Newsletter on Art Kavanagh

Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 18:13:24 +0100

A few months ago, I wrote about Anthony Cronin’s recently reissued memoir, Dead As Doornails, particularly as that book recounts Cronin’s recollections of Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh. I said at the time that I’d return to it to take a look at what Cronin has to say about Brian Ó Nualláin, whom he often refers to as “Myles”, and who published his English-language novels under the name Flann O’Brien (which is what I’ll call him in this post).

When I wrote the earlier post, I hadn’t yet read either of the two novels that are the subject-matter of this one. I made my first hapless attempt on At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) as a preteen. I had heard my parents talking about “difficult” books and asked what they meant and whether I might be able to read them. My mother gave me her copy of At Swim-Two-Birds and some general comments on what I could expect from it. I managed only a few pages. The narrator’s claim, in the first paragraph, that a book might have multiple openings and endings seemed nonsensical to me. A greater obstacle, though, was the description of Finn Mac Cool, which struck me as vaguely disgusting in a way I couldn’t explain:

The arms to him were like the necks of beasts, ball-swollen with their bunched-up brawnstrings and blood-veins, the better for harping and hunting and contending with the bards. Each thigh to him was to the thickness of a horse’s belly, narrowing to a green-veined calf to the thickness of a foal. Three fifties of fosterlings could engage with handball against the wideness of his backside, which was wide enough to halt the march of warriors through a mountain pass. (At Swim-Two-Birds, 7)

I gave up and didn’t return to At Swim-Two-Birds for approximately 56 years. In the meantime, I didn’t read The Third Policeman either, though for a while I heard a great deal about it: it was popular with some of my fellow students in 1970s UCD. Until a few months ago, the only novel by Flann O’Brien that I had read was The Dalkey Archive (1964), which I had chosen simply because my local library had a copy. That was some time in the 1970s. After a gap of more than 50 years, almost the only thing I remember about it is that it seemed to treat James Joyce somewhat satirically. (At the time, I hadn’t yet read anything by Joyce, so presumably the more subtle aspects of the satire were lost on me.)

I think it’s a fair summary of Anthony Cronin’s assessment to say that he thought of At Swim-Two-Birds, the first of the novels, as a modernist masterpiece, followed by several lesser and, in their different ways, disappointing works.

Shortly after leaving [University College Dublin] and entering the civil service, he published a book of amazing virtuosity, At Swim-Two-Birds, which dealt with the novel form in an utterly nihilistic way, while retainng, in dialogue and description, elements of realism far beyond the compass of most novelists. (Dead As Doornails, 137–8)

In an The Irish Times piece dated 12 December 1975, Cronin described At Swim-Two-Birds as “a genuine anti-novel”, remarking that when it was published “the chief masterpieces of modern, avant-garde writing in English were not quite 20 years old”.

Flann O’Brien had placed himself unerringly in the central tradition of that literature and he had done so with a single book.

Not long after I first read Dead As Doornails in the early 1990s I found myself suspecting that Cronin’s opinion of At Swim-Two-Birds and its place in Flann O’Brien’s oeuvre, might be wrong. Viewed as a whole, and including his newspaper columns as Myles na Gopaleen, the tenor of his work is comic: a mixture of satire, parody, pastiche and absurdity. To be sure, the humour is very often bleak and (as I described it recently) “sour”.

So, rather than seeing Flann O’Brien as Cronin does, a once promising modernist anti-novelist who was unfortunately diverted into less serious work which (for the most part) failed to match his talents, it seemed possible to view him as always having been a satirist or parodist whose first novel belonged to a category not starkly different from his later work. On that view, At Swim-Two-Birds could be taken as a parody of the modernist novel just as plausibly as an example of one. Lack of familiarity with the work prevented me from testing this guess. Actually reading these two novels years later did very little to disabuse me of the notion, nor did it do much to confirm it.

During the 30-odd years between my first reading of Dead As Doornails, and its reissue, I didn’t think very much about the fiction of Flann O’Brien. I certainly didn’t pay any attention to scholarship about or criticism of his novels. When I started to think about writing this post, I had a quick look on JSTOR and was struck by the fact that in recent decades At Swim-Two-Birds has tended to be classed as postmodernist rather than modernist. More recently still, there have been some descriptions of it as metafictional.

I tend to think that “postmodernist” is too slippery and amorphous a category to be much use as a critical tool where literature is concerned. In architecture, for example, postmodernism tends to be viewed as a reaction against modernism, as its contradiction. In literature, though, the relation between postmodernism and its predecessor is more ambiguous, as if the postmodernists are unwilling completely to let modernism go. David Cohen is suggesting something like this when he writes:

O’Brien’s novel is an aggressively anti-modernist work that is simultaneously modernist in the sense that it does not, in its reductio ad absurdum of modernism, advocate a return to more traditional forms of fiction, but rather calls into question the enterprise of artistic creation itself. (David Cohen, “An Atomy of the Novel: Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds”, Twentieth Century Literature, 39,2 (1993), 208-229, 208)

I don’t wish to dispute the first part of this, that At Swim-Two-Birds is “aggressively anti-modernist”, but it doesn’t seem to me that much weight can be placed on the absence of advocacy for “a return to more traditional forms”. It’s surely not unusual for a satirist to avoid advocacy for a preferred course of action. Usually it’s enough to hold the real or supposed iniquity up to exposure and ridicule, without outlining the remedial measures that might be required.

I approached this topic expecting to question Cronin’s view of At Swim-Two-Birds as a modernist novel, only to find that the terms of the critical discourse have changed in the last 35 years or so and that, if I wanted to argue that it has been misclassified, I’d have a different fight on my hands than the one I’d been expecting. Because, as I’ve said, I find “postmodernism” too elusive to be useful, I’d much rather argue against the category itself than about whether a particular work fits into it, and to do so would take me far beyond the novels of Flann O’Brien. For now I’ll just mention that 1939 would be very early for postmodernism. I hadn’t come across the term earlier than 1988, twelve years after the original publication of Dead As Doornails, so it’s no surprise that Cronin doesn’t mention it.

Although The Third Policeman wasn’t published till 1967, after Brian Ó Nualláin’s death, it was completed shortly after At Swim-Two-Birds and sent to publishers, who turned it down, in 1940. Cronin describes it as “an uneven book” (Dead As Doornails, 141). That’s all he has to say about it in his memoir, though he goes into more detail in the Irish Times article cited above, where he says that the novel “suffers from the usual fault of allegory in that the world of its author’s imagining lacks substance, texture and, even, detail”. There is a “mere anxiety to describe” and the allegory (as Cronin takes it to be) is not self-consistent. While it seems to me that, in concentrating on the allegorical and descriptive, Cronin is missing what is distinct and characteristic about this novel, he is right to describe it as “uneven”.

The Publisher’s Note at the end of the book includes a letter from the author to William Saroyan in which he wrote:

The only good thing about it is the plot … When you get to the end of the book you realize that my hero or main character (he’s a heel and a killer) has been dead throughout the book and that all the queer ghastly things which have been happening to him are happening in a sort of hell which he earned for the killing … It’s made clear that this sort of thing goes on forever — and there you are. (The Third Policeman, 207)

The point of the novel is the “twist”: the narrator has, without knowing it, been dead since page 24, and is condemned to repeat the events of the rest of the book interminably, without end, forever. That means that “the queer ghastly things that have been happening” have to fulfil a dual function. They have to appear a suitable punishment for the murderer without at the same time seeming too tiresome to entertain the reader. It’s a tall order, hence the unevenness as perceived by Cronin. At least the reader has to go through it at most a handful of times.

The idea of hell as an endless loop has been used in subsequent works, notably in film. Parallels have been noted between The Third Policeman and Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, in which Colin Farrell plays a hitman who has unintentionally killed a child and is appalled to find that he can never (ever) leave the Belgian city. A more interesting example is Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los ojos (“Open Your Eyes”, 1997) in which Eduardo Noriega plays César, a spoiled, wealthy and very handsome young man who is about to turn 25 when the film begins.

César has been an orphan since he was 10, when his parents were killed in an accident. His father had owned a chain of restaurants and left César extremely well off. The young man is impatient, often bad-tempered and usually at war with the “partners” who run the business he inherited. His best friend, Pelayo, and Nuria, a woman he has recently slept with, both allude to his reputation for sleeping with a different woman every night. Nuria asks him if he’s afraid of ruining that reputation if he is seen with her a second time. In short, César can be seen as a kind of Don Juan character, and we know where Don Juan ends up.

César doesn’t believe in God (as he tells Antonio, the psychiatrist who is interviewing him in the framing narrative) and by implication doesn’t believe in hell either.

Pelayo is clearly smitten by Sofía, a young actor and mime artist, and confides to César that he thinks she might be the girl of his dreams. César promises Pelayo that he would never let rivalry over a woman damage their friendship and shortly afterwards tells Sofía that if they were to sleep together Pelayo wouldn’t know about it. She comments wryly that friendship obviously means a lot to him and he replies that that’s why he wouldn’t tell Pelayo!

César spends the night of his 25th birthday with Sofía, but they don’t have sex. The next morning, Nuria is waiting for him and takes him for a drive in her bright red Alfa Romeo. After asking César if he believes in God, and not waiting for an answer, she crashes the car at high speed, killing herself and putting César in a coma.

César survives and regains consciousness but his extreme good looks are gone: he compares himself to the Phantom of the Opera. He lost flesh and muscle from his face in the crash and his skull was smashed. His team of surgeons are proud of their work in reconstructing his face, but César angrily berates them for their failure to give him back his appearance.

He withdraws and doesn’t see people, eventually approaching Sofía in a park where she is performing her mime act. They arrange to meet at a club the next night. Sofía takes Pelayo along as well. César gets very drunk and passes out in the street, clutching the prosthetic mask that the surgeons have provided him with. After that, strange and unexpected things begin to happen, culminating in César’s being held awaiting trial for killing Sofía, whom he brutally attacked under the delusion that Nuria had replaced her. Antonio attempts to get César to tell him the full story of what happened but César resists (and doesn’t know much more than Antonio does in any case).

Finally, they discover that César killed himself with sleeping pills, having first paid a company named Life Extension to freeze him cryogenically “like Walt Disney”. Life Extension’s main business is freezing people who have just died, to preserve them until such time in the future as reanimation of the dead (and cure of whatever killed them) will inevitably become possible. But they also have an experimental sideline, of which César has availed himself: instead of reviving him to live in some distant future, they can give him a virtual life in the immediate aftermath of his death. He will control this life: it can be whatever he wants it to be. At one point, Duvernois, the man with the soothing voice who represents Life Extension on television, interrupts his virtual life to show him that he can control the behaviour of the “people” around him. Life Extension has offered César a sort of instant paradise, exclusive to the very wealthy.

But César’s virtual paradise has gone wrong; there’s been some kind of error. Since the Life Extension people insist that he’s in complete control, we must infer that he has, not entirely voluntarily, and not consciously, but out of a deserved sense of his own guilt, turned his “life extension” into a continuing punishment. In short, the wealthy atheist has used his large resources to pay LE to build a secular hell for himself.

So where does the “endless loop” come in? At the end of the film, César confronts Duvernois on the roof of the Torre Picasso in Madrid. Duvernois, who has something of the air of the devil tempting Christ on the top of the Temple, tells César that, as his paradise has gone wrong, he has two options, one of which is to kill himself outright, ending his “life extension” for good. César, though suddenly remembering that he suffers from vertigo, accepts his option and jumps from the building. The film ends with the voice of his alarm clock telling him twice to be calm, then to open his eyes.

This (finally) makes sense of the film’s opening sequence where the alarm clock repeatedly tells him to open his eyes. César finds the streets of Madrid uncannily deserted. Traffic lights change but the only vehicle we see, apart from César’s own, is parked. Then that scene fades out and we get the wake-up sequence again. This time it’s much the same, but Nuria is in César’s bed and he tells her irritably not to programme messages into the alarm clock. The streets are busy, as normal. It’s clear that the second sequence is real life, the morning of César’s birthday, or perhaps the day before. The first sequence, though, is part of his virtual life extension. The fact that there is nobody about implies that this is happening after his confrontation with Duvernois, when the imaginary Frenchman gets César to make everyone disappear, saying they’re not needed. The leap from the building didn’t end César’s life extenion after all: it all starts over. If it’s true, as Duvernois says, that 150 years have passed since César killed himself, it must have started over thousands of times already.

Was Duvernois lying or mistaken? Remember that Duvernois, like everybody else that César encounters after he passes out in the street, is wholly controlled by César’s mind. Whatever the Frenchman says, however unwelcome César may find it, is something that César is making him say. So, in a sense, Duvernois is the devil, a secular devil to go with this secular, concocted hell: something else that César’s unconscious has come up with to torment him with, endlessly.

Amenábar’s film is very different in tone, style and almost every way imaginable from Flann O’Brien’s book which, I suggest, shows the versatility of the idea of hell as an eternally repeating loop. It might seem incongruous that I should spend the bulk of a purported discussion of The Third Policeman writing instead about Abre los ojos. My excuse is that the latter is markedly more entertaining. I was a little surprised to read in Wikipedia that Amenábar considers Abre los ojos his worst film, it having been written by inexperienced teenagers. While it has faults, it’s my clear favourite among those of his films that I’ve seen, the other ones being Tesis, The Others, Mar Adentro and part of Agora.

Editions: Anthony Cronin, Dead as Doornails, The Lilliput Press paperback (with flaps), 2026;
Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds, Penguin Modern Classics paperback, 2001, reprinted 2018;
Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman, Harper Perennial paperback, 2006.

Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake, on the blog “Elle Thinks”

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:11:01 +0100

Nine days ago, I failed to post a piece I’d intended to write about Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake (2024) because I realized, late in the day, that my grasp of the novel’s themes and effect were shakier than I had thought. Today, I discovered that I’m not the only one who has responded to it in that way. Eleanor Franzén writes in her blog “Elle Thinks” (which I recommend) about having been affected very similarly by Kushner’s book. Finding that she doesn’t feel able to write authoritatively about the book despite having read it, she instead engages in a Socratic dialogue with herself which reveals that she found the novel compelling, “ripped through it”, but does not “entirely understand what Kushner is driving at with this novel”. (Kushner does indeed seem to be driving at something, though what it is is elusive.)

I agree with most of what Elle says about Creation Lake, though I’m not wholly convinced by her assertions that “there’s a real value in getting off the hamster wheel” and that that’s “the choice Sadie makes at the end”. I suspect that the protagonist’s ultimate choice is more ambiguous, less simple, than that, though I remain unable to say how. So, I thought I’d link to Elle’s piece as a stand-in for the post I didn’t write, one which partly covers the ground I had meant to stake out. I’m still planning to write about Creation Lake after a further reread later this year.

In the same blog post Elle discusses Miranda July’s All Fours (2024) which I had decided, based on the reviews and other commentary I’d read) was probably not for me. Elle makes it clear that much of that commentary gives a misleading impression:

… the part in which a rich white woman hides from her life, fully redecorates a motel room on a whim, and embarks on an ill-advised, all-consuming affair is actually not the whole book or even most of the book. A lot of All Fours is about what happens after all of that stops, which it must inevitably do.

She expands on this:

I don’t think it’s legible as an argument for or against an open marriage in general; that feels very specific to the unnamed protagonist’s situation. (This might explain so many readers’ issues with the novel, if they’re reading it as a general prescription instead of a contextualised description.) Oddly, I’m not even sure the poly/sex/marriage stuff is the point at all, except insofar as this makes a good exhibit A for staging more abstract points.

So maybe I should take a look at All Fours after all? I’ll think about it.

“A small disturbance, quickly ironed out”: Helen Dunmore, Burning Bright

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:19:04 +0100

I heard small snippets of Burning Bright (1994) when it was serialized on BBC Radio 4 in the 1990s: enough to grab my attention but not to give me an overall impression of the book’s shape or a reliable sense of its themes. I vaguely intended to read the novel but I didn’t come across a copy till earlier this year, almost 30 years later. I had bought a copy of another of Dunmore’s novels, The Siege (2001) in the early 2000s for a book group, but couldn’t bring myself to read a story in which the inhabitants of a besieged city were starved and frozen during a Baltic winter. I finally got around to reading The Siege recently, only after I’d read Burning Bright. I’m not going to write about The Siege in this post because so far I’ve read it just once and I prefer to reread any book that I’m going to comment on. The only other work by Dunmore that I’ve read is her first collection of short stories, Love of Fat Men (1997), which I’m now rereading. In other words, I’m familiar with no more than a small portion of Dunmore’s fiction: she wrote 15 novels for adults and three short story collections, as well as poetry and novels for children and young adults. I intend to read more of her work before too long but it’s not easy to know where to start.

Burning Bright tells the intertwined stories of two women, two generations apart. Nadine is 16 though in most context she claims to be 19. She used to do well at school, but something changed.

Have a nice life, Nadine Light, eight GCSEs taken a year early, one of our high-flyers. Nadine Light, half-way through her A-level course when she suddenly stopped being able to read. But they didn’t know that. Only the essays coming in late and the coursework not done and the lessons missed. Nadine Light standing in the staff-room, face sullen, averted. A disappointment. “After all we’ve done for you,” said their eyes. “Not university material” said the headmistress’s report … Five years on an assisted place and nothing to show for it. (pp. 21–2)

Her parents have sold their house and moved to Germany with her handicapped sister, Lulu, to a Centre where Lulu will receive “Conductive education: repatterning, intensive speech therapy, hydrotherapy, music therapy, art therapy” (p. 23). Nadine’s and Lulu’s mother explains:

“We’ve got to think of Lulu now. This might be her chance.” (p. 40)

Nadine has had her turn. (Though as Nadine sees it, her sister has always had first claim on their parents’ — particularly their mother’s — attention.)

As the rest of her family has moved to Germany, Nadine has taken up with Kai Toivanen, a man twice her age. When Kai and his business partner, Tony, buy a run-down house in (I think) Bristol or maybe Bath — the train there goes from Paddington — she and Kai move in and set up their home there. Squatters (including Jenny, the mother of a baby) have been intimidated into leaving but there remains a sitting tenant who can’t be legally evicted. This is Enid, an elderly woman who lives on the top floor and whose room has the only surviving door-knob in the house.

Tony and Kai find Enid a disgusting nuisance but Nadine likes her and gets on well with her. You’ll notice that Nadine’s name contains Enid’s backwards, perhaps suggesting that their lives are lived in parallel but in opposite directions, with Nadine’s extending beyond the older woman’s. Enid tells Nadine that in the late 1930s, just before the Second World War, she had a chance encounter with a woman named Sukey, who introduced her to the Millicent Sowerby Association for Ladies, more familiarly known as Manchester Ladies. Sukey had an apparently aristocratic husband who, since she provided him with an heir (though not a spare), mostly left her alone to go her own way. Enid became her lover and found the experience, and the premises occupied by the Manchester Ladies, opened her eyes to possible ways of living that she hadn’t been aware of before. But Sukey already had another lover, Caro, who was jealous of the developing relationship with Enid and eventually stove Sukey’s skull in with a poker, then spent 20 years in prison as a result. (Whenever I encounter a character named Caro, I always wonder if the name is meant to suggest flesh. In this case, given Dunmore’s play on the names Enid and Nadine, I suspect it is, though I’m not at all confident that I can explain the significance.)

At first, Enid tells Nadine only the first part of this tale, wanting the young woman to understand how much Sukey’s energy impressed her and helped her to develop her own personality. She doesn’t want to tell her the violent end, though. Eventually she finishes the story while Nadine is asleep.

Nadine is aware that Kai carries large amounts of cash, some of it in new £50 notes. As he and Tony talk a lot about property and have bought the house that they are partly occupying, she believes that their income comes from property dealing, but in fact they’re pimps. They have plans for Nadine — they agree it’s time she started to pay her way — but they don’t intend to put her on the streets: she’s too “classy” (p. 20) and potentially valuable for that. They have a particular client up for her.

He is Paul Parrett, now a powerful Government minister and formerly a successful (and as a result very wealthy) businessman. Paul was a wartime “GI baby” (p. 9), adopted by a woman he came to hate. By the time his birth-mother knew he was on the way, his biological father had been shipped abroad.

His adoptive mother never disclosed to the adoption society that the reason she had not been able to have a child herself was that she had never slept with her husband in fifteen years of marriage. Mr Parrett said nothing and died two years after Paul was adopted. Her dislike of sex extended to those who practised it and to those who were obviously the result of it. Paul was clearly in the second category, as the product of sex which must have been undertaken for pleasure rather than endured for the satisfaction of a wedding ring. Such an attitude was inconceivable to Mrs Parrett. She foretold bad blood. (pp. 9–10)

The upshot of this upbringing is that the adult Paul is able to get off only by being humiliated. His sexual needs are specialized and, as he puts it himself, “unfriendly. There was nothing in them for anyone else, except money” (p. 11). So he has accepted early on that sex is something that he will always have to pay for, that he’ll have to deal through intermediaries, and that the onus will be on him to judge carefully the risks that he’ll be undertaking.

Tony takes Nadine to London to go to dinner with Paul Parrett. She is wearing an extraordinary silk dress that Kai bought and that looks perfect on her. After dinner, she and Paul go back to his apartment for coffee and Tony makes himself scarce. Paul lives on the top floor of a fifteen-floor new building. He has a rooftop garden high above the city where he grows, among other things, strawberries and apple trees:

Sheltered by the low hedges there are six big tubs with branchless apple trees growing in them, like fruiting poles. Immature apples cluster on the stems in bunches of six or seven.

“Ballerina,” says Paul Perrett, but the trees have no grace. They are maimed ballerinas with their limbs chopped off. He looks at them with satisfaction. (p. 166)

Tony hasn’t prepared Nadine for her enounter with Paul: he hasn’t told her what to expect or the nature of the transaction. She likes Paul but isn’t able to provide what he requires, which is that she should strap him securely to his bed and then masturbate herself while he looks sideways on, “so I can just see you if I turn my head” (p. 162). Nadine tells him that she doesn’t masturbate.

Notwithstanding the frustration of his expectations, Paul is not angry — apparently not even with Tony, whom he describes as a “fucking idiot” but “not worth wasting time on” (p. 164). The government minister who has made a fortune in business turns out not to be quite the monster that the stereotype leads us to expect, though neither is he wholly without fault. He’s solicitous of Nadine, giving her a private phone number where she can contact him if she needs help, and having his driver take her to Paddington so she can get the late train home. Tony has booked both of them into a hotel but Nadine decides to go straight back to the house, a decision leading to further complications, culminating in an attack by Kai on Enid, in which she falls downstairs and appears to be dead.

Believing that he has killed Enid, Kai moves her “body” to hide it from Nadine. Once Nadine has left the house, he moves it back to where it had fallen. He tells Nadine that they are moving to Finland, back to his home country. She is happy to go along with that, though by now, at Enid’s prompting, she has realized not only that Tony tried to pimp her out, but that Kai was on board with this.

In Finland, Kai and Nadine live in a holiday home belonging to former friends of Kai’s with whom he hasn’t been in contact for years. It’s in the sparsely populated north of the country, surrounded by forests and lakes. There Kai lapses into depression and heavy drinking while Nadine explores the forests on a new, expensive mountain bike that he’s bought her, and swims in the lake beside the summer-house.

After some weeks, Kai explains to Nadine why he’s drinking so much: he confesses to having killed Enid. Nadine immediately flees on her mountain bike, heading for the nearest town, which is 25 miles (40 Km) away. She has hidden the car keys so that Kai, who in any case is too drunk to drive, can’t immediately follow her. She thought about throwing the keys away but realized that, without transport, Kai was likely to die in the remote forest.

As she nears the town and its railway station, Nadine, flagging, comes across a lake in the forest. It’s now late autumn and very cold. In a remarkable episode, Nadine pauses to go for a swim in the lake.

Kai has told her not to bathe anywhere unless she knows the water. Some of these lakes are very deep. She should never swim alone. There’s always the risk of cramp and sudden exhaustion from cold. Kai could be very protective. (p. 242)

Some of the lakes are reputedly a thousand feet deep and contain huge pike, “fresh-water sharks” (p. 243), but she thinks that the water she is swimming in is too clear for them. The pike prefer murk. With her return to shore blocked by a family of swans who would attack her if she got too close, she is compelled to swim right across the lake — really no further than if she had swum back from the middle, but psychologically more forbidding — and climb out onto a large crag, which seems both to impede and aid her exit: she cuts her hip on its sharp edge when she is washed against it, but finds that there are ledges in the rock that she can traverse. She then has to walk back around the lake, skirting some marshland at its edge, to where she left her clothes and bicycle. The swimming episode suggests that Nadine is at home in an element very different from that which hosts Kai, Tony and their associates.

Back in England, Nadine goes to the house, where Tony tells her that Enid is in hospital. He had found her, realized that she was still alive and called an ambulance. Nadine visits Enid every day. She intends to get a job and rent a flat, where she wants Enid to come and live with her. She phones Paul Parrett, who is interested in what has happened to Enid. He asks Nadine what she looks like, which Nadine takes to be an enquiry as to how Kai’s attack affected her. She answers:

“Oh, well, pale. But you’d expect that. Her arm’s in a sling.” (p. 259)

Paul has already asked Nadine about Enid’s appearance (and her age) the night she was in his apartment, when she first told him about her older friend. On first reading (and, I’ll admit, on second) I assumed that either Paul was in the habit of enquiring about any elderly woman who had given up a wartime baby for adoption, or that he had decided that Enid would fit the bill as someone who might have been his birth-mother. But this is what I had overlooked, from Paul’s first appearance early in the story:

His mother is alive, he knows. He has checked it. One of the advantages of a ministerial position is that all sorts of small barriers fall away. The social security system is usefully comprehensive, and old people live a long time these days. She is in receipt of a supplementary pension, and she lives alone in rented accommodation. He has never seen her. (p. 9)

So, as soon as Nadine mentions Enid’s surname (“Shelton”, p. 168), he is sure that she is his direct link to his mother. This largely explains his unexpectedly friendly interest in the young woman he had shortly before been prepared to exploit as a prostitute.

Helen Dunmore was a poet before she started to write fiction. Several times in this book, and in some of the short stories in Love of Fat Men, we find a phrase or clause that reads like a line of poetry. One example is the phrase I’ve chosen as the title of this post (p. 244), which is in iambic pentameter. Another is “the use of an official car for unofficial business” (p. 11) — iambic heptameter, ending in an extra unstressed syllable. There are other examples which, while not actually metrical have a rhythm which suggests poetry. And a section of one of the short stories, “Family Meetings”, ends with this, a complete paragraph:

White cakes that set her mother’s teeth on edge. (Love of Fat Men, p. 121)

Dunmore is also sensitive to smells and textures. As here:

New banknotes are just as fresh and moist as cigarettes. She eases them over the lip of the pocket. The money is dense but pliable, and surprisingly heavy. The band around the notes is unbroken and it’s too tight for her to slip them out or fan the edges of the notes and count them without the risk of the band tearing. Then he’ll know she’s been in his pockets. The notes smell of new books with a touch of metal. (p. 34)

Or here, where Tony tries some home cooking with one of the sharp new knives he’s bought:

He dries the knife on a paper towel, then he unrolls the veal, flattens it with the back of the knife and begins rapidly to slice it into fine, almost translucent ribbons of flesh. The meat is nearly bloodless. It doesn’t look like flesh at all. Her mother would never have veal in the house, because it was cruel. Nadine watches the small muscles moving in Tony’s forearms as veal ribbons peel away beautifully from one another, then spread out fanwise on the board. They look like the gills of oyster mushrooms. Certainly this meat doesn’t look as if it was ever part of anything as warm and sweet-smelling as a calf. (p. 55)

In each of these examples the olfactory detail is brought in just at the end of the description, very simply, just enough to pervade the reader’s sense of what is going on.

As I mentioned already, I’m now rereading the stories in Dunmore’s first short story collection. I expect to write about them, and quite possibly other work by her, before too long.

Edition: Penguin paperback, 1995.

Human subjects: Mick Herron, Down Cemetery Road and Smoke and Whispers

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:32:11 +0100

Before he found huge success with the Slough House/Slow Horses series of spy novels, Mick Herron wrote a short crime fiction series: four books known variously as the Zoë Boehm and the Oxford Investigations series. I haven’t yet read any of the books in the main Slough House series, just Nobody Walks (2015) which is set in the same milieu and mentions characters from the main series, and a potboiler novella. I’ve always liked spy stories, so the Slough House would seem like an obvious choice for me, but when I heard that Herron’s first published books were crime fiction featuring a woman private detective in her forties, they seemed the obvious place to start. So far, I’ve read two of the novels, the first and the last in the series.

In neither of these is Zoë Boehm the main character, though I understand that her role is central to the two middle books, The Last Voice You Hear (2004) and Why We Die (2006), both of which I hope to read before long. The two I’ve read both centre on Sarah Tucker (still known by her married name, Trafford, at the start of the first book, Down Cemetery Road (2003). While Sarah is reluctantly hosting a dinner party for a prospective new client of her husband’s, a house in her South Oxford street blows up, killing a married couple, and orphaning their four-year-old daughter who is shielded from the blast by a wardrobe. Curiously, the husband was already officially dead, having reportedly been killed in a helicopter crash in Cyprus a few years earlier.

Sarah didn’t know either of the dead parents, but when the little girl, Dinah, is spirited away from the hospital Sarah engages a private detective, Joe Silvermann, who is Zoë’s largely estranged husband, to try to find out what happened to her. Joe and Sarah fail to find out very much about the explosion or Dinah’s whereabouts but following a wild goose chase to an orphanage in Surrey, Joe is murdered: his throat is cut with a razor which the killer leaves in his hand, making the death look like suicide. The killer also plants a variety of drugs in Joe’s office and a bag of cocaine behind a loose tile in Sarah’s bathroom.

As a student Sarah had been a fairly prolific drug user but when her first ever acid trip ended with her attempting to fly off the roof of a four-storey house, resulting in several broken bones and a miraculous escape from impaling herself on railings, she stopped using them. However, nobody (including her husband, Mark) initially believes her claim that the cocaine must have been planted. The solicitor friend of her husband whom Mark engages on her behalf advises her that she has no choice but to admit simple possession and blame the deceased Joe as her supplier. She takes the advice and Mark keeps her tranquilized at home.

It’s at this point that Zoë enters the story, and persuades Sarah that she should retract her statement to the police that Joe had been dealing drugs. Sarah does so, to the fury of the investigating detective who threatens her with dire retribution. Not long after this, an attempt is made to kill Sarah. The attempt comes from a very unexpected source but helps Sarah to understand what she’s been getting wrong so far, and why the trip to Surrey was a wild goose chase.

The man who tried to kill her was also the one who had blown up the house, Axel Crane. He worked for a anonymous clandestine branch of the state which to all appearances formed part of the Ministry of Urban Development (whose name was “MUD” anyway). Axel’s superiors were holding Dinah as bait, to catch and neutralize Michael Downey a fellow-soldier of Dinah’s father, Tommy Singleton. (Downey had been in love with Dinah’s mother and thought, mistakenly, that he might have been Dinah’s father.) To be effective as bait, Dinah must be relatively easy for Downey to find, so he and Sarah (whom he has rescued from Axel’s homicidal grip) set off to search for her on a remote, uncharted island off the north-west coast of Scotland, where Downey, Singleton and four others had been held following their official deaths.

The two novels have various elements in common, the most striking being that each story ultimately rests on nefarious experiments carried out on human beings. In Down Cemetery Road, the experiments are part of the age-old quest to develop a weapon which will be lethal to an enemy while remaining harmless to one’s own side. The first aim is achieved perfectly: captured Iraqi conscripts — “boy soldiers” — melt (not figuratively) when exposed to the biological weapon. The British soldiers who have been illegally holding the boy soldiers in custody — themselves already war criminals, having murdered a group of Iraqi prisoners during the Gulf War — have been painted with something that is expected to protect them. (Of course, they haven’t been told why they’ve been painted, or that they are experimental subjects.) The protective coating turns out to be only 70% effective, leaving the surviving soldiers looking and feeling as if they have been flayed.

The experiments in Smoke and Whispers are 30 years in the past. They were conducted, not by the state or the military, but by a psychopathic monomaniac, determined to discover a cure for asthma. He came to an arrangement with an orphanage, run by Catholic priests, which allowed him to test drugs on the orphans, in one case on an eight-year-old girl. A generation later, at least one of the experimental subjects give birth to children with severe birth defects. Gerard Inchon, Sarah’s unlikely (and very rich) friend, tells her about his son, Zach. Zach is eight months old, but Gerard hasn’t previously mentioned him in Sarah’s presence. She didn’t know he existed.

“He has no arms,” Gerard said. “But then, he has no legs either. You know what he looks like? He looks like a Ping-Pong ball balanced on a boiled egg. And I look at him, and I know I’m supposed to love him. And I do. I love him. But I want him to die. Because he’s not living a life, not in any sense you or I would recognize …” (p. 111)

Zach needs a ventilator to breathe. His condition has caused a breach between Gerard and his wife, Paula (whom Sarah had labeled “the Trophy Wife” on first meeting, partly because Paula’s name didn’t register with her). Paula wants Zach to have an existence as comfortable (even pleasurable) as possible. Gerard, as we’ve seen, thinks he should die. Paula and Gerard were both Catholics before. Gerard has abandoned religious belief, Paula seems to have found comfort in hers.

Two other (related) features that these two books have in common are (a) wild goose chases and (b) Sarah’s early but mistaken conviction that she knows who the bad guy is. In the first book, she thinks that Gerard, whom she’s only just met, is up to no good and may have planted the bomb that killed Tommy and Maddie Singleton. Gerard and Paula had come to dinner: Sarah was reluctantly entertaining a prospective new client of her husband’s. Gerard arrived a few minutes after Paula — he said he’d been locking his briefcase in the boot of his car — and Sarah wondered whether he might also have been setting the bomb. When, later, Gerard gives her cryptic warnings, she thinks he is trying to intimidate her, but in fact he’s trying to prepare her for the trouble her husband is about to get into over his money-laundering.

In the other book, Sarah becomes convinced that a bartender in the downmarket Newcastle hotel where Zoë had been staying is actually the shadowy serial killer of women whom Zoë had been pursuing. Barry has an Australian accent and claims to be from “Wallaby Springs” but Sarah overhears him speaking Geordie, and realizes that he has said things to her that might be interpreted as teasing/taunting hints about what has happened to Zoë. Her misapprehension results in the terrorizing and torture by Sarah and another of her unlikely friends of an innocent man who doesn’t have the information she’s looking for. Barry the fake Australian barman suffers because of Sarah’s unwarranted near-certainty, though not as much as Joe did in the earlier book: to the injury of having his throat cut with a razor was added the insult of being branded a drug supplier.

These books tell stories of violence, cruelty and inhumanity in a jocular tone. Sometimes the jocularity verges on the tiresome, particularly in the first book, Chapter 1 of which opens like this:

On discovering a fire, the instructions began, shout Fire! and try to put it out. It was useful, heart-of-the-matter advice, and could be extended almost indefinitely in any direction. On discovering your husband’s guests are arseholes, shout Arseholes! and try to put them out. This was a good starting point. Sarah was one glass of wine away from putting it in motion. (p. 9)

But the effect, for the most part, is of tales of outrageous injustice being told in a deadpan voice leavened with incongruous humour so that the outrage stands out. Herron seems to hate the nastiness of the secret state bureaucracy and institutions exercising authority (like the orphanage). He shows the former resorting to grossly disproportionate violence, often merely for for the sake of convenience. In Nobody Walks, for example, Dame Ingrid Tearney orders the death of a relatively innocent man who might have exposed her scheme to replenish her personal coffers.

Sometimes Herron’s approach veers into the territory of cartoon violence. It’s perfectly entertaing but the apparent exaggeration of the villains’ inhumanity and brutality may occasionally rob his attack of some of its force.

Given the title of the first book, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise to find that that novel in particular contains a sprinkling of poetic allusions, many (but not all) to the work of Philip Larkin. My impression is that most of them don’t have any direct thematic relevance to the story, but I may write a further short post at some point.

Sorry this is a couple of days late: it’s been a busier weekend than usual. Next time, I’m hoping to look at some of the work of Helen Dunmore.

Editions: Down Cemetery Road, Baskerville paperback reissue, 2025; Smoke and Whispers, Soho Press paperback, 2015.

An ever-increasing gloom: Susie Steiner’s Manon Bradshaw series

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:14:44 +0100

There will be no new additions to Susie Steiner’s series of three novels featuring the Cambridgeshire cop Manon Bradshaw, a detective sergeant in Missing, Presumed (2016) and a detective inspector in the later novels. Steiner died aged 51 of glioblastoma in 2022. In the Acknowledgements to the third book, Remain Silent (2020), she referred to “my year of horrendous illness” and says that she has “faced an extremely frightening illness over the past year” (p. 358).

In the first book Manon Bradshaw is 39 years old, unmarried and childless. She’s investigating the disappearance of a 24-year-old Cambridge graduate student, Edith Hind. Unlike most postgraduates, Edith hasn’t been living in Cambridge itself but in a rented house in Huntingdon with her “preposterously handsome” (p. 20) and boring boyfriend, Will Carter, and her best friend Helena. There are signs of a struggle — broken glass and a small amount of blood — and the front door has been left open. Her phone, money and keys are still in the house. The detectives believe that if they don’t manage to find Edith within 72 hours it’s unlikely that she will be found alive. Edith’s father, Sir Ian, is a prominent ENT surgeon who has reputedly treated members of the royal family and is a personal friend of the Home Secretary. Because of this the investigating team expect to be put under additional pressure from above, but when Sir Ian eventually asks his friend to do something about the slow pace of the investigation, the Home Secretary is reluctant to intervene because of how it would look.

The 72 hours pass without much happening, then a body is pulled out of the Ouse near the Hind family’s country home. The body isn’t Edith’s, but that of a young mixed race male, who is identified as Taylor Dent, 17 years old, from Cricklewood. There is no apparent connection with Edith Hind’s disappearance, but because of the proximity of time and place the detectives assume that the disappearance and the death must be linked. Manon goes to North London to interview Taylor’s family and meets his mother, Maureen, an alcoholic Irishwoman with a terminal disease who doesn’t attend her hospital appointments, and Taylor’s younger brother, Fly, 11. Fly tells Manon that his brother had a plan to to get them out of their dire situation and that it wouldn’t have involved drugs, though he doesn’t know anything else about it. (It turns out to have involved blackmail.)

Manon is increasingly taken with Fly. She makes an arrangement with a nearby café to feed him and give her the bill. By the end of the book, when Maureen has died and Taylor’s killer been identified and charged, Manon has taken her inspector’s exam, transferred to the Metropolitan Police in Kentish Town, and is renting a flat in Kilburn, where she is taking care of Fly, who eventually agrees to being adopted by her.

She’s living a few doors down from the flat of her younger sister Ellie, from whom she had been estranged. When they were younger, they had been united in enmity to their father’s second wife, Una, who was very effective at keeping their father away from them. (Manon thought that Una had “subsumed him like some mollusc who crept over the top of him till he disappeared”, p. 354.) When Manon found out that Ellie had visited and stayed with their father and Una, she had felt betrayed and had avoided contact with her disloyal sister for three years. So, though the reader is barely aware of the fact until later, Ellie’s absence is keenly felt by Manon throughout most of the first book, towards the end of which Ellie contacts her to tell her she now has a baby, Solly.

By the beginning of the second book, Persons Unknown (2018), Manon has moved back to Huntingdon, taking Ellie and their respective children with her. Manon had not found North London to her liking. Though she’s now a DI, she’s working (on her own) on cold cases: the Major Incident Team, now apparently rebranded as the “Major Crime Unit” (p. 4), doesn’t have a place for her to return to. Manon is now pregnant, having bought frozen sperm online. She is conscious that, having had her heart so strongly set on Fly’s adoption, it might be seen (particularly by Fly himself) as a bit of a slap in the face to him that she is now just as determined to have her own biological child who will, of course, be white. Fly, now 13, is unhappy to have been uprooted and taken to live in a place where his is the only Black person in the school, and indeed in the neighbourhood. He skips school and goes back to Cricklewood for a day. When Manon tackles him about this, he says that he is planning to move back to London and live with his father, a Nigerian who, Manon knows, has a conviction for pretending to be a medical practitioner.

Ellie, too, is unhappy with the move. She’s a nurse and gets a job at Hinchingbrooke Hospital, but the NHS funding crisis is getting to be too much for her. She has been notified that she was accidentally overpaid to the tune of £5,000, and that she is required to repay the money, which she doesn’t have. Ellie has a plan to get herself and her son out of poverty but neither Manon not the reader learns about this till much later in the story.

Manon, who insisted before her reappointment that she would be happy with cold case work, is feeling isolated and dissatisfied. She is doubly removed from a central role when Fly is charged with the murder by stabbing of Solly’s father, the outrageously rich vice-president of a wealth management company. As the accused person’s mother and sister of the victim’s ex, she is obviously not allowed anywhere near the files on the case. Disclosure of the prosecution’s evidence will not take place for many weeks or even months, hampering her ability to investigate on behalf of the defence. And Fly has taken her off his authorized visitors list. On the plus side, she finds herself growing close to Mark Talbot, the solicitor she has engaged to represent Fly.

I noticed a number of patterns or motifs that recur in these novels. One is that each of them features a suicide (attempted, successful or apparent) by hanging. In Missing, Presumed, Helena, former best friend of the missing Edith, is beseiged by sensation-hungry journalists who have surrounded the entrance to her flat; she worries that the fact that she is seeing a psychiatrist will be exposed, and is left alone and unsupported over the weekend. Small and light, she hangs herself neatly by her dressing-gown cord from a hook on the back of her bedroom door, reminding us of the children in Jude the Obscure. Although in her 20s, Helena is not much more than a child.

In Persons Unknown (2020) Fly, detained in Arlidge House while awaiting trial, tries to hang himself using his bedsheets as a rope. Fortunately he is found almost immediately and suffers no serious or lasting injury. The third novel, Remain Silent begins with the discovery — by Manon, who is walking through the park with her four-year-old son, Teddy — of a body hanging in a tree. The body is that of Lukas, a Lithuanian who had been an agricultural workers based in Wisbech in the Cambridgeshire fenland. The hanging would be treated as almost certainly suicide but for the presence of a note, saying “The dead cannot speak” in Lithuanian. But if it’s not suicide, there’s a mystery as to how the killer got the victim into the tree. One detective remarks that homicidal hanging is almost unheard of: if the intended victim is conscious, s|he would struggle and otherwise s|he would be dead weight. There was no evidence that Lukas had struggled.

Another repeating pattern can be seen in situations where a character pursues a desired object or state, achieves it at a certain cost to the him/herself and (usually) some of the people around him/her, only to find that the outcome isn’t nearly as satisfying as expected. So, Manon moves to North London, largely in order to live with her adopted son and to be near the sister with whom she’s just been reconciled, only to find herself desperate to return to Huntingdon less than 2 years later. Returning, she gladly accepts a role dealing with cold cases, only to find that she feels excluded from Major Crimes and that she and Ellie both hate the house they’re living in and that her son feels that she has failed or tricked him. Fly is keen to return to the North London environment he was used to and to live with his father, but that doesn’t work out and four years later he’s still living with Manon in Huntingdon.

Similarly, Ellie takes a serious risk to secure Solly’s future financial wellbeing. This necessitates their moving abroad (to Mexico to start with) but she soon finds that Solly is miserable, missing Fly (in particular) and Manon. But the most significant example of this pattern is found in the case of Lukas and his friend Matis. Matis persuaded his friend to move to rural England where, the ads promised, they could earn £350 per week for agricultural work. This turned out to be a brazen lie. In Wisbech, the Lithuanians were in a real sense enslaved, their passports and bank cards seized so that they couldn’t get away and had no access to the money that was paid into their acccounts, ostensibly as wages. This is how Bridget, the senior office on the Fenland Exploitation Team, describes their plight:

“Even though they’re effectively slaves, in terms of payment and conditions, they are there by choice. No one is locking them up. Often they have mental health issues, shady pasts, alcoholism. They think it’s work, so they get on and do it, but they don’t get paid for it. They are locked up by the language barrier, by their mistrust of authority, their dependence on the gangmasters for their basic needs. They get petty cash to buy deodorant or a packet of crisps, but no wage.” (p. 72)

In Klaipeda, Matis and Lukas had not been well off, but not impoverished either. It was boredom and a desire for a change of scene, not economic necessity, that had motivated Matis to persuade his friend to come with him to England, where they found themselves trapped and forced into dangerous labour with no let up.

Matis admits his mistake and feels guilty about it but its consequences aren’t limited to him and Lukas. The latter’s fiancée, Janina, who remained in Klaipeda, suffered a shocking acid attack intended to intimidate Lukas who had not been working fast enough and had been showing compassion to another worker who was forced to work with broken ribs. Like Manon, Fly, Ellie and other characters, the two Lithuanians had wanted a fresh start. To a far greater extent than the others, they found that their changed situation was much worse than what they’d had before.

Particularly, in books two and three, characters find themselves fighting against debilitating exhaustion. In Persons Unknown, where Manon is five months pregnant, there are constant references to Manon’s fatigue:

Flumping into an armchair, Manon felt her tiredness mingle with affection for her adopted son; so much older than his years …

She could sleep right now.

She could sleep walking up the stairs.

She could sleep stirring a pan at the stove.

The baby squirms, a bag of eels. (p. 9)

This is echoed in the final book, where Matis, Lukas and their fellows have to be out at a filling station at 4 am, often after just two hours’ poor sleep, waiting for a van to pick them up and take them to their job. This is Matis, after Lukas’s death:

Twelve hours in the darkness of an industrial chicken shed made him forget himself. The stink, the noise, being scratched, being exhausted. Perhaps Lukas is best off out of it.

In the van back to the house, his head lolls against the seat rest and he dozes a blank sleep …

He can see Dmitri is exhausted and would rather lie on his mattress, boots off. He is grateful to him for his companionship. (p. 13)

And Manon, four years after the birth of Teddy, hasn’t recovered her energy. At 46, she finds the weariness compounded by anxiety:

It’s not just the same old row about mental load, about who should be doing the utterly tedious bedtime routine while simultaneously preparing a nutritious dinner brimming with fresh veg, but the deep chasm over The Anxiety of It All. (p. 23)

She despairs of ever getting around to replacing the coat hooks which have fallen out of the wall beside the front door. In the meantime she and her family will store their coats on the floor. Worn out lightbulbs don’t get replaced, so “they live in an ever-increasing gloom” (p. 25).

I had intended to finish by writing a bit about the differences — in narrative approach, tone and sociopolitical themes — between Remain Silent and the two earlier books, but I’m already a whole day late with this post and I haven’t yet managed to work out what I meant to say. I may add a supplementary few paragraphs on these topics at some point but at the moment I can’t imagine doing so very soon. I hope you’ll have got something out of this in any case.

The next time I expect to take a look at a couple of novels by Mick Herron which are about something other than his “slow horses”.

Editions: Missing, Presumed, Borough Press paperback, 2016; Persons Unknown, Borough Press paperback, 2018; and Remain Silent, Borough Press paperback, 2021.

“Live long enough and you’ll see everything”: Scott Turow, The Last Trial and Presumed Guilty

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 11:50:57 +0100

Two of Scott Turow’s three most recent novels tell the stories of the final legal cases of two characters who were introduced in his first novel almost forty years ago. Presumed Innocent (1987) was the first-person narrative of Rusty Sabich, a prosecutor who was blindsided to find himself charged with the murder of another lawyer in the Prosecuting Attorney’s office, with whom he’d previously been having an affair. Rusty had been supervising the investigation of her murder and had taken oppostunities to steer the investigation away from the victim’s involvement with him, so his behaviour looked guilty. At trial, he was represented by Sandy Stern, an established defence lawyer who in turn becomes the central character in Turow’s second novel, The Burden of Proof (1990). Unlike his first, this is not a first-person narrative: the reader generally perceives Sandy from a certain distance. In Turow’s subsequent novels, Sandy is often referred to in passing, as is Rusty, though less frequently. Rusty makes an appearance in Limitations (2006) as Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals.

Then, in Innocent (2010) both characters reappear, and in their original roles again. Rusty, who has recently been elected to the state Supreme Court, is again charged with murder, this time of his wife, and again retains Sandy as his counsel.

And now, in The Last Trial (2020) and 2025’s Presumed Guilty, each of these characters returns to address a jury for the last time. Each of the novels centres on a criminal trial in which a great deal is at stake. In fact, in both of them there’s a count of murder on the indictment, though in the first case there is never any likelihood of the defendant’s being convicted of that offence. Kiril Pafko, a 78-year-old doctor and scientist who was awarded a Nobel Prize some decades earlier, is in no danger of being formally sentenced to life imprisonment, though throughout the trial there is a real possibility that he will die in prison.

The Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of the role a particular family of proteins plays in most of the major forms of cancer. Decades later, Kiril and his son Leopoldo (“Lep”) developed a treatment, a medicine, based on this discovery. During blind trials, it was noticed that some patients were dying in their second year of treatment, apparently of an allergic reaction. Kiril is accused of having unblinded the data, had the names of the deceased patients removed (on the pretext that they had left the trial before it was complete and had mistakenly been labeled as having died) and failed to tell either the FDA or the company conducting the trial about any of this. The main accusation against him is one of fraud, but he is also charged with murder (of several patients who died, also of allergic reactions, after the medicine was approved by the FDA) and insider trading.

While the murder charge is never going to be considered by the jury — it’s included on the indictment so that the prosecution can introduce evidence about the people who died — and the fraud is the real substance of the case, the insider trading count is the one that that Kiril and his lawyer will find it hardest to beat. On learning of the deaths of the alleged victims, Kiril did not sell any of his own shares, which he would have been prevented from doing by a company policy, but he ordered the sale of those which were being held for his grandchildren in a trust handled by a different broker. Sandy hopes to confuse the issue by arguing that the information on which Kiril acted was not confidential — the victims had waived medical confidentiality for their lawyers — but this is not a good defence to the charge.

Faced with the prospect of years in prison and the destruction of his reputation as a scientific superstar, Kiril Pafko engages his old friend, Sandy Stern and Sandy’s daughter and law partner, Marta, to defend him. Sandy is now 85, twice a widower, a cancer survivor and seriously contemplating retirement. He is reluctant to take on a demanding major criminal trial but he feels an obligation to Pafko, whom he has known for nearly 60 years. They were both born in Buenos Aires and became youthful immigrants to the United States. Sandy owes his recovery from cancer to Parko’s drug, which he was able to obtain “right after the dogs and rats” (p. 99) — before it was tested on humans.

As the case progresses, Sandy indeed becomes convinced that he’s no longer up to the rigours and stresses of a long and complex trial. He makes some mistakes that would once have been uncharacteristic, particularly early on, and risks antagonzing the judge, whom he has known for more than 30 years (see The Burden of Proof) and is a good friend of Marta’s, but he recovers quickly. He is misled by a flirtatious doctor, who was once an executive in Pafko’s company and Kiril Parko’s lover, about what her evidence will be. As soon as Marta sees the doctor entering the courtroom to give evidence, she hands her father a note: “Your girlfriend is about to stick it to Kiril” (p. 262). Marta is right, but Sandy still has enough mental agility to adjust his cross-examination strategy, relying on an inspired discovery by his paralegal grandaughter, Pinky. When the doctor has finished giving evidence and the jury has been sent home for the day a little early, the judge comments “Live long enough and you’ll see everything” (p. 287).

In the later book, Rusty Sabich, too, is prevailed upon to take a case that he feels it would be much wiser to pass up. It’s only his second trial as a defence lawyer, and his first major one. This time, the murder charge is at the centre of the case. Whereas Sandy Stern has spent a long career as a defence lawyer, Rusty comes to that role very late. When we first met him in Presumed Innocent he was a deputy in the Prosecuting Attorney’s office. He almost immediately became the accused in a murder case. After that, he was interim Proscuting Attorney, then a trial judge, an appellate judge, a murder accused again, a convicted felon (obstruction of justice, to which he pleaded guilty but of which he was exonerated after a few months), and most recently a mediator and arbitrator. He has seen the criminal justice system from more angles than most.

Rusty is now 77 and engaged to be married to Bea, a teacher who is 23 years younger than he. Bea has a son, Aaron, whom she and her ex-husband adopted immediately after his birth. Aaron is now in his early 20s and on probation following his conviction of possession of drugs with intent to supply. He is Black, and his lived all his life in a rural, white and predominently wealthy area north-west of Kindle County and near the border with Wisconsin. When his childhood sweetheart is found strangled in her car, which has been hidden in woodland, Aaron is the obvious suspect. There’s a substandial amount of apparently compelling evidence against him.

The dead young woman, Mae Potter, was the daughter of the Prosecuting Attorney for Skageon County, where Rusty, Bea and Aaron now live. Hardy Potter is out to get Aaron, but the prosecution won’t be happening in his county. Although the prosecutors believe (wrongly, as it turns out) that the murder occurred in Skageon County, the car was found in a neighbouring county to the north, and it’s apparent that an attempt had been made there to hide the body and cover up the crime, so Aaron is also charged with obstruction of justice and, while the more serious charge usually determines where the trial will take place, this is not a strict requirement. So, Aaron’s lawyer, whoever that might turn out to be, will be up against the PA for Marenago County, Hiram Jackdorp.

Rusty is clear that, whoever Aaron’s attorney might be, it shouldn’t be him. However, it isn’t so easy to find an alternative. Rusty is sure that a city lawyer from Kindle County or elsewhere would not go down well with a rural jury; there’s one lawyer in Indiana who has experience of murder trials and would be ideal but he’s about to begin a civil antitrust case that “‘may last the rest of my life’” (p. 151). He won’t be available for months, and Aaron has been refused bail. Like it or not, Rusty is It.

Mae is universally described as having been both beautiful and brilliant. Her shrink said she had Borderline Personality Disorder, a disgnosis with which her mother disagreed. Her former best friend, Cassity, who is still friends with Aaron, believed that Mae was compelled to try to make everyone hate her as much as she hated herself. She had blackmailed her father into letting her go to New York to try to become a model. Her grandfather, Mansfield (“Mansy”) Potter, a retired judge and Republican party figurehead, had been Rusty’s closest friend in Skageon County — they didn’t discuss politics, recognizing that neither of them had any real influence — but told Rusty that if he represented Aaron that would be the end of their friendship.

I’ve said before, more than once, that Turow tries to do something different with each of his books. That’s less obviously true of these two novels than of most of his earlier ones, given that each is a continuation of or sequel to a previous story, so some degree of continuity is required. The Last Trial, is a kind of sequel to his second novel, The Burden of Proof, which remains one of my favourite books of his. Both novels centre on the same characters, Sandy himself, Marta, and Sonny Klonsky, an assistant US Attorney in the earlier book, a Federal judge in the later one. (She has also been a judge in the state courts in The Laws of Our Fathers where, as here, she presides over a murder trial.) One of the things I particularly like about The Burden of Proof is that, while it is clearly a legal drama and opens with the discovery of a body (that of Sandy’s first wife, Clara), it’s not about a murder. The crimes with which it’s concerned are largely financial. And, while The Last Trial features a murder charge, there is no actual murder in the story. One character takes an action that might be considered an attempted murder.) But, like its predecessor, it’s mainly a story about corporate wrongdoing, in which the word “racketeering” (p. 10) is briefly mentioned.

Presumed Guilty, in contrast, has a murder right at its heart. As may be clear from the outline I attempted above, it adheres much more closely to the model or template of the typical legal thriller than does any of Turow’s previous novels, with the arguable exception of his first: a lawyer undertakes, with misgivings, the defence of a family member accused of the murder of a young woman and against whom the evidence seems overwhelming. It’s as if Turow had said to himself, “maybe it’s time I did my version of the standard model before I finish up”.

So, while each of these books is mainly taken up with a complex criminal trial that unfolds over several days, so that there is a structural resemblance between them, the contrasts between them are striking. One is a Federal case, taking place in a grand old building designed to inspire awe. The other is a state trial, being heard in a backwater. While the proceedings in the first are more formal and restrained, in the second the judge several times rebukes the prosecutor for what she calls “speaking objections”. That’s to say, instead of something like “Asked and answered”, or “Calls for a conclusion” or “Relevance”, Jackdorp has asked questions like “What’s Mr Potter’s job got to do with anything?” (p. 221).

The most dramatic and engaging episodes in both novels feature the crossexamination of prosecution witnesses. Rusty reflects that prosecutors tend not to become as good at crossexamination as defence lawyers, because the latter have to try to find flaws in the prosecution case but will often not adduce any evidence themselves, so the prosecutors don’t get the same opportunity to develop those skills. Be that as it may, both Rusty (who has prosecuted murders before, but not defended them) and Jackdorp (a lifelong prosecutor) turn out to be effective crossexaminers.

The resemblances and contrasts between these two novels are most in evidence in the decisions as to whether the defendant should testify. Kiril Pafko insists that he wants to tell the jury what he did and didn’t do. It’s obviious to Sandy that this would be a disaster. Kiril isn’t able to explain any of the evidence against him: he maintains that he did not unblind the data or request the removal of the dead patients’ names from the data set, notwithstanding the computer and phone records that show that these actions were taken from his office. Sandy thinks that Kiril believes that he can charm the jury into thinking he must not be guilty, but that his evidence would have no substance. And he would have no choice but to admit the insider trading: Sandy couldn’t knowingly allow him to perjure himself. In fact, as it turns out, Kiril understands fully that he cannot afford to be a witness, but has insisted right to the end that that is his intention in order to put pressure on two members of his family. (Sandy is astonished to learn that his relations with those family members are so hostile, something that is not at all apparent from outside.)

Aaron, in contrast, has every intention of giving evidence, against Rusty’s strong advice. In their respective novels, both Sandy and Rusty note the apparently paradoxical fact that in most circumstances (including the present cases) a defence lawyer will, with good reason, do everything possible to dissuade the defendant from testifying, though 70% of acquittals are of defendants who actually gave evidence. It’s striking that the defence lawyers in both books mention this statistic. The paradox is merely (or at any rate largely) apparent. Most criminal defendants are guilty and will be found so. That’s because prosecutors don’t want to squander public money or their own credibility by prosecuting cases where they don’t have a strong chance of winning. It follows that only a small proportion of defendants will be acquitted. So there’s no contradiction between the propositions that (a) 70% of those acquittals will be of people who gave evidence in their own defence and (b) that giving evidence in one’s own defence is generally speaking a losing strategy.

By the time he has to tell the judge and prosecutor whether Aaron will be testifying, Rusty is convinced both that Aaron is in fact innocent and that the evidence already before the jury should be sufficient to persuade them of that. But Aaron still wants to testify. Rusty suggests to Jackdorp that he drop the charges. Jackdorp replies that he’s not afraid of a “Not Guilty” verdict and that he feels obliged to pursue the case to a verdict out of consideration for Mae’s family. So Rusty then contacts his former friend, Mansy, the victim’s grandfather, to make essentially the same request: Jackdorp would probably drop the charges if he was sure that was what the Potter family wanted. But though Mansy has heard the evidence given in court, he’s not yet ready to concede that Aaron might be innocent.

“… The reality is Aaron will walk out of there because Hardy and Vanda made those mistakes. And me too, if you want to blame me for the same errors. That’s the truth. At least if Aaron doesn’t breathe life back into the prosecution by getting on the stand.” As soon as Mansy hears his last words, he stops cold and slowly rears back against the dark leather. He emits a low sound, while he lifts his face to see me from the side.

“Oh,” he says, “oh, that’s what this is about. That’s why you’re thumping your chest and giving me all these pretty speeches about the good and the true. Because your idiot client is going to jump on the witness stand … You want me to save that little devil from himself, when you can’t.” (p. 470)

Kiril Pafco does not give evidence in his trial; Aaron does so in his. In each case, the jury reaches a unanimous verdict.

I suggested above that one thing The Last Trial has in common with The Burden of Proof is that they’re both legal dramas in which the central crimes are not murders. Another is that both feature a relationship between father and son that can best be characterized as dysfunctional. In the earlier novel, Sandy is shocked to discover the depth of his son’s hatred for him. The son, Peter, who is obviously grieving for his mother, has betrayed his father’s principles at the instigation of the US Attorney and an FBI agent. Sandy is taken wholly by surprise and seems to have no idea what is behind his son’s betrayal. By the time of the later novel, relations between the father and son have improved somewhat, in that Peter will speak to his father by phone and both are quite civil. Peter is now living in a different city. He and his husband have adopted a daughter, whom Sandy is keen to meet, but the invitation is slow to come.

In The Last Trial the dysfunctional paternal/filial relationship is between the two doctors Pafko. Professing reluctance, Lep gives damning evidence against his father, having made a deal with the prosecution. Because Lep has been granted immunity, it makes sense for the defence to try to shift blame to him, suggesting to the jury that he rather than Kiril may be responsible for the fraud. But Kiril, at the insistence of his wife Donatella, Lep’s mother, will not allow Sandy to follow this line. Lep, unlike his father, may not be in any danger of imprisonment but Donatella is determined to protect him from reputational damage too and if possible to save his career. Kiril’s instructions on this point severely limit Sandy’s options for the conduct of the defence.

Kiril, unlike Sandy in the earlier novel, is at least aware of the reasons why his son might hate him. Maybe that makes him a bit more perceptive than his old friend. Sandy is highly intelligent, observant and quick thinking but, as perhaps befits a defence lawyer, he has a tendency to narrow his focus to the issues relevant to the instant case.

Editions: The Last Trial, Pan paperback, 2021; Presumed Guilty, Swift paperback, 2026.

“It’s a catastrophe. Relax!”: Ian McEwan, Solar

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:21:17 +0100

Michael Beard, Nobel Prize winner for Physics and antihero of Ian McEwan’s 2010 novel, Solar, is a grotesquely comic character. Increasingly obese through the novel’s three sections, he finds himself unable to control his ravenous appetite for food (whether fine or gross), adulation, sex (and possibly marriage), booze, salt and vinegar crisps, travel, well-paid sinecures and solar energy patents. Darlene, the Nebraskan, New Mexico-resident waitress (originally named Janet) who is set on becoming his sixth wife, tells him that he is “not an entirely good person” (p. 265) and neither is she, but she doesn’t know the half of it. Beard has framed one of his fifth wife’s lovers for the murder of his successor in that role and seen him sentenced to sixteen years. The death was in fact a ridiculous accident but it could be made to look like foul play and occurred in circumstances that must lead to suspicion falling on Beard.

The dead man, Tom Aldous, had been a post-doc in the National Centre for Renewable Energy of which Beard was the titular head, known as “Chief”. Beard, who hadn’t done any real scientific work in twenty years, and now believed himself incapable of following Aldous’s theories or workings, had genuinely been an intellectual powerhouse in his twenties and had come up with a refinement of Einstein’s account of the photoelectric effect. That discovery was what won him the Nobel Prize.

Tom Aldous had admired Beard’s earlier work but, like the other post-docs in the centre (whom Beard found indistinguishable from each other) he progressed beyond Beard’s present level of understanding. Aldous had been trying to interest Beard in the possibility of artificial photosynthesis, in mimicing the process by which plants with leaves obtain energy from sunlight. Speaking of the growing enthusiasm for a return to nuclear power generation, Aldous said:

“Dirty, dangerous, expensive. But you know, we’ve already got a nuclear power station up and running with a great safety record making clean energy converting hydrogen to helium at no cost, nicely situated ninety-three million miles away. You know what I always think, Professor Beard? If an alien arrived on Earth and saw all the sunlight, he’d be amazed to hear that we think we’ve got an energy problem. Photovoltaics! I read Einstein on it, I read you. The Conflation is brilliant. And God’s greatest gift to us is surely this, that a photon striking a semiconductor releases an electron. The laws of physics are so benign, so generous …” (p. 26–7)

At this point Beard, in spite of his position at the head of the Centre for Renewable Energy, is sceptical about both the risk of climate change and the potential of solar power as a source of energy to replace fossil fuels. After Aldous’s death, Beard is given a file of the younger man’s calculations which at first he finds it difficult to follow. But when Beard is sacked from the Centre (after some ill judged remarks about women’s aptitude for physics are amplified by a professor of science studies who believes that a particular gene, “or any gene, was in the strongest sense, socially constructed” (p. 131), he reads Aldous’s file more attentively and finds that he can, with difficulty, make sense of it. Within a few years he has registered several patents relating to synthetic photosynthesis.

The idea is to use the sun’s energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, both of which can be compressed and the hydrogen used as fuel. The attraction of this approach is that the compressed hydrogen can be stored with negligible loss when the energy is converted into another form. In contrast, electricity generated by photovoltaics and not required for immediate use will need to be stored, for example in batteries, and some energy will be lost in the process. It’s not clear to me whether McEwan, writing in or shortly before 2010, considered synthetic photosynthesis as a realistic possibility, or whether he thought of his antihero as pursuing an unachievable goal. In one sense, it doesn’t matter that much what the author thought. Solar is a work of fiction, not a polemical or didactic tract. It was certainly not intended as a road-map towards our post-fossil-fuel future.

As it turns out though, battery technology has improved so much in recent years that photovoltaics have come to look like our best bet for a solution to the energy “crisis”, while we learn from Wikipedia that synthetic photosynthesis “has never been demonstrated in any practical sense”. Whether or not his author knew it, Professor Beard was never likely to see a return on his investors’ millions. For this reason, Solar is a decidedly more pessimistic work than its comic tone might seem to indicate.

Reviewing it in The Guardian, Christopher Tayler wrote:

Beard's argument about the correct response to climate change, an argument that McEwan has also made, is that we have no choice but to hope that technological ingenuity, enlightened self-interest and the market's allocation of resources can get us off the hook; personal virtue counts for little.

To this I’d add, first, that technological ingenuity can take many forms, and that we’re probably lucky that one particular form it has taken recently is the development of much better batteries; and second, that Beard’s self-interest is not, for the most part, noticeably enlightened. One of his projects is horrific:

The idea was to dump many hundreds of tons of iron filings in the ocean, enriching the waters and encouraging the plankton to bloom. As it grew, it absorbed more carbon dioxide from the air. The precise amount could be calculated in order to claim carbon credits, which would be sold on through the scheme to heavy industry. If a coal-burning company bought enough, it could rightfully claim that its operations were carbon neutral. (p. 187)

Early in the novel Beard accepts an invitation from an all-expenses-paying foundation to spend six nights aboard an ice-bound ship in a fjord in Spitsbergen. He is to be one of “twenty artists and scientists concerned with climate change” (p. 46). As it turns out, he is the only scientist on board. The group’s convenor warns that there are strict rules which must be followed concerning the boot room:

All coming on board must stop there and remove and hang up their outer layers. On no account was wet, snowy or iced-up clothing to be brought into the living quarters. Prohibited items included helmets, goggles, balaclavas, gloves, boots, wet socks and snowmobile suits. Penalty for infringement was certain death. (p. 62)

Over the course of the visit, the boot room descends into steadily worsening disorder, something that Beard finds intolerable, while remaining oblivious to his own significant contribution to the decline. On arrival, he hangs his snowmobile suit on peg 28 and places the other impermissible items under it. The next morning, he is put out to find that his stuff is not to be found on or under peg 18, which is where he is sure he left it, so he takes a suit, gloves and so on from another peg. Returning that afternoon, he finds that somebody else has used the peg he thinks of as his, so he moves their things to another free peg. This pattern of behaviour continues. The convenor’s warning notwithstanding, nobody actually dies, though the author doesn’t explain how a fatality is avoided.

Though I referred above to Michael Beard as “a grotesquely comic character” and described the novel’s tone as comic, it’s probably best to think of Solar less as a comedy than as a savage satire. Rereading it over the past few days, I was left feeling less hopeful about humankind’s capacity to avert or mitigate the climate catastrophe than I had been. Beard, with his inability to control his various appetites or to change his behaviour, and his repeated pattern (despite his intellectual brilliance) of making the wrong choices in the different spheres of his life, represents our species in general (as Christopher Tayler’s review points out). There is a suggestion that his blinkered self-interested fumblings might lead to a workable solution to our climate catastrophe, but there are so many wrong paths open to him that the prospects don’t look favourable.

Notwithstanding the savagery of the satire, McEwan seems to regard his protagonist with something more like regret than contempt. Beard, it might be said, is no more capable of acting contrary to his nature than a scorpion being ferried across a river by a frog. Several of the reviews I’ve read suggest that the novel’s comedy is a departure for McEwan. The sharply satirical depiction of its protagonist strikes me as reminiscent of the treatment of composer Clive Linley and newspaper editor Vernon Halliday in Amsterdam. That novel was McEwan’s only Booker-winner, though he has been shortlisted several times. I’ve written about it before.

Other McEwan protagonists with whom Michael Beard has something in common are Enduring Love’s Joe Rose, the successful popularizer of science who finds that his former field has moved on too quickly and too far for him to be able to return to serious scientific work, and Henry Perowne, a brain surgeon whose daughter and father-in-law are both poets, but who is suspicious of the devices he thinks are characteristic of postmodern fiction.

If all goes according to plan, the next post from Talk about books, in two weeks’ time, will also feature a Nobel laureate who turns out to have feet of clay.

Edition: Vintage paperback, 2011.

An order things can’t happen in: Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

Sat, 30 May 2026 22:14:47 +0100

I haven’t seen any of Tom Stoppard’s plays in live performance. I watched Professional Foul on television when it was first broadcast in 1977, but it’s rather different from his work for theatre. It’s about a philosophy professor attending an academic conference in Prague. He’s using the unexciting conference as cover to go to a World Cup qualifying match which is being played at the same time. At first, he refuses to smuggle a thesis (which argues for the primacy of individual rights) out of the country because he thinks that this would be unethical, an abuse of the Czech government’s hospitality, which he has accepted by agreeing to participate in the conference. When the thesis’s author, a former student of his, is arrested on fabricated charges of illegal currency dealing, the professor is persuaded to change his mind, and resorts to playing a dangerous trick on one of his colleagues in order to get the thesis out. I approached the play warily: I understood that Stoppard had a reputation as something of a conservative thinker at the time — he was certainly an anticommunist, which I would then have seen as adequate grounds for suspicion.

What I remember most about this play, which (as I’ve just recently learned) is now available in its entirety on YouTube, are some of the jokes, though its theme is deadly serious. For example, while they’re listening to a tedious paper about linguistic ambiguity, another academic asks the protagonist if he ever wonders if all this is worth it. The professor answers with a decisive “No”, indicating that it never crosses his mind that it might be worthwhile, quite a different point of view from the one that prompted the question. The scene in which newspaper journalists dictate their reports of the match over the phone from their hotel rooms is highly amusing.

Years later, around 1990, I went through a phase of reading several of Stoppard’s plays and Michael Billington’s book on the playwright. I was going to the theatre relatively often for me, to see plays by David Hare, Tom Murphy, Edward Bond, Pinter, Shakespeare, Webster, Etherege, Wycherley and various others, but still didn’t see any Stoppard. I read The Real Thing about a decade after its first performance in 1982 and remember thinking “I wish I knew how to do that.”

By the time of Stoppard’s death last year, it had been more than 30 years since I’d read any of his plays, and I didn’t have copies of any of them. Arcadia, first performed and published in 1993, which must be the last one I had read, is the subject of this post. It’s partly a play of ideas, a dazzling confection of theories about landscape design, mathematics, entropy, literary and historical scholarship, but it is not just, or indeed primarily, a play of ideas. There’s quite a lot about sex, which 18-year-old Chloë sees as the factor which introduces a fundamental unpredictability into our otherwise orderly universe:

The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said. I mean it’s trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren’t supposed to be in that part of the plan. (sc. 7, p. 73)

Chloë asks her mathematician brother, Valentine, if she is the first person to have thought of this idea and he replies that he thinks she is. In this, Chloë is echoing another daughter of the Coverly family, almost 180 years earlier. In the play’s first scene, Thomasina, then 13, asks her tutor, Septimus Hodge, if she is the first person to have thought of the proposition that, if the universe is deterministic (as Chloë will come close to admitting) then even though nobody is clever enough, or good enough at algebra to arrive at “the formula for all the future” (sc. 1, p. 5), that formula must already exist. It is real and accurately describes everything that will happen, even though nobody can know what it is. Septimus confirms that, as far as he knows, Thomasina is indeed the first person to have thought of this.

To a convinced determinist, Thomasina’s argument will be more convincing than Chloë’s. Unpredictability is already a feature of the universal system: there’s no need for sex to be an “attraction that Newton left out” (as Valentine describes it, sc. 7, p. 74) in order to account for the future’s propensity to evade our foresight. Anyway, sexual attraction is already an integral part of the deterministic system, not an independently complicating factor that determinists had ignored. So, for that convinced determinist, Chloë’s late 20th century conception represents a falling off from Thomasina’s early 19th century one. This is consistent with the argument I want to put forward, that the play’s major theme is entropy: that disorder must increase with the passage of time.

In the characters’ discourse Newton represents two distinct ideas. First is determinism (about which I wrote a year ago in my discussion of Brian Klaas’s book, Fluke) which implies Thomasina’s idea that the formula that determines all future events already exists. The other thing “Newton” represents is a conception of reality that doesn’t include the second law of thermodynamics, the discovery of which his theories predate. In layperson’s terms that law says that energy will always irreversibly move from a more highly ordered state to a less ordered one. The law is easier to illustrate than to formulate in easily intelligible terms. So, as Thomasina points out, you can stir jam into your rice pudding, but you can never stir it out again. Similarly Valentine tells Hannah that her tea is getting cold by itself but it won’t spontaneously get hot, absorbing heat from the air in the room around it. The heat that was in the cup will spread out, not collect itself into a small concentration.

Although Thomasina doesn’t know enough mathematics to prove the law, she perceives its application, telling Noakes the designer of gothic gardens, that his steam-driven pump will never produce enough energy to keep itself running. Looking at her working papers 180 years later, Valentine is at first sure that she can’t have discovered the idea of increasing entropy avant la lettre: “Because there’s an order things can’t happen in” (sc. 7, p. 79). Soon, though, he has to concede that Thomasina was indeed writing about heat exchange:

She didn’t have the maths, not remotely. She saw what things meant, way ahead, like seeing a picture. (sc. 7, p. 93)

The discovery of the second law of thermodynamics caused a great deal of shock in the nineteenth century because it meant that life, the universe and everything would inevitably come to an end (at a point which might be so far in the future that nobody need worry about it). The effect of the shock distorted some people’s thinking, possibly including Thomasina’s. When, on the eve of her 17th birthday, Septimus shows her a French scientific paper, telling her that it confirms her earlier understanding and heretically departs from Newton, her first thought is that it must contradict determinism. Septimus replies:

No! … Well, perhaps. He shows that the atoms do not go according to Newton. (sc. 7, p. 81)

Thomasina, having read the French paper, summarizes its implications:

THOMASINA: Well! Just as I said! Newton’s machine which would knock our atoms from cradle to grave by the laws of motion is incomplete! Determinism leaves the road at every corner, as I knew all along, and the cause is very likely hidden in this gentleman’s observation.

LADY CROOM: Of what?

THOMASINA: The action of bodies in heat.

LADY CROOM: Is this geometry? (sc. 7, pp. 83–4)

Thomasina has, in a jocose and not wholly knowing way, prefigured Chloë’s observation as to the role of sex in the unpredictability of the world. Neither she nor Septimus is quite sure whether increasing entropy has implications for the validity of determinism. Septimus is more inclined instinctively to resist the idea (“No! … Well, perhaps”) than Thomasina is (“the cause is very likely hidden”). Such uncertainty and hedging are only to be expected, given what were perceived as the earth-shattering implications of the second law of thermodynamics at the time. The unsettling effect probably explains in part what later became of Septimus.

The play unfolds in two separate time-frames, but in the same room. Scenes 1, 3 and 6 are set in Thomasina Coverly’s schoolroom, where she is tutored by Septimus Hodge, a Cambridge graduate. It is 1809, and Thomasina is aged 13. Scenes 2, 4 and 5 take place in the same room in “the present day” (late 1980s or early 1990s). The long final scene 7 has the characters from both periods occupying the same space (for example, 20th-century Hannah and 19th-century Septimus drink from the same glass, filled from the same decanter, and Valentine and Septimus read separate copies of Thomasina’s essay). In this scene, Thomasina is about to turn 17 and we learn that she will die in a fire just after the play’s end. That circumstance, I suggest, is the other factor which helps to explain Septimus’s fate.

Two of the characters in the present day scenes are Hannah and Bernard. Hannah appears to be an independent scholar — she says she doesn’t teach — while Bernard is an academic expert on Byron. Hannah has written a book about Lady Caroline Lamb, which has been patronizingly reviewed by various Byronists including Bernard: “The Byron gang unzipped their flies and patronized all over it”, Hannah says, describing Bernard’s review as “a thousand words in the Observer to see me off the premises with a pat on the bottom” (sc. 2, p. 22). A description of the garden at Brocket Hall in Hannah’s Caro book led the present Lady Croom (Hermione, who unlike her forebear doesn’t appear on stage) to invite her to research the history of her garden at Sidley Park.

Bernard is there to look for information about an obscure (and according to Septimus and other characters, very bad) poet named Ezra Chater who (in a letter found in a book that had been in Byron’s library) challenged a man who had sex with Chater’s wife to a duel. Bernard is convinced that the person who was challenged was Byron himself, who killed Chater before fleeing the country. The audience (reader) can see that Bernard’s conjecture rests on a chain of shaky assumptions: that no man in the household was as likely as Byron to have slept with Mrs Chater; that it was surely he who wrote two mocking reviews of Chater’s books in an obscure periodical (which, unknown to Bernard, happened to have been edited by Septimus’s brother); that the bad poet and the amateur botanist who discovered a dwarf dahlia in Martinique could not have been the same person; and more besides.

Hannah is pursuing a less sensational (yet arguably more consequential) hypothesis and doing so rather more cautiously than Bernard. It is, moreover, one which changes as she accumulates evidence. During the 1809 scenes, Mr Noakes is fundamentally changing the character of the Sidley Park gardens. This is being done at the instance of Lord Croom, who doesn’t appear in the play; Lady Croom is not happy about it. She complains that Noakes’s sketches, which allow his new designs to be superimposed on the existing gardens, show an appalling transformation:

Where there is the familiar pastoral refinement of an Englishman’s garden, here is an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house, of water dashing against rocks where there was neither spring nor a stone I could not throw the length of a cricket pitch. My hyacinth dell is become a haunt for hobgoblins, my Chinese bridge, which I am assured is superior to the one at Kew, and for all I know at Peking, is usurped by a fallen obelisk overgrown with briars — (sc. 1, p. 12)

Hannah’s research shows that Noakes’s displacement of the “familiar pastoral refinement” has been preceded, barely 50 years earlier, by the destruction of the formal classical gardens that had been there before.

The history of the garden says it all, beautifully. There’s an engraving of Sidley Park in 1730 that makes you want to weep. Paradise in the age of reason. By 1760, everything had gone — the topiary, pools and terraces, fountains, an avenue of limes — the whole sublime geometry was ploughed under by Capability Brown. The grass went from the doorstep to the horizon and the best box hedge in Derbyshire was dug up for the ha-ha so that the fools could pretend they were living in God’s countryside. And then Richard Noakes came in to bring God up to date. By the time he’d finished it looked like this (the sketch book). The decline from thinking to feeling, you see. (sc. 2, p. 27)

She has discovered that Noakes’s hermitage had been occupied by a real, live hermit. He was “suspected of genius” but was ultimately found to be “off his head”: he had covered thousands of sheets of paper with “cabalistic proofs that the world was coming to an end”. Hannah sees this as a “perfect symbol” of the decline from the Enlightenment into Romanticism: “A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself”. The “decline” can be seen as analogous to entropy, with the qualification that it was “intellectual rigour” that made possible the discovery of the law of increasing entropy.

Bernard is impressed, possibly in spite of himself. Like Hannah, he seems to value eighteenth-century reason over nineteenth-century picturesque irregularity. Dismissing her book as “a novelette” (sc. 5, p. 59), he tells Hannah that she’s wrong about Byron and Caroline Lamb:

You got them backwards, darling. Caroline was Romantic waffle on wheels with no talent, and Byron was an eighteenth-century Rationalist touched by genius. (sc. 5, p. 60)

The audience doesn’t know what’s in Hannah’s book, so we have no means of judging whether Bernard is being fair to it and its author. However, we shouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that he hadn’t read it all that attentively before writing his patronizing review. There’s certainly one respect in which he’s wrong about the book. He tries to persuade Hannah that the picture on the dust-jacket is of the wrong people. He shows her an article in the latest issue of the Byron Society Journal asserting that the sketch is “No earlier than 1820” (sc. 5, p. 62) and that Byron was in Italy when it was made. However, we know that (at least within the world of the play) Bernard, the Fuseli expert and the Byron Society Journal are wrong: both Septimus and Lady Croom say they saw Byron (and Lady Croom also mentions Caroline Lamb) being sketched by Fuseli at the Royal Academy (sc. 7, pp. 84–5).

Hannah comes to believe, but is unable to prove, that the Sidley Park hermit is Septimus himself. This causes her to adjust her theory slightly:

I thought my hermit was a perfect symbol. An idiot in the landscape. But this is better. The Age of Enlightenment banished into the Romantic wilderness! The genius of Sidley Park living on in a hermit’s hut! (sc. 5, p. 66)

She’s wrong about the genius of Sidley Park. Hannah is perhaps too ready to accept Valentine’s claim that Thomasina hadn’t discovered anything. Thomasina was the genius, as Septimus acknowledged more than once, for the last time when he returned her essay, having “given it an alpha in blind faith” (sc. 7, p. 96). But he was certainly a rationalist and Hannah’s reformulation might have been better if she had so described him.

Almost at the end of the final scene, Thomasina and Septimus were kissing periodically while he taught her to waltz. It’s clear that they were becoming close. She asked him to come to her room and he declined, so perhaps he later experienced survivor’s guilt, as well as grief. We must conclude that, after the young woman’s death by fire, her former tutor withdrew to the hermitage where he lived out the remaining 22 years of his life speculating wildly about the end of the world, an event that, as a result of her speculations, he had come to realize was inevitable.

Edition: Faber paperback, 1993 (reprinted with corrections)

Look back in bemused wonder: Anthony Cronin, Dead As Doornails

Sat, 16 May 2026 14:02:59 +0100

Lilliput Press has recently reissued Anthony Cronin’s memoir Dead As Doornails (1976) with a new short introduction by Joseph O’Connor (which can also be found in The Irish Times — subscriber only). I had long intended to reread Cronin’s account of literary Dublin in the 1950s, so I immediately ordered a copy.

I had first read it, borrowed from the library, in the early 1990s. I had been living in London for about 4 years and was feeling nostalgic, not for Ireland, but specifically for Dublin. Cronin has given us his recollections of seven men, four writers and three visual artists, whom he knew well in Dublin and/or in London’s Soho and the book is set for the most part in the 1950s. By the time Cronin wrote about them they were all dead (as doornails). The three central figures are Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien, the others being Julian Maclaren-Ross (who stayed for a while with Cronin and his wife in Wembley when Cronin was literary editor of Time and Tide), a couple of Scottish artists both of whom had the same first name, Robert, (Colquhoun and MacBryde) and Ralph Cusack (who gave up painting and wrote a memoir titled Cadenza).

In this post, I intend to focus on Behan and Kavanagh. It’s quite likely that I’ll write separately about Flann O’Brien in future, relying on Cronin’s treatment of him in Dead As Doornails. (Cronin also wrote a biography of Flann O’Brien which I haven’t read and have no immediate plans to read.)

Cronin was, to start with, an unequivocal admirer of Behan’s talent. If most of the regulars in the Fitzwilliam Place basement known as the Catacombs had a party piece, Brendan Behan, he tells us, had “thousands” (p. 17).

He was a kaleidoscopic entertainment, but he was also fecund in serious ideas. He had a line in bemused wonderment about the activities of the world which was only partly an affectation, for he was genuinely naïve in certain ways and genuinely full of questionings. And he knew too when to drop the act and show himself capable of intimacy. The salt which makes penury palatable, ironic comment on all forms of possession and ownership, sometimes quite savage, he had in abundance. He had also in those days the remarkable gift of being able to realize and humorously illuminate the other person’s circumstance while comically examining his own … (p. 19)

In an early chapter, Behan and Cronin move to Paris, hoping to pass “a year or two on the Continent” (p. 41). Their trip is hopelessly underresourced: Behan has been paid £40 for the right to make a film of a short story of his. They have the idea of making their way through France and Italy as far as Rome, posing as pilgrims, hoping to be supplied with food and shelter by the devout along the way in the Marian Holy Year. He also considered the possibility, if they get to Italy, of defecting from there to Czechoslovakia. Cronin comments wryly on Brendan’s sense of geography. Yugoslavia might have been a better bet. As it turns out, only Cronin makes it to Italy, and he gets only as far as Milan. Behan has turned back at Grenoble. They meet again by chance in Paris.

By this stage, they are drinking almost all the money they can get their hands on, including the funds they are given by the Irish Embassy for their repatriation. Brendan also joined the Foreign Legion, in which he served overnight. As Brendan works his way through Cronin’s repatriation money, drinking and singing with a group of French workmen in a late-night café, Cronin, himself “miserable and angry” (p. 55) as well as drunk, sees for the first time that there is something disturbing about his friend’s behaviour:

Behind all the pseudo-generosity, the songs and toasts and exchanges of national good will, there was something frantic. It began to dawn on me that it was also something destructive, and this was a new side of him. He wanted to get rid of the money and get back into what was certainly going to be the gutter. (p. 56)

This adventure culminates in a farcically doomed attempt, with Cronin now hobbling shoeless, to stow away aboard an Irish ship from Rouen. That doesn’t work, of course, but through extraordinary good luck they both separately manage to get back to Dublin. (Behan is unwilling to risk travelling through England and Wales because, years earlier, he was released from prison on condition he never came back to the country. Later still, when his plays were being put on in London, he would overcome that wariness.)

Cronin became de facto editor of The Bell, with the final say exercised by its cofounder, old IRA man Peadar O’Donnell. Brendan Behan wanted Cronin to publish in The Bell part of the draft of what would later become his book Borstal Boy, but O’Donnell wouldn’t hear of it. The name of his fellow old IRA man was “anathema to him” (p. 88). This gave rise to some friction between Behan and Cronin, the former not understanding that the latter’s discretion was by no means absolute. In contrast, Cronin was able to make an arrangement with Peadar O’Donnell whereby he would pay £5 instant cash to Patrick Kavanagh for every poem of his that The Bell published.

Cronin considered Kavanagh “a man of genius” (p. 82), and points out that most of the poems that were included in the poet’s third and most highly regarded collection, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling (1960), were ones that had first appeared in The Bell:

They were the first products of Kavanagh’s late maturing, the first examples of the kind of poetry that made him important; and if I mention the matter now it is partly to put the record straight and partly because my opinion of myself as an editor was not very high, nor, dear knows, was I encouraged on any side to take a much higher one than I did, so that I look back now with a sort of bemused wonder on the strange excellence of many of the things that actually did get into the magazine. (p. 108)

(It’s worth remarking that that “put the record straight” tone of somewhat abashed self-assertion is not at all typical of Cronin’s style elsewhere in the book.)

Kavanagh could not stand Behan. Cronin devined “an element of fear” (p. 86) in the countryman’s attitude towards the Dubliner. This fear can hardly have had a physical basis, as Kavanagh was much bigger. More than once he suggested to Cronin that Behan was “evil”. Anyway, Cronin’s friendship with Kavanagh played some part in his growing distance from Behan.

Kavanagh always seemed to be short of money and, when a publication titled The Leader published a sketch suggesting that he was a sponger who rarely paid for his own drink, he thought he saw the opportunity to obtain a handsome libel settlement. But the paper fought the case (though without pleading justification), leading to Kavanagh’s being cross-examined by its senior counsel, John A Costello, then back at the bar between bouts as Taoiseach. Costello asked the poet about his insciption on the flyleaf of a copy of his novel, Tarry Flynn, to Behan. No issue in the case turned on the inscription, but it made Kavanagh look like a liar and must have affected the jury’s estimation of him.

The jury found that there had been no libel. The Supreme Court overturned their verdict and ordered a new trial which never took place, the case having settled in the meantime. Presumably, therefore, Kavanagh got some money out of it but nowhere near as much as he had been hoping for, and it can be expected that the costs would have been out of proportion to the damages. The general impression was that Kavanagh had lost the case (as in a sense he had). Cronin assumed (wrongly, he later believed) that it had been Behan who had given the book with its damaging inscription to the paper’s lawyers and for a long time refused to speak to Behan, who once physically ambushed him as Cronin was leaving the Bailey near closing time.

I was a prig of course, indulging myself in a little bit of drama in which I was the haughty incorruptible and Brendan the indubitable villain. I was to pay a penalty. We should beware of the grand gestures which it costs us nothing to make. (p. 130)

Notwithstanding this acknowledgment, the two were never fully reconciled. When The Quare Fellow was being put on in Stratford East by Joan Littlewood’s theatre company, Cronin didn’t go because he mistakenly thought it would entail an expedition from London to deepest Warwickshire. Of Behan’s very public flameout, which like much of what he did had the air of a performance, and which of course led to his death, Cronin writes:

Chief among the new precipitating elements must have been the knowledge that with his plays (all two of them) rewritten by other people and his books increasingly the products of “collaboration”, he was not in fact functioning as a creative artist at all, and the whole thing was to a large extent a tawdry fraud. Deaths of his kind are preceded by a death of the spirit. There is a sense in which he was the victim of society as clearly as if society had taken him out and shot him, but he was, one is forced to conclude, a willing victim … (p. 200)

It was only recently, after I read this piece in The Irish Times that I realized that Behan and my father may have known each other. At any rate, they were both locked up in the Curragh during “the Emergency” (known to the rest of the world as the Second World War). I see that Behan refers to this period as his internment, which is also the term my father used, though I found out after his death that he had technically been convicted of membership of an illegal organization by a Special Criminal Court (which in those days would have been a military tribunal). I believe that after the war was over my father was pardoned. At any rate, he was given back his Civil Service job, apparently on condition that he made no further trouble. He was transferred to the west of Ireland (to Ballymote, County Sligo) where he met and married my mother, fathered me and my three younger sisters, and died young, at 53.

I remember my father referring dismissively, indeed contemptuously, to Brendan Behan. I was too young to understand exactly what he had against Behan — I was not yet a teenager when my father died — but I have the impression that he thought that the writer both exaggerated the extent of his involvement in secret Republican activities, and strayed close to dangerous indiscretion about those he had been involved in. If I had to guess, I’d say that similar considerations may have been the reason for Peadar O’Donnell’s dislike.

As I mentiond above, Cronin believed that the poems he published in The Bell and which were later collected in Come Dance with Kitty Stobling marked the beginning of Kavanagh’s mature work and were “the first examples of the kind of poetry that made him important”. He describes them as having been written:

… in a direct, conversational manner with ironic undertones which used Pembroke Road, the flat, the bookmakers, the days he spent, either as themes or images, and which were written in something approaching the conversational manner of the living man, with a sort of humorous but tender advertance to the fact that they were being written at all and that they were poetry. (p. 108)

Antoinette Quinn, Kavanagh’s biographer as well as the leading scholar and editor of his work, says in her introduction to the Selected Poems:

Kavanagh’s intolerance of cultural nationalism and his unwavering focus on the contemporary left him peculiarly unsympathetic to the various linguistic devices to which Irish poets had recourse in order to emphasize their racial difference from English poets … English was for him the normal vernacular of Ireland and he experienced no postcolonial anxieties on this score; it was the Irish language which Independent Ireland was endeavouring to revive that appeared to him an “acquired speech”.

Kavanagh believed that poetry should avoid artificial diction and express itself in a personalized vernacular. (Selected Poems, xxviii)

Unfortunately, Kavanagh’s eschewal of the devices on which his predecessors had relied, such as national(ist) mythology and Yeatsian occultism and mysticism, may have led him to run out of material more quickly than he might have hoped. Though he must have read widely when he was younger, Cronin remarks that in his later years he hardly seemed to read at all. He reports a conversation in which Kavanagh said that, whereas Auden had “a well-stocked mind”, replete with philosophy, psychology and other mental “furniture”, Kavanagh had nothing comparable.

”… Of course it’s junk, but it does to make a blaze, it creates energy and a sort of warmth, and when you get the blaze going you might succeed in saying something. But I’ve read nothing and have no rubbish to burn. None at all, no philosophy, no nothing. And you can’t go on writing lyrics.” (p. 144)

In the absence of philosophy or psychology, something like Yeats’s Celtic myths and mist, specious as they were, might have constituted combustible matter. Indeed, Kavanagh’s “no rubbish to burn” calls to mind Yeats’s “foul rag and bone shop” and may well be a direct reference to it. Cronin adds:

He had written his poems of celebration and then he had written some celebrating the writing of them. And that was that. (p. 144)

On first reading Cronin’s book almost 35 years ago, I was shocked. It was no surprise to me to learn that these literary figures had lived most of their lives in poverty, or that they had passed much of their time in pubs, drunk; but I was genuinely taken aback to discover that their existences had, in general, been so miserable. The book is a record of litrary (or painterly) careers barely getting off the ground before ending in failure. Behan, Kavanagh and “Myles” were all stymied by poverty, by alcoholism, by artistic obscurity (at least some of the time) and a lack of opportunity. And crucially, Cronin points out, by the Second World War.

The creative and personal lives of nearly all the figures in this chronicle were much more deeply affected and distorted by the war than may be immediately apparent. In the case of both Kavanagh and Brian O’Nolan the effect was a curious provincialization. In both cases, because of the war, Ireland, or, to be much more exact, Dublin, became the sole matrix which formed the developing artist and man. (p. 139)

Until I read Dead as Doornails, the very idea that I might not have enjoyed being an author in the Dublin of the 1950s (or 60s) was too absurd to have even crossed my mind. My reaction to reading the book was the beginning of my disenchantment with Dublin (a process which, however, wasn’t completed until I returned to live there 20 years later).

Editions: Dead as Doornails, The Lilliput Press paperback (with flaps), 2026;
Patrick Kavanagh, Selected Poems, edited and with an introduction by Antoinette Quinn, Penguin Modern Classics, 1996, 2000.

Purposes mistook Fallen on th’inventors’ heads: Shakespeare, Hamlet

Sat, 02 May 2026 20:44:47 +0100

To Hamlet, hell is real: he takes seriously the prospect of an eternity of torture, unendurable yet inescapable, as punishment for one’s sins. That’s why, when he finds his father’s murderer at prayer he holds back from taking his revenge:

A villain kills my father, and for that
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge.
’A took my father grossly, full of bread,
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May;
And how his audit stands, who knows save heaven?
But in our circumstance and course of thought,
’Tis heavy with him. And am I then revenged,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and seasoned for his passage?
No. (III.iii.76–87)

Hamlet’s impulse to revenge will not be satisfied if he merely kills the king: he needs to ensure his damnation too.

When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,
Or in th’incestuous pleasure of his bed,
At game, a-swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in’t —
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,
And that his soul may be as damned and black
As hell, whereto it goes. (III.iii.89–95)

Ironically, the audience, unlike Hamlet, knows that Claudius has not been cleansed of his sin: he is unable to repent, since that would mean giving up what he has gained by his sinful actions.

… But, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? “Forgive me my foul murder?”
That cannot be, since I am still possessed
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition, and my Queen.
May one be pardoned and retain th’offence? (III.iii.51–56)

If Hamlet is alive to the possibility (and, as far as he is concerned, desirablilty) of eternal damnation for Claudius, he must also be conscious of the peril in which he is placing his own soul. He recognizes that “The spirit that I have seen | May be a devil” (II.ii.596–7), so when he attempts to “catch the conscience of the King” (II.ii.603) he is testing that spirit’s veracity just as much as the king’s guilt. As he tells Horatio:

There is a play tonight before the King.
One scene of it comes near the circumstance,
Which I have told thee, of my father’s death.
I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot,
Even with the very comment of thy soul
Observe my uncle. If his occulted guilt
Do not iteself unkennel in one speech,
It is a damnnèd ghost that we have seen,
And my imaginations are as foul
As Vulcan’s stithy. (III.ii.85–94)

If Claudius is innocent, the ghost has been lying to Hamlet and therefore must be an evil spirit whose function is to trap the prince into condemning himself. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Hamlet yet that the converse is not necessarily true. It doesn’t follow that, because the ghost has been telling the truth about how old Hamlet met his death, it really is what it claims to be: the late king’s ghost demanding revenge. As Banquo says in Macbeth:

… oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s
In deepest consequence. (Macbeth I.iii.135–8)

The ghost turns out to be truthful, at least as to the present king’s murder of his brother and predecessor, but does that mean that it should be trusted? It says of itself:

I am thy father’s spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. (I.v.9–13)

A few lines earlier, it has said:

My hour is almost come,
When I to sulpherous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself. (i.v.2–4)

Here, the ghost seems to palter with Hamlet in a double sense. Its language implies that its present circumstances are limited in time: “for a certain term to walk the night” and “Till the foul crimes … Are burnt and purged away”. But, presumably by design, it does not expressly assert what the words imply: that its torment will eventually end. If the ghost is in hell, as the “fires” and “sulpherous and tormenting flames” suggest, then the foul crimes will never be burnt and purged away, so it can say that it is confined “Till” an event that will never happen, without literal untruth.

In the play’s best known soliloquy, Hamlet describes death as

The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns (III.i.79–80)

If this is what Hamlet believes, it ought to be incompatible with an acceptance of the existence of ghosts and revenants. Strictly speaking, I admit, it could be claimed that the ghost has not come back to life, but merely assumed, temporarily, an intangible form to deliver a message. Even so, it has clearly given Hamlet plenty of reason to doubt its bona fides.

So now Hamlet is caught in the worst of both worlds: he’s morally convinced of Claudius’s guilt but he can’t be sure that he himself isn’t being manipulated by a devil. And it has to be said that, if the “ghost” is not a malevolent tempter, it must have missed its vocation, for by the end of the play it’s hard to see how Hamlet can avoid hell. His casual slaughter of Polonius is followed by an attempt to impede his burial; he has sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern unsuspecting to their deaths and played a large part in driving Ophelia to suicide. In the forged instructions concerning Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he has ordered that they be “put to sudden death, | Not shriving time allowed” (V.ii.46–7). Again, Hamlet is not satisfied with sending his enemies to the grave: he wants them to go to hell. He shows little sign of repenting any of these actions. Horatio’s farewell to the dying protagonist is therefore ironic:

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet Prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest! (V.ii.353–4)

The point of the irony is to bring home to the audience the gulf between their sympathetic view of Hamlet’s predicament and the reality of his situation. Horatio immediately reinforces the point when he addresses the newly arrived Fortinbras:

… So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen on th’inventors’ heads. (V.ii.374–9)

In her 1979 Introduction to the New Penguin Shakespeare edition, Anne Barton wrote of this speech:

As an account of The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger’s Tragedy, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta — or The Murder of Gonzago — it is (just) acceptable. As a description of Shakespeare’s Hamlet it is not. Horatio astonishes us by leaving out everything that seems important, reducing all that is distinctive about this play to a plot stereotype. Although his tale is, on one level, accurate enough, it is certainly not Hamlet’s “story”. (p. 52)

But it is not true that Horatio leaves out everything of importance. The murders of two successive kings of Denmark, the death by poison of the queen to both of them: these are events of great significance, the more so as they result in the state’s falling under Norwegian rule; and they are certainly “carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts”. Horatio’s reframing of the play’s story, startling as it is, is a reality check.

Before his encounter with the “ghost” Hamlet has been in a depression brought about by his father’s sudden death and the oppressive atmosphere of the court. After that encounter, he is in a bind: of the various actions that might appear to be open to him, there is none that can be justified, yet to do nothing is no more acceptable. A large part of his problem is that, as well as being his father, old Hamlet was king, and his killer has been crowned in his place. As a son, he may feel an obligation to avenge the murder, but as a prince without any official governmental role, he has absolutely no right to attack the present king, murderer though the latter may be. Hamlet is merely a student who has returned from Wittenberg for his father’s funeral.

Within 50 years England would be preoccupied with questions as to what to do about a bad king. Different parties held a variety of conflicting theories, but it was widely held that even a usurper or a tyrant could be deposed only by an “inferior magistrate”, never by ordinary subjects. Claudius is confident that his position as king protects him: when an angry Laertes, out to avenge the death of Polonius, looks as if he might attack, the king reassures his queen:

Let him go, Gertrude. Do not fear our person.
There’s such divinity doth hedge a king
That treason can but peep to what it would,
Acts little of his will. (IV.v.124–7)

It isn’t clear exactly how Claudius was chosen to succeed his brother but there’s no doubt his succession was valid and legally effective. Hamlet says that he

Popped in between th’election and my hopes (V.ii.65)

As Hamlet is dying, conscious of the fact that in killing Claudius he has left the throne vacant, he says:

… I do prophesy th’election lights
On Fortinbras. He has my dying voice. (V.ii.349–50)

He might well have added faute de mieux. Fortinbras is not an ideal candidate for the Danish monarchy. When first we hear of him, he is taking advantage of King Hamlet’s death to try to recover his father’s former lands which the elder Fortinbras had, “by a sealed compact | Well ratified by law and heraldry” (I.i.86–7), transferred to the Danish king. He wants to undo what his father had previously agreed. To be fair to Fortinbras, when his uncle, the king of Norway, tells him (at Claudius’s instance) to knock it off, he obeys. He then turns his attention to Poland and sets off to conquer “a little patch of ground | That hath in it no profit but the name” (IV.iv.18–19).

So in the end the combined effect of Claudius’s and Hamlet’s machinations is to put Denmark’s government into the hands of a young man “Of unimprovèd mettle hot and full” (I.i.96), and a foreigner to boot.

In the play’s final scene Hamlet, knowing that his uncle has twice plotted to end his life, first in the letter he sent to England and then in his conspiracy with Laertes, and himself now facing inevitable death from Laertes’s wound, is at last able to kill his father’s murderer. Till this point, he has been restrained in part by his uncle’s royal status, and partly by his doubts as to the nature of the ghost. When he kills Claudius, he knows that his own death is imminent and that he has no time left to save his own soul.

As well as the considerations that have held Hamlet back, though, there have been forces pushing him in the opposite direction. Quite apart from the son’s natural unwillingness to see his father’s murder go unpunished, there is the question of his oath. Shakespeare doesn’t explicitly tell us just what it is that Hamlet swears. At first the ghost tells him he is “bound” to revenge “when thou shalt hear” (I.v.6–7). Then, it exhorts Hamlet to “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” (I.v.25) but before it has told him who the murderer is. Finally, having identified the villain, the ghost goes on:

Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest.
But howsomever thou pursues this act,
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once
The glow-worm shows the matin to be near
And ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire.
Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me. (I.v.82–91)

Hamlet, still addressing the ghost after it has left the stage, declares that

… thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven! (I.v.102–4)

Hamlet then writes something and then says:

So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word:
It is “Adieu, adieu, remember me”.
I have sworn’t. (I.v.110–2)

What has he sworn: to avenge his father or merely to remember him? To kill his uncle or to take some vaguer action? Oaths and the binding obligations they give rise to were taken extremely seriously in this period and earlier. (I have touched on this before when writing about The Revenger’s Tragedy.) An oath committing oneself to kill a king or to murder anybody would not of course be binding, but would presumably be considered sinful and wicked in itself. Hamlet would probably consider himself bound in “honour”, if not morally, to do what he had sworn to do. So, one way or the other, it is clear that Hamlet is caught between conflicting obligations: that’s what I meant when I said above that he is in a bind. It’s a conundrum that he can resolve only when he is on the point of death.

There are things I wanted to say about Hamlet’s (first feigned, then real) madness, and about the reasons for the misogyny he shows towards both his mother and Ophelia, but I’m afraid I haven’t left myself enough time to deal with these topics adequately today. I may write at a later date about madness as a theme in several plays from about this time, obviously including this one, and also Othello, King Lear, The Changeling (Middleton and Rowley) and probably Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (though I haven’t seen my copy of this last one for years). I don’t know when (or if) I’ll write that post but I look forward to it.

Sidelined narrators: Booker winning novels by Kazuo Ishiguro and Julian Barnes

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 19:46:11 +0100

On the first page of Julian Barnes’s short (150 pages) novel, The Sense of an Ending (2011), the narrator, Tony Webster sets out one of his premises:

We live in time — it holds us and moulds us — but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. (p. 3)

As someone who is neither a scientist nor a philosopher, I was immediately relieved to read that the narrator was not referring to physicists’ theories or to esoteric thought experiments. My own commonsense, unsophisticated notion of time differs from his though, and at first I found myself wanting to argue with the narrator, maintaining that time is an abstraction, not something that we can conceive of ourselves as being “in”, or that is capable of holding or moulding us. It quickly became clear to me that such an argument would be beside the point. Tony’s subject is not really time but memory. Memory presupposes that time should pass but it doesn’t depend on our having a phlosophically or scientifically sound idea of what time is.

Tony Webster is an unexceptional man: he’s in his mid 60s, retired after an unremarkable working life spent in arts administration, long divorced from a woman with whom he is still (or again) friendly, a woman who, they both agree, is the opposite of enigmatic. They have a daughter, Susie, and grandchildren. His memory is deliberately selective: he remembers his schooldays but really only to recount how his friend group of three was joined by the more intellectual Adrian Finn, who would win a scholarship to Cambridge. Toby studied history in Bristol, where he met and started “going out” (p. 21) with Veronica. When she takes him to visit her family in Chislehurst he finds her father and brother patronizing and supercilious but her mother is apparently well disposed toward him, though she warns him not to “let Veronica get away with too much” (p. 28). He doesn’t know what to make of this.

Tony and Veronica break up before their final year in college. He subsequently receives a letter from Adrian, telling him that Adrian and Veronica are now going out and hoping that Tony will “accept” (p. 41) this state of affairs. Adrian says he wrote the letter at Veronica’s urging. Tony replied at first with a flippant postcard, followed by a more serious reply.

As far as I remember, I told him pretty much what I thought of their joint moral scruples. I also advised him to be prudent, because in my opinion Veronica had suffered damage a long way back. Then I wished him good luck, burnt his letter in an empty grate (melodramatic, I agree, but I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance), and decided that the two of them were now out of my life for ever. (pp. 42–3)

Some 40 years afterwards, Veronica will send him a copy of his letter, which is much more cruel and vicious than he had remembered, as well as being vituperatively misogynistic towards Veronica.

After university, Tony spent 6 months travelling around the United States and came home to the news that Adrian had killed himself. When they had been at school, a classmate had killed himself after he had got his girlfriend pregnant. (His suicide note was rumoured to have read “Sorry, Mum”, p. 14.) Adrian had cited Camus as stating that suicide was the only true philosophical question, and had spoken about life as an unsought gift which each of us has the right to refuse.

Decades later, after Tony had retired, he received a solicitor’s letter telling him that Sarah Ford, Veronica’s mother, had died, leaving him £500 and two documents. One of the documents was a letter from her, telling him that Adrian had always spoken warmly of him and that she was leaving him Adrian’s diary, which she thought he might find “an interesting, if painful memento of long ago” (p. 65). She added that she thought the last months of Adrian’s life were happy. The second document, then, was the diary, which Veronica withheld and claimed to have burnt. Toby made several attempts to get her to turn it over but none was successful and eventually he gave up.

Toby’s efforts to obtain possession of Adrian’s diary resulted in his meeting Veronica several times. She repeatedly told him that he just didn’t get it and he never would. He discovered that Adrian had had a son, also named Adrian, who was now about 40 and living in an institution, apparently with a learning difficulty or developmental disorder. He had been very upset by Sarah Ford’s death. Ultimately, Tony discovers that Adrian Jr’s mother is not Veronica (who is now apparently using her middle name, Mary).

Tony is what is sometimes called a peripheral narrator: someone who is not directly involved in the story being told, but observing from the edges. The quintessential example of a peripheral narrator is The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway, who narrates not his own story but that of Gatsby and the Buchanans. It occurs to me just now that another example that I particularly like is that of George Mason in Scott Turow’s Personal Injuries. (Mason’s own story is told, in the third person, in the later Limitations.)

Toby Webster is unusual in that, while he tells us the story of Adrian Finn, Veronica Mary Elizabeth Ford and the latter’s mother, Sarah, he never learns the whole story himself. He is left to speculate as to the reasons for Adrian’s suicide (which he assumes must be discoverable given Adrian’s rationality), as to his friend’s state of mind at the time of his death, the contents of his diary, Sarah’s reasons for apparently wishing that Tony should read the diary so many years later, and what Veronica/Mary felt about the whole sad business. He couldn’t trust his memory to tell him quite how badly he himself had behaved. The reader, too, is left to speculate. We never learn (any more than Tony does) the circumstances of Adrian Jr’s conception. We can guess but we can’t be sure.

There is a huge gap in the story that Tony tells, reflected in the fact that the narrative jumps from Tony’s early 20s to his mid 60s, not long after he has retired. He reminds us that the story he is attempting to tell is not quite his own. While he was in the US, he had become involved with a woman named Annie, with whom he spent three months.

Annie was part of my story, but not of this story. (p. 46)

Barnes’s handling of this teasing narrative is admirably clever and skillful but I did not find it satisfying. What I think particularly clever is that the gaps in the story are not wholly, or even mainly, the results of Tony’s deceptive memory. He may have forgotten, or convinced himself he had forgotten, the details of his hurtful letter to Adrian and Veronica but he later reproduces the document in full (having been sent a copy by Veronica, who must have kept it for 40 years). The lacunae are not things that Tony has forgotten but things he never knew in the first place, so that the riff on time and memory on the novel’s first page is seen to be an adroit piece of misdirection. It leads us to expect the kind of “memory” novel that has often been written before, whereas what Barnes gives us is much more unusual. I almost wish I liked it better.

Until I began to write this post, I thought of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) as another novel whose narrator tells of events in which he has not been directly involved and which he has imperfectly understood. It seemed to me that the novel was one of several in which Ishiguro exposed a central character’s shortcomings in the character’s own account of events whose importance he or she perceived but dimly. So, in this novel, Stevens at first came across as a character so wrapped up in his own narrow aspiration to being a “great” butler that he failed to appreciate the extent to which Lord Darlington had become a Nazi sympathizer and would-be collaborator. His apparent blind spot where Darlington was concerned, combined with his futile attempts to develop an ability to banter, and his failure to pick up on Miss Kenton’s obvious hints that she did not after all wish to marry Mr Benn, make him seem a pathetic figure, one whose self-exposure can only an act of cruelty on the part of the novelist.

It’s only in the last few days, on my third reading of the novel, that I see that I see that Stevens is a more self-interested, astute and to some extent malign character than I had given him credit for, and not at all pitiable. In the last quarter of the short novel, he describes something that occurred in 1935, about four years before the start of the war, and after the Nazis had come to power in Germany. Lord Darlington is entertaining three guests, one of whom, Spencer, poses a series of questions to Stevens, to each of which the latter answers with a variant on “I am sorry, sir, … but I am unable to be of assistance on this matter” (p. 195).

Spencer’s questions are calculated to demonstrate the supposed absurdity of a democratic system of government which, in Spencer’s view, requires ordinary voters to form opinions on a variety of issues which are too complex for any but experts and specialists to grasp. These are the questions on which Stevens says he is unable to give an opinion:

“… do you suppose the debt situation regarding America is a significant factor in the present low levels of trade? Or do you suppose this is a red herring and that the abandonment of the gold standard is at the root of the matter?”

“… Would you say that the currency problem in Europe would be made better or worse if there were to be an arms agreement between the French and the Bolsheviks?” (p. 195)

“… What was M. Laval really intending, by his recent speech on the situation in North Africa? Are you also of the view that it was simply a ruse to scupper the nationalist fringe of his own domestic party?” (p. 196)

The next day, Darlington apologizes to the butler for “the ordeal we put you through last night” (p. 196) but Stevens is unperturbed. He has not been at all put out by the questions. He has described his response to the first one:

I was naturally a little surprised by this, but then quickly saw the situation for what it was, that is to say, it was clearly expected that I be baffled by the question. Indeed, in the moment or so that it took for me to perceive this and compose a suitable response, I may even have given the outward impression of struggling with the question, for I saw all the gentlemen in the room exchange mirthful smiles. (p. 195)

Stevens has correctly divined what he is being asked and delivered the appropriate, desired response. The fact that, more than 20 years later, he is able to recall the questions and report them as direct speech suggests that he fully understood them at the time, though he might have struggled to provide a substantive answer, had that really been what Spencer was asking for. And, if he understood questions about the gold standard and French politics, he must also have understood Darlington’s developing position, from an apparently well intentioned oppposition to the Treaty of Versailles (Keynes is mentioned as a visitor to Darlington Hall), through appeasement, hosting secret meetings between von Ribbentrop, the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary and later conspiratorial activities, leading to a lost libel trial after the war. Stevens gives more detail about the early stages of this development, suggesting that he was fully aware as to where it was leading. Similarly, his tendency to deny ever having worked for Darlington (in one instance causing embarrassment for his new employer, Mr Farraday) suggests that he is less innocent than he would sometimes like to appear.

Having belatedly realized that Stevens is, as I put it above, “a more self-interested, astute and to some extent malign character” than I had previously noticed, I’ve had to revise my opinion of The Remains of the Day, and I am no longer inclined to qualify my admiration for the novel, nor to describe it as one I don’t like.

I’ve been rereading what I wrote a few years ago about Never Let Me Go, suggesting that that novel’s narrator too is less innocent, altruistic and benevolent than she has sometimes been taken to be. While she clearly couldn’t be said to be wholly in control of her life or of what happens to her, she is far from passive. I see, however, that I haven’t made the argument as clearly as I meant to. I may try to rewrite it soon to make it more persuasive.

Editions: The Remains of the Day, Faber paperback, 1990, all ellipses added; The Sense of an Ending Jonathan Cape hardback, 2011.

Some books I haven’t liked as much as I thought I would

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 11:30:35 +0100

I’ve often said that I prefer to write about books that I’ve enjoyed reading. I don’t regard these posts as reviews, so I don’t feel any obligation to warn readers about books that I think they ought to avoid. Having said that, I have sometimes written in this newsletter about books that I found disappointing, and that I wouldn’t particularly recommend. Last year, I wrote about Rebecca F Kuang’s Yellowface, which I hadn’t liked nearly as much as I was expecting to, because it had a thematic element in common with Laura Lippman’s Dream Girl. Longer ago, I discussed Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon in the context of Michael Dibdin’s Dark Spectre, because I wanted to argue that Dibdin’s book was a riposte or corrective to Harris’s. But generally, writing about books I haven’t liked is not something that appeals to me.

That might be changing, however. I’ve noticed that in the last 8 or 9 months I’ve read more books than usual that I’ve been disappointed in or dissatisfied with. And I find that I do want to write something about them: not the 2,000+ word discussions that are typical of these posts but shorter notes, recording that I read the book and giving a brief summary of what it is I didn’t like about it. So I made a list of ten books that fall into this category. Two of them are Booker winners and, as chance would have it, books about which I have a bit more to say than will fit in the brief notes below. So I’m going to keep those two for the next post and devote this post to the other eight, in no particular order.

Eliza Clark, She’s Always Hungry (Faber, 2024): I enjoyed Clark’s first novel, Boy Parts, though I’m not yet sure whether I have enough to say about it to make it the subject of a newsletter post. I suspect that the best place to start with her fiction may be her second novel, Penance, which I haven’t read. I saw a secondhand trade paperback in a charity shop but I decided I’d prefer a smaller format paperback — and found She’s Always Hungry, a collection of short stories, istead. I’m sure I read an interview (but I can’t remember where) in which Clark said that the stories in this collection are more typical of her writing than either of the novels. That worries me a bit.

As a collection, this is very uneven. One story in particular, “The Shadow over Little Chitaly”, isn’t really a story at all and, though amusing, had me puzzling over what the point was. Fantasy and body horror feature strongly, so from the start I’m less well disposed towards this collection than I might be. Six of the 11 stories — that’s more than I had thought at first — could be described as naturalistic (in the sense of “not fantasy”). Two of the body horror stories, “Build a Body Like Mine” and “Shake Well” are also quite naturalistic, and the second of these is one of my favourites, though it’s about the exploitation and abuse of a 15-year-old girl by her older “boyfriend”. In general, I prefer the naturalistic stories, with the exception of “The King”, which features immortal beings living among humans on earth, and makes reference to Highlander.

Beryl Bainbridge, Sweet William (1975; Virago Modern Classics, 2013): This is the only Beryl Bainbridge book I’ve read and I’m not in a hurry to read any more on the strength of it. I remember my aunt being very enthusiastic about it sometime in the late 1970s. She said it was very funny, so I started to read her copy but soon gave up. It was only in the last 6 weeks or so that I read the whole thing, and … well, I think I can see what appealed to my aunt. Bainbridge writes in an acerbic style, with a detached and sometimes cruel humour: Katha Pollitt, in the New York Times review from 1976, calls “epigrammatic character assassination”. Pollitt adds:

It's hard to write about people who are as hollow as William, as lacking in vitality as Ann without sounding dreary and affectless oneself; it's a mark of Bainbridge's artistry that she avoids the imitative fallacy and is never less than sharply and savagely ironic.

Fair enough, but is William simply hollow, and is Ann merely lacking in vitality? I suspect that there’s more going on beneath the surface, particularly in Ann’s relationship to her mother, the dreadful Mrs Walton, than the reader is allowed to see. Ann tells her cousin, Pamela, that Mrs Walton lost all her teeth (through septicaemia) two weeks before giving birth to Ann.

“No wonder she doesn’t like you,” said Pamela. (p. 92)

Pamela and Ann don’t like each other either, but they’re civil, for the most part, whereas Mrs Walton tells her daughter to “Go to hell” (p. 115). The predominant impression I had while reading this novel was of people with very different interests, desires, personalities and expectations having to rub along together as members of families, and keeping each other in check. A story on similar lines, but which takes a much less jaundiced view of its characters, is Gerry Stembridge’s film About Adam (2001).

Bainbridge is often praised for giving the reader so much in such a small page count, but I can’t help thinking that her characters could have done with more room to breathe.

Bridget O’Connor, After a Dance: Selected Stories (Picador, 2024): Briget O’Connor died young, not long after the screenplay for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2010), which she wrote with her husband, Peter Straughan, won a BAFTA and was nominated for an Oscar. After a Dance is a selection made from her two earlier collections of short stories published in the 1990s.

I suspect that the only thing wrong with this selection may be that I approached it with excessive expectations, having given too much weight to the very favourable reviews and publicity. It’s blurbed by Roddy Doyle (“some of the wildest, arresting, just plain brilliant short stories I’ve read in a long time”) and The Irish Times (“A storytelling genius before her time”). Following that build-up, it’s not surprising I was disappointed. I’ll certainly be reading this again, giving the stories more time to work on me. I hope I’ll like (and appreciate) them better when I do.

Jeffrey Eugenides, Fresh Complaint (2017): I don’t expect to be rereading this collection, which is the only one of Eugenides’s books that I’ve read so far. I have a copy of Middlesex but I haven’t got around to it yet, no doubt partly because I didn’t enjoy the short stories. I don’t remember very much about them, just a general feeling of disappointment. It strikes me that it’s often quite difficult to say what one doesn’t like about a novel or short story: I think I don’t like to dig too deeply into that general feeling of disappointment to try to work out what’s causing it. That’s probably one of the reasons why I prefer to write about books and stories that I view favourably.

Caroline O’Donoghue, Promising Young Women (Virago, 2018): This was O’Donoghue’s first novel for adults. When it came out, I read the free sample chapter in Apple Books and decided it wasn’t for me. I was right first time. I’ve written in this newsletter about her next two books for adults, Scenes of a Graphic Nature and The Rachel Incident. Because I liked them so much, I decided to go back and try the first novel. Though their premises and plot setups are quite different, it strikes me that Promising Young Women is in part a dry run for The Rachel Incident. The latter is not about an affair between a young woman student and her male lecturer (though the lecturer’s wife is convinced for a while that that is what’s going on), the former is about a young woman working in marketing who has an affair with her (inevitably married) boss. O’Donoghue comes up with some impressive variations on that old theme but I’m not sure that’s enough. I’m still enthusiastic about the two later novels.

Abigail Dean, Girl A (HarperCollins, 2021): A secondhand copy caught my eye in a charity shop and I thought it must be worth gambling €2 on. It was, barely. If you’re looking for a story about maltreated children needing to escape from a fanatical father, Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall (2018) is my recommendation. (I notice blurbs by Jessie Burton prominently displayed on both Girl A and Ghost Wall.) Or, if you prefer something more sensational but still good, try Liz Nugent’s Strange Sally Diamond.

Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians (Faber, 2016; paperback 2017): I had for several years steered clear of Eimear McBride’s writing because of some of the things reviewers had written about it. Jacqueline Rose in the LRB (quoted in the front matter of the paperback) is a good example.

More or less single-handed, McBride has taken us back to the experiment of modernism and ushered it into an eviscerating new phrase …

Why, I asked myself, would anybody want, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, to take us back to “the experiment of modernism”? Eventually, I came to see that I was being inconsistent. I’m not sure I ever did believe it, but I no longer think it’s useful to speak in terms of the “development” of the novel (or any literary form) or of constant progress and improvement. Academics find such ideas convenient because they’re to some extent measurable, demonstrable and examinable, but to my mind they often obscure more than they reveal. They encourage us to study the wood at the expense of the trees. But, if we let go of the idea of literary development, why shouldn’t a modernist novel be written in the twenty-first century — or a postmodernist one in the eighteenth, a metaphysical poem in the twentieth or a 12-book epic in the seventeenth?

Then I learnt that McBride disputes the notion that her work is “slavishly Joycean”. She sees it differently:

I think Joyce’s barbarism gave me the chutzpah to try. But it was never about imitating him. I remember sitting down to write [A] Girl [Is a Half-formed Thing] and feeling Joyce was on the outside. He and I are looking for different things. His work is about the extension of the human into the universe, mine is about human vulnerability and fallibility.”

So maybe it was a mistake after all to think of her work as modernist. The recognition of that likelihood gave me a good enough reason to read her second novel. It took me about 10 days to do so. The language is dense, not easily digestible, and I finished the book with a sense of relief as if I’d been freed from an onerous experience. But, though I found the novel hard work, it wasn’t difficult to make sense of, unlike McBride’s short story, “The Adminicle Exists” (in Being Various). In case I’ve been unfair to the novel, I fully intend to read it again — provided I live long enough. (And now there’s a sequel.)

Niamh Campbell, This Happy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020): I read and enjoyed two short stories by Niamh Campbell, “Love Many” and “An Encounter”, so I was a bit surprised to find her first novel quite dull. It’s the familiar tale of an unsatisfactory relationship between a young woman and an older man. I have little doubt that this particular example contains subtleties that I’m missing, but I’m really not inclined to go looking for them: I feel as if I’ve been reading a lot of (not very) different versions of this story. I must reread those two short stories soon, to see if I think they stand up.

I see that, of the eight books I’ve mentioned, three are collections of short stories. That strikes me as an unexpectedly high proportion, and I wonder if my problem with them is simply that I haven’t given them enough time to work on me. I’m again reminded of what Mavis Gallant said (in the Preface to her 1950 Collected Stories:

Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.

Maybe I should have let them wait a little longer. The other thing that strikes me is that, in the process of writing about these books, I have become less dismissive of some of them, more inclined to give them another chance. It’s as if having had to think about them has made me more attentive to qualities I hadn’t noticed before. So perhaps I should write more often about books I haven’t liked. Next time, on or about 18 April, I’ll be writing about the two Booker winners that I mentioned in the second paragraph above. Can you guess what they are?

How much you value life: Somerset Maugham, Ashenden stories

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 19:03:18 +0100

The sequence of short stories by Somerset Maugham featuring a character named Ashenden was first published in the 1920s and is set in the previous decade, during the First World War. Ashenden is a writer of plays and novels who is recruited into British Intelligence by a colonel whom he knows only as “R”, who points out to him that as an author he has a plausible reason for living in Geneva, where he can gather intelligence from a network of informants who pass regularly in and out of Germany. When he is confronted by two detectives of the Swiss police, he tells them that he is in Geneva to write a play. The detectives know perfectly well that he is a spy — Ashenden is convinced that he must have been denounced — but they don’t have evidence that would justify his prosecution. (Neutral Switzerland couldn’t simply shoot him as a spy, and he tells one of his contacts, who is trying to pressure him to pay an additional 2,000 francs, that the maximum sentence to which he is liable is 2 years.) So long as Ashenden remains in neutral or friendly countries he is in no great danger, though R has impressed on him that if he succeeds in his mission he can expect no thanks and if he gets into trouble he can expect no help.

Ashenden describes wartime Geneva as “a hot-bed of intrigue” (p. 27). It’s possible that the capital of a neutral country may be a less congenial environment than that of one of the combatants.

There were Frenchmen there, Italians and Russians, Turks, Rumanians, Greeks and Egyptians. Some had fled their country, some doubtless represented it. (p. 28)

For his own amusement, he flirts with la Baronne de Higgins, an Austrian with Yorkshire antecedents, who is clearly working for the Germans, till R tells him to knock it off. He and a German agent with whom he had been acquainted in London before the war show no signs of recognizing each other.

Each of course knew on what work the other was engaged and Ashenden had had a mind to chaff him about it — it seemed absurd when he had dined with a man off and on for years and played cards with him, to act as though he did not know him from Adam — but refrained in case the German looked upon his behaviour as further proof of the British frivolity in face of war. (pp. 28–9)

Asheden, appropriately for a comic playwright, is a sardonic observer of human foibles, fairly tolerant and moderately courageous. On original publication, the stories were divided into 16 chapters, some more eventful and compelling than others. The edition that I have combines the original 16 into 6 stories (each about 35 to 40 pages); in his preface, the author mentions their “great length” (p. 7). This volume adds a seventh story, “Sanatorium”, which does not have a wartime setting but shows Ashenden recovering from tuberculosis in Scotland.

The consolidation of the stories omits one brief episode which appeared in the original publication, titled “The Flip of a Coin”. The omission is intersting and I’ll have a bit to say about it later in this post.

Much of Ashenden’s work involves aggregating small bits of information from various sources, incorporating them into a report and sending the report, in laboriously encoded form, up the line. He has been warned that he will often now know the results of his efforts if any. As it turns out, in the first two (consolidated) stories he is left in no doubt that nothing good comes of those efforts. The title character in “Miss King” is a disaffected Englishwoman, governess to the children of an exiled Egyptian prince (who are now old enough not to need a governess). She rebuffs Ashenden’s attempt to engage her in conversation and refuses to speak English. However, on her deathbed, she sends for him and apparently has something important to tell him but she’s unable to communicate because of a stroke and he never finds out what she had to say.

In the next story, “The Hairless Mexican”, Ashenden is sent to Naples (Italy was still neutral, so the story is set during the first year of the war) to oversee and eventually pay the title character, a flamboyant and eccentric self-styled “General”, whose mission is to intercept a man named Constantine Andreadi. The target is travelling from Piraeus to Brindisi with important information which he is to deliver to the German ambassador in Rome. The Mexican is to prevent the information, which is partly in the form of written dispatches and partly memorized by Andreadi, from getting through. Clearly, the only foolproof way to stop the unwritten communication is to kill the messenger, and R tells Ashenden that he doesn’t believe that the Mexican has a great respect for human life. However, R doesn’t tell Ashenden exactly what the General’s mission is.

“I don’t think you need bother your head about that.” (p. 48)

The Mexican intercepts the only Greek on the ship from Piraeus, and he and Ashenden search his hotel room but fail to find the papers. It turns out that Andreadi was prevented by illness from sailing, and Ashenden, who has been getting increasingly impatient with the Mexican’s antics, reveals that, R’s reticence notwithstanding, he fully understood what the General’s instructions were.

“You bloody fool, you’ve killed the wrong man.” (p. 80)

In the next two stories, Ashenden similarly plays an indirect role in the deaths of characters whose activities are inimical to British interests. Giulia Lazzari, the title character of the third story, is a dancer (“Popular Spanish music and a mantilla, a fan and a high comb”, p. 90) who has been doing some inconsequential spying for the Germans. As her name suggests, she is Italian, but her husband and passport, as well as her style of dancing, are Spanish. The British have captured her and want to use her to force her lover, Chandra Lal, to come to France where they can seize him too. Chandra Lal is a fighter for Indian independence who is now in Berlin and R considers him extremely dangerous and effective. When Ashenden asks what they intend to do to him, R replies that they will “shoot him damn quick” (p. 90).

Giulia Lazzari is threatened with a lengthy term in prison unless she contacts Chandra Lal and arranges to meet him in Switzerland. When he gets there, she is to write to him to say she is stuck in France and assure him that it’s safe for him to come to her there. Afraid of prison, she cooperates reluctantly and up to a point, but tries to warn her lover to stay in Switzerland. When, eventually, he crosses into France, he kills himself with poison as soon as he realizes it’s a trap. The dancer tells Ashenden:

“He always carried it with him. He said that the English should never take him alive.” (p. 117)

In “The Traitor”, which is one of the longest stories and, as the fourth of seven, occupies the central position in the volume, Ashenden is in Lucerne to find Grantley Caypor, an Englishman who is spying for the Germans. Caypor is married to a German woman and says that he has chosen to live out the war in a neutral country as she would find it intolerable to live in England while the conflict continues. Ashenden’s cover is that he works for the Censorship Department, and Caypor, under pressure from his German paymasters to gather more intelligence, sees an opportunity. With a letter of recommendation from Ashenden to the latter’s supposed employer, Caypor goes home to England where (or so Ashenden interprets the cryptic acknowledgement from R) he is summarily shot. Ashenden, still in Lucerne, witnesses the mounting distress of Frau Caypor and their dog when no news arrives from England.

Caypor’s fate contrasts with that of an agent codenamed Gustav, who is based in Basle. Gustav has been the commercial representative of a Swiss company which has business interests in Germany, and so is understood to have many opportunities for intelligence-gathering. His reports are treated as models of what R requires from his agents. However, R becomes suspicious and Ashenden discovers that the well paid Gustav no longer travels to Germany at all and that his reports, rather like those in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, are pure invention. Ashenden seems unperturbed by the deception and merely tells Gustav that the British will no longer pay his salary. He suggests that, instead, Gustav should take up the same role with the Germans, passing on to them misleading information provided by the British, who would also be prepared to pay an irregular bonus for valuable information, provided it was verified. Both parties seemed content with this arrangement.

The fifth story, “His Excellency”, seems to be set in immediately prerevolutionry Russia, though the country is named only as “X”. Ashenden is there on a mission about which the British and US ambassadors have largely been kept in the dark. The British ambassador, Sir Herbert Witherspoon, is formal and rather stiff and Ashenden has the sense that both ambassadors are put out at having been instructed to dispatch Ashenden’s coded telegrams without knowing what’s in them. He is surprised, then, when Sir Herbert invites him to dinner, and even more so when he finds that he is the only guest. They discuss Byring, the current ambassador to France, who intends to leave the diplomatic service so as to marry a beautiful and charming courtesan, who appears to love him as much as he does her. At any rate, the prospect of his abandoning a career for which he is excellently suited, and the income that goes with it, doesn’t perturb her.

Ashenden thinks that Byring, whom he admires, is “a damned fool” (p. 166), but the ambassador tells him a long, sad story about a friend of his, whom he calls “Brown”, who found himself in a similar position to Byring’s and made the opposite choice, giving up the woman he was obsessed with and going on to marry someone more suited to being a dipolmat’s wife, leading to to a life of quiet domestic misery. It clear almost immediately that the ambassador is telling his own story and Ashenden is acutely embarrassed, wishing that he would stop. This is the first indication that we have, I think, that Ashenden, who has often in the previous stories seemed a rather permissive, live-and-let-live character, also has a conventional side. He feels that Byring should put his hitherto stellar career first, and that Sir Herbert, having made his eminently defensible choice, ought to maintain a stiff upper lip.

In the next story, made up of the last three chapters in the original publication, we see some more of this aspect of Ashenden. “Mr Harrington’s Washing” is expressly set in Russia, just at the beginning of the Bolshevik revolution. Ashenden is on a demanding and ambitious mission which depends on Kerensky’s government staying in power for at least another three months. Essentially, his job is to make sure that Russia stays in the war against the Germans. In this he is is assisted by, among various others, Anastasia Alexandrovna Leonidov, a woman with whom he was deeply involved in London five years ealier (that’s to say in 1912, two years before the start of the war).

They had wanted to get married but what was to be done about Anastasia Alexandrovna’s husband?

“Vladimir would never expose me to the vulgar notoriety of the divorce court. When I tell him that I have decided to marry you he will commit suicide.” (p. 208)

Ashenden’s reaction to this confident assertion was to be “startled, but thrilled” (p. 208). It was like being in a Russian novel. “These Russians, what fun they have!” (p. 209). Given the terrible potential consequences for Vladimir Semenovich, they had to be absolutely sure they were doing the right thing before telling him about their plans. Anastasia Alexandrovna suggested that they spend a week in Paris together, so that they would know for sure.

Ashenden was a trifle conventional and the suggestion took him by surprise. But only for a moment. Anastasia was wonderful. She was very quick and she saw the hesitation that for an instant troubled him.

“Surely you have no bourgeois prejudices?” she said.

“Of course not,” he assured her hurriedly, for he would much sooner have been thought knavish than bourgeois, “I think it’s a splendid idea.” (p. 209)

But in Paris, she not only ate scrambled eggs for breakfast every morning but insisted that he do the same: it would be “inconsiderate” (p. 212) to give the cook the unnecessary work of frying eggs for him as well as scrambling hers. When they got back to London after the week away, he immediately booked a berth to New York, and didn’t see Anastasia Alexandrovna again till five years later in Petrograd. He is relieved to see that she does not seem angry with him and shows no sign of having pined for him during the intervening years.

It seems possible that her eccentric breakfast habits, as well as her alarming prediction of Vladimir Semenovich’s suicide, were calculated to push Ashenden away without her dumping him outright. If so, it’s striking that the scrambled eggs were much more effective at putting him off than the prospect of her husband’s doing away with himself.

The final story, “Sanatorium”, is set after the war has ended. Ashenden is expected to recover from tuberculosis and he observes the behaviour of a varied group of fellow patients who react in different ways to the possibility (and in some cases near certainty) of early death.

Ashenden continued to read, and with amused tolerance to watch the vagaries of his fellow-creatures. (p. 241)

After a conversation with Mrs Chester, the wife of a man who was used to being healthy and resents his disease as a nasty, undeserved trick, he reflects:

People often said he had a low opinion of human nature. It was because he did not always judge his fellows by the usual standards. He accepted with a smile, a tear, or a shrug of the shoulders, much that filled others with dismay. (p. 239)

The omitted episode, “The Flip of a Coin”, is concerned with events that unfold just before those of “His Excellency”. Ashenden approaches R with a proposition which has come through one of his agents and about which he himself is noncommittal. A subject of King B, the ruler of one of the Balkan states, is offering to assassinate the king in return for £5,000. The king intends to bring his country into the war on the German side, so his assassination would probably benefit the allies. R rebuffs the offer: their side does not wage war by those means. “Damn it all, we are gentlemen.” He reproaches Ashenden for bringing the proposal to him, while at the same time intimating that if the would-be assassin were to go ahead with the scheme of his own accord, the allies would be glad to take advantage of the resulting situation. It takes Ashenden a moment to catch on.

“Don’t think I’m going to pay the fellow five thousand pounds out of my own pocket. Not a chance.”

On first reading I thought it was a mistake to leave out this episode, in that it makes clear to the reader R’s deviousness and the nature of his “principles”. On reflection, I realized that such a revelation is perhaps a bit too on-the-nose and that it was best after all to leave a certain anmbiguity about R’s character and methods.

Edition: W Somerset Maugham, Collected Short Stories volume 3, Penguin 1963, reprint 1974.

Masochism and submission in books by Jillian Keenan, Mary Gaitskill and Sally Rooney

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 18:07:32 +0100

Very early in the first year of Talk about books, I wrote about the first chapter in Jillian Keenan’s memoir, Sex with Shakespeare (2016) in which she advanced an unfamiliar argument as to how we should read A Midsummer Night’s Dream and in particular what we are to make of the character of Helena in that play. According to Keenan, Helena is kinky: she is not a pathetic weakling, but is determined to make sure Demetrius understands what she desires. I found Keenan’s argument persuasive in general, while disputing her reading of one line in particular: “And even for that do I love you the more”.

More than three years later, I wrote about Mary Gaitskill’s second collection of short stories, Because They Wanted To (1997) which features many characters who have desires that will never be satisfied. Some of those desires, notably those of Erin in the long final story, “The Wrong Thing”, involve being seriously hurt or humiliated. Several of the stories suggest that the gratification of desires may come at a cost that is either too high or not capable of being paid. As a result, I found myself wondering if I hadn’t been too sanguine about the likely outcome for Helena and Demetrius in A Midsummer Knight’s Dream. Perhaps a match between a committed masochist (or submissive — it’s not clear which Helena actually is) and a budding sadist (or dominator) isn’t necessarily the ideal union after all? Could it be that sadists are very often bad, dangerous, malevolent people, however accommodating they might seem to a masochist’s needs?

This is not the picture that Keenan presents. She suggests that Demetrius rejects Helena because he is disturbed by the recognition of his own desires.

Coming to terms with the details of our sexual identities is hard for everyone … This process is often even more difficult for sadists. I can’t imagine how scary and confusing it must feel to realize, in the early stages of sexual development, that you long to “hurt” the people you desire. Many sadists have told me that, at first, their fantasies terrified them. And in the early stages of awareness, it doesn’t necessarily help when sadists and masochists first meet. It’s overwhelming. We feed into each other, and the realization that our fantasies could become realities is the scariest thing of all. (pp. 17–18)

When I was writing about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I accepted this view more or less uncritically. It wasn’t until I read Gaitskill’s stories that it struck me that, though Keenan is probably right about those sadists she has spoken to, there must surely be some sadists who just get off on inflicting pain without ever finding the prospect at all disturbing. How is a masochist supposed to know which kind of sadist s|he has got?

I originally read Keenan’s book as an ebook borrowed from the library. When I came to write about it some months later, I relied on an abridged version of the first chapter published in Slate online magazine. That suited my purposes very well, as the first chapter deals with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was the subject of my post. It meant, though, that my recollection of the rest of the book was vague. I have since acquired a paperback edition and reread it twice (most recently last weekend, to prepare for this post). I decided that I should take another look at Keenan’s book in the light of some of Gaitskill’s stories. This time, however, I’d use Gaitskill’s first collection, Bad Behavior (1988). And I’d also take the opportunity to consider Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018), particularly with regard to Marianne’s submissiveness, which I haven’t been quite sure what to make of in previous readings.

I’ve written before about Rooney’s first and third novels (and hope to write about Intermezzo before too long) but I haven’t till now had anything to say about Normal People apart from a few paragraphs in the post about Conversations with Friends. No doubt my reticence has had something to do with the submissiveness, which I’ve found disturbing (as I’m sure the reader is meant to).

On first reading of Sex with Shakespeare, my aim was to learn more about Shakespeare’s plays (and, to be sure, the treatment of sex in those plays) than about Jillian Keenan’s life. And there’s plenty about the plays that’s of interest, but the book is described as “A Memoir”, something I may not have noticed when I read the ebook. (Recently, I’ve begun to wonder if writers of literary biography wouldn’t much rather be writing literary criticism, but have been firmly told by their publishers that they can sell the former but not the latter, so they smuggle in as much criticism as they can get away with.)

Keenan describes herself as a masochist and “in rare cases, even a submissive” (Sex with Shakespeare, p. 10). The difference is that a masochist gets gratification or satisfaction from having pain inflicted on him or her whereas a submissive obtains them by being subjected to the will or control of another. As Keenan makes clear, the two don’t necessarily go together, though it’s easy to confuse them. Keenan herself was confused to start with:

The scraps of information that I’d found on the internet suggested that I was “submissive,” but that word didn’t seem right. I never acted or even felt submissive. I had spent the entire span of my sexual maturity fantasizing about this kind of relationship, but now that I had it, I was holding back … I argued, complained, bargained, negotiated, and did everything a submissive wasn’t “supposed” to do. (p. 94)

Before too long, she realizes that pain is what satisfies her, not powerlessness or the surrender of control.

Pain releases endorphins, which can cause a euphoric high, similar to the high that long-distance runners describe. (p. 79)

Keenan describes her relationships with two sadists — who, to be fair, don’t fit the “bad, dangerous, malevolent” characterization I touched on above — but David, the man she falls in love with and eventually marries, is not one of them. She persuades him to spank her but can never get him to hit hard enough. After his first serious attempt, she reaches certain unaoidable conclusions.

Two things were certain: I was in love with my boy with the baseball cap.

And he was as vanilla as a Snack Pack pudding cup. There wasn’t even a sprinkle in sight. (p. 181)

In effect, she resigns herself to several spankless years, though she eventually manages to teach David to inflict severe pain on her against his inclination. In some ways, the real-life story of Jillian and David is a mirror-image of the fictional tale of Marianne and Connell in Normal People. Marianne asks her college boyfriend, Jamie, to hit her during sex and he does so with gusto, also choking her. He’s really obnoxious, though, so she breaks up with him and finds that nearly all their friends in college side with him and think that she has behaved badly.

She spends the next academic year in in a Swedish university, where she gets involved with a photographer named Lukas, who is taking a series of photographs of her. He photographs her in a submissive pose with her hands bound and her bra off, and wants to blindfold her but she demurs. When she says she doesn’t want to do this, he replies “I know”. He goes on to tell her that he loves her, “And I know you love me” (Normal People, p. 197). Marianne recoils in horror and demands that Lukas release her. That’s the end of their game. Clearly she finds it abhorrent that he associates what they’ve been doing with “love”, however gratifying she might have found it before he mentioned that word.

Back in Ireland and eventually reconciled with Connell (again), she asks him if he will hit her while they have sex.

For a few seconds she hears nothing, not even his breath.

No, he says. I don’t think I want that. Sorry. (p. 237)

And so, Marianne discovers that she is not necessarily a masochist after all, but a submissive. She can get what she wants without having to undergo physical torture.

She used to wonder if he really loved her. In bed he would say lovingly: You’re going to do exactly what I say now, aren’t you? He knew how to give her what she wanted, to leave her open, weak, powerless, sometimes crying. He understood that it wasn’t necessary to hurt her: he could let her submit willingly, without violence. This all seemed to happen on the deepest possible level of her personality. But on what level did it happen to him? Was it just a game, or a favour he was doing her? Did he feel it, the way she did? (p. 258)

That’s the end of Marianne’s story qua story. It’s not what you might call a conclusive end, though. The events of a life don’t form a neatly structures narrative, they’re more like one damned thing after another. Here, as in her other fiction, Rooney tries to give the reader both: the formal structure and the realistic, contingent mess. Connell is offered a place on an MFA course in New York. After an initial squabble as to why he didn’t tell her he’d applied — he says he was embarrassed that she might think him “Deluded” (p. 264) — Marianne encourages him to go.

She closes her eyes. He probably won’t come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. (pp. 265–6)

Marianne’s encouragement to accept the New York offer echoes her urging him a few years earlier to apply to study English in Trinity, in preference to Law in Galway. For a while, his acquiescence in her plans had seemed like a bad idea. In his final year, Connell suffers from depression, particularly after the suicide of a former schoolfriend, Rob Hegarty. He sees a therapist/counsellor provided by the college. He tells her that he hasn’t been happy in Trinity.

I probably thought if I moved here I would fit in better, he says. You know, I thought I might find more like-minded people or whatever. But honestly, the people here are a lot worse than the people I knew in school …

I just feel like I left Carricklea thinking I could have a different life, he says. But I hate it here, and now I can never go back there again. I mean, those friendships are gone. Rob is gone, I can never see him again. I can never get that life back. (p. 217)

Unexpectedly, Marianne has had an unhappy time in Trinity too, her apparent popularity notwithstanding. Following her break-up with Jamie, only one member of their friend-group, Joanna, stays in contact with her. She is surprised to learn that Joanna hadn’t liked Jamie or Peggy, thinking of them as Marianne’s friends, not hers. Marianne replies: “I guess I just got caught up in how much they seemed to like me” (p. 194).

It was true, Peggy and Jamie were not very good people, bad people even, who took joy in putting others down. Marianne feels aggrieved that she fell for it, aggrieved that she thought she had anything in common with them, that she’d participated in the commodity market they passed off as friendship. (pp. 194–5)

Given how isolated Marianne had been Carricklea, both at home and at school, what a lonely existence she’d had throughout her childhood, it’s not surprising that she should have fallen for the illusion of popularity. So, would she and Connell have been happier if either or both of them hadn’t gone to Trinity? I take it for granted that Connell — ultimately editor of a college literary magazine and likely MFA student — is better off having studied English rather than Law, but he might equally well have done that in Galway. At least their both being in Trinity meant that they stayed in touch, something that is hard to imagine otherwise.

(At the end of the novel Marianne is working for a dodgy business type, possibly a property developer, who pays her in cash and doesn’t seem to do very much. Not a job that need keep her anchored to Dublin. So it might make sense for her to accompany Connell to New York. Maybe her mother would be willing to pay her to leave the country. But this possibility doesn’t seem to have occurred to Marianne — yet.)

In Sex with Shakespeare, Jillian Keenan twice mentions the film Secretary (dir. Steven Shainberg, 2002) which she first went to see with a group of high school friends. Her first impression was that the film was “close to right up my alley” (Sex with Shakespeare, 40). Later, though, she comes to have reservations: “Secretary seemed to suggest that sadomasochistic relationships are merely an alternative form of self-mutilation” (p. 40).

Shainberg’s film is “based on” a short story also titled “Secretary” from Mary Gaitskill’s first collection, Bad Behavior. There are major differences between the story and the film. Shainberg has made no bones about his intention to present masochism and submissiveness as liberating, fulfilling and healthy, whereas Gaitskill’s story is more enigmatic. In the story, when Debby’s employer masturbates behind her and ejaculates on her, she goes to the bathroom to masturbate (and clean herself off), then stays at home the next day and never returns to the office. When a journalist (named “Charming”) phones her looking for dirt on the employer, who is now running for local office, she has nothing to say. What the journalist has told her is not news: she has already seen a report in the paper of her former employer’s candidacy.

For the first time, I felt an uncomplicated disgust for the lawyer. Westland was nothing but malls and doughnut stands and a big ugly theater with an artificial volcano in front of it. What kind of idiot would want to be mayor of Westland? (Bad Behavior, p. 149)

This suggests that she already felt disgust at the lawyer’s behaviour but that her disgust was complicated by her own reaction to it. And perhaps she holds back from helping to scupper his chances of election because she feels that to be mayor of Westfield is what he deserves.

The other story in Bad Behavior that has most to do with masochism or submission is “A Romantic Weekend”, in which Beth, a self-described masochist, goes away for a weekend with a married man she met at a party a week before. Each of the parties is quickly disappointed in the other.

“Why did you tell me you were a masochist?”

“What makes you think I’m not?”

“You don’t act like one. (p. 40)

Beth says things like “Anything you do will be all right” (p. 35) and “I would do anything with you” (p. 42), but is clearly thinking in generalities rather than specifics, and claims to find the things he says he’d like to do to her “incredibly banal” (p. 43). It’s likely that she’s one of those people who find the abstract idea of “submission” arousing but can’t conceive of, still less submit to, any concrete behaviours. (I suspect that such people comprise a significant part of the audience for the film Secretary.)

The man threatens her with torture and says he wants to force her to do things she doesn’t want to do. (She replies that she won’t do anything she doesn’t want to: he has to make her want it.) There are suggestions, though, that the man is actually submissive — I have in mind his recollections of the “rather combative girl who wanted his number” (p. 32), the “little Italian girl” who squatted over his head (p. 39) and “this great girl at Billy’s Topless” (p. 43) — but presumably feels that it’s more “masculine” to act the sadist. Anyway, they both fail to realize their fantasies, at least on this occasion. On the 6-hour drive back to New York from Washington DC, their fantasies reassert themselves and the story ends with him thinking “This could work out fine” (p. 49).

I may well write about the remaining seven stories in Bad Behavior at some point.

Editions: Sex with Shakespeare William Morrow paperback, 2017; Normal People Faber paperback 2019; Bad Behavior Penguin Modern Classics, 2018); all ellipses added.

Guilt and friendship: Lisa Lutz, The Accomplice

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 21:04:00 +0100

I’ve written about Lisa Lutz’s novels twice before in this newsletter: The Passenger (2016) during the first year of Talk about books in a post about women on the run and The Swallows (2019) in a post from two years later. As the first post discussed two novels (the other one being Laura Lippman’s Sunburn) I had intended to write about The Accomplice in conjunction with another of Lippman’s books, Dream Girl (2021). As it turned out, however, I found that Dream Girl seemed to pair better with Rebecca F Kuang’s Yellowface (2023), a book I didn’t like well enough to want to write about it on its own. So I wrote about Dream Girl and Yellowface together and held back The Accomplice till now.

An important figure in the novel is someone who, when she was 11 years old, did something very bad. A bookish and intelligent preteen, she fully understood at the time that what she was doing was wrong and even had a dim understanding that the person she was protecting might indeed be as evil as people said. She did not, however, foresee the full repercussions, which were such that, more than 20 years later, at least one person still wanted to kill her in revenge. She had in the meantime received hate letters telling her that she was going to hell.

The two central characters are a pair of inseparably close friends, Luna Grey and Owen Mann. They meet when they’re both students at Markham University, “a small liberal arts college in the Hudson Valley” and “a safe haven for lazy stoners who wanted a break from life” (p. 15). It was Luna’s first choice of college and just about Owen’s last. He came from a wealthier background than she did. The setup might sound a bit like Erich Segal’s Love Story except for the fact that Luna and Owen don’t fall in love — at least not in an erotic or romantic sense.

Their names give a clue as to the nature of their relationship. Each first name and each surname consists of four letters. Put them together and they form a square: apparently solid, like building blocks. The appearance is a bit misleading, though. Unlike the surnames, the first names are both disyllables: you might say they trail off, or flex. So perhaps the names indicate that their friendship is based on mutual reinforcement: each of them covers the other’s weak point. It’s also true that Luna’s surname wasn’t always a tidy four letters. She was originally Luna Brown, that surname being her father’s. When her mother reverted to her original name, Luna changed hers too. She was prepared to go that far to hide her past and her identity, but apparently no further.

Luna didn’t want people to know who she was but presumably didn’t feel that she had the right to take active steps to conceal her history. One fellow student, discovering her secret, ridiculed her half-hearted attempt to change her identity. “Luna”, after all, is not that common a name. Her mother’s change of name, being outside Luna’s control, was something she could benefit from with — at least in this respect — a clear conscience.

The novel has a double time-frame, with short chapters alternating between the earlier period (2002–2005) and the later (2019). In each period a woman is killed and Owen is suspected (by some of the other characters, if not necessarily by the police) of being the killer. In March 2004, a fellow-student of Luna’s and Owen’s named Scarlet is found dead at the bottom of a bluff. She had apparently gone “on a drunken late-night hike, wearing a party dress and Converse sneakers” (p. 355). She and Owen had been having sex a few months earlier but he wanted to end the relationship, such as it was, while Scarlet bombarded him with text messages, which he had been ignoring. Scarlet’s mother, to whom Scarlet had been complaining about Owen’s behaviour, knew immediately who must be responsible for her daughter’s death. The investigating detective questioned Owen without arresting him, though the uniformed police who brought him in for questioning made it look as if he had been arrested.

The detective and prosecutors concluded that Scarlet’s death was probably an accident. In any case, there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Owen or anybody else. There was no sign of a struggle at the point from which she had fallen, and only earth under her fingernails, no skin or hair. She did not seem to have been sexually assaulted: although her tights had been pulled down, this was explained by her need to pee. As against the hypothesis of accident there were unexplained details: a series of text messages between Owen’s phone and Scarlet’s which had been deleted from his phone but not from hers; the fact that she had been on the hiking trail at night so inadequately dressed; and an anonymous 911 call the following day, telling the emergency services where her body was to be found.

Owen’s non-arrest had a lasting effect on his life. With the exception of Luna and two other friends, the other students at Markham shunned him and some of them gave him a severe beating. He wasn’t able to stay at Markham for the rest of the semester and didn’t finish his degree there.

Before Scarlet died, before Owen was called into a police station for questioning, before he settled for Markham U, and before he met Luna, Owen had a shine to him. Everyone saw it. If you’d asked anyone who knew him when he was young, they’d tell you he was going to be somebody. It was assumed that he’d be a working artist, maybe a famous one. There was no denying his talent. And he was handsome and charismatic. (p. 249)

This implies that Owen’s deviation from his presumably destined path didn’t start with Scarlet’s death, or his interrogation, though these bumped him further off course. The rest all followed from his “settling” for Markham. If he hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have known Scarlet. Surprisingly, this passage implies that he would also have been better off if he hadn’t met Luna, though something in his life had already started to go wrong before he did.

The woman who was killed in 2019 was Owen’s wife, Irene. This time, there was no doubt that it was murder: she was shot while out running. Luna discovered her body. In 2019 Luna and Owen are still best friends and live near each other. Shortly before her murder, Irene had confided in Luna that she believed that Owen was having an affair. Luna immediately told Owen about Irene’s suspicion (as Irene must have assumed she’d do), and Owen confirmed to Luna that he had been sleeping with a much younger woman, one of his students. The investigation into Irene’s murder turned up the facts that Irene had been sleeping with Luna’s husband, Sam, for about a year — something that came as a complete surprise to Luna (and to Owen for that matter) — and, more bafflingly, that Irene had a photograph of a sleeping Owen taken nine years before what Owen insisted was their first meeting.

In fact, they had met in London, where Owen had gone to get away from the fallout from Scarlet’s death. Irene had just had her hair dyed blue and was calling herself “Phoebe from Sheffield” with an accent that was good enough to fool Owen, who in turn was pretending (less successfully, as “Phoebe” immediately placed his Boston accent) to be from Halifax, Nova Scotia. The next morning, Irene gave Owen her phone number and was hurt and disappointed when he never called. In fact, he did call and was told by the woman who answered, who must have been Irene’s mother, that he had a wrong number. He had, of course, asked for Phoebe. When they met again in 2014, Owen didn’t recognize Irene as the blue-haired Yorkshirewoman from nine years earlier and she never told him that they had already been to bed together.

Irene’s mother, though she owned the London apartment where Irene was living, was staying there only briefly on the eve of her latest wedding. The reader is left to deduce that Irene hadn’t been expecting anyone other than herself to answer the phone, so she had no reason to worry that Owen knew her by a false name.

On the face of it, The Accomplice appears to be much more a conventional crime/mystery novel than the two books by Lutz that I’ve written about previously. However, there are various little games, tricks and unexpected details, which undermine the naturalism of the storytelling. There are the symmetrical patterns: between Luna’s and Owen’s names, between the two time-frames, each revolving around a dead woman, and between the business with the text messages.

As I mentioned above, Scarlet had been subjecting Owen to a flood of text messages. Owen didn’t reply to any of them, feeling that to ignore them was the best way to convince Scarlet that he wasn’t interested. On the night that Scarlet died, Owen had been one of a group who were drinking in Luna’s room. He left his phone behind when he went back to his own room. Not knowing that Owen wasn’t answering Scarlet’s texts, Luna replied to one of them with “You have to stop, Scarlet. It’s over” (p. 173). After months of silence from Owen, this seemed to Scarlet to indicate a weakening of his resolution, so she sent several more messages, telling him that Luna had a shameful secret and he’d no longer be friends with her if he knew what it was. She wanted him to meet him at the bluff so she could tell him what it was. Luna deleted the whole exchange of texts from Owen’s phone.

The following year, Owen used Luna’s phone to break up her relationship with his own older brother Griff, a lawyer. She was cramming for her final exams and had left the phone with him in the kitchen to avoid distraction. Owen told himself, not very convincingly, that it was for the best that Griff and Luna should break up, that the relationship was unlikely to survive her finishing college anyway, and that being single would help her to focus on her exams.

The thing with Griff had been Luna’s most serious relationship before she married Sam, a surgeon. When Sam and Griff meet for the first time, in the aftermath of Irene’s murder, they’re both wary and a bit confused:

“She told me about you once,” said Sam.

“Good things?” Griff said.

Sam’s eyes squinted in confusion, then amusement. “You broke her fucking heart, man. No. Not that good.” (p. 229)

This obviously comes as news to Griff, who believed that Luna had broken up with him.

The friendship between Luna and Owen is strong and remarkably persistent — I’m tempted to call it “indestructible” — but that’s not to say that it’s perfect or that it’s always healthy for both of them. It’s at its weakest when Luna finds out that it was Owen who broke up her relationship with his brother. At first I found this the most puzzling element of the plot. Why did Owen behave like that? There has always been a certain amount of intersibling tension between the brothers. Griff, the lawyer, is a Type-A personality and their parents’ clear favourite. (One of the detectives calls such people “astronauts”, and agrees that Griff is one.) That changes when Griff falls out with their mother over Owen’s suspicion, when their father dies of cancer more quickly than expected, that her mother “eased the passing” by overdosing him with opioids. Owen thinks this is no big deal but Griff is appalled and confronts their mother, who is outraged and will have nothing further to do with her elder son.

There’s also the fact that, not long before Owen sent the crucial text from Luna’s phone, he had discovered that Griff suspected him of having killed Scarlet after all. This suspicion is based on the fact that Owen knew how Scarlet had been dressed, which he shouldn’t have done if he hadn’t been present when she died. He had told the detective that he hadn’t seen her for months. So, while Owen maintains that he thought he was doing Luna a favour in sending the breakup text, it seems likely that resentment or antipathy towards his brother had more to do with it. When Luna asks him if he feels guilty, he replies “Not that guilty” (p. 404).

Luna, on the other hand, has consistently felt irredeemably guilty since she was eleven years old. That’s why she chooses a third-rate college, it’s probably why she spends so much time lounging around smoking weed, why she gets involved with men (including her eventual husband, Sam) whom Owen finds unimpressive; and why she takes a job she’s completely unsuited for, as a medical representative. In the end, when Irene’s killer is at last identified her reaction puzzles the detectives who have come to give her the news.

“Okay,” Luna said, the tears falling freely.

The feeling was so familiar. Another death she’d have to carry around like dead weight. (p. 412)

That’s when I realized that she has probably also been feeling guilty about Scarlet, who wouldn’t have been on that bluff at dead of night if she hadn’t received a text that she believed came from Owen.

Luna’s guilty feelings are probably the reason that this novel appeals to me so much. I have for years been preoccupied with how a character manages to live under the weight of potentially crushing guilt. I’m not necessarily talking about Dostoyevsky but rather with characters like Mary in Michael Winterbottom’s film Genova (2008) or Ruby in Kate Atkinson’s first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995). Ruby learns that she has been repressing the memory of her twin sister, of whose death she may have been the cause.

Luna and Owen both end up in careers or jobs that could be viewed as falling short of what they probably expected. Owen teaches art in a school that’s even less prestigious than Markham University, while Luna is unemployed, having turned out not to be very good at selling medicines. Each is effectively being subsidized by his or her spouse: as a surgeon, Sam has a healthy income, while Irene inherited most of her mother’s wealth (which will now pass to Owen). Luna is about to divorce Sam, but there’s a distinct possibility that she might end up with Griff again. In much crime fiction, characters like these would at least be shady, and probably villains. Not here, though.

Edition: Titan Books paperback, 2022; emphasis original.

Renunciation and inundation: George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:14:15 +0100

Sorry, I’m two days late with this post. I think I have to recognize that, when reading George Eliot or writing about her, I should always leave myself more time than I believe I need.

I had intended to write about The Mill on the Floss (1860) at the end of August last year but didn’t manage to get the post written. My experience with reading George Eliot hasn’t been all that happy. Apart from Silas Marner, which I studied for the Irish Inter Cert in the early 1970s, I hadn’t finished any work of fiction by her till about a year ago. Middlemarch was the only text on my English degree course that I didn’t read all the way through. I hadn’t allowed enough time to read it all before the seminar and then I never went back to it — till last year.

Having heard the stormy climax of a radio dramatization of The Mill on the Floss during my teens, I thought I’d like to read the novel but never (until early 2025) got further into it than the first few chapters. I reread it for the August post that never happened, and I’ve just completed a second rereading, a necessary preliminary to the present post. As with Middlemarch, I found that each reading took longer than I had allowed for. So I seem to have a particular problem reading Eliot. I don’t think it’s just me.

As far as I can see, in both this book and Middlemarch, Eliot brings together an unusually balanced mix of individual psychology and socioeconomic history. For the reader, it’s hard to keep both elements equally in view at any point in the story, so we tend to perceive the balance as being less stable than it really is. In one chapter, we’re sympathizing with Maggie’s frustration and sense of not belonging; in another, we attempt to figure out the social dynamics of the market town in which members of her family have significant economic roles.

The novel features several contrasting pairs of characters. First, of course, we have Maggie and her elder brother Tom. She is dark — both her hair and her eyes are described as “black”. As a child she’s messy and perhaps accident-prone. She forgets to feed her brother’s rabbits while he’s away at school. Her mother despairs of her straight hair, which she can’t get to curl like a normal girl’s. Her father says that she physically resembles his sister Gritty (Mrs Moss). Maggie reads for hours on end and understands much more of what she reads than would normally be expected of a nine-year-old girl.

Her brother Tom is just the opposite: fair-haired, neat and disciplined, not at all a reader or a scholar and happiest at outdoor activities, such as fishing. His mother thinks he much more closely resembles her side of the family, the Dodsons.

The Tulliver parents are another contrasting pair: Mr Tulliver, is the owner of Dorlcote mill on the river Floss. He congratulates himself on having chosen a pretty wife who is not his intellectual equal, but though he has strong opinions on some matters he is not as far her intellectual superior as he imagines.

Mr Tulliver was, on the whole, a man of safe, traditional opinions; but on one or two points he had trusted to his unassisted intellect and had arrived at several questionable conclusions: among the rest, that rats, weevils, and lawyers were created by Old Harry. Unhappily he had no one to tell him that this was rampant Manichaeism, else he might have seen his error. (p. 11)

Mrs Tulliver has a talent for taking action which tends to undermine her own objectives and intentions. She sends one of her sisters, Mrs Pullet, to try to dissuade another, Mrs Glegg, from calling in a loan she made long before to Mr Tulliver (who had in turn lent money to Mr Moss, the husband of his sister). In fact, Mrs Glegg had already decided to leave her money where it was, as Mr Tulliver was regularly paying her interest at a good rate. But the idea of vicariously pleading with his sister-in-law strengthened Tulliver’s resolve to pay off the loan with money borrowed from outside the family. Again, Mrs Tulliver visited the lawyer Wakem to petition him not to bid for the mill when it was put up for sale — and thereby put an idea in his head that he hadn’t already considered.

Mr Tulliver stands somewhat apart from the other husbands of the Dodson sisters. He is the one who produces a commodity, who makes a useful physical product for sale. That’s not to say that he is using advanced industrial technology, although the story is set at a time when the industrial revolution was transforming manufacturing. But water-driven mills like Dorlcote were nothing new: they had been in use for centuries. For all its lack of innovation, though, the mill seemed to be a sound business. When Mr Tulliver was ruined financially, it wasn’t because either the supply or grain or the demand for flour failed, nor because the level of the Floss fell so far it could no longer power the mill, but because he lost a lawsuit that he should never have pursued.

After Tulliver’s death, when his son Tom and brother-in-law Deane are discussing what is to happen to the mill, they mention the possiblity of converting it to run on steam. In the meantime it is owned by the lawyer Wakem, who has bought it on a (rather cruel) whim and treats it as a hobby, showing no interest in developing the property.

Deane himself appears to be the most materially successful and is certainly the most ambitious of the husbands. He’s a partner in Guest & Co, a business which combines production (“oil-mill”, p. 247) and trading elements, including international trade. When Tom is on the point of expressing a desire to go back and run the mill that had belonged to his father, Deane tells him:

“… Somebody has said it’s a fine thing to make two ears of corn grow where only one grew before; but, sir, it’s a fine thing too to further the exchange of commodities and bring the grains of corn to the mouths that are hungry. And that’s our line of business, and I consider it as honourable a position as a man can hold to be connected with it.” (p. 405)

There’s not much point in increasing food production, unless it’s also possible to get the additional food to the people who want to consume it.

Of the other husbands, Glegg is a lender of money on “excellent mortgages” (p. 247), and Pullet is a gentleman farmer. So, Pullet lives (very well) off the rent paid by the active farmers who are tenants of his land. Glegg has effectively retired to his garden, but the interest on his loans continues to flow in, supporting him comfortably. Mrs Glegg, unusually for the time, manages her own assets — partly, it would seem, to save her husband the trouble. During one of their frequent quarrels, her husband reminds her that she is “… allowed to keep her own money the same as if it was settled on her” (p. 125). Like him, she lends her money out at interest and does well out of it.

These are among the most comfortable people in the community, which (as we see) is hardly a hive of enterprise.

When Mr Tulliver is ruined, Maggie and Tom each, in a different way, submits to a form of renunciation or self-denial. Tom persuades his uncle Deane to give him a low level job in the company, and studies bookkeeping at night. He saves all he can from his wages to contribute to the eventual discharge of his father’s debts. He dedicates himself to his work and makes himself valuable to his employers, to the point where, less than seven years after he is offered a share in the company. He has developed a deep furrow in his brow (which, however, suits his looks) and appears much older than he is (which, his uncle Deane tells him, is an advantage in business, at least while he’s young). After his father’s death, Tom lives in a room which he rents from his old friend Bob Jakin and his wife.

When Maggie pays a rare visit to Tom’s lodgings, she learns from Bob that Tom is leading a lonely life, with little to occupy him except work. He seems to be in love with their cousin, Lucy Deane, to whom he gave a spaniel pup as a present. But while Lucy is fond of the pup, she has a tacit understanding (falling just a little bit short of an engagement) with Stephen Guest, son of the founder of Guest & Co.

Tom would say that the straitened path he has followed was necessary, a requirement of his duty to provide for his mother and extricate his father from debt. He does not see an equivalent necessity for Maggie’s self-denial. Nor does her friend, and Tom’s former fellow student, Philip Wakem. When she is 15, Maggie is given a bundle of books by Bob Jakin, among which she finds a copy of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Years earlier, her father had been shocked to find that the nine-year-old had read (and absorbed much of) Defoe’s History of the Devil. It’s arguable that the devotional work of à Kempis had the potential to do her more harm.

In that old book she reads:

“Know that the love of thyself doth hurt thee more than anything in the world … If thou seekest this or that, and wouldst be here or there to enjoy thy own will and pleasure, thou shalt never be quiet nor free from care: for in everything somewhat will be wanting, and in every place there will be some that will cross thee […] everywhere of necessity thou must have patience, if thou wilt have inward peace and enjoy an everlasting crown … If thou desire[st] to mount unto this height, thou must set out courageously, and lay the axe to the root, that thou mayest pluck up and destroy that hidden inordinate inclination to thyself, and unto all private and earthly good …” (pp. 293–4)

This seems to the fifteen-year-old Maggie to be the solution she has been looking for. It has an appeal similar way to those of Stoicism and Buddhism: one should extinguish desires which (whether in their fulfillment or their frustration) are liable to give rise to psychic agitation, and so achieve serenity. Maggie is delighted to find that she is capable of such renunciation, but she hasn’t yet discovered that there are some desires that are much more difficult to suppress than others. She won’t learn that till she meets Stephen Guest, her cousin Lucy’s almost-fiancé.

Perhaps the main thing that Maggie wants to renounce is her friendship with Philip Wakem. Philip does his best to persuade Maggie that the serenity she hopes to achieve by her practice of self-denial is illusory. He tells her:

“… you are shutting yourself up in a narrow, self-delusive fanaticism, which is only a way of escaping pain by starving into dullness all the highest powers of your nature. Joy and peace are not resignation; resignation is the willing endurance of a pain that is not allayed, and you don’t expect to be allayed. Stupefaction is not resignation; and it is stupefaction to remain in ignorance, to shut up all the avenues by which the life of your fellow men might become known to you. I am not resigned; I am not sure that life is long enough to learn that lesson. You are not resigned; you are only trying to stupefy yourself.” (pp. 334–5)

This attempt at persuasion is self-serving on Philip’s part: he is in love with Maggie and is trying to talk her out of her determination to stop seeing him. In this he is partly successful — and the fact that his statement is self-serving doesn’t mean that it’s utterly wrong. A year later, they are still meeting secretly, though Maggie feels that it is wrong of them to do so.

“… You know we couldn’t even be friends if our friendship were discovered. I have never felt that I was right in giving way about seeing you, though it has been so precious to me in some ways; and now the fear comes upon me stronly again that it will lead to evil.” (p. 342)

Maggie has told Philip that she loves him too but it becomes clear (to her and to the reader) that the love she feels for him is not the equivalent counterpart of his for her. Her feeling for him is effectively a kind of fraternal love: an extension of, and in part a substitution for, the love she feels for Tom:

“What a dear, good brother you would have been, Philip,” said Maggie, smiling through the haze of tears. “I think you would have made as much fuss about me and been as pleased for me to love me as would have satisfied even me. You would have loved me well enough to bear with me and forgive me everything. That was what I always longed that Tom should do. I was never satisfied with a little of anything. That is why it is better for me to do without earthly happiness altogether […]” (p. 335)

When Tom tells her that if she marries Philip that will mean an irrevocable breach between the siblings, she relinquishes her friend-lover. She feels pain for Philip and believes that Tom is punishing their secrecy too harshly.

And yet, how was it that she was now and then conscious of a certain dim background of relief in the forced separation from Philip? Surely it was only because the sense of a deliverance from concealment was welcome at any cost. (p. 356)

Is Tom Tulliver a hero or a villain? To me it seems obvious that he is neither, though his character includes elements of both. Rather, he is a young man, still in his early 20s at the end of the tale, who has found himself in his mid teens obliged (as he sees it) to support his parents and sibling, a role in which his unsuitable education will be no help at all. As to how he discharges this responsibility, he doesn’t have a choice: it has to be done in the stifling and largely stagnant milieu that I’ve described above.

Tom, like everyone of us, was imprisoned within the limits of his own nature, and his education had simply glided over him, leaving a slight deposit of polish; if you are inclined to be severe on his severity, remember that the responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision. (p. 512)

It’s true that Tom treats his sister monstrously. If Maggie had survived, though, it might have turned out that he had been doing her a kindness, if an implacably cruel one. By pushing her away, he might have been making it possible for her to separate herself from her mother and the aunts and uncles as well as from himself, allowing her to develop an independent, self-sufficient personality. Her death, of course, precluded that possibility.

There’s more I could say about The Mill on the Floss but I’m conscious that this post is already very late. I wanted to take a brief look at Eliot’s handling of Bob’s “patter” as he sells various materials to a professedly reluctant Mrs Glegg. The other aspect I’d particularly like to have dealt with is the advice given by Dr Kenn to Maggie after her reputation has been ruined in the restricted world of St Ogg’s.

I’ll be reading Middlemarch for the second time and writing about it at some point, maybe not all that soon. When that happens, I’ll probably have more to say about The Mill on the Floss, as I think the two novels have something in common in their combination of inndividual psychology and the study of a society.

Edition: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994; emphasis original, ellipses original (to Eliot’s text) except where indicated by square brackets.

Promises almost kept: Tana French, The Searcher; The Hunter

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 23:39:00 +0100

I’ve mentioned before Tana French’s unusual approach to the series of crime novels. Each of her first six books centres on a different member of the fictional Dublin Murder Squad: she didn’t think she could credibly put the same central character through the wringer every two or three years. Her seventh, The Wych Elm, was a standalone novel. The two most recent, The Searcher (2020) and The Hunter (2023) look like the first two-thirds of a new trilogy.

The Searcher features Cal Hooper, a retired American who has bought a house to fix up, on ten acres of land in the west of Ireland. Surprisingly for someone in that situation, Hooper doesn’t have Irish ancestry: he has bought the house because it’s somewhere he could afford, in a setting that seems both peaceful and congenial. He spent 25 years in the Chicago Police Department, most recently as a detective.

He is asked for help by a local 13-year-old, Trey, whose older brother, Brendan, suddenly disappeared six months earlier. Trey has a buzz-cut hairstyle and wears ill fitting jeans and hoodies, so it isn’t till two-thirds of the way through the book that Hooper cottons on that she’s a girl, not a boy. It’s a third-person narrative but told from Hooper’s close point of view, so that Trey is referred to with masculine pronouns up to the point where Hooper is told of his mistake; and the vocabulary is his: “cookies” rather than “biscuits”, “mama” instead of “mammy” etc, except where direct speech is being reported.

Hooper (reluctantly, of course) agrees to try to find out what happened to Brendan and to tell Trey what he discovers. He tells her that there are things he’d have been able to do as a detective in Chicago that won’t be open to him as a retired foreigner in Ireland. He can’t check Brendan’s phone records or find out whether (and, if so, where) his bank card has been used. He’ll have to go around to Brendan’s friends and associates and speak to them himself.

He learns that Brendan (who had apparently seen more Breaking Bad than was healthy, but presumably hadn’t watched right to the end) had been setting up a methamphetamine “lab” in a remote deserted farmhouse up in the mountains. He intended to supply his product to the Dublin gang who control the drug trade in the area. The gang provided him with some equipment and raw material but a group of local farmers found out what he was up to and stole the contents of his “lab”, leaving him in debt to the gang, so that he had to borrow money to restock. Hooper assumes that the drug gang is responsible for Brendan’s disappearance.

In the meantime, the locals have noticed that Hooper is asking questions about things best left hidden. He’s invited to the pub, where he’s introduced to a strong but smooth-tasting poteen. The next day, less hungover than he’d have expected, he’s in no doubt that he’s been given a warning — riddling and cryptic but very serious: he has been asking too many questions. Not willing to renege on his promise to Trey, Hooper continues his enquiries, but with more circumspection.

The warning about asking too many questions and the information about Trey’s femininity were both delivered to Hooper by his neighbour, Mart Lavin. Mart is a 60-year-old bachelor sheep-farmer, who lives alone following the deaths of his mother and brother. He is partly self-educated, having read deeply in such subjects as geology and the Ottoman Empire (The Hunter, p. 84). He has an apparently jocular relationship with Hooper, whom he enjoys teasing. He devours Mikado biscuirs, which Hooper buys for him in the nearby town: the local shopkeeper, Noreen, refuses to stock them for him because (so Mart says at any rate) of a dispute between their families in previous generations. Noreen wants to set Hooper up with her widowed sister, Lena; this is one of the things that Mart teases Hooper about. It’s clear that neither Noreen nor Lena likes Mart.

Trey and Hooper both sustain painful beatings, intended to deter them from investigating further. As well as being painful, the beatings are calculated to look serious, without causing long-term injury. Trey suffers a couple of cracked ribs, a black eye and an injury to her hand that looks at first as if it might include some broken bones. This beating is administered by her mother, who has been threatened that, if she doesn’t carry it out, “they” will. The injury to her hand was caused by the heavy buckle of a belt which her mother used. Hooper is set upon by three young men who throw a covering over his head and lay into him with hurley sticks, breaking his nose, fracturing his collarbone and injuring his knee, making it difficult for him to walk for a few days. Like Trey’s ribs, his fractured collarbone will heal without needing to be set.

(What follows will be even more spoilerish than usual because I can’t say what I’d like to about the second book without describing how the plot of the first is resolved.)

Thinking that the drug gang is behind the beatings, Hooper tries unsuccessfully to contact them to negotiate an understanding of some sort. He accidentally discovers that the beatings were ordered by his good-humoured friend and neighbour, Mart, who is also behind Brendan’s disappearance. Hooper was already getting a bit suspicious of “Mart’s quirky-yokel shtick” (The Searcher, p. 320), but is blindsided by the revelation that Mart is the person he wanted to kill when he saw what had been done to Trey.

“Well,” Cal says, after a long while. “Don’t I feel like the idiot.” (p. 350)

Mart tells Hooper that Brendan’s death was “an accident”. He and some of the local farmers had confronted Trey’s brother in the abandoned house that he had been going to use as a meth lab.

“We were intending to explain the situation to him, was all,” Mart says. He nods at Cal’s beat-up face. “You know the way yourself, sure. Just a bitta clarification. Only this lad didn’t want anything clarified …” (The Searcher, p. 354)

In other words, they had been going to administer another one of their trade-mark beatings: painful and serious-looking but not severe enough to require a trip to the hospital. Unfortunately Brendan fought back and ended up banging his head against a propane tank. So his “accidental” death was at least manslaughter and might be considered murder, since an intention to cause serious injury is enough to ground a murder conviction. Mart and his crew buried him in the bog on the other side of the mountain.

Hooper reaches agreement with Mart: he will tell Trey what happened to her brother, stressing the “accident” story and without naming names, on condition that she promises not to take any further action about it. If Mart will lead him to the grave, he will recover Brendan’s watch, to prove to her the truth of his story. He will then also be able to assure her that he has seen the body for himself.

The upshot is that Hooper finds himself living next door to a man who ordered not only his own beating but that of a 13-year-old girl, and who forced the girl’s mother to carry it out. Finding himself tempted to make a joke about Mart’s headgear, “he remembers they’re no longer on those terms. It catches him with a twist of loneliness. He liked Mart” (The Searcher, p. 374).

The events of The Hunter take place two years later. Hooper is now in a relationship with Lena. He has taught Trey some carpentry and she and he make some money by making and repairing furniture. Trey comes to work at his house most days and usually has her lunch there. Again, it’s a third-person narrative but now for much of the time the close point of view is Trey’s (though we still visit Hooper’s, particularly in episodes where Trey isn’t present). Trey and Hooper both have dogs who came from the litter of one of Lena’s. The stability of this idyll is threatened when Trey’s father, Johnny Reddy, comes back unexpectedly after four years in London. Johnny is accompanied by an Englishman, and is claiming that there is gold to be found at the base of the mountains around their townland.

Johnny leads the local farmers to believe that he’s running a scam on the Englishman, who is calling himself Cillian Rushborough. In fact, Rushborough is a dangerous criminal to whom Johnny owes a lot of money that he can’t pay, and the two of them are planning to scam Johnny’s neighbours. Hooper worries that this will make Trey a pariah in the townland, particularly as she seems to be helping her father. The problem of what to do about Johnny leads to an uneasy rapprochement between Hooper and Mart.

Another thing he doesn’t like is the sense of alliance with Mart that’s somehow been thrust on him. He had the boundary between the two of them carefully and clearly mapped out, and it held firm for two years, although Mart sometimes poked at it just out of devilment. (The Hunter, 176)

Then, Rushborough is murdered and his body left on the road near the Reddy house. Trey, accompanied by her dog, Banjo, is the first person to find it.

Trey gives the police an accurate account of her finding the body, but prefaces it with made-up details tending to throw suspicion on men from the townland. Hooper can see what she’s doing, but doesn’t feel he can intervene.

She gave Cal her word never to do anything about Brendan but all this is just distant enough from Brendan that she can convince herself it doesn’t count. She saw clearly that she would never get a chance like this again, so she took it. (The Hunter, p. 263)

Hooper is both worried and appalled by Trey’s embroidery of her statement to the detective investigating Rushborough’s murder but he can’t see what he can do about it. He doesn’t seem to recognize that he hasn’t quite kept his promise to her either, first telling her that Brendan had been scared off, then relaying Mart’s account of an accidental killing, though by now he is well aware of how Mart operates.

The detective, Nealon, has not of course made it known where his information is coming from but Mart realizes that it must be from Trey, and so takes the highly uncharacteristic step of calling to see Lena who, as I’ve already mentioned, does not get on with him.

Lena, who has been called cold plenty of times and acknowledges some truth in that, recognises it when she sees it: under all the chat and the mischief, which are real enough, Mart is cold as stone. (The Hunter, pp. 287–8)

Unlike her sister, Lena has always held herself aloof from the townland’s messy business. As a young woman she had been about to get away, to study veterinary science in Scotland, but she equally wanted to marry Sean Dunne, who was going to inherit the family farm and wasn’t prepared to leave Ardnakelty on any conditions. After Sean died, Lena sold most of the land, to the chagrin of his siblings. She stayed on in the townland but continued not to get involved. When Trey asked her if she knew who was responsible for the attack on Brendan, Lena said she could guess, but insisted that she wasn’t going to. (Lena and Trey’s mother, Sheila, were childhood friends and Trey has been welcome to stay in Lena’s house when she needed to take refuge somewhere other than at home, such as after Johnny’s return.)

Recognizing that the trouble that Trey has been stirring up for the local men will reflect badly on the American, who is regarded as the teenager’s de facto parent, Lena has unilaterally announced that she and Hooper are engaged to be married. She has often said that she has no intention of ever marrying again and that remains the case, but she is hoping that being “spoken for” by a local woman will prevent Hooper’s being seen as a blow-in or interloper. Mart tells her that her protection won’t be enough. If Trey won’t withdraw the part of her statement that implicates local men, various locals will drop hints and remarks that will leave Cal Hooper looking like the obvious suspect in Rushborough’s killing. If Detective Nealon can’t make a case against Hooper, he’ll go after the one person who was unquestionably, admittedly on the mountain road that morning. In that case, Hooper can be expected to confess to save Trey. Lena knows that better than anybody.

The differences between Cal’s point of view and Trey’s are interesting. Cal tends to notice physical details, including the scenery, as here:

The sky is clear and the moon is big enough to keep him on the road with no need for his flashlight, although once or twice when the tree shadows crowd in he gets addled and feels one foot sink into the deep grass of the verge. He keeps an eye out for whatever crossed in front of the car, but it’s either gone or turned cautious. The mountains on the horizon look like someone took a pocket knife and sliced neat curves out of the star-thick sky, leaving empty blackness. (The Searcher, p. 42)

Contrast that with Trey’s perceptions:

Trey takes it for granted that there are unseen things on the mountain. The assumption has been with her from as far back as she can remember, so the edge of fear that comes with it is a stable, accepted presence …

Trey has seen none of them, but when she is on the mountain at night, she feels them there. The sensation has changed in the last year or two. When she was younger she felt herself glanced over and dismissed, too slight to be worth any time or focus, just another small animal going about its business. Now her mind is a denser, more intricate thing. She feels herself being noted. (The Hunter, p. 147)

The story reaches its climax with a roaring fire on the drought-parched mountain. Trey has set light to the shed behind their house, believing that it contains evidence which, unless it is destroyed, would identify Rushborough’s killer, an eventuality she’d rather avoid. The fire rapidly spreads to the house and then to the trees and gorse around.

Trey runs. As she jumps for the top of the wall, something sounds in the recesses between the stones, a hollow scrape like bone along rock. Trey, startled off balance, misses her footing. She comes down hard and feels her foot bend inwards underneath her. When she tries to stand up, her ankle won’t take her weight. (The Hunter, p. 385)

It may be that the mountain’s “things” may no longer be content merely to note Trey’s existence, still less to glance over her.

I see that a new novel by Tana French is due for publication this year. The title, The Keeper, suggests that it’s a third book in this series. I’ll be quite surprised if it isn’t largely (or at least partly) told from Lena’s point of view, but time will tell.

Editions: The Searcher, Penguin paperback, 2021;
The Hunter, Penguin paperback, 2025, ellipsis added.

John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 22:26:12 +0100

John Carey, Emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, died at the age of 91 on 11 December. He’d been on my mind because few days before I had been revisiting his lecture “Reversals transposed: An aspect of Marvell’s imagination” which he delivered in 1978 on the tercentenary of Andrew Marvell’s death. That lecture, I was suggesting, is where any attempt to appreciate Marvell’s poetry should start. John Creaser, who was the first (of four, eventually) supervisor of my thesis, and himself a former student of Carey’s, said that it “must be the most acute essay on the poet since T. S. Eliot’s classic of 1921 — an agile and lucid essay matching the poet’s ingenuities” (Creaser 1999, 147). The lecture begins with the assertion that it’s impossible to write about Marvell’s poetry “without feeling that you have flattened or coarsened it” (Carey 1978, 136).

When I first read the Marvell lecture in the mid 90s, it came as a pleasant surprise to me because I had approached it with suspicion, having read Carey’s book on John Donne a few years earlier and been shocked and repelled by it. I wasn’t the only one. In a review of the first edition (1980) in the New York Review of Books, “There Is No Penance Due to Innocence” (1981), William Empson had attacked the book and its author intemperately. Empson’s review opens:

This long, hammering book amounts to saying that no one need bother any more about Donne, because the admiration for his love poems was based on a delusion. The love poems are brief but very various and quite large in number, and they are much his best work; for most readers, they are the only memorable part of it.

I didn’t reread the Donne book until this week. I rediscovered my copy some months ago, having thought it had been lost years earlier, and intended to read it alongside Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite (of which I still haven’t bought a copy). But, nudged by the announcement of Carey’s death, I thought the time had finally come for me to take another look at what he had to say about Donne. I found that my first impressions had been wrong and unfair — and so had Empson’s review.

Donne was brought up as a Catholic, which put him under serious legal disabilities in Elizabethan England, and even constituted a threat to his life: his brother Henry died of plague in Newgate while waiting trial for harbouring a Catholic priest. But Donne himself converted to the Church of England, somewhat reluctantly took holy orders under pressure from King James himself, and eventually became Dean of St Paul’s cathedral, where among other things, he preached against Catholicism. Carey tells us that guilt at his apostasy coloured Donne’s writing throughout his life. The first two chapters of the book are titled “Apostasy” and “The Art of Apostasy”.

The other factor that shaped Donne’s writing, according to Carey, was his ambition. After university and Lincoln’s Inn, Donne became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, who would later become Lord Ellesmere and Master of the Rolls. His marriage to Ann More, daughter of a wealthy landowner, led to his dismissal from Egerton’s service and his career stalled for several years.

I came away from Carey’s book with the distinct impression that Donne had been an unprincipled (though initially none too successful) careerist, changeable and uncommitted in his beliefs, a cynic, and that Carey had viewed the subject of his book with contempt rather than admiration. I hadn’t been reading it attentively enough. Neither had Empson. As I mentioned above, Empson believed that Carey had written off Donne’s love poetry which, for Empson, was “much his best work” and “for most readers … the only memorable part of it”. In fact, Carey is not dismissive of the love poetry, but emphasizes the continuity — of language, ideas and preoccupations, for a start — between early and late Donne. In his Introduction, Carey writes:

This study will try to show … that Donne’s opinions on such furiously controverted issues as original sin, election, resurrection and the state of the soul after death, were generated by recognizably the same imagination as the poems about love and women. They are not dull side-tracks but members of an animated whole in which every part illuminates and is illuminated by every other. (p. xiv)

But he roused Empson’s anger (to the point where the reviewer referred to him as “panting, bug-eyed Carey”) by his admittedly questionable reading of Elegy XIX, “To his Mistris Going to Bed”. Much of the first part of Empson’s review is taken up by Empson’s outraged reaction to this particular reading.

Carey quotes the poem (48 lines) it its entirety. A male speaker tells a woman to take off all her expensive, luxurious clothes, until she arrives at “Full nakedness” (l. 33). In the second-last line he reveals, to the reader if not to his addressee, “To teach thee, I am naked first”. It’s not clear whether he has been naked all along or has undressed at high speed. Carey characterizes the speaker as “despotic” and the woman as his “submissive” victim (p. 91), presenting the events described in the poem as a cruel exercise of power. The speaker is in the grip of an “urge to dominate” (p. 92: the discussion of the poem is in the chapter titled “The Art of Ambition”). Carey suggests that the speaker is more interested in the woman’s fine clothes and possessions (including a chiming watch) than in her person, or her physical attributes:

The salivating survey of female physique which was de rigueur in most Elizabethan pornography (see, for instance Thomas Nashe’s enjoyable “The Choice of Valentines”) has vanished. By comparison, Donne is rarefied and abstracted. He hardly seems to see the woman, though his appraising eye dwells on the clothes she takes off. (p. 93)

In the next paragraph, indeed the next sentence, Carey refers to “This lack of purely visual contact”, a comment about which I’ll have more to say below. In the meantime, Empson accepts Carey’s description of the poem as “pornographic” but assures us that

… it is not sadistic — the girl has chosen to come to him; the speaker insists upon that at the end, and it is part of the story all along.

Empson places great stress on the third-last line of the poem which exists in three variants, one of which is evidently a corrupt running together of the other two. Carey has printed “Here is no penance, much less innocence”, while Empson uses the other as the title of his review: “There is no penance due to innocence”. According to Empson, Carey’s preferred variant if accepted, would indeed make the speaker a vile brute.

On Carey's view, the man seduces an innocent girl by arguments purporting to prove that yielding will not be sinful, and then triumphs over her, at the very moment of penetration, by telling her she will go to hell for it. This is sadistic pornography, a very evil thing which Carey is right to be indignant about, but it has emerged from his own mind.

I find both variants difficult to interpret. In his notes to the Wordsworth edition of Donne’s poems, Roy Booth (another of the supervisors of my thesis) says that the sense is that “the Lady, in this blameless love-making, does not need white linen, as worn by (say) adulterers sentenced by a Church court to acts of public penance”. With this clarification, we can see that Carey’s version of the line is much more innocuous than Empson thinks. If we read it in the context of the previous line, the obscurity disappears.

… cast all, yea this white linnen hence.
Here is no pennance, much lesse innocence. (ll. 45–6)

In other words, there is no reason for her to wear a white shift because she is neither an adulteress doing penance, nor a virgin. “Innocence” in this context is taken as meaning virginity, not (as Empson has read it) as freedom from sin, so that the denial of her innocence merely implies that she is not a virgin, not that she is in danger of being condemned to eternal punishment. (Her accoutrements lead Empson to speculate that she is married, perhaps to a lord.)

Carey’s and Empson’s mutual incomprehension is remarkable. As we have seen, Empson opens his review with the claim that Carey dismisses Donne’s love poetry and thereby effectively implies that Donne’s poetry is not worth paying attention to. This is directly contradicted by what Carey says plainly in his Introduction, which Empson must have read. Carey, on the other hand, writes about Empson that

He believed all his life that John Donne was interested in space travel, and in the theological problems of extra-terrestrial life forms … (quoted by John Haffenden in Empson, 1993, 1)

The fact that Empson had written an essay titled “Donne the Space Man” might lead the unwary reader to take this at face value, though Carey was presumably joking. In fact, Empson’s argument was that Donne understood that the discovery that there were many more planets than had previously been known, some of them presumably habitable, and perhaps inhabited, called into question the uniqueness of Jesus’s atonement for the sins of humankind and the value of the Bible as the revelation of the truth to God’s creation. It also raised the possibility of escape (as to America) from the oppressive jurisdiction of a single church. (Of course, this is all rendered hypothetical by the fact that no other inhabited planet has been discovered in the 400 years since Donne lived.)

If Carey had addressed Empson’s opinions about Donne directly, he would presumably have answered that, while Donne may have entertained doubts about Jesus’s uniqueness, or ideas about the implications of life on other planets from time to time, they did not consistently form part of his thought. He shows that Donne went back and forth between an acceptance of Copernican astronomy and older ideas, so that it is not possible, for example, to date a poem based on heliocentric assumptions as necessarily being later than one that asserts geocentric notions. Donne didn’t change his mind about astronomy once and for all:

But we should not imagine that this represents Donne’s consistent attitude, or that he had one. The fact is, he did not care whether the new theories were true or not, so long as they supplied material for his speculation. He wanted to feel free to entertain or dismiss them and to play them off against his existing patterns of thought, as mood or occasion prompted. They were grist to his mill, whether he denounced them or drew on them for images. (p. 235)

Donne expresssed similarly inconsistent beliefs about what happens to the soul after death. He argued strongly against the notion that the soul could have any existence apart from the body, implying it could not go independently to heaven or hell after the death of the body, but both would be resurrected together on the last day. This is a version of the mortalist “heresy”, which Milton also held. According to Carey:

At one stage in his religious development Donne certainly believed that the soul died, or slept, with the body, and remained with it in the grave until the Last Judgment. Even though he seems to have relinquished this belief, in the interests of orthodoxy, before he took orders, he continued to assert in his sermons, as he had in his Paradoxes, that the soul depended on the body and could not properly exist without it. (p. 148)

I’ve suggested before that “heresy” is a bit strong: the belief was just mildly heterodox, was compatible with the doctrine of the resurrection of the body and at least avoided the need to explain how a disembodied soul could suffer bodily torments in hell while waiting for the final judgment. But, as Carey points out, Donne’s “contemporaries tended to brand as atheistic a whole host of political and religious ideas from communism to doubts about the soul’s immortality” (p. 240). So perhaps it is not surprising to find Donne later preaching the opposite view: that the soul does indeed continue to exist after the body has died, and is rewarded in heaven or punished in hell in the period between the body’s death and the last day.

In the final chapter of Carey’s book, where he shows the conclusions to be drawn from what has gone before, he says:

Donne liked imagining opposites which combined, while remaining opposites. He cultivated conjunction and disjunction equally and at the same time. (p. 248)

Towards the end of the chapter, he describes the poet’s “habits of mind” as being “simultaneously dualistic and synthesizing” (p. 264). This makes me wonder whether, instead of regarding Donne as vacillating or alternating between mutually contradictory ideas — betweem Copernican and Ptolemaic conceptions of the cosmos, or mortalist and orthodox Christian beliefs about the (im)mortality of the soul — we should think of him as attempting to hold incompatible views together simultaneously. Is he attempting to synthesize these antithetical elements, to make of them an admittedly self-contradictory world-view, and thereby to achieve a completeness that is not available otherwise? Something like that is happening in the poems where he asserts that the lovers’ separation is at the same time their unity:

Our two soules therefore, which are one,
Though I must goe, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate. (“A Valediction: forbidding mourning”, ll. 21–4)

Here the enjambment (“endure not yet | A breach”) immediately followed by the caesura before “but an expansion”, seem at once to contradict and to underline what the words assert. The word “expansion” is itself stretched to four syllables, imitating the precious substance in the next line, beaten out almost to the point of insubstantiality. Then “thinnesse” is slightly drawn out by the need to distinguish between the “n” that ends its first syllable and that which begins the second.

I mentioned above that Carey refers to a “lack of purely visual contact” in “To his Mistris Going to Bed”. What might be called the visual poverty of Donne’s poetry comes up again in Chapter 5, “Bodies”. Rupert Brooke is quoted as complaining that Donne “never visualizes, or suggests that he has any pleasure in looking at things … His poems might all have been written by a blind man in a world of blind men” (p. 117). Carey doesn’t endorse Brooke’s objection. He ends that chapter like this:

The shallowness of mere vision is what his poems struggle to supervene. Whether he is writing about the human body, or animals, or plants, or inanimate objects, his effort is to engage us on other, and deeper levels than the visual; to sensitize us, rather than to please our eyes; and to enhance our awareness both of organic life and of the solid, intransigent materials in which it inheres. (pp. 151–2)

I wrote some time ago about Empson’s aphantasia, or inability to form visual images in his mind, and suggested that it may have affected both the kind of poetry he wrote and his criticism of the poetry of others. Partly on the basis of my own experience, it seems to me that poetry which is not attempting to evoke visual images is more likely to appeal to a reader with aphantasia than the kind of poetry that Rupert Brooke would prefer. There is little doubt that Donne has been a deeper and stronger influence on Empson’s writing than any other of the many poets that Empson has written about. If so, it would be worth investigating whether it was the relative absence of visual interest in Donne’s work that appealed to Empson and whether other poets with a similarly lacking visual sense would have been equally appealing to him. Such an enquiry would, of course, be far beyond the scope of the present post.

Works cited

Booth, Roy, ed. The Collected Poems of John Donne (Wordsworth Editions, 1994);

Carey, John. “Reversals Transposed: an Aspect of Marvell’s Imagination”, in Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures, ed. C. A. Patrides (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 136–54;

Carey, John. John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, revised edition (Faber and Faber, 1990);

Creaser, John. “‘As one scap’t strangely from Captivity’: Marvell and Existential Liberty”, in Marvell and Liberty, ed. Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (Macmillan, 1999), 145–72;

Empson, William. Essays on Renaissance Literature, 1: Donne and the New Philosophy, ed. John Haffenden (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Against self-slaughter: Three short novels by Muriel Spark

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 17:13:54 +0100

This is my 130th post in Talk about books, so the newsletter is now 5 years old. The first post was in the middle of November 2020, This one, as you can see, comes at the end of November. The slight slippage comes from the fact that I was a week late with each of two posts earlier this year. I’m going to take December off and start year 6 in alignment with the calendar year, on 10 January. There might be a solitary post in December but it won’t be about books I’ve read, but (if it happens at all) about what to expect in 2026.

For about 49 years, ending earlier this year, I read nothing at all by Muriel Spark. In my early teens I read my mother’s copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and found that it was not what I had been expecting. As well as that book, my mother had The Girls of Slender Means (1963) which I didn’t read, though the title had caught my attention. She had seen and enjoyed the film starring Maggie Smith as Miss Brodie and had Rod McKuen’s song, “Jean” on a 7" single. From what she had told me before I read the book, I had somehow got the impression that the title character, a teacher, was a flawed but lovable eccentric and an inspirational figure. This impression was somewhat shaken by my discovery that Miss Brodie admired Hitler and Mussolini and was (as far as I can remember after a gap of more than 50 years) not always a good influence on the girls she taught. Clearly I was missing something. I had a vague intention of rereading the book some day to see if I could make more sense of it, but that never became an urgent project.

A few years later, around 1974 or 75, I borrowed The Hothouse by the East River (1973) from the library. I didn’t get very far into it before I gave up and returned it. At the time, I was going through a phase: I had a strong preference for realism in fiction. It’s a phase that, while the strength of the preference has fluctuated from time to time, has lasted throughout the decades since. From the small amount I read, I didn’t know what to make of The Hothouse by the East River, but I was fairly sure it wasn’t realist. And that was my last attempt to read anything by Muriel Spark until 2025.

Partly because of the publication of Frances Wilson’s Electric Spark (2025), which I have no plan to read, I’ve been seeing Spark’s name a lot recently. When The Driver’s Seat (1970) appeared in the Penguin Archive series, it seemed the right time to resume my long-interrupted reading of her work. I had placed that book at the top of a short list derived from John Self’s “Where to start” guide on The Booker Prizes website. I followed The Driver’s Seat with Loitering with Intent (1981). I had intended to move on from that to The Public Image (1968) but I happened to see A Far Cry from Kensington (1988) in a bookshop so I bought that and read it.

Of the three novels I’m going to discuss in this post, there’s a marked difference in style between the two published in the 1980s and that from 1970. While The Driver’s Seat is told in the third person, both Loitering with Intent and A Far Cry from Kensington are first-person narratives. The earliest novel is detached, chilly in tone, its central character inscrutable, in that we learn what she wants, at least in outline, but we’re not given much of a clue as to why she wants it. The style in places seems to owe something to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s concept of “pure surface”:

She breathes deeply and deliberately, in and out, for a few minutes. Then she gets up, takes off her coat, and examines what there is of the room.

It is a bed with a green cotton cover, a bedside table, a rug, a dressing-table, two chairs, a small chest of drawers; there is a wide tall window which indicates that it had once formed part of a much larger room, now partitioned into two or three rooms in the interests of hotel economy; there is a small bathroom with a bidet, a lavatory, a wash-basin and a shower. (p. 46)

In contrast, the two later books seem warmer, more humane, with their narrators at the centre of the story. The impression is misleading. These narrators withhold from the reader a significant amount of information about their own motivations and about those they impute to others. Fleur Talbot, who is writing her first novel, Warrender Chase, in 1949 takes a job working for the Autobiographical Association, which is effectively the private fiefdom of Sir Quentin Oliver. The association has 10 members (about 6 of them still active), who are supposedly writing memoirs — “although none had got beyond the first chapter” (p. 19) by the time Fleur goes to work for the association. The memoirs are to be locked up by Sir Quentin for 70 years before eventual publication, to avoid the risk of libel. Fleur becomes convinced that Sir Quentin is up to something underhand, possibly using the memoirs to blackmail their authors. Later, though, she seems to suggest that he behaves as he does because he likes to control people, to make them do what he wants.

He supplies his autobiographers with Dexedrine, “doubting his power to enthral unaided” (p. 87). Several of them tell Fleur that “Sir Quentin insists on complete frankness” (pp. 68, 71, 82), which would be consistent with Fleur’s idea that he wants to blackmail them. Towards the end of the novel, Fleur tells Sir Quentin “You had this desire to take possession of people before I came along and reminded you of the existence of [John Henry] Newman” (p. 149). When he is killed in a car crash, she tells her friend Dottie, who had replaced her as Sir Quentin’s secretary, “The man was pure evil” (p. 161).

Dottie is the wife of Fleur’s “off and on” lover, Leslie, who soon takes up with a young male poet. Fleur at first encourages Dottie to join the Autobiographical Association but when she begins to suspect Sir Quentin of skulduggery she tears up Dottie’s manuscript memoir, for which Dottie doesn’t thank her. Dottie and Fleur are friends, though it’s soon clear to both of them that they don’t actually like each other. They are both Catholics but Fleur tells us that her beliefs are different from Dottie’s, without specifying what her own beliefs are.

I learned a lot in my life from Dottie, by her teaching me some precepts which I could usefully reject. She learned nothing of use from me. (p. 18)

Sir Quentin and Fleur both steal manuscripts from each other. Fleur maintains that most of Warrender Chase was written before she came to work for the Autobiographical Association, and she did not draw on her experiences there in writing the novel. In effect, she created a version of Sir Quentin before she met him. Sir Quentin persuades the intending publisher of Fleur’s novel that he would be at risk of proceedings for libel and/or breach of copyright, and orders Dottie to steal Fleur’s only copy. Fleur tells us that he has inserted excerpts from her novel into the autobiographers’ manuscripts to bolster the copyright claim, so she takes the manuscripts home with her to remove those extracts.

It’s never becomes clear to what extent we should believe Fleur’s version of events. The idea that she had written about Sir Quentin and his memoirists before she even met them is oddly appealing, but in the end not all that plausible. Perhaps we are meant to understand that her portraits of the characters in her current narrative (that’s to say, in the book Loitering with Intent itself) is shaped and coloured by her recollection of writing the earlier (and, of course, fictional) book. Or maybe she’s just lying about when she wrote the bulk of Warrender Chase. Anyway, if she thinks that Sir Quentin is “pure evil”, he claimed to think much the same as her. Dottie tells her:

“He believes you’re a witch, an evil spirit who’s been sent to bring ideas into his life. It’s his mission to turn evil to good. I think there’s a lot in what he says.” (p. 152)

One significant parallel between Warrender Chase and the events at the Autobiographical Association is that a character kills herself. In the main narrative it’s Lady Bernice “Bucks” Gilbert. Fleur agrees with the comment of Sir Quentin’s mother, Lady Edwina: “Suicide. Just like the woman in your novel” (p. 107). We do not learn what led to Lady Bernice’s death, but Lady Edwina later gives Fleur some pages torn from Sir Quentin’s secret diary, in which he records having written to her in these terms:

I thought in that moment ’twere sweet
to die. My dearest, I would that we
could die together. (p. 145)

Bucks Gilbert is not a major character in Loitering with Intent but her death is strikingly similar to the suicide of Wanda Podolak, who is a signifcant character in A Far Cry from Kensington. Wanda is a Polish dressmaker who lives in the same rooming-house as the book’s narrator, Nancy Hawkins. Like Fleur and Dottie in the earlier novel, Wanda was a Catholic. She believed that suicide was a mortal — and possibly unforgiveable, because unrepentable — sin, yet she killed herself. After Wanda’s death, Nancy is astonished to be told that Wanda received regular visits from Hector Bartlett whom Nancy detests.

Bartlett was a hanger-on of an established novelist, Emma Loy. He wanted to adapt one of Ms Loy’s novels for film and pestered Nancy for an introduction to a director of the publishing company for whom Nancy worked, whose uncle was a film producer. Whenever Nancy met Bartlett, she couldn’t resist hissing “pisseur de copie” at him.

I forget which of the French symbolist writers of the late nineteenth century denounced a hack writer as a urinator of journalistic copy in the phrase “pisseur de copie”, but the description remained in my mind, and I attached it to a great many of the writers who hung around or wanted to meet Martin York; and finally I attached it for life to one man alone, Hector Bartlett. (p. 43)

Nancy’s adamant refusal to withdraw or to stop using the insulting phrase about Barlett results in the loss of her job in publishing, an industry as she often has to remind people, in which openings are scarce and jobs in high demand. Unlike Fleur in the earlier book, Nancy doesn’t anathemize her adversary as “evil”, but she might as well do. At one point, while she is having lunch in a pub, she notices Barlett holding his sausage roll carelessly so that a dog is able to take a bite out of it. Bartlett slathers mustard onto what remains of the sausage roll and feeds it to the dog, to the distress of the animal, his owner and the onlookers.

After Wanda’s death the landlady, Milly, finds apparent newspaper cuttings under her mattress that Nancy recognizes as fakes that Bartlett had had printed to make Wanda believe she was under investigation and might be deported

As well as Wanda, Bartlett had also been a regular visitor to another occupant of the rooming-house, a younger woman, Isobel. She was a poorly paid secretary with a wealthy father. Isobel found herself pregnant, so a meeting was called to discuss the situation with her father and all the occupants of the house except Wanda. Isobel insisted that Hector Bartlett could not be the father.

“Oh, it’s one of those boys in Fleet Street or in publishing. You know how they promise to get you a job in publishing, and you sleep with them, and then they don’t know of any jobs in publishing and to be quite fair, it isn’t easy to get a job in publishing. Daddy doesn’t realize that.” (pp. 126–7)

It might be more accurate to say that Daddy, who is used to getting his own way, doesn’t accept it.

Eventually, Nancy got to read an article by Hector Bartlett, describing his involvement with Wanda from his point of view. Emma Loy, now living in New York, and having at last extricated herself from Bartlett’s grasp, had written a letter of recommendation to a new magazine where Nancy had been given a job as copy editor. The title of the article was “Radionics: A Power against Evil”. Radionics was a kind of mystical flim-flam practised by Nancy’s former boss, a director of the firm where she had worked in her second publishing job. It involved the operation of a mysterious “Box”. Nancy had seen the Box in Wanda’s while Wanda was alive and had recognized it, but Wanda had refused to explain why she had it in her possession.

Bartlett had concluded that the “effectiveness of the Box depended on the sensitivity and psychic skill of the operator” (p. 187). He described using a naturally skilled operator to curse an evil woman.

Since the victim of the curse was evil it was a benevolent accomplishment for the Organiser to induce the operator, a devout Catholic “with all the psychic energy of her faith” to effect this curse. Within a few months of treatment, the evil victim, an extraordinarily obese woman, began to waste away and was unable to hold down a job. (p. 187)

From Bartlett’s point of view the operation was a great success and good triumphed over evil, even if there was an unfortunate side-effect where the “operator” was concerned.

In this case, the operator, apparently weakend in her powers by terror of the priesthood and her reputation amongst Catholics, had to be dropped from the programme and, incidentally, eventually went mad and committed suicide. But that in no way detracted from the obvious success of the experiment during the months that the operator came gradually under the full control of the Organiser. For future experiments it would probably be advisable to choose operators free from the oppressive influence of the mass-religions.

“He must mean Wanda Podolak,” said Abigail. “Who is the poor fat woman?”

“Me,” I said. (p. 187)

So Bartlett evidently believed that Nancy was the evil monster who had to be destroyed, that he was fighting for the victory of Good over Evil, and that Wanda’s death was a price worth paying, and hardly worth bothering about. Obviously, he’s wrong about some of this, at least. If we take these two books together, the underlying principle seems to be that evil is real, but it’s not necessarily easy to spot: our own prejudices, blind spots and animosities may lead us to misidentify the malefactor. And if Bartlett is misleading himself as to Nancy’s supposed evil, might it not equally be the case that Fleur Talbot is doing likewise where Sir Quentin Oliver is concerned?

Perhaps I should say here that I don’t share the conception of evil apparently held by Spark and her principal characters. I don’t view it as a force that drives people to act or something in their nature that impels certain behaviours but rather as a category that we use to classify our worst actions. In other words, it’s not a quality that’s inherent in those actions so much as a way we use to describe them.

Anyway, it’s clear that both of these books are concerned with the collision of the impulse to suicide with Catholic (or more generally Christian) principles. The third book, the earliest of the three, is different from them in tone as well as in style, but it has similar themes. While the serious themes of evil and morality in Loitering with Intent and A Far Cry from Kensington are set within the frame of a comedy, The Driver’s Seat, as I’ve already suggested, is cooler and harder.

Its central character (not a first-person narrator this time), Lise, is going on holiday to find her killer. She is confident that she will find him, though she doesn’t seem to have any detailed plan or prior arrangement. She makes a scene or draws attention to herself everywhere she goes, wearing garish colours that clash, and ridiculously objecting to stain-resistant material, on the pretext that she considers it an insult. We’re told that her highly visible progress will ensure that people remember her and make it easy for the police to trace her movements after her body is found the next day. That is probably a side-effect rather than her main purpose: her aim is not to help the police investigation but rather to make sure that the killer notices her. It would be a shame to miss him.

She finds him almost immediately, in the seat beside her on the plane, but he recognizes what she wants from him and tries to get away from her. It seems reasonable to infer that Lise would like to kill herself but has moral — presumably religious — objections to suicide, so she is looking for somebody who can be counted on to do the job for her, without her having to take any action — a kind of passive suicide. She finds that this is impossible. She has to pursue the killer, befriend his aunt, manipulate and in the end persuade him. She can’t evade responsibility for her death, as she’d like to. That’s the significance of the title, I think: Lise is in the driver’s seat, controlling what happens, while appearing to be a passive victim.

When Lise has got Richard where she wants him, she tells him to tie her hands with her scarf and her ankles with his necktie. Richard objects to tying her ankles, she shouts at him that she doesn’t want him to have sex with her while she’s still alive. It seems that Richard ignores this, and rapes her:

All the same, he plunges into her, with the knife held high.

“Kill me,” she says, and repeats it in four languages.

As the knife descends to her throat she screams, evidently perceiving how final is finality. (p. 117)

It’s only after she has died that he ties her ankles with the necktie. Lise obviously didn’t want to be raped — just stabbed to death — but it seems possible that she nevertheless used the prospect of rape to firm up Richard’s resolve. As they’re arriving at the murder site, Lise calls him a “sex maniac” (p. 113). Richard replies that he has been cured and that he now sees sex as normal. Lise says that sex is all right before and during, but that “Most of the time, afterwards is pretty sad.”

“You’re afraid of sex,” he says, almost joyfully, as if sensing an opportunity to gain control.

“Only of afterwards,” she says. “But that doesn’t matter any more.” (p. 114)

Spark wrote a lot of fiction: about 22 books, as far as I can tell. I’m unlikely to read very many of them, though I think I have room for one or two more — after I’ve taken a little time to recover.

Editions: Loitering with Intent, Virago Modern Classics paperback, 2007;
A Far Cry from Kensington, Virago Modern Classics paperback, 2025;
The Driver’s Seat, Penguin Archive paperback, 2025.

Some other time: Ian McEwan, The Child in Time and Atonement

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 21:36:18 +0100

The Child in Time (1987) is the book that made me start to take Ian McEwan seriously. I had read his first three books, the short story collections, First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978), and first novel The Cement Garden (1978), and found them gripping. I was about 21 at the time and, as it now seems, quite innocent. I thought his stories, though powerful, were a bit of a cheat. Many of his characters were rapists, killers, pathetic specimens of humanity, solipsists. It seemed to me at the time that his focus on abnormal psychology was an evasion of the more urgent and challenging problems of the normal kind. I didn’t read his second novel, The Comfort of Strangers (1981) until years later, though it was shortlisted for the Booker in the same year as Midnight’s Children, The White Hotel and Loitering with Intent as well as books by Molly Keane and Doris Lessing.

The film The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983), scripted by McEwan and directed by Richard Eyre, is what started to change my mind. The story of a cynical, opportunistic journalist who wants to sleep with a researcher played by the singer Charlie Dore but instead ends up sleeping with her mother, a socialist historian, it looks at the ways in which news media distort facts and mislead the public. The film is set at the time of the Falklands war and the journalist is writing a revisionist (from a Conservative point of view) book about the Suez crisis. It appealed to me that McEwan seemed to have written something more unambiguously political than I had seen from him before, so when The Child in Time appeared a few years later I was favourably disposed to the comment on the paperback from Sheila MacLeod’s Guardian review: “This is the McEwan you and I have been waiting for”.

Published in 1987, the novel is a mildly dystopian fiction set in the 1990s. The Thatcher government, or its continuation under new leadership, has continued to make life worse (to varying degrees) for most of the citizenry. Licensed beggers are strictly regulated and the government is about to issue an officially Authorised Childcare Handbook, short excerpts from which appear at the top of each of the book’s nine chapters, like this:

Childcare writers of the post-war era sentimentally ignored the fact that children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival. (p. 155)

The handbook is supposedly being assembled from the reports of various subcommittees. The protagonist, Stephen Lewis, an author of children’s books, is on the subcommittee on Reading and Writing. He has been appointed to the subcommittee at the instance of his friend and former publisher, Charles Darke, who left publishing to become a Conservative MP and subsequently a favourite of the Prime Minister. It was Charles who had persuaded an extremely reluctant Stephen to position is first novel, Lemonade, as a book for children. Its success “generated a tax bill that two years later made it a virtual necessity to publish his second novel as a children’s book too” (p. 34).

Late in the story, Stephen learns that the work of the various subcommittees is to be scrapped: the final draft of the handbook has already been written, largely by Charles. Stephen is surprised that Charles — whom he has taken to be more an opportunist than an ideologically committed Tory, and whom he knows to have yearned for what he saw as the freedom of childhood — should have written an authoritarian text on the subject. Charles’s wife, Thelma, explains:

The Prime Minister invited him, which in that world means ordered him, to write a shadow Childcare manual, the one there’s been all this fuss about. Charles and the Prime Minister worked on it together. He was being fancied, I mean sexually fancied. He pretended not to notice he was making a killing. He was repelled, but he couldn’t help flirting. He wanted to get on, he couldn’t stop himself wanting that. (p. 201)

But at the same time as wanting to get on, the adult Charles has always wanted to revert to childhood. As Thelma tells Stephen: “It wasn’t an eccentric whim. It was an overwhelming fantasy which dominated all his private moments” (p. 200). Charles saw childhood as appearing tantalizingly to be almost outside time. While persuading Stephen that Lemonade should be sold as a book for children, he says:

“… talk to a ten-year-old in mid-summer about Christmas. You could be talking to an adolescent about his retirement plans, his pension. For children, childhood is timeless. It’s always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up …’ there’s always an edge of disbelief — how could they ever be other than what they are? …” (pp. 32–3)

As Charles sees it, the strength of Stephen’s first novel is that it communicates with children, “across the abyss that separates the child from the adult” with the message that “they are finite as children” (p. 33). Childhood won’t last — though Charles will make a doomed attempt to restore his own.

Charles’s wife is a scientist, a physicist, whose thesis was about “ — as far as any gossip columnist could tell — the nature of time” (p. 32). Stephen has often asked her to explain current theories on the subject but has always come away baffled. Then he has an experience that appears inexplicable (we’ll come to that) and his questioning of Thelma becomes more urgent. Having repeated something she’s told him before, about the “many universes” hypothesis, Thelma goes on:

“… Then there are physicists who find it convenient to describe time as a kind of substance, an efflorescence of undetectable particles. There are dozens of other theories, equally potty. They set out to smooth a few wrinkles in one corner of quantum theory. The mathematics are reasonable enough in a local sort of way, but the rest, the grand theorising, is whistling in the dark. What comes out is inelegant and perverse. But whatever time is, the commonsense, everyday version of it as linear, regular, absolute, marching from left to right, from the past through the present to the future, is either nonsense or a tiny fraction of the truth …” (p. 117)

Having assured him that physics, “still a divided subject” (p. 118), can’t help him with his puzzle, Thelma begins to expatiate on the possibility that a higher order of theory might emerge, citing David Bohm. “It was at this point that Thelma livened up and Stephen began to understand less (p. 118). (Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980) is one of the three books that McEwan refers to in his Acknowledgements.)

Stephen’s strange experience had occurred while he was walking through the countryside, on his way to visit his wife Julie, who had withdrawn to a remote cottage in Kent following the disappearance, presumed abduction, of their three-year-old daughter Kate. Passing a pub named The Bell, he had looked through the window and seen a young couple that were recognizably his own parents some 40 years earlier, earnestly discussing something over a beer. Much later his mother will tell him that she was pregnant with him when they were in that pub and had just resolved to have an abortion, convinced that his father wasn’t ready to have a child. The appearance at the pub window of someone she instinctively knew to be her own child had dissuaded her from terminating the pregnancy. So it seemed as if Stephen had gone back in time to preserve his own existence.

He went on to Julie’s cottage where they were not immediately reconciled but (as Stephen did not find out until nine months later) they conceived a second child who would in the end bring them back together. Kate’s disappearance, while at the local supermarket with her father, happens near the beginning of the novel. It obviously devastates both her parents and their marriage. They never find out what happened to her and neither does the reader. On first reading I was hugely impressed by McEwan’s willingness to confront such a horrifying occurrence, and to show us the effect on Stephen and his reaction to it.

The novel brings together a number of themes related to children and childhood, and the “nature” of time: the loss of three-year-old Kate, Stephen’s accidental career as a children’s author, Charles’s regression, the Prime Minister’s direct involvement in an official childcare handbook and, of course, Stephen’s passive, unintentional intervention in his mother’s long-ago dilemma. There’s a parallel between Stephen’s temporary loss of Julia and Thelma’s permanent loss of Charles to rural retreats, yet it may seem that some of these themes are only loosely connected. That doesn’t strike me as a weakness in the novel, but rather an indication of time’s ungraspable quality.

I had decided to write about The Child in Time together with another of McEwan’s novels, and had settled on Atonement (2001) as the companion piece. As I reread both novels in the past two weeks (The Child in Time for about the third time, but the first since the late 80s, and Atonement for the first) it struck me that each of them would pair better with a different book. The Child in Time strikes me as having a strong family resemblance to Enduring Love, about which I’ve written in this newsletter before. Both novels open with a horrific, shocking incident involving a child. That incident (and, in the case of the later book, what follows from it) leads to the estrangement of the protagonist from his wife/partner. At the end of the novel they’re reconciled. And Stephen’s unreasonable self-justifying recriminations against Julie’s inaction while he spends every day fruitlessly showing Kate’s picture to strangers have something of the same flavour as Joe’s against Clarissa in Enduring Love:

He suspected — and it turned out later he was correct — that she took his efforts to be a typically masculine evasion, an attempt to mask feelings behind displays of competence and organisation and physical effort. The loss had driven them to the extremes of their personalities. They had discovered a degree of mutual intolerance which sadness and shock made insurmountable. (p. 24)

The book I think would best make a pair with Atonement is Sweet Tooth, about which I’ve already written in conjunction with The Innocent on the basis that these last two are spy stories. But Atonement and Sweet Tooth resemble each other in ways I hadn’t noticed before, probably because, until last week, I had read the former only once. Both books feature novels whose publication must be delayed by many years, in one case because the litigious model for one of the characters is still alive, in the other because of the Official Secrets Act. Both of these novels-within-a-novel fictionalize actual events — “actual”, that is, in the fictional world of the novel which encloses it — and change the endings. Sweet Tooth can be thought of as the actual novel it refers to, its publication delayed for 40 years, whereas Part II of Atonement is part of the final, posthumous work of its protagonist, Briony Tallis. And so on.

Atonement is probably McEwan’s best regarded novel and biggest hit, whereas my impression is that Sweet Tooth was poorly received. Ironically, my initial estimation of the two books was the other way around: I enjoyed Sweet Tooth’s playfulness and the puzzling intricacy of its plot, while I found Atonement tiresome and frustrating, which is why I never reread it until now. But I think I made a mistake: this time I liked as well as admired Atonement. I haven’t quite been able to recover the state of mind that led me to be to be so dismissive back in the early 2000s, but I think I was partly misled by the publisher’s description on the back of the paperback.

Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.

The first time around, I took that at face value. This time, I’m fairly sure that the book itself, as distinct from the publisher’s description, does not indicate that Briony spent “the rest of her life trying to atone”.

When she was 13 in 1935, and already set on being a writer of fiction and drama, Briony opened and read a love-letter that she had been asked to deliver to her older sister, Cecilia. That, and her misinterpretation of two scenes that she witnessed the same day, led her to jump to a conclusion when her 15-year-old cousin Lola was raped. She was in no doubt who the attacker must be. She identifies him to the investigating detective.

“You saw him then.”

“I know it was him.”

“Let’s forget what you know. You’re saying you saw him.”

“Yes, I saw him.” (p. 181)

She indeed saw the rapist but it was too dark for her to make out his features. Briony sticks to her lie with catastrophic consequences, the first of which is the conviction and imprisonment of the wrong man. It gets worse from there.

About a decade earlier, I had read some criticism by A S Byatt (I’m afraid I can’t remember where) in which put great stress on the “fictive” character of fiction. I’m pretty sure she quoted B S Johnson who maintained that “Telling stories is telling lies.” It seemed to me that to say that fiction was fictive and therefore not truthful seemed a tautology and too obvious to be worth making a fuss over. With that in mind, I imitated the 13-year-old Briony and jumped to conclusions. I took it for granted that McEwan was making much the same point, that all Briony’s many attempts to rewrite her, Cecilia’s and Robbie’s past couldn’t undo what had actually happened to the characters.

But on rereading I think I see that this is not at all what’s going on. It’s only shortly before her own death, in her late 70s, that Briony finally attempts to write a different, happier ending, and she does it not because she imagines that it could undo what is done, but simply because it’s the best, as a writer, she can do. This isn’t “telling stories is telling lies”, nor is it the opposite. It’s something else again. I may attempt to say what some other time.

Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? I couldn’t do that to them. I’m too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life I have remaining. I face an incoming tide of forgetting, and then oblivion. I no longer possess the courage of my pessimism. (p. 371)

Editions: The Child in Time, Picador paperback, 1988; Atonement, Vintage paperback 2002. An ellipsis at the beginning or end of a quotation is added, otherwise ellipsis is original. All emphasis is original.

War games: Stefan Zweig, Chess; Bohumil Hrabal, Closely Watched Trains

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 20:25:22 +0100

Earlier this year Penguin published 90 small paperback books in a new series, “Penguin Archive”, to mark the publisher’s 90 years of existence. I bought just eight of these books (though there are some more I’d stil like to get) of which I’ve so far read five, including (obviously) the two I’m going to write about today. Of the others I’ve read, I’m quite likely to write in future about Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat (I’ve recently read two more of her books after doggedly ignoring her for years) and Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady. The books in the series are all short: today’s two are each under 100 pages.

Both books are translations, Hrabal’s from Czech by Edith Pargeter and Zweig’s from German by the prolific, versatile Anthea Bell. I don’t think I’ve written before in this newsletter about translated work; I’ll have to think about why that is.

Zweig’s book is concerned with a chess game between the world champion, Czentovic, and an opponent whom the narrator refers to only as “Dr B”, on a passenger steamer travelling from New York to Buenos Aires. Dr B had been a lawyer in Vienna, having inherited from his father a discreet, inconspicuous but highly influential firm that had helped the imperial family and other wealthy people to hide their assets from the encroaching Nazis. After the annexation of Austria, Dr B had been arrested and placed in solitary confinement, not in a bare concrete cell but in a normal hotel room. However, he was held without books, newspapers, writing materials or any kind of mental stimulation or distraction, and with no contact with anybody but his jailers and interrogators.

After some months of this brutal deprivation, Dr B managed to steal a book from the pocket of a military overcoat which was hanging in the anteroom where he had been waiting (it seemed interminably) to be interrogated. At first he was thoroughly dejected to find that the book was a record of 150 chess games, not something he could actually read. But in time, for want of something better to do, he began to follow and learn the games, having worked out how to interpret the unfamiliar algebraic notation. Over several months, he learned all the games and began to make up new ones in his head. As he later tells the narrator:

… even the briefest reflection should be enough to show that as chess is a game of pure thought involving no element of chance, it’s a logical absurdity to try playing against yourself. At heart the attraction of chess resides entirely in the development of strategies in two different brains, in the fact that Black doesn’t know what manoeuvres White will perform in this war of the mind, and keeps trying to guess them and thwart them, while White himself is trying to anticipate and counter Black’s secret intentions. (p. 58)

The former lawyer explains to the narrator that if he were to avoid being driven mad, he felt that he had no choice but to attempt the self-contradictory task of knowing and not knowing at the same time.

Such dual thinking really presupposes a complete split of consciousness, and arbitrary ability to switch the function of the brain on and off again as if it were a mechanical apparatus. Wanting to play chess against yourself is a paradox, like jumping over your own shadow. Well, to be brief, in my desperation I spent months trying to achieve this absurd impossibility. However I had no option but to pursue it, if I were not to fall victim to pure madness or see my mind waste away entirely. My desperate situation forced me at least to try splitting myself into a Black self and a White self, to keep from being crushed by the terrible void around me. (p. 59)

Dr B first comes to the narrator’s attention when he impulsively intervenes in a game between Czentovic and a group of passengers among whom are the narrator and a Scots engineer named McConnor who got rich in the Californian gold rush and is paying the grandmaster’s fee to play against them. Dr B’s intervention prevents a disastrous mistake on McConnor’s part, and he then guides the challengers to a draw. The following day, Dr B takes on Czentovic alone, having told his story to the narrator in the meantime, and asked him not to let the doctor-lawyer be drawn into playing a second game. Not having played an actual game against a real live opponent since his schooldays, he wanted to know if he was capable of playing outside his own head. Once that question had been answered one way or the other, he wanted to leave it at that.

What interests and intrigues me is just a retrospective curiosity to find out whether I was really playing chess in my cell or whether it was mere delusion, if I was on the edge of the dangerous precipice at the time or already over it — that’s all, nothing more. (p. 72)

The defeated champion immediately offers a rematch, which Dr B accepts without hesitation, in spite of his earlier request to the narrator to limit him to just one game. But Czentovic has noticed his opponent’s impatience, and begins to play as slowly as possible, taking the full ten minuted (the agreed maximum period between moves) before even the most obvious response. The former lawyer becomes increasingly agitated, pacing restlessly and apparently playing other games in his imagination. Eventually, he loses control and, at the narrator’s urging, is forced to resign. After Dr B has left the smoking room, saying he will never again attemmpt to play chess, Czentovic has the last word:

”A pity,” he said magnanimously. “It wasn’t a bad attack at all. For an amateur, that gentleman really is uncommonly gifted.” (p. 85)

Both his own apparent ability to do the impossible and split his consciousness, and Czentovic’s gamesmanship in their final confrontation, give the lie to Dr B’s assertion that “chess is a game of pure thought” (p. 58). It’s a sentiment that had earlier been voiced by the narrator, on discovering that he would be in Czentovic’s company on the voyage:

I knew the mysterious attraction of the “royal game”, the only game ever devised by mankind that rises magnificently above the tyranny of chance, awarding the palm of victory solely to the mind, or rather to a certain kind of mental gift. (p. 13)

The narrator looks forward to spending the 12 days of the voyage in proximity to Czentovic:

I have always been interested in any kind of monomaniac obsessed by a single idea, for the more a man restricts himself the closer he is, conversely, to infinity; characters like this, apparently remote from reality, are like termites using their own material to build a remarkable and unique small-scale version of the world. (p. 11)

Czentovic, the orphaned son of “a poor South Slavonian boatman” (p. 2) had shown no sign of any intellectual or imaginative ability and no aptitude for anything except chess, at which he could defeat all comers. To his rivals for the world championship, “every one of them immesurably superior to him in intellectual talents, imagination and daring” (p. 8), he seemed a comically grotesque figure, a “dull-witted country boy” (p. 9). But that’s not to say that his sole and unique skill or ability was for playing chess. As the narrator’s friendly informant puts it:

“… For all his severe limitations, he’s a wily peasant and shrewd enough not to present himself as a target, by the simple means of avoiding all conversation except with fellow countrymen of his own background, whom he seeks out in small inns. When he feels he’s in the presence of an educated person he goes into his shell, so no one can boast of ever hearing him say something stupid, or of having assessed the apparently unplumbed depths of his ignorance.” (pp. 11–12)

As it transpires, the narrator doesn’t get any more out of the cagy grandmaster than anyone else has managed to do but finds a different specimen to study in the Viennese former lawyer. The result suggests that neither he nor Dr B is right about the rational and intellectual nature of the game. He himself admits that within the confines of th 64 squares there are “unlimited combinations” (p. 13), so that no normal human brain could foresee all the possible moves. Rather than an intellectual exercise, it’s a game that rewards a certain kind of cunningly aggressive instinct. Unlike other games, chess may be wholly without the element of chance, but unpredictablity, which is does have, is from the player’s point of view effectively indistinguishable from chance.

The events of the novella take place at or just before the start of the Second World War: Dr B’s arrest occurs immediately after the resignation of the Austrian Chancellor in 1938, he is held for several months, and the book is published in 1941. Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains is set as the war is coming to an end: the climax coincides with the firebombing of Dresden. Both these novellas have first-person narrators but, while Zweig’s is largely and observer, Hrabal’s is directly involved in the action.

He is Miloš Hrma, an apprentice dispatcher at a small but busy Czech railway station. Miloš is in his early 20s but seems a bit younger. As the story opens, he is returning to work after a three-month period of convalescence, following an attempt to kill himself by slashing his wrists in a hotel bathroom. We learn late in the story that Miloš has attempted to do away with himself after he fails to have sex with his inamorata, Masha, and as a result doubts his own manhood. Masha is a conductor on the trains that pass through Miloš’s station. She and he have declared their love for each other, and she has visited him at night while they’re staying at her uncle’s photographic studio, but he (in his own words) “wilted like a lily” (p. 76).

Miloš hero-worships the station’s dispatcher Hubička who can sleep on duty without missing anything important and has a reputation as a success with women, notwithstanding an unprepossessing appearance. Hubička originally trained Miloš and is now supervising him again following his three months off work. Miloš tells the station-master about one of Hubička’s sexual escapades at a different station during Miloš’s training, when the oilcloth covering on the station-master’s couch was ripped. Hubička is now under investigation for a possible “felonious infringement of personal liberty” (p. 52) arising from a game of forfeits between him and the station’s then telegraphist, Virginia, when they were both on night duty and bored. Virginia’s mother was outraged to find that her daughter’s backside bore the inkmarks of all the station’s official stamps, and complained.

The station-master is appalled at Hubička’s behaviour and calls him a pig, but finds that others, including Prince Kinský, who seems to be the station-master’s patron, are impressed by the dispatcher’s élan. The prince wants to meet him.

At a hearing before the Traffic Chief and some councillors, Virginia denies that she had been bullied or coerced into the game of forfeits, so Hubička is not finally charged with infringement of personal liberty, but he still faces disciplinary proceedings for debasing the German language, which was used on some of the stamps. That would still presumably be enough to lose him his job.

Masha asks Miloš to come to see her in two days’ time. In the meantime she’ll ask some of the older girls for advice on how to have sex, and she’s sure it will work out. As the novella’s climactic event approaches, Miloš seeks reassurance that he really is a man. He approaches the station-master’s wife, who tells him:

“But Miloš, I’m in the change already, I don’t want to have anything to do with all that any more, really, I do understand, and if I were younger … Holy Virgin, what’s got into you all on this station? First, it’s Dispatcher Hubička with those stamps, and now you rubbing the velvet off your antlers … But everything will be all right the day after tomorrow, you’ll see, you’re a man all right, very much so.” (p. 72)

As things turn out, Miloš and Masha never get to have sex together but any lingering doubt that Miloš may have about his masculinity is resolved by the mysterious Viktoria Freie (presumably a nom de guerre) who has come to the station to provide Hubička and Miloš with the explosive charge that the latter will drop into the middle carriage of a long goods train carrying German munitions.

Sex and violence are strongly associated in this story. It’s probable that Viktoria Freie’s motive in relieving Miloš of his burdensome virginity was reinforce his sense of masculinity and shore up his resolve to destroy the munitions train.

A recurring motif in the novella is the cruel treatment of animals. The station-master breeds pigeons, of whom he seems to take great care. When the Germans invade Czechoslovakia, he shuts his Nurembergs in their loft and, leaving instructions that their necks are to be wrung, he goes off for a week to find some Polish silver-points to replace them. His wife is a calm, capable woman who regularly kills rabbits by cutting their necks with a blunt knife and letting them bleed slowly to death. She said that killing them in this way made the meat tastier and more tender. When Miloš returns from his convalescence, she is force-feeding a gander who, when he has been fattened up, will be killed in the same manner.

A train that passes through the station coming back from the front, ten days away, carries cows and sheep who are starving and some of whom have died in place. The cows have kicked through the floors of their carriages and their bruised feet drag along the track. Miloš finds the sight unbearable: “‘These Germans are swine!’ I cried” (p. 47). A bull being taken to the slaughterhouse has his eyes casually poked out with a knife to “calm” him. If animals are cruelly treated, we’re repeatedly reminded that the humans are animals too. The Germans are “swine”, as Miloš said. The station-master regards Hubička not just as a pig but as a cannibal: “… But for that grunting pig nothing exists but pork, dumplings and cabbage …” (p. 20)

The blinding of the bull is echoed at the end of the story when Miloš shoots a dying German soldier through the eye (with the soldier’s own rifle). He does so, not to put an end to the soldier’s suffering, though it incidentally has that effect, but to silence the German whose marching in place and incessant calls for “Mutti” (Miloš thinks he means his children’s rather than his own) are making Miloš’s own last moments unbearable. The two dying men have shot each other: Miloš has been hit in the lung and is coughing up blood, the soldier was shot in the belly, so was dying slowly and in agony, till Miloš ended his life.

Earlier, Miloš had thought that the man who saved his life in the hotel bathroom was God. Now, it dawns on him that “I had been predestined for another death than the one I had attempted there in Bystřice by Benešov” (p. 92).

The novella was published in Czech in 1965 and the film adaptation by Jiři Menzel came out 3 years later, at about the same time as the repression of the Prague Spring. A work about resistance to the Nazi occupation that had ended 20 years earlier would not in itself be unacceptable to the Communist authorities though once the Soviet tanks were rolling into Prague, the parallels between the earlier period and the later would be harder to deny.

I read the book for the first time earlier this year. I had seen Menzel’s film a few times before that, though not for many years. I used to have a copy that came on a CD (before I ever had a DVD player) with, if I’m remembering correctly, one of the Sunday newspapers. I don’t know what happened to the CD: I haven’t seen it for almost 25 years.

My impression is that the film was more uplifting than the book — not nearly as grim — though they tell the same story. Maybe my memory is misleading me or perhaps I wasn’t paying full attention while I watched the film. At any rate, the novella is undoubtedly bleak.

Editions: Penguin Archive paperbacks, 2025; I’ve omitted quotation marks when quoting passages from Dr B’s account of his confinement by the Germans in Chess. Ellipses are original except where occurring at the beginning of a quotation.

The anti-intentionalist fallacy and the usefulness of paraphrase

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 16:03:04 +0100

I haven’t written anything new for today’s post because of various other claims on my time. Also, Saturday is when I’d usually write the bulk of a post but today I went to see Kevin Barry at the Rolling Sun book festival in Westport. He read a new short story, “Finistère”, and a couple of passages from his latest novel, The Heart in Winter. It was highly enjoyable. Allowing for bus times, that knocked 4 hours out of the middle of the day, though the event itself lasted just over an hour. Why did nobody warn me that retirement would be this time-consuming?

So instead of something new, I’m posting the following, which I’m afraid is more of a curiosity than a serious argument. I wrote it in 1999, as part of a longer piece. My original thesis supervisor had asked me to frame an argument as to why I thought it necessary (or permissible) to write yet more about Andrew Marvell’s poetry than already existed. Could there be anything to say that was both new and worthwhile? I rediscovered the piece when I was looking through my notes from the early days of my work on Marvell, trying to find a link between what I originally meant to write about (enclosure, containment, limitation) and the eventual topic of the thesis (Marvell’s ambivalence about justice). I had completely forgotten about the piece I had written in 1999, and was surprised to find that it included a few passages that had made their way almost unchanged into the eventual thesis, and one or two more that might still be worth developing. And also this (which amounts to about a fifth of what I originally wrote):

John Carey began his contribution to the York lectures on the tercentenary of Marvell’s birth, “Reversals transposed: An aspect of Marvell’s imagination”, by asserting

You cannot write about his poetry without feeling that you have flattened or coarsened it — or if you can, you should not be writing about it at all. (Carey 1978, 136)

Carey then went on to deliver what, according to John Creaser, “must be the most acute essay on the poet since T.S. Eliot’s classic of 1921 — an agile and lucid essay matching the poet’s ingenuities” (Creaser 1999, 147). I found Creaser’s judgment easy to accept: Carey’s lecture was indeed the the most acute essay on the poet that I had yet read — though at that point I had read relatively little, not nearly as much as Creaser had, or as I would do in the following years. It, along with the lecture by Christopher Ricks that immediately preceded it in the volume of tercentenary lectures, formed the starting point for the thesis I thought I was going to write (and, though less obviously, for the one I finally wrote).

A central element of Carey’s unease about critical approaches to Marvell is his distrust of paraphrase as a critical tool. He speaks of the trepidation that a critic ought to feel at the prospect of “using his own words to give an account of Marvell’s” (Carey 1978, 137), just as a few years earlier he had suggested that bad criticism was often criticism not of the poem itself but of a prose paraphrase (Carey 1969, 71). Marvell’s poetry, he says, resists paraphrase. This is one of the points that William Empson emphasized in his review of Approaches to Marvell. Noting that the lectures by Ricks and Carey stand quite apart from the others in the collection, in finding Marvell transparent and not inconclusive or “treacherous”, he argues that Carey could only achieve this transparency by departing from the “rigorous policy” he announced in his inaugural lecture as Merton Professor of English, which is paraphrased by Empson as follows: “… there must be no more paraphrase, no reading in or spelling out, because all such tampering with a text was the work of vandals” (Empson 1984, 39).

Carey bases the argument of his inaugural lecture as Merton Professor on the acknowledged impossibility of divorcing form from content. An earlier and influential statement of the case against paraphrase was made by Cleanth Brooks, who gave to the last chapter of The Well Wrought Urn the title ”The Heresy of Paraphrase”. His argument is much less dismissive of the usefulness of paraphrase than that title might lead the reader to expect. This may be why Empson (who had at the time already published Seven Types of Ambiguity and Some Versions of Pastoral, both of which employ a method which might be described as ”alternative paraphrase”), could give The Well Wrought Urn a very favourable review, saying that he could not disparage Brooks’s critical approach without attacking his own (Empson 1988, 282). Brooks emphasizes the danger of mistaking the paraphrase for the poem, and thinking that all that needs to be done to account for the working of a poem is to explain what it means in other words. He certainly does not say that an explanation in prose of what a poem might be said to mean can never assist the critical process.

Brooks’s warning of the dangers of paraphrase is considered, rational and persuasive; unfortunately, the lesson has been learned too well. Carey tells us that the indissolubility of form and content is so generally recognized that the words ”form” and ”content” themselves are no longer seen as acceptable, because ”they insist upon a separation in which we no longer believe” (Carey 1976, 178) It might be thought that paraphrase is useless because it cannot hope to catch every nuance, to convey every variation of tone, or to capture the sound and rhythm of the words themselves. Whereas, of course, if a paraphrase could do all these things, it really would be useless; it would carry precisely the same meaning as the main text, no more and no less; and therefore could not possibly add anything to our understanding of it. The utility of paraphrase lies, oddly, in its imprecision; to paraphrase is implicitly to say ”not quite this” or ”almost that, but with subtle, unspecifiable, differences”. Paraphrase helps to orient the reader, to locate the object of study (with greater or less certainty) among a number of other possibilities of meaning.

Paraphrase then, is a useful tool, though admittedly a dangerous one in inexperienced or careless hands. The question remains: useful for what? If it’s a critical tool, so the question would seem to be what are the purposes of criticism and, in particular, what is its immediate purpose? For the New Critics (and for other important twentieth-century critics such as Leavis), the purpose of criticism was valuation. If the poem is a verbal icon, or a figurative urn, the important question will inevitably be how well or ill wrought it is. Here again, Empson provides a useful corrective. Agreeing that the purpose of criticism is valuation, he argues that it is often not possible to pursue this end immediately. His own criticism tends more to the interpretive, and he is quite explicit that interpretation entails a determined effort to unearth what the author meant, or intended. For him, in short, intentionalism is not a fallacy; on the contrary, the fallacy is what he called “The Wimsatt doctrine”, which holds that the author’s intention is unknowable, and that to pursue it is fruitless and misleading.

This difference between the New Critics and Empson, who has sometimes been thought of as one of their early members, lies in their differing conceptions of the aim of criticism. Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s statement of the doctrine, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946), proceeds from the undeniable proposition that, since our best evidence of what the poet meant is the poem itself, to attempt to judge the poem by its success or failure in realizing that intention is to impugn the evidence on which we rely. To attempt to use the author’s intention for evaluative purposes results in absurdity. But their objection to enquiring into the author’s intentions loses its force when the immediate aim of the enquiry is not judgment but interpretation, and Empson’s approach assumes that the latter must often precede the former; it is dangerous to try to evaluate a work of literature without having a reasonably clear idea of what the author is getting at, what he or she is trying to do.

Not only that, but it is possible that the interpretive effort may reveal previously unrecognized standards of judgment. In order to evaluate something, it is necessary to have an idea of what is good. If that idea has its origins outside the critical process (for example, in Christianity or Marxism, in the writings of Foucault, in a political commitment to liberal democracy, or in a suspicion that our whole idea of literature — among other things — has been irremediably distorted by the fact that women have been “hidden from history”), and is never modified by the process itself, there is a danger that all criticism will result simply in a confirmation of what the critic knew already. To avoid this danger, criticism must be an activity that learns from itself, that modifies its assumptions in the light of its discoveries. A criticism whose first and paramount aim is evaluation would then be in difficulty, a difficulty analogous to that ascribed by Wimsatt and Beardsley to intentionalism: the critic would have to attempt to amend his or her standard of evaluation in (and in the light of) the evaluative process itself.

Recognizing that the starting point and much of the activity of most criticism will be interpretation, we can return to Brooks’s indictment of the “heresy” of paraphrase. His central point is that a poem is a structure which is composed of stresses and tensions as well as “meanings, evaluations and interpretations” which complement each other; it relies on balance as well as harmony. It is the central importance of these stresses and tensions to the whole idea of poetry that makes necessary his frequent reliance on concepts like paradox and irony. An attempt to account for such a necessarily complex structure by means of paraphrase results in something that Brooks rightly describes as an abstract:

… we can always abstract an “idea” from a poem — even from the simplest poem … But the idea which we abstract — assuming that we can all agree on what that idea is — will always be abstracted: it will always be the projection of a plane along a line or the projection of a cone upon a plane. (Brooks 1968, 167)

Precisely; and if we doubt the usefulness of such projections, we might consider projections onto a plane, not of cones, but of the globe. The analogy of a paraphrase with a map or plan is a good one; no one doubts that a map is on a much smaller scale than the thing mapped; that it omits more detail than it includes; or that it is flat while the thing itself is three dimensional. In short, it is indeed an abstract. Yet (and particularly in the hands of an experienced map reader) it can help us to pinpoint where we are, and where we might arrive. To acknowledge the usefulness of the map is in no way to mistake it for the landscape. Nor is it to imagine that, once we have the map, the landscape can be dispensed with. Rather, a map of a landscape one never expects to see is of more limited utility than one of the landscape one now happens to be in.

The point of agreement between those, like Carey and to a lesser extent Brooks, who believe that the abstract or plan can be of little assistance and those, like Empson, who wield it enthusiastically, is that the poem is a structure, a complex totality. The disagreement lies in the belief of the former that this structure, if it is to be apprehended at all, can be apprehended only as a totality; to attempt to apprehend it piece by piece, or cumulatively, is to admit failure from the beginning. The opposing view is unabashedly analytical. Empson’s best-known statement on the subject of analysis is to be found in the note to his poem “Bacchus”: “… life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis” (Empson 1955, 104–5). This recognition of the limits of analysis (what, in the finite world, does not have limits?) should not mislead anyone into thinking that analysis was anything less than fundamental to Empson’s critical approach. He wrote, for example:

As is particularly clear with children from homes where they don’t read poetry, but also sometimes true I’m afraid of all of us, it is quite possible to be confronted with a work of art and not see what the point of it is, what it is trying to do, how one part of it is supposed to affect another. There is room for a great deal of exposition, in which the business of the critic is simply to show how the machine is meant to work, and therefore to show all its working parts in turn. This is the kind of criticism I am specially interested in, and I think it is often really needed. Anyone who objects to it because it does not try to give a Final Valuation of the work, in relation to all other work, seems to me merely irrelevant. (Empson 1988, 106)

To “show all its working parts in turn” is precisely to analyze, analysis being a way of explaining or accounting for a complex system by separating it into its constituent parts. With a real machine, it may be necessary physically to take it apart in order to show how it works as a whole. It seems to me that this is what gives rise to the idea that analytical criticism is equivalent to vandalism, but that the objection is misconceived. The analysis of a work of literature remains distinct from the work itself, in much the same way as a map remains merely an incomplete representation of the landscape. There are, in fact, two quite different types of analysis, which might be labelled the abstract and the concrete. A chemical analysis, in which a sample of a compound is split into the elements of which it is composed, is a concrete analysis. More common, I suspect, is the abstract type: the analysis of an economic system, of the functioning of an organization, or of a task to be automated would fall into this category. It will be clear that the elements of an abstract analysis must comprise something other than the actual “working parts” of the thing to be analysed. These elements will themselves be abstract. I take it that it will often be the case that one of the elements in the analysis of a novel, poem or other literary work will be a paraphrase. The paraphrase does not, in other words, constitute the whole of the analysis but it does represent an important part of it.

I’m not at all sure that this 26-year-old fragment still has any relevance: at this remove its argument seems too obvious to be worth trotting out again. All the same, I’d rather post something that’s out-of-date than nothing at all, particularly as I’ve missed or delayed some posts in recent months. I hope that if you found it tedious you’re not still reading! Next time, I’m probably going to post about two books from the recent Penguin Archive series. I’ve bought 8 of the titles in the series, and so far read 5. I’ll probably save Muriel Spark (The Driver’s Seat) and Willa Cather (A Lost Lady) for later and write first about Stefan Zweig’s Chess and Bohumil Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains (subject to change without notice).

Works cited

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry, 2nd edn. (Methuen, 1968)

Carey, John. Andrew Marvell: A Critical Anthology (Penguin, 1969)

Carey, John. “The Critic as Vandal”, New Statesman, 92 (1976), 178–80, 210–12

Carey, John. “Reversals transposed: An aspect of Marvell’s imagination”, in Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures, ed. C A Patrides (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 136–54

Creaser, John. “‘As one scap’t strangely from Captivity’: Marvell and Existential Liberty”, in Marvell and Liberty, ed. Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (Macmillan, 1999), 145–72

Empson, William. Collected Poems (Chatto & Windus, 1955)

Empson, William. “Other People’s Views”, in Using Biography (Chatto & Windus, 1984), 28–42

Empson, William. Argufying, ed. John Haffenden (Hogarth Press, 1988).

Her story to tell?: Laura Lippman, Dream Girl; Rebecca F Kuang, Yellowface

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 20:58:38 +0100

Four years ago, towards the end of the first year of this newsletter, I wrote a post titled “Fugitive women”, about two books whose central characters were on the run from serious accusations of past wrongdoing: Lisa Lutz’s The Passenger and Laura Lippman’s Sunburn. Earlier this year, I read later novels by both these authors and thought I’d write another joint post about their books. However, rereading Lippman’s Dream Girl (2021) at the end of last week, I wondered if Rebecca F Kuang’s Yelloface (2023) wouldn’t pair better with it than Lutz’s The Accomplice (2021). Dream Girl and Yellowface have certain thematic resemblances, as the earlier books from Lutz and Lippman had to each other. Kuang’s novel is broadly about cultural appropriation, or perhaps the exclusion of certain racial groups from publication, as well as the more blatant theft of one author’s work by another, while the NPR review of Dream Girl implies that it has “something to do with one character stealing the story of another character and passing it off as their own”.

This is true, finally, but the identities of the plagiarist and true author, and the particular work appropriated, are not those we have been led to expect, and the “thief” is a character for whom we can’t help having particular sympathy. Dream Girl’s Gerry Anderson is plausibly suspected of having stolen the story of an unidentified woman. It turns out, however, that he has done nothing of the sort, though he is guilty of something much worse. Stolen intellectual property is not central to Lippman’s novel as it is to Kuang’s, but there are some resemblances between the two books. In both the relationship between an author and his or her agent plays an important role. (For example, each novel features a discussion between author and agent about the possibility of a film production company taking an option on one of the author’s works.)

Over a literary career lasting almost 40 years, Gerry Anderson has written 7 novels, some of them bestsellers. The middle one, Dream Girl, is his biggest success. In it, he convincingly portrayed the interiority of a female character, Aubrey, something he had not managed to achieve in any of his first three novels. It’s also an achievement he hasn’t repeated. Two young women whom he’d taught in a creative writing workshop eight years earlier, come back into Gerry’s life. One, Victoria, successfully applies to become his assistant; the other, Aileen, acts as his night nurse when he is immobilized by a sudden and terrifying domestic accident. He doesn’t recognize or remember either of his former students and (at least according to Aileen) Victoria is particularly put out by that.

Gerry has been receiving anonymous phone calls. The caller is a woman whose voice isn’t familiar to him, but she claims to be the original of Aubrey, the real person on whose true story the Dream Girl’s is based. Gerry doesn’t know what to make of this: he knows that there was no “original”: Aubrey is completely invented. The lover he has been attempting to discard, Margot, is threatening to disclose his “secret” unless he provides somewhere for her to live. Again, Gerry is bewildered. He doesn’t have any particularly damaging secret that he’s aware of.

Eventually, after Margot and one other person have been murdered, Aileen (or Leenie as he knew her when she was his creative writing student) explains the first mystery:

“We realized that you don’t see women unless you’re attracted to them, that it was such a joke that you’d gotten all this praise about some ‘dream girl’ who changed a man’s life, that there was no way Aubrey was really your creation because she was too real, and you didn’t know anything about real women. There’s always been this rumor that you stole some woman’s life, maybe even stole her literal story. We decided to gaslight you.” (p. 244)

Berating himself for not having recognized Victoria’s (Tori’s) “mousy squeak”, Gerry thinks that his problem may be not so much one of seeing women as “that he didn’t hear women” (p. 245). And if he’s not hearing women, a large part of the reason is that he’s not listening, most of the time.

Before taking up with Margot, Gerry had been married three times. His first and third marriages ended when he slept with someone else. Significantly, it was he who ended the marriages, not the betrayed wife. Although Gerry loves sex, he hates adultery. As a college student in 1978, he is unreservedly in favour of the former:

Gerry had been with only three women, but the first time he entered one, he couldn’t believe how amazing it was, how literature, which he held in such high esteem, had failed to inform him fully of the wonders of sex … And he knew, because of his father, that he had to guard himself against becoming obsessive about this particular joy, that he must never hurt another person in his pursuit of this pleasure. (pp. 142–3)

(The choice of vocabulary in this passage — “the first time he entered one” — implies that Gerry is more preoccupied with the sensation or the experience itself than with his sexual partner.) He’s horrified at the prospect of turning out like his father, who had maintained a second, bigamous marriage for many years. Gerry didn’t love either his second wife or his third. Indeed, he agreed with the second, Gretchen, who initiated the break-up and to whom he hadn’t been unfaithful, that he didn’t like her. Yet he didn’t want to split from her. He should never have divorced his first wife, Lucy, whom he met when they were both MFA students at Johns Hopkins.

She was the acknowledged star of their class. She was so talented and full of promise that she was capable of being without envy, which astonished Gerry. She had been publishing her stories in the best literary journals since she was an undergraduate, yet here he was, with an offer for his first novel, a good one, from one of the top houses, and there was no doubt that she felt only joy. (p. 39)

But if Lucy is gloriously free of envy of her husband’s literary success, she compensates for that, in Gerry’s view, by being rabidly jealous of his attraction to other women. But this is a crucial instance of Gerry’s failure to pay attention to what Lucy is actually telling him. She pesters him about imaginary “affairs he wasn’t having” and Gerry concludes that she was “so determined not to be envious of Gerry’s professional success … that she became crazed with jealousy of other women” (p. 61).

Finally, finding that Gerry isn’t picking up on her hints, Lucy tells him that he can have sex with whomever he likes, but Lucy always has to be in the room. It becomes apparent that by being “in the room”, Lucy doesn’t just mean watching: she wants to join in. Gerry is appalled by his own enjoyment of the experience. Early on in their relationship, he has decided that what he likes best about Lucy is that, “beneath her ladylike looks” (p. 40), she is wild where sex is concerned. Now it seems that she’s wilder than he can cope with. He soon sleeps with a colleague, a woman in whom he’s not really “interested” (p. 182), without Lucy being present, and so ends the marriage. That’s his first big mistake. His biggest mistake, though, is to have sex with a woman he has met in a hotel bar, again bringing his current marriage to an end.

It turns out that Margot really had known a highly discreditable secret about Gerry, but her attempt to blackmail him got nowhere because he didn’t yet know it himself. When Gerry’s mother was dying, he reluctantly sold his New York apartment and moved back to Baltimore, buying a $1.75 million duplex apartment on the top two floors of a building on the former site of a grain silo. The two floors are connected by a floating staircase. Gerry seriously injured himself falling down this staircase, and is confined to bed for the “present-day” part of the novel’s action.

Margot held on in his former New York apartment even after he had sold it, and opened mail that had been addressed to him there. That’s how she learned his secret before he knew it himself. Kim, the woman he’d slept with in a hotel towards the end of his third marriage, had written to him, accusing him of having raped her. When a confrontation is arranged between Kim and the bedridden Gerry, he is outraged at her accusation. Kim had engaged him in conversation in the hotel bar, had been reading The Master and Margarita (known to be “one of his cherished favourites”, p. 208). She had obviously engineered their meeting, and had happily gone to his hotel room after several drinks. After it became clear that he intended to have sex with her, Kim had produced a condom, saying she would “like that better” (p. 211) if he wore it. (Gerry, still deep in his third marriage, of course wasn’t carrying one.)

Gerry can’t imagine how a young woman could behave like Kim had if she hadn’t wanted to have sex with him. But, to his dismay, it turns out that she had compelling reasons both to want to speak to him and not to have sex with him. And she had said “no” twice, if not very forcefully. Gerry had missed her refusal — not listening again.

Gerry is a successful author who teaches creative writing, so it’s not surprising that the book contains many references to other writers and books. Though there are many more references to authors from William Congreve to Jim Thompson by way of Eudora Welty and Josephine Tey, the principal model for the story is Stephen King’s Misery. In the Author’s Note at the end, Lippman writes:

This is a book about what goes on inside a writer’s mind and it is, by my lights, my first work of horror. (p. 327)

Much of the horror probably lies in the demonstration that rape could make so little impression on the rapist, a man who had long since resolved not to injure the women he had (or wanted to have) sex with. After the novel’s climactic events, Kim wonders:

How could the worst thing that ever happened to her not be one of his pivotal memories? (p. 323)

Before moving on from Dream Girl, I wanted to mention some of Gerry’s comments on other literary figures:

The crime novelist Elmore Leonard, whom Gerry respected about as much as as he could respect any genre writer, had famously said to cut out the parts that readers skip. Gerry hated that glib aphorism. If anything, writers should be committed to putting in more passages that readers were likely to skip. (p. 94)

And this, from 1999, just after Gerry has been in a bar watching, but not meeting or speaking to, the woman who will inspire the character Aubrey:

Fuck the maximalists, the Tom Wolfe imitators, the worst of whom was Tom Wolfe these days. (p. 317)

Having reread Yellowface earlier this week, immediately after Dream Girl, I find that I’m not ready to discuss it in any depth. I have various ideas as to what I might like to say about it, but most of those ideas haven’t crystallized. So I’ll just deal with two aspects of the book now.

The narrator, June, steals the just-finished manuscript draft of a new novel by her sort-of friend Athena Liu, when Athena dies suddenly, having choked on a pancake. Once June has edited the draft and filled in a few gaps, she passes the manuscript off as her own and it proves to be a bestseller. Athena’s previous books have been hits, June’s sole publication hasn’t.

Stolen manuscripts are a fairly popular plot device, particularly in films. As a device it tends to be implausible, since it depends on there being no backup of the manuscript and no living person apart from the thief who knows what its contents are. In this case, the theft is possible because Athena wrote her draft on a typewriter and had just completed it before her sudden death. She hadn’t told anybody except June about it and hadn’t had time to copy it onto her computer. Fortunately such a combination of circumstances doesn’t happpen very often. I think it’s fair to say that, except in the case of a willing ghost-writer, situations where an author passes somebody else’s work off as her own are very rare.

In this case, there’s a complicating factor. Athena was Chinese-American, June is white. With her publishers’ encouragement, June publishes the book under the name “Juniper Song” (the two first names given by her mother, a hippie at the time of June’s birth), initially giving many readers the impression that the supposed author has a Chinese background, as the genuine author had.

This raises important ethical questions about cultural appropriation and the possibility that June is taking a place in the publisher’s list that might otherwise have been occupied by an actual Chinese-American. Or, rather, it would do so, if June weren’t already totally in the wrong because of her plagiarism. Her conduct is indefensible from the start, so her masquerade as a member of an ethnic minority seems oddly inconsequential. I couldn’t help feeling that the plot would be more compelling if, instead of an almost complete manuscript, June had taken, or been handed, a bundle of Athena’s preliminary notes, or an outline of ideas.

The novel’s climactic confrontation takes place between June and Candice Lee, a Korean-American who had been an editorial assistant at June’s publishers and had been present at the discussion about June’s author-name. She had attempted to ensure that the book had a sensitivity-read before it was published. Goaded by Candice to explain why she stole Athena’s book, June reveals a streak of racism that, to my European ear at least, hadn’t been evident before. (The “they” in the first paragraph below refers to publishers.)

“But it’s true, isn’t it? Athena had it made. You people — I mean, diverse people — you’re all they want — ”

“Oh my God.” Candice presses a palm against her forehead. “You really are insane. Do all white people talk like this?” (p. 307)

It seems to me that, if June has been racist all along, we should have seen some indication of that before we got within 8 pages of the end. Perhaps it was indicated and I missed it. I’ve never been to the United States and I know nothing about the US publishing industry. While racism exists pretty well everywhere, I believe that it takes a particular form in the US from elsewhere, largely because of the history of slavery. My views on racism were formed in the late 1970s, the time of Rock against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, and developed when I lived in London between 1988 and 2005. I’m well aware that it’s a mistake to try to apply views formed in that context to American society.

There’s quite a bit more that I could write about Yellowface. There’s a good chance that I might not return to it, but anything’s possible. I’ll write separately about Lisa Lutz’s The Accomplice before too long.

Editions: Dream Girl Faber paperback 2022; emphasis original, ellipses added;
YellowfaceThe Borough Press, 2024.

Fantastic and grotesque: Sarah Hall, Sudden Traveller

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 21:24:11 +0100

Sarah Hall’s third collection of short stories is the second of hers that I’ve read, but the first I’ve read in print. Three years ago, I borrowed the ebook edition of her Madame Zero (2017) from the library. In his review of that collection in The New Statesman, Tim Martin wrote:

So many of these stories are about characters who have vanished, become strange to themselves or stepped out of the centres of their own lives.

The displacements are literal, figurative and, occasionally, fantastical.

The stories in Sudden Traveller (2019) similarly tell of displacements that are literal, figurative and occasionally fantastic. My first impression was that the fantastic played a greater role in this collection than in the previous one but, counting up the ones without fantastic elements, I see I was mistaken about this. I’ve also found that the stories from Madame Zero that have stayed with me are, at least in my memory, naturalistic in style. The one that comes first to mind is “Wilderness” (the link is to its 2013 publication in The Guardian). The note I made at the time summarizes the story as one in which an Englishwoman and two South African men cross a rusting, decrepit and precarious viaduct high above a shallow estuary, as the strains in two separate relationships become all too evident. The other story from Madame Zero that I particularly remember is “Luxury Hour”, in which a new mother, escaping briefly from her baby for a quick swim in her local lido, unexpectedly runs into a former lover.

Whether fantastic or naturalistic (or some third thing) the stories in Sudden Traveller are all mysterious to some extent. The author gives us plenty of detail and particularity, so that we don’t feel that there are any gaps in the story, that anything material has been left out, and yet we will often have trouble interpreting these particulars correctly, in working out exactly what is going on.

Usually, if a writer is being oblique, if she’s withholding relevant information, the story is likely to seem unsatisfactory to the reader, as if it’s somehow incomplete, flimsier than it ought to be. These stories don’t seem at all incomplete or unsatisfactory, yet it’s impossible for the reader to be quite sure about certain important aspects. For example, in “The Grotesques”, what has become of Rebecca and her baby?

That story opens when the central character, Dilly, sees “the vagrant Charlie-bo” (p. 41) waking up under a shop awning on a Cambridge street. As a “prank”, some students have arranged a mask of fruit and vegetables over his face as he was sleeping. Dilly feels that she ought to help him but is too timid and fastidious to do so. She’s also late, though clearly not as late as she fears, as her delay is not mentioned by her mother or anybody else. It’s Dilly’s thirtieth birthday and her mother is hosting a rather boring party. Dilly is hungry enough to be in danger of fainting — her mother keeps a strict eye on both her daughters’ diet, afraid that their father’s “broad, Dutch genes” (p. 54) will make their presence obvious. The father himself is out of the picture, just beyond the edge of the frame: a friend of her mother’s tells Dilly that she bumped into him on the way to the party, and that he said to wish her a happy birthday.

Dilly appears immature for her age, as if she had not been allowed to grow up. She spent some time living (and presumably working) in London but has returned to live in her mother’s house. A Kenyan priest, speaking to her brother-in-law at the party, wants to give her a birthday blessing and is apparently taken aback to discover that she is all of 30 years old, though he had initially taken her for her married (and perhaps older) sister, Cleo.

Rebecca had been involved with Dilly’s brother, Peter, who is an officer in something, presumably military. Rebecca’s baby was apparently also Peter’s but it is is not made clear what happened to it. There was clearly a falling out between Rebecca and Peter’s mother, who thinks that Rebecca had an “over-attachment” to the baby.

Some of the words that had been said, by Rebecca when she was very upset, and also by Mummy, afterwards, had echoed in Dilly’s head a long time. Congenital. Abusive. Your son’s twisted priorities and your bloody eugenics — now it’s fine to destroy life? Dilly didn’t know how people could believe in exact opposites where humans were concerned. Mummy could be quite fierce about her sons, but sometimes Peter did need their help, actually, where emotions were concerned. (p. 58)

Rebecca’s reference to eugenics makes me wonder whether “Mummy” (who appears to be Catholic) put her under pressure, for unspecified reasons, to have an abortion, and Peter refused to take Rebecca’s side. In any case, the mother seems to be taking Rebecca’s revolt — “The greatest betrayal of all was to disaffiliate” (p. 59) — harder than her son does. So Rebecca is not at the party. Neither is Dilly’s boyfriend, Sam.

Dilly had wanted to ask Sam, but it was beginning to look like Sam didn’t meet with anyone’s approval. He’d been a bit too quiet at the dinner last week, and hadn’t wanted to sing when Mummy had asked him to. When Dilly had sung her number, a northern sea shanty, which she’d performed nicely but with the usual mild mortification, Sam had looked suddenly very frightened. He hadn’t replied to Dilly’s last three messages. (p. 46)

Following her return from London, Dilly’s mother had arranged a single session with a neighbouring psychoanalyst, Merrick.

He’d finished the session with a little talk about boundaries and identity within a family, he’d used a fishing-net metaphor, and Dilly had felt uncomfortable and was glad when it was over. (pp. 52–3)

At the party, having finally had two scones to eat, and divined that her mother didn’t want to criticize her or expect her to do anything like answer the door to guests, Dilly relaxes and decides that Merrick was wrong about families, boundaries and identity:

She had tried to be unmoored, tried to live without protections, but the world was full of grotesque, frightening, ridiculous things. It was full of meaningless sorrow and contradiction. Like a sick little baby, with a perfect soul. Here — didn’t he see? — they could all help each other. Failure could be forgiven, good things shared. They could all be each other. (pp. 64–5)

So, from Dilly’s point of view, the “grotesques” of the title are the frightening, ridiculous things that surround her, from which she feels she needs protection.

Towards the end of the story, Charlie-bo’s body is pulled out of the river. We don’t learn how he died; he had clearly been in a bad way when Dilly saw him earlier. Dilly had been thinking about him shortly before the discovery of his body was announced, and associated him with Rebecca, whom she describes as a scapegoat:

She thought of Charlie-bo … His ruined hazel eyes. His terrible predicament: not the fruit joke, but his life. She thought of Rebecca, pictured her, fatally, like the painting of the goat in the Fitzwilliam with its red headband, standing in salt near the water, its amber eyes dying. (p. 63)

She imagines the examination of Charlie-bo’s body. (He, too, has a red headband.) The face that is uncovered, “so peaceful and untormented” (p. 67) is her own. So Dilly identifies herself, in “a secret, dangerous thought, not ever to be shared with anyone” with both Rebecca and Charlie-bo, all of them people who “didn’t belong any more,” because they “took the sins of others and were cast out” (p. 63).

“The Woman the Book Read” has a male protagonist, a man who lives and is in business in a Turkish town by the sea. He appears to be English; at any rate, his business partner, Eymen, addresses him as “foreigner” (p. 26). (He addresses Eymen as “Arab”, p. 27.) As he’s waiting for Eymen, he hears a woman calling the unusual name Ara and thinks it must be the same Ara that he was reluctantly parted from 20 years earlier. He soon recognizes her as the same individual. He watches Ara and her companion as they get ready to go for a swim at Derya beach. The protagonist wonders if he should approach Ara, if she has perhaps come back to look for him, but he holds back. He has left Eymen at their café table without an explanation, and ignores other acquaintances whom he’d normally stop and speak to, risking their taking offence.

He recalls the delight he used to feel in her learning things:

He’d loved teaching her words, little phrases. Sentences were harder, she didn’t understand the order of syntax, but then neither had he at first, in reverse. (p. 29)

This probably explains the story’s title. At first glance, it looks as if it’s not a complete sentence, but consists simply of a noun qualified by a relative clause: the woman [whom] the book read. This would be a paradoxical phrase, as books can’t read. Once we know that the problem has to do with not understanding “the order of the syntax”, it becomes clear that this is a complete sentence, but it’s arranged subject-object-verb instead of subject-verb-object: the woman read the book.

The last time he had seen Ara, there had been tears and a fight. He reflects on how things might have been different.

If he’d had longer, maybe, or if he and Catherine had married, he could have made a decision that would have mattered in the end. Maybe he could have run with Ara. But everything had happened out of order, too fast, and the lines, no the law, had been made clear to him. (p. 35)

This starts alarm bells ringing. If he and Catherine (Ara’s mother) had married? In the same way as Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert married Charlotte Haze, not specifically to obtain control over Charlotte’s young daughter, but with that result? Is this a more sinister story than it has so far appeared, a tale of child sexual abuse? But no, apparently not. Catherine had been killed in an accident (so she resembled Charlotte Haze in one respect at least), and the protagonist is wondering whether, if they had been married, he might have a right to guardianship of his lover’s daughter. As it was, he had no rights at all and Ara had to go with her father …

… not understanding this wasn’t just a visit with a man she hardly knew, a stranger, who now had every right to keep her. As she’d mounted the train she had suddenly begun to cry and struggle, realising something was wrong, and she’d been lifted aboard quickly and disappeared. (p. 37)

But, once the suspicion of child sexual abuse has been planted, it’s very difficult to root it out completely. Isn’t there something a bit off in his fascination with the present physical reality of a woman he has hitherto known only as a child? He notices her beauty, and her resemblance to her mother. It’s true that he seems quite unperturbed by what he sees, as well as by the “[i]ntimate, sexual” (p. 34) quality of her gestures towards the woman who is with her. It’s probable that his feelings towards Ara have always been benign, harmless. But what if they haven’t?

On first reading, I thought several of the stories in this collection were vaguely disturbing, only to find on looking more closely that they were much more disturbing than I’d first thought. That’s true of “The Woman the Book Read”, and also of the first story in the book, “M”. Here, a busy lawyer is asked to represent a women’s refuge that is threatened with eviction because the freehold owner wants to redevelop the site as “unaffordable new flats” (p. 10). The attempts by the refuge to raise publicity gives its location away, so some of the husbands and abusers of the women who live there have besieged it. It’s the first pro bono case the lawyer has taken for a long time. She works the case, but the law is against them; there is little she can do legally. The women are dispersed.

In the meantime, the lawyer has been suffering excruciating pains at night. The pains culminate in the eruption from her shoulders of a huge pair of wings. She is transformed into a creature like “an angel with wings so vast they looked like moons” (p. 14). This creature visits the women who were previously in the refuge, carrying out abortions and bringing other forms of comfort and support. She also starts to kill abusive men. The first time, she does not prevent a rape, but picks the rapist up only afterwards. This isn’t calculated, it’s instinctive, and her instincts are developing. The second time, she snatches up the man just as he’s pushing his potential victim into an alley.

The passage in this story that I found particularly disturbing concerns a woman whom the angel caught up with too late for an abortion.

In a clinic in the south, a woman waits for the nurse to leave, then turns the baby over on its front, pushes its head down into the mattress of the crib. Warm, and soft as vegetable. It moves, surprises heer with its strength … The woman stops. She rolls the baby over and its mouth sucks air. Hasn’t got it in her … It should be both of them. Tomorrow she will take it to the river. She cries with relief. The baby cries for milk. The woman dozes. She feels a breeze and when she looks the little boy is gone, adopted by the wind. (pp. 19–20)

Obviously, the lawyer’s transformation into this creature is mysterious, but it’s not the only mystery in the story. Several times, before she became a lawyer, she very narrowly escaped death. The first time, she had scepticaemia from a burst appendix. The school nurse had told her twice to go back to class, and the surgeon said she was lucky to be alive. Next, she was inches away from the rolling tractor that crushed her father. The compensation from that incident paid for her legal eduction and a basement flat in London. When she was 19, she broke her spine or neck in a motorcycle accident; later, she had to be airlifted off a mountain with a broken ankle, unconscious and dehydrated after three days. As a child, she was raped and abused while her mother was in hospital. All of this formed part of “a life’s contract of survival and compensation” (p. 2).

I haven’t been able to work out what were the terms of this contract. Perhaps her violent, vengeful actions against predators and at least one innocent baby are the price that is being exacted from her for all the times she was saved from imminent death. But then why was her life so often at risk in the first place? I don’t have an answer to suggest.

At the end of the story, she goes back to the village of her childhood, to deal finally with the rapist-abuser. He’s still alive, though barely, so he can’t be her father. He seems to be the next-door neighbour, but again it’s not very clear. That doesn’t, in my view, make these stories any less satisfactory, though they remain disturbing.

Edition: Faber paperback, 2020; emphasis original, ellipses added.

“Lady you deserve this state”: Second person singular pronouns in Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 17:11:36 +0100

Last weekend, there should have been a newsletter post but I didn’t manage to write it because my attention was on other things. Having missed that post, I thought I’d just skip last week and send out the next post (probably about Sarah Hall’s short stories in Sudden Traveller) two weeks later, on 13 September. But I’ve changed my mind again.

The main thing taking up my attention last week was the poetry of Andrew Marvell. I’ve been trying to turn my thesis into something publishable and relatively accessible and, on about the fourth attempt, I’m finally getting somewhere. So, I was thinking mainly about Marvell. I’ve been searching through some of the things I wrote about his poetry in the early days of postgraduate study, before I had figured out what my “thesis” was. I had been under the impression that I hadn’t written anything at all about “To His Coy Mistress”, largely because there’s very little in it that is relevant to my topic (Marvell’s treatment of the theme of justice) and also partly because so much has already been written about Marvell’s best-known poem that I was unlikely to come up with anything new.

I was surprised to find that I had, in fact, written a bit about the poem. Apart from a brief comment on the couplet

Rather at once our Time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapped power (ll. 39–40)

none of what I wrote back then is worth resurrecting, but I noticed something about the poem that had escaped me till now.

A while ago, I wrote on my personal site about second person pronouns in Marvell’s other best-known poem, “The Garden”. Although I had been familiar with that poem for decades, it had only just struck me that the shift from “thou/thee/thy” to “you” in the second stanza is a shift from singular to plural.

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men. (“The Garden”, ll. 9–12)

The speaker begins by addressing “Fair Quiet” alone, but the “you” in line 11 is directed at “Fair Quiet” and “Innocence, [her] sister dear” together. That got me wondering whether Marvell had ever used the singular “you” in any of his non-satiric poetry.

In fact, he uses it quite freely, for example in “Clorinda and Damon” line 16, and “The Nymph Complaining” line 31. (It may be worth noting that, in both of these poems, “you” is spoken by a would-be seducer: Clorinda in the first and “Unconstant Silvio” who “soon had me beguiled” in the second.) But I missed somthing, presumably because I hadn’t looked in any detail at “To His Coy Mistress” for such a long time. In that poem, the speaker uses “you” and “thou” inconsistently.

Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find. I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood:
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews. (“To His Coy Mistress”, ll. 5–10)

The speaker returns to the more familiar form in line 14, with “Thine eyes” and “thy forehead”, but in lines 18 and 19, he has reverted to formality:

And the last age should show your heart.
For Lady you deserve this state;
Nor would I love at lower rate. (ll. 18–20)

Clearly, in this poem the “you/your” form is not a plural, as it is in “The Garden”. Rather, the speaker is alternating (perhaps wavering) between an intimate, confidential mode of address and a reserved, respectful one. Why might he be doing that?

When I wrote about Marvell and gender, I had this to say about “Clorinda and Damon”:

Marvell again engages in the detachment of a masculine role from a male and of a feminine one from a female in “Clorinda and Damon”. The carpe diem motif is usually encountered in the univocal utterance of a male persona, the woman’s voice remaining unheard. “Clorinda and Damon” (note that the young woman’s name comes first in the title, in contrast to “Ametas and Thestylis”, “Daphnis and Chloe”, or “Thyrsis and Dorinda”) is a dialogue in which it is Clorinda who urges her companion to “Seize the short joys then, ere they vade” (l. 8). Because only one voice speaks in Herrick’s “Gather Ye Rosebuds” or, indeed, in “To His Coy Mistress”, the reader is left with no clear sense of the effect that the attempt at persuasion has had on its addressee. Success or failure, this might imply, is not really the point. In Marvell’s dialogue, on the other hand, we do learn the result: Clorinda, far from having things her way, is instead won over to Damon’s point of view. (Kavanagh 2016, 213–4)

I now think I was unfair to “To His Coy Mistress” in stating that, because we only hear the man’s words, we don’t know how the woman has received his attempt at persuasion. His switching between the intimate and the formal, and back again, is most likely his response to what he perceives as her reaction. He is adjusting his tone according to whether he thinks she is being receptive to his arguments or resisting them. Having addressed her as “you” in lines 18 and 19, he is being familiar again a few lines later:

Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity:
And your quaint honour turn to dust … (ll. 25–9)

The impersonal “That” comes between “thy” in lines 25 and 26 and “your” in line 29, holding them apart as it were. The speaker is attempting to be at once forceful and delicate: he is talking about body parts — intimate, private ones — and their inevitable decay and decomposition. Nigel Smith cites the OED showing that “quaint” means both “proud” and “prim”, but adds “There is also a pun on ME ‘queynte’ (vagina)” (Smith 2007, 83 note to l. 29).

So, in speaking of “your quaint honour” (emphasis added) the speaker appears to be attempting to balance a rather brutal intimacy with a respectful deference. In the next verse paragraph he is back with “thy”: “thy skin” (l. 34), “thy willing soul” (l. 35) — which “transpires | At every pore with instant fires”. These are the last occurrences in the poem of a second person pronoun. In the remaining ten lines, all the pronouns that refer to the speaker and the woman he is addressing are first person plural:

Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like am’rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our Time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball:
And tear our pleasures with rough strife,
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run. (ll. 37–46)

This might be taken to suggest that the two parties are now a couple, that they have reached agreement and are acting as one. Alternatively, it could be that in desperation the speaker is behaving as if they were in agreement, but that his attempt at persuasion has come to nothing. Because of the “willing soul” and the “instant fires”, I’m inclined to prefer the first view, but either way we can’t say (as I thought before) that the reader learns nothing about the reaction of the poem’s addressee.

There is another poem by Marvell in which one character is addressed as both “you” and “thou”. In the first stanza of “The Gallery”, the speaker invites Clora to view his soul, whose “several lodgings” are “Composed into one gallery” where

… for all furniture, you’ll find
Only your picture in my mind. (ll. 7–8)

Having been “you” in the first stanza, Clora becomes “thou” in the rest of the poem. It becomes clear that in the first stanza, though speaking to and about a single woman, he is using the plural. She appears to him in a gallery of different images, alternating between the alluring and the frightening. She appears successively as “an inhuman murderess” (l. 10), “Like to Aurora in the dawn” (l. 18), “an enchantress” (l. 25), “Venus in her pearly boat” (l. 34) and, finally, in “the same posture and the look | … with which I first was took. | A tender shepherdess, whose hair | Hangs loosely playing in the air” (ll. 51–4). The enchantress has been shown

Vexing thy restless lover’s ghost;
And, by a light obscure, dost rave
Over his entrails, in the cave;
Divining thence, with horrid care,
How long thou shalt continue fair … (ll. 26–30)

The penultimate stanza (VI) is explicit as to Clora’s multiplicity:

These pictures and a thousand more,
Of thee, my gallery does store;
In all the forms thou can’st invent
Either to please me, or torment:
For thou alone to people me,
Art grown a num’rous colony … (ll. 41–46)

She is both singular and plural.

The next post in Talk about books will be two weeks from now, on or about 20 September. It’s likely to be about Sarah Hall’s Sudden Traveller. Till then.

Works cited: Kavanagh, Art. “Andrew Marvell’s Gender”, Essays in Criticism, 66.2 (2016), 198–220;
Smith, Nigel, ed. The Poems of Andrew Marvell, revised edition (Routledge, 2007).

Care and maintenance: Caoilinn Hughes, The Alternatives

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 18:16:43 +0100

As I’ve written before, probably too often, I was very enthusiastic about Caoilinn Hughes’s short stories and disappointed to find her first two novels less satisfactory, particularly the second of these. I was hopeful that her third novel would be the one to live up to the quality of the short stories. And I’m glad to say that I think The Alternatives (2024) is the novel I had been waiting and hoping for.

It’s not without flaws, of course. It’s a novel, after all, a form that was defined by Randall Jarrell as a prose fiction of a certain length that has something wrong with it. There are passages and episodes in The Alternatives which I found unconvincing or in which a particular set of circumstances could have done with being more precisely drawn. The example of the former that stands out comes in the middle of the book, when Rhona, the second eldest of the four sisters at its centre, unhesitatingly drives over a cat that has been cleaning itself in the middle of the road. Before she hits it she says “Look at the dead cat.” Rhona’s two younger sisters and her 11-month-old son are in the car with her. The sisters are aghast that she didn’t “swerve, like, even slightly” (p. 142).

I hit the horn! Rhona replies sternly. You saw me! What do you want me to do? Swerve my car in this lashing rain with a baby in the back and hydroplane it into Leitrim … all so some cat can keep rimming itself? (p. 143)

Cats hate getting wet, which is why I have trouble accepting that this one sat calmly in the road carrying out its ablutions in the middle of a downpour. Surely it would have found a bush or a hedge or some other kind of shelter, however inadequate. But perhaps the unfortunate creature had become so acclimatized to the weather in the Irish midlands that it had given up hope of ever being able to avoid the rain for very long?

Convincing or not, the episode tells us something about the relationship between the sisters. Rhona is the most outwardly successful: a full professor (of Political Science) in Trinity, with a busy sideline in consultancy, she is pragmatic and decisive. Her rationale for driving straight over the cat in her Tesla Model 3, which is “really too low to the ground” (p. 142) is certainly defensible, but her instruction to “Look at the dead cat” before she hit it seems calculated to provoke her two sisters.

It was Rhona who, at sixteen, persuaded their aunt to authorize the exhumation of their parents’ bodies and arranged autopsies, without discussing it with the other sisters. It turned out that the implausible account they had been given of the parents’ deaths — that they had been blown off a cliff in a high wind — was far from being the whole story.

Rhona is the only one of the sisters who has a child, though Maeve, the third sister, is considering the possibility and Olwen, the eldest, has recently left a relationship with a widower who has two young sons. It is Olwen’s walking out, not just of her relationship with Jaspar and his sons, but of her job in the University of Galway, where she teaches a degree course in Earth Science, that brings all the sisters together for the first time in many years. Maeve comes from London where her success as an Instagram chef has led to a catering business and a three-book deal for cookery books (neither of which activities is without its complications), and Nell from Connecticut, where she is an adjunct professor, not on a tenure track or likely to be, and without health insurance. Her subject is philosophy. She has lost all feeling in her feet, which makes it very difficult for her to walk or drive.

Each sister seems to be partly motivated by an impulse to look after the others, whether they want her to or not. It is Olwen’s sudden disappearance that brings the other three together in a mission to find her and make sure she’s OK. When they turn up at her new home — a formerly derelict bungalow that gets its electricity from solar power and its water from the collection of rainwater — Olwen is not pleased to see them or grateful for their concern. Yet the eldest sister is drinking too much and clearly depressed, apparently because her her work in earth science has convinced her that neither our species nor our planet has a bright future. When, at the end of the novel, Olwen gets into “a spot of bother” (p. 340) and needs rescuing, her sisters have already left and it is to the man who sold her the bungalow and his partner that she turns for help.

Maeve has an accidentally and ambivalently successful career that bewliders Rhona. She started cooking on Instagram as a way of connecting with Nell, who moved to the US when she had finished her doctorate. Success on Instagram led to a contract for a series of cookery books, which in turn led to her catering business, which required her to buy a van which she quickly wrote off, losing £23,000. Maeve has conflicting aims: on the one hand, she wants to be able to fund Nell’s health care bills — while acknowledging that for now Nell can’t even afford exploratory steps to get an idea of what the ultimate cost might be. On the other hand, she wants to take advantage of the success of her first two cookbooks to make her third more political than her publishers are happy with, looking at questions like food shortages and poverty.

In her catering work and in the book it grew from, Maeve insists on using only British-grown produce. Her aim, it’s clearly implied, is to avoid planet-endangering international transport, but the unintended effect is that her work tends to appeal to Brexit-supporters, which may partly account for her success. It becomes clear that Maeve developed her love of and skill at cooking as her way of caring for her sisters, particularly the younger Nell, after their parents had died. The entirely to be expected irony is that her sisters appear to appreciate her efforts much less than her Instagram followers do. Rhona, for example, drives off with her son shortly before Maeve serves up a meal over which she has spent hours.

The sisters want to help and protect each other partly, I suppose, to assuage their own anxieties and satisfy their own sense of responsibility. But they find it difficult to find a way of helping that is acceptable to the sister being helped. As we’ve seen, Olwen is not pleased to have been sought out by her younger siblings, even though they had good reason to be concerned about her wellbeing. Rhona is particularly good at coming up with interventions that are not entirely acceptable to the supposed beneficiary. She arranges for blood tests to be carried out on Nell (“just preliminary process-of-elimination stuff. To save time”). She also asks Nell to stay in her house for a month, as she thinks she can get her an appointment for an MRI.

The best consultant neurologist in the country owes me a favour, so I’m waiting for his secretary to confirm a slot in early June. His wait list is normally six months and you’d need a referral. My guess is, he’d get you in for an MRI if he suspects neural entrapment or to rule out benign spinal tumours. He’ll check autoimmune stuff, multifocal motor neuropathy. I have my own theories based on some reading. But you don’t need to hear them. (p. 265)

Rhona’s main theory, which Nell insists on hearing, is that the causes of the problem are environmental. Nell, who has increasing difficulty getting about on land, goes for long early morning swims in Long Island Sound. Rhona points out that there is “a huge naval base just across the Thames River from” the University of Connecticut campus which is one of the places that Nell teaches, and it has an active nuclear submarine.

I’ll grant you, topical exposure’s a long shot, but that water’s bound to be military-grade nasty. (p. 266)

Nell cooperates with the blood tests, but says she can’t wait around for the month of June. She will be going back to her several jobs in Connecticut.

When Olwen asks her youngest sister “Why did you run off to America and never come back?”, Nell answers:

Because I couldn’t stand being worried about, she finally said. All the concern — it was suffocating. I’d take a nap and there’d be a thermometer under my tongue. That social worker smile everywhere. I couldn’t move for crashmats. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t be curious. Like, inconspicuously curious. Even just … being bi: I didn’t want a family meeting about it! (p. 325)

While Nell is unwilling or unable to accept the main part of the help offered by Rhona, she urges Maeve to accept Rhona’s offer to her. Maeve has sent an email to her pubishers, asking them to cancel the contract for her third book, and offering to return one third of her advance. Almost immediately she regrets the email and tries to withdraw it, but the publishers like the idea. Rhona has been urging Maeve to simply write the book the publishers want, and keep the one that she has already written for future publication. Now, she puts Maeve in touch with a London lawyer she knows who, she is confident, will be able to get Maeve out of the contract without having to return any of the advance.

While Maeve is undecided, Rhona asks her to come with her when Rhona goes to Coleraine to speak at a panel on direct democracy in Northern Ireland. They can talk through Maeve’s options without interruption and Maeve can find out about the food economy in Northern Ireland. Nell thinks she should go.

I’m not sure what significance to give to the fact that, from oldest to youngest, the sisters’ disciplinary specialisms could be said to move from the sciences to the humanities. Olwen is a geologist who teaches Earth Science. Rhona is a political scientist. This is obviously less a “hard” science, but Rhona is, as we see, practical, “results-oriented” and good at getting her way. Maeve likes to joke that she is the only one of the sisters whose doctorate is honorary, but she takes an experimental and evidence-based approach to her cookery. And Nell is a philosopher.

There’s a funny scene near the end where Nell leads a seminar over Zoom on Heidegger’s concept of “care”.

We inhabit the world by caring for it. Not only the sweet kind, the moral, sentimental, chicken soup kind; to hate is also to care. To slide a knife across a chicken’s throat is to care, too. To mute Nazis is to care about Nazis. (p. 237)

In the meantime, and partly audible to Nell’s students on another continent, Maeve is demonstrating care in her characteristic way, preparing some elaborate dishes which will not be appreciated as they probably deserve to be.

Nell resembles a mythical creature in a way the other sisters don’t. Finding it difficult and painful to walk on land, she is at home in water, which may, however, be the very thing that’s impairing her health. One character even refers to a selkie. It’s a many-stranded novel that I haven’t attempted to deal with comprehensively. I’ve now read it twice, as I almost invariably do with a book before writing about it. More than usual, I feel that I’ve missed quite a lot, and want to read The Alternatives again before too long. I was pleased to read in an interview with Caoilinn Hughes that she has been working on a collection of her short stories. I expect to read that when it comes out (probably when it comes out in small format paperback, which I much prefer to trade paperbacks) and write about it eventually.

Edition: Oneworld paperback, 2025; ellipses in quotations is original.