Books do furnish a room

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto The book consists of a novella (Kitchen) and a short story (Moonlight Shadow). There is a focus on loss and grief and its effects and the ensuing loneliness: “Usually, the first time I go to a house, face to face with people I barely know, I feel an immense loneliness. I saw myself reflected in the glass of the large terrace window while black gloom spread over the rain-hounded night panorama. I was tied by blood to no creature in this world. I could go anywhere, do anything. It was dizzying. Suddenly, to see that the world was so large, the cosmos so black. The unbounded fascination of it, the unbounded loneliness…For the first time, these days, I was touching it with these hands, these eyes. I’ve been looking at the world half-blind, I thought.” And, of course the title has its relevance: “The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. White tile catching the light (ting! ting!).” Kitchen is the story of Mikage and Yuichi. Mikage loses her grandmother with whom she is living and she is alone in the world and has to move out of her grandmother’s apartment. She moves in with Yuichi and his mother Eriko, who is transgender. There are many nuances of pain, loss and hope here. There’s also a great deal of food: “This katsudon, encountered almost by accident, was made with unusual skill, I must say. Good quality meat, excellent broth, the eggs and onions handled beautifully, the rice with just the right degree of firmness to hold up in the broth — it was flawless.” Food is part of what holds the characters together and part of the healing process. Inevitably part of me wants to ask if the centrality of the kitchen for Mikage and the fact she is drawn to cooking is just another way of saying the way of happiness for women revolves around domesticity. The transgender parent might indicate a different attitude to conventional family life. However the working out of the story points to a more conventional sense of family, but that obviously is a matter of opinion. It could be argued Eriko is a victim of society’s hatred and transphobia or that Eriko’s removal eases the way to a conventional heteronormative ending. Nevertheless the approach to grief is sensitively handled and there is no minimizing of it. There is an unavoidable truth; life ends, for all of us. But in the meantime life goes on: “Despair does not necessarily result in annihilation that one can go on as usual in spite of it. I had become hardened. Was that what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities? I didn’t like it, but it made it easier to go on.” 7 out of 10 Starting Eclipsed by Danai Gurira

Picasso I Want My Face Back by Grace Nichols This is another very good volume of poems by the Guyanese poet Grace Nichols. The first poem in the collection relates to the book cover, a reproduction of Picasso’s weeping woman. The portrait was of Dora Maar, a surrealist photographer, who was his muse and lover at one time. This is an ekphrastic poem which gives Maar a critical voice and she becomes subject rather than object. Nichols give her an agency which she does not have, her own history is unlocked. Here is a selection from the poem put together by the Guardian: 2 Even my hat mocks me laughing on the inside of my grief – My twisted mouth and gnashing teeth, my fingers fat and clumsy as if they were still wearing those gloves – the bloodstained ones you keep. What has happened to the pupils of my eyes, Picasso? Why do I deserve such deformity? What am I now if not a cross between a clown and a broken piece of crockery? 3 But I am famous. People recognise me despite my fractures. I'm no Mona Lisa (how I'd like to wipe the smugness from her face that still captivates.) Doesn't she know that art, great art, needn't be an oil-painting? I am a magnet not devoid of beauty. I am an icon of twentieth-century grief. A symbol of compositional possibilities My tears are tears of happiness – big rolling diamonds. 14 Picasso, I want my face back the unbroken photography of it Once I lived to be stroked by the fingers of your brushes Now I see I was more an accomplice to my own unrooting Watching the pundits gaze open-mouthed at your masterpieces While I hovered like a battered muse my private grief made public. 15 Dora, Theodora, be reasonable, if it weren't for Picasso you'd hardly be remembered at all. He's given you an unbelievable shelf-life. Yes, but who will remember the fruits of my own life? I am no moth flitting around his wick. He might be a genius but he's also a prick – Medusa, Cleopatra, help me find my inner bitch, wasn't I christened Henriette Theodora Markovitch? Picasso, I want my face back the unbroken geography of it. The rest of the poems are much briefer and consider art, landscape and memory (as the blurb says. A number about laughter, some about travel (I vaguely remember travel), some relating to events (the Iraq war for example). They are all good and are better listened to than read: plenty of examples on You Tube, but Weeping Woman is a great poem. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting Nobody Nowhere by Donna Williams

Venus and Aphrodite by Bettany Hughes This is a biography and history of the goddess Aphrodite/Venus running through ancient history to the modern day. It is a surprisingly brief tome and consequently there are times when it feels a little thin or brief. It would have benefited from more detailed analysis. It reads easily but it felt a little superficial at times. There are plenty of brief anecdotes sometimes loosely linked together. Thought provoking statements are not always furnished with arguments. There are though plenty of interesting historical facts. There is information about Enheduanna, the first named female author in history, describing Inanna, an early version of Aphrodite: Lady of blazing dominion clad in dread riding on fire-red power flood-storm-hurricane adorned battle planner foe smasher It’s all pretty warlike and the wildness of war clearly took female form as well. Enheduanna also said “you can turn man into woman, woman into man”. The chapter on sexuality again contains interesting information, but its brevity leads to a certain muddling of terms. One of the pluses is the amount of art and artefacts pictured charting the development of Aphrodite as she gradually changes and becomes part of the Christian tradition as Eve and the Virgin Mary. The changing role of Aphrodite also mirrors the changing role and perception of women. All in all a mixed bag, perhaps most useful as an introduction. There are interesting facts and references for further reading, but I was a bit underwhelmed. 6 out of 10 Starting Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

First completed read of the year Homecoming by Colin Grant This is about the Windrush generation in Britain; those who came to Britain in the 1940s to 1960s. Grant has collected their views by doing interviews, accessing Mass Observation records and newspaper quotes and articles at the time. This generation are becoming older and an oral history of this kind is important in recording how those who came to Britain from the Caribbean were treated and how they made homes here. Grant is a radio producer, author, fellow at the Centre for Carribean Studies and has written other works about the Windrush generation and he marshals his facts well. There is a potted biography of all of those in the book (some with more details than others). The chapters are organised by themes which include arrivals, work, housing, carnival, daily life (including food), inter-racial relationships, the 1958 Notting Hill riots and so on. There are many recollections some of them heart-breaking and horrifying, some downright funny. The stories open a window onto aspects of British history which many would rather forget. The interviewees are from all over the Caribbean, many arrived as children or young adults. The level of racism they experienced was high; being asked to leave a Church and not come back, not being allowed to have a bank account, struggling to find a room to rent, coping with a lot of outright hostility, the list is a long one. The separation of parents and children was one very difficult aspect that came out. Many children were left in the Caribbean with grandparents for some years and re-establishing family life was often difficult. Grant noted that there was a matter of factness in the descriptions of racism, a sense of “that’s the way it was”. He also noted that when he asked them to reflect more deeply on their experiences they often became emotional. It may be that some of the memories of how bad things were have been somewhat repressed. This leads to the danger that we begin to think “it wasn’t that bad” which is an easy get out for those in power and those who still have the long-established racist views prevalent in Britain. Grant examines through the interviews the different strands of thought in the West Indian community with the “dreamers” and “realists” being two ways of looking at the move to Britain. He does deal a little with the recent Windrush scandal and the Circumlocution Office which is the Home Office, but maybe he could have added more detail about these events. This is essential reading for those who wish to understand racism in British society. There are a few structural issues with the presentation (all the biographies are at the back), but these are minor issues. This is a must read. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting Picasso I want my face back by Grace Nicholls

I think it's all going to be rather interesting, when all the hell is over. I do intend to reread Mrs Dalloway in the light of this.

This book was published in October 2019 and focuses on the effect of the 1918-1919 pandemic on literature. It notes on the blurb on the back that despite the deaths of fifty to a hundred million people worldwide it has more or less disappeared for the historical and cultural memory, but it is very much present (though hidden) in the literature of the 1920s/1930s. Outka asks the question: “Why did the flu, which produced so much death and suffering, largely disappear from American and British history and much of its literature? And given its historic position in 1918–1919, why is it not investigated as a central trauma within modernist studies?” Outka points out it is a matter of adjusting the way we look at the works she examines. What Elizabeth Outka cannot have known is that many of the early readers of her work would be doing so in the midst of a pandemic. I must admit I have taken my time with this one, partly because it is interesting and partly because it has been a sort of companion during what has been a very difficult year. There is a remarkable quote at the end of the book which I will reproduce here because it is remarkably prescient: “As scientists and researchers continually remind us, we are not ready for the next severe global pandemic, which—as they also remind us—is most assuredly coming. On the one hand, the last one hundred years have seen dramatic advances in disease treatments, and efforts are made every day to monitor and prevent outbreaks and to develop new vaccines. On the other hand, as I write this coda, dramatic cuts are proposed in the United States to some of the very programs that might prevent or respond to future global pandemics. Public support for such programs tends to peak during outbreaks, like the swine flu in 2009 and Ebola in 2014, but then wanes in their aftermath. And in the United States, as budgets for health care programs are reduced, funds for military spending has increased. The willingness to tolerate this discrepancy echoes the difference I have traced throughout this study between the attention the war received and the attention the pandemic received. For all the reasons I have analyzed, military threats, political conflict, and human-based violence are typically treated, represented, and seen far more clearly than threats posed by disease; the pandemic killed more people, but it’s the war we remember. It would be more than possible to build and augment effective global response systems that would greatly reduce the impact of a deadly pandemic—but first far more people have to see the threat and be willing to act. The works I investigate remind us that even a modern catastrophic pandemic that has already happened can be hidden, unless we learn to read for its presence.” Outka focuses on a number of works in particular. In part one, entitled Pandemic Realism, Outka looks at: One of Ours by Willa Cather Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Anne Porter This section looks at how the war and memories of war tends to overshadow the pandemic in memory. Interestingly with the Cather novel, this is remembered as her “war novel”, whereas it is more than that and is as much a pandemic novel and indeed a novel about the end of the pioneer days. The novels address survivor guilt and the threat of contagion amongst other themes. The second part looks at three particular and well known modernist texts: Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (also looking at her essay On Being Ill) The Wasteland by T S Eliot The Second Coming by W B Yeats The last part looks at early horror films and zombie stories, looking especially at Lovecraft and linking them to the pandemic. There is a Coda at the end which looks at To The Lighthouse by Woolf and specifically the Time Passes section. All of the authors here were touched by the pandemic. Eliot and Woolf had influenza. Eliot’s wife almost died from it. Yeats’s pregnant wife was seriously ill with it just two weeks before he started the Second Coming. The sections on Woolf are particularly interesting and Outka quotes Woolf from On Being Ill: “Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of angels … when we think of this and infinitely more, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.” Outka says specifically about Mrs Dalloway: “Of all the pandemic literature I investigate, Woolf’s novel grants the most extensive mapping of the virus’s long-term after effects on bodies, teasing out the hard-to-see interchanges between physical health and perception. The novel not only tracks the virus across time; it investigates the cumulative, composite blows the war and pandemic together have on the societal and individual body.” Outka, along the way pulls in a number of other authors and artists, including a reproduction of Munch’s striking “Self-portrait with the Spanish flu”. It was striking and surprising to look at these works through a different lens and it makes me want to go back to some of them again, especially Mrs Dalloway. I have added the Cather novel into my Reading Women challenge for this year and I have a copy of the Maxwell novel. This is a thought provoking and scholarly work and maybe someone in a hundred years’ time will write something similar about the literature of the 2020s and 2030s. 9 and a half out of 10 Starting Dead Epidemiologists: On the origins of Covid 19 by Rob Wallace

Down in the Valley by Laurie Lee This is an older Laurie Lee looking back. Back as well in Slad in the Cotswolds where he began and reflecting on his life. The book is based on a series of conversations and recordings in 1994 which went to make up a TV documentary. The documentary was made by David Parker and he stored the notes and recordings and forgot about them. He found them again in 2017 and decided to make a brief book from them and here we are. The writing comes across as a little strained at times, and that is explained by the fact that they were originally recordings. This is certainly not Cider with Rosie, but it is not meant to be. It is the thoughts of an older man: “Before I left the valley I thought everywhere was like this. Then I went away for 40 years and when I came back I realized that nowhere was like this.” The writing covers some of the same themes as Cider With Rosie and the geography is the same. Lee talks about the old pub, the village pond where he played as a child and some of the characters he remembers. A few of his schoolmates are still alive. Lee also throws in some of his poetry, this is Apples: Behold the apples’ rounded world juice green of July rain, the polestar of flowers, the rind mapped with its crimson stain The russet, crab and cottage red burn to the sun’s hot brass then drop like sweat from every branch and bubble in the grass. They lie as wanton as they fall and where they fall and break the stallion clamps his crunching jaws the starling stabs his beak In each blunt gourd the cidery bite of boys’ teeth tears the skin the waltzing wasp consumes his share the bent worm enters in. And I, with easy hunger, take entire, my season’s dole: and welcome the ripe, the sweet, the sour the hollow and the whole There is a sense of the history of the area back to the Stone Age. There are snippets of the Civil War where Charles II is supposed to have hidden in an oak tree and strains of Elgar. This is a rehash and is not as good as the original and there are several recycled stories, possibly having grown a few details over the years. It may seem like a rural idyll. It certainly wasn’t, there was great poverty and many children died young of now curable diseases. The original had more of that feel of rural poverty, there is more rose-tinted reminiscence here. 6 and a half out of 10 Starting Black Car Burning by Helen Mort

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West This is West’s first novel, published in 1918. It concerns a soldier, Chris Baldry, who is 36. He goes to war in France and as a result he is suffering from shellshock. This shellshock affects his memory and he believes he is twenty-one. This clearly has an impact on his family. He has a wife, Kitty, who he does not remember at all. His cousin Jenny, who narrates and who lives with the couple (in their rather large house, no working class slumming it here), he remembers. He returns believing he still loves Margaret, with whom he had a summer fling when he was twenty-one. She is a publican’s daughter and so is of a different class and is married to someone else. Chris does not even remember his son Oliver who died aged six. This is a novella and it’s a pretty quick read. The whole point is the working out of the problem whilst West makes a series of points and raises issues for the reader to ponder. Reviews were generally good at the time. It is obviously allegorical with Chris representing the establishment, Kitty and Jenny represent tradition and Margaret innocence lost. There were roughly about eighty thousand cases of “shell shock” by the end of the war. This pushed mental health concerns high up the public agenda, probably for the first time. West’s critique of gender and class norms are well documented and the main reasons why the book is so revered and I would agree with that analysis. However I want to focus on another aspect of the novel, its approach to mental health and the then new science of psychoanalysis. West does provoke thought: “If madness means liability to wild error about the world, Chris was not mad. It was our peculiar shame that he had rejected us when he had attained to something saner than sanity. His very loss of memory was a triumph over the limitations of language which prevent the mass of men from making explicit statements about their spiritual relationships…. I was even willing to admit that this choice of what was to him reality…, this adroit recovery of the dropped pearl of beauty, was the act of genius I had always expected from him.” But the question of whether he is faking it also occurs: "Either it means he's mad, our Chris, our splendid sane Chris, all broken and queer, not knowing us…I can't bear to think of that. It can't be true. But if he isn't…" There is a period during the novel where West seems to embrace disability and madness and accepts human imperfection. However, and there are spoilers ahead, Chris must be cured. "Why did her tears reveal to me what I had learned long ago, but had forgotten in my frenzied love, that there is a draught we must drink or not be fully human?" This, of course, is the essence of ableism. Full humanity is not compatible with disability. West then brings in an almost religious sense: “I knew that one must know the truth. I knew quite well that when one is adult one must raise to one's lips the wine of the truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk, but draws the mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality, or else walk forever queer and small like a dwarf. Thirst for this sacrament had made Chris strike away the cup of lies about life that Kitty's white hands held to him, and turn to Margaret with this vast trustful gesture of his loss of memory. And helped by me she had forgotten that it is the first concern of love to safeguard the dignity of the beloved, so that neither God in his skies nor the boy peering through the hedge should find in all time one possibility for contempt, and had handed him the trivial toy of happiness.” Obviously by this point Chris does know he has lost a part of his memory, but the above passage infantilizes him by suggesting be is not in full communion with humanity. Of course if they did not cure him “he would not be quite a man”. A real man of course has to be able and sane and no doubt dominant. West seems to change direction at the end of the novel and decides Chris must be cured. She says so herself in a later essay: “Now, there are drawbacks about following this course. It means that [Margaret] loses him: and it means that he has to go back to his wife Kitty, whom he does not like, and to the war. On the other hand, one does not want one's loved one to live in a land of illusion and infirmity. Nobody realises all this but Margaret. Now she might have turned this over and over in her heart, and suddenly been conquered by the latter and graver consideration. But I had been obliged to tell the story in the first person, in the character of Chris's cousin Jenny.” I have a problem with this and am reminded of Szasz’s comments on the right to be ill. Someone with cancer has the right to refuse treatment, but the right to reject psychiatric treatment is much more limited. Chris is repeatedly described as ill and a cure must be imposed on him: a neat solution is required that will not upset tradition. I have focussed on this aspect of the novel rather than gender or class. Because this is an aspect less focussed on. The way of the cure is over simplistic and seems to be a plot device to bring the tale to an end and it’s rather cruel. 5 and a half out of 10 Starting Venus and Aphrodite by Rebecca West

A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar This is a follow up to Matar’s search for his father in The Return. The title absolutely sums up the book. It is a description of Matar taking time to do something he has wanted to do for some time, spend a month alone in Siena looking at art. Absolutely nothing happens and the danger is that it becomes a description of “What I did on my holidays”, an essay I used to dread writing at the beginning of an autumn term at school. Matar had been interested in Sienese art (dating from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) for some time. There are a fair number of colour reproductions of the art he spent time with. It is a short memoir, some fifteen chapters. Matar describes the month and contrasts it with his usual life where he is normally wishing to be somewhere else: “The strange thing was that I never suffered this in Siena. Every day and for the entire month I spent there I felt myself to be in time ...Everything I experienced was happening at the pace at which it ought to happen.” Of course there is a link to his recent search for his father: “I had come to Siena not only to look at paintings. I had also come to grieve alone, to consider the new terrain and to consider how I might continue from here. “ Matar describes his wanderings in Siena and of course, the art. He talks a little about some of the people he meets and a few friendships he strikes up. There is a bit about the art, its context and history, especially Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s allegories of good and bad government which adorn the Palazzo Pubblico. There are plenty of personal, moral and aesthetic perspectives and reflections. It’s about art love and loss. As I said nothing really happens and some people will love this, others will find it pointless. This year I would have welcomed time like this to spend alone and reflecting but for most of us that will not be because of lack of time and resources (and at the moment the ability to travel). 7 out of 10 Starting One of Ours by Willa Cather

Rose Under Glass by Elizabeth Berridge There is a quote from an interview with Colson Whitehead which is somewhat apposite here: “Q: Why write about slavery? Haven’t we had enough stories about slavery? Why do we need another one? A: I could have written about upper middle class white people who feel sad sometimes, but there’s a lot of competition.” The answer to an extent sums this novel up, but I am being slightly unfair because it is well written and an interesting study of character, set in 1950s London. It is told from several points of view, but the centre of it is 45 year old Penelope Hinton whose artist husband Jamie dies very suddenly in a traffic accident. Berridge analyses the course of her grief and bereavement and how familiar things and places seem to change: “They related to nothing, so, terrifyingly, she felt nothing. Nothing revived her. Staring at the stone emperors, she thought, “We are two stone people, face to face.” In the past, she had loved the ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the tiny miracles of the jewelled watches and snuffboxes. Now they shone up at her dully, dead in their glass coffins. Neither did the compassion and depth of Rembrandt’s paintings at the Wallace Collection, revive her, although the spaciousness and cold elegance of the house itself eased her by enclosing her in its own mood of petrifaction.” Added to the mix is Pye Rumplelow who strikes up a friendship with Penelope. He owns a few laundrettes and strategically opens coffee shops next to them. Then there is married couple Spencer and Nika who move from Wales to London so Spencer can move into publishing. Finally there is Stefan and his girlfriend Bonny; Stefan being Spencer’s partner as they purchase a small publishing house along with money from Pye. There you have it. There isn’t much plot and it drifts along. Berridge resists the temptation to tie up loose ends at the end of the novel and it sort of drifts to a close. The title comes from a sentence in the book relating to Penelope’s feelings: “She continued to be enclosed in this hard shell of unspoken feelings and undelivered comment like a rose drowned horribly in an inverted glass globe.” The characters in the novel are well portrayed and worked out but the whole is rather forgettable. 6 out of 10 Starting Frida by Hayden Herrera

A Cheesemongers History of the British Isles by Ned Palmer Blessed are the cheesemakers: and there is a touch of pythonesque humour about all this. You need to really like cheese to get a great deal out of this (and I do). It is as described a history of the British Isles in terms of cheese, starting in Neolithic times with the origins of cheese and running up to the present day. There is a glorious eccentricity about this, after all, who approaches a tome like the Domesday Book and asks: “I wonder what it says about cheese?” There is an awful lot about the making of cheese. Each chapter covers a historical period and focusses on a particular modern cheese which represents a typical cheese of the era. Numerous cheeses are mentioned and there is a list in the back. The cheeses covered in the book are generally local farmhouse cheeses, most of which are available at Farmers Markets, specialist cheese shops and some supermarkets. Some of my local cheeses even get a mention (Lincolnshire Poacher for example). There are lots of interesting historical snapshots, including the Nottingham cheese war of 1766. The ups and downs are all outlined along with the renaissance of cheese making in the last fifty years. If you love cheese you’ll love this. 9 out of 10 Starting Down in the Valley by Laurie Lee

Bad Behaviour by Mary Gaitskill This is Mary Gaitskill’s first published work (1988) and is a set of nine short stories. The first four are from a male point of view, the last five from a female point of view. The themes are loneliness, destructive behaviour, sexuality, romance, love, drug addiction, sadomasochism, living in New York and aspirations to be a writer. The characters are often troubled, disillusioned or bored: teenage runaways, jaded sex workers, rootless businessmen. Discomfort and angst is pretty much a default setting and a great deal goes on beneath the surface. Inner conflicts are laid bare and the complexities and problems of human connection are analysed. Gaitskill writes from some of her experiences as a teenage runaway and she worked for a time as a stripper and a call girl. It is centrally about women’s inner conflicts and their response to men; whether lovers, husbands, clients, fathers and sons. There is an interesting tale about family life at the end which examines mother/daughter relationships. Women here seem to make better connections than men but there is always something just beneath the surface. The men are not cardboard cut-outs or stereotypes and there is nuance. Somehow the nuance makes the betrayals and the violence worse. Reading these is sometimes like watching a car crash in slow motion and Gaitskill doesn’t really do neat and tidy happy endings. One of the stories, Secretary, was turned into a Hollywood movie. The story here is much bleaker than the movie. Gaitskill does discomfort as a default setting, but the stories provoke thought and discussion. 7 out of 10 Starting The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

The Mighty and their Fall by Ivy Compton-Burnett This is the first time I have read any Ivy Compton-Burnett and this novel is almost entirely dialogue. It reads very much like a play. Compton-Burnett was born about the same time as Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce but she was a very different writer. She wrote as thought the Victorian still continued and tended to look at what lurked behind conventional domesticity. Contemporary reviews compared her to Faulkner. There is a sharpness to her dialogue and Elizabeth Bowen made a pertinent point: “Miss Compton-Burnett as ever, makes few concessions: she has not, like some of our writers, been scared or moralised into attempting to converge on the “real” in life. But possibly life has converged on her.” This particular offering focusses on an upper middle class family whose fortunes are fading slightly. There is Ninian Middleton, a widower and patriarch, his elderly mother, five children, their governess and Hugo, who lives with them all and is also middle-aged. Ninian is a charming tyrant and has been relying on his eldest daughter Lavinia for companionship since his wife’s death. Add to this a potential spouse for Ninian and step mother for the children, a returning prodigal, a disappearing letter, some jiggery-pokery with wills and sharp-tongued perceptive children. There is some sharp observation of the role of women and the tyranny of men as when Hugo compares Ninian to a Biblical patriarch: “I have never believed in God. I believe in him now. We have known he is a father. And I see that he is yours. There are the anger, jealousy, vaingloriousness, vengefulness, love, compassion, infinite power. The matter is in no doubt.” People don’t talk in the sort of dialogue Compton-Burnett writes, I doubt if they ever did and it reads like a play because it is only dialogue. However it certainly does expose some of the less pleasant aspects of human nature. You can have too much of English middle class angst, but this is quite perceptive. 6 and a half out of 10 Starting A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe Oh dear, what was my teenage self thinking of when liking this? It is a piece of literary journalism which looks at the roots of the hippie movement and the origins of the use of LSD. The book centres particularly on Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Kesey took LSD very early (1959) in a trial to test its effects (funded by the CIA, although Kesey was not aware of this). He liked it and felt it was something that everyone should try, in fact he became a bit of a zealot in promoting it, gathering a group of disciples around him. With some of his literary earnings he bought a property in La Honda in California where a group of devotees congregated. They bought a bus, decorated it and went on a road trip. They also filmed a good deal of it and there are hours of film. The bus was driven by Neal Cassady, already immortalised as Dean Moriarty in “On The Road”. The collection of people on the bus became known as the Merry Pranksters. Copious amounts of drugs were taken, not just LSD, which was not yet illegal. The police were never far behind. As they travelled they set up Acid Tests, parties involving LSD and various types of lighting. The in house band morphed into The Grateful Dead. It’s all very repetitive and the portrayal of Kesey is a bit too messianic for me. You also have to wade through writing like this: “EXCEPT FOR HAGEN’S GIRL, THE BEAUTY WITCH. IT SEEMS LIKE she never even gets off the bus to cop a urination. She’s sitting back in the back of the bus with nothing on, just a blanket over her lap and her legs wedged back into the corner, her and her little bare breasts, silent, looking exceedingly witch-like. Is she on the bus or off the bus? She has taken to wearing nothing but the blanket and she sheds that when she feels like it. Maybe that is her thing and she is doing her thing and wailing with it and the bus barrels on off, heading for Houston, Texas, and she becomes Stark Naked in the great movie, one moment all conked out, but with her eyes open, staring, the next laughing and coming on, a lively Stark Naked, and they are all trying to just snap their fingers to it but now she is getting looks that have nothing to do with the fact that she has not a thing on, hell, big deal, but she is now waxing extremely freaking ESP. She keeps coming up to somebody who isn’t saying a goddamn thing and looking into his eyes with the all-embracing look of total acid understanding, our brains are one brain, so let’s visit, you and I, and she says: ‘Ooooooooh, you really think that, I know what you mean, but do you-u-u-u-u-u-u-u- ueeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” — finishing off in a sailing trémulo laugh as if she has just read your brain and !t is the weirdest of the weird shhhhhhh ever, your brain eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee —“ A good deal of it is just bloody annoying (a bit like the hippies), but did you spot something else. The drugs clearly affected some more than others and there were some vulnerable people involved as well. The attitude to women and race is pretty awful (plenty of use of the word “spade”). There is also a level of cruelty which I found disturbing. Perhaps it would be more accurate to sat there was a level of self-absorption which drugs can bring leading to a lack of awareness of the needs of others. In fact Wolfe does portray all this as similar to the birth of a new religion: “In fact, none of the great founded religions, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, none of them began with a philosophical framework or even a main idea. They all began with an overwhelming new experience, what Joachim Wach called ‘the experience of the holy,’ and Max Weber, ‘possession of the deity,’ the sense of being a vessel of the divine, of the All-one.” The ironic thing is that the whole thing was funded by the royalties from “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” Kesey’s famous novel. Capitalism funding psychedelia! Wolfe did all his research in three weeks when he was with the Pranksters and never took LSD himself, so there is almost an element of parody and ridicule. Given what I have quoted above there is the issue of whether the cruelty, racism and misogyny comes from Wolfe himself or the original Pranksters. Given Wolfe’s history being reactionary and racist I would question the veracity of anything he wrote. As the book says: “You’re either on the bus…or off the bus.” I’m definitely off it! 2 out of 10 Starting The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

The Face in the Glass by Mary Elizabeth Braddon A collection of fourteen gothic tales from Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Braddon was a prolific Victorian novelist and short story writer. She is best known for Lady Audley’s Secret (on my virago shelves but not yet read). After a brief stint as an actress she spent her life writing. The Victorian era saw a great interest in ghost stories and the supernatural and these are some of Braddon’s efforts. Braddon is very good at setting a scene and creating atmosphere. On the whole they are typical Victorian ghost stories: there is plenty of melodrama, some unintentionally amusing moments. The women tend to be strong characters and there is even a vampire tale thrown in. Shadows and mirrors play their part. They aren’t all ghost stories and there is a little subversion going on. There is as much human evil as ghostly goings on, but there are a couple of standard ghost stories. One point to make is that Braddon isn’t a writer who ensures good triumphs and evil suffers. She is quite capable of developing likeable characters and then killing them off. If you enjoy Victorian gothic tales you will enjoy these. 6 out of 10 Starting Home Coming by Colin Grant

The River by Rumer Godden This is the first work I have read by Rumer Godden. She was an Anglo-Indian writer who spent a good deal of her childhood in India and lived there as an adult. She left when India gained independence. In her writing she often used experiences from her own childhood and this novel is no exception. Born in 1907, Godden was in India at the height of Empire. Although she could be critical of the British, she also felt they did a great deal of good. When Nehru said, “My quarrel with the British is that they left a land of poverty-stricken wrecks” Godden leapt to the defence of the British. She seemed to confuse individual acts of charity and goodness with the mechanisms of imperialism. This is a fairly brief novel and is really about the end of childhood. Harriet is the focus of the novel and she is approaching puberty. Her older sister is no longer a playmate and her younger brother she feels is still a child. There are lots of beginnings and ends. The world for Harriet is limited and is mainly the large house and garden with her siblings and nanny. Her parents are a little distant and her mother is pregnant. There are Indian servants around, but it is the interior world of the end of a childhood that is central. The domestic staff are the only way the children learn of the culture of India. There has been a recent war (it is not clear which). A wounded soldier is staying nearby, (Captain John) and he plays a central role for the two older girls and is an object of fascination. The garden and its surroundings do feel very much like a Garden of Eden. There is even a real serpent and a river running through. Gooden does capture some of the disconnectedness of childhood and the changes from seeming very young and then quite grown up. This is an idyll, but real life intrudes with jealousy, death and burgeoning sexuality. I have a vague recollection of Jean Renoir’s 1951 film of this, but really don’t remember how closely the plot was followed. The colonial backdrop is really only a canvas to hold a very Eurocentric plot. The human element of the canvas seems to be irrelevant and the focus is the climate, vegetation and animal life. There is no real plot (not necessarily a problem), but most of all there is no sense that anything in particular is going in in the outside world (wars, riots, famine, the push for independence). It isn’t possible to completely avoid the imperial backdrop as this novel tries to do. There are also a couple of short stories at the end where Godden tries to write from the point of view of the indigenous population. These descend into sentimentality and are patronising: talk about primitive spectacle and the imperial gaze! 5 out of 10 Starting The Glamour Boys by Chris Bryant

The Offing by Benjamin Myers This is one of those novels that evokes a time and has someone looking back to that time. It bears comparison to Carr’s A Month in the Country and The Go-Between by Hartley. It is set just after the Second World War. Sixteen year old Robert Appleyard lives in a mining village in the north east England, near Durham. He decides to set off on foot to walk and have adventures and explore the coast before settling to work. He works for board and lodging on farms and smallholdings; places where the men have not returned, “or seen them return depleted, decrepit or broken, parts of them missing like second-hand jigsaw puzzles”.Near Robin Hoods Bay he chances upon what seems like a fairy tale cottage in which lives Dulcie Piper. She is a bohemian free spirit. Her age is never specified but the sense is that she is in her late 50s or 60s. She lives alone and the reader discovers that at the beginning of the war her German poet and lover (Romy Landau) had drowned herself. There is a run-down studio in the meadow and a good deal of overgrownness. In return for being fed Robert stays for a while and restores the studio and tidies up the grounds. As the studio is renovated Robert discovers some work by Landau and Dulcie starts to come to terms with her loss. Robert tells the story looking back in old age.The novel is about friendship, the beauty of nature, art, good food, wine and not forgetting a dog called Butler. There is very much a sense of living in the present, close to nature:“At times like this, or when hoeing soil or sanding wood, or just sitting on a bench with my face turned to the sun, I appeared to slip out of the moment so entirely — or, conversely, perhaps was so deeply immersed in the here and now — that I forgot who I was. The slate of self was wiped. Gone were all thoughts of past and present, of the stale air of classrooms and of looming exam results, coal boards and pitheads and pension plans, as all worries and concerns were diluted away to nothingness and I drifted in and out of the day, brought back into being only when either the sky or my stomach rumbled, or birdsong broke the silence.These were the lingering states in which I was happy to revel, as night replaced day and day replaced night, and time became not a linear thing but something more elastic, stretching and contracting at will, one minute expanding into a day, one week gone in the blink of an eye. Petals unfolded, willow blossom took to the breeze and hogweed stems grew towering in the shaded dell at the bottom of the meadow, and time itself was measured only by the clock of green growth, and marked out by the simple routine of working, eating, swimming, sleeping.”The writing is beautiful and evocative describing a summer long gone but always remembered. The character of Dulcie is memorable and refreshingly open and non-judgemental.This is a wonderful novel. The only real niggle is that Myers is required to write some poetry written by Romy Landau who was supposedly a poet of genius. Now Myers is a good poet, a very good poet even; but a poet of genius? But that’s a minor point.“That distant stretch of sea where sky and water merge. It’s called the offing.” 9 and a half out of 10 Starting A Cheesemongers History of the British Isles

The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing I always seem to find Lessing difficult to read, and this was no exception. This is Lessing’s first novel and it is set in what is now Zimbabwe in the 1940s. The title is from Eliot’s The Wasteland. Dick Turner is a poor white farmer who wants a wife: he meets Mary and asks her to marry him. The novel starts with Mary’s murder by Moses, one of the black workers on Turner’s farm. The rest of the novel is a linear chronology up to that point.It shows Mary’s disillusion with her life, her disillusion with her rather incompetent husband Dick and her total inability to relate to the black workers on the farm. Their neighbours try to be neighbourly but to no avail and Lessing vividly describes the heat:“she went out to look at the sky. There were no clouds at all. It was a low dome of sonorous blue with an undertone of sultry sulphur colour because of the smoke that filled the air. The pale sandy soil in front of the house dazzled up waves of light and out of it curved the gleaming stems of the poinsettia bushes, bursting into irregular slashes of crimson.”This is an extended diatribe about the immorality of the farming system and that is clear, but it also feels like Lessing is also being negative about the natural world the farmers inhabit. The climate and landscape almost feel like characters in themselves. The language consists of frequent racial slurs and the main black character, Moses is not very well drawn. As his relationship with Mary develops the reader sees all of Mary’s issues and angsts but Moses seems more inscrutable because his character is not developed. The failed farming and strained relationship Lessing takes from observation of her parents and presumably relationships with the black workforce came from there as well. Lessing does sum up well Mary Turner’s attitudes to race:“She had never come into contact with natives before, as an employer on her own account. Her mother’s servants she had been forbidden to talk to; in the club she had been kind to the waiters; but the ‘native problem’ meant for her other women’s complaints of their servants at tea parties. She was afraid of them, of course. Every woman in South Africa is brought up to be. In her childhood she had been forbidden to walk out alone and when she had asked why, she had been told in the furtive, lowered, but matter-of-fact voice she associated with her mother, that they were nasty and might do horrible things to her.”Some of the attitudes are much more visceral. I have speculated why Lessing chooses not to enter the minds of the black characters. It may be that she didn’t really know how to. Maybe she wanted to focus on the arrogance of the white farming community. It was published in 1950 and certainly held a mirror up to the racism of the she was brought up within. Lessing writes from a position of privilege, but one thing she does very well is analyse the roots and nature of the white supremacism she saw in her home country. Where she is on less sure ground I think is her description of Mary’s mental disintegration and the murder. I found this section of the book less convincing. Nevertheless this is a powerful description of the racism prevalent in 1940s Rhodesia. 7 out of 10 Starting The Mighty and Their Fall by Ivy Compton-Burnett

Reality and Other Stories by John Lanchester A collection of short stories (eight to be exact) which are meant to be chilling and unsettling as the nights draw in here in the UK. They have modern settings and often involve technology and things we are all aware of, like reality TV. The author clearly had fun dreaming up this set of scenarios. There are some clever twists: many of them pretty predictable.The Signal is set of a New Year weekend where a couple and their two technology go to stay at a rich friend’s houseparty for the celebrations. The house has many gadgets and a tall helpful gentleman with a mobile phone shows the children how to use the gadgets and access the wi-fi.Coffin Liqour is narrated by a witty and cynical academic at a conference in Romania, where he is bored. Following a bit of sightseeing. He downloads the e-book of Great Expectations to listen to instead of the conference, but the description of Pip on the marshes seems ghastlier than he remembers as something horrific follows Pip off the marshes. He then downloads another book and the same description of something following is still there. He tries Richard Dawkins on atheism and yes there is the description of something horrific following.Which of these would you like is a short story about a prisoner whose guards show him a catalogue every day consisting of various articles for the cell and various ways to be executed. He has to choose.We Happy Few is about a group of rather pretentious academics having coffee together and is about the nature of reality: how alone are we? Very forgettable.Reality takes place on the set of a reality TV show with six contestants and is as shallow as you would expect. But is it reality? Is it hell? Will it ever end?Cold Call is a tale about a father-in-law and daughter-in-law who don’t get on. He is always calling for random assistance at very awkward times and is never ever thankful. Will the calls ever end?The Kit concerns a piece of kitchen equipment that breaks down and needs replacing. A father and his four sons debate how soon the replacement needs to be purchased. This one is pretty predictable, but makes a rather salient point.Charity is about a selfie stick that arrives at a charity shop and is sold. As you would guess there is more to it than meets the eye. Actually unexpectedly this one makes quite a powerful point about colonialism.Couple of these are much stronger than the rest and a couple are pretty weak. Also much depends whether you like your chilling tales in the James tradition or if you like them modern and up to date. 7 out of 10 Starting The River by Rumer Godden

Essex Girls by Sarah Perry Sarah Perry, an Essex girl herself, takes the pejorative term and turns it on its head. She sets the scene:“Essex Girls are disreputable, disrespectful and disobedient.They speak out of turn, too loudly and too often, in an accent irritating to the ruling classes.Their bodies are hyper-sexualised and irredeemably vulgar.They are given to intricate and voluble squabbling.They do not apologise for any of this. And why should they?”The misogynist scapegoating is noted and then Perry picks a number of women to illustrate her points. There is Rose Allin, a Protestant martyr part of the movement that insisted that the scriptures were for all the people, not just priests. Anne Knight was a Quaker and abolitionist, campaigning on after the initial abolition because slavery still existed in the Empire. She also wrote what is regarded as the first pamphlet on women’s suffrage. Emily Hobhouse was the woman who exposed the brutality of the British concentration camps that were set up for women and children during the Boer War (yes they were a British invention) and which killed many Boer women and children. Harriet Martineau was a writer and social activist and notably an atheist in a time when that was most unfashionable. The letters between her and Henry Atkinson which argued against conventional Christianity and the Genesis account of Creation was published eight years before Darwin.This is a brief account, less than ninety pages and there is plenty of polemic. It shines a much needed light on women who are pretty much forgotten or little known and who were argumentative and awkward and campaigned for what they believed in. There are a few flaws but the whole is a reminder that some cultural tropes need to be overturned. 8 out of 10 Starting Bad Behaviour by Mary Gaitskill

Crime on the Fens by Joy Ellis It is very rare these days that I read a crime novel. But I thought I’d try this one as it was set in the Lincolnshire Fens in a made up area which vaguely approximates to Kings Lynn. It follows a well tried formula with a Detective Inspector and a sidekick Detective Sergeant (as in Morse and Lewis). In this case the DI is a maverick who has worked her way through a variety of partners because of her abrasiveness and being generally difficult to work with. Ellis makes her DI a woman and her DS a man. She also creates backstories for each of them and adds a little complexity to their interaction. She throws in a big council estate, plenty of disaffected youth, plenty of drugs, some nasty villains, some villains who were less nasty and a little helpful. There are characters that will no doubt be around in later novels. The plot is a little wooden, but pretty much works and doesn’t have too many holes. There are apparently at least ten more of these. On the whole it was ok and didn’t irritate me too much; at some point a may read another. 6 out of 10 Starting Rose under Glass by Elizabeth Berridge

The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson This is a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and sticks quite closely to the plot (not completely). The story moves from London after the 2008 crash and moves to the US and the fictional city of New Bohemia, which feels a little like New Orleans. The novel, like the play revolves around revenge and forgiveness, a child (Perdita) abandoned and found. The parallels with the play are clever and original and there is humour running through the tale as well as revenge, tragedy and forgiveness: “And the world goes on regardless of joy or despair or one woman’s fortune or one man’s loss. And we can’t know the lives of others. And we can’t know our own lives beyond the details we can manage. And the things that change us forever happen without us knowing they would happen. And the moment that looks like the rest is the one where hearts are broken or healed. And time that runs so steady and sure runs wild outside of the clocks. It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.” Those of you that recall the plot will remember the jealousy of Leontes (Leo) in regard to his wife MiMi and his friend Xeno. Leo has installed a camera to spy on his heavily pregnant wife so he can catch her out with Xeno. On this occasion Leo’s PA Pauline is also present as well as Xeno. It’s all innocent and nothing untoward is happening. However Leo’s mind is working overtime: “Was Pauline a Top? All Leo knew about lesbian sex came from porn sites but he was pretty sure there had to be a Top and a Bottom. But Mimi was eight months pregnant—she couldn’t have sex on her back. If she couldn’t be a Bottom—and she couldn’t be a Top because, damnit, she was his wife—then she must be a Side. Do lesbians have Sides as well as Tops and Bottoms? They must do.” Winterson uses humour throughout which balances well with the tragedy. Now I know there have been quite a few reviewers that didn’t really like this, but I really did. It read very easily and Winterson’s take on the play worked for me. “Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely Each one demand an answer to his part Perform’d in this wide gap of time since first We were dissever’d: hastily lead away.” 8 out of 10 Starting The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Jubilee by Margaret Walker A historical novel running from the period before the American Civil War, through the war and to the aftermath. It follows Vyry, a slave with a black mother and a white father (the master of the plantation) through slavery in the ante-bellum years to freedom charting the struggle of freed slaves to make a living and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Walker researched the history behind this for thirty years and it is basically the story of her great grandmother. Comparisons have been drawn with Gone with the Wind, but this is from the perspective of a slave. This is a well told story which ought to be better known than it is and it is told from Vyry’s perspective and is one of the first novels to focus on an enslaved black woman’s experiences. There is a day to day ordinariness about it whilst the horrors of slavery are lived and survived (or not in some cases). The novel is populated by strong female characters and a matrilineal model of tradition. Vyry learns from the older women in her life: “Vyry was so devoted to Aunt Sally she would never have told anyone how often she saw her steal great panfuls of white folks’ grub, and how many pockets she had in her skirts and her bosom where she hid biscuits and cakes and pie, even though Big Missy threatened more than once to have Aunt Sally strung up and given a good beating if she even caught her stealing.” What Walker also does is draw links with other subjugated groups and points to a more collective history and a wider perspective on white supremacy and colonialism: “One time they posted a sign with an Injun head on it, and it said that Injun had smallpox and everybody keep away from him; and another time the poster read how it was agin Georgy law (still is) for nary nother piece of paper, pencil, pen, writing papers, books, newspapers or print things to get in black hands, slave or free.” The older members of the community bear the culture; the wisdom of the women in the novel, the preacher brother Ezekiel, and music and song which plays a central role. It all adds to a sense of wistfulness for Vyry: “She stood on the hill and watched the sunrise and saw the ribbons of mist hanging over the valley […]. This was her favourite spot in the early morning, but oh, how she wished she were going some place. She wishes herself out where the fields ended, where the wagon road was winding, and the Central Railroad of Georgia was puffing like a tiny black fly speck along the tracks. […] She would like to go far beyond Aunt Sally’s voice calling her back to her morning chores of picking up chips, feeding chickens, finding that setting dominicker hen” The sense of a growing movement called abolitionist grows only slowly and even when the war starts it feels distant at first. Parallel with the political developments is Vyry’s relationships with the two men she marries and the birth of her children and the novels shows her developing into one of the strong women who raised her. There is a bit of idealisation going on as well: “She was only a living sign and mark of all the best that any human being could hope to become. In her obvious capacity for love, redemptive and forgiving love, she was alive and standing on the highest peaks of her time and human personality. Peasant and slave, unlettered and untutored, she was nevertheless the best true example of the motherhood of her race, an ever present assurance that nothing could destroy a people whose sons had come from her loins.” But there is a political engagement and identity and a sense of collective courage driven the women of the novel. It’s also a damn good story with real power and purpose. 9 out of 10 Starting Essex Girls by Sarah Perry

Ships of Heaven by Christopher Somerville To write this Christopher Somerville spent a year of his life visiting twenty of Britain’s cathedrals (or ships of heaven as he calls them): Wells, Lincoln, Salisbury, Chichester, Canterbury, York, Durham, Ely, Worcester, Gloucester, Hereford, Kirkwall, St David’s, St Paul’s, Westminster, Armagh, Liverpool, Coventry and Inverness. In Armagh and Liverpool he takes in the Catholic and Anglican cathedrals as they are so close together. As a result it is a bit of a dash around with limited time on each. Somerville has an eye for odd stories and unusual bits of architecture. Thankfully he doesn’t populate the book with lots of bishops and clerics (there are a few), but there are plenty of masons, vergers, guides, glaziers, cleaners, background workers and random members of the public who happened to be there when he was. There is plenty of architecture and descriptions of interiors and Somerville delineates all the times various bits of buildings have burned down, collapsed, fallen down and blown over. This makes the reader realise that these structures have their frailties and weaknesses. Somerville has an eye for detail as well, picking out some of the idiosyncrasies of the medieval masons. Characters that might be straight from a Breughel painting and Green Men abound. The descriptions of the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral after the War are moving and the destruction of the old one with the new one adjacent to the ruins. The stories throughout are fascinating and Somerville is an entertaining narrator and even manages to get in a verse of Robert Wyatt’s Shipbuilding. Much ground is covered and that is a strength and a weakness. I enjoyed reading about Lincoln Cathedral, something I look at every day. I suspect there may be a limited audience for this but it captures a sense of these buildings by juxtaposing a number of them. 7 out of 10 Starting Reality and Other Stories by John Lanchester

Thanks Madeleine Summerwater by Sarah Moss This is a fairly brief novel set in a day, the longest day of summer. It is set in Scotland in the Trossachs, next to a loch where a group of holiday cabins sit. The novel consists of the day from the various perspectives of the occupants of the various cabins, except one of the cabins. There is a cross section of ages with a variety of concerns about day to day life. The weather for the day is appalling, cold and raining: high summer in the UK! It starts at dawn and ends in the dark in the late evening. There are brief one page forays into the natural world which separate the perspectives of the various residents of the cabins. There is also a tent in the woods where someone is living. The torrential rain has an effect on everyone, especially the children who find it a struggle to play outside. Moss does write teenage angst very well and she manages as well to bring some sympathy even to the less likeable characters. The title is from a poem by William Watson (The Ballad of Semmerwater). There is something distinctive about all of the characters, a quirk, an illness, a small despair, an obsession. It is very much set in the present and Brexit is in the background. In the unmentioned cabin are a group of foreign workers: polish, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, we are never sure. They are the focus of some opprobrium and hostility just for being there (aren’t they supposed to have gone home?) and especially for appearing to have a good time and playing loud music at night. There is a range to the voices, but also a marked similarity. The innate racism shows through. There is also some good observational comedy too. The reader realises that there is a build up to something and there are a few near misses, but the something is right at the end of the book. As always with Moss we are ever close to the natural world: “The sky turned a yellowish shade of grey, the colour of bandages, or thickened skin old old white feet. Rain simmers in puddles. Trees drip. Grass lies low, some of it beginning to drown in pooling water…” Moss writes damp and soggy very well! She also explores unquestioned prejudice and its effects in a telling way. This is well written and feels very prescient for our times and is the third novel I have read by Moss. It won’t be the last. 8 out of 10 Starting The face in the Glass and other Gothic tales by Mary Elizabeth Braddon