Art Kavanagh

“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 🤷‍♂️

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:03:26 +0100

None of these options quite reflects my view. I’d say that till recently a degree has been essential, though not necessarily in economic terms. But its nature is changing (decidedly for the worse), largely because of the increased role and influence of administrators.

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 11:42:28 +0100

Robert Reich was born 10 days later than Donald Trump. His reference to “ending his seventh decade and beginning his eighth” must be a deliberate error illustrating his point about reduced sharpness: someone about to turn 80 will be ending their eighth decade and immediately beginning their ninth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LADY CROOM: Of what?

THOMASINA: The action of bodies in heat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edition: Faber paperback, 1993 (reprinted with corrections)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 that Adrian and Veronica are now going out and hoping that Tony will “accept” (p. 41) this state of affairs. Adrian says he wrote the letter at Veronica’s urging. Tony replied at first with a flippant postcard, followed by a more serious reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 🤷🏻‍♂️