Baswoods books 2

Time for a new thread imaginatively labelled Baswoods books 2

Reading projects.

Elizabethan literature
Reading chronologically I am coming towards the end of 1592, which seems to be a significant year in English drama: Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, George Peele, John Lyly and Thomas Kyd, who had been the backbone of the London theatres all stopped writing either because of death or retirement. Leaving one William Shakespeare to keep things going until a new breed of playwrights came along. So plenty of Shakespeare to read along with some poetry from the Elizabethan sonneteers and items from the pamphlet tradition.

Unread books from my shelves
Slowly getting through some of these concentrating on authors whose surname begins with B. I have read and reviewed so far

Simone de Beauvoir - Force of Circumstances
Iain M Banks - Matter
Dorothy Baker - Cassandra at the wedding
Samuel Becket - The Becket Trilogy
Anthony Burgess - The Malayan Trilogy
William Boyd - A Good man in Africa
Julian Barnes - Flauberts Parrot
Michael Baker - Vox
Iain Banks - The Bridge
Saul Bellow - The Victim
A S Byatt - Angels and Insects

Still quite a few to read, but the numbers are not increasing because I am turning around all new books within a three week period and so they do not get put on the shelves (however the pile of books on the floor is growing)

Iain Banks - Against a dark black
Alain De Botton - The art of Travel
Anthony Burgess - The Doctor is sick
Frederick Barthelme - Moon De-luxe
William Boyd - The Blue Afternoon
Simone de Beauvoir - The Mandarins
T C Boyle - Water Music
John Baxter - A pound of Paper
John Buchan - The Island of sheep
Balzac - Old Goriot
John Berendt - Midnight in the garden of good and evil
Julian Barnes - A history of the world in 10 and a half chapters
Anthony Burgess - The Devils Mode
Malcolm Bradbury - Who do you think you are
Iain Banks - Dead Air
Saul Bellow - Herzog
Arnold Bennet - Clayhanger
Marjorie Bowen - The Bishop of hell and other stories
A S Byatt - The Childrens Book
William Boyd - Armadillo
Julian Barnes - Arthur and George
Saul Bellow - Humbolds gift
Anthony Burgess -1985
Balzac - Lost Illusions
Iain Banks - The steep approach to Goobade
William Boyd - Ordinary Thunderstorms
Anthony Burgess - The Kingdom of the wicked


Science Fiction published in 1951
I have read:

Ray Bradbury - The illustrated man
L Sprague du camp - Rogue Queen
Arthur C Clarke - Prelude to Space
Hal Clement - Ice World
Philip Jose Farmer - The lovers
Austin Hall - The Blind Spot
Robert A Heinlien - The Green Hills of Earth
Clifford Simak - Time and Again
John Wyndham - The Day of the Triffids
Robert A Heinlein The puppet Masters

Still to read:
Leigh Brackett - People of the Talisman
Fritz Leiber - Gather Darkness
Stanislaw Lem - The Astronauts
H P Lovecraft - The Hunter of the dark
Isaac Asimov The stars like dust
E C Tub - Planetfall
Jack Vance - The Dying Earth
Nelson S Bond - Lancelot Biggs Spaceman
Frederic Brown - Space on my hands
Robert Spencer Carr - Beyond Infinity
Curme Gray - Murder in Milenium VI
Raymond F Jones - The Toymaker
Arthur Koestler - The age of Longing
Henry Kuttner and C L Moore - Tomorrow and Tomorrow and the fairy chessman
William F Temple - the four sided triangle
Jack Williamson (Will Stewart) - Seetee ship
Groff Conklin - Possible world of science fiction
Kendell Foster Crossen - Adventures in tomorrow
Gill Hunt - galactic storm

Science fiction from the Masterworks series 1950's is going quite well and I think I have a chance to finish it this year.
I have read
1952 Clifford D Simak - City
1952 Bernard Wolfe - Limbo
1953 Alfred Bester - The demolished Man
1953 Ward Moore - Bring the Jubilee
1953 Theodore Sturgeon - More than Human
1953 Frederik Pohl & C M Kornbluth - The Space Merchants
1953 Arthur C Clarke - Childhoods End
1954 Richard Matheson - I Am legend
1954 Hal Clement - Mission of Gravity
1955 Jack Finney - The Body Snatchers
1955 Leigh Brackett - The Long Tomorrow
1955 The Chrysalids - John Wyndham
1956 Arthur C Clarke - The City and the Stars
1956 Double Star - Robert A Heinlein

Still to read
1956 Richard Matheson - The shrinking man
1956 Alfred Bester - The Stars my destiny
1957 Robert A Heinlein - The door into summer
1957 The Midwich Cuckoos - John Wyndham
1958 Wasp - Eric Frank Russell
1958 Brian W Aldiss Non-stop
1958 James Blish A case of conscience
1959 Philip K Dick - Time out of joint
1959 Kurt Vonnegut JR - The Sirens of Titan
1959 Walter M Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz

I am also reading some proto-science fiction (before science fiction was invented) this seems to be consisting of books by Jules Verne at the moment as I have reached the 1870's

There is always time for a new project and in previous years I have discovered many new authors by picking a year at random and reading books published in that year.
As I am reading science fiction books published in 1951 it would seem churlish not to expand this to most genre books from that year. So far I have already made some discoveries having read:

John Dickson Carr - The Devil in Velvet

Camilo Jose Cela - The Hive

Julio Cortazar - Bestiario

Daphne Du Maurier - My Cousin Rachel

Francois Mauriac - Le Sagouin

There are plenty more to have a go at and so far this is the list I have compiled - fairly exhaustive I think (I have excluded children's books)

Morley Calaghan - The Loved and the lost

Rachel Carson - The Sea around us

Truman Capote - The Grass Harp

Emile Danoen - Un maison souffleé aux vents

Owen Dodson - The boy in the window

Jean Dutourd - A Dog's Head

Georges Duhamel - Cri des Profondeurs

Howard Fast - Spartacus

Jean Giorno - Le Hussard sul le toit

Julien Gracq - The Opposing shore

John Hawkes - The Beetle Leg

Shirley Jackson - Hangsaman

James Jones - From here to Eternity

A M Klein - The second scroll

Wofgang Koeppen - Pigeons on the grass

Olivia Manning - School for love

Ngaio Marsh - Night of the Vulcan Opening night

John Masters - Nightrunners of Bengal

Nancy Mitford - The Blessing

Nicholas Monserrat - The Cruel Sea

Albert Moravia - The Conformist

Roger Nimier - Les enfants tristes

Anthony Powell - A question of upbringing

Lucien Rebatat - Les deux étendards

Sax Rohmer - Surumuru

Ernst von Salomon - The Questionaire

Ooka - Shohei - Fires on the plain

John Steinbeck - The log from the sea of Cortez

Rex Stout - Curtains for three

William Styron - Lie down in darkness

Elizabeth Taylor - A game of hide and seek

Dylan Thomas - Do not go so gentle into that good night

T H White - The Goshawk

Herman Wouk - The cain Mutiny

Marguerite Yourcenar - Memoirs of Hadrian

Eric Ambler - Judgement of Deltchev

Mulk Raj Anand - Seven summers

H E bates - Colonel Julian/selected short stories

Walter Baxter - Look Down in Mercy

Elizabeth Bowen - Early stories

John Collier - Fancies and good nights

Rhys Davies - Marianne

Alfred Duggan - Conscience of the king

James T Farrell - This man and this woman.

Nelson Algren - Chicago city on the make

W H Auden - Nones

A C Bentley - Clerihews complete

Charles Causely - Hands to dance

C Day Lewis - The poets talk

William Faulkner - Collected stories

E M Forster - Two cheers for democracy

Graham Greene - The end of the affair

Patrick Hamilton - The West Pier (Gorse Trilogy)

dasheill Hammett - Woman in the Dark

L P Hartley - The Go-between.

A P herbert - number 9

James Hilton - Morning journey

John Holloway - Language and intelligence.

Geoffrey Household - A rough shoot

sheila kaye-smith Mrs Gailey

Molly Keane - Loving without tears

Arthur koestler - The age of longing

Norman Lewis - Dragon Apparent

Sinclair Lewis - World so wide

Wyndham Lewis - Rotting Hill

Jack Lindsay - A passionate Pastoral

Eric Linklater - Laxdale Hall

Carson McCullers - The ballad of the sad Cafe

Compton Mackensie Eastern Epic

Norman Mailer - Barbary shore

Robin Maugham - The Rough and the smooth

Gladys Mitchell - Devils elbow

Wright Morris - Man and boy

Nicholas Mosely - Look at the dark

R H Mottram - One hundred and twenty eight witnesses

P H Newby - A season in England

John O'hara - The farmers hotel

V S Pritchett - Mr Beluncle

John Pudney Hero of a summer's day

Herbert Read - Byron writers and their work

J D Salinger - the catcher in the rye

William Sansom - The face of innocence

William Saroyan - Rock Wagram

C P Snow - The masters

Wallace Stevens - The Necessary Angel

William Styron - Lie down in darkness

Edith Templeton - Living on yesterday

Fred Urquhart - Jezebel's dust A

Calder Willingham - reach to the stars

Josephine Tey - The daughter of time

Agatha Christie - They came to Baghdad

Victor Serge - Memoires of a revolutionary

Ross Macdonald - The way some people die

Yukio Mishima - forbidden colors

Shohei Ooka - fires on the plain

Manuel Rojas - Hijo de Ladron - Born guilty

David Goodis - Cassidy's girl

John Gerard - autobiography of a hunted priest (Elizabethan originally in latin)

Ringstones and other curious tales - Sarban (john William Wall)

Elizabeth Yates - Amos Fortune, free man

Helen McCloy - Through a glass darkly

Cyril Hare - An English murder

Edward Atiyah - The thin line (murder my love)

Mickey Spillane - The big kill

Frederich Durrenmatt - The quarry

Robert Van Gulik - The Chinese Maze Murders

Charlotte Armstrong - Mischief

ERnst Von Salomon - The Questionnaire or answers to the 131 questions of the allied military government

Yasunari Kawabata - The Master of Go

Claud Cockburn - Beat the devil

Rex Stout - Murder by the book

Mary McMullen - Strange hold

Elswyth Thane - This was tomorrow

Thomas B Costain - The magnificent century

Robertson Davies Tempest-tost (First book of the salterton trilogy

Ann de Vries - Journey through the night

August Derleth - The memoirs of solar pons

Nevil Shute - Round the Bend

Stephen Spender - World within world

Maigret Takes a room Georges Simenon

Maigret and the burglars wife Georges Simenon

Maigret and the Gangsters Georges Simenon

The Strangers in the House Georges Simenon

Karl Kerenyl - The Gods of the Greeks

James A Michener - The Voice of Asia

Mark Van Doren - The selected letters of William Cowper

Arnold Hauser - The Social history of Art (4 volumes)

Menachem Begin - The Revolt, Begin

>2 baswood: You seem to have a chunk of books listed twice (School for Love caught my eye, as I title I am interested in reading and, therefore, also interested in hearing your thoughts about it, and then it caught my eye again....).

>3 ELiz_M: Thank you, that's reduced the numbers a little.

Philip Wylie - The Disappearance, Philip Wylie

Thus American imagination is directed—as if in the whole of life no other aims or satisfactions could be found than those of being a consumer, avid, constant and catholic.
In America, the child is schooled, if a boy, toward fiscal endeavor. It is taught to want to be a “good provider,” if not a millionaire. From babyhood it is pursued by advertisements and commercials which give it the aggregate impression that the aim of life is to acquire funds wherewith to obtain all it hears recommended. The American media of communication hypnotize it into a set of special desires. A girl, of course, takes up the same doctrine. Her aim becomes to find a mate with money to act on every radio commercial or, at the very least, to set herself up in a career which will enable her so to act, independently.

Science Fiction from 1951 and Wylie's fine but overstuffed novel flies in the face of much of what was being published at the time; It signals its intentions by having as its principal characters a philosopher (Doctor William Percival Gaunt) and his able and intelligent wife Paula. The scenario is the sudden disappearance of all the women from the world; in the blink of an eye the only human beings on the earth are male, however the women experience the same catastrophe as from their perspective all the males suddenly disappear. Alternate chapters then tell the story of a world without women and others a world without men. Both scenarios are looking towards extinction of the human race, because creating children is an impossibility.

It is 1950's America when the biggest threat to the survival of the human race was a nuclear war. The world of men soon lurch precipitously into a war with Russia. The world of women fare better, being able to negotiate and to a certain extent work together with the enemy in the hope of finding a solution to the problem of procreation. Doctor Gaunt is summoned to the White House to confer with a group of the ablest men of his generation to find a solution to the dilemma, but their convocation is soon overtaken by the need for military action. What is left of America degenerates into lawlessness and central government is again forced to take military action this time against the militias and criminal gangs that roam the country. The women in their world have different problems because there are a lack of qualified women to run the power plants, pilot the aircraft, drive the trains. There is an acute shortage of doctors, builders and engineers and so the material fabric of their world starts to break down. A major theme of the novel is not only that the two sexes need each other, but they also need each other on equal terms. The problems that the women face is because of their their lack of expertise and knowledge.

The paper that Doctor Gaunt prepares for the convocation of great minds is psychological in nature emphasising the fact that man and women of the 'West' have inhabited two utterly discrete worlds; he goes on to say that by the demeaning of women men have demeaned themselves. The answer to the problem is that men and women must come together equally to form a single unit. The Disappearance of the other sex has highlighted an opportunity that has been missed and which now psychologically has caused the permanent separation. Wylie has headed his chapter 13 as:

"AN ESSAY ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF SEX, OR THE LACK THEREOF, EXTRANEOUS TO THE NARRATIVE AND YET ITS THEME, WHICH THE IMPATIENT MAY SKIP AND THE REFLECTIVE MIGHT ENJOY."

This is the paper that Doctor Gaunt contributes to the convocation, which finds no favour with the politicians, but sets out for the readers of the book the central idea running through the novel. A little clumsy maybe but it serves to bring together the story to its conclusion. Wylie is also not frightened to raise issues around same sex love and the need for sexual fulfilment. This is a novel that castigates humanities need for always wanting more, for stripping the planet of its resources, for the dominance of one sex over the other: enlightened themes which sometimes sit uncomfortably with the story. Having created the mystery of the disappearance Wylie has the difficult task of explaining it away and readers who are looking for a satisfactory conclusion may be disappointed. I also found that some of the dialogue especially on a political level seemed a bit simplistic, but then again after listening to President Trump, Wylie might have got it just right.

This is an ambitious novel that tries to introduce philosophical/psychological ideas into a science fiction novel. It would not be a candidate for serialisation in magazines such as Weird Science or Astounding Science fiction that were popular at the time, nor would it be taken completely seriously by readers not accustomed to science fiction. However I would not condemn it as falling between two stools, but admire it for its thoughtful telling of a story that sets the imagination running and also resonates with some deeper ideas and themes. This one surprised me and so a four star read.

Let Doctor Gaunt have the last word:

Gaunt nodded. “No future in it. Strip the resources off the planet. Leave nothing for any posterity—” “That. The cockeyedness of mass production. A plenty of having things and a total dearth of living a life. You were born, educated, and then what? You tended a machine. You sat in an office. You traveled to and from it. You aged and died. Most of your active self was spent in a long, nasty, unrewarding day. Dumb or bright, poor or rich, that was the schedule for nearly all. Crazy!” “Yet most of the men who retired were miserable.” “And slaves love chains. There were too many people. They exploited their ability to stay alive. Took no responsibility for selecting the stock. For dying. For anything but breeding. And then what? The more there were the harder and harder they had to work!”

Morley Callaghan - The Loved and the Lost, Morley Callaghan
Was Canada a cultural desert for 20th century writers before Leonard Cohen burst on the scene with an album of songs (The Songs of Leonard Cohen) or was it more to the point that if writers chose to stay in Canada they would never get a foot on the world stage. Morley Callaghan was part of the group of writers centred around Paris in 1929 which included Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, F Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce, unfortunately for him (as far as international fame is concerned) he chose to return to Canada. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein, Joyce, Pound and er.... um Morley Callaghan? His novels were published by Scribners and he regularly had stories published in the New Yorker, but none of his novels were published in the United Kingdom. When I read the wikipedia article it would seem he was more famous for an alleged boxing match with Ernest Hemingway than any book he wrote. So then what of The Loved and the Lost his novel published in 1951 and now available on kindle.

Jim McAlpine is a college professor who leaves his post to seek his fortune and widen his horizons in a new city. He has the chance to get a regular column in a prestigious newspaper and also to romance the wealthy owners daughter. He is a man with liberal some might say progressive views but he must overcome the suspicions of the editor in chief to get employment. He charms both the owner Mr Carver and his daughter Catherine and is made to believe his appointment is only a matter of a delay of a week or two. Meanwhile he is introduced to Peggy Sanderson a sort of femme fatale, with whom he quickly falls in love. Peggy is trying to make ends meet in the city, but is not helped by her associations with some black musicians who play jazz in a dive in the black district across the tracks. Jim starts to follow her around and into the cafe where the musicians play. He must balance his chance of employment with his growing obsession for Peggy whose reputation is becoming increasingly disreputable with the English and French white communities.

The city is obviously Montreal although it is not named and it is winter time and a bitterly cold period. The snow fall seems to mirror Jim's struggle as he moves through the city with some difficulty. He shivers in pursuit of Peggy who leads him around her regular haunts, while he seeks shelter in bars and eating houses. At times he becomes lost not able to find places in which he feels secure and although he is a confident man, he is cast into a world where he starts to feel out of his depth. Morley Callaghan paints a vivid portrait of the city and keys into the events and lives of the people surrounding Jim. It is a psychological approach and although detached; in as much as there is no moral tone the author lays bare the thoughts and feelings of Jim, however hazy they might be. Peggy of course remains an enigma, but a back story of her childhood (which she tells to Jim) of her joyous relationship with a large black family when she was a child uncovers her motives to become accepted by the black community. It is a snapshot of the lives of the communities in the city told through the experiences of a select group of people. The author refuses to make any moral judgements and although a major theme of the book is black and white relationships and those between the rich and not so rich, Morley Callaghan refrains from making or leading to any judgements. It is up to the reader to find his own way. The book has an overtone of tragedy almost from the start, but this is not overplayed and the excellent pacing moves through the gears to its unsurprising conclusion. It is a dose of sharply observed reality with suspense and anticipation building through its wintry urban landscapes.

Morley Callaghan was a journalist and his sharp observations reflect this background, but there is no clipped journalistic style in his beautifully turned prose. His psychological interest do not at any stage hint at a crusade. He tells the story of the relationships between the communities with sympathy for the economic deprivation of the black people, but any stance on racism is not evident from this novel, however It was written in 1951 and so black people are referred to as negroes or mulattos and by more colloquial terms by some of the white characters. Morley Callaghan from the evidence of this novel is a major discovery for me and I look forward to reading more by him. Evidently he was an excellent writer of short stories. 4.5 stars.

>5 baswood: love the quote you open this Wylie review up with

>6 baswood: Morley Callaghan? Interesting find, Bas.

Kind-Harts Dream - Henry Chettle
Printed in 1592 the Kind-Hart; a tooth puller dreams of five apparitions that tell him of abuses by certain kinds of people. Anthony Now Now an itinerant fiddler, Dr Burcot a foreign physician, Robert Greene dramatist and poet, Tarlton the celebrated comedian and William Cuckoe an expert in coosenage, it is a series of invectives against sharp practice and confidence tricks in Elizabethan times. It is told in the style of Robert Greene in some instances and in others bears a similarity to the Martin Prelate pamphlets.

Chettle in his early career was involved in the printing industry in some capacity, which may account for this pamphlet getting into print. It does not have much to recommend it apart from bandying about the names of Elizabethan celebrities. However in his epistle to Gentlemen readers Chettle details his role in the printing of Robert Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, which had sold well. Chettle claimed that he had put the pamphlet together from Greene's papers left behind after his death. This curious explanation was probably as a result of the controversy stirred up by Groatsworth of Wit amongst writers connected with the theatre, but it has led some historians to claim that Chettle was actually the author of Groatsworth. Be that as it may Chettle's kind-Harts Dream is only for the completist.

Truman Capote - The Grass harp including a tree of night and other stories.
Weird and weirder: Capote's early stories delve into small town America. The Grass Harp was published in 1951, but the other stories included in this edition are from the late 1940's. Strange characters, oddball events was it really like this? Is it still like this in America? or is this more typical of Capote, there is no hint of modernity these stories could have taken place 40 years earlier. Anachronistic perhaps because of the character profiles that Capote presents to his readers. Elderly ladies, young girls, pre teens people the stories, dysfunctional characters who rarely lift their heads from their own private worlds, but when they are forced to do so they present a challenge that must be snuffed out. The Americans in these small town stories seem to live with a certain amount of oddball behaviour: it is part of the fabric of their lives, but when weird gets weirder people get hurt.

The Grass Harp is of novella length taking up nearly half of this publication and is the best and most developed of this collection. It is narrated by Colin a young teenager small for his age a runt who when his mother dies is sent away to live with the Talbo sisters, who are well into their sixties. Verena is a business woman and runs the household; Dolly wears a veil outside the house; she ventures out once a week with her friend/servant/companion Catherine Creek a coloured woman. They collect herbs, bark and grasses to make a potion that they sell as a cure for dropsy, strictly by mail order. Dolly and Catherine live apart from Verena in their own part of the house and Colin becomes their new friend confessing that he is in love with Dolly. The event which fractures this strange household is when Verena seeing a business opportunity attempts to take over the selling of the Dropsy cure. Dolly, Catherine and Colin run away to an abandoned tree house in the woods, where they make their last stand against the forces of law and order. A young roustabout Riley Henderson and a 70 year old judge join the unlikely trio as they defend themselves against the extreme redneckery of the sheriff and his posse. There is hardly room enough in the old tree house.

Capote treats his oddball characters with sympathy in most of his stories, they are tolerated by their community and it is only when their actions challenge others that they run into problems. His characters are not quite in the same realm as Todd Brownings film "Freaks" (1932) but some come pretty close for example in Tree of Night a young woman meets a couple on a train and the man appears to be suffering from some sort of somnambulism. The woman reveals they have a stage act entitled Lazarus where the man is buried alive. Miriam is another typical story a precocious young teen haunts the flat of a lonely 60 year old woman, taking over her life.
In another story Miss Bobbit is a precocious ten year old who moves into a small town and dominated the local people. What sets these stories apart from other weird tales collections that were popular in the 1950's is the quality of the writing and Capote's affinity with his characters. Although the Grass Harp stands head and shoulders above some of the other shorter stories Capote does not fail to provide an atmosphere of strangeness in nearly all of them. Some readers may be offended by Capote's references to black people, but one has to remember that these tales were set in 1950's small town America. Not an essential collection but worth it for the Grass Harp and so 3.5 stars.

Iain M Banks - Against a Dark Background
This was the first Of Banks' science fiction novels that I have not enjoyed. Published in 1993 it was the first of his science fiction novels not to feature the Culture: an advanced utopian machine based empire that had become guardians of the universe. I think I probably missed the Culture which until Against a Dark Background had given Banks' novels added depth. The trouble with this book in my opinion is a lack of any depth. It is an adventure story that moves on from one incredible escapade to another. An old team of adventurers get back together in a quest to find a weapon of mass destruction, amidst a war between various religious rival sects. Death and destruction is the order of the day along with some nasty villains who specialise in torture. The heroic team are only slightly less villainous than the bad guys and the body count starts to stack up.

Banks fills out the background of his leading character: the Lady Sharrow and her family with a series of flashbacks, but in my opinion they did not add anything much to the novel. A dysfunctional family that were so dysfunctional that the destruction of their siblings seemed to be the prime mover for most of their actions. The action sequences are noisy and brutal with too much happening too quickly, the reader hardly has time to get his breath back before the novel lurches on to another confrontation. There is plenty of evidence here that Banks could write a more satisfying book: he creates some imaginative fictional worlds, full of atmosphere in which his characters must adapt to and overcome challenges and problems, for example the end of the world feel of the Sea House or Miykenns with its vegetation consisting of one single large plant, but these just seem exotic backdrops to a treasure hunting storyline that could have taken place anywhere. I found the plotting cliched and predictable. Some fine descriptive writing tends to be spoilt with some flabby dialogue by characters that could be interchangeable.

Readers of science fiction will feel that they have read plenty of stories just like this one, although the writing is of a better quality than much in this genre. This has the feel of a reworked unpublished manuscript which is exactly what it is. Three stars from me and a definite blip in my enjoyment of Banks' science fiction.

>2 baswood: Out of curiosity, I checked my list for 1951 books, and came up with quite a few you have in your list already, plus Nevil Shute's Round the bend, which might interest you if you don't know it already. Also Stephen Spender's memoir World within world, which is something of a classic, but I don't know if you want to expand your reach to non-fiction...

You've still got Elizabeth Taylor's A game of hide and seek in your list twice. Worth reading twice, though! :-)

Wasn't Le hussard sur le toit one of the 1951 books you read earlier?

>11 thorold: Thanks for the heads up on World within World I have recently read a review in the LRB by Seamus Perry on Poems Written Abroad: The Lilly Library Manuscript By Stephen Spender and so an autobiography of his early years certainly merits inclusion on my list.

I will also add the Nevil Shute novel which led me to think about other prolific authors of the late 1940's early 1950s and Georges Simenon immediately sprang to mind and so four more books to add:

Maigret Takes a room
Maigret and the burglars wife
Maigret and the Gangsters
The Strangers in the House

I have deleted the double entry for Elizabeth Taylor

I have started Le Hussard sur le toit which is my current french reading - I am even slower reading in French than reading in English and so don't expect to finish it very soon.

Christopher Marlowe - Edward the Second
Ever the subversive; when Christopher Marlowe decided to write a history play he had at his disposal probably all of Raphael Holinshed's chronicles from which to chose and he chose the reign of Edward the Second. Edward was no hero king but a weak minded individual who was accused of letting his country go to rack and ruin while he indulged his favourites at court in a milieu of homoerotic dalliances. Marlowe not only succeeded in telling the story of Edwards reign but also created a tragedy with psychological dramatic overtones. Despite telescoping the action of a twenty year reign into a matter of months Marlowe created a play that works on paper and works on the stage: the number of modern revivals plays witness to its playability.

Edward II's reign has been labelled as just one squabble after another as the nobles of England sought to gain power at the expense of a king who had no stomach for war. During his reign the Scots defeated the English army at Bannockburn and the French King had seized part of Normandy. Edward surrounded himself with favourites at court particularly the Frenchman Gaveston. The Earls of Warwick, Lancaster, and the Earl of March: Mortimer plot to kill Gaveston. Edward is mortified and with the support of The Spencers (his new favourites) he declares war on the nobles. At first he is successful, but Mortimer who flees to France returns with Isabel Edwards Queen to defeat the King and his followers. Mortimer arranges for the captive king to be murdered, while making himself protector of the new KIng the young Edward III. The play ends with Edward III asserting his authority and executing Mortimer and putting his mother Isabel in the Tower of London.

Marlowe's characters develop over the course of the play; Mortimer appears first as an indignant patriot but develop into a scheming machiavellian lusting for power. Queen Isabella changes from being a patient suffering wife to a conspiring adulteress. Spencer and his attendant Baldock appear as parasitic sycophants but become loyal supporters of the king and suffer courageous deaths. Edward from a weak indulgent king to a heroic king triumphant in battle and finally to a broken and weary ruler who elicits our pity as we witness the last trace of regal dignity struggling vainly against dispare. It is king Edward who dominates the play and modern productions tend to emphasise the homosexual relationship with Gaveston that leads to the nobles incipient rage against the court favourite. Certainly the kings love for Gaveston influences and controls all his actions and homoerotic references in Marlowe's text are evident, however the overriding struggle is one of class. Gaveston and Spenser after him were not nobles by birth and the continual references to their birth right outdoes any accusations against homosexuality. The nobles force the king to send Gaveston into exile again and Edward is distraught which causes Lancaster to remark:
What passions call you these?

Afterwards Mortimer sets out his complaints against Gaveston

Uncle, his wanton humour grieves not me;
But this I scorn, that one so basely-born
Should by his sovereign's favour grow so pert,
And riot it with the treasure of the realm,
While soldiers mutiny for want of pay.
He wears a lord's revenue on his back,
And, Midas-like, he jets it in the court,
With base outlandish cullions at his heels,.......
While others walk below, the king and he,
From out a window, laugh at such as we,
And flout our train, and jest at our attire.
Uncle, 'tis this that makes me impatient.

Some critics read between the lines and claim that Mortimer's jealousy is sexual jealousy or abhorrence of homosexuality, but I don't read it this way. There is no doubt that Gaveston and the king were in some sort of love relationship, but this was hardly an issue at the time unless it was so overt it caused offence. Marlowe himself fell foul of being accused of sodomy, but was not in real danger of being sent to prison although at the time it was an offence.

The real interest for me and what makes this a great Elizabethan play is the final third starting from when Edward has lost his war with Mortimer and Queen Isabel and has sought sanctuary in an abbey. He is there with his followers Spencer and Baldock and one feels drawn to a magnetic personality, Edward was not a warrior king, but attracts people to him and his long sojourn of imprisonment and torture elicits sympathy from the reader. A tortured Edward proves difficult to kill and Mortimer must carefully select a villain to carry out the murder, one who will not feel pity for the dignified king. Marlowe tells us of the method of the murder and why it is done this way: A red hot iron spit is inserted into his anus to avoid any detection of the murder. Marlowe spares us the gory details, but lets one of the murderers say:

I fear me that this cry will raise the town.

Marlowe gives Edward some excellent speeches especially towards the end when he gives the impression of a king at a loss to understand why he is being ill treated and why he must give up his kingship, but there are moments of clear prescience when he says:

But what are kings, when regiment is gone,
But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?

The king never completely loses his dignity under duress, but one could say that earlier in the play he does lose his dignity in his declarations of love for Gaveston.

Marlowe's text is mainly in iambic pentameters with some rhyming couplets and passages of prose as is appropriate to the speaker. It flows well, but becomes a little pedestrian in the battle scenes. Marlowe introduces scenes of anti-catholicism and critiques of the kings courtiers in lively exchanges between his characters. This is one of the earliest plays to make use of Holinshed's Chronicles and tells the story of a king out of step with the need to be a strong forceful monarch in a time when the nobility were warrior princes looking to get their hands on the levers of power. This was a five star read for me and I finish with Marlowe imagining what Edwards court would be like under the influence of Pier Gaveston: (sounds good to me)

I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits,
Musicians, that with touching of a string
May draw the pliant king which way I please:
Music and poetry is his delight;
Therefore I'll have Italian masks by night,
Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows;
And in the day, when he shall walk abroad,
Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad;
My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,
Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hay;
Sometime a lovely boy in Dian's shape,
With hair that gilds the water as it glides
Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,
And in his sportful hands an olive-tree,
To hide those parts which men delight to see,
Shall bathe him in a spring; and there, hard by,
One like Actæon, peeping through the grove,
Shall by the angry goddess be transform'd,
And running in the likeness of an hart,
By yelping hounds pull'd down, shall semm to die:
Such things as these best please his majesty.—
Here comes my lord the king, and the nobles,
From the parliament. I'll stand aside.

>13 baswood: Yes, but what about the bit where Annie Lennox sings "Every time we say goodbye"...? :-)

I'm just reading a biography of Frederick the Great — maybe I should re-read the Marlowe (or dig out the VHS tape of Jarman's version, at least) for "compare and contrast" purposes.

ETA: ...and I'd never spotted that that was where Huxley got Antic hay from!

Great review, great prep should get to Marlowe

I noticed my library has 17 books tagged 1951. (Not all are novels, some are books for kids. Also several are duplicates, including Arnold Hauser’s 4 volume Social History of Art, that I put it as 4 separate entries.) direct link: https://www.librarything.com/catalog/dchaikin&tag=1951

Time to take stock of the reading projects - half way through the year

Elizabethan Literature
This one has gone quite well - I have now read all of the available plays by the early pre-Shakespeare dramatists: John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe and other bits and pieces published in 1591 and find myself halfway through 1592 and so I am on course to crash through into 1593.

Unread books from my shelves (authors surnames beginning with B)
I have 38 books listed and so far I have read only 12
Still to read

Alain De Botton - The art of Travel
Anthony Burgess - The Doctor is sick
Frederick Barthelme - Moon De-luxe
William Boyd - The Blue Afternoon
Simone de Beauvoir - The Mandarins
T C Boyle - Water Music
John Baxter - A pound of Paper
John Buchan - The Island of sheep
Balzac - Old Goriot
John Berendt - Midnight in the garden of good and evil
Julian Barnes - A history of the world in 10 and a half chapters
Anthony Burgess - The Devils Mode
Malcolm Bradbury - Who do you think you are
Iain Banks - Dead Air
Saul Bellow - Herzog
Arnold Bennet - Clayhanger
Marjorie Bowen - The Bishop of hell and other stories
A S Byatt - The Childrens Book
William Boyd - Armadillo
Julian Barnes - Arthur and George
Saul Bellow - Humbolds gift
Anthony Burgess -1985
Balzac - Lost Illusions
Iain Banks - The steep approach to Goobade
William Boyd - Ordinary Thunderstorms
Anthony Burgess - The Kingdom of the wicked

Science fiction books published in 1951
29 books listed and 10 read so far
Still to read:

Leigh Brackett - People of the Talisman
Fritz Leiber - Gather Darkness
Stanislaw Lem - The Astronauts
H P Lovecraft - The Hunter of the dark
Isaac Asimov The stars like dust
E C Tub - Planetfall
Jack Vance - The Dying Earth
Nelson S Bond - Lancelot Biggs Spaceman
Frederic Brown - Space on my hands
Robert Spencer Carr - Beyond Infinity
Curme Gray - Murder in Milenium VI
Raymond F Jones - The Toymaker
Arthur Koestler - The age of Longing
Henry Kuttner and C L Moore - Tomorrow and Tomorrow and the fairy chessman
William F Temple - the four sided triangle
Jack Williamson (Will Stewart) - Seetee ship
Groff Conklin - Possible world of science fiction
Kendell Foster Crossen - Adventures in tomorrow
Gill Hunt - galactic storm

Science fiction from the masterworks series 1950's
24 listed and fifteen read - this looks promising
still to read:

1956 Richard Matheson - The shrinking man
1956 Alfred Bester - The Stars my destiny
1957 Robert A Heinlein - The door into summer
1957 The Midwich Cuckoos - John Wyndham
1958 Wasp - Eric Frank Russell
1958 Brian W Aldiss Non-stop
1958 James Blish A case of conscience
1959 Philip K Dick - Time out of joint
1959 Kurt Vonnegut JR - The Sirens of Titan
1959 Walter M Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz

Books published in 1951 looks like it's going to be two year project 128 books and I have read 7

>Thanks for that link Dan I have added the following to my list

Karl Kerenyl - The Gods of the Greeks

James A Michener - The Voice of Asia

Mark Van Doren - The selected letters of William Cowper

Arnold Hauser - The Social history of Art (4 volumes)

Menachem Begin - The Revolt, Begin

Time to take stock of the reading projects - half way through the year

Elizabethan Literature
This one has gone quite well - I have now read all of the available plays by the early pre-Shakespeare dramatists: John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe and other bits and pieces published in 1591 and find myself halfway through 1592 and so I am on course to crash through into 1593.

Unread books from my shelves (authors surnames beginning with B)
I have 38 books listed and so far I have read only 12
Still to read

Alain De Botton - The art of Travel
Anthony Burgess - The Doctor is sick
Frederick Barthelme - Moon De-luxe
William Boyd - The Blue Afternoon
Simone de Beauvoir - The Mandarins
T C Boyle - Water Music
John Baxter - A pound of Paper
John Buchan - The Island of sheep
Balzac - Old Goriot
John Berendt - Midnight in the garden of good and evil
Julian Barnes - A history of the world in 10 and a half chapters
Anthony Burgess - The Devils Mode
Malcolm Bradbury - Who do you think you are
Iain Banks - Dead Air
Saul Bellow - Herzog
Arnold Bennet - Clayhanger
Marjorie Bowen - The Bishop of hell and other stories
A S Byatt - The Childrens Book
William Boyd - Armadillo
Julian Barnes - Arthur and George
Saul Bellow - Humbolds gift
Anthony Burgess -1985
Balzac - Lost Illusions
Iain Banks - The steep approach to Goobade
William Boyd - Ordinary Thunderstorms
Anthony Burgess - The Kingdom of the wicked

Science fiction books published in 1951
29 books listed and 10 read so far
Still to read:

Leigh Brackett - People of the Talisman
Fritz Leiber - Gather Darkness
Stanislaw Lem - The Astronauts
H P Lovecraft - The Hunter of the dark
Isaac Asimov The stars like dust
E C Tub - Planetfall
Jack Vance - The Dying Earth
Nelson S Bond - Lancelot Biggs Spaceman
Frederic Brown - Space on my hands
Robert Spencer Carr - Beyond Infinity
Curme Gray - Murder in Milenium VI
Raymond F Jones - The Toymaker
Arthur Koestler - The age of Longing
Henry Kuttner and C L Moore - Tomorrow and Tomorrow and the fairy chessman
William F Temple - the four sided triangle
Jack Williamson (Will Stewart) - Seetee ship
Groff Conklin - Possible world of science fiction
Kendell Foster Crossen - Adventures in tomorrow
Gill Hunt - galactic storm

Science fiction from the masterworks series 1950's
24 listed and fifteen read - this looks promising
still to read:

1956 Richard Matheson - The shrinking man
1956 Alfred Bester - The Stars my destiny
1957 Robert A Heinlein - The door into summer
1957 The Midwich Cuckoos - John Wyndham
1958 Wasp - Eric Frank Russell
1958 Brian W Aldiss Non-stop
1958 James Blish A case of conscience
1959 Philip K Dick - Time out of joint
1959 Kurt Vonnegut JR - The Sirens of Titan
1959 Walter M Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz

Books published in 1951 looks like it's going to be a 2/3 year project - 128 books (now 136 after >15 dchaikin:)
I have read 7 so far.

“I have now read all of the available plays by the early pre-Shakespeare dramatists”

That’s pretty amazing, Bass. Looking forward to your 1593.

John Hawkes -The Beetle Leg
When I pick up a book by an author new to me who has gained some critical appreciation over the years, I look for clues as to style and content. I will usually read the first fifty or so pages and hope by that time I will have a handle on the writing that will enhance my enjoyment of the book. The Beetle Leg has a front cover that could be described as contemporary featuring a black on white jagged design which is anything but comfortable. The inside page tells me that it is "a new directions book" I was not surprised therefore to find a piece of experimental writing with sentences of unusual constructions, not that they were ungrammatical, but they turned this way and that with nouns adjectives and verbs that made them seem as jagged as the design on that front cover. I was not surprised that there was no narrative shape to speak of or that the book failed to follow a linear progression. I got used to the fact that events jumped around in time, but was thankful that the characters seemed to appear regularly enough to give some sense of consistency. However fifty pages in and I needed more information on the author and his style.

The most quotable reference from the author himself was:

''I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of fiction or structure was really all that remained. And structure -- verbal and psychological coherence -- is still my largest concern as a writer.''

and then that the New York Times had said Mr Hawkes:

was called a figure ''in a post-modern pantheon of experimental novelists who include John Barth, William Gass and William Gaddis'' by Mel Gussow in The New York Times in 1996.
Mr. Gaddis once said Mr. Hawkes's ''sentences are themselves 'events.' ‘'

Armed with this information I could read on in confidence knowing I was just going along for the sheer hell of the ride. I didn't need to worry about plot, characterisation or narrative drive, but I did have to pay attention to what those sentences were telling me or it would all pass me by in something like a blur so that I would be hard pressed to come to any conclusion about what I had just read.

The Beetle leg was published in 1951 and was the second of Hawkes fourteen published books. I had bought an electronic copy, because any surviving printed copies are quite expensive, which may tell its own story. It has a setting and there are recurring themes that can be picked out. The setting is Minnesota (America) Clare county in a small town that sat beside a dam and at some point in the narrative the dam burst (the great slide)flooding some or all of a town which now lies beneath a lake. There was one fatality Mulge Lampson brother of Luke Lampson and his family and friends have him on their mind as they go about their lives.

It is a harsh landscape that is stifling hot in the summer and very cold in the winter, it is a landscape for hardy people and native Americans and Hawkes sketches in the feel of the first arrivals to the area coping with the harsh conditions in a sort of tent city. It has the feel of a western which is enhanced by the current sheriff of the town and his dealing with a motorcycle gang known as the red Devils. We meet the sheriff in the first pages of the novel who reflects "It is a lawless country" a bit like the novel itself.
There is a primitive feel to the whole thing. Ma (Lukes Ma) prepares herself and her wagon for a wedding: she might be re-enacting a marriage to Mulge, but at her age she must face down the other women. Camper comes back to the town after an absence and wants to fish in the lake, Cap. Leech runs a medical business from the back of his wagon which is primitive in the extreme. Both of these characters stir up old hostilities. It is a mean hard world where people just get on with their lives.

The novel has its share of shocking images:


He lifted the huckleberry pole and there, biting the hook, swung the heavy body of a baby that had been dropped, searched for, and lost in the flood. The eyes slept on either side of the fish line and a point of the barb protruded near the nose stopped with silt. It turned slowly around and around on the end of the wet string that cut in half its forehead. It had been tumbled under exposed roots and with creatures too dumb to swim, long days through the swell, neither sunk nor floating. The white stomach hung full with all it had swallowed. God’s naked child lay under Luke’s fingers on the spread poncho, as on his knees and up to his thighs in the river, he loosed the hook, forcing his hand to touch the half-made face. His hook cracked through the membrane of the palate; he touched cold scales on the neck. One of the newborn sucked inside a gentle wave to the bottom of a stunted water black tree, its body rolled on the slippery poncho while the crouching figure of a young man shut his eyes, wet his lips. In both hands he picked it up, circling the softened chest inside of which lay the formless lungs, and stooped again to the water. As his feet moved it thickly eddied, splashed. He held the body closer to the surface, water touched the back of his knuckles, and letting go, he gently pushed it off as if it would turn over and quickly swim away to the center of the bankless stream.

I was not expecting any resolution and I was not disappointed, but we do get a reflection by Cap Leech when he finds the body of the drowned Lampson brother. I was intrigued by the reading experience and once used to the style of the writing there was enough to cling onto and to enjoy the vignettes without worrying too much about where it was all leading. To be fair we know this almost from the start when the Sheriff talks about the one fatality and the great slide. 3.5 stars.

The Last Days of the Republic, P W Dooner - P W Dooner
This book has been listed in a genre of anti-enlightenment invasion fiction. Published in 1880 it foretold the invasion of America by China from the vantage point of a historian looking back from the early years of the 20th century. Neither Pierton W Dooner or his book has a page on wikipedia, but he can be tracked down in 1870 when he was the editor of a weekly newspaper: the Arizonian based is Tuscon. Described as a pioneer editor Dooner certainly had run-ins with local politicians which resulted in him having to close down his paper and leave the territory. He moved on to California where he later practiced law. His altercations with politicians may have been responsible for his views of the state of America in 1880 which take up the first four chapters of his book. According to him it is a country riven with political controversy and greed and therefore ripe for invasion.

It was probably the fears of Asian invasions sparked off by the employment of Chinese labour on the Central Pacific Railroad in the 1860's leading to the Californian State Legislature passing an Anti-Coolie Act that gave Dooner the idea for his book. He describes California as a state where the rich were getting richer by hiring Chinese labourers and undercutting the American workers. This resulted in racial tensions and politicians needed to agree on how to deal with the issues, but owing to individual self interest no consensus could be achieved. It has to be said that Dooner is deeply prejudiced against the Chinese workers and saw them as an advanced force for an invasion by the mother country:

‘This unwholesome spirit (a servile attitude), seconded by a consuming avarice and directed by a most incredible cunning; laid the foundations of a scheme of conquest, unparalleled in the human race.'

The Chinese took the place of the negro workers in the Southern States, because they would work hard in worse conditions, however they were organised amongst themselves and the advanced guard of Chinese coolies became militarised as more and more of them flooded into America. They formed their own army and quick local victories were supported by mainland China. They were more ruthless than their American counterparts and better organised and although the American fought bravely they were overcome in a matter of a few years, mainly because of the numbers of Chinese on the battlefield and their ability to put up with atrocious conditions and needing only a bowl full of rice for sustenance. The American resistance was fractured by disagreements and the old divisions between the North and the South reappeared.

This is a political diatribe rather than a novel. A diatribe that would play on the fears of its english readership. Populist fiction dressed up to look like a well thought out road map of the future. Reprehensible of course, but it has ben considered as an example of invasion literature. It all sounds half-baked today and I hope it did when it was published. 2 stars.

>20 baswood: In grad school I took a seminar during which we spent the semester reading John Barth and John Hawkes. We didn't read The Beetle Leg, though. According to the professor, who was a huge Hawkes devotee, Hawkes was influenced by Graham Greene, and The Lime Twig was inspired by Brighton Rock. The professor was a bit of a character and more than a little opinionated (I got called "erudite" in class once for speaking up to agree with him about something) but passionate and I would think only someone with those qualifications could teach an effective class about these two authors.

>21 baswood: Interesting.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in California actually wasn't repealed until 1943, as China had become America's ally in World War Two.

Anyway, fascinating reading and great reviews as always.

(The hell with Dooner.) I enjoyed your take on Hawkes, who I’m unfamiliar with. I partially agree with his comment about the novel. I could maybe see “plot, character, setting and theme” as an enemy to a novelist, but I’m not sure they need be abandoning altogether. Obviously he has a little of them all within this book.

>22 rocketjk: Interesting about your semester reading John Barth and John Hawkes. It would seem that Hawkes has faded from view a little over the years. I would be happy to attempt something else by him. Hawkes himself took creative writing classes.

>23 dchaikin: I agree Dan (The hell with Dooner)

Samuel Daniel - Delia, the Complaint of Rosamond.
The critical view of the Delia sonnet sequence is that it is beautiful but mediocre, well written but limited in scope. A masterpiece of phrasing and melody, but which offers no ideas, no psychology and no story. Perhaps it could be summed up as a sequence that will appeal to poets and lovers of form, but may leave the general reader a little cold. This would be a pity because two themes emerge which are treated at length: a sustained elegiac lament on the passing of youth (and beauty) and a declaration of faith in the survival of the poets vision. These are not new themes for the Elizabethan sonneteers and some may feel they are too dominant in a sequence that is meant to be about love, although to be fair courtly love.

There are fifty sonnets in the Delia sequence and twenty eight of them were published in 1591 at the conclusion of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella. In the following year he had printed the remaining twenty two with revisions to the earlier twenty eight. He continued to refine the sonnets for versions printed in 1594 and 1601 and so he was a precursor to William Wordsworth who famously brought out later more refined versions of his Prelude. Like Wordsworth Daniel could be accused of tinkering with the originals to no great effect other than to reduce still further any of the passion in the original. I read the 1592 versions before a more mature Daniel had made his revisions: as though he was trying to banish all thoughts of lusty youthfulness. The sonnets have a regular rhyming scheme and end with a rhyming couplet in which the final line comments or or makes sense of the preceding 13 lines.

Throughout the poem we learn nothing much about Delia only that she continues to look on the poet with disdain and never gives a hint that she welcomes his attentions. In fact so little happens that Delia may well have been completely unaware of the poets love for her. Delia is an anagram of Ideal and she may have only existed in the poets imagination. Here is an example and one of my favourites from the sequence (if only for the first four lines):

Sonnet XLV.
Care-charmer sleepe, sonne of the Sable night,
Brother to death, in silent darknes borne:
Relieue my languish, and restore the light,
With darke forgetting of my cares returne
And let the day be time enough to morne,
The shipwrack of my ill-aduentred youth:
Let vvaking eyes suffice to vvayle theyr scorne,
Without the torment of the nights vntruth.
Cease dreames, th'ymagery of our day desires,
To modell foorth the passions of the morrow:
Neuer let rysing Sunne approue you lyers,
To adde more griefe to aggrauat my sorrow.
Still let me sleepe, imbracing clovvdes in vaine;
And neuer vvake, to feele the dayes disdayne.

Sonnet XXXV shows his debt to Petrarch:

Sonnet XXXV.
Thou canst not dye whilst any zeale abounde
In feeling harts, that can conceiue these lines:
Though thou a Laura hast no Petrarch founde,
In base attire, yet cleerely Beautie shines.
And I, though borne in a colder clime,
Doe feele mine inward heate as great, I knowe it:
He neuer had more faith, although more rime,
I loue as well, though he could better shew it.
But I may ad one feather to thy fame,
To helpe her flight throughout the fairest Ile:
And if my penne could more enlarge thy name,
Then shouldst thou liue in an immortall stile.
But though that Laura better limned bee,
Suffice, thou shalt be lou'd as well as shee.

The Complaint of Rosamond is a poem of 742 lines divided into seven line stanzas with a regular rhyming scheme of ABABBCC and it tells the story of Rosamond who appears as a ghost to tell the poet of her complaint. She was a beautiful virtuous young woman who came to be noticed by King Henry II of France. She finally gave into his advances and he built a Palace for her which could only be entered by a complicated maze. She is now alone with her entourage of female assistants and regrets that nobody else is witness to her beauty. Henry's Queen discovers a way into the maze and forces Rosamond to drink poison. Henry discovers her body and is bereft.

Much can be made of the allegory and classical allusions in the poem, but it can be enjoyed as a straight forward moral tale. It is full of passion and feeling, almost melodrama which makes it an interesting companion to Delia. Daniel does not miss an opportunity to compare the actions of Rosamond with the chaste Delia of his earlier poem. Time passing and the destruction of beauty is again a theme explored:

What greater torment euer could haue beene,
Then to inforce the fayre to liue retired?
For what is Beautie if it be not seene,
Or what is't to be seene vnlesse admired?
And though admyred, vnlesse in loue desired?
Neuer were cheekes of Roses, locks of Amber,
Ordayn'd to liue imprisond in a Chamber.

Daniel's choice of words and phrases flow beautifully in a poem that can be read pleasurably today. It was good to read these poems one after another and while my reactions to Delia were a little cool, after reading Rosamond I went back to Delia and discovered much to like. 4 stars.

Alain De Botton - The Art of Travel
"mais il faut cultiver notre jardin" is the last thing Candide says in Voltaires novel published in 1759, after travelling extensively and seeing some of the man made horrors in the world. Alain de Botton seems to come to a similar conclusion at the end of his The Art of Travel, although he might extend his garden to include his immediate locality. Why bother to travel when there is so much to see close to home if you can be bothered to look more carefully. Published in 2002 this book might become more relevant to a post covid-19 world where travel is likely to be either more difficult, more dangerous or both. Miles Davis is reported to have said something like 'why do I need to go and visit famous sights when I can see pictures of them in books.' Why indeed and after reading de Botton, and perhaps being careful of your carbon footprint you might think that Miles Davis had a point. I am sure that de Botton wished to educate his readers on how to travel better, how to enhance their experiences, but his own examples of his travels are hardly inspirational: a wet three days in the lake district (England), a package holiday to Barbados and a guilty escapade in Madrid following a working seminar.

Alain de Botton is a Swiss born British philosopher who writes books and articles aimed at a more general readership. His first book 'Essay on Love" was a best seller and his "The Consolations of Philosophy" published in 2000 also sold well. He has then turned his attention to travel; travel for pleasure and to help with his ideas he has enlisted the aid of artists (authors and painters) from the past to act as our guides. Wordsworth accompanies us in our travels in the Lake District, Vincent Van Gogh is present in Provence (France) and Edward Hopper in the transit stations along the way. The book starts with the thoughts of the Duc des Esseintes the misanthropic hero of J K Huysman's "A Rebours" who came to the conclusion that: the anticipation of travel is so much better than the real thing. The Duc made careful preparations to travel from his Villa on the outskirts of Paris to London, but when he arrived at the Parisian train terminus he had a cup of coffee and decided it was not worth the effort and returned home. There are further examples of regretful travellers: for example Charles Baudelaire:

We saw stars
And waves; we saw sand to
And, despite many crises and unforeseen disasters
We were often bored, just as we are here.

It would be misleading to give the impression that the book is totally negative about travelling, but de Botton does always find something that stops him being euphoric about the experience.

In addition to de Botton's thoughts on travelling the prime motive for the book is as a self-help guide, to encourage people to think a little more about what they are doing and why they are doing it. I personally found many of his observations to be in tune with my thoughts or at least how I would like to be thinking if I took the time to write them down. His ideas can seem a little trite but they are mercifully free from wisecracks and bon mots. Towards the end of the book John Ruskin is our guide in a search for beauty and how we can benefit by looking more carefully at what is around us, perhaps taking the time to sketch our viewpoints as a way of making us see more of what is there. We are almost back to spending our time cultivating our garden and not intrusively involving ourselves in the lives of other people.

I started of reading impatiently; in as much as de Botton seemed to spend much of his energy in stating the blindingly obvious, but I warmed to him and his thoughts as he paired his travels with authors and painters from the past to give a resonance to his own writing. My penguin edition of the book contains many and only black and white photos, which do nothing to enhance the text as they are of such poor quality. Perhaps this is a coffee table book struggling to get out. It might work better in a larger format with better art work.

The book probably won't stop you booking your next holiday and it is not intended to do so, but it might make you think a little more about your expectations and how you can gain more enjoyment from the experience. 3.5 stars.

>26 baswood: Five pages into On Love I had to buy my own copy because I needed to underline all of the clever phrases. Fascinating that this work is free from the bon mots I so enjoyed in the one work of his that I've read.

>26 baswood: I'm not sure Alain de Bottom is for me. I read his architecture book and while the writing is beautiful, it had a similar sort of pessimistic strain that didn't resonate with me.

>27 ELiz_M: Clever phrases are good for me too, when they are backed up with something more that just an excuse for a witty remark. I found that De Botton had plenty of intelligent things to say.

>28 janemarieprice: interesting that you found another book of his pessimistic.

Howard Fast - Spartacus, Howard Fast
Howard Fast published Spartacus himself in 1951. He had served a short prison sentence the previous year for the crime of committing un-American activities in the McCarthy era and he could not find a publisher for the novel that he had conceived in prison. Fast says in the foreword to the 1996 edition that he owes something of its coming into being as a result of his time in prison:

war and prison are difficult for a writer to approach without seeing something of it himself.

This may account for his damming indictment of the Roman civilisation which was based on slavery. The Tokens of Punishment: the 6000 slaves crucified along the length of the Appian way from Rome to Capua in 71BC forms the grisly backdrop to the opening scenes of the novel and they are never far away as the story of the slave revolt led by Spartacus unrolls.

Stanley Kubrick's film has become more famous than the book on which it is based and as good as the film is, it is conceived as an entertainment: albeit with a moral message. The message from the film is the fight against injustice and the right to be free. Fast's book covers these themes too but also attacks the whole moral fibre of the Roman Empire. The story of the slave revolt is told largely from the viewpoint of those people who knew Spartacus or the history of the uprising. Caius the son of a wealthy patrician and his two sister decide to travel to Capua down the Appian way that has just been reopened with the decaying bodies of the crucified slaves lining the route. After a days travelling they stay at the Villa of their wealthy uncle just off the road where they meet Crassus the Roman general who crushed the revolt, Grachus an elderly politician and the younger Cicero a representative of the younger power brokers who had pushed forward the idea of the Tokens of Punishment. Caius and the sisters have no interest in the the 'servile war' they are hedonistic young people who are only interested in their own comfort and entertainment, but find themselves surrounded by a group of people who cannot get the revolt free from their minds. Crassus is pressed to tell how he defeated the army of Spartacus which seemed invincible at one stage and he tells how he set about knowing his enemy by searching out his history, by interviewing his slave master. There follows a story of the young Caius who witnessed Spartacus fight as a gladiator and others chip in with their knowledge of the war and what they have heard about Spartacus.

Crassus offers to escort the young people on the final leg of the journey to Capua and when they arrive they witness the crucifixion of the last of the beaten gladiators. This turns out to be David: Spartacus right hand man and through the agony of his crucifixion he tells his story. Finally Crassus and Grachus become obsessed with tracking down Varinia; Spartacus wife who it was rumoured survived the final battle. It would seem they are hoping in their own way for perhaps some sort of redemption. Fast therefore tells the story of Spartacus from the viewpoints of those that got closest to him. He skilfully fills in a short history of the wars while examining the relationships of the three generations of Romans that are shaken by the recent events. The patricians and the most wealthy citizens still believe in the power of the Roman state and are proud of the civilisation that has given them such a good life style. The telling of the story of Spartacus however reveals the rot at the core of Roman power. The Tokens of punishment present throughout the novel, the crucifixion of David, and the story of Spartacus is juxtaposed with the superabundances of the lifestyles of the wealthy Romans. The rich are getting richer at the expense of the poor, but the impoverished Roman citizens can still look down on the vast slave population, but the slaves have become a threat.

The story of the slave revolt is told by witnesses to the events, which may be unreliable, for example David and Varinia who paint a picture of Spartacus as the most gentle of human beings, a father figure to all those who served him and a shinning example of a civilised man. The fight for freedom is altruistic in their eyes and Fasts prose can become a little sentimental even a little naive, especially when contrasted with the young Cicero's view of the world which is Machiavellian:

"There is an elite—a group of superior men. Whether the gods made them that way or circumstances made them that way is not something to argue. But they are men fit to rule, and because they are fit to rule, they do rule.
We rationalize the irrational. We convince the people that the greatest fulfillment in
life is to die for the rich. We convince the rich that they must part with some of their riches to keep the rest. We are magicians. We cast an illusion, and the illusion is foolproof. We say to the people—you are the power. Your vote is the source of Rome’s strength and glory. You are the only free people in the world. There is nothing more precious than your freedom nothing more admirable than your civilization. And you control it; you are the power. And then they vote for our candidates. They weep at our defeats. They laugh with joy at our victories. And they feel proud and superior because they are not slaves."

Howard Fast's prose does justice to the story that unfolds, the battle scenes are realistically described and Spartacus experiences as a gladiator and a slave in the mines are moving and disturbing, the agony of David on the cross whose troubled mind is shot through with pain is as close to realism as I want to get. The back story of the profligate life styles and sexual mores of the wealthy Romans and their illicit encounters are also well documented. This is a novel of Historical Fiction and while Fast is keen not to stray too far from what is known about Spartacus he is also aware he is writing a novel that needs to appeal to a majority of readers and so he makes it an engrossing read, fleshing out his characters to fit the historical facts. He ended up with a best selling novel and as he has one of his character say:

“No, indeed. Two things all men are convinced they have talent for, with neither preparation nor study involved. Writing a book and leading an army. And with good reason, since such an amazing number of idiots get to do both.

Howard Fast is not one of the idiots and not only did he write a most entertaining novel but he also made some political points as well. I was surprised at how well he made his story undermine the idea of glorious classical antiquity. This was a society that was based on slavery with a rigid class system and Fast does not let his readers escape without acknowledging these facts. A thoroughly enjoyable read and a well thought out novel 4.5 stars.

The Sea Around Us - Rachel Carson
1951 was the year when a science book became a best seller. The Sea Around us spent 86 weeks on the New York Times best seller list. Rachel Carson was a marine biologist and therefore a scientist who discovered that she had the talent to write for a popular audience and although her book is packed with scientific information, it also waxes lyrical about the sights, sounds and feel of the sea both above and below the surface. A book written by a lover of sea and seascapes for an audience who want to know more about the 70 percent of the world in which they might paddle, swim, or travel over, but have never thought much about. This is the opening to her chapter "The Long Snowfall"

'Every part of earth or air or sea has an atmosphere peculiarly its own, a quality or characteristic that sets it apart from all other. When I think of the floor of the deep sea, the single, overwhelming fact that possesses my imagination is the accumulation of sediments'

Sediments! A chapter about sediments? Sediments are usually very important for people with a scientific bent, but Carson with her image of a long snowfall and a chapter that eases her readers through some scientific information manages to make her sediments, mysterious, beautiful and thoroughly absorbing. Right now writing this I have a picture of the flakes of a snow storm falling, falling, one by one, out there on the ocean floor.

The book is more interested in geology, oceanography, meteorology the more physical elements of the oceans rather than individual species of animals that inhabit the sea. It is a book about the environment, but written before Carson made a reputation for being an environmentalist and so doom laden warnings come to us as feint echos in what is a celebration of the wonders of nature. There are chapters on the teeming surface of the oceans and the black sunless depths, There are chapters on the birth of Islands, the hidden lands beneath the sea, The destructive power of the sea and the science of the waves, and finally exploration and exploitation by mankind.

Carson became prominent in the conservation of the environment movement with the publication of Silent Spring in 1962; a book that highlighted the dangers of synthetic pesticides. In the Sea Around Us she talks about climate change, and a warming of the sea, but comes down on the side of cyclic changes in oceanic circulation, therefore a natural phenomenon rather than man made. This is somewhat surprising with the knowledge that we have today of greenhouse gasses and environmental pollution, but one must remember that her book was published in 1951. She wrote a preface to the 1961 edition, but her concern then was the dumping of atomic waste. She died in 1964 a considerable time before concerns were raised on an international level about global warming and mankind's involvement in that process. This is not a book that will supply an up to date scientific story on the latest developments in the world of oceanography a lot has happened since the 1961 edition and some of them have thrown Carsons ideas on the ocean basins as being older than the continents into disrepute: for example the theory of plate tectonics has established that the creation of the sea bed in geological terms is relatively more recent.

I read the Oxford University press 2003 edition which is billed as an Illustrated Commemorative Edition with glossy photographs and a coffee table book feel. There is an introduction and forward which puts Carson's book in context and an afterword by Brian J Skinner a professor of Geology as well as some notes throughout the text that point out scientific developments since the original publication back in 1951. Today we might read Rachel Carsons The Sea Around us for her innovations in producing a science based book that captures some of the poetry of the sea, but it also still provides much basic information. I learn't quite a bit and enjoyed the learning and so a 4.5 star read.

Leigh Brackett - People of the Talisman
A science fiction fantasy novel by female science fiction writer Leigh Brackett: one of the few women writing in the so-called golden age of science fiction. It appears in an Ace double edition along with The Secret of Sinharat published in 1964. However People of the Talisman was adapted from Brackett's earlier story published in 1951 Black Amazon of Mars which appeared in the pulp magazine Planet Stories.

Planet Stories has been described as the the epitome of Pulp science fiction. It was a magazine whose garish covers promised extravagantly melodramatic interplanetary stories. Leigh Brackett is more widely known as a film screenwriter, being credited with William Faulkner and Jules Furthman for the film The Big Sleep. Brackett took a long break from screenwriting and from 1948-1955 she wrote many of her science fiction adventure stories for the pulp fiction market. Black Amazon of Mars is a typical example and proves to be a well written adventure story that builds to an exciting climax. It features the Tarzan like hero; Eric John Stark who is well matched by Ciaran the Black Amazon who leads a gathering of northern chieftains on Mars again the city of Kushat. Stark has in his possession a mysterious Talisman of crystal that seems to contain the voices of an alien species. The crystal is believed to protect the city from invasion and Stark finds himself organising the city against the tribesman from the north.

The adventure story with its science fiction ending is what this novel is all about and characters are set in motion to guide the story through to its ending. It all works well enough and provided me with an afternoon's entertainment laying out on my sun-bed under the shade of an oak tree. It's July; its hot in South West France and I don't have a swimming pool, but the oak tree is magnificent and doesn't require any maintenance. 3 stars of its genre.

Anthony Burgess looking a bit like Boris Johnson suffering from Covid-19

Anthony Burgess - The Doctor is sick

A dog called nigger and the opportunist but criminal Jewish Stone brothers are all rolled into this comedy satire along with the cockney proletariat, the medical profession, professors of linguistics, a loss of libido, promiscuous women and sexual perversions. Farcical and satirical by turns it does poke much fun at "Johnny Foreigner" and could have been an inspiration for the idea of dog whistle politics (not that there is any politicians in this novel). Anthony Burgess had just arrived back in England from Burma in order to seek medical help for a suspected brain tumour. His hospital experiences and his fresh look at London (he was a Mancunian) gave him all the inspiration he needed to dash off this novel in six weeks. The authors name and a price of 50p in a charity bookshop was all that was needed for it to appear on my bookshelves, where it has rested in quiet contemplation for about 30 years.

In the novel a doctor of linguistics: a doctor Spindrift is in hospital after collapsing during a lecture, he undergoes a number of tests and is told that there might be something in his brain and he needs an operation, his wife is told the full facts but has been sworn to secrecy. Spindrift suspects his wife is conducting one of her love affairs, they have an open marriage and so he creeps out of hospital for an evening to find his wife. She persuades him to return and he undergoes preparation for his operation, while under a preliminary anaesthetic he dreams he has escaped from hospital again and is again on the track of his wife. He has no money, it is cold and his head has been shaven for an operation, he embarks on a series of adventures when he meets the Stone Brothers who run an illegal speakeasy. They earmark him as a contestant in a bald headed man competition and he runs foul of Bob Courage who is a sado-masochist. Spindrift spends a madcap three days chasing round London after his wife, getting kidnapped by Bob, trying to avoid the Stone brothers and their dog called nigger.

Burgess has great fun with the language of his characters many who boast heavy accents or different modes of speech; his parodies of characters from a 1950's depressed London come alive for me. I found myself laughing a little guiltily at their antics, after all we should not be amused by a dog named nigger or of foreigners with heavily accented English. Having finally read it, I dare not put it back on my book shelf and so into the charity box it goes 3 stars. Sorry Borrie

Thomas Lodge - Euphues Shadow, the battle of the senses
Printed in 1592 under the supervision of Robert Greene who often collaborated with Tomas Lodge. Greene explains in his dedication to Robert Ratcliffe, Viscount Fitzwaters that Lodge was away on a sea voyage and had left his book with Greene to have printed and also to seek patronage. It was Lodges second expedition overseas and two years previously he had his romance novel Rosalynde printed with some success. Rosalynde owed much to John Lyly who had paved the way for many writers of romantic novels with his book Euphues, the anatomy of wit and Lodge's Euphues Shadow is written in the same style, in fact it follows Lyly's book more closely than Rosalynde even to making his hero Philamis sound similar to Lyly's Philautus.

Euphues Shadow follows a similar format in that the book contains poems, songs, sonnets, a dialogue and stories within stories all integrated more or less into the central story line which features star crossed lovers. The deaf man's dialogue tacked onto the end of the story makes this publication seem more of a hotch potch than Rosalynde and may well have been influenced by Robert Greene.

The story of Claetia which is titled "the lamentable and pitiful torments of a constant lover serving a cruel lady" is typical of much of the subject matter of this book. It is always the ladies who treat their wooers with disdain that lead to the unhappiness and sometimes tragedies. Lodge has much to say about the fickleness of women even though his book starts out by castigating the vain fancies and foolhardiness of young men. The sermon type feel of the final section when Philamis is resigned to living alone is fairly dull. This book is for completists only I think 2 stars.

>34 baswood: I don't remember much about that one, but I think I had similar reactions when I read it, many years ago! To judge by what everyone says about the Bojo novel, Burgess was still probably the better novelist, even on his off days.

Hangsaman - Shirley Jackson
As I was reading Shirley Jackson's 1951 novel I thought of that other novel featuring a teenage rebellion from that same year. One of the most famous literary novels published in 1951 was The Catcher in the Rye, which spent many months in the New York Times bestseller lists. Hangsaman never got anywhere near the best seller lists and although it appears as a penguin classic it is probably not on many peoples reading lists and it does not even make the 1001 novels you must read before you die. The Catcher in the Rye features Holden Caulfield a 17 year old young man who tells his story of an escapade in New York the previous year; Hangsaman is written in the third person and tells of 17 year old Natalia Waite's difficulties in conforming to life at home and life at an all girls college. Both novels feature the thoughts and feelings of the young adolescents who find themselves out of step with normal American teenage college life: Both Holden Caulfield and Natalia Waite have problems with relationships and their sexuality and look towards their favourite college teacher for assistance, both are disappointed. Hangsaman delves deeper into the psychology of an adolescent and while The Catcher in the Rye is a series of confrontations over a short time span Hangsaman is mysterious and dark with Natalia's inner conflicts providing a more unreliable witness to the events in her life which might be more or less what they seem.

Natalia has a literary father who is intent on nurturing his daughters talents. her mother is a more vague figure in her life who cannot come to terms with her more intellectual partner and is at a point where she becomes an embarrassment to him. Natalie's father is both domineering and egotistical setting his daughter writing projects and dispensing words of wisdom most mornings in his study. Natalie is socially inept and her thoughts lead her into all sorts of strange directions: at one of her fathers literary gatherings (she and her mother are the caterers) she drinks for the first time and finds herself going for a walk in the woods with a much older man. Something may or may not have happened to Natalie that night, but the story cuts to her leaving home for college. She has trouble making friends and is content with her own space. She finds herself attached to a small group of girls who are intent on being seduced by one of their male teachers: Mr Langdon, who is already married to a former pupil Elizabeth; there are awkward social occasions and Natalie finds herself shepherding a very drunk and unhappy Elizabeth home after a cocktail party. Natalie withdraws into herself. One night she is accosted by Tony a girl friendless like herself and suddenly she has found a kindred spirit, they room together and one dark rainy night Tony leads her pied-piper like into the woods and Natalia fears for her life. The mystery is centred around how much of this is happening inside Natalie's head; Is Tony her own creation these thoughts are never fully resolved and the reader is left with a feeling of fear and apprehension for a young girl, who may have been damaged in some way.

This is a novel that becomes increasingly weird and other worldly, but Shirley Jackson makes Natalie seem real, an intelligent and confused young woman out of step with the world in which she is expected to live. Her strangely intellectual relationship with her father, the walk in the woods, the alienation with other girls in college, the thoughts that run through her head which intrude into her conscious actions all make her an outsider. The novel becomes increasingly dark and a little gothic as both the weather and Natalies sanity degrade into grey, wet, troublesome areas. The novel moves slowly towards its uncertain ending, but some fine writing and a feeling that something will happen just around the corner made this into a page turner. This is a fine achievement and probably deserves to be more well known. It has also reminded me that a survey of books from 1951 would not be complete without a re-read of The Catcher in the Rye, however I think it will need to be better than I remember to outdo my reading experience of Hangsaman 4.5 stars.

Richard Matheson - The Shrinking Man
Sex and science fiction were uncomfortable bed fellows in the 1950's, and I was surprised to find sexual issues addressed with some sympathy in Matheson's story of Scott Carey; The Shrinking Man. Shrinking an inch a week even after 6 months is likely to cause problems in many marital situations and after a year with no sign of a halt to the shrinking then relationships sexual and otherwise would have to be rethought. Scott Carey is a proud individualist and fights for survival until the very end; this does not usually sit with a more sensitive soul and after all this is a science fiction novel written in the 1950's when male chauvinistic men of mettle were the norm. Now I do not read science fiction from over 60 years ago for its exploration of sexual mores, but I do "sit up" when personal sexual difficulties are not only discussed, but are integral to the story line. Scott Carey in the prime of life does not lose his sexual appetite with his shrinking, but of course finds it difficult to talk about it to his wife.

In I Am Legend: Matheson first successful novel there was an overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia along with an increasingly desperate battle against impossible odds. This formula is largely repeated here: when we meet Scott Carey he is an inch high and is running across a desert, being pursued by a spider. As the book unfolds we learn through flashbacks that Scott has been trapped in the cellar for the last two and a half months and that his world has shrunk with his size. He is an inch tall and is resigned to shrinking one seventh of an inch per 24 hours and so by the end of the week he will cease to exist. We learn that a toxic mixture of radiation and insecticide has caused his condition and despite many weeks of treatment no cure has been found. He has remained at home being supported by his wife and his young daughter to the best of their abilities, but after he loses his job then the family face an increasingly difficult financial situation. The flash backs are interspersed with Scotts battle to stay alive in an increasingly hostile environment for the last seven days of his life. Finding water and food sets him off on climbing expeditions that test his physical abilities to their limit as well as extreme problem solving. These sections of the story are an adventure wonderland, but the interspersions of the back story are no less intriguing. They are mostly skilfully done and reveal aspects of Scotts character as well as an increasing alienation from a world that has grown too big for him.

One of the most poignant episodes is before eventually being trapped in the cellar, he is banished there by his wife who has to employ a child minder while she goes out to work. Scott has dealt badly with the publicity caused by his condition and does not wish to expose himself any further hence he must hide in the cellar. He fantasises about a beautiful 17 year old female child minder and when he finally catches sight of her he sees a dumpy teenager, but he still cannot control his desire and risks his life for glimpses of her from the high cellar window. This exploration of an inner life, conscious and unconscious puts this book firmly in the category of a novel, albeit a fantasy novel. Matheson has created a fantasy world that is full of realism and although the science is pure gobbledygook, his world is one of wonder. The Shrinking Man was published in 1956 and is now part of the science fiction masterwork series. The book has of course been made into a successful film "The Incredible Shrinking Man" scripted partly by Matheson.

This is a fantasy novel, although a dark and brooding one with gothic elements that might appeal to a crossover readership, Matheson has also made a name for himself in the horror genre and as a genre novel I rate it as a five star read.

>37 baswood: This sounds so intriguing. I remember rebeccanyc often mentioned it and it features in her "Best of the Rest" list for 2013. It appears in other Club Read threads from time to time, usually favourably .I wonder what it is that makes it more appreciated now than when it was first published.

>39 SassyLassy: "I wonder what it is that makes it more appreciated now than when it was first published."

That is difficult to answer, but could it be that its was a female writer who was writing about a young female teenager in 1951.?

>40 baswood: Unfortunately, you've probably hit it spot on.

William Walworth Kills Wat Tyler at London Bridge 1381

Richard Johnson - The Nine Worthies of London.
Next up on my reading list was Richard Johnson's The Nine Worthies of London published in 1592. I was a little surprised to find it was not a play and then braced myself for a read of a panegyric about celebrities from history. Little is known about Richard Johnson apart from what can be gleaned from his publications, he hit relative pay-dirt with "The Most Famous History of the Seven Champions of Christendom" a few years later which ran to several reprints and was popular with a middle class readership. I was not expecting to be entertained by the Nine Worthies of London, but ended up enjoying the reading experience.

Richard Johnson is considered to be a hack writer, a typical recycler of stories and legends that were becoming popular at the time, However several things lift his Nine Worthies out of the rut of the more typical romances of the period. Most of it is written in verse in sexains with a regular rhyming scheme, each of the nine worthies gets a chance to reflect on the lives they have led. There is an overarching story binding together these potted autobiographies. Fame travels to Parnassus the home of the nine muses and seeks out Clio who is responsible for history, they travel together to the underrearth where Clio shakes her wings; awakening nine bodies who are eager to tell their stories and they do so in lively verse form.

Apparently Richard Johnson was an apprentice himself according to the dedication at the start of this text. His nine worthies all share this humble start to life, and through hard work and effort they ended up being Lord Mayors of London and so there are nine rags to riches stories taken from English history from the period of King Edward III to Queen Mary:

First. SIr VVilliam VValworth Fishmonger, in the time of Richard the second.
Second. Sir Henrie Pitchard Vintener, in the time of Edward the third.
Third. Sir VVilliam Seuenoake Grocer, in the time of Henrie the fift.
Fourth. Sir Thomas VVhite Marchant-tailer, in the time of Queene Marie.
Fift. Sir Iohn Bonham Mercer, in the time of Ed∣ward the first.
Sixt. Sir Christopher Croker Vintener, in the time of Edward the third.
Seuenth. Sir Iohn Haukwood Marchant-tailer, in the time of Edward the third.
Eight. Sir Hugh Cauerley Silke-weauer, in the time of Edward the third.
Ninth. Sir Henrie Maleueret Grocer, in the time of Henrie the fourth

Many of theses worthies were new to me: I had heard of Sir John Hawkwood a famous mercenary soldier and Sir John Bonham more of a legendary figure honoured by the Turks, but this was the point of Johnson's book as he wished to highlight worthy men who should be revered for their achievements that were not necessarily gained through success on the battlefield. Sir Henrie Pitchard Knight is an example of a lord mayor who did not strive to get rich, but did all he could for the poor. He is remembered for entertaining King Edward III and three captive kings at his home in London which Sir Henrie proudly says he never thought would happen to a man of his humble upbringing. He reminds his readers that whatever station you have in life death comes to us all:

Yet lo this pompe did vanish in an houre,
There is no trusting to a broken staffe,
Mans carefull life doth wither like a flower,
The destenies do stroy what we do graffe:
For all his might, my gold wherewith I pleasde,
Death tooke vs both and would not be appeasde.

Johnson tells us there are more than enough statues to famous men of arms.

Sir William Walworth, the first on the list, was the Lord Mayor who killed the rebel Watt Tyler during the reign of a very young Richard II and he is allowed to boast a little:

The stroke was giuen with so good a will,
It made the Rebell coutch vnto the earth,
His fellowes that beheld (t'is strange) were still
It mard the manor of their former mirth:
I left him not, but ere I did depart,
I stabd my dagger to his damned heart.

Sir John Hawkwood the mercenary soldier is also allowed to reflect on his life:

All warres you see do ende as well as peace,
And then remaineth but a tumbe of dust,
A voyce of Fame, a blacke and mourning hearce,
To what then may we like this worldly lust:
It is an euill vapouring smoke that fumes,
Breaths in the braine, and so the life consumes.

Books such as this one by Richard Johnson were written as examples for people to emulate. They were moral stories written at a time (more than 100 years) before novels, that could give insights to the inner working of the mind were invented. Many such publications in the late 16th century were fairly turgid affairs and so it was good to come across something that hinted at deeper thoughts and whose lively verse form owed relatively little to the proscribed style in fashion at the time. A surprising 4 star read.

Henry VI part 1 (Arden Shakespeare) - William Shakespeare
Henry VI part 1, video BBC production
The first part of a tetralogy consisting of Henry VI parts 2 and 3 and Richard III. Critics agree it was one of the earliest of Shakespeare's plays and was performed in 1592, but they do not agree that it was the first play written of the tetralogy. Some critics claim that part 2 was written first closely followed by part 3 and then part1 and so I have read them in that order. There are no very famous lines from the play and it is the only one of the plays that I have read that does not have that "stand alone" feeling: it feels more obviously part of a series. It is a historical drama which does not aim to subvert the known facts, but does play havoc with the time line for dramatic effect.

The play starts with the funeral of Henry V. England is in mourning and the nobility are already arguing amongst themselves. The new king Henry VI has not reached the age of majority and does not yet appear in the play. Messengers arrive to interrupt the pageantry and the news is bad. Henry V's conquests in France are already falling apart and Talbot the warrior knight and scourge of the French has been captured. The Duke of Bedford the regent of France says he will take 10,000 troops across the channel. The scene shifts to France who has found a new military leader - the peasant girl Joan of Arc. Back in England the disorder amongst the nobility grows worse The young kings protector the Duke of Gloucester finds himself locked out of the Tower of London by the Bishop of Winchester and the first of many fighting scenes is the English fighting amongst themselves. Back in France Talbot has escaped, but his attempts to regain the conquered territories are meeting with fierce resistance from the French led by the young Dauphin Charles and Joan Purcelle (Joan of Arc). In England the new king is crowned, but in the famous Temple garden scene the nobility choose their sides in the coming power struggle by selecting a red or white rose. Henry VI and his entourage travel to Paris where he will be crowned again as king of France, meanwhile Talbot is still involved in a see-saw struggle of arms with Joan and the French, but he attends the coronation and there are glimmers of unity, but Richard Plantagenet the Duke of York has been instructed by old Mortimer that he has a legitimate claim to the throne. Talbot is soon back in arms and the fighting continues, he and his son are slaughtered outside Bordeaux, but the Duke of York who failed to provide the necessary support for him has captured Joan of Arc outside Rouen. He instructs that she be burnt at the stake as a witch. A truce is brokered and as part of the agreement the Duke of Suffolk has arranged for Margaret of Anjou to be the young king Henry's bride. The play ends with Margaret arriving in London, but already being wooed by Suffolk himself.

There is a lot of fighting: a continuous display of arms seems to take up the first three quarters of the play, all is bravado and derring-do and ends with the tragedy on the battlefield of the death of Talbot and his son. Then suddenly there is a truce and the play switches to a more romantic mode as Suffolk intrigues to get Margaret of Anjou wedded to the young king. On a first reading the play seems unbalanced and this readers attention was taken up by trying to work out who was fighting who and where, but it became clearer on a second read through. The play does have a logic to it and events follow each other as the play makes its dramatic points. The most obvious theme is the disunity caused by a king who has not reached the age of majority and of a disputed right of accession. Another is the end of chivalry, the French are being led by a female peasant for goodness sake and Talbot who is of the old school is mortally offended and says:

"My thoughts are whirled like a Potters Wheele,
I know not where I am, nor what I doe:
A Witch by feare, not force, like Hannibal,
Driues back our troupes, and conquers as she lists............

Seignior hang: base Muleters of France,
Like Pesant foot-Boyes doe they keepe the Walls,
And dare not take vp Armes, like Gentlemen

Joan is burnt as a witch and is treated with disdain by the Duke of York. Sir John Falstaff who runs away from battle is publicly stripped of his royal garter by Talbot who then lectures his fellow nobles on the significance of being awarded the order.

Shakespeare is setting the scene in this play for his depiction of the wars of the roses and the descent of England into chaos. The English are fighting amongst themselves and the French change sides when it suits them, this changing of allegiance will soon cross the channel and become a feature of part 2 of the tetralogy. The characters that will populate the later plays start to emerge. The fiercely proud Duke of York, the peace-loving King Henry VI whose courtiers snigger at his naiveté behind the scenes. The old protector the Duke of Gloucester who sees his control slipping away and the entrance of Margaret of Anjou who Suffolk thinks he can manipulate, but will find that it is he who is being played. The BBC produced plays of this series has kept the same actors in their roles as the events move on, that is of course until they meet their end, this process is started by Talbot and son in this play and will accelerate until the bloodbath in part 3. Shakespeare does repeat scenes in this: one of his earliest plays and although the language is recognisably Shakespearian it never rises to the heights of his subsequent efforts. His play does however fit together quite well and with its rousing battle scenes would have provided entertainment for its Elizabethan audience.

It has been produced a number of times on the modern stage and most successfully when it is followed by the other plays in the series. The poignant scene of the deaths of Talbot and his son John may have been Shakespeare's first tilt at tragedy:

Come, come, and lay him in his Fathers armes,
My spirit can no longer beare these harmes.
Souldiers adieu: I haue what I would haue,
Now my old armes are yong Iohn Talbots graue.

I suppose it has to be said that this early play is one for Shakespeare completists, but if you are going to read the more substantial King Henry VI parts 2 and 3 then it would be amiss to leave out this one 3.5 stars.

Moon Deluxe Stories - Frederick Barthelme
Diffident men play the mating game in suburban America. 17 short stories by Frederick Barthelme published in 1983. Barthelme was editor of the Mississippi review for 35 years and his stories are well written with detail and atmosphere that conjure up life in residential suburbs. People meet, interact amidst a landscape of plasticity, so concerned with consumerism that they hardly see anything else. Soulless, emotionally void the male characters deal with chance meetings against a backdrop of boredom and loneliness. No dramas, but a fascinating look at the lives of a series of men seen through their own eyes as many of the stories are written in the first or second person.

Shopgirls the second story in the collection gives a flavour of the stories that are to follow; written in the second person a good looking man becomes obsessed by one of the female sales people in a department store. After some chiding by some other sales ladies in the store you are invited back to Andreas flat and you eat together and tell each other a little about your past life, however you notice a slight imperfection in Andreas make-up and suddenly she looks wrong to you, you do not want to hurt her feelings and so you stay until midnight. This is how the story ends:

"When she decides to go to bed you make no move to follow her into the bedroom, and she makes no special invitation. You sleep on the sofa, fully dressed without even a sheet to cover you. You imagine yourself leaving the apartment on a sunny day in the middle of the week. Three beautiful women in tiny white bikinis lift their sunglasses as you pass them in the courtyard. They smile at you. You drive to the mall in a new car and spend two hours in Housewares on the second floor. You do not remember ever having been on the second floor before. Kitchen equipment is exquisite, you believe. You buy a wood handled spatula from a lovely girl with clean short hair."

Sex and consumerism, but when the going gets tough the men and the women go shopping. All the stories are written from the male perspective, but in the majority of them the women are in control if control is the right word, it is more like a careless insouciance an insouciance about their own sexuality. The men are attracted, but in most cases ultimately repelled. The stories are too short to go into motives of these people many of whom one thinks would be hard pressed to communicate reasons for their actions and some of the stories appear as mere curios, but there is usually an atmosphere of uncertainty of irresolution that is intriguing. I enjoyed reading these stories with their flavour of suburban life in the 1980's 3.5 stars and it goes back on the bookshelf.

Le Hussard sur le Toit - Jean Giono (The Horseman on the roof)
Temperatures in France this summer have reached nearly 40 degrees a handful of times in my area and it was during one of these periods that I became engrossed in Jean Gionos book, which features a canicule (heatwave) during a pandemic for which there was no known cure. Reading with the shutters of the house all closed up to keep out the sun and with the contagion figures for covid -19 increasing at a frightening rate outside it was small wonder that I could so easily identify with the Horseman on the Roof (there were other reasons too which will become evident). Giono's book is set in the Provence area of France during the first wave of the cholera epidemic in the early 1830's and the hero: Angelo a captain in the Italian cavalry is riding through the area on some sort of mission, when he becomes caught up in the catastrophic effects of the pandemic.

Le Hussard sur le Toit was published in 1951 and is considered to be the last of Giono's grand oeuvres although he died in 1970. It was a long time in gestation and it feels like a book written over a long period of time. Giono was born and died in Manosque in the Alpes-de-Haut-Provence and the town features in his book, but it is the descriptions of the countryside suffering from the heatwave that give this book such a powerful presence. Like many of Giono's characters the author is slow to reveal their names and as the Horseman rides through the shinning white heat of the canicule we gradually learn more about him. He is in exile from Italy after an ill considered dual with an Austrian from the ruling class. Angelo believes he was fighting for liberty, but was forced to flee. He hears stories of a mystery disease in the land he is travelling through and then suddenly is confronted with the reality when he stumbles into a hamlet, which is covered under a cloud of flies and a murder of crows. He sees the body of a woman on the path outside the house and finds inside the houses dead bodies being eaten by birds and domestic animals, his horse panics and flees and is brought back to him by a young French doctor who is out on call. They find a young boy who collapses in front of them the doctor immediately springs into action desperately trying to restore circulation to the boy who loses control of all bodily functions and vomits the tell tale signs of creamed rice (le riz au lait), the two men work for two hours on the boy and Giono describes the desecration of the boy's body with the cholera in some detail. The boy dies horribly in spasms and the doctor anxiously asks Angelo if he can still feel his legs, but it is the doctor who succumbs and Angelo cannot save him.

Shaken by the events Angelo arrives in the town of Manosque at nightfall and when he is seen washing his hands in the fountain he is accused of spreading the disease; a local militia hunts him down but he manages to escape onto the rooftops of the houses. He spends the next few days living on the rooves, foraging below in abandoned houses for food and fighting off the swallows and crows who are becoming crazed with the availability of human flesh. Angelo witnesses many appalling scenes below of residents succumbing to the cholera. He finally gets off the roof when he goes to the help of a nun who has charged herself with helping the afflicted and removing those past all help. Angelo continues his travels when the cholera has wiped out most of the town; he is searching for his boyhood friend and comrade in arms Giuseppe who has also fled Italy, but travelling becomes increasingly difficult as the area is becoming shut down by the army in the belief that the contagion is spread by bodily contact. Angelo meets a young woman (much later revealed as Pauline) and protects her in her efforts to find her husband. They take small country roads and tracks trying to avoid the quarantines and become prisoners in a town where they are kept in an abandoned castle with other people picked up on the highways. They witness many more horrible deaths in a nightmare scenario, but Angelo's military training equips him to outwit the local militia's and police forces. The two never lose their self belief that they will come through the epidemic.

Giono's descriptions of the countryside burning under the heatwave are interlaced with his record of Angelo's journey and his battle with the cholera and the police forces. The horror of the deaths of those infected are given first hand portrayals as Angelo follows the example of the young French doctor in trying to do what he can to help. Angelo himself is honourable , courteous and optimistic, never giving up hope in the face of appalling events, he believes in the goodness of humanity despite his own experiences, but he is a proud man and this conflicts with his curtesy and he struggles with the events that have forced him from his homeland.

There are similarities to Albert Camus' The Plague, published four years before but the feel and thrust of Giono's book is entirely different. It is less political, more earthy perhaps more fundamental and yet it has a similar idea of treating the disease as an occupying force. There is no cure and the country that Angelo travels through is similar to a country under army occupation. Angelo fights for his freedom, his liberty and his desire to make things right, however Giono has set his book back in the 1830's when a cavalry officer was seen as a heroic figure and Angelo and Pauline's honour and curtesy are far different from the characters that people Camus' book. Giono is concerned with morality, the instances of humans stepping up, taking enormous risks for the good of others, even when many have succumbed to a bleak worthless future, but the reality of the disease always grounds this book back in the dirt and filth of the darker side of humanity.

Towards the very end of the book as Angelo and Pauline are nearing the town of Gap high in the Alps, they come across a man living in a ruin of a house. Described as the "man in the redingote" (fitted coat and we never learn his name) he lives surrounded by books and artefacts. He feeds his visitors with a heartening stew and a good slug of rum, before launching into a lecture about the effects of the cholera on the population and his view on how people can survive. He appears to have been a doctor, but although he goes someway in getting closer to a way of preventing the spread of the disease he is more interested in theorising why it attacks some people and not others. His long speech (nearly twenty pages of the book) talks of how some people are more susceptible than others, according to their moral make up; their moral fibre. He condemns those who he says are jumping with pride and how the cholera reduces them down to the level of others. A certain pride has been an essential characteristic of Angelo: pride in his patriotism, pride in his beliefs and pride in his uniform and the speech goes some way to drawing together those elements in the book, despite if being incoherent in places and more like a rant. Angelo and Pauline still have a chapter of the book left to come to the end of their journey, but it is the speech of the "man in the redingote" that rings out most loud.

Some books are memorable because they provide a reading experience that is different from others; this maybe because of the way it is written or it maybe because of the place and time one chooses to read it. A book like Le Hussard sur le Toit can fall into that category, because of the relentless feel of the disease and the repetition of Giono's writing. There are pages of descriptions of the landscape and there are pages of descriptions of the effects of the cholera so that it all feels claustrophobic. Giono repeats himself driving home the atmosphere created by this novel, of course we want to know what happens to Angelo and there are some memorable incidents, but it is the feel of the burning heat in the countryside and the dirt and squalor of the disease that leaves a lasting impression. 5 stars.

Across the Zodiac - Percy Greg
A science fiction novel published in 1880, which has been cited for being the first such novel to attempt to give the nuts and bolts of an alien language: unfortunately Percy Greg did not stop there, but supplied the nuts and bolts of many other things as well, making his novel a bit of a trial to read. It was published in two volumes and while it might have kept Victorian audiences entertained it only sparked occasionally into life for me. There is also the depiction of the child-like women, which just about stays the right side of being creepy.

It is a story of one man's solo flight to the planet Mars which was discovered from papers found in a crater on a Pacific island. It is told in the first person and seems to be dated 1830. The hero of this tale finds a Martian civilisation more advanced than that on earth, but he has the advantage of being a foot taller than the average and also posses strength and agility because of gravitational differences. The interest shown in his space flight makes him welcome as a guest in a rich man's house, he learns the language, marries one of the daughters and then discovers there is an underground movement to re-introduce religion into society. He becomes a leading member of the new movement, who are planning some sort of coup. Mars has a monarch who becomes fascinated with the spaceman and grants him a palace and a harem of his own.

Percy Greg spends many words creating a Martian society, based around women being virtual slaves to the men. Because of his size the spaceman sees the women as child-like creatures and treats them accordingly, trying to control their petulant and wilful behaviour, even his favourite wife he refers to as "child." My issues with this novel were the prosaic descriptions and the sometimes turgid explanations of Martian speech and manners. In their original form each of these volumes ran to nearly 300 pages and I found it hard work to keep my eyes on the page. There is an interesting story and it is an early example of world building, but two stars from me.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach - Les Amis de Bernhard
Les Amis de Bernhard was published in 1931, it was Schwarzenbach's first novel and it tells the story of a group of young artists trying to make a living in Paris and Berlin and coming to terms with their sexuality. It's main focus is Berlin where some young people enjoyed a bohemian lifestyle just before the Nazi takeover in 1933. Annemarie Schwarzenbach was born in Switzerland in 1908 and after completing her doctorate in history she spent some years in Berlin and moved in a circle that included Erika and Klaus Mann (daughter and son of Thomas Mann). Annemarie had from an early age dressed herself as a boy and set her cap at Erika, but she was to be disappointed. Her first novel reflects the artistic community that she was so anxious to be included within.

Bernhard is a young musician that is recognised by some critics to posses a special talent but he lacks the drive and ambition that might push him onwards :

Tout le monde aime Bernhard, dit-elle, c’est un garçon vraiment gentil et d’un charme rare”

He settles to make a living by giving music lessons, not even having the confidence to try his hand at playing in cafes. He has two special friends Gert and Innes whom he met at the conservatoire and they form a sort of threesome while all the time Gert and Innes talk of Bernhard's child like characteristics and Gert falls in love with the prospect of making a perfect drawing of Bernhard's features. Christina, a successful artist falls into their circle and she has a younger brother Leon a fiercely talented artist. Gert begs to meet up with him and travels to Berlin to meet him and soon moves in to his apartment where he shares his bed and they work together. Leon has perhaps the selfishness needed to succeed and Gert becomes bitterly disappointed when he realises that he is not the centre of Leon's world: Christina warned him that this would be the case. The story moves away from Bernhard in Paris and onto Berlin with Gert and Leon who have left Innes trailing in their wake.

The book's themes are the difficulties of carving a place for yourself in an artistic milieu while at the same time not losing confidence in yourself and your abilities. There are other characters involved: Gerald is a successful surgeon and also a patron of the arts, he has an interest in young girls, but sees in Bernhard with his waif like qualities someone he is prepared to nurture, but again this is a one way relationship. Bernhard meets Betsy a wealthy young American woman to whom he gives singing lessons, but when she moves back to America it causes the start of a crisis for Bernhard and then there is the precocious thirteen year old Mica under the protection of Gerald. The need to earn money only affects some of the characters, these are largely privileged young people drifting around trying to find meaning to their lives. Although the epoch is lightly sketched is gives enough background to the story: Hitler is only mentioned once when Gert asks someone what they think of Hitler and does not receive much of a reply.

This is a book is a Libretto edition which is a French publishing house that seems to specialise in early 20th century literature. This book was translated from the German. There are other books published by Libretto from the same author who led an interesting life in the arts, in travel and in drug taking - she died young. I enjoyed this short excursion into Mitteleuropa and so 3.5 stars.

>47 baswood: That sounds really interesting! I’ve had Schwarzenbach on my list for years, but never got around to her...
You should probably read Mephisto next!

From Here to Eternity - James Jones
A doorstop (nearly 1000 pages) published in 1951 tells the fictional story from the inside of a number of enlisted men of an infantry division of the United States Army posted in Hawaii in 1941 taking in the attack on Pearl harbour. The author James Jones enlisted in the US army in 1939 at the age of 17 in the 25th infantry division stationed in Hawaii and uses that experience to make his novel drip with the realism of life in an army barracks during the first year of the second world war for the United States. This is not a novel for the feint hearted and forcibly expresses the culture of army life in the 1940's when men were hardened for war and all the women were called whores. It is a novel that takes you into another world, one that probably still exists to a certain extent and I found myself wrapped up in the edginess of the characters who fight to make sense of the life of men who serve in the armed forces.

About three quarters of the way through the novel Private Robert E Lee Prewitt is court-martialled for assaulting a senior offices. He is a man who you would be wise to ask first before using his nickname Prew. His pride and his obstinacy have set him up against the system that he knows and loves. He has been overlooked for a promotion and transferred to another unit who take him because of his boxing skills (before hostilities, commissioned officers lived or died by the athletic successes of the men they commanded), but Prewitt for personal reasons will not join the boxing team. He is given the "treatment" by his commanding officers who want to break his spirit and make him change his mind. When an irresistible force meets an immovable object then Prewitts path to a court martial and time in prison (the Stockade) seems inevitable

In room no 2 in the stockade Prew thinks that he is amongst men just like himself - he thinks “that he did not have to explain", because each one of them had the same hard unbroachable sense of ridiculous personal honour that he had never been able to free himself from either.

Hard labour in the stockade comes with cruel beatings as the breaking of a man's spirit is the only way of getting him in the right frame of mind to take his place back in the army.

Private Prewitts story runs in parallel to that of Milt Warden a staff sergeant who takes pride in his ability to play the system for his own ends. Like Prewitt he has the same pride in his abilities; pouring scorn on those around him who he can harass and bully. The Warden as he is called finds himself in deep water when he falls in love with his commanding officers wife. His playing of the system does not stretch quite far enough to allow him to indulge in a long term affair with Karen Holmes and like Prewitt who falls in love with Alma the most beautiful girl in the services-men's brothel he struggles to contain his feelings within the context of the harsh army life that he leads.

Towards the end of the novel the attack on Pearl Harbour which results in the infantry seeing action for the first time albeit far enough back from the centre of the attack so as not to endanger life: leads to the army being put on a war footing with the inevitable tightening of security measures. Both Prewitt and Warden are forced to make choices in a new lockdown situation.

Author James Jones knew how the army works and his own experiences would have enabled him to draw and refine the male characters that people his novel and while he may have too rosey a picture of the women who work in the brothels, he is more convincing with the restrictions that army wives must undergo and the life that they are forced to lead. His book bristles with machismo and sexism as the cultural norm, but there is room for finer feelings and briefly Warden and to a lesser extent Prewitt attempt to find a more enlightened viewpoint. They indulge themselves in cod psychology and Prewitt is searching for someone to provide him with some answers that he can accept. Jones is careful not to take this too far and the level of discussion is probably fitting to that of young army recruits, however these young recruits do not lack experience of the culture of a disciplined service that needs to be ready for war.

Jones attempts to re-create the dialogue that he would have heard during his time in the army and so there is some slang; phrases are shortened and words are made up or misspelt. This gives his story some authenticity, but is not overdone to the extent of making parts of his book unreadable. I found the whole novel very readable indeed. This was Jones first novel and he went onto write Some Came Running and The Thin Red Line among others in which his military experience and knowledge also played a major part. I am pleased to have been taken into the world that Jones inhabited, but probably won't feel the need to read another. However 4 stars for this mammoth undertaking.

I hope to catch a showing of the 1953 film soon if only to see Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling about in the surf on the beach.

>45 baswood: Although I read this in English, I remember well the feeling of heat and claustrophobia you reference. Reading it now as you did would add an extra dimension. Enjoyed the review and the rethink it prompted.

Thomas Nashe - Pierce Penilesse his supplication to the Devil
- Summers last will and testament.
Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) was an Elizabethan playwright poet and satirist, but made his name as a pamphleteer. Pierce Penilesse was his most popular pamphlet and Summer's Last Will and Testament is a play of sorts, but the interesting thing about these two works were that they were probably written in 1592 the year that the plague struck London resulting in the closure of the theatres. The closure of the theatres meant that many avid theatre goers especially those people of leisure suddenly had afternoons to fill and Nashe was able to profit from this by supplying reading material, which may have been a substitute for live theatre performances. This is especially true of Summer's Last Will and Testament which although written as a Performance play has no action (apart from people entering and leaving the stage) and serves just as well as a piece of rhetoric to be read aloud by a small group of people.

Thomas Nashe is not easy for 21st century readers because of: his use of satire, his expectation that readers will be familiar with recent artistic and historical events and his use of Latin Phrases. He has however abandoned the over elaborate style of John LIly, which in my opinion was becoming tedious to strike out with his own less formal sentence structure. This makes his writing more readable, but his use of allegory, his satire and his tendency to wander off into side issues and ambiguity, (sometimes in the same sentence) does not always make it easy to follow. It was a text where I found myself re-reading previous sentences to discover how I had got so lost in what the author was saying.

Pierce Penilesse, His supplication to the Devil is a prose satire in which Pierce makes a written request to serve the devil in hell, because of his miserable circumstances. He is an educated man; a poet who has failed to gain patronage or make a decent living from his writing. He is proud, sometimes naive and feeling vengeful:

"But beware you that be great mens Favorites: let not a servile insinuating slave creepe betwixt your legs into credit with your Lords: for pesants that come out of the colde of povertie, once cherisht in the bosome of prosperitie, will straight forget that ever there was a winter of want, or who gave them roome to warme them.".....................With the enemies of Poetrie, I care not if I haue a bout, and those are they that tearme our best Writers but babling Ballat-makers, holding them fantasticall fooles"

Nashe seems to make an exception for actors and stage performers, but one can never be sure how much is ironical. Nashe then goes on to describe the the seven deadly sins one by one with plenty of examples and with the underlying motif that those people who have given into them have brought down the plague on London. Pierce has found someone who he thinks is an emissary from the devil (found in St Pauls courtyard; a place where printers and pamphleteers sold their wares) and asks him what it is like in hell. Of course he does not get a straight answer, but is told that people by their actions create their own hell wherever they are. This is an interesting idea, but Nashe does not really follow this through, instead he launches into a tale of the wicked bear and the fox, which would probably have kept contemporary readers wondering who they were meant to depict. It has certainly exercised the minds of scholars of more recent times.

Thomas Nashe was an author of one of the more famous Marprelate pamphlets earlier in his writing career; taking the side of the bishops who were under attack from the puritans. Satire, irony in-jokes and scurrilously libel prose were the stock in trade for these pieces and there is something of this in Pierce Penilesse.

Summers last Will and Testament is a more lighthearted affair, but contains plenty of satirical barbs aimed at authors and those that patronise them. Will Summers was a famous court jester at the time of Henry VIII and he makes an appearance in this play. Summer is coming to an end and he is the Lord of the seasons and he summons Spring, Autumn and Winter and asks them in turn to make a case to receive his legacy. Significantly Winter is blamed for providing the circumstances in which the plague would flourish:

Autumne hath all the Summers fruitefull treasure,
Gone is our sport, fled is poore Croydens pleasure:
Short dayes, sharpe dayes, long nights come on a pace,
Ah who shall hide vs, from the Winters face?
Colde dooth increase, the sicknesse will not cease,
And here we lye God knowes, with little ease:
From winter, plague & pestilence, good Lord deliver vs.

Summoned onto the stage also are: Time, Sol the sun, Bachus the god of wine, Orion the Hunter and Harvest. All are quizzed as to their part in providing the conditions for sickness and disease and their part in mans downfall. They all vigorously defend themselves and Autumn, Winter and Spring are careful to disassociate themselves. There are songs and music as Nashe tries to entertain rather than lecture. There are more latin phrases used and casual references to classical literature point to a court entertainment. It was performed in the Bishops Palace at Croydon in the early autumn of 1592 and was revived for the first time in 2017 in the same venue. It seems to have been successful.

For 21st century readers Nashe is not easy to read without some background knowledge - 3 stars.

A very different St. Paul’s, I imagine. I finally saw Wren’s in December.

Enjoyed catching up and appreciate having your take on these more obscure but interesting 1951 books. Noting H VI part one. We should work through these plays in the foreseeable future in my Litsy Shakespeare group.

Jules Verne - Autour de La Lune
Around the moon published in 1869 is the sequel to Verne's From the Earth to the Moon published four years earlier. It qualifies as the first real hard science fiction novel containing at one point an algebraic equation as proof of the speed necessary for the three adventures to leave the earths atmosphere. This sequel takes up the story of the earlier novel where the three adventurers (they cant really be called astronauts) are waiting for the enormous cannon to be fired that will launch their hollowed out bullet like capsule towards the moon. Two Americans: Barbican the President of the gun club and Nicholl the scientist along with the Frenchman the bon viveur Michael Ardan are resting on their water filled couches and awaiting the explosion. The cannon is successfully fired and the three men gradually regain consciousness and check their calculations to ensure that they will hit the moon.

On the journey to the moon they are knocked off course by a tiny asteroid and find themselves in orbit around the moon with their hopes dashed of making a landing and resigned to being entombed in a satellite that will forever circle the moon. It is at this point when the three men particularly the scientists have considered all their options that the Frenchman says 'There is only one thing that we can do - we must sit down and have lunch' and he cracks open a bottle of good quality french wine.

It is of course a preposterous story from the vantage of our 21st century knowledge of a journey to the moon, but Verne spends a large part of this novel bombarding the reader with factual detail, which includes a potted history of the use of telescopes and calculations of distances and speeds needed for a trip to the moon, much of this would appear to be accurate, but don't ask me as my eyes started to glaze over when I came across that equation. Perhaps Verne was trying to convince his readers in 1869 that such a trip under the circumstances that he imagined was possible, but all that will be lost on todays readers and all that is left for us to do is to verify what he got right. The devil may care attitude of the characters also rings hollow, although there are some amusing moments. This is a story where scientific detail gets in the way of a good story line - sounds like hard science fiction to me and so 3 stars.

Fritz Leiber - Gather, Darkness
A mix of genres for Leiber's first work to appear in book form (1951). This science fiction/fantasy story was originally serialised in Astounding magazine starting in May 1943. Astounding magazine was subtitled science fiction and its stories have a reputation of leaning towards a "literature of ideas". Gather, Darkness would have been right at home there.

It is set on earth during the year 2305. The earth is ruled by a Theocracy and the priesthood is known as the Hierarchy. There are references back to a Golden Age of Civilization from which the Hierarchy have gathered technological knowhow and some weaponry, society is now made up of a clerical elite and non members of the priesthood who are known as commoners. Unsurprisingly the commoners do all the work and the clerics rule by fear from their headquarters in Megatheopolis. There is an underground movement amongst the commoners known as the Witches and when one of the lower order priests denounces his superiors in the central square he finds some unexpected help from the Witches movement that is shrouded in mystery. On the surface they appear to be women who have minor spell casting abilities, but are a cover for a more sinister organisation that has technology of its own. The book features witches familiars, a sisterhood of sorts and an attempt to seize power, but the main thrust of the story is the battle between the Hierarchy: (riven itself into "realists" and "fanatics") and the Witches revolutionary movement. What appears to be spell casting or divine intervention is driven all along by scientific hardware. There is even a duel with wrath rods which appear to be light lasers like something out of Star Wars.

This is plot driven sword and sorcery science fiction with enough mystery to keep the reader turning the pages. I enjoyed the mix of genres which is handled well and the writing is good enough to keep it all moving along, but which also can find time to fill in some gaps with some imaginative ideas. There are no super heroes, and characterisation is not a priority here. Not a classic by any means, but a good example of the stories that might appear in Astounding Magazine - 3 stars.

William Boyd - The Blue Afternoon
There are plenty of things that I did not like about Boyd's The Blue Afternoon, but the excellent telling of a story is not one of them. The limpid style and the sometimes unexpected note of hitting the human condition right between the eyes adds to an intriguing tale. Published in 1993 this is Boyd's sixth novel to hit the bookstores and he had by this time already established himself as a best selling novelist.

The novel is divided in three unequal parts. The middle section is by far the longest and tells the story of Doctor Carriscant, it is set in Manila in 1902 and although Carriscant is telling the story of his life in the Philippines it is told in the third person. Carriscant was a surgeon in a large hospital and his new ideas of scrupulous cleanliness and his operating skills and teamwork had resulted in a huge success rate in comparison with the old style surgeon Dr Cruz who was still wallowing in filth. There is a guerrilla war against American forces taking place in the countryside, but this has little impact on life in Manilla. Doctor Carriscant falls in love with Delphine who is married to an American Officer, they conduct a difficult affair amidst the spying servants and the close knit community. Carriscant has other problems a series of gruesome murders of American serviceman leads Paton Bobby as the investigating officer to Carriscant's door first to help with the medical details, but then as a suspect. Carriscant's anaesthetist Pantaleon after learning of Carriscant's affair blackmails him into co-piloting an attempt on the heavier than air (motorised) flight distance record.

The first section is told in the first person by Kay Fischer making a living as an architect in Los Angeles in 1936. Carriscant contacts her claiming that she is his daughter. Kay has no reason to believe him and her mother who is still alive stays by her story that a certain Englishman Hugh Paget was her father, but he died two months after she was born. Kay however gets drawn into Carriscant's claim and agrees to help him in a search for Paton Bobby who has retired to LA. They find Bobby and this is when Carriscant tells her his story. This first section is told as a pastiche of a Raymond Chandler mystery thriller with Kay acting out the role of a hard headed business woman. The final part is of course the search for Delphine who Carriscant believes is still alive and living in Lisbon and we are back with Kays first person story, but the pastiche is missing. This leads to one of the problems I found with the novel it does not quite hang together. Boyd has created a mystery and a style of telling the story only to abandon it when Cariiscant's story is told. There are also plenty of gaps in Carriscants tale that are never resolved, maybe because he is an unreliable narrator or because Boyd does not want to provide the reader with all the answers, but some of the answers would have been good.

The story of the love affair and the clandestine relationship is the best and most intriguing part of the book. The murder story is gruesome as is the descriptions of the operations and Dr Cruz is shown as a monster, Boyd likes to rub his readers noses in the filth and the dirt, and this can spill over into his telling of acts of physical love, where he strives to convey an erotism that made this reader feel a bit like a voyeur.

As a spinner of tales Boyd is right on the money, but at the end of the day I did not believe any of it, despite some flashing insights in human psychology that the author suddenly seems to pluck out of the ether and that do ring true. This novel is good entertainment with Boyd's skill at setting his characters in a time and place and providing enough of a sketch to fill in some of the background. A beach read, but one that may leave the reader a little frustrated. 3.5 stars.

This was the next unread book on my shelves, which I must have bought in a charity shop. The books price had been reduced from £3.50 to 50p and inside was a newspaper clipping giving a good review of the book. I presume this was an enterprising bookseller but it could have been a reader who wanted to remind him/herself of the book.

>53 baswood: If you must read science fiction, then at least let it have equations in the text! :-)
(Looks like conservation of energy, standard "A" level physics stuff.)

>55 baswood: Boyd is someone who gets a lot of good reviews, but I've never got very far with him. Not sure why.

I should say around 2-3% of the secondhand books I buy arrive with a yellowed press cutting or two folded into the flyleaf — it must have been a fairly general habit among a certain type of reader (academics, at a guess) at one time. I even got one recently that was obviously a review copy, where the reviewer had left a carbon copy of his typescript review in the flyleaf.

The Rise of the Novel - Ian Watt
Published in 1957 Watt's book became the go-to book for many English literature students. Considered a little naive and outdated today perhaps, but it was still being used enthusiastically after it was published in a Pelican edition in 1972 if my copy is anything to go by: there are copious passages underlined some notes and evidence of at least three different students. The book is subtitled: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding and Watt analyses Robinson Crusoe (1719) Pamela or Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady (1747) by Samuel Richardson and finally The History of Tom Jones a foundling (1749) by Fielding to demonstrate why he thought these books were the start of novel writing and making an almost clean break from previous fictional writing.

He asks himself the following questions: What, exactly distinguishes the novel from all earlier forms of narrative fiction? and How does social change influence the evolution of literary form?. He starts by stating that realism is the defining characteristic which differentiates the work of early 18th century novelists from previous fiction and goes on to change the label a little by referring to formal realism, which he says is the:

"particularisation of time, place, and person: to a natural and lifelike sequence of action; and to the creation of a literary style which gives the most exact verbal and rhythmical equivalent possible to the object described."

He briefly refers to previous fictional writing such as Romances and Courtly love, Italian Renaissance short stories, Rogue literature and points out how much of this referred back to classical literature: where style was as important as content and authors took their plots from mythology, history, legend, or previous literature. Early fiction was rarely set in a time or place where the plot could logically progress; coincidences, the wheel of fortune or disguises were used to move the story along; characters were not fleshed out their actions did not follow from previous experiences and finally there was no attempt to come to terms with inner lives or their psychological profile. Watt claims that Robinson Crusoe was the first book length fictional writing that would qualify under his definition of novel writing.

Watt covers the changing social conditions that laid the groundwork for a new kind of fiction writing in his chapter: "The Reading Public and the Rise of the Novel" and then launches into an analysis of Robinson Crusoe pointing out how different this was from previous fiction. He claims Defoe was the first writer who visualised the whole of his narrative as though it occurred in an actual physical environment and he came up with an original storyline that owed very little to previous fictional writing and was independent of literary conventions. Defoe's ideas on rational economic individualism and his naked capitalism which drives much of his hero Robinson Crusoe' actions does not escape criticism and Watt doesn't believe that Defoe managed to reveal much of Crusoe's inner life. Watt claims that Samuel Richardson's two epistolatory novels come the closest to his definition of formal realism and that his characters reveal more of their inner lives. Watt's close reading of passages from Pamela and Clarissa are enough to encourage me to read these two doorstops: editions of Clarissa run to 1,500 pages.

There is a short final chapter: Realism and the Later Tradition (described as a note) which mentions other writers of English novels that Watt feels enhanced the tradition of the novel. In Watt's opinion the novel reached its apogee with James Joyce's Ulysses. I found Watts criticism lively and thought provoking especially on Robinson Crusoe which I have read and his reasons for claiming it as the first in the genre of novel writing. His thoughts are clear and these studies do not get bogged down in academia. I will enjoy re-reading this when I get to reading Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding.
5 stars.

>57 baswood: That was one I didn’t know about — obviously just a bit too recent for my father to have used it as a student, but out of date by the time I came along. I’ll have to look out for it.

How does he get around Don Quijote? Presumably he has some reason for not considering it to be a proper novel.

Does he talk about the economics of novel production at all, or is it all about literary content?

>58 thorold: He only considers English language fiction. He has a chapter on The Reading Public and the Rise of the Novel where he covers the costs of printing books and the ability of more readers being able to afford the books and the start of the circulating libraries. He does not go into great detail, but makes some interesting points about the availability of books.

>57 baswood: He claims Defoe was the first writer who visualised the whole of his narrative as though it occurred in an actual physical environment

Had never thought of Robinson Crusoe in that way before, but I think it is a really interesting point that I can't disagree with. On my most recent reading of the novel I was struck by how much religious content there was, but the surroundings were really part of it as well. Perhaps Aphra Behn, as an almost contemporary, might be the closest in that respect.

Love the cover.

The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas - Rick Harsch
The great American novel, let us not be presumptuous; a great American novel.

Who best to write about his country than an American in exile. Exiles have a view both from the inside and from the outside; who better to come to a conclusion about what is wrong or right about their country of origin. One loses count of how many exiles come back to seize power in their country of their birth. Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini known as the Ayatollah springs to mind an anathema to many Americans. Will Rick Harsch exiled in Slovenia writing The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas be a railhead, a clarion call to fire up the semi-moribund state of literature in the U.S A.? The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas (which deserves it's own acronym (TMDOEV)) could be the hot pick for every library in America if Rick Harsch could win his battle with the mighty Amazon(onians) but that's a story for another book.

Dictionary.com says that Manifold Destiny is a belief or doctrine, held chiefly in the middle and later part of the 19th century, that it was the destiny of the U.S. to expand its territory over the whole of North America and to extend and enhance its political, social and economic influences: in the 21st century one could substitute the World for North America. Nuclear bomb (testing and usage) in the 20th century and drone strikes in the 21st century are the outward signs of this process and feature in the central story of TMDOEV. Manifold Destiny can also refer to a pure mathematical problem known as Poincaré's conjecture (a century old conundrum about the characteristics of three-dimensional spheres) which was claimed to have been solved in 2003 by Chineses mathematicians and has now morphed into Chineses expansionism. Manifold Destiny is also the title of a book subtitled: The One The Only Guide to Cooking on your car Engine, (but we won't go into that) therefore Manifold Destiny can mean different things to different people and this brings me to the second big theme of Rick Harsch's book: language and the way we use it.

Through the Garvin family Harsch tells the story of America from its pioneering mountain men days fighting the indians to its surgical strikes on muslim leaders. Eddie Vegas is a Garvin who changed his name after breaking out of prison, he is searching for his son Donnie (no-one wants to be called Donald these days) who has travelled to Brussels with a super rich American named Drake. Along the way there are lively stories about Garvins ancestors, interspersed with Donnie and Drake marking time in Brussels. Drake is summoned back to America after the murder of his parents who were in the business of clandestine terrorism around the world. They are followed back by "Picasso Tits" who has become Drakes lover in Brussels and the mysterious 22b. The story reaches its conclusion in the desert outside Las Vegas and while the central story is a good one, involving family connections and loyalties, the real meat of the book is the getting there. The story of the original Tom Garvin and Hector Robitaille who survived a bear attack is a brilliant evocation of American wild lands before civilization: the struggle to survive, the reliance on or the menace of the indigenous Indian peoples and the bridge of a mixed language of words as a means of communication: Harsch makes up his own language to give an authenticity to this section of the book. One could say that much of the book is written in a language that is familiarly English but twisted, bent out of shape as the story demands. The book is full of good stories, wild characters and American landscapes, but it is also full of something else and that is Harsch's use of language.

Readers of Rick Harsch's work will not be surprised by his use of alliteration, striking metaphors and word changing: nouns become adjectives or adverbs, words are invented to assist in the flow of the writing. The cleverness of some of this language goes way beyond the tired old wisecracks that litter much of modern writing. Rick is a master of a style that will be familiar as stream of consciousness, but when Harsch uses it there is a feeling of really being inside the head of his characters. There are passages when the author interjects into his own story and then the reader feels he inside the head of Rick Harsch, not always a comfortable place; but then this is not a comfortable book. The character can find themselves arguing about language; the meaning of words: this is a short section where Drake and Donnie and 'Picasso Tits' are talking about stochastic inertia:

"You don't understand the meaning at all do you?"
" No less than before you asked. But as far as that goes we really have to admit we've been pretty gullible when it comes to presuming to understand meanings at all. We manage by refusing gravidity of meaning to mystifying objects"
"I have no idea what the fuck you are talking about"

A word of advice to readers of this book: don't refuse gravidity of meaning, You could be missing much.

A book that reaches to portray the soul of America, through a history of stories and in a language that brings those stories alive must be considered as an important event in these days of some facile modern writing. Rick Harsch is not afraid to take risks, his lengthy tome of over 700 pages has most things including some pages of lists of random (maybe) phrases. The fact that it is all bound up in a story that bubbles along seemingly of its own accord makes the journey worthwhile. I found my experience of being in Rick Harsch's world both exciting and entertaining and for readers who might want to try something a little different then I would recommend getting a copy sooner rather than later (my copy comes from a limited edition of 100 copies) A five star read.

PS I had to get my copy direct from the author himself as it is not available though Amazon or it's subsidiaries.

Diana, Henry Constable
A collection of Sonnets, some of which were published in 1592 but many added later. Constable's poetry was much admired by his contemporary critics. They take the Petrarchan model as a base and follow in the footsteps of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophell and Stella. Sonnet collections from this period have since been grouped together under the genre of Elizabethan Love sonnets, however they were highly stylised and not at all as a modern reader would imagine a love sonnet to be. Feelings expressed by the poet seem curiously detached, they have a language all of their own: it is basically the language of courtly love and it does seem today more of a pretence of love rather than an actual passionate feeling. They were written to be admired for their technical accomplishments, their grace and beauty and their turn of phrase.

Henry Constable was a courtier who held various positions amongst the followers of the leading courtiers to Queen Elizabeth I. He was a man who wrote for pleasure and would not be looking to make his living from poetry. He was following a fashionable pursuit of the courtiers at the time. In the tradition of Petrarch who addressed his poems to the mysterious Laura Constable's poems were addressed to Diana, who may have been a figment of his imagination, because there is nothing in the 60 odd sonnets to connect him to any known person at the time. The reader does not get any impression of a real person in any of the poems, she appears to be a stock figure who gives no encouragement to the poets protestations of love and treats him with disdain.

This is a typical example of one of the original 23 poems; more concerned with word play and style than on any expression of feelings:

Lady, in beauty and in favour rare,
Of favour, not of due, I favour crave.
Nature to thee beauty and favour gave;
Fair then thou art, and favour thou may'st spare.
Nor when on me bestowed your favours are,
Less favour in your face you shall not have;
If favour then a wounded soul may save,
Of murder's guilt, dear Lady, then beware.
My loss of life a million fold were less
Than the least loss should unto you befall;
Yet grant this gift; which gift when I possess,
Both I have life and you no loss at all.
For by your favour only I do live,
And favour you may well both keep and give

There are other poems that concern themselves with conceits and Constable was proud of his conceits, which is a word that was used to describe the use of imagery in metaphors that combined unlikely comparisons or gave a twist to formulaic or previously used standard comparisons. In poem 19 he compares the five wounds in his heart to the stigmata of St Francis

Saint Francis had the like, yet felt no smart,
Where I in living torments never die.

However for every original image or metaphor used there are many more that are conventional for the type of poetry that was being written at the time. There is much hyperbole for example the eyes of Diana are often depicted as two suns that light the gloom and in a famous line he says 'My lady's presence makes the roses red'. These are poems of unrequited love and the poets attempts to outdo the pain they suffer as a result, are another example of the hyperbole that is customarily used.

The poems that are more likely to appeal to the modern reader are those that can show a modicum of feeling that one is able to relate to, or poems that use images that appear fresh and add to the reading experience. Fortunately there are a few instances of this in Constable's sonnets. There is a theme running through them of the constant battle between the poets eyes and the poets heart. The heart blames the eyes for the constant pain it suffers.

"My heart mine eye accuseth of his death,
Saying his wanton sight bred his unrest;
Mine eye affirms my heart's unconstant faith
Hath been his bane, and all his joys repressed."

The pleasure of reading Constable's sonnets are in their very form which can be delightful. Some of the earlier sonnets can seem a little obscure but as they were added to, the later additions express more clarity of thought and are well worked through. They sound good when being read aloud.

An example of one of the later poems is one that features a pun on the word care and has some fine lines that are not without interest:

But being care, thou flyest me as ill fortune;—
Care the consuming canker of the mind!
The discord that disorders sweet hearts' tune!
Th' abortive bastard of a coward mind!
The lightfoot lackey that runs post by death,
Bearing the letters which contain our end!
The busy advocate that sells his breath,
Denouncing worst to him, is most his friend!
O dear, this care no interest holds in me;
But holy care, the guardian of thy fair,
Thine honour's champion, and thy virtue's fee,
The zeal which thee from barbarous times shall bear,
This care am I; this care my life hath taken.
Dear to my soul, then leave me not forsaken!

Perhaps the whole point of these courtly love sonnets can be summed up in a line from one of Constables:

I say, "I love!" My mistress says "'Tis lust!"

I think it is easy to be disappointed by the Elizabethan love sonneteers, one could argue that they wrote too many that sounded too similar and the lack of true feeling and the distance placed between the lover and his mistress makes them seem too artificial. However when the poems read as well as most of Constable's do and when one can come across an occasional gem, then it is worth the effort. 3.5 stars

The Second Scroll - A M Klein
Published in 1951 this slim beautifully written book is both a travelogue/voyage of discovery to the new state of Israel and a young Canadian Jews search for a messianic member of his family. It is steeped in the words of the Torah and the five chapters loosely follow the books of the Pentateuch, but this is not a book that preaches, it is a book that tries to place a modern Jewish man in a position to come to terms with the holocaust and the new zionist Israel. I did not find the religious terms and references in any way preventing me from enjoying what was at times a remarkable read.

In 1949 Klein travelled on behalf of the Canadian Jewish Congress to the new State of Israel and to Jewish refugee camps in Europe and North Africa and this inspired his novel. It is written in the first person and in the novel the speaker has been sent to Israel to find and translate the best of the new Israeli poetry, but he has a more important personal mission and that is to find his uncle Melech who the family fears has lost his faith. The books opening sentence:

"For many years my father - may he dwell in a bright Eden! - refused to permit in his presence even the mention of that person's name"

It is therefore a journey of reconciliation, a journey of reunion that is foregrounded with the jewish diaspora's return to the Holy Land. In Klein's case he spends only two weeks in Israel, but his journey is longer with stops in Southern Italy and Morocco in search of Uncle Melech. We learn that his uncle was a brilliant scholar of the Torah and became the go-to person for interpretation and clarification before the holocaust in what is now the Ukraine. The speaker discover's letters about his uncle that say that he became a communist: a Bolshevik, but just before his departure a package arrives containing a letter from Melech Davidson himself, which tells a horrifying story of his survival of a pogrom (Kamenets-Podolski massacre 1941) where he was denounced as a Jew and his lucky escape with a rumour that he fled to Southern Italy; to Bari where boats were setting out to take settlers to Israel. The speaker arrives in Italy where to his horror he finds that Davidson had been to the Vatican and had been talking with a Cardinal about Catholicism, from there the trail leads to Casablanca in Morocco where Davidson had found a post in the office of the administration of the Jewish community. As soon as the speaker arrives at the office and mentions the name of Melech Davidson he realises that his iconoclastic uncle had immediately stirred up trouble. Nobody really wanted to talk about it. The speaker is shocked by what he finds in Casablanca:

"there were, too, the classics of the French cuisine, to whose napoleonic strategy my palate had ever surrendered - but the gourmandizer's repelled me. They lived well these Moors, but too well: the thigh filled pantaloons that waddled along the street; the Negress with scarves, striped as with the lines of latitude, knotted about her large hips, gripping a sausage in her pinkish pink palm; the paunch proud merchant seating his buttock and belly on his chair - these spoke eloquently of past banquets, of many-coursed meals digested reposeful upon soft pillows and divans beneath the gauze of golden slumber, the brocade of the golden snore."

He visits the mellah (the Jewish quarter) where the inhabitants live in a squalor which he compares to Dante's Inferno, but is driven away by the flies and the stench that is everywhere. He leaves Morocco by aeroplane to Israel where the trail of his Uncle grows cold, but he visits places sacred to his family in the hope of picking up clues............

The story is packed into 90 pages, but there follows some poetry and excerpts from a letter from his uncle that details his visit to the Sistine chapel and how Michelangelo had shown a vision of the Pentateuch that could make reverence to Catholics and Jews; this is a fine piece of writing in itself.

The search for a missing person provides the narrative flow for the book which can be read on the level of a mystery travelogue, however there is much more to the book, not the least the sympathetic portrait of a Jewish family, the faith that holds them together and gives meaning to their lives and the vicissitudes of anti-Semitism that effects them all. Perhaps it would not be too much to suggest that the book should be required reading for people leaning towards intolerance that can so easily be stirred up into hatred. I found it a salutary experience and a five star read.

Alfred Bester - The Stars my Destination

Gully Foyle is my name
Terra is my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
And Deaths my destination

Gully Foyle is the hero of Alfred Bester's The Stars my Destination and we first meet him trapped in a small air-locked compartment of a wrecked spaceship; he is the only survivor. The nursery jingle from his child hood passes through his ravelling mind. Bester's science fiction classic published in 1956 was so well known that in 1968 the Liverpool Poet Adrian Henri was able to publish a poem based on a section from the novel. Starting with the Chapter where Gully Foyle is imprisoned in the caves of Gouffre Martel in South West France:

Gouffre Martel. Darkness
Under the rock and earth a voice
Lying your tigerface blazing in the dark
Listening to her
Your mind still trapped in the broken spaceship

Flaming man appearing like your vengeance
On the beach, in the 3-ring cosmic circus
Your scarred body your tattooed face
Leaping between Aldebaran and Ceres
Eternity at your feet. The stars your destination

The blurb on the front page of my kindle edition says "Considered by many to be the greatest single SF novel" - Samuel R Delaney. While I might not agree with that, even for novels in the "golden age" of 1950's science fiction it does combine many of the aspects that made this genre so popular with younger readers. It is a rip roaring adventure story, the hero is placed in a number of seemingly impossible situations, there is intrigue and mystery and a denouement that many would not see coming. In addition to this it has a central idea that has that sense of wonder that permeates the story. The idea that humans in the 25 century can "jaunt" that is can teleport themselves if they can know and remember the exact co-ordinates of their destination and their jumping off point. This relatively new discovery that most people can master with a bit of practice has led to social problems with people anxious to keep teleporters or jaunters out of their property. The 25th century finds the human race masters of the inhabitable worlds of the solar system, but greed and corruption has led to a society where the fittest are able to enjoy the limited resources.

Gully Foyle is a 3rd class mechanic on a spaceship, he is devoid of ambition, but an incident where he is denied a rescue attempt when he is in a desperate situation has galvanised him to seek revenge and unlocked parts of his mind that has lain dormant. He embarks on a series of adventures and pits his wits against some of the most powerful men on earth, not always remaining one step ahead. His brute force carries him through, but there is plenty of collateral damage along the way.

It is 1950's science fiction and so revenge is a driving force for many of the characters: it is a fast paced but sexism and racism is for the most part not too obvious, but it is a thriller and so character development is not a prime consideration. There is much going on and Bester's fertile imagination and ability to move the action along and create some good situations make this an exciting read. 4.5 stars.

The Mandarins - Simone de Beauvoir

Nothing to do with China but everything to do with France.

An intellectual is an educated person whose interests are studying and other activities that involve careful thinking and mental effort. Simone de Beauvoir was proud to be an intellectual and for much of her adult life she operated amongst the intellectual elites in France, often being the only woman in the group. The most challenging periods for her cadre of left wing thinkers was after the liberation of Paris in 1944, when some of them who had been leading figures in the French Resistance, had to come to terms with a new French Republic ultimately lead by General De Gaulle a right of centre politician. She covered this period in the third part of her autobiography La Force des Choses published in 1963, however earlier she had written Les Mandarins published in 1954 a novel based on those events immediately after the war, which became an international best seller.

In her novel Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, De Beauvoir herself, the American Nelson Algren and Arthur Koestler are portrayed as thinly disguised characters acting out some of the imaginary events based on incidents from De Beauvoir's own life. It was an exciting and stimulating time for those characters who were desperate to play a part in politics and literature after the end of the second world war, it was also a time when those people found a new freedom to think and act after the German Occupation, although still bearing the scars of the war years. Simone De Beauvoir catches this brilliantly as a person who lived through those times: it reeks of authenticity. There are two main threads to the novel: the first is the battle to keep a war time left wing newspaper in circulation after the end of the war with Henri Perron and Robert Dubreuillh (based on the characters of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre) struggling to keep their paper out of the hands of the Communist Party; the second thread is Anne Debreuillh's (De Beauvoir) affair with the American author Lewis Brogan (Nelson Algren). The storylines of these two threads are told in alternate chapters with the battle for the newspaper told in the third person and the American affair told in the first person, with the stories overlapping.

The private lives of the characters are explored in some detail. Henri Perron's partner Paula leads a life that she devotes to Henri, willing to accommodate his affairs with younger women, but ultimately heading for a nervous breakdown. Anne Debreuillh's daughter Nadine a strong independent young woman who has an affair with Henri, but strictly on her terms. Henri also has an affair with Josette a beautiful young starlet whose mother may have collaborated with the Germans, this will come back to haunt Henri and although he is portrayed as a man of integrity much admired by younger acolytes he is compromised by events as are all of the characters in this novel. Anne's affair with the American author is a love story, but one that cannot bridge the gap between the new/young Americans and the old Europeans. De Beauvoir writes with painful honesty here and as in all the love affairs that she details; the battle of the sexes are picked clean through her brilliant character portraits. As well as the love stories, disturbing events lurk in the background; there is a gang seeking out and murdering war time collaborators that gets too close to Henri and Nadine. There is a spiteful war of words between left wing writers and thinkers that aims at character assassination and then there is the struggle to hold at bay those frenchmen and woman who were sympathetic to the German invaders and who are encouraged by the political drift of the French government towards the right.

The busy intellectual lives of Henri and Robert Dubreuill are depicted by an author who had an immense admiration for hard work. The two men are forever dashing to meetings, heading of crisis, re-inventing themselves, dreaming of a life less busy, but forever denying themselves the opportunity of resting when the chance arrives, they are both scared of not being able to make a difference. It was a world where men were in control and women were very much on the sidelines as one of the characters is heard to say:

Women? Either they are idiots or they’re unbearable.

However this is said by one of the rich young men before he tangles with the ferocious Nadine. De Beauvoir's female characters are strong in their own way, but they had little opportunity to work at the same level as the men in 1950's France. Above all this novel feels like a realistic representation of the life and times of artistic or politically motivated people.

Because it is a novel about the so-called intelligentsia De Beauvoir has plenty of opportunity to rehearse political and philosophical thoughts of people on the left wing of society. She does this through some lively conversation as her characters ruminate on their own ideas and try to influence others. She gets this so right (even in the English translation that I read) that it is no stretch of the imagination to surmise that she is recording snippets of actual conversations that she was party to at the time. Certainly Anne's conversations with Lewis Brogan feel like she is putting the record straight, even if in real life De Beauvoir did not have those actual conversations with Nelson Algren, obviously she has no trouble in getting inside the heads of her characters.

This is the second time I have read this novel; I probably read it first time round for the salacious episodes concerning the private lives of her characters, but at over 700 pages there has to be more to a novel than gossip and sex and even on my first reading I was mightily impressed with the story and the reading experience. This time around I am convinced it is one of the best novels I have read. I found myself fully immersed in the lives of Simone's characters as they attempted to come to terms with post war France. These are real people albeit at a certain elite level of society, but they are people who cared about their country, about the human condition, but like nearly everybody they could be corrupted, manipulated or just let their emotions lead them by the tail. Real people, real lives and so much to think about makes this a 5 star read.

Olivia Manning - School for Love
Published in 1951 this novel tells the story of Felix an orphan from England who is sent out to a distant relative who has a house in Jerusalem. Felix a young adolescent arrives full of insecurities to live in a boarding house near the old town run by Miss Bohun. It is 1944 and Jerusalem was still under British mandate, but as the world war was coming to an end both Arab and Jewish communities were becoming apprehensive of what would happen next. Felix is largely unaware of the bigger picture as he grows up in the seclusion of Miss Bohun's establishment amongst other poor refugees.

Olivia Manning arrived in Jerusalem in 1943 and spent three years their with her husband, she worked as a press assistant with the Jerusalem Post and then with the British Council and so was well placed to write a novel about the experiences of refugees or itinerant workers. It was a period when house owners or managers expected to be able to employ servants and Miss Bohun's Misboon house had the Lezno family (jews escaped from Poland) living in and paying for their keep by working. Felix arrives in winter to a cold house and an unfriendly household. He worshipped his mother who had recently died and disruptions to his schooling had made him naive and lonely and the first part of the book describes his difficulties in adapting to this new and foreign household. His only friend is Faro: Miss Bohun's siamese cat. The cold winter gives way to spring and Felix's boredom is alleviated by the arrival of Mrs Ellis a young woman whose husband has been killed in the war. Felix's year of growing up sees him move from being a child who blushes at the mere presence of Miss Ellis to wanting to become her friend and even her protector.

Towards the end of the book when Felix has learned more about how adult people behave towards each other Miss Ellis tells him about a poem she remembers and when Felix asks her what it means she says:

"I suppose it means that life is a sort of school for love"

She might have added that it was also a school of hard knocks where experience is hard won. Felix is the pupil; he must come to terms with Miss Bohuns hostility towards her boarders which is a result of her penny-pinching and her manipulating of the rooms to let. Miss Bohun is also a religious leader of a sect known as the Ever Readies (they are ever ready for the second coming) and she prides herself on her good works and is occasionally kind towards others. Felix asks one of the other boarders if Miss Bohun is wicked and he replies:

"Don't use that silly word Felix, Of course I don't. She's absurd and tactless and a busybody, probably no worse. She belongs to a generation that seems to combine thinking the worst of everybody with trying to do the best for them. I expect she's awfully innocent."

Felix must also come to terms with Miss Ellis whose battles with Miss Bohun make Felix a sort of piggy-in-the-middle. He does not know who to trust or who to love, their mood changes leave him confused and he also has much to learn about the Lezno family.

The year in Jerusalem is a bildungsroman for Felix and Misboon house is a world within a world. Mannings description of the household is full of atmosphere and when the occupants venture outside she portrays their excursions into a more exotic world with a feel for its different environment. I found it a gentle story, but readers today may find it a little too optimistic. It is well written with excellent characters and observations, well worth reading and so 3.5 stars

Michael Drayton - Idea - the Shepheard's Garland: fashioned in nine eglogs.
Michael Drayton an Elizabethan poet published The Shepheards Garland in 1593; it was the first of his non spiritual works. An eglog is more commonly spelt today as a eclogue and is a pastoral long poem based on the classical example set out by the ancient Roman Poet Virgil. By 1593 it was a common form of poetical expression used by educated men associated with the court of Queen Elizabeth and made popular by Edmund Spenser's poem The Shepheards calendar in 1579. An Eglog harked back to a golden age that never existed where shepheards tended their flocks and played and sung about an idyllic life and the troubles of the world outside their own sphere of existence.

The format of Drayton's first effort followed closely the expected format and so there are passages of poetry with songs and story telling competitions told by rustic folk with a classical education. It is subtitled Rowland's sacrifice to the nine muses and contains the usual themes of age versus youth and unrequited love; it also dwells a little on the troubles of the contemporary world, but It is all very artificial. Drayton's poetry and songs are lively and expressive, but there is nothing new here and certainly nothing to excite readers today. For me it was just another poem to cross off the list and so 2.5 stars.

Miskatonic River
Flowing through a landscape that is
always evening
Accusing eyes
In the empty streets of Innsmouth
Strange movements out on the reef
Tumuli on hilltops
Trembling in the thunder
Behind the gambrel roofs of Arkham

'In his house at R'lyeh
Great Cthulhu sleeps'

amid
alien geometries
perpectives
walls shifting as you watch them
slumbering
in the Cyclopean dripping gloom
waiting to wake like Leviathan
when his children shall call him

From Universes by Adrian Henri

The Haunter in the Dark & Other Tales of Terror - H P Lovecraft
This collection with an introduction by August Derleth published in 1951 is expensive to buy, (a good second hand copy is about 80 euros), but you can read all the stories in the collection free on the internet (without Derleths introduction). The listing of these classic stories in the original collection is:

Pickman's Model - 1927
The Call of Cthulhu - 1928
The Colour out of Space - 1927
The Dunwich Horror - 1929
The Haunter of the Dark - 1936
The Music of Eric Zann - 1922
The Outsider - 1921
The Rats in the Walls - 1924
The Thing on the Doorstep - 1937
The Whisperer in the Darkness - 1931

I took the option of reading these stories on my kindle, but in the same order as the 1951 collection.

People may be familiar with the Dunwich Horror, which has been made into films a number of times and it contains all the classic elements of the Cthulhu mythos. The scenario is in backwood country in Massachusetts along the upper reaches of the Miskatonic river and near the town of Arken. Inbreeding is rife and Wilbur Whatley's birth is heralded by a chorus of barking dogs. He is deformed but develops at a prodigious rate. The family has vague connections with the witches of Salem and Wilbur seeks out a book of old spells called the Necronomicon: there is a copy in the library at Arken and a Doctor Armitage becomes interested in the Whatley family and visits their old farmhouse. He soon discovers that Wilbur was attempting to call the Great Old Ones by using the Necronomicon. The Whatley farmhouse erupts with monsters rising from the depths...........

The "Call of Cthulhu" published a year earlier is one of the first of the stories and fills in the history. Two events in different parts of the world set the scene for the stories that follow: an Icelandic tribe and a voodoo gathering in backwoods America are found to be committing atrocities and both chanting the same refrain:

"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming"

Six of the stories in this collection are based around the Cthulhu mythos and we learn that the monsters are from outer space and are using the earth for mining precious metals in out of the way places. They are able to exert mental power that can control weak minded earthlings, but are content to remain hidden. When they do arise from the depths of the earth there is devastation. Each of the six stories develop the mythos a little more, but of course they have a sameness about them and so by the time I read the final story "The Whisperer in the Darkness" I was getting a little bored.

The strength in the telling of these tales is Lovecraft's ability to create a milieu that has all the portents of coming doom. Nobody behaves foolishly, but they are sucked into the strangeness that surrounds situations that Lovecraft creates. One of the stories: "The Colour Out of Space" which is not really part of the Cthulhu mythos, but tells of the effects of a small meteorite landing in a sparsely populated area and how it slowly poisons the land of the Nahun family and causes their eventual destruction is both atmospheric and sinister. Most of these stories have that same quality. The Collection contains Lovecraft's last tale "Haunter of the Dark" written in 1935 which is of short story length and seems to distill many of the elements of Lovecraft's writing into a superb horror story reading experience. Perhaps people curious about H P Lovecraft should start with this.

I really enjoyed two other stories which are not part of the mythos; 'The Music of Erich Zann' and "The Outsider": the ideas that fuel these two stories have since been written and rewritten by other authors since Lovecraft's versions, but his stories stand up well. Horror stories from the 1920's-30's are short on gore, leaving the reader to imagine the worst and that is just how I like them. Well written and inventive with that unmistakable sense of wonder, this is a 5 star collection.

Great review of The Mandarins, Barry. It's high on my list of books I'd like to read soon, but I keep putting it off. I'll have to make room for it next year.

The Stars Like Dust - Issac Asimov
Critics of science fiction writing often point to cardboard-like characters, clunky dialogue and plotting that suspends belief and Asimov's The Stars Like Dust has all of this. It was published in 1951 and novels from this so called golden age of science fiction tend to be sexist and racist and Asimov's novel has all of this too. It also has a hero in Biron Farill who is smarter and more physically powerful than any other character, never putting a foot wrong amongst all the improbable plot twists that litter this book. Asimov can usually be relied upon to tell a good story, but even this is missing here. The novel comes from early in Asimov's history of publications and is said to be the one that he disliked the most, with its flag waiving nationalism and an ending that feels particularly inappropriate.

The book falls into the genre of a galactic space adventure and one that Asimov mastered with his Foundation series. I have not read any for a long time, but I am hoping that they stand up better than this effort. 2 stars.

T C Boyle - Water Music
Reading this is like a plunge into a sickly bath of filth and depravity. After a few chapters I wanted to go out for a walk in the fresh air; avoiding my local pig farm, thankful that I am living in the 21st century. London at the turn of 18th century seems little different from Central Africa when these events took place. There are two principle story lines: Mungo Park's explorations in Central Africa and Ned Rise's struggles to escape the poverty of a teeming London, there is no doubt that the two story threads will come together at some point. The story of Mungo Park is based on historical events; Mungo Park was a Scottish explorer seized with the idea of mapping the course of the River Niger while Ned Rise is a character invented by the author, both suffer horrible vicissitudes trying to survive their environments.

The whole book is one long overblown, overripe extravaganza. Was it really like this in the period: 1794 -1806? Was Mungo Park such an idiot?. Of course it is a caricature, but caricatures are based on something and how much of that something is exaggerated by T C Boyle is probably the whole point of the book: it does however make for a lively entertainment. The novel at over 400 pages seems overlong, however in my opinion it is saved by a very exciting account of Mungo Park's final chase down the River Niger, juxtaposed with his wife Ailie's calm acceptance of a life without her husband. After all the wallowing in the filth of Africa and of London, Boyle manages to infuse a little realism in the final section of the novel.

Ned Rise like Mungo Park seems indestructible

"Neither dysentery nor ague has touched him, so inured is he to filth and deprivation, so hardened against the assault of microbes by a lifetime of wallowing in the shit, scum and slime of Londons's foulest and most putrid holes"

Boyle has by this point in the novel been at pains to describe in lurid detail all of that shit, scum and slime of London as well as the barbaric shit, scum and slime of central Africa and the best that can be said of his two main characters is that they survive all that is thrown at them. When we meet Mungo in Africa he is like a rag doll figure, he is continually battered and bruised, but staggers on to the next disaster, with an air of a man who is born to lead, but with hardly a thought in his head. Ned thinks he is a self-centred fool, but follows him nevertheless. At one point in the story Mungo has a moments reflection; wondering why he finds himself about to embark on a hazardous journey just before the start of the rainy season, but quickly dismisses it: after all why should he dwell on niggling little unpleasantnesses, when he is about to make a historic journey. A caricature then rather than a characterisation, Boyle does not waste much time getting inside the heads of his characters assuming that they are as greedy, lustful and self-centred as any other human beings.

The overpowering impression that the book leaves is of the muck, filth and stench that appears to be everywhere at the turn of the eighteenth century. The drunkenness, the perversion is told with so much gleeful detail that if the reader was accused of burying his nose in a book he might retort that he has had his nose rubbed into this book. I am all for an author adding realism to his writing and appreciate that Central Africa and the poorer districts of London were not noted for their cleanliness, but one can have too much of it.

T C Boyle has used Mungo Park's own written account of his first journey "Travel in the Interior of Africa" published in 1799 as a basis for his story and so the interested reader can follow on a map the actual journey he made and the references to the people he met. Mungo Park was imprisoned by a Moorish chief at Ludamar for four months and in his account he says that Fatima the corpulent wife of his captor came to look upon him favourably. Boyle fictionalises this to tell of a woman that is force fed to become more attractive to men reaching such a size that she needs two servants to help her move around. She takes Park as her lover who delights in exploring the large landscapes of her body and by her favours he is able to fashion his escape.

This was Boyle's first novel published in 1981and he has gone on to enjoy an extremely successful career. Water Music with its extravagant historical fiction was a forerunner to more successful books. I enjoyed his reworking of history, bringing it to life with plenty of over the top, lustful and imaginative stories even though it felt a bit too much of a good thing. It had been on my book shelf for over twenty years and I was not sorry I took it down to read. Good but not really healthy entertainment 3.5 stars.

Gabriel Harvey - Four Letters and Certain Sonnets
Gabriel Harvey was an English writer and notable scholar. He was active between 1577 and 1600 and is remembered today mainly for his efforts to protect the honour and reputation of himself and his family, launching into print some vituperative pamphlets aimed at fellow writers Robert Greene and Thomas Nash; although earlier he had taken Edmund Spenser to task. There is no doubt that Harvey was the subject of satire by other writers, some who objected to his overweening ego and others who thought he was a humourless pedant. Harvey's quarrel in print with Thomas Nash arose from an attack on Harvey's brother in one of the Martin Marprelate pamphlet wars and he took Robert Greene to task for his comments in Greene's Groatsworth of wit and the publication of Greene's Quip for an Upstart Courtier which pushed him over the edge. The Four letters and 24 sonnets aim to set the record straight, but Harvey cannot help launching his own attacks even when knowing that Greene was on his deathbed. He certainly didn't think much of Greene:

"Alas, that any should say, as I have heard divers affirm, his wit was nothing but a mint of knavery, himself a deviser of juggling feats, a forger of covetous practices, an inventor of monstrous oaths, a derider of all religions, a contemner of God and man, a desperate Lucianist, an abominable Aretinist, an arch-atheist, and he arch-deserved to be well hanged seven years ago. Twenty and twenty such familiar speeches I overpass, and bury the whole legendary of his life and death in the sepulchre of eternal silence."
(modern English translation by Nina Green)

If the four letters were just a series of personal attacks on other writers they would hardly be of consequence today, but they do provide some information on the lives of his contemporaries and while we must remember that they are hardly dispassionate they are still useful. From the evidence of the letters there was much more to Gabriel Harvey than just a settling of old arguments. He makes some cogent points about the state of literature and of society in general. He is particularly concerned with status and refutes Nash and Greenes views that a humble birth should not prevent an able man from rising to the top of his profession. The Harvey brothers were tradesman's sons.

I enjoyed this much more than I thought I would. Harvey's style is logical and thoughtful, but there are times when you can catch him thinking that perhaps he is not being completely fair. Of course it helps if you have read Robert Greene and Thomas Nash, but it is not essential as Harvey's prose carries it all along pretty well. 3 stars.

Here is one of the sonnets.

Unlucky I, unhappiest on earth,

That fondly doting upon dainty wits,

And deeply ravished with their luring fits,

Of gentle favours find so hard a dearth.

Is it my fate or fault that such fine men

Should their commender so unkindly bite,

That loves to love in spite of rankest spite,

And hates to hate with heart or tongue or pen?
Sweet writers, as ye covet to be sweet,
Nor me, nor other, nor yourselves abuse;
Humanity doth courteously peruse

Each act of friend or foe with favour meet.
Foul devil, and fouler malice, cease to rave;
For every fault I twenty pardons crave.

>72 baswood: Loved your review. This was one of the first novels by Boyle that I read. Over the years he has become one of my favourite authors. "Gleeful detail" is a good description. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, there is World's End.

Night at the Vulcan (Opening Night) - Ngaio Marsh
Ngaio Marsh was known as one of the "Queens of Crime". She wrote 32 detective novels during the period 1934-1982 and Night at the Vulcan published in 1951 was number 17 and so just over halfway through the oeuvre. All the novels feature Inspector Roderick Alleyn a gentleman detective who works for the Metropolitan Police (London). Marsh's great passion was the theatre and all the action in this novel takes place in the Vulcan a refurbished London theatre that had suffered a tragedy some time before.

The time scale is fairly tight: all the action takes place over a three day period and starts with Martyn Tarne arriving at the theatre looking for work three days before the opening of a new play. She is employed as a dresser to the leading lady Helena Hamilton who is married to Clark Bennington who is on the skids, but has a part in the play. It is not until halfway through the novel that Inspector Allen and his team arrive after Clark Bennington appears to have committed suicide by gassing himself. The first half of the novel is therefore taken up with the workings of the theatre and Marsh creates this little world of actors and their staff preparing for the opening night. It is also a world that appears rather quaint being set in 1950 with its gas fires and its sightings of London buses through the windows of the theatre. Inspector Alleyn is politeness personified and his only role in the drama is the solving of the crime. The whole thing is a bit like a locked room mystery, which in the end is nicely worked out

I enjoyed the claustrophobic atmosphere of the theatre that Marsh has created and her characters were lively enough to keep me happily reading along to the end to discover the solution to the mystery. 3.5 stars.

Caroline Moorehead - Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France
During the second world war some villages in unoccupied France sheltered jews from Nazi persecution. The Vichy government in collaboration with the Germans ruled the unoccupied area which covered roughly half of France. The Village of Secrets is really a collection of villages on the Plateau Vivrais-Lignon which succeeded in frustrating some of the Vichy government's attempts to round up jews for deportation to the German death camps. The villages unique position in the mountains of the central massif and the religious culture that was prevalent inspired the inhabitants to do more than most frenchmen to save Jews from the holocaust. The Vichy government were intent on carrying out the bidding of their German masters and some might say they were overzealous. Although the Vichy government were ruling their country in collaboration with the Germans they saw themselves as protecting the nation of France. It is not difficult then to understand why French officials and the police force fearing occupation and the loss of their identity as a nation would carry out, and in some cases encourage the persecution of minorities who were not french. Unfortunately there are many examples of racial hatred as a tool used by politicians to cling on to power.

After the end of the war while France was busy taking revenge against the collaborators it was also trying to move on from some actions regarded as shameful during the occupation. There was a collective denial of the events surrounding the rounding up of the Jews to placate the voracious Nazis final solution. Moorehead's book was published in 2014 when France had belatedly admitted to the role of the Vichy government in the holocaust. It was therefore not as controversial as it might have been, but would have added to the unease of many inhabitants of villages and towns in rural France that were in Vichy territory, because many were far more compliant with the Nazis aims. It should also of course stir up unease in many readers who might well ask themselves what action or non action they would have taken in a similar situation. This was a horror story that happened in living memory.

I found Village of Secrets a well organised book. The first few chapters fill in the background to the Vichy Government's policies and the setting up of the French internment camps, from there we learn of conditions inside the camps and start to meet some of the individuals who will feature in the story of the 'Secret' villages. We follow the lucky ones who made the journey up into the mountains and are with them when they meet the people who will be responsible for trying to save their lives. Chambon the most important village is described along with the characters who will play an active part in the story. The unique protestant culture is explained with the pacifist pastor André Trocmé being an inspirational preacher, but in surrounding villages there were Darbyists and Ravenist; protestant cults who new the price to be paid for being different. When the first of the Jewish children arrived in Chambon it was not too difficult to find safe houses for them with the reclusive religious families. On to 1942; it is the Vichy officials who are the main threat with a system of informers and collaborators, more children arrive through an unofficial network and by 1943 conditions have become so desperate that a network of people smugglers is set up to get children and Jews on a wanted list across to Switzerland. In 1944 it is the Germans who are the enemy, facing defeat they desperately try to complete the extermination programme themselves, while the Vichy armed police fight it out with the maquis. Morehead tells her story through incidents in the lives of the refugees during the four years of German control. We follow their stories and the stories of the villagers that helped them. Characters emerge and just as tragically disappear as Moorehead chillingly documents numbers of the convoy train carriages that take them to the death camps. Some just disappear, but many are kept alive through the hard work and risks taken by the villagers. The liberation of France while stopping the immediate threat to life and limb did not solve the long term issues for children who have lost their parents and adults who have lived in fear for four long years and Moorehead provides some living testimony to this.

There is an after-word that ties up some loose ends, but also questions the veracity of some of the stories. It is still not clear who among the Vichy officials lent a helping hand when they could. There were double agents and some acted pragmatically, but by the very nature of clandestine actions it will never be known who were the good guys and who were the traitors. Publications and films made of the events have tended to cloud the issue. A book by Philip Hailie an American historian published in 1979 based on an autobiography by Andre Trocmé, which seemed to claim that the pacifist views of the pastor were the main reason the villages were successful: caused much distress amongst the villagers. Moorehead has tried to let the villagers and the jews speak for themselves when she can, but their stories are couched with her own research of the events. It is probably even more difficult to arrive at a true version of events when people are still alive to give their versions; relying on a memory that stretches back 70 years or the stories of their parents.

Caroline Moorehead's book is a sobering account of life in an area of France where people had sometimes to make life or death decisions. At the time the German extermination camps were not common knowledge, but the evidence was everywhere to be seen of the ill treatment of the jews, identified by the Nazis as an inferior race. The people of the Plateau Vivrais-Lignon did better than most areas of the country in the preservation of human dignity, by taking risks to save others. Moorehead provides a lively background to her history and the events are described in a style that bends towards journalism, which makes it an enthralling and realistic read. The lists of primary sources and secondary sources at the back of the book is evidence of her research. Perhaps not the last word on the treatment of jews in Vichy France, but being tied to a relatively small area with characters brought alive by their stories it makes for a good book and so 4 stars.

The Door into Summer - Robert A Heinlein
If you are going to indulge yourself in reading 1950's science fiction, you can't avoid Heinlein. I have previously read four books by him. Two collections of short stories and two novels: The Puppet Masters and Double Star, were both fast moving science fiction tales that relied very much on storytelling rather than characterisation. The Door into Summer is very much of the same vein, but this time there is an excellent story to tell and Pete the cat is the best character.

The novel was published in 1957, but Heinlein imagines an America in 1970 and again in the year 2000. Our hero Daniel Boone Davis is an engineer and inventor, and a typical character of much 1950's science fiction, he has a great sense of personal liberty and self reliance; an individual who does things his own way, not afraid to kick against corporate authority and not afraid to take risks. He invents a series of household aids that become successful, he is cheated out of the profits of his company by his secretary and his business manager and is tricked by them into taking the big sleep (suspended animation) for a thirty year period. He awakes in 2000 still infused with a need to use his engineering skills, but the world has moved on. He gets a job in an off shoot of the company he started and is intrigued that the original patents for their best selling machines still bear his name. He discovers that time travel has been successfully attempted and tricks his way into going back to 1970 to discover what happened and to collect Pete his cat.

It is an intricate tale of time travel forwards and backwards first by cryogenic suspended animation and then by a time machine, but the story evolves around D B Davis's attempts to put things right back in 1970 and to get the girl he loves. His main motive however is that he wants to continue working with his beloved inventions, but has discovered he much prefers the future 2000, rather than the more dull 1970. Fixing things back in the past while preserving a better future has long been a theme of science fiction writers and while Heinlein spends a little time on theories of time travel, it is really only a plot device. The meat of the book is Davis's attempts to fix things for his own advantage. Heinlein has to invent two scenarios Great Los Angeles in 1970 and Denver the new seat of government of the USA in 2000. He manages this pretty well and the worlds that he describes bear some relation to the worlds that we recognises today. This is such a good story that we can forgive Heinlein almost anything as his tale rushes onwards. It is inventive, funny and full of wonder and it even has a scene in a naturist colony: Heinlein loves the characters in his books to get naked. (although being 1950 he rarely does anything with them).

Last night I started the novel and found I was three quarters of the way through at 1.30 am - what to do? finish or go to bed. The fact that I even thought about finishing it shows what a good page turner it is. 5 stars.

Shakespeare - The Two Gentlemen of Verona

HE WAS HAVING A LARF

Securely placed in the Shakespeare cannon being the second play included in the first folio of 1623 this comedy was probably written early in the playwrights career probably before the closure of the theatres in January 1593. The theatres were closed due to an outbreak of the plague in London and would not be re-opened until spring 1594: (any similarities between those years and the Covid-19 virus today when many of us have restrictions is purely coincidental). The Two Gentlemen of Verona is considered by many critiques and readers to be an inferior play because it is thought to be an immature work. Admittedly it has no great drama and does not grapple with "life meaning" issues as some of the later plays do, but it is one of the most consistently funny of the Bards plays and never fails to entertain, it also contains Shakespeares most celebrated song (thanks to Schubert amongst others). I read the Arden Shakespeare edition with its copious notes and modern English spelling, but it is not a difficult play to follow and might serve as a gentle introduction to Shakespeare's oeuvre.

Although the play contains some of the Elizabethan tropes expected of comedies: disguise, trickery and banter between masters and servants, its main feature is the ludicrous natures of some of the characters. One would probably never meet a bunch of outlaws so ridiculous or a central character (Proteus) who changes his attitudes on the turn of a pin (not once but twice) or male characters who are so easily deceived. The females are much more resolute, but the reason for much of this behaviour is of course love sickness or one could say lust.

The story: Proteus and Valentine are very close friends, but it is time for them to seek their place in the world. Proteus is in love with Julia and they exchange rings just before he leaves Verona to go to the big city of Milan. Valentine has made the same journey some time before. Proteus is joined by his servant Lance and his dog Crab. At the court of Milan he discovers that his friend Valentine has fallen in love with Sylvia and as soon as Proteus meets SyIvia he becomes love stricken as well. He stitches up his lifelong friend Valentine with the Duke; Silvia's father causing Valentine to be banished, so he has a chance to woo Sylvia. Meanwhile Julia missing Proteus disguises herself as a man (Sebastian) so that she can travel to Milan in safety to find her beloved. Proteus is making no headway with Sylvia and is not helped when the dog Crab whom he gives as a present to Sylvia pisses all over her petticoats. Valentine is captured by outlaws who are so impressed with his demeanour they make him their general. Proteus does not recognise Julia disguised as Sebastian and employs her to act as a go between with Sylvia. Sylvia now engages Sir Eglamour to go with her to find her true love Valentine. The Duke and Proteus are in pursuit and they all meet up in the woods with Valentine and the outlaws. Proteus attempts to take Sylvia by force, but is prevented by Valentine, Proteus immediately realises he has been acting foolishly and asks to be forgiven. Julia still in disguise faints and when she comes to throws off her disguise and once again claims Proteus. The outlaws are all pardoned by the Duke and a wedding day is arranged for the two couples.

My usual method of approaching a Shakespeare play especially one that is new to me, is to read the play through first, before reading any criticism, so that I can gain my own first impression. The introduction to the Arden edition written by William C Carroll concentrates on Shakespeares dramatic strategies and its links with previous sixteenth century drama and also recent critical and theoretical work on the early modern theatre. There is a discussion of male friendship which is undoubtedly a feature of the play. The question it poses is can a male friendship be more important than love between a woman and a man and there are plenty of examples from the text, especially the controversial ending to the play where some interpretations of Valentines reconciliation speech with Proteus see him offering to share Sylvia with him. This supposed offer comes a very short time after Proteus has attempted to rape Sylvia, however I think that the offer of sharing Sylvia is a misinterpretation of the text and it is surprising that Carrol's introduction makes so much of it. The links backwards to the plays of John Lily and further back to Ovid as sources for the ideas of friendship in previous drama are explored. Another theme explored at some length is that of the prodigal son. Both Proteus and Valentine are away from their home in Verona, but we never see them return to their families. There is also a section on women disguised as men (this could have been the first time that Shakespeare used this trope) and how it would look to an audience who would see men playing all the female roles and then see them playing females disguised as males. This sounds very complicated to an audience today who might have trouble getting their heads around the fact that there were no female actors in Shakespeare's companies.

Reading this scholarly introduction seemed like it was avoiding the elephant in the room. The play is a comedy, throughout the play there are comic interludes, nearly all the characters indulge in word play, there are malapropisms galore and plenty of good jokes and there is Lance and his dog Crab. In my opinion much could have been gained by writing more on the tradition of comedy rather than giving an impression that the play was essentially a serious examination of renaissance themes. The comedy is mainly verbal, there is no slapstick, we are only told about Crabs indiscretions in Julias house. Speed is the name given to Valentine's page and he is well named for his quick repartee whether it is outperforming Valentino or making fun of Lance. There is also plenty of wit and repartee between Julia and her waiting maid Lucetta and then there is Lance with his hilarious soliloquies with his dog Crab. Even at the plays most dramatic moments there is time for some comedy, for example when Julia is disguising herself as a man there is the question of the codpiece:

Lucetta says:

A round hose, madam, now's not worth a pin
Unless you have a codpiece to stick pins on.

Then Julia makes a speech about Proteus who at that moment is betraying her love in order to woo Sylvia:

Base men that use them to so base effect!
But truer stars did govern Proteus' birth;
His words are bonds, his oaths are oracles,
His love sincere, his thoughts immaculate,
His tears pure messengers sent from his heart,
His heart as far from fraud as heaven from earth.

I could imagine an Elizabethan audience laughing out loud through much of this play and waiting for the next joke to come along.

There are other scenes that could be played to garner laughs: for example when the Duke accosts Valentine who is about to elope with his daughter and is hiding a ladder under his cloak; the Duke asks him for his advice on how to gain access to a lady who lives in an upstairs apartment. I agree with William Rossky who maintains that the play is first and foremost a burlesque and should be judged on those terms. He goes on to say;

"If it is myopic to read Shakespeare only in terms of our own time and convenience, it is just as blind to read him as inevitably illustrating any single Renaissance convention. The result of unscrutinised assumptions about Elizabethan acceptance of a particular idea or convention has sometimes been to make Shakespeare appear inaccessible to our time and to dehumanise the drama"

Although the idea of a burlesque is never far away, the second half of the play has enough dialogue to enable the actors to move the audience as the lovers stories unfold. Julia and Sylvia have some particularly touching scenes. There are very few long speeches, but plenty of one liners. Proteus gets the longest speech in a scene all to himself when he convinces himself that his love for Sylvia is worth forsaking Julia and his friend Valentine. The speech contains some word play, but it is straight forward with no imagery. Why waste time on metaphors and similes when you are going all out to make people laugh, however be it in a more sophisticated non physical way. I enjoyed reading the versification which flows well and I enjoyed figuring out the puns. I am sure I did not get them all. Looking forward to seeing a production of the play - hope it makes me laugh.

The BBC film of the play shown in 1983 certainly did make me laugh and I thought the two main stage settings: The court in Milan and the Forest of Mantua were brilliantly set up. The first half of the play with all its wit and repartee had an innocence about it, especially as the actors were mainly young people. It was frothy, light and just right. The second part of the play which has all the drama of the lovers betrayals was darker, but still with some lighter touches, there was a lovely setting of the song "Who is Sylvia" Overall a very good film of the play and proof positive that it can be made to work and to entertain.

The play has been performed sporadically during the last century, but the Royal Shakespeare company has three productions to its credit, the last in 2014. Any production must come to terms with the comedy elements, how much of the play should be played to amuse the audience, to keep it laughing, without stopping the drama unfolding of the lovers betrayals and eventual conciliation. At the end of the day it is a fantasy, a lovers fantasy and a play that can make its audience laugh and cry - 4 stars.

>76 baswood: That sounds fascinating - I've read quite a few non-fiction books on WWII but none on this subject of Vichy France. One I'll add to my list.

Night Runners of Bengal - John Masters
Published in 1951 this was Masters first novel and is a work of historical fiction. Its subject is the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Masters was a regular officer in the Indian Army and served from 1939 to 1946. His family had a long tradition in the Indian army and so he was steeped in the culture of British rule under the Raj, but his setting for the novel is ninety years earlier when the country was controlled by the East India Company. He is probably at his best in describing the life of an officer in the army, but this first novel combines this with an adventure story and a full scale battle with much brutal action. It is quite well written, but in some places it feels a little clunky, there is a lot going on and sometimes I feel it doesn't quite hang together..

The central character is Captain Rodney Savage of the Bengal native Infantry. He has a good working relationship with the sepoys (Indian native army regulars) whom he has grown to appreciate. An English female visitor to the garrison at Bhowani Junction; Caroline Langford, becomes suspicious of possible plots against the ruling British elite. Savage is starting to feel that the opportunity to make his mark in the Company's service is passing him by and he takes an interest in Carolines concerns. The nearby all Indian town of Kishanpur is rocked by the assassination of the Rajah and Savage carries out his own investigation into the affairs of the Rani. He does not find out enough information to stop an uprising of the sepoys in Bhowani and just about escapes from a massacre of the white ruling class. His injuries lead to temporary insanity as Caroline attempts to hide him in the forest, he insists on going to Kishanpur, but they are imprisoned by the Rani. They learn more details of the mutiny, escape from prison and with the help of a loyal sepoy hide out in a small village. There follows an attempt to reach the British garrison at Gondwara to warn the British contingent of another sepoy mutiny.

There is a good opening sequence to the novel when Savage and Caroline witness a guru in Bhowani holding an audience in the centre of town and appearing to summon a murder of crows. He issues a cryptic warning of coming troubles and this gives the novel an edgy start that contrasts with the subsequent description of daily life amongst the British contingent in the cantonment. The expats lead an insular life in an endless round of socialising based on British traditions. The club house with its bar is where most come to gossip and to uphold the class divisions in their own society. The majority have a lifestyle supported by and endless supply of Indian servants that could not be achieved back home and they have become for the most part pampered and indolent in a climate that is totally unsuitable to them. John Masters describes their lifestyle with real firsthand knowledge, but I get the impression that it is more like the lifestyle of the British Raj in the 1930's than 1870 under the East India Company. Savage takes a more benevolent view of the natives than most and has an understanding and acceptance of their society. When he suffers his period of insanity he becomes more like the racist native hating ogre that one feels was more prevalent amongst the British ex pats at the time.

Caroline Langford says at some point in the novel:

“There are not two standards for us, for the English—only one. We must keep our standard, or go home. We must not, as we do now, permit untouchability and forbid suttee, abolish tyranny in one state and leave it in another, have our right hand Eastern and our left hand Western. It is not that India is wicked; she has her own ways. If we rule we must rule as Indians—or we must make the Indians English. But we do neither; we are like Mr. Dellamain. We have one foot in a whirlpool. Sometimes I am sure we will be dragged into another and drowned. God will punish us for compromising. As He will punish me.”

Masters has set his story back in 1857 when the East Indian Trading Company was looking to exploit the country for all that it was worth and they brought with them plenty of Christians who were looking to convert the natives, by any means possible to save their souls. I think Masters could be accused of giving some of his characters the more enlightened views that would be more appropriate to a later period of British rule than at the time of the mutiny. There is plenty of violence in the book and atrocities are committed by both sides in the struggle, Masters does not shy away from describing them.

The novels descriptions of India, its village and town life and the life of the expats tucked away in the cantonment rings true for me. It is told from a British imperialist perspective, but that is entirely suited to the events the novel describes and the characters that Masters has chosen for his story. He has created some interesting characters even if the story slips away from him at times, the novel has some good moments and so 3.5 stars.

>81 baswood: Interesting! Took a moment before I could work out why I thought I’d heard of John Masters, but of course he’s the Bhowani Junction man. I’ve never actually read any of his books, though I’ve seen the film, of course. Sounds as though he’s a bit more thoughtful about colonialism than his background would imply.

Interesting cover, too — it’s not often that publishers give the author an apostrophe on the front cover!

>82 thorold: Masters is an interesting person. His family lived in India for generations - they go back from a time when British men were encouraged to marry locally, as a way to embed themselves in the region. He's actually Anglo-Indian. And just like his character Rodney Savage in Bhowani Junction, he spent part of his youth living in a Gurkha family.

>82 thorold: >83 Dilara86: Yes an interesting author and I suppose Bhowani Junction is his most famous book. I have read it in the dim and distant past. Savage family members appear in other novels by him as do some of the characters like Piroo in Night Runners of Bengal who was a a retired Thuggee and apparently appears in Masters' second book published in 1952. In The Deceivers it is Rodney Savages father William who takes on the Thuggees and Rodney bemoans the fact that he will never be as famous as his father. I wonder then if John Masters had both books written by 1951 and chose to publish the second one in the series first.

I might get a copy of The Deceivers to read

Les Enfants Tristes - Roger Nimier
Roger Nimier was a French author who was recognised as the leader of a group of writers (the Hussards) who opposed the more left wing stance of Jean Paul Sartre and the existentialists writing after the second world war. Nimier was in the second regiment of the Hussards which were involved in a battle with the German forces very near the end of the second world war. Nimier was wounded at Royan. He published his first novel in 1948 and had his biggest success in 1950 with Le Hussard Blue.

Les Enfants Tristes was published in 1951 and that is why it got onto my reading list. It tells the story of Olivier Malentrade a young man whose family are well-to-do members of the petite bourgeoisie. M le Barsac has made money from his investments during the second world war and Olivier is the son of his first wife. Olivier does not quite fit into the business world of le Barsac and does not approve of the modern more liberated ways of the females in Le Barsac's family. The novel is in three parts and the first part takes place during the war where we meet the family who are largely unaffected by the war and tells the story about their relationships particularly Raoul; Oliviers half brother. Raoul is an intellectual who falls in love with the flirtatious Tessa whose family are lower down the social scale, but her outward going character and her pretty looks charms M le Barsac and he approves of Raoul marrying her. The second part tells the story of Tessa who manages to have a number of affairs to escape from the more conventional Raoul, one of her affairs is with Olivier Malentrade who is seduced by a pretty woman who is far more experienced than him and has difficulties when the affair is over. In the third part two younger women Dominique and Catherine enter in the circle of friends around Olivier, who is still clumsy around women. He has become a successful author and playwright, but his world is turned upside down by the two women.

It is the story of a man who feels out of step with his family and who is not at all assured in his relations with women. Roger Nimier builds his characters at some length, but the book comes alive in their conversations, which can take some unconventional twists and turns, especially when Olivier and Raoul are involved because of their uncertainty in relationships with women. Nimier's females are more free than the men, and more knowing in their dealings with the opposite sex, but are intellectually their inferiors. The background of Parisian life for well connected people is sketched adequately, but Nimier is mainly concerned with explaining why and how his characters act out their lives. I found his characters too far removed from the story for my liking a bit like moths fluttering around a light in danger of getting burnt. I am not encouraged to search out other books by Nimier and rate this as three stars.

John Baxter - A Pound of Paper
Subtitled confessions of a book addict and my hard backed copy comes complete with its dust cover; it was bought in a second hand book shop in Melton Mowbray (England). There were a couple of others for sale, I don't remember the cost because a friend bought it for me. These details might be important to you if you were a collector of books, although you might be in a world of your own collecting books by John Baxter, who is described as writer, journalist and film maker. A pound of Paper is an autobiography with a continuing thread of Baxter's life as a collector and dealer in books, many other aspects of his life are sketched in to give some sort of continuation to the story.

For people who read books and who visit bookshops especially second hand shops; the world of the book collectors will hold some fascination. Baxter is not overly concerned with the why's of collecting, but his story bounces along with an enthusiasm for his two subjects: which are John Baxter and book collecting. His book starts of with his collection of books by Graham Greene which serves as an introduction into first editions, unpublished works, signed copies, dedications, marginalia, manuscripts and all the paraphernalia that can grip a person addicted to collecting. Baxter's hunting down of 'Greenes' (books by Graham Greene) leads him into the slightly murky world of book dealing or book running. The visits to book fairs, and shops, the searches at house clearance sales, tip offs of collections coming up for auction, and the chasing around the countryside looking for a rare item reinforces the old adage that the chase is the most exciting part of the hunt.

Following the introductory chapters on collecting and dealing Baxter tells of his early life in Australia and his love of science fiction, which is the route that many young (men mostly) follow into the world of books. The search for something different or for favourite authors in a country where publications were more scarce than Europe or the USA fuelled the excitement of the chase and seems to have been a character defining moment for Baxter. He dabbled in science fiction and then fell into the career of journalism that opened up more work-life connections for him, but the lure of greener pastures got him on a boat for England where he had more scope to enjoy his hobby and sometimes livelihood. Baxter writes about his sojourns in America, then back to England and finally settling in Paris, but books are never far from his thoughts. He does not tell us much about his enjoyment of reading, but concentrates on the the acquisition of books. He tells us that opening a rare book can decrease its value and so perhaps he does not read so many.

My impression of John Baxter is that he is very good at self promotion and is probably rarely short of a word to say. The book of course is littered with name dropping and there are plenty of little stories about famous people in the book world. If he comes across like a poor man's Clive James, we can probably blame that on his Australian upbringing. He is certainly a man who is good at making connections and is probably good company. He has written a number of biographies of film directors and is now enjoying a career as a chronicler of an English speaker living in Paris. A Pound of Paper gives the reader a glimpse into the world of a collector and book dealer and a life well lived, it touches lightly on most things and can be read at a gallop. I enjoyed it and so three stars.

Richard Jeffries - After London or Wild England
There have been plenty of Utopia novels through the ages starting in Europe with Utopia by Thomas More in 1516, but there have been far fewer dystopians; the first was probably The Last Man by Mary Shelly in 1826 which featured a devastating pandemic, there was nothing else that threatened the whole of mankind until Jeffries book published in 1885. This might be the first book to describe the earth in a scenario that is familiar to many science fiction readers today: an old civilisation has died out, because of a catastrophic event and any survivors must start almost from scratch to build a new society, without the help of the science and engineering that died with the old race.

In Jeffries' After London an event similar to the extinction of the dinosaurs has taken place, but it is the human civilisation that has been destroyed. Nobody knows what happened exactly; there are theories of the earth passing through a cloud of darkness or a tilting of the axis, but this does not concern the humans who now inhabit a very different England. Nature has destroyed much of the evidence of the previous civilisation and the geography of England is now very different; an enormous lake of clear sweet water occupies the centre of the country with humans living around the shores reduced to a stone age like existence, The science of mining and smelting metals has been lost and the only metal that exists is that which has been found. It is a feudal society where the most powerful nobles are those that have kept or found items from the past. Jeffries novel has two parts: the first and much shorter section tells how nature has reclaimed the earth after the demise of humankind. Jeffries had made his living as an essayist and novelist based on his writing about nature and natural history and so he was well equipped to describe a developing world minus human beings. The second part tells the story of Felix the son of one of the nobles who has become impoverished. Felix is a dreamer and builds a canoe to explore the uncharted waters of the enormous lake. The second part reads like an adventure story.

Richard Jeffries had also been successful with children's books and his writing has an easy flow that seems totally absent of the more stilted writing that can be found in some Victorian fiction. His description of the inefficient sieges and battles that occur between the fighting warlords and Felix's journey across the lake are convincing, but the best moments are when Felix enters the bad lands where the city of London used to be. It is an area that is totally poisoned with gasses and inflammable material, like something that could be imagined after a nuclear explosion or a volcanic eruption.

As one of the first books of it's kind it is an essential read for anybody interested in the genre of proto science fiction. The innocence of the natural world does battle with the rapaciousness of man's needs in a charming novel, a bit of a find and 3.5 stars

The Blessing, Nancy Mitford - Nancy Mitford
A book that was quite a success in 1951, which is frivolous and amusing, but I would prefer to read it as a social satire rather than a romance or celebration of the life of some very rich people. Nancy Mitford was a member of a privileged, well connected family and was at home in writing a novel about rich and privileged people; it is a world where the only poor people one might meet are the servants. Money and position is everything and to readers outside that social circle (which is the vast majority) it must appear like a sort of fantasy land. We all like to laugh at the "nobs" whose world in reality hardly touches ours. I laughed along with many readers of the book, but was always unsure how deep the satire was meant to penetrate.

The novel tells the story of Grace Allingham's adventures in the marriage market. She falls in love with the Frenchman Charles-Edouard a charming cavalier of a man always wanting to move on to the next thing and a serial womaniser. After a whirlwind romance they are married and soon Grace is pregnant with her first child Sigi (the blessing). Grace is happily married and enjoys the high society life in Paris and turns a blind eye to her husbands dalliances with other women. Charles-Edouard's continual absence from home starts to annoy her and when she catches him in bed with another woman who she believed was a childhood friend, she leaves him and returns to her family home in England. Sigi is a resourceful child of seven years and he discovers that living with both parents, one in France the other in England for an agreed portion of the year; he gets the best of both worlds and the second part of the novel are his increasingly desperate attempts to keep his mother and father apart.

The most obvious satire is the difference between the French, the English and the Americans. Francophiles will love this book, Americans perhaps not so much. Paris high society according to the novel soon gets back to how things were before the second world war. rationing, food shortages hardly get a mention, all is light and glamour and the whirl of Parisian life and the charm of the chateaus in the countryside is compared to the crabby lifestyle in England. Grace loves the culture, the good manners, the more modern approach to love and sex and the conversations around the banqueting tables. Grace's American friend in Paris; Carolyn Dexter is not so enamoured, finding it difficult to get into the society and appalled by the less than sanitary arrangements. Grace's nanny finds the garlicky food inedible and keeps young Sigi away from the horrible rough french children.

The charming energetic Charles-Edouard is everything that a man with privilege and money can be in free wheeling society in Paris. Grace is willing to forgive him almost everything because of her own position as his wife, his charm and success reflects on her and that is enough for her. This message comes through loud and clear in a book which might not be in tune with more 21st century thinking. Grace does assert her independence to the extent that she can afford to go back to her father Sir Conrad, but it is only the machinations of Sigi that keeps her away from Charles-Edouard.

Nancy Mitford's prose flows nicely throughout the book, her characters are well drawn and are not lampooned to the extent that they are unbelievable. They sometimes do crazy things, but then they are rich enough to get away with it. They certainly do nothing to harm their own position, but how light can it be, I asked myself, should I be enchanted by their lifestyles. The novel has some funny moments and never fails to amuse, light. frothy entertainment with satire pitched at a level that rarely gets below the surface. Nancy Mitford moved to Paris in 1946 and became a firm francophile and this is certainly reflected in her novel and so as an ex-pat myself I give it three stars.

Good lord, reading your thread is way too interesting for the health of my TBR list. I've downloaded Jeffries` "After London" for free from Amazon, and I've requested a number of others from my library: The Horseman on the Roof, The Shrinking Man, The Sea Around Us and Spartacus.

The Arden Shakespeare - King Richard III
Norton Critical Editions - Richard III - Shakespeare
BBC The Tragedy of Richard III - William Shakespeare
I have been steeped in Shakespeares Richard III this week and steep is probably the word because it can seem like a long climb to the end. The play that has come down to us from the first folio edition is the second longest of Shakespeare's plays, only Hamlet is longer. The BBC production of the play clocks in at over 3 hours 45 minutes, but don't despair if you are going to see a live theatre production, as there is a good chance that it will have been cut. It has a history of being adapted for the stage, not only for it's length, but also to provide some information on whose who in the play, because it continues on from Shakespeare's Henry VI part III and following the history of the Wars of the Roses is complicated enough without coming in over half way through. From 1700 to the late nineteenth century the version performed would have been a rewrite by Colley Cibber: he incorporated parts of Henry VI part III, inserted some continuity into the text and made considerable cuts to the first folio edition, cutting all extraneous material to the main story of Richards rise and fall. I could appreciate why there could be a need to adapt the first folio edition when I read it through for the first time; certain scenes seem to be overlong and it can be difficult to distinguish the characters and there are references to what had gone on in the previous play.

The play remains the most performed of all Shakespeare's histories and that is probably because central to the play is the character of Richard III, probably the most evil genius ever to rule England according to Tudor propaganda and many people going to the theatre like to see a bad guy. Just what sort of evil genius you will see not only depends on the actors but also to the cuts made in the text. Cibber for example cut out Clarence's dream and his pleading with his murderers, the prattle with his children, the dialogue with the citizens, the cursing scene with Margaret and much of the scene with the Duchess of York, the spectres visiting the combatants tents at Bosworth field and much else. There was plenty of the play left, but the audience would not have seen Richard at his cleverest or most wittiest. There is much in the text that could be used to show Richard as a clever rogue, no better or worse than some of the other noble members of the houses of York and Lancaster, but if the aim of the production was to depict a malevolent and evil Machiavellian usurper of the crown then a more straightforward reading is possible, like that of Cibber's

The play opens with Richard's soliloquy and one of the most famous of Shakespeares lines:

"Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York"

A soliloquy is a device for passing confidential information to the audience and Richard not only tells us about his feelings of inadequacy in times of peace, his physical deformities, but also of the plots he has laid to get rid of his brother:

"I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days"

The audience immediately knows where they are with Richard, which is more than the other characters do in the play. Richard plays to the gallery, which if there was not an audience that gallery would be only himself. He immediately convinces his brother Clarence he will do everything he can to get him released from the Tower (prison) and then hires a couple of ruffians to murder him. His finest feat of manipulation however is completed shortly afterwards. He joins the funeral cortege of Henry VI and sets out to seduce the Lady Anne who is mourning her husband Prince Edward who Richard killed at the battle of Tewksbury; Richard also killed her father and Anne also knows he killed Henry VI. Richard stops the cortège to speak to and seduce Ann who starts off by calling him a foul devil and black magician, but Richard's wit, his offer to kill himself and his protestations of love persuades Ann to accept his ring. He cannot help himself boasting to his audience:

"Was ever woman in this humour wooed?
Was ever woman in this humour won?
I'll have her, but I will not keep her long.

Richard is an extreme misogynist, blaming his mother for his deformities. His disdainful treatment of Anne is typical of him. There are however strong female characters in the play who confront Richard or who talk about him amongst themselves. It is the female parts of the play that often end up on the cutting room floor. The women have all suffered by Richards actions either because husbands have been killed or children murdered and it is their challenge to him and their curses against him that start his loosening of the grip of the kingship. Not including this aspect of the play is like not including a piece of the jigsaw.

The fascination and perhaps the difficulty of understanding Richard for a modern audience is that his character is partly based on an earlier trope that appears in morality plays or early Elizabethan theatre. Richard is of course a modern day Machiavellian character in his plotting and his lust for power, but he is also representative of Vice or Punch in morality plays and so he has the power to do and persuade others to do; things that appear a little far fetched for modern audiences. The characters on the stage know what Richard has done and what he is capable of doing and yet they are all susceptible to his charms. It is only Richmond (Henry Tudor) who is immune and who leads the final assault on Richard's crown. Richard is involved in everything, if he is not on stage then plots that he has set in motion are coming to fruition, or enemies are planning to get the better of him, or are talking about him. It is not quite a one man show, but not too far off. Against Richard it is the female characters who are the strongest.

There is not a high body count only two people die on stage: Clarence and Richard himself; the young princes of the tower are murdered off stage, but it is clear that Richard has arranged their deaths. There is no mystery, it is clear what Richard is doing, much of the power of the play is contained in Richards character and his presence and so it is the words, the wit, the language of the performers that holds the audiences attention. Watching the BBC production brought this home to me. It uses many of the same actors from the previous plays in the tetralogy and an amusing piece of casting is that the actors that play Richards two dead brothers and his father reappear as followers of the triumphant Henry Tudor at the end of the play.

The Arden Shakespeare as usual gives a full analysis of the text, as much information as you could possibly want and it has a good introduction that refers on to further reading if necessary. It gives a potted history of the performance of the play up to modern times. The Norton Critical edition gives very little help with the actual text, but is very good on context. For example it gives excerpts from Shakespeares source material and an Example from Colley Cibbers rewritten version. It also includes essays of criticism, which as usual are a mixed bag.

I found the full version of the play overly long, but it is such a powerful play that it is a 5 star read either in the Arden or the Norton edition.

>90 baswood: Richard III is not one of the Shakespeare plays I know well, but I did love the 2007 Ian McKellan movie version. Some liberties were taken in terms of setting. Those tanks, for instance! Have you seen that movie and if so, did you have any use for it?

>91 rocketjk: No I have not seen the Ian McKellan version, but perhaps the weirdest version is the 1912 silent movie version - Shakespeare as a silent move - how does that work.

>90 baswood:

Magnificent review (as usual). That is one of the Shakespeare plays that I had not reread in more than a decade -- while I love the language and most of the play, the story gets me really annoyed most of the time :)

>90 baswood: Nice review!

This summer I bumped into Richard III again after a long separation, when I read Anthony Sher's Year of the king, his diary of preparing to play Richard. Very interesting — worth looking out for if you haven't read it. That made me watch the 1955 Olivier film, which is of course cut to the bone and all about keeping Sir Larry on screen at all times. The battle scenes are filmed in a Spanish olive plantation, for no obvious reason except cost, and everything else is in a painted-plywood cathedral. But it's worth it for the slowest ever rendering of the opening soliloquy and for the moment when Claire Bloom as Lady Anne very magnificently spits in his face.

>91 rocketjk: I don't remember anything from McKellan's film except the tanks...!

"I don't remember anything from McKellan's film except the tanks...!"

I remember thinking that Ian McKellan was quite good, and that it was one of the few times I enjoyed a "modernization" in setting of a Shakespeare play. Also, the chilling reading of the line (if I'm remembering it correctly), "My Lord will want his dinner."

John Buchan - The Island of Sheep
John Buchan's The Thirty Nine Steps was published in 1915 and introduced his hero Richard Hannay. The Island of Sheep published in 1936 relates Richard Hannay's (now General Hannay) sixth and final adventure. He survives yet again, but John Buchan had only one more novel to write being busy with his job as Governor General to Canada; he died in service in 1940. Buchan seems not to have lost his skill in story telling even if his hero has a bit too much of the British 'stiff upper lip" and there are a few too many co-incidences, but this is fantasy adventure writing that is designed to entertain albeit based on solid ground.

Rapscallions, scoundrels, scallywags, skellums are words frequently used to describe the criminal classes, and although no doubt the world in the 1930's was no less innocent than now, the writing of novelists like Buchan certainly was. Richard Hannay and his chums belong to a social class that is bordering on being aristocratic, there are no money worries and servants and other employees take the strain out of daily living. One dabbles in politics perhaps, or writes or one holds down a job in one of the professions: the legal profession is always useful for those gentlemen that get involved in adventuring. Of course everyone knows how to shoot and most people own a gun and getting time off work is not a problem. The police force is only in existence to clear up the mess. Incidents from past exploits are liable to come back to haunt you, which is the case in this story.

Despite it all feeling like another world, one that is perhaps lost forever (even if it ever existed), there is still much to enjoy. Buchan stories usually have a surprise heroic action at the denouement and this one is no exception and the well put together plotting keeps the pages turning. Buchan's descriptions of the natural world are keen as is his love of the countryside. He also paints lively pictures of his characters once he gets past calling them rapscallions or scoundrels. There is no overt sexism or racism, but there are some allusions to the class system more prevalent in the 1930's even than today; where we might disparagingly refer to the 'white van man' Buchan refers to a tradesman's van "driven by one of those hatless youths". However for me born some twenty years after the events in the story and marvelling at a car chase up the Great North Road (before the motorway system) it holds much charm.

This was an unread book from my bookshelves and the old penguin edition (1956) just about kept together long enough for me to finish. An enjoyable read on a rainy Monday and so 3.5 stars.

The Midwich Cuckoos - John Wyndham
The common European cuckoo is a brood parasite, laying its eggs in the nest of other species of birds. If successful it tricks the host bird into raising its young as its own, but the young cuckoo instinctively destroys the other eggs of the host bird. In a quiet village somewhere in middle England most of the childbearing women fall pregnant at the same time after the village has been sealed off for 24 hours probably by aliens. Wyndham imagines what would happen to the village in this cuckoo like scenario. The novel was written in 1957 and that is when Wyndham places his story and he is not altogether wrong in thinking that the village might want to close in on itself perhaps keeping its shame hidden as much as possible. Anyway it makes for an excellent science fiction story.

Wyndham's science fiction writing although dealing with fantastical events will often pause to think about the issues that the story throws up. In this case it is the battle for survival and the savagery of so called mother nature. The wider issues do not usually get in the way of the development of the plot, or the suspense or the excitement of the action and in this novel it is Mr Zellaby an author of philosophical works, living in the village, who thinks more deeply about the wider issues. Wyndham writes however from a male perspective and the women's voices in the village are rarely heard above the desire to nurture the young. One of the male characters says:

‘If we remember that the majority of feminine tasks are deadly dull and leave the mind so empty that the most trifling seed that falls can grow into a riotous tangle'

It is the men who do the fighting it is the men who take action and it is the men who are in control, but this would be typical of the time in which the novel was set and Wyndham certainly knew and could write about society in England in the 1950's. It makes for a quaint story in some ways, but also it has a certain charm, an innocence perhaps. The setting of Wyndham's stories in rural England reflect the ideal of rural English life, he reminds me of a less radical H G Wells.

This is an imaginative work of fiction written in an easy flowing style with an excellent plot. Many of us know the story from the films "Village of the Damned" and then "Children of the Damned". Published in the science fiction masterwork series it raises its head above much of the pulp fiction of the time and still provides an excellent page turning read 4 stars

Shirley Jackson - The Haunting of Hill House (the novel)

WHO GHOST THERE

Published in 1959 the storyline is very familiar to many mystery readers or film buffs. Doctor Montague invites three other people to spend their vacation at a so called haunted house. The story is told largely from Eleanor's point of view as the story starts with her travelling in a borrowed car to Hill House. Eleanor has been invited by the doctor because of a paranormal event that she witnessed as a child and he has asked his guests to help him record events at the house during their stay. Theodora another of the guests has a slight reputation for telepathy and Luke is a relation of the owner of the house which will soon come down to him as an inheritance.

Doctor Montague has no special equipment and apart from relating the back history to the building and being fascinated by paranormal activity, he has no real qualifications for his ghost hunt. Four people and a weird housekeeper alone in a house 6 miles from the nearest town is the stuff or springboard for plenty of mystery/horror stories, but Jackson imbues her story with many atmospheric descriptions of the house and some puzzling conversations between the four characters. The novel has a tension created by some ghostly events and some surprising reactions from the invited guests. Eleanor seems to be affected most by the house and the book closely follows her experiences as she starts to lose a grip on her situation.

It is a very well written gothic horror story with a 1950's flavour, but am I the only reader who is inclined to read more into the story than is actually there. Much is unstated and yet the story has a conclusion that brings the tale to a satisfactory ending, but I can't help wondering who was the ghost or who were the ghosts, or were there any ghosts at all. A fine mystery and 4 stars.

>98 baswood: I remember the original movie version as being a truly good ghost story. Haven't read the book, though, but I have read some of Jackson's short stories.

William Shakespeare - Titus Andronicus
The pornography of violence is writ large in this early play by Shakespeare. It was considered too shocking for a Victorian Audience, but was a success in 1592 when it hit the Elizabethan stage. Recent modern revivals have also succeeded which may say more about the 21st century than Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. The amount of violence in the play is listed in the wikipedia article. I lost count of the incidents way before the end:

The play is saturated with violence from its opening scene, and violence touches virtually every character; Alarbus is burned alive and has his arms chopped off; Titus stabs his own son to death; Bassianus is murdered and thrown into a pit; Lavinia is brutally raped and has her hands cut off and her tongue cut out; Martius and Quintus are decapitated; a nurse and a midwife are stabbed to death by Aaron; an innocent clown is executed for no apparent reason; Titus kills Chiron and Demetrius and cooks them in a pie, which he then feeds to their mother. Then, in the final scene, in the space of a few lines, Titus kills in succession Lavinia and Tamora, and is then immediately killed by Saturninus, who is in turn immediately killed by Lucius. Aaron is then buried up to his neck and left to starve to death in the open air and Tamora's body is thrown to the wild beasts outside the city. As S. Clark Hulse points out, "it has 14 killings, 9 of them on stage, 6 severed members, 1 rape (or 2 or 3 depending on how you count), 1 live burial, 1 case of insanity, and 1 of cannibalism – an average of 5.2 atrocities per act, or one for every 97 lines

This run down does not reveal the whole picture however, because it is Shakespeare's depiction of his characters seeming to revel in the violence that is most shocking for audiences and readers of the play. This is Marcus coming across his sister Lavinia in a forest who has just been raped by two Goths and has had her hands cut off and her tongue cut out:

Why dost not speak to me?
Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,
Like to a bubbling fountain stirr'd with wind,
Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips,
Coming and going with thy honey breath.
But sure some Tereus hath deflowered thee,
And, lest thou shouldst detect him, cut thy tongue.
Ah, now thou turn'st away thy face for shame!
And notwithstanding all this loss of blood-
As from a conduit with three issuing spouts-
Yet do thy cheeks look red as Titan's face
Blushing to be encount'red with a cloud.

This is what happens to Aaron at the end of the play:

Set him breast-deep in earth, and famish him;
There let him stand and rave and cry for food.
If any one relieves or pities him,
For the offence he dies. This is our doom.
Some stay to see him fast'ned in the earth.

We only have to wait until line 130 for the first violent act: Lucius has demanded that one of the prisoners be sacrificed to appease the Roman dead and selects the eldest son of the conquered queen Tamora. She pleads with Titus Andronicus for mercy; the first of the characters kneeling in supplication. Her plea is dismissed out of hand and Lucius gives the order:

Away with him, and make a fire straight;
And with our swords, upon a pile of wood,
Let's hew his limbs till they be clean consum'd.

This is the murder that starts the chain of the murder and revenge cycle.

The play is set in Roman times where it could be argued that there was violence and spectacle enough to warrant this graphic rendition. With the amount of action that takes place it is a wonder that Shakespeare can tell a coherent story, but he does and significantly his character have no time to develop, the only soliloquy's are by the arch villain Aaron. It is a story of power and vengeance. Titus Andronicus has returned to Rome from a ten year campaign against the barbarian goths. His return coincides with the election of a new Roman emperor. Saturninus claims the throne as the eldest son of the dead emperor, but his brother Bassianus also lays claim: the people favour Titus, but he declines saying he is too old and too weary and supports Saturninus. Lavinia is chosen by Saturninus as empress to unite the two families, but Bassianus seizes her claiming they are already married. Saturninus therefore turns to Tamora who has already sworn vengeance against Titus and his family. Aaron the Moor and lover of Tamora plots to destabilise the regime and instigates two of Tamora's sons to rape and disfigure Lavinia and kill Bassianus. War breaks out between the families as each murder leads to more bloodshed. It can only end when most of the principal characters are dead, but their is no moral to this story, the violence continues to the end of the play and the audience is left with the impression that violence is endemic.

Shakespeare was following a tradition of earlier successes in the theatre: Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Christopher Marlowe's the Jew of Malta were both revenge tragedy's, but Shakespeare took this theme and ran with it further into the darkness and darkness is the overall impression that I got from this play. The BBC production starring Trevor Peacock as Titus stays true to the text and there is no light at all in the 2 and a half hours playing time. It does show how well the play can be made to work. An evening in the theatre with this play cannot fail to depress the viewer. No thoughts of better times ahead, no optimism, just blackness piled on blackness. Perhaps it was a play of its time with the theatres on the verge of being closed due to the plague. It does not make for cheerful viewing during the covid 19 epidemic. It is a powerful unrelenting play and I can understand why it might be well thought of by some, but for me at this moment in time I could quite cheerfully pass it by 4 stars, but 5 stars for the BBC film.

Nicholas Monsarrat - The Cruel Sea
Published in 1951 a mere six years after the end of the second world war, this is a novel of historical fiction that tells the story and role of the smaller boats that formed the protective screen around the convoys that made regular crossings of the Atlantic ocean during the second world war. The strength of the novel lays in its depiction of the work and conditions aboard Corvettes and then Frigates who were in almost constant danger from german submarine (U boat) attacks and from the horrendous nautical conditions during the winter months. Monsarrat focuses on his leading character Keith Lockhart who held various posts on both types of boat under the command of a professional navy officer Ericson with whom he forged a good working relationship.

The novel follows Lockhart's journey through the war years from his initial posting as an officer recruited from a career in journalism at the start of the war until his position as first lieutenant in a new frigate at the end of hostilities. Monsarrat own career during the war followed a similar path and while the novel is not an autobiography, Monsarrat uses his experience to paint a picture of life on the high seas during wartime. He tells a story full of danger and adversity spiced with memorable seascapes and impossible working conditions. Lockhart's first boat the Compass Rose was one of the early corvettes which first took to the sea equipped with a small gun and depth charges, but without any radar and proved to be a soft target for the German U Boats. The corvette struggled in rough seas and its crew of ninety endured very cramped conditions, with more injuries caused by weather conditions than from hostile forces, but in danger on every trip of being sunk with perhaps the loss of all on board. Monsarrat's skills as a writer create a realistic picture of the struggle against superior forces and the toughness of the men to survive the attacks and the hard learned skills of officers who have to make life or death decisions. He creates plenty of tension and excitement.

While the novel also attempts to show relationships between the officers and sometimes between them and the ordinary ratings this is not its strongest point. It is good on a fairly superficial level and shows the teamwork needed to survive the awful conditions, but there is little in depth of characterisation and sometimes it feels a little corny. Where women do feature it is as lovers and wives of the men and one particular episode could qualify as a contender for the best "bad sex" episode of the year, remembering that the year is 1951. It could be said that Monsarrat never gets far beneath the oil skins. Where the novel can appear even more unstuck when read today is when it strays into an insidious patriotism. I fully understand that people signing up for the war effort were brave and patriotic, but one gets the feeling when talking about other nations that Monsarrat is merely mouthing the xenophobia that was in existence at the time.

Reading the novel gives a seemingly authentic account of the struggle to keep the convoy system in operation across the Atlantic during the war and as such provides an historical retelling as seen through the eyes of one of its participants. Conditions on board the small boats were both difficult and horrifying and Monsarrat does not spare his readers some of the more gruesome details. This was a wartime situation and Monsarrat's descriptions would be vivid enough to put the book into the anti-war camp for many readers. A cruel sea, a cruel war and an intolerable strain on the men who had to survive the conditions. Its not great literature: its all a bit too episodic for that, but it places the reader inside those small ships amongst the stink of oil and seawater to create an exciting account and a 4 star read.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - John Berendt
Truth is stranger than fiction or in this case near truth is as strange as near fiction. The story of Jim Williams several trials (1981-89) for the murder of Danny Hansford in Savannah Georgia (USA) has been manipulated by Berendt into a nonfiction novel, but the real star of this novel is the city of Savannah. The novel apparently remains the longest standing New York Times bestseller (216 weeks on the list) and two years after its publication in 1994 Savannah enjoyed a 46% increase in tourism. The city is certainly made to sound attractive, but is not a place that I would have wanted to visit in case I had met any of the characters that appear in the novel: an unlovely bunch of braggarts, social climbers and miscreants in anyones language.

The novel is written in the first person by Berendt as an active observer taking notes and meeting with the characters as the events unfold and in some ways proves to be a social document of the life of the city as seen in the upper echelons. Part one of the book describes the city and some of the characters that Berendt meets while carrying out his research. He starts with a meeting of the wealthy socialite Jim Williams at his house and the young man Danny Hansford who will be shot by Williams later (much later) in the book. The author then takes in the high spots of Savannah telling us a little about himself and his meeting with other characters; many who will not feature at all in the murder case or trial, but will still be part of Berendt's social group. Part two of the book roughly halfway through gets the story moving of the murder and trial. Part one therefore serves to be a long introduction and a whose who of the city and a whose who of those involved in the drama.

It takes some time therefore for the story of the murder and the trial to get started and that would have been fine if the first part of the book had not been written in a style that feels like reportage. Although Berendt inserts himself into the book he is a mere cypher and gives only a superficial view of the characters he meets. He is just a teller of stories and some of these are second hand. It is really only the transgender person of colour; Chablis who is so extrovert that she cannot help talking about herself that reveal any inner thoughts and she has no part to play in the murder and trail. Of course characters talk about other characters, but they are unreliable witnesses.

Forget the story of the trials that plod on through the second half of the book, because Berendt does not add much to the known facts and instead concentrate on the indictment of the social elite of Savannah. Old money. new money, racist, sexist its all here if you can see the wood for the trees. I am not sure Berendt can, but then he has a story to report. The book did not do much for me and so three stars.

Barnabe Barnes - Parthenophil and Parthenophe: Sonnets, madrigals, elegies and odes.
This collection of Elizabethan love poetry first appeared in 1593 in a small private print run and were anonymous. They were reprinted subsequently under the name of the poet Barnabe Barnes. It is a large and varied collection of poems containing 105 sonnets, 21 elegies, 21 odes, 26 madrigals, 3 canzones, 5 sestinas, and an eidillion. The variety is in their form not their subject matter. They are love poems following the example set by the Italian renaissance poet Petrarch. They are poems of unrequited love and were closely connected with the idea of courtly love. However Barnes was not a courtier in the traditional sense, merely a gentleman which might account for the final couple of poems in the sequence where the lover Parthenophil in desperation tricks Parthenophe into love making that would be construed as rape.

There are an awful lot of poems and they are presented without much narrative thread. The sonnets take up much of the first part of the collection interspersed with some madrigals. Parthenophil as the poet/speaker is enamoured by Laya, but in sonnet five she takes up with a courtier and Parthenophil is able to escape away to find Parthenophe, who at first is pleased to see him, but by sonnet 9 he is already complaining:

"Thus in her love She made me such hard measure"

The poems then fall into the well worn track of the poet praising his loves beauties and also becoming increasingly frustrated because she seems to pay him less and less attention. There are then some sequences of sonnet/complaints: one particular set uses the signs of the zodiac, another the power of his loved ones eyes, there are many poems describing his hot passion and her cold reproof and many more on the sorrows of unrequited love. After sonnet 102 there are a sequence of elegies where new themes are introduced and the frustrated poet seems more inclined to plot his revenge, noting that his poems will be for all to see and will show the hardness of Parthenophe's heart

"And thine hard heart, thy beauty's shameful stain I
And that foul stain, thine endless infamy !
So, though Thou still in record do remain,
The records reckon but thine obloquy !
When on the paper, which my Passion bears,
Relenting readers, for my sake ! shed tears"

There then follows a series of odes and then some pastorals where the poet imagines himself in the innocent world of the shepherds.

There is a final sonnet, which underlines the action he will take in the final sestina where he will summon Hecate and her magic spells to kindle the passion in Parthenophe:

AH ME ! How many ways have I assayed,
To win my Mistress to my ceaseless suit !
What endless means and prayers have I made
To thy fair graces ! ever deaf and mute.
At thy long absence, like an errand page,
With sighs and tears, long journeys did I make
Through paths unknown, in tedious pilgrimage ;
And never slept, but always did awake
And having found Thee ruthless and unkind ;
Soft skinned, hard hearted ; sweet looks, void of pity;
Ten thousand furies raged in my mind,
Changing the tenour of my lovely Ditty;
By whose enchanting Saws and magic Spell, '
Thine hard, indurate heart, I must compel.

And the spells work a treat because:

'Tis now acquitted ! Cease your former tears !
For as She once, with rage my body kindled ;
So in hers, am I buried this night.

Barnaby Barnes is a poet who was not afraid to play with the more classical forms of poetry and so there are a number of fifteen line sonnets and his madrigals and odes take on a number of formats. The poetry cannot help but be a little repetitive and there are some quite dull examples here. Saying the same things that many of the Elizabethan soniteers were saying is not going to make for much originality of thought, but this was not the aim as I suspect that Barnes found his pleasure in tweaking with the formal structures. This is by no means essential, but if you like the Elizabethan sonneteers you can do worse than Barnes. 3.5 stars.

Sonnet LIX

AH ME ! sweet beauty lost, returns no more.
And how I fear mine heart fraught with disdain !
Despair of her disdain, casts doubt before ;
And makes me thus of mine heart's hope complain.
Ah, me ! nor mine heart's hope, nor help. Despair !
Avoid my Fancy ! Fancy's utter bane ! .;.
My woes' chief worker ! Cause of all my care !
Avoid my thoughts ! that Hope may me restore
To mine heart's heaven, and happiness again !
Ah, wilt thou not ? but still depress my thought !
Ah, Mistress ! if thy beauty, this hath wrought.
That proud disdainfulness shall in thee reign :
Yet, think ! when in thy forehead wrinkles be ;
Men will disdain thee, then, as thou dost me

>103 baswood: He seems to have been trying to reintroduce alliterative verse single-handed! Once again, we all have to admire you for boldly going where no-one has been for a very long time.

>102 baswood: I purchased a copy of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil shortly after I moved from Pittsburgh to Atlanta in 1997, due to the popularity of this novel, and the proximity of Savannah to my new home. I still haven't read the book, or seen the city, although I'm more inclined to make the four hour drive there for a trip sometime next year, once the pandemic is under better control, probably as a two city journey when I pay a visit to my close friend and former neighbor who retired and moved to relatively nearby Charleston, South Carolina last month.

Alberto Moravia - The Conformist
Bernado Bertolucci - Il conformista
My last read of a book published in 1951 in the year 2020; proved to be one of the best reads of the year and I got to see an impressive film to boot. Facist Italy in 1937 forms the backdrop to much of Moravia's The Conformist although there is also a sojourn in Paris. The novelist focuses on Marcello who works for the state and drifts into espionage, but this is a story of Marcello's voyage of self discovery as he scrutinises his own actions in an attempt to fit in; to achieve a much sought after normalcy after believing himself to be abnormal. Moravia shows us everything through Marcello's eyes and yet the writing keeps just a little distance from him, because of Marcello's tight control of his emotions and one wonders if he is a character without a soul; perhaps a character like Meursault in Camus L'etranger. It has a feeling of an exercise in existentialism although Moravia does not stray into absurdism. The novel bristles with themes and ideas as we follow Marcello's journey through life; the grimy world of espionage, homosexuality, desire, religion, a tightly controlled police state and the inevitability of reactions as a result of actions taken.

In a prolog to the main action of the novel we meet Marcello as an innocent thirteen year old who is bullied at school and whose father is well on the way to his insanity and his mother has her own issues. Marcello takes pleasure in killing lizards and to his surprise discovers that his behaviour is seen as abnormal by his friend next door. He is picked up while walking home from school by a man driving an impressive car and bargains with him to obtain a hand gun. He avoids being raped by shooting his adversary Lino (a defrocked priest) and escapes any consequences. This incident remains with him all his life. We pick up Marcello's story in his early thirties; he has graduated and is a government employee, a member of the facist party and about to get married. He concentrates his efforts into being a good husband and model employee, but his enthusiasm to do what is expected of him is derailed by his selection to carry out a clandestine operation by his employers and the sexual desire of his fiancé.

His acceptance of his part in a mission to kill his old and revered professor who is making anti-fascist waves in Paris and his attraction to the professors wife (Lina) leads to further complications, but Marcello's psychopathic tendencies enable him to find his way through. It is a complicated situation made more so by the professor's young wife wanting to seduce Marcello's fiancé Giulia and the professor himself refusing to acknowledge the machinations of the fascist plot. There are some brilliant set piece incidents in the book which make great subject matter for the film: Marcello must go to confession before his marriage and decides to confess to the murder of Lino, the professor and his wife take Marcello and his wife who are on their honeymoon to a lesbian club in Paris, the fall of Mussolini and Marcello's flight to the countryside. These incidents along with the earlier one of Marcello's seduction by Lina are used by Bertolucci's to create a sort of cut and paste cinema style. Marcello just appears to move on to the next thing he must do, hardly questioning anything, sleepwalking almost in his desire to be seen as normal. He enjoys the regularity of life as a government employee, he looks forward to a settled marriage, but must exert an almost iron willed control on his emotions and feeling that threaten to disrupt his life. This is a tightly controlled novel with sinister overtones that is unsettling in its depiction of Marcello as a man just on the outer edge of normalcy.

The film released in 1970 is an impressive piece of artwork. The director uses a backdrop of modernist monumental architecture with its impeccable clean lines and grandeur that dwarf the human characters. It lends an added depth to the character of Marcello who is a character with a vital something missing. It expresses the would be power of the fascist state and its overriding feeling of control permeates throughout. It is also a good backdrop to the decadence of the principal characters, both morale and physical. Like the book the film has an unsettling edge to it enhanced by the performance of Jean-Louis Trintignant as Marcello. I think it is a visual masterpiece; a delight to the senses. I viewed the film just after finishing the book and although the film is not exactly faithful to the book I found my imagination bouncing around between the two. You can hardly have a better compliment to the film maker.

There is no doubting the erotic charge to the book which the film does not quite capture in all its complexities but here is an example:

In Lina, was the purity he seemed to perceive there - mortified in the prostitute, triumphant in Lina. He now understood that only the radiant light emanating from Lina's forehead could dissipate the disgust for decadence, corruption and impurity that had burdened him all his life and which his marriage to Giulia had in noway mitigated.

The eroticism is set by the female characters, they make the decisions, they make the first move, they look to satisfy their desires. They threaten Marcello's ideal world of order and conformity, but they don't threaten his inviolable inner world. This is a novel that would benefit from a re-read and it would go back on my shelf, however I note that I have got the kindle version, my old penguin orange and white cover hard copy must have bitten the dust some time ago - 5 stars.

Appearing on a desk near me

>106 baswood:

Interesting review. Moravia is popular back home but I don’t remember this one at all (although it seems to have been published in Bulgaria). Had not thought of him in years - maybe time to revisit him next year.

>106 baswood: I've seen the film on the big screen a couple of times and did buy the book which I must try (I started the Garden of the Finci-Contini's first and had to take it back to the library before finishing). It's been a while since I saw the film, but it is so perfect I find it a bit too perfect and somehow closed, but then maybe that is me not understanding such a closed person. That closed-ness is something i tend to avoid -- ahh that's it I find the analysis of him too reductionist and perfect, but maybe I just don't know (all attempts to buck his behaviour seem framed within being related to that behaviour -- it irks me) -- but yes very fitting for that style of cinema. Trintignant I found fantastic, there is a little sequence in which he sort of skips down some steps that is just delightful and so right somehow. And you're right about the framing and architecture, colour too.

edit - i enjoyed your review, i'm more likely to read it now as it is fascinating despite my dislike, which partly may be related to fitting in and hiding who i am myself in the past.
I've a few of your reviews to catch up on - I realised after your Two Gentlemen of Verona review tht I never dared write my own review, one of the very few i must have missed here. It made me remember that it may be some of it is lost. You and Dan are making me think of more focus on Shakespeare though, and i have the bbc versions to watch. Happy New year to you.

>102 baswood: Shame - I was poised to add this to my wish list from the first part of your review, but I'll hold off....

Hi. Had a deep catch up here - Oct to today. Enjoyed the Shakespeare commentary especially. I always wonder if the humor i saw in Titus is real or imaginary, you certainly make me more uncertain about that. I haven’t read The Two Gentle of Verona, or Richard III. Hopefully we will get both on 2021. ?? Anyway I appreciate your argument with the introduction on TTGoV.

Loved reading about the Haunting of Hill House and it’s not just you. She was saying a lot outside the story - a commentary on the horror genre, on men, and American materialism and American belief and character and insecurity. I think there definitely was no ghost, and also there certainly was. : ) I think she has it both ways.

Fascinated by The Mandarins. And your review of Lovecraft is simply terrific. Not sure i need to read him, but I enjoyed your take. Lots a great stuff here and great reviews.

Happy New Year everyone.

>106 baswood: Interesting: Moravia is one of those people who seem to have gone out of fashion in English just before I got to them: my parents had quite a row of Moravia translations sitting on the paperback shelf between How green was my valley and Olivia by Olivia, I never saw any of them move... But he’s obviously still treated as a very important writer in Italy. I must get to him!

Happy new year, and I hope you’re having fun with Boris Vian!