Art Kavanagh

Tue, 12 May 2026 15:49:07 +0100

Today I learned, thanks to Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History, that Lenin was a mushroom. That explains a great deal that has puzzled me for decades. I wish I’d known it much earlier.

Thu, 07 May 2026 23:32:31 +0100

On my way to the coffee shop today, I realized I’d forgotten my book so I looked in the Oxfam shop, not expecting much, and found a copy of Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont which I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. Loving it so far 📖

Thu, 07 May 2026 13:11:32 +0100

I somehow missed the fact that Jack Shepherd died back in November. I first noticed him on tv in Bill Brand, then almost failed to recognize him as Baxter Dawes in Griffiths’s adaptation of Lawrence. Also have fond memories of Blind Justice. And then jazz piano: The play that changed my life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few lines earlier, it has said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamlet then writes something and then says:

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

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

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

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:30:55 +0100

This is the predicament of modern Britain. The country needs centre-right reform at home and centre-left leadership abroad.

So says Janan Ganesh of the FT. If that’s true, it sounds like an opportunity for Ed Davey and the Liberal Democrats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 11:02:45 +0100

Miss it (every so often).

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:17:21 +0100

Eurosceptic governments often counted on Orbán to veto proposals from Brussels without having to pipe up themselves. His absence might now draw out their own awkward views: on Ukraine, for instance.

Depressing thought. Janan Ganesh in the FT on “The weird resilience of the EU”

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:13:33 +0100

This arrived in the post this morning. I had to pay An Post an extra €15 to get it delivered in Ireland because the publisher doesn’t yet have a distributor in the EU. I’d rather that money had gone to the editor and/or publisher but hey, at least I got the book 📖

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 17:00:13 +0100

Mike Westbrook has died, aged 90. Here is The Guardian’s obituary 🎹 🎶

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:10:54 +0100

Rather than building housing, local councils are outbidding first-time buyers for new and second-hand homes, using the State’s financial power to outbid local people.

David McWilliams, Irish Times. This is absurd and reckless. We should be building before the corproation tax bonanza disappears.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:13:16 +0100

The Guardian’s lines will have come up nearly undigested in Alex’s review, I suspect, because the AI didn’t have lots of reviews to subtly compost in the way it subtly composts billions of sources for most of its work.

Sam Leith on how that NYT AI/plagiarism kerfuffle came about

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:16:31 +0100

I was watching a video on YouTube of a discussion and instead of concentrating on what the speakers were saying, I was watching the subtitles, looking out for the next error, so I gave up after a few minutes. Uncorrected subtitles are distracting and can effectively make a video unwatchable.

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 16:48:09 +0100

Ethan Iverson’s 50 ECM tracks prompted me to dig out my copy of Not Two, Not One (Bley, Peacock, Motian) 🎶, which I hadn’t listened to for 17/18 years:

The pianist in particular had become essentially intractable; it was the drummer who had grown into one of the musicians of the age.

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:42:22 +0100

When did Channel 4 streaming stop being available in Ireland (Republic)? A few weeks ago, I could watch it online with no problems. Suddenly it’s saying it’s only available in the UK 🤷🏻‍♂️

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 12:47:05 +0100

Reading this Irish Times story about Brendan Behan, I just realized that my father must have been locked up in the Curragh at the same time as Máirtín Ó Cadhain. As an Irish-speaker, he must have known Ó Cadhain there, but I never heard him mention him. He was contemptuously dismissive of Behan.

How much you value life: Somerset Maugham, Ashenden stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:57:35 +0100

eyelashes like draught excluders

Tana French, The Keeper 📖 Looking forward to this, though I probably won’t read it till the paperback comes out in about a year’s time.

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:32:11 +0100

In the late 70s my aunt was enthusing wildly about Sweet William, so I started to read her copy and really didn’t get on with it. I gave up and haven’t tried to read anything else by Bainbridge till now. I just read it over the past few days and I found the humour too cruel for my taste 🙁 📚

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:50:40 +0100

If he dies? You mean he might be immortal?

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:47:26 +0100

Deep Down is one of the 20 or more Pieranunzi albums that I have but I haven’t listened to it recently. Thanks to Ethan Iverson for the reminder 🎶🎹

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What makes you think I’m not?”

“You don’t act like one. (p. 40)

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

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

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

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

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:31:40 +0100

People should read more French novels, says Cecily Carver. She makes a good case for Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma … and for starting with Balzac.

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 11:50:09 +0100

Ironically, high housing costs, seen as a sign of wealth by some, taken together with a thriving multinational sector, seen as a sign of economic success, is probably the most disastrous combination militating against the establishment of a diverse, healthy economy.

David McWilliams, Irish Times