BOOKS+

Humankind by Rutger Bregman

When something like a war or a disaster scratches away the veneer of civilisation from humans, then we revert to primitive and brutally selfish behaviour. This profoundly pessimistic view has been dominant as long as…well the foundation stories of the major faiths, with their view of original sin, and because of important philosophical texts such as Thomas Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’ that characterised human existence as nasty, brutish and short. The consequence of this dominant view, as Hobbes’ explained, was that the only way to save ourselves from our baser natures is to establish authoritarian regimes and a framework of rules and regulations to regulate our behaviour. You only have to see the daily reports from disaster and war zones, or any occasion such as tribal sports events, or at the Capitol building, when the mob gathers, to realise the truth of this evaluation of human behaviour.

The Dutch author of this book, Rutger Bregman, a young, fashionable historian, would beg to differ. He sets himself firmly in the camp of Rousseau, the 18th century philosopher, who took a diametrically opposite view from Hobbes. He believed we were born innocent with a strain of decency and kindness that was gradually corrupted by those very features of the civilised world that Hobbes believed stood between humans and anarchy.

Although an optimistic soul, I came to this book with a fair degree of cynicism but also curiosity, particularly after reading Hans Rosling’s book ‘Factfulness’ with its evidence based defence of a world where, on the whole, life is getting better for most of us. Bregman is as rigorous in the examination of the facts as Rosling but in this book his main evidence is drawn from research studies by behavioural psychologists. Nevertheless, he is also willing to go down fascinating tangential paths to explore real life stories and historical and archeological research, wherever it comes from, in order to decide if we are bad to the bone or filled with human kindness. 

One of his earliest examples comes when he tries to test out the ideas explored by William Goulding in ‘Lord of the Flies’. Okay, Goulding was a heavy drinking, miserable old git but his seminal work only seemed to dramatise something we all believed to be true: by putting his public school boys in a primitive world with no grown up rules or authority, they behave like murderous, selfish savages. However, when Bregman tracks down a long forgotten real life story from 1963 that replicated many features of the novel – several teenage school boys marooned on a Pacific island for over a year – the results were directly opposite to Goulding’s fictional conclusions. The boys cooperated peacefully, calmly, instituting sensible methods for conflict resolution and cohesive routines for survival. When they were eventually rescued, they left the island as friends and free of trauma. 

It is stories like this that provide fascinating colour between his forensic examination of a series of world famous behavioural studies, most of which took place in America in the decades after the second world war. You will possibly be aware of many of these studies. For example, in 1971 Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychology professor, conducted research with student volunteers who were assigned roles as either prison guards in uniform or prisoners in cells. Over the two week long simulation of a prison environment, the members of both groups lost their individual character traits and behaved in accordance with their roles which meant that the guards were increasingly brutal and authoritarian and the prisoners became dysfunctional, chaotic and lacking in self-esteem. As I say, this was just one of several such studies – another famous one being Milgram’s electric shock treatment where research volunteers follow orders to administer potentially fatal electric shocks to other volunteers who fail to answer questions correctly – all of which reveals the brutality and indifference to suffering that lies beneath the surface. As Bregman highlights, there was just one problem with these world famous, concept defining studies – they were irredeemably flawed. What I hadn’t realised is that for each of these eye catching studies there was a ton of archive materials (notes, recordings, interviews,etc). These archives are in effect the evidence about the methodology and rigour of the research; and in case after world famous case, Bregman shows that over the years each of these studies was run in a dubious, downright unethical and dishonest way. Zimbardo briefed the students how to behave, and coaxed and cajoled guards to be more brutal when they expressed reservations about the treatment of the prisoners, amongst many other actions that made his findings unreliable. At the time, academic peers did not bother themselves with the archives because the findings seemed to confirm their unconscious bias about human nature and explain why, for example, Germans were able to say that they were just following orders during the war. 

Time and again, Bregman shows how the methodology was flawed and was only questioned many years afterwards when Zimbardo, Milgram and their like had made their reputations. Worryingly, despite the fact these studies have now been discredited Zimbardo still holds a senior role amongst the psychological establishment and his and other ideas seem to be well entrenched. 

This is perhaps my strongest impression from this book, a certain cynicism about accepted ideas regarding human behaviour based on “so called” research evidence. I just hope that the flabbiness around methods and research rigour, present in academic circles in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, is a thing of the past. 

It is hard not to come away from Bregman’s beguiling mix of research, anecdotes and historical precedents with a sense that most people are pretty decent. He tackles head on all the obvious rejoinders to this optimism such as the holocaust and the Eichmann trial; and I think he does a pretty solid job but this is such a sensitive issue that readers will have to make up their own minds about the way Bregman frames this behaviour. 

As I say, my naturally sunny personality makes me unconsciously biased to believe that even in the most extreme situations people will do the right thing. Bregman uses an initial example of a questionnaire that is used to test how people would react when trying to get out of a crashed plane and this certainly sets the tone for this book. The vast majority of people surveyed were clear that they would trample over everyone to escape. However, in real life in examples over many decades, the opposite is true: the vast majority invariably help others first. 

The first part of this book is well worth reading just to make you feel better about humankind. In the second half, when Bregman tries to establish systems to enable this decency to be the foundation of the way the world runs, I found this less successful. Yes, he provides good examples of true communal government but seems to easily excuse the failed examples. I am also suspicious of any books that tell us humankind was more happy and fulfilled as hunter gatherers before the yoke of an agricultural, fixed society emerged about 10,000 years ago. It’s not that I don’t believe this is a reasonable possibility but I don’t know how one can know.

Despite those caveats, I really enjoyed this book and the examples of people doing the right thing whether from Nazi occupied Denmark or during the blitz were uplifting. And remember, don’t listen to those pesky psychologists, they're mountebanks and hucksters not academic gurus.

All in it Together by Alwyn Turner 

This is just the sort of book I love – a fluently written account of the political and cultural landscape of the UK in the first two decades of this new century. With life moving so quickly, or at least seeming so, as new technology presents an unending stream of sensational new items for our attention, it is good to have Turner’s reminder of the key news stories, political events and cultural highlights and lowlights of the near past. For all his tone of detached and slightly disdaining amusement, this is, though, a carefully selected set of events which makes a point about where all this new millennium hurly burly was heading. And no spoiler here because I am sure you are ahead of me…yes, it’s 2016, Brexit and the inevitable end of this madness, a dangerous buffoon in charge of the country. 

Except, I don’t accept that the self-inflicted wounds of the Labour Party after the disappointments of Blair and Brown seem to be inevitable. Where Turner does have a point, which is backed up by a whole tranche of political bombshells and celebrity madness, is the loss of faith by a large section of the country in the experts. He doesn’t mean this in the dishonest, calculating Gove way but as a gradual breakdown of trust. It is still fascinating, for example, to be reminded of how the financial crash unfolded; but it is more painful to be reminded that those who were most to blame – those oh so clever bankers who were operating at a too rarified level to be accountable – escaped the consequences that the rest of us faced. 

So, there you have it: this book is a great reminder of the recent bizarre times we have lived through in this country as well as a persuasive case for how we got here. Talking of which, I had forgotten the dire warning of tens, nay, hundreds of thousands of fatalities by our country’s health experts when SARs, bird flu and other health issues arose in the noughties. What this means, well as ever in this book, Turner leaves us to decide but it may be that some of the public and politicians perhaps see covid as another case of the science boffins crying wolf. After all, it was mainly the same group of experts who were responsible for public health at the start of the millennium and who made doom laden projections then and who are now advising the government’s response to the pandemic. 

Politically, this book also reminded me about how irrelevant the Tories were when New Labour were in their pomp; and, conversely, how little I remembered about Ed Miliband’s time in charge of Labour when Cameron seemed quite statesman-like alongside Nick Clegg and operating a coalition that nobody anticipated would last five years. And a sense of inevitability about Brexit was definitely not apparent when Robert Kilroy-Silk became UKiP’s most famous politician, with Farage stepping back for a while frustrated with those labelled “fruitcakes” by Cameron who complacently saw no threat from them in 2010. 

Turner is good on the cultural stories that are fascinating in their own right yet also stand as touchstones for the evolving state of the nation. This was highlighted in a fascinating comparison of the two hugely popular comedians, Roy Chubby Brown and Jimmy Carr, at opposite ends of the cultural divide. One resolutely working class and popular in the red wall constituencies, shunned by television and often banned by local authorities from their venues. The other expensively educated, beloved by and ubiquitous on all the coolest, most right on television shows and able to bounce back without much trouble from his involvement with tax avoidance schemes. Both purveyed comedy that pushed the envelope but Carr could play the game and knew that an ironic look allowed him to get away with a multitude of things. Brown’s audience, who loved him, saw this as another case of the metropolitan elites ruling their pleasures as out of order. 

As I said at the start, this is the type of near history that works for me because the bonkers celebrity stories seem as telling as the political theatre that Westminster has become. Of course, you may argue these events are too close to call history and perhaps that is right – Turner’s book can seem like journalism anthologising about what just happened in the country. There is, though, some underlying principle to the way he structures these once important and now barely remembered events. He also provides enough background detail about stories that I was unaware of when they came around the first time. 

As I read this book, I was reminded of how I felt at the start of the new millennium. First of all, I was thankful that the Millenium Bug hadn’t caused Armageddon and then I was able to chuckle at the images of the Blairs welcoming in the new year in with an uncomfortable-looking monarch at the Millenium Dome. If I had then turned to 2020 and tried to imagine where the country would be … well you couldn’t make it up. That’s the beauty of a book like this: it gives you some of the continuities but reminds you how quickly life changes.

Barca: The Rise and Fall of the Club That Built Modern Football by Simon Kuper 

This is an excellent sport book. That’s no surprise because Kuper is a talented and well-connected sports journalist who has produced several critically acclaimed books. He is in the same mould as Duncan Hamilton and Tim Vickery who have a clear understanding about the cultural significance and essential irrelevance of sport; they see all the beauty and romance in sport but can be objective about its absurdities as well as the moments of transcendence that it can provide at its best. 

It’s also an excellent book because it has a good story to tell. Prior to the arrival of Johan Cryuff as manager, the club, based in a provincial Spanish city, had a history of patchy successes and underachievement in comparison with the hated big city fat cats at Real Madrid (and that’s before we factor in the civil war overtones). He laid the tactical and philosophical foundations that Louis Van Gaal and, gloriously, Pep Guardiola perfected in order to establish Barcelona as the coolest, most forward-thinking and successful team in the world – and that’s only half the story, and probably the least interesting half. 

As the title highlights, after such a dazzling period of success, where not only did they win with aesthetic attacking grace but with a moral force, the very things that led to their ascendancy became the fatal flaws that caused their decline as the world’s premier sports team. As covid engulfed the world and Kuper began his book, the decline of this mighty empire accelerated at such pace – debts fuelled by ageing stars on inflated contracts, the European failures and the departure of Messi – that the narrative arc resembled a classical tragedy. 

It is the second half of the book, when Kuper analyses Barcelona’s operation as an example of an elite club in the modern sporting world, that I found particularly fascinating. But first things first and let’s start with Cryuff which is where Kuper starts his story. 

The chain-smoking, fitness averse Dutch maestro was a footballing phenomenon. He played the game as much in his head as on the pitch. At Ajax and with Holland in the early 70s, and alongside Rinus Michels who shared his footballing philosophy, Cryuff revolutionised the way the beautiful game was played. Cryuff introduced an approach to the game that was revolutionary at the time but which now provides the basic foundations of most professional sides. Training was always with a ball and was shorter and more intensive than the long sessions of shuttle runs and laps of the pitch particularly associated with English teams of the 70s and 80s. Cryuff’s four second rule was about trying to win the ball back within that time and as near to the opponent’s goal as possible; and this has evolved into the sort of high intensity pressing that Manchester City have now perfected. City are so good because they have a hard-working team of athletes whereas, ironically, Cryuff saw it as a way to avoid long, lung-bursting runs back down the pitch to defend. 

There were many other training and tactical evolutions from the skinny Dutch master but it was Guardiola who would eventually perfect his mentor’s methods. Cryuff had spotted something in Pep’s technical skill and awareness that were more important than his lack of athletic ability. He was Cryuff’s leader on the pitch but when he took over as manager he was determined to discard the creative conflict model of management that Cryuff thrived on. In that sense, Guardiola, as a Catalan, was aligning the football side with the traditional community ethos of the club. The motto “more than a club” not only reflected the team’s symbolic status for the Catalans but referred to the ethos within the organisation about the way players, staff and fans should be treated. Talk of creating the feel of a family was more than marketing bluster. The fact that the club was owned by the fans and run by Catalan bourgeoisie who were wealthy but rooted in their community, not like the super-rich who run most other huge clubs, was key to this culture. That’s why they were able to establish an innovative football academy that produced the crop of world class players, including Messi, who formed the basis of perhaps the greatest club side in modern football history. Unlike more traditional football academies in England, where young boys inhabited a world of harsh, macho discipline and a ruthlessness that meant they could be discarded with little preparation or support, Barca’s academy provided the pastoral support and human warmth of the best sort of boarding school. 

As the title of the book suggests, this is the model now adopted across the world. As world class players such as Xavi, Iniesta and Messi emerged from this academy and were brilliantly coached by Guardiola, their possession-based, high intensity and attacking approach swept all before them. However, when Guardiola left and was replaced by less high profile figures from within the club, the seeds of decline were planted. Of course, there were many other factors than Pep’s departure that caused this slow but steady decline. Ironically, the very family ethos that created a sense of unity in the club also led to the directors showing too much loyalty to ageing stars, rewarding them with generous, over long contracts. For a while, Messi’s brilliance kept them in the top end of the global game but even this then became a weakness as the all-round team approach was subjugated to the little genius’ needs. As the moments of Messi magic reduced, the inadequacies of the team became more apparent; and their inability to get through to the knockout stages of the Champions League this year for the first time in ages, reflects their reduced status. 

This book is worth reading just for the insight into the way Messi approaches the game explaining how he has been able to produce match-winning moments for so long. Yet there was also something rather sad about this book. It was not to do with Barca’s fall from the heights they set, after all that is part of the beauty of sport. No, it was more to do with the nature of modern football in the very top clubs, those clubs who were looking to form the abortive European Super League. There’s something soulless about the lives of the elite players and the way they feel about the game – to them it has become just a job. The loyalties and the passion for playing that existed in the last century don’t seem there. Players seem to be on a treadmill of great financial reward but less internal satisfaction. I don’t think that was Kuper’s intention when writing this fascinating account of how the modern game operates, and I may be putting my own spin on things, but that was the impression with which I came away. 

By the end, I thought it might be best for those wealthy European clubs to go off and start their Super League and leave the real fans, real clubs to renew their link to the verities of the game. I’m not decrying the global product that some football clubs have become, it’s just that they seem to be involved in a different sport altogether than the majority of clubs that are still firmly rooted in and central to their communities and fans’ sense of identity.

The Prime Ministers We Never Had by Steve Richards

Regular blog readers will know that I am a big fan of Richards’ political writing as well as his ‘Rock and Roll Politics’ podcast and, hopefully, I will be at his next live show in May – by then, even more hopefully, the lying, criminal Tory buffoon who leads the country will have been replaced by a less dishonest, non-criminal Tory second-rater. And if I can just digress further: over the last few years, I have become less tribal in my political views and, on the whole, I like centrist politicians who work across the parties, as there are many well-intentioned, capable politicians of whatever stripe… except for this particular government which has forced out its most capable politicians and so adds incompetence to their sub-Trumpian approach to truth and integrity. So, now you know where I’m coming from! 

Richards sets himself the task in this book of trying to explain and find common patterns in the careers of talented and popular politicians who did not secure the top job. Why Boris and not Rab Butler, who had a record of making a real difference through the seminal legislation he introduced in his several high-profile cabinet posts? Or why Callaghan and not Roy Jenkins, who was called in by Harold Wilson to replace Sunny Jim, when he was perceived to have failed in his management of the economy? 

Richards makes it clear that talent is not the factor that keeps many politicians from number ten. He does, however, succeed in identifying several key factors in this survey of nearly men and women that concentrates on modern, post second world war politicians. Of course, that’s right down my street as the focus is on politicians who were in their pomp during my lifetime. 

The other criteria that he sets himself when drawing up this list is that each of his subjects should have been talked about as a potential prime minister and have had the opportunity to assume the role. That’s why John Smith is not included because his untimely death meant that he was never in a position to make his move. He was undoubtedly a more substantial figure than Jeremy Corbyn who is featured in this book. However, Corbyn fought two elections and after his better than expected result in the 2017 election, when May lost her majority, there was a short period when the perpetual backbench rebel was talked about as a potential prime minister. 

The pleasure of this type of book for me is that it reminds one of familiar events from the near past but provides a narrative and analysis that makes sense of the shifting power dynamics. Mind you, Richards seems just as fascinated by the politicians who did get to the top and in each chapter uses them as a defining contrast to the prime ministers we never had. In that way he is able to highlight the qualities – and it is, usually, personal qualities – that are the key factors that sabotage his subjects’ ascent. 

None of these qualities is particularly surprising. Portillo, who at one time was feverishly hailed by Tory members as Thatcher’s heir, simply did not want it enough. Heseltine, a towering and impressive figure with a track record of ministerial impact, was too loyal to John Major. Even after Black Monday, when Major was fatally damaged, Heseltine made no move because he thought his boss was doing his best. 

In contrast, Butler wanted the top job but was fatally hampered by his past – he was never forgiven fully for having supported Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. Similarly, despite Kinnock’s heroic achievements in reforming the Labour Party, he was never given enough of a fair shot by the press because of his historic links to the unions and the left. Interestingly enough, though, Richards does not believe that Kinnock’s triumphalist Sheffield rally did for him. He points out that the polls were already turning when he proclaimed: “We’re alright!” The same could not be said for Butler and Portillo, though. Portillo’s toe curling references to the SAS at the Tory party conference at the height of his popularity with activists, was too aggressively jingoistic for even that John Bull focus group. Butler’s rather lacklustre keynote speech to an earlier incarnation of that conference when he stood in for the ill Macmillan, led to the grey men choosing Sir Alec Douglas Home as the next leader. 

For many of you who are interested in politics, this is a fascinating and fluent book that wears its analytical intelligence, research and insights lightly. It also provides a few sliding doors moments – what if Healy had succeeded Wilson or Callaghan and what would this have meant for Thatcher? What if Jenkins had not moved to the SDP but stayed to fight for his pro-Europe, mixed economy version of Labour? Closer still, what if David Miliband had challenged Brown when he was floundering? Maybe we would have avoided Cameron’s premiership and the disastrous internal psychodrama in the Tory Party that led to Brexit.

The Age of the Strong Man by Gideon Rachman 

Rachman is a respected foreign affairs journalist who has witnessed the rise of Trump, Xi, Putin, Erdogan, Orban and all the other autocratic populists who have paraded on the global stage this century. After the rise in countries embracing liberal democracy post world war two and the establishment of a rules based international community dominated by the USA, the last few years have seen a retreat from those principles. And this retreat has manifested itself in a glut of men who simply do not accept the end of history and the triumph of western liberal values and freedoms after the end of the cold war. In the mid 1990s there was a touching belief that Putin would continue perestroika as a more sober, competent version of Yeltzin and that China’s leaders would gradually and steadily embrace freedoms as the country interacted with the global economy. How wrong they, the international community, and we were. 

Rachman’s analysis of how this happened is thorough and informative. He spends less time, however, analysing why we have all these men - and they are all men – who have no patience with the rule of law, democratic institutions, individual and cultural freedoms, and why they have all seemed to emerge at the same time. He really only offers the well-trodden reasoning: the financial crisis, the less positive aspects of globalisation for indigenous populations, and the weakness of America and its closest allies manifest in the failed middle eastern interventions. 

His main interest is to identify the recurring patterns in the background and psychology of the strong men as well as the methods they use to gain power and embed themselves. People like Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Bolsinaro begin by convincing themselves, or are born convinced, of the special personal relationship they have with the people, the ordinary, hard-working, patriotic citizens, whatever that means. They convince themselves that they have a hot line to the people’s concerns which are, usually, always the same: fear of the other or, in other words, control of immigration; and reinforcement of conservative social policies that promote restrictive traditions – old-fashioned views on sexuality, the role of women, and so on. 

In order to establish themselves as the people’s spokesman, the strong man has to create enemies, usually characterised as the liberal elites – which is ironic considering that most of the strong men come from privileged backgrounds. Entwined with those liberal elites is the media which is derided for fake news and then gradually shackled. The judges and constitutional protections follow the same route. So, that’s the game plan and none of these methods is unique to this generation of populists. Nor is the approach much different if the strong men are from opposite political backgrounds: Marxists, KGB and party officials on one side and right wing, free market libertarians on the other. They all have one thing in common: they want to grab all the levers of power and hold on to them for as long as they please; and, surprisingly often, try to then pass them on to family dynasties. The Marcos’ son is emerging as Duterte’s chosen successor in The Phillipines and we know that Trump has positioned Ivanka and Jarrod as key political figures in his past and, as looks frighteningly more likely, next administration. 

This is a depressing but fascinating read. The Trump section is familiar and, as a result of Ukraine, we are now well-informed about Putin’s long game establishing himself as a modern Tsar. However, we also get gruesomely fascinating accounts of the wily Orban and Erdogan. Both were initially hailed by the EU and western democracies as dynamic, reforming politicians, men with whom we could do business. Okay, they were a bit rough around the edges and sometimes rode roughshod over democratic processes but, eh, as we drew them closer, we were confident that democracy would eventually flourish. That’s why Hungary is in the EU, despite Orban’s rampant anti-semitism and control of the media; and it’s why at the beginning of the 21st century Turkey began the early stages of negotiations to join the EU. 

As ever in this sort of book, Johnson is the outlier. In Anne Applebaum’s excellent book around the same issue, ‘Twilight of Democracy’, she is ambivalent about Johnson’s potential danger as a populist. Perhaps she imagined the liberal and optimistic London mayor would re-emerge when he had secured No. 10, whilst Brexit and Red Wall voters believed he was on the side of the disadvantaged and disenfranchised. Rachman has none of this and with good reason. When you consider Johnson’s willingness to break international law based on partial legal interpretations, as well as the floating of proposals around electoral reform that will make it harder for certain people (ie. probable Labour supporters) to vote, then you can see the strong man methodology in action. No amount of dishevelled boosterism and willingness to move on, can hide the way he has set his attack dog, Nadine Dorries, to intimidate the BBC. Nor should his Rwandan plan be seen as a realistic proposal to tackle the vile people smuggling gangs – it is simply dog whistle politics to demonise victims and a cynical attempt to stoke up culture wars. Rachman makes the obvious comparison with Trump’s wall, Putin’s anti-gay legislation and Xi’s view that all Muslims are potential terrorists who need re-educating. 

Rachman offers little hope at the end of this survey of the strong men. He talks about thirty year cycles but there is also a sense that Churchill’s famous statement about democracy being the least bad way of running a country is going out of fashion. And remember, of the two hundred plus nations around the globe, only about forty can claim to be democracies and this number has fallen in the last few years. 

If there is some hope, Rachman points to the way that the democrat constitutional processes kicked in when Trump’s supporters stormed the senate. It is now fairly clear that this was a blatant attempt by Trump to bypass the people’s presidential choice by a populist coup. Politicians across the parties, and most significantly Pence, as well as the police and other arms of the state stood firm. We have to keep our fingers crossed that remains the case as the next US Presidential race draws closer.

Jews Don’t Count by David Baddiel 

This Sunday Times Political Book of the Year 2021 is really an extended essay. It is very well written, forensically argued and strikes me as uncontroversial in its conclusions. Nevertheless, its publication aroused a great deal of discussion, as you have probably picked up in the media, and which, of course seems to prove Baddiel’s central contention: in the current focus on identity politics and the fight to hear the voices of a whole range of disadvantaged groups, Jews are invisible, or seen as somehow not a proper member of the minority groups for whom progressive people go into battle. 

As Baddiel admits, this book is not aimed at the boneheads with racist views – what’s the point. Instead it is written for those people with whom he would broadly align politically -anti-racists who would describe themselves as progressives and who will gleefully and smugly inform you that they are on the right side of history. It is from them that Baddiel believes Jews get a raw deal. As he systematically examines, this is sometimes due to an unconscious underestimation but, more often, it is because of dangerous assumptions about Jews and confused thinking about hierarchies of disadvantage. 

Before he develops this point, however, he amasses plenty of evidence of the way antisemitism is not treated as seriously as racism and other prejudiced behaviour. He looks, for example, at blatant antisemitic comments from famous people such as T. S. Eliot and Alice Walker and shows how this has barely impingeg on their reputations. The sort of crass prejudice they espouse would see them permanently cancelled if made about people of colour, trans people and any of the other “legitimate” (my adjective) groups of victims. 

Often, well-meaning people from the progressive camp set out in strong terms their criticism of a whole range of discrimination and support for the disadvantaged, yet simply forget to mention Jews. Baddiel points out the problem caused by the use of the term antisemitism as it is separated from more powerfully generic nouns such prejudice, discrimination and racism. Incidentally, he addresses the issue of antisemitism being a religious prejudice not a racist one by hypothesising that his own well-known atheism would not have deterred the Nazis from putting him in a concentration camp. 

This first section of the book has power because of the rise in recent years in antisemitic attacks across Europe and hardening views about Jews that he identifies from recent social surveys. However, I found the second half more interesting when he tries to explain why this is the case. 

The fact is that progressives don’t consider antisemitism to be as worrying, dangerous or important as homophobia, racism, misogyny and transphobia. Think, for example, about the relative sensitivity shown when people refer to the N word in comparison to the Y word. Why do such online defenders of the disadvantaged, such as Ash Sarkar, whose good intentions Baddiel acknowledges, create this hierarchy of disadvantage. Well, some progressives fall into centuries old stereotypes that equate Jews with power and wealth – how can they be victims, is the assumption, when they run the world? Then there’s the sometimes deliberate and sometimes moronic blurring of anti-zionism and antisemitism. Corbyn and his faction in the Labour Party swallowed this double whammy and that’s why he simply didn’t register how distasteful the antisemitic portrayal of evil capitalists was in street artist Mear One’s mural.

 There’s also a fascinating and significant discussion about whiteness linked to this idea of power. Baddiel explains the subtle way Jews are portrayed as white and not white depending on the nature of the attack – are they omnipotent manipulators of the world order or a rat-like pestilence? 

There are no real solutions here, and I don’t think that’s Baddiel’s point. It’s a frustrated cry about the unfair assumptions, subtle distinctions and continuing prejudice of Jews by influential people who should know better. The biggest revelation, for me, however, was the examination of the online world and, in particular Twitter. I’m afraid it seems ghastly and the arguments raging there seem to be impacting on more nuanced, thoughtful discussion in a destructive manner.

Free by Lea Ypi 

This is Lea Ypi’s account of growing up in Albania in the 1980s before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s an everyday coming of age story which is made absolutely uneveryday by the fact that prior to 1990 she describes living in a totalitarian communist state and, thereafter, a ‘wild west’ capitalist country that descends into civil war. 

Before reading this book, my knowledge of Albania seemed as comprehensive as I required: I knew their formal royal family was led by King Zog but that following the second world war, Enver Hoxha became the “much loved” Marxist leader of a totalitarian state. Like Tito, he kept himself distanced from the twin communist superpowers, Russia and China, and stayed in power until his death in 1985. With Hoxha’s love of Norman Wisdom and his determination to keep the country cut off from and untainted by decadent western influences, I’d always perceived Albania as an amusing oddity from the cold war. Ypi’s book provides a much more personal and nuanced picture. 

This book is very funny on occasions and it is also a wonderful insight about what it was like to live in a socialist bubble – a world that the young Ypi knows is different from everywhere else but which, throughout her childhood, she has been told is the only country doing things right. And then almost overnight, as an eleven year old in 1990, she discovers that everything she ever believed about her country and the world around her is wrong; more than that, all those people who loved her most had never been truly honest with her. 

The first half of the book is disorientating because Ypi presents her perceptions of growing up in Albania from her child-like perspective without any knowing references to what is actually going on. To her, the endless queuing is more like a traditional Albanian pastime than a failure of the country’s economy. It is the glimpses of Italian television that seem odd to her as she focuses on the socio-economic inequalities in the soap operas that so transfix her. Of course, this is inevitable as Ypi ingenuously catalogues the daily lessons about Hoxha’s wisdom and the moral superiority of Albania’s socialist society. She so absolutely believes that Albania is an earthly paradise that the simple meze food and continual socialist school projects she throws herself into give her life richness and joy. Yes, Ypi is the victim of lifelong, pervasive brainwashing but she is not a thoughtless dupe. In fact, she is the opposite, a bright and curious narrator constantly asking questions - but she is at the same time a trusting, innocent child.

 This memoir is as much about Ypi’s family as the strange world of Hoxha’s Albania. And this is where the skill in her presentation is most evident. Her mother is strong, self-reliant and pragmatic and her father is a soft-hearted, romantic. They seem constantly at odds with each other in everything except their fierce love for their family and one another, as well as the fierce intelligence they share. They carefully avoid any criticism of the strange world in which they live, yet subtly exude a querulous lack of enthusiasm for it. Ypi is smart enough to know that her parents are in some mysterious way at odds with their country. It may be because neither seems to hold a job linked to their abilities, or from the way they always promise to get her framed photograph of the glorious leader but never do. The mystery is only partially explained by her parents’ reference to the issue of ‘biography’ - problems in their background that see them viewed with suspicion by the state. 

All, of course, is revealed in the second half of the book when the restrictions of state control crumble away without soviet backing and the international community sweeps into their woefully unprepared country. I found this second section of the book profoundly moving and in many ways rather depressing. At first, Ypi has to deal with the emotional shock of having her conception of the world turned upside down and then she has to struggle to understand that her anger with her parents is unfair – their lack of honesty during her early childhood was a way to protect her and themselves from an oppressive state. 

After the fall of the totalitarian regime, we see both Ypi’s parents take on responsibility for the progress of Albania’s new future through their involvement in government projects and national politics. Ultimately, though, all their efforts cannot stop Albania being exploited by financial chancers sweeping into a new market as the country embraces the rather dubious freedoms of a post-cold war world. Inevitably, in the late 1990s the country implodes into a short but brutal civil war triggered by a series of disastrous pyramid schemes that I had totally forgotten about. 

The book ends at that point and I was rather unsettled by this. I guess it was because I wanted the second half of the book to end on a positive note celebrating the victory of democratic values. Ypi is more clear-eyed than this, though, and points up what has been lost from her childhood: the sense of community, people supporting one another and her own sense of purpose. It reminded me of Sebastian Payne’s book about the Labour Red Wall towns that went Tory in 2019. Time and again the people he interviewed bemoaned the loss of community and meaning in their lives even if their previous lives working in the mines, the shipyards or the factories were full of hardship and struggle. 

It’s probably best to finish where Ypi finishes by dedicating the book to her paternal grandmother, Nini. She grew up in Albania before Hoxha and then outlasted him. She was the person who embodies steady love and decent values that can somehow make life bearable whatever bizarre Marxist or capitalist madness is going on. 

I would strongly recommend this book.

Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through: The Surprising Story of Britain's Economy from Boom to Bust and Back Again by Duncan Weldon

 First of all, don’t be put off by the title and particularly the reference to the economy. I know nothing about the economy but found this an enlightening read. This is a history book first and foremost. Its aim is to explain clearly how the British economy has progressed, oscillating between boom and bust, since the catalyst of the industrial revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. When Weldon does introduce concepts such as fiscal and financial policy, government debt and deficit, macro and microeconomics, demand and supply side factors, he explains them clearly and concisely. 

He takes the last two hundred years as his starting point because this is when the industrial revolution began. Prior to that event for scores of years economic growth and per capita earnings were relatively unchanging. Apart from those people he calls, with admirable clarity, Violence Specialist (the descendants of William The Conqueror and his supporters who owned the land) most people had subsistence lifestyles and most people would be living the same type of life as their grandparents, great grandparents and even further back. There was no expectation that their children would automatically have a better life. 

Weldon has an interesting take on the industrial revolution and why it started here. What is clear, however, is that for a hundred years or so, because it did start in Britain, we were able to get a head start economically on our European peers. By the end of the first world war they had closed the gap and the USA overtaken us, but even in our late Georgian and Victorian pomp the country’s political leaders were arguing and complaining about the very issues that dominate today’s headlines – productivity, sound money, tariffs and protection of our markets, lack of required skills in the workforce, government spending. 

The idea that many of today’s economic discussions would not seem strange to past generations is one of Weldon’s main conclusions. Coupled with that, he points out that even when the country was at the peak of its global status politicians and leader writers were worrying about the country’s impending decline. Yet as Weldon points out, not until the 20th century was well underway did the average income per capita in Germany and France, which had been significantly below that of English workers, begin to catch up. 

I think that the main argument Weldon wants to develop is to show how we got where we are now from a period of relative strength built upon our colonial markets and our technological advantage – mind you the Napoleonic Wars had a massive impact on the country’s wealth and our borrowing was at an eye watering level in that late Georgian period. He suggests that historical factors would always have led to other countries, and especially comparable western democracies, catching up with us. However, the interplay of politics and economics with its short termism consequences is why he chose the title “200 Years of Muddling Through”. And that’s why the book is divided up into chronological sections that examine the political decisions and philosophies that have driven economic policies. In particular, the idea of a planned approach, utilising the power and influence of the state, constantly slugging it out with liberal economic approaches driven by market forces and de-regulation, becomes increasingly important in the 20^th century. 

As I began, economics made more sense to me thanks to Weldon’s clarity and his focus on the political and historical context that drives the endless discussions about such issues as tax cuts, or taxation for investment and redistribution in modern Britain. So yes, it is the economy stupid … and the politics.

Two Books about The British Empire: Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera Empire by Jeremy Paxman 

Quite coincidentally, Mark Cornelius and Peter Bailey, recently leant me different books about the Empire with both authors promising to look at its history as a means of understanding the country we have become today. I thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast them as the writers, Sathnam Sanghera and Jeremy Paxman, are both Oxbridge educated, establishment journalists but from very different backgrounds.

 Sanhgera, a well-respected journalist for papers such as The Times and Financial Times, was born in England to Indian Sikhs who migrated to this country in the 1960s. In his book “Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain’ Sathnam Sanghera starts from his own experiences growing up in the West Midlands; he gives a personal account of the statement set out in the title of the book, rooted in family interviews and extensive historical research. At the outset, he is clear that the issue of empire and its legacy is a problem for our country. In particular, he asserts that a kind of deliberate national forgetting of the realities of empire, and its marginalisation in the school curriculum, is a problem that has hampered race relations over the last fifty years. He believes that a full, open and honest debate is necessary if the country is to be comfortable with itself; and he sees his book as part of that process for all sections of our variegated society. 

What his book shares with Paxman’s is an unflinching account of the cruelties and brutality the British inflicted on the people of the colonies. Despite the fact that Sanghera is critical of contemporary Britain’s knowledge of this history, many of the exemplars he chooses to focus on are familiar – the cruelty of the 17^th century slave owners, such as Colston, in the nascent days of our empire building in the West Indies; Sir Robert Clive’s mafiosa behaviour in India where his deceptions and advanced military resources some him plunder riches for himself whilst dealing ruthlessly with all who stood in his way; and, of course, the massacre at Amritsah where Dyer’s cold blooded slaughter of unarmed civilians saw him lauded back home by the British public who blithely disregarded the humanity of the victims. 

Sanghera hammers home his point with an overwhelming cascade of such deplorable behaviour, highlighting that the invariably worst excesses were taken against non-white citizens of the empire. Of course, this was all very necessary and there were many events I did not know, so from that point of view the scale and duration of the abuse and humiliations imposed over nearly three centuries hit home. However, what I found more interesting was his analysis of what the impact on the British character and British society has been in modern times, post the second world war, when Attlee rapidly commenced the disposal of our colonies. 

It is clear that Sanghera wants to be fair-minded in his judgement of the country’s behaviour when we were imperialists and in the years post Empire when those peoples who were over there, are now over here because we were over there. And, of course, this seems wholly appropriate because he is an Anglo-Sikh with different loyalties and perspective from someone like me but with an equal stake in our shared country. To that end, he rightly focuses on how Britain’s initial trading impetus for the overseas’ colonies developed into a moral and civilising crusade based on Christian morality and a sense of British exceptionalism. We can see how that still pervades attitudes today – controversially in the Brexit debate but more consistently in the way we like to portray Britain as being at the forefront of every international conflict and event. An unrealistic self-perspective seems to be the legacy of the self-delusion that empire was good for the less civilised, ‘degenerate’ cultures that we ruled over. 

Both writers are strong on the imperial mind-set and its consequence in the stories we have told about ourselves since the second world war. However, I found Paxman’s handling of this issue much more interesting and enlightening. Sanghera writes with an outsider’s rather condemnatory focus – understandably so – but Paxman examines the details of how the traders, adventurers, missionaries, bureaucrats and ruling administrators thought and behaved in their time overseas and how these changed as the empire grew and became an entrenched fact of the global picture. This included a look at the way improved transport meant that women moved over with their husbands to the colonies and intensified the way that British values were manifest in everyday, colonial life. He makes the point that a great deal of the way the British see themselves nowadays is an image rooted in the rituals of expat communities. 

Sanghera, on the other hand, is determined to see every aspect of colonial life as a bad thing. I understand why – his aim is to make people like me objectively analyse what went on rather than finding solace by saying such things as “well we weren’t as bad as the Belgian colonisers” or “we left some good things for those countries we colonised”. However, Paxman’s approach seems to me more likely to initiate this important debate that both writers want. This is because he gets in the mind of the colonisers with all their venalities, hypocrisies and, yes, good intentions, however wrongheaded they were. Labour got crushed in the 2019 election because the message to their core, working class voters was often a patronising explanation pf how they were thinking about things in the wrong way. I’ve always thought that you need to move towards people when you want them to move towards your way of thinking. Anyway, sanctimony over. 

Both books give a fair hearing to the dissenting voices about many of the worst aspects of British colonial behaviour during the zenith of empire. The first and most important area of contention was over the abolition of slavery. Here the writers diverge in their response to the fact that Britain was early into this cause and was proactive in trying to limit the trade around the globe. They diverge in the evidence they examine and it was hard for me to discern where the truth lay. Sanghera emphasised what he saw as a half-hearted approach to abolition, citing the compensation paid to former slave owners and our continued dealing with countries still practising this despicable trade. Paxman, however, cited strong public opinion in favour of abolition and many examples where the government tried to disrupt the business model of those countries still practising slavery. 

As you can probably see, I was more sympathetic to Paxman’s approach although he did lay bare the horrors of empire. Sanghera would probably argue Paxman’s book provides more comfort and therefore allows a reader like me to ignore the ongoing legacy of empire. That’s probably right but I would not argue with the conclusions Sanghera makes in his thoroughly researched and well-written book. Racism is still an issue in this country and, as already stated, we have an enduring image of ourselves as Churchill’s Britain that stands up to bullies and makes a difference on the world stage. Yes, we do concentrate too much on World War II and the Tudors. There is a need for us to look again at our imperial past; but I think we are doing so. I don’t agree with his view that as a country we are shying away from self-examination. What I do think, however, is that it is naïve to expect a country to be constantly berating itself. These things are gradual and I do compare us with other colonial powers – something Sanghera criticises -  and think we are moving in the right direction. Of course, I could just be complacent but the beauty of modern Britain is that I can articulate that view and many others without fear. 

I’m glad to have read both books. Paxman and Sanghera are both Brits but from different backgrounds and perspectives who cover much of the same story and sources. Sanghera has enabled me to see the importance of bringing into the light a full, non-selective account of our colonial history. Paxman’s account helped me to see that interpreting that history is complex and nuanced.

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell

 This is one for fans of the metaphysical poets and, in particular, the daddy of them all, John Donne. Now, I realise this is rather a niche interest but Donne is my favourite poet and a man with a fascinating life. Rundell, an Oxford academic and prizewinning author of children’s books, is even more keen on Donne than me and in fact she admits in this biography that she is a little in love with him. Her passion shines through in this beautifully written account of his turbulent life and the turbulent times he lived through. The book, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in 2022, melds a forensic consideration of his work with telling details about the way people thought and lived in those dramatic years spanning the end of Elizabeth’s reign and the beginning of James’. 

For a poet who went out of fashion for nearly three hundred years until he was championed by T.S. Eliot at the start of the twentieth century, many people will know the outlines of Donne’s roller coaster life. They will recognise the famous portrait of him as a handsome young Elizabethan rake with fashionable clothes and lothario moustache that was painted when he was first making a name for himself as a quick-witted, intelligent courtier and brilliant poet. This was the time when he and his friends shared verse about the numerous love affairs they were involved in and tried to outdo one another with the originality and intensity of their work. Donne’s poetry shone most brightly of all the young bucks with its dramatic openings, unusual and striking imagery, and intellectual contortions. It is this work for which he is most famous – poems such as The Sunne Rising, The Flea, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. 

Many people will also be vaguely aware that after such a promising start when he gained a role as secretary to the wealthy and powerful Sir John Egerton, things quickly spiralled out of control. He made a secret marriage to his employer’s young niece and ward, Anne More. Blinded by love and bad judgement, this misstep saw him, initially thrown into prison before his release; many hard years were then spent eking out a living from hack, writing jobs to support his burgeoning family. 

More people will know that he eventually worked his way back to a prominent role in society when, at James I’s prompting, he made a career in the church, eventually taking on the prestigious and well-remunerated role of Dean of St. Paul’s. “No man is an island” is probably the most remembered line from his regular sermons but, as Rundell makes clear, this public role made him a huge celebrity in the early years of the 17^th century. A lazy analogy – when has that ever stopped me – is to see Donne’s preaching being anticipated as eagerly as Strictly Come Dancing, albeit in the form of a lengthy but beautifully choreographed routine with challenging moral, theological and intellectual content. 

As you can see, “transformations” is the right word to use about such a life. Not only due to these great reversals of fortune but because just to survive Donne had to be nimble and attuned to the constantly changing political and theological mood. Rundell underlines how the early death of his brother caught hiding a Catholic priest had a profound effect on Donne. For many years, he was aware that his mother’s Catholicism made him vulnerable which makes his marriage even more surprising coming as it did when he had begun to establish a foothold on the greasy ladder of preferment. Perhaps it was love. Similar to Shakespeare, we know a lot about some aspects of Donne’s life and little about others especially his feelings towards Anne. We can infer, though, from his regular absences and his devotion in time and verse to other women, such as the powerful Countess of Bedford, that he did not treat her too well. Sadly, like many women of that era, after years of continuous child birth and the loss of some children, Anne died at a relatively young age, worn out by yet another difficult labour. 

So, by the end of this rollicking gallop through his life, I think I ended up not quite liking Donne as much as I had when my image of him was mostly based on the voice in his poems. He was loyal to many of his friends and they in turn reciprocated that loyalty. This sadly meant that at his request many of his letters were burnt. As Rundell acknowledges, there is an ambiguity about him as the record is incomplete but also because the quicksilver shift of his reasoning in the love poems seems to characterise the many shifts of his mind and emotions in life. She does, however, try to tackle head on some of the crucial questions about him where there is evidence. For example, his great success as a clergy man in later life has often been presented as an expedient second best after more grandiose hopes of preferment at court. Rundell makes short shrift of that view. She marshals evidence from his writing and from the way he fought hard for his new role to support her interpretation that at the end of his life he found the sense of purpose he had always sought. 

I’ve tried to persuade my friend, Mark (a regular contributor to this blog) of Donne’s greatness as a poet but he’s not having that. He has read this book, though, and was impressed with the super infiniteness of the life this most interesting of poets lived and the times he lived through. I suggested this book is a niche interest at the start but since Mark and I started reading and discussing it together, Rundell and her prizewinning book seem to be ubiquitous – it’s currently being serialised on Radio 4. Nevertheless, I still think it benefits from having read some of those sublime love poems that even now, nearly fifty years after I encountered them, shock, delight and intrigue with their emotional power, passion and intellect..

A Duty of Care by Peter Hennessy 

Peter Hennessy is one of my favourite political historians who has written some excellent books about the social and political developments in Britain post the Second World War. He is always a welcome addition to radio and television programmes, and Reflections, his series of BBC radio interviews with heavyweight politicians of the recent past - Heseltine, Kinnock, Ashdown, Blair - was a masterclass in how to gently coax revealing insights from substantial figures. In addition to his lightly worn but deep intellect, his particular approach is to view political events in an historical context. This focus enables him to find the roots for what is happening now in the past as well as uncovering philosophical links and repeated trends of behaviour.

 Which brings me to ‘A Duty of Care’, a book written whilst he was shielding during covid and pondering what impact it would have on Britain when we emerged from lockdown to a world with new challenges. In order to look forward to what he hoped would be a potential period of national renewal, Hennessy looks back to what he sees as the rich and substantial socio-economic improvements, broadly supported by both main political parties, that emerged at the end of the second world war. His idea and hope is that the sense of all being in this together shown during the covid crisis – that’s if you forget Partygate, Hancock, the billions wasted on useless protective clothing, etc - is an echo of the spirit that drove the country forward during the war and led to the national reforms that began with Attlee’s government in 1945. 

Now before I begin to unpack his thesis, I should add that despite having never met Hennessy it is clear that like Attenborough he is patently decent. In all his media appearances, including recently on Desert Islands Discs, he comes across as wise, kind and optimistic, with a humorous twinkle in his eye; he’s the sort of person you’d want as a dad or grandad. Therefore, it gives me no pleasure to say that this book seems a sincere, well- meaning failure. 

I’ll get to why I’ve come to that conclusion in a short while. However, this being Hennessy, there are still things of value in this short book. As a concise history of the post war governments and the impact of their policies on the socio-economic life of the country, it is informative and illuminating. The story is well known. Attlee’s government, surprisingly to some and especially Churchill, swept into power on the votes of a population rejecting the inequities of the past. The structural changes this government introduced, despite the dire financial situation after six years of war, were broadly carried on by all governments until Thatcher came to power. 

At that point, the existing, shared assumption that our capitalist society needed to be tempered by a benevolent government, with involvement in and responsibility for economic and social planning, was replaced. In its stead, Thatcher introduced a market economy approach and echoed Reagan’s idea that government was a problem for the economy and society and not an integral and positive partner. There is, of course, some disagreement about how big a rupture Thatcherism was from the post war political settlement as well as whether we are still living in a version of Thatcher’s Britain. Certainly, inequality has increased on all the different measures available, and the number of families in real poverty seems on the increase. Despite our historical advantages and such short-term blessings as North Sea oil we are becoming less competitive and productive than many other western democracies and the rising economies of the developing world. 

Is this simply the result of increased globalisation and the historical decline, including the loss of empire, that has been going on since the mid nineteenth century? Well, Hennessy acknowledges that historical paradigm shift but also seems to link our decline to the rejection of the post war settlement. As I say, many people would dispute how far Thatcher changed the fundamentals of British society. Yes, there were privatisations, union reforms, council house sales and social housing depletion but the state still had a significant role in people’s lives despite the free market rhetoric. I’m also not sure that the attempts by both governments to operate economic and industrial strategies in the 60s and 70s were that effective. However, that is not Hennessy’s main point. He focuses in on the idea of the state caring for its citizens and the notion that we all contribute to society in order that the machinery of government functions effectively for everyone and that, if we falter, there will be reasonable and timely support. It’s hard to argue with him that, at present, it seems this function of the state is under strain. Sewage in the rivers, the difficulty in seeing one’s GP, crippling industrial disputes and a lack of affordable housing are just some of the symptoms of broken Britain. And, of course, this then feeds into an unstable political system where we seek simple solutions to complex political problems. 

I’m getting away from Hennessy’s central argument, though. Now, remember this was written during covid, and as my good friend Mark noted, it already seems out of date. Hennessy sees the way we responded to the pandemic as analogous to the spirit of war time Britain. It is inspirational to think of the NHS workers and other key workers risking their own health to keep the country going. It’s the same with the volunteers and our brilliant scientists. Many people did rise to the challenge and, in addition, there were many small acts of kindness that have bolstered my faith in people. Conversely, I could mention the inner government’s sense of criminal exceptionalism and the fraudulent contracts but Hennessy’s point about the behaviour of the majority of people in the country is well made. However, from there he projects a plan to harness this sense of national unity and purpose to enable a New Jerusalem to emerge as lockdown ends. Now, of course, no one could have anticipated Truss and Ukraine, but even without these two disasters Hennessy’s plan seems rooted in wishful thinking. It just seems more of the same under this crumbling Conservative government. 

Like the Chinese Communist Party member’s judgement about it being too soon to make a judgement about the French Revolution, it may be too early to judge how we will fare post-covid; but it doesn’t look too good. To be fair to Hennessy, he does offer ideas for what he calls the new politics under the following headings: Social Care; Social Housing; Technical Education; Artificial Intelligence; and Climate Change. This is his conscious effort to provide a blueprint in the vein of The Beveridge Plan published in 1942. That austere academic’s detailed report diagnosed exactly what was holding the country back and was accepted across the political spectrum; and, as Hennessy argues, many of the broad approaches to the policies required were agreed. No such consensus exists today – there seems to be no shared agreement, for example, about what to do about social care and how to fund it. 

And here’s my problem with Hennessy’s book – if you’re looking for solutions then you’d be just as well-informed reading reports in The Economist. There are interesting ideas, but little detailed analysis, and little coherence other than a duty of care for the people. There are 125 pages describing how we got to where we are today since 1945, and only 39 pages on his proposals for a new consensus. Perhaps that was the extent of what he wanted to achieve. However, I wanted more – he looks, for example, at schemes to reduce income inequality but admits the idea of a Universal Basic Income is too expensive. Then he rather airily mentions the state setting up a system of Universal Basic Services as “a more likely runner” – great – but fails to explain how it could be implemented. 

If I thought there was a political party, or better still a political consensus, pushing forward his blueprint for a new approach to the manifest issues facing the country, then the policies would follow. But there isn’t and so they won’t. Hennessy is still a good chap, though, to use one of his own well-known phrases.

English Journey by J. B. Priestley 

As an English teacher of nearly forty years it was impossible for me to not know about Priestley. After all, his 1945 play ‘An Inspector Calls’ is a staple of most GCSE courses. And it’s right that it should be as it is an accessible, entertaining study of class issues in mid 20^th century Britain; there aren’t many students who don’t get something from its carefully structured plot set in one location on one night. If you haven’t seen it on stage or in one of the many screen adaptations, it’s worth watching. It is of its time but not in an off putting, creaky manner, and its exploration of personal responsibility is as relevant today as it was when written. 

My conclusion about English Journey will be much the same – it’s of its time but still, surprisingly, relevant. There, I’ve given away my ending in a way that Priestley, a professional craftsman with words, would have stylishly avoided. However, I’ve plenty more to say about this extremely influential book and will do so in a moment, but first let me explain why I decided to read it. 

A few months ago, I listened to an excellent documentary on Radio 4’s Archive series about Priestley. It was made by Stuart Maconie, who wanted to make a modern audience aware about what an important cultural figure Priestley was in Britain during the 20^th century. Now, although I had taught his play on numerous occasions, there were no marks for biographical insights and anyway Priestley’s political views are manifest in the way the plot unfolds. I had a vague memory of English Journey but was, to my shame, ignorant of Priestley’s background. Until Maconie’s excellent programme, I did not realise that Priestley was prolific in a range of creative and non-fiction genres, and was also a well-known figure regularly broadcasting to the nation on the radio or during discussion programmes in the early days of television. 

Aside from a consummate skill with words, which it appears was the result of putting in the ten thousand hours of practice that Matthew Syed has identified as the key to developing expertise, Priestley was also a distinctive character. He was born in Bradford in 1894 to a solid middle-class family. Although he left school at 16 he gained a university education after the First World War in which he had been seriously wounded. His initial career was in essay writing and journalism until the success of his novel The Good Companions moved him into the literary big league. He maintained his love of the north, the community values of socialism and high regard for the traditions of England and good sense of its people. This was allied to a zest for life and a rather racy personal life. As you can see, a beguiling mixture; and it was this that initially sparked my interest in reading something by him following Maconie’s programme. When Maconie described An English Journey as “The finest book ever written about England and the English”, my choice was clear. 

By 1933 Priestley was an established literary figure and received a commission from his publishers to travel around England and write about his experiences in order to give a personal impression of the state of the nation. I am currently reading a book about the year 1962 in Britain and it’s interesting to note that in that tumultuous year, just prior to Larkin’s Annus Mirabilis, The Telegraph sent one of its correspondents on a similar, if shorter, version of Priestley’s project. It seems obvious to state that people always tend to think that the time they are living through is seminal and that important conclusions about the state of the nation need to be drawn. However, 1933, that between the war period of economic and political turmoil here and abroad, seems a fertile period for Priestley’s consideration. It’s even suggested that Orwell’s influential account of his time in England’s changing industrial heartlands, The Road to Wigan Pier, was inspired by Priestley’s book. 

A review of this sort of book faces many of the problems faced in a review about a murder mystery – once one has explained the set-up, deciding what details to then reveal is a tricky matter. Priestley’s structure is straightforward: he starts in Southampton and moves around the country before finishing up at Lincoln and Norfolk. During these visits, he describes the state of the towns and the countryside around him as well as the people he encounters, and he also uses these experiences to reflect on different aspects of English life – its culture, its economic future and its role as a major world power, that he understands is in decline, are just some of these. His method is to focus in on the particular, a visit to the theatre or a factory, a conversation with a fellow guest in his hotel or an old school friend in Bradford and then he expands from there. The problem, though, is that as can be seen from his biography his distinct personality means that he takes a distinct approach to each subject. Therefore, if I were to tell you that he has a low opinion of the Irish, you might come to a conclusion about his perspective at odds with the warm, humane and empathetic attitude he has to the vast majority people he meets during his travels. His low opinion of the Irish is a generalisation based on the Navvies who came over to modernise the country’s infrastructure. He is struck by their lack of personal hygiene, ignorance and drunkenness. What did he expect from men of their background and lack of opportunities? His error, of course, aside from failing to contextualising their situation is to generalise. This is something he is prone to do and he is noticeably more sympathetic to the innate decency and industry of those northern workers hanging around on street corners as the factories, shipyards and furnaces decline.

 Ultimately, all his conversations and observations are an attempt to define what it is to be English at this point in our country’s history. This has been an increasingly more important question in the first two decades of the 21^st century as we try to understand what it means to be a modern multicultural country. In contrast to his comments on the Irish, he is strongly ant-racist in relation to the empire and in his stark warnings about the dangers of Europe’s fascist leaders with their anti-Semitic, nationalistic ideology. This seems more in keeping with his well-known socialist principles and belief that people need to look out for one another in society. His writing is said to have also influenced the Beveridge Report and it is fair to say he would be appalled about the growing economic disparity in our society. However, as a man of his time, he also expected people to take responsibility alongside the support he was urging the government to provide. This makes me curious to know how he would feel about some of the consequences of our more empathetic society which has a tendency to, often inadvertently, support people in their victimhood. Those words, of course, betray me as a man of my generation, generalising about lives I know little about based on my experiences teaching and what I see in the media – I can see that Priestley  had a tough brief. 

Fair play, though, to the great man of letters as he spent months travelling around the country and mixing with all levels of society. He was probably as well-informed as anyone trying to grasp that most slippery of subjects – who are we, the English, right now, at this time? The success of such a book as this depends on how much you enjoy spending time travelling with the chronicler of the nation. I did. I enjoyed it as a social history and as a thought-provoking exploration of our national characteristics. Priestley seemed, on the whole, to be fair in his assessment of his experiences, was right on all the big issues and had great curiosity about the places and people he encountered. It is hard not to be struck by the fact that the issues of concern to him – the influence of the media, authoritarian governments, social inequality, the flaws in our education system, the lack of an economic strategy for the country, and so on – are the same issues we are wrestling with today. That ought to make me depressed but I have imbibed Priestley’s positive belief that perhaps we might just muddle through.

Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK by Simon Kuper 

I guess that when this book was published in 2022 the country had already begun to understand that this Tory government was the King’s New Clothes. Now that the country doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to them and is waiting for the opportunity to kick them out of office, this book ought to feel less urgent. After all, we now know about the partying and incompetence at the heart of government during Covid, which we had all suspected; we’re also aware that Brexit has damaged the country, and those who pushed its cause have either fled the scene blaming others or are blithely protected from its consequences; and despite all the world class claims by our leaders and willingness to assert Britain’s continuing  greatness and exceptionalism, we can see that nothing seems to be working properly in our day to day lives. 

Despite this bucketload of … harsh reality, this book still left me raging with anger. As a reasonably educated person, I thought I had a good grasp of the insidious effect of the narrow tranche of Oxford educated, mainly public school boys, who still constitute the establishment. I was wrong. Kuper’s book forensically, albeit with good anecdotes, lays bare all the networks of influence and inherent weaknesses of this privileged group that have so damaged this country over decades, but most pointedly in the last thirteen years. I can feel my blood boiling even as I contemplate the way he opened my eyes to the great con that has been perpetrated by this group in plain sight. 

Let’s begin with the con that pretends this is all about excellence. Now, of course, anyone involved in education knows that the smaller class sizes and individual tuition that private education buys are the first steps to academic achievement; and when this is allied to the wonderful surroundings and facilities that boost the self-esteem of private school pupils as well as the prevalence of a rich, cultural capital (books, trips to museums and theatres) in their families, then it is no surprise that the Eton alumni have dominated the Oxford colleges. However, our ruling class leave nothing to chance. There are still the donations and bequests to school and college that ease the way for those born to rule. Toby Young has written a rather sniffy review of this book labelling such criticisms of the system as one sided. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? After all, as Kuper reveals, when Toby didn’t do as well at A level as expected or required, his dad made a few phone calls to an Oxford college and he was in. The irony is, of course, that his father Michael Young, sociologist, politician and member of the post war establishment, coined the term “meritocracy”. 

And that’s where this book gets interesting. You see, with the in-built deference of my class, I thought that despite my political differences with Cameron, Gove, Cummings, Osborne, Hunt and the many other Tory ministers and advisers who’ve dominated political life this century, they were, nevertheless, intelligent, committed and thoughtful people – the talent at the top of our system. Turns out that Boris Johnson, dishonesty and low morals aside, is not an aberration. Shallow understanding of the massive issues of government is the default setting. Short term strategy and persuasive rhetoric are prized above deep thinking and a willingness to embrace complexity. As Kuper carefully and clearly explains PPE and the importance of the Debating Union underpin the caste’s approach to government. Talking and writing entertainingly, with style, in order to win the day were the key outcomes from such an education for this group; little knowledge of the cause under discussion was no impediment to these future political leaders.

 We are all aware that there are networks that operate in all sectors of society. You will, however, be overwhelmed and surprised by quite how extensively this particular network has managed to secure so many of the key positions of influence in this country. Yes, this has always been the case historically – MacMillan’s government was crammed with his fellow school and university chums. That was sixty years ago, though, and we expect to live in a country nowadays where diversity and merit are prized -  and this should mean a  resulting diminution of leaders who were born to rule. Sadly, though, the situation is even worse nowadays. And for balance’s sake, I ought to point out that Labour has lost a tranche of trade unionists who once filled the ranks of their MPs. 

It is Rory Stewart in his excellent memoir ‘Politics on the Edge’ who highlights the consequences and problem with this situation. He describes meeting with Cameron, who had invited him to discuss his experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was bad enough that Cameron felt he knew more about the topic than Stewart because he had read books about the topic – there’s that arrogant, shallow PPE attitude in action. However, what most struck Stewart as someone who was a product of the same educational route as Cameron, was that Cameron’s four political advisors in the room were people who had been at Eton with the prime minister. The austerity strategy his government followed during the coalition was out of step with most other western governments whose countries bounced back more quickly than the UK after the financial crisis in 2008; and social inequality has increased significantly in this country since then. It seems fair to say that the key people in the room making these decisions might have paused for thought about the public sector cuts that austerity brought if they had been drawn from a wider circle. 

Kuper also makes the excellent point that even the MacMillan cabinet and other governments from times of greater class division could call on their experiences in the world wars. Military service and involvement in the war effort not only brought them into contact with people from different backgrounds but also gave them a political purpose to avoid future conflicts. This meant trying to create a better world where the catalysts for such conflicts – nationalism, societal divisions, unemployment and the evils set out in the Beveridge Report - were constantly being addressed. 

The post-Thatcher Oxford Tories had no such vision or cause. As Kuper explains: in the calm of a post -cold war world with relative prosperity, the chums were on the lookout for a cause. Unfortunately, the group who have mainly governed the country since then settled on the vision of a swashbuckling Britain reaffirming some form of imperial greatness. Inevitably this appealed to the chums’ innate ability to build emotive rhetoric around concepts of sovereignty and freedom, powerful words that can mean whatever you want them to mean. And equally inevitably, for some key members of the group, this meant Brexit and some cockeyed notion of independence minus the details. Oh, and as regards Cameron and Boris there was the opportunity for rivalries from their school and university days to be reignited – bugger the good of the country. Or rather, what they thought was best must be the best for the country – after all, their birthright was to be the natural, national leaders. As Cameron explained when asked why he wanted to be prime minister, he thought he’d be good at it. 

I could go on pulling from the book numerous outrageous examples of this group’s privileges and incompetence rooted in the particular education they received. I want to finish on a more positive note by pointing out that, during the same period when this narrow caste took over the country, real world class experts were being produced via this academic route. They, generally, kept their heads down, avoided the debating and political societies and got on with their work. Yes, some came from Eton but many others came from less fashionable schools, public or state. These were the scientists, engineers, medical scientists, social scientists and other experts from a range of fields who developed the vaccine, for example, and daily keep things ticking over in this country despite the worst efforts of the chums.

The Age of AI by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher 

This book’s tag line is “the book we all need” which is a bold claim. For someone like me, without a mathematical or technological brain who wants to understand what AI is, then it did partly deliver on its claim by providing an accessible explanation. There were, however, some issues that I didn’t think the book explored as fully as I would have liked but I’ll leave that caveat until the end. 

Huttenlocher is a computing academic and Schmidt a former executive chairman at Google so they are more than able to provide a basis of solid knowledge about the topic. Kissinger, a huge geo-political figure, presumably led on the implications of AI for the power struggle between nations. These were covered with some thoroughness in the second half of this short book along with the impact AI might have on human identity and what it could mean to be human in the future. Mind you, it was a little disconcerting to discover that Schmidt admitted in an interview that he “didn’t expect the internet to be used by governments to interfere in elections.” This reinforces this one of the book’s key conclusions, that leaders, governments and a variety of thinkers need to engage with AI now and create some form of regulatory framework or set of principles for its development – it’s too important to leave it to tech company executives, geeks, a handful of countries and the Doris Day philosophy – que sera, sera. 

If we accept that the I of AI can be misleading – and my friends who understand this topic better than me have made this point firmly – then it might be important for a ‘know nothing’ like me to refer to computer technology; and this technology is not new. Since not long after the second world war, computers have been undertaking some of mankind’s processing tasks and usually more quickly and precisely than humans can. Indeed, in a rather overlong section of this book, the history of mankind’s development of technology is set out, with the Enlightenment seen as the key moment when scientific thinking began to provide rational, technological solutions to the provision of society’s needs. A computer is just another form of this technology: planes and cars, agricultural machinery, communication systems, weaponry and many other inventions that do things better, faster, more efficiently than humans. Yet in all cases, including computers, humans create and direct this technology; they are the product of our capabilities. We are the masters. 

So, why has AI suddenly become a hot topic, with dire warnings from people like Musk that AI has the capacity to go beyond human capabilities, to, potentially, act with independence, the Terminator scenario? Well, if I’ve read this book properly, then the authors don’t make such claims for AI. Yes, AI can predict and make conclusions but that’s on data sets provided by humans and for a purpose also delineated by humans. However, AI cannot reflect on these predictions and conclusions and it doesn’t have intention, morality, motivation or emotion. The big change in recent years is in the philosophical approach or strategy we, mankind, now have in the way we use computers. And all the recent headlines about AI seem bound up with this approach which is termed computer learning. In the book, there is great use made of a couple of examples of computer learning in the chess world and big pharma’s development of antibiotics. The chess example is probably the most accessible way to understand computer learning. 

Years ago, the Deep Blue computer beat Gary Kasparov at chess but that was as a result of processing the precedents of successful chess strategies from numerous games of chess played by the grand masters. The philosophical shift was to simply provide the computer with the rules of chess and then instruct it to play innumerable games of chess against itself with a simple objective to maximise the number of wins over losses.  The result was that the computer learnt how to beat human opponents more often than the Deep Blue computer had been able to do. Of greater significance was that it came up with moves and strategies for victory that were beyond human comprehension. 

We now come to the explanation of AI that I struggle with. This book claims that this approach where the geeks stopped encoding human-distilled insights into machines meant that they were delegating the process itself to the machines. This implies that the machines seem to learn and create from experience. Yet the framework and perimeters for tasks still seem to be set by humans. The book makes the point that AI is constrained by code and its objective function – the products of human decisions and actions. As a result, AI is not self-aware; and, I repeat, it does not have intention, morality, motivation or emotion. I guess that’s why my ‘know something’ friends seemed intensely relaxed about the most dire existential concerns regarding AI. Nevertheless, the second half of th book did a good job analysing the dangers from rogue states or poor regulation that could lead to AI-related problems for mankind. The solutions, whilst sensible, were obvious and probably unrealistic at the moment. I assume it was Kissinger who  put forward the suggestion of using strategies from the age of Cold War détente and nuclear de-escalation as a template for the international community when responding to the growth of AI. 

This ignores the fact that the spread of AI capabilities has gone beyond a world where there were only two nuclear superpowers. Other solutions around government regulation made more sense but I suspect that, as with the printing press, we are at an early stage of trial and error, where companies and countries are perhaps too hubristic, too excited at AI’s possibilities to cooperate over regulation. 

If you know something about the subject then this book isn’t for you. That’s why most of my friends probably found its fairly simple explanations and potted history of human thought too constraining. I didn’t, and as I suspect most people are less well informed on this subject than my particular group of local male friends, I would recommend it as a good, but not essential introduction to this subject. However, here’s my caveat. Kissinger’s involvement and the potentially existential threat of AI when combined with the industrial military complex made this a priority of the book. However, I believe that the impact on AI on human identity and behaviour, which we can already see in the attitudes of the younger generation of digital natives seem more relevant to most people’s experiences. And that’s before we consider the impact on human work and leisure. That focus was, I believe, under-explored by the authors. 

To finish on an apocalyptic note in keeping with the current discussion of this topic, the book makes a fair point that AI has no common sense. Or to put it another way, no common sense unless the precision of the instructions and contextual information given to AI for a particular task are sufficient. So, for example, AI won’t stop to reflect and consider if instructed to find and implement a solution to the following problem: maximise crop growth in a particular area. One way of doing so might be to get rid of the humans who occupy the potential land for the crops. Only if it is built into the coding for the task will AI stop rather than take this logically correct decision for the task it has been set. 

That, of course, is one of those unlikely worst-case scenarios and as my friend, Mark, would undoubtedly point out – we could always just pull out the plug

Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar by Tom Holland  

Having read a few reviews by academics it seems that Holland, a popular and respected academic himself, has given the reader an authentic portrayal of the dynasty of emperors from Julius Caesar to Nero. This is the line of emperors who lasted for a relatively short period in the BC dog days and the early first century. Yet these are the emperors whom we see as emblematic of Rome even though that great empire lasted for a thousand years. 

It’s easy to see why we focus on these men and their politically active mothers, wives, daughters and mistresses. Their stories are well documented: Roman power was at its zenith and these colourful characters seem to encompass some of humanity’s greatest and most base qualities turned up to eleven. Holland’s strength is giving the reader all the most lurid, gobsmacking and peculiar features of the Roman world whilst setting out a coherent analysis of the power dynamics that this great dynasty was struggling to control. It’s a perfect mix of engrossing narrative history allied to a rigorous academic exploration of everything we know about the imperial family and the cast of political, military and entrepreneurial figures orbiting around them. 

The story starts appropriately with Caesar and his brilliant, bloody and daring ascent to become the first man of Rome. Those of you who know your Shakespeare, will be aware that he was assassinated when he became too big for his boots. Rome was a republic that had long ago rejected kings. The wealthy patricians who ran the senate had benefitted from the riches and triumphs Caesar brought to Rome from his savage pacification of foreign outposts in France and Germany, but they also feared him. Of course, his death by honourable men, the noble Brutus among them, sparked a civil war that was ultimately won by Octavius Caesar (later Augustus) via a spicy excursion to Cleopatra’s Egypt. 

Augustus’ defeat of his former ally, Antony, in Egypt, marks the start of the eponymous dynasty. Augustus, first with threats and brutality, established his authority over the senate. However, he played a game that his successors tried to copy – he exercised ultimate power but gave the impression of deferring to the senate and the republican ethos of Rome. He was masterful in making strong marriage alliances, buying the loyalty of the army and maintaining the Pax Romana. This not only brought in a period of stability and economic growth but banished the people’s memory of the savage civil war that had preceded it. As in modern day China, the people were happy to give up some of the freedoms of the republican past for a more peaceful, secure life. 

Augustus really was an operator. He built grand buildings and public facilities to increase his popularity; and he cultivated an image similar to our own royal family that was respectable, admirable but just accessible enough. He died in his bed, a success in itself considering what was to come for his successors. He was also able to identify his immediate successor, Tiberius – so not a royal family but, nevertheless, a family that could pass on power to the next in line. 

I have read an excellent novel by John Williams about Augustus and I am fascinated by the way he wrestled the empire to his will and was probably the most influential Roman emperor of all time. Yet because many of his talents were organisational and of a Machiavellian kind his story lacks the pizzaz of the rest of his dynasty. That’s not a problem for Holland, though, as he gives us the whole gaudy spectacle of Caligula’s and Nero’s rule as well as the unlikely successes of Claudius before he too became a victim of one of the many ruthless women fighting for their bloodline’s supremacy.

 Whilst these latter stories are familiar, especially from Graves’ ‘I Claudius’ books, Holland gives us a fully rounded, psychological portrait of the emperors. Caligula’s cruelties, for example, seem more comprehensible when you learn about the precarious nature of his childhood, the bloody fate of his immediate family and the humiliations he suffered at the hands of the senate. 

Tiberius is also a fascinatingly complex character who struggled for so long as the model Roman soldier and leader, pacifying the wilder edges of the empire and upholding the ideals of the republic through his deference to the senate. Until, in old age, and depressed by the loss of heirs and a sense of under appreciation, he seems to have given up to spend his later years on Capri. I’ll leave you to discover what he got up to there. 

I thought this was a first-rate history book. It is as accessible as it is knowledgeable. If you enjoy Holland on The Rest is History podcast, then I am certain you will respond positively to this book.

Johnson at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell 

I wasn’t intending to read this 500 pages plus account of Johnson’s disastrous tenure as Prime Minister. After all, I lived through the scandals and incompetence, the dishonesty and chaos; and, like many people, I understood that this was all so predictable from the very moment he replaced May. There was his well-documented record of sexual incontinence, lies and dysfunction, even though he managed not to bungle being London Mayor. His only ministerial post as Foreign Secretary was a total, unmitigated disaster. 

But you know all this, and so did I, and I wasn’t keen, therefore, to plough through a detailed account of how he managed to add to this record of infamy and catastrophe as PM. In addition, there was another reason why I was wary of this book, and it doesn’t reflect well on me. Seldon, as I’m sure you know, is a prolific political historian who has also been a successful headteacher. Now as someone who also held this latter role, there is no way I would have had the intellectual and physical energy to write books even if I had the talent to do so. Jealousy, therefore, has always kept me away from his books. 

Luckily for me, therefore, my friend Mark, who shares my interest in contemporary political books, persuaded me to read this. And how grateful I am that he did. This is a hugely well researched book, with access to all the key players, who have revealed the murkiest details and secrets from within the heart of government. It is also very well written – drat Seldon – and narrates the machinations of those around him and by Johnson himself, with brio and flair. It also achieves the impossible – no, don’t worry, it didn’t make me like or sympathise with Johnson - it did make me aware that things were even worse than I could have imagined. However, it was more than just a sensationalist expose. The writers are fair to Johnson by setting out what they considered to be the qualities and skills needed to succeed as Prime Minister within the specific context and events he faced. Such an analytical, objective approach makes the conclusion, therefore, that he was totally lacking any of those qualities and skills needed to be effective even more damning. 

Memory is a funny thing: it seems as if the events between Johnson’s ascendancy in 2019 and downfall in 2022 were from pre-history bearing in mind the speed with which events have tumbled one upon another since – an endless Tory election campaign, Truss and her mad budget followed by the economic crash, the ongoing impact of events in Ukraine and Gaza, oh and then a remarkable election outcome, with the electorate showing little enthusiasm for any party … and then there’s the monarch’s death and the riots. Nevertheless, as I stated at the beginning, we think we know the narrative arc of Johnson’s story. If you are a supporter of his – and despite Mad Nad’s protestations, the Tories got rid of him because it was the public not the herd that turned against him – then you might see him as a tragic hero who got the big calls right, was the people’s premier and fell because his fatal flaw undermined his great qualities. Indeed, I was gobsmacked to read that one of his inner circle, on the day of his resignation, touchingly explained to Johnson that his problems were all because he was too kind, too loyal, too trusting. Johnson’s shameless resignation speech and subsequent petulance seems to suggest that he concurs with this theory that he was brought down by those around him even though he was doing a great job. 

The evidence set out in this book points in another direction – Johnson brought himself down. He had no thought through vision about what he wanted to do for the country and, therefore, there was no strategy to do anything beyond slogans, publicity gestures and one-off gimmicks. He was lazy, lacked intellectual resilience and focus and valued his instincts and enthusiasms over evidence. Most damagingly, though, and by far the most interesting and damning section of this book was his inability to build up an effective team of advisors and cabinet around him as well as establishing an effective, accountable working relationship with officials and the government machine. 

He ran his government like a personal fiefdom with courtiers swirling around him seeking his attention and favour. There was a huge paradox at the heart of the No. 10 operation. On the one hand, Johnson was always craving a Willie Whitelaw or Angi Hunter figure, who was totally loyal and able to turn his incoherent and capricious wishes into effective actions and policy. Yet, on the other hand, he was often swayed on a course of action by the last person he had talked to and so constantly shifted his position on issues; and he also enjoyed keeping his advisors wrong footed by creating different cliques. These power bases were often in conflict with one another because Johnson was incapable of clearly setting out areas of responsibility and accountability. The arguments about who should be at this meeting, or who was briefing what about whom must have reminded Seldon of the playground disputes with which he would have had to deal. It did me, anyway, and it was pathetic because these weren’t school children but, supposedly, the brightest and best. 

The worst thing is that Johnson seemed to encourage this argy bargy between his advisors, cabinet and senior civil servants but then when it all got too messy he would swoop in and, with exasperated petulance, take personal control of the issue under discussion. The problem is that for most of these issues he had not done the work to have any mastery of the situation and, perhaps Ukraine aside, he quickly lost interest. And yes, it was that bad. 

As you can see, this book made me rather cross. Not just at Johnson but at the way our politics is organised that allowed this buffoon to become prime minister. If you’ve read Rory Stewart’s memoir or Isabel Hardman’s ‘Why We Get the Wrong Politicians’ then you will be familiar with the problems in our parliamentary democracy. And no, I can’t chuckle about the entertainment he provided, not when you read the section on his handling of the second wave of Covid in the Autumn and Winter of 2020. His failings as prime minister at this time and his inability to take certain decisions most likely led to more people dying than should have done. It’s perhaps best, therefore, if you have high blood pressure not to read this book. If you have any residual sympathy for Johnson, though, perhaps you should. 

If you do get hold of a copy but don’t want to plough through pages of immorality and incompetence, can I recommend you read the excellent section about Cummings’ time as his main advisor. Now I can accept that he is an extremely clever man with some interesting ideas about how to improve the government machine but as one official reflects in the book, it was obvious that he was psychologically and emotionally dysfunctional and would inevitably blow up damaging everything around him. It is well documented here that the blow up was around a power struggle with Carrie Symonds and her supporters. Playground behaviour, again, although I have perhaps been a bit hard on the pupils at my school in this comparison.

A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict by Ilan Pappe 

I have read several weighty books over the years about this tragic, seemingly intractable situation yet the history and the facts (all of which are contested) that I get from these tomes never seem to enable me to grasp the essentials of this conflict.

 I am instinctively drawn to the Israeli narrative of a search for their traditional homeland. Aside from my family connections, Israel is a democracy surrounded by autocratic and theocratic regimes. Their lively internal political debate seems more akin to our own in comparison to the oppression in the countries arraigned against it such as Iran. Yet I understand that I am heavily influenced by a pro- Israeli media as well as my own memory of events such as the 1972 Munich tragedy. My wavering attention has also meant I have accepted the narrative around the Oslo peace talks that paints Arafat as the rock upon which the hope of a two state solution was shattered. 

Yet, I am aware there is another story of a people forced out of its homeland by a combination of western guilt following the second world war and a strong Zionist lobby in the west that won the argument for the reassigning of territories in this relatively small area in the Middle East. And even before the recent events that followed on from the horrific 7^th October attack, it seems clear that there was a form of apartheid operating in the Gaza strip and West Bank that seems to be increasingly similar to the situation from those dark days in South Africa before Mandela’s release.

 The problem is, whenever my sympathy kicks in for the Palestinians, I remember the joyous celebrations in Gaza when 9/11 occurred or the fact that they voted in the Hamas regime. As I say, stating the blindingly obvious, it’s complicated. No wonder I, along with millions of others, feel tempted to turn my back on something I can’t properly comprehend. 

That is of course why I chose to read this book. It was reasonably well-reviewed in several magazines although the online comments mirrored in their five stars and one star reviews the dividing lines between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian viewpoints. However, it had two big attractions for me: its length and the fact that it is written by an Israeli academic. 

Nevertheless, it still proved problematic. Whilst Pappe writes with the air of an objective chronicler of the evidence and events over the last 150 odd years that have led us to the current situation, it’s not quite that simple. He presents two enemies: the western powers who seem keen to move the Jewish diaspora away from Europe; and then there’s the Zionists in Israel who he presents as moving seamlessly from pushy, mendacious invaders to full blown colonialists. However, close reading in several instances reveals his bias when, for example, he focuses on the Israeli government’s heavy-handed response to the Palestinians but minimises the catalyst often referring in deliberately sketchy descriptions to an attack on some Israeli farmers or an uprising without ever detailing the deaths and damage these inflicted. 

Despite this, though, I would recommend the book as a good starting point for understanding the conflict. In particular, the sections prior to the 1948 Nakba are really clear and informative. I now have a much better grasp of the Balfour Agreement and the British Mandate in Palestine. When we get to the modern era some of the clarity was lost because of the complicating involvement of foreign powers in support of the Palestinians. 

Going back to where I started, though, I now believe I was wrong about Arafat’s role in the Oslo Peace Accords. If like me a cloud of incomprehension descends when watching news reports from the Middle East, this is worth a read, biases and all. As Steve Richards, one of my favourite political commentators always says: you can’t understand what’s really going on unless you understand the context. Well, there’s plenty of context, and history, to this conflict and it seems to me the best place to start.

The Waiter by Ajay Chowdhury

I’ve seen this recent novel described as a different sort of crime novel and ground-breaking. It’s not. It is a very entertaining and satisfying detective story, with many of the tropes of that appeal to readers of this genre, people like me. Its difference comes from the fact that it is set among the Anglo-Indian community in Brick Lane and the action alternates between this location and Kolkotta; and, with one minor exception, it has no white characters.

The waiter of the title is Kamil Rahman, the son of a retired legend of the Kolkotta police force and formerly a promising police detective in his own right. We quickly learn that he has been forced to leave India in disgrace over his mishandling of a high-profile murder case. He is lying low in London with Saibal and Maya, friends of his father who own a restaurant called Tandoori Knights, whilst he makes sense of what has happened to him. 

When Kamil is working at a glamorous party being given by Rakesh, a wealthy businessman and friend of Saibal, a grisly opportunity arises for Kamil to get his life back on track. Rakesh is clubbed to death and tipped into his swimming pool. The obvious suspect is the millionaire’s second and younger wife, Neha, his ex-secretary. The clues all point to her and most particularly that she has a motive as Rakesh had publicly announced at the party his intention to give away his fortune to charitable concerns. However, Saibal, Maya and their daughter, Anjoli, Neha’s best friend, are convinced of her innocence. They urge Kamil to resurrect his detective skills and provide him with access to a community that are wary of the police. Kamil now has a purpose and a chance to rebuild his reputation. 

Kamil is a likeable protagonist. He is intelligent, methodical and dogged. At first, his confidence in his abilities is denuded and he is still in a state of despondency about the loss of his career, home and fiancée. However, as he becomes intrigued by the case and is bolstered by Anjoli’s ebullience as his sidekick, he begins to uncover a series of secrets about Rakesh’s finances and a number of long-held deceptions within the Anglo-Indian community. 

We are all aware of many characteristics of this community, including the importance of family and links back to India, and these become important features of the plot. This is underlined by the narrative structure that alternates between Kamil’s present investigation and the murder investigation that had precipitated his downfall. We learn that Kamil had been assigned to the high-profile murder of one of Bollywood’s top actors. Kamil’s junior status had left him susceptible to pressure from his boss for a quick resolution even if this meant cutting corners. Eventually, Kamil refuses to play ball and persists with some dangerous lines of investigation that threaten everything he cares about. 

It is not really a spoiler to say that these two plot strands eventually coalesce, but it is done in a satisfying manner. This is because the two worlds are concisely and authentically realised. The characters may have slightly different backgrounds and cultural influences than my own but the dilemmas, motives and behaviour are exactly the same as we all face. 

This book has received some splendid reviews and I believe there is talk of it being turned into a film or television series. I can see that. It doesn’t mean the book is perfect – I found the eventual resolution a little too pat. Also, as a greedy person the descriptions of wonderful Indian cuisine had my culinary juices enflamed. But hey, that’s my problem and testimony to the crowd-pleasing nature of this book.

The Appeal by Janice Hallet

You might think this whodunnit’s USP, that it is composed almost entirely of email exchanges between the characters, would be some form of limitation on the tension and mystery – but that would be a wrong conclusion. In fact, I found this to be a perfect example of a page turning novel and one that I devoured in large, absorbed chunks desperate to discover the answers to all the conundrums it sets up. 

The framing device is that a criminal barrister, Rodney Tanner, instructs two of his legal team, Charlotte and Femi, to look over the evidence for a case in order to provide him with some fresh insight. At the start, we are not sure about the stage this case has reached, or whether he has provided his colleagues with all the information. After this initial exchange, however, we are in exactly the same place as these legal detectives in having to work our way through a glut of emails from a glut of characters. 

The setting is that staple of a traditional, golden era murder mystery: Lower Lockwood is a cosy English village, probably in the Home Counties. The centre of village life is The Grange, an upmarket hotel and conference centre that provides employment and business for a large number of the local residents, and is presided over by the Haywards, undoubtedly the community’s alpha family. They also run the village’s amateur dramatics society, the focus of the community’s cultural and social life, which is about to start work on its next production, ‘All My Sons”. 

Into this seemingly tranquil, conventional society, Charlotte and Femi find out about the arrival of two new members of the community and drama group, Samantha and Kel Greenwood. They have returned in mysterious circumstances from working overseas for a medical charity and begin to stir things up. At the same time, Poppy Hayward, a young member of the alpha family, falls seriously ill and is in need of expensive, ground-breaking medical treatment. Of course, the community falls over itself to raise funds in order to ingratiate themselves with the Haywards. The Greenwoods, though, smell a rat, the rehearsals for the play become a tense arena and we realise, as Femi and Charlotte delve further into the emails, that a crime has taken place. 

It is a long time before it becomes clear exactly what crime or crimes have taken place. Helpfully, Femi and break off from the perusal of the messages to summarise what has happened and what deductions can be made about the motives and behaviour of each member of the acting group and the medical staff involved with Poppy. Eventually, when they have worked their way through the emails, Roderick explains exactly what he wants from them as well as further information about the case. However, this is not a cop out where the reader is provided with information that makes everything clear. We, like his colleagues, still have to deduce, and the pleasure of the book is that we do it alongside two perceptive, intelligent individuals who have kept notes and who bounce ideas off one another. 

The denouement is satisfying and appropriate; and, oh, I haven’t mentioned that the book is also very funny in a typical English way. Lower Lockwood is a class-conscious, gossipy microcosm of society - think Vicar of Dibley, Dad’s Army, Pride and Prejudice – with a whole tranche of secrets and deceits lying just below the surface. Highly recommended.

Take Your Breath Away by Linwood Barclay

This is the latest in a long line of brilliant thrillers that this man has written over the last ten years or so. He is the author of the best thriller I have ever read, “No Time for Goodbye”, but this in my view nearly equals that book.

Andy Carville has had to change his name because, some years ago, whilst he was away for the weekend with his best friend, Greg, his wife Brie disappeared. No trace of her was ever found and Andy became the police’s number one suspect. But they could not find one piece of substantive evidence against him. 

Ever since, Brie’s sister Isabel has been desperately encouraging the police to arrest him.Eventually, he sold the house for less than it was worth. The new owner tears the old house down and builds a modern structure in its place. Andy has moved a few miles away and changed his name from Mason to Carville. He has tried to restart his life and Jayne, his new partner, has been a substantial help to him in that regard as has his old friend, Greg.

Now, six years later, he receives a phone call from his old next-door neighbour, Max. A woman has turned up who looks a lot like Brie and has stood in the old driveway and demanded to know where her old house has gone. She has made a nuisance of herself with the new owners and has driven off leaving her shopping strewn across the driveway. The new owner has filmed part of what happened. When Andy looks at that footage, it does look like Brie.

The police are informed and old questions and suspicions are reactivated. Has Brie returned and, if she has, where has she been and what has she been doing?

This narrative, as always with Barclay, throws up plenty of red herrings and also you discover that some small issues are going to matter in the end like Andy’s habit of tearing up beermats and flicking them away.

This setup is extraordinary and leads Andy into a tortuous sequence of events as he tries to piece together what has happened while the police and Brie’s family continue to harass him in their certainty that he ultimately killed his wife.

I read the book in two days despite its hardback edition being 449 pages long. I was simply gripped by Barclay’s habit of keeping the story going at a cracking pace and constantly leading to more remarkable revelations.

Because of the very nature of the book, to tell you any more would be giving away the ending or leading you towards the ending.

I recommend this book and this author without reservation.

The Cask by Freeman Wills Croft 

This 1920 novel is considered a masterpiece from the early days of the detective novel. It starts in dramatic fashion when a heavy, wooden cask splits whilst being unloaded at a busy London dock revealing some sovereigns and a human hand crammed inside. A dock worker is left to stand guard whilst a shipping clerk goes to fetch the police – remember, there are few phones or cars and life moves at a gentler pace. When the police arrive, the cask and its guard have disappeared and the plot begins to thicken. 

Eventually Inspector Burnley of Scotland Yard tracks down the cask, and the body of a woman who has been strangled to death is recovered. From this point on, Croft takes us through a detailed procedural investigation as Burnley’s team painstakingly work out the movements of the cask, the identity of the dead woman and the range of possible suspects. This involves Burnley travelling over to Paris from where the cask had been despatched to work alongside the French police. There is great cordiality between Burnley and his counterpart Lafayette both of whom approach the investigation with a thoroughness that we have all seen in detective television series over the years. This book is a clear riposte to the brilliant deductions of detectives such as Holmes. The police here are presented as intelligent and assiduous, carefully checking all alibis and information. Yet Croft’s writing ensures the proceedings of the case never drag. Of course, the social history helps – Bradshaw is used to check train times from London to Brussels, witnesses are contacted through adverts in the local newspaper, and up to date technology, a Remington typewriter, provides a crucial clue. 

About halfway through the book, Burnley and Lafayette’s hard work has built up a solid case against a particular suspect. However, friends of the suspect engage a private detective, La Touche, to reappraise the police investigation. There is no criticism of the police’s work, in fact La Touche admires the case they have put together, but he simply sifts through the evidence, digging ever more deeply until crucial anomalies in the evidence emerge. 

The pleasure of this book comes from spending time with all the different detectives as they breakfast together, discuss the case, interview witnesses, hypothesise over a leisurely lunch and so on. They are all good chaps and congenial company. Yet the horrific nature of the crime is not ignored and there is a dramatic, action-packed ending as the truth is finally revealed. 

Another one for lovers of traditional detective stories.

Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith

As Cormoran Strike, Galbraith’s dogged private detective would assert: verify everything. So, in that spirit, I will assume nothing about your knowledge of this writer and her work. Galbraith is the name J.K. Rowling has used over the last few years when writing a set of murder mystery novels featuring Strike and his partner Robin Ellacott. These novels have been critically well-received and popular enough to garner a very good BBC television adaptation. 

Be warned, this is a monster book that takes nearly all of it 900 plus pages to reach its denouement. Galbraith is as concerned with exploring the complicated personal lives of his two detectives as much as unravelling the central mystery. This involves solving a cold case involving a determined, attractive and principled woman, Dr Margot Bamborough, who went missing forty years previously and, though her disappearance was a high profile case, nothing was ever heard of her again. DI Talbot, the initial investigating officer, was convinced that the doctor was another victim of Dennis Creed, the now imprisoned serial killer, and it drove him mad trying to prove it. Margot’s now grown up daughter, Anna, is desperately seeking some sort of closure and agrees to give Strike a year to discover anything further about this cold case. 

Galbraith’s method is to sit the reader alongside Strike and Robin as they dig away at the mystery, re-building the back story of all the characters whose lives were affected by the disappearance, or who came into contact with Margot in the final hours and days before she disappeared, or who had fallen under police suspicion in the original investigation. This takes us with the detective duo into the London practice where Margot worked and fought against the sexism of some colleagues and the jealousies of others. We also learn about her strange marriage to Roy, another medical man, whose subsequent re-marriage to the family’s nanny and his strange decision to keep the details of her mother’s death secret from Anna for many years arouse Strike’s suspicions. After four decades, Robin spends a large part of her time tracking down Margot’s ex-colleagues and especially her former boyfriend, the seedy artist Paul Satchell, whom she had surprisingly met up with only a few days before her disappearance. 

Whilst all this is going on Strike and Robin juggle several other cases they are investigating with their team of private eyes whilst negotiating complex, tricky personal lives. Robin is going through a messy divorce from her childhood sweetheart. Despite the fact he cheated on her, she feels a mix of guilt about her job being more important to her than her marriage and a sense of grievance that he is playing hardball in the divorce proceedings. Strike’s personal life is on a different level of messiness. For large chunks of the novel he is drawn away from the agency to his childhood home in Cornwall to support his dying aunt and distraught uncle who had brought him up when he simply became too much for his glamorous but dysfunctional mother. At the same time, he is coping with constant pestering from his ex, Charlotte, one of the most beautiful women in London but as dysfunctional in her own way as his mother. He knows that nothing good can come of her efforts to re-engage with him especially because she has remarried and has twins. Yet he cannot quite abandon her, not least because he fears what she might do to herself. As the novel progresses the final thorn in his side emerges – his father, Johnny Rokeby, a Mick Jagger-like character, wants to re-establish contact after years of deliberate abandonment. Stroke is angered at his father’s sheer effrontery which is sharpened by the suffering of his aunt and uncle, the people he considers his real parents. 

And then for both Robin and Strike there is the unresolved nature of their own relationship. There is an undeclared and close bond based on a mutual respect and affection that their intense work has engendered. Robin knows Strike is a good man who always tries to help people in trouble; but she is maddened by his closed up and often distant nature whilst understanding that his complicated family background and personal life have caused him more damage that his amputated leg, the result of his military service. Robin has her own demons linked to a sexual assault in her past and her sense that as a thirty year old divorcee life is passing her by. Underpinning their relationship is a sexual tension of which they are both aware but which they both fear could damage their close friendship. 

Those bare facts only cover the skeletal structure of this sprawling novel. The central investigation is gripping and the denouement powerful and satisfying. However, the themes of loss, abandonment and the complexities involved in forming positive relationships are as important as the resolution to Margot’s disappearance. As a result, the book received mixed reviews. Whilst praise for her writing is consistent some critics felt that the pace was slow and the focus too dispersed and distracted. I read this whilst spending a leisurely week in Southwold and so this delving into the characters’ backgrounds and the painstaking re-creation of key events from forty years previously matched my reading mood perfectly. It helps that Robin and Strike are fully realised and likeable company, good-hearted and self-aware. As a result, I was happy to spend several hours in their company.

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie - Review by Terry Heiser

I have my favourites: spy novels by le Carre; detective novels by Raymond Chandler; police novels by Mankell and Donna Leon; old-fashioned murder mysteries by P. D. James; the novels of gentleman detectives like Sherlock Holmes or Fandurin (Botris Akunin). 

But on the whole, the great majority are not literary classics that will stand the test of time. “Crime and Punishment" is a great novel about crime. “Bleak House“ is full of criminality. They are still being read 100 years or more after they are written. Most of the novels by Agatha Christie and the hundreds of other popular writers on crime will not survive that long. But some will make a case for a few. Such as Raymond Chandler. 

What made me choose “Death on the Nile" for us to read was that it is a typical Christie novel. and wanted to look at two things.  Why has the English "country house" novel endured; and how did a second rate writer like Chrtistie create characters which rise far above the level of the novels in which they live and populate the public imagination? 

First-the endurance of the country house novel. Christie wrote 38 novels and 65 short stories. “Death on the Nile” was written at the height of her popularity in 1939. She published many under the imprint of “The Crime Club” (pub.Collins). In “Death”, Christie introduces us in the first 30 pages to all the dozen or so characters - Poirot. himself, and Colonel Race, who serves as an assistant in solving the mystery, but in such a way as to flatter Poirot’s “little grey cells"; 

The main murder victim is Linett Ridgeway, “the richest girl in England”  and her friend Jacqueline de Bellefort; the man she steals from Jacqueline and marries Simon Doyle. 

It is usually said that Christie can only create cardboard characters. This it broadly true, since they all serve to form part of the puzzle that has to be solved. But she is skilful at giving them each enough life to make them potential suspects with a motive for murder. And she can do more than that. e.g. Cordelia, the plain Jane who is brighter and more sensible than others think, comes alive on the page. 

Once on the boat, she moves the story on rapidly with an absorbing series of murders - that of Linnet herself, and two others who we find have to be eliminated as otherwise they would give the game away -Mrs. Otterburn and Louise Bourget. 

On the night of the murder, Jacqueline argues with Simon and supposedly shoots him in the leg. The gun disappears. Jacqueline, in a state of shock, is sedated. Linnett is found by Poirot murdered with a J scrawled in blood beside her and her necklace is missing. There are clues aplenty - rosary, nail polish and a velvet shawl. But halfway through, in case you are not keeping up, we are given a memorandum by Colonel Race summing up the key facts so far. 

Then comes the classic Christie denouement, with the gathering of the survivors together to reveal the arch-criminal as Jacqueline, who has conspired with Linnett’s husband to murder Linnett. The story is now well known to all whom like this sort of thing because of frequent TV reshowing of the film vesions. But the denouement probably comes as a surprise to most readers who pick up the novel for the first time. 

One middle-aged lad, a snob from the English Home Counties, says Poirot is “an old mountebank! He’s all talk and moustaches.” Far from it! 

“Death” is the kind of novel of the golden age of English crime fiction, presided over by Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh. Some critics dismissed this particular genre with contempt. Edmond Wilson once wrote an essay in 1943 entitled “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd”? 

Raymond Chandler wrote another famous essay in 1944 - only a year previously - 'The Simple Art of Murder'. He concludes that the English genre is too out of touch with the modern world to succeed. He favours the hard-boiled world of his own hero, Philip Marlow, who goes down the mean streets of Los Angeles to rescue the weak and oppressed. His model is Dashiell Hammett who created the detective Sam Spade and wrote the” The Maltese Falcon”. 

Subsequently, in 1946, George Orwell published 'The Decline of the English Murder', an essay which both charts and laments the demise of a specific kind of criminal: the English gentleman-murderer, who commits his crimes in a domestic, often suburban setting. 

But the truth is that classic “country house" novel continues to be read and thrive in the hands of authors like P. D. James. These novels all present an enclosed and hierarchically ordered society, in which everyone knows their place and role. This order is shattered by a murder. The detective-professional or amateur – arrives on the scene and solves the puzzle.  And the reader follows the detective and attempts to solve the puzzle under his or her detection. The murderer is unmasked and order is restored. 

There is another kind of mystery here - how secondary writers like Christie can create a character who enters into and remains into the public imagination. It is one thing for a major author to do this -unforgettable characters like Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist and Beccy  Sharp,

 But what about immortal characters by lesser writers, who produced at best what Orwell called “good bad books”.

 -Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and his monster. -Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, who was so popular that the public would not let him die. Conan Doyle had to bring him back to life after he had left him for dead at the foot of the Reichenbach falls after a struggle with the “Napoleon of Crime”, Dr. Moriarty ; 

-Dracula, created by Bram Stoker, Henry Irving’s stage manager;  -Svengali, created by the artist and actor du Maurier; 

-Buchan’s Richard Hannay; -  Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond; -Fleming’s Bond; and characters from children’s fiction like Biggles and Bunter. Christie of course has left us with two 

- Miss Marple and Poirot. How did she do it? After all Poirot seems like a character created from mother’s dressing up box as a stage foreigner.  At one level, he is a collection of clichés: 

-dapper, fastidious 

- “I like an audience. I am vain. I am puffed up with conceit. I like to say “See how clever Poirot is”….. 

-“I am constantly in the habit of being bright” 

-a lover of symmetry, order, cleanliness, good food and fine wine; 

-courteous but impatient when in pursuit; 

-a stock foreigner who eloquently mangles stock English phrases, hates the outdoors and adores central heating; 

-above all a thinker who solves problems by using “his little grey cells” 

Of course, it is true that film and TV have extended the life of these larger than life characters. It would be difficult for the middle-aged to see Poirot as anyone but David Suchet; a good actor can give a depth to this type of literary creation that the authors could not. 

Readers of Carl Jung - if there are any left, will explain Poirot’s impact by reference to a Jungian archetype.

The Blackbird by Tim Weaver 

Like many of the best contemporary thrillers this book starts with a powerful mystery that seems to defy rational explanation; and then we wait expectantly travelling alongside the investigator as he or she chips away, like Michelangelo when carving David from an enigmatic block of marble, to reveal everything. In this case our guide is David Raker, a private investigator who has made his reputation finding missing people and solving mysteries that have defeated the authorities. As a result, he has a newspaper profile and a mixed relationship with the police.

 The enigma here facing Raker has been brought to him by the desperate parents of Cate Gascoigne. She and her husband Aiden had been involved in an horrific car crash on Gatton Hill near Reigate. The happy smiling couple was captured on CCTV a few seconds before they plunged down a ravine and their car burst into flames; they didn’t stand a chance. Yet when the police arrived on the scene, called by two separate witnesses, there were no burnt bodies. And as the months passed by nothing has turned up – no miraculous escape and reappearance, no explanation for what happened to them. 

Raker initially follows two strands: the witnesses and the background of the missing couple. Cate, a vivacious, determined photographer is working on a new project related to historic crimes and this seems a fertile area for exploration. Cate and Aiden seem like a golden couple – attractive, successful and popular. Raker is, therefore, even more intrigued that it appears Cate’s new project provided one of the few examples of conflict in their solid relationship. 

From that point onwards, the plot twists and turns in a pleasurable way. Weaver is equally adept at drawing the reader into the minutiae of Raker’s investigation and thrilling them with muscular descriptions of action scenes. A great deal of the success of such a book rests on how much the reader enjoys Raker’s company. At first, I found him a little too cool, composed and competent. However, this is the reassuring front he gives to his clients because he has great empathy for their suffering. In addition, Raker has secrets of his own that make him vulnerable. Although this manifests itself in a totally independent narrative strand that is going on in a separate part of his life, it is no great spoiler to say that Weaver gradually melds the different parts of Raker's life into the central mystery. 

No more spoilers, other than to say that the extended denouement is thrilling and tense. It is satisfying because it is just on the right side of that clichéd but important marker: the suspension of disbelief test. Weaver has written a series of books featuring Raker, and so the best recommendation I can give is that when I’m looking for a page turning, comfort read in the future, I’m happy to try another one of them.

Rum Justice by Jolien Harmsen 

It would be so easy to write a sniffy review of this book. It has a crime that becomes the focus for the last section of the book with a court room denouement. That’s why it’s in the page turner section. However, the over-writing and various tangents from this plot make it anything but a page-turner. Yet the circumstances why I read this book and its insight into a society of which I was ignorant meant that it held my interest throughout even if I had to skim read certain sections.

My friends, Chris and Hilary, recently holidayed in St Lucia and the setting for this story, St. Cecilia, is a fictionalised version of this Caribbean island. The story is narrated by Claire, an Australian writer and journalist, raised in Europe, who has made her home on St Cecilia. Again, based on Chris and Hilary’s account of meeting Rum Justice’s writer, it seems that Claire is a lightly fictionalised version of Jolien Harmsen. 

When a local fisherman discovers the body of Riley Jackson, a well-liked odd job man who had recently been working for a wealthy American couple, Hazel and Michael Cunningham, yachting in the Caribbean, Claire is persuaded by his distraught family to use her journalistic skills to investigate what happened. That is, of course, an indictment on the effectiveness of the local police but more of that in a moment. Claire follows the most obvious line of enquiry, the Cunninghams. After all the wife had been acting in a drunken, erratic manner prior to the discovery of the body, brandishing a handgun and talking about wanting to shoot up something. In addition, there are rumours that she and Riley had been sexually involved. The police certainly believe in the guilt of the Americans but their  stretched resources and less than meticulous procedures leave many unanswered questions. Forensic evidence is lacking, timelines are confused and all that seems to tie the Americans to the crime is the wife’s behaviour and a possible motivation for the husband based on a sexual jealousy. Nevertheless, the case goes to court as the local politics demand some attempt to solve another senseless death. 

The murder mystery is only part of the interest in this baggy, Boris trolley (veers all over the place) novel. The most interesting parts were some of the descriptions of the everyday life of the island’s inhabitants in what is superficially an island paradise but with a fatal underlying culture of violence. The writer also examines the antipathy felt towards wealthy American tourists – it’s a classic compromise where their cash is needed but not the cultural arrogance. What is most interesting, though, is that Harmsen gives the American perspective a voice; in this case a journalist, part of the press pack who descend on the island for the trial. The discussion between the journalist and Claire may be contrived and typical of this novice writer’s structural clumsiness but, nonetheless, provides a balanced view of the relationship between the USA and the island. 

I’ve written more than I intended about this novel because I can’t really recommend it. The thing is, though, Chris and Hilary’s personal acquaintance with the island and the writer provided ample strands of conversation when we discussed this at our book group. Therefore, I think you should only read this if you know Chris and Hilary or have visited St. Lucia.

No More Lies by Rachel Abbott 

Abbott is an immensely popular writer of thrillers and has had great success with her series of novels featuring DCI Tom Douglas. The praise heaped on this novel as one of the very best thrillers of 2023 is hyperbolic; fellow writers, in particular, laud her combination of exciting plot twists and psychological drama. 

Hmm … well this is a good story and can certainly be deemed a page turner. I did not think, however, that it was as spectacular as the responses set out in the book’s blurb suggested. For a start, it uses a narrative framework that has been presented before and more effectively by other writers. It’s that idea of a group of people who were once a close-knit band of friends in their youth; now grown up and grown apart they are forced to face up to the consequences of a guilty incident from this shared past. If you want to see this idea explored in a thrilling, psychologically acute book, try Barbara Vine’s ‘A Fatal Inversion’ from 1987. A more literary variation on this theme is Donna Tartt’s outstanding debut novel ‘The Secret History’. 

Nevertheless, there are many pleasures to be gained from this novel and each one of the group of six former friends, outsiders at their school, are delineated with a plausible level of variety and authenticity. The most well developed, likeable member of this group and the character whose point of view is most often given to us by Abbott is Molly Hansen. She is one of those positive, attractive young women who seems to have her life under control without being too smug. Yet, at the very start of the novel at her book club, she discovers something about her partner, Nathan, that throws her life upside down. He has been accused of something at work, where he is a senior and successful lawyer, that introduces a sense of suspicion into their relationship. 

Molly and Nathan were both part of the same friendship group at school and were probably the closest friends in that group. Yet Molly had always resisted his overtures to take their relationship further because of his immature, casual attitude to a string of girlfriends. As Nathan matured he understood and was embarrassed by his previous behaviour and in the last few years they had turned their previous friendship into a close, loving relationship; or so Molly thought. 

At the same time as this personal drama is unfolding a child abduction takes place and a young woman goes missing. This is when DCI Tom Douglas and his team of officers are introduced. There is plenty of back story, initially, about these characters that presumably picks up on developments from previous books in the series. However, whilst Douglas and his team are an appealing, humane group of investigators the focus remains on Molly, Nathan and their old school friends. This is because the police quickly establish a link between Nathan’s work issue, a missing baby and woman – it all comes back to the group and their former relationship as well as an incident that took place on their last big night together in their meeting place, a local wooded area. 

Gradually, we find out about the other members of the group, how their lives have panned out and why the group fell apart so quickly after the events in the woods fifteen years previously. Molly and the police know that the secret of what is happening to them all now – each is being attacked in a precise, personal manner – can only be explained by delving back into the past. 

Despite my sniffiness at the start of the review, this is a proper page turner and Abbott’s massive sales indicate that she knows how to put together an engrossing psychological thriller. I wanted a quick read that would enmesh me in its own world of secrets and twists and this book did just that. I think I saw the final twist when it came although that did not lessen my enjoyment as I had suspected several other characters at different stages of my reading – and that, of course, is one of the pleasures when reading such a book.

 The Dinner Guest by B. P. Walter - Review by Phil Large 

This novel begins with the murder of one of the main characters. My telling you this is not really a spoiler, as the murder happens on page one!

The book's timeline then goes back and forth as the other two main characters tell their versions of the lead up to and the aftermath of the murder. It's not so much as a whodunit as a whydunit, and as such is an interesting and unusual addition to the genre.

The couple at the centre of the tale live a life of shameless luxury in a community of similarly wealthy people in central London, and seem blissfully unaware of just how gilded is their existence. I couldn't decide if the author was making a simple point to show that money can't buy everything and that even the rich and privileged have their problems, or if he was in thrall to the idea of a lifestyle of apparently limitless wealth.

To give an illustration, at one point one of the protagonists goes off to a bar to drown his sorrows and think things through. Not a particularly original literary device, you might think, except that the bar he chooses is at the Ritz! I mean, who would do that?

 The sustained opulence and privilege on show just made me dislike all the characters, and I wonder if that was the author's intention, or if he wanted us to be in awe of them and I just got the wrong end of the stick. I'd be interested in anyone else's take on this, but despite the unsympathetic characters it's a highly readable and unusual thriller.

The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly 

As you know, I love a long, languorous murder mystery that I can lose myself in; and as you also know, The Sunday Times Culture section is where I often go for some guidance about the latest additions to this genre. This recent recommendation seemed to tick my boxes; however, I didn’t quite get what I expected from this interesting hybrid of a book. 

There is a murder mystery at its heart but for a lot of the time this takes a back seat to the dynamics that exist between two artists and their closely entwined families in Hampstead. To that end, this is more of a literary novel (whatever that means) that sometimes messily goes off down different thematic paths but always intrigues. And don’t get me wrong, the murder mystery is properly twisty and engaging. It also has a shifting chronology that I always respond to in murder mysteries and which enables us to understand the evolving bonds and tensions that have developed between the characters over the years. 

The story starts in the late 60s with two friends, Frank and Lal. Both are aspiring artists, part of the counterculture, who play with different ideas to make their mark on the scene. Frank achieves popular and financial success with his picture book, The Golden Bones, based on a tragic folk tale of a dead woman and her scattered bones. Commercial to his fingertips, Frank ties the story in with a treasure hunt for seven scattered bones whose locations are cryptically concealed in the book’s text. Over the years this ensures the book’s enduring appeal and provides Frank with a springboard for his other artistic projects. 

I have a vague memory of the inspiration for this part of Kelly’s plot, a story book called Masquerade from the late 70s, with a hidden, golden hare. Like Masquerade, Frank’s book inspires a large hard core of fans eager to solve the clues – in this case, called the Bonehunters. It also creates an enduring tabloid story – many of the fans are obsessional and attach a kind of mystical power to collecting the bones which has spilled over in the past to an attack on Frank’s daughter, Nell. However, as the book jumps forward to the present day, Frank is holding an event to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the book’s publication and it is expected that he will reveal the location of the final hidden bone, a golden sculpture of a girl’s pelvic bone, to end the mystery. 

Of course, the event does not go to plan and instead of a denouement for the famous picture book, we have the beginnings of a murder mystery. That is only the half of it, though, as several other plot strands spring from this set up. There’s Nell, now a woman in her thirties, who was so traumatised by the attack on her and the circus surrounding the book, that she has withdrawn from the family and lives an impoverished, artistic life on a narrow boat. 

She is our main point of view in the book but is unable to provide the reader with a clear focus on the murder mystery. That’s because she is trying to look after Billy, the teenage daughter of one of her former, feckless boyfriends, whom Nell wants to protect from the dysfunctional life that she seems destined to fall into. 

Then there’s Frank, a serial adulterer who has moved on and upwards from the picture book to become a grand man of British art. The key event that transformed his reputation was an exhibition of acclaimed portraits of the women he had slept with that had occurred twenty years earlier. The problem is: the murder uncovered at the 50^th anniversary seems to be linked to that event. 

There’s also a rather odd bohemian set up in Hampstead, with Frank and his family living an entwined existence with his artistic soul mate, Lal, and his family. They party, create art and all live, rather incestuously, in one another’s pockets, with Frank’s son marrying Lal’s daughter. There is creative tension as well as loyalty and love that links the two artists; and, of course, there are also a series of secrets and deceptions that are gradually revealed as the police and the family try to make sense of the past murder uncovered at the book celebration. 

As I said, there’s a lot going on that often takes you away from the central mystery. And that’s before factoring in the colour added by the bunch of fantasists and obsessives chasing the final skeleton bone. As a result, the narrative can seem to meander on occasions, although there is always an enlightening flashback or twist to focus one’s attention back to the murder. 

If you like a mystery with a remorseless working out of the plot and a pervasive sense of dread as in scandi-noir books for example, then the bagginess of this narrative may not be for you. The forays into the art world, fandom, family dynamics, amongst this book’s myriad interests, turned it into the languorous read I was looking for. At times, I lost sight of the mystery but I was always curious to see how the cast of flawed, complex characters would resolve the problems that Frank set running – and not just for the Bonehunters - when he created The Golden Bones. 

Perhaps if you enjoyed Galbraith’s recent Cormorant Strike novels that wander off down various byways before strolling back onto the crime’s main path, then this could be the book for you.

The Stranger at the Wedding by A. E. Gauntlett 

This is a recently published mystery thriller that has secured a number of gushing reviews. Its admirers throw around adjectives such as unsettling, shocking and dark in order to characterise the twisty plot that keeps its revelations coming all the way to the final page. 

The book’s central concept is a variation on a familiar theme: a seemingly perfect couple, Annie and Mark, are joyously celebrating their wedding when one of the guests, a stranger that no one recognises, has a quiet word with the groom that changes everything. 

From that point onwards, the plot moves back and then to the present to show us how Annie and Mark met and the development of their romance. From the flashbacks, we learn that both have tragedy in their pasts and Mark, in particular, struggles with the mysterious loss of his first wife. However, their story seems to be a victory for two damaged people who have found joy again in their new relationship. And following the stranger’s intervention at the wedding, Mark and Annie begin married life under a cloud of suspicion and mistrust. Annie, who is our prime narrator, can’t understand Mark’s coldness towards her. What did the stranger say and what exactly happened to Mark’s first wife? 

The set up for this psychological thriller sounds just my thing with its echoes of one of my favourite 80s’ thrillers ‘Jagged Edge’. Unfortunately, it just didn’t do it for me, though. I found the narrative repetitious and slightly limp – there was too much focus on Annie’s unsettled feelings and Mark’s erratic behaviour when I needed more narrative drive. And perhaps I have read too many books and seen too many films of this kind but the ending was not quite the revelation as touted by the critics. It’s an okay read but, in a competitive market, I think there are many better examples of this genre.

Crime Novel Reviews – Phil Jones

I read a lot is crime fiction and recommend the two latest books by Mark Billingham. A previous series involved the flawed DI Tom Thorne and his character evolved as the books progressed. He has created a new ‘flawed’ detective, Declan Miller, who loves ballroom dancing and keeps pet rats. In The Last Dance he returns to work in Blackpool following the murder of his wife, who was also a detective. He has no respect for authority and takes time to establish a relationship with his new work partner. Unofficially he is trying to discover his wife’s murderer as he doesn’t ‘t have confidence in the team who are investigating it. Whilst the writing is hard hitting it is also humorous, full of surprises and thrilling. The follow up, The Wrong Hands, continues in the same vein. Highly recommended for anyone who loves crime fiction.

Always on the lookout for new crime fiction, I followed Mark Billingham’s recommendation of books by Doug Johnstone. One series follows the Skelf family, Dorothy, Jenny her daughter and Hannah her granddaughter, who run a funeral business and a private investigators. So far, I have read the first three in the series, A Dark Matter, The Big Chill and The Great Silence. Whilst they are dark they are also funny and keep you guessing. As above, highly recommended if you are a fan of crime fiction.

A Stranger in the Family by Jane Casey 

This crime book was on many ‘best of’ lists for 2024. I can see why because it has an intriguing set-up, with a well-handled police procedural plot, several potential suspects and investigative strands and, finally, a suitably satisfying denouement. There is a but though. 

If you have read any of Casey’s books before you may be familiar with her key protagonist, DI Maeve Kerrigan. She has featured in several books alongside her colleague, Josh Derwent. They are both well developed, intriguing characters, serious about their job but with enough spiky bits, Derwent especially, to be engaging. There is, though, an unmistakeable attraction between them which threatens to blur the lines between the professional and personal. 

Now there’s nothing wrong with that and many detective stories have incorporated these elements, successfully – Moonlighting, The Cormorant Strike books. Therefore, if you have read a Kerrigan story before and enjoyed the entwining of the murder investigation with their slightly messy love story then you’ll love this. Unfortunately, I found the emotional rollercoaster that Kerrigan endures as she is forced to constantly evaluate her feelings and behaviour towards Derwent all too much. 

With that (big, for me) caveat, I’ll tell you what I did like as you may be less of a Grinch than me about this sort of thing. The central crime and its context are intriguing. The detectives are called to the London home of a wealthy, elderly couple who appear to have committed suicide. Or rather, the husband, Bruce, has smothered his dementia suffering wife and then shot himself. Except our perceptive detectives spot anomalies that contradict that version of the crime scenario. Their suspicions are also aroused by the fact that several years earlier the couple’s young daughter, Rosalie, had disappeared never to be heard of again. It was a dead end despite a huge police hunt and a great deal of press speculation because Rosalie’s mother, Helena, was a high-profile figure – the sort of media commentator who is famous for simply having strong opinions. 

It seems obvious that the staged suicide murders are in some way connected with the cold case. This means that not only are they chasing a contemporary murderer but also re-investigating a disappearance that had long seemed unsolveable. 

Into that mix, Casey skilfully introduces a set of well-developed characters who in some way are part of both cases – the eccentric podcaster, Tor Grant, who seems unusually obsessed with Rosalie’s disappearance; Rosalie’s two older brothers, Ivo and Magnus, diametrically different characters whose lives have been subtly affected by their sister’s loss; and a sad, superficially unpleasant, journalist whose interview with Helena provides clues about family’s life together prior to the girl’s disappearance. 

In some ways, there are similar tropes in this novel to those in the excellent ‘Kala’ that I have recently reviewed. However, these are very different novels. Whilst there is some darkness in this book, it is a more traditional murder mystery. The pleasure comes from the interviews with characters where secrets slowly emerge as well as the procedural discovery of coincidences and connections. Casey does manage to include some flashback episodes to the period just before Rosalie disappeared but these tantalise rather than reveal too much. All this appealed to me, but, goodness, the ‘will they, won’t they’ central relationship got on my nerves. This book was not for me but I would read another book by Casey from this series if the blurb makes it clear that the Maeve and Josh relationship is more of a side dish than the main course.

The Mission House by Carys Davies - Review by Terry Heiser

I have recently read this novel and thought it was excellent. The review, below, by my father-in-law, Terry, which appeared on my previous blog, gives a perfect sense of what makes this novel so good.

I have noticed how some authors seek to attract a younger generation of readers by scattering their pages with references to Twitter, Instagram, Zoom, Filter, Messenger - even to emails, not realising that the young text rather than email - the dark web, and dark matter. They do not convince. 

And so, I was attracted to Carys Davies' second novel, that seemed in its subject matter to harken back to a more thoughtful and reflective age of novel writing. Oota is a hill station in South India. British soldiers had arrived in Oota on horseback in 1819 in search a location for a field hospital. They built shops, houses, a club, a library, a racecourse, an Assembly Room. A Scotsman from Kew had then laid out a Botanical Garden.

The main character in the novel is Hilary Byrd, who had been a librarian in Petts Wood, a suburb in South London, for 25 years. He had led a celibate, repressed life. His sister Wyn had kept a worried eye on him. He became disenchanted with his life as librarian with the arrival of: “…new shelves on wheels and new self-check-out stations, and the new Mothers and Toddlers music group, the noisy new librarian called Margaret, the removal of the dictionaries and small wooden tables, and how he had been sworn at by a young girl in a flowery dress and an old man in a white sweater.” So, he decided to make a break with is old life and go for an extended stay in Oota. 

He takes up residence in a bungalow near the house of the elderly Padre Andrew, who has a young Indian servant, Priscilla. She had been born without thumbs and a partially deformed foot. The Padre’s main aim in life seems to be to see Priscilla securely married. 

Byrd also develops an unlikely and unexpected friendship with an elderly auto-rickshaw driver, Jamshed. The latter has a nephew, Ravi, whom he grossly overindulges with financial gifts. Ravi want to be a pop singer and star. This is the new India , not the India of E.M.Forster.

Byrd falls into a routine of daily trips with Jamshed along what becomes a fixed route through the little town:“He visited the Botanical Gardens and the lake. He called at the King Star Chocolate Shop and bought 6 ounces of Fruit and Nut in a vacuum-sealed foil bag. He replenished his supplies at the market and at the Modern Stores. He ate lunch at the Nazri Hotel. He visited the library and Higginbotham’s bookshop…..” His attitude towards the Indians he meets is informed by an inherited cultural view of an Empire created and civilised by the British - that of a sahib, polite but slightly condescending.

The author writes in the third person and reveals Byrd from a number of different perspectives - especially Jamshed, Priscilla and the Padre. The most illuminating is that of the auto rickshaw driver, Jamshed, who listens over his shoulder to all Byrd has to say about himself on the daily drive through the town. Jamshed not only listens, but unknown to Byrd, can speak and write English and at night keeps a dairy and creates a sensitive portrait of Byrd seen through sympathetic but Indian eyes.

Byrd meanwhile develops an affection or even love for Priscilla, and adjusts his behaviour to win her affection and the Padre’s endorsement. But he is utterly out of his depth and things do not turn out as he had hoped.

There is an illustrious list of books by British authors about India, of which E. M. Forster’s “Passage to India” is perhaps the most famous. There has also been a stream of later books and memoirs about Europeans and Americans seeking enlightenment from gurus, and learning mantras. But Carly Davis has time for none of this. She creates a picture of India today, in one tiny hill town that the British tried to turn into a “corner of England”, and that very few of the present population want or care about. She also has a sharp ear for the way in which her characters speak - you can tell who is talking without a name being attached; and she has a precise use of language that is rare these days.

Well worth reading.

Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger - Review by Angela Harvey Williams

The prologue of William Kent Krueger’s novel warns that there is going to be a lot of death in the story, in all its forms – death by natural causes, accidental death, suicide and murder. The reader is also reminded of Aeschylus’s quote that knowledge and wisdom come through pain and “the awful grace” of God. One gets the impression that this is going to be a challenging read, but nothing could be further from the truth. The quality of the writing, the evocative sense of time and place, and the beautiful characterisations make this a novel to savour. 

The story is told by Frank Drum, a 40-year old man looking back to the summer of 1961 when he was 13, to events that he now realises shaped his life and the lives of those around him. The setting is a small town, New Bremen, in Minnesota, where the young Frank lives with his family: Nathan, his father, is a Methodist minister; Ruth, his mother, is a talented pianist and singer; his sister Ariel has inherited her mother’s talents; and Jake, his younger brother, is Frank’s companion in his scrapes and adventures. The main characters are not two dimensional, they are well-rounded and lovingly portrayed by Krueger. Nathan is a man damaged by his war experiences; Ruth is disappointed with the life she has ended up with and tends to live vicariously through her daughter; Jake’s stammer means that he is bullied at school and socially isolated; Ariel seems a little too good to be true, but she also has her secrets and her obstinacies. Apart from the family members, there is a cast of supporting characters who are also well written and convincing, making this a story in which the reader feels very much involved and invested. The evocation of small town America in the early 1960s feels authentic, when watching a fuzzy black and white television seemed like the height of sophistication, when children could roam the streets in safety, and when riding around in a classic car was just an everyday experience. 

To some extent this is a whodunnit, so I do not want to give too much away about the plot. Suffice it to say that I did not manage to work out who had ‘dunnit’, so it works well just on that level. More importantly, it is a brilliant coming-of-age novel as the young Frank tries to make sense of the events of that summer, some of which he only really understands as an older man. “Ordinary Grace” has been compared to “To Kill a Mockingbird” and I think there are similarities, but this novel is no pastiche. It is a beautifully written work that stands very much in its own right. It made me laugh and cry; and it made me want to read more of William Kent Krueger’s work. This novel is a class act – read it!

Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen - Review by Mark Cornelius

Jonathan Franzen is widely hailed as a “literary genius” and “America’s greatest living novelist”. His book “The Corrections”, published in 2001, is one of the best American novels (that I have read!) published in this century. It’s a tale of a dysfunctional family that is both funny and sad. “Crossroads” is another tale of a family at odds with each other. It is set in the early 1970s. Indeed, most of the action in the book actually takes place on a single day close to Christmas, with much family history captured in flashback. It did start well, and it promised to justify the lavish praise Franzen has received for his writing. For a while I could not put it down. Then it stopped being compelling. And by the end I was struggling to finish it. 

Franzen uses the close third person, and five characters take centre stage at different points as we move through the book. The key problem for me was the father, Russ Hildebrandt. He is an associate pastor at a church in a small town. He is self-obsessed and fraught with indecision. His life is one endless regret about how he could have achieved so much more. It might have been engaging in a shorter book, but this one is 580 pages long. Sadly, the “Russ chapters” are by far the longest and the most tedious. 

The other characters are more engaging. Marion, Russ’s wife, also has many regrets, and is dissatisfied. Franzen manages her story more effectively. And we spend a lot less time with her! There is a very unsettling chapter, where Franzen describes Marion becoming mentally ill. That was a time I also wanted to put the book down, not because it was boring, but rather because it made very uncomfortable reading – a testament to Franzen’s talent. 

Russ and Marion have four children. One is too young for a starring role. The others are certainly more interesting than the father. With them, I thought Franzen tried a little too hard. Their personas changed a bit too frequently and abruptly. It’s obviously difficult for me to remember being young. But I am not sure I or my friends went through so many character shifts as these teenagers do and so quickly – a lot of the action happens in a single day, don’t forget. 

The book isn’t redeemed by Franzen addressing wider and important societal issues. In his novel, “Freedom”, for example, Franzen weaves a discussion of the environment into the story. Vietnam, native Americans, racism, religion and drugs are part of the backdrop in “Crossroads”. Does Franzen give us any new insights? I am not sure. 

The book ends in mid-air. It’s deliberate. Franzen has said that this is the first book in a trilogy. So we can expect another 1000 pages at some point. I may not be reading them.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver – a review by Paul Whiteing 

In the acknowledgement at the end of this impressive page-turner of a novel Kingsolver writes: “I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Coppefield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us. In adapting his novel to my own place and time, working for years with his outage, impressiveness, and empathy at my elbow, I’ve come to think of him as my genius friend.” 

Kingsolver transposes David Copperfield to the world of Damon Fields who is nicknamed “copperhead” due the colour of his hair, hence Damen Copperhead, the central character of the book who tells his story of growing up in Appalachia the first person. We start out with Damen living in Lee County Virginia in a trailer with a single, drug addict mother who spends time in rehab at first doing well to get clean only for things to take a bad turn. Demon then spends a number of formative teenage years living in the care system, which if much neglected in the UK, is practically non-existent in the USA. Demon is moved from foster family to foster home and exploited in each case, albeit in differing ways which his caseworkers set out to ignore and indeed Demon learns to not talk about it recognising that the alternatives may be even worse. 

Demon has little family or friends but in the McCobbs there is an extended family that offers some help and support. And after absconding from his foster family, Demon eventually finds a grandmother who fosters him to Coach Windfield (and daughter who goes by the name of Angus). 

Windfield is the coach of a high school football team which Demon joins and shows much talent for. This is psychologically transformative for Demon who up to now has judged himself as a loser. However, an accident takes hold which becomes compounded by Copperhead self-medicating some pain relief through opioids which turns quickly to an addiction. Here Kingsolver excels in taking us into a world of cheap and easily accessible opioids and the destructive impact they have on young (and so not so young) people across the rural communities of the USA. The opioid crisis in the USA is well known and documented, but Kingsolver shows its brutal impact and destructive power through the human impact and misery that it sows. Whilst entirely fictionalised, Kingsolver is brilliant identifying the bigger picture of the injustice that drug addiction causes and how “the system” is designed to support easy availability combined with limited public finding for recovering users so that everyone feels trapped. 

This book, in telling us the story of Demon Copperhead, goes much further and the canvas Kingsolver is working on is much larger and hence the parallels with David Copperfield and the social injustice that Dickens was also pointing to, being re-created here. 

This is a truly excellent novel. By the end I finished the last chapter, I felt a close affinity to Copperhead and was sad to read close the book as I want so much to know what happens in the next chapters of his life.  

Demon Copperhead - some additional comments

There’s no need for me to do a full review of this book because my brother in law, Paul, has produced an excellent review which is already on the blog. In fact, the reason I decided to read this prize-winning book by this accomplished novelist was because of Paul’s review – and I am delighted that I did so. 

This is one of the best of those recently written novels that I have read over the last year. Despite being located in the lives of the disadvantaged and disenfranchised white inhabitants of Lee County, Virginia, who are hooked on prescription drugs, it was not the worthy but depressing read I expected. It was so much more than that.

 Without treading on Paul’s review, I’ll just remind you of its key components. Damon Fields, nicknamed Demon Copperhead because of his red hair, is our narrator. As Kingsolver explains, she has created a modern version of David Copperfield. Like David, Damon has had a tough start living with a drug addicted mother in a trailer. She tries hard to break her addiction for Damon’s sake but gets entangled with a controlling man and her life begins to unravel once again. This starts Damon on a downward spiral as he eventually gets lost in America’s terrible social services system. Whilst he has a moment of false hope as a high school football star, Damon expects to fail and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. He masks his pain at the seemingly inevitable dysfunction of his life with the readily available prescription drugs that America uses to pacify the messy parts of its society. 

The reason that the book is more than just a misery fest is that Damon, for all his sense of hopelessness about himself and the lack of opportunities for him and all those he loves, never stops trying to do the right thing and behave with loyalty and kindness. His voice and the book itself is generous in presenting the decent core within most of its characters even when their lives are falling apart and they behave in a self-destructive way. Like Dickens, Kingsolver doesn’t blame Damon and his friends for the messiness of their lives but instead she focuses on the way those in power who have created the systems and circumstances that blight so many lives. 

Some readers have expressed criticisms of the book’s extended middle section when Damon and his girlfriend are trapped in a domestic drug hell. I don’t agree, and would say that the humanity on display, intermingled with the waste of so much potential, give this story dramatic power. There’s a stirring if tragic final set piece and shards of hope at the end. As I say, I loved this book and was swept along when I read it. Incidentally, it also received a very positive response from everyone in my book group.

The Age of AI  by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt & Daniel Huttenlocher  

An interesting book.  This hardly touches on the technology of AI, the focus is on how AI has, is and may impact on our society.

The main perception that the book proposes looks at the shift from an age of faith, when any inexplicable events or phenomena were attributed to god and a deeper understanding could be achieved through study (of god) and ritual, through the age of reason, where the human mind was elevated to a level where, with enough research, it could understand anything, towards a proposed age of AI where we may be forced to accept that AI can provide useful and valid knowledge but we may never be able to understand how it reached its deductions or conclusions.

The strength of the book, for me, lies in the way that it doesn’t foretell the future: it doesn’t tell us how AI will pan out, instead it gives possibilities and asks questions, questions that we, as a society, should try to address so that we can try to prepare for what is likely to come.

The first three chapters put the current situation into perspective, then a couple of chapters look at the impact AI can and will have on global platforms (think Facebook, TikTok) and on global security and militarisation.  The last two chapters look at the future of AI and how it may change our perception of our own role in the world.

Reading this short book - 240 pages - has changed my view of AI from being (just) an exciting new technology to something that may eventually have an impact on nearly every aspect of our lives.

The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith 

This is the seventh novel in the popular Strike series by Robert Galbraith, aka J K Rowling.  Like many others in the series it is chunky – 950 pages – but it is immensely readable and quite a page turner so the length (at least for me) was not an issue.

 Once more the reader is drawn into the lives of private investigator Cormoran Strike and his business partner Robin Ellacott when they are asked to try to make contact with a client’s son, who is part of a religious cult.  As those in the cult have been separated from their families, Robin has to go undercover and join the cult to try to reach the client’s son.  In doing so, she is taking a huge risk and putting her own life in danger.  I recently watched a BBC documentary about a Nigerian cult and could tell from the similarities to the novel that J K Rowling has done her research as there seem to be certain common elements between the cult she portrays and the one in the documentary.  For example, control is easier to exert over people if they are befuddled through sleep deprivation and hunger; gaslighting and turning followers against their families and friends is a necessary part of exerting control over them; and abuse of power, both sexual and psychological, keeps them subjugated, along with a belief system that is manipulated to – literally – put the fear of some sort of god into them. 

If not a particularly challenging read, I thoroughly enjoyed The Running Grave and found it informative in many ways.  In all the Strike novels, there is a second string to the story which I also enjoy, and that is the back stories and developing relationship of the two central characters, Strike and Ellacott.  I know some readers find the ongoing will they/won’t they get together to be a distraction, but I like it and find that it gives an added dimension to the stories. 

I recommend this as a well paced and enjoyable page turner, don’t be put off by its length.  The only thing I find slightly annoying and unnecessary in the Strike novels is the author’s habit of putting a quote at the start of every chapter, but it’s a small price to pay for a good read.

Two Political Books Reviewed by Chris Cotton

Rory Stewart’s Politics On the Edge is an anecdotal view of his time in UK politics. It touches on his experience in becoming an MP, the selection process, the hard slog and the rather dysfunctional process that he had to go through.  Once an MP he becomes acutely aware of his impotence, his only real power was to help push issues for his local constituents.  As a junior minister he slowly realises that no-one, not his political masters in the government, and not the civil servants that he is working with, have any particular interest in any expertise that he might already possess.  For one group he is a flag carrier to advance their cause and for the other he is, ideally, a public relations frontman.  

He does manage to achieve some change as a junior prisons minister, he is moved to the foreign office but to the Africa section rather than anything that could make use of his previous experience in the Middle East and Afghanistan.  He struggles to get either Government Minsters or Civil Servants to recognise that he may have a workable solution to the problems that he is faced with and he becomes eventually disillusioned with the whole process.  

The above doesn’t do justice to the detail that Stewart puts into this book.  What I think really makes it an enjoyable read is the details and personal reminiscences that he provides.

Having finished Politics On the Edge the next book I picked up was How Westminster Works …and Why It Doesn’t by Ian Dunt.  This was covering much of the same ground but rather than viewing it through a very personal lens it takes a much more analytical approach, dissecting the various parts of the processes in and around Parliament. He looks again at how MPs are selected, what limited power they have individually once they become an MP.  He explains the imbalance of power between the Government and Parliament, he explores the shortcomings of the Civil Service and the subservient role of the modern press.  The process by which new legislation is designed and developed is set out in some (sometimes depressing) detail.  The bodies that come out well in this book are the House of Commons Select Committees and the House of Lords.  Interestingly he attributes the efficiency and usefulness of the Lords, when compared to the Commons, in large part because they are not elected.

This is still a very readable book, Dunt illustrates his arguments with real examples but, unlike Stewart, he does not appear in his own book.  By its focus this is a more detailed coverage of the workings of our system of Government.  I thought that I already had a good understanding of the subject but this book shed a sometimes depressing light on the inner workings.  Reading the second book helped me to understand some of the absurd and frustrating situations that Stewart had encountered.

Both books are informative, well written and entertaining.  Together they give a rounded picture, with Dunt adding detail where Stewart adds colour.  Recommended.

Follow the Money by Paul Johnson – reviewed by Paul Whiteing I nearly didn’t buy this book. I consider myself fairly well read when it comes to current affairs with a better than average grasp of economic affairs by reason of being an avid reader of the FT and The Economist. But I am glad I did buy it and what a well written and concise book this is. In just under 300 pages and a very engaging tone that you would expect from a pundit who pops up on our TV quite regularly to explain the meaning of detailed economic jargon, we get a complete overview of the UK economy in terms of where the money comes from and where it goes. 

The book is broken into ten punchy chapters, the first two of which explain where the UK Government gets most of its money. Through these chapters Johnson superbly highlights the incongruities in our various income raising taxes as well as the rather large number of basic loopholes that exist. 

Thereafter Johnson spends the remainder of the book explaining where these vast billions of pounds go and how successive governments have fiddled with our spending arrangements as well as pander to their various constituencies of interest to end up in a place that I can best describe as a complete muddle much of which has a history in Beveridge for whom Johnson has little time. He explains why. 

I have a professional interest in healthcare policy and the chapter on this subject – and not least the vast sums we spend on the NHS – was one of the best I’ve read. Here, as elsewhere, Johnson’s ability to be dispassionate and independently minded about, in this case the NHS, is excellent. He makes the excellent point that we should not put the NHS on a pedal stool and idolise it in the way we do. Yes, of course, we should value it and the many lives it saves but many other healthcare services provided in advanced nations do equally as well and many do a lot better when it comes to healthcare outcomes and the overall health of the nation. He also makes reference to the needless harm that the NHS can cause, on which I know just a little. In this chapter, and elsewhere Johnson is critical of the last Coalition Government, as well as our current one, for cutting capital expenditure on things like new hospitals and other healthcare advancements. He explains why such decisions compounded the damage inflicted by “austerity”, a concept that I suspect will be judged harshly by future generations of historian. 

Johnson’s last chapter, ‘Whereto from Here?’ is a good summing up and here he also considers the policy challenges ahead that are already flashing amber, if not red, on the Chancellor’s dashboard – namely climate change, the impacts of a rapidly ageing population and how to improve growth. Of the last of these three, how to improve growth, I thought the weakest part of the book as clearly without improvements to productivity as a nation, we will not get the growth needed to sustain the public investment needed if we are to retain a seat at the top table of the G7. Johnson acknowledges the political trade-offs involved in some of the policy prescriptions he offers to increase the UK’s level of productivity but offers no viable ways by which politician can find what, I believe, will be needed namely a new consensus about those trade-offs. And I for one believe that without some consensus around, for example, planning reform to build more houses and other infrastructure, then we will remain locked in the same policy loop as this Government has found itself since 2010. 

But just as Johnson tries to end on an upbeat note, so do I. I have come to believe that our propensity to somehow “muddle through”, whilst sub-optimal in so many ways, has served us well for the last 200 years and may work for the next generation equally well. Fingers crossed!

The Other Side of Silence by Philip Kerr and Villa America by Liza Klaussmann Review by Mark Cornelius  

We had not been abroad for five years.  A combination or the pandemic and worrying about carbon emissions had led us to go to places like Devizes and Mumbles for our holidays instead.  So a week in the South of France was going to be exciting and a little scary.  I decided that the whole experience would be more complete if my holiday reading were also set in the same region.  I should have asked Martyn P to recommend some books. That would have been the simple option.  My wife is also a walking encyclopaedia of literature, so that was an even more obvious person to ask.  But I decided to Google it.  I had never heard of either of the books or the authors that I bought.  Perhaps discovering something new and obscure was subconsciously what I wanted.  Anyway, the two books were “The Other Side of Silence” by Philip Kerr and “Villa America” by Liza Klaussmann.  

The Philip Kerr book is set around Cap Ferrat, and the Liza Klaussmann book centres on Antibes. Kerr’s book takes place mostly in the 1950s and the action in Klaussmann’s is a few decades earlier.  Many of the characters in both books were real people.  Indeed, most of the individuals in “Villa America” are famous historical figures.  But that is where any similarity ends.  They are very different books. 

“The Other Side of Silence” is a thriller.  It is number eleven in a fourteen book series about Bernie Gunther.  Gunther is now working as a concierge in a hotel on the Riviera.  He has had an interesting life.  He has been a Berlin policeman, a private detective, and worked for senior Nazis (I sensed under duress – Bernie’s moral compass seems to work pretty well).  Gunther is invited to help the author, Somerset Maugham, who is being blackmailed with a photograph of himself and a number of other men lying naked by a swimming pool. Maugham is worried that the photograph could harm his book sales and lead to the cancellation of lucrative film contracts.  Homosexuality was illegal in the UK and US at that time.  As well as being a famous writer, Maugham had also worked for the British secret service.  And two of the people in the photograph are Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess.  The plot soon develops into an espionage story.  Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess make cameo appearances, as does Sir John Sinclair – the head of MI6.  We are also treated to flashbacks into Gunther’s past that helps to explain why he was called in to help Maugham in the first place.

I probably have not done his plot justice with my description.  But it is a convincing, exciting and suspenseful page turner.  His writing is not the best, some of his similes are a bit convoluted and pretentious.  But I really recommend this book, and I will be going back to the first in the series to read more about Bernie Gunther. 

Villa America is very different.  The tragedy of the main characters is revealed on the first few pages.  So there is no suspense. It is the story of Gerald and Sara Murphy.  They are real historical figures whose main claim to fame is probably that they were rich socialites.  Gerald also had some success as a painter.  They are credited with, among other things, making the South of France a place to visit during the summer months.  Apparently or allegedly, they encouraged a hotel in Antibes to stay open during the summer for them and their family.  That changed the whole dynamic of when it was fashionable to visit. Prior to the Murphy’s innovation, the South of France had been a winter destination for people seeking a little warmth.  They knew everybody who was anybody: Picasso; Ernest Hemingway; and Dorothy Parker.  Gerald made friends with Cole Porter at Yale.  Another friend, Scott Fitzgerald, based the main characters in “Tender is the Night’ on the Murphys. 

The book is a fictionalised account of the Murphys’ life.  The fiction fills in gaps between actual historical events.  And that fiction extends to inventing one of the main characters in the book, Owen.  Owen is a pilot who has an affair with Gerald.  There is no evidence of Gerald having had an affair with anybody in real life.  But the introduction of Owen is an interesting way to examine Gerald’s struggles with his sexuality, which apparently are well documented.  In any event, Owen is an interesting character.  

The book is mostly about how wonderful the Murphys are: their parties; their life in Antibes; and their building of Villa America.  Gerald loves his family and his wife, but his love for Owen begins to pull him away and provides tension.  We also know from the very beginning of book that Owen dies and that the Murphy family will be beset by cruel tragedy. That darkness also pervades the book and the otherwise perfect lives of Gerald and Sara. 

It is a very well written book that has been thoroughly researched.  It is quite long at 469 pages.  But it is really easy to read, and it’s compelling. 

I had wanted to read some books that would complement my holiday, because of where they were set.  As it turned out, the settings were slightly incidental.  The characters and the stories were much more important, and the books really could have been about anywhere.  Nevertheless, I read and really enjoyed two books I would not have come across otherwise.  So I will definitely take to Google next time I go away.

The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz 

This is a book that has been creating quite a stir recently. Written in 1938 by Boschwitz, a young German Jew who had fled to London from his homeland to escape the Nazis. This long-neglected story about life in Germany on the brink of the second world war has just been re-launched and published for the first time in Germany; and it is drawing favourable comparisons with contemporaneous fictional accounts of this turbulent period such as ’Suite Francaise’ and ‘Alone in Berlin’ – high praise indeed.

‘The Passenger’ is a powerful, tense and slightly unusual story that begins in Berlin in 1938 but goes on to provide a panoramic account of the atmosphere and attitudes prevalent in the third reich just at the moment when the brutalities and persecution of the Jews were about to intensify. In a dramatic opening, Hitler’s thugs are rounding up Berlin’s Jews in a bogus response to an assassination in Paris. They arrive at the home of Otto Silbermann, who is forced to flee out the back door and keep moving. And that in essence is the plot – the novel is subtitled ‘The man who took trains’ and Otto spends most of the novel moving around the country in a Kafkaesque limbo where all his attempts to escape the country or seek other possible solutions are thwarted. 

Whilst the plot is undoubtedly exciting and tense the book is an inside account of what it is like to find your world and your place in it turned upside down. And Otto’s place had seemed assured, secure and fulfilling for many years: he is a successful and wealthy businessman, a veteran of the first world war with a solid family life, social status and a sense of belonging. He is intelligent, a little complacent and slightly detached from the lower classes – not a hero just a very realistic member of the bourgeoisie. He had his chance to leave Germany a couple of years earlier but like many he felt that Hitler was a passing phase, that the good sense of his countrymen would reassert itself. Now it is too late. 

As he travels around Germany he encounters all types of citizens: hard line Nazis who treat him with courtesy and respect due to his wealth and Aryan features; ordinary citizens too self-centred or cowed to speak out; a few brave idealists who risk everything to help the victims of the new order; and other Jews inhabiting a similar tormented inner exile to himself. One of the most disturbing scenes is when he separates himself from an old acquaintance whose too Jewish features might increase the threat to Silbermann if they were to become travelling companions. 

All this, we experience close up and personal with Silbermann. At times the narrative reads like a stream of consciousness narrative as he alternates between manic energy to take control of his life and a listless sense of drift as every plan meets an unmoveable block. Eventually, his ‘groundhog day’ of hellish frustration impacts on his emotional stability and psychological ability to imagine a way out; and because we are forced to follow his internal thoughts and feelings as he scurries around, we feel, experience and understand the disintegration of a man that Boschwitz presents to us. 

The great strength of this book, which makes it a vital text, is the undoubted authenticity of life under the Nazis, the complex mood of fear and exhilaration in the country and that awful sense of your own turning on you. The content of this book makes it a classic but I do not think that the writing matches its insights. That’s no surprise: Boschwitz was in his twenties and this was only his second book. It is a young man’s urgent response to the growing crisis in his homeland and so there is some immaturity in his technique. He also did not have the chance to revise his first draft as his life was tragically cut short in 1942 – by the way, it is worth reading what happened to him after he sought refuge in Britain. Yet despite these niggles, this is an important and thrilling (in an awful way) novel. It provides an account of this terrible period that gave me a perspective I had not previously experienced.

Lily by Rose Tremain

I am a big fan of Rose Tremain’s novels. ‘Restoration’, her 1989 novel about the adventures of the unheroic but fascinating Sir Robert Merivel during the reign of Charles II, is one of the best, most entertaining novels I have read in the last few years. It gives me no pleasure to say, however, that I found her current novel distinctly average. 

'Lily' is an historical novel set in slap bang in the Victorian period and concerns the young life of Lily Mortimer, the name conferred on her by the Coram Foundling Hospital where she was taken after having been abandoned as a baby in London’s Victoria Park on a cold winter’s night. Her saviour on that night was a young police constable, Sam Trench, who almost lost his life as he carried the abandoned bundle by foot to safety through the snowy and icy cold streets. As a child, she is sent to foster parents in Suffolk who are paid to look after her for the first six years of her life, a common arrangement for foundlings, until she is returned to Coram where she is raised, partially educated and put to work until she reached adulthood. 

The simple but loving and happy time she spent at Rookery Farm, with her foster family the Bucks, is contrasted with the cruel physical and emotional abuse she suffers at Coram where she is daily reminded that, like all the other foundlings, she is the product of sin and will forever be tainted by that shame. 

The novel moves between her past life, with piteous descriptions of the daily cruelties at the foundling hospital, and her present life where we discover she has become a skilled wig maker for Belle Prettiwood’s business that supplies stage wigs for the opera. Lily finds some form of purpose in her work and comradeship with her employer and colleagues. It is, however, clear that she has been damaged by her upbringing and, in particular, the brutal removal from her loving foster parents to an unloving, unkind environment. 

The shuffling of the narrative’s chronology also makes us aware that Lily has committed an act of violent revenge against her cruel past and so she lives with a daily sense that an inexorable justice will track her down and punish her for this crime. This is only heightened when Trench, now a senior policeman, reappears in her life – she senses a spark between them but things are complicated not least by her dread that she will weaken and confess her crime to him. 

There is a denouement and resolution to this rather melodramatic story and part of my disappointment is that, for such a skilful writer, it seems rather rushed and pat. In fact, that is in essence my problem with the whole story: it seems flat. The horrors and the emotions don’t seem enough for Lily’s experiences. This may be deliberate but, after the initial set up, I was anticipating something Dickensian, and I got neither the sweep of feelings or pathos and certainly no humour associated with his novels. The only similarity came from the way the plot wandered down tangential alleyways – a failed escape by Lily and her friend Bridget from Coram and Lily’s visit with Belle to the opera, for example. Dickens followed these type of strands because he was writing sections of the story for a magazine published monthly whereas here it felt a little like padding. 

Tremain is too good a writer for me not to get bound up with Lily’s struggle to cope with her deep psychological need to confess her crime. There were also important ideas explored about the damaging effect on someone of abandonment, guilt and childhood trauma. The exploration did not seem to me, though, to be that deep and the story also seemed rather slight.

The History of Bees by Maja Lunde 

You’d probably define this as a dystopian science fiction novel because one if its three narrative strands is set nearly a hundred years in the future when the world has suffered an ecological disaster. It’s a science fiction novel in the mould of ‘Cloud Atlas’ as we alternate between three stories set in Victorian England, America at the start of the 21st century and China in 2098. The obvious link between all three strands is the importance of bees, or in the case of the Chinese story the absence of bees, who have long since become extinct with, we infer, drastic consequences for human life. As the stories progress, more subtle links begin to emerge including a focus on the parent-child dynamic. 

The protagonist in the Victorian story is William, a disappointed seed merchant, who has given up his hopes of academic success and esteem for love. The pleasure of married, family life has proven transient, however, and he swings between deep depression and bravura plans to make a mark in the science world to gain the kudos with society and his family that he desperately craves. He sees what he considers a chance to produce something of value to society – a new type of beehive that will make beekeeping a much more manageable process. It seems that his close observation of the bees will lead to a technological breakthrough and the esteem that matters most to him. Things don’t, however, turn out as he expects. 

George is a Midwestern beekeeper who is struggling to maintain his traditional approach to apiary in the face of modern farming methods that have ecological side effects but financial advantages. He seems not only to be fighting uphill against this rather dubious agrarian progress but also with his wife and son. The former wants to swap the harsh demands of her husband’s vocation for a more comfortable lifestyle in Florida. His son wants to write and has no interest in carrying on the family business, much to his father’s vexed incomprehension. 

The third story, whilst at time slow moving, is the most fascinating. We are introduced to Tao who with her husband spends long, hard days painting pollen onto fruit trees. It seems that the centralised state control of the country has allowed China to cope with the worst of the dystopian future that the bees’ disappearance has engendered. Life for Tao and her family is full of backbreaking labour and few of the luxuries of life that we now enjoy, but there is a sense of purpose in their community and a feeling that China is in a better state than elsewhere. That is, however, until Tao’s son is struck down by a mystery ailment when the family take a trip into the country on a rare day’s holiday. The state authorities whisk him away, with Tao and her husband left distraught and mystified about why they are receiving no news of his condition or whereabouts. This leads Tao on a quest into the squalid, dangerous underbelly of the ruined city, Beijing, to reclaim her son. 

Now this book seems to be right down my street as I love dystopian fiction as well as the creation of specific historical lifestyles. Yet this book left me rather underwhelmed. It had so many interesting elements but, ultimately, I found it slow moving and repetitive. The investments I made in the story and characters did not come to an enlightening coherence for which I had hoped. 

I don’t normally look at other readers’ comments but did so in this case because I struggled to properly understand why I was unsatisfied with this novel. What I gleaned was that most readers liked the idea of this book more than the execution. Now this is Lunde’s first book for adults and, whilst I have never written a book, it seemed to me to have the characteristic of a less mature work. The two historical stories did not seem sufficiently differentiated in terms of the central male characters and the dilemmas they faced. Whilst I am not someone who needs to like characters to find a book appealing, here, both William and George were so self-centred, dogmatic and self-pitying that there was little hope of seeing them develop – they were fixed in their own worlds literally and metaphorically. 

This is not a book I can recommend but, if the premise intrigues you, then it is not badly written and it may be more to your tastes than it was to mine.

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood 

I’m not sure that I am the right person to review this novel about twitter and the impact of spending a large amount of time using social media. I am a sixty three year old man and so the first thing I do when I wake up is to look at the BBC news headlines on my i-phone, complete wordle and the covid survey before putting it down and picking up my current book. I use social media but, because my habits were formed many years ago, I can and do cut off and revert to books, newspapers, the BBC and all the other familiar communication sources that provide my window on the world. 

From all I’ve read, Patricia Lockwood has drawn hugely on our own life and experiences for this story. Her protagonist is a youngish female writer who has made her reputation online, attracting attention and followers for her witty aphorisms on twitter before branching out into articles and lectures about these new ways that we use to communicate. Lockwood’s career has followed a similar trajectory and includes a powerful online poem ‘The Rape Joke’ that went viral and was based on her own traumatic experience. 

Lockwood writes beautifully, and she brilliantly conjures up the hyper creativity of her protagonist’s mind that moves almost instantaneously from absurdist or surrealist thought to profound observation in a millennial stream of consciousness. I was convinced that she had captured the way that today’s online users see technology and social media as part of their reality and, as a result, think differently from someone like me whose mind is analogue. There were, of course, some references that were lost on me and I must admit that I didn’t really understand why the tweet which established the protagonist as a major online presence – “can a dog be twins” – went viral? Is it a modern version of the aphorisms that Francis Bacon popularised in the 17th century or is Lockwood pointing out that this is ridiculous? I guess that’s a strength of the book because we cannot uninvent the online world and Lockwood is assiduous, via her protagonist, in reminding us of its positives - the sense of community, openness and opportunity to take on a different identity that new technology offers. Yet she also explores the pile-ons and obsessions of this world. 

Whether this thoughtful and stylistically bold exploration of the way her intelligent and plugged in protagonist has adapted and evolved as part of the internet’s hive mind is enough to sustain my interest…well, I don’t have to worry about that. You see, to resort to one of my favourite clichés oft-used in these reviews: this is a book of two halves. Now, both halves are good but, after this unsettling and funny start, Lockwood introduces a shocking real world element to her story. The protagonist’s pregnant sister learns that her baby has developed an unusual and awful condition that will blight and prematurely end its life. From this point on, the writing becomes more emotionally charged and slightly more conventional as we see the characters wrestle with their grief and their overwhelming joy at sharing the baby’s precious moments of life. 

You can see how easy it would be to conclude that Lockwood wants to show that the protagonist is transformed by her love and understands that the online world is not real nor emotionally substantial. Well, she is transformed by her love but Lockwood doesn’t move to such a pat conclusion. To be honest, I’m not sure what conclusion she reaches but I did find the second half of the book genuinely affecting; and yet the solipsism that is heightened online is at the forefront of this part of the story because the protagonist focuses on her love and grief - the baby’s parents seem peripheral. 

This is a hard book for someone like me to properly describe for all the reasons I’ve explained. I believe that a younger person may grasp its nuances better than me. However, the first half of the book did give me insight into the mind of a regular internet presence – the detached, ironic tone, the angular, imaginative connections and the way a communal view or feeling emerges and evolves – and the second half gave me an insight into love and grief in extremis. How they fit together…I’m not sure but two out of three ain’t bad. 

This is another book that’s hard for me to wholeheartedly recommend. It was Booker shortlisted, but that doesn’t mean much. Lockwood has a distinctive wit and style that constantly grabbed my attention. Google her – how appropriate - and you’ll get a better idea about what she has to offer.

Some Kids I Taught And What They Taught Me by Kate Clanchy 

I chose to read this book as a personal act of defiance against the worst excesses of the current toxic culture wars. This book is an account of Clanchy’s thirty year career in education teaching creative writing to a range of disadvantaged children, including refugees; and, as you’re probably aware, after receiving rave reviews and winning the Orwell Non-Fiction Prize, she was subsequently cancelled by her publisher because of a vicious campaign by woke online warriors. Her crimes were the usual double whammy – her colonialist heritage as a privately educated, liberal, middle class writer meant that some people though she wrote about the children she taught in a stereotypical, racist manner as well as portraying herself as her pupils’ “white saviour”. Of course, not one of the pupils whose stories she covered in her book saw things that way. And, of course, that did not bother her critics or her spineless publisher. 

I was shocked to read about the terrible toll this episode took on this patently decent woman – why else would she have spent her career teaching in such demanding educational institutions? So, as I say, I sought out this book, which thankfully had found a new publisher, as an act of solidarity with Clanchy. I’ve ended up grateful, though, to have read such a fascinating and moving account of her experiences; this is undoubtedly the best and most authentic account of what schools and teaching are like in modern Britain that I have ever read. 

Clanchy has spent most of her teaching career in challenging schools in Scotland and Essex as well as periods when she concentrated exclusively on her writing. Most impressively, she made a conscious decision to teach in an exclusion unit for those children whose mainstream schools could not cope with them despite their best efforts. Her thing, especially in the second half of her time in schools when she was established as a writer, was to use creative writing, and poetry in particular to give her students a voice. She is clear that she never saw what she was doing as a form of therapy but, she is astute enough to realise that for many of the pupils it became a way for them to work through the pain and challenges in their lives. However, she didn’t see it as therapy because she valued the craft and originality as well as the emotional power of the pieces that her pupils produced. She would help them craft and refine their work as appropriate and type them up to be shared and displayed to give her young writers a sense of achievement, esteem and visibility. 

During her long career, the different kids she taught write for a whole variety of reasons but the pieces she reproduces from the young people she worked with who has been displaced from war zones, forced to flee their homes or brought up in dysfunctional homes are the most astonishing. Astonishing for their visceral power and insights into the lives of people who we tend to push into a passive victimhood, but also astonishing for the brilliance of the writing. Clanchy’s approach of using a well-chosen poem to engender discussion and as a starting point for the children’s own writing seems deceptively simple – and I am sure that there is a lot more that she does with the kids in her writing clubs and workshops – but whatever she did, the results are staggering. 

The emotional heart of the book are these astonishing pieces of writing. Clanchy, who is so obviously filled with an abundance of empathy and love for her pupils, discusses these poems with a clear-eyed analytical tone out of respect – she is a fellow writer commenting on work that moves and impresses her. Yet, she also gives us the children’s back stories which make their achievements even more impressive. Perhaps her most important teaching skill is the patience and space she gives to these damaged but resilient young people. She never gives up on them and when they are ready to write she provides guidance with her craft as a professional poet to enable them refine their writing so that the full emotional power of their experiences is communicated on the page. This is, I think, what she partly means by her choice of title. 

This is only part of what this book is about, however. Elsewhere, she surveys the contemporary UK education system and writes with intelligence and proper common sense (not the spurious kind that The Daily Mail always claims for itself) about all the most knotty features of this system. For the first time, I read a balanced but devastating analysis of why the private system is inimical to the health of our country. There was a superb exploration about the dilemmas well-meaning parents face when choosing a secondary school for their child which was rooted in her family’s own situation and her own experiences in school. The section on teaching those children excluded from mainstream school was especially affecting for me as a former head teacher who had to make this terrible decision about a child’s fate. In none of these sections did she take the easy way out by spouting easy ‘do gooder’ phrases that are absolutely correct in theory but collapse at the first touch of reality. In particular, a section about a girl from a defiantly working class family who had material goods but deep down understood she was lacking other aspects of cultural capital was powerful. And this was more so because Clanchy admitted that she failed to bridge the gap between herself and the girl due to their different class and background. She didn’t shy away from the fact that there was little pleasure in the relationship she forlornly tried to develop with her. 

Ultimately, I think it is the tone of these sections that might have irked those looking for something to offend them. That’s because she sees the nuances and complexities around the competing visions of what education should look like in a modern society. Traditionalists will be suspicious of her championing of what they might see as the undeserving poor but admire the achievements of her pupils, whilst progressives will respond to her championing of the disadvantaged whilst recoiling at her unwillingness to confer a blanket victimhood on all her pupils. I have read the criticisms of this book and her own semi-defence of the things she got wrong. I am sure that the original text which she has now amended may have used some clumsy phrases about kids with special needs as well as some racial stereotypes that were nearer to cliché than offensive labels. Having read this book, though, I can’t accept that this was anything more than unintentional clumsiness. But don’t take my word for it, instead listen to the voices of the kids that she helped to find their voices.

Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I recently read and reviewed music journalist, David Hepworth’s book about the music industry in 1971. It is a musical era that fascinates me due to my age and the fact that I was just beginning to develop my own listening tastes during those heady first few years of the 1970s; but, also, it is hard to not be excited about this era when the pop sounds and flower power artists morphed into the variegated rock sound that has been so influential for contemporary music. That’s why I was drawn to this novel set slap bang in West Coast America, the coolest place for music then, about a fictional band whose fame blazed brilliantly before ending abruptly and mysteriously. Even though there have been many books about that particular scene by the artists, journalists and even groupies who were there, this book takes the madcap mayhem and beautiful creativity of that scene and brings it fully to life in the story of Daisy Jones and The Six. 

This is a story familiar to many young people following the rock gods of this time – a band rises from seemingly nowhere to create music, television appearances and concerts that mean so much to their massive fan base and then it just as quickly disintegrates. Often the band splinter around the cliché of creative differences, more often the accompaniments of fame (sex, drugs, alcohol and too much too soon) become impossible for these youthful and, predominantly working class, artists to handle. Burnout, breakdown, break up and, in some cases, death (Morrison, Hendrix and Joplin from the famous 27 club) were the results. And these were all lived out in the newly intrusive media of the 70s to the worldwide attention of fans who were alternately saddened at the demise of their heroes and ghoulishly fascinated by what seemed the glamorous bohemian excess of the times. 

In this novel, we are made aware that the reason for the bright but transient trajectory of Daisy Jones and The Six has remained a mystery for decades and only now is the true story of their rise and fall emerging. And to get at the truth, Reid presents the novel as a series of interview responses from all the people who were there at the time – the band, management and promoters, roadies and studio engineers, family and friends, rock journalists and anyone else who was a witness to the band’s story. We have a sense that someone is pulling together all these accounts (and we eventually find out who and why this person is looking so far back into rock’s past); but the voices are unmediated and often contradictory in their perspectives of the past. 

We start with the back story of the two key but different elements of the band that were the reason for the creative tension which inspired their one perfect album and so fascinated the fans. The Six were set up by Billy Dunne and his brother along with four other musicians in the late sixties. They were making a name for themselves touring and releasing tracks and they knew they were good. To be more precise, Billy knew they were good and he knew he was the biggest reason why as the band’s songwriter and charismatic lead vocalist. In these early stages, we quickly grasp the tensions in the band. The book’s structures give them all a voice and their admiration and frustration with Billy are clear as is the fact that they are all talented artists with their own ideas and belief about the contribution they make to the obvious chemistry in the band. 

Daisy is a strikingly beautiful and intelligent young woman from LA, unnoticed by her family who, therefore, finds a new family in the clubs along Sunset Boulevard with all the groupies, drug dealers and itinerant musicians. It is her passion for music that saves her from being totally swamped by drink and drugs. Her voice and song writing as well as her charisma and beauty begin to get her noticed. And then a prescient producer has a eureka moment and sees the potential of putting Daisy and the band together. 

From that point on, we are plunged into a world of hyper-creativity, artistic and sexual tensions and a series of descriptions about concerts and recording sessions told by those who were there, with a tang of authenticity. That is one of the main appeals of the book: as Billy, Daisy and the other band members shape the lyrics, experiment with different musical choices as well as make sudden short leaps of inspiration, it’s hard not to believe that this is how great records get made. 

The other strength of this novel is the attention paid to all the characters. Billy and Daisy, the song writers, of course, get plenty of attention and they leap off the page. Neither is perfect and their prickliness is part and parcel of their artistry. Yet they respect each other’s talent. However, Daisy understands the need to fight her corner in an industry even more patriarchal than the prevailing society. Billy’s appreciation of her talent is touched with a tinge of condescending paternalism. At the start of the book during The Six’s first tour the hedonistic adrenaline rush of touring and adulation sends him off the rails. His drink and drugs fuelled breakdown nearly causes him to lose Camilla, his soul mate and rock. Her strength brings him back from the brink and, thereafter, he brings a puritanical professionalism to his music career and Daisy’s talent. This gives the band drive and purpose but, occasionally irritates his more chilled band mates. When Daisy joins them, her independent spirit refuses to fall in line. The band to her is a democracy not the Billy Dunne project. 

Camilla, along with Daisy and the Six’s keyboard player Karen, is one of three excellently presented female characters. Reid does not allow them to be outshone by Billy’s charisma and they help to highlight the passions competing within him whilst remaining utterly their own persons. 

Perhaps the final pleasure of this book is that there is ample opportunity to guess which real life artists inspired the different members of the band and other musicians and celebrities they encounter. Fleetwood Mac is an obvious choice but not the only one. And Reid does that Zelig thing of inserting real people into the action to entrench the sense of time and place. 

Yet for all the nostalgic pleasures this story evokes, the lure is finding out what happened to all these fascinating characters who for a short time gave to the world music that meant so much.

As you can tell, I really like this book. Don’t take my word for it, though. Here’s what my good friend and avid reader Dave Smith emailed to me: Just read "Daisy Jones and The Six", by a distance the best fiction I have ever read about music.

Still Life by Sarah Winman 

When this novel was discussed at book group, there was overwhelming love for it. This chimes with the majority of criticisms and reader comments. And yet, the very things that are charming and appealing about this book and that swept me along as I read it were the very things that actually made me very cross. I’ll take you more into my mixed-up reaction to this book in a moment but first the synopsis. 

The book starts in Tuscany a short time before the end of the second world war where we are introduced to Ulysses, who is to be our main protagonist and companion over the following decades. He is an intelligent and sensitive working-class soldier with a kind and open nature. As his army unit work their way through Italy, he meets Miss Evelyn Skinner, a sixty something art historian and possible spy working to secure from destruction the wonderful artistic riches of the renaissance. Now, a quick digression – as a working-class teenager with no culture, I was lucky enough to be taken on a package tour sea and sun holiday to Italy. I was even luckier, although I didn’t think it at the time, when my parents decided to break up our beach days with a long trip to Florence. I may have grumbled at the early start, long bus journey and force-fed culture but when we visited the Uffizi I was literally blinded by the brilliant colours and beauty of the art on display. Whilst I didn’t immediately become an avid consumer of the high arts, I do think the door to an aesthetic sensibility was opened a crack and I can still picture my younger self wide-eyed at the wonderful sights of the city. Now the point of this digression is that a similar awakening happens in Ulysses, especially as he discusses the importance of the connection between art and real life with Evelyn and his commanding officer, one of the finest men he has ever met. The power of these experiences remains lurking in his background when the war ends and he returns to his patch of East End London in those war-ravaged, post conflict years. 

Winman concisely and skilfully sketches the tight community of characters centred around ‘The Stoat and Parrot’, the pub where Ulysses returns to work behind the bar – Colin, the grumpy landlord, whose sarcasm can’t hide his kindness and disappointed romantic nature; and Old Cressy, another kindly soul with a belief in the redemptive power of nature and an organic relationship with objects and machinery which means he can fix virtually anything. Ulysses also returns to his wife, Peg, the beautiful and tempestuous singer at the pub with whom he has one of those strange relationships that will never cohere and yet never end. Their marriage was a practical, financial act before he went off to fight but now that he has returned the first thing they do is divorce. Peg’s usual whirl of emotions has been stirred by the end of her brief but bedazzling love affair with an American soldier. He leaves her with a hopeful longing for his return over the ensuing decades and a child. Ulysses, decent and loving, acts as a surrogate father for The Kid. 

And then the novel takes a sharp shift as Ulysses inherits a Tuscan villa, the result of a typical act of kindness by him during the war. Enticed by the beauty and possibility he had tasted only a few years previously, he persuades Peg to let him take along The Kid, and Old Cressy also joins for one last adventure. In Italy, this strange family begin a new life renting out part of the villa to tourists. Ulysses resumes his dead father’s craft of globe making – a hint here of the emotional manipulation that made me angry, but I’ll hold my horses for a while on that. 

Eventually, through the 1950s to the 1980s more and more characters from England, the Italian village community and Ulysses’ past are drawn into this new world that he has created. Together they create a beautiful, caring, secure new life, a still life that values the everyday and shows that each of the characters still has a life of wonder and happiness. That’s the part of this book that is easy to love. It has an optimistic view of human nature and a belief that whether someone considers themselves different or an outsider there is always the possibility to create a loving family just as Ulysses does. The core of this book’s philosophy and charm is summed up by Ulysses towards the end of this book when he looks around at his friends and thinks “You’d want to be with them…. You’d want to be part of them.” 

This sense that anyone can create their own family and that most people are decent and kind is not the only case for the defence of this book – and actually there’s no need for a defence as my opinion is the outlier on its merits. In addition, Winman moves confidently around the characters’ different perspectives to create a group of distinctive, well-rounded people. Yes, many of them are different often because of their sexuality, sometimes because of their uncomfortable fit with life’s realities and conventions, but in the new world Ulysses and they create, there is always understanding and acceptance. 

As I say, it is this rich characterisation, the evocation of the novel’s two distinct milieu and the sunny optimism of the characters’ lives that made this a smile-filled breeze to read. And that should be enough – but for me it isn’t. We have one bad guy (white, English and mean in every way) who brings some darkness to Peg’s life but that is in the margins of this story. Then there’s some typical teenage angst for The Kid - we’ve all been there. And that’s about it. None of the positivity and good feelings seem to have been properly secured – there’s not enough contrasting darkness to give the glorious moments proper impact. It’s as if I could eat and drink whatever I liked, never exercise or show restraint and yet still live a healthy life all the way to my hundredth birthday – a lovely thought but not real life. 

That caveat, of course, tells you more about me than the book. I could try to bolster my case by mentioning the frankly annoying parrot and other magic realism touches; but, again, I know I am on dodgy ground because many people like this genre. It also strikes me that this book ticks all the boxes for fair-minded, kind, anti-Brexiteers: it creates a world in the heart of Europe where everyone gets on in a charmingly, idiosyncratic manner, and there is no prejudice or disharmony in contrast to broken Britain from which the characters escape. Wishful thinking but, like a lovely sweet treat, its sugar rush was soon forgotten … by me. 

Assuming, however, that you are less of a grump than me, I suggest you pay more attention to the rest of my book group and the flood of positive critical reviews.

Memorial by Bryan Washington 

Just as a reminder, here’s how I started the review on my first blog of Washington’s previous book, the short story collection ‘Lot’.

There is a buzz around Bryan Washington. With only two published books – this short story collection from 2019 and his novel, ‘Memorial’, from 2020 – he has garnered a heap of awards and ‘Lot’ was selected by Barack Obama as one of his books of 2019. Washington is young, black and gay and his subjects are race, sexuality, identity and that part of American society that has been disenfranchised from the American Dream. That is why I was drawn to this collection in the first place because of its stories’ pertinence. I expected to encounter a world, characters and issues far removed from my life, and they are. I also suspected that these stories might have been lauded because of who wrote them and the world they describe rather than for their craft; my suspicions were unfounded. Washington is a fine writer – more of that in a moment – but that doesn’t mean that the lives he describes and the deprived milieu and culture he explores were easy for me to respond to. This novel is probably not written for the likes of me… but I am getting ahead of myself.

As you can tell, I was pleased to have read ‘Lot’ and I feel the same about this novel. The point I made previously about the milieu and characters being outside my orbit – and that was my main reason for reading it – applies also to this book. That being said, the dilemma facing the two central protagonists, Mike and Benson, is universal – they are a few years into their relationship and are beginning to suspect that it may have run its course. The fact that Mike is Japanese, a decent chef working several jobs in not very decent restaurants, and Benson is a slightly buttoned up young black man who works in a day centre looking after disturbed children, and both have fraught, distant relationships with their respective families, only provides further complexity. As with ‘Lot’ the setting is Houston; they share an apartment in a black neighbourhood that is becoming more gentrified … white. Although both are educated and smart, there is a sense that both are drifting; and that’s the starting point for the story. 

If the catalyst for what happens in this story is the state of Mike and Benson’s relationship, it manifests itself in a specific set of events. Mike’s mother, Mitsuko, is just about to arrive from Japan for an extended stay with Mike but, at the same time, Mike has decided to travel to Japan to stay with his terminally ill father, Eiju, whom he has not seen for several years. His motive for doing so seems more bound up with his own sense of disorientation about his relationship with Mike and the direction of his life. Benson and his mother are both bewildered by his decision and, in a repressed manner, furious with him. This first section is seen from Benson’s perspective and his unease about hosting a stranger, a middle aged Japanese woman, for an indeterminate period is clear and yet it emerges in a muted manner in-keeping with his emotionally controlled personality. 

Now, in a different writer’s hands, Mitsuko and Benson would have gradually bonded over their love for Mike, and in some sense they do, but any hint of understanding is hard-won and complex. Theirs is a spiky relationship in a home without Mike. Mitsuko cooks for Benson whilst he goes out to work and then patiently but rather gruffily shows him how to cook the meals that she must have once shown to Mike. Mitsuko is waiting for Mike to return as well as trying to understand something about her son’s life by staying in his home and living with his partner. Benson, however, intensely re-examines his time with Mike but life also intervenes as the possibility of a different future emerges with the older brother and carer of one of the children from his work. 

In the second section of the book we see events from Mike’s perspective. He is confused as to why he has decided to live with and care for his father whom he had rejected following Eiju’s drunken decline and abandonment of his family. In many ways, this father son relationship is a more aggressively spiky relationship than the one back in Houston. Yet, in the same hard won and complex manner, Mike and Eiju begin to evolve a companionable rhythm to their lives. Mike works alongside his father in the small, local bar he has set up and gradually takes charge as Eiju’s illness advances. He appreciates the sense of rough community that his father has created and has to reassess his options when Eiju offers him the bar after he dies. Like Benson, Mike constantly replays scenes from their relationship in his head and things are not only confused by his father’s offer but also the possibility of a new relationship. 

It is at this point, in the final section of the book, that Mike returns home. The focus inevitably falls on what is going to happen to Mike and Benson and their life together. Some form of external perspective is provided, however, by a set piece where Benson’s family, including his estranged father, meet Mitsuko and Mike. There is something rather manufactured about this scene but nevertheless Washington handles it well. Deep familial scars are examined as Benson expresses his anger at the lack of support, especially from his father, when he experienced some difficult times with his sexuality in the past. Mike and Benson both reassess their understanding of one another as they learn about each other’s families and the way they perceive the young men’s relationship. 

That makes the ending seem rather schematic and it’s really not. At the very end, there are no real answers about their relationship, other than the ones that the reader supplies. You feel that you know both men more deeply but certainly not fully. I have twice used the phrase “hard won” about the emotional progress made by the characters and, at times, this makes the book uncomfortable reading. There is a mixture of psychological honesty alongside disorientating complexity that reminded me of many of the short stories in ‘Lot’. Ultimately, I felt I knew these two men better but wasn’t sure that I liked the values and behaviour in their world which seems so far removed from my own. Yet, isn’t it a good thing to sometimes examine the lives of people one rarely encounters? Which, of course, brings me back to my first review.

A Stranger City by Linda Grant 

This book reminded me of John Lanchester’s novel ‘Capital’. I enjoyed that book for the way it explored the changing nature of British society by presenting the occasionally intermingling stories of a particular London street’s multi-ethnic and socially diverse residents. Grant takes a broader view of the changing nature of London but, like Lanchester, she follows a collection of diverse Londoners who, this time, are loosely grouped together by the mysterious suicide of a forty something woman. The other significant change is that Grant’s book is written post-Brexit and the consequences of that decision are as much the subject of this novel as the experiences of her characters and the nature of London, itself. The title, therefore, reflects the way London is changing; people seem to be taking sides in a national debate and yet it also refers to the way London has constantly evolved with the arrival of strangers from across the country and further afield. 

The dead woman is claimed by no one and has left no trail for the police to follow. As Marco, a tech savvy, wannabe social media entrepreneur points out it is pretty hard to be anonymous in the modern world, with the digital footprints that we all leave whether we want to or not. This aspect of the suicide both intrigues and disorientates Pete, the investigating police officer. As someone who loves the bustling energy of London, the echoes of history in all its locations and its shifting swathes of strangers, Pete becomes obsessed with finding out the truth about the dead woman. And yes, the resonance with the mysterious death at the start of Dickens’ Mutual Friend is deliberate and something that Pete also probably senses. 

As time passes, a documentary maker, Jim, teams up with Pete to explore the dead woman’s story and what it tells us about modern life and the lives of those Londoners whose own lives were touched tangentially by this mystery. Jim enters the novel along with his new wife, Francesca, herself the daughter of immigrants who had a generation before fled to London as an escape from a less open society. Then we are introduced to people on Jim and Francesca’s street, strangers who have made homes in the capital from Germany, Iran, India and many other locations and who now begin to feel strangers in a strange country that they increasingly feel does not want them. 

I have only touched on some of the characters to whom we are introduced. All of them are given space and have their own stories, which in most cases, are only slightly touched by the unknown suicide. Pete is the anomaly: the dead woman represents a sense of lost potential on which he projects his own feelings at a time of personal crisis and change. His wife, who has recovered from cancer, wants to re-locate to the Lake District but Pete seems to need London in order to be himself – a sliding doors moment heads his way. Oh, and there is still the mysterious woman; and despite the fact that this isn’t a whodunit or what happened sort of novel, the narrative moves onwards to some sort of resolution of her mystery – a resolution that people like Pete, projecting their own lives onto the dead woman’s story, want to see resolved. 

Interestingly enough this novel, a book group choice, really divided my group with a passion. At least one member hated it and couldn’t finish it because she found the structure confusing and could not get a grasp of the connections between characters. Those who felt the same were disorientated and alienated from the story by the way Grant jumped from one character and story to another without providing something for the reader to gain his or her bearings. Those who were more positive about the book, and I was one of them, enjoyed the way Grant handled these different strands allowing characters’ lives to occasionally intersect. This was of a piece with the idea of displaced Londoners from different backgrounds leading slightly atomised lives in a changing country. All of them to me seemed presented in a nuanced complex way which is something that I always enjoy in the novels I read – the characters have multi-faceted lives, and lives that will continue in various unexpected ways after the book has ended. 

I am glad to have read this book for its characterisation but I had my own, different concerns. Ultimately, I found the main ideas and the ending of the book bleak and dispiriting. I thought it was because of the behaviour of the characters but my good friend, Rob, astutely pointed out that many of the characters do behave in a kindly way and help others at various points in the novel. This is, however, a post-Brexit novel which seemed to me to say that England has become a mean-spirited, xenophobic, aggressive and angry country. Hence Grant’s depiction of blacked out trains and offshore prison hulks for refugees awaiting deportation, as well as characters suffering nasty racist attacks or making decisions to return to their mother country. I think Brexit is a terrible mistake but even with Johnson and Truss I don’t think we are hurtling towards a dystopian nightmare where ravaging English nationalists gradually erode our long-held values and freedoms. And again, it seems to me that too many of our current novelists, in varying degrees, seem to take this profoundly negative stance – it is the self-loathing of the intelligentsia that in some ways provoked the Brexit backlash … but that is another story.

The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle 

Science Fiction is a genre I have wanted to explore properly for some time. Where to begin though? After all, a quick skim of recommended lists will confuse you with steampunk, cyberpunk, dystopias, hard science, tech noir and so on. The best thing to do with such a bewildering choice is to chat with an intelligent, perceptive reader, who has a great knowledge and enthusiasm for the different genres, and let him guide you towards the right intergalactic highways for your tastes. In my case, that’s a love of serious science fiction films such as ‘Arrival’ and, based on my fondness for H.G. Wells in my youth, a need for the issues explored to be rooted in today’s problems no matter what the speculative context. So, thank you, Paul for this first recommendation: a classic of the first contact sub-genre written in 1974 by Pournelle, a serious scientist as well as writer, and Niven, a master of the genre with a body of award winning novels. 

The novel is a fascinating mixture of existential thriller and serious speculation, rooted in hard science, about what has happened to mankind in the distant future. The dramatic core of the book occurs when future mankind comes into contact for the first time with an intelligent alien life form. At times, the hard science was difficult for me to unravel. Eventually, though, I relaxed into the book by only concerning myself with the outcomes of the scientific and technological features of the novel’s world rather than trying to understand the scientific basis underpinning them.

 The novel is set far into the future, 3017 AD, yet many of the social structures and conflicts seem very familiar. We are immediately plunged into this future world onto the bridge of the Imperial battlecruiser INSS MacArthur which has been involved in the quashing of a rebellion on the planet New Chicago. In this long novel, the writers take their time introducing a wide range of military personnel, political and business leaders from the Second Empire, a sort of muscular United Nations dominated by America and Russia, that has emerged slowly following a brutal interstellar war resulting in the demise of the First Empire. 

At different times crew members from MacArthur become our window on events and their interactions gradually reveal the Second Empire’s social and political structures. A strict hierarchy prevails and concepts of duty, hard work and intellectual curiosity motivate most characters. Yet the sense of team work and purpose as well as genuine friendship does not seem very far removed from another crew popular when this book was written – the USS Enterprise. Whereas, Star Trek presented an optimistic view of the Western democracies driving the world forward to a more liberal, peaceful and understanding future – they got that wrong – there is something more ambivalent about the Second Empire. For a start, we learn that there are continuing rebellions in colonised planets occupied by people referred to rather disparagingly as Outies. We also pick up on several quite cold-hearted references to the brutal suppression of those deemed terrorists (perhaps another man’s freedom fighters) – and some of these suppressions seem to be quasi-genocidal. This all makes sense as we get to understand the strict societal and power structures in the Second Empire, with its ruling aristocracy and caste-like rigidities in the hierarchical roles that its citizens occupy. 

The catalyst for the main narrative focus in the novel occurs when MacArthur, led by its new captain Rod Blaine, an aristocrat gaining naval experience prior to assuming a constitutional leadership role, is sent to investigate an alien spacecraft. Understanding the significance of this moment, Blaine brings the alien ship’s main capsule aboard in a nerve shredding episode where his new ship is placed in great danger. Blaine fears that his decision, although ultimately successful, will be seen as reckless and his captaincy will be stripped from him before it’s barely begun. However, the discovery of a dead alien, a furred three-armed creature, vindicates his decision in the eyes of his superiors – this is the first intelligent alien species ever encountered. From that point onwards, Blaine is sent with a retinue of scientists, ethnologists, sociologists and many other experts to visit the star, The Mote, from whence the alien ship journeyed. The motivation for this mission is, of course, mankind’s boundless curiosity. However, there is a fear of the unknown which means that MacArthur is accompanied by the battleship Lenin, whose commander has strict instructions to monitor the anticipated first contact and take action, including the destruction of the aliens and MacArthur, if there is any risk to the Second Empire. 

It is the encounter with the aliens, quickly nicknamed The Moties, which is the heart and the strength of this book. The writers do a brilliant job of creating an alien species whose development, psychology, institutions and customs seem just that – alien. I’ll say no more because this is the pleasure of the book, discovering something wholly different and new. This is enhanced by the various encounters being narrated from a range of characters aboard MacArthur; and then at a crucial moment these perceptions are shifted as we see things from The Moties’ perspective. We know that Blaine and his crew have to withhold key information about the Alderson Drive which allows space craft to travel instantaneously between specific points, and the protective Langston Fields that each craft possesses. That is the main reason why Lenin stands guard to secure this technology. However, The Moties, who despite their alienness seem open and friendly, have secrets of their own. 

The meeting with the aliens and the growing tension between the two species is still engrossing nearly fifty years on. However, even those readers who acknowledge this book as a classic of the genre, will also admit that some aspects of the book have not aged so well. The main focus of criticism tends to be the characterisation of the human characters and particularly the sexual attitudes explored through the book’s only significant woman, Lady Sally Fowler. She is an earnest, slightly buttoned up member of the ruling class who strives to make herself useful as a socio-ethnic expert but ends up as a rather conventional love interest. There may indeed be some criticisms to be made in the writers’ development and rounding out of the main characters yet this did not unduly bother me. In some respects, the conventional and flat characterisation seemed appropriate to the attitudes and ethos that the Second Empire seemed to impose on its military personnel and politicians. 

I was happy to give the writers the benefit of the doubt – how could they anticipate all the technological changes that have happened in the last few years, or even the fact that Russia is no longer a superpower. If one puts aside these quibbles, then it is the meeting of two utterly unalike species that still resonates for the 21^st century reader.

The World According to Garp by John Irving 

For years, I have read and heard Irving’s name mentioned as an important, contemporary, American writer, and film adaptations of his books have attracted such stars as Robin Williams and Michael Caine. In particular, The World According to Garp is a book that caught my attention because text books and articles that I read when teaching often used extracts from this novel to illustrate literary ideas and techniques. Having now read it, I understand why this was the case – Garp is a writer, in a book featuring several other writers, and it spends a fair amount of time exploring the idea of storytelling and writing. That doesn’t mean that it is an introverted book even though Garp is a classic example of the novelist as navel-gazer. There’s actually a lot of dramatic action in what is essentially an account of his life. 

It’s a relatively long book at 500 pages and on top of the usual catalogue of first love, real love, marriage, parenthood, loss, infidelity and career anxieties and imperatives, Garp also experiences several dramatic events far outside most people’s lives as well as encountering the type of characters one tends to meet rarely. Therefore, I’m at a loss about how to summarise the plot. Garp wouldn’t be at such a loss because as a writer he tends to over-do it and use a paragraph when a sentence would do. And in the same way that I’m now having a conversation with myself about what to write, Garp seems to have that sort of conversation in his head and with his family and friends constantly. Let me try instead to keep my synopsis as straightforward as possible. 

Garp’s mum, Jenny Fields, is a nurse determined to live her own life in mid-century America without the encumbrance of a man in her life. However, she wants a child and so in what could be seen as a rather tacky scene she gets pregnant following sex with one of her patients, a severely injured aircraft gunner called Garp. She brings up her son at a private school where she works as a nurse and is left alone. There Garp finds his sport, wrestling, and meets his future wife, Helen, the wrestling coach’s daughter. In this early part of the story, our focus is on Jenny and her single-minded determination to live on her own terms which seems to involve raising Garp, having a job and reading lots of books. Garp, more conventionally, gets educated academically and in the ways of the world, including sexually and romantically. 

In these passages from Garp’s youth, there are some very funny set pieces usually involving the wealthy and obnoxiously self-regarding Percy family whose ancestor founded the school – Garp’s attack on their family dog that terrorises the boys on campus is particularly funny and hints at our protagonist’s idiosyncratic nature. Eventually, though, when Jenny thinks Garp has reached adulthood, she moves on to her next project, a bestselling account of her own life that becomes a must read for 1960s boomers. Reluctantly she becomes a feminist icon and gradually begins to use her platform to push women’s rights issues and sets up a commune for a whole range of vulnerable people. So, Garp is still in her shadow as he begins his own writing career. Yet it is clear from everything people say about him and his work, as well as the extracts from his work that are inserted into the story, that Garp is a serious and talented writer. 

For a period of time, Garp settles down and starts a family whilst trying to write; but he ends up spending the days channelling his energy into distance running, energetic games of squash with his transgender friend, Roberta, and happily taking on the role of homebuilder. Of course, with a mother like Jenny he seems remarkably comfortable about gender roles although he is highly sexed and has several affairs. Then in the second half of the book the plot goes mad and Garp and his family are subjected to nasty and life changing events that are partly of their own making and partly the consequence of a chaotic, mad universe. There’s no point saying much more except the gear shift from the usual to the exceptional didn’t seem that surprising to me because all the way through I felt on edge with Garp’s character: he seemed the sort of person to whom things would happen. 

What to make of it, therefore? Well, when it was written over forty years ago the discussion of gender relations and how men and women might develop a more healthy and equal relationship was a hot topic in the western world; and, arguably, that hasn’t changed much. Garp encounters a nurturing and caring brand of feminism through his mother and wife but this is contrasted with a bitter, antagonistic brand embodied in the self-mutilating Ellen Jamesians. I suspect that we are supposed to respond positively to Garp because of the way he responds to the people he encounters with interest and kindness – and I do – but I’m not sure that some of his ‘When Harry Met Sally’ attitudes about male-female relationships would be looked on so positively in the current climate. The thing is, though, that he and most of the other characters are trying to do their best and act, most of the time, out of love and compassion … but they also make mistakes. Ultimately, it reminded me of Candide – it’s the striving in life that makes it bearable and most of us spend our lives trying to get better and be better knowing that we’ll never quite get there. 

When I glanced at some reviews of this book, it struck me that people either considered Irving a towering genius dispensing wisdom through a beguiling combination of comedy and tragedy. Or, they found his writing bloated and Garp an annoying, solipsistic and ridiculous character. Typically, I fell between these two extreme judgements. I did laugh several times when reading this book and was also genuinely shook up by some graphic scenes in the second half as well as moved by Irving’s exploration of loss and how people carry on. However, by the end I was glad to finish the book and will probably never read another book by Irving. Like a rich, heavy meal of several courses, it was an experience but I ended up forcing the final mouthfuls down.

Silverview by John le Carre 

This book, published after the great (espionage?) novelist’s death in 2020, is his final novel. According to his novelist son, Nick Cornwell, who downplays his tidying up of the draft text, his father passed on to him a fully formed novel – short and focusing on the same range of concerns that had adorned his most famous books. 

Now I don’t think of myself as a le Carre fan. I have never rushed to read one of his novels. Yet, starting with The Spy Who Came In From The Cold which I read in the 1980s at one of the most dangerous periods of the Cold War, and then more recently when I read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy at the same time as I saw the Oldman film, I have enjoyed his tales of the men and women who live in the shadows protecting their country’s security. Some of my reluctance is to do with the nature of these books … and it’s not because I have a literary snobbishness about thrillers. Mark Kermode says that Jaws is not really about a shark, and similarly le Carre’s books are not really about spying. They are about spies, the type of people drawn to such a discombobulating role, and the corrosive effect on their characters that a job description built on secrets and deceits inevitably causes. It seems to bother me that he always returns to these damaged lives and the unreasonable sacrifices the state imposes on them. There’s always a moment when the agents and the reader are asked to consider whether what they are doing, the damage they cause to themselves and others, makes a difference for the better and has a moral purpose. 

Le Carre returns to that theme with added force in this novel, which is unsurprising as the last few years have seen western democracies begin to lose confidence in the superiority of their institutions, systems and values, and the international world order they created. This is the novel of someone looking back. Therefore, his spies are all people of a certain age who look at the world they have tried to shape with a degree of ambiguity. 

After a rather perplexing first scene where a bit of espionage business takes place that only makes sense much further into the novel, we are introduced to the everyman, Julian Lawndsley, who will provide some form of outsider perspective on the secret world of the spooks. After a successful career in the city he opens a bookshop in an East Anglian town and becomes embroiled in an unlikely relationship with a Edward Avon, a Polish immigrant who has recast himself as an elderly English eccentric. Lawndsley is intrigued by Avon. We learn that the older man is a retired MI6 agent and Lawndsley’s fascination is in part because he perceives that Avon seems to be performing his life with a hinterland of mystery. Lawndsley not only meets his Avon’s dying wife, Deborah, a high ranking, establishment figure in British intelligence but begins a relationship with his daughter, Lily. And unbeknown to both, he involves himself in a secret transaction in a London cinema, set up by Avon, with a mysterious foreign woman. 

At the same time, we are aware of a security issue which may or may not involve Avon that is being investigated by Stewart Proctor, MI6’s head of domestic security. He is a world weary Smiley figure and le Carre uses him to articulate a sense of Britain’s decreasing global influence and the fracturing of the post second world war settlement. Le Carre, a passionate Remainer, allows this likeable character to voice his disillusion with what he perceives as the country’s increasing Little Englander character. 

Eventually, the different strands of the novel become entwined and Lawndsley is dragged into Proctor’s investigation. Avon has been a committed communist in his youth before violently rejecting this ideology and building a career running agents with great success for MI6. Now, in his old age, has that passion that has been a feature of Avon’s approach found a different cause to support? Proctor doggedly moves towards an answer to that conundrum. 

Despite my reluctance to become a le Carre superfan, there is no doubt that this an entertaining, suitably tense and well written novel. There may be quibbles about the quick and neat wrapping up of the different strands of the story. And, yes, Lawndsley may sometimes seem to serve the needs of the plot rather than behave as an autonomous character. Those are, though, quibbles – there is plenty to enjoy from a master of this genre in this, his final peek into a world that hides in plain sight.

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem 

I don’t have a great deal to say about this book. That’s not because I didn’t like it. In fact, the reverse is true and I enjoyed it a great deal. No, the reason I expect to be unusually brief is because there is one central pleasure to be gained from reading this book, in my opinion, and that is being inside the head of the narrator, Lionel Essrog, and listening to his internal and external voice. The plot – and this is a sort of detective novel set mainly in 1950s New York amongst the Goodfellows and the Wise Guys – starts off well but peters out. By the end I’d lost interest as the denouement unfolded. 

Lionel is the reason to read this book. He has Tourette’s, with its involuntary tics and unstoppable outbursts of jumbled up, interconnected words and profanities. Of course, 1950s Brooklyn is not the time and place to have such a condition as it is little understood and sympathised with even less. Yet Essrog is a likeable, loyal and kind character. He’s also something of an outsider because of his condition and also because he was brought up in a Brooklyn orphanage – hence the title. When the book begins, he and three other orphans, Tony, Danny and Gilbert, have been working for a small-time hustler called Frank Minna since they were young boys in a mix of low level legit and illegitimate jobs. Now adults and known as the Minna Men, they still work for Frank in, let’s say, ambiguous jobs whilst operating out of a detective agency and limousine business. 

The novel starts with a violent, world-altering event for Lionel. He and Gilbert accompany Frank on a job and drive their boss to a secret meeting. When they eventually rendezvous with Frank, he has been fatally stabbed and their dash to a hospital is in vain. Now the whirling thoughts in his head are matched by the whirling of events around him. Gilbert is charged with murder, even though Lionel knows he is innocent. Solving the crime becomes his personal mission. First and foremost, he has a duty of honour to Frank. We quickly understand that the Minna Men and Frank are his family and that his now deceased boss had provided Lionel with a safe environment. Frank was the first to recognise his condition and helped Lionel educate himself about his neuro-diversity. Frank may have been using Lionel and the others but that didn’t mean he didn’t care for them. Lionel needs to find his killer not just to honour Frank but to try and calm down the increased activity in his head as well as freeing Gilbert. 

There are plenty of suspects – Frank’s wife and also his brother, a bigger mobster than Frank, who has now reinvented in California as a lifestyle guru; and then there’s Tony, the ambitious Minna Man who believes he has mafiosa blood pumping through him. Yet Lionel’s picaresque investigation to find the truth is more Scooby Doo than Philip Marlowe; and as I’ve already stated, that’s not where the heart of this book lies. 

Read this book because Lionel’s slightly skewed but perceptive take on the events around him is moving and funny. Read it for the poetic and musical splurge of phrases that seem at the same time nonsensical and yet with their own internal coherence – they pour out of Lionel at moments of high drama. Read it to get a better understanding of his condition. I don’t think Lethem has Tourette’s but through Lionel he provides a convincing explanation of what is going on in his head and why. I guess I’m just saying: read it.

The Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks 

I always think that Faulks seems like the sort of writer I’d like to have a drink with. In his frequent media appearances, he seems a genial character who wears his literary learning lightly and talks about his books and other people’s in an engaging manner. It’s just that apart from Birdsong which I was desperate to read, I never anticipate his latest book release with the excitement I feel about a forthcoming novel by say McEwan or Carys Davies or even the French enfant terrible, Michel Houellebecq. Which is unfair really because, like McEwan, his novels deal with important ideas and Faulks’ books are always solidly crafted.

I had not picked up, therefore, on the paperback release of his latest novel until my friend, Sue Gunter, chose it for the book group. And when I picked up the book, it had two things that immediately appealed to me – a setting in the near future (2030-2056) and a big idea. The near setting thing is just a personal quirk – I am fascinated by what intelligent writers show as the small shifts in society and how they convey them. More on that in a moment - Faulks handles that aspect of the story well and the glimpses of change he reveals seem plausible and interesting. 

Talissa, a young, hard up American academic, signs up for a fertility clinic to raise funds for her studies. She is assigned as a surrogate for a childless English couple, Alaric and Mary. An immediate bond is established between the three of them and the procedure goes ahead at the clinic, part of the Parn institute, a series of scientific businesses founded by the Elon Musk-like figure, Lucas Parn. And similar to Musk, there is something of the maverick in Parn’s approach - that’s where the story sets up its big idea. On Parn's instruction, a fertilised egg is implanted into Talissa’s with fifty percent human DNA and fifty percent Neanderthal. 

This first part of the novel when Faulks sets up the plot and introduces us to many of the main characters is clear, engaging and concise. Talissa, Mary and Alaric are fully rounded, slightly quirky characters whom the reader is concerned about. Parn is suitably larger than life but his willingness to follow his own scientific passions without worrying about the consequences for others is presented with some complexity; and the same applies to the characters who are drawn into Parn’s unethical research. 

That though is just the set up. The bulk and heart of the story focuses on Mary and Alaric’s child: Seth. Faulks puts us alongside Parn in our observation of Seth’s development from a baby to a young man. Parn wants to study a different consciousness from our homo sapien mind in order to understand why our species became dominant. We, the reader, similar to Parn, can’t help but be fascinated by the small but significant changes in Seth’s behaviour, attitudes and mental capabilities compared to his peers. These differences, which have marked him out as an unusual character as he progresses through school and university, predictably escape the institute's vain attempts to keep his existence a secret. As investigative journalists delve into the dubious practices at the Parn Institute, Seth feels the net tightening. 

Now this is where the novel, in my opinion, begins to unravel. It lurches clumsily into becoming a sort of fugitive style, road movie as Seth moves between New York and Scotland, with support from Talissa. This might have worked if the book had seemed to have a clear idea of what it wanted to do with Seth’s unique situation - it doesn’t. 

The novel drifts, and I guess we are expected to compare Seth’s hounding by our more sophisticated society with that of his ancient forbears by our primitive ancestors. However, there seems so much more that Faulks could have done after his initial, neat set up. He hints at Seth’s heightened senses, affinity with the natural world, craft and technical skills and inability to project his thoughts forward, although he seems to live, vitally, in the moment. These were all worthy of further development. And there was more scope for an exploration of the interplay between the two species. It seems, though, that Faulks gave up on this and adopted a shrugging acceptance that humans always turn on the other, be it stranger, refugee or hybrid Neanderthal. 

This then becomes a disappointing book and seems to give some sort of basis for my lukewarm attitude towards the admirable Faulks.. For cricket followers, there is something of the Mark Ramprakash about him - you know he’s good but just when he seems set, he gets out and fails to deliver the match winning hundred. Even in this book where he seems to be succeeding, for example, in his depiction of a future world distinct from our own not through technology but limits on behaviour - rationed trips abroad, social funding based on protected characteristics - he doesn’t follow through fully on any of his conceptions. 

Unless you are a Faulks completist or super fan, therefore, I would suggest you grapple with his big idea in related articles and reviews rather than this incomplete novel.

The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli   

This is an excellent novel and a chilling read. It is a novel, even though its insights about life in the Kremlin from a Putin aide seem to be those of an insider, with an authentic grasp of Vlad’s ruthless machinations. It is narrated by Vadim Baranov, a bright young media executive from an old Russian aristocratic background who has made his name as an acolyte of Boris Berezovsky – you may remember him, a real-life ally of Putin’s who fell out of favour and ended up dead in dubious circumstances. 

Although Baranov is an invention, my small amount of research suggests that he is modelled on Vladislav Surkov who became attached to Putin in the late 1990s as the ex KGB man began his move from Yeltin’s chosen successor in post-Soviet Russia to the autocratic figure he is today. Described as Putin’s Rasputin, Baranov fulfilled a similar role to Alistair Campbell but with a, necessarily, darker edge. Whether like his mentor, Berezovsky, he fell out of favour, well I’ll leave readers to discover that for themselves. 

The rest of the book’s plot is more well-known: Putin gradually seizes all the reins of power after a turning away from the more respectable part of the world community mainly based on pique at the failure of world leaders to welcome him into their club and treat him and Mother Russia with the respect he felt was his and his people’s due. The methods he uses are equally familiar: the projection of Putin as a strong father figure of the nation beset by threats at home and overseas but willing to conquer them for the sake of his people. Here we see Baranov deploy an array of propaganda strategies with a ruthlessness to match his master, including the rejection of Berezovsky. 

As I say, much of this is familiar not just because we have seen it play out in front of our eyes but also because of the avalanche of books and documentaries on the phenomenon of 21^st century populism and the new global strong men. Oh, and there’s also Orwell’s ‘1984’. Nevertheless, the book is resolutely not jaded because of the brio and wit of its narrator. The book’s framing has Baranov fluently recounting his time in the Kremlin to a visitor over one night at his isolated country pile. He glories in his machinations, peppering his talk with literary and philosophical aphorisms and maintaining a fluent, brisk narrative of the past quarter of a century in Russian. Throughout, his tone is ambiguous and teasing. He provides a historical, political and psychological explanation of what Putin is doing and why. Much of this is bound up with the myths Russia has created about itself and the country’s sense of manifest destiny – the same idea that Trump used about the USA in his inauguration speech. 

There is always a problem creating a charismatic narrator whose ideas are at best full of black-hearted cynicism and at worst dangerous. Nevertheless, an intelligent reader, which every member of this blog readership is, means you should be able to compartmentalise your reactions, I believe, to be fascinated, intrigued and sickened by this book’s subject.

The New Confessions by William Boyd 

I think I always start any review of a William Boyd novel by saying something about what a reliable, solid craftsman he is. Now that may seem like faint praise but it really isn’t – he consistently produces entertaining and satisfying novels, with engaging characters and engrossing depictions of a variety of settings and historical periods. That is certainly the case for this novel from 2000. 

It does, however, deploy a familiar structure from one of his best-known novels ‘Any Human Heart’. As in that book, we are taken through and experience several decades of the 20^th century in the company of one man, John James Todd, here. He fights in the first world war where he is wounded but not before finding his vocation making films. He then makes a name for himself as a director in Berlin at its 1920/30s’ zenith of craziness and creativity. Against his wishes he is then forced to Hollywood before doing his bit as a war correspondent during World War II. And then, rather ironically for this totally unpolitical man whose only interests are himself and his films, he becomes involved in the communist witch hunts. 

That is only a brief montage of his experiences and the events he witnesses; they are all presented entertainingly and with brio by a now elderly Todd holed up in rather languorous exile on a Mediterranean island in the 1970s. The narrative provides ample scope for fascinating recreations of time and place by Boyd, and Todd suffers a range of triumphs and successes followed by sharp reversals of fortune – there is no shortage of engaging set pieces and characters. 

It is, nevertheless, Todd’s character that towers over this book. Despite being so frequently at the heart of many iconic events of the past century, he also seems often at a remove from them. As I have already hinted, this is because he is always on the verge of some obsession - sometimes a woman but more often a film project. It is this absorption, we are happy to assume from his high self-estimation, that makes him a first-rate film maker; but it also means he is observing and framing events, often uninterested in the true importance of what is going on around him. 

He is engaging company as much for his faults as his virtues such as his courage, artistic integrity and zest for life. At turns, he can be comically self-deceiving and on other occasions laceratingly objective and self-critical. He is not always a good man - he abandons his early marriage and family - but is a loyal friend, lacking in prejudice and, on the whole, shows great resilience in the face of those shattering reversals of fortune. 

The reader goes along with all this because Todd is indefatigable but also because of his early life growing up in Edwardian Edinburgh. When he was born his mother died and whilst his father and brother never openly blame him for this, and nor does he seem guilt ridden, there is something off about his family life. Whilst his cold father and indifferent brother may seem typical of a buttoned up late Victorian middle professional family, Todd grows up always on the look out for an all-consuming love to give his life some purpose. At various times, it focuses on a family servant, his aunt and an American actress. Eventually, though, all that passion and feeling feeds into one great artistic project - an epic trilogy of films adapting Confessions, the autobiography of the great Swiss philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau. This rather reminded me of the thrillingly tortured real stories behind the making of some famous film projects such as Coppola’s Apocalypse Now or Klauss Kinski’s Fitzcarraldo. I

t is this project that becomes the framing device for Todd’s story as the completion of his cinema adaptation lurches back and forth from near realisation to impossibility. Yet as the story moves to Todd’s present life in his comfortable Mediterranean obscurity, the book seems to peter out. I’m not sure if that is deliberate, hinting that for such a man there is always another chapter to his adventures. I like to think that is the case if only to back up my initial judgement on Boyd’s craft as a novelist. Highly recommended.

Booth by Karen Joy Fowler 

Over the last few years, I have become more interested in the American Civil War for two reasons. The first is why I now read so much non-fiction: an increasing awareness of my ignorance about so much. The second is because the recent chaotic state of America, still the leader of the free world in my opinion, clearly has deep roots. It seems increasingly obvious that such shocking events as George Floyd’s public murder and the Capitol riots are part of the ongoing, and seemingly unresolved, consequences of the Civil War. 

That’s why then I was drawn to this Booker long-listed novel about that tumultuous period in American history. Fowler takes as her key point of reference the assassination of Lincoln - the first of those murders that characterise America’s modern history - and explores the state of the nation through an epic, sprawling focus on the family of John Wilkes Booth. 

Like all good schoolboys, I knew that Booth was an actor who shot Lincoln in his box at the theatre in the dog days of the war. What I was not aware of was the fact that he was part of America’s foremost acting dynasty - think the Redgraves for a more homely British equivalent. 

The novel begins in the early 19th century and as we surmise not long after famous Shakespearean actor, Junius Brutus Booth, has brought his family from London to a rural homestead in Maryland - we later learn the scandalous reason why he has chosen to make his career in America and in such a remote location. Junius’ hugely charismatic and idiosyncratic personality dominates the first half of the novel. Interestingly enough though, Fowler regularly switches the family character whose perspective leads the narrative but does not use Junius for that purpose. Instead it is his range of unusual or unfashionable views - vegetarianism, anti-slavery - and his brilliant public performances and wild behaviour away from the stage that light up the family’s domestic routines. He is away for nine months of each year taking the bard to the different corners of this sprawling new country, sending back money from his triumphs to support his growing family. 

The story, however, remains rooted with the left behind family and the perspective comes initially from his eldest daughter Rosalie and then her younger sister, Asia. Rosalie early on accepts her role as the unobtrusive family carer, deeply affected by the childhood deaths of her siblings, who supports her mother to run the family in her father’s absence. Asia, beautiful and spirited, constantly fights against the restraints of being a woman and rather surprisingly becomes the family’s chronicler. 

This early section is as much social history, with fascinating insights about the acting life as the country moves westwards, and about life on a 19th century American farm with a family of a similar status to Austen’s Bennetts. However, in two respects there is a larger perspective. Throughout the novel, Fowler intersperses the family’s story with short extracts from letters, speeches by Abraham Lincoln and news reports about him. We know how this story ends and we see the man of destiny moving towards that tragic destiny. 

The second level of subtle perspective is supplied by Joe Hall and his family. Joe is a freed slave who runs the Booth farm. Yet his family is spread around the surrounding farms and are not free, and he is helped to run the farm with indentured slaves whom Junius leases from his neighbours. Despite the Booth family’s enlightened views they are compromised - much like the American economy where morals often clashed with business. 

When Junius abuses himself to death via his wild roistering, the focus falls more on his sons. They have all moved on to the family business and begin the arduous yearly round of touring in order to support the increasingly stretched family. Fowler particularly focuses on Edwin, the second eldest surviving boy, and the true inheritor of Junius’ acting talents - this is significant. There is a deliberate turning away from John, the youngest, spoiled child. We learn about the circumstances of his birth that provides him with his own sense of destiny as well as his less benevolent wild nature. He is handsome, dashing and has some of his father’s charm but it is skin deep and does not encompass Junius’ big-heartedness. 

As I stated, we know where the story is going and yet it is still thrilling and disturbing to see the family unwillingly bound up in a national tragedy. John’s confederate sympathies, at odds with his family, eventually become intolerable for his indulgent family to contain. His arrogant sense of being chosen for this moment, leads John to Lincoln. The two strands of the story come together briefly and portentously; and this is perhaps where this excellent novel faltered slightly. The ending was tidied up, with Lincoln and the family quickly consigned to history. Having spent so long with the family, this was disappointing but then, again, it must be difficult for a writer to move on from such a senseless real life climax. 

I can thoroughly recommend this book. It is an imagined history of a resonant period in the modern world’s history and it had the ring of truth and deep psychological insight.

Hunters in the Dark by Lawrence Osborne 

I was thinking about how I used to read a lot of Graham Greene’s novels in my twenties. I’ve hardly read any this century and since his death in 1991, he seems to have gone out of fashion. That may be because the exotic locations, where many of his most famous books are set, no longer seem so exotic in the globalised 21st century. Or perhaps the brand of Catholic guilt that tormented his protagonists is less interesting and relevant now than other au courant guilt. Whatever, I was pondering why a writer who was considered so significant last mid century now seems a less vital writer to read, when I was attracted to a glowing review of a novel by “the modern Graham Greene.” 

Lawrence Osborne’s biography seems to match that of Greene’s in many ways – an Oxbridge educated Englishman who has lived and worked in a variety of foreign locations and has written fiction, journalism as well as having some of his books adapted for the screen. 

What of his work, though, and this novel in particular? Well, for a start and similar to many of Greene’s books, this is a thriller that strives for deeper significance and is set in a still relatively little-known part of the world, Cambodia. Our protagonist, Robert Grieve is a 28 year old secondary school teacher from Sussex who is spending a languid summer break in Indochina. When he unexpectedly wins a relatively large sum of money at a Cambodian casino he decides to extend his holiday. He is bored with his life in England and disappointed with his own lack of purpose, and his reluctance to open himself up to opportunities and the flow of an unknown fate. The money makes that a possibility if only for a brief while. 

In this new state of possibility, he ends up in the company of a charismatic and dangerously ambiguous American, Simon, and his young, beautiful Cambodian girlfriend, Solthea. Despite the warnings from his Cambodian taxi driver, Ouksa, with whom he has established a tentative friendship, to avoid entanglement with Simon, Robert goes with the flow. 

After a dreamlike evening together of idle chat, drink and drugs, Robert awakens on a boat bound for Phnom Penh with only a hundred dollars left from his winnings and dressed in Simon’s stylish linen suit. After an initial, brief panic Robert not only accepts this change in his fortunes but views it almost as a gift from Simon. Some of the building blocks of his normal existence have been removed and he can now remake himself for a period of time. He takes on Simon’s name and creates a new backstory for himself in the capital. At this point, the novel seems to be a picaresque exploration by Robert of the freedom this remaking of his identity gives him; in a wider sense, it also seems to reflect the remaking of Cambodia that is taking place after the traumatic years of Pol Pot. 

There is something of the everyman about Robert - he is physically attractive with an equally alluring charm and intelligence. Yet, we the reader seem to sense something hidden and undiscovered within him, and it is this air of mystery that adds to his allure for the characters he encounters. 

When seeking work as an English teacher to supplement his finances, Robert is taken up by the wealthy Dr. Sar who appoints him as tutor to his beautiful and educated daughter, Sophal. Her excellent English needs little help but Robert suspects that his appointment is more to do with the prestige of employing a foreign tutor, than linguistic need. We, the reader, suspect Dr Sar is as much intrigued by Robert as we are. Certainly, Sophal, finds him diverting and they begin a relationship. She seems as directionless as Robert; having been educated in Paris she has a European sophistication but only feels at ease in Cambodia. 

The story really began to take off for me when Robert starts to craft this new life in Phnom Penh. I was slightly bedazzled before that at the start of the book by the dense, sensuous descriptions of the Cambodian landscape and building. Subsequently, I realised that this was probably intentional by Osborne as it disorientates and drugs the reader in much the same way that Robert is affected by his surroundings. At this point, one of the pleasures of the book is the contrast presented between Asian attitudes and those in the western world – one is outward looking, lacking in self-pity and embued with energy, and the other is slowly stagnating in self-absorption and self-pity. The other pleasure is to do with Robert’s fate: how will his reinvention play out, will he return to his former life? 

The story, however, becomes something else as Robert begins to improvise and play with his new identity. Simon, who has the money that Robert had, is reintroduced to the story as is Ouksa, Robert’s friendly taxi driver, with his own desperate need for cash – a sick wife. Osborne then adds to that unstable mix a dangerous and brutal element in the form of Davuth, a former Pol Pot interrogator now reinvented as a provincial policeman. He also has his demons but more importantly he has a daughter that he wants to get through college. The catalyst for all this action is the casino winnings. Nobody is quite sure who has it but Davuth follows all the leads ruthlessly and this leads eventually to a bloody showdown and a final scene with dramatic life or death consequences. I really did not know which way the dice would fall at the end of this story for Robert, which is a strong recommendation in itself. However, as I started with Graham Greene, I think it is fair to say that if you have enjoyed his perceptive depictions of other cultures and environments, and conflicted characters as well as the knotted tension of his plots, then this book is for you.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. Mandel 

I enjoyed the only other book of St. Mandel’s that I have read. The Glass Hotel was presented as a mystery thriller with science fiction elements; it struck me, however, as being a mainstream literary novel that looked at the moral choices people make in their lives and the delusions and deceits that we sell to ourselves and others. Sea of Tranquility is part of a trilogy with Glass Hotel and Station Eleven, and seems much more driven by its sci fi conventions. There’s an obvious comparison with Cloud Atlas because of St. Mandel’s use of different chronological narratives set in our world’s past and future. It’s also worth pointing out that I don’t think you need to have read the previous books to enjoy and follow the action in this novel. Brendan, who loves his sci fi and chose this for our book group, rightly points out that characters reappear in this book from the earlier stories and there are references to events from those books. However, St. Mandel always provides a concise explanation of who people are and what has happened in the past. Perhaps reading both previous books might provide greater resonances but I felt equipped enough to pick up on the connections between the different time period milieus here. 

The comparison with Cloud Atlas is pertinent because of the way that the links between the four main narrative strands (the early 20th century, the current period, the 23rd century and the 25th century) gradually emerge, and allow the reader not only to make these connections but also respond to the emotional dilemmas thrown up by them. The main idea that St. Mandel explores is based on two tropes of the sci fi genre: the world we humans experience is a construct (think The Matrix); and in the future time travel will be possible. She handles these fascinating ideas in an imaginative and original manner - I won’t go into how, exactly, as this would be a spoiler. However, fair to say that St. Mandel evokes drama and tension from that age old ethical question: how far can future time travellers impact on the past? 

The four sections have distinct and enticing stories that are clearly influenced by the covid epidemic. The early 20th century sections feature Edwin St. Andrew, an eighteen year old younger son of an English aristocratic family who is exiled to the colonies, Canada, because of some ill-judged, radical comments at a dinner party. His itinerant existence is eventually impacted by the First World War and the Spanish Flu. However, it is a strange experience he has in a Canadian forest that the reader anticipates will connect him to the future narratives. The second strand in the late 20th, early 21st century refers back to The Glass Hotel and features characters involved with a Ponzi scheme from that novel. When the book then moves forward to the 23^rd century as we follow Olive Llewellyn, a writer, on a book tour, we begin to put the pieces together. There’s a strange disorientating experience and a strange man, the same man, who turns up in all three sections. There’s also the sense that the main protagonists from each section, Edwin, Mirelle and Olive seem isolated, to have lost their bearings somewhat, and are tinged with sadness. 

When we move forward to the Moon colony in the 25^th century, we move to the heart of the book. Here we meet Gaspery Roberts, languishing in an undemanding hotel job, and overshadowed by his brilliant sister, Zoey, who is involved in top secret research at the Time Institute. Gaspery will become our guide during the second half of the book and it is his actions that drive and reconcile all the different narratives. It was good to read a contemporary novel that knew how to end things appropriately. 

Although I have stressed that this book is a proper science fiction novel, like the best books in that genre it wanders off along rewarding routes. Through the character of Olive there is some playful satire of the book promotion scene; and when we learn that humankind has migrated to spaces other than the Earth, St. Mandel shows what this might mean for the way humans feel about themselves. Ultimately, though, this is a book written in the shadow of the pandemic and so tackles the big questions – what gives life purpose and meaning, and what do we owe to one another? 

As is the way with this sort of narrative structure, I was at first a little put out by this book. The individual stories seemed engaging and intriguing, but were aborted too soon. Of course, though, patience is all, and St. Mandel skilfully gathered all the strands together in this splendid novel. Recommended.

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov 

This 2023 winner of the International Book Prize is a Hungarian novel that is part satire, part reflection on the nature of memory and nostalgia, with a tricksy, experimental structure and some tropes of magical realism. In other words, it is just the sort of pretentious novel I read and then lambast for its pretention. Well, surprise, surprise, that’s not the case on this occasion… mostly. I really enjoyed this book, most of the time, although for large chunks of that time I was a little disorientated. That may have been Gospodinov’s purpose as the focus is very much on the pleasure and comfort of nostalgia but also the dangers. That’s where the satire comes in as nostalgia, which some 19^th century physicians saw as a form of illness, is linked in this book with the emergence of populist leaders in Europe who hearken back to a golden age of national contentment. 

For such a novel, it is easy to give a broad outline of the plot whilst struggling to provide the details that usually add a dash of colour to a review. An unnamed narrator, who is a Hungarian writer, tells us about his mysterious friend, Gaustine, a therapist who is involved in the treatment of people with Alzheimer’s and dementia. At the start of the novel, Gaustine is pioneering a new treatment for his patients which involves setting up a clinic with different rooms that reproduce the sights, sounds and smells from different decades. These are the decades from his patients’ past when they were younger, happier and which offer a deep-rooted familiarity. The narrator is fascinated by his enigmatic friend and the radical treatment that appears to offer a form of nostalgic comfort to the disordered minds of the patients. He begins to work alongside Gaustine as he expands his clinics and the different periods of the 20^th century for which they cater. The narrator’s role is to travel across Europe seeking out objects from the past that will help create the illusion that a particular version of the past has returned. 

The story then broadens out as healthy people begin to seek out the consolations of a past that seems so much more appealing than the harsh reality of now, with its uncertainties and potential threats. This yearning turns into a mass movement and soon entire countries spawn political movements seeking a mandate for a return to the past. Across Europe, referendums are called with different parties campaigning for a particular decade to be chosen that best represents a time of security, hope and happiness. Gospodinov has great fun describing the arguments deployed, the intensity of the campaigns and the clear parallels with the emergence of strong man leaders and nationalism in the world now. As someone who came of age just as the Soviet block was crumbling, he touches on all the resentments of countries such as East Germany where its citizens were disillusioned by the promised future post 1989. Lingering over all these amusing debates on the century’s best decade, though, is the warning that nostalgia has a tendency to forget the bad bits. 

The main idea for this book, the MacGuffin, is an intriguing idea that is handled with skill by Gospodinov. That is until the final quarter of the book, following the referendum, when the focus is on the narrator. This is where the tricksiness, which I mentioned earlier, comes to the fore. The novel is a meta fiction that reflects on the nature of writing, memory and creativity and this moves away from political satire to an almost stream of consciousness exploration of the creative process. In this final section, the narrator and Gospodinov are most closely aligned and we see him seeking refuge in his writing while, at the same time, the reality around him is eroded by a created, nostalgic set of memories. All very clever but, in my opinion, the book loses its urgency at this point. 

Nevertheless, I would urge you to read this book despite this caveat as it packs in more ideas than most of the contemporary British novels that I read which still, depressingly, have a narrow focus on certain types of dysfunctional middle class families.

The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson 

Another book group choice and another novel garlanded with literary prize nominations and awards. Well, fair enough, it is well written with an acute eye for human foibles. It did, however, remind me of the Arsenal football team that Arsene Wenger put out on the pitch in his final, less successful years at the club. They passed the ball beautifully, creating stylish angles all over the pitch; unfortunately, they barely registered a shot on goal and were prone to basic errors. This rather laboured image is my way of saying that I appreciated the skill and style of much of Mendelson’s prose but it didn’t seem to amount to much, and there were things that just didn’t work for me. 

The Hanrahan family is her subject in all their messy, bohemian north London splendour. Ray is the family patriarch, a sixty something artist whose early promise has long stagnated. He is also a domestic tyrant whose strong personality and early promise has enabled him to convince his wife and family that he is a misunderstood genius who has suffered at the hands of jealous fellow artists and the wrongheaded art establishment. 

The Hanrahans live in arty squalor, an apt metaphor for the state of Ray’s art career. This is where Mendelson’s writing is at its best in the way that she describes the mould at the back of shelves, the faint aromas of sweat stained clothing permeating the corner of rooms and the Heath Robinson nature of the house’s fittings and fixtures. I actually felt a little dirty as the action took us through the house. Mind you, action is perhaps overdoing it – there is a plot but the book is marked by the inability of many of the characters to make up their mind and take action. 

The plot then is centred on Ray’s new exhibition of work, his first for many years and a much-reduced affair with a local events room for his paintings with catering at the house. Nevertheless, the family begins to gather as well as several long-term friends of Ray – these can be seen as acolytes or hangers on. Lear, his eldest thirty something daughter who still lives in the family home is Ray’s handmaiden. Convinced of his genius, overly protective and alert to any perceived slights against him, she is trapped in a role that Ray’s erratic behaviour and artistry clearly don’t warrant. Her younger sister, Jess, seems to have escaped Ray’s influence. She works in Scotland as a teacher and lives with a colleague, Martyn. 

Quick diversion here – I don’t often read about characters with the same name as me but, oh dear, he is an awful character, particularly in his admiration for Ray and his conniving to transplant himself and Jess into the Hanrahan home. So, Jess has jumped from one controlling man to another and is eaten away with irritation and anger about Ray’s repressive effect on her siblings and mother. 

There is, to be fair to Jess, plenty for her to be cross about in Ray’s treatment of his long-suffering wife, Lucia. For a start, It’s her burgeoning art career and domestic works that are just about keeping the family afloat. However, she is the most frustrating character: in the book, there are two revelations linked to her personal and private life that give her an opportunity to escape from Ray’s baleful influence. Yet time and again she worries about the impact of her increasing artistic reputation on her husband’s self-esteem. Okay, he was once the charismatic artist and teacher to her student but he is also the man who had an affair with one of the medical team treating her when she was seriously ill. Nothing in this novel suggests what it is that holds Lucia in the relationship; and yet by the end we are not sure what she is going to do next. Aside from being extremely unsatisfying it doesn’t ring true – surely a talented, intelligent and sensitive woman, which Lucia is, would not behave this way.

She is not the only character who is problematic. I mentioned there was a third child – Patrick, Ray’s step son. He is treated by his father like a domestic servant, to be humiliated and exploited. Although Patrick’s damaged and fragile personality is revealed iby his incoherence and flakiness, he also has skills and an opportunity to escape -  a job as a chef in a local pub – but, surprise, surprise … he procrastinates, too scared about how Ray might react. However, in comparison to his sisters he remains an under-developed character. This may be deliberate, because he has a stunted personality, but it is still unsatisfactory. 

There are several other minor characters who needed fleshing out. However, Ray’s rather sporadic appearances in the novel is a deliberate move by Mendelson and this works. She skilfully makes us aware what sort of man-monster he is but she is more concerned with his effect on his family and friends rather than a detailed exploration of his monstrousness. 

Ultimately, however, I didn’t care about these people and didn’t fully believe all of the personal dilemmas examined during the lead up to, and post mortem on, Ray’s exhibition. I remember feeling the same about the only previous novel I have read by Mendelson – ‘Daughters of Jerusalem’ was about a dysfunctional academic family in Oxford with characters who quiver on the edge of life changing dilemmas. So, not my cup of tea, with some aspects that were really annoying, but, nevertheless, the work of a fine writer – Wenger’s late period Arsenal, in other words.  

Order of the Day by Eric Vuillard 

This short book explores some of the events leading up to the second world war. It fits well with my recent viewing – The Trials of Nuremberg on i-Player and The Zone of Interest at the cinema. Of course, there’s nothing unusual about this fascination with why the Nazis were able to assume such a hold over a people as civilised, sophisticated and cultured as the Germans. There have been millions of words written about the banality of evil; the horror and hatred that lie beneath the sheen of normality; the dangers of turning away and allowing the water to gradually heat up until… well, you choose your own phrase to describe the seemingly inconceivable yet, ultimately, inevitable rise of the Nazis. 

This book by the French writer and film-maker, Eric Vuillard won the Prix Goncourt in 2017. Although the Goncourt is a literary prize, this book is firmly rooted in historical events – the Anschluss in 1938 when Germany forcibly annexed Austria. Vuillard seems meticulous in his research into the actions and attitudes of that prelude to the second world war. Yet he also confidently dramatizes the conversations of the principal players behind closed doors. And throughout there is the knowing tone of an author looking at events from a magisterial height, with the perspective of history. I was comfortable with that but, I can imagine, that some people could find his knowing register slightly off-putting. 

Vuillard’s book has been classed as a satire; and he brings a sharp, clear-eyed and cynical perspective to the behaviour and motives of the main players. In some sense, it reminded me of Jonathan Swift’s satires, with their uneasy mixture of darkness and absurdity. Vuillard uses the genre to strip away some of the narratives people in Germany and Austria created for themselves about their culpability in the horror that gradually unfolded. It also strips away the narratives that history has imposed on some of the main players, including Halifax, Chamberlain and Ribbentrop. 

Vuillard’s method is to present and ask questions. This book begins with the seemingly peaceful reunion of the volk in Germany and Austria but we know where that is heading. You see, when Burt Lancaster’s basically decent but guilty judge in The Trials of Nuremberg says that he never expected this period of history to end with the horrors of genocide, Spencer Tracy intones in that morally adamantine way that only Tracy can: the first time Lancaster’s character made a judgement to appease the Nazis, he made the Holocaust inevitable. And this is what Vuillard understands: he sets out the small compromises, the self-delusion and moral blindness that seem less significant in the period before the war and then makes the reader aware of the ultimate consequences of this behaviour. 

There is a loose chronological build up to the annexation of Austria. We start, therefore, with the business elite courting and being courted by the Nazi elite. More Lebensraum means more markets, an increasing workforce (slavery is not spelled out) and greater returns. Vuillard makes it clear that there was enthusiasm also for the stability the Nazi leadership seemed to bring – after all, aren’t we always being told, businesses love certainty. All they had to do was make a pact with the devil by funding the Party. 

At the end of the book, Vuillard returns to these businessmen and presents two outcomes so that we, the reader, can draw our own inference. The first is a fictional episode, towards the end of the war, where the ageing, possibly senile, Gustav Krupp, whom Vuillard describes as a high priest of German industry, has a ghastly vision of those enslaved, worked-to-death ghosts from his factories appearing in his dining room. This is then undercut by the cold reality of the esteemed market position in the 21^st century of all those businesses who lined up behind the Nazis in the 1930s – Siemens, BMW, Telefunken, etc. 

The march of history is interspersed with dramatized set pieces featuring some of the historical figures of this period. There’s a dinner party thrown by Chamberlain for Von Ribbentrop to mark his departure from his role at the English embassy because of his promotion to German Foreign Minister; and we also have recreated an excruciating meeting at the Hitler’s Eagles’ Lair between the Fuhrer and the Austrian prime minister. The former episode emphasises the complacency of the British about the type of people with whom they were dealing. The latter focuses on Hitler’s bullying yet also warped desire to cover his land grab with a patina of legitimacy – a bit like Putin holding elections when the result is decided beforehand. All these dramatized versions of meetings that took place and which feature Nazi bigwigs underline what absurd figures they were with their bizarre outfits and strutting behaviour – Vuillard points this out in the narrative because he is incredulous that no one seems to have commented on it in the historical records.

 The major part of the book, though, focuses on the annexation of Austria. The question left hanging is:  how much was it welcomed or not? Once again, Vuillard offers no easy answers. He points out that there were a rash of unexplained suicides following the Germans entry into Vienna. Yet he also asks the young Austrian girls captured in photographs from the time cheering wildly at the appearance of the Fuhrer, to articulate their thoughts and feelings, presumably now as old women, as they look back at themselves. 

Vuillard keeps digging into this psychology of those people who enabled and encouraged the Nazis. It’s obvious that without spelling things out, he wants us to understand how such evil can emerge and sweep across a people. Particularly in the sections when he explores the actual detailed events of the Anschluss, he makes it clear that the Nazis’ success was not inevitable – their tanks, for a start, were not up to the task and had to be transported into Vienna on freight trains. What he concludes, is that the Nazis were just better at the game of bluff and bravado then the rest of Europe. 

As I say, there’s a lot for us all to consider, today – the conspiracy theorists, populists and authoritarians may project certainty and destiny, and that makes them dangerous, but surely we must be able to expose them as the preening, strutting madmen that is now our idea of the Nazis.

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray 

I was aware of Murray’s reputation as a well-regarded contemporary novelist who many people thought should have won the Booker with this book. However, I was wary of picking up this hefty tome as it has been routinely described as a comedy drama. I like to laugh but sometimes novels that I have read described this way fall between two stools– not enough laughs and too many plot contrivances. Black comedy strikes me as a better tag for this excellent novel. At its core, it is tragic. Things fall apart for the four members of an upper middle class Irish family whose comfortable life seems ordinarily happy at the start. Each of them tries to recreate a new and better world around them as their old world crumbles; and this means they put themselves in absurd situations. You laugh at these passages and wince at the same time. 

Despite showing my cards and calling this an excellent novel, it is not an alloyed triumph. In my review of Poor Things, I deemed it, in my self-important way, an interesting failure. The Bee Sting is its inverse: a flawed triumph. The novel meanders in some of its middle sections but this issue is more than outweighed by the boldness of its approach and scope; and it has a properly thrilling, unpredictable ending. 

The book is, essentially, a family saga, narrated from the perspectives of the four family members: the mother, father, son and daughter of the Barnes’ family. Since Dickie’s father passed on his thriving car dealership to him and moved to Portugal, Dickie and his family have lived an existence of security and ease rooted in a satisfyingly elevated social position in their small Irish town. Imelda, Dickie’s wife and still the town’s epitome of beauty, is able to maintain herself with a round of gym and beauty treatments, an expensive wardrobe and socials with the girls. Cass, the eldest teenage daughter, and PJ, her younger brother, are both intelligent, in a very different way from one another, with a slight quirkiness that makes them interesting. Dickie is a father who has relished their childhoods and whom his children love even if they are not the sort of demonstrative family who would say so. 

That, however, is the family picture barely in place just as the novel gets underway – and is, we later learn, not as uncomplicated as it sounds. The 2008 crash has begun to impact on the car dealership and we quickly grasp that Dickie for all his academic intelligence and curiosity about the world is not a natural businessman. This gathering storm plays out as a background rumble in the first two sections narrated by each of the children. 

The ages of the two siblings – one on the cusp of womanhood and the other adolescence - means that their perspectives have coming of age flavour. Cass, who has inherited Dickie’s bookishness and sensitivity to the world around her, is awakening to an intense but difficult friendship with Elaine. The turbulent rushes of giggling joy and forlorn rejection that Cass’ glamorous, cool friend evokes in her is authentically captured. At the same time, Cass can feel fissures in her hitherto solid belief in Dickie: money troubles, domestic tensions and knowing small town looks surface at the margins of her grand obsession with Elaine. 

PJ also has his father’s intellectual curiosity and a sense of dutifulness to the family that seems to have been Dickie’s default characteristic before it wasn’t. The youngest of the Barnes seems to bear the brunt of the family’s problems at first. There are painful scenes for PJ around crippling footwear and a local bully as well as rejection by some of his computer geek community. He is desperate for things to go back the way they were and for his parents not to divorce. 

All of this is skilfully delivered by Murray. The book presents a lovely exploration of the fizzing, unformed emotions and ideas about their world of the two young narrators. It’s well done, but conventional. 

When we get onto the first sections by Imelda and Dickie, though, things change … become more complex, darker. Imelda comes from a violent, dysfunctional and quasi-criminal family. Her beauty and spirit had caught the eye of Frank Barnes, Dickie’s younger brother, and the town’s sports hero and loveable, charming rogue. When he dies in a car crash, she and Dickie are overcome with their grief at the loss. Quickly afterwards, they get married. This is presented in the novel as a sort of acceptable inevitability. Yet even as you read about the shared loss bringing them closer, the reader understands there is something off, rather disturbing about their marriage. This is when the darkness emerges. Both Dickie and Imelda seem damaged. Dickie understands that he has to step up and take over the business, become a big man in the town, but we always sense that he understands his unfitness for such a role. 

As the novel progresses we find out more about a different sort of life that he might have led if he had stayed in Dublin after university. Imelda’s grief means she marries a man the opposite in every way to her true love Frank. Their main connection is their shared love for and sense of his ghostly presence. Leaving the Barnes’ house would be leaving that part of her life, and she can’t and won’t do that.   

This where the Barnes family stands as their family business begins to falter badly and Dickie’s standing in the town deteriorates. Yet there’s a whole lot of plot still to come. 

Cass becomes more disillusioned and detached from the family before finally escaping to university in Dublin. How, though, will she and Elaine escape from a friendship which becomes increasingly toxic for both of them? 

PJ, at first, takes responsibility on himself for his disintegrating family but then decides to escape. Escape to the woods and outhouse building at the back of the family home, and escape to the shadowy online world. 

Dickie’s journey is even more dramatic and filled with dilemmas. He has to deal with a blackmailer as well as his own paranoid fantasies about creating a survivalist refuge in those rather metaphorical woods. More pertinently, though he has to deal with decisions he took in the past when trying to be a person he wasn’t in the wake of Frank’s death. 

The most intriguing and rewarding of the narratives belongs to Imelda. Before we get her perspective, we have been led to believe that she is an empty but beautiful vessel, a social climber, a damaged person who made a marriage that the incestuous town conversation still finds baffling. Her stream of consciousness sections, which I found clumsy, nevertheless revealed her to be a complex and thoughtful person. She is trying to be a good wife and mother despite her dysfunctional background and the tragedy of Frank’s death. Having read one or two reviews about this book, I may be in the minority in responding to Imelda’s character. Nevertheless, I found her willingness to fight for her family and her struggles with the moral dilemmas imposed upon her by a violent father and a disintegrating husband convincing and moving. 

A flawed triumph, therefore, for one and the same reasons – its ambition. Murray covers topical issues around grief and mental health, the dangers of the online world, sexuality and identity and the way it seems people’s lives are impacted by forces beyond their control. Of course, it is also suffused with universal themes about making sense of one’s life and the need to love and be loved. Tolstoy would have approved – the Barnes family certainly find ways to be unhappy in their own way.

Lessons by Ian McEwan 

This has now replaced Atonement as my favourite book by McEwan. Its scope is huge: how do we seek meaning in our life and what are the forces and experiences that shape us? And McEwan sets this against the backdrop of world events from the end of the second world war to the present day. Of course, he knows that the answers to those questions depend on where one stands and what perspective we bring. Our perspective, here, is provided by Roland Baines, McEwan’s everyman, who narrates the story, responds to public and private events trying to make sense of his personal development and the sweep of history. 

The temptation with such a book is to muse on how much of it is autobiographical. Well, I’m a fan of McEwan’s work and have enjoyed listening to him talking about his books. However, and I may be wrong about this, I’ve always enjoyed the cool, intellectual way he describes his work. In interviews, he often seems to be revealing the influences, motivation and inspiration for his novels whilst remaining slightly removed. I don’t, therefore, feel that I know him well enough to comment on the autobiographical aspects of this book. 

Perhaps it is best to accept his own comment that he had raided parts of his life when creating certain scenes in the book. Actually, I’m not sure that Roland Baines is an everyman because he has a distinct and unusual back story. Of course, I accept that most people do have such back stories but Roland’s experiences seem to make him unusually reflective. Perhaps, though, it is the rather passive way that he drifts through life that makes him a character around whom momentous things, personal and public, take place. 

At the start of the book when Roland is in his late thirties, there is uncertainty. The Chernobyl disaster is downplayed but the paranoia associated with those dog days of the Cold War leave people helplessly wondering if a cloud of radiation is heading towards the UK. Roland’s own world mirrors this sense of anxious uncertainty. His German wife has left him and their two year old son, Lawrence, abruptly. Her note makes it clear that this departure is about her destiny which she believes is stifled by the life she has fallen into. There is no blame in her eyes just a ruthless decision to start again, some place else, where she can’t be followed. 

Roland’s response is dutiful and urbane. He steps in as sole parent to Lawrence without a sense of grievance. He finds it hard to understand why Alissa’s maternal instinct does not bring her back to London. His urbanity, however, kicks in as he discovers more about her new life – the excellent novel she sends to him, which begins to mark her out as a generational writer, makes him reflect on what the world has gained from her selfish decision. 

This thread of the story develops as Alissa’s reputation grows but at its heart is Roland’s reflection on the fact that he had never even contemplated that she had the desire or genius for such a stellar career. Was he so wrapped up on his own destiny that he didn’t take time to know his wife properly? Or is the fact that his own trajectory in a series of inconsequential jobs – some well-paid (wordsmith for superior greetings cards) and some satisfying, convenient but meagrely rewarded (afternoon pianist at an up-market hotel) – are evidence of his own mediocrity in comparison to his wife’s achievements. 

This is one of two key events that are the foundations of Roland’s story. The other, again involves a complex woman, his music teacher Miss Miriam Cornell who teaches him piano. Around these foundations, to which the endlessly reflective Roland keeps returning, McEwan allows his story to veer off towards the different relationships and events, significant and ordinary, that make up Roland’s life. 

The narrative is jerkily linear as he moves from his childhood as an army child in Libya to his old age in a familiar, to me, part of South London where he has spent a large chunk of his life. The structure seems deliberately random after the initial set up when we are introduced to his parents. It is a key family moment as they move back to the UK in 1959 so that Roland can receive the benefits of a good English education. Then we move between memories of his time supporting his German friends in Berlin at the tense moment when the wall was built and on to memories of Germany before and during the war as he explores the stories of Alissa’s parents who were involved in a Nazi resistance movement. Yet, as in normal life, these experiences, closely aligned to major world events, are jumbled with the ordinary details of his family life as Lawrence grows up and starts his own family. 

Let me finish, though, by returning to that other structural foundation – Miriam Cornell. Many of the reviews of this book have focused on this crucial childhood episode because of its shock value. She seduces the young Roland during their lessons leading to a sexual relationship that begins when he is only fourteen. Roland’s description of Miriam is, initially, as an attractive femme fatale, only in her mid twenties, and with whom he indulges in an ecstatic physical relationship; but it is an abusive relationship. As with his abandonment by Alissa, you could see this abusive relationship as impacting significantly on the messy life Roland leads subsequently. However, Roland in his reflections and McEwan in the way he structures his story eschew such a formulaic interpretation. Perhaps Roland’s fascination, almost bordering on obsession, with sexual relationships (never abusive ones, though) as well as his inability to stick at a career despite his intelligence and numerous talents are because he was the victim of two bad women. 

The reader, however, is unlikely to reach such a conclusion as Roland does not seem a victim. Yes, his thoughts constantly circle around Miriam and Alissa … not all the time, though. He seems to lead a decent life and is capable of close, happy relationships. He seems to be a slightly incoherent amalgam – culturally middle class, socially capable if sometimes reticent, baffled by the country’s repudiation of Europe, whose life is enriched by his family and friends. Not that different from many of us, so perhaps a sort of everyman after all.

When We Cease To Understand The World by Benjamin Labutat

It’s not easy to describe what this book actually is. It looks at the lives and discoveries of several major scientists and mathematicians from the early part of the twentieth century. Much of this historical survey is grounded in fact and yet the way Labatut presents the emotional and psychological insights of these men (and they were all men) is an act of creative imagination. 

It therefore exists at a meeting point between what we know and what we can surmise. To that end, Labatut’s narrative tries to put us in the place of these men who, working, for example, in the new and seemingly ungraspable world of quantum physics, had to delve into their own souls as much as their research findings and equations to impose some type of intellectual order to the chaotic world of atoms and particles. And then having struggled with this intellectual and imaginative task they had to cope with the consequences - those focusing on research into quantum physics opened the door to the atomic age, others exploring new chemicals unleashed beautiful poisons that wreaked havoc on battlefields and in the concentration camps. 

To go back to my initial point then - this is a series of interconnected stories or essays which cover the ideas of physicists such as Heisenberg and Schrödinger or the mathematician Grothendieck, with the turmoil of their personal lives; and it appears that the details of these lives are a beguiling mix of the real and invented - and, often, the most fantastic detail is the most real. These men are not heroes beavering away in their laboratories or studies to create a better world through progress. Nearly all of the them are self-obsessed, narcissists with a compulsive commitment; and to paraphrase Einstein, they all stuck with an idea like an addict sticks with his addiction - the drug reference is mine but could have been Labatut’s. 

It may seem that I have shied away from describing the scientific ideas in this book such as how the German chemist Huber extracted cyanide from the newly discovered pigmentation Russian blue. However, that is not because Labutat fails in making them comprehensible to a non-scientific audience. In fact, the reverse is true: the heated debate between Heisenberg and Schrödinger about the nature of electrons, which I have read about before, came thrillingly to life in this book. Heisenberg’s rejection of Newtonian ideas about the laws of physics required an imaginative leap of faith that Schrödinger understandably struggled to accept. The implications that an electron is, at one and the same time, a particle and a wave was shocking and required these scientists to visualise the material world in a completely new way. Newton’s laws which had allowed scientists a rational framework for understanding the world seemed to have been replaced by magical thinking but where magic is the only feasible and rational explanation. 

And that is why I found this book so fascinating. The hybrid fact-fiction approach and the exploration of the scientists’ febrile psychology allowed the reader some insight into the import of these startlingly new theories and explanations. Don’t get me wrong, this book won’t be for everyone; and its frenzied narrative structure isn’t always successful. However, the addition of imagined episodes such as the final story about a gardener who has turned away from his former life as a mathematician hammers home Labutat’s key point: ideas are powerful and as well as the increase in understanding of the material world that they provide, they also bring great danger. And that’s not just danger for the world but for the individuals who bring them into the light. 

Similar to the international book winner, Time Shelter, that I read recently, this book was shortlisted for the same prize. And like that book it is fizzing with original ideas and original ways to present them. Whilst these books are challenging because they don’t patronise or spoonfeed the reader they are a bracing antidote to some of the comfort reads I have indulged in recently. I’ve just had a swim in the sea at Southwold and it was initially forbidding as I edged out and then a shock to the system as I finally plunged in but now I feel enervated. So with that laboured analogy about my experience reading this book, I’ll leave you to decide if you fancy a literary dip in the North Sea.

West by Carys Davies

Most critics have Davies’ latest book, ‘The Mission House”, high up in their list of 2020’s best novels. Ever behind the curve, though, I decided to read her first novel, also well-received by critics. 

‘West’ is a short but quietly affecting story about mule breeder, Cy Bellman’s, decision to leave his farm in 1815 Pennsylvania to journey west into lands still relatively uncharted by the white man. He is convinced that there are wonderful giant beasts to be discovered as a result of unimaginably huge bones and fossils unearthed in the swamp regions of Kentucky by recent exploratory expeditions. This quest, that has come to obsess him, means that he must leave behind his ten year old daughter, Bess, in the care of his hard-edged, resentful but dutiful sister, Julia. 

In a different time, we’d call his decision a form of mid-life crisis. Davies’ shows it to be something more through Cy’s touching memories of his much-loved dead wife. His mission to discover these prehistoric creatures, which we know from the start is a doomed enterprise, is a personal journey to discover some purpose in his own life that has been knocked off kilter. Yet Davies is too intelligent a writer to present his behaviour in too simple terms. After all, he and his daughter have a touching relationship, they love one another, and it is clear that Cy has done a good job raising her for the past eight or nine years. Despite all this, he sets off on a mission that he knows will take him at least more than a year; a journey that involves travelling through beautiful but harsh environments, peopled by indigenous tribes fearful and resentful of the white settlers who have driven them out of the east of the continent. 

Davies is a skilled short story writer and this is apparent on every page in the way she concisely brings to life the story’s small collection of characters and the overwhelming, varied landscapes. She chooses to follow two strands: the journey west by Bellman and the journey made by Bess as she begins to grow from a child to an adolescent. This change brings its own dangers for her in the unwanted attentions of older, sexually frustrated men. She first becomes aware of the effect that her nascent womanhood has when the grotesque, predatory librarian gives her free access to the written accounts of the recent expeditions to the west of the continent that have paved the way for her father. This seeming act of kindness is simply a ruse to enable him to presses himself to closely to her and touch her intimately. More threatening are the silent machinations of Elmer Jackson, the rough neighbour who makes himself indispensable to Aunt Julia during Cy’s absence. Bess can sense better this time the predator’s cunning as Elmer manoeuvres himself into Aunt Julia’s favour, waiting for his moment to get her niece alone. The looming danger he represents is more real than the monsters her father seeks. 

Cy is a complex but appealing character. He is a decent man unaware of and unable to properly resolve his underlying, long-term sense of loss. He knows that he is not particularly well-suited to the task he has set himself. This gives him the air of a religious zealot willing to suffer in the cause of finding something marvellous. He rarely wavers in his belief that a great discovery will be his if he just keeps going. As he moves beyond the outer limits of the areas inhabited by white settlers, he hires an unprepossessing adolescent native boy, ’Old Woman From A Distance’, to help him survive in lands that few white men had traversed at that time. 

The relationship between these two becomes central to the second section of the novel. They do not speak each other’s language and both are wary about the other. Cy, in particular, as a man of his time and circumstances finds it hard to imagine that ‘Old Woman From A Distance’ has the same sensibilities as himself but, as the journey gets tougher with a brutal winter, he understands this is not the case. The ‘Old Woman…’ realises that not all white men are exploitative invaders and begins to feel an incoherent bond of loyalty to Cy and his mission. 

Ultimately this bond is the reason the novel moves to some form of resolution; but it is not neat – the novel may end, yet the characters’ stories still have some way to go. 

I thought this was an excellent novel. The story is quietly engrossing and the milieu is brilliantly evoked by Davies. The beauty and danger of this new world for the white settlers, gradually colonising the Native Americans’ land, is at the heart of this novel – you can feel the gnawing hunger, the cold’s knife thrusts and are awed by the grandeur of the monumental landscape.

Empire of Light 

This film arrived in British cinemas with great expectations. Directed by Sam Mendes after his varied triumphs with 1917, American Beauty and Skyfall, this was the first screenplay he had written and was clearly a personal project focusing as it did on the mental health of middle aged woman, something he had witnessed when growing up with his mother in the 1980s. The anticipation was even greater for cinephiles and serious devotees of Mendes’ work as the marketing proclaims the film a love letter to the cinema and Olivia Colman leads an impressive British cast. Yet, somehow, it has misfired. Not only has it received mixed critical reviews but it failed to impress two critics, who like me, were predisposed to enjoy this film – my wife, Sarah and good friend, David Edwards. 

The general criticism is that it tries to do too much, cover too many ideas without ever giving them the necessary depth and weight; consequently, the film lacks emotional resonance and impact. Let me begin, therefore, by sketching out those ideas. 

The film is set in a south coast seaside town and more specifically an independent cinema. It is the 1980s and the rigours and harsh realities of Thatcherism have highlighted how far the town and cinema have fallen from their mid-century glamour, allure and confidence – a metaphor for the country Thatcher inherited or the result of her policies. Mendes judgement is clear but I’ll leave potential viewers to discover this. Colman’s character, Hilary Small, matches this setting. As we are introduced to a new employee, Stephen (Micheal Ward), it is clear that she is a crucial member of the cinema staff, turning her hand with diligence and care to any task asked of her; but it is also clear that in some way she is damaged and we learn that she has recently returned to work from some sort of breakdown. Although she is taken advantage of by the cinema manager - an oily, sad figure convincingly sketched out by Colin Firth – she is liked and respected by her colleagues. As the film progresses, we see them rally round and support her. However, a fair criticism is that we find out little of their back stories even though we are asked to respond to the small, caring community that they create. 

Stephen and Hilary quickly form a close friendship over their care of a damaged pigeon discovered in closed off upper floor of the once thriving cinema. Another couple of metaphors for Hilary’s character and the decline of cinema-going; and I think that in these devices many critics found Mendes laying out his themes in a too on the nose manner. This is most apparent in the fact that Stephen is a young black man trying to work out what he wants to do with his life. His friendship with Hilary soon turns to a sexual relationship and both watch each other with loving care but helplessness as she suffers another mental breakdown and he is attacked and hospitalised by racist thugs. 

The film eventually moves to some form of resolution: their relationship moves to a more appropriate level of friendship and Mendes shows the redemptive power of art, particularly the films that Toby Jones’ cranky but kind-hearted projectionist lovingly presents to Hilary. 

So, there we have it: mental illness; racism, the importance of community and understanding, tolerant support; the value of art and its ability to refresh and renew the human soul; and, of course, all against the backdrop of Thatcher’s free market individualism. And yes, I agree with Sarah’s and David’s assessment that this scattergun approach lacks cohesion and depth. It leads to what some critics have characterised as an impersonal tone to the friendship and love that this film portrays. And yet … I enjoyed the film for all its flaws. Of course, a great deal of this pleasure was derived from the beautiful work of acclaimed cinematographer, Roger Deakins. The film was lovely to behold. Despite its structural issues, though, I took a great deal from the story and responded to the kindness and understanding it tries hard to celebrate.

 Târ by Sarah Hegarty 

I had high hopes for this film. I’m a huge fan of Cate Blanchett, in my opinion one of the finest actors of her generation. I knew Târ had divided critics but – what do they know? I set off for my solo treat on a freezing winter’s evening, the only question in my mind when – not if – I’d be able to watch it again. Alas… even before I got home and announced ‘It was a stinker,’ I was struggling to stay awake in my cinema seat. 

And yet… 

Blanchett is completely convincing as Lydia Târ, world-famous conductor and maestro (‘We don’t call astronauts astronettes, do we?’ she informs an interviewer at the start of the film).  Blanchett’s mastery of the classical music arena, as well as her apparent musical intelligence, is impressive and will surely bag her the Best Actress Oscar. 

The film signals its intentions at the start: that long-winded interview between Târ and a friendly journalist is the kind of thing you’d find on an obscure arts channel. There’s no action at all. This is a film for egg-heads. It also helps if you understand German – into which Târ/Blanchett slips effortlessly and convincingly – as it’s not always translated for the viewer. Another distancing factor. 

In her beautiful Berlin apartment with her partner and their child, Târ is at the pinnacle of her career. But she’s starting to fall apart. She’s treated her juniors badly – during the film we learn that her previous protégé has taken her own life. She also seems to be suffering aural delusions – or is she? And someone’s watching her… 

Despite these promising complications, the pace is glacial. There is the odd tense moment, when Târ is deleting incriminating emails, or when she’s threatened by a growling dog (in a run-down apartment block, where she’s followed her latest love interest, in a scene reminiscent of Blanchett’s superb Carol). But they’re not developed. 

Having felt excluded by the intense discussion of classical music terms and personalities, I was further annoyed by the film’s portrayal of the Yoof of Today, when Târ humiliates a student who ‘doesn’t get’ Bach. Okay, the young man offers a simplistic and daft argument – but some of us are fed up with the Canon, in all areas of art. How much more interesting, and potentially risky, to have the young man produce a thought-provoking analysis; and for Târ to even engage with it. 

A 2015 report found that women make up 1.4% of conductors in professional British orchestras. Worldwide, the numbers must be even fewer. Lydia Târ is a successful woman in an impossibly tough field. So why does she have to be abusive? Why does she have to have a breakdown? Sure, it’s art – and the film is beautiful, the music uplifting, the cinematography stylish. But in my view art has responsibilities. Plus, the end is silly – and patronising. In fact, that’s what I felt all the way through.  

The Fabelmans 

This film is perfectly fine but it has not stayed with me, which is the way I judge a really good film. My headline view of The Fabelmans is not because I have a condescending attitude to Spielberg’s films. In fact, the reverse: I have found many of his films deeply moving and he has succeeded in being appreciated by critics and mass audiences alike – the sweet spot for any film maker. Unfortunately, despite the obvious story-making and cinematic skills manifest in this film, it didn’t hit my sweet spot. 

Spielberg appears before the film begins to explain that this film is his most personal because it is about a family very much like his own, and its youthful protagonist, Sammy Fabelman, is a nascent film maker. If you know anything about Spielberg’s biography and watch this film then the similarities are blatantly clear. It’s a coming of age story for the young film maker; and his obsession with creating movie stories gradually becomes his way of controlling the world. This is because the heart of the story is the slow disintegration of his parents’ marriage. 

The Fabelmans are a professional Jewish family living in America during that golden age period of possibilities after the second world war. His father Burt (Paul Dano) is a talented, hardworking computer engineer. His steady, good-natured but unimaginative nature is a contrast to Mitzi (Michelle Williams) his vivacious, spontaneous and creative wife who gave up a potential artistic life as a concert pianist for the stability of the nuclear family. There you have it, then – Sammy as an amalgamation of both as the technically supreme storyteller. 

As the universal domestic story of Mitzi and Burt’s mismatched relationship gradually unravels, we are given fascinating snapshots of technicolour American suburban life. The hook is that we not only see Sammy developing his craft whilst capturing this world but we are also able to respond to the knowing references to his future films. I’ll say no more but if you have only seen a few of his films you’ll enjoy spotting some beautiful and typical Spielbergian visual images where the domestic is imbued with a greater significance. 

When Burt moves the family to LA to take on a big Silicon Valley job, the strains on the marriage reach a crisis point. For Sammy, this is a triple whammy: he is not only struggling with the usual adolescent angst but also the anti-Semitic attitudes of his homogenous WASP schoolmates. The gentle and nostalgic tone of the first half of the film then evolves into a powerful exploration of the damage of divorce on a family as well as a teen high school movie. 

The only issue in the pre-LA section is Burt’s concern that Sammy is wasting too much time on his film making hobby. However, when the family moves to LA against Mitzi’s wishes, the drama accelerates. Eventually, when Sammy’s parents explain to him and his siblings that Mitzi is moving out, Spielberg conjures up a scene with real emotional heft. The film finally finds a hopeful resolution as the young adult Sammy is allowed to embark on his career and has a slightly anomalous encounter with the world’s greatest living director played by David Lynch in the final scene of the film. 

And the fact that Sammy had begun to follow his dream and his family had moved forward from the family break up all made me happy. Okay, perhaps it moved too quickly from the mess of Sammy’s adolescent years to this positive ending but the narrative arc had been handled well as one would expect from Spielberg and the talented screenwriter, Tony Kushner.

 So why did I find it just a perfectly fine film but one that lacked resonance? After all, the cinematography was top notch evoking the fizzy excitement of America at that time. In addition, the acting particularly by Dano and Williams was convincing – he unable to use his problem-solving skills to make his wife happy and fulfilled and she unable to accept that her life in LA had nothing more to offer (spoiler: there’s a third person in their marriage). One scene did stick with me – the aforementioned family discussion about the separation. That was not enough, though. The youthful film making montages and the nostalgic episodes from the family’s life passed by on screen in a smooth, enjoyable manner … but they didn’t stick. Still, even a merely fine Spielberg film is better than most.

Rye Lane 

The knowing references to Love Actually in this witty, charming film position it as a street-wise update on the British rom com. Its central couple inhabit a specific version of a part of London – Peckham and adjacent parts of SE postcodes – and we are introduced to a colourful cast of ‘characters’, friends and strangers, that they encounter as their relationship develops. The fact that both Yas (Vivian Oparah) and Dom (David Jonsson) are young black Londoners and the dialogue is a salty mix of contemporary yoofisms and loud profanities, can’t disguise that this is a traditionally constructed rom com, and all the more charming for that. 

The set-up is that we encounter Dom crying in the toilets at his friend’s art exhibition devastated over the break up with his girlfriend of six years, Tabby, who had cheated on him with his best friend, Eric. Yas hears him sobbing in the unisex loos at a friend’s art exhibition. As they get chatting, the confident, loud Yas naturally falls into the role as Dom’s cheerer upper in chief. Therefore, as they leave the exhibition, she embroils him in sharp, witty conversation that seems an update on the screwball banter we have grown up on – When Harry Met Sally, My Girl Friday.   

They then begin to wander around South London for the rest of the day, sparking off one another in a genuinely charming manner. There are two key set pieces that shape their day: the first is a meeting that Dom has to attend, which explains why his grief is so raw; and the second event is activated by Yas and helps us understand why she was so sympathetic to Dom at the start of the film. 

I won’t say any more about these events but they explain why this film is a superior rom com. Whilst it follows the classic trajectory of meet cute, followed by jeopardy and then resolution, there is also character development and a degree of complexity in Yas’ behaviour in particular.

 We are also introduced to a world of educated young people, who have ambitions, some hang ups and plenty of verve but remain utterly relateable, and who inhabit a world familiar from my youthful days in South London – and much more familiar than the more privileged world of Curtis’ rom coms. But I’m not trying to be divisive here as I love films like Four Weddings… and, as I said at the start, this is in the tradition of those sorts of rom com at their best. It’s also just the right length and ends on the South Bank. What’s not to like. If you want a light, funny but not dumb film, then I can thoroughly recommend it.

Anatomy of a Fall 

Sandra Huller’s character (Sandra Voyter) is an accomplished writer who starts this film in relaxed mood. Wine glass in hand she plays and flirts with the young female journalist who has come to the novelist’s chalet in Grenoble to interview her. Unfortunately, Sandra’s husband, an unseen presence working on renovations upstairs in the chalet, has a loud instrumental version of a rap song on loop and so the interview is brought to an abrupt end with promises of a continuation in town at a later date. Sandra returns to the chalet and settles in her bedroom to work whilst her husband continues his unseen renovations and their visually impaired son takes his dog for a walk in the glorious snowy landscape surrounding the chalet. When the son returns an hour later, he discovers his father’s dead body spread-eagled outside the chalet apparently having falling to his death. The boy’s cries arouse his sleeping mother and she in turn alerts the emergency services. 

The film then moves forward and we see Sandra meeting with an old friend, who is also a French lawyer. With the deftness and naturalism typical of this Palme d’Or winning film, we quickly learn that the investigation into the husband’s death is proceeding to court. The possibility that he fell by accident is ruled out as improbable by the police due to the high balcony on the top floor of the chalet. That leaves only two possibilities: he committed suicide or someone murdered him. As his wife was the only one in the chalet at the time, she becomes the prime suspect. The scene is, therefore, set for a court room thriller with a did she-didn’t she question and where evidence is gradually revealed about what really happened when he fell. A thriller, then, in the classic Hitchcockian mould. 

Well, yes and no. Yes, because the exploratory nature of the French court system presents an account of the Voyters’ marriage that is touched by tragedy, betrayal, jealousies and secrets; and yes because the jury reaches a decision on the most probable explanation for what happened when Monsieur Voyter fell. Yet that is only one side of this complex thought-provoking film. The thriller conventions are addressed but also enriched by a profound psychological insight into a complex, complicated marriage that leaves the fatal act open to interpretation. It also focuses in on the way that the performative nature of the French court system is antipathetic to the strong, intelligent woman Huller brilliantly presents to us. When discussing her marriage, her searing honesty about the nature of long term relationships gives an impression of a detached, cold woman. The strength of this film is that we understand that this a is a fault in the way we, the public, have been conditioned to expect certain conventions of behaviour that have little relation to the messy, complex nature of most people’s relationships. 

This is a terrific film. The acting is uniformly strong, with Huller and the child actor playing her son particularly impressive. It is a distinctively European film, with the alien nature of the court scenes a marked and fascinating contrast to the numerous films set in US and English courts. Highly recommended – I hope the Oscars eschew their normal parochialism and nominate Huller for an acting award.

Napoleon 

If you enjoy grand spectacle, epic productions values, sweeping action, oh and battle after battle after battle, then Ridley’s Scott’s latest film is for you. If, however, you are looking for a nuanced, psychological study of a complex, contradictory soldier, thinker and leader, then look elsewhere. That is not to disparage Joaquin Phoenix’s performance: he gives us a Napoleon whose daring and military audacity are clear but which fill him with a boiling mixture of fear and dare devil impetuosity. Along with Vanessa Kirby, as an endlessly beguiling Josephine, Phoenix also shows the depth of his feelings for his empress. What started off as a relatively mercenary union – he desired her and also wanted her sophisticated glamour and she needed a secure meal ticket – became more emotionally fulfilling for them both. 

That’s about it, though, for my review of this film. I was never bored in this two hours plus movie. The battle scenes were everything you would expect from an action director of Ridley Scott’s talents. They were properly epic, with a physical heft and a curious mixture of the bloody chaos of huge battles alongside their grand beauty. Napoleon’s daring at Austerlltz and bad luck at Waterloo are particularly memorable set pieces. 

I’m glad I saw this film but little about it has stayed with me perhaps because I was not emotionally engaged with the characters. I looked at them as performers for my entertainment rather than complex, authentic characters with whom I could empathise, or perhaps analyse. And that’s okay, it’s not that sort of film. I do feel, however, that a trick was missed by Scott in not using the chemistry between Kirby and Phoenix as a way into a deeper exploration. The only time I was properly moved in this film was when Napoleon reluctantly has to divorce Josephine. If Scott had spent more time on these famous lovers, though, this would have been a whole different movie.

Saltburn 

There was a lot of buzz about this film prior to its release. It seems to have dropped out of sight fairly quickly, however, for a film with a cool cast and even cooler director-writer in Emerald Fennell. It has also largely missed out at the start of the awards season. Both disappointments may be due to the mixed reception from critics and the film’s structural messiness that audiences seem to have picked up on. 

I’ll try to highlight why this film, with so many intriguing, crowd pleasing moments, becomes, ultimately, an interesting failure. I’ll start with the plot, which in itself is not ground-breaking and harks back to several television dramas and film comedies that are part of this country’s cultural legacy – ‘Brideshead Revisited’ and ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ for starters. It would be reductive to classify this as an erotic thriller. Nevertheless, I’ll use that generic term as my guiding light when summarising the plot so as not to reveal the story’s twists and turns – some of which were predictable and rooted in character and some that had a rather ‘sleight of hand’ improbability. Remember, though, that I said this categorisation is reductive and I’ve already referred to the film’s structural messiness. 

The first scene features Barry Keoghan’s character, Oliver Quick, reflecting back from the present to his time at an Oxford college in the early noughties. In a rather detached way and perhaps protesting too much, he tells us that he was never in love with Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi).  Therefore, when we cut to the scene where stolidly lower middle class Oliver enters the gilded surroundings of his Oxford college as a new undergraduate, we think we know this film. 

Oliver is clearly a sharp, intelligent young man. He has, presumably, worked hard to secure his place at this exclusive bastion of possibility, for someone like him, but which is a birthright for others; and this latter group, naturally, includes Felix. Oliver wants to get on the inside with Felix and cool kids, who also happen to be stinking rich, beautiful and totally at ease. Chance encounters provide Oliver with the opportunity to insert himself into the margins of Felix’s circle. He meets predictable hostility from some of Felix’s set for being non-U. There does, however, seem to be some connection between the two young men that is driven by more than just desperation from Oliver for an unattainable dream. Quietly, he seems to make himself indispensable to Jacob. The golden boy, on the other hand seems to have emotional gaps and an unfocused caring side – a caring side that we are signposted to believe is akin to an unimportant hobby, a hollow sincerity. At this stage, we’re left wondering about what Felix’s motives are for this friendship. This then takes on an extra dimension when he invites Oliver to his family’s grand manor house set in the bucolic splendour of the Catton Estate. 

Although there is something distinctly off kilter about Oliver, this first part of the film left me wondering who was using whom in the friendship. There are hints that Felix has an annual habit of bringing an unlikely friend into his radiant orbit only to discard him or her when he eventually tires of them. Yet Oliver veers between being a socially clumsy and naïve poor relation to someone with a Machiavellian sensibility. He makes himself a confidant to the elder members of the Catton family – Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant and Carey Mulligan having great fun with the privileged caricatures they’re given – and we see him assimilating the emotional fissures that run through this dysfunctional family. 

So, that’s the set-up, which takes us halfway through the film’s running time. At that point, we are left having fun with Oliver and Felix during a long hot summer, sunbathing on the Capability Brownesque terrace, with Felix’s beautifully cool and fragile sister (Alison Oliver), drinking fine wine to a period pop sound track. And we’re just waiting for something to happen. 

The film has progressed, so far, as sensory overload, with dashes of social comedy. The surface allure is enriched only by the depth and ambiguity of Keoghan’s performance. He is the outsider who provides us with a way into this charmed circle whilst being resolutely unknowable. However, there are one or two scenes that hint, uncomfortably, at a darker narrative and denouement. Will Oliver’s insertion in the family mean that his obsession with Felix gets out of control, or will Felix’s attention wither and die? 

Well … it didn’t quite go where I expected next and yet the playing out of the film was also not a shocking revelation. Perhaps I simply wasn’t tuned in enough to the type of film Fennell wanted to make. You see this is about a series of moments, visually arresting and emotionally discombobulating scenes. In my opinion, proper character development and a properly worked out narrative arc seem less important. It was a film to feast on whilst in the cinema but forget straight afterwards. 

I hope you can see that I think there’s a lot to like about this film despite some reservations about how it hangs together. Barry Keogh is a creepily charismatic lead who has a face that allows the audience to see the cogs working in his brain. The over-privileged and self-centred Catton family seemed to be caricatures, as I’ve already indicated – although perhaps that may be my impression because I don’t move in those circles. The star-studded cast draw out the humour in their ghastly behaviour and affectations. The problem with such an approach, though, is that it is hard to feel any empathy with them when the plot seems to require some. 

So, there’s my take, and because this is such a striking and, yes, messy film, you, dear moviegoer, may disagree. You could think I’ve missed the point, or succumbed to the need for genre conventions, or simply mislaid my sense of humour. Perhaps. If I am guilty of any of those things, it has still not stopped me recommending that you see this film.

Anora 

I had to wait until December, but I have now seen my top film of 2024. This film won the Palm d’Or at Cannes, has been described as a more modern, grittier take on Pretty Woman and features a performance from relative unknown, Mikey Madison, that is generating best actor Oscar buzz. 

Ignore all that, though, because Madison gives an utterly remarkable performance in this film miles away from the type of crowd pleasing turns that usually bag on Oscar. Nor is the Palm d’Or the sort of award that guarantees much except cult status – Titane and Triangle of Sadness provide examples of this in the last five years. It is, however, most important to ignore the comparison with Pretty Woman. That was fluff, good fun, but fluff. Anora is a more complex, emotionally resonant film, with laugh out loud moments and a truly moving end that has hope but also recognises the reality of life for people like Madison’s eponymous heroine. 

So, who exactly is Anora? At the start of the film we find her at work – she is confident and in control. She has a positive relationship with her customers and colleagues and she combines a typical American mix of sass and energy as we see her grifting. The only thing is, she is a sex worker at a fairly high-end nightclub. Whilst the exact nature of what she is expected to do is left a little opaque, she is often topless in these early scenes dancing and rubbing herself against the customers. Now I know we are in dangerous territory here because what can appear a choice is often nothing of the kind. However, Sean Baker’s direction and Madison’s performance make it clear that Anora does not see herself as a victim. 

After this initial set up, Anora is asked to speak with a Russian customer as he has little English and she has some knowledge, as the child of immigrants. Ivan, the customer, turns out to be the young son of a Russian oligarch. He is funny, spoilt, entitled but with an immature charm and he likes Anora. In short order, he pays for her to spend a week with him at his parents’ luxurious American home where they constantly party, have fun and copious amounts of sex. 

At this stage, the relationship is understood by both to be transactional. He is attracted to Anora and finds her congenial company and she realises this is an easy job, enjoyable even, and certainly a break from her real life. In this part of the film, there is an uneasy balance. Both are young but her street wise nature is in contrast to his gauche, privileged view of the world. He loves having sex with her, spending time in her company as he breaks up the drink and drugs with endless computer gaming, and she relaxes into the novelty of an excessively luxurious lifestyle. There is a hint that she also likes her client when she gives him tips about how to improve his love making – the transaction seems to be morphing into something more. Yet this is never properly explored until an impulsive moment during a trip to Vegas when he proposes and, after some bartering, she agrees. 

From this point on, the movie lurches in a different direction. Nothing is spelled out by Baker and so it is not exactly clear what exactly each feels for the other. Is Ivan a golden ticket for Anora? Is she just another of the throwaway pleasures he indulges in when away from his parents? Or is this something more for both of them? 

What quickly becomes clear, though, is that the oligarch and is iron hearted wife won’t allow this marriage to continue. They dispatch a local fixer from the expat Russian community who, ostensibly, has been responsible for monitoring and curbing Andrey’s worst excesses, to sort things out. When he turns up with two henchmen at the newlyweds’ house, however, it becomes clear that Anora is not going to allow herself to be cast aside. She is on her own, though, as Ivan flees the scene leaving her alone with the heavies.

 Except that nothing is as it seems. They aren’t quite as heavy as they appear and they aren’t able to properly cope with Anora’s anger and outrage at the attempts to quash her marriage and pay her off. The film becomes something very different at this point and I’m not really sure how you’d classify it. I’m certainly not going to say much more about the plot except that after some very uncomfortable scenes as the fixer tries to work out what to do and how to handle Anora, the four of them set off on a search for Ivan. There is a race against time element because Ivan’s parents are on their way from Russia. However, this section of the film alternates between genuinely laugh out loud moments with gritty social realism as they visit many of the less salubrious parts of Brooklyn. 

There are also the first emerging shoots of kindness and empathy. In this section of the story, Baker is happy to keep the camera rolling for longer than normal to catch those usually un-filmed moments when the desperation of desperate characters emerges. 

The acting is first class throughout and Baker wants us to see the all-round humanity of the men sent to deal with Anora. 

This middle part of the film has a certain beguiling effect as we see the interactions of the group as they seem to occupy their own alternative reality driving from clubs to diners to bars in search of Ivan. 

Then Baker produces another gear shift in the final section of the film when the oligarch and his wife arrive, with all the flash import of visiting royalty – the modern equivalent, in effect. 

This may sound all rather disjointed but the messiness of the narrative is the essence of this story. Anora and her travelling companions are often at the margins of society, doing any type of dirty work required from them and then easily dismissed or shrugged off when they disrupt things. Baker is making a similar point as Parasite, another Palm d’Or winner, about the have nots of society. He wants to tell their story, give them back a voice and fullness of humanity. What ultimately lifts this film, though, is the way Anora refuses to be shrugged off as if she doesn’t count. 

Madison’s magnificent performance is matched by a powerful ending. If you are a serious cinemagoer, you must watch this film.