigning, or even heart-rending sensational novel about the injustices of slavery. Instead Jones treats the topic in a relatively calm matter-of-fact manner and, though the morality issues are constantly referred to, there is no hectoring from the author. There is a fairly large number of characters and the structure constantly moves the focus from one group to another. This works well, although occasionally I could have taken more depth on an individual basis. Another merit is the writing: clear, comfortable, efficient with the occasional touch of humour: "Barnum Kinsey, then considered by everyone to be the poorest man in the country, "saved," as one neighbour said, "from bein a nigger only by the color of his skin."" Old-fashioned story-telling of a high quality. SJG
The greatest strength in my view is the book's integrity in locating all the complexities of action and moral choice firmly in the context of each character's ‘known world'. All the virtues such as fairness, compassion, a sense of justice are to be found in both black and white characters as are the vices of cruelty, mean-ness and so on. The focus on the people of Manchester county (and mostly the free black Henry Townsend's estate) is close and detailed. Character emerges through action and dialogue, with satisfying author asides telling the reader what eventually happened to these people. But the most admirable thing is the way in which the close focus allows the reader subtly and by degrees to really comprehend what a social system based on ownership of one person by another does to human relationships, however paternalistic and caring those relationships are. Nowhere does the author preach or wring his hands, but the reader is left in no doubt of the pernicious nature of slavery and its attendant racism. SRG

Kafka, Franz
The Trial (1914-15? pub 1925 tr 1935)
Rating:- ****
According to the date of my edition (price 3s/6d!) I must have previously read this when 15 or 16 - a time, if I remember correctly, when I was in my ‘European phase' with my brain cells being re-arranged by Satre, Hesse, Camus etc. Remember this having a powerful effect on me, although not to the same extent as his slightly earlier ‘Metamorphosis' which blew me out of the water. Forty years later I'm still fairly in awe of it and would argue that it is one of the defining novels of the 20th century. The blurb talks of the story as "a Pilgrim's Progress of the sub-conscious" which may be true, but my more simplified reading took it as a political novel which comments on the individual's role in modern society. Whatever, there's room here for a number of interpretations. I kept the ‘star' rating to four since, as for a general reading experience, there are a few problems. Firstly it does tend to sag after half-way, and secondly, the structure falls apart towards the end as several chapters clearly remain to be written and the ending seems to be tacked on from another story. It would have been a considerable feat to tie up the storyline neatly, and I feel that Kafka realised that he hadn't the necessary skill or imagination and simply abandoned the project. Nevertheless .... SJG
As an individual, Kafka seems to be exasperated with the power and logical contradictions of the social/legal machinery. His hero, Joseph K, is doomed to be labelled as guilty by it and to be trapped forever in its toils in a fruitless effort to assert his innocence and right to self-determination. Here is the Marx/Engels truism writ large - Man is born free, yet everywhere is in chains - and realised at the level of the individual. What a crashing answer to Romanticism! The gauntlet is thrown down to Existentialism for the recovery of freedom. SRG

Kennedy, Richard
A Boy at the Hogarth Press (1972)
Rating:- ****
A minor classic. Gets job with Leonard and Virginia Woolf when he leaves school at 16. It combines complete irreverence for these figures with a lot of contradictory respect. He is mainly interested in the girls in the office and the opposite sex generally which the Woolfs with all their sensitivity obviously failed wholly to understand. The blurb refers to his affectionate recollection of Leonard and V. which is not wrong but doesn't seem to be quite the right word. To the management their office seemed unreliable. Written in the early 70s he wrote little else but became a successful illustrator of children's books. He "rose to the rank of Corporal in the Second World War." A gem. Mercifully brief. "He was of no consequence to the paladins of Bloomsbury. There was no reason to exercise their intellect and charm on him. He saw them at their most unguarded and least artificial. That is what makes his account so fascinating." from the Intro by Bevis Hillier. MP
MP calls this a minor classic', but I failed to find any real merit in it. Badly written disconnected anecdotes about the totally tedious Woolfs. Also note that this diary was written 40 years after the actual happenings, so: "I have interrupted my reading of ... to write this", strikes a totally false note. Mercifully short - about half the 80-odd pages are taken up with adequate line drawings. Overall I thought it was the stuff of vanity publishing. SJG
A few glimpses of something did hold my interest:
- Kennedy's own failure at Marlborough which indicts a school that could let someone fail' who was capable of reading Proust and not give him an inkling of what he had failed at.
- Leonard Woolf's prudish edict against Kennedy going out to lunch with the young typist while presumably countenancing his wife's crush on V. Sackville-West.
- Uncle George's judgement on Ivy Compton's work as "a work of genius", while Leonard Woolf rejects it as rubbish and ends up back-pedalling when the public led by A. Bennett acclaim her work. SRG

Kermode, Frank
Not Entitled - A Memoir
Rating:- ****
This is the book which has made the most impression over the last month or two. No one can be totally honest' but this man gets close to it I should say. Of course making a show of being T.H.. can itself be a way of showing off, but he does appear in so dismal a perspective as to suggest that we are near to the bone. Certainly no grandiose intellectual bombast à la George Steiner. First of all we get his upbringing in the Isle of Man in remote lower class surroundings. A man of very little practical ability. During the war was in the Navy from where the book's title is taken. If you had amassed a certain number of bad conduct points you were docked all your pay and as your name came round on pay parade the paymaster would say "Not Entitled". He tells of various disasters as editor of Encounter and worst of all as Professor of English at Cambridge. Making it quite suitable that after the book was written a postscript appeared in the papers with the story that on moving house all his books had been accidentally pulped as he mistook the waste-disposal men (smartly dressed) for the furniture removers. This makes the book even more convincingly honest. MP

Kingsolver, Barbara
The Poisonwood Bible (1998)
Rating:- ****
One of those rare books that actually gets better as it goes on. Starts off with right-wing American missionary taking wife and four daughters to the Congo just before Independence and, of course, things start to go rapidly downhill. Lots of echoes of Conrad's ‘Heart of Darkness', Theroux's ‘Mosquito Coast' and, in the missionary's treatment of his children, Christina Stead's ‘ The Man who Loved Children' - not light reading by any stretch of the imagination. But from these derivative beginnings, Kingsolver manages to conjure up something personal and successful. Three reasons I think. Firstly she is able to convey to me the African mind-set, something I've never really come to terms with and something which has curtailed my reading of a few Africa-based novels. Secondly the ‘tragedy', where one of the four girls dies, comes, not at the end in a dark climax, but about two-thirds of the way through. This allows the survivors time to come to terms with her death and means that the novel finishes on a relatively upbeat note. Thirdly her writing and insights do not falter after the usual 50 pages, but surprisingly improve as the novel progresses. Recommended, though make sure that you're in a reasonably positive state of mind before you start. SJG
The title refers to the arrogant way in which the missionary father thinks he uses the native Congo tongue to declare that "Jesus is precious" at the end of his sermons while in fact saying (only a different pitch is required) "Jesus is poisonwood". This incident is a metaphor for the way in which the Bible and American values do not translate to Africa. The author shows over and over again how ways of life have to be understood in their terms, and understanding between cultures can only come about through respectful listening and unconditional goodwill. It is a very moving book which uses the device of telling the story through the voice of each female member of the family in turn as they come to terms with the horrific missionary father and West Africa. It was a gruelling read in parts, but overall, life-enhancing. SRG

Kipling, Rudyard
The Man who would be King & Other Stories
Rating:- ****
No surprises but great stuff. Available for £1. SJG

Kipling, Rudyard
Limits & Renewals (1932)
Rating:- ****
Short stories from the end of his life. Beautifully written of course, but I'm going to have to read them again, not for this reason, but because I hadn't much idea what was going on in half of them. I'm not sure whether they were deeply profound or whether the bloke was just losing his marbles and relying on technique. I would be interested in what you made of them. SJG

Kipling, Rudyard
Kim (1901)
Rating:- ****
Re-read after x years where x>7. Could only remember the overall flavour and nothing about the plot/structure. I now know why. He is really unable to maintain a narrative over 300 pages. Kipling starts off with a young Anglo-Indian Kim who is joined by an unnamed Buddhist lama on a journey through India. The attention then reverts to just Kim as the English find, educate and enrol him in the Great Game ie spying. Then Kim and the lama meet up again for another journey after which the lama achieves enlightenment. Finis. Kim and his many companions in the Great Game are left in mid-air. Disappointing, as the spying parts are the most interesting dramatic episodes, and in truth the lama can be a bit of a bore. All in all, structurally, a mess. Not surprisingly Kipling's finest work comes in his short stories of which he is a master. Nevertheless there is enough here to award it a 'recommendation'. The picture of a rich and vibrant society in all its detail is superb - to quote the blurb: "Unsurpassed panorama of Indian life." A couple of other interesting quotes from John Bayley's Introduction to my edition:
"The whole feel and atmosphere of 'Kim' depends on this fact that everyone talks to everyone else, forming one gigantic and involuntary family."
"...one of his very few texts to suggest in copious if indirect detail that all the world's separate races do the same thing in their own way, and have the same kind of degree of enlightenment or non-enlightenment. All exercise the same kind of understanding."
Indeed I remember after my first reading of 'Kim' wondering why Kipling was now considered a (virtually unacceptable) racist. SJG The plot is not the point. Who cares what happens in 'Pickwick Papers' or whether the pilgrims in 'Canterbury Tales' ever got to Canterbury? The interest is in the characters and in their place in the teeming millions of India. Historically, too, it is heartening to find that it was possible to be enlightened and white even in the 19th century. The curator of Lahore Museum is a thinly-disguised portrait of Kipling's father and the "pearl-dealer" in Simla is a man whose racist neutrality would be the envy of the top British journalists of today. SRG

Koch, Christopher J.
Highways to a War (1995)
Rating:- ****
(Unknown to me) Australian novelist's take on war photographers/cameramen covering the Indochina wars in South Vietnam and Cambodia. Really well written with some strong characters. There's also a strong sense of place but I'm not sure how much of this comes from the actual novel, or from my recollection of the extremely powerful contemporary photos and newsreel coverage. The latter part as the Khmer Rouge slowly overrun Cambodia cannot be separated from the haunting film, 'The Killing Fields'. This novel is not a total success. The hero is too much of a goody-goody - Lord Jim without the self doubts. He could have done with a little more Conradian angst. Also at 450 pages it is perhaps a 100 pages too long, with a definite sag in the middle - having 'done' Saigon in the first half, Koch restarts and covers similar territory with Phnom Penh. Nevertheless have been reading some rubbish recently and this came as a breath of fresh air. SJG
The author deals with his research material well and tells his story through a series of (fictitious) interviews with the main character's friends and colleagues plus some (fictitious) cassette diaries. The main character has disappeared in Cambodia, so the story takes on some characteristics of a detective mystery as the narrator (a childhood friend) attempts to reconstruct his life in Saigon and Phnom Penh and explain why he went over the border to near certain death. SRG

Krauss, Nicole
The History of Love (2005)
Rating:- ****
Was rather dubious of this given the title and also that it is a 'Richard & Judy' Book Club recommendation, but it would seem they know a decent book when they come across it, as they recently recommended Michael Connelly's 'The Lincoln Lawyer' which is very good, as is this. Once again the fertile ground of immigrants to the USA is being ploughed. In this case Jews who slipped out of Europe before the Nazi pogroms were in full force. Specifically two Jews who both seem to claim authorship of a book called 'The History of Love'. The end result is a convoluted piece of plotting concerning them and their families. It really needs consuming in just one or two sittings as I read it in little bits over a period of a week and found it difficult to hold all the threads in my head. (No comments please about old age and loss of memory.) It really is well done though, if perhaps a little too clever for its own good. Reminded me of some author from my dim-distant past - possibly Nabokov's later stuff? SJG
It is very powerfully handled. There are various aspects of love/loss explored in a way that is all the more poignant for being spare. A young boy's strange behaviour whilst grieving his father is even more heart-rending than the main character's loss of his fiancée for whom he writes the eponymous book. The working-out of redemption is intricate, subtle and extremely moving. A wonderful book. SRG

Kurkov, Andrey
Death and the Penguin (1996 tr 2001)
Rating:- ****
Ukranian. Friends who have been there say it's a slightly strange place where seemingly illogical things happen and where there is still a considerable hangover from the oppressions of the Soviet regime. And that could do as a brief summary of this excellent novel. The lead is employed to write newspaper obituaries of soon-to-be eliminated public figures. His home life consists of the young daughter of an eliminated gang-leader, and a penguin that the hero had taken responsibility for when the local zoo couldn't afford to feed it. That brief summary makes the novel sound rather wacky but it isn't. This is a direct descendant of Kafka with perhaps less feeling of gloom and a little lighter touch. (Although, thinking back, I used to find Kafka quite funny.) It's a sort of cross between Kafka and Haruki Murakami. Whatever, it's excellently written/translated and comes as a breath of fresh air compared to many contemporary novels I read. Recommended. SJG
It does encapsulate the situation most of us are in: we work to earn a living but in so doing unwittingly prop up a system that does things we'd never condone on a personal level. We never 'know the whole story' until, as in the quote used by the author at the start and the hero himself, our work is no longer needed. A nice twist in the tail, though. SRG

Kurkov, Andrey
Penguin Lost (2002 tr 2004)
Rating:- ****
For his 4th novel - well at least the 4th novel that has been translated into English - Kurkov has returned to the familiar territory of Viktor and his penguin, Misha, in this follow-up to 'Death and the Penguin'. This is excellent distinctive stuff unlike anything else I can remember reading. The story moves from the Antarctic to Kiev, Moscow, Chechnya and eventually to a boat headed for Argentina, but mostly, like its predecessor, it is a send-up of the new politics of Russia and its satellites. It's a witty, fast-paced story whose only minor problem is an occasional clumsiness in the translation. It is not essential to read its predecessor first, but it is highly recommended that this is done. After so doing, I would find it difficult to conceive that any reader would not want to move on to this one. SJG
The appealing/seductive aspect of this book is its gentle, human optimism in the context of political chaos, corruption and mindless violence. Viktor picks his way through these minefields protected only by his simple unselfish devotion to a penguin he feels to be wronged and his promise to a dead friend to care for his daughter. Viktor is no hero, but is nevertheless an icon in a Godless world. SRG

Lambert, Constant
Music Ho! (A Study of Music in Decline) (1934)
Rating:- ****
This is an engaging and witty book. Recommended! I wish I had enough musical know-how to tell when he is being serious and when taking the piss. Question: What is the connection of this with Dance to the Music of Time'? Answer: Constant L. is the model (probably the one closest to the original) for Hugh Moreland tho' Moreland never experienced anything as exotic as an affair with Margot Fonteyn. But the book is not about affairs but Modern Music. It was written in the early 30s and to a non-musical reader is amusing in several ways as it seems that everything had got about as Modern as could be. Stravinsky, Schoenberg, plus Joyce and Lawrence on the literary side. It is intriguing to come across the fictional Moreland's prejudices:
Lambert: "Balakireff's Thamar' is a more closely knit and convincing piece of construction than any of Brahms' symphonies" "... drab shades and muddy impastos of Brahms."
Moreland: "I should not go anywhere near the Albert Hall if I were you Edgar. It would be too great a risk. Someone might seize you and compel you to listen to Brahms. In fact from the way you have been talking tonight you would probably enter of your own free will. I would not trust you an inch where Brahms is concerned, Edgar. Not an inch."
Moreland or Lambert? "The artist who is one of a group writes for that group alone, whereas the artist who expresses personal experience may in the end reach universal experience."
Lambert can be read about in Andrew Motion's biog The Lamberts. George, Constance and Kit' (of the Who). MP
Intelligent and artistic music criticism. It surprised me how un-dated this treatment was, apart from referring to some composers who have sunk without trace. He uses comparisons with the other arts to get across his points on music without resorting to technical detail, and some of these are spectacularly apt. His analysis that Schoenberg has plunged down a cul-de-sac has proved to be prophetic. I don't share his admiration of Sibelius but am prepared to believe that he has been an important figure for composers since Lambert's book - Britten, Tippett, Messien. SRG

Lawrence, D.H.
Letters of (1950)
Rating:- ****
Possibly and by some said to be the best way of getting on to his wavelength and see him at his most likeable. There is a great immediacy in his escape' to Italy with Frieda. Though looking down his nose at England and saying that he couldn't stand Bennett's resignation he was still desperate to get hold of the English newspapers. Despite the self-justifying refrain which sometimes takes over there is a wonderful sense of life'. MP

Lawrence, D.H.
Odour of Chrysanthemums & England My England (1922)
Rating:- ****
The first is story of death of miner husband in pit accident. First of all tension as he doesn't come home when expected. Goes past the time when he might have stopped at the pub first and ends when they bring home his body. It is superb and immediately puts him a Division ahead of Arnold Bennett. The second is good example of DHL whipping up the Lawrence-view of everyone else and preaching away in what sometimes descends to a peevish whine. It is an outstanding story if you can get past this and ends with truly remarkable description of the protagonist dying in the 14-18 war. MP

Lawrence, T.E
Seven Pillars of Wisdom (privately published 1926)
Rating:- ****
First read in 1962 and my copy has since been on the shelf. Must have found it a difficult read then because it's not just a record of gung-ho adventures as Lawrence joins the Arabs to rid them of their Turkish overlords. He doesn't hesitate to add in his philosophies, thoughts and emotions to the extent that there is a tendency to ramble. Neither is the main narrative that clear with its myriad of characters and places. Publication of this work clearly had an effect. Churchill wrote that "It ranks with the greatest books ever written in the English language" and my father - no great reader - fell under its spell. It does, I suppose, present a more acceptable face of WWI, away from the horrors of trench warfare in France. For me, as well, the book had an aura even though I drifted through some sections. Arguably, its main strength was its sense of place with some wonderful descriptions of the terrain. I was led onto this re-read after coming across James Nicholson's 'The Hejaz railway' and in turn SPOW will probably move me to find some biography of Lawrence as reports I vaguely remember suggest that some of SPOW is less than the whole truth. Nevertheless, for reasons I can't put my finger on, a remarkable and effective read. SJG
I also read this as a teenager. The sense of place endures. This time round I was alive to more of the detail. While still somewhat confused by the exact movements in the action (sketch maps would have helped), I was interested in the philosophy and what comes across of Lawrence's own personality and motives. He was certainly one of the pioneers of the 'new' imperial approach of meeting 'other races' on their own terms. His adoption of Arab dress was seen by many at the time as 'going native' in the sense of slumming it in cultural terms while to us today it seems merely common sense. I'd like now to read a historical account of what he achieved in objective terms in the context of British war strategy. I suspect it was limited to keeping some Turkish forces busy and keeping most Arabs from aiding them. His own dream of helping the Arabs to free themselves and gain their own self-rule embittered him because he could see that the Allied powers would not let it happen, whatever might have been promised to secure Arab interests to the Allied cause. However, he also shows us the internecine hatred and rivalry amongst the Arabs that would have made the establishment of an Arab state at this time impossible. Lawrence's espousal of the Arab cause becomes less of a passionate personal mission towards the end of the book, perhaps from battle-weariness, but perhaps after the death of his Arab lover(?) S.A. to whom the book is dedicated in an introductory poem. SRG

Lee, Chang-Rae
Native Speaker (1995)
Rating:- ****
Strange book about a Chinese detective in New York. Filed under crime in Waterstones but not so. Rather about relationships and coming to terms with life etc. Not a masterpiece but it has a certain quality which I can't put my finger on. Worth a try as it's a lot superior to most modern novels. SJG
I think it's better than that. On reflection, SJG agrees. It goes to the essence of identity in a very light-handed way, exploring it through the ironies of an undercover role and the effect of different styles of grief on a marriage. Language is a constantly worked thread giving coherence to the very subtle ideas. Also charming and haunting! SRG
I know that accusations have been floated around about being too easily pleased but have to confess that also thought this book had a lot going for it. Agree that it's not a crime or thriller genre novel but a serious mainstream one. I'm not altogether sure that pleasure was what I got from it. It was extremely disturbing and disquieting and didn't always feel like picking it up again. But you don't have to a Korean immigrant spy yourself to feel the creeping sense of unease and dislocation which haunts this book. A lot of the relationships are understated and implied but he gets across a completely convincing sense of the realness of all the crises the protagonist goes through. Was impressed but it didn't add anything positive mentally. Rather depressing. MP
Re-read for a Reading Group. Much above general Reading Group material, but I would say that as I'm the person responsible for getting it on the Group list in the first place. Generally speaking the majority of Group members aren't too keen on my recommendations (M.Amis, W.Gibson etc) so will be interested to see how this goes down. Was a bit worried myself as nearly every time I re-read something I'd thought highly of, it goes down in my estimation. Also note that MP had found it very depressing. Anyway to my relief found it every bit as good second time around - could hardly fault it - writing, structure, insights, ideas all excellent. Almost a ‘five-star' read but it could have done with some lighter touches, some humour in parts to give it a broader wash. Note that the blurb says: "... a beautifully written, wise and compassionate novel about the immigrant experience, about love, loyalty and the languages that define us." I think that's a pretty good summary. Highly recommended. SJG

Lennon, J. Robert
On the Night Plain (2001)
Rating:- ****
When I commented on his earlier ‘The Funnies' I said that it had potential but that he still needed to hone his skills. Well, Lennon certainly has done that. This is an excellent book that must certainly end on the short list for my Book of the Year. Totally different in subject material from ‘TF', it tells the story of one of six brothers eking out an existence on a mid-West sheep farm post-WWII. The family is beset by a number of tragedies (as Lennon says, like a bush that has been pruned back too far) but the overall effect is not too depressing. I can do no better than to quote from the blurb where the Publishers Weekly states: " A terse and haunting story that speaks of inescapable bonds of blood, the ineluctable hold of the land, and the healing powers of work and solitude." The writing is fine, the characters excellent and the sense of place superb. Thoroughly recommended. SJG
There is nothing noble about the main character, Grant, and he absorbs what life throws at him and endures. The book ‘covers' his whole life but is sparingly written and the impression is space and sameness in the same way his life would have appeared to Grant. There is dialogue and there are relationships. Much is left unsaid. Only Grant's thoughts are given to us. The author does not interpret or explain. The result is powerful, rich and absorbing. Incidentally the title comes from a Terry Riley work for string quartet called ‘Cadenza on a Night Plain' which the author listened to while writing. A candidate for a Music & Book Club. SRG

Lennon, J.Robert
Mailman (2003)
Rating:- ****
Another powerful portrait of one character to follow the excellent 'On the Night Plain'. Told in the third person, usually referring to the main character, Albert Lippincott just by his profession, 'Mailman', the perspective is always the central character's rather than the author's. Mailman's 57-year-old-life has reached a crisis point and various parts of it have started to unravel, taking the reader progressively deeper into his past, his personality and the people he is linked to. This is done with consummate skill, engaging interest, sympathy and humour. Mailman is a mess, a non-hero if ever there was one with his routine obsessions, gauche social errors and failures with women. However, he is doing what we all have to, finding his way through the jungle that is life. J. Robert Lennon has no allusions about the quality of modern American life either and paints it as it is, sharpened by contrast to life in Kazakhstan where Mailman spends a disastrous week having joined the Peace Corps. The end is ambiguous, but satisfying. Having taken too many pain relievers he has hallucinations involving a conversation about success with someone he knew on his mail-round. "Your life is successful if each day is fully lived ... What is it, then, to live fully? ... Can you, say, climb a mountain and write a string quartet, and cure a disease, and have hot sex, all in one day? What can be expected of a single person any way? You did what you were capable of doing, and then some. You lived as fully as it was possible to for you to live. You loved badly, but you loved intensely. You left no emotional stone unturned. There are people broken by the absence of love. You were broken by an excess of it. You shielded your heart from nothing." SRG
Can't say that I feel as strongly in favour of this as SRG. Certainly didn't enjoy it as much as 'On the Night Plain', which had a much more laidback style. I felt that Lennon seemed to have been influenced by the 'dazzling style' that recently seems to have to the fore of American literature (eg Franzen's 'The Corrections', Foer's 'Everything is Illuminated' etc). As I've said before I find this 'style' too exhausting for comfortable reading. Also I've recently read Ford's 'Independence Day' which has got certain similarities with this book and, although I'm not a particular fan of Ford, I do feel that his novel comes off better in most aspects. That said one must admire Lennon. Excluding his first novel, the later three are considerably different yet each are clearly the work of a skilled craftsman, who needs to be thought of with great respect. It will be fascinating to see where he goes from here, hopefully away from dazzling. SJG

Lent, Jeffrey
Lost Nation (2002)
Rating:- ****
Set on the American/Canadian border in 1836 in a small rural settlement where men were men and times were tough. Cover blurb mentions David Guterson, William Faulkner, Charles Frazier and Cormac McCarthy. The first two can be immediately ignored, but if you crossed the latter pair you wouldn't be far off. The quality is better than Frazier's ‘The Cold Mountain', but doesn't match McCarthy's often wonderful prose. The story here is fairly bleak stuff with most of the cast being wiped out by the end. However Lent doesn't wallow in the brutality of it all and there's a fairly redemptive ending. One could argue that the two central characters are flawed in fictional terms. The male, Blood(!), is a little too taciturn and a stereotypically tall-in-the-saddle-all-American pioneer, and the female, Sally, too obviously the tart-with-a-heart. Both are a bit too knowing and wise considering the damaged lives they've emerged from. Nevertheless Lent got away with this, suspended my initial disbelief and ended with creating a wonderful novel that deserves to hold its head up high amongst recent American fiction. SJG
As with so many good modern novels, it's about people finding out who they are through adversity. Truth to self and the ability to give the same right to others are the highest virtues. The excess of ‘righteousness' in the American pioneers is seen as a retrograde force, guaranteeing pack mentality and mischief. A stimulating and satisfying read. SRG

Lethem, Jonathan
Motherless Brooklyn (1999)
Rating:- ****
The narrator in this story has Tourette's Syndrome which it would seem is an uncontrollable urge to shout out nonsense. The twist is that instead of making him a politician or teacher, the 'hero' is a very amateur New York detective. So from one angle this is a detective story with a few dead bodies and a mystery which is duly cleared up in the last twenty pages. From another angle it's about the strange effects of an unusual illness and the storyline is merely a peg on which to hang them. Chang Rae Lee's 'Native Speaker' comes to mind although the whole is considerably less bleak. Whatever, this is recommended. The writing is good and often quite interesting, and while the minor characters are fairly flimsy, the 'lead' is an important new and different voice. Most impressively Lethem gets the balance between plot and strange mental condition just right. As an example, here the author has just bumped off one of the minor characters:
"Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step out of the page and burden you with his actual existence? Detective stories always have too many characters anyway. And characters mentioned early on but never sighted, just lingering offstage, take on an awful portentous quality. Better to have them gone." SJG
The title refers to the group of orphan boys taken up by (and adulating) a minor hoodlum. The latter's death is what the main character 'investigates' in his crazy way, using only the echoes of obsession for clues. Very enjoyable with good balance of plot, character and philosophy. SRG

Lewycka, Marina
A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian (2005)
Rating:- ****
The title is an interesting marketing strategy for what is basically a family saga, although it needs to be said that the text justifies the title. Like most family sagas this is simply written and leaves little work necessary by the reader. Nevertheless the voice of the first-person narrator is never cloying, rarely sentimental and quite vibrant. The story tells of an 84-year-old Ukrainian immigrant in England who falls for and marries a 36-year-old gold-digger from his homeland. His two daughters, who were previously at war with each other, join forces to rid him of this woman. Lewycka intersperses this story with some back-history and comments on the state of present-day Ukraine. (See also Andrey Kurkov's ' Death and the Penguin'.) Unlike Andrea Levy's 'Small Island' this back-history is slipped in unobtrusively and doesn't overshadow the main thread. This is also a 'feel good' read and as I don't come across that many, they are generally appreciated when I do. Overall it's light reading but thoroughly enjoyable and just about scrapes a 'Recommendation'. From the information given by the publishers one would assume that this is Ms Lewycka's first work (and as such would make it even more praiseworthy.) However a bit of detective work shows that she is responsible for a host of other things with titles like: 'Caring for someone who has had a stroke', 'Caring for someone with diabetes' etc. Interesting that Penguin did not want this facet of her work to be presented on the blurb. Another aspect to the marketing strategy. SJG
Very enjoyable with its mixture of history, family relationships and semi-farcical goings all told with a light touch and down-to-earth humour. SRG

Loudon, Jane
The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827)
Rating:- ****
Let's get the bad news out of the way first of all: the writing's iffy (especially the dialogue), the characters thin and unbelievable, and the plot silly with a poor structure. Yet this is one of the most surprising and unbelievable books that I've ever read. A science fiction tale written in 1827(!) by a 20-year-old who had lost both parents and needed to pay her bills. (She later went on to be a specialist in horticultural works and sold over twenty thousand copies of 'The Ladies' Companion to the Flower Garden'.) Here though she is attempting to cash in on the success of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' and the contemporary London craze for all things Egyptian. Doing this she unconsciously created one of the first-ever science fiction novels. Because she keeps it in check the science fiction aspect is not so bad with lots of things (including houses) moving around on rails, clean fuel and a sort of visual telegraph system. The Egyptian bit is totally ludicrous with one of the heroes reviving a 3000-year-old mummy who then accidentally gets catapulted by balloon to London and goes around appearing at the most opportune and inopportune moments. (Indeed the mummy is developed rather nicely as a character and one of the disappointments of the book is that there isn't more of him (it?).) But what the book is more often about is a comment on the corrupt politics of the Georgian era, and this works well despite the fact that Loudon seems quite willing to regularly change the plot direction in a mere sentence. There's a little too much of unhappy lovers not getting their act together (even when meeting in the tunnel between England and Ireland), but given the date I suppose this is only to be expected. So all in all quite fascinating and worth reading if it can be found. It's out of print and copies on the net seem to start at £140. Could well do with a reprint especially as the editor of this 1994 edition seems to have shortened the original by 25%. Grab it if you can find it. SJG
It does read rather like a child's story (as written by a child, that is) with too many characters and plot turns which begin to be more than the author can handle without resorting to ad hoc solutions, (eg two imprisoned characters 'suddenly' - after three months- find a secret way out of their cell.) The bizarre nature of the book somewhat makes up for this. I did find the prose over-wordy in places and found my eye slipping paragraphs. An interesting read but only for the curious. SRG

McCann, Colum
This Side of Brightness (1998)
Rating:- ****
My main complaint is that it is written in a simple lyrical style - a style which quite a few contemporary British authors use to little good effect. However the content of this (Irish/American) novel is much stronger than usual and I was gradually won over. The structure is of two side-by-side stories: one covers seventy years in the life of a black tunnel-digger; the other about an ex-construction worker on skyscrapers who is now an urban down-and-out. Neither story is told in any great detail - just incidents in their lives. One of the great strengths of this book is how these two threads are bound closer-and-closer together towards the end - it's a technical tour-de-force. As well as that there are many good things here: strong characters, powerful imagery, an excellent treatment of insidious racism and an even better one of grief and its results. The author is not frightened to take chances and he is not averse to jolting the reader to make sure that he/she doesn't get too complacent. Interesting stuff and a potentially significant new(ish) voice. SJG
I've increased the rating to Recommended' as I feel McCann writes very powerfully. His poetic treatment is entirely appropriate and he conveys the complex stuff of people's lives with great economy. The implications of historical change are played through the lives of these two generations, grazing their humanity but not quenching it. Poignant and moving. SRG

McCarthy, Cormac
All the Pretty Horses (1992)
Rating:- ****
Set in Texas/Mexico in late 1940s. A western! Sort of Hemingway meets William Faulkner meets Shane. Despite this it's actually quite good. The writing is fairly simplistic and spare, but often manages to convey great emotion and a wonderful feeling of place. The faults are those of a western-too-good-to-be-true hero who always sits tall in the saddle etc. Also the hero is only supposed to be 16, but acts with a maturity three times his age. However it's a good stab at writing an intelligent western and comes with a recommendation. SJG

McCarthy, Cormac
Suttree (1979)
Rating:- ****
Another attempt to fill in the gaps before 'The Border Trilogy'. It's McCarthy's fourth novel, and although written 14 years after the first, 'The Orchard Keeper', it has stylistic similarities with that novel and the best I can do is refer you to the comments on it. There is a sometimes frustrating combination of occasionally over-blown writing and some of the most evocative, and often humorous, passages in recent literature. My problem was, I think, that I tried to read this too quickly; it's the sort of novel which should dictate the pace to its reader. SJG
Having been warned, I followed the advice above and found this novel impressive and moving. The eponymous main character is down-and-out in Tennessee in an entirely convincing way. He is an educated man, with some bitterness in his background, who has taken to a life amongst low-life and vagrants as a way to touch bottom and find himself. The descriptions are poetic and economical, the dialogue gritty and realistic, the characters are well-drawn. There is no message or resolution to the story but the dignity of man is upheld in an important way. SRG

McCarthy, Cormac
The Road (2006)
Rating:- ****
Pushing a supermarket trolley a young boy and his father are journeying south, to escape the winter, through a devastated landscape that contains only an occasional, usually aggressive and cannibalistic, human being and no other living creatures. What befell this land is never stated. The pair try to survive by looting deserted houses in order to find tinned food and the means to keep warm. It's about as bleak a setting as a novel could have. As shown by the absolutely wonderful ‘The Border Trilogy', McCarthy is a fine writer and his greatest strengths are the ability to convey a sense of place and, secondly, to develop character through dialogue. Unfortunately in the scenario he has chosen this time he has placed a significant handicap on these strengths. Admittedly the ravaged landscape is conveyed with great conviction but there's only so much one can write about a largely featureless landscape. Also whilst the dialogue between the two leads is faultless the boy is too young for it to hold any real interest and for most of the time it consists of ‘Are you OK? Yes, I'm OK' or similar. Additionally a story like this is almost impossible to finish convincingly and McCarthy's attempt at the end is no more than passable. Because he is such a great writer McCarthy has largely succeeded in the challenge that he has set himself; it's just that the parameters of that challenge are too restrictive. SJG
I disagree and think that this is an important book in spite of being uncomfortable to read. McCarthy has aptly chosen the metaphor our language uses for life itself - a road or journey and has skinned down the setting until all that we have is a journey for survival of self and of the species. This reduction of issues to the fundamental is part of earlier books, too, with his characters essentially alone and having to find practical ways through hostile circumstances. The father is trying to hold on to, and teach his son to live by, principles of human decency (they refer to this as ‘carrying the fire'), namely consideration for others and love. It is only this urge that has kept the father from killing himself and the boy. The mother has taken the suicide route already. The pair do as we all have to do: put one foot in front of the other and live our lives as well as we can until we die. There could be despair here but there is not, even though the end is of necessity still ambiguous as to the final outcome. What do any of us really know about the end? SRG

McKinerney (or McInerney), Jay
The Last of the Savages
Rating:- ****
A find! Basically the story of two friends between mid-60s and mid-90s - one is a hell-raising rock promoter, the other (the narrator) a repressed Irish lawyer. Writing is excellent - he has a clever' style that's neither too verbose not too dialogue-based. Not quite sure who he reminds me of - perhaps a looser' Updike, but not really. Indeed it's more of an English style' rather than American. Perhaps Gordon Burn or Penelope Fitzgerald? There's a nice feeling of humanity and the first 100 pages are excellent. After that it sags a bit, but picks up towards the end. Would have probably benefited by being 150 pages longer as we move through time a bit quickly in the second half. Not quite Book of the Year contender but recommended. SJG
" ... it seemed possible that afternoon to start fresh, to take twelve steps into a brave new life. If we log on to the Internet, eat the right foods and exercise religiously, surely we will forget our differences and begin to love one another. But then the riots break out again in the city of Angels ... and sons stand trial for shotgunning their parents ..."
After flailing so awkwardly against my own modest heritage, I know that my only contribution to the great tide of history will be to relay the message of my genes. There be giants ... and there be the rest of us."
SRG

Mailer, Norman
The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Rating:- ****
Plugging another gap in my reading, this was a pleasant surprise. It does for WWII what All Quiet on the Western Front' did for WWI, despite (because of?) being written only four years after end of the war. In truth it's a little long at 550 dense pages, but not by much. Also the writing style is only very average - it reminds me of a book that has been translated. That said, there's little else to complain about. A packed and varied roll of male characters (I had to make a list to keep them defined at first) - there are additional chapters giving background for the main ones. Most of them have unpleasant traits and have been further de-humanised by the process of war. The story concerns the American invasion of a Pacific island held by the Japanese, but there's relatively little action here, the fog-of-war being well done - most of the time is taken by officers squabbling amongst themselves and the NCOs/privates performing mundane tasks or pointless patrols etc. More readable than these comments suggest, it's strongly anti-war and comes with a recommendation. SJG
A very strong portrayal of modern troop movement' war. The issues of power and leadership are dealt with very well and the book is way ahead of its time in suggesting that deprived conscripts make better soldiers than comfortably off volunteers. The effects of army life on personality and vice versa are shown very clearly. (He is very skilled developing character through relationships and actions.) An important book. SRG

Malone, Michael
Time's Witness (1989)
Rating:- ****
Follow up to 'Uncivil Seasons' which introduced the wise-cracking pair of detectives - Justine Saville and Cuddy Mangum - from North Carolina. Unlike a lot of these series where the books come thick and fast, one can hardly say that Malone is a prolific writer as five years elapsed before this follow-up appeared. There are quite a few changes in emphasis too - no repetitious formula here. The humourous patter between the detectives has been reduced, as has the part played by Justin, who now becomes no more than a significant bit player. This places much of the onus on Mangum, whose character can easily take it. At 500 pages it is, and feels, much longer and denser than books in the genre. In the second half the emphasis moves to the courtroom where an old, engaging lawyer takes over much of the spotlight. There's a considerable volume of sentimentality throughout which some may find cloying but which I, being an idoliser of Dickens, had no problem with. The story-line is given an important edge by the strong theme of racism which runs throughout. I've given this a 'Recommendation' for the sheer scope of the novel with its wide variety of characters and incidents. He has taken something which was enjoyable in the earlier work and created something extra with breadth and scope. I believe there's a third novel in this series which I must certainly dig out. SJG
Very satisfying. Jigsaw pieces in the police procedural puzzle come thick and fast but, realistically, in very small helpings. You need to keep reading to remain abreast of events and characters before they fade from (in my case) decaying brain cells. The main character is entirely engaging and his ideas for law-enforcement and penal policy are excellent. I'm thinking of using his approach to team building in the force in my own educational setting ... SRG

Mankell, Henning
The Fifth Woman (1996 tr 2001)
Rating:- ****
Very good police procedural. Fourth Inspector Wallander novel to be translated (superbly by Stephen T. Murray) from Swedish. The good news is that there are another half a dozen waiting over in Scandinavia. Similar in several ways to the Rankin stuff in that there's a great feeling of place and that the ‘hero' is rather a dour and sad figure. Usual complaints about police procedurals apply. Notably that the villain is too clever and too knowing, and secondly that there seems to be a rule that all the killings must be as macabre as possible. Also Wallander seems to know instinctively whether somebody being questioned is telling the truth. Nevertheless these are minor carps and more than made up for when, for example, it is mused that "... Sweden's prosperity was a well-camouflaged quagmire. The decay was underneath it all". Not the stereotypical view of that country. SJG
Yes, Wallander's consciousness of encroaching age and his despair about what is happening to his country are touchstones of humanity. His father dies in this one and he has to put off dealing with the grief - just another burden to add to the low pay, worries about his personal life and getting things right at work. Very enjoyable. SRG

Mankell, Henning
Before The Frost (2002 tr 2004)
Rating:- ****
What do you do when the hero of your police-procedural series, Kurt Wallander in this case, comes up to retirement? Rankin (up to the ones I've read so far) has determinedly avoided the problem with Rebus. Connelly turned Bosch into a P.I. - not really Wallender's scene. The answer in Mankell's case is to have his 30-year-old daughter take an interest in joining the police at the end of the previous novel, ‘Firewall'. Here she joins her father's area police force. Not a bad idea and this novel is now subtitled ‘A Linda Wallander Mystery' rather than as previously ‘A Kurt Wallander Mystery'. In fact this is more ‘A Kurt and Linda Wallander Mystery' but no doubt in future the emphasis will swing further over to the daughter. There are a few problems. Linda is almost instantaneously a ‘super-cop' and she is, in thought and deed, almost a carbon copy of her father. Be interesting to see if Mankell can create a true separate entity out of Linda. The story here, dealing with Christian lunatics, is great fun and, especially after just reading a heavy dose of Kafka, comes recommended. One however does wonder when the population of southern Sweden will be completely wiped out by Wallander's adversaries. One final point. In the past there's quite a few years between publication in Sweden and translation/publication in the UK. Now I note that the gap has narrowed to two. Won't be long before the publisher will be demanding immediate translation. Nice to have been there ‘at the beginning' thanks to a recommendation from my postman. SJG
Mankell likes to tie his plots in with world events. (Perhaps to convince us that Sweden is more than a Scandinavian backwater.) Here we have links with the Guyana Peoples' Temple massacre and a glancing reference to 9/11. However these are tangential enough to be realistic. A good page-turner. SRG

Mankell, Henning
The Return of the Dancing Master (2000 tr 2003)
Rating:- ****
A return to form. In the Inspector Wallander series, Mankell seemed to run out of steam as Wallander reached retirement, and replacing him with his daughter was not going to be one of his best ideas. So Mankell has done the right thing and started afresh. A younger detective, Stefan Lindman - late 30s - and a move further north in Sweden. And it works even if Lindman is little different in his characteristics to Wallander. The story is very tight, concerning ancient ex-Nazis hiding out in remote districts - scared, anxious and now being hunted for revenge purposes. It's all very bleak - the weather (it's winter), the lack of daylight and the suggestion that half the population of northern Sweden are Nazi-sympathisers. On top of this Lindman is walking around with untreated cancer. Despite this it's an enjoyable read and certainly one of the best things Mankell has written. SJG
He really keeps it moving and, although we know who-dun-it very early on for one murder, other complications and the link to an underground Nazi network keep Stefan Lindman and the reader in suspense. Extra tension is provided by the fact that Lindman is not really supposed to be involved in the investigation as he comes from another force. A page-turner with the extra depth that the best of Mankell's work always has. SRG

Marchant, Ian
Parallel Lines (2003)
Rating:- ****
Similar in style and subject matter to Bill Bryson's 'Notes from a Small Island' except that Marchant takes as his theme the railways of the British Isles. As someone who spent a few years of his youth train-spotting, who is automatically impressed by steam locomotives and who, if I could bring myself to wear an anorak in public, might still become a railway modeller, I felt naturally disposed towards the subject material. However, even given this, I think this is an excellent, funny (I actually laughed out loud in several places) and enjoyable book, which I felt to be an improvement on Bryson's. I've not read that many railway books but this easily leads the pack. Each chapter has a theme such as railway modelling (It seems that you have to throw away your cool image and become a romantic in order to embrace it.), narrow gauge railways, the National Railway museum etc. Within each chapter you get a reasonable amount of factual stuff, but it is welded together by very human personal reminiscences and a deep hatred of the late 20th century privatisation of the railways. His tastes seem very similar to mine for example enjoying smoking, Rothko, praising the Aire valley where we live, and in his analysis of newspapers left by commuters: "The 'Guardian' was po-faced and hypocritical, the 'Mail' was psychotic and mystical, the 'Express' was pointless, 'The Times' teetered on the brink of insanity, the 'Telegraph' was drooling with early on-set senile dementia (except the sports pages) and the 'Independent' was worthy and dull… None of the City types had left an 'FT', that's how you get rich, I guess, by hanging on to what you've got." Finally here's one of the memorable anecdotes that are dotted throughout: "I have a chum called Big Doctor Dave, and when he was a boy, his mother always used to buy dull, unappetizing biscuits on the grounds that 'they don't get eaten'. This annoyed Big Doctor Dave, and he swore that if he ever had kids, he would buy nice biscuits. I can now tell the world that Big Doctor Dave's mum is the chief biscuit buyer for the various catering companies that serve refreshments the length of Britain's railways; or, if she isn't, her biscuit-buying philosophy has somehow spread through the entire network." SJG
I have never been a train-spotter or hankered after products in a model shop. However, I found the book very amusing and congenial; it is at least as much about humans as about trains. SRG

Mason, Anita
Angel (1994)
Rating:- ****
English. Story of a female German pilot between 1925-45. I hadn't got high expectations as wasn't particularly impressed by her The Illusionist' which I'd read a few years ago. She writes in rather a flat impersonal narrative style. Not too many adverbs or adjectives and few one-liners'. However I was pleasantly surprised. Firstly it was about WWII (rather than another WWI novel for a change) and after first 50 pages the story picked up considerably. Secondly being from the German perspective and concerning itself with gliders/'planes brought a new (to me) slant. Thirdly it made a reasonable stab at how a liberal' got sucked into involvement with the Nazis. It also made a reasonable stab at how a woman competes in a male world. Overall rather good and comes with a recommendation. SJG
I agree. It manages to express well the double-think in gender stereotypes without being aggressively women's lib. SRG

Maupassant, Guy de
Bel-Ami (1885)
Rating :- ****
Re-read after about thirty years as had come across the following passage in Anthony Powell's 'Miscellaneous Verdicts': "Conrad speaks of 'that amazing masterpiece Bel-Ami.' One would certainly agree that 'Bel-Ami' is a novel of extraordinary skill and adroitness of characterization, but not expect Conrad to pick it out for special praise." So curiosity raised, I returned to this novel of which, I must admit, I had no recollection. Agree with Powell about the skill and characterization but can see why Conrad raved over it as many of his most interesting characters are drawn in a similar way to Maupassant's anti-hero George DuRoy. Indeed it is a stunning portrait of a social climber as he uses people, mainly females, without compunction to move from being an ex-NCO, through the worlds of finance and journalism to reach the heights of Parisian society. What also impressed me was how modern this novel felt in its dealings with sex and corruption. Surprised the BBC, or whoever, hasn't already made a TV series of it. SJG
I did not enjoy reading this. I can see how admirable it is in many ways but the utter amoral hypocrisy of the characters and cynicism of the author in presenting them as typical examples of Parisian society disturbed me. The whole tenor of the book is nihilist: religion and morality are shams, all government is corrupt, every relationship has an ulterior motive, status, money and sex are the only things worth lifting a finger for. I was waiting for the 'hero', Georges DuRoy, to have his come-uppance, but unfortunately the author, like a malign spirit, kept granting him much more than his fair share of luck with which to extricate himself from the seemingly impossible tangles he had got himself into. SRG

Maupin, Armistead
Maybe the Moon (1992)
Rating:- ****
American story about an upfront female dwarf. Written by the author of Tales of the City' who specialises in pithy pacy dialogue usually about L.A. gay community. Fair amount of sex and not many adjectives/adverbs. Much better than it sounds. Treat yourself. SJG
Some nice twists about ways we see deviants/deviants see themselves. SRG

Maxwell, William
Time will Darken It (1948)
Rating:- ****
Superbly told tale of small town USA just before WWI. Easy-going lawyer and family are visited by some relations, who are a sort of family from hell. From then, the steadfast framework the lawyer's family lived in starts to crumble away. Characterisation is excellent, especially the visiting family and their self-obsessions. Writing is good: plain and straight-forward. The story is told with wit and the narrative interspersed with homespun philosophies:
"As an only child, Mrs Ewing had inherited everything, including, for about fifteen years, the problem of supporting her parents, both of whom were now dead."
"For most people, having company for more than three or four days is a serious mistake, the equivalent of sawing a large hole in the roof and leaving all the doors and windows open in the middle of winter."
"Women are never ready to let go of love at the point where men are satisfied and able to turn to something else. It is a fault of timing that affects the whole human race. There is no telling how much harm it has caused."
Faults? Well not quite a ‘five star' book. It contained, for me, no new ideas or perceptions. Also he dug a considerable Thomas-Hardy-size black hole for the main characters to walk into, and hence was a touch too depressing for my present tastes. SJG
He's excellent on the subtleties of human relationships and the way mistakes live with us. One of the main characters finds he can be too nice and others dash themselves to pieces on his gentleness. Nobody means to damage the children, but they get brushed by events and have to find their own salvation. SRG

Mistry, Rohinton
A Fine Balance (1995)
Rating:- ****
Son of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy' except it's shorter (a mere 600+ pages), is set in mid-1970s and has a more working-class' feel - death and nasty accidents happen more often in this book. In virtually every instance it is inferior to A Suitable Boy' - less intelligent, less well written, less depth of character. The story centres around four individuals and when the story starts to sag he moves from one to the other. Also the first couple of hundred pages or so contain a lot of padding by going back over each individual's life story - a rather lazy way of writing. However it's still a pretty good read even though it suffers in comparison with Seth's work. In particular it opened my eyes to the way the poor suffered under Indira Ghandi. Recommended. SJG
It is a more political book than A Suitable Boy'; less poetic, philosophical. The Fine Balance' of the title is between misery and happiness; enmity and friendship; love and hate; violence and compassion. The characters are trapped in their humanity, searching for means of survival and ways to find meaning in existence. They are pawns in the game of fate as well as of horrendously corrupt political systems and savage traditions. Thought-provoking. SRG

Mistry, Rohinton
Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987)
Rating:- ****
Mistry's writing style is a cross between Vikram Seth and Kipling. Two illustrious names to be in company with, but he comes fairly close to reaching their heights. His long novel was excellent and these (earlier) short stories are even better. I'm assuming that they were the first things he published - it seems de rigeur for new authors initially to bring out a short story collection. However I think his writing style - concerned with the small details of life - is more suited to this format. This collection centres around the inhabitants of a block of flats in Bombay with characters popping in and out of different stories. There's also a bit of to-ing and fro-ing to Canada (where the author now lives). They may not quite reach the standards set by Joyce, Kipling and Chekhov but they come reasonably close. If, as I'm sure you did, you loved the mother' in A Suitable Boy' you'll soon warm to this crowd of wonderful characters. Totally unmissable. SJG
Yes. He does get right in there' in portraying character economically through actions and speech. It also succeeds, without being heavy, in explaining the Indian emigré's motivation and his sense of forever being alien to both countries. SRG

Mistry, Rohinton
Such a Long Journey (1991)
Rating:- ****
I've eventually got around to Mistry's first novel; lighter, more optimistic than 'A Fine Balance' with lots of echoes of the earlier collection of short stories: 'Tales from the Firozsha Baag'. (Indeed newcomers to Mistry probably only need to choose between these two earlier works as there are great similarities.) This is an extremely enjoyable read, with excellent characters and a solid well-structured storyline in the Dickensian tradition. I particularly like the lead, Gustad Noble, a middle-aged, lower middle-class Parsee living in Bombay. At first he comes across as a more recent version of Naipaul's cantankerous 'Mr Biswas' but as the novel develops his inner strengths come out and he becomes a well-rounded and admirable figure; for some reason I was reminded of one of my heroes - Updike's Rabbit. Like a lot of recent novels from the Indian sub-continent, the story is clearly fixed in time - in this case there is the war of independence of Bangladesh. Along with all the other threads it adds up to a finely-woven piece of tapestry. Recommended as are all this author's works so far. SJG
Yes, it is a most satisfying read. The hero is a truly moral character experiencing the everyday conflicts between principle and practice. He resolves his conflicts through his faith and humanity in contrast to the country at large. India at the time of Indira Ghandi is painted with all its filth and corruption but, true I suspect to life, the individuals caught up in its meshes are shown to be impotent but also morally innocent in relation to its excesses. Threads of local scandals about drains, neighbourhood enmities about adolescent children's behaviour and national scandals about slush funds are woven into the life of this Parsee family. A many-faceted jewel of a book. SRG

Mitchell, David
number9dream (2001)
Rating:- ****
Blurb says it "belongs in a Far Eastern, multi-textual, urban-pastoral, road-movie-of-the-mind, cyber-metaphysical, detective/family chronicle, coming-of-age-love story genre". While for once a blurb is showing a bit of humour (I hope), it does give a flavour of this book. Very much of its time. Underlying story is a 20-year-old Japanese boy who goes to the big city (Tokyo) for the first time in order to try and find his father. To the country boy the city comes across as rather similar to the one in the film ‘Bladerunner' - video arcades, underworld, alarming transport system, continual insecurity etc. Mitchell does it very well. He's obviously absorbed the works of William Gibson but he keeps his feet firmly planted on the floor, and the plot and language should present no problem, even to those not keyed into the latest aspects of culture. Surprisingly his use of dreams is quite acceptable and didn't annoy me in the way it does in most novels. This is not a great book but it is heartening that, in company with the likes of Zadie Smith, there are young novelists about who respect the tradition and can bring it up-to-date without an obsession with sex, violence and excessive use of four-letter words.
"I wander past an electronics shop, and on TV see someone familiar walking past an electronics shop. He stops, examines the TV, amazed and semi-appalled at how he must appear to other people."
""Fulfilment"! Writing is not about "Fulfilment"! Writing is about adoration! Glamour! Awards!... When I was a mere human I was deluded by "fulfilment". I learned the language of writers, o yes - I said "coda" and "conceit" instead of "ending" and "idea"; I said "tour de force" instead of "the good bit"; "cult classic!" instead of "this tosh'll never sell!"" SJG
The hero restores one's faith in the younger generation in the same way as the author does. He tries to make sense of his life and finds meaning in the process of the search. The plot has the flavour of a computer game with a quest and various demons that leap out at the hero. The baddies are exaggerated and android-like while the goodies ring true as wholly human. A book of substance. SRG

Mitchell, David
Cloud Atlas (2004)
Rating:- ****
Mitchell's a promising author but unfortunately this is a return to the style of 'Ghostwritten' (rather than the excellent 'number9dream') whereby a collection of tenuously related long short stories are compounded into one long novel. The individual stories cover an awful lot of ground: crossing the Pacific in the 19th century, a young composer in Belgium between WWI and WWII, a journalist pursuing corruption in 1970s California, a publisher being incarcerated unwillingly in an old people's home and then two pieces of science fiction. The latter pieces are probably the best but none carry the quality or conviction that would stretch to make a first-rate full-length novel. The binding between them is contrived and of little import, and the overall conclusion disappointingly naive. Nevertheless Mitchell writes professionally with both imagination and gusto, and this could have been highly enjoyable if not for a flawed structure whereby all but one of the stories (call them A, B, ... F) are split in two and placed in the novel in the form: A1,B1, C1, D1, E1, F, E2, D2, C2, B2, A2. Now it's not too difficult to remember the end of E1 when you start E2, but remembering the characters in B1 when you start B2? It might have seemed a good idea in theory when he devised it in a pub one night but in practice it's just a damned nuisance. SJG
I've often had the idea that if I ever wrote a novel I'd try to follow the structure of a piece of music. Mitchell has saved me the trouble as this novel does just that, taking the music/prose imitation as far as possible. The composer of the 'Cloud Atlas Sextet' explains his work (which I believe is also key to the novel's structure): a "sextet for overlapping soloists: piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe and violin, each in its own language of key, scale and colour. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order." The theme of this work is the essential question of whether man can transcend "tooth and claw" which will lead to eventual and violent annihilation. The stories set this theme in different times and places (and in ways that may themselves be truth or fable.) They refer forwards and backwards to each other in small ways that resemble musical figures that are no sooner registered than they are past. Each story is itself involving and well-written, and I found the structure deeply satisfying. SRG

Moody, Rick
Purple America (1997)
Rating:- ****
Very good but an uncomfortable read. Belongs with Dale Peck and William Gaddis in a school of recent American fiction that, as far as I'm aware, hasn't been given a name - and indeed is probably not considered as a ‘school' by anybody but me. The content is not especially violent, but the writing and psychological content does have a violent feel; it's all very in-your-face and what I would term as hard-edged. Like Peck and Gaddis the writing and characterisation are excellent, the content disturbing and the whole very critical of modern American society. A major theme in this particular novel is old age, as various parts of the mind and body stop working, and additionally the modern dysfunctional family, the lack of security concerning atomic energy, the dependence of our culture on alcohol are all given a working over. I marked this down to ‘three stars' as I found that I had to take a deep breath each time I picked up the book. However I do believe that, along with the aforementioned Gaddis and Peck, we have an important and significant group of writers here. SJG
I've put it up to ‘four stars'. The humour is black and nearly becomes farce at times - scenarios include drunken girlfriend of main character leaving paralysed mother in bath while she's on the phone and breaking crockery making a cup of tea. The disfunctionality can all be traced back to the nuclear tests for the atom bomb by a subtle set of casual links. This is not overdone, but does give the book a doom-laden quality. SRG

Moore, Brian
The Doctor's Wife (1976)
Rating:- ****
I'm not so keen on his later novels but this comes from the 70s and is good stuff. Basically middle-aged woman has a whirlwind affair with younger male and its consequences. Writes about women probably better than anybody and this is no exception. The story-line is a little obvious and it could have done with some sub-plots. That said, it's extremely well-written and comes recommended. SJG
A good read. Plot almost entirely driven by character - nothing happens but a playing-out of who people are. SRG

Murakami, Haruki
dance dance dance (1988 tr 1994)
Rating:- ****
A member of my Library Reading Group has been encouraging me to read this author. I'd consequently waded through 600 pages of ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' and, having not enjoyed it, decided to put him on the reject-author-pile (which is getting rather large). However I was thwarted by aforesaid member, told that I'd read the ‘wrong' book and lent this one. So had no choice but to try again. And it's very good. Reject-author-pile decreases by one. Similar sort of comments to the ones I've made about ‘TWUBC' but the whole thing is tighter and he keeps it moving. Less dream sequences and the Japanese version of magic realism was held in restraint and actually gave the reading experience a more ‘novelistic' flavour. Not a total convert to ‘Japanese magic realism' but it worked well here. Still don't know what he's going on about underneath the basic story. No doubt SRG will put me right there, as she did last time. SJG
I liked it. The ‘hero' is a thoroughly nice guy who has reached the age of 34 and is trying to make sense of his life. He follows up some threads of his past life that are a bit like shadows or dreams calling out to him. Along the way he meets some other people (one a 13-year-old girl as in ‘TWUBC'). His principles of treating everyone as having value, and approaching each situation with respect and integrity so there are no regrets, carry him forward to a resolution in which he finds what he is seeking - basically himself. SRG

Murakami, Haruki
The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (tr 1991)
Rating:- ****
Have blown a bit hot and cold on this author but am decidedly coming down on the hot side. This is an earlier work than the previous two I've read, but seems more focussed. Fewer aimless meanderings and less - what I've called for the want of a better phrase - ‘Japanese magic realism'. Not that most of this is realistic as it is, in all but name, science fiction. There are two parallel stories: one set in a Utopian fantasy land, and the second in modern day Japan and dealing with the control and protection of data information. If that puts you off, don't let it. The writing is solid (another excellent translation), and it's chock full of cultural references from Turgenev to Bob Dylan. How about: "I ... went to a beer hall. It was almost empty. They were playing a Bruckner symphony. I couldn't tell which number, but who can?" or: "The autumn sky was as clear as if it had been made that very morning. Perfect Duke Ellington weather." or: "I watched her walk straight out of the park like Joseph Cotten in The Third Man." The structure is totally impressive. At first you wonder what on earth is the connection between the two disparate stories, but he brings them together in a most satisfying way that makes you want to give him a round of applause. Recommended. SJG
Yes, it's really good. The psycho-babble that gives it the sci-fi touch is just sketched in lightly so the technical aspects don't get in the way of the story being about mind, individuality and what gives life its point. SRG

Murakami, Haruki
Kafka on the Shore (2002 tr 2005)
Rating:- ****
This is my fifth (of nine in all) Murakami novel and it's probably the best. A large book, it contains all his trademarks. If anybody wanted to try this author then it is certainly the one I would recommend. If you don't like this then you can safely ignore Murakami in future. As to what it's about, I can't be so definite. In fact I haven't a clue. However the combination of (i) the description of contemporary Japan (particularly from the viewpoint of a teenager), (ii) references to many modern-day cultural icons (At one point the hero is walking through a forest humming the tenor solo from Coltrane's 'My Favourite Things'.) and (iii) a significant dose of (for want of a better term) 'magic realism'', works superbly, knitted together as it is by some lovely calm even-paced writing beautifully translated by Philip Gabriel. My dislike of magic realism has been stated on numerous occasions but here it works. Too often it's used as a device for a writer to proceed with little thought and structure. In this book it is used with a discerning touch and only when it has a significant role in the structure. Overall an impressive work that will probably be regarded as Murakami's masterpiece. SJG
There is a prevailing feeling of philosophical conundrum about this book. The 15-year-old character is on a journey of self-discovery having been saddled with the same predicted fate as Oedipus (killing father and marrying mother). He seems to be caught up in some time/reality fault-line as a result of machinations before he was born and some power (taking his father's form) is busy working through humans to reverse the damage. This, of course, matches the idea that the human condition is always one in which we are 'programmed' in terms of heredity and early environment and have to free ourselves enough to choose our own path. This philosophical working-out is subtle and satisfying and the book is made even more so by the pervasive humanity, love and general decency of most of the characters, the touches of humour and richness of reference. SRG

Murakami, Haruki
After Dark (2004 tr 2007)
Rating:- ****
Much shorter than the usual Murakami fare; it's really an extended novella. One expects his work to be beautifully written but this is exceptional; the translator, Jay Rubin, also deserves a round of applause. Not much of a story, indeed none at all really. A small group of characters, mainly, but not exclusively, in their late teens or twenties, circulate in a large city for about seven hours between about midnight and dawn. They converse and the characters are built up through their dialogue. Little of any moment happens but by the end of the novel the reader feels that these lives will continue beyond the book. Not at all sure what it's supposed to be ‘about' especially as in place are a number of Murakami's ‘mystical moments' eg reflections remain in mirrors, the reader is able to move into a TV screen etc. Stated in this way, it may seem unnecessarily wacky but, believe me, it works superbly. The writing has a strong visual quality and the whole feels more like watching a film than reading a book. This is one of those novels that as soon as you have finished it, you want to start all over again. Highly recommended. SJG
The story parts are expressed like the stage directions in a play - and in the present tense. The reader is invited to join the narrator in the role of a ‘conceptual viewer' who can see whatever the ‘camera' points at. One aspect of the story is of a beautiful girl who has seemingly lost her real self by trying to be Miss Perfect and becoming the darling of her parents and the commercial interests for whom she is a model. She is nicknamed ‘Snow White'. It is not a surprise, therefore, that she resolves her predicament by deciding to sleep constantly, which she has been doing for two months. Sequences involving a television screen through which she appears to travel reinforce the idea that she lacks real substance. Her younger sister, the main character in the book, is worried about her but feels cut off. The events of the night serve to show her how to approach her sister and give her back her personality, more or less with the kiss that we expect in fairy tales. All of this is told with great economy and the warm humanity that we have come to expect and love in Murakami's work. SRG

Murdoch, Iris
The Bell (1958)
Rating:- ****
Another re-read after 30 years or more and stands up well. Generally thought to be her best or thereabouts. The religious community vividly realised. Interesting too as a period piece particularly (like the Angus Wilson) with its rather muffled treatment of homosexuality which is an important theme in both books and neither author seems able to get to full grips with it. A very good read, near to the top class. The symbolism of the recovery of the Bell from the lake and the nature of the enclosed order are not as convincing as the relations between the members of the lay community. Recommended to possible Murdoch-doubters. It was followed by A Severed Head' which caused much disappointment. MP
MP recommended this about four years ago and have only now got round to it. Agree with all MP's comments re the religious community, treatment of homosexuality. Writing is strong without being exceptional. Main criticism is the lack of pace in the first three-quarters, I tended to lose interest in some of the wordy religious sermons. Take 30 to 50 pages of this section and it could become a British novel of the 1950s that I could actually recommend - a rare thing.
PS Have just been reading that this is in the English A' level syllabus. Surprised that teachers think that this is the sort of thing to inspire 21st century youngsters to become interested in literature. Think it more suitable for old fogeys like us in reading groups. Admit there's plenty to get your teeth into, but mainly for a sociological perspective of views in the ‘50s. SJG
Murdoch explores the inner life resulting from webs of relationships. I suppose it could be said to be a weakness to do this by analysing events through the minds of her characters (Dora, Toby, Michael) instead of by demonstrating action and consequence. The theme - that chaos can ensue when people get turned from expression of their real feelings by convention, religion, ‘goals' - is obscured rather. SRG

Murdoch, Iris
The Sandcastle (1957)
Rating:- ****
Nothing ever quite replaces those novels written when one is growing up (assuming such a process ever actually takes place) and read at that formative eerie period of one's life. Eerie, perhaps, because one is not sure what the quality of newness is, that is so compelling - only that one shares it with these writers (Amis, Larkin, Wain, Murdoch in my case) just a decade (more or less) older than myself. Re-read nearly half a century later, the question of their attractiveness is no less hard to define or account for.
While I agree with Dawson that reading Murdoch might possibly damage your mental health, and with Byatt that the character of Rain Carter is a rather embarrassing invention at times, I cannot escape the fact that this book gave me such great delight that I began it again straight away with undiminished excitement at the treat in store.
""Do you mean that we should not paint other human beings?" asked Miss Carter.
"Each must find his own way" said Bledyard.
"If it were possible to treat a head as if it were a spherical material object" said Mor. "We know what a head is, and we know what it is to understand another person by looking into his eyes. I don't see why a painter should be obliged to forget all this."
"Who is worthy to understand another person?" said Bledyard. He spoke with no more and no less intensity than at the start. He answered Mor's words but his eyes were on Miss Carter. "Upon an ordinary material thing we can look with reverence, wondering simply at its being. But when we look upon a human face, we interpret it by what we are ourselves. And what are we?""
What I think I am finding delightful is that Iris Murdoch has written a serious book unseriously. The way she has written it is not 'serious' though the theme is. The way she has written it is the way of art. Aesthetic (dirty word?) pleasure is created. In her endlessly fascinating if clumsily titled book 'Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals' she says:
"Art illuminates accidents and contingency and the general muddle of life, the limitations of time and the discursive intellect, so as to enable us to survey complex or horrible things which would otherwise appal us." Does she succeed in her novels in meeting these objectives? The jury is still out; but in 'The Sandcastle' our reader at least remains bedazzled by the attempt. 'Four stars' for my pleasure in reading it. Recommending at that level might be tendentious(?) MP

Naipaul, V.S.
A House for Mr Biswas (1961)
Rating:- ****
Was looking forward to this. About 13 years since first read it when it made a considerable impression. Probably because it was unlike anything I'd come across before - very honest (often cringe-making) warts-and-all story of an Indian (and his large family circle) living in Trinidad in the middle of the 20th century. Lots of lovely touches and Mr Biswas is a genuine major figure in 20th century literature. However since 1992 there's been a lot of excellent literature that has its foundation in the Indian sub-continent - Seth, Roy, Badami, Mistry etc. And these writers have taken inspiration from Naipaul and moved his style further on, producing more satisfying works: most noticeably because of more sophisticated structures and plot mechanisms. For it is here that this novel falls down after the initial novelty wears off. In truth the work is mainly a succession of episodes and little is added to the characterisation (the novel's main strength) after the first couple of hundred pages. And at 600 pages it is too long. At half the length it would still be a real gem. SJG
Nevertheless it is a masterpiece. The struggle of Mr Biswas against the muddle and pettiness of the fate he was born into is an epic one. Naipaul describes the states of mind (often impotent rage and humiliation) with a skill that is totally successful in transporting us to this alien culture. It may be an uncomfortable journey, but we can sense its integrity. SRG

Newby, P.H.
Coming in with Tide (1991)
Rating:- ****
Author was, I now learn, Managing Director of BBC Radio. Above novel ( Feelings have Changed') was weak but showed promise'. This is a real cracker! It's set in South Wales in the first twenty years of this century. It's sort of a (lower-middle-class) family saga - a format I usually detest. However he's much more interested in the development of character than the passage of time. The main character - a successful local builder who spends a lot of time reading in an attempt to find a philosophy of life - is extremely well-drawn. It's a fairly easy read and there are lots of nice touches. In the same class as Bruce Chatwin's Under the Black Hill'. Highly Recommended. SJG
Excellent. A real lift of a read - makes you believe we're here for something! SRG

Nicholson, James
The Hejaz Railway (2005)
Rating:- ****
Came across this by accident in the local library. It's a large, beautifully presented, coffee-table book of the history of a railway, built at the beginning of the 20th century, from Damascus to the holy city of Madinah (Medina) by the ailing Ottoman Empire. Most of its fame is due to Lawrence of Arabia who spent some of his time blowing it up during WWI. Indeed by the time Lawrence et al had finished the bulk of the railway was in an irreparable state less than twenty years after it was opened, leaving just working remnants in the northern area. Fascinating stuff. This book covers concisely all its major aspects but its great strength is the stunning photographs. No doubt in part because it pandered to two major interests of mine - railways and deserts - I was entranced. Apart from additional maps I can't see how Nicholson could have improved on the job he has done. Additionally it will lead me on to a re-reading of 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom'. One of the most enjoyable non-fiction books I've read in years. SJG
The quality of the photographs and the writing ensured my willing attention, though I don't feel the same fascination for trains. I was glad to have read it but would not have sought it out had it not been placed next to my chair by an ever-thoughtful husband. SRG

Oates Joyce Carol
Blonde (2000)
Rating:- ****
This is a fictionalised biography of Marilyn Monroe/Norma Jean Baker. Thinking at the start that I would object to the fiction/truth dichotomy, I found myself won over by Oates' skilful handling. The main events and people we all know about are there - sometimes not referred to by name but as "The ex-athlete" (De Maggio) or "The Playwright" (Miller). However, these are just the bones on which the author fleshes out her theme, which is a thorough working-out of the character development of a woman who could be Monroe. The character is built up, as in fiction, through her own words, actions and the perceptions of those around her. This is done artistically rather than didactically. The result is a picture which is coherent and psychologically sound. Is it true to life? Perhaps nobody could ever know whether this is true to the individual life that was Norma Jean Baker herself (though one feels that the author respects the knowing silence of Arthur Miller on this subject). However, it contains many truths about the way in which a human being could become a phenomenon for a time; the desperate drive which made this worthwhile to her, and the terrible inadequacies that made it insupportable. SRG
I have no objection to the idea of a fictionalised biography especially as I have little time for most ordinary' biographies, which I nearly always find sterile and, of course by definition, too linear. Ms Oates sticks to the linearity but weaves around it using differing voices and a variety of writing styles. The idea has a lot of potential but, unlike SRG, I didn't find it a satisfying read. It is very long - over 700 pages - and without encouragement' I would have probably given it up midway. In this type of project, where the emphasis is shifted away from a simple recital of facts' of the subject's life, there is a greater burden placed on the author's writing skills and, however much she may try, I just don't think that they come up to scratch. There was a woolliness, a lack of sharpness, no wit and little that I felt was perceptive. The other main problem I had was that nowadays in biographies it seems de rigeur to concentrate on the deficiencies of the main participants. Oates is no exception, particularly where any males are concerned. In this case it may be a reasonable representation of the truth, but it does paint a fairly depressing picture of humanity. I could have done with the occasional glimpse of light to relieve the gloom. Monroe must have got a little more fun and enjoyment out of life than suggested here - but, of course, that doesn't make good biographical material'. Overall, not impressed. SJG

Orwell, George
Animal Farm (1944)
Rating:- ****
The clarity of his satire is still impressive and is remarkable for a time when the Cold War had yet to begin. There is a humour in the way Orwell finds an animal equivalent for the Five-Year-Plans, Stakhanovism, the purges, the condemnation then toleration of religion, trade, technology etc. He shows neatly the way history is constantly revised and slogans utilised to drown out argument. New Labour shows a lot of similar attributes! SRG
As history/fable/satire it is OK, but as a novel - a piece of literature - it has few redeeming qualities. I found it lacking in sophistication and too didactic. If I'm to be educated' I like it to be done more obliquely than this. The writing was poor and I thought that, with the exception of "more equal than others", the ideas were all fairly obvious. Not impressed. SJG

Pagnol, Marcel
Jean de Florette & Manon des Sources (1962 tr 1988)
Rating:- ****
Have combined these two novels together for in reality they are just one book that was probably split by the publisher to increase revenue. Set between WWI and WWII in rural southern France the basic plot concerns a scheme by an old man and his nephew to acquire a neighbouring property which contains a much-needed spring. The plot really serves its purpose as a structure for a superbly evocative portrait of village life in a 'backward' community. Pagnol is clearly entranced with the area and that comes across both in his portrait of the local characters and in the description of place. Sort of book that makes you want to visit the area. The translation by W.E van Heyningen is stunningly good even to the extent of using the English language to create sympathetic jokes, which were unlikely to have been in the original. Both books were filmed which should have been a relatively easy process as time after time Pagnol creates highly visual scenes/incidents. Really looking forward to seeing them and hope they give me as much pleasure as the books did. SJG
I read both in French and found the language visually evocative and very straightforward to understand. The events are nicely rounded, interlaced with village/peasant morality and there is a twinkle in the eye of the author and many of his characters. The first book is about the triumphs of the worst aspects of narrow, miserly peasant morality. The second is the counterbalance and redemption. This is managed subtly. SRG

Palliser, Charles
The Unburied (1999)
Rating:- ****
A superior whodunit'. First of all a couple of gripes. One: the cover blurb mentions Henry James and Charles Dickens, and while this is competently written, it never reaches those sort of heights. Two: the plot, or rather plots, are quite involved - the main one is a contemporary account of a murder in a late Victorian small cathedral town; the second relates to historical documents etc which discuss several murders two hundred years earlier. Added to this are a sub-plot concerning historical researches into Alfred the Great and another sub-plot dealing with the editing, in the 1930s, of the Victorian account. (Are you still following this?) The publishers have felt it necessary to add a cast list - always a sure sign that the reader will need to pay closer attention than usual. Having said that all the rest is good news. It's very readable, in particular the atmosphere of the claustrophobic Victorian church-based society is excellent. There's even some character development - something which most modern authors seem to have forgotten about. The first-person narrator is a bit of a prat - more like Watson than the All Seeing I' Holmes - but quite likeable. And being supposedly an academic historian it gives the author an opportunity to satirise that breed. Mention of Dickens early on is not entirely out of place. The characters (an interesting bunch) have wonderfully Dickensian names like Quitregard, Pepperdine, Pomerance, Scuttard etc. Additionally it's some time since I read it, but Dickens' Edwin Drood' is called to mind - though the plot in The Unburied is far superior. I suppose the nearest 19th century comparison would be Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White'. Obviously not up to that exceptional standard, but not a bad try at all. Recommended. SJG
I got into trouble for reading it too quickly (overworked library courier service SJG), but that did not prevent me from enjoying it. Time of year and weather resonated with the pre-Christmas frost/snow of the book and there was a pleasant sardonic treatment of the plot through the amateurishness of the main character. Use of another narrator in the guise of the editor' at beginning and end added depth to the plot. A good read for winter evenings; nearly a ghost story, certainly a murder mystery. SRG

Panter-Downes, Mollie
London War Notes 1939-1945 (1972)
Rating:- ****
Dug this out of the library as had enjoyed her novel, ‘One Fine Day', and the only thing left I could find in her oeuvre are pieces of journalism. Disappointingly this collection comes with no introduction and only the briefest of mentions that it was edited down from her weekly reports to the ‘New Yorker' magazine. I thought they were wonderful. In part this may be due to my lack of knowledge of WWII having read little on the topic. The writing is competent journalese obviously slanted for an American audience, but the most successful aspect is that the whole is written without the benefit of hindsight. The sense of not knowing what's round the corner comes across strongly, especially during the ‘Phoney War' in the first nine months and in the dispiriting grey year of 1942 when little seemed to happen except incremental pieces of bad news. There's also a lot here of routine stuff about rationing and various conferences, but they are interwoven with the occasional arresting piece: "... it is noticeable that the papers are not being officially discouraged from printing a good deal of fairly creepy talk about V-2. There are even some rumours that, instead of being a bomb, V-2 may be an incendiary fog sprayed from planes or something involving splitting the atom." One could criticize by saying that this is largely a middle-class London-based view of the war, but I found it fascinating. SJG
I found it so vivid that I had difficulty deciding whether we were in 1939-1945 or 2007 when I put the book down. Panter-Downes has a way with apt similes for the way people were reacting to various events and must have helped the cause of maintaining American sympathies. SRG

Parks, Tim
Destiny (1999)
Rating:- ****
I gave it just three stars' for being Admirable' rather than Enjoyable'. Impressive is probably a better word. This is a monologue about a contemporary Anglo-Italian family whose marriage appears to be on its last legs after the suicide of the son. Fairly gloomy reading, well entrenched in the modernist' idiom:
"It was the intuition of an infinite multiplication of detail which, while incarnating the spirit of history, or indeed reality, or even truth, nevertheless veils it, renders it forever opaque, or eventually distracts the mind from it, that finally prompted my repudiation from journalism."
Needs a little unpicking, but certainly worth the effort. Indeed, although it comes it an under 250 pages, it took considerable effort to get through as the general tone is far from light ("What we do is always less and worse than what we are.") and the text seems to be unremittingly hurled at the reader. The blurb mentions Joyce and Beckett; I thought more Proust and Woolf. As a crafted work, one must acknowledge that it is of high quality but after finishing it I'm looking for a nice light page-turner. SJG
The stream of consciousness technique with few paragraphs and ongoing topics spliced together can feel overwhelming and dense, but it is good stuff. The narrator's thoughts about nationality/national character, political views, family relationships and his own health are ongoing, developing facets of a personality you get closer to understanding as the book goes on. It is a very strong portrait of a destructive marriage in which there is, however, love. Excellent, I've added a star' to SJG's assessment. SRG

Paton, Alan
Cry the Beloved Country (1948)
Rating:- ****
Not great literature/writing but a significant social document in novel form, deliberating on the problems between blacks and whites in South Africa in the mid-1940s. To my shame I hadn't been aware of it, and was avoiding South African novels after one too many worthy Nadine Gordimers. One could complain that the story is too sentimental, too through-religion-there-will-be-an-answer, too the-people-individually-are-fine-it's-the-system-that-causes-all-the-problems and too much written from a white perspective with no real understanding where the natives were coming from. It is also a little over-optimistic considering the mess that the place was going to get itself into. Nevertheless I found it affecting and a fascinating social document. Paton went on to become a big cheese Liberal politician but his Party was eventually abolished and his passport withdrawn. Unfortunately he died in 1988 before seeing the tide turned - his frustrations with the white establishment depicted here must have continued and sorely tested his own religious faith. SJG
There is some good social philosophy embedded in the story via the writings of a liberal white who has been murdered in a house robbery. There is much about the responsibility of whites to do something because they are in a position to be able to see what is happening: it is one thing to stand by while blacks begin to leave their village and go wrong in the city; it is another to go on letting it happen once the evil is identified. SRG
Hard to add anything to all the things that have been said or written about this true Modern Classic over the last half century. We read this back in Yorkshire days as part of an African writers' class. One fellow student - a self-confessed 1968 revolutionary - said: "This is not a Political Novel", with an air of firmly putting it in its place. Of course this was, still is, quite true. It is a Christian novel. In the same way as Dickens, Paton is a ‘change of heart man'. Not so much a change in structure, though the riposte might be that a change of heart might lead to a change in structure. In assessing it, the impact, the effect on the world outside South Africa must be considered. The attitude of the USA in particular had great influence and Paton's book, among others, had reached a wide and influential audience. There are affinities with ‘The Grapes of Wrath' which came out nine years earlier. "The great red hills stand desolate, and the earth has torn away like flesh. The lightning flashes over them, the clouds pour down on them, the dead streams come to life, full of the red blood of the earth. Down in the valleys the women scratch the soil that is left, and the maize hardly reaches the height of a man. They are valleys of old men and old women, of mothers and children. The men are away, the young men and the girls are away. The soil cannot keep them anymore." Though not a revolutionary tract it is possible to argue that ‘Cry the Beloved Country' had a revolutionary effect. MP

Pawel, Rebecca
The Summer Snow (2006)
Rating:- ****
A police procedural with a refreshingly different angle, if only because it's not set in Italy or Scandinavia. The cover proclaims it's "A Carlos Tejada Alonso y Leon Investigation set in Spain" and it seems I've joined the series at its fourth incarnation. The writing is solid and the plot less labyrinthine than most, but what raises this novel above the herd is its setting in Franco's Spain at the end of WWII. The hero (anti-hero?) is a Guardia lieutenant, born into a rich family, who sided with the fascists during the Civil War and who has little sympathy for ‘Reds', ‘Gypsies' etc. As a counter-balance he is married to a ‘Red', Elena, who adds a liberal conscience. It's interesting having a right-wing perspective although at times one can feel Pawel having to restrain herself from drifting Tejada to a more humanitarian point of view. In this story Tejada is taking a break from dealing with ‘Reds' in northern Spain and returns to Granada where his arrogant wealthy family are based. The resulting tensions are a delight and hold at least as much interest as the main storyline. Definitely a series worth investigating. SJG
It is somewhat unbelievable that the hero, straitlaced as he is, can love his wife who is able to consider Gypsies and Communists as people. However, he is a slightly complex character, having rebelled enough against his patrician family to join the Guardia and seek appointment far from home. An enjoyable mystery read. SRG

Pearl, Matthew
The Dante Club (2003)
Rating:- ****
Echoes of A.S. Byatt's 'Possession' here, as it's a Victorian detective with lots of research successfully woven into the plot. However, whilst it's of the same excellent quality as Byatt's novel, the flavour is quite different with a more sharpened thriller feel. This is Pearl's first novel (quite incredibly) and he's basically a Dante scholar, so he's set it in 1865 Boston (USA not Lincolnshire) where, in real life, Longfellow and a group of other noteworthy Americans had set up a Dante Club to produce the first American translation of 'The Divine Comedy'. Now before reading this I had only a sketchy knowledge of Dante and had little interest in 'TDC' let alone in its translation. However this novel is so impressive that an interest in Dante was aroused and maybe one day I might get round to having a stab at reading 'TDC'. It is difficult to believe that this is a first novel so expertly does Pearl handle both aspects (the research and the thriller) and mesh them together in a way that must make far more respected novelists green with envy. If I was to carp I could say that the character of the half-caste policeman, Rey, would benefit from extra attention, and a little more of Dante's poetry would have been nice. Nevertheless this is an essential read and at the time of writing (April) is my present Book of the Year. SJG
The dialogue and the characterisation are the weakest points for me and this gaggle of poets reminds me of the society of priests in 'Father Ted'. However, the logic of the plot is a real strength and you are certainly kept guessing 'who-dun-it'. SRG

Peck, Dale
Now it's Time to Say Goodbye (1998)
Rating:- ****
Impressive stuff. The blurb suggests it's a sort of cross between James Baldwin and Carson McCullers and I can see what they mean, although it's possibly a better piece of work than either of them have produced. Another in what is becoming a long line of modern American writers of exceptional quality who seem to be virtually unknown over here (and over there?). Superficially there's not a lot going for it: it's long, full of seemingly emotionless homosexual sex, and containing a couple of nasty scenes relating to violence and torture. However the last do not dominate the book, whose story tells of a couple of New Yorkers visiting a small town in Kansas. The white population of this town lynched an innocent black man in the past, and retribution is catching up. If one examines it too closely the plot creaks, but there is a wonderful feeling of menace and tension built up. The writing and he book's structure are exemplary and would have earned a Not to be Missed' recommendation, if the sex and violence had been tempered a little. Fully deserving a recommendation though. SJG
Small-town America is very clearly shown: webs of intrigue in which the truth is not only avoided but is not felt to be relevant. Truth is created and people are manipulated by a white woman who has bought the town lock, stock and barrel. She orchestrated the lynching, the destruction of a town by fire and the final calling to account of the wrong man. The technique of unfolding/revealing bits of the story through different people's eyes is very effective. SRG

Powell, Anthony
Journals. Volume 3 1990-1992
Rating:- ****
The persona encountered in these Journals bears little or no relation to the cool hero of Dance to the Music of Time'. He speaks of "getting off a few Old Friend scores." His oldest friend Henry Green he says was really a bit of a shit. Graham Greene novels were "wholly unreadable" (do I hear cries of agreement?) But Powell watchers will know that half a century ago Greene working then as reader for Eyre & Spottiswood described Powell's biog of John Aubrey as "a bloody boring book anyway" when Powell taxed him with its continuing non-appearance. He is full of trenchant opinions and obviously well able to keep his end up in the literary world. Where the novel is an exercise in distancing the hero/author from events in real life Powell seems more likely to attack things head on though generally with ironic humour. MP

Price, Richard
Samaritan (2003)
Rating:- ****
Bit of a rarity: a thriller with 'real' people. Nothing here to complain about. Price writes cleanly, can structure a novel and develop tension. And provide a collection of characters who are flawed and believable. Story concerns a medium-successful white screenwriter who returns to New York where his ex-wife and daughter live, and where he can wander around his childhood housing estate (now virtually 100% non-white) bestowing cash and soaking up nostalgia. He is assaulted but won't give up the perpetrator to a rather sassy black female detective who is the other main character. Ending - for once in a thriller - is excellent. Even better, most of the characters are, to some extent, dysfunctional with some not very endearing, but believable, traits. Price's underlying thesis seems to be that problems come down from fathers flying the roost when their children are young. Possibly a little simplistic but it ties the threads together nicely and gives a surprising dimension to what I originally expected to be a straightforward thriller. SJG
A very good read in which the theming is successful. The title gives the clue, and the main character finds out how the kick he gets from being a good Samaritan comes at a price unless he is prepared to go the distance and accept responsibility with the risk of being consumed by the insatiable need in others - a modern Christian conundrum. SRG

Proust, Marcel
Jean Santeinl
Rating:- ****
Of interest to Proust lovers as it was a fore-runner to À la Recherche'. The thing is a collection of loosely connected episodes as he has not found a continuous theme - involuntary memory which is the basis of his masterpiece. Has great charm and you will like it if this is what you like ie don't think you will. It wasn't published in his lifetime as he didn't want it to distract attention from his central achievement. MP

Pym, Barbara
A Glass of Blessings (1958)
Rating:- ****
It might be possible to read this without noticing that it is a comedy, or that the central character Wilmet is being mildly satirised But if you see the point, can share the Pym angle of vision, recognise a genuine individual fictional voice, a created Pym world, then you are in for a treat. At least the characters are clearly identifiable and (cf recently read Faulkner) do not have unexplained visions (or visions at all.) MP
My second Pym and a bit of a disappointment after Excellent Women'. I appreciated the comedy but it was handled a little too deftly - the touch was sometimes so light that it failed to leave any trace. Also her indifferent English was shown up more - the dialogue was poor and her use of language is limited. I couldn't really find one apt and witty sentence/phrase/paragraph to quote here. A lot of the comedy centres on the first-person heroine not realising that (a) her friend's husband is making a pass at her and (b) two of the main male characters are homosexual. But Pym doesn't really make that much of these misunderstandings - the comedy is not black enough - and once the reader realises what is going on the situations hardly progress. I can see how MP was captivated but I found it a bit of soufflé. SJG
I disagree, (for once!) I liked the way she worked through the mundane feelings of the heroine who knows very well she is being flattered by her friend's husband and allows herself to dress it up' more acceptably to hide the truth from herself. She then indulges a fantasy about a man who turns out to be a homosexual. The last laugh is on the heroine, who is humble enough to recognise what an idiot she has been and to recognise her own glass of blessings'. There is no grand passion, but a realistic level of feeling, matured in respectability. SRG

Pym, Barbara
Jane and Prudence (1953)
Rating:- ****
Why go on? The standard is maintained.
""What a fine marrow, Mr Driver" said Miss Doggett in a bright tone.
"It is the biggest one we have had so far, isn't it Miss Doggett?" ...
Jane felt that she was assisting at some primitive kind of ritual at whose significance she hardly dared guess."
It is the exact balance of the last five words which count. (She was a great Chekhov fan.) MP

Pym, Barbara
Less than Angels (1955)
Rating:- ****
Pym has been rediscovered once but seems to be fading again from the (reading) nation's consciousness. Perhaps time for her publishers to set up a second rediscovery. But maybe it wouldn't work again. She really is the antithesis of the present media-driven short-attention-span aggressive world. She is far more of a 20th century Jane Austen who, I note, Pym quotes with reverence. As with Austen the plot is a minor matter. Here it deals with the lecturers, students and general hangers-on of a small university faculty of anthropologists. The benefit of this is that it allows Pym to compare the observed behaviours of the African natives with those of the social world of the faculty members. This is fine and provides a focal point to the book, but it is the writing with its gently mocking tone that is, as usual, the highlight.
"Father was so much higher than the former vicar that it was sometimes difficult to keep up with him."
"Catherine stayed nearly a fortnight at the Swans' home, during which she was cosseted and cared far and almost knew what it was like to be one of the family. In that short time she experienced all the cosiness and irritation which can come from living with thoroughly nice people with whom one has nothing in common." SJG
Always the best observer of single women in their relations with each other and men, Pym's analysis involves the reader in her mild sending-up rather more than would be correct for an academic anthropologist. Much to enjoy here, even though the 'types' are a bit dated. SRG

Rankin, Ian
Mortal Causes (1994)
Rating:- ****
Another Inspector Rebus' thriller. This one's still in Scotland but tied up with loyalist' Protestant/Orange Order doings as well. Again well plotted and a good read for a wet day indoors. SRG
A considerable improvement over Strip Jack' - Rankin is clearly learning his trade. This one's got an interesting plot and is more tightly written. He's got the texture' right. OK, it's only a thriller and doesn't pretend to be anything else, but within the constraints of the genre it's pretty good and earns a recommendation. SJG

Rankin, Ian
Set in Darkness (2000)
Rating:- ****
Recently have been reading stuff mainly from Reading Groups and because I usually read well in advance and because my short-term memory seems to be getting worse, this usually means taking notes so I won't forget the plot/characters etc. So nice not to bother with this and take time out for an old-fashioned ‘good read' - another Inspector Rebus story. This was a relaxing way of passing Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It starts off excellently with two Detective Inspectors - Rebus and a young whizz-kid - trying to score points off each other. Unfortunately Rankin seems to lose interest in this sparring and latter parts of the novel fall off correspondingly. Also lots of good tit-bits on the new Scottish Parliament, and, of course, Edinburgh is, as usual, the real star of the story. Wouldn't like to read too many Rebus stories in succession as they tend to be a bit formulaic. However am prepared to give it a ‘Recommendation' because it is so much more enjoyable than a lot more ‘worthy' novels that I've been reading recently. SJG
Rankin has refined his ‘formula' as he goes on, and knows how important the private world of the main figure is; drink and cigs problems, family in ruins etc. He has also added ‘distractors' - a pair who are getting into violent rape, who are irrelevant to the main story but heighten tension and end up sorting each other out. Most enjoyable. The ending was a tiny bit lame but leaves a space for the sequel. SRG

Rankin, Ian
Black and Blue (1997)
Rating:- ****
Thoroughly enjoyable Inspector Rebus story. Better than most as Rankin sets up and juggles (successfully) with four plot lines. After reading a Rebus story I usually end up by saying that the real hero is the city of Edinburgh. Not so here as Edinburgh plays very little part. There are some scenes in Glasgow, the Shetlands and on the oil rigs, but the majority of the action is set in Aberdeen. Rankin makes a reasonable fist of conjuring up an image of all these places, although none resonate quite like Edinburgh. But the variety together with the impressive handling of the plot lines makes for a recommended read. SJG
It is more like the American police procedurals in giving Rebus a tough, heroic role, dwelling on his drinking/family problems and in the amount of violence underlying the crime. Not only like them, but up to the standard of Michael Connelly et al. Rebus' dry way with words is also good. SRG

Rankin, Ian
Fleshmarket Close (2004)
Rating:- ****
My two favourite police-procedural series - Rankin's Rebus and Connelly's Harry Bosch stories - have both recently had their latest additions published. However whereas Connelly's 'The Closers' was well below par, this Rankin novel rates along with his best. Pacy, full of interesting themes with characters who just don't pall, and the wit to keep Rebus out of a threatened love affair which was on the point of dragging the book down. Both writers face the same problem of coping with a hero close to the end of his working career. To try and solve this Connelly has taken Bosch out of his police force and then been forced to put him back in again with the result being a bit of a mess. Rankin manfully keeps Rebus struggling on even though most of his fellow-workers expect him to retire, and this reader wonders just how long Rankin can keep going before he has to pull the plug. I think the secret of Rankin's success is the amount of research he does for each book - virtually every one has a contemporary theme be it oil-rigs, the Scottish Parliament building or, in this case, asylum seekers - and it is this which goes a long way to maintaining the freshness. SJG
There is a contemporary relevance, too, in the way in which near retirement Rebus relates to his younger career-hungry colleagues. He can afford to step back a bit, and let them fall over their feet. Through his (and Rankin's) eyes we can appreciate humanity and Scotland, warts and all. SRG

Robinson, Marilynne
Gilead (2004)
Rating:- ****
Written in the form of a 'letter' from a 70-year-old preacher, John Ames, whose heart is giving way, to his seven-year-old son - the result of a rather late marriage. Ames has lived all his life in the small nondescript Mid-West town of Gilead and some of the letter focuses on this, some of it on the history of his father and grandfather (both preachers), and some of it on his love for his wife and son. There's also a 'plot' about the wayward son of his close friend but mostly we have ruminations on Christianity. It's calmly written with a certain charm that no doubt helped it win the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and come in several 'Best of 2005' lists. I admired it rather than enjoyed it as the religious stuff was not my cup of tea, but I can see what the fuss was all about and the central character, Ames, is certainly a notable figure in the fiction of the last few years. SJG
I like the reflective and discursive nature of this book, The idea of using an old character trying to leave something of himself to a child is a good one and succeeds on various levels. Background about family (the "bigots") is given which also paints a picture of small-town Kansas and national events of the last century. The growing unease of the narrator with his present situation and feelings when his godson returns to the town and seems to be making moves on his young wife and son, begins to haunt the avowed purpose of the journal, but in fact shows the humanity of the narrator and the difficulties of being truly Christian. The narrator never quite acknowledges to himself that he is fine about loving his neighbour when he and his own are not threatened. He cannot, however, deal with his own feelings when his ministerial and emotional ties come into conflict. This conflict in turn sets his vocation into context and shows it up as a small-town one in contrast to his grandfather who became an activist in the cause of abolition, neglecting his family in the process. A thought-provoking and rich book. SRG

Robson, Justina
Mappa Mundi (2001)
Rating:- ****
Recommended but probably only to those of a particular persuasion ie someone who has enjoyed William Gibson or Noel Stephenson. As science fiction it's not as 'advanced' as those two, and certainly there's nothing like Klingons or Darth Vader here. Set in about 10/15 years time when the advances in biotechnology have resulted in mankind being on the brink of making a map of the brain with the then potential to alter a person's map. This of course arouses the interest of both governments and criminals to be the first to use this technology for their own ends. So there's a fairly exciting story of spies, double-dealing etc which is very well done. What might put a lot of people off though is the sheer volume of (bio-)technical detail the author includes. It sounds very authentic but was beyond my level of understanding. Whilst this did not mar my enjoyment, I can see others finding it too off-putting. Robson handles the whole with great confidence and skill, and she deserves to be much better known. SJG
The 'technical' stuff is not obtrusive and really is more philosophical. (Can we think outside our own parameters? Is there such a thing as a perfect human being? What is the core of individuality?) The 'human' side is much more to the fore than in most male-dominated sci-fi, and is the more satisfactory for that. A very impressive and enjoyable book. SRG

Robson, Justina
Natural History (2003)
Rating:- ****
Robson's third and this time, instead of tinkering around the edges of science fiction, she produces some real hard-core stuff. Set over 3000 years hence it has lots of strange hybrid creatures, an 11-dimensional universe, instant time travel to the opposite end of the universe, the discovery of aliens etc. This sort of thing can quickly deteriorate into mere action or into the totally unconvincing if the author fails to create a consistent world. Robson falls into neither trap and has produced a novel (and a universe) that come close to rivalling the best of William Gibson. It's thoughtful, intriguing and intelligent. Couple of minor complaints. Nowadays it seems de rigeur for the personal AI/robots to give a lot of snappy backchat, à la 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' or the robots in 'Star Wars'. This is starting to become a worn-out cliché. Secondly the use of lots of made-up words and a myriad of characters make the first 50 pages difficult to penetrate resulting in some re-reading. This, though, eventually settles down. Overall a great piece of imagination and a welcome addition to the genre. SJG
I like the way her plots hinge on certain philosophical questions like 'How do we know we are seeing what is there when we know our senses are limited?' And, anyway, what is 'there' when reality has 11 dimensions? Enjoyed it a lot. SRG

Roth, Henry
Mercy of a Rude Stream Vol I (1994)
Rating:- ****
After writing the superb Call it Sleep', the novelist had writer's block for 50 odd years until turning out four volumes of a novel recently. Not that it's really a novel - more a (very literate) autobiography. The sole topic of all these works is a Jewish upbringing amongst poor immigrants in New York. In Call it Sleep' the author was 7/8 years old - here he goes from 8 to 14 covering the WWI period. His ear for dialogue is wonderful and he evokes the period/atmosphere. Also there are some nice touches as the author breaks off from the main story to talk to his word-processor. However it does ramble on a bit and lacks the structure of Call it Sleep'. Read that first and only if you're hooked (like me) try this. SJG
I found the overlap with Call it Sleep' disturbing - we're obviously in the same slum amongst the same people but the names have changed!? However the older years of school and part-time job are later' than Call it Sleep' so I began to enjoy the book more at this point. The strengths are the combination of deep personal insight into his own self-development and a wonderfully observed and loving portrait of other people warts and all. (Even when he hates them, people's right to be themselves is taken for granted.) SRG

Roth, Philip
American Pastoral
Rating:- ****
First in the trilogy which follows with 'I Married a Communist' and 'The Human Stain' but, for various reasons, the last to be read by me. It's only tenuously a trilogy as no characters or incidents are carried over. It's just that in them Roth, as the blurb says, is making "a profound and personal meditation on the changes in the American psyche over the last 50 years." Here we have a highly successful third-generation immigrant - a Jewish businessman married to a beauty queen and living in idyllic surroundings - whose world is blown apart when his 16-year-old daughter - involved in the anti-Vietnam, anti-capitalist movements of the late '60s - bombs the local store, kills someone and then disappears for five years. Overall I preferred it to the other two in the series. Roth's prose is always admirable, indeed often awe-inspiring, but at times it does seem to ramble on with little purpose. Here it seems much more focussed as the 'hero' (and his generation) fall apart. An uncomfortable read but certainly one worth embarking on. SJG
Superbly illustrative of how the concepts of normalcy, decency and the American way of life are merely fragile constructs shored up by self-delusion. The effort required by the hero in this novel to hold it together eventually destroys him. Frighteningly good, too, on how children can unerringly find the flaws in their parent's characters and worry at them until they are gaping wounds. There are some flaws in the book, too. Starting out with a narrator ex-friend of the hero, the author seems to dump him and there seems little point in him being there at the start. The ending was as elegant as it could have been. SRG

Russo, Richard
Empire Falls (2001)
Rating:- ****
Excellent. The blurb says: "He combines good old-fashioned story-telling with a large-hearted wit." and for once I'm in full agreement. Contemporary tale of small-town America, which seems a particularly fertile ground for recent novels I've been reading, although I suppose a lot of dross is weeded out before crossing the Atlantic. Major strength of this novel is the characterisation - there must be at least ten individuals here who are completely fleshed out and totally engaging. The structure's fine and the writing often witty and perceptive: he's especially good at parent/child relationships, the ‘control' over a town by its leading figure, as well as putting in lots of nice little asides including a parent's bewilderment at how his daughter uses the Internet to conduct a relationship, and the following on luck:
""I said it's about time our luck changed around here."
"It sure is," Miles agreed. Assuming it's luck that's the problem, of course. Which he privately doubted. The problem with trying to gauge mathematical probability was that it presupposed the circumstance you were observing was governed by chance."
Lots of succinct things like that here. Faults? My only real criticism is that he brings things to a big climax and then very quickly ties up lots of loose ends. I read the 480 pages and would have been more than happy if he'd spent another 480 tying up all these loose ends at the pace he maintained for the vast majority of the book. Indeed, so strong are the characters that they would have kept me going for several more novels. ‘Empire Falls' won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. Whatever the opposition, one feels that it was a worthy winner. SJG
There are lots of running jokes with characters - people insisting on doing the same daft things like one man who always squares up to the main character for an arm-wrestling match and is always ignored until ... It is masterly in showing how a take on reality can be completely changed by a small piece of new information and we can spend large parts of our lives tilting at the windmills of our imagination. Excellent. SRG

Schechter, Betty
The Dreyfus Affair. A National Scandal
Rating:- ****
Deciding it was time that read at least some of the unread books on the shelves surrounding me in Bennett-recommended style picked this bought some years ago second-hand because of interest roused by the part played in the Affair in In Search of Lost Time'. (Greatly preferred translated title to Remembrance' etc created by Scott Moncrieff and enabling him to use a bit of Shakespeare. He had a tendency to the ornate.) There were two Dreyfus books on the shelf. Picked this as it was written first and was 100 pages or so shorter (239).
"A martinet of a man, totally respectable in his private life, Dreyfus had an impeccable record of competence and devotion to duty. Seemingly, it would be unthinkable to sacrifice such an officer to the honour of the Army. But Dreyfus was a Jew; and in the close-minded circle of the Army, he was therefore both suspect and expendable." The story is exceptionally well told and completely absorbing. Proust was 25 when Dreyfus was convicted and sent to Devil's Island. His name and subsequent fate and the bitter taking of sides as re-trial followed re-trial haunt the pages of his novel. The convolutions of cover-up and corruption make present convolutions seem small beer. It is also enlivened by episodes of high comedy and farce. Highly recommended even to novel readers'. MP

Selvadurai Shyam
Cinnamon Gardens (1998)
Rating:- ****
This starts off like a travelogue for Ceylon in the 1920s. Add to that an unhealthily large dollop of research and I was extremely dubious. However he settles down to his task and gets the various storylines going. It soon becomes good stuff and there are considerable similarities with Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy'. It's not quite in same class though; it hasn't the same awe-inspiring structure and depth, and comes in at a mere(?) 350 pages. However his aim is to give an insight into the lives of some of the middle-class' inhabitants of Ceylon at this time and in that he is very successful. In particularly he is able to discuss the repressiveness of the society, particularly for women and homosexuals; to show the early manoeuvrings in anticipation of a post-colonial era; and to reflect on the mix of cultures that is now causing that island so many problems. The writing and structure are pretty solid and the whole thing is thoroughly enjoyable. Incidentally this is yet another writer from the Indian sub-continent who is now settled in Canada, like Anita Rau Badami and Rohinton Mistry - all of whom have a remarkably high hit rate. There's a thesis in this for someone. SJG
It is extremely good on relationships and feelings, from the first stirrings of interest in a potential partner to the denunciation of an adult child by a tyrannical father. Homosexual love is convincingly portrayed, and the author's insight into this seems to help him get the feelings of women for men right too. The writing is a bit gauche at times, but rarely loses its grip on the subject matter. SRG

Sinclair, May
Life and Death of Harriet Frean (1922)
Rating:- ****
With the use of large print, wide margins and gaps between the lines that you could draw pictures in, Virago have managed to stretch a 70 page novella to 180 pages - no mean feat. The writing of it was no mean feat as well as this was a totally unexpected and very pleasant surprise. I'd never heard of her but the introduction (clear and to the point for once) states: "After the First World War, before the emergence of Virginia Woolf as a major writer, May Sinclair was considered the most distinguished woman novelist in England." So, 0 out of 10 for me in the History of English Literature. The novella tells the story of Harriet, the only child of a typical Victorian middle-class couple whom she idolises. She rejects the only man in her life and ends up as a disillusioned old maid'. Doesn't sound gripping stuff but May Sinclair uses it to criticise the belief that women should achieve fulfilment through self-denial and the subjugation of the individual will, and also to take several other swipes at Victorian hypocrisy. After a quiet beginning her points come across very powerfully especially in the scenes in the last years of Harriet's life. An important book and highly recommended. SJG
I think it's wider than just about women's self-denial. It says a lot about the type of "unselfishness" that is rooted in peoples' cowardice; in their unwillingness to ruffle the smooth comfort of their surface lives by allowing expression to the messier emotions. The consequences of such "unselfishness" are personal impoverishment and consequent denial of love to others. The introduction by Jean Radford, which as SJG says is excellent, says that the work of Jung and Freud had interested Sinclair, though she did not subscribe to a "let it all hang out" solution to repression. Apparently in one of her other books she explores the idea of sublimation in which the negative repression can be made to work positively if redirected with energy to a higher objective. Harriet Frean, who never developed an individual personality, lacks the energy and the book is an excellent treatment of the result. SRG

Sinclair, May
A Cure of Souls (1924)
Rating:- ****
A prolific writer who published novels and short stories between 1897 and 1931, Sinclair was "once regarded as the leading writer of her generation before Virginia Woolf appeared on the scene". There are parallels here with Constance Fenimore Woolson as both are excellent, intelligent novelists and both are virtually unobtainable nowadays. An exception is Sinclair's wonderful ‘Life and Death of Harriet Freen' from Virago, but anything else is more problematical. I didn't enjoy ‘A Cure of Souls' quite so much but it certainly is a fine, impressive piece of work. The story is totally focussed on a self-centred, indolent rector, Clement Chamberlain, who is only concerned about a life of ease so that he can relish his food, and spend a lot of time napping and reading slightly risqué literature from Flaubert, Maupassant etc. The concerns of his flock come way down his list of priorities. Little happens in the novel, and the repetitious nature of the structure together with a considerable amount of religious discussion (about which I have little interest) were a drawback. However all the time I was able to admire the precision and skill with which Sinclair presented her analysis of character. Unquestionably other works by her need to be investigated. SJG
The religious element was skilfully chosen to strengthen the novel. The rector selects texts and writes sermons to preach lessons to others that he patently fails to observe himself. The humour is subtle and telling. Sinclair is more serious than Barbara Pym but as successful in exposing the weaknesses of the Established Church. SRG

Sinclair, May
Mr. Waddington of Wyck (1921)
Rating:- ****
Why is this author virtually out of print. It really is criminal. She writes in an easy fluid and intelligent style and her characterisation is superb. This particular story centres on the eponymous Mr. Waddington, a member of the Cotswold gentry just after WWI. In most respects he has an unpleasant personality: totally self-centred, gullible, superficial, believing himself (despite all physical indications to the contrary) to be God's gift to women. However Sinclair's ability is such that, whilst ridiculing him, she makes him loved and cherished by those closest to him AND by the reader. It's an outstanding achievement. Whilst never ‘laugh-out-loud' funny the novel is written with genuine wit and can be considered a truly humourous novel. The reading experience is very similar to that provided by Barbara Pym, although I would suggest that Sinclair has the greater skills. If anybody needs an excuse to go hunting through secondhand bookshops, she provides it. SJG
A wonderful piece of light entertainment. SRG

Sinclair, May
Mary Olivier: A Life (1919)
Rating:- ****
The last of the May Sinclairs that the library can find: the rest have seemingly disappeared. I have been mainly reading books by her written in the Twenties, and this is only a couple of years earlier but the style is quite different. The later works are far simpler and less ambitious, being novels of character developed largely through dialogue. The writing here is more adventurous than I have become used to from her. And the book has a much denser feel with lots of ruminations on religion and philosophy. Not that character has been put to one side. The mother is an absolute delight: selfish, thoughtless and self-controlling. The eponymous Mary, trying to make sense of her considerable self-driven education coupled with her naive relationships with her family and potential suitors, runs her a close second. One feels that this novel is highly autobiographical - for example alcoholics in the family appear not for the first time in her oeuvre - and it will be interesting to read the biography of her waiting on my bookshelf. Overall this is an impressive work. One cannot but wonder how the publishing world fails to maintaining it consistently in print. SJG
The philosophy that comes out in later books is treated quite explicitly here, and very impressively. Mary works out her own approach to reality that allows her soul to break free from the attempts by her family to stifle it (not always in cruel ways, but through an emotional blackmail that can only work because she loves them). It completely explains and justifies a woman remaining an Old Maid at this time and I shall be interested to see whether this resembles May Sinclair's own situation. A wonderful, moving and inspiring book SRG

Slovo, Gillian
Red Dust (2000)
Rating:- ****
Another excellent novel from post-apartheid South Africa to go alongside J.M. Coetzee's ‘Disgrace'. Neither are comfortable reads although this one is not as bleak. The general message from both is that there is still a hell of a lot of sorting to be gone through yet. Slovo had the very bright idea of structuring the book around the Truth Commission. The dramatic possibilities thus presented means that half the book is written before she's even started. All she has to do is find some sort of plot, add a few interesting characters and then describe the scenario/locality. And she does this most competently. One could perhaps argue that the main character - a young female lawyer returning, albeit briefly, to S.A. from New York - doesn't need to be there at all, but at least she doesn't get in the way of the main narrative. I was half-expecting Slovo to start to fall to pieces after 50-100 pages - as per many of her contemporaries - but am pleased to say that she kept a high standard throughout. Recommended. SJG
It helps to have the female lead as someone who has returned from the States after 14 years. It means things have to be explained to her (and thus to us) which would otherwise be opaque. It also throws into relief the different takes that are required on ‘justice' in different circumstances: under apartheid justice was anything that evened the balance between black and white power; in the U.S. justice is somewhat abstracted and related to evidence and constitutional rights; in the new South Africa justice is a negotiated settlement that compensates for only enough hatred, pain and suffering for a future to be possible. In the case that forms the centrepiece of the story we see how reconciliation can only take place if truths are not completely exposed; that the legacy of apartheid is that shared truth about the past is not possible and that the only hope for the future is to forge a new, shared truth, however ‘false' it may seem. SRG

Smiley, Jane
A Thousand Acres (1991)
Rating:- ****
Had previously read ‘Moo' which thought very poor and had put this author to one side. However had seen praise for this specific title from a number of sources so knew it would turn up eventually, just a question of sitting back and waiting. And Lo and Behold here it is on a Reading Group list. And it's very good. Story of the disintegration of a family working on a farm of I'll-let-you-guess-how-many-acres. Interesting strong characters, reasonably written and a rather thin storyline, but one which excellently catalogues the stifling and destructive nature of families dominated by narrow-thinking males. Because the main father has three daughters - one of whom initially rejects his latest idea - there are obvious echoes of ‘King Lear' which, I think, don't add much to the novel, but at least Smiley doesn't feel herself constricted by this comparison. Main criticism is that it's a little too bleak - a few too many die (if the drink doesn't get you, cancer will), and the men are all bastards. I could do with a little more sunshine. Nevertheless, very readable, falling, for me at least, just short of a ‘Recommendation'. SJG
I've bumped up the ‘star' rating as the quality of perception about interpersonal relationships is so impressive. Smiley conveys the most complex nuances incredibly economically. Her narrator, one of the daughters, is thoroughly believable and certainly not a ‘heroine'. The way she feels herself pulled between the points of view of the others is very well presented. She gropes towards self-fulfilment, but lacks the courage to be entirely selfish. She is really the ‘Cordelia' of the Lear parallel. SRG

Smith, Zadie
White Teeth (2000)
Rating:- ****
This is not a great book; the writing is nothing special, it sags about two-thirds through and she makes a botch of a long built-up climax that has her forcing the characters into some holes of her choosing, rather than letting them develop organically, (which she is prepared to do for most of the book). That said it's a great deal of fun. The author was 25 and seems to pack almost every thing that she's come across in this first novel, so you get lots of stuff about immigrants living in London ("immigrants: they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow"), the culture of multi-racial youth, along with some interesting psychological insights and a surprisingly large collection of humourous bits: "I'm as liberal as the next person. But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe that homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not." Nowadays there seem to be lots of books dealing with street culture and aimed at teenagers and those in their 20s. With the exception of ‘Trainspotting' which stands out like a beacon, I've found most of it to be second rate. But this book holds its own and can be recommended as a light, enjoyable read. SJG
Because she's so young it is actually an amazing book. The depth of insight into the characters and social/political situation is very impressive. It is just the craft of structure that is lacking and she has time for that... I thoroughly enjoyed it and found it a breath of fresh air and hope for a multi-cultural future that I'd like to be part of - different from the politically-correct, po-faced, puritanical strait-jacket that passes for the same in this neck of the woods. SRG

Somerville, E.OE. & Ross, Martin
The Real Charlotte (1894)
Rating:- ****
I haven't got a clue how the mechanics work of having two authors writing a novel, but, according to the blurb, Somerville & Ross had a ‘long and successful collaboration' and this novel is indeed excellent. Sort of an updated Trollope. Like some of his novels it is set in Ireland, largely concerning itself with the English aristocracy and middle-class there, although they do some nice caricatures of the local inhabitants. The pace is a little faster than Trollope (which is only to be applauded), the writing good and the structure sound apart from a Hardy-esque doom and an unnecessary death at the end which was a little cheap. The star of the show is Charlotte Mullen, a frustrated spinster who can plot and connive with the best of them - one of the great characters from Victorian novels and worthy of a place in a Dickens' work. This is supposed to be Somerville & Ross' best work but is of sufficiently high standard that I will be searching through the local libraries for other instances. SJG
The romantic heroine in this book is a naive teenager called Francie who is somewhat like Hardy's Tess in the effect she has on the eligible males, and there are lookalikes for Alec Durberville and Angel Clare. However, Francie is a more multi-dimensional character than Tess and it is her cousin Charlotte who plots her downfall rather than Hardy's Heavy Hand of Fate. Her feelings while this is going on are well described and the ending does resolve them, I think fairly. The male characters are also presented with insight. A most enjoyable and unexpected read. SRG

Soueif, Ahdef
The Map of Love (1998)
Rating:- ****
This was filed under Romance' in Leeds Library and, in one sense, with good reason. However, the connotations that Romance' bring belittle this book, for it is a highly intelligent and well thought out novel. Another area where one may be put off is that it is, in part, a faction': fictional characters and situations are merged with actual events and people in Egypt at the turn of both the 19th and 20th centuries. But the research doesn't intrude and the whole thing is crafted so superbly that the marriage of fact and fiction is seamless. (Something that can rarely be said about many modern factions'.) Indeed the structure of this novel deserves the highest praise. Soueif uses several different voices to tell her tale; each has their own individuality and the way she balances between them and keeps the novel moving forward can only be commended. In addition to this I learnt quite a bit: the story is written from the point of view of liberal Egyptians and to have their insight, about the English making a total mess of governing Egypt a hundred years ago, as well as perspectives on fundamentalism in present-day Egypt, was fascinating and nearly all new to me. As a minor point this is the first novel I've read where e-mails have been used as an additional literary device; she does it very well by not getting obsessed by them - just a touch here and there. All in all recommended. SJG
This novel is very deeply thought out, but retains a lightness of touch. The parallels between the period dealt with (1900-11, 1990s) are inferred by the reader who is drawn into the past through the letters, journals etc of Anna and Layla, and who lives the present' with the narrator Amal. The pattern of relationships (=Map of Love) repeats, especially in the brother/sister bonds (very Egyptian) and the blessed importance of children. The love story at the heart of the past' is not repeated clearly in the present' where husband/wife relationships are fragmented - divided up by serial monogamy. This is an interesting implication of modernity inferred by Soueif - the end of the Grand Passion? The three-piece tapestry, woven by Anna and representing Isis, Osiris and Horus, surmounted by a Quranic verse about life coming from death, is put together again at the end of the novel and figuratively the hope of new life is iterated. It is a romance - a book about feelings - but is more because of the engagement with politics and the crafting of the two strands - whole brain stuff! SRG

Spufford, Francis
Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin (2003)
Rating:- ****
Six separate accounts of British ‘boffins', usually running on little finance, making significant technological and/or marketing breakthroughs. Not really my cup of tea but I started it because of the author whose earlier ‘I May Be Some Time' I thought superb. The accounts are book-ended by two dealing with space - Black Knight and Beagle 2 - which I felt to be rather disappointing. They seemed a little short and too rushed with insufficient scientific explanations for a layman like myself. The other four though were excellent and showed Spufford's ability to bring a fairly cold subject to life. They are, I suppose, intelligent journalism but, with exception of Dickens, I've never encountered journalists who can write as well as this. These central four stories concern the re-branding and re-financing of the Concorde fleet, the development of the ‘Elite' computer game for the BBC Micro, the rise of Vodafone and human genome research. Not exactly the stuff to make the non-specialist rush out and buy this book, but, believe me, in Spufford's hands they become a gripping read. SJG
As engrossing as a who-dun-it. Told with clear, un-patronising explanation of the science and politics necessary for understanding the stories. Very enjoyable. SRG

Stead, Christina
The Man who Loved Children (1944)
Rating:- ****
Why have I never heard of this before? Virtually the entire focus is on a dysfunctional American family (parents with half-a-dozen kids) that used to be middle-class and is now falling on hard times. It's not especially well-written, (at 500+) possibly 200 pages too long and the ending has been put in to stop the book - it could have been placed anywhere after page 100, ie there's not much structure. What makes it an important read is that the two parents (and especially the husband) are probably the most awful, selfish, toe-curling, embarrassing people I've ever read in fiction. Their emotional immaturity and insecurity are bared in every detail and while the children suffer relatively little physical abuse, the psychological attacks made on them (especially the eldest child) are almost unreadable. An uncomfortable read, but one which should be attempted. SJG
Apparently the book was a flop with the critics and public when it first came out. ( House of all the Nations' in 1940 had been a best-seller.) I can see why it didn't appeal; it is a very detailed portrait of the family as the fount of all human ills. Very good if extremely uncomfortable to read. SRG

Sterne, Lawrence
The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy (1766)
Rating:- ****
A shaggy-dog/cock-and-bull story famous for its real and mock learning, bold experimentation with the form of the novel, constant digressions from the title subject matter, bawdiness and humour. I found its lack of reverence for self-important earnestness and its gentle respect for all humanity very refreshing. The Victorians, coming after, obscured this attractive side of the novel, and it has been re-discovered by modern authors. Sterne's work therefore seems more modern to 20th century readers than Dickens or Trollope. Not great but great fun, and an important pillar of style in the history of the novel. SRG

Stoker, Bram
Dracula (1897)
Rating:- ****
As MP shows more than a passing interest in blurbs, I thought he might wish to add to his collection the one that comes with the Penguin edition: "No book since Mrs Shelley's Frankenstein, or indeed any other at all, has come near yours in originality, or terror - Poe is nowhere ..." A little over the top you might think. But not when you find it was written by his mother!! Nepotism rules OK! Perhaps this should set a precedent so that blurbs can only be written by close members of the family. Not sure whether this would take this 'means of communication' to any new depths but it would make a change from writing up your mate's book in the Sunday press which is what we seem stuck with at present. Whilst I am on the subject of the Penguin edition, there's an Introduction written by a 'freelance writer' called Maurice Hindle. In it he 'proves' (by using such words as 'obviously') that Stoker and Dracula were repressed homosexuals and that "...sex was the monster Stoker feared most...". This may or may not have been true, but there's no convincing argument here and the whole probably reflects more on Mr Hindle's personal problems. But to the actual novel. Late-Victorian Gothic. Never previously read as been put off by Vincent Price et al, and somehow assumed it would be a flimsy piece of nonsense. At nearly 500 pages it's certainly not flimsy, and it's not really a piece of nonsense. It's surprisingly well written and he manages to produce pace and tension that make you forget about the baggage (eg Hammer films, Count Duckula etc) that the reader initially brings to the book. The story is told from different first-person perspectives in the form of letters, memos etc and I thought this worked very well. I was reminded of Wilkie Collins' 'Woman in White' although without the depth, complexity and satisfying storyline of that novel. Particularly impressed by some of the set-pieces (eg Whitby) and the way the issue of madness was threaded throughout the plot. I'm never affected by horror novels but this came as close as any. On the negative side his female leads were deeply flawed - embodiments of perfection: "... of that sweet, sweet, good, good woman in all the radiant beauty of her youth and animation." Yuk! Overall though, surprisingly impressed. SJG
I found myself surprisingly enthralled by it, to the extent of dreaming different outcomes. He arranges the atmosphere well. I suspect a much stronger treatment could have been achieved if he had used psychology a bit more. The power of Dracula was rather formulaic and if it was so easily counteracted by crucifixes and garlic, one wonders why the protagonists didn't make a strict habit of wearing them at all times! The Introduction does make a couple of useful points. Firstly the novel needs to be understood as part of a strong tradition of ghost stories in the late nineteenth century. And secondly the decline of Europe etc was perhaps bringing to the surface anxieties about 'primitive' states usurping power where men had 'gone soft' from too much culture and good living. However, it is maybe just a bit of 'harmless fun' and an age-old story of the fight of good and evil. SRG

Swift, Jonathan
Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Rating:- ****
If one is intending to read this, and there really is no good excuse not to, then make sure that you obtain a copy that has good footnotes and a reasonable Introduction for there is much here that needs either clarification or putting into the context of the time. (No doubt contemporaries would have had no problem dealing with the allusions but few people nowadays have a familiarity with early 18th century politics.) Also using the footnotes etc does give the work another dimension. Not essential, I suppose, for without them, here is a perfectly acceptable tale, or rather four tales, told with great wit, humour and invention. There is enough material here to stretch over several volumes never mind a mere 200+ pages. Personally I find most 'comic novels' completely unamusing, and so it is with great relief I come to read Swift who exactly appeals to my sense of humour. In the edition I read (Wordsworth Classics) the footnotes, context etc are all fine, but they did leave me wanting more. Be nice to find a biography of him that includes more of his writings and some literary criticism, though knowing my hit-rate with biographies, I'm not optimistic. SJG
The book has a surprisingly modern tone in spite of being constructed especially to evade assiduous censors. It is a good reminder how relatively recent our assumption of freedom of speech is. Swift's comments on political corruption and such matters are, unfortunately, still only too recognisable even if the forms of corruption have changed. SRG

Toibin, Colm
The Master (2004)
Rating:- **** '
The Master' in this case is Henry James - the title being used by devotees of whom I am not especially one. I have considerable respect for the man, but he is not exactly my cup of tea, and sometimes tend to agree with a quote from this book: "I find I have to read innumerable sentences you now write twice over to see what they could possibly mean." So the thought of 350+ pages in a book, that whilst short listed for the 2004 Booker, couldn't even beat Hollinghurst's dire 'The Line of Beauty', was not instantly appealing. It is presented as a novel but it is closer to a biography, covering five years of James' late middle-age, (together with plenty of reminiscences from earlier.) OK, it's a fairly imaginative biography, but underneath most biographies are if they are not to be weighed down by a procession of facts eg Claire Tomalin's 'The Unequalled Self'. The fact that Toibin doesn't have to bother with all of James' life, doesn't have to bother with detailing who he has met, where, when etc is only to the good. And what he has produced here is something extremely good. I'm sure I learnt more and understood more about James than I would have from any 'proper' biography. It is stunningly well written and, probably most importantly, it made me want to sit down and read more James, even with those long winding sentences. SJG
He takes the risk of sketching and developing the full character of James with a novelist's care. Whether this is 'really' James or a fiction merely begs the question of who could possibly know apart from James himself. The character has coherence and (I expect, arguably) 'fits' the known/recorded facts of relationships, contemporary writings and, most importantly, his literary works. James is presented fully and yet retains the mystery any individual possesses in the eyes of others. Excellent. SRG

Trollope, Anthony
The Warden (1855)
Rating:- ****
What more/new can one possibly say about Trollope. Only to repeat that he is at the top for readability - well above the normally easy to read best-seller. The Lit. Class is in the middle of discussing this book. Our Literary Theory Man describes it as a "shoddy" work. Though interested in his approach I am tending to think that this view of things tends to undermine my confidence in his Theory approach. He does come up with some subtle points though. For instance the drawer in which the archdeacon hides away his under-cover reading of Rabelais is the same one in which he secretes the Attorney General's equally dubious judgement on the bequest to Hiram's Hospital. There might be more to report on this after next week's Class; the jury's still out. There are still more copies of Trollope in print than any other author ancient or modern. MP
Trollope here creates a conundrum within the quiet of a conservative Cathedral Close with which he can explore some of the inconsistencies of the Church of England, also taking a swipe at the press, sentimental commentators such as Charles Dickens for their appearance of taking action in favour of justice and recipients of charity for becoming vociferous on their own behalf. The mild and truly Christian Mr Harding, the eponymous warden, is criticised by his prospective son-in-law, an ardent reformer, for his enjoyment of a charitable income in spite of the good work he does for the inmates of the almshouses he supervises. The inmates are encouraged to feel that they must petition for ‘their rights'. The Archdeacon, Dr Grantly, rises with the joy of righteous indignation to the challenge of defending the Church's right to keep Churchmen in the lap of luxury. Mr Harding's daughter persuades her fiancé to drop the case but Mr Harding feels it incumbent upon him to resign. This reduces him to poverty but restores his feeling of self worth and his true friends do not desert him. Between them, the reformers and Dr Grantly have succeeded in removing a good man from office and the post goes unfilled, to the detriment of the almshouse inmates. Trollope and the reader enjoy every moment of the two sides having their ‘come-uppance'. SRG

Trollope, Anthony
Barchester Towers (1857)
Rating:- ****
Second in the ‘series' of Barchester cathedral town novels. In this one Trollope enjoys with the reader the rivalry between the factions connected to the new low-church Bishop Dr Proudie and the traditional high church Archdeacon Dr Grantly. Again the wardenship of Hiram's Hospital is at issue. As a lucrative preferment, the Bishop's party, headed by his chaplain Obadiah Slope, seeks to use it for its own ends while the Archdeacon's party wants to see the reinstatement of Mr Harding. Slope is a wondrous creation, on the same lines as Uriah Heap. He and the Bishop's wife Mrs Proudie are allied at first, but soon begin to compete for the weak Bishop's power and this competition becomes the motor for the action, such as it is in this sleepy part of England. The love story that runs through the book, centred again round Eleanor Bold neé Harding who is now a well-provisioned widow, is a by-product of the intrigues. Trollope plays an interesting game with the reader, declaring early on which of three possible suitors will win Eleanor's hand and challenging the reader therefore to watch him about his craft of bringing the affair to a conclusion unaided by surprise. He succeeds in this and thus avoids the novel becoming a ‘romantic' one. His ironic distance from the events is maintained and contributes to the reader's enjoyment on the whole. SRG

Trollope, Anthony
Framley Parsonage (1861)
Rating:- ****
The fourth Barchester novel returns to the standard of the first two. The main story concerns a parish clergyman, Mark Robarts of the eponymous parsonage who has achieved a comfortable situation and loving wife rather too soon in life as a consequence of his close friendship with a young Lord. Having thus acquired inflated ideas of his own worth and unsuitable tastes in leisure pursuit, with no mature experience to arm him, he gets into trouble with loan sharks. This story is well-supplemented by another concerning the young Lord and the seemingly insignificant younger sister of Mark Robarts. These two fall in love but Lucy sets as a condition to her marrying Lord Lufton that his mother should ask her to marry him, something which at first seems unlikely. Seasoning these two main stories are more doings of the Proudies and Grantleys, news of Dr Thorne and Miss Dunstable and sardonic forays into the world of Whigs and Tories on the eve of a General Election. In this novel Trollope does not speak in a detached way to the reader about his plot, relying on the reader's own appraisal of the characters to predict the outcome. A good read. SRG

Trollope, Anthony
The Small House at Allington (1864)
Rating:- ****
This story concerns itself with the widowed Mrs Dale and her two daughters, Lily and Bell who live in the eponymous house rent-free through the generosity of their rather stiff uncle the squire. In return for this favour the uncle wants Bell to marry his heir Bernard. Bell has other ideas. Lily falls in love with Bernard's friend Crosbie, a ‘swell' from London. He proposes and is accepted but no fortune is offered by the uncle. He jilts her in favour of an earl's daughter and is suitably punished by marrying the vacuous and spoilt woman. Further love interest is added through the character of John Eames. He is a local lad who is awkwardly making his way into civil service life. He has loved Lily all his life and seems to have no hope of winning her until he saves a local landlord from an angry bull. Trollope relishes writing of the dull falsity of the titled family into which Crosbie marries and the sordid lodgings where Eames lives and nearly loses his freedom. He illustrates lives based on solid values compared to those based on self-seeking manipulation and calculation. Lily Dale, whose constancy to her false lover is celebrated throughout the novel is perhaps a little too sweet for total comfort. Otherwise, a masterly novel. SRG

Trollope, Anthony
Can You Forgive Her? (1866)
Rating:- ****
This, the first of the ‘Palliser' novels, concerns the behaviour of Alice Vavasor who is a jilt (changing her mind several times), but whom Trollope is keen to exonerate. He does this by showing how she has been left to her own devices too much by a father fond of his own comfort so that she develops a dangerous reliance on her own judgement. Blame is also accorded to one lover who is a reprobate and the other who errs on the side of cold perfection. The mitigating circumstances also include the fact that she tries to be honourable throughout. The sub-text is fairly anti-feminist, however, as one might expect at this date from an establishment male. For all that, the story is told in an interesting way and is livened further by two contrasting marital situations: a rich widow playing off two comic suitors against one another and Glencora Palliser kicking against her arranged marriage with Plantagenet. In the latter Alice is Glencora's confidante and there is a certain irony in the stance she takes as moral arbiter when that lady contemplates elopement with the ne'er do well Burgo Fitzgerald. The figure of George Vavasor, the cousin who is Alice's first and third fiancé, develops perhaps too fast into a stock Victorian villain, complete with bulging eyes and facial disfigurement. This is all to the purpose in making sure that Alice rejects him, but is somewhat unsporting. There is a hunting interlude in which, I think, Trollope himself appears as the ‘weighty literary gentleman' called Pollock, exhausting his horse with his weight and having to drop out before the kill. The episode is hardly necessary to the plot except in painting George's character subtly as a man who does not join the fellowship of others. I devoured the 900 pages over a weekend of cold, grey weather. What a treat! SRG

Trollope, Frances
The Abbess (1833)
Rating:- ****
Early (pre-Victorian!) potboiler from Anthony's mum. Had previously read ‘Domestic Manners of the Americans' and then a biography which had awakened an interest for more. Unfortunately apart from ‘DMOTA' there's absolutely nothing in print from the twenty-odd(?) novels that she wrote. However the private library that I use came to my rescue and there could be found most of her works. I chose this more or less at random. It's a sort of gothic romance and deals with an abbott and abbess fighting it out in the days of the Inquisition. The setting is mainly Italian although we eventually end up in Monmouthshire of all places. There's nothing particularly sophisticated about the writing but it's a thoroughly enjoyable read that puts most of today's novels to shame. The plot is fun although the real climax comes a third of the way through the third volume and she has to create two mini-climaxes before (presumably) she completes her allotted number of pages. Adding to the pleasure was the fact that this was the first time I'd ever read a three-volume in three separate volumes as the copy I borrowed had been acquired by the library in 1852. One quite whips through each page as they are small and only consist of two or three average-size paragraphs. It is interesting that the standard of proof-reading hasn't changed much over the years as there were a not inconsiderable number of typos. (Presumably a distinctive feature of a ‘cheap' edition.) Whatever, great stuff. I'll certainly be returning to find more of the same. SJG
The author certainly knew how to create suspense and keep the reader's attention. This is especially praiseworthy in that she firmly keeps her women (the eponymous abbess and her high-born niece) in the thick of the action, employing all their considerable wit to outsmart the selfish, malicious and bigoted wiles of the power-crazed male ecclesiastics. There is much that is reminiscent of Shakespeare here, apart from the frequent quotes used as chapter headings. The heroine is called Juliet (whose Romeo is from a family separated from her own by a deep rift), and there is a father Laurence and a young page who acts the fool while being of unswerving loyalty to his mistress. We have a mother poisoned after being shunned by a husband taught to regard her as a heretic, a nun buried alive, a trial by Inquisition, a shipwreck and a kidnap: plenty to entertain the ladies! SRG

Turgenev, Ivan
On the Eve
Rating:- ****
Same period as Great Expectations etc. This is recommended with confidence. It does have something of the Chekhovian atmosphere'. The translation reads smoothly and convincingly tho' mention of one character "jogging off" hints at the surrounding pitfalls. A series of intense happenings. A soulful heroine seeking to find a place for her soul to flourish or at least not wither away completely. Runs off with a foreigner who arrives among the local very confined society. We are then told the after life in a few brief pages. How does he do it? This was an early work and he seems to have mastered a mature style almost from the word go. Have only read Fathers and Children' of his other novels but remember this as having the same freshness and economy. Life lived in endless days, people seeking a sense of significance, clever intellectuals, personal arrogance and the whole thing drifting away without anything coming to real fruition. There is one novel of his called Smoke' but haven't read it so don't know whether a smokescreen' is implied. MP
Dug this out from my bookcase after seeing that you had recently read it. Had read it before but didn't remember one single iota of it. Also noted that he ( I have a tendency to confuse Russian authors) wrote Memoirs of a Hunting Man' which I enjoyed not that long ago. The downsides were those damn Russian names and a rather creaky, obvious plot - there really was no need to include a whole chapter of the heroine's diary extracts to convince us that she was in love. Apart from that I thought it was great. One: the translation (for once) was excellent. Two: the characters (although almost out of a stage play) were nicely delineated. Three: the sentimentality reached Dickensian standards and hence found favour with me. Four: I liked the way Venice was as usual used for people to die in. A lovely crisp novel. Great Stuff.
"...death is like a fisherman who, having caught a fish in his net, leaves it in the water for a
time; the fish continues to swim about, but all the while the net is round it, and the fisherman will snatch it out in his own good time."
SJG
It is a very 'romantic' book. One of the characters goes on to read Werther' at one stage and Turgenev is tongue-in-cheek about the vapidness of romantic longings while looking forward to the time when a real hero' will come to save a people. I don't think we ever read it - it was probably bought to fill a bookshelf when we were younger ...! SRG

Tyler, Anne
The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Rating:- ****
Saw this as a movie first and was only mildly interested in it but started to get vibes from round and about that Tyler was a writer with an original talent. On getting down to reading it found that this was the case. The close observation and the humour are her own. Went on to read others. MP
Good stuff. Basically it's about two dysfunctional Americans - sort of equivalent of English eccentrics. Clearly' written with a nice combination of sadness and comedy. My only criticisms are firstly that the comedy never made me laugh out loud (but few books do) and I smiled only infrequently. Also I may have read this before, I'm not sure. In truth it's a fairly light bit of froth and probably won't stay with me'. However I enjoyed the process and it comes recommended.
"I really don't care for movies. They make everything seem so close up."
"There is no sound more peaceful than rain on the roof, if you're safe asleep in someone else's house." SJG
I've definitely read it at some point - could be last year or 10 years ago. It's very good as a portrait of how people make sense of their lives after the death of a child. I did find it amusing - the treatment of animals is first rate, as is the portrayal of complete eccentrics like the hero's family. It has a message - the importance to life of chaos vs control. SRG

Tyler, Anne
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Rating:- ****
Is even better than Accidental Tourist'. There is nothing particularly new about the content. Same old American family problems. It's the angle of vision - the lighting or something like that which gives it its flavour. Same school as Alison Lurie. (Remember Foreign Affairs' which we did with the tutor who never- well hardly ever - spoke.) MP
Quite enjoyed Accidental Tourist' but unlike above, I found this one disappointing. The writing's fairly plain and the insights few and far between. It's the characters and situations that keep her novels going and, apart from the mother, I wasn't that interested in them. Also the story was a bit of a family saga, a concept that I'm very intolerant of. It all rather reminded me of a jumbo jet (complete with characters) trying to take-off. The pilot keeps accelerating down the runway but never manages to make enough speed to actually get in the air. The exception to this is the penultimate chapter when one of the sons is reading his (now blind) mother's diary (from her youth) to her. Excellent stuff and one of the few occasions when the novel rises above the mundane. SJG
SJG's analogy is very apt, though I thought she caught the way enmities develop in families quite well - emerging from the chaos and hurly-burly like scum on broth. Not as good as Accidental Tourist', but worth reading. SRG

Tyler, Anne
Earthly Possessions (1977)
Rating:- ****
Starts a little slowly but eventually the two main characters (a pathetic third-rate bank robber and a trapped housewife) come into their own and become fairly typical Anne Tyler type' figures. If they had been written by an English author they would have become extrovert eccentrics. Here they are quirky and alienated from their surroundings. Although it's supposed to be one of her best, I didn't enjoy as much as Accidental Tourist' - the humour is thin on the ground (I only smiled a couple of times) and there are few exceptional one-liners:
"I saw that all of us lived in a sort of web, criss-crossed by strings of love and need and worry."
However I'd be surprised if she ever wrote a bad novel. The name Anne Tyler is rather like a kite mark on the front of the book, guaranteeing a minimum level of quality. SJG
I thought it was a very subtle and successful treatment of passivity. Charlotte, the main character, is accused by her brother-in-law:
"Every year you've settled for less, tolerated more. You're the kind who thinks tolerance is a virtue. You're proud of letting anyone be anything they choose; it's their business, you say, never mind whose toes they step on, even your own .."
Yet she is not a doormat. She wants to be free and finally is freed' to be a hostage. That enables her at last to see what she really wants. SRG
An early Tyler. So far have not got my head round the sequence of Tyler's works. In her now extensive output have read them in various order regardless of their date and made no connection with any ‘development' of themes or ideas. One of my favourite authors, one generally feels ‘on her side' and in sympathy with what is being revealed about human character, insights and limitations. ‘Earthly Possessions' is low key and generally depressing - she can be more high spirited. This reader was feeling low before reading it and didn't cheer up during the journey. Summary: "For 35 year old Charlotte Emory, leaving her husband seems to offer the only way out from the mundanity of everyday life's earthly possessions and emotional complications. In the bank, she withdraws enough money to escape a life and a marriage gone sour. But Charlotte is about to escape in a way she never expected, as a young bank robber takes her hostage, and they head south for Florida in a stolen car." There is a sense that her flight is a relief from existing conditions but things don't necessarily get any better. The robber is a pretty dreadful chap but then so was her husband in some ways. The ‘good' are not that good, nor the ‘bad' that bad. The characters on the run are humanised and particularised. Is this the general Tyler theme? Agreed for once with one blurb, this from the Observer: "A skilful novel by a writer in full flight from the obvious." MP

Tyler, Anne
Ladder of the Years (1995)
Rating:- ****
Greatly enjoyed reading this. Highly recommended to anyone who admires Anne Tyler. Light as a soufflé but plenty going on below the surface. The blurb writers start off under reasonable control which is an encouraging sign. "A novel by Anne Tyler is a subject for rejoicing": The Times. The Observer starts off with words would fully agree with: "The lucidity and economy of style, the psychological acumen and emotional depth ..." but then goes steeply into book review babble: "... make almost everyone else in the fictional field looked confused or trivial" (= they liked it). Perhaps with the reviewer's "almost everyone else" he/she had read too many of those occupying the fictional field. In fact it is possible to be confused and/or trivial and a very good writer. You could say that we live in a confused and trivial age and that writers particularly Anne Tyler mirror this in their characters. What counts in this kind of writer is imaginative insight. The core of the book is the run-away mother's experience in an unknown town; the particularities; the felt life'. When she eventually rather vaguely returns home and more or less decides to stay there is this exchange with her uncommunicative husband:
"Delia: "You know that letter you wrote to me in Bay Borough."
"Yes."
"Well what was the line you crossed out?" He stirred beneath the bedclothes.
"Oh" he said. "I crossed out so many lines. That letter was a mess."
"I mean the very last line. The one you put so many X' through I couldn't possibly read it."
He didn't answer at first. Then he said "I forget". Her impulse was to stand up and leave, but she forced herself to stay. She sat motionless, waiting and waiting.
"I think" he said finally "that it was ... well, something like what Driscoll was wondering earlier. Was there anything that could you know. Would persuade you to come back."
She said "Oh, Sam. All you had to do was ask."
Then he turned toward her, and Delia slipped under the blankets and he drew her close against him. Although, in fact, he still had not asked. Not in so many words."
Here we have words describing lack of words. Sentimental for some. Full of human warmth for others. What could a film version do to cope with this scene? MP

Tyler,Anne
A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Rating:- ****
How does she keep the standard up? This is her 14th and, I think, it's my favourite. All the usual Tyler trademarks: humour, warmth, interestingly eccentric three-dimensional characters, neat structure, competent writing. I'm not sure why this one is that little bit better than most of them. Possibly because the sag in the middle comes fairly late and doesn't last very long, possibly because she succeeds in taking a risk by writing in the first person as a male, or more probably because she takes as the main source of humour the very fertile ground of the elder generation and their peculiar foibles. Whatever, a thoroughly recommended read.
"Overnight a light snow had fallen - that considerate kind of snow that sticks to lawns but melts on streets and sidewalks."
"His car was one of those macho four-by-fours. You'd think he rode the range all day, herding cattle or something."
"The way she served wine tickled me: one glass for each of us with each dinner, already poured beforehand. Me, I was used to drinking either not at all or far too much. This moderation business was a whole new approach." SJG
Great on the elderly:
"Before I started at Rent-A-Back, I thought a guy could just make up his mind to have a decent old age. Now I know there's no such thing ... Those kitchen windowsills lined with medicine bottles! Those miniature servings of food, a third of a banana wrapped in a speckly black peel and sitting in the fridge! ... The reminder notes all over the house: Lawn-mowing boy is named Richard, Take afternoon pill with full glass of water."
Beautifully structured, human, amusing and satisfying. SRG

Tyler, Anne
Back when we were Grownups (2001)
Rating:- ****
As I'm sure I've said before, I think Anne Tyler couldn't write a bad book. However, this comes in below average. The writing is still lovely and the characters excellent, but you do feel that you've already met them before in earlier books. The plot really is too thin and when she starts to develop a humourous situation or observation, she seems to lose interest in it before it's fully realised. As if to confirm that she's running out of ideas, there's an over-reliance on reminiscing about the past and on dreams - neither a good sign. Having said that I'm sure that MP/BP will enjoy the parts where the lead has to deal with four (as distinct from three?) rather sparky 30-odd-year-old daughters. The next Anne Tyler will be interesting; is this the beginning of a decline or just a minor aberration? SJG
A nice idea - exploring the feeling you get around 50/60 that things might have turned out differently if you'd chosen another fork in life's road years before, and that the real ‘you' might be the person on that other road. It is an upbeat conclusion, too. However, just a bit too much of the routine of the character's life which, one suspected, was attempting to cover thin patches rather than crucially portraying character. Enjoyable, if not worthy. SRG
What is the Tyler secret? Perhaps it is something to do with family disorientation which, though endemic, is somehow offered to the reader in a consoling way. Its effects are rather like the weather in a moderate climate - not too hot or cold but pretty depressing at times; then again quite funny on occasions - now and then hilarious as the one (which novel?) where they re-enact their wedding ten or so years on. The query - which novel? - is fairly regular; the stories (though with different plots) do have a similarity of tone and atmosphere so that on reflection the reader (or at least this one) feels a general drawing together of the Tyler world. ‘Breathing Lessons'. What exactly was that one about?. In some ways the title is a collective - most of her characters are learning, or trying to, in different or unusual surroundings; that is learning to ‘breathe'. ‘Back when we were Grownups' is no exception. The title remains obscure to me. We have a very extended family indeed. Necessary for the oldie to begin to compile his cast list from Page 1 on. Cousins, uncles, mothers have all married, re-married etc. At the centre the heroine is trying to keep the whole show together. She runs an establishment for people to hold large events - weddings, birthdays - catering and entertaining. This can also be used for family get-togethers. Here everything continually teeters on the brink of disaster. In addition to this she is trying to take up again with an old flame from student days. It is all quite beautifully done. Things though well intentioned go wrong. If you're lucky they don't go quite as wrong as potentially they might have done. The main character doesn't have a particularly rewarding life but she tends to get by - often unscathed. Maybe the reader (similarly beset) will also reach a moderately safe haven! MP

Tyler, Anne
The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Rating:- ****
Had recently read two depressing novels so to turn to the latest Anne Tyler was even more of a pleasure than usual. Such a pleasure that I sat down and read it in one day. As some critic has said, she's the best line-and-length novelist around. This one covers seventy years or so in the life of a marriage and could so easily have fallen into the trap of being a sentimentalised 'family saga', but Tyler has the skill to adroitly steer clear of most of the expected genre clichés. Perhaps the insights, perceptions and humour are not as great as in some of her 'middle-period' novels, but still a pleasure to read. SJG
The book will surely begin to figure in reading lists for trainee 'Relate' counsellors - its insights into the consequences of attraction of opposites are knife-sharp. There is the usual Tyler tolerance and even affection for the flawed but essentially well-intentioned nature of mankind and this does give an optimistic cast to her books even though tragedy is not far from the surface. Not quite as emotionally involving as 'The Accidental Tourist' but very good none the less. SRG

Unsworth, Barry
Pascali's Island (1980)
Rating:- ****
I'm rapidly becoming a fan of this novelist. This is better than Stone Virgin' and as good as the excellent Sacred Hunger'. My reader's guide' talks of him as a historical novelist' and as this one is set on a Greek island at the beginning of the century (and the other two were set in 15th cent Venice and 18th cent) I suppose he is. But that phrase demeans him. He has a more-than-competent writing style and the content is a nice balance between discussing ideas, psychological insight and keeping the plot going. Here the first-person narrator is a pathetic, down-at-heel spy who is reporting to Istanbul just as the Ottoman Empire is falling apart. Lots of echoes of the forthcoming WWI as well. Good stuff. Recommended. SJG
Yes. It has a completeness of integrity which is very pleasing. You never quite know what's happening because the engines of the plot are human motives which we can never know exactly in other people, or even ourselves. Nothing much does happen in a way, yet there is an impression of a tranche of history and a well-built tension. SRG

Updike, John
The Visitors From Philadelphia
Rating:- ****
60p. Five superb stories by the Master. No need to say more? MP

Updike, John
Towards the End of Time (1997)
Rating:- ****
Big disappointment from the author who wrote The Rabbit Quartet' - one of the best series of books in the last half century. Now he is quite reasonably worried about dying and seems to be writing at an ever-increasing rate. And some of it is excellent: "in the ice and packed snow receding on the asphalt, the patterns of melting - the ornate undercutting, the fragile lace left behind by liquefaction and evaporation, the striations of successive snowfalls, some damper and icier than others." But the book is such a mess - ideas and words flung at the page with little purpose except to expound on a 70-year-old's immediate concerns- most of which seem to centre on bodily fluids and his wish to have sex with younger women. It becomes very tedious very quickly. The story is set twenty years in the future but he gets that all wrong as, except for scientific oddities, all the references relate to living in the 1990s - eg he complains about people putting rings through their navels or wherever, but this is a 1990s issue and unlikely still to be one twenty plus years hence. (Jokes about President Al Gore are a hostage to fortune.) I wasn't enjoying it and gave up after passing the halfway mark. Perhaps after this it may have all become clear but I doubt it. Legends' in pop music usually have died early and didn't have a chance to fail to follow up their excellent early work. It seems that Updike may be more Paul McCartney than Buddy Holly. SJG
Whatever criticisms may be made of Updike he does have convincing claims to be in the Premier League. The sheer quality of the writing page by page, the rhythms and the cadences sing out. Opening paragraph:
"FIRST SNOW: it came this year late in November. Gloria and I awoke to see a fragile inch on the oak branches outside the bathroom windows, and on the curving driveway below, and on the circle of lawn the driveway encloses - the leaves still unraked, the grass still green. I looked into myself for a trace of childhood exhilaration at the sight and found none, just a quickened awareness of being behind in my chores and an unfocused dread of time itself, time that churns the seasons and had brought me this new offering, this heavy new radiant day like a fresh meal brightly served in a hospital to a patient with a dwindling appetite."
The book expresses "the quintessence of morality." Margaret Atwood. The blurbists refrain from extravagant praise: "... a force that gets under your skin and can put fear into the best of us." There has been a nuclear war with China which has caused the Federal Government to collapse and public order is maintained by FedEx, a sort of Securicor, which exacts money in order to provide protection which, agreeably, is less than the Federal Taxes had been. This, as the novel progresses, is replaced by young semi-savage predators. America is back to a kind of frontier/exposed state. The people who prey on the hero remind us faintly of the lawless prowlers of Conrad (cf Victory'), moody and unpredictable. The background of post-nuclear America (in 2020) is not really convincing but Updike is not writing about exactly what it might be like but what it might be like to live in it - the feel of things - and this is stunningly good. There are some reservations. It is at times overwritten - the somewhat lush style, the endless descriptions of nature, plants and animals - does pall occasionally. But having complained of the thinness of some talented contemporary writers who leave little impact once you have finished reading, here surely we have a major talent to celebrate. MP

Updike, John
In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996)
Rating:- ****
Never quite sure what you're going to get with a recent Updike. The older Rabbit Quartet was truly wonderful but several more recent works I've tried have been woeful. Happily this is a welcome return to form. The writing is, as ever, excellent, but in this work he has ignored a heavy plot-line and concentrated on characterisation - a field in which he excels. Indeed the first half is nearly all steady character development and is really superb. In the second half the plot intrudes a little too much and there is a definite drop in quality. (From what I remember the afore-mentioned Rabbit Quartet had little real plot and benefited accordingly.) Another of Updike's trademarks is a surfeit of erudition and whilst often awe-inspiring, it can sometimes get in the way of the story's flow. Here it's well under control, concentrating mainly on religion and the development and social effects of the growth of the movie industry. Occasionally Updike ends up just giving a list of famous incidents in a particular year, but the stuff that goes with it is of such high quality, that he can get away with it. Incidentally the novel consists of a novella-length story from four successive generations, and they are nicely tied together. If you want to read some of the highest quality contemporary writing try the first ‘novella' about a turn-of-the-century vicar who loses his faith - in particular the first twenty or so pages which rank in quality to ‘The Dubliners'. Yes, that good. SJG
What Updike has done is to reflect the real questions about existence, purpose and belief in the lives of his characters (four generations) tying them in at the same time with the material development of the USA. The title is taken from the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic', ("As Christ died to make men holy, Let us die to make men free, While God is marching on." is the concluding line of the quote), and the book exemplifies each generation taking up (or failing to take up) the challenge in its own way. The irony of the full circle (or is it spiral?) from the first character who: "loses his faith" and martyrs his family, to the last, who finds a faith and murders strangers, is illuminating about God and human society. SRG

Usborne, Richard
Clubland Heroes
Rating:- ****
As a counterblast to various Lit. Class books (see under Thorpe, Adam') a friend lent this truly entertaining book. Nostalgic study of some recurrent characters in the romantic fiction of Dornford Yates, John Buchan and Sapper. I had never read more than a page or so of the first name. "Never did an author revel in the music or discords of names as Dornford Yates does - John Rodney Slure, William Red Spencer, Adam Boleyn, Richard Stone Ludlow, Jonathan Baldric, Terence Ammiral, Dominic Medmenham, Virgil Padouser, Piers Marinner, Sir Spencer Sedan, Sir Valentine Scrope, Richard Alanol, Slure ninth earl of Aron, and Lippe, Surrey fettering, Crispin Willoughby VC, Simon Beaulieu, Pomfret Tudor, Diery Peruke, Sir Andrew Plague, Sir Willoughby Sperm" (!?) I will spare you the women Maisie Dukedom, Athalia Chaote etc etc. Rather reminiscent of an entirely different set of names, those of East Coast USA in the 30s who went to Gatsby's parties. Usborne has a confessed "weakness" for Yates and for Sapper. Of Buchan he says: "He was the best writer of the three, the best story teller and the best craftsman. But, for me, he is the easiest to forget ... There is throughout the Buchan canon a slight but persistent propaganda for the decencies as preached by the enthusiastic housemaster - for cold baths, for hard work, for healthy exhaustion on the playing field, for shaking hands with the beaten opponent, for the attainment of Success in after-life ... but Yates' Berry and Sapper's Bulldog Drummond they were ... heroes with real glamour. It was they who took me out of school, out of myself into a world of laughter, lazy riches, topping girls and villains that I could enjoy with relish." Literature as fun: a holiday from the intellectual pretensions of the Post Modern Cleverbrigade. MP

Vargas, Fred Seeking Whom He May Devour (1999 tr 2004)