Books do furnish a room

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders An awful lot of people love this, and it won the Booker Prize. It is based on a real life event from 1862 during the Civil War: the death of Abraham Lincoln’s young son Willie from typhoid. It is set on a single night in a cemetery. Most of it is brief snippets from contemporary sources or brief snippets from the occupants of the cemetery. The occupants of the cemetery are some of those buried there. They appear to be spirits with some hint of corporeality, who don’t yet know they are dead. Although they all seem to recall the moments of their deaths. There are shades of Bruce Willis in Sixth Sense! Some of these spirits periodically disappear with a flash of light and a loud bang if they realise they are dead. An occurrence called the “matterlightblooming phenomenon” by the rest. Some of these spirits have been around for years and they provide a commentary on young Willie and the president, who visits a couple of times. The idea of the bardo comes from Buddhism and is the name for a transitional state between lives, a stage where these souls are stuck. Coffins are referred to as sick boxes, where they are resting before returning to life. Many of the contemporary sources are actual quotes, some are made up. As well as the serious stuff there is also a comedic element. There are black and queer characters scattered about as well as the inevitable WASPs. There’s lots of playing around with the nature of memory and the subjectivity of memory. Basically looking back and looking forward is mostly guesswork. Saunders drags in all sorts of issues as all types mix together in the cemetery: racism, homophobia, slavery, but obviously also grief and loss. It’s all a bit surreal, but also well meaning. Parts of it reminded me of the Greek chorus, some of it was sheer Monty Python (one of the characters died on his wedding night before consummation and wanders round with a “prodigious member”) and a little puerile. There are interesting aspects to this, but I also found it messy, incoherent and somewhat tedious as well. “None of it was real; nothing was real. Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth. And now we must lose them.” 6 out of 10 Starting Stalky and Co by Rudyard Kipling

It wasn't a total disaster Hayley, might be worth borrowing from the library rather than buying or keeping an eye on the charity shops People of Abandoned Character by Clare Whitfield Here we have yet another twist or variation on the mythology around Jack the Ripper. This is set in London around the time of the Ripper murders, close to Whitechapel. There will be spoilers ahead as it is difficult to say anything meaningful about this novel without. It must also be said that any writer straying into this area after Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five needs to be really good. This isn’t. One can reach for the usual descriptors like, gothic, atmospheric, visceral. But it is just another variant on an old theme. There are certainly several tropes in play. Strong female lead, nurse marries handsome doctor who turns out to be abusive, violent and secretive. Unfortunately strong female lead turns out to be a murderer (more than one) as well. Of course there is a Jewish doctor as well as this is the East End and Whitechapel. The Jewish doctor is an arranger of abortions, stealer of organs and also a murderer. Strong female lead also has a relationship with a female nurse. The LGBTQ+ element might be a positive if it wasn’t linked to a homicidal protagonist. There is also a Molly House the descriptions of which have an element of farce and somewhat less than wholesome. It felt a little like a parody. The ending was so odd and clunky. The last Ripper victim, Mary Kelly being a part of the previous killings; really? The cuckoo storyline is way too contrived and the housekeeper was somewhat unbelievable. I generally partial to Victorian Gothic and I know there have been positive reviews of this. But I didn’t get it. 4 out of 10 Starting Our Spoons came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns

Storyland by Amy Jeffs This is an illustrated history of the mythology of the British Isles; ranging from the Orkneys and Shetlands down to Cornwall. It covers prehistory up to about 1200. Jeffs is an art historian and so the illustrations are good, linocuts and wood engraved prints. The story is told, one per chapter and then Jeffs provides a commentary with the background and origins of the myth in question. Sometimes there is geographical information, if Jeffs has visited the area in question. The whole is steeped in old magic, wild landscapes, giants, dragons and fog (inevitably). The sources are varied, but include some of the usual suspects such as Geoffrey of Monmouth. There are refugees from Troy, giants from Africa, travellers from Greece, Britons fighting Saxons, inevitably Arthur, Merlin (in lots of stories), Joseph of Arimathea, lots of Vikings, Scots, Picts, Stonehenge, curse, treasure hunts, even Nessie. As ever the stories can be brutal and are often magical. Christianity intrudes in the later stories. There are rather good evocations of the landscape. Jeffs speaks about her purpose in writing this: “A desire to share the stories and get people excited about them was the beginning of it all. I was fascinated by how the illustrations in the Brut legend followed the narrative action but they were very concise illustrations and communicated so many elements of an episode so efficiently. I really enjoyed that challenge of persuading people through pictures that these were stories to pay attention to and to enjoy.” On the whole I enjoyed this. I did feel though that some of the rougher edges were taken off the myths and that was perhaps a shame. The language has been modernised and some of the stories changed slightly. It just felt a little sanitised. 7 out of 10 Starting Game of thrones by George R R Martin

Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark Another dry and acerbic novel from Spark. It was nominated for the 1981 Booker Prize, the year Midnight’s Children won. It is set in 1949/1950 and concerns Fleur Talbot, a writer struggling to complete her first novel and get it published. She takes a job as a secretary to Sir Quentin Oliver and his Autobiographical Association. It is an odd grouping who are attempting to write their memoirs. Fleur’s novel Warrender Chase begins to reflect what is happening in the association and this being Spark there is a lot of fun with the interplay between the texts and also two other autobiographies; Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua and Cellini’s autobiography. Fact and fiction are wound together. It’s an odd mix. There is an Ealing comedy/melodrama feel about it and one wouldn’t be surprised to find Alistair Sim or Alec Guinness wandering through the pages. There are also sorts of other references. A nod to A Room of One’s Own and Woolf. Hints of Blake, Spark’s usual irritation with the nature of family, some interesting juxtapositions in terms of friendships: “I don’t know why I thought of Dottie as my friend but I did. I believe she thought the same way about me although she really didn’t like me. In those days, among the people I mixed with, one had friends almost by predestination. There they were, like your winter coat and your meagre luggage. You didn’t think of discarding them just because you didn’t altogether like them.” and a strong female protagonist, one who embraces everything life (and men) throw at her and is not bowed down. As Spark says: "The true novelist, one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story" The mirroring of Fleur’s employer and the main character in her novel (Warrender Chase) is handled well and is quite amusing: “In my febrile state of creativity, I saw before my eyes how Sir Quentin was revealing himself chapter by chapter to be a type and consummation of Warrender Chase, my character. I could see that the members of the Autobiographical Association were about to become his victims, psychological Jack the Ripper as he was.” The portrayal of Bohemian life is effective and funny and there is an element of farce in relation to the manuscript of Fleur’s novel. As always Spark poses lots of questions and the satire is effective. Incidentally the trio of siblings at the Triad Press represent the Sitwells. It’s also brief, a good read. 8 out of 10 Starting Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada

Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky This is traditional sci-fi, a proper space opera featuring starships, stroppy space crew, a variety of alien races, implacable antagonists and some decent world-building. The antagonists are called The Architects and are entities the size of the average moon, they move through space destroying inhabited planets in rather creative ways: “Earth would always be the same now. Earth was like a flower, forever turned towards the sun. An alien flower whose exemplar might grow in some fecund jungle on a distant world. A thing of creepers and reaching shoots, something more than vegetable, less than animal. Earth’s mantle and crust had been peeled back, like petals whose tips formed spiralling tendrils a thousand kilometres long. The planet’s core had gouted forth into yearning, reaching shapes, formed into rings and whorls, arches, curved arms… A hundred separate processes shaped from the living core of the planet as it writhed and twisted, then was left to cool. A flower twenty thousand kilometres across, splayed forever in full bloom; a memorial to ten billion people who hadn’t made it to the ships in time.” The Architects seem not to notice the inhabitants of the planets and weaponry has no effect, so other forms of communication are sought. There are also a few concepts thought up by Tchaikovsky. One of those is unspace, a way of moving between stars. Unspace can only be traversed if the ship has a pilot who has been altered neurologically (a risky process) and the main protagonist is a pilot called Idris. There is a timeline and glossary at the back which is useful. The various factions of humanity are interesting enough and the whole seems to work well. This is the first in a series, so there are plenty of loose ends to be picked up next time. It does take a while to get started, which is inevitable when so much is being thrown into the pot. There are three different points of view in the novel, which helps keep a balance. One of the principal themes of the novel is diaspora and the treatment of refugees, which seems quite pertinent at the moment. On the whole this was pretty good. 8 out of 10 Starting Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

The Winter Guest by W C Ryan I was pleasantly surprised by this one. It is a number of things. It is set in 1921 in Ireland during the struggle for independence. It is a whodunit and a whydunnit, a sort of crime novel which examines the brutality of British Imperialism and the difficult choices people had to make. It is also a ghost story and a vivid account of what was then known as shellshock. The main character is Tom Harkin a veteran of the Great War who is suffering from shellshock after having been blown up at Passchendaele along with his squad. Harkin is an IRA intelligence officer who is sent from Dublin to a small community on the Atlantic coast to investigate a murder near to a country house he knows from before the War. A local IRA unit has ambushed a car and murdered a police officer and an Auxiliary, The Auxiliaries or Auxis were all ex-military and were volunteers working for the British and had a reputation for brutality. In the car also was Maud Prendeville from Kilcolgan House nearby. She is an IRA supporter and heroine of the 1916 rising and also an old flame of Harkin’s. She is still alive after the ambush, though concussed. But then five minutes later she is shot whilst still in the car. Harkin is sent to find the killer and deal with a tense situation, his cover being insurance investigator. There is a good cast of characters and plenty of twists and turns with a scattering of evil Brits and a few dubious aristocrats. There are also a couple of romances (one of them gay). Ryan has based some of Harkin’s experience of shellshock on that of Siegfried Sassoon who when walking around London often saw maimed, dead and dying soldiers on London streets. Ryan also blends in the supernatural elements into the plot well. As he says himself: “The idea that Harkin, like Sassoon, could both experience these terrifying visions but also function on a day-to-day basis fascinated me. It also worked for the setting of the novel: a haunted country house on the edge of the Irish Atlantic coast. Harkin is never quite sure if the strange things he sees there are supernatural, or the manifestations of his own mind. I hope that the reader is similarly unsure.” Ryan has based his characters and story loosely on actual events and has a family history to draw on as his forbears fought against the British at the time. This is a good tale for this genre and the historical background is well researched and portrayed. 8 out of 10 Starting The Whispering Swarm by Michael Moorcock

The Gods Arrive by Edith Wharton “Vance thought of the Cretan labyrinth, of Odysseus evoking the mighty dead, of all the subterranean mysteries on whose outer crust man loves and fights and dies. The blood was beating in his ears. He began to wish they might never find the right door, but go on turning about forever at the dark heart of things.” This is a follow on from Hudson River Bracketed and centres on the same two characters: young aspiring writer Vance Weston and his muse/lover Halo Tarrant. It follows directly from Hudson River Bracketed. With the two books combined the reader spends over nine hundred pages in their company. By the end this is quite enough! All courtesy of Virago! Vance Weston is a bit insufferable and various alternate titles suggested themselves; mainly along the lines of Portrait of the Artist as a Young (insert your own epithet). Wharton is actually wrestling with the epistemology on an artist/writer. The interplay between imagination, cognition, processes and places. The plot is simple: (spoilers for the first in the series), after Vance’s wife dies he persuades Halo to leave her husband and go to Europe with him without waiting for divorce and remarriage. Much of the book follows their perambulations around Europe. Society shuns Halo because she is still married. Vance of course is fine because he is a man and Wharton makes her point forcefully. Vance seems much more self-absorbed in this sequel: “The next morning Vance announced that he meant to spend at least a month at Cordova. He said “I mean” as naturally as if the decision concerned only himself and he would not for the world have restricted his companion’s liberty … It was not that he was forgetful of her, but that, now they were together his heart was satisfied, while the hunger of his mind was perpetual and insatiable.” There is much about the male artist/writer taking his companion/muse for granted assuming the world is centred on him and what concerns him. The tasks performed by women are taken for granted. “The mere fact that she was patient with him, didn’t nag, didn’t question, didn’t taunt, somehow added to the sense of her remoteness. Did that curious tolerance make her less woman, less warm to the touch.” One reviewer has suggested that Wharton is using the Cupid and Psyche myth in the two novels, explaining the suspicion and disenchantment. It is an interesting follow on. Not Wharton’s best but worth reading, although I did find the ending a bit irritating. 7 out of 10 Starting Loitering with Intent by Murial Spark

Supporting Cast by Kit de Waal Kit de Waal is a social worker and has written about fostering and adoption. She has had a career in social care as well as in writing. Her mother was Irish and her father from the Caribbean, she was brought up in Birmingham. She is my age and so remembers like I do the signs in windows saying “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs”. She recalls: "We were the only black children at the Irish Community Centre and the only ones with a white mother at the West Indian Social Club." She has written a couple of novels. This collection of short stories feature secondary characters from the novels. I haven’t read the novels and found it no barrier to reading these stories. The themes include loneliness, cultural dislocation, thwarted desire and often important points in life like marriage, divorce, death, release from prison, children, holidays, journeys and much more. The stories themselves are often very short, sometimes a couple of pages: vignettes, just a little glimpse. These little glimpses are powerful, but the whole can feel a little dislocated. Nevertheless they are to the point and powerful and I really enjoyed them. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting The Winter Guest by W C Ryan

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell How to review this behemoth, almost a thousand pages, not to mention the film. It is much beloved still by many readers. There are so many areas of contention and discussion it is difficult to know where to start. Mitchell hangs the whole tale, covering about twelve years, on the character of Scarlett O’Hara. One review, from the Guardian, summed her up: "The story exalts an incredibly spoiled, vain, hypocritical, dishonourable and narcissistic woman." If it had just been the convoluted love story involving Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, Ashley Wilkes and Melanie Hamilton then I am sure it would be much less well known. The setting is the key, starting in the ante-bellum South and encompassing the Civil War and its aftermath, including the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. So, what are the issues? Obviously race and slavery are central and dominate the book and are linked to the rights and wrongs of the Civil War. Linked to this is the mythology around the South/the Confederacy. It is the referred to as The Cause, sometimes the Glorious Cause or the Lost Cause and conveys a pre-Civil War, abolition of slavery idyll. I will come back to this. Mitchell herself was born in 1900. She obviously met many veterans and heard their stories: “On Sunday afternoons when we went calling on the older generation of relatives, those who had been active in the Sixties, I sat on the bony knees of veterans and the fat slippery laps of great aunts and heard them talk.” Her father was an amateur historian and collected information. Mitchell herself started to collect and write down reminiscences and recollections and she used many for the novel. The obvious question is whether the book is racist. There shouldn’t be any real debate about that, of course it is. The novel strongly promulgates the myth that pre-war the slaves were happy, well looked after and were not desirous of freedom. The language used would in no way be acceptable today and even had to be toned down for the film. It also pushes the idea that after slavery came to an end the former slaves were lost, easily led (especially by Northern scallawags, carpetbaggers and ruffians) and effectively conned. Passages such as this illustrate the point: “Aided by the unscrupulous adventurers who operated the Freedmen's Bureau and urged on by a fervor of Northern hatred almost religious in its fanaticism, the former field hands found themselves suddenly elevated to the seats of the mighty. There they conducted themselves as creatures of small intelligence might naturally be expected to do. Like monkeys or small children turned loose among treasured objects whose value is beyond their comprehension, they ran wild - either from perverse pleasure in destruction or simply because of their ignorance.” This is not a character speaking, but an authorial point of view talking about the “horrors” of Reconstruction. There is a great deal more like this. As well as the racism there is the abiding myth of the Old South. It portrays a happy society with contented slaves and where the poor white trash knew their place. A land flowing with milk and honey where women had their beaux and all was right with the world. It is a myth of course and most countries have similar myths. In the UK there was an abiding myth about idyllic pre Norman Conquest times which talked about the Norman Yoke. This developed into an abiding myth about pre-industrial times. These myths always omit the poor, starving and oppressed and this one is no different. An idyllic past which did not exist. There are certainly strong female characters in the novel, but then marital rape is ok as well (towards then end, how does Scarlett realise she really loves Rhett?). It certainly tells a tale which can hold the reader, but so many values I hold dear would have to be suspended to enjoy this and I couldn’t do it. 3 out of 10 Starting A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

Prosperity by Rachel Thomas I have a bit of an ambivalent relationship with short stories and only occasionally do I read one outside of a collection, but here we are. This is, I think a variation on the Pride and Prejudice theme. That may have some of you running for the hills. However there are no zombies (thank god) and no one in the cast turns into a sleuth in the mode of Marple or Poirot (again thank god). It is set in the future, probably not too distant and it does have a distinctly dystopian edge. There are a limited number of characters and the D’Arcy/Elizabeth comparators are clear enough. The dystopia centres on the development of social media and some of the life coaching and self-help that now appears to be developing with it: along with an obsession with the exterior rather than the interior. There is some inventive playing with where social media lifestyle support might lead, mostly amusing with a sense that this might actually happen. It’s a snapshot, a glimpse into a small enclosed world which may reflect a larger one behind it: glimpses of positive human interaction mixed with the dysfunctional. I liked: “A grind of blackbirds emerged from still branches, harmonising with their Viking cousins, here for the winter stretch.” This is a brief story and it does sometimes feel like there is a longer tale trying to get out. There is more behind the façade in the story, things we would recognise, but things sinister too. The tension between reason, impulse and emotion still playing out whether in Regency England or just into the future. Some of the OTT lifestyle/coaching is very funny, more so because it feels as though it’s a bit close to reality, or where reality may go. I enjoyed this and it is has brevity on its side, although I would have read more. 8 out of 10

How to find Home by Mahsuda Snaith This was a bit of a random selection, mainly because I knew well the areas where it is set. It is a sort of reworking of the Wizard of Oz. It’s not a work I am familiar with, so most of the references will have gone over my head. The novel revolves around a group of homeless people, and most especially Molly who is 25 and has been on the streets for ten years. The centre of the novel is inevitably a journey. The Journey is from Nottingham (a city I know well and I lived there for some years) to Skegness. Skegness is a seaside resort in Lincolnshire and was a central part of my childhood. It has a unique ambience all its own. It does attract a significant number of homeless people, especially in winter. Mahsuda Snaith is a writer local to me, based in the East Midlands and has written short stories and a couple of novels. She also writes for the colonial countryside project. She is a British born Bangladeshi writer, who was brought up on a council estate and has struggled with dyslexia. The novel and the journey involves three people. Molly, her unpredictable friend Jules, the enigmatic Luca who has a sense of being on a quest and a three legged terrier called Boy. Cute dogs are always a danger in this sort of story, but it is true that many homeless people do have dogs as companions. There is also an antagonist called Rusby who pops up periodically. At one time he was Molly’s pimp and is a periodic threat of male violence. All of the characters are vulnerable, fragile and have mental health problems. One of the themes is what home means to those who don’t have a home. This could have gone badly, but it didn’t. Snaith manages to capture aspects of the homeless life and its unpredictability. The ending is a bit neat and tidy, which for me did not reflect the chaotic lives I see amongst the homeless, but I see that Snaith is giving a sense of hope which I didn’t strongly object to. There are flashbacks which fill in the gaps in Molly’s life. I didn’t get many of the Oz references, but I am sure others will. Not bad at all. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting People of Abandoned Character by Clare Whitfield

All we Know by Lisa Cohen An interesting biography of three lesbian women of the early twentieth century: Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta and Madge Garland. All had female partners at one time or another. All three married (sometimes for convenience) with varying degrees of disaster. Acosta was well known in the early days of Hollywood, Murphy was a great talker and polymath who was expected to produce great work (but didn’t) and Garland was an editor of British Vogue and a luminary and ground breaker in the fashion industry for over fifty years. The usual list of suspects turn up and link the three together. Sybille Bedford had a relationship with Murphy. Then there is Gertrude Stein, Woolf, Natalie Barney, Dietrich, Garbo, Nancy Cunard, Cecil Beaton, the Huxley’s, Janet Flanner the Fitzgerald’s, Dorothy Parker, Highsmith, to name a very few. Cohen talks about “the seductiveness of the facts and the necessity of fictions.” in every life and reflects on biography: “every biography is a disappointment of some kind, premised on unbearable impasses and opacities, on the impossibility of bringing someone back to life, and on the paradoxes of representing, inhabiting and balancing the past and the present.” What really makes this book is the three subjects who all come to life in Cohen’s hands: they are sharp and interesting and the juxtaposition of the three (they are tenuously linked anyway) helps a great deal. There are lots of interesting facts: Woolf’s short story The New Dress was based on an encounter with Madge Garland. There are a few fallings out. One of Garland’s early partners Dorothy Todd (also an editor at British Vogue) and unpredictable because of her alcoholism is referred to as the bucket in the well of loneliness by Acosta. All three women lived at a time when being open about their sexuality was very problematic and Cohen analyses how they managed the inevitable tensions. None of them are as well-known as they should be and Cohen sets out to remedy this. She does it pretty well. 8 out of 10 Starting The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism

The Haunting Season by Bridget Collins et al A collection of eight ghostly tales from modern writers including Natasha Pulley and Laura Purcell. All bar one have chosen to set their tales in the Victorian era, only one (by Andrew Hurley) is set in the recent past/present. They are easy to read and I read this in a few nights. I found five of the stories pretty run of the mill, but there were three that for me stood out from the rest. A Study in Black and White by Bridget Collins, The Eel Singers by Natasha Pulley and Confinement by Kiran Millwood Hargrave. Collins sets her tale in an old house with a ridiculously cheap rental (always a sign) and an arrogant protagonist. There is also a chess theme in the background: “He stared down at the trees, feeling a kind of vertigo that was not quite fear. The unearthly light – the dark shapes against the moon-drenched sky – the clarity of outline, the density of the shadows…He felt the space contract, so that for a sickly second the chess pieces were both huge and small enough to fit in his hand. He shut his eyes, but it made him dizzy and he hastily opened them again. The shadows flickered against the pale glare of the moon, seeming to shift.’’ The Pulley story has characters from her Filigree series, which I don’t know. However it is set in the fens and is suitably eerie and atmospheric with sinister locals, and eels! The Hargrave story looks at Victorian views about childbirth and examines the nature of post-partum psychosis. It is also based partly on the author’s own experience and on a real life Victorian case. This, for me, was the most telling of the stories. I’m already having difficulty remembering the others! 6 and a half out of 10 Starting Storyland by Amy Jeffs

My pleasure Luna! Witch Bottle by Tom Fletcher “As a teenager, I found it easier being around people than either before or afterwards. Partly I think because everyone else was in flux, too. There was chaos in everybody – not just me. Not that I understand why I feel the way I do. Generally, I just have this sense of guilt, and a feeling I shouldn’t spend too much time around other people.” This is a sort of gothic folk horror story with some literary pretensions. The protagonist is Daniel. He has left his wife and daughter for reasons that become clearer later in the novel. He also has memories of his younger brother who died when he was five. He is now living in a remote area of North West England (Cumbria) close to the A595. He is working as a delivery person, in actuality a milkman, but as the area is remote he also delivers fruit, veg and a variety of other things. The significant themes are repressed guilt, grief and fear. The descriptions of the countryside are good and give a sense of the numinous: “the wind picks up and blows a hail of bright yellow leaves across the brooding black sky, and at just the same moment a flock of crows rises from the fields and flies in the opposite direction. The leaves are like fire against all of the darkness. The crows make it look as if the wind is blowing in two directions at once.” The novel is mainly written from Daniel’s point of view and things soon take a sinister turn. He starts to see things, odd things like a naked emaciated giant with a black bag over its head, along with a few other groaning apparitions who seem to wander round his house. He lunches in a local baked potato shop and its owner Kathryn and he strike up a friendship. He talks to her about what is happening to him. She happens to be a modern witch and prepares a witch bottle for him which he has to bury near/in his home. This witch bottle is distinctly earthier than the ones you can buy on e-bay these days. It is effective and Daniel soon discovers lots of other people on his rounds are having similar problems. He starts making deliveries for Kathryn as well as others seek her help. The antagonist takes the form of Fallen Stock vans which pick up dead livestock from farms. They start appearing an awful lot on Daniel’s and things start to get strange. If you like a broken central character majoring in loneliness and hiding in a dead-end job this may be for you. Some of the links are a bit tenuous and the ending is rather abrupt and not thought out. This is a slow burn and is not the usual gore fest, although there is some. I haven’t used the words “deeply atmospheric”, which is apparently mandatory for this sort of novel. That’s remedied that. It had its moments but the working out at the end felt problematic. 6 out of 10 Starting Supporting Cast by Kit De Waal

Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald The title is from Ode to a Nightingale by Keats. It is Fitzgerald’s last novel and is now thought of as one of his best, getting onto all the must read lists. It has also been touted as a feminist novel (I kid you not). His relationship with his wife Zelda and her metal ill-health are also well known. Fitzgerald is a chronicler of the Jazz age. He is undoubtedly a talented writer but he was also indifferent to politics and felt literature should not be used for political purposes or to support activism. The plot I am sure is well known. Dick Diver is a doctor specialising in mental health. At a clinic he meets a very young woman (Nicole) who is there because she has had a breakdown following abuse by her father. To cut a long story short they marry, despite his being old enough to be her father. Some five or six years later they are living on the French Riviera with a couple of children and Dick and Nicole meet Rosemary Hoyt a young (17) American actress. Dick and Rosemary have an affair. The novel charts Dick’s gradual descent into alcoholism and its effects. There a couple of films, a stage production and a ballet (yes really!) There are two versions of the novel. The original has a fractured structure and chronology with an extended flashback in the middle explaining how the Divers met. A later posthumous revision put the novel into chronological order. I read the original version. Given that Diver has a number of similarities to Fitzgerald (and is certainly based on him), there are a number of indications of feelings about women that I noted: “Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man’s world – they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.” And: “Like most women she liked to be told how she should feel.” Nicole is also modelled on Zelda and her comment on Dick’s decline is telling: “But you used to want to create things—now you seem to want to smash them up.” Also telling is that Nicole in the novel is seen as needing rescuing and as having mental health problems from the start; she marries her therapist! In real life Fitzgerald also had an affair with a seventeen year old actress. None of the characters are particularly likeable, but I think Fitzgerald’s portrayal of the female characters is particularly problematic. They have no real depth or agency and are dependent on men. The female role is a supporting role. Here is Dick speaking and Nicole responding: “I envy you. At present I don’t seem to be interested in anything except my work.” “Oh, I think that is fine for a man,” she said quickly. “But for a girl I think she ought to have lots of minor accomplishments and pass them on to her children.” Then of course there is the issue of race. For example: “a big splendidly dressed oil Indian named George T. Horseprotection” And: “He was not quite light enough to travel in a Pullman south of Mason-Dixon; he was of the Kayble-Berber-Sabaean-Hindu strain that belts across north Africa and Asia, more sympathetic to the European than the mongrel faces of the ports”. Then there is the black male who was murdered and left in Rosemary’s bed. The characters of colour have even less agency than the women. The concepts of womanhood are not very palatable. Rosemary, the film star is idealised and young with plenty of male attention. Her breakout film was a silent movie and indeed throughout the novel she doesn’t really have a voice. Nicole does but hers is seen as suspect because of her mental health. There is an incident where Nicole takes the wheel of the car and scares Nick, exactly mirroring an incident between Fitzgerald and Zelda. On the whole the problems outweighed the lush writing. 4 out of 10 Starting The Doll Factory by Elizbeth Macneal

Toto Among the Murderers by Sally Morgan This novel won the 2022 Portico Prize, one of the prizes I do take note of. It is biennial and open to books that evoke the spirit of the North of England. This one is set in Leeds and Sheffield in around 1973. Morgan takes a very small incident in her own life when she was living in the area. She relates that she was hitchhiking and was offered a lift by (she later discovered) the serial killers Fred and Rose West. This turns into a very small incident in the book. The main protagonist of the book is Jude Totton (the Toto of the title) who is an Art student who has just graduated from Sheffield University. She moves with two friends and fellow art students (Jo and Nel) to Chapeltown in Leeds. There is a focus on the dangers of violence towards women by men. It was the time when the Wests were operating and there were regular reports of young women disappearing or being violently murdered. The Yorkshire Ripper was just starting. Hitchhiking was also common and Toto regularly hitchhikes in the novel: as she says: “the edge between life and death glitters” Morgan captures the area well and as I remember it from slightly later in the 1970s. Take this description of a pub: “a poky collection of fusty rooms, full of art students, anarchists, Irish republicans, homosexuals and prostitutes” I remember a couple of pubs exactly like that, sometimes with the occasional undercover policeman sticking out like a sore thumb. There are also descriptions of an anarchist alternative school. (I remember escaping from the furore over Charles and Diana’s wedding by going to an anarchist picnic in a Sheffield park just a few years later). Morgan describes areas that were often dangerous and violent, but there were also groups of students, graduates, vegetarian cafes, left wing bookshops, aging hippies (those who hadn’t sold out) and a fair amount of weed. I remember all this well. This is a well told story, a little earnest at times, but Toto is a strong character and likeable. There is a queer love story at the centre of it as well as a few dysfunctional relationships as well (mainly, but not entirely with men). The sense of male violence is ever present: “The world runs on the random acts of cruel men” And Toto is well aware of the dangers of hitchhiking: “My preferred game is much more dangerous. It’s played with men in small cars who hide girls under leaves on the top of moors and deep in the woods.” The characters are in that phase between the freedom of youth and the responsibilities of adulthood. Friendship is an enduring theme as Morgan herself indicates: “I wanted to show friendship across a whole range of possibilities, across class and gender – non-sexual friendship between men and women, the camaraderie of people in the same stage of life, etc., and all the ways friendship can support you through the most testing parts of your life. The intense friendship between women isn’t as well covered in literature as its male counterpart is, we saw it on screen in Thelma & Louise and in Greta Gerwig’s 2012 film Frances Ha, but it’s not as celebrated as it should be. It can be huge and consuming. There is a viewpoint that desire comes first, and love grows out of desire. And sometimes friendship stays on the side of non-sexual love, and sometimes crosses over into the physical. In Toto Among the Murderers, I wanted to show how love can grow out of friendship and turn into desire.” This is a novel I really enjoyed. It won’t be for everyone, but it evoked a time and place for me and I liked the main characters. 9 out of 10 Starting The Haunting Season by Bridget Collins et al

I will try some of the later ones Poppy. A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes “Just as I promised him: this was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of all of them. A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we?” Another retelling of Greek myth from the women’s point of view. It follows the plot of the Iliad (with a bit of the Odyssey thrown in). Haynes is a classicist and knows her stuff. Barker has focused on Briseis and Miller on Circe, but here Haynes takes a more general approach and we hear from a number of voices, including some on the Greek side (Penelope and Clytemnestra for example. There chapters on Penelope take the form of letters to her absent spouse. "But this the women's war, just as much as it is the men's, and the poet will look upon their pain - the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men - and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn." Haynes also adds the perspective of the female gods which adds interest and a different aspect to the tale. The men of the tale are not really heroic at all. Haynes contrasts the wife Paris abandoned for Helen, Oenone, with Menelaus whose wife abandons him. Menelaus: “loses his wife so he stirs up an army to bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises her son. Which is the more heroic act?” The telling is not linear, but the whole does flow pretty well, although it can feel a little disjointed because of the multiple characters. It is a feminist retelling and bears comparison with the other recent novels in this genre. The portrayal of Cassandra is interesting as well. There’s nothing really new, except perhaps for the descriptions of the viewpoints of the female gods. It’s well written and easy to read. “She isn’t a footnote, she’s a person. And she- all the Trojan women- should be memorialized as much as any other person. Their Greek counterparts too. War is not a sport, to be decided in a quick bout on a strip of contested land. It is a web which stretches out to the furthest parts of the world, drawing everyone into itself.” 7 and a half out of 10 Starting How to find Home by Mahsuda Snaith

Whose Body by Dorothy L Sayers I vaguely remember reading a few of these in my teenage years and as I felt it was time to look again I thought I would try the first in the series. This was Sayers’s first novel and Wimsey’s character is somewhat underdeveloped compared to the later novels. Sayers did talk about her reasons for creating Wimsey as a rich aristocrat: “Lord Peter’s large income (the source of which, by the way, I have never investigated) was a different matter. I deliberately gave him that. After all, it cost me nothing, and at that time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room, I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare, I presented him with a Daimler double six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it.” Well, it’s never worked for me! In this first novel I felt there was a distinct link with Wodehouse. Wimsey feels like an intelligent version of Wooster. He also has a very bright manservant (Bunter), not unlike Jeeves. Some of the descriptions are even more reminiscent of Wodehouse as in this one of Wimsey: “His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.” The plot is rather ingenious and convoluted, but is solved relatively quickly by Wimsey. There is the typical obstructive policeman and another police detective who admires Wimsey and assists him in a Holmes/Watson type manner. It has been said previously that this first in the series is fairly slight and it certainly is. The entrance of Harriet Vane later in the series apparently makes a difference. This could easily have been a total write off, but there was an interesting addition to the mostly mundane. Wimsey is described as having suffered from shellshock at the end of the War (we are in about 1923). His manservant Bunter was Wimsey’s batman during the War (inevitably Wimsey was an officer). There is a quite effective description of PTSD in the book affecting Wimsey and managed by Bunter which managed to salvage it from being a complete washout. There is also the beginnings of nuance in Wimsey’s character: “but if it comes to really running down a live person and getting him hanged, or even quodded, poor devil, there don’t seem as if there was any excuse for me buttin’ in, since I don’t have to make my livin’ by it. And I feel as if I oughtn’t ever to find it amusin’. But I do.” Parker, the Watson like police detective also has a bit more about him as well: “Look here, Peter,” said the other with some earnestness, “suppose you get this playing-fields-of-Eton complex out of your system once and for all.” And then there is this: “I remember so well that dreadful trouble there was about her marrying a Jew” “… I’m sure some Jews are very good people …” “A good Jew can be a good man …” Here there is no escape from the antisemitism of the time. It’s an introduction to a series but it has many problems. The series can only get better, but I am not in a great hurry to go on to the second. 5 out of 10 Starting Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Hudson River Bracketed by Edith Wharton This is the first novel of two featuring the two main characters, Vance Weston and Halo Spear/Tarrant. The title itself refers to a style of architecture particularly found in New York State (developed by Alexander Jackson Davis). Inevitably it is the Virago edition with an afterword by Marilyn French. I much prefer afterwords. The novel is set in the early 1920s and is really a type of coming of age story: Vance Weston is only nineteen at the beginning. It’s also supposed to chart the development of an author, a little like Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “Never was a girl more in love with the whole adventure of living, and less equipped to hold her own in it, than the Halo Spear who had come upon Vance Weston that afternoon.” There is a sort of love story going on, unrequited as they marry others. The novel charts Weston struggling to become a writer. Wharton also has some fun with other contemporary authors: “Of the many recent novels he had devoured very few had struck him as really important; and of these The Corner Grocery was easily first. Among dozens of paltry books pushed into notoriety it was the only one entitled to such distinction. Readers all over the country had felt its evident sincerity, and its title had become the proverbial epithet of the small town atmosphere. Some of the novels people talked about most excitedly--Price of Meat, say, already in its seventieth thousand, or Egg Omelette, which had owed its start to pulpit denunciations and the quarrel of a Prize Committee over its exact degree of indecency--well, he had begun both books with enthusiasm, as their authors appeared to have; and then, at a certain point, had felt the hollowness underfoot, and said to himself: "No, life's not like that, people are not like that. The real stuff is way down, not on the surface." For The Corner Grocery read Main Street by Sinclair Lewis. Egg Omelette is probably Ulysses and Price of Meat probably The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. The prize mentioned, the Pulsifer Prize, is a lightly disguised Pulitzer. The geography of the Hudson Valley is central to the novel, an area Wharton knew well and her descriptions are effective: “The house, which was painted a dark brown, stood at the end of a short grass-grown drive, its front so veiled in the gold-green foliage of two ancient weeping willows that Vance could only catch, here and there, a hint of a steep roof, a jutting balcony, an aspiring turret. The facade, thus seen in trembling glimpses, as if it were as fluid as the trees, suggested vastness, fantasy, and secrecy. Green slopes of unmowed grass, and heavy shrubberies of syringa and lilac surrounded it; and beyond the view was closed in on all sides by trees and more trees. “An old house, this is the way an old house looks!” thought Vance.” This is one of Wharton’s lesser known works and it is possible the portrait of Weston may be based on her. Weston isn’t particularly sympathetic and Wharton certainly paints Weston’s misogyny effectively and subtly. Weston has dreams and doubts as would any young writer. It’s a good novel, not her best, but worth reading. 8 out of 10 Starting The Gods Arrive by Edith Wharton

A Plague on both your Houses by Susanna Gregory Another novel which is the first in a crime series set in medieval England (like Cadfael and Shardlake). As the title suggests it is set in 1348, when the Plague arrived in the country. The protagonist is Matthew Bartholomew who is an academic and physician at Michaelhouse College (now part of Trinity). I think there are now about twenty in the series. There are lots of characters and the plot is quite complex with plenty of twists and turns. This does mean that the characterisation was a bit limited apart from the main character. Gregory does try to make Bartholomew slightly more modern. He is sceptical of practices such as using leeches and opts for what feels like a more modern, common sense approach (a bit like Cadfael). There are some attempts at realism and there is plenty of slime, rot, blood, sewage, decomposition and the like. Gregory does try to convey the effect of the Plague where almost half the population died, the issues with how to manage burials, contagion and the inevitable gaps in society. The author has been a coroner’s officer and does show off her depth of knowledge about death. The plot is all over the place and I found it difficult to see the point of the villainous plan when it was revealed. All in all Bartholomew doesn’t really appear to do anything apart from being a pretty adept physician and manages to get himself in a few situations where the opposition could bump him off; unfortunately they don’t. 5 out of 10 Starting Witch Bottle by Tom Fletcher

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene One of what Greens called his Entertainments. I vaguely remember the film starring Alec Guinness (it has also been turned into an opera and a play). During the War Greene worked for MI6 and this is a satirical comedy about the security services set in Cuba in the late 1950s, just before the revolution. Jim Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana who somewhat accidentally is recruited to a British security agency (based on MI6). He is divorced with a teenage daughter (who is a practising Catholic) who has expensive tastes. He discovers he is supposed to recruits agents to gather information and send regular coded reports. He makes up some of the agents and for others, he picks names of people he doesn’t know, but who seem vaguely relevant (engineers, academics and the like). He also does some drawings of vacuum cleaner parts and passes them off as scientific equipment: “When he was alone, Wormold unscrewed the cleaner into its various parts. Then he sat down at his desk and began to make a series of careful drawings. As he sat back and contemplated his sketches of the sprayer detached from the hose-handle of the cleaner, the needle-jet, the nozzle and the telescopic tube, he wondered: Am I perhaps going too far? He realised that he had forgotten to indicate the scale. He ruled a line and numbered it off: one inch representing three feet. Then for better measure he drew a little man two inches high below the nozzle. He dressed him neatly in a dark suit,and gave him a bowler hat and an umbrella.” All of this impresses London and he suddenly acquires a secretary and staff. Then suddenly things start to happen to the names on the list and the plot thickens. George Smiley this is not. The recruitment takes place in a pub toilet. Greene’s Catholicism is fairly tangential in this one, but there are a few in jokes. Wormold is a non-believer, but his daughter says her novenas to get a horse. She also tells her father that he doesn’t need to become a Catholic as he is already “invincibly ignorant”. One of Wormold’s friends Dr Hasselbacher has the following exchange with a stray American in a bar, they are talking about the next day’s lottery which Hasselbacher imagines he has already won: ““I have won them as certainly as you exist, my almost unseen friend. You would not exist if I didn’t believe you existed, nor would those dollars. I believe, therefore you are.” “What do you mean I wouldn’t exist?” “You exist only in my thoughts my friend. If I left this room…” “You’re nuts” “Prove you exist then.” “What do you mean prove? Of course I exist. I’ve got a first-class business in real estate: a wife and a couple of kids in Miami: I flew here this morning by Delta: I’m drinking this Scotch, aren’t I?” The voice contained a hint of tears” Plenty of twists on Theology and Existentialism there! Greene also throws in lots of one-liners, as he is wont to do: “A picture postcard is a symptom of loneliness” “Someone always leaves a banana-skin on the scene of a tragedy” “A big wardrobe stood open and two white suits hung there like the last teeth in an old mouth” There’s also a fair amount of whisky involved as there is in The Power and the Glory. The part where Wormold plays checkers with Captain Segura with whisky miniatures is very funny. There are however several racial slurs, one on the first page, which do jar and cannot be ignored. On the whole this is funny and a good counterpoint to Smiley and Bond. 7 out of 10 Starting Whose Body by Dorothy L Sayers

Second Place by Rachel Cusk This is rather odd and some have said a bit incomprehensible. It is however, beautifully written. It is about a writer M who owns a house on some marshes. She is married to Tony. Also staying at the house for the duration of the novel is her daughter Justine and her boyfriend Kurt. M invites and aging artist L to stay in the annex (the second place) of the house for the summer. L is a somewhat irascible character. He turns up with a young woman, Brett, who is an heiress. The whole novel is a sort of lengthy rambling letter to another friend Jeffers. It also feels like a bit of a mid-life crisis. All that is well and good. The reader may wonder if all this happened. Well, it is very closely based on another memoir from 1932 Lorenzo in Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan. That is an account of when D H Lawrence stayed at her artist’s colony. His stay was somewhat fractious and he even threatened to destroy his hostess; mirrored here by L threatening to do the same to M. There are further parallels. Luhan addressed her memoir to the poet Robinson Jeffers, so there is a link there. Luhan herself was married to a Native American and there is a passage in the novel where M’s partner Tony was said to look like a Native American. The novel is particularly middle class, but the themes of fate, narrative and will are ones which Cusk seems to come back to. I would probably add identity and confusion to the themes. This one is also about the nature of womanhood, tyranny and gender. A typical passage: “This had been my mistake, to underestimate my old adversary, fate. You see, I still somehow believed in the inexorability of that other force — the force of narrative, plot, call it what you will. I believed in the plot of life, and its assurance that our actions will be assigned a meaning one way or another, and that things will turn out — no matter how long it takes — for the best. Quite how I had staggered along so far still holding on to this belief I didn’t know. But I had, and if nothing else it was what had stopped me from just sitting down in the road and giving up long before this. That plotting part of me — another of the many names my will goes by — now stood directly counter to what L had summoned or awakened within me, or what in me had recognized him and thereby identified itself: the possibility of dissolution of identity itself, or release, with all of its cosmic, ungraspable meanings.” Cusk is no doubt playing with novelistic conventions and literary forms. I found this in a review of the novel. I am not entirely sure of its relevance, but it spoke to me and I also found it amusing: “In the concrete, mixed realities we daily inhabit, and in hybridised writings like Cusk’s, taking the fiction out of auto and the auto out of fiction is like trying to take chocolate out of chocolate cake.” Cusk also makes a point about the invisibility of older women: ““If you’re going to paint anyone, then surely it ought to be me!” He looked at me with a faintly quizzical expression. ‘But I can’t really see you,’ he said. ‘Why not?’ I asked, and I believe it was the utterance that lay at the furthest bottom of my soul, the thing I had always been asking and still wanted to ask, because I had never yet received an answer.” And also: “‘second place’ pretty much summed up how I felt about myself and my life – that it had been a near miss, requiring just as much effort as victory but with that victory always and forever somehow denied me by a force that I could only describe as the force of pre-eminence. I could never win, and the reason I couldn’t seemed to lie within certain infallible laws of destiny that I was powerless – as the woman I was – to overcome.” There is quite a lot going on here, perhaps a bit too much and the odd construction of it can get in the way. I think knowing where the idea for the novel does help, but it stands alone. It’s an interesting read with a number of layers. 7 out of 10 Starting Toto Among the Murderers by Sally Morgan

The Decline and Fall of Roman Britain by Neil Faulkner An analysis of the history of Roman Britain from a Marxist perspective. Faulkner, who sadly died earlier this year, was also an activist and had some interesting perspectives on modern life. He wrote about the First World War as well as archaeology. He has also written a book entitled Creeping Fascism which looks at the rise for the far right (for example Trump, maga and Bolsonaro) and arguing that fascists with come to power through elections. He’s an interesting thinker. In this work he does not follow the classic Marxist line about Rome, that it was a slave mode of production. He argues from the evidence that Rome was kept going by “robbery with violence”. Conquests produced slaves and loot and then colonies which could be taxed to fund the army. The army took a massive percentage of the Imperial income and was funded by ongoing conquest. This worked whilst conquest was easy and possible. But once the size of the Empire meant it was almost impossible to manage and new conquests were not easy or straightforward then the inevitable decline began. Faulkner examines the different layers of Roman Britain, urbanisation and the later decline of towns, the untamed tribes in the north, agriculture, taxation and the role of the army and its forts. He uses the archaeological evidence and such written records as are available. It’s a good read and provides a refreshingly different perspective to all the grandeur that was Rome stuff. 8 out of 10 Starting All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen

Yes, I quite enjoyed it too Madeleine At the Still Point by Mary Benson A novel set in apartheid South Africa in the mid-1960s. Another fortuitous find, thanks to Virago. Mary Benson (born 1919) was a white South African. She left when she was eighteen with a view to trying her hand at films, but the war intervened. After the war she was secretary to David Lean. Then she read “Cry, the Beloved Country” and became aware of what was happening in South Africa. She left the US and went to London and met the radical cleric Michael Scott. She worked with him for a number of years, met many influential figures and challenged the prejudices she was born with. She returned to South Africa in 1956, in time for that’s year’s treason trials. She met and interviewed many members of the ANC. She also attended and recorded (stenographically) many trials in more remote areas and reported on them. In 1963 she testified to the UN about her findings. She received a banning order and was under house arrest in 1966 and had to leave South Africa. She describes her situation: “No charge to answer. No trial. No effective appeal. No means of protest, because thenceforth I could not be quoted in a newspaper without the editor committing a serious offence. In one way it is an honour to be house-arrested and banned: it means the South African Government dare not charge one with any offence even under the fantastic network of laws at its disposal; yet it so fears one, or one’s power as a writer, that it arbitrarily imprisons one’s talents and stunts one’s life.” She continued to write and wrote histories of the ANC based on the interviews, this novel and an autobiography. She lived long enough to see the end of apartheid. She spent her life lobbying and writing for justice in South Africa. This novel, written in the late 1960s fictionalises the political trials taking place at the time. Benson herself points out some of the tactics used by the regime to mask what was going on: “Virtually all the trials have been held in camera, in villages remote from Port Elizabeth, on the grounds that state witnesses fear intimidation or reprisals, with resulting difficulty in finding defence counsel and in the Press being able to cover them, so that a dreadful pall of anonymity settles on the Trials.” Benson was a middle class white activist and in the novel she documents the mores and attitudes of the white community, especially those who were uncomfortable with what was going on and those who actively opposed it. The novel charts a couple of trials and sets the background and attitudes of those members of the white community who opposed apartheid to one degree or another. It charts the gradual move from an authoritarian to a police state and its consequences. Benson’s characters, whilst fictional are based on actual events and the primary character Anne Dawson is certainly based on Benson. Benita Parry once wrote about (in relation to South Africa) the “liberal novel of stricken conscience” and this falls into that category. There is political awakening and development in the main character, which I suspect mirrors Benson’s own. The descriptions of the trials are powerful and illuminating: ““You Bantu have an inferior education?” “Yes.” “What’s that? Speak up!” “Yes, Your Worship.” “En jy is dood tevrede?” The Prosecutor must have been carried away; quickly he corrected himself. “I mean, you are dead happy with your lot, Jerry?” “Dead happy, Your Worship.” The voice was small. “Dead happy in your job?” “Dead happy. I get my pay.” Jerry’s round boyish face was quite blank, but his knuckles gleamed white in his tense hands. All of a sudden his hands went limp. I realized the Magistrate had spoken. Adjournment!” A good description of coerced acquiescence. Benson does raise the stakes somewhat when draws links with the holocaust as well: “Indifference equals support of Verwoerd and Vorster. Apathy led to the Nazis’ gas chambers. To be indifferent is to condone. Worse! It is to collaborate. What is the moral distinction between the doctor who cut up his fellow Jews, who dissected two-year old twins, knowing they’d been killed specially, knowing knowing KNOWING, and Hitler and the SS who ordered the experiments? Where draw the line between Jews here who gave a gold medal to the Prime Minister and the farmer who beats a labourer to death? Between Verwoerd and the English-speaking businessmen who whitewash apartheid? Business as usual” This virago edition was published in 1988, Benson was still alive and wrote a powerful afterword which traced what had happened since she had written the novel and commented on it: “South Africa in 1965: as Ben Lowen puts it in the novel, though the sabotage has been well and truly crushed, the Security Police continue “bulldozing every crumb of protest.” He is referring to the Eastern Cape. Yet within a few years Steve Biko and other young Blacks from that area were to found the Black Consciousness Movement, helping to inspire the 1976 uprising when Black schoolchildren in Soweto confronted heavily armed police.” This is a much too little known novel and deserves to be more widely read. There is a love story within it too, which managed not to irritate me too much. It isn’t perfect but it is powerful and draws an illuminating picture of nuances within the white opposition and some of the risks they took from one who was there. 9 out of 10 Starting A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

Thanks Madeline The Devil in the Marshalsea by Antonia Hodgson Another in my trawl of historical novels, for which I seem to have a penchant at the moment. Again the first in a series. This one is set in 1727, the year of George II’s coronation and focuses on the Marshalsea prison. The Marshalsea figures in some of Dickens’s novels as the debtors prison, especially in Little Dorrit. That was the second Marshalsea, built around 1811. This is the original built in the fourteenth century. It was primarily a prison for debtors, but included other categories as well (including members of the gay community caught in flagrante, though not in this novel). Hodgson serves up basically a whodunit. Her somewhat befuddled hero, Thomas Hawkins is thrown into the Marshalsea for a debt he cannot pay, when he loses the money following a mugging. The community within the Marshalsea is quite eclectic and Hawkins finds himself at the centre of a murder mystery. There are plenty of suspects and he doesn’t know who he can trust. The regime is brutal with lots of goal fever and plenty of deaths, particularly on the common side (those who reside there are the poor and this who cannot afford any other accommodation). Some research has gone into this. There are a few historical figures: Acton, the Master of the Marshalsea and former butcher certainly existed as did a few of the other upper class characters. Hodgson also read some of the available records form the Marshalsea. It’s certainly not Hilary Mantel, but if you like this sort of historical fiction it may be for you. It reads easily enough and as with classic crime there are plenty of twists and turns. 6 and a half out of 10 Starting A Plague on both your Houses by Susanna Gregory