Newsletter on Art Kavanagh

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 and 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. Steven 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 20:04:04 +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 undermind 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 puzzled 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 shadyt, 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 22:39:55 +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 with 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.

Making herself understood: Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 13:43:53 +0100

I first read Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times (2000) three years ago, about a year after the paperback came out. I enjoyed the read, but with reservations, and I thought it unlikely that I’d want to write about it. I read it for a second time at the end of March this year and began to get a vague idea of what I might want to say if I were to write something. So, to try to clarify that idea, I read the book a third time a few days ago. I’m still not sure whether I want to write about it.

The central character is Ava, a Dubliner in her early 20s who goes to work as a TEFL teacher in Hong Kong, where she spends at least half of her relatively low income “renting a tiny room with people who hate me” (p. 68). (Compare the living conditions of Eileen in Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You published the following year.) Fairly soon, Ava has befriended an Oxford-educated English banker who lives in a spacious and expensive 50th-floor apartment in Mid-Levels. She gives up her rented room and moves into the spare bedroom in Julian’s apartment. Not long after that, they are regularly having sex, while denying that they are boyfriend and girlfriend.

Ava thinks a lot about language, particularly since she is now teaching it. She had known that other languages have a subjunctive mood, but it it comes as something of a revelation to her that it exists in English too:

English has a subjunctive. I learned that fact the morning I taught it …

I didn’t know because the English subjunctive required phrasing I would never use. Apparently, you didn’t say: “What if I was attracted to her.” You said: “What if I were.” (p. 106)

But in fact she has been using the subjunctive, apparently without noticing: “I wished Julian were married” (p. 26); “What if I were your age?” (p. 30). Perhaps she’s comfortable with it when she’s referring to a male, but not to a female? Has she been brought up to believe that statements about women must be indicative or imperative, while only those about men may be conditional, wishful or hypothetical?

Regularly throughout the novel, Ava analyses what she and others say. When Julian’s employer sends him back to London for several months, Ava, who has remained in the apartment in his absence, meets and falls in love with Edith Zhang, a woman her own age, a Cambridge graduate — she tells Julian she’s a “tab” (p. 205) — now working as a junior lawyer.

The evening before I went to meet Mrs Zhang, I’d voiced my concern that I only used Edith’s English name and asked if I was ignoring a plank of her personhood. She laughed and said her family used “Edith” more often than “Mei Ling” and that she identified more strongly with the former. She didn’t say I was being condescending. She didn’t need to. I wished I had her talent for making herself understood. (p. 243)

These passages in which Ada scrutinizes her own and others’ speech are a large part of what give the novel its unique flavour, but they can also be its most irritating feature. The differences between Irish and English usage of the prepositon “after” have been rehashed ad nauseam. Ava doesn’t avoid the cliché but she adds some nuances that were new to me:

… when you were “after” doing something, it meant you’d just done it but didn’t expect the hearer to know. “I’ve just fallen in love”: we thought it might happen and it has. “I’m after falling in love”: look, I didn’t think there was a heart in this piece-of-shit chest compartment, either, but here we are. “Only after” was “just after” plus exasperation: mud on a carpet you’re only after hoovering, losing someone you’re only after finding. (p. 181)

Ava went straight from Dublin to Hong Kong without ever having spent any time in Britain, not even in London. Julian is incredulous that she has “never been” to London (p. 4). I suspected at first that Ava’s unfamiliarity with England leads her to overestimate the difficulty that English people supposedly have in comprehending their own language as we speak it in Ireland. English people have been interacting with Irish people for decades at least. They may find our peculiar locutions amusing or quaint, but that doesn’t mean they need subtitles. Then I noticed that Oisín, a wealthy friend of Julian’s friends and an Irishman, is not pulled up for asking “Will we” do some cocaine, rather than “Shall we” (p. 57). So perhaps Julian’s circle are more likely to quibble at or tease a woman than a man (particularly an expensively educated one) for her Irishisms.

If Ava is fascinated by language both as a medium of communication and as a remarkably complex human artefact, that is perhaps even more true of the author who created her. Dolan’s second novel, The Happy Couple (2023) is the story of an engagement between Celine and Luke, who are described respectively on facing pages as “violently allergic to two things: logistics, communications” (p. 8) and “a communications strategist at a multinational tech firm that had bought up Dublin’s docklands for its headquarters” (p. 9). Celine’s aversion to communications and Luke’s strategization of the field may be at the heart of the conflict between them. Luke’s habitual refrain that he’s “not good at relationships” is glossed by Celine when she explains to Archie, who had been Luke’s sort-of-boyfriend in college:

“He wanted you to contradict him,” Celine said. “And you can’t do it by scolding. So that would be why he shut you down. If you’d said ‘Luke, I want us to be together, and if we can’t we need to break it off completely or I’ll be tortured with false hope’ — I think that’s what he was after. He needs the ultimatum.” (The Happy Couple, p. 250)

Is something similar going on with Julian in the first novel, who maintains that the pattern of interactions between him and Ava is not “a relationship”, yet effectively subsidizes her existence and, when his bank transfers him to Frankfurt, asks her to come with him?

As well as the novels, I’ve been reading Dolan’s Substack for a few months now. Indeed, it was probably her Substack posts that sent me back to Exciting Times and made me consider writing about it after all. Many of her posts are about language. She already spoke French and Spanish and learned German, Italian and some Swedish more or less from scratch, and she understands some Slovakian. Recently, she has gone back to Irish which, like most of us who had our primary and secondary education in Ireland, she studied for fourteen years at school.

While I find her views about Irish teaching and learning interestingly provocative, I don’t share her enthusiasm for the language, still less her apparent disdain for the one in which she writes her fiction, which she describes in the post I linked to above as “this imperialist shitshow of a language”. Some of her thoughts on learning Irish, and on how the teaching of the language could be improved, sent me back to a post of my own from nearly eight years ago. It’s the first thing I posted on Medium, and my first substantial blog post: The Language of Ireland. I was surprised, and a little bit perturbed, at how little my views on the subject have changed in the meantime.

I had thought I might say something about Naoise Dolan’s first name, simply because “Naoise” happens to be my own middle name. When I was growing up the name was quite unusual, in part because Catholic priests tended to insist on saints’ names for “christening” (as the local parish priest attempted to do with my mother). The mythical Naoise was the lover of Deirdre of the Sorrows, something I didn’t know until I was well into my 40s, when a US graduate student (presumably of Yeats) enlightened me as to the origin of one of my own names.

Editions: Exciting Times, Weidenfeld & Nicolson paperback, 2021;
The Happy Couple, Ecco/HarperCollins hardback, 2023 (US edition)

Not from any other place: Mavis Gallant, Home Truths

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 18:35:18 +0100

I had been vaguely aware of the name Mavis Gallant as a highly regarded writer of short stories but I hadn’t read any of her work until a little over a year ago, when I found a copy of her Overhead in a Balloon and Other Stories (Faber, 1989) on a seconhand books website. A few years earlier, I had thought that her stories were something I should look out for when Sinead Gleeson quoted a comment by Gallant from the preface to her Collected Stories (1950):

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.

She was right, of course, and it’s a good principle to keep in mind, particularly when confronted with a volume like Overhead in a Balloon and Other Stories. It’s a paperback edition that combines two earlier collections, Overhead in a Balloon (1987) and Home Truths (1985). The combined volume contains 26 stories over 500 pages.

A new selection of Gallant’s “essential” stories, with an introduction by Tessa Hadley, was published this year by Pushkin Press as The Latehomecomer. It contains sixteen stories. I compared the contents list with that of the book I have and found that the books have seven stories in common: “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” (which, I read somewhere, is said to be Gallant’s most anthologized story), two Linnet Muir stories and a sequence of four connected stories from Overhead in a Balloon about a man’s two marriages during and after the Second World War. I then noticed that the cycle of Linnet Muir stories form the final six stories in Home Truths, and therefore also in my combined volume. So, partly for the sake of having somewhere to start, I decided that for this post I’ll concentrate on “The Ice Wagon” and the Linnet Muir stories (which include “Voices Lost in Snow”, another often-discussed piece).

“The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” is about two Canadians in Europe. They are very dissimilar; in Canada, their paths would probably never have crossed, but in Geneva they may have been placed in the same office partly because of their shared nationality. Peter Frazier is the son of a prominent and formerly wealthy family whose background has left him with with no understanding of or preparedness for the world of work.

Peter’s father’s crowd spent, they were not afraid of their fathers, and their grandfathers were old. Peter and his sister and his cousins lived on the remains. They were left the rinds of income, of notions, and the memories of ideas rather than ideas intact … When he was small his patrimony was squandered under his nose. (p. 309)

Peter’s small inheritance gets him, his wife and two daughters to Paris where he hopes to do well financially. But he annoys a former school-friend, who hadn’t liked him anyway, at the latter’s wedding. He believes that, as a result, “a French-Canadian combine was preventing his getting a decent job” and appeals in letters to some “English”-Canadian contacts to whom the name Frazier might still mean something.

No one answered directly, but it was clear that what they settled for was exile to Geneva: a season of meditation and remorse, as he explained to Sheilah, and it was managed tactfully, through Lucille. (p. 305)

Lucille, his sister, alerts him to a position as a filing clerk, which he successfully applies for. The job was not intended as a sinecure but Peter treats it as one, imagining that the work is irrelevant and that what’s really going on is that he is undergoing some penitential test before being readmitted to the world where people like him make their fortunes as a matter of course.

The other Canadian is Agnes Brusen, Peter’s immediate superior at work, though younger than he. When she gets his name wrong he reads too much into it:

If she had called him “Ferris” and pretended not to know he was Frazier, it could only be because they had sent her here to spy on him and see if he had repented and was fit for a better place in life. (p. 312)

But there’s no reason why she should recognize the Frazier name, or know that it used to mean something in Toronto, which is far from where she was brought up. He gets her wrong too, describing her as “a Norwegian from a small town in Saskatchewan” (p. 310), and is surprised that a “Norwegian” doesn’t drink or ski, but she insists “I’m not from any other place” except Saskatchewan (p. 317).

Though Agnes doesn’t usually drink, she has too much at a party and Peter is asked to make sure she gets home safely, while his wife, Sheilah, works on a new acquaintance named Simpson who looks like he might be able to put an opportunity their way. Sheilah is extremely beautiful, a former model, originally from Liverpool, where she and her family were “rat poor” (p. 307). She and Peter had temporarily fallen into disfavour with the party’s hosts when “Sheilah had charged a skirt at a dressmaker to Madge’s account. Madge had told her she might, and then changed her mind” (pp. 317–8). So, while Peter is surely wrong to think that he is under observation or scrutiny, it seems that Sheilah is the one being tested.

Restored to the Burleighs’ guest list, Peter and Sheilah squabble a bit on the way to the party but close ranks as they approach it.

… to show Peter she treasured him and was not afraid of wasting her life or her beauty, she took his arm and they walked in the snow down a street and around a corner to the apartment house where the Burleighs lived. They were, and are, a united couple. They were afraid of the party, and each of them knew it. When they walk together, holding arms, they give each other whatever each can spare. (p. 319)

Agnes has been one of the few guests at the party to have obeyed the instruction to come in costume. When she and Peter get to her apartment, she is cold and wet from the snow. (Peter has forgotten what the hired car looks like and where he parked it and anyway Sheilah has the key.) Seeming to forget that Peter is there, Agnes goes to take a bath. When she comes out of the bathroom, wearing “a dressing gown of orphanage wool” (p. 323), she presses her face and rubs her cheek on his shoulder and Peter thinks “this is how disasters happen”.

The next week at work Agnes is feeling guilty and full of self-reproach. She says “I led you to think I might do something wrong” (p. 325). Peter interpets this as meaning she might have had sex with him.

“I might have tried something,” he said gallantly. “But that would be my fault and not yours.” (p. 325)

But he is getting her wrong again.

“It was because of you. I was afraid you might be blamed, or else you’d blame yourself.” (p. 325)

Peter seems still not to grasp what she is saying, or perhaps he’s being deliberately obtuse. She continues:

“… I’m not a suicidal person, but I could have done something after that party, just not to see any more, or think or listen or expect anything …” (p. 326)

Agnes is sickened by the behaviour of “educated people”, after her family have worked so hard to make her one of them. “You’re educated and you drink and do everything wrong and you know what you’re doing, and that makes you worse than pigs” (p.326)

Agnes considered doing away with herself so that she wouldn’t have to confront this any more, but of course she doesn’t do so. She says it’s because she’s afraid that Peter would be blamed for not preventing her suicide, or might blame himself, though we can assume that this isn’t her only reason. What she tells him doesn’t register with Peter: he seems not to hear her.

Sheilah’s efforts with Simpson have borne fruit and soon she, Peter and their daughters are off to Ceylon as “the Fraziers began the Oriental tour that should have made their fortune” (p. 327). The story opens about eight years later (nine from when they first left Canada). They have not managed to make their fortune in Ceylon or Hong Kong and are living temporarily with their two daughters in Lucille’s overcrowded apartment, where their steamer trunk blocks access to the fridge. They still have the Balenciaga dress that Sheilah had worn to the party years before, but it is too long for current fashion and the collar is stained from makeup. “The Balenciaga is their talisman, their treasure” (p. 304).

They think about the many people they’ve met, whose names represent their past. Peter thinks about Agnes Brusen but doesn’t mention her name to Sheilah.

Agnes is the only secret Peter has from his wife, the only puzzle he pieces together without her help. (p. 327)

If Agnes really is the only puzzle he pieces together without Sheilah’s help, then maybe his wife is partly responsible for Peter’s wrong answers to the other puzzles: his misreading of his circumstances, his continuing misunderstanding of what’s expected of him, his fantasy of being watched over by influential people who ensure that “Nothing can touch us” (p. 309).

The story gets its title from something Agnes had told Peter about her childhood. She was brought up in a large family, and the only way she could find to be alone was to get up very early, before everybody else. When she did so, she would watch the ice wagon going down the street. Peter understands, up to a point, but in the end Agnes’s refuge doesn’t appeal to him:

Everything works out, somehow or other. Let Agnes have the start of the day. Let Agnes think it was invented for her. Who wants to be alone in the universe? (p. 328)

But Agnes has never suggested that she thinks early morning solitude was invented for her, or that she wants to be alone in the universe; only that as a child she enjoyed temporary respite from living in a crowded home.

The narrator of a sequence of six stories, Linnet Muir had three godparents. It’s as if, in choosing a third, her partents had been making a gesture at compensating for their own deficiencies. Linnet tells the reader that her mother “had found me civil and amusing until I was ten, at which time I was said to have become pert and obstinate” (“In Youth Is Pleasure”, p. 409). Finding her daughter civil and amusing did not stop Charlotte Muir from sending the child away to boarding school from the age of four. While the Muirs were anglophone (Angus Muir had originally come from Scotland) and nominally Protestant, though not actually believers, the school they chose on the recommendation of Dr Raoul Chauchard, a particular friend of Charlotte’s, is a “Jansenist”, and of course francophone, convent (“The Doctor”, p. 488), where Linnet will claim to have actually encountered the devil.

When she’s at home during holidays, she sometimes overhears one parent asking the other how long it will be before she goes back.

That Charlotte’s perception of her daughter changed when Linnet was ten may be significant: that’s when Angus Muir died. His death was kept from Linnet, and she never reliably learned the circumstances or exact date of his death. He had a terminal illness but there’s a suggestion that he may have shot himself rather than wait for the disease to take its course.

The narrator tells us that three years after Angus’s death she was still expected to believe that he had gone to live in England and might send for her.

Head-on questions got me nowhere. I had to create a situation in which some adult (not my mother, who was far too sharp) would lose all restraint and hurl the truth at me. It was easy: I was an artist at this. (“In Youth Is Pleasure”, p. 419)

Somehow a rumour seems to have spread that Linnet too is dead. When she returns to Montreal after she turns eighteen, her former nurse, Olivia, is astonished (but apparently pleased) to find that she’s still alive; and Linnet later remarks:

I had heard people say, referring to me but not knowing who I was, “He had a daughter, but apparently she died.” (“Between Zero and One”, p. 439)

About two years before he died, Angus Muir took Linnet, then 8 years old, to visit her third godparent, Georgie. Georgie, whose given names were Edna May, was a former friend of Charlotte’s. Linnet understood that the two women had fallen out because Charlotte had reneged on a promise to name her daughter Edna May, after Georgie. Later, she recognizes that this is not entirely plausible, since Georgie is not herself known as “Edna May”.

Georgie doesn’t seem pleased to see her goddaughter. On a previous visit, Linnet left a mark on a white sofa, by kicking her feet. The spot is no longer visible “owing to new slip-covers” (“Voices Lost in Snow”, p. 480) The conversation between Angus and Georgie seems inconsequential, as far as Linnet can see. She mentions that she met Georgie only once more. That would be more than twelve years later, when Linnet was a journalist (and a married woman, Mrs Blanchard), interviewing Georgie as “president of a committee that sent bundles to prisoners-of-war” (“With a Capital T”, p. 513).

In “Voices Lost in Snow”, there seems to be some kind of negotiation going on between Angus and Georgie, as to whether he will leave Charlotte and take up with Georgie. It obviously doesn’t lead anywhere. Some years later, Angus’s friend Ward Mackey tells Linnet:

“Georgie didn’t play her cards well where he was concerned. There was a point where if she had just made one smart move she could have had him. Not for long, of course, but none of us knew that.” (“Voices Lost in Snow”, p. 482)

And would it have been worth it, after all, if he was going to be dead within two years? Linnet has some idea that it was Angus, not Georgie, who didn’t play his cards well. In her memory or imagination Angus put down a card which Georgie didn’t pick up.

It was a low card, the kind that only a born gambler would risk as part of a long-term strategy. She would never have weakened a hand that way; she was not gambling, but building … The card must have been the eight of clubs — “a female child.” (“Voices Lost in Snow”, p. 481)

That’s the end of Georgie’s and Angus’s game: Georgie is not going to take up a female child. At their later meeting, Georgie tells Linnet that she has four godchildren, all male, and that none of them will inherit anything from her, as she has nothing to leave. Was she never really Linnet’s godmother at all, or did she renounce the relationship along with her former friendship with Charlotte?

The eight-year-old Linnet isn’t fully aware of what is going on between her father and her supposed godmother, but nor is she oblivious to it. In “The Doctor”, she declares:

Unconsciously, everyone under the age of ten knows everything. Under-ten can come into a room and sense at once everything felt, kept silent, held back in the way of love, hate, and desire, though he may not have the right words for such sentiments. It is part of the clairvoyant immunity to hypocrisy we are born with and that vanishes just before puberty. (p. 493)

There’s another Linnet Muir story that I haven’t mentioned so far. It’s “Varieties of Exile”, in which the adult Linnet befriends a married man, Frank Cairns, whome she describes as “a remittance man”: someone who is being paid an adequate though certainly not extravagant income by his father to stay away from England. It was, she said, “a term of abuse all over the Commonwealth and Empire” (p. 462). She seems acutely aware that it’s a term that might have been applied to her father.

I’ll be returning to this volume, whether in this newsletter or elsewhere I don’t yet know. There are several stories I’d like to say something about, and that I’ll need to reread, or in one or two cases read, before I do so, among them the horrifying “Bonaventure” and “In the Tunnel”.

A period of transition: Kate Atkinson, Not the End of the World

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 17:55:30 +0100

Kate Atkinson is the versatile author of at least 13 novels who has also published two substantial volumes of short stories, as well as Festive Spirits (2019), a small book consisting of three short stories set at Christmas. I mention Festive Spirits because reading it led me to suspect that the short story is not her strong point. I haven’t yet read her more recent collection, Normal Rules Don’t Apply (2023) but am unsurprised to find that the Guardian review describes its contents as “linked” short stories and Goodreads calls them “interconnected”.

The 12 stories in Not the End of the World (2002) are linked but it wasn’t until I reached the tenth of them, “Temporal Anomaly”, that I noticed the connections. In that story, Marianne, a married lawyer, mother of a young son and none-too-careful driver, is returning from a visit to her mother when her Audi is overtaken on the inside lane of the M9 by Hades’ chariot, “so close that she could smell the rank sweat on the flanks of his horses and the stench of his breath like rotten mushrooms” (pp. 271–2). A little later, Marianne is hovering above the wreckage of the Audi watching the unsuccessful attempts to revive her corpse. We’ve been at the scene of this accident before, in an earlier story, “Sheer Big Waste of Love”, with Addison Fox, a fortyish traffic policeman.

Addison had just arrived at an accident on the M9 when Clare went into premature labour. It was raining and they’d had a call on the radio to say “the VA looks as if it’s going to prove” (the “fatal” was always left off the end of this sentence — Addison sometimes wondered if it was out of a kind of delicacy). By the time they got there it was over and there was nothing to do but stand around helplessly looking at the smashed-up Audi A4 and somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother lying all broken up on the road. Addison wished his own wife wouldn’t drive so fast. (pp. 146–7)

Clare’s labour probably isn’t really premature. She’s a primary-school teacher by whom “Addison had been courted, bedded and wedded in haste” (p. 128).

Clare, Addison very soon discovered, ran her entire life at breakneck speed. By the time they were sprinting up the aisle he had begun to wonder if she didn’t have some kind of metabolic disease. “Well, neither of us are getting any younger, Addison,” she said, when she proposed to him after two months of hectic dating. (p. 128)

Addison, the policeman, almost certainly isn’t as slow on the uptake as this makes him sound. His mother, Shirley, had been a prostitute, a fact that Addison didn’t mention to Clare or anybody else, not because he was ashamed but because it was nobody’s business but Shirley’s own. He may well have thought that the paternity of the son of whom Clare had just been delivered was strictly her own business too.

Shirley gave her son (as a forename) the surname of the man she always claimed was his father, the wealthy businessman Bill Addison. Young Addison had met his supposed father just once, when he was seven. The man hit him a blow that burst his eardrum.

Not long after Clare had given birth, Addison Fox went to Bill Addison’s funeral. He wasn’t tempted to identify himself to his putative half-siblings. The youngest of these, Susan, had been five at the time of Addison’s encounter with Bill, and had seemed sympathetic to his predicament, placing a toy aeroplane on the grass beside him before being pulled away by her mother. Now, the adult Susan, who of course doesn’t recognize Addison as the injured child from years ago, tells him that her father was a bully and a drinker. “I think he abused my sister, but she won’t talk about it. He had no idea how to love” (p. 153).

“He’ll never go,” Susan said blankly. “He’ll never die. We’ll carry him around inside ourselves for ever. You can’t imagine what it was like to be his child.”

“No,” Addison agreed. “I can’t. I have to go,” he added awkwardly. (p. 153)

The sister whom Susan suspects their father of having abused is Pam, a teacher who appears in several of the stories. Pam gives no direct indication as to how she felt about her father.

And now she hardly ever saw her brothers (whom she didn’t like anyway), and her sister, Susan, was so used to being the baby of the family (she was forty now, for God’s sake) that it never crossed her mind that Pam might not be coping. But she was coping, wasn’t she? She was too much of a bloody stoic not to cope. Maybe she should try falling to pieces, see if anyone noticed. Of course, they’d just give her Prozac again and tell her she was in a period of transition. Life, life was a period of transition. (pp. 298–9)

That passage is from “Wedding Favours”, the penultimate story in the book. Pam has been urged by her school to take early retirement, and her younger child, Simon, has gone off to do Religious Studies in an undistinguished university. (It had been that or Hospitality Management at at an even less prestigious institution.) “The house already felt unlived in” (p. 301). She has been persuaded to join another retiring teacher, Maggie, in a business making and supplying “wedding favours”, little presents for the wedding guests. They go to a wedding fair where they find that their competition is rather more professional than they are.

Pam hadn’t from the start been enthusiastic about going into business with her colleague.

“We’ll have no jobs, no kids — we’ll be free as birds!” A bell rang for the next period, thank God. No job, no kids — what kind of a life was that? (pp. 304–5)

But Maggie is persistent and Pam is worn down.

“Something creative, something we’ll enjoy. We’ll be starting all over again — new lives!” Pam didn’t want a new life, she wanted the old one over again so she could do it better, so she could feed her children organic food and give them a Montessori education and do erotic things to her husband — although she couldn’t quite imagine what — after listening patiently while he talked about the finer points of Scottish conveyancing law … (p. 305)

At a couple of points, the thoughts and dialogue of the characters in this story echo the first story in the book, “Charlene and Trudi Go Shopping”. Buying fabric from which to make some of their wedding favours, Pam finds herself wondering where the word “haberdashery” comes from. In this she is following Trudi from the first story.

“We should make clothes,” Charlene said as they passed through the habeerdashery floor of the department store.

“What a wonderful word,” Trudi said.

“What a wonderful world?” Charlene said doubtfully.

“No. Word. Haberdashery.” (p. 33)

Just after this, the two women hear a calm announcement that Charlene correctly interprets as a warning that there’s a fire in the department store: “Mr Scarlet to haberdashery, please” (p. 34). The fire is real, though the women don’t at first see any evidence of it. Trudi imagines:

… she could smell the excessively combustible materials in haberdashery catching and flaming, she could feel the black smoke choking them. Perhaps they could wrap themselves in the bolts of cloth, like the poor Bangkok sweatshop girls Trudi had read about — hoping that their fall would be cushioned as they threw themselves from the building, as they threw themselves away. Trudi wondered if they would unravel as they fell, like bobbins unwinding, like Egyptian mummies unrevelling through the air. (p. 34)

The other echo in “Wedding Favours” from the first story has to do with the wedding favours themselves. Charlene, who has been pinned down by sniper fire on her way back from a wedding fair (which sounds very like the one attended by Pam and Maggie), phones Trudi.

“A bonbonnière?” Trudi said doubtfully.

“Or bomboniere if you prefer the Italian. In pink shadow crystal net with red roses.”

“Why?” (p. 37)

Compare that with this passage from “Wedding Favours”:

“And as for bombonieres,” Maggie, Pam’s friend, was saying eagerly, “there’s goodness knows how many ways you can make them up.”

“Bombonieres?”

It’s an Italian word, Pam, or bonbonnières, if you prefer the French …” (pp. 303–4)

In the first story, Trudi and Charlene are shopping for, among other things, a birthday present for Charlene’s mother: something that can be put in the post and won’t break. They are given to reciting lists of luxurious things they would like, or exotic places they’d like to go. As they shop, something strange, perhaps catastrophic, is happening in and to the city around them. “Somewhere in the distance a bomb exploded softly” (p. 34). Before the fire alarm in the department store, there were no sales assistants in evidence. The receptionist at the television station has “strawberry-blond hair, coiffed extravagantly” and, it appears, “a Heckler and Koch MP5A3 9mm submachine gun under her desk” (p. 28). Charlene sleeps with an Sig Sauer semiautomatic under her pillow (p. 31). “There was a festive atmosphere generated by communal terror” (p. 35).

One of Charlene’s lists is of strange creatures she’d like to have:

“A singing fish. A fish that sings and has a magic ring in its stomach. A huge carp that is caught in a fishpond — usually at a royal court somewhere — and cooked and served at the table and when you bite into the fish you find a magic ring. And the magic ring will lead you to the man who will love you. Or the small white mouse which is the disguise of the man who will love you.”

“That would be a rodent then.”

“Failing that,” Charlene continued, ignoring Trudi, “I would like a cat as big as a man.”

“A cat as big as a man?” Trudi frowned, trying to picture a man-sized cat.

“Yes. Imagine if men had fur.”

“I think I’d rather not.” (p. 27)

A cat who grows to be as big as a man (and who comes to behave like a man in some respects) features in the story “The Cat Lover”, where a bedraggled tom-cat inveigles his way into the apartment of Heidi — who is Trudi’s twin sister and doesn’t even particularly like cats. As Heidi feeds the cat at ruinous expense to herself, it grows first to the size of a baby tiger. Soon, Heidi has to admit that “the cat was no longer the size of a baby tiger, he was the size of a full-grown one” (p. 232). It begins to sit upright on the couch beside her, with its hind legs crossed, while eating ice-cream out of the tub.

Just as Charlene had correctly understood the calm fire warning in the department store, Heidi, herself a nurse, recognizes the controlled tone in which ultrasound technician asks a student nurse to fetch a doctor for her (p. 238).

As well as being Trudi’s twin, Heidi is the friend of Missy, who trained with her as a nurse but is now a supernanny, and the principal character in “Unseen Translation”, as well as being mentioned in passing in “Transparent Fiction”. At the end of “Unseen Translation”, Missy seems to be turning into the goddess Artemis, as she rushes to catch an unplanned flight to Rome with her eight-year-old charge, Arthur — “A lot of museums in Rome” (p. 182). She and Arthur have been hanging around Munich for a week, fruitlessly waiting for Arthur’s rock-star father (a member of the band Boak) to turn up on his apparently cancelled tour.

Heidi’s former boyfriend, Fletcher, has a more prominent role in “Transparent Fiction” than does Missy. In this story he is the very temporary boyfriend of Meredith Zane, a Californian who has recently been awarded a doctorate in pharmacology and, like her aunt Nanci before her, has apparently got stuck in London while embarking on a European tour. He is also a scriptwriter on a television soap, Green Acres, which is mentioned in several of the stories.

“Untroubled by death or history or love” (p. 71), “Meredith had gone through life borrowing other people’s personalities rather than going to the trouble of developing her own” (p. 73), at least up to the age of 25. She discovers the secret of eternal life and brazenly snatches it from the shoulders of the ancient wife of the most powerful television producer in the world, to whom Fletcher has been pitching his treatment for “a kind of historical-medical-detective thing, sort of Silent Witness meets The House of Eliott” (p. 83).

In “Evil Doppelgängers”, a character named Fielding has the job of reviewing that very show, now titled The Secret Life of Jemima Bates, and finds that he can’t watch more than ten minutes of it without falling asleep. Fielding and “Transparent Fiction”’s Fletcher are in some sense counterparts. Fletcher contributes to the writing of Green Acres, Fielding would write about it if his editor, Flavia, would let him, instead of assigning that task to the new guy, Joshua. Fletcher wrote the treatment for Jemima Bates and it was presumably his idea to start with; Fielding is supposed to review it and isn’t getting anywhere. Both men are obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

But Fielding has a bigger problem than an impending deadline. People keep referring to things he supposedly did but that he can’t remember. It looks as if he has a doppelgänger, who seems to be around only when he isn’t. He eventually comes face to face with his other self (who, to his alarm and disgust, is in his bed with Flavia) after he has woken up in an alleyway, with no idea how he got there. A mangy dog sniffs around him and for a moment it seems to have three heads. A passing tramp asks him for “Coin” (p. 216) but Fielding’s pockets are empty: it seems that has been robbed. “‘No boat trip for you, sonny,’ the tramp laughed” (p. 216).

So it seems that the doppelgänger may have been there to take his place, with the original Fielding’s continued existence on this plane some kind of anomaly. When Joshua had earlier suggested to him that this kind of doubling was “the whole basis of Buffy”, Fielding had replied:

“Josh, I never thought I would ever say this but — Buffy isn’t real.” (p. 213)

If Fielding’s situation is an anomaly, it’s similar to that of Marianne, in “Temporal Anomaly”. After the scene of her accident has been cleaned up, she walks along the motorway to a Little Chef where she discovers that nobody can see or hear her. She tries to phone her husband but he can’t hear her either so she walks home. Months later, still invisble and inaudible to the living, and unable to leave her house, she reflects:

She should have hung on to that last coin, the twenty-pence piece she’d used to phone Robert from the Little Chef — what if it had been her fare for the last ferry of all? (p. 282)

Fielding and Fletcher aren’t the only male characters in these stories to be preoccupied with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. After Pam’s son, Simon, has gone to university, she finds several Post-Its stuck around the house, remining her to tape the show for him.

Buffy’s friends brought her back from the dead. And she had to get a job and pay bills and take care of her younger sister because their mother was dead, but unlike Buffy she wasn’t coming back. If Pam died would Rebecca look after Simon? She couldn’t imagine it. Would they care if she died? Would they grieve for her as much as Buffy grieved for her mother? They probably would, but in their hopelessly dysfunctional way. (p. 315)

The final story, “Pleasureland”, brings us back to Charlene and Trudi. They are confined to Trudi’s flat. Charlene had been about to leave, to get home before curfew, when they heard the door being nailed shut. Passers-by told them that large red crosses, signifying plague, had been painted on all the flat doors in the building. Charlene and Trudy had an old nurse’s dictionary of Heidi’s: “They seemed to have a lot of other diseases, but not the plague” (p. 327). They have run out of food and have no heat; water and electricity have been cut off; they collect dirty rainwater in a Sèvres bowl that Charlene had stolen (as a gift for Trudi) from an unguarded museum. The radio no longer works: “There was no music any more” (p. 325).

They’ve played all the games they have or know, innumerable times. Trudi wants Charlene to tell her a story.

“I could tell you the story of the seven sisters who became the Pleiades.”

“I think we’ve had that one.”

“‘Marianne was thinking about lemons when she died’?”

“We’ve definitely had that one.” (p. 331)

So have we: that’s the first sentence of “Temporal Anomaly”. And Nanci Zane, Meredith’s aunt, whose story is told in “The Bodies Vest”, is Charlene’s version of the youngest of the seven sisters. Having met in Crete the rather dull Englishman (a lecturer on metaphysical poetry, hence the Marvellian title to the story) whom she’ll marry, Nanci decides that (unlike Missy) she doesn’t want to go to Rome after all.

So it looks as if the stories we have been reading were improvised by Charlene, mixing her memories of Greek myth, popular television, her own history and observations and whatever else came to mind. When she suggests the story of Circe, “who turned men into animals” (p. 331), Trudi thinks she may not have heard that one before.

So Charlene told Trudi the story of the great witch Circe, and the story lasted all night long so that on the morning of the thousand and first day they were still awake when Helios left his magnificent eastern palace, with its columns of gold and bronze and its gables of ivory, and mounted his golden chariot and rose into the sky, the fiery manes of his horses flaming in the dark. (p. 331)

Charlene, then, is a type of Scheherezade, telling story after story, not (in her case) to stave off death but to make her and Trudi’s condition more bearable as they wait for death. I can’t say whether each of these stories would stand alone as a separate short story: by the time I noticed the links between them, I had forgotten how they seemed to me at first. It does seem to me that the connections between these stories are unusually close and intricate, so that this book does strike me as something quite apart from most collections of short stories, linked or othersise. I expect to have more to say about linked story collections in a future post.

Edition: Black Swan paperback, 2003.

Honour and policy, a Martian perspective: William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 12:42:16 +0100

This is a follow-up to my post from last November All honourable men: Shakespeare’s Romans, in which I wrote about Julius Cæsar and Antony and Cleopatra. I had intended to write about Coriolanus too, but I ran out of time and the post was already rather long.

Having the defeated the Volsces in battle and captured their city Corioles, Caius Martius Coriolanus is now expected to become consul. He has the support of the Senate and patricians but he also needs the people’s approval, something that would normally be forthcoming for a victorious military leader who had enriched the city with the spoils of war. It was usual for a soldier who sought the consulship to appear before the populace, boast of his brave actions in combat, and display the wounds he had sustained in Rome’s service. Coriolanus can’t bring himself to do it. He holds the people in contempt, having in the first scene called them “dissentious rogues, | That rubbing the poor itch of your opinion | Make yourself scabs” (I.i.162–4) and “curs” (I.i.166). To appear before them as a suppliant, begging for their “voices” would be unthinkably demeaning.

When Coriolanus manages to get the required approval by demanding rather than entreating, and without showing any wounds, the tribunes of the people, Junius Brutus and Sicinius Velutus, incite the citizens to a pitch of fury, to the point where they not only revoke their consent but demand that Coriolanus be thrown to his death from the Tarpeian Rock. To have any hope of rectifying the situation, Coriolanus will have to apoligize for his haughty rigidity. His mother, Volumnia, has the argument that might sway him:

But when extremities speak, I have heard you say,
Honour and policy, like unsevered friends,
I’th’war do grow together. Grant that, and tell me
In peace what each of them by th’other lose
That they combine not there. (III.ii.41–5)

If there’s nothing dishonourable about deceiving the enemy during wartime, why should he think that honour prevents him from dissembling his true intentions and feelings where the people are concerned? Menenius approves of this line of argument, which Volumnia resumes:

If it be honour in your wars to seem
The same you are not, which for your best ends
You adopt your policy, how is it less or worse
That it shall hold companionship in peace
With honour as in war, since that to both
It stands in like request? (III.ii.46–51)

To deceive the people, she urges

… no more dishonours you at all
Than to take in a town with gentle words,
Which else would put you to your fortune and
The hazard of much blood. (III.ii.58–61)

What Volumnia doesn’t say is that this argument implies that her son owes no greater duty of truthfulness to his plebeian countrymen in peacetime than to an enemy in war. Honour is compatible with “policy” because there’s no duty to deal fairly with an enemy. Of course, the application of this principle to Coriolanus’s situation is questionable: officially, there is no state of war between the Roman patricians and the ordinary citizens, but Volumnia understands that Coriolanus views the plebeians as an enemy. In the previous scene, he has told Menenius and Cominius:

I would they were barbarians, as they are,
Though in Rome littered; not Romans, as they are not,
Though calved i’th’porch o’the’Capitol. (III.i.237–9)

Later in the play, when Volumnia again has to persuade her stubborn son to swerve from the course he is resolved on, she again invokes honour. Having been permanently banished from the city, Coriolanus has sought out his old sworn enemy, Tullus Aufidius, the Volscian general, and undertaken to lead an attack on Rome. He will deliver his former home city to the Volsces. The pleas of his former comrades, his friend and adviser Menenius, his wife and even the prospect that his young son will be slaughtered, completely fail to move him. Volumnia has one argument left.

If it were so that our request did tend
To save the Romans, thereby to destroy
The Volsces whom you serve, you might condemn us
As poisonous of your honour. No, our suit
Is that you reconcile them, while the Volsces
May say, “This mercy we have showed”, the Romans
“This we received”, and each in either side
Give the all-hail to thee and cry “Be blest
For making up this peace!” (V.iii.132–40)

On the other hand, if he goes ahead as planned and sacks his own city, his name will be “To th’ensuing age abhorred” (V.iii.148). Here, Volumnia shows that she understands what “honour” means to her son better than she had seemed to do in the earlier scene. Then, she had affected to believe that his qualms had to do with acting deceptively — dishonestly. In fact, Coriolanus’s concerns about his honour had more to do with having to petition the despised plebeians for something that it was in their power to withhold.

Coriolanus’s idea of honour is something that Volumnia herself has instilled in him.

When yet he was yet he was but tender-bodied and the only son of my womb, when youth with comeliness plucked all gaze his way, when for a day of kings’ entreaties a mother should not sell him an hour from her beholding, I, considering how honour would become such a person — that if renown made it not stir — was pleased to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame. To a cruel war I sent him, from whence he returned his brows bound with oak. (I.iii.5–14)

Martius (who will be given the cognomen “Coriolanus” following his capture of the city Corioles) is forthright, disdaining to hide his contempt for the common people. In the play’s first scene, he tells them:

Who deserves greatness
Deserves your hate; and your affections are
A sick man’s appetite, who desires most that
Which would increase his evil. He that depends
Upon your favours swims with fins of lead
And hews down oaks with rushes. Hang ye! Trust ye? (I.i.174–9)

Immediately afterwards he says to Menenius:

Would the nobility lay aside their ruth
And let me use my sword, I’d make a quarry
With thousands of these quartered slaves as high
As I could pick my lance. (I.i.195–8)

Menenius doesn’t seem to dissent from his younger friend’s opinion of the citizenry but he is more dipolmatic and conciliatory, at least until Rome is threatened by Coriolanus’s vengeful return, when he taunts the tribunes for their stupidity in depriving the city of its former champion. When, at the beginning of the play, the people are about to revolt because of food shortages, he tells them a fable of the body politic, in which all nourishment comes from the senators, as the “belly” of the state:

The senators of Rome are this good belly,
And you the mutinous members. For examine
Their counsels and their cares, digest things rightly
Touching the weal o’th’common, you shall find
No public benefit which you receive
But it proceeds or comes from them to you,
And no way from yourselves. (I.i.146–52)

Clearly, the characterization of the senate as the city’s storehouse is self-serving on Menenius’s part, and not to be taken at face value. Equally clearly, though, ancient Rome did not have a capitalist economy, in which all value was the product of a proletariat. We’re not told exactly what the rebellious citizens work at but it seems unlikely that they are expecially productive. As similar crowd at the opening of Julius Cæsar is made up of service workers: a carpenter and a cobbler are the first to be questioned. After Martius’s banishment but before he threatens to return in vengeance, on of the tribunes, Sicinius Velutus, happily notes “Our tradesmen singing in their shops and going | About their functions friendly” (IV.vi.8–9).

It’s safe to say, then, that the source of Rome’s wealth lies neither in the deliberations of the senate nor in the labours of the tradespeople. Given the significance of “grain” (I.i.79) in the popular protests, we can assume that agriculture plays a large part. The other important element is predation. After the fall of Corioles the general, Cominius, offers Martius one tenth of the spoils “Before the common distribution” (I.ix.35). Martius declines to accept:

I thank you general,
But cannot make my heart consent to take
A bribe to pay my sword. I do refuse it,
And stand upon my common part with those
That have beheld the doing. (I.ix.36–40)

Martius, it appears, is not driven by a desire to get rich, or richer. The ease with which he later goes over to Aufidius’s side suggests that neither is he motivated by love of his city. His main aim is to achieve glory, and it is his mother’s reminder that to destroy his own city can only dishonour his name that finally persuades him to break with Aufidius. That, rather than the life of his son, his wife or his mother herself.

The deal that he negotiates presumably costs Rome dear and favours the Volsces. However, he has acted without the approval of the Volscian senate and (though their leaders seem happy enough with the outcome) that makes it easy for Aufidius finally to put paid to his old enemy. Though the title of the play is The Tragedy of Coriolanus, Martius’s death feels less like a tragic ending than a damage limitation exercise, the tidying away of someone who has always been an awkward customer, except on the battlefield. Aufidius’s oration over the body has a notably muted air:

Beat thou the drum, that it speak mournfully,
Trail your steel pikes. Though in this city he
Hath widowed and unchilded many a one,
Which to this hour bewail the injury,
Yet he shall have a noble memory. (V.vi.151–5)

This was not the noblest Roman of them all.

Martius’s attitude towards the common citizenry is abhorrent, but there is, by his own lights, a rationale to it. He believes that the office of tribune should be abolished, as it was established, in effect, under duress:

In a rebellion,
When what’s not meet, but what must be, was law,
Then were they chosen. In a better hour
Let what is meet be said it must be meet,
And throw their power i’th’dust. (III.i.166–70)

For their part, the tribunes think that Coriolanus, having been elected one of the two consuls, intended to rule alone, becoming in effect a dictator. After his expulsion, Sicinius says he had been “affecting one sole throne | Without assistance (IV.vi.32–3). Menenius does not believe this.

The “Martian perspective” in my title for this post refers to Martius’s peculiar way of looking at things. “Martial” might have been a less misleading adjective, but I think it’s worth noting that the alternative form does indeed appear in the play, when Brutus refers to “The noble house o’th’Martians” (II.iii.237).

Edition: Penguin Classics paperback, 2005, 2015.

“I think it’s only fair”: Chris Power, Mothers

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 21:56:00 +0100

I had read the story “The Crossing”, which is still available on the Faber website a few years before I read the rest of the collection, which may be part of the reason why I think of it as the story which best represents Chris Power’s Mothers (2018). Ann and Jim, who have known each other for just a few weeks, are on a four-day walking break on Exmoor. They are still finding things out about each other. When Jim mentions the start of the shooting season, Ann is surprised: she hadn’t known he shot. She asks if he would shoot an animal.

He looked away. “No,” he said.

He was lying. She knew he was lying. Several times, in the weeks since she met him, Ann had thought Jim was telling her what she wanted to hear. Even before she agreed to this weekend away the trait had been irritating her. Now she regretted having come. (p. 70)

This isn’t the only aspect of Jim’s behaviour that gets on her nerves, notwithstanding her physical attraction to him. Jim is cautious about crossing a river by a ford. They don’t know how deep it is and he doesn’t want to risk their gear getting wet. He’d rather take the long way around, which would mean going back the way they came.

Later, Ann suggests that Jim had been “scared”, causing him to retort that he had been “A bit cautious, maybe, that’s all” (p. 79). The following day he’s a bit less cautious.

Rereading the story, I noticed that it is slightly reminiscent of some of the ficton of Ian McEwan (who is, incidentally, an enthusiastic walker). The couple’s walk in Exmoor is a bit reminiscent of Clive Linley’s solo walk in the Lake District in Amsterdam and the story’s suddden ending, with Ann helplessly looking on, seemed to me to suggest a quieter and less malevolent but still lethal version of the ending of McEwan’s short, early novel The Comfort of Strangers.

Another story which features a man and a woman who are physically attracted to each other but who fail to achieve a meeting of minds is “Portals”. The narrator, Stephen, gets a message from a Monica, “a dancer from Spain” (p. 173), saying that she is going to Paris to stay with a friend and would like to see him there. They had met at a wedding in Barcelona, where the narrator, Monica and her boyfriend Victor had all hit it off. Now, Monica’s message said, she was no longer with Victor.

In Paris, Monica and Stephen are happy to see each other, though he takes a dislike to the boyfriend of Tanis, the friend that Monica is visiting. Stephen and Monica doze off, lying on their backs on the grass in a Paris square, holding hands. When they wake up, Stephen says they need to go, but Monica is in no hurry.

I turned and looked at her. Staring at me she shifted her body, rolling onto her back. It was an invitation, but I hesitated. This was exactly what I had come for, but now the tiny space between us felt unbridgeable. To be there again! I was in front of a door I’d been searching for, only now I couldn’t reach out and turn the handle. (p. 178)

From then on, Stephen’s behaviour gets worse and worse. He insists on going to a club, though Tanis’s boyfriend, Alex, hates clubs. Once there, he refuses to dance with Monica, on the grounds that he’d be embarrassed to dance with a professional dancer.

— You danced with me in Barcelona, she said. — And this “professional”, she wagged her fingers around the word, — is drunk. (p. 182)

To Guy, the Englishman who told them about the club, he denies that Monica is his girlfriend, which is strictly true but hardly the whole story. Finally, he thows a punch which flattens Michel, the Frenchman who has been showing an unmistakeable interest in Monica.

Michel went down so fast it was like I made him disappear. A space cleared around us. Monica — who I never saw or spoke to again — looked at me like she didn’t even know me. Which she didn’t, I realised. I laughed. It was so ridiculous and sad. (p.186)

So, this is in part a story about a woman coming to realize (like Ann in “The Crossing”) that the man she’s gone away (to be) with is not at all who she thought, but this time it’s told from the man’s point of view. While Ann was nonplussed to learn that Jim liked shooting, in this story it’s the man who has trouble accepting that Monica finds guns “totally sexy” (p. 177). Perhaps Stephen’s ambivalence towards Monica’s “invitation” and his behaviour afterwards, culminating in a violent act, results from a feeling on his part that he ought to be the one persuing her, that that would be the “masculine” way to act, and that she ought to be a bit more coy.

There’s another mismatched couple in “Run”. Gunilla, who is Swedish, and English David, are supposed to be spending a week with Gunilla’s mother and stepfather in a large, remote, rented farmhouse, but Gunilla has had a long and fierce argument with her mother, so the older couple have stayed at home. Gunilla, like her mother, is not hesitant about bluntly saying what is bothering her, but not easy for David to get to know.

When David asked for more she called him needy. He had never known anyone as independent as her. When she left a room it might be for five minutes, or three hours, or forever. (p. 155)

When he asks what the argument with her mother was about, she merely says “The same things we always fight about” (p. 158).

Gunilla is particularly annoyed by David’s obsession with the Second World War.

Being anywhere on the Continent made him think of the war. When he ate lunch in an old town square, or crossed a railway line or passed any industrial plant, he thought of Nazis. Tram systems made him think of Nazis. Bicycles made him think of Nazis. Alpine passes and quiet forests — especially quiet forests — made him think of Nazis. He could never shake his amazement that an ordinary crossroads had been a battlefield; that a park had once been stacked with bodies; that a town hall had served as headquarters for a battalion, or even a division. All these places that had been one thing had suddenly become another, and both were as real as the wheel in his hands. (p. 154)

It’s possible that Gunilla is angered by David’s preoccupation with the War because it makes her feel defensive: he could be taken as implying that the Swedes had been too cooperative with the Nazis:

”Well,” said David, unable to stop himself, “the Swedish government did allow Wehrmacht troops railway passage to and from Norway till mid ’43. How do you think your grandfather got the chance to fall in love with them?” (p. 164)

This is clearly not a relationship that is destined to endure.

One review that I read mentioned how wide a geographical range these stories cover. It’s true. There’s a Mexican wedding and visits to the Greek islands, Barcelona, Berlin, Paris and Nice, London and Somerset. An English stand-up comedian, working in the US, has run out of his own material and adopted wholesale the performance of a deceased star, becoming a kind of tribute act that he despises. One story, “Insbruck”, moves from Cadaqués, Spain, to Croatia, Le Havre, Connemara and London. Notwithstanding the globetrotting it’s striking how often Sweden and its inhabitants turn up.

The narrator of “The Colossus of Rhodes” is on holiday with his two young daughters (Sonja, 4, and Nora, 2) and his Swedish wife, Anna. The peripatetic main character of “Innsbruck” is herself Swedish, though based in London. Gunilla, in “Run”, and her mother are both Swedish. “Run” is set near Simrishamn, on the eastern coast of Sweden, in the south of the country. The events of “The Haväng Dolmen” take place not far from there.

The narrator of “The Haväng Dolmen” is an English academic who has read a paper at a conference in Lund, subtitled “On the Aetiology of Archaeological Belief”:

It was good work, and I was excited about the presentation, but the few people who turned up lacked the ability to grasp even the simplest of the points I was making. (p. 134)

After the conference he decides to drive around the countryside alone and visit the dolmen. “I needed some time away from people” (p. 134). It seems that there are plenty of people about: there is an apple festival in Kivik and the hotels are almost fully booked. But the narrator encounters very few of them and for the most part he is a solitary figure in the landscape, which seems to suit him.

He delays his approach to the dolmen, stopping to eat his sandwiches and an apple at the beach. When he gets to the dolmen, he crawls into the burial chamber, then turns onto his back with the capstone just above his face. He presses his palms against it. His feet are still outside the chamber: presumably he is taller than the people for whom the burial chamber was intended. Though there was enough room for him to crawl into the chamber, he has difficulty getting back out.

I scrambled between capstone and sand, digging my heels into the ground to help lever myself out, but I couldn’t move. I felt as though the life was being crushed out of me. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe, and felt a scatter of rain on my face. (p. 150)

The experience reminds him of something that had happened to him when he was 10 years old, on holiday in France. A slightly older boy named Guillaume tricked the narrator into wedging himself into a crevice at the back of a cave which Guillaume had told him is underwater at high tide:

I was helpless. For a long time I did nothing but cry. Eventually, desperate, I began wrenching my body forward and back against the rock. I felt my skin tearing, but still I wasn’t free. (p. 149)

The narrator hasn’t thought about Guillaume or the cave for years but is reminded of them by the similarly piercing blue eyes of a disturbingly eccentric youth he encountered in Simrishamn. He had forgotten the entire experience but he won’t forget it again.

When I fall asleep, I feel the rock encase me. There are moments in life when we grasp what it is to die. If we’re lucky we forget them, but my luck has run out. (p. 152)

“The Haväng Dolmen” shows that not all of the stories in this collection are about couples who don’t quite manage to get on. The narrator of that story manages to be nervous and on edge all by himself. The same is true of Eva, the character who features in “Innsbruck”. As I’ve already mentioned, she is Swedish, living in London. She travels from place to place with an old guidebook that had been her mother’s and which contains her mother’s annotations, most of them now out-of-date. (The book refers to the Dalmatian coast as being in Yugoslavia.) By the story’s end she has not yet been to Innsbruck, but has made up her mind, after some hesitation, to go there next.

Eva features in two other stories, the first and last in the book. (“Innsbruck” is as close as possible to the middle, being the fifth of ten stories.) The first, “Summer 1976” is narrated by Eva in the first person, and tells about the time “I lied about Nisse Hofmann” (p. 1). This happened shortly before her eleventh birthday. She blamed Nisse for a minor act of vandalism which she hadn’t seen him commit, though he did seem a plausible suspect. The later stories, however, suggest that this one is less about Nisse Hofmann, or Eva’s feelings of guilt at having lied about him, than about her relationship with her mother.

The final story, “Eva” is narrated by Eva’s estranged husband, Joe. It’s the longest story in the book, just over 60 pages. Eva meets Joe in London, two years after she went to Innsbruck. She tells him that she tried to kill herself there, by throwing herself off a footbridge into the river. Eva and Joe soon get married and have a daughter named Marie, whom Joe calls Pluff. Before long, Eva is showing signs of depression. Eventually, she goes away, saying she needs to be on her own.

She sent them gnomic, uninformative and for the most part infrequent postcards from places as far apart as Japan and Canada, Vietnam and Norway. After seven years, a postcard comes from Sussex, asking Joe to bring Marie to see her there. Marie, who is now eleven, starts to visit her mother regularly and Eva gets a dog, apparently as a guarantee that she’ll stay put this time. Joe sees it as his main responsibility to protect Marie from the consequences of Eva’s erratic behaviour.

Joe wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, but he was jealous. He had stayed and Eva had gone, so why did Marie want to be with her more than him? Now Eva is back, and wants to see Marie again, the old wounds are reopening. He is surprised at how keenly he feels them, and how relentlessly they drag him into the past. (p. 262)

Soon, however, Eva is gone again. She felt something about to happen to her, and needed to get away before it did. Joe is furious, ostensibly on Marie’s behalf, but she tells him:

“I like the postcards, OK? I like them. It does me good knowing she’s out there somewhere. She’s still my mum, even if she’s really, really shit at it. If it’s all I’m going to get I’ll take it.” (p. 269)

Joe doesn’t expect to hear from Eva again but, nine years later, he receives an email from a doctor in a Swedish hospital, where Eva is being treated for a schizoaffective disorder. By now, Marie is a medical student, and has recently found that she is pregnant. She insists to Joe that this was not a mistake. She will still qualify as a doctor, it will just take a bit longer.

Joe goes to Sweden to see Eva but lies to Marie about it, telling her that he’s going to a conference in Germany: “It was to protect her after all” (p. 270). A week after Joe returns to London, he learns that Eva has died. He hasn’t told Marie that he knew where her mother was, or that Eva wanted to see her.

This final story clarifies certain aspects of the two earlier ones. The first story, “Summer 1976” is something Eva wrote at the behest of a therapist in the hospital. I suggested above that this story is primarily about Eva’s relationship with her mother. Twice in the story, the 10-year-old Eva wakes up in the night to find her mother sitting at the end of her bed, with a lit cigarette between her fingers but not remembering to smoke it, looking straight ahead. Eva thinks her mother might want to say something to her. When Eva’s mother dies suddenly of cancer, the conversation remains forever uncommenced.

So when Eva travels through Europe with the outdated guide book, it seems obvious that she’s looking for some connection with, or message from, her mother. When she goes away again after her sojourn in Sussex, Eva sends the guide book to Marie. Joe says he never saw their daughter open the book but she takes it with her when she goes travelling with her fiancé, Matt, and sends Joe postcards “from at least two places he knew Eva had visited: Cadaqués and Innsbruck” (p. 272).

This seems the best excuse I’m ever likely to have to ask you to listen to Traffic’s “Every Mother’s Son” on YouTube.

Edition: Faber hardback, 2018.

Random thoughts about determinism: Brian Klaas, Fluke

Sat, 24 May 2025 20:15:45 +0100

It’s unusual for me to write about nonfiction in this newsletter but Brian Klaas’s Fluke (2024) is an unusual book. Klaas is associate professor in global politics at University College London and describes himself in the book’s introduction as “a (disillusioned) social scientist” (p. 11). His Substack is “The Garden of Forking Paths”, taking its title from a story by Borges. The book could be described as a popular science synthesis of various approaches to understanding the world, from chaos and complexity theories, through neuroscience, evolutionary biology, a bit of narrative theory, physics, economics and history. Oh, and philosophy — mustn’t forget that.

Klass is a disillusioned social scientist because he has found that the social sciences promise something they’re incapable of delivering: predictability, a straightforward, traceable relationship between an action and what follows from it, a world that, given enough data about it, we could expect to “grasp” or “comprehend”. He assures us that that’s not the kind of world we live in and, perhaps more to the point, we’re not the kind of beings who could expect to achieve a full understanding of the world, even if it were straightforwardly predictable.

We have evolved, not to perceive accurately our surroundings, but to survive (at least long enough to reproduce), amidst many threats, both known and unknown. If we’re in a situation that we feel might be dangerous, it’s more important to be able to react immediately than with a full understanding of the circumstances. In Klass’s terms, a Shortcut Creature will, on average, survive longer than a Truth Creature will. So, we haven’t evolved to be Truth Creatures. That’s to say your perceptions are distorted; you might as well accept that unavoidable fact.

Not many readers will be surprised by that insight but Klaas synthesizes it with several others which add up to a less familiar world view. Of the book’s thirteen chapters, the first eleven run through various reasons why the world is neither predictable nor susceptible to our control. Very small changes in “initial conditions” lead to enormous differences later on, or in another part of the world. We may like to believe that everything happens for a reason, but it isn’t true. Human behaviour, no less than that of locusts, is greatly changed when we “swarm” (as we do under certain conditions). Where you are in history, or your geographical location, can also make a significant difference to your life.

There’s a term I’ve avoided using so far: “linear”. The relationship or connection between those initial conditions and the eventual outcome could be described as “nonlinear”, and that would be true in the sense that a mathematical equation attempting to describe that relationship would not be a linear one. There isn’t a line — “straight line” would be a tautology: in geometry lines are straight by definition — between what is happening right now, and whatever happened in the past that caused or affected it. So “nonlinear” is not inaccurate but it could be misleading, in that it might lead some people to think that because we can’t trace the chain of cause and effect between a butterfly’s wings in Uruguay and a storm in Yunnan, that the chain doesn’t exist, or can be treated as if it didn’t.

In the twelfth chapter, Klass lays out a compelling case for determinism. While it may not be true that “everything happens for a reason”, that doesn’t contradict the proposition that everything that happens has a cause. Nothing “just happens”. The universe isn’t random, according to him.

When I first got the opportunity to mess around with a computer in 1979 — my mother, a teacher, was told by the school principal to take the new Apple ][ home and see what she could do with it — the thing I was most surprised to learn was that computers can’t generate random numbers. They can’t just pluck a number, any number, out of the air. On the other hand, they do a very convincing job of appearing to produce random numbers — the computer manual called them “pseudorandom”. I understand that things have got a lot more complicated in the meantime, but in 1979 a computer produced a pseudorandom number by shaving the next digit off a very large prime.

It didn’t happen immediately, but eventually I began to ask myself whether randomness exists anywhere. A computer can produce the convincing appearance of randomness, though not the real thing. What if the same were true of the world at large? We’re told that evolution is driven by “random mutation”, haphazard changes that occur, apparently spontaneously, in the reproductive process, which may or may not make an organism more likely to survive. But is there any requirement that the changes be truly random? Mightn’t they just as well be haphazard changes that occur, apparently spontaneously, in the reproductive process simply because of the complexity of the process itself, and the multiplicity of factors, many of them external, acting on it?

In the mid 2000s I bought a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness (2001). It quickly transpired that I had been fooled by the title. I was disappointed to find that by “randomness”, Taleb meant something different from my understanding of the term. I was interested in whether things could “just happen”, without being caused by something else: could something new just pop into existence for no reason — and if it could, how could we be sure it had? Taleb (as far as I remember) was more concerned with surprises, the unforeseen, the unpredictable, irrespective of how those things came about. Twenty years later, I’m delighted to find that Fluke is the book I thought I was buying when I ordered Fooled by Randomness.

Klaas argues that that our universe is wholly deterministic and that randomness plays no part in it — except at the subatomic level, which we’ll come to. Everything that happens is caused by something else that happened before it, usually multiple things, each of which has been caused by something that preceded it. It’s just one damn thing before (and after) another, right back to the big bang, and all happening simultaneously with countless other things some of which affect our thing. It’s complicated.

If the world is deterministic, then everything is, in effect, scripted. Determinism is the notion that change is simply a function of initial conditions (the way things are at a certain snapshot in time) and the natural laws of the universe. Everything that happens is directly and completely caused by that which came before it, a nonstop chain reaction of endless causes and effects, unfolding according to physics. (pp. 221–2)

This is fairly uncontroversial but some of the implications are startling:

The exact state of particles in the instant after the big bang, 13.7 billion years ago, determined the state of the universe in the next instant, which determined what happened in the next instant, on an on, endlessly, until the present moment. If causes and effects are fully determined in an unbroken chain of events, that means that if you brushed your teeth at 8:07 this morning of if your dog barked after seeing a squirrel in the yard, then that was fully and irrevocably determined by the initial conditions of the universe 13.7 billion years ago during the big bang. (pp. 222–3)

Yet there does seem to be an important source of randomness in the universe. Random activity, if it happens at all, does so in subatomic particles. As Klaas tells us, there are fierce disputes between scientists as to what is to be made of the bizarre behaviour — he calls it “quantum weirdness” — of those particles. While nobody knows for sure what is happening, Klaas tells us that the Copenhagen interpretation is the “dominant” one. He summarizes it like this:

the Copenhagen interpretation implies that at the tiniest levels of matter, some aspects of our world are completely random, governed not by determinism, but by probabilities. The interpretation implies that some changes at the subatomic level are unlike anything else in the known universe. They are genuinely uncaused — meaning true randomness reigns. (p. 228)

Part of me instinctively wants to insist that, if randomness is to be found at the quantum level, it must equally have some effect in the big world, in the reality that we misperceive with our senses. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Schrödinger’s Cat is a thought experiment that demonstrates the absurdity that must result if quantum behaviour could affect the big world. You can’t have a cat that is superposed between death and life, waiting for the collapse of the probability wave, even if the particle on which its state is dependent is in that indeterminate condition.

Is it possible that the subatomic world is to some extent random, while the world at large is not? (They are of course the same world: the latter is made up of the former.) Sure, it’s possible. Stranger things have happened, maybe. It’s also possible that the Copenhagen interpretation is entirely wrong. The fact is, we don’t know. Quantum weirdness remains weird — and not understood.

The other main problem with determinism is that it seems to rule out free will. Our brains are physical things, made up of living cells, like the rest of our bodies, and subject to the same laws of physics as everything around them. Unless you believe in a “ghost in the machine” (p. 233), the current state of your brain is determined by its previous state in combination with events that influence it from outside, which in turn are determined by whatever went before, and so on, all the way back to the beginning of the universe. Where does the free will fit in?

Klaas acknowledges that there are compatibilists (p. 234) who believe that determinism and free will are compatible. (I think I might describe myself as a “naïf compatibalist”, in that I’m inclined to believe both in determinism and free will, but I’m not able to explain how they can be reconciled.) Klaas cites Sam Harris as a neuroscientist who pours scorn on compatibalism, pointing out that to make it work its adherents have to distort the idea of free will beyond recognition. Klaas himself is less doctrinaire than Harris is, but nevertheless seems close to being a “hard determinist”:

I don’t believe in free will, though I acknowledge that these questions are mind-bending, baffling and mysterious. We don’t understand consciousness, so it’s plausible that some new discovery will change how we answer this question. In discovery, never say never. But if libertarian free will is indeed what we have, then pretty much everything we know about science would have to be wrong. Compatibalist conceptions of free will aren’t at odds with science so much as they’re redefinitions of what it means to be free. (p. 237)

The reference to our not understanding consciousness is what strikes me as significant in this passage. Much earlier in the book, Klaas has acknowledged the intractability of the consciousness “problem”:

The greatest mystery of all is consciousness, and we don’t understand it. Since 1994, the thorniest challenge has been called the hard problem of consciousness, the term coined by a titan of modern philosophy, David Chalmers. Humans have long been baffled by the so-called mind-body problem, the question of whether there is something fundamentally different between what we think of as our minds and the physical, chemical structures of the brain. (p. 110)

For myself, I understand consciousness so badly that I can’t even grasp what it would mean to understand consciousness. How would one understand it? What is it that we’re trying to do?

These debates and questions bear a startling resemblance to religious controversies of the seventeenth century. Some time ago, I wrote about one of Andrew Marvell’s prose works, Remarks upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse (1678), in which he defended a nonconformist minister, John Howe, against the attacks of another, Thomas Danson. Danson was a Calvinist and Howe was a follower of Richard Baxter, who attempted to steer a “middle way” between Calvinism and Arminianism. Arminians believed in free will, which Calvinists thought was a derogation from God’s omnipotence. Howe had argued that it was clearly within the competence of an omnipotent God to create a creature endowed with free will, who was thus capable of acting against God’s commands or wishes.

It struck me that there might be an analogy to be drawn between Howe’s argument and the very different conceptions of determinism and free will that Klaas is writing about. Our universe is, I agree, wholly deterministic. But it has been around for 13.7 billion years, getting increasinly complex all the time. Evolution has been happening in it for many millions of those years, resulting in creatures, organs and behaviours of wondrous variety and ability. One of the things that evolved is that consciousness that Klaas acknowledges is such a mystery.

So, is it not possible that, in this aeons-long, deterministic, extremely complex, ghost-free universe, there evolved a brain capable of making choices, taking decisions, evaluating alternative courses, arriving at judgments, independently of its conditions? Such a brain would not, of course, be completely free of constraints, any more than would be the body it animated. Sam Harris might ridicule the idea that the will exercised by such a brain could accurately be called “free” but it’s hardly much different from what we commonly understand as free will. Perhaps we should stop calling it “free will” and come up with a more accurate term.

Is there any reason why a wholly deterministic system shouldn’t be able to accommodate a decision-making, autonomous intelligence that evolved (through deterministic processes) within that system? I’m not claiming that’s what happened, only that it’s not impossible.

Klaas accepts that most of us, in normal circumstances, feel that we’re able to act independently, to choose, to take a different course from one laid out for us. We don’t experience life as if we were helplessly following a predetermined program. Perhaps this sense of freedom is an illusion. Perhaps, but there’s a real possibility that it isn’t. That means, I think, that it makes sense for us to try to behave as if we were independent, self-acting, free agents, even if we’re not sure that that’s really the case.

I’ll be back to fiction next time.

Edition: John Murray paperback, 2025.

“Detective-fever”: Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

Sat, 10 May 2025 19:34:14 +0100

The Moonstone (1868) is the last of what have sometimes been called Wilkie Collins’s four great novels of the 1860s (the other three being The Woman in White (1859), No Name (1862) and Armadale (1864). It rivals The Woman in White to be considered his best known novel. T. S. Eliot said it was “the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels” (Introduction, p. 7). If it’s the first, we shouldn’t expect to find it a typical example, or that it should already contain all the elements of the mature, developed form.

There are murders, one in the prologue and another, of an important character, in the body of the story, but this second killing doesn’t happen till almost the end of the novel and it isn’t the crime which is being investigated. None of the other characters seems to have any doubt as to who the murderers are: that isn’t a part of the mystery, which is concerned with the disappearance (presumably theft) of an enormous, flawed but yet extremely valuable yellow diamond, known as the Moonstone.

The novel introduces a celebrated detective, Sergeant Cuff of Scotland Yard, renowned for his deductive powers. But Cuff withdraws from the proceedings about 40% of the way through the story, having asserted that the diamond was not stolen, and leaving much of the task of accounting for its disappearance to other characters. Cuff reluctantly emerges from retirement late the story, to help to rectify his initial “mistake”.

A notable feature of the story is that, with one important exception, the main characters don’t seem to care very much about the diamond’s monetary value, great though that is. Rachel Verinder has been given the Moonstone on her eighteenth birthday. It had previously been in the possession of an estranged brother of her mother’s, whose will left it with instructions to give it to Rachel. The uncle believed the diamond to be cursed and, it is strongly implied, left it to his niece expressly with the aim that it should cause mischief in Lady Verinder’s household.

The diamond was taken later on the night of Rachel’s birthday. She appeared to be much less concerned with the pecuniary loss than with something she witnessed that night that persuaded her that she had been despicably betrayed by someone she loved. She showed no inclination to help Sergeant Cuff’s investigation. Not long afterwards, her mother, Lady Verinder, died, leaving a substantial estate. Rachel was now a wealthy woman — though not wealthy enough for one suitor who quickly had second thoughts when he learned that, though she had a large income from the estate, she had just a life interest in the land, without a power of sale or the ability to raise money on it.

The diamond was never recovered and Rachel does not seem to have been at all put out or inconvenienced by the loss of its value. She has reasons for not being willing to help Sergeant Cuff: when it becomes clear that a paint smear on a nightgown may implicate the thief, she flatly refuses to allow her own clothes to be inspected. Shortly after that, Lady Verinder pays off the sergeant and he goes back to London.

So, the story is not about recovering the stolen goods or the punishment of the criminals but rather about the effort to find out what happened: to unravel the mystery. Cuff’s part in this is significant. He is half right in believing that the diamond was not stolen, at least not initially, though that changed almost immediately. He was absolutely right in his conclusion that Rosanna Spearman had posted a “memorandum” to the Yollands’ house in Cobb’s Hole, containing instructions for the recovery of the box she had hidden in the Shivering Sands. (The actual addressee is their daughter Lucy, Rosanna’s friend.)

But it is the unfortunate doctor’s assistant, Ezra Jennings, who plays the decisive role in discovering why and how the Moonstone was taken. Jennings has reconstructed the vital fact that Dr Candy has forgotten: that Franklin Blake had unknowingly taken a dose of laudanum the night of Rachel’s birthday. Jennings put that fact together with Franklin Blake’s anxiety as to the vulnerability of the diamond to theft (and of its possessor to violence), and formed a theory as to what must have happened. Then he put the theory to the test.

Ezra Jennings’s experiment is at once the plot’s great weakness and its sensational climax. To remove it would be to deprive the novel of much of its suspense and excitement — while at the same time making the story much more plausible. Ezra Jennings believes, and persuades Franklin Blake, that if they can exactly recreate the circumstances and conditions in which the Moonstone disappeared, they can expect a recurrence of the events of that night, and they’ll finally know what happened.

At the time of the Moonstone’s disappearance, Franklin Blake had been sleeping badly, having recently given up smoking. That fact, combined with his professed scepticism about doctors and medicine, had been the reason why Dr Candy had given him a dose of laudanum, without his consent. To replicate the conditions of that night, Blake now agrees to give up smoking again.

“From this moment.”

“That is the first step. The next step is to reproduce, as nearly as we can, the domestic circumstances which surrounded you last year.” (p. 445)

Of course, it proves impossible to reproduce everything exactly. The carpets have been taken up since Lady Verinder has died, Rachel is living in London and most of the servants have been laid off. Gabriel Betteredge, who narrated the first part of the story, has been keeping the house with just a few other servants. They do their best to restore things but there is one big thing that’s missing: the Moonstone itself. Blake can’t help knowing that the stone is no longer there, and no longer in any immediate danger of being taken again. Whatever he might be feeling anxious about, it isn’t that.

Insofar as the aim of the experiment is to prove that Franklin Blake removed the Moonstone so as to put it in a safer place, it is quite unnecessary. Blake claims that he needs proof if he is to believe that he acted under the combined influence of laudanum, anxiety and nicotine withdrawal, but this should not be necessary. Clearly, he took the diamond: Rachel saw him do it, and the nightgown that Rosanna hid corroborates that. He himself knows that he didn’t consciously or intentionally steal the jewel. So, what other explanation could there be?

On hearing Ezra Jennings’s theory, Rachel immediately realizes that it must be the truth. She doesn’t need empirical evidence to convince her. Bruff, the solicitor, strongly advises against going ahead, and the cautious, unimaginative stick-in-the-mud is on this occasion quite right. What is to be gained from the experiment? Why risk an inconclusive result, which might draw suspicion on Blake? Gabriel, caught up in his familiar “detective-fever”, happily goes along with the test, but he least of all requires proof that Franklin Blake is not a thief.

Of course, Ezra Jennings has a second aim: to find out what Blake did with the Moonstone after he had removed it from Rachel’s cabinet. In this respect, the experiment is a complete failure, though the information eventually emerges from another source.

This episode is full of suspense, yet the experiment really adds nothing to the unfolding of the plot. When I first read the novel, I found the unlikelihood of Blake’s repeating exactly the actions he had taken the previous time he’d been under the influence of laudanum distracted my attention from the rest of the novel. The book seemed to me to be on that account less satisfactory than either The Woman in White or Armadale. On this rereading I see what I missed before, that The Moonstone has similar strengths to those of the other two novels.

Dr Candy gave Franklin Blake the laudanum because he was annoyed by the latter’s dismissal of the possibility that he might benefit from it. The doctor, in other words, was acting as an advocate for, a promoter of, the drug. He wanted to persuade the young sceptic that there was some good to be had from it. I’m wondering if the author might have had a similar aim in mind, and if that’s why this episode, which in my view is neither necessary nor helpful to the plot, is included. The first thing I ever read about Wilkie Collins, a long time ago — it was probably in one of the Sunday papers — described him as “a frank and happy addict of the drug”. So maybe it wasn’t enough for his purposes to establish that Franklin Blake had been given laudanum on the night of Rachel’s birthday in 1848; better to show him knowingly taking a stronger dose the following year.

The characters are, for the most part, either flawed or idiosyncratic. Franklin Blake, who is more or less the hero, and loved by two women, Rachel Verinder and the unfortunate Rosanna Spearman, is irresponsible with money and almost ruins one of his creditors by failing to pay the debt on time. Rosanna’s criminal past is known to her employer, to Gabriel Betteredge and to Sergeant Cuff, who believe (correctly) that she has mended her ways, but she hides the evidence of what she believes to be Blake’s guilt so well that it remains undiscovered for a year, before killing herself in quicksand.

Gabriel Betteredge, harmlessly if rather ludicrously, relies on his pipe and a reading of Robinson Crusoe for the solution to every question that confronts him. He proudly rejects the siren call of rationality:

I am (thank God!) constitutionally superior to reason. This enabled me to hold firm to my lady’s view, which was my view also. This roused my spirit, and made me put a bold face on it before Sergeant Cuff. Profit, good friends, I beseech you, by my example. It will save you from many troubles of the vexing sort. Cultivate a superiority to reason, and see how you pare the claws of all the sensible people when they try to scratch you for your own good! (p. 208)

Later, we find him urging Franklin Blake not to get too hung up on the facts:

“Facts?” he repeated. “Take a drop more grog, Mr Franklin, and you’ll soon get over the weakness of believing in facts! Foul play, sir!” (p. 361)

Gabriel is the character who provides the reader’s first impression of Rachel Verinder:

To put it seriously, my dear pretty Miss Rachel, possessing a host of graces and attractions, had one defect, which strict impartiality compels me to acknowledge. She was unlike most other girls of her age, in this — that she had ideas of her own, and was stiff-necked enough to set the fashions themselves at defiance, if the fashions didn’t suit her views. In trifles, this independence of hers was all well enough; but in matters of importance it carried her (as my lady thought, and as I thought) too far. She judged for herself, as few women twice her age judge in general; never asked your advice; never told you beforehand what she was going to do; never came with secrets and confidences to anybody, from her mother downwards. In little things and great, with people she loved and people she hated (and she did both with equal heartiness), Miss Rachel always went on a way of her own, sufficient for herself in the joys and sorrows of her life. Over and over again I have heard my lady say, “Rachel’s best friend and Rachel’s worst enemy are, one and the other — Rachel herself.” (p. 87)

When Rachel witnesses Franklin Blake apparently stealing the Moonstone she doesn’t speak of it to anybody: not to Blake himself, to her mother, or to Sergeant Cuff, leading the last of these to draw the wrong conclusion as to who it is who hasn’t stolen the jewel (but has removed it). Gabriel’s picture of Rachel is entirely at odds with Rosanna’s, who writes in a letter to Franklin Blake (which he doesn’t receive till about a year after her death) that she “hated” (p. 363) Rachel.

“If she had been really as pretty as you thought her, I might have borne it better. No; I believe I should have been more spiteful against her still. Suppose you put Miss Rachel into a servant’s dress, and took her ornaments off — ? I don’t know what is the use of my writing in this way. It can’t be denied that she had a bad figure; she was too thin … But it does stir one up to hear Miss Rachel called pretty, when one knows all the time that it’s her dress that does it, and her confidence in herself …” (p. 363)

Rosanna is one of two characters, the other being Ezra Jennings, who lead miserable lives before suffering horrible and painful deaths. The novel treats them with sympathy, which is more than can be said for most of their fellow characters.

Miss Drusilla Clack is a minor character who narrates the opening chapters of the second part of the book (the first part consisting entirely of the narrative of Gabriel Betteredge). She is a straitlaced, prim, evangelical Christian woman who greatly admires Godfrey Ablewhite for his work with charities like the Mothers’-Small-Clothes-Conversion-Society. It’s from her that we first hear about that gentleman’s short-lived engagement to Rachel Verinder. He tells Miss Clack that Rachel has “taken a sudden resolution to break the engagement” (p. 296).

“… Reflection has convince her that she will best consult her welfare and mine by retracting a rash promise, and leaving me free to make some happier choice elsewhere. That is the only reason she will give, and the only answer she will make to every question that I can ask of her.” (p. 296)

Godfrey has accepted Rachel’s apparently capricious decision without complaint. The next narrator, the solicitor Mr Bruff, presents the breaking of the engagement in a rather different light. He has told Rachel that Godfrey Ablewhite lost no time in inspecting Lady Verinder’s will at Doctors’ Commons even before it has been admitted to probate, so learning that Rachel has only a life interest in the estate. His ready acquiescence in her decision is cofirmation in her and the lawyer’s eyes that he had wanted to marry her for mercenary reasons.

But if the younger Mr Ablewhite had succeeded in deceiving Miss Clack as to his character and motives, she is much more clearsighted when it comes to his father. Of him she writes:

I am not ignorant that old Mr Ablewhite has a reputation generally (especially among his inferiors) of being a remarkably good-natured man. According to my observation of him, he deserves his reputation as long as he has his own way, and not a moment longer. (p. 301)

She foresees that the father will make much more of a fuss about the ending of the engagement than his son does, and so it turns out. Ablewhite Senior takes it as a personal affront. He had been appointed Rachel’s guardian by Lady Verinder’s will, but now he refuses to act in that capacity.

The novel contains a lot more besides. It’s a big, many threaded story with convincing, well delineated characters and a plot that is skilfully crafted to fit together satisfactorily — even if I remain sceptical about one aspect of that plot, the laudanum experiment.

Edition: Penguin Classics paperback, 1966, 1986; ellipses added.

Noblesse désoblige: Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 17:24:03 +0100

I find stories about doppelgängers, and particularly about someone taking over somebody else’s life, irresistible. The first of Tana French’s novels that I read was The Likeness and what attracted me was its premise: the discarded identity of a cop who used to work undercover is taken up by someone who looks just like her and who is later murdered. It’s a compelling setup, but the main substance of the book isn’t really dependent on it: it’s an exploration of the interactions between a close-knit and rather isolated small group of graduate students, and how the relationships between them are changed (and not changed) by the murder of the murder of the one who joined them most recently. But the reader is always conscious that the narrator has to pass as somebody else, someone who physically resembles her but about whose life and personality she knows very little.

The narrator of Daphne du Maurier’s The Scapegoat (1957) likewise finds himself in a situation where he has to emulate behaviour and characteristics that, for the most part, he can only guess at. John is an Englishman, a lecturer in French history at an English university. He spends his holidays in France, travelling about and researching his subject. At a railway bar in Le Mans, he meets a man who looks and sounds exactly like him. His doppelgänger is Jean, le comte de Gué.

After an evening’s drinking, John wakes up to find that the comte has run off with John’s car, passport, money and everything else that was in his immediate possession. Jean’s manservant has come to the hotel, ready to drive him home. After some half-hearted attempts to protest that he is not the comte de Gué and that his own clothes and possessions have been stolen, John dresses in the comte’s clothes and allowes Gaston to take him to the château.

Only Jean’s retriever, César, recognizes that John isn’t who he’s pretending to be but, though he growls a bit and keeps his distance, César doesn’t attack the imposter. He apparently doesn’t understand that this newcomer is attempting to take the place of his master, who has been away and for some reason hasn’t yet returned. The other members of the family are puzzled by César’s hostility but don’t suspect the reason for it. The dog must be ill.

John has walked into a family about whose dynamics he hasn’t the remotest idea. The dowager comtesse is a morphine addict who rarely leaves her shuttered, overheated bedroom; Jean’s younger brother, Paul, discontentedly runs the glassworks on which whatever’s left of the family fortune is founded; like her husband, Paul’s wife Renée is bored and unhappy; Jean’s wife, Françoise, is in the late stages of pregnancy and desperately hoping for a boy; their ten-year-old daughter, Marie-Noel, seems at risk of developing into a religious fanatic under the tutelage of Blanche, the sister of Jean and Paul.

In spite of the things he gets ridiculously wrong, none of these people suspects that John is anything other than the genuine article. The fact that I didn’t find this at all credible did not impair my enjoyment of the story in the slightest. However indistinguishable the two men may have looked and sounded, and however much time the Englishman might have spent in France speaking the language, there would certainly be some turns of phrase and habits of speech, perhaps peculiar to the region, that he wouldn’t replicate. But our minds have a way of adjusting our perceptions, of making allowances to conform with what we expect to see and hear, and presumably that’s what happens in the case of this family.

When they met in Le Mans, Jean had been returning from Paris, where he had gone to try to negotiate a new contract with Carvalet, the main customer of the verrerie. His luggage contained wrapped and labeled presents from the capital for the various family members. The fact that the comtesse’s gift — a renewed supply of morphine — had had to be delivered secretly during the night should perhaps have alerted John to the private quality of some of the items, but he prefers to hand them over at lunchtime, in the hope of cheering up the recipients.

The presents for Marie-Noel and Françoise are unexceptionable, but Renée’s is “the flimsiest of nightgowns, gossamer light, a frivolity for brides on midsummer eve” (p. 83), while that for Paul is an elixir that implies he might be impotent. Everybody, particularly Marie-Noel, is incredulous that he has something for Blanche, as he never gives her presents. This, to his embarrassment, is the biggest faux pas of all: though the wrapping is marked with the initial “B”, the card inside is addressed to Béla; the gift is a large and expensive bottle of scent. Marie-Noel tells John that Blanche hasn’t spoken to her elder brother for 15 years.

Béla, as John discovers, is Jean’s mistress. (The masculine Hungarian name is a nickname he gave her because of her tendency to emphasize her nationality.) She lives in the nearby town of Villars where John pays a visit to the bank to try to get a picture of the family’s finances and business situation. He learns that Françoise’s father had been “a rich man with little faith in the stability of Jean de Gué, and no desire to bolster the tottering fortunes of the family of St Gilles” (p. 130). He had settled her large dowry in trust for her male heir. During the minority of some putative future son of Françoise, the income from the trust was to be paid to her and her husband. If she should not have a male heir, the money was to be divided between her and any daughters she might have, when she reached the age of 50. And, if she were to die before reaching that age, the money would be divided between such daughters and her husband. Hence her anxiety to have a male child.

John puts his foot in it again on Sunday, at la grande chasse, an annual hunt (with guns, of course, not hounds) of which Jean has always been the enthusiastic organizer. Not being able to shoot, John deliberately burns his hand as an excuse for handing the matter over to Paul. John, drunk, addresses the assembled hunters at the lunch afterwards, and raises the hackles of several neighbours by unintentionally appearing to disparage their conduct during the war.

Shortly after this, Françoise dies in a fall from her bedroom window. It looks for a while as if she might have deliberately killed herself, but Marie-Noel establishes that she was trying to recover the gift that her husband had bought for her in Paris, a locket, which had apparently fallen onto the ledge below the window. According to Marie-Noel, her mother was in the habit of shaking her duster out the window and the locket had apparently got caught in it. There was nobody else in the room with her, so at least there was no suspicion of homicide.

The death of Françoise means that half her dowry immediately vests in her husband, the other half being held in trust for Marie-Noel till she reaches full age. Up to that point, John has felt that every action he has taken since his arrival at the château has made the family’s predicament worse. Now, with his inheritance from Françoise, it seems that things are starting to get better. He has already committed the verrerie to remaining open and operating at a loss, even before he could see where the money would come from to make up the difference. He took this step because he was affected by the demeanour of some of the workers, and didn’t want to throw them out of work. However, when he remarks to Jacques, the clerk who administers the business’s office, that the important thing is that nobody should be out of work, the answer isn’t what he expects:

He raised his eyebrows. “Were you so concerned about the men?” he asked. “I hadn’t realized that. Actually, after the first shock they would soon have found employment. They’ve been prepared for a close-down for a long time.” (p. 162)

With the financial pressure off, John releases Paul from his role as manager and encourages him and Renée to travel, with Paul looking for new markets to open up. Blanche, who used to design glass ornaments, will take over the running of the foundry. (Blanche had been about to marry the then manager of the verrerie, Maurice Duval, when he will killed during the German occupation as a collaborator by a group of partisans, led by Jean.)

The newly happy state may not last, of course. Learning about his wife’s death, Jean decides to come back, after just an eventful week away. John resolves to kill the comte and take his place permanently, but his plan is frustrated when the local curé sees him with a handgun. Jean is disgruntled to discover that his stand-in has signed a contract with Carvalet that means he will have to support the loss-making business with part of his inheritance, but he is otherwise satisfied.

“That will break up the marriage even sooner,” he said. “Renée will find the lover she’s been searching for, and Paul feel himself more inferior than ever. Put him in the world and he’ll look what he knows he is — a provincial boor …” (p. 302)

Blanche could design “cheap gimcrack stuff to attract the tourist” so that they wouldn’t any longer be reliant on demanding firms like Carvalet.

A week earlier, Jean had swapped places with his English doppelgänger in order to escape from a family and circumstances that he was finding intolerable. Now, he is incredulous at John’s claim that he has attempted to set things right, not out of a desire to get his hands on Françoise’s money, but because he “loves” Jean’s family:

”You have the audacity to tell me,” he said, “that you love my mother, who is without exception the most egotistical, the most rapacious, the most monstrous woman I have, in all my experience, ever known; you love Paul, who is an oaf, a weakling and a thoroughly disagreeable personality; you love Renée — presumably for her body, which I grant you is enchanting, but she has a mind like an empty box … (p. 304)

Blanche is a religious fanatic and Marie-Noel can put on her sweetness and innocence for effect, at will. John doesn’t disagree with any of this but maintains that it doesn’t prevent him from loving them.

The comte de Gué has made changes to John’s life which may be even more fundamental than those that the latter has made to his. Before Françoise died, Jean had intended to assume the Englishman’s identity permanently. To that end, he resigned from John’s university job, surrendered the lease on his flat, emptied his bank account (which had a balance of £200) and arranged the sale of his furniture. John had been dissatisfied with his life before the swap — that, of course, is why he went along with it — but had no real idea of how to go about changing it. Now, he has no choice but to find out. Before the meeting in Le Mans, he had been about to visit a Trappist monastery in search, presumably, of some kind of spiritual solution. At the novel’s end, he has resumed his way there.

The two doppelgängers are alike in other ways as well as physically. Their attitudes to existence are similar, though the comte is more openly cynical. He assures John:

“… I have learnt one thing in life, which is that the only motive force in human nature is greed. Insects, animals, men, women, children, we live by greed alone. It’s not very pretty, but what of it? The thing to do is to minister to the greed, and to give people what they want. The trouble is, they are never satisfied.” (p. 21)

Having lived the other man’s life for a few days, John quickly formed a poor impression of his counterpart’s character.

It might have been an inspiration to take on the role of someone fine — the change of skin would have acted as a spur to endeavour. Instead, I had exchanged my own negligible self for a worthless personality. He had the supreme advantage over me in that he had not cared. Or had he, after all? Was this why he had disappeared? (p. 96)

In the end, each man resumes his own character, personality and life, which has in the meantime been changed by the other. As to whether those changes will persist, the novel doesn’t reach a conclusion.

Edition: Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat, Pan paperbacks 1975.

The next post, in two weeks’ time, is probably going to be about Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone unless I have other ideas in the meantime.

“Some colour at least of justice”: Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 14:03:40 +0100

The two contrasing authority-figures in Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) are both justices of the peace as well as being neighbouring landowners. Squire Western is hot-headed, impatient, unreflective, obsessed with hunting and inclined always to revert to his fixed ideas about filial duty and what constitutes a good marriage. Allworthy, on the other hand, is scrupulously fair, far-seeing, thoughtful and, for the most part, careful not to let anger or other strong emotions (not including sympathy and mercy) influence his decisions. But justice is an elusive concept and Allworthy’s attempts to behave judiciously occasionally leave him open to criticism. The occasional ambivalence of his position is seen when he commits Molly Seagrim to the house of correction for the offence of being pregnant without ever having been married:

A lawyer may, perhaps, think Mr Allworthy exceeded his authority a little in this instance. And, to say truth, I question, as here was no regular information before him, whether his conduct was strictly regular. However, as his intention was truly upright, he ought to be excused in foro conscientiae, since so many arbitrary acts are daily committed by magistrates, who have not this excuse to plead for themselves. (IV, 2; p. 184)

Some twenty years earlier, Allworthy had been more understanding when confronted with the similar case of Jenny Jones, who didn’t deny being the mother of the foundling of the novel’s title. When she entreats Allworthy not to insist on knowing the name of the child’s father, because she is “under the most solemn ties and engagements of honour as well as the most religious vows and protestations, to conceal his name at this time” (p. 69), Allworthy tells her:

… she had done wrong to enter into such engagements to a villain; but since she had, he could not insist on her breaking them. He said, it was not from a motive of vain curiosity he had enquired, but in order to punish the fellow; at least that he might not ignorantly confer favours on the undeserving. (I, 7; p. 69)

Jenny has already promised him that he will one day know the father’s identity, and eventually he indeed learns it, though not as soon as Jenny expects.

Allworthy relents in the case of Molly Seagrim; he does so at the urging of Tom Jones, who uses arguments very similar to those relied on by Allworthy for treating Jenny with mercy so many years earlier. But Tom is an interested party, being perhaps the likeliest of the several candidates for fatherhood of Molly’s baby. So, strictly speaking, Allworthy’s eventual lenity towards Molly is as questionable as his initial severity.

This is not to suggest that Allworthy is, in general, a bad magistrate. He is certainly aware of what justice requires. Arguing with Captain Blifil, his sister’s husband as to whether benevolence towards the unfortunate children of unmarried parents is an encouragement to vice, he asserts:

But to represent the Almighty as avenging the sins of the guilty on the innocent, was indecent, if not blasphemous, as it was to represent him acting against the first principles of natural justice, and against original notions of right and wrong, which he himself had implanted in our minds; by which we were to judge, not only in all matters which were not revealed, but even the truth of revelation itself. (II, 2; p. 90)

The fact that Allworthy puts “the first principles of natural justice” even before “original notions of right and wrong” suggests that he sees these principles as fundamental. That would certainly be an appropriate opinion for a magistrate or other judicial figure to hold, though Fielding implies that it is quite unusual for magistrates to act according to those principles. The principles are (1) hear both sides (or hear the other side) and (2) nobody should be a judge in his or her own cause. In the decisive event that kicks off the novel’s main plot, Allworthy breaks both of these rules.

He has broght up the foundling as if he were his own son and has been tolerant and forgiving of the scrapes and “vices” (III, 2, p. 123) into which Tom’s exuberance and high spirits habitually led him. However, after Allworthy has recovered from an illness that had seemed to threaten his life, learned of the death of his sister, and been maliciously misled into believing that Tom Jones had drunkenly exulted in the prospect of his benefactor’s death, he throws Jones out of his home and resolves to have no further contact with him.

It’s true that the magistrate gives Tom the opportunity to answer the accusation against him. Unfortunately for the young man, he largely in ignorance of the case he has to rebut:

Many disadvantages attended poor Jones in making his defence; nay, indeed, he hardly knew his accusation: for, as Mr Allworthy, in recounting the drunkenness, &c. while he lay ill, out of modesty sunk everything that related particularly to himself, which indeed principally constituted the crime, Jones could not deny the charge. (VI, 11, p. 286–7)

Jones is conscious of the many minor transgressions of which he has previously been guilty, but not of the imputation of monstrous ingratitude, so all he can do is plead for mercy and forgiveness.

“… Nay,” said Mr Allworthy to him, “your audacious attempt to steal away the young lady, calls upon me to justify my own character in punishing you. The world, who have already censured the regard I have shewn for you, may think, with some colour at least of justice, that I connive at so base and barbarous an action …” (VI, 11; p. 287)

Allworthy is acting as a judge in his own cause, since he is the supposed victim of Jones’s alleged ingratitude. Of course, he doesn’t leave young Jones completely destitute, but gives the young man a packet containing £500. Jones hasn’t opened this packet before he loses it, so it’s only at the end of the story that he discovers how much it contained. Molly’s father, the gamekeeper Black George Seagrim, has picked up the package while going through the motions of helping Jones to search for it. When shortly afterwards, Sophia Western asks George to deliver 16 guineas to Jones, George has to work out of the ethics of stealing a large sum while passing the much smaller sum to its intended recipient.

Black George having received the purse, set forward towards the alehouse; but in the way a thought occurred to him, whether he should not detain this money likewise. His conscience, however, immediately started at this suggestion, and began to upbraid him with ingratitude to his benefactor. To this his his avarice answered, “that his conscience should have considered the matter before, when he deprived poor Jones of his 500l. That having quietly acquiesced in what was of so much greater importance, it was absurd, if not downright hypocrisy, to affect any qualms at this trifle.” In return to which, conscience, like a good lawyer, attempted to distinguish between an absolute breach of trust, as here where the goods were delivered, and a bare concealment of what was found, as in the former case. Avarice presently treated this with ridicule, called it a distinction without a difference, and absolutely insisted, that when once all pretensions of honour and virtue were given up in any one instance, there was no precedent for resorting to them upon a second occasion. In short, poor conscience had certainly been defeated in the argument, had not fear stept in to her assistance, and very strenuously urged, that the real distinction between the two actions, did not lie in the different degrees of honour, but of safety: for that the secreting of 500l. was a matter of very little hazard; whereas the detaining the sixteen guineas was liable to the utmost danger of discovery. (VI, 13; p. 295)

Magistrates and justices of the peace like Allworthy and Western are the lowest rung of the judicial ladder. They’re not much concerned with questions of law but are routinely called upon to make findings of fact. How it is possible to determine the truth, or the facts, with an acceptable degree of certainty? This is the question at the heart of Tom Jones. That his primary concern is with matters of fact and truth is behind the author’s reminder that he has titled the work a “history, and not a life; nor an apology for a life, as is more in fashion” (II, 1; p. 87).

This impression is reinforced by the speech paterns adopted by the authorial voice. “To tell truth” and variations on this expression recur throughout the story, implying that the “truth” of any given situation is not necessarily evident on the surface. Also, the authorial voice repeatedly professes ignorance as to the mental states behind a character’s behaviour or appearance. For example, we are told about Dr Blifil:

Whether his religion was real, or consisted solely in appearance, I shall not presume to say, as I am not possessed of any touchstone, which can distinguish the true from the false. (I, 10; p. 75)

There are many similar cases throughout the book. In most of them, the implication is that the discreditable alternative is most likely to be true — but that one must always be wary of imputing bad motives on inadequate evidence, as the example of Jones himself demonstrates.

As for the questions of fact to be determined, it is well known that it can be difficult to establish a child’s paternity. Tom Jones believes (to start with, at least) that he is the father of Molly’s baby, but there’s no reason why it might not equally be Square’s or Will Barnes’s (V, 6; p. 220). But, by the end of the novel, it has become apparent that, in certain circumstances, the question of maternity might be equally elusive.

One circumstance in which it may be particularly difficult, and particularly necessary, to find out the truth is where a man professes his undying love for a woman he wishes to marry. Might he, like Blifil, feel no affection at all for his intended and merely wish to gratify his desires by tormenting her and making her life miserable? Or, like Fitzpatrick, might he simply want to get his hands on her estate, so he can gamble it away? At least, Sophia’s instinctive revulsion from Blifil protects her. But the question remains a hard problem.

In the penultimate chapter, Sophia still doesn’t have a foolproof way of knowing whether Tom Jones will be faithful to her if she should accept him. She knows about his history of adventures with Molly, Mrs Waters and Lady Bellaston, and of his duplicitous proposal to the last of these. Tom assures her that he would never have behaved so licentiously if he had thought there was any possibility of his winning her hand, and that he has sincerely repented.

“Sincere repentence, Mr Jones,” answered she, “will obtain the pardon of a sinner, but it is from one who is a perfect judge of that sincerity. A human mind may be imposed on; nor is there any infallible method to prevent it. You must expect however, that if I can be prevailed on by your repentence to pardon you, I will at least insist on the strongest proof of its sincerity.” (XVIII, 12; p. 865)

The “strongest proof” that she has in mind is time.

“[T]ime, Mr Jones, can alone convince me that you are a true penitent, and have resolved to abandon these vicious courses, which I should detest you, if I imagined you capable of persevering in.”

In the end, though, she doesn’t insist on proof of this kind but accedes to her father’s command that she marry Jones the following day. She is quite right that any human mind, including one as wary and experienced as Allworthy’s, may be deceived. The passage of time would give her the opportunity to view Jones’s behaviour from a number of different perspectives, giving her a fuller picture, but even that could never provide an absolute guarantee of his constancy, so arguably she’s not going to learn anything more useful by waiting longer.

Fielding himself became a justice of the peace for Westminster the year before Tom Jones was published, though probably after he had finished writing the novel. Later his jurisdiction was extended to the whole of Middlesex and, with his fellow-justice and half-brother, John Fielding, he became an influential figure in the development of a police force. Clearly he had thought deeply about questions of justice and adjudication, and his conclusions have a significant influence on this novel.

In this post, I’ve concentrated on the related themes of justice and finding out the truth. There’s at least one other major theme in the novel, and it has to do with the question of honour. This first becomes an issue when Jenny tells Allworthy that she has promised not to reveal who Tom’s father is. Allworthy responds that it was wrong of her to give the promise but, having done so, she would be wrong to break it. When the almost adult Tom is whipped for shooting a partridge on neighbouring land, he worries that he might, under this torture, be brought to break his promise and betray the identity of his accomplice, who would lose his livelihood as a result.

The honour theme continues when Jones prepares to challenge Northerton to a duel, but it really caught my attention when he goes to meet Lady Bellaston at a masquerade:

Jones had never less inclination to an amour than at present; but gallantry to the ladies was among his principles of honour; and he felt it as much incumbent on him to accept a challenge to love, as if it had been a challenge to fight. (XIII, 7; p. 633)

That’s when it first struck me that he’s attempting to work out his own morality from first principles, presumably in reaction to the tiresome doctrines peddled by Thwackum and Square, and that it’s inevitable that he will sometimes make mistakes.

I’d like to write some more about the novel’s treatment of honour but I haven’t left myself enough time or space to do so here. (This post is already very late.) I may return to the theme in a future post. In two weeks’ time, unless there’s a change of plan, I’ll probably be writing about Daphne du Maurier’s The Scapegoat (1957).

Edition: Penguin Classic paperback, ed. RPC Mutter, 1966, 1985.