"Copenhagen" by Michael Frayn

Why did Werner Heisenberg visit Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941? This three-hander play, first performed at the National Theatre in London, England in 1981, explores this meeting.

It was, of course, the height of the Second World War and both Nazi Germany and the Allies were trying to develop the Atom bomb. Heisenberg was working on nuclear fission in Germany, Bohr, with a mixed Jewish ancestry, was living in Denmark under Nazi occupation (he escaped to Sweden later in the war). Did Heisenberg ask Bohr whether it would be morally wrong for a physicist to create a bomb? When, later, he asked Speer for money to pursue his research he,  possibly deliberately, asked for less than he would need. 

The meeting was complicated by the fact that Bohr, one of the father's of the quantum atom, had been Heisenberg's mentor in the 1920s when quantum physics was experiencing revolutionary new ideas almost monthly. This was the period when Heisenberg, seeking solitude on a rocky island in Heligoland, invented the matrix-maths solution to quantum mechanics which would later be superseded by Schrodinger's wave mechanics. It was also when Heisenberg announced his Uncertainty Principle and when they together created the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics.

The play mostly explores the relationships between the two men, and Bohr's wife Margarethe. Inevitably it involves some quantum physics. I used to teach Physics and I have always struggled to understand quantum mechanics (as did most of the scientists of the time, one of the reasons why the Copenhagen Interpretation was needed to explain what the mathematics and experiments 'meant'). So this play was always going to be difficult. There were times when it managed slightly over-simplified but nevertheless very clear explanations and there were times, for example when mentioning Complementarity, when it seemed to duck the issue entirely.

Here is my understanding of Complementarity. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (better called his Indeterminacy Principle) is a mathematically proved conclusion that some system's (for example an electron) have paired properties (for an electron, its position is paired with its momentum) which are linked in that the more precisely you measure one of these properties the less precisely you are able to measure the other. In the play, Heisenberg explains it thus: “You can never know everything about the whereabouts of a particle, or anything else ... because we can't observe it without introducing some new element into the situation, an atom of water vapour for it to hit, or a piece of light - things which have an energy of their own, and which therefore have an effect on what they hit.” (Heisenberg, Act 2) But the principle is more fundamental, it isn't simply an experimental error that could somehow be circumvented but a property of nature. Nevertheless, the Uncertainty Principle is one aspect of Complementarity. Another is the fact that an electron can behave both as a wave or as a particle ('wave-particle duality') and which behaviour it adopts appears to be determined by the way it is being observed. Thus Complementarity seems to be the idea that there are two versions of truth and both are true although neither can be true at the same time.

Selected quotes:

• “If you don't know how things are today you certainly can't know how they're going to be tomorrow.” (Heisenberg, Act 2)
• “If it's Heisenberg at the centre of the universe, then the one bit of the universe that he can't see is Heisenberg.” (Margarethe, Act 2)
• “If you are doing something you have to concentrate on you can't also be thinking about doing it, and if you’re thinking about doing it then you can't actually be doing it.” (Margarethe, Act 2)

March 2025; 96 pages

Published by Methuen Drama in 1998

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Nickel Boys" by Colson Whitehead

This sometimes harrowing expose of cruelty and abuse in a Florida reform school won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Elwood Curtis is a conscientious and intelligent young man. He studies hard at school and works hard at his part-time job. But he is black and this is Florida in the early 1960s. He is arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and sent to the Nickel Academy, a reform school. He has to learn how to survive in a brutal environment where the rules are made by the abusers. 

We also meet Elwood Curtis as an older man. He has survived Nickel and now lives in New York. Journalists have exposing the truth about what happened at Nickel.

And there is a twist.

Irony is deeply embedded in this beautifully written and compelling read, from the merely comic “Cherry, a mulatto who took up boxing as a matter of pedagogy, to teach others how not to speak about his white mother.” (Ch 9) to the deeply political: the house where the boys are beaten nearly to death is called the "White House"; what is outside the jail is called the "free world" in the way that the USA calls itself the 'leader of the free world' although even outside the jail the black boys, poor and persecuted, have very little freedom.

An tender and angry portrait of “the infinite brotherhood of broken boys.” (Ch 15)

Selected quotes:

• “He’d outgrown his shirt and the pressure against the buttons made him look upholstered.” (Ch 4)
• “He was familiar with Elwood's ‘situation’ - his intonation swaddled the word in euphemism.” (Ch 4)
• “Stuffing dribbled from the couches and armchairs in the recreation room.” (Ch 4)
• “The first thing Elwood noticed was the notch in the boy's left ear, like on an alley cat that had been in scrapes.” (Ch 5): Elwood’s first view of Turner.
• “He had the screwed-down smile of the rickety-toothed.” (Ch 5)
• “Horror comics, he’d noticed, delivered two kinds of punishment - completely undeserved, and sinister justice for the wicked.” (Ch 7)
• “Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.” (Ch 8)
• “The boy struggled over two plus three, like he didn't know how many damned fingers he had on his hand.” (Ch 9)
• “Out in the Free World to make your zig zag way.” (Ch 11)
• “The White House got a new coat. No one saw who did it. One day it was its dingy self, the next it made the sun vibrate on eyeballs.” (Ch 14)
• “Mr Betts paid on time, in cash, off the books. Didn’t matter what his name was or where he’d come from.” (Ch 15)
• “The worst thing that ever happened to Elwood happened every day: He woke in that room.” (Ch 16)
• “The world had whispered its rule to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order. The world continued to instruct: Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead to deliverance, fight and things will change.” (Ch 16)
• “Elwood’s arms went wide’ hands out, as if testing the solidity pf the walls of a long corridor, one he had travelled through for a long time and which possessed no visible terminus.” (Ch 16)
• “She took his head into her lap as he wept, running her thumb over that stray-cat notch in his ear. The scar she never noticed but was right in front of her.” (Epilogue)

March 2025; 208 pages
First published in the UK by Fleet in 2019
My paperback edition issued in 2020.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Dead Simple" by Peter James

 A crime thriller packed with action.

This is the first of a long series of novels starring Roy Grace, a police officer based on the south coast of England. It's fast-paced (the chapters average five pages) and I read it very quickly because I wanted to finish so I suppose you could say it was a page-turner but I skim read because I wasn't very interested.

There were a number of things that disappointed me:

• I like murder mysteries. There was very little mystery. This was mostly because the narrative head-hops between the points of view of many of the characters so we quickly learn whodunnit.
• Except for the character introduced in a major twist about two-thirds of the way through the novel. To introduce such an important character so late without any foreshadowing seemed to me to break the rules of the genre. It felt like a diabolus ex machina.
• Some reviewers have described it as a police procedural but routine forensic work seems to be jettisoned in favour of action sequences: no-one followed up the soil analysis, nobody bothered to enquire about the land owned by the missing person's property development company. The investigating officer seemed more interested in psychics than science. 
• I didn't feel that a single character had depth. I didn't care about any of them which was perhaps just as well given how many ended up dead. 
• The hero's back story and physical attributes were given in a chunk near the end of chapter three. This felt like I was reading the author's notes but it wasn't quite so clunky as when he did the same thing for the villain near the end of the book.
• Given that it head-hops between multiple points of view, the reader very quickly learns who are the baddies - except for the extra villain brought in by the major twist at about the two-thirds mark - so there is very little mystery about these murders and almost no element of whodunnit. Instead it relies on shocking and sensational writing and short chapters. 
• There was also a significant amount of casual misogyny designed, presumably, to appeal to a mostly male readership. I understand that Roy Grace has been celibate for none years since his wife left him and must be feeling sexually frustrated: given that he seems to remember his wife purely for her bodily attributes I can understand why she went. We meet him in chapter 3 when he is driving to meet a woman he has hooked up with over the internet: "Her picture was hot! Amber hair, seriously pretty face, tight blouse showing a weapons-grade bust, sitting on the edge of a bed with a miniskirt pulled high enough to show she was wearing lace-topped hold-ups and might not be wearing knickers." The next paragraph made me laugh aloud, when Grace's interior monologue described himself as "an old-fashioned romantic". What a bizarre and ridiculous juxtaposition. 
• The misogyny even enters the similes: "A one-armed bandit at the far end of the room winked and blinked away forlornly like an old tart in a windswept alley." (Ch 73) I'm not sure that works for me on any level.

This tasted like fast-food: rapidly assembled, predictable, unsubtle and easy to consume. I prefer to eat more interesting meals carefully cooked to have depth and complexity.

Selected quotes:

• "Misty rain was falling from a sky the colour of a fogged negative." (Ch 1)
• "Good sex is one per cent of a relationship; bed sex is ninety-nine per cent." (Ch 68)

March 2025; 457 pages

Published in 2005 by Macmillan.

My Pan paperback was issued in 2019.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro

 

This novel by the winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature won the 1989 Booker and adapted into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, nominated for eight Oscars including best picture.

It is written in the form of reminiscences by a butler, Mr Stevens, who used to work for Lord Darlington at Darlington Hall. As he remembers his life as a servant and his tangential observations of secret negotiations between the British and Nazi German governments, the reader realises the sacrifices he has made in order to serve and the minimal reward he has gained. 

He is seeking to define what makes a great butler. He never claims that he himself is a great butler but his long service at the top of his profession suggests he might have been, although service has cost him and now he is beginning to make mistakes as age and exhaustion catch up with him. Given that his savings are small and that his home has always been in the great houses of his employers, one fears for his future if he ever has to retire. 

In order to serve his employers he has repressed all sense of personality and personal relationships, to the extent of missing the death of his own father upstairs because he had duties downstairs and, for the same reason but on another occasion, failing to condole with a bereaved colleague. He could come across as pyschopathically cold and unemotional but one senses that he has feelings, he just suppresses them.

The style is as a diary written a few days before and during a road trip that he makes to see an old colleague; therefore in the first person and incorporating both present and past tense. We learn both the details of the road trip (visiting beauty spots, drinking tea, running out of fuel etc) and his memories. It doesn't quite ring true because many of the conversations are reported verbatim, even those from many years before. Although he is prepared to lie to people he meets, and there is one occasion when he corrects something he said earlier, the narration seems fairly reliable - it is nothing like the frequently self-contradictory and self-serving narration of, for example, The Good Solider by Ford Madox Ford.

It wasn't difficult to read, although the narrator, Stevens, is somewhat long-winded and formal, and although his anecdotes sometimes ramble. It wasn't exactly a page-turner but I was never bored. It managed to make me feel gently sorry for the opportunities this dry old stick had missed and the sense that his life had been wasted in serving outdated employers in a vanishing world.

Selected quotes:

• "The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost ... They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstances tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when, and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone. It is, as I say, a matter of 'dignity'." (Day One - Evening: last page)
• "I would myself much prefer to wait on just one diner, even if he were a total stranger. It is when there are two diners present, even when one of them is one's own employer, that one finds it most difficult to achieve that balance between attentiveness and the illusion of absence that is essential to good waiting." (Day Two - Morning)
• "We were ... an idealistic generation for whom the question was not simply one of how well one practised one's skills, but to what end one did so; each of us harboured the desire to make our own small contribution to the creation of a better world." (Day Two - Afternoon)
• "One has had the privilege of practising one's profession at the very fulcrum of great affairs." (Day Three - Morning)
• "There is, after all, a real limit to how much ordinary people can learn and know, and to demand that each and every one of them contribute 'strong opinions' to the great debates of the nation cannot, surely, be wise." (Day Three - Evening)
• "His lordship ... chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. ... I trusted in his lordship's wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?" (Day Six - Evening)
• "The evening's the best part of the day. You've dome your day's work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it." (Day Six - Evening)
• "Surely it is enough that the likes of you and me at least try to make a small contribution count for something true and worthy." (Day Six - Evening)

I suppose that the book resonated with me because I have retired after 33 years working as a public servant, a school teacher in state comprehensive schools. All those years and what for? Very few of the kids I taught ever made it through to become outstanding exponents of what I taught, Physics, though one or two have made a name in other fields. The obvious successes are balanced by those who ended up committing suicide, or in prison. Probably my influence helped shape lives in some small ways but it is almost impossible to discern, and if it had not been for my guidance and support they would have found other hands to help them, or they would have succeeded by themselves. So I do wonder whether it was worth while and whether I could not have had a more fulfilling and successful life if I had taken another path. Now I am trying to write novels and they are heroically unsuccessful: self-published and rarely purchased. I fear dying with regrets. I think I know how Stevens must feel.

Other books by Sir Kazuo Ishiguro reviewed in thius blog include:

• The Buried Giant
• The Unconsoled
• Never Let Me Go
• Klara and the Sun
• When We Were Orphans

March 2025; 258 pages

Published by Faber and Faber in 1989

My paperback edition was issued in 2011.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Crossing Over" by Ann Morgan

 An old lady struggling with vascular dementia encounters an economic migrant sleeping in the barn of her old farm house. She mistakes him for someone from years ago when she was confronted with a 'Whistle Down the Wind' situation.

It is written in the present tense from the alternating points of view of old Edie, formidable and furiously combative to prevent the neighbours learning her secrets, and young Jonah. Both narratives include flashbacks to fascinating back stories: Edie remembers the second world war and 'Michael', a previous uninvited guest; Jonah the famine in Malawi that forced him to travel to England.  

The dementia aspect of the story reminded me of Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey but here it is shown within her sometimes chaotic interior monologue in which she repeats herself, confuses chronology, sometimes thinking she is a little girl again, sometimes living in the past, and searches for words or substitutes other words for them, such as "internet" for "innocent". Edie's chapter headings are muddled and the numbers grow increasingly chaotic as she deteriorates ( asimilar device is used in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog  in the Night-time in which the narration is by a young lad with Asperger Syndrome and the chapter headings are prime numbers). I think this way of showing Edie's confusion worked very well.

The migrant hiding indoors while just outside is a building site full of potential betrayers reminded me at first of my scenario for my novel The Kids of God except that the consequences of discovery are less serious. Jonah's chapter headings get more ordered with time, as he copes better and better with the confusing culture-clash of English life (not to mention the necessary subterfuge in which he is forced to become Edith's carer). To start with his has many difficulties, from confusing consonantal sounds (he thinks Edie is called 'ET') and his bewilderment when shopping to being completely at sea when confronted with English idioms such as "they don't let the grass grow"- I loved the idea that Jonah thinks the word "wireless" in Edie's diary is anachronistically modern. I wasn't sure if Jonah rang quite true, given that he had spent two years journeying from Malawi including traversing the Libyan civil war and crossing at least two European countries before reaching England; I would have thought he had learned more on this odyssey. The refugee journey was, I think, better told in The Bee Keeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri.

A perfectly paced story which kept you guessing until the last few pages with a clever and unusual narration.

Selected quotes:

• "The night sky is peaceful, the stars glistening, but that means nothing. He has seen beauty birth ugliness too many times to be taken in." (Unnumbered prologue) I live that phrase "beauty birth ugliness"!
• "He is too knotted with need to care." (Unnumbered prologue)
• "Fluttering in the rafters flaps into stillness." (Unnumbered prologue)
• "The cupboards not stuffed with cuttings and letters are crammed with stacks of painted boxes, porcelain pots and glass jars ... many of them empty, as though the main business of the house is to store pockets of air." ('Two' - the 2nd Two)
• "He cries long and loud ... for the being forced to look his fellow beings in the face and make over and over the same unforgivable choice: my survival matters more than yours." ('One' - the 2nd One)
• "The sighing business of darkness, that first sweet, searing time." ('Beep')
• "So they are gone then. ... Reduced to nothing. Burnt up like maize shoots under the sun. Leaving the landscape of his heart bare." ('13')
• "She has unpacked life to the bottom of the box and knows there is nothing there." ('Many')

March 2025; 266 pages

Published by Renard Press in 2023.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"A Spot of Bother" by Mark Haddon

A dysfunctional family prepares for what looks like a catastrophic wedding in this work of comic brilliance.

George has discovered what looks like cancer on a patch of skin; he is terrified of dying. His wife, Jean, is having an affair with an ex-colleague of George's. His adult son Jamie has just been dumped by his boyfriend. George's daughter, Katie, wants to marry Ray (or does she?), but the rest of the family don't like him. Jacob, Katie's son, is a challenging infant.

The past tense third person narrative hops between the four principal adults. The plot is driven principally by George, whose response to retirement and mortality is a series of bizarre actions. It seems that hypochondria, paranoia and depression are fertile grounds for comedy and that's before he experiences the side effects of mixing medication. But the fearsomely belligerent Katie was another wonderful character, not to mention the extremes of parenting demanded by Jacob. 

I hardly ever laugh out loud but I did with this book, more than once.

It's a big book at 503 pages but it is divided into 144 chapters so I found it quick reading.

Selected quotes:

• “That was the weekend, of course, when Gareth burned the frog. How strange, looking back, that the course of an entire life should be spelled out so clearly in five minutes during one August afternoon.” (Ch 2)
• “George could do the bluff repartee about cars and sport if pressed. But it was like being a sheep in the nativity play. No amount of applause was going to make the job seem dignified.” (Ch 4)
• “Jamie wondered, sometimes, if Tony had been a dog in a previous life and not quite made the transition properly. The appetite. The energy. The lack of social graces. The obsession with smells.” (Ch 12)
• “His own preferred exits were rapid and decisive. Others might want time to bury the hatchet with estranged children and tell their wives where the stopcock was. Personally, he wanted the lights to go out with no warning and the minimum attendant mess. Dying was bad enough without having to make it easier for everyone else.” (Ch 24)
• “He was going to die. ... With blinding clarity he realized that everyone was frolicking in a summer meadow surrounded by a dark and impenetrable forest, waiting for that grim day on which they were dragged into the dark beyond the trees and individually butchered.” (Ch 24)
• “When his bus arrived he was packed into a confined space with thirty unwashed people and shaken vigorously for twenty-five minutes.” (Ch 46)
• “‘Mum said you weren't feeling very well.’ She couldn't work out where to put herself. Sitting on the bed was too intimate, standing was too medical and using the armchair would mean touching his discarded vest.” (Ch 49)
• “Which was how young people took over the world. All that fiddling with new technology. You woke up one day and realised your own skills were laughable. Woodwork. Mental arithmetic.” (Ch 51)
• “Maybe old people always fooled themselves, pretending that the world was going to hell in a handcart because it was easier than admitting they were being left behind, that the future was pulling away from the beach.”
• “The tape ended and the screen was filled with white noise.” (Ch 51)
• “It occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. the other part was not giving a toss about what other people thought.” (Ch 111)
• “As a gesture of goodwill, it being their wedding, she decided to admit that he was right. Not out loud, obviously, but by not answering back.” (Ch 142)

March 2025; 503 pages

First published in 2006 by Jonathan Cape

My paperback Vintage edition was issued in 2007.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Lowlife" by Alexander Baron

Harryboy Boas lives (mostly) by gambling. But when he makes promises he can't keep, he gets involved with people who want to hurt him.

This book took a long time to get going. The first three-quarters of the book is scene setting. It is set in the East End of London during the early 1960s when a row of slum houses under threat of demolition cost £200 each, when polio was rife and you could legally make money on the stock exchange through insider trading. Harryboy lives in a bedsit, a single room in a house with shared cooking facilities and a shared bathroom; downstairs is a mother, father and pre-school child. 

The period and setting reminded me of a couple of slim novels by Wolf Mankowitz: Make Me an Offer and A Kid for Two Farthings.

We take a long time to explore how Harryboy lives, following him from dog track to horse racing, from eating in cheap restaurants to sleeping with expensive whores. We also explore the other characters, in particular the family downstairs, a downtrodden father, a house-proud and ambitious mother and their son, a manipulative child who seems to prefer Harryboy to his own father. 

There is some cleverly written dialogue. Harryboy is a Jew and the speech patterns of his sister and brother-in-law and landlord are rendered by reversing sentence sequence as in: "A good wife I marry ... Can good ever come to a man without trouble? ... From me you got the tip ... A discussion now we're having about religion." (Ch 1) This gives a very distinctive voice.

This level of detail mean that the story is built very slowly, brick by brick, and if you're looking for a shallow thriller you'll probably find this book boring. But I was fascinated by it. It is written so beautifully and the characters are so real.

Selected quotes:

• “We are carried to the grave on a stream of dead days and nights. we lived them and forget them.” (Ch 1)
• “I wouldn't put a dog in that basement, and I hate dogs.” (Ch 3)
• “I gobbled books like peanuts. How I didn't wear my eyes away I don't know. But a lowlife is a lowlife. I was losing money on the cards at fourteen, and going with my pals to shilling whores.” (Ch 6)
• “Among the uneducated (which frankly is what you would call the general population where I live) the serious reader is a lonely person.” (Ch 8)
• “I made the old excuse of sinners that I do know harm to anyone but myself. this is never true, as I was to find out.” (Ch 8)
• “She was so determined to make this flat into a preview of the little suburban home of her dreams, that she had turned herself into a kind of domestic machine, which I could hear on the go from morning till night.” (Ch 9)
• “Crying is a fine art with kids. They look at you, judge how much is needed, then start the performance. Sobs, pathetic whimpers, heartrending shrieks, pitiful moans, all these are let loose till you feel as guilty and miserable as if you've done murder. Then you give way and in an instant the tears have stopped, the child is victorious.” (Ch 9)
• “The chain of lights, the unearthly floodlit green of the turf, the stir of people, the soft excited hub out of which rises the characteristic noise of the track - a yapping tumult from the bookies’ stands - it all goes on like a pageant.” (Ch 10)
• “God? Excuse me, I don't know this gentleman. He looks after people? If this is his job he must be the biggest messer in creation.” (Ch 10)
• “Man is a killer. I learned that in the war. It is all nuts about conscience. In Normandy I was with a bunch of steady, ordinary boys from respectable homes, craftsmen, clerks, ordinary boys, and they killed men like killing rabbits. Years after, I went to a reunion, and over pints of beer I heard quiet, ordinary fellows, a greengrocer, or waiter, a shipping clerk, chuckle with contentment and pride over their memories of this killing or that killing.” (Ch 20)
• “You can forget a million children. You cannot forget one child.” (Ch 22)

March 2025; 167 pages
First published in the UK by William Collins in 1963
My paperback edition was issued in 2010 by the Black Spring Press

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Dad" by William Wharton

 

When your parents get old and need help, family tensions and secrets are exposed.

Jacky, a painter living in Paris, returns home to 1977 California to care for his father after his mother has had a heart attack. Then his father gets cancer and has a mental breakdown. Sudden onset dementia or worse? And when his ferocious mother returns home, how can anyone cope with her? To add to the mix, Jacky's son, Billy, has quit university and turns up on the doorstep. 

The narrative is told from the first-person present-tense PoV of the two sons: mostly Jacky and occasionally Billy. The narrative flips between the pair of them driving across the USA (in a road trip that reminded me hugely of the one in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) and Jacky's experience with his ailing parents. From time to time a third voice breaks in, in italics; we learn later whose voice this is.

The plot reminded me of that puzzle (referenced in the text) in which you have to transport a fox, a chicken and a pile of grain across a river in a boat that will only take two of the items. First the mother was in hospital and then the father, then he was in a care home, then she ... Add to this swirling confusion the repeated gut-wrenching hammer blows of heart attack, dementia, cancer etc in which almost everything that could go wrong did and there was no way you could stop reading even though the going was sometimes gruelling. There's a graphic description of a terrible road traffic accident at one stage which summarised my impression of the book to that point: I didn't want to rubberneck and yet I couldn't look away. There was also a puzzle aspect to the plot: just trying to work out the relationships between the characters and the main narrator's back story was an incentive to keep reading. So I turned pages and read this big book in four days.

The main characters are thoroughly drawn:

• Jacky is a superman, perhaps a little too good to be true, a sort of Marty Stu. He is good at every aspect of keeping a household going from domestic chores to DiY. In addition to this he has a PhD (I wasn't quite sure in what but it seems to be medicine related) but now supports his family living in Paris with a second home in the French countryside by painting pictures. This was one aspect that didn't quite ring true: he just didn't seem to view the world in the way that painters do. There were moments when he thought, for example: “There's something special about painting landscape in the cold when it isn't snowing. The colors are toned down, muted, and the forms are much more visible.” (Ch 2) But these felt like add-ons rather than integral to his personality. At one point he thinks: “He's probably seeing forms, shapes, colors and movements in an original, personal sense, the way an artist tries to see and never can.” (Ch 10) But I thought that Jacky, as an artist, should see everything in terms of form, shape and colour, as does the artist protagonist in My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok and as I have tried to do with the protagonist-narrator in my novel Bally and Bro. 
• His father is a working man, brilliant with his hands, who is easily intimidated and has become a carpet for others to walk on; nevertheless he retains deep mental reserves of compassion and understanding and strategies to cope with the bullying behaviour of his wife. 
• Mother is a fascinating character - “the Lady Macbeth of Colby Lane” (Ch 20) - whose default strategy is attack and whose weapons include passive aggressive emotional blackmail - “first, recrimination, doubt I'd come; second, self-pity.” (Ch 2) - and straightforward aggression. 
• Billy, the grandson and university drop-out is trying to understand the complexities of life while retaining sufficient independence to chart his own way forward. 
• Other characters, including Jacky's presumably long-suffering wife Vron who stays in Paris and from whom we never hear, are less complex, but I don't think I could have coped, as a reader, had they not been.

The book ends with a terrifying summary of what to expect as one grows old: “Maybe it's time for me to start learning how to be old. ... Somehow, I've got to get myself ready to accept being weak, in pain, mentally debilitated, forgetful, less sensitive, less aware, inflexible, intolerant ... I need to absorb, without resentment, the hurt when my grown grandchildren feel violated by my most cherished values, while their ideas, in turn, will violate me. I must get ready for the deaths of lifelong friends, relatives, the frequency increasing with time. I must also live with those who survive who will be boring, uninteresting. ... I'll become a bore to others, a drag in conversation, repeat myself, be slow at comprehension, quick at misunderstanding, have lapses in conceptual sequence.” (Ch 23)

An emotionally hard read, but a compelling one.

Selected quotes:

• “You're old when most people would rather have you dead.” (Ch 1)
• “It's weird seeing this counterfeit world inundated with thick, caking, beige mud, cracking in the sun like a Christmas tree in a trash can, tinsel still sparkling.” (Ch 1)
• “It's well past noon. Lead-heavy sun is forcing itself hard into the tops of our heads.” (Ch 1)
• “In any competitive-comparative society there are hundreds of losers for every winner.” (Ch 4)
• “It's not fair. you do what you're supposed to do when you're young, Then they change the rules.” (Ch 6)
• “There's something about being with a woman, knowing mutual pleasure, sharing the most natural part of being alive.” (Ch 8)
• “Mother ... doesn't actually invent so much as she grabs onto rag-tail ends of things and elaborates them into personal fantasies.” (Ch 12)
• “There's something tenuous about being male, nothing in line, all so zigzag.” (Ch 12)
• “He must’ve paid a fortune for them. That's the way he is, tight as a witch's cunt; then bango, big-shot spender.” (Ch 13)
• “America is clots of people, joined by gigantic straight highways.” (Ch 13)
• “Most men are scared, so they’re scared for their sons.” (Ch 20)

Trigger warnings: There is in-character use of racist and anti-semitic language, and in-character misogyny.

March 2025; 442 pages

First publishing in the USA by Knopf in 1981

My Penguin paperback edition issued in 1982

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Cranford" by Mrs Gaskell

 

An 'episodic' novel (constructed from linked short stories which were originally published in a series in Household Words, the magazine edited by Dickens; Mrs G made sure she plugged the editor's Pickwick Papers - perhaps her archetype: another episodic comic novel - and his Christmas Carol). 

It's very gentle, making a Jane Austen novel seem rugged around the edges. Cranford is a small town whose population consists almost entirely of gentlefolk, almost all of whom are women (and most of those seem to be unmarried). There is a great emphasis on propriety: little breaches of etiquette will be gossipped about for weeks and might lead to social exclusion. Nevertheless, right from the start, there are those who through ignorance or carelessness flout the rules of civilised behaviour from motives of kindness, generosity and great-heartedness and the narrator (anonymous almost to the end) recognises that this makes the perpetrator of these social sins a better person.

The ladies are mostly caricatures, drawn with nothing like the gothic  exuberance of Dickens but nevertheless subtly ridiculous. For example, Miss Matty has a horror of men and green tea; a couple of burglaries in the neighbourhood sends the entire flock of human hens into a frenzy of clucking; the perfomance of a conjuror is both exciting and scary. Nevertheless, despite the comedy, the author always has empathy for her creations: these are people, sometimes silly but fundamentally good. And when there is need, the community comes together as best it can to help.

Cranford is a microcosm of a hugely conservative society threatened by change. A railway is being built (against the nimby wishes of the ladies). Literature is changing from the Augustan elegance of Dr Johnson's Rasselas to the boisterous popularism of The Pickwick Papers. A bank fails, destroying the (unearned) income of one of the characters and reducing her to poverty and the shocking necessity of earning her living.

It is a soft book, suffused with kindness, carefully told. 

Selected quotes:

• In Cranford “economy was always ‘elegant’, and money spending always ‘vulgar and ostentatious’; a sort of sour grapism which made us very peaceful and satisfied.” (Ch 1)
• “We were none of us musical, though Miss Jenkins beat time, out of time, by way of appearing to be so.” (Ch 1)
• “Correspondence ... bears much the same relation to personal intercourse that the books of dried plants ... do to the living and fresh flowers in the lanes and meadows.” (Ch 3)
• “I have often noticed that almost every one has his own individual small economies - careful habits of saving fractions of pennies in some one peculiar direction - any disturbance of which annoys him more than spending shillings or pounds on some real extravagance.” (Ch 5)
• “Men will be men. every mother's son of them wishes to be considered Samson and Solomon rolled into one - too strong ever to be beaten or discomfited - too wise ever to be outwitted. If you will notice, they have always foreseen events, though they never tell one for one’s warning before the events happen. My father was a man, and I know the sex pretty well.” (Ch 10)
• “The old story, you know, of ladies always saying, ‘When I marry’, and gentlemen, ‘If I marry’.” (Ch 11)
• “My father once made us ... keep a diary, in two columns; on one side we were to put down in the morning what we thought would be the course and events of the coming day, and at night we were to put down on the other side what really had happened. It would be to some people rather a sad way of telling their lives.” (Ch 11)
• “At this charitable committee, every lady took the subject uppermost in her mind, and talked about it to her own great contentment, but not much to the advancement of the subject they had met to discuss.” (Ch 12)
• “Mr Hoggins ... creaked up the middle aisle at church in a bran-new pair of top boots ... the boots he had worn till now were the identical pair in which he first set out on his rounds in Cranford twenty-five years ago; only they had been new-pieced, high and low, top and bottom, heel and sole, black leather and brown leather, more times than any one could tell.” (Ch 12) The Ship of Theseus otherwise known as Trigger’s Broom!
• “I'll not listen to reason ... Reason always means what some one else has got to say.” (Ch 14)

March 2025; 290 pages

First published in 1853 after serialisation in the magazine Household Words

My hardback edition with illustrations by Hugh Thompson and a preface by Anne Thackeray Ritchie was issued in 1892 by Thomas Y Crowell of New York and Boston, USA

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Wager" by David Grann

 

A gripping true story of shipwreck and its aftermath set during the 1740s.

In 1740 a squadron of eight Royal Navy ships led by Commodore George Anson set off to attack Spanish shipping during the War of Jenkin's Ear. The plan was to cross the Atlantic, go round Cape Horn into the Pacific, and capture the Spanish treasure ship somewhere near the Philippines. Almost immediately, disease (including scurvy) began to deplete the crew. The seas at Cape Horn were atrocious: two ships turned back. HMS Wager, captained by David Cheap, rounded the Horn but turned north to early and was wrecked off the coast of Chile. The survivors were stuck on a island and began to starve. They began to split into factions. One group, under the command of the gunner, built a boat and sailed through the Straits of Magellan to the coast of Brazil from where they eventually made it back to England. The captain and some officers were rescued by native Americans and some of them also returned, even later, to England. Once back home, accusations of mutiny and counter-accusations of murder were made and best-selling books published to justify points of view.

The rest of Anson's expedition were eventually reduced to a single ship with a skeleton crew; nevertheless, they successfully captured the Spanish treasure galleon and completed the circumnavigation of the globe to return home.

This is not so much a tale of derring do and heroic survival against all odds as a chronicle of what can happen when men are in extremis: there is mutiny and murder, theft of supplies, tyranny and rebellion. It's like a real-life version of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Above all there is death, repeated death, usually from sickness. The ship had a complement of 120 men when it left England; ten returned (of Anson's command, 188 out of 1854 survived). As with Grann's previous history also set in South America, The Lost City of Z, I wondered why anyone who had any choice would embark on a voyage when death from drowning, exposure, disease, starvation and enemy action were all more likely than survival. 

One of the naval officers was the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron who refers to his grand-dad's exploits in his poetry. In his subsequent career (yes, he went back to sea!) he achieved notoriety as a  commander who always seemed to attract dreadful storms and received the nickname 'Foul Weather Jack'. 

It's a ripping yarn. The history is thoroughly researched and well-explained; the well-written story keeps you reading to the end. I read it in two days.

There was one error I noted. When discussing naval slang, the author repeats the oft-repeated assertion that the phrase 'piping hot' derives from the fact that a pipe was sounded to call the crew to meals. This seems unlikely given that Chaucer uses the phrase in Canterbury Tales, published in the 14th Century, two centuries before Henry VIII founded the Royal Navy. 

Selected quotes:

• "A diplomat later quipped that Anson was so unknowing about the world that he'd been 'round it, but never in it'." (Ch 1)
• "When ailing seamen were shielded belowdecks from the adverse elements outside, they were said to be 'under the weather'" (Ch 3)
• "To keep warm they [the Native American Kawesqar who wore almost no clothing despite the chilly climate] oiled their skin with insulating seal blubber." (Ch 11)

Also by David Grann:

• The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

Links to my reviews of other travel and exploration books may be found by clicking here.

March 2025; 257 pages

• First published in 2023 in the US by Doubleday
• My Simon and Schuster paperback edition was issued in the UK in 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God