Art Kavanagh

Sunbathing in the rain: Bridget O'Connor, After a Dance

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 18:46:16 +0100

I’ve mentioned After a Dance (2024) in this newsletter before, when I included it in “Some books I haven’t liked as much as I thought I would” about 6 months ago. I wrote then:

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”).

I foresaw that a reread after a lapse of some months might leave me better disposed towards these stories. It has certainly sharpened my appreciation of some of them. The book is compiled from O’Connor’s two earlier collections, Here Comes John (1993) and Tell Her You Love Her (1997), with two later stories. These are short stories: After a Dance contains 15 stories over 141 pages. As well as short stories, O’Connor wrote plays for stage and radio and (for the most part with her husband Peter Straughan) film scripts, including that for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) which won two BAFTAs and was nominated for an Oscar.

In her introduction to the selection, O’Connor’s daughter, Constance Straughan, tells us that her mother didn’t think of screenwriting as serious work, though she enjoyed it, and that Peter Straughan wrote “Short stories were her first and enduring love” (p. xiii). The introduction casts some light on the origins of some of the characters. According to Constance Straughan:

There is often a gap between who the narrator thinks they are, and who we understand them to be. Funny, then, that all four of my mother’s siblings were convinced that there was one story written about each of them. (p. x)

She goes on to say that Tina, the narrator of “I’m Running Late” was said by Bridget to be “based on my sister Peggy actually” and that “her brother James features as a best man on a bender in ‘Love Jobs’”. There might seem to be a slight inconsistency here. To say that the siblings “were convinced that” each had a story written about them, implies that they were mistaken. If the stories were actually based on the brother and sisters, surely it would make sense to say that they were, rather than that the individuals were convinced of the fact. Yet, we are told that Tina is based on Peggy and Joey is based on James.

The answer, it seems to me, is that, while these characters are depictions of O’Connor’s brother and sisters, the stories, the situations in which they find themselves, are entirely fictional. The longest story in the selection, “Heavy Petting” is one of the two later stories, having first been published in 1998 in Intoxications: an anthology of stimulant-based writing. It features a goldfish named Godfrey, who survives a lot longer than the narrator ever expected him to. The goldfish originally belonged to the narrator’s older sister, Majella, “hooped him at a fairground” and “named him after her ex-fiancé, the paratrooper, the one who’s chucked her out on the street, howling. Godfrey.” (p. 9). To start with, Majella loves the goldfish but comes to hate him after she gets into drugs and clubbing. Then, she develops a practice of coming in late with her boyfriend-dealer and trying to spear Godfrey with a rusty fork, following which the fish forms a mysterious connection or attachment to Majella’s and the narrator’s mentally ill mother. Ultimately, Godfrey is supplanted in the mother’s attentions by a mouse.

As to the real-life fish and the real-life sister, Constance Straughan tells us:

The stand-out cameo, however, is her sister Kathleen, who was once given a goldfish by a boyfriend and, when they broke up, took to trying to stab the fish to death with a fork … (p. x)

The details of the story are more elaborate and colorful, not to say bizarre, than the actual events. The narrator of this story offers this description of herself:

I was studying for A levels at the time, training hard as a Young Novelist, honing my powers of observation in little red notepads. (When I got my grades, the predicted A, A, A, I’d get to university five hundred miles away: leave home without one look back. I had to stay focused, unattached.) But I couldn’t resist saving Godfrey. (pp. 10–11)

Her determination to get away is more than adequately explained by the squalor of their living circumstances:

One day the air was a soft brown wall of unflushed loos, rusting geraniums, takeaway foods, Dust snuffed from the carpets thick as bonemeal. All day Mum made secret-recipe soups; threw great slop waves across the lawns. She’d scour the cupboards for odd ingredients. In went Majella’s old school tie, an aubergine, one cake of Cherry shoe polish … Out puffed rust and rubble, smells that made the plants cave in. (pp. 11–12; ellipsis original)

Outside, the family’s other pets — albino rabbits, tortoises, poodles with “pale dreadlocks” (p. 12) — compete for the sustenance provided by the mother’s discarded “soups”. The water in Godfrey’s tank (inherited from a former pet, a terrapin) gradually turns into another of these soups. Pieces of meat and vegetable float in it. Godfrey gets fatter and the space available to him more congested, so that he finds it increasinly harder to turn.

Then, notwithstanding the predicted As, the narrator fails her A-levels and does worse in the resits, leaving her and Godfrey both trapped. This puts it beyond doubt (where of course it should have been already) that the story is not autobiographical: Bridget O’Connor graduated from the University of Lancaster with a degree in English and Creative Writing.

I’m labouring the point about the fictional (not autobiographical) quality of these stories because it seems to me that readers and reviewers often tend to get hung up on incidental details in works of fiction that carry some echo of the author’s life, and conclude that the whole work must be a roman à clef. Recently there’s been widespread speculation that Rachel Cusk’s Life of M is really about the actor Natalie Portman. Even without having read Life of M (and having no plans to read it), I have trouble seeing this speculation as anything other than wildly implausible. Salman Rushdie somewhere tells about the suggestion by an interviewer following publication of his novel Fury (2001) that this is his most autobiographical novel yet. The book concerns a revolution in the (obviously fictional) South Pacific island of Lilliput-Blefuscu and features a very angry protagonist who at a crucial point finds himself standing over his sleeping wife and child, wielding a carving knife. How could we suppose it to be anything other than autobiographical? As a general rule, I’d suggest that it’s best to assume that fiction is wholly made up, even if we think we detect in it traces of the author’s life story.

One thing I learned in rereading After a Dance is that my initially adverse response was partly conditioned by the role played by disgust, particularly in the first two stories. The second story is “Heavy Petting”, of which I’ve given you a taste above. The first is “Love Jobs”, whose protagonist is the “best man on a bender” mentioned by Constance Straughan. The morning after the wedding of his friend, Steve, Joey (still wearing the tuxedo he slept in) takes Steve’s dog for a walk by the filthy canal. An encounter with two would-be muggers results in the dog’s falling into the canal and Joey accidentally breaks its neck while pulling it out. The muggers are immediately remorseful and, in spite of Joey’s reassuing them that the dog wasn’t his, take him boozing, carrying the dog’s corpse with them.

The vivid description of the filth of the canal and its environs, and of the dog, designedly distracts the reader’s attention from the action of Joey’s story. Steve’s marriage means the end of their musical duo, “The Two Leaves”. Years earlier they were “The Three Leaves” with Joey’s ex-wife Eve. Eve arrived at Steve’s wedding in a black Mercedes and walked right past Joey apparently without noticing him, though he was the best man. Joey is telling his new drinking companions, the muggers, who he is when an unwelcome fact is brought home to him.

Here’s me, I was going to say, really I’m a musician, like I’ve done for years … I goes, “I’m a postman.” It comes out weak. I’m thinking about it for miles. Postman. Postman Pat. I think, that’s what I am. It’s not just me day job, it’s me. (p. 6)

The front matter of the paperback reproduces praise for O’Connor’s writing from various publications, including this from The New Statesman:

In this new collection her most accomplished and most devastating stories lie side by side. O’Connor writes of everyday characters so pitiful they are ridiculous, so often they become lovable … (p. i)

This implies that the “accomplished” and the “devastating” are distinct categories that don’t overlap. Judging by these fifteen stories, I’d be inclined to accept this a broadly true, but there’s one story, “Plastered”, that belongs in both categories. It’s a first-person narrative that begins:

My name’s Tony Wornel, to cut a long story short. I believe in acting on first impressions, so when I see a bird at a party I go up to them, find their best feature and say, “Great hair,” or, “Hey,” pointing, “cat’s eyes.” It works one time out of ten. That’s not a bad average. (p. 47)

Uh-oh, we think, a sex pest. But no: the next sentence tells us that Tony is a pest of a different, and altogether stranger kind.

When I say “works” I mean social not sexual intercourse. I don’t believe in using birds like that. I like a chat. I subscribe to a number of interesting magazines. (p. 47)

It becomes clear that one or other of Tony’s “interesting magazines” has recommended that a way to make friends and find people to “chat” to is to approach women and parties and compliment them. He follows the recommendations without apparently understanding why, or knowing what he hopes to gain from these encounters. He sometimes sounds as if he were writing a lifestyle feature from one of his magazines:

Me, I like to keep busy. I like to play hard. In the evenings, if I’m not out partying, then I’m reading through my mags, or playing my electric guitar or my jazz CDs. I’ve got a Complete Jazz Lover’s Collection from the Sunday Times Magazine (though I’d say jazz is more a taste I’m acquiring). What I’d really like is to play in a rock band, as a hobby. (p. 49)

This sounds harmless enough — at any rate much less harmful than the sex pest he first sounded like would have been — but Tony is quite a danger to himself. When he follows some women who are clearly going to a party, he ends up gatecrashing a gathering at which he is the only male, the only white person and, very possibly, the only one who isn’t a lesbian.

I’ve read somewhere, in a magazine, that if friendliness fails (which it did), acting a bit berserk in a potentially dangerous situation can act as a protective shield. So I started dancing a bit, like Mary Poppins on E, thrashing around … (pp. 50–51)

This results in concussion, a broken femur and an encounter with two nurses, Katy and Tracy, to whom Tony quickly becomes a real nuisance. Katy is kind to him, to her own disadvantage, while Tracy gives him short shrift once his injuries have been attended to. He enjoys having his leg in plaster because it makes him the centre of attention, with people, mostly women at work, wanting to write on his plastercast. “Personal injury is a great conversational gambit” (p. 52). It won’t be the last time that femur is broken.

When the plaster comes off his leg for the first time, he is dismayed.

Compared with the other one, it was all withered and scaly. Mum said it reminded her of me next to Helen in the incubator. (p. 56)

Tony’s twin, Helen, who as clearly always been the favoured sibling, now lives in Australia, and he learns that his parents are selling their house (where he still lives) and moving there to join her. Tony is an almost entirely unsympathetic character, but there seems to be little he can do to escape his predicament, so the reader views him with a mixture of sadness and exasperation. For reasons that may or may not have to do with his birth and upbringing, he has never developed his own personality so has attempted to assemble one, largely from magazine articles and from “knowledge” (p. 47) he harvested from his work in market research.

Tina, the narrator of “I’m Running Late” is so preoccupied with her everyday concerns that she fails to take in the cause of her friend’s distress:

I picked up the phone again. Sandy was still bawling. “… it’s not fair, I only did it once … and you know I can’t stand needles … and oh God hospitals …” I said, “Eh?” I thought, Oh-oh, silly cow’s preggers. (p. 122; ellipses and emphasis original)

Unless I’m missing something,Tina’s solipsistic narrative doesn’t say in terms what is troubling Sandy, but both Constance Straughan’s introduction and the Irish Times review of the first collection say that Sandy is HIV positive. Of course this likelihood would have come to the reader’s mind more immediately in 1993, when the story was first published.

“Gabriel Ascending” is narrated by Andy, an alcoholic who relapses after he misses a couple of AA meetings. He’s been taken to Alcoholics Anonymous by Gabriel, whose real name is is probably Dave (or maybe Mark, Den or Len).

His real name? We called him Gabriel, Gabby, Gabs. For? Descending on drinkers and giving out gyp. Each meeting he’d drag along a new one … (p. 85)

“Gabriel” is a forceful personality who is very effective at getting people to attend meetings.

His method? Simple. He’d spy you quietly sipping or in the act of falling over or catching a kip, sunbathing in the rain, in the park, and then, he would not let you go. (pp. 85–6)

This works on most people but not on Gina, “his live-in love” (p. 86), who has no wish to give up the drink. When Andy, back on the sauce, sees Gabriel lying on a bench in the park, he at first thinks that the latter too has fallen off the wagon and is inclined to gloat. He’s mistaken. though: Gabriel is sick and on some powerful medication. He has been out looking for Gina, who has said she is leaving him. The drunken Andy helps Gabriel home but ends up pouring whiskey down the weakened man’s throat. Gina comes home (apparently to announce again that she’s leaving) but is pleased to find that Gabriel/Dave has been drinking: “You’re back” (p. 93).

The story ends inconclusively, as Andy sinks further into a stupor. Perhaps Gabriel’s illness is terminal and there’s no real point in his trying to stay sober. Maybe he’ll be better off enjoying his final days with the determinedly unsober Gina. On the other hand, probably not.

The final story in this selection, “We Do Not Forward Suicide Notes”, is one of several which sets up a reader’s expectations only to overturn them. It’s set in a cliff-top café by the Atlantic, where a man sits writing on a page taken from his notebook. The only other person in the café is the woman behind the counter, who sits “an acre away” froom him. The café is “vast, dimly lit and derelict” (p. 131) with the tables far apart. It turns out that the man is a danger not to himself but to others, and that the character contemplating suicide is someone else. And there’s an unexpected reference to Samuel Beckett’s short story, “Dante and the Lobster”

— They scream, she said. It is upsetting but it is over quickly.

— Yes, he said. For he did know that.

The lobster screamed once, faintly, like a girl in a park. (p. 136)

Edition: After a Dance, Picador paperback, 2025.

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:35:35 +0100

I’m celebrating Coltrane’s centenary in a highly unorthodox way: listening to Christian Sands, Thomas Fonnesbæk and Rasmus Kihlberg play “A Giant Leaves (Giant Steps/Autumn Leaves) — for Alex Riel” from Between Then & Now 🎶

Sinking in the bog: Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 19:12:00 +0100

Sarah Moss has published nine novels, of which Ghost Wall (2018) is the sixth. Though it’s short at 150 pages, it’s not at all slight. (I had allowed myself two days at the beginning of this week to reread it and found that I had several hours to spare.) It’s the first-person narrative of 16-year-old Silvie (short for Sulevia) whose father, a bus driver and amateur historian, has taken her and her mother, Alison, to spend his two weeks’ holiday in Northumberland living as Iron Age foragers. They’ve joined a small group of university students and Professor Slade (“Oh, please, call me Jim”, p. 10), who are camping out as part of their course on “experiential archaeology” (p. 6). Silvie’s dad takes the importance of recreating an authentic experience much more seriously than do the students and their professor. He insists that the three members of his family sleep in a roundhouse (pitch dark at night) on uncomfortable deerskin bunks, and wear homemade tunics (“scratchy”) and moccasins. They must eat only what they can catch (and gut and skin, as necessary) or gather.

Professor Slade said, ah well, after all authenticity was impossible and not really the goal anyway, the point was to have a flavour of Iron Age life and perhaps some insight into particular processes or technologies. (p. 7)

The students, Molly, Dan and Pete, ask Silvie how she came to be named Sulevia, given that the goddess was not local to where her family lives. When she replies that her father “wanted me to have a proper native British name”, they exchange knowing glances. On first reading, I thought they were being oversensitive to political hints and clues, but it turns out that their suspicions were well founded: Silvie’s father uses racial slurs and appears to believe in a kind of ethnic continuity between the Britons who populated the region before the Roman invasion and the English of today.

Right, said Pete, you mean he likes the idea that there’s some original Britishness somewhere, that if he goes back far enough he’ll find someone who wasn’t a foreigner. (p. 20)

Pete goes on to say that Sulevia’s name is “obviously” a version of the Latin “Sylvia”, and Silvie counters by suggesting that Sylvia (and cognates) might be “a Roman corruption of a lost British word” (p. 20). I take it that both are wrong. Molly remembers that the professor had mentioned Sulevia as the “Northumbrian goddess of springs and pools” (p. 19), so there’s no necessary link between the goddess and woods.

The professor is generally conciliatory and averse to conflict but apparently can’t help correcting Silvie’s father when he refers to “carnyxes” rather than “carnyces” (p. 44) and mentions Boadicea: “we call her Boudicca these days” (p. 45). When her father asserts that the Britons managed to maintain an effective resistance against the Romans, ultimately driving them out and “there weren’t dark faces in these parts for nigh on two millennia after that”, and the professor starts to object mildly “hang on, we don’t —” (p. 44), Silvie adroitly directs the conversation into a slightly different channel. She has clearly learned very young to defuse situations where her is liable to get into a fight (unless she’s the one fighting him).

Their camp is near a bog, which has preserved items which have fallen or been deliberately cast into it, like a Victorian girl’s boot, with little buttons (and a heel, which Silvie’s dad ridicules as a “right daft thing to wear on a moor, an’ all”, p. 101).

In Denmark they found braids of human hair very much like Molly’s cast into the bog, because you give what you most want to keep. You would have been able to see your votive objects, Dad had told me, for months or maybe years, and there were special walkways and platforms built out over pools and marshes perhaps partly for the purpose of visiting the murdered things. People too, this particular book suggested, they weren’t necessarily gone when they were put into the bog but would have lain there, dead and still present, not going, faces wavering through the clear water, mouth and skin and hair arrested in the retreating moment of loss while time continued to pass for the rest of the community. (p. 103)

You “give what you most want to keep” because a sacrifice would be pointless unless its object were highly valued. The students discuss what they would offer up.

I felt Dad’s gaze on me and knew with a shiver what he was thinking. My daughter. Break her and stake her to the bog, stop her before she gets away. They weren’t dead, the bog people, not to those who’d killed them. They had to be pinned to their graves with sharp sticks driven through elbow and knee, trapped behind woven wooden palings, to stop them coming back, creeping home dead and not dead in the dark. (p. 104)

I’ve noticed that some parents (not always male ones) seem to regard their children as property or possessions, to be deployed and directed at the parent’s will. Worse, a parent will sometimes apparently feel that the child is actually a part of his or her body, and become angry and frustrated if the child doesn’t immediately carry out the parent’s wishes, as if the parent’s own limbs were evading his/her control. Bill Hampton is obviously an excessively controlling (and violent) parent.

When he and the professor come across Silvie washing herself in a pool of a stream, he thrashes her brutally with his leather belt. Silvie has been out foraging with the students for hours in the scorching sun without any water, and is sitting in the pool wearing only her underpants when the two men come “striding over the heather” (p. 61), carrying rabbits that they’ve caught. Having apologized to the professor (“maybe the second time I’d heard him apologise to anyone ever”, p. 61) and sending him ahead of them back to the camp, her father gets her to stand against a small rowan tree and gets to work with his belt. Silvie distracts herself from the pain by thnking “hard” about the tree, its photosynthesizing leaves, ripening berries, pulsing sap and downward reaching roots.

It went on longer than usual, as if the open air invigorated him, as if he liked the setting. I thought about the leather of his belt, the animal from whose skill it was made, about the sensations that skin had known before the fear and pain of the end. (p. 62)

The welts left by the belt prevent Silvie from sleeping: she can’t lie on her front because she doesn’t have a proper pillow and her back and both her sides are painful. Her mother can see that her husband has been “upset” (p. 64) but doesn’t know, or ask about, the details. She wishes that Silvie wouldn’t provoke him or wind him up. Silvie replies that this time she didn’t mean to, though sometimes she does.

Bill and the professor have been working in semi-secret on their “special project” (p. 102). which turns out to include a reenactment of the sacrifice/burial of a young woman in the bog. Silvie is the only plausibly suitable candidate for the role of victim, as the professor explains:

I can’t ask Molly, she’s a student and frankly her marks aren’t great and I don’t want her saying she was pressured into anything she didn’t want to do, it could put me in a very difficult position. (pp. 136–7)

Silvie is increasingly reluctant but her father has no hesitation in committing her to the project. Though she doesn’t exactly consent, she understands why.

Because I was the person you can hurt. Because I was the scapegoat, the sacrifice, the thing Dad wanted to keep. (p. 136)

Just before sunset, Silvie is paraded to the edge of the bog. Her father has put a rope around her neck, tied with a knot designed to strangle the victim slowly rather than break her neck. Her hands will be tied behind her when they reach the bog, but not before, to make it less likely that she will fall on the way. The two male students are drumming slowly, Molly has gone to look for help. “Strip her, said the Prof” (p. 143). The men start to chant.

The professor has promised Silvie that she will come to no harm, but the promise is broken when “they” cut her forehead along the hairline with a flint blade and her father makes two cuts on her arm with his hunting knife, “just done for the pain, like” (p. 144).

They came at me with sticks raised and I lost my balance and fell on the water’s edge, was set on my feet again for more. For as long as I could, I watched the infinitesimal progress of the moon along the darkening sky, listened to the calls of the last birds crossing the cool of the evening. There was pain. They had a pile of stones ready. (p. 144)

The supense has mounted unexpectedly and quickly over the novel’s final 15 pages. Throughout the book there has been an atmosphere of oppressive foreboding (and serious violence, as in the episode with the leather belt, and a incident, undescribed, when Alison allows the fire to go out) but the sudden escalation of the danger to to human (particularly female) life comes as a very effective shock.

Sarah Moss has taught creative writing at University College, Dublin (UCD) since 2020, having previously taught the same subject at the University of Warwick and before that literature at universities in the UK and Iceland. Until recently, she wrote a weekly column in The Irish Times. In her final column earlier this month, she revealed that she was stopping for several reasons,

… but mostly because the initially minor discomfort of being hated on the internet has begun to tint more of my life and sleep and thoughts.

The extremely hostile reaction of a particular demographic of readers to her columns did not come as a complete surprise.

I knew that thinking in public while female would incur punishment and that particular issues — cycling, gender equality, big trucks — attracted particular attention from angry men.

Some of these people “(apparently mostly men) wrote that I am vile and stupid, that they would enjoy driving over my body, that they wanted me to kill myself”. This reminds me of how genuinely shocked I was, around 2010, to read about the online attacks on an obviously well-meaning woman journalist who wrote (if I’m remembering correctly) about computer games: rape and death threats, with vivid fantasies of sadistic mutilation. The threats were so grotesquely out of proportion to even the most hostile interpretation of the journalist’s imagined “offence” that it seemed fanciful that a significant part of the gamer community could be so unhinged as to have written them, let alone posted them publicly. We’ve all had a lot of time since to grow used to preposterous yet serious forms that online misogyny often takes. It’s salutory to be reminded what it looks like from the viewpoint of someone like Moss, who has avoided social media since its beginning.

Her novel, Ghost Wall (which, of course, was written years before she began her Irish Times column) shows that misogynistic impulses to silence and control women and girls have long been a significant part of our human condition, if it took the invention of the internet to give them unprecedented expression and bring it home to many of us how deranged they are.

Edition: Granta hardback, 2018.

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 18:52:57 +0100

I ordered a CD from Denmark a little over 2 weeks ago. It’s “estimated to arrive no later than” 13 October. Maybe they meant “no earlier than”. According to Postnord’s tracking site, it arrived in Ireland over a week ago (10 Sep). How does it take a week to deliver a CD in Ireland?

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 06:32:19 +0100

‘If you really believed AI was going to kill us all why would you participate?’ was a common question to Amodei this week.

Kathleen Stock,Unherd. I still think the answer to that is Roko’s basilisk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She expands on this:

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

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

No Talk about books post today, sorry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edition: Penguin paperback, 1995.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She could sleep right now.

She could sleep walking up the stairs.

She could sleep stirring a pan at the stove.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So comments Charles Arthur, The Overspill