Art Kavanagh

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 12:29:05 +0100

Altman and tech “leaders” who rush ahead with AI while simultaneously warning of the risks of catastrophe probably take so-called Roko’s basilisk seriously. They feel compelled to press ahead while pleading with the rest of us to save them from the consequences of their cowardly credulity 😜

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 16:23:26 +0100

I’d have sworn Sandy Denny had died earlier than 1978. I saw Fairport (for the second time) in Theatre L, UCD after she had died, and I finished in UCD in 1978, so it must have been very shortly after her death. No wonder an acquaintance of mine was getting very upset. Where the time went 🎶

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 23:45:01 +0100

(For the record, I also thought Madeleine Peyroux sounded too much like Billie Holiday and Wallace Roney sounded too much like Miles Davis.)

Lovely parenthesis in the middle of a discussion of crime fiction by Ethan Iverson 🎶

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:21:08 +0100

Somebody mentioned that it’s John Coltrane’s centenary this month 🎶

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

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

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

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

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

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

She expands on this:

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

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

No Talk about books post today, sorry

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 20:11:01 +0100

I’m sorry to have to tell you that there isn’t going to be a full post today, as there should have been. I had intended to write about Rachel Kushner’s Booker-shortlisted novel Creation Lake (2024) but I haven’t yet written anything substantial about it. I was halfway through my reread, which I finished on Thursday night, when I realized that my grasp on the novel wasn’t nearly as firm as I had thought after my first reading, a few months ago. I was going to have to read for a third time certain extensive passages before I’d be able to write about the book. And at that rate I thought I might as well undertake a second reread of the whole book. So, my apologies, I have nothing of substance for you today.

The newsletter has been running for 5½ years now and there have been more than 140 posts of variable quality, some of which you may have missed or forgotten. There’s a list of authors whose work I’ve discussed (sorted alphabetically by first name) and another list of the top 12 authors, the ones I have retuned to most frequently. You might find something there to make up for today’s disappointment.

I intend to write about Creation Lake once I’ve read it again and thought about it a bit more but probably not until November. In two weeks’ time, I’ll be returning to Dead as Doornails. Anthony Cronin’s memoir of literary Dublin in the 1950s. I already wrote, back in May, about Cronin’s treatment of Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh and now I want to look at what he has to say about Flann O’Brien (Brian Ó Nualláin). Till then

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 12:42:52 +0100

… who subscribe to a set of authoritarian ideas and plans for the future based on half-baked theories and an incomplete understanding of how the world works.

Laura Miller in Slate, reviewing Gil Durán. Surely any “understanding of how the world works” is necessarily incomplete?

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:44:08 +0100

Today I couldn’t get my dinky little toy HP wireless printer (which I tend to use at least once most years) to connect to the wireless router and I discovered the previously unsuspected fact that I can connect to it straight from the Mac without going through a router. What’ll they think of next?

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:07:53 +0100

the hard left will always pair a conceivably popular economic programme with a provably hated cultural one. The mystery is why.

Janan Ganesh, FT No mystery. They’re terrified of having to implement the (conceivably popular) economic programme. Capitalism is how they get paid.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 22:31:14 +0100

I like to remind myself every so often that Leopold Bloom was the same age (38) on 16 June 1904 as Cleopatra was in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edition: Penguin paperback, 1995.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:26:22 +0100

According to this Guardian headline, Sam Neill filmed role in Legend of Zelda film adaptation before his death. A “dog bites man” story if ever I heard one. How often does an actor film a role after his/her death?

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 16:03:20 +0100

I’ve finally finished reading At Swim-Two-Birds. I first attempted it at least 56 years ago and didn’t return to it till earlier this year. I kind of hate it: it’s bleak and depressing, the humour sour when not merely silly. Heavy going for a mere 228 pages. I’ll reread soon in case I’m wrong 📚

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 18:26:29 +0100

For several years now, I’ve preferred to buy albums on CD. Elias Stemeseder and Thomas Morgan, Io Pur Respiro is available only as a download or on vinyl so I bought the download. Here’s Richard Williams’s review 🎶 🎹

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She could sleep right now.

She could sleep walking up the stairs.

She could sleep stirring a pan at the stove.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 11:52:07 +0100

Farrago doesn’t “find comedy funny”. That’s all you need to know — though in fact we all know plenty more than that about him by now.

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 11:41:56 +0100

It’s been 14 years since I’ve been in London (or any part of the UK), so obviously I don’t keep up with what’s on in the theatre. When I wrote about Stoppard’s Arcadia a month ago, I didn’t know the play was about to be revived in the West End. My uncharacteristic timeliness was sheer accident 🎭

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 11:26:53 +0100

Recommended Wynn Williams’s book [Careless People] to a friend, who bought it. A little poke in the eye for Facebook.

So comments Charles Arthur, The Overspill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 10:51:30 +0100

I answered without stopping to think. I used to believe that pedestrians were the big menace. They often don’t look around them. I’ve been knocked off my bike twice by wayward pedestrians (and once by a driver suddenly throwing open the door of her parked car). But no, drivers are worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewing it in The Guardian, Christopher Tayler wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edition: Vintage paperback, 2011.

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:21:26 +0100

Someone on the train has the Z Cars theme as his (I’m assuming) ringtone!

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:41:37 +0100

Until a few months ago it hadn’t occurred to me that Anthony Head and Murray Head could be brothers. They seemed to belong to different worlds: 1) Sunday, Bloody Sunday, Centrepoint, “Say it ain’t so, Joe”; and 2) freeze-dried instant coffee ads, Slayer-watching 🤷‍♂️