Books do furnish a room

Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo “Words not only mattered but they were power. Words were muti. Words were weapons. Words were magic. Words were church. Words were wealth. Words were life.” There are going to be inevitable comparisons with Animal Farm and terms like Orwellian are going to be bandied about. It is a satire on the last forty or so years of history in Zimbabwe, here renamed Jidada. All of the characters are animals of varying sorts and varieties: horses, pigs, cats, dogs, donkeys, goats, geese, ducks, peacocks, crocodiles, hens and possibly more. I may have missed a few. It tells the story of a totalitarian regime ruled by “the old horse” and his downfall. This leads to the birth of hope until there is again despair and disillusion. As the song by The Who goes: “Meet the new boss: same as the old boss” Social media now plays a role and there is a very perceptive comment on queueing: “Standing on hind legs, the back leaning against a wall, tail curled or tucked between the legs. Sitting on the pavement. Squatting. Holding on to walls. Sleeping queues. Sleeping pressed together like hot loaves of bread in queues. Sleeping standing with one eye open in queues.” Bulawayo ties in African folklore into the tale and so you have an interesting juxtaposition of the old and the new. The novel is in very small sections and this made it easy to read and to put down and come back to. The language is almost a performance in itself, consider this description of the initial reactions to the fall of the dictator and the arrival of a new regime: “The new Dispensation was such a show bird that very soon other parrots learned the strange new song that now seemed to always be in Jidada’s airs. It felt to the birds like another popular fad not to be left out of, and so in no time crows were cawing New Dispensation, owls were hooting New Dispensation, sparrows were chirping New Dispensation, canaries were singing New Dispensation, doves were cooing New Dispensation, hornbills and other birds were calling New Dispensation, and the cicadas were droning New Dispensation, bees were buzzing New Dispensation, crickets and grasshoppers and other insects were chirping New Dispensation so that Jidada’s hedges and trees and air and skies and even the jungles outside Jidada were all New Dispensation New Dispensation New Dispensation, yes, tholukuthi New Dispensation everywhere and New Dispensation all the time.” Before tying this too closely to Animal Farm, we need to remember that much African folklore tells stories about animals as well. It’s sometimes difficult to follow and can meander a little; but it is a sharp and well-aimed satire. Like the list of government posts: “Minister of Order, Minister of the Revolution, Minister of Propaganda, Minister of Things, Minister of Disinformation, Minister of Corruption, Minister of Homophobic Affairs, and Minister of Looting” The variety of narrative voices works as well and this is certainly worth reading. 8 out of 10 Starting Incomparable World by S I Martin

Thanks Madeleine The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington “People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats.” Very unconventional and a product of surrealism. Carrington herself was also rather unconventional. I was aware she had spent much of her time in Mexico. I hadn’t realised she escaped there, following a period in an asylum in Madrid and her family’s plan to move her to an asylum in South Africa. The protagonist is 92 and it makes a change to have an older main character with a great deal of life in her. The best summation of the book I am borrowing from the back: “After coming into possession of a hearing trumpet, 92-year-old Marian Leatherby discovers her son's plans to send her to a nursing home. But this is no ordinary place.... Here there are strange rituals, orgiastic nuns, levitating abbesses, animalistic humans, humanistic animals, a search for the Holy Grail, and a plan to escape to Lapland and knit a tent” There is much more than this including an apocalypse and a nuclear winter. It is a sort of feminist fable as well. It’s idiosyncratic with a strong sense of the absurd. And yet it is also domestic at the same time. Marian’s description of herself: “Here I must say that all my senses are by no means impaired by age. My sight is still excellent although I use spectacles for reading, when I read, which I practically never do. True, rheumatics have bent my skeleton somewhat. This does not prevent me taking a walk in clement weather and sweeping my room once a week, on Thursday, a form of exercise which is both useful and edifying. Here I may add that I consider that I am still a useful member of society and I believe still capable of being pleasant and amusing when the occasion seems fit.” The novel starts rather sedately and goes into apocalypse mode towards the end. Marian’s friend Carmella always adds interest as when she finds out Marian is to go into a care home run by a Christian group: “‘The Well of Light Brotherhood,’ said Carmella, ‘is obviously something extremely sinister. Not I suppose a company for grinding old ladies into breakfast cereal, but something morally sinister. It sounds terrible. I must think of something to save you from the jaws of the Well of Light.’ This seemed to amuse her for no reason at all and she chuckled although I could see she was quite upset. ‘They will not allow me to take the cats you think?’ ‘No cats,’ said Carmella. ‘Institutions, in fact, are not allowed to like anything. They don’t have time.’ ‘What shall I do?’ I said. ‘It seems a pity to commit suicide when I have lived for ninety-two years and really haven’t understood anything.’ ‘You might escape to Lapland,’ said Carmella.” Some of the off the cuff remarks are amusing as well: “At times I had thought of writing poetry myself but getting words to rhyme with each other is difficult, like trying to drive a herd of turkeys and kangaroos down a crowded thoroughfare and keep them neatly together without looking in shop windows.” Olga Tokarczuk in the Paris Review describes the novel as having open-endedness and wild metaphysics. The Hearing Trumpet defies easy classification, but it goes in distinctly surprising directions which makes it worth reading. 8 out of 10 Starting Mischief Acts by Zoe Gilbert

Black Drop by Leonora Nattrass “This is the confession of Laurence Jago. Clerk. Gentleman. Reluctant spy.” Another historical novel. Set in London in 1794. The Black Drop of the title is Laudanum. It is the height of the terror in France and England and France are at war. The main protagonist is Laurence Jago a clerk at the Foreign Office. There is plenty of intrigue and deception and I believe this is the first of a series. Jago is a flawed hero as he is somewhat reliant on of the opiate of the title. There is a mix of fictional and historical characters. Lord Grenville is the foreign secretary. Others include George Canning, Thomas Hardy (not the novelist, but the radical shoemaker tried for treason), John Jay (an American envoy) and, of course, Pitt the Younger. One of Jago’s fellow clerks has been murdered and Jago takes it on himself to investigate. This takes him around the back streets of London with a mix of spies for France and the government and the home grown radicals caught up with the Corresponding Societies. There are a few journalists around as well. Nattrass creates atmosphere well and the tale holds the attention. It was quite fun to reacquaint myself with radical London of the 1790s: it felt like home when I was at university! 6 and a half out of 10 Starting Weird Woods edited by John Miller

The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers ‘People just want to believe in something bigger than all this. Something beyond. It takes them away from the mundane details of their tiny lives. You can’t blame them.’ Myers has produced another great novel here to go with The Offing and Cuddy, already two of my favourites of all time. This was is set in the summer of 1989 in rural Wiltshire and centred around crop circles. It was the time of illegal raves and New Age Travellers and the Thatcher era was beginning to wind down with protests about the poll tax. The two main protagonists, indeed pretty much the only characters, are Redbone and Calvert. Redbone lives in his rickety old van and is what would have been described at the time as a crusted punk. He is something of a musician, having been in a variety of local bands. He comes up with the ideas for the crop circles. Calvert is an SAS veteran, having fought in the Falklands War. He is scarred on the inside and out, lost likely having PTSD. He is generally quite taciturn with occasional moments of volubility. He plans the crop circles and identifies the remote locations. There is a chapter for each of the crop circles they create that summer. “they tell a strange story, create a narrative. More than anything, they are something to believe in during cynical times … Hope is the human currency, and we’re spreading it about.” The crop circles are symbolic and were quite a thing at the time. There were all sorts of esoteric theories about them, many involving aliens. Myers’s theory here was that it was two approaching middle aged blokes in an old van. One to which I heartily subscribe. The men here are outsiders, on the edges of society. The two men plan in detail and try to avoid notice which they mainly do. There are occasional interruptions from fly tippers, the wildlife, a pissed lord of the manor and confused pensioners. The land itself might almost be seen as a character in itself. It is ancient, almost conscious: there is a sense of history of continuity: “A dark crescent spreads like a silent malevolent force across the mottled greys and whites of the sullen moon’s countenance, its surface a curious patina. Redbone and Calvert stop what they are doing and stare upwards until their necks ache, not daring to drag their eyes away from the empyrean display. The blank clock-like face fades from view as the black shutter of the earth’s shadow covers it to create a total lunar eclipse, and for a few seconds it feels as if the darkness will be unending and absolute. Momentarily the land is an undeveloped photograph and time is rendered meaningless, and both Redbone and Calvert are aware that they are part of a long lineage of men and women who have stood in these very fields in rapt astonishment for thousands of years, infatuated and intrigued by the magic of the sky at night, and feeling the smallness of their lives and the preciousness of their planetary home.” This is about much more than just crop circles. It is obviously about the friendship between Redbone and Calvert. They share scraps of their lives and loves (in Redbone’s case) and the way they see society. Calvert has some reflections on his time in the army and his country: “It means that, once, we looked to the horizon, and we wondered what lay beyond, and then set out for it. We colonised and plundered, and then when innocent people had been slaughtered and their resources accrued, we returned with riches. Then we turned inwards to slowly fester and moil in our bitterness for a century or two, fearful that someone would one day do the same to us. Believe me, I know because I’ve been a part of it, but never again. Never again. The sea is a border, a boundary, and living on an island like this makes us think we’re something special. But we’re not. We’re just scared, that’s all. We’re scared of the world. And that breeds arrogance and ignorance, and ignorance signals the death of decency.” Although in some ways this feels like a comic novel it has a strand of melancholy woven into it and the humour is often cynical. Myers does manage to create two very unlikely likeable characters and again manages to say a good deal about the current state of England. Again another favourite from Myers. 9 out of 10 Starting Begars Abbey by V L Valentine

The Animals of Lockwood Manor by Jane Healey ”Lockwood had too many empty rooms. They sat there, hushed and gaping, waiting for my mind to fill them with horrors – spectres and shadows and strange creeping creatures. And sometimes what was already there was frightening enough: empty chairs; the hulk of a hollow wardrobe; a painting that slid off the wall on its own accord and shattered on the floor; the billowing of a curtain in a stray gust of wind; a light bulb that flickered like a message from the beyond. Empty rooms hold the possibility of people lurking inside them – truants, intruders, spirits.” I loved the cover art on this one, but I’m not quite that shallow as to have bought it for that! Another historical novel, I’m reading quite a few of those at the moment. This one is set during the Second World War. The main protagonist Hetty works at the Natural History Museum. A large part of the taxidermy section is moved to the country for safe keeping. It ends up at a large rambling country house called Lockwood Manor and Hetty is sent to look after and manage the collection. Lockwood Manor has a large collection of servants and a few alleged ghosts. The residents also include the owner Major Lockwood and his daughter Lucy. The stage is then set for a sort of queer gothic mystery as odd things happen at the Manor. There are certain similarities to Sarah Waters. The chapters alternate between Hetty and Lucy’s point of view. This is also a first novel. The whole is a slow burn and things do take a while to come to fruition. There is plenty of “atmosphere”, secrets, nightmares, paranoia, stuffed animals being moved about the place, women in white flowing dresses wandering corridors at night (no tropes there), a cruel lord of the manor, devious servants, walled up rooms and much more. The house itself is also a significant aspect of the book: ”The house seemed to encourage wandering, hunting – the long corridor of its first floor, with the wall sconces leading you forward, the tall windows, the neat condition of each room that a dozen servants tended to; the hidden service stairs waiting to be found; the narrow warren of the servants’ floor; and above all the vacuum of life, the absence of people in the rooms that had been so lovingly prepared for them.” On the whole I found this fairly innocuous, easy to read and mildly entertaining. 6 out of 10 Starting One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

I may try another one France One Moonlit Night by Caradog Prichard “Give us this day our daily bread … bread. And after saying daily bread, I didn’t go any further with the others, I just started thinking. I remembered Mam telling me before we came to Church that we had no bread to make bread and butter with, and so I asked God for some more daily bread cos the parish money wasn’t coming till Friday.” This has been voted the greatest novel written in Welsh. It was published in 1961 and translated into English in 1995. The setting is the North Wales village of Bethesda, which was a community built around a slate quarry. The narrative voice is that of a young boy at various ages (well, it’s slightly more complicated than that …) and it happens around the time of the First World War, just before, during and just after. The author Caradog Prichard was born in 1904 and spent his childhood in Bethesda, so there is certainly an element of autobiography. One particular similarity is what happens to the child’s mother in the novel. As with Prichard’s own mother, she has mental health issues and ends up in the local asylum. The descriptions are vivid and harrowing. Prichard’s mother spent almost forty years in an asylum. He was a journalist, moving to London. He wrote some poetry and this novel. It is a very powerful evocation of a working class childhood haunted by the spectre of poverty. There is a good deal of humour in it, but the whole is pretty bleak, but beautifully written. Despite the voice of the narrator being a child the reader is confronted with suicide, shellshock, indecent exposure, domestic violence, child abuse, alcoholism, prostitution, mental health issues, epilepsy, drug use, war, TB and much more. That makes the whole sound pretty grim, but it isn’t. The village itself and the landscape are almost characters in themselves: “Jees, the old lake looks good too. It’s strange that they call it Black Lake cos I can see the sky in it. Blue Lake would be a better name for it, cos it looks as though it’s full of blue eyes. Blue eyes laughing at me. Blue eyes laughing at me. Blue eyes laughing” Religion is also central to the novel: Church and Chapel, along with a fair amount of singing. There is a good deal of Biblical language and a fair amount of Church going (that wasn’t a trigger warning!). It is about a brutal childhood and about three boys: the narrator, and his friends Huw and Moi. There isn’t really a plot, more a series of episodes which move around within the time frame. Some of the episodes are almost hallucinogenic and comparisons have been made with Under Milk Wood, but the differences are greater than the similarities. And there is great power here: “And then I started crying. Not crying like I used to years ago whenever I fell down and hurt myself; and not crying like I used to at some funerals either; and not crying like when Mam went home and left me in Guto’s bed at Bwlch Farm ages ago. But crying just like being sick. Crying without caring who was looking at me. Crying as though it was the end of the world. Crying and screaming the place down, not caring who was listening. And glad to be crying, the same way some people are glad when they’re singing, and others are glad when they’re laughing. Dew, I’d never cried like that before, and I’ve never cried like that since, either. I’d love to be able to cry like that again, just once more.” Then, of course there is the ending. It takes a great deal these days to shock or surprise me in a novel, but I really did not see this ending coming. It is an ending which makes the reader reappraise the whole thing. One of the greatest things about the novel is the descriptions about everyday life and death. I’m still processing it, but I would certainly recommend it. 9 and a half out of 10 Starting Black Drop by Leonora Nattrass

Yes Madeleine, they are comfort reads, but quite enjoyable. The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley “What's gone before you, and what will come after,' I said instead. 'Beg pardon?' 'The past ahead. Time is like a river and you float with the current. Your ancestors set off before you did, so they're far ahead. Your descendants will sail it after.” There is a certain serene nonsensicalness to this. It has an edge of surrealism and fantasy added to a historical novel and a travelogue. In addition there is an element of steampunk as well. It is mainly set in Peru in and around the 1860s. It revolves around quinine and the attempts to steal some to be grown in other parts of the world. This is also an excuse for introducing plenty of references to Incan culture and mythology. So there are statures that move, pollen that does odd things, cloud cities, obsidian and much more. The plot itself is simple. Merrick Tremayne works for the East India Company (that noble and pure institution!) and has spent time in India and was previously an opium smuggler running into China. He has an injured leg, but is persuaded by the Company and a couple of friends to go to Peru to steal cuttings from the trees that quinine is produced from. And so the adventure starts. The Bedlam of the title is the name of a village, a shortened form of Bethlehem. On the surface the story is well told and there is a sense of adventure or daring do. It’s a bit Jules Verne with clockwork, bees, pollen lamps, mercury, whitewood and much more. It works as a jolly japes adventure story, but unfortunately it sanitises something rather unpleasant. At the heart of this is colonialism, with all its horrors. This is the summation of colonialism in the novel: “Why do you hate Indians? You know white people are much worse, don't you? It isn't as though there's some kind of international bar you're not reaching out here. We're terrible at everything. Lasting much past forty-five. Learning more than one language. It's a miracle, actually; sickly prematurely aging worryingly inbred horsey idiots have managed to convince everyone else their way is best by no other means than firmness of manner and the tactical distribution of flags. I can't believe no one's called our bluff yet.” This is set around the time of the first Indian War of Independence in 1857 and all the concomitant horrors. This is a sweetened version of Imperialism. It’s all a jolly adventure with the magic realism and interesting natives. I am a great fan of historical novels, but not this sort. 4 out of 10 Starting The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths “Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit, everything changes, nothing perishes,” The second in a crime series set in Norfolk and about forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway. I have read the second in the series as I quite enjoyed the first and the characterisation was good. It’s also pretty good in this second outing. The main protagonists are engaging and nuanced enough to avoid cliché. Some of the minor characters in the first novel are given a bit more space and flesh, including Cathbad the Druid. The plot revolves around a rather grand old house in Norwich which is being gutted to be turned into modern apartments. The skeleton of a small child is discovered under one of the door frames. This turns out to be relatively modern (1950s). There is also another dig, Roman this time, which Ruth is involved in and we move between the two. Here is introduced assorted gods, particularly Janus and Hecate. There is a good deal about borders and boundaries and Jocasta also crops up. There’s also a fair amount about Roman festivals. DCI Harry Nelson, who at first appeared to be a fairly unreconstructed male chauvinist, continues to develop and become more nuanced. There are some flaws in the plot and sometimes it’s a bit thin. Moving between the characters can take some getting used to. The writing in the first person can be annoying as well: “On impulse Ruth goes over to the box containing the other evidence bags from the site.” However it is well paced and Griffiths creates atmosphere well. Catholicism rears its head and there’s an elderly nun or two floating about. On the whole this is ok and I read it pretty quickly. 6 and a half out of 10 Starting The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers

The Past by Tessa Hadley Tomorrow’s almost over, Today went by so fast, It’s the only thing to look forward to – the past You would have to be of a certain age and from the UK to recognise that reference. This is the first novel I have read by Hadley and it does have a Chekovian feel to it. The plot is simple and involves a family holiday. Four siblings spend three weeks in the home of their late parents in the country. There is Roland, his new wife Pilar (from Argentina) and his teenage daughter Molly. Then there are three sisters, Fran, Harriet and Alice, all in their forties. Harriet is a former left wing radical starting to mellow, Fran brings her two children, Ivy and Arthur (between eight and twelve): Alice is on a break between lovers and brings Kasim the son of an ex-lover who is in his late teens/early twenties. Take a family home, add some plentiful family dynamics, a bit of tension, some reminiscing, a couple of mischievous children, some horny teens and stick them in the middle of the countryside and see what happens. “They knew one another well, all too well, and yet they were all continually surprised by the forgotten difficult twists and turns of one another’s personalities, so familiar as soon as they appeared.” The book is split into three sections. Two present day sections with a middle section going back to 1968. As there is no real plotline the novel flows along with the interactions and the reflections of the characters on life and each other: “part of the oddity of marriage, she thought, was in how unwise it was to attend too intently to the other person. This was the opposite to what she had naively imagined, as a girl. To the unmarried, it seemed that a couple must be intimately, perpetually exposed to each other – but actually, that wasn’t bearable” There are plenty of contrasts between middle age and youth as you would expect and doses of longing, wistfulness and wasted youth. The writing about childhood is also pretty well written. It’s skilfully woven together and it becomes obvious that Hadley is influenced by Elizabeth Bowen. The descriptions of the landscape and weather are evocative and effective. This is middle class angst at its best. That may put a few people off, but Hadley does inject some psychological subtlety and personal dysfunction. The switching between characters does work in this case. There are shades of Woolf’s To The Lighthouse in the ebb and flows, but for me it’s not in that league, although it held my interest and I enjoyed it. “New growth sprouted livid green, the tan mulch under the pines in a plantation had darkened to ox blood, unripe blackberreies were fuzzy with grey mould. Beside a path a bank had sheared away ina smear of red mud; skirting around it they saw into the raw root-gape, like flung arms, of a tree upended, its deep hole whiskery with torn roots.” 7 and a half out of 10 Starting The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry “The eastern sky was red as coals in a forge, lighting up the flats along the river. Dew had wet the million needles of the chaparral, and when the rim of the sun edged over the horizon the chaparral seemed to be spotted with diamonds. A bush in the backyard was filled with little rainbows as the sun touched the dew. It was tribute enough to sunup that it could make even chaparral bushes look beautiful, Augustus thought, and he watched the process happily, knowing it would only last a few minutes. The sun spread reddish-gold light through the shining bushes, among which a few goats wandered, bleating. Even when the sun rose above the low bluffs to the south, a layer of light lingered for a bit at the level of the chaparral, as if independent of its source. The sun lifted clear, like an immense coin. The dew quickly died, and the light that filled the bushes like red dirt dispersed, leaving clear, slightly bluish air. It was good reading light by then, so Augustus applied himself for a few minutes to the Prophets. He was not overly religious, but he did consider himself a fair prophet and liked to study the styles of his predecessors. They were mostly too long-winded, in his view, and he made no effort to read them verse for verse—he just had a look here and there, while the biscuits were browning.” It isn’t all that lyrical! This lays a claim to be the best book about the West ever written. It may well be, but it is certainly one of the best. Chronologically it is the third of four, but it was the first to be written. Set in the 1880s it tells the story of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana and the men on it. There are women in the book: many are 'ladies of the night' or ex-'ladies of the night', some are wives. There are certainly some strong women as well: “What was it you said?” he asked finally. “I said we oughta get married,” Louisa said loudly. “What I like about you is you're quiet. Jim talked every second that he didn’t have a whisky bottle on his mouth. I got tired of listening. Also, you’re skinny. If you don’t last, you’ll be easy to bury. I’ve buried enough husbands to take such things into account. What do you say?” A very practical approach to marriage. It is a portrait of a West that is changing. The great herds of buffalo have mostly gone (although not quite in the more northern states). The Native Americans have mostly been brutalised into submission; again although not entirely as the novel shows. The cowboys ride past miles of buffalo bones left on the plains and McMurtry’s descriptions of these are poignant. There are clichés and tropes. The one Native American we do see most of is vicious and a caricature villain. There are plenty of descriptions of settlers and their struggles with the landscape, with outlaws and with their animals. The character development is pretty good, even for the more minor characters. As is often the case I felt that it could even do to be longer, there was space for more. Thankfully the temptation to tie up all the loose ends was resisted. There is plenty of death and regret and McMurtry has philosophised over the book for years. The two main characters, Gus and Call are a contrast, Call being a Stoic and Gus an Epicurean. He also referred to it as a poor man’s Inferno. There is also behind it all the doctrine of Manifest Destiny which seems to drive some of the characters. The reality of course is entirely different and the brutality of the land and its weather are front and central. There are also those on the other side of Manifest Destiny: “This is rare country, this Montana. We’re a lucky bunch. There ain’t nothing better than this…That’s the wild for you––it’s got its dangers, which is part of the beauty. ‘Course the Indians have had this land forever. To them it’s precious because it’s old. To us it’s precious because it’s new.” It is worth noting that the women don’t have the foolish romanticism of the men. It’s also worth remembering that McMurtry also claimed to have based it partially on Don Quixote as well. It is bleak and there are lots of moral and ethical dilemmas. There are problems with this, but one thing is certain McMurtry is a great storyteller. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting One Moonlit Night by Caradog Prichard

In Search of a Past by Ronald Fraser “The ego is a graveyard scattered with the headstones of lost objects” Ronald Fraser was a notable oral historian, particularly in relation to his adopted Spain and the Civil War. This offering is an analysis of his own past. He was brought up in a Country Manor in Berkshire and had a far from idyllic childhood. For this book he went back to the area and interviewed as many of the old servants and workers that he could find and interviewed them (this was in the late 1970s and early 80s). He did this in conjunction with psychoanalysis and there is a good deal of information about the analysis in the book. Fraser was born in Germany and moved to the Home Counties when he was three with his wealthy American mother and Scots father. They pretty much lived the life of the idle rich and Fraser was primarily brought up by a nanny. Fraser provides a picture of what is now a lost world and looks at the lives of the servants, groom and gardeners as well as his own. His subjects here are his own self and the class system. Fraser was a socialist and very involved with the New Left Review for several decades. There is a compelling picture of dependency and paternalism along with the minutiae of class distinction. This leads to a more interesting portrait and characterisation of a particular house. The psychoanalysis seems to have been primarily Freudian, which makes for an interesting juxtaposition of Marx and Freud. Fraser says he had the “aim of combining two different modes of enquiry – oral history and psychoanalysis – to uncover the past in as many of its layers as possible.” Fraser is not only looking for a voyage of inner discovery, but also a “voyage into the social past”. Fraser does recognise the problems with analysis: “Analysis is more limiting because it recreates the past only in the forms in which it was internalised or repressed” Combining oral history and psychoanalysis isn’t necessarily an obvious connection, so there is an element of experiment, and obviously the title itself is a reference to Proust. Fraser makes clear he isn’t trying to discover his past. He’s learning about different perceptions of it from the family servants. He’s also trying to understand the split he perceives in himself. Contradiction is central. He had a second mother, his nanny Ilse, who was effectively his first mother as he spent most time with her. Fraser also found a second father in the form of Bert, the gardener, who taught him a great deal about life. His own father was not interested in his child “until he can go out shooting with me” Fraser speaks about rubbing out the past and preserving it: “The aims seem contradictory, don’t they? But they’re the same. I kept the past alive out of a desire for revenge. One day I would write it – and them – off the face of the earth” He’s speaking of his parents. It’s an interesting account and an unusual perspective. At times the psychoanalysis can be a little irritating, but it’s worth the effort and the accounts of life in a Manor House in the 1930s is interesting. 8 out of 10 Starting Whigs and Hunters by E P Thompson

Owlish by Dorothy Tse “Most of the group had lived all their lives in this coastal territory called Nevers, located to the south of Ksana. Nevers had been built up by the kingdom of Valeria and ruled by her for a hundred years, developing first on Valeria Island and then expanding to the Ksanese peninsula across the harbour. Nowadays, the city was looking well past its prime. Skyscrapers thrust upwards like lethal weapons, and, at fixed times every evening, a light show started up on both sides of the harbour, laser beams strafing the water and blinding passers-by.” Owlish takes place in the city of Nevers, which is a very thinly disguised Hong Kong, Tse’s home. It is a fairy-tale and nothing is quite as it seems. It is a political allegory and also manages to encompass a typical male mid-life crisis (well, typical if you include falling in love with a life size female automaton in the form of a ballerina called Aliss typical). It is clear though that we are dealing with real life events, even if there is a hint of dystopia and the surreal. The man, Professor Q is fifty and a university professor. His wife Maria is a very well organised civil servant. He has a rather odd friend, it seems, called Owlish. There are all sorts of references to other works, a multiplicity of them. I can do no better than point you towards Alwynne’s review which captures the essence of this better than I can: Alwynne’s review of Owlish | Goodreads It’s interesting, although I felt it lost its way towards the end, although again that may be the point. Nothing is as it seems. ‘He turned, noticing a dressing-table with a three-way mirror. He went over to it and sat down. He had no interest in looking at his own ageing face; what he wanted was for the mirror to give him a clearer view of the church interior. But rather than making the room more visible, the mirror dragged everything out and chopped it up, creating a chain of overlapping images, making a two-dimensional world into something as grand and complex as a pipe organ. Perhaps the astonishing thing was not that he had lived so many years in Nevers without knowing that such an island, or such a church, existed, but rather that, in all the cities he had lived before, there had never been a place like this one – somewhere willing to accept him and all his treasures. Treasures he had been gathering like secrets, gorgeous, resplendent things, which were now in the mirror before him, replicated, larger than life. Aliss was there too, reborn many times over, watching him from inside all those parallel worlds. Her gaze no longer scared him. In fact, her eyes felt the way the sun does in dreams: encouraging, nourishing of everything that the dull, tasteless, real world chooses to forbid.’ 6 out of 10 Starting Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” There may well be a few spoilers ahead, but of course the main spoiler here is the title of the novel! This is not one of Greene’s comedies. “The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.” This is a 1951 novel set around the Second World War and is very much based on Greene’s own affair with Catherine Walston. The primary characters are writer Maurice Bendrix, Sarah Miles and her civil servant husband Henry Miles. The inevitable affair is conducted between Bendrix and Sarah and the whole is narrated by Bendrix, a rather unpleasant narrator. There have been two films and God help us an Opera. It is also the last of the four novels Greene wrote with a distinctly Catholic dimension. Greene uses a fair number of literary devices along with the conventional narrative: plenty of flashback, some stream of consciousness, a diary. Greene, as he does, also employs a “third man” figure, who in this case turns out to be the Almighty! The book is about passion and obsession. But it’s also about sainthood, unfortunately. A careful reading of Sarah’s character confirms this, a touch of the miraculous, more than once. Then there’s the ending, apart from Bendrix and Henry Miles moving in together like The Odd Couple: “I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever.” It does feel very dated now and it is certainly not shocking in the way it might have been when it was printed. It is well written, but the characterisation isn’t particularly good, the conversion scene isn’t effective. This really hasn’t aged well. The passive aggressiveness is very British. The first person narration was an experiment after Greene read Great Expectations: “Dickens had somehow miraculously varied his tone, but when I tried to analyze his success, I felt like a colourblind man trying intellectually to distinguish one colour from another. For my book there were two shades of the same colour — obsessive love and obsessive hate; Mr. Parkis, the private detective, and his boy were my attempt to introduce two more tones, the humorous and the pathetic.” The second half of the book is far too sentimental or maybe I’m too cynical. 5 out of 10 Starting The Animals at Lockwood Manor by Jane Healey

Brother Jacob by George Eliot Another Virago! This is Eliot’s shortest offering, barely a novella, and only three chapters. It is a fable and a morality tale with a central role for Nemesis. The main character (and very unlikeable he is) is David Faux. He comes from fairly humble origins. He finds himself fascinated with confectionary as a child and of course the sweetness of sugar. He grows up to be a less than pleasant young man. He decides to leave home, taking with him his mother’s life savings (twenty guineas). The process of leaving is complicated by his brother Jacob who has a learning disability. Jacob also has a sweet tooth and David’s attempts to bribe him lead to difficulties. David goes to Jamaica for several years, where he ends up as a cook, despite expecting to make his fortune. Again this is significant as Jamaica is linked to the production of sugar and to slavery. After several years David returns to Britain under a new name, Edward Freely. He opens a confectioner’s shop some distance from his home town and purports to be middle class with an admiral in his lineage. His sweets and cakes are a hit and he becomes a hit with the local ladies. He sets his eyes on the daughter of the local squire. However this is about nemesis and it is called Brother Jacob. This has the obvious problems linked to shorter works, particularly character development and the ending is pretty obvious. The introduction of Jamaica adds the spectre of imperialism and colonialism: there is a cultural resonance given when it was written (1864, during the American Civil War). The links between sugar and slavery are too obvious to ignore, as is the unlikeability of the main character. Quite a good deal has been made of this. It is unusual for Eliot as it is written as a fable, but the symbols are clear: “How is the son of a British yeoman, who has been fed principally on salt pork and yeast dumplings, to know that there is satiety for the human stomach even in a paradise of glass jars full of sugared almonds and pink lozenges. . . . David chose his line without a moment's hesitation; and, with a rashness inspired by a sweet tooth.” David’s thought process is significant: “David's imagination circled round and round the utmost limits of his geographical knowledge, in search of a country where a young gentleman of pasty visage, lipless mouth, and stumpy hair, would be likely to be received with the hospitable enthusiasm which he had a right to expect. Having a general idea of America as a country where the population was chiefly black, it appeared to him the most propitious destination for an emigrant who, to begin with, had the broad and easily recognizable merit of whiteness.” Then we have the issue of Jacob and learning disability and the management of that particular trope: “David did not entirely lose his presence of mind . . . and if he had had any lips they would have been pale; but his mental activity, instead of being paralysed, was stimulated. While he was inwardly praying . . . he was thrusting his hand into his pocket in search of a box of yellow lozenges, which he had brought . . . as a means of conciliating Jacob . . . . Not one of these delicacies had he ever offered to poor Jacob, for David was not a young man to waste his jujubes and barley-sugar in giving pleasure to people from whom he expected nothing. But an idiot with equivocal intentions and a pitchfork is as well worth flattering and cajoling as if he were Louis Napoleon. So David . . . drew out his box of yellow lozenges, lifted the lid, and performed a pantomime with his mouth and fingers, which was meant to imply that he was delighted to see his dear “Brother Jacob,” and seized the opportunity of making him a small present, which he would find particularly agreeable to the taste.” This was the part of the fable I found most difficult: the management of this particular trope. I prefer Eliot in long form. 6 out of 10 Starting The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley

Everybody by Olivia Laing “imagine, for a minute, what it would be like to inhabit a body without fear”. This is a book about freedom, bodily freedom to be precise. It is effectively a series of essays. What sort of freedom you have depends on what sort of body you have. Laing looks at a series of thinkers who had influence on our view of the body. She covers art, history, politics, psychoanalysis, violence, sex and much more. It’s the body as a prison and a possibility. She looks at the thought and lives of a number of people. At the centre is Wilhelm Reich and his theories about how people carry their emotional pain physically. On and off Laing looks at Reich’s thought throughout the book from his theories on sexual repression to his more arcane and esoteric theories he later developed and finally onto his orgone accumulator: the less said about that the better! Although the exploration of Reich’s fusion of Freud and Marx is interesting as is the reaction of the Nazis to psychoanalysis and Reich’s views on sexual repression: “Pleasure is frightening, and so too is freedom. It invokes a kind of openness and unboundedness that’s deeply threatening, both to the individual and to the society they inhabit.” Laing also looks at the lives and thought of a number of others along the way: Malcolm X, Susan Sontag, Nina Simone, Andrea Dworkin, Bayard Rustin, Christopher Isherwood, Kathy Acker, Agnes Martin and Angela Carter. Laing also looks at her own journey and this is sort of a memoir as well. She grew up in a lesbian family before the repeal of Section 28 (for those not in the UK, Section 28 forbade schools from promoting or teaching about gay lifestyles amongst other things) and felt that law was a: “powerful education in how bodies are positioned in a hierarchy of value, their freedoms privileged or curtailed according to more or less inescapable attributes, from skin colour to sexuality”. Laing identifies as non-binary and describes her journey and the sense of dissonance between how the world perceives one and how one perceives oneself: “What I wanted as a trans person was to escape the binary altogether, which feels so natural if it includes you and so unnatural and violently enforced if it does not.” “We’re all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they’re capable of, and what they’re allowed or forbidden to do. We’re not just individuals, hungry and mortal, but also representative types.” It’s about bodies and how we live in them. Laing was an eco-protester and traveller in the 90s and was on the protests about the Newbury by-pass, living in trees and tunnels. And how did she pick those she focussed on: “It felt really important to me, in this culture of purity, where people either have to be brilliant or they are cancelled, to talk about people who are difficult but have really rewarding ideas” Laing here addresses and grapples with big ideas. It’s always interesting and thought provoking. 8 and a half out of 10 In Search of a Past by Ronald Fraser

The Vicar's Daughter by E H Young “And meanwhile the thunder, the sound impersonal, yet applicable to many states of mind, to fear, triumph, despair, suspense, was gradually coming nearer and the rain slackened a little as if to listen,” One of the great things about the old green virago books (of which I have quite a few) is reading stuff you don’t find in most bookshops and authors who are less well known and not in the “canon”. This is the second one by Young, I’ve also read Chatterton Square. Young was an interesting character, a supporter of women’s suffrage and a keen mountaineer. She was in a long relationship with a married man. After her husband died in the First World War she moved in with her lover and his wife and they lived together, all three of them. This novel really does feel quintessentially English. It’s set in a vicarage and involves a vicar, his wife and daughter, a clergyman friend staying with them, and a couple of brothers involved in the Church who live across the road and their housekeeper. That’s pretty much the whole ensemble, although there is the odd skeleton lurking in a cupboard or two. This is an odd one. It’s a bit melodramatic and almost feels like one of the old school farces (I remember from my youth the farces they used to put on TV, Brian Rix I seem to remember). It would also make a good play as characters are forever moving to and fro, on and offstage. There is a comedic element, but it isn’t a comedy. Plot wise, not a great deal happens. Edward and Margaret, have a daughter Hilary. Edward is the vicar of a parish. They go on holiday and another cleric, Maurice looks after the parish. Maurice is an old friend and was once in love with Margaret (still is). There are lots of misunderstandings, a stray child form twenty years ago, misdirection, jealousy, a bit of doctrinal disagreement, some reflections on marriage, a few more reflections on belief and disbelief. It can get a bit preachy at times and in terms of plot, not a great deal happens. The interplay between characters is at the centre of it. The ending is a bit too tied up and neat and none of the characters are particularly likeable, but they are human with plenty of nuance. There are reflections on the role of women. Margaret is by far the most competent of the characters but she subsumes her talents to be the wife of a vicar. Maurice is the most unsympathetic character, traditional in his religion, alone and jealous of those around him, but he is the most welldrawn. The whole is a bit inconsequential but it is an interesting period piece. “She felt tired, incapable of emotion, and her mind, detached from agitating considerations, could deal reflectively with the double dramas of John’s dishonesty and Edward’s youthful sin, known to each other, unless Caroline had been silent, and both depending for proof on assertions alone, both hasty sins, if Margaret judged John aright, and both, in their complications of fear, repentance, jealousy, revenge and love, liable to change the currents of many lives. This might be well or it might be ill: the problem of good and evil, in intention and in result, could not be settled until the end of time, for as the cause of sin might lie in some good intention generations back, so what seemed evil might be productive of future good. There was nothing to be done with the past or the future except what seemed good in the present and even that was doubtful.” 6 and a half out of 10 Starting Brother Jacob by George Eliot

We are all birds of Uganda by Hafsa Zayyan "We have over a thousand species here in Uganda. Those you just saw are nothing special, common migrant birds from Europe and Asia...We were trying to exterminate them for a while, couldn't work out how to stop them coming back though - you can't exactly stop birds from flying, can you? They don't recognise borders - they go where they will...In a way, I suppose we are all birds of Uganda." This is a debut novel. Zayyan is a dispute resolution lawyer based in London. She was one of the winners of the #Merky new writers prize in 2019 (a joint venture between penguin and Stormzy – I kid you not!) and this is the result. The novel pivots around Uganda and the history of one particular family. In 1972 Idi Amin expelled many of the East Asian population from the country. They had been moved there in the nineteenth century by the British to create a merchant class and to provide a buffer between the British and the African population. As a consequence the East Asian population owned many of the businesses in the country. Most of those expelled ended up in the UK, East Asian countries having refused them entry. The novel tells the story of Sameer, a young London lawyer with prospects and the possibility of a lucrative move to Singapore. It also tells the story of his grandparents as they have to leave Uganda. That part of the novel is epistolary with letters from Hassan’s grandfather to his deceased first wife. The chapters alternate between the two and the switch of styles does work. Zayyan deals with racism in its many forms, even micro-aggressions, which Sameer realises a little belatedly are part of his life. Family is central as is the tensions between the generations and the expectations that children will tread a path their parents approve of and marry someone from the right community. Identity and the relationship to faith is also important. Zayyan portrays the dislocation of having one’s life transplanted very well. The descriptions of Uganda itself resonate. On the whole this was a success for me. I was concerned towards the end that Zayyan had tied up all the loose ends and was going for a rather conventional ending. Thankfully she didn’t and the last couple of sentences created uncertainty. “If you don't understand where you've come from, you'll never really understand who you are or where you're going.” 8 out of 10 Starting The Past by Tessa Hadley

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth “This era no longer wants us! This era wants to create independent nations-states! People no longer believe in God. The new religion is nationalism. Nations no longer go to church. They go to national associations. The Monarchy, our Monarchy, is founded on piety, on the faith that God chose the Hapsburgs to rule over so and so many Christian peoples. Our Emperor is a secular brother of the Pope, he is His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty; no other is as apostolic, no other majesty in Europe is as dependent on the Grace of God and on the faith of the peoples in the Grace of God… The Emperor of Austria-Hungary must not be abandoned by God.” The title is from a musical composition by Strauss senior. It tells the story of three generations of the Trotta family. During the battle of Solferino Lieutenant Trotta saves the life of the emperor Franz Joseph, whose long life spans this book. Coming from Slovenian peasant stock he is rewarded with being ennobled and becomes a baron. The perceptions of those around him are changed and over the long term being nobility does not serve the Trotta family well. The novel focuses primarily on his son, a District Commissioner and his grandson, also a cavalry officer. This novel is on most of the “to read” lists and Llosa reckoned it was the best political novel ever written. There are lots of ironies and people not telling each other how they really feel: as with the District Commissioner and his son: “Always he wanted to say, Don’t cause me any grief, I love you, my son! All he said was, “Stay well!” There are hopeless love affairs, men in armies, behaving as men in armies behave when they are bored in barracks (gambling and alcohol). There are social rules and mores and it’s all about honour: there’s even a duel. As well as all this there is the background of the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, mirrored by the declining abilities of its emperor. We see the elements of change and growing unrest with the established order. The novel charts decline and gradual disintegration until it was all blown away by the First World War. “And the world was not what it had been. It was at an end. And it was in the disposition of these things that, barely an hour before its end, the valleys and the young and the fools would all be in the right, while the mountains and the old and the wise would all be in the wrong.” The younger Trotta was for ever in the shadow of his illustrious grandfather and there is a symbolic portrait of his grandfather which seems to haunt the younger Trotta. He struggles to live up to it all: “The sub-lieutenant Trotta looked like someone who not only had lost his country but also the nostalgia of his country.” Roth doesn’t have Tolstoy’s flair for characterisation, there are a limited number of female characters and we are dealing mainly with the officer class. This isn’t an easy read and it does take a while to get going. However it does chart the decline and fall of a society and does it rather well. “In the years before the Great War, at the time the events chronicled in these pages took place, it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died. When someone was expunged from the lists of the living, someone else did not immediately step up to take his place, but a gap was left to show where he had been, and those who knew the man who had died or disappeared, well or even less well, fell silent whenever they saw the gap. When a fire happened to consume a particular dwelling in a row of dwellings, the site of the conflagration remained for a long time afterwards. For masons and bricklayers worked slowly and thoughtfully, and when they walked past the ruins, neighbours and passers-by alike recalled the form and the walls of the house that had once stood there. That's how it was then! Everything that grew took long to grow; and everything that ended took a long time to be forgotten. Everything that existed left behind traces of itself, and people then lived by their memories, just as we nowadays live by our capacity to forget, quickly and comprehensively.” 7 and a half out of 10 Starting The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

Be Ready with Bells and Drums by Elizabeth Kata The original title of this novel “Be ready with bells and drums” was displaced when it was filmed and became “A patch of blue”. The film starred a rather young Sidney Poitier and Shelley Winters. Winters won a best supporting Oscar. The novel was written by Australian novelist Elizabeth Kata in the late 1950s. The title is from a Chinese poem and the whole is a twist on the Cinderella story with a blind protagonist. Selina (Sleena) is eighteen. She lives with her mother Rose-Ann who is a prostitute and her grandfather Ole Pa who is an alcoholic. Sleena is blind and has been so since she was five. Her mother had thrown some acid at her father, but Sleena was hit and blinded. She now cleans the house and looks after the two adults. To earn some money she threads beads which are delivered to the home. She sometimes spends her days in the park and there she meets Gordon, a young man who is kind to her. They fall in love. The twist is that Gordon is black. Not difficult to guess with Sidney Poitier starring in the film. Sleena’s family and her acquaintances are racist and she isn’t initially aware of Gordon’s colour. Added to this her mother has plans to set up in a flat with a fellow prostitute and make Sleena become a sex worker as well, hoping her disability will add a premium to what they can charge. So the stage is set. The film has a more positive ending than the book. I have the old penguin copy with a cover drawing by John Ward. On the whole I did enjoy this. I’ve never (to my recollection) seen the film. It is a little melodramatic and Kata has created a very memorable evil character in Rose-Ann. It’s a quick read and a bit of a period piece but the themes are enduring. 7 out of 10 Starting The Vicar's Daughter by E H Young

The Bread the Devil Knead by Lisa Allen-Agostini “Ever since I was small, when I get licks I does picture myself disappearing inside a black hole. The black hole does swallow up everything, starting with my navel and sucking everything down with it. This morning the black hole pick up the places where Leo cuff and kick me the night before, the places where he hold me down and force me to do what he does call making love, the places with the nasty kitchen and the overflowing rubbish bag and the mossy bathroom and the neighbours talking behind my back and the mud on the road and the cussing maxi driver and the gaping little girl…everything get suck down inside that black hole and I was staring at the page of the book like it was blank or infinity.” This is by a Trinidadian author, written partially in Creole dialect and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2022. I am not too familiar with Trinidadian dialects, but sources more knowledgeable than me say the author has nailed it. Alethea manages a boutique in Port of Spain: she is forty and in an abusive relationship. She is feisty and independent, but there seems to be inertia in relation to her partner. There are cutbacks to her childhood, which it also transpires, contains a good deal of abuse. It does often take time for those being abused to break away and may even defend the abuser for a while. Allen-Agostini captures this well: “Hear nah, girl, you have to leave that man, you know.’ ‘Who, Leo?’ ‘Yes, Leo! Who else? You feel is the nuts man I there with?’ ‘Well these nuts kind of dry…’ ‘Thing to cry you laughing?’ ‘What you want me do, Tamika? Leave him and go where? And do what?’ ‘How you mean? You’s a big woman. You’s a free woman, too. You not married. You don’t have no children. You have a good work. You buy house and car and land with he or what?’ I shake my head. ‘Well, pack your things and leave.’ ‘I can’t just walk out on him. Is not really he fault.’” And: “Even with the licks and the rest of it, when he wasn’t hurting me, he was my best lover. For me, that was good enough.” Allen-Agostini describes the process Alethea goes through very well without over describing the abuse. The ending feels a little too contrived but the journey is compelling and in Alethea Allen-Agostini has created a memorable character. She is another Trinidadian writer to take note of and she does write with purpose: “I would like readers to take away that we can be redeemed and that we can grow beyond our histories.” 8 out of 10 Starting Be ready with bells and drums by Elizabeth Kata

Waterland by Graham Swift “There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress. It doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-ending retrieving what it lost. A dogged and vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.” Another book I have been meaning to read for decades. It is set in the East Anglian Fens. As well as the grand themes of murder, jealousy and love there is eels, ale and incest: it won the Booker Prize. It moves between 1942/3 and the late 1970s with an added historical narrative going back into the eighteenth century. This narrative tracks the main character, Tom Crick’s family from then until the present. There are reflections on time: present day Tom, although brought up in the Fens, lives in Greenwich. The narrative is fragmented, but easy enough to follow. Tom is a history teacher at a time when history is becoming less valued and there are asides relating to the French Revolution. Tom has reached a crisis aged 52. It looks as though he is about to be made redundant as his history post is being replaced by General Studies. His wife of thirty years has snatched a baby. He resorts to teaching history to his class by teaching them his own history: “Children [are those] to whom, throughout history, stories have been told, chiefly but not always at bedtime, in order to quell restless thoughts; whose need of stories is matched only by the need adults have of children to tell stories to, of receptacles for their stock of fairy-tales, of listening ears on which to unload, bequeath those most unbelievable yet haunting of fairy-tales, their own lives.” There are also the reactions of Tom Crick’s pupils who are living under the shadow of nuclear war and see a bleak future: "I want a future. . . And you -- you can stuff your past!" As critics and reviewers have pointed out there are similarities with Great Expectations and Absalom, Absalom: post-modern retellings which question narrative itself. Of course the material of the stories refuses to be shaped by them. There’s a great deal of water (this is the Fens!) and lots of water related motifs and symbols. It also fairly deftly jumps between the quaint and the macabre. This is an amalgam of lots of ideas which actually works rather well. And don’t forget the eels! “Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. Man, man -- let me offer you a definition -- is the story-telling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right.” 8 out of 10 Starting Owlish by Dorothy Tse

Campbell Bunk by Jerry White An excellent piece of social and oral history about Campbell Road in North London, otherwise known as Campbell Bunk. This focuses primarily on the period between the wars, although there are chapters on the development of the road, its pre First World War history and post 1945 history until it was demolished in the 1950s. White follows a number of the individuals and families throughout the period. This was researched and written in the 1970s and early 1980s and so White was able to interview some of the people he writes about: the original voices do add an extra dimension. It was also good to read a piece of Marxist historiography which takes note of and assesses the place of class. The book covers all aspects of life, particularly family relations, living conditions, employment, entertainment, crime and punishment, violence and abuse. The shadow of the workhouse is present. Religion occasionally tries to permeate with little success. Information comes from police and court records, from other surviving written records from a variety of sources and oral accounts. The oral accounts make the book. Take this from a young thief in 1933: “Why should I be singled out to walk the places – nowhere to go, nothing to eat? Mother at home crying, Dad’s out of work and you see all those people with lovely horses coming down Holloway Road there, and always going out shopping with bags of servants – never used to seem right to me, somehow. Something seemed to be wrong, something’s missing, you know, something’s gotta be put right. I used to rebel against this. I used to take things as a right. If my brothers and sisters were at home crying, they got nothing to eat, and there’s a bakers shop just round the corner full of bread! Course I’m going to nick some bread. It’s mine! I want some.” Crime started young, sometimes with training from parents and White refers to the street as a “collective Artful Dodger”. Police had to walk down in twos and were often attacked if they tried to make an arrest. Most of the work people did was casual, short term labouring, totters and costermongers. Women worked in factories or charring. There was also a great deal of unemployment, especially if you were disabled. Violence was a commonplace between men and women, parents and children. Attitudes were plain and sometimes brutal as with this advice from mother to daughter: “She always warned me my mother did: “If you ever marry a man” she said …. “who knocks you about, just wait until he gets in bed and get the chopper or the hammer and break his legs. He can’t run after you and pay you no more.”” Or this reported by a policeman from the mid-1930s: “On Sunday afternoon I was walking up the Bunk when a little girl came out of the house crying and said to me “Come in our house and see what mummy’s done to dad.” I went with the child and on the living room floor lying unconscious and spread-eagled on his back was the bald-headed husband, his head covered in blood. Standing over him, holding by the handle the remains of a chamber pot was a grim faced wife. The remainder of the pot was shattered round his head on the floor. “What’s happened here?” I asked. She looked at me for a moment then said, “I had just emptied this when he came in as usual pissed. His first words were, “I’m the King of the Castle”, so I fudgeing crowned him.” He came to a short time after but he refused to charge her for assault.” The history records great bleakness and poverty along with a certain resilience and humour. The name was changed to Whadcoat Street in the late 1930s to try to change the reputation, but that was pretty much ignored. This is a very good piece of historical research about an area of history that has been often ignored. 9 out of 10 Starting Imperial by William T Vollmann

The Element of Water by Stevie Davies Another by Stevie Davies and this one was longlisted for the Booker Prize in about 2001. A novel set in Germany in 1945 and 1958 around Lake Plon which focuses on guilt, deception and memory. Michael Quantz and Paul Dahl grow up in Nazi Germany and both join the armed forces, but take different routes. Dahl joins the SS and adopts their brutal ideology. Michael takes a different route in an intelligence unit on Donitz’s staff. Both have a wife and child. In 1945 they met at Lake Plon amongst the dying embers of the Nazi regime. Both want to survive. Michael plans to teach music. Michael’s wife dies in an air raid and he is left to bring up his son Wolfi. Dahl’s wife leaves him and moves to Wales with his daughter Isolde. In 1958 Lake Plon is the base for British boarding school for girls. Isolde arrives to teach. Michael teaches music there and his son Wolfi lives with him. Past and present meet: how will guilt and memory affect the actors? Will the sins of the fathers be visited on the children? The element of water is lake Plon itself around which the novel revolves. The shadow of the holocaust is present as are many ex-Nazis trying to pretend they weren’t really culpable. It’s interesting to note that there was a boarding school on Lake Plon which Davies attended. As you would expect with Davies the morality is complex. Isolde is shocked at the brutality and sadism of the boarding school and at the still present anti-Semitism. Wolfi increasingly sees his father as guilty for his own part in the war. There are no easy answers: what is the difference between participating in evil and standing by whilst it goes on? Isolde is faced with the brutal regime in the boarding school and the victimisation of one girl in particular, thought to be Jewish: how will she react? The reader already knows her father played a significant part in the persecution of the Jews. What is also chilling is the portrayal of ex-Nazis living normal lies, but not so different under the surface. “We are them and they are us” Davies again writes brilliantly. One of the most underrated writers that I have come across. 9 out of 10 Starting Everybody by Olivia Laing

Villager by Tom Cox “This is what all the best art is: our repainting of the world, in our own individual language. And it’s when that language is least compromised and most individual that the art is less likely to drown, more set to surf successfully across time. But of course it’s also true – and here is the difficulty, and the cruelty – that some of the painting where the language is most truly and beautifully of ourselves, least swayed by a mission to please and be quickly understood, is the kind that can have a very difficult birth, feel like an unwanted, unloved child for a while. But then when, and if, it gets past that difficult stage, the dream life it lives – whether it is a painting, a record, a book, or some other form of creative endeavour – in the minds of those who adore it is astonishingly powerful, arguably no less real and vivid – maybe even more real and vivid – than the thing from the less abstract world that inspired it.” This is the first fiction I have read by Tom Cox. I hadn’t registered that this was the same Tom Cox who wrote a book on cats I read some years ago. Cox seems to have written about numerous topics: he has a podcast and a blog and uses Twitter a good deal (so I am told), he used to review music for The Guardian and tried briefly to be a professional golfer (failing spectacularly, but getting a book out of it called Bring me the Head of Sergio Garcia). This novel is set in a fictional village (Underhill) on Dartmoor, which is situated under a hill. It is a series of snapshots in time, mainly in the twentieth and twenty-first century, but ranging from prehistory to 2099. Some of the sections are almost stand alone. There are threads running through. The hill itself is one of the voices adding a folklore/gothic element. Another strand is a fictional American who arrives in the village in 1968 and records an album which becomes a sort of cult classic (a la Nick Drake). As one reviewer has noted it’s a sort of cross Mike Leigh, Oliver Postgate and Public Enemy. Cox has a good turn of phrase and some eccentric ideas. There is a discussion about pylons with a Facebook group called “Pylons I have known”; needless to say the spirit of Underhill hates pylons. There is also a section on apples and apple varieties with the more obscure varieties referred to as: “Apples of the insurrectionary underground … which would upset the apples in your local supermarket with their foul mouths …” There is a mix of newcomers and locals and a more general theme of “don’t mess with nature. Tragedy and comedy mix rather well and characters do keep appearing at different times in their lives. It’s a rather eclectic mix and some of the pieces work better than others. Those that do work tend to work well. On the whole it captures the essence of village life rather well and makes some good points about our relationship with the landscape. The comedic moments are good, including the one where a pre Stone Age member of the Beaker tribe appears to join a modern WhatsApp group. I found this mostly interesting, inventive and thoughtful making some pertinent comments as it progresses like the one about a new train line which: “smashes through ancient woodland, f++ks over a couple of Elizabethan farmhouses, rapes and pillages the homesteads of hares, otters, stoats and badgers”. “There’s so much to know. It will never end, I suspect, even when it does. So much in all these lives, so many stories, even in this small place.” 8 out of 10 Starting We are all Birds of Uganda by Hafsa Zayyan

Claudius the God by Robert Graves “Two years have gone by since I finished writing the long story of how I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, the cripple, the stammerer, the fool of the family, whom none of his ambitious and bloody-minded relatives considered worth the trouble of executing, poisoning, forcing to suicide, banishing to a desert island or starving to death – which was how they one by one got rid of each other – how I survived them all, even my insane nephew Gaius Caligula, and was one day unexpectedly acclaimed Emperor by the corporals and sergeants of the Palace Guard.” This is the follow up to I Claudius and charts the time Claudius was emperor. The title is shared with his new wife Messalina who turned out to be every bit as resourceful and unscrupulous as Caligula. Herod Agrippa and the Jews also take a significant role at the beginning of the book, with the occasional martyred Christian thrown in. There is also a significant section on the conquest of Britain, one military campaign Claudius led himself. It’s quite fun to observe Claudius trying to justify himself. He spent most of the first book advocating a return to a republic and here he is an emperor and verging on the divine: “It was becoming increasingly difficult for me now to sustain my Republican convictions. What a farcical situation- myself, the only true anti-monarchist, forced to act as a monarch!” “I brooded over the problem. Wasn’t it Plato who wrote that the only sound excuse that anyone can offer for ruling is that by doing so he avoids being ruled by people inferior in talents to himself? There is something in that. But I was afraid, on the contrary, that if I resigned, my place would be taken by someone superior in talents […] so that the monarchy would become stronger than ever and the Republic never be restored. In any case, the moment of tranquillity had not come. I must get to work again.” There are still plots and problems and so Claudius finds himself having to dispense justice: he manages to be just as ruthless and the body count is still high. He does go in for a few public works for Rome like an aqueduct and a harbour at Ostia. It is pretty much more of the same following on from the first book. It reads well but isn’t quite as powerful as the first. It probably also reinforces Acton’s famous dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. 7 out of 10 Starting The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth