The Lonely Londoners - Sam Selvon (57/1400)

Summary
8/10
Bittersweet comedy about West Indian immigrants to 1950s London told with verve and authenticity and perfectly capturing the zeitgeist.

Published 1956

Review
There are around 600,000 Afro-Caribbeans living in the UK, mostly in London and mostly descended from immigrants who arrived in the 1950s. This is an inspired account of what life was like for those immigrants and part of a chronicle of how much has changed in the UK over the past 60 years.

The story, which is very slight, is told as a series of anecdotes, many only a few sentences long, about Moses Aloetta and his fellow immigrants from the West Indies into 1950s London. Selvon marvellously realises the thought and speech patterns of his subjects conveying the excitement and strangeness of moving to a cold and potentially lonely city from a warm and neighbourly group of islands.

His cast of characters could be out of Dickens, the dissolute survivor Cap, Harris the proto Englishman, Sir Galahad, the newbie and Tanty and Grandma who have descended on Tolroy uninvited. Moses is the wise old bird who knows everyone and everything.

Although the lowest of the low, discriminated against in jobs and housing and having very little money, the immigrants pulse with life, energy and comradeship. London becomes their playground and they enjoy it like children – the great roundabout of Piccadilly Circus, and swinging through the glory of the parks in summer for example. London doesn’t intimidate them or beat them down with it’s size but rather they respond to it as if were a person, a relative such as a big sister to be loved and abused at the same time.

The book describes a variety of surprising interactions between the immigrants and fellow Londoners, including many and varied sexual encounters. These touch on but don’t dwell on prejudice and instead relate more to strangeness and novelty so that the native white Londoners see the immigrants as a novelty to be explored and vice versa.

The work is loaded with comic episodes, or rather they are told in a comedic manner even when they relate to periods of difficulty and there is a real feel good sense to the novel. The sadness that is rippled through it and guides the title relates to the longing to be back in the West Indies and the good life coupled with the economic understanding that, like the London the immigrants have helped create, there is no going back.

Hard Times - Charles Dickens (56/1400)

Summary
8/10
Hard facts are overcome by soft hearts as Dickens contrasts the apparent needs of business with those of humanity in a recognisably modern theme. This is less cartoonish than some Dickens and the very funny set pieces mingle with authentic grace.

Published 1854

Review
This book’s theme of urbanization at the expense of humanity and society is bang up-to-date in our globalizing world and although Dickens’ usual trait of over-the-top characterization is present it’s done with greater sympathy for and harmony with the plot and themes than is the case in some other of his works; it’s also very funny.

Dickens doesn’t do subtle, so the big idea of how mechanization and industrialization chew up people’s humanity is laid on with a trowel. The two lead male characters both express different aspects of this, with Thomas Gradgrind, a school teacher and later an MP, being entirely devoted to facts and the principles of the market - whether applied to goods and services or human relations; whilst the industrialist Josiah Bounderby is interested in self promotion and self profit. Together they provide some of the funniest and most modern parts of this book, demonstrating the absurdity of the limits of their viewpoints. Anyone listening to a Goldman Sachs partner justifying his bonus or a multinational company defending its third-world employment practices will recognize and shudder at their dialogue and views.

More subtly done are the complimentary themes of the value of love, loyalty and redemption played out through the various plots weaving across the novel. These all have their seeds in the treatment meted out to the other characters by Gradgrind and Bounderby. Dickens nicely distinguishes the two men because Gradgrind undertakes one out-of-character selfless action at the beginning of the book by taking into his household Sissy, an abandoned circus girl. At the end, Bounderby reaps nothing but destruction from his life, but this one act of kindness saves Gradgrind and his family from complete wreckage.

It would spoil the fun to say too much, but the plot has two strands that interconnect. In one Gradgrind’s daughter, Louisa, has all human spark taken out of her by her father’s teaching and is unhappily married off to Bounderby, whilst her dissolute brother Tom, equally unhappily, becomes his clerk. In the second, Bounderby’s self-centred view of the world destroys the life of the saintly Stephan Blackpool, one of his hands.

These threads come together at the end so that the consequences of treating men like machines is thrown back in the faces of Bounderby and Gradgrind and the beauty of individuals with compassion and humanity rises above the grime and pollution of the Coketown setting. Gradgrind gets the message but Bounderby carries on, living and dying alone and with no useful legacy.

Finally there are two sub plots; one is brilliant involving Bounderby’s housekeeper, the deliciously wicked and very funny Mrs. Sparsit, who is angling to get rid of Louisa and marry Bounderby; but the second jars a little and doesn’t really come off concerning James Harthouse, a cad, who tries to get into Louisa’s knickers. Both characters come to a satisfying sticky end.

This is a delightfully compact story with great relevance to today’s world that manages to get across its message with humor and without preachiness. It’s not subtle but it is thoughtful, and has a great heart.

Othello - William Shakespeare (55/1400)

Summary
6/10
Hard work to read, yet one of the Bard’s easiest plays as a stage work. My mark reflects the reading experience but it’s fantastic if staged well. A superb study of ambition, love and revenge. This is a real potboiler with beautiful poetry thrown in for free.

Performed 1604

Review
This is one of the Bard’s more easily digested plays, since the themes and the plot are relatively straightforward – although there are plenty of academic theories and counter theories if you want complexity.

Iago is passed over for an army promotion by Othello and swears revenge - which he takes by planting the seeds of jealousy in Othello’s mind about the fidelity of his new wife Desdemona, whom he suggests is having an affair with Cassio, Iago’s successful military rival. A simple enough plot made interesting by three things. First the scale of Iago’s success in his plans is such that Othello murders Desdemona and kills himself – revenge indeed, although some critics can’t equate the quarrel with the outcome – I suggest that they have never sought revenge. Secondly Othello is black – a Moor – and yet holds a position of command in the Venetian army. There are reams of material written about the significance of Othello’s colour both as regards Iago’s revenge and Shakespeare’s racism. Personally I found it an irrelevance and I suspect that as much as anything Shakespeare might have needed to find a role for a black actor. Finally and most interestingly is the manner in which Iago executes his revenge, which is a model of subtlety and how well he knows the weak spots and vanities of his target.

Othello is in many ways the perfect man, he is physically strong and courageous, and is an acclaimed war hero and respected general. So much so that, although he steals Desdemona without her father’s permission, the state of Venice is anxious to overlook any impropriety so that Othello can lead a campaign against the Turks in Cyprus. And it seems that he is good with people and a wise and kind human being but it transpires that he cannot bear disloyalty, neither in Cassio – his lieutenant, who is induced into drunkenness by Iago, or his wife who might be having an affair with that same Cassio.

Iago plays him like an instrument, and with the merest of shams convinces Othello of the unworthiness of Cassio and his wife. This was probably a message that was not lost on Shakespeare’s royal audience who would be used to having honeyed words trickled into their ears designed to advance their author at the expense of others (and any senior manager in a large firm will be familiar with the set up).

But Iago leaves too much of a trail and is caught out – too late to save Othello and Desdemona. To that extent Shakespeare pulls his punches because we all know that in real life Iago would get away with it and take Othello’s position not just Cassio’s.

You will read a lot about the racism allegedly in this play but there is plenty of evidence for this being pro black as well as anti – Othello is perhaps the most beautiful character in the work. After 400 years there is nothing more left in the debate, decide for yourself.

There is a lot of good stuff here, not too many long speeches and the motivation of the characters is pretty clear throughout. I can’t really recommend reading the play however – it’s so much easier to understand if a great actor delivers the lines. Maybe it’s an idea to have a copy for reference afterwards. My score therefore reflects the reading experience. If I scored a great performance of the play it would get an 8/10.

A Kestrel For A Knave - Barry Hines (54/1400)

Summary
8/10
A super piece of story telling about an under privileged teenager who trains a Kestrel. Great atmosphere and narrative tension but it’s so short that Hines only just gets going before he ends. Really a children’s book.

Published 1968



Review
What a delightful and softly told story this is. Billy Casper is a dissolute one parent teenager living in a Yorkshire mining town. He’s a social and academic failure and his home life is a mess with a bullying elder half brother and a mother whose ambition is to snare another man.

But Billy has a rapport with nature and is a wizard at training animals. He takes a young Kestrel from its nest and, with infinite care and patience, trains it to the lure. Sadly the world is stacked against Billy and his brief interlude of peace and pleasure ends in conflict and disaster.

Hines is very good at the mechanics of telling the story, using Billy’s family and school to permit him to reflect Billy’s sympathetic relationship with the Kestrel and how it compares to his awkward relationships with human beings. The narrative tension comes naturally out of Billy’s character and those of the people in his life. Hines deftly invokes the atmosphere of the town, the school, the mine and the fields around so that Billy’s universe is complete for the reader.

The shame of it is that Hines only runs the story to 159 pages, which makes it fine for a children’s book but makes it seem like a set of notes rather than a full blown novel to an adult reader. In particular he condenses Billy’s thoughts on his missing father to a dream sequence that is the only duff note in the whole book. It ends up feeling like a script for a film – which of course is what it became.

Orlando - Virginia Woolf - (53/1400)

Summary
5/10

A treatise on what it takes to be an author disguised as a tribute to a bi-sexual friend. Told as a fable covering 400 years of history this is beautifully written but without an obvious narrative so that at times it is slightly laboured.

Published 1928


Review
This work is generally described as a tribute to Woolf’s bisexual friend, Vita Sackville-West and it’s true that Orlando starts the book as a boy and changes into a woman during its course and there are other points of reference as well but in truth it is a hymn to being an author, and all that it takes and entails to become a real writer.

The book is written as a biography of Orlando but comes across as more of a biography of an author or perhaps even autobiography. It is written in a very simple style like a fable or fairy tale with straightforward language used in layers to produce penetrating descriptions of scenes and emotions. An object under scrutiny is described in four, five, or perhaps a dozen different ways to build a convincing picture. The setting at England’s royal court, the strangeness of much of what happens and the enormous timescale enhance the feeling of reading a myth.

Orlando is born into a noble English family in the last days of the reign of Elisabeth I and dies in 1928 some 400 years later and the book follows his (later her) story. This covers a variety of extraordinary adventures and experiences most notably changing sex, but including various types of love and intercourse with different kinds of society and the artistic world and importantly Orlando writes and loves literature.

This last is a constant thread through the book as Orlando right from the start is a would-be writer and may even have seen Shakespeare at work. Although she is stung by the cruel opinions of the poet Nicholas Green into burning most of her work, she keeps one poem – the Oak Tree – which is worked on and over for four hundred years until, meeting Green again in the Victorian age, it is published.

At the end, the reader is asked to look back over all that Orlando has experienced as man and woman, and felt and done and the huge time span over which she has done it; to understand that only armed with these experiences, and with endless revision of the work, can an author be created. This is finally expressed as being a multitude of people inside all of whom have a voice (Woolf suffered from mental illness so this may have been a resonant image for her).

The cleverness of the writing is hidden by the use of simple words and phrases but this does create a very emotional and evocative picture of a life and world. However, the book drags, because it never becomes clear where it is going - it’s like modern maths, you are just supposed to discover it – and that puts a lot of weight on simply enjoying the writing.

This was one of Woolf’s most popular books during her lifetime but I suspect that most modern readers will prefer her other works.

Pictures From Italy - Charles Dickens (52/1400)

Summary
5/10

Various sketches of Italy told by Dickens as an observant tourist. Useful insight on the atmosphere of Italy at the time and Dickens' writing process but otherwise lightweight.

Published 1846

Review
This is more like a sketchpad than a picture book, as Dickens travels on a grand tour of Italy giving his take on the major sights. He makes it clear than this is in no way a guidebook but more a collection of impressions – each one a sketch of his experience. They have some of the same observation and wit of the characterizations in his novels but without the narrative drive this becomes simply a collection of notes. Many of them did find their in way into his stories in one form or another, but here they exist in the raw making it possible to see the workings of the artist’s mind and technique more easily. So easily in fact that parts of the book were lampooned at the time.

Very little of what is written is truly memorable but it is evocative of a tourist Italy that has now passed away and anyone wishing to write about that period would do well to read this book, since if nothing else it is powerfully atmospheric. Where it fails however is that is only shows the people of Italy in a shadowy way. They are observed but without interaction so that the work becomes a series of vignettes that lack coherence other than the author’s own journey, but since that is just a meander there is no storyline to speak of.

In the end this is a curiosity, it’s quite useful to see parts of Dickens’s thought process but ultimately this is just background to his major works.

Fanny Hill - John Clelland (51/1400)

Summary
5/10

Medium-soft porn set in 18th Century England. If you want to be turned on sexually then better stuff is available on the internet. If you want to be turned on intellectually then better stuff is available in paperback.



Review
This is a pretty raunchy book sold here as classic fiction. Whilst it is historically interesting to understand that soft porn of this kind was printed, published and read in mid 18th century London (and more so in Paris) it’s hard to make any claims for it beyond that .

There is a neat and sweetly written sob story of a prostitute with a heart of gold finding, losing and finding again Charles her first and greatest lover. In between Fanny meets and screws a wide variety of social and sexual types all of which is described in sufficient detail to leave not much to the imagination. Clelland is better than average at writing bedroom scenes and shades off (to avoid censorship) the most graphic details in a way that heightens the sensuality of each set piece. Nonetheless, the fact that he is above the norm does not make him a classic writer and no one could seriously recommend this work for the quality of the prose alone. And so what is left is an interesting historical piece, and I was surprised to learn that such a book could have been circulated in mid 18th Century London.

Before the rise of the internet I can see that this would also have been a useful way of getting hold of some porn without your parents, say, being any the wiser but given that constraint no longer applies it’s hard to say what use this book is to the ordinary reader.

It’s an easy read and a bit of fun. It’s just not literature.

Half A Century

Fifty books seems a good moment to pause for reflection along the path of this marathon task.

I should say something about my scoring system. I award my mark the second I finish the book without pause for reflection and it therefore represents my instantaneous feelings at the moment of completion. There are some books that I have grown more fond of after I have read them, but the mark stays unchanged because it is intended to represent whether or not it is a good work to sit down with and just read, not whether it is an intellectual exercise or otherwise preys later on your mind. Broadly speaking the marks runs as follows. The pass mark is 6/10 so anything less than this is a fail and I do not recommend reading that book. I won’t bother going into the gradations of failure as these essentially represent various degrees and styles of my disgust.

6/10 represents a book that is fine to read if there is nothing else to hand
7/10 is a good book that is a decent read
8/10 is a very good book that is worth reading
9/10 is an excellent book that should be sought out and read
10/10 is life changing

So far I have given Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and This Way For The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski 10/10, but I have handed out several 9/10s.

I have also awarded 17 fail marks of 5 or less, which means that fully one third of the Classics that I have read so far I would not recommend to others. That is very disappointingly high given that one of the objects of this exercise is never to read another duff book. From that point of view this mission has failed.

The fact that I intend to read all 1400, or at least to try, does mean that I don’t really care which one I read next. I try to mix long books with shorter reads but apart from that just grab one at random either from my shelves or the library. Sometimes I need a break for a few days to think about what I have been reading and sometimes I can just pass on to the next one as if I had been reading a newspaper. Very few of the books have become un-putdownable page-turners, and with many I have gone through phases of like and dislike before coming to a view.

However, in the main I have found something to enjoy in almost every book that I have read (except Keats) and have read a great many books that I have thoroughly enjoyed that I might never have picked up were it not for this quest. Some simply didn’t appeal because of their subject matter, or looked intimidatingly large on the shelf, or had reputations that seemed off putting, or I had a false idea of what the authors were about or I simply didn’t like the cover. And one thing I have found is that you really can’t judge a book by its cover, especially the deadly dull Penguin Classics covers.

I do think that Penguin could do a better job of marketing these books by putting them into special editions and making the notes and introductory essays more accessible. I’m sure many people are put off by the very serious look and style that Penguin has adopted, making the works seem specialized and irrelevant to modern readers, which they certainly are not.

Let’s see what the next batch brings.

Tender Is The Night - F Scott Fitzgerald (50/1400)

Summary
9/10
Real literature with the poetry of Shakespeare and the bleakness and humor of Beckett. A brilliant study of the conflict between intelligence and money, men and women and youth and time all set in a shimmering world of Riviera glamour.

Published 1934

Review
I’ve never been mugged, but I imagine the experience is very much like reading this book - a feeling of having been sensually and sensibly breeched and both losing and learning something without being immediately sure what.

It’s a dazzling piece of work, where the images and attitudes come so fast and so profoundly that it would be easier to have the sentences spread out individually on a large table, like puzzle pieces, so they could be examined in isolation, without the need to connect them to a story line. Anybody who wants to write rock band lyrics should keep this work beside them as a repository of musical thought bites.

The plot hardly matters in the traditional sense, the book charts the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a brilliant middle-class American doctor of psychiatry, through his failed entanglement with the centrifugal force and centripetal desires of one of the US’s aristocratic money-baron families. This is superb and subtle stuff with the action taking place in 1920’s Paris and the Riviera, which are gorgeously evoked and so realistic that I find it almost impossible not to see shades of autobiography in Fitzgerald’s handling of the story. At the same time it has a universal message of the conversion of young men’s hopes, drive and expectations into physical and mental middle-aged mediocrity, and what’s especially delicious is that this is achieved partly through a vampire like draining of energy from Dick by the various women in the story, who blossom and flourish as he struggles and declines.

Dick is first seen in Book One through the eyes of Rosemary, a Hollywood starlet, who has an immediate crush on the dazzling sophisticate and his complicated wife, Nicole. Dick is at the height of his powers, writing notable academic papers at the same time being the life and soul of the party and humming with sexuality. In Book Two we see via Dick’s perspective what he has given up to achieve this prominence and the Faustian bargain that is his marriage to Nicole, so that, in Book Three, Dick is in decline and Nicole shows us his reduction back to his middle American roots, stripped of all his former social, sexual and academic luster. Essentially Dick is used by Nicole’s old school, old money, family for its own ends, and part of the delight of the plot is that Dick thinks he is outsmarting them the whole time – and so do they - with only Nicole’s big sister, Baby Warren, retaining a feel for the underlying rhythm of who fits where and what Dick is useful for.

It’s a vicious, nasty book disguised as an intelligent, tender, love affair that goes wrong. Everyone in this book is smart in a way that is refreshing but rare in real life; here people are properly and directly engaged with others and yet at the same time living lives of complete frivolity - the contrast is very special.

Writing about American high society on the French Riviera in the 1920s is superficially a very remote topic in 2009, and the shell of this book – the drinks, dinners, yachts, parties and so on might as well be science fiction they are so alien. But the core of the decline of a man and the bad things that moneyed people do to achieve their objectives is universal and timeless, and I recommend this volume to any thinking person.

Daniel Deronda - George Eliot (49/1400)

Summary
6/10
Weird merging of polemic for a Jewish Homeland with neat human story of the search for personal identity. The themes fit together but the novel doesn't really make sense. A work of genius probably best read by others of the same ilk.

Published 1876

Review
Before I read this book I visited Eliot’s grave in Highgate Cemetery, close to where I live. A number of her enraptured fans bought plots near by so they could be with her in death, and she was clearly an extraordinary and thrilling person, with a piercing and academic intellect, but somewhat frail, so that she could not, for example, travel to the US to see the New World.

This was her final book and in it, “I meant everything in the book to be connected to everything else,” she said. But what an immense downer that sentence puts on the reader who is compelled to examine every phrase in conjunction with all others at the expense of enjoying the narrative. Nobody wants to read a book looking only for clever interconnects, since that reduces the reader to the role of an engineer admiring the mathematics instead of the form of a complex structure; the interconnectivity of a novel’s themes and gestures should be there to be enjoyed if you look for them but, given Eliot’s introduction, the reader can never be sure which were intended and which are invented in the reader’s own mind. Perhaps that is the point, or perhaps anyway doesn’t matter, but the search for intent can be rather maddening when it is supposed to be enlightening.

Superficially there are two books here, one about Gwendolen Harleth, a middle class girl who is determined to be herself in a world where she is expected to be what society requires; and the second about Daniel Deronda, born as the apparent nephew of the aristocratic Sir Hugo Mallinger, but who doesn’t know who his parents are and spends the book, like Gwendolen, in search of his identity.

Gwendolen is splendid stuff as she makes a complete hash of her life and finds that her wild and independent spirit is brought down by her marriage to Sir Hugo’s nephew, Grandcourt. She becomes a destroyed human being with no identity save that which Deronda is able to give her.

So far so good, but the Deronda branch of the story is heading in an unexpected direction, as he discovers that he is Jewish and embraces Judaism. This is a clumsy bit of plotting that only matters because it is the central narrative of the novel, which explores the identity of the Jewish race and whether or not it should have a homeland (this is 1876 remember, when the idea of a Jewish Homeland was almost entirely new). This has nothing in plot terms to do with poor old Gwendolen although the idea of identity obviously flows through. Nonetheless Deronda plugs into his Jewish past with enthusiasm and sails off to try to establish a Jewish Homeland

Deronda and Gwendolen are sort of intertwined as she leans completely on him to show her the path out of her despair. On the other hand he is never really very interested in anyone in the book except himself but is frightfully polite, kind and earnest so he gives support to Gwendolen without actually being of any real use.

Even at the time reviewers differentiated the ‘Jewish’ and ‘Gwendolen’ parts of the book and there were editions published with just those parts in them (and sequels where Deronda came back for Gwendolen). All in all then it’s a bit of a mess, neither coming out properly as a pamphlet concerning the plight of minorities nor as being a novelic examination of identity. Because she was a genius, Eliot easily papers over the cracks and so there is much here to be savored. But if you step back from the work and ask the simple question as to whether or not you enjoyed it and would read it again, it becomes problematic and can be seen to have missed the mark.

Paradise Lost - John Milton (48/1400)

Summary
5/10
An entire lifetime of scholarship on display in one epic poem describing man’s fall from God’s grace. Sadly, modern education has not equipped most contemporary readers with the necessary learning to appreciate this unique work of art.

Published 1667


Review

There are two possible reviews of this epic poem telling the story of the fall of Adam and Eve from God’s grace and the loss of paradise. Option one is open to scholars and intellectuals who are completely familiar with the biblical story and surrounding legends, understand the timbre and rhythm of the poem, are unfazed by the countless classical and other cross references and spot and appreciate the puns and subtleties introduced by Milton into this his masterwork.

Option two is to acknowledge that this is unquestionably a vivid work of imagination but to accept that it’s very hard for a modern reader who can really only appreciate it in the company of an experienced and sympathetic guide.

The vast majority of readers will fall into category two, in which case this Penguin edition is of no use whatsoever. This version is a dry and scholarly take on the poem. The notes (which are essential) are all at the back so the reader is flicking constantly between sections, and the notes are curt and precise so that they give the minimum of information. The layout and print size are mean spirited, whilst academically correct punctuation has been retained instead of modernised (Milton dictated the work as he was blind so perhaps he assumed that the scribe would tidy it up later). Overall the book can be a challenging read. Penguin has been a cheapskate and this volume gives a lie to pretense on its part to be enhancing or protecting British Culture. To be done properly this book should be published in a much more accessible and grand scale version.

If you do give Milton a go then you will find yourself in the company of an extraordinary mind. A poet capable of condensing thoughts into a tight space, who understands the need to ask some of the deepest questions surrounding the Christian religion (did God know that man would Fall and if so what does that mean for free will? Are there other planets created by God? And so on). It’s a cracking story with superb intergalactic and inter race sweep, wars, suffering, good and evil, the fall and redemption. But it’s not a book to attempt in a week, it can only be ingested a few stanzas at a time, the thoughts and processes therein needing to be considered properly.

By all means have a go at Milton but think of it as a lifetime’s work – after all he spent his lifetime conceiving and writing it.

Suetonius - The Twelve Caesars (47/1400)

Summary
5/10
A contemporary account of the lives of 12 of the Caesars from Julius onwards. Spoiled in this Penguin version by a overly academic translation, but anyway not as good as Tacitus or as useful as a good modern history would be. One for the geeks.

Published 100 AD

Review
Suetonius was writing at the time of Emperor Hadrian in around 100 AD and naturally assumes that his readers have a body of background knowledge about the Roman constitution, customs and nomenclature. He rattles through the names of important and relevant contemporary figures - Pompey, Lepidus, and so forth – but then unwittingly confuses the modern reader by referring to several more souls with the same names but without explanation of who they are. It’s all rather hard work requiring extensive reliance on the notes at the back and here is where the book fails in its updated ‘James B Rives' form; the original 1950’s Robert Graves translation for Penguin tried to help the reader out by modernising the text and by adding extra words to make the meaning clear. Crucially, Graves was a poet and not a scholar so he was more interested in conveying meaning that in the strict accuracy of his translation. But Rives is a professor of classics in the US and has disastrously but proudly reverted to a strict translation, thereby forcing the reader to rely on the notes at the back. It’s a rubbish formula that reduces this to a source textbook instead of a ripping yarn.

Rives has created a grindingly awful reading experience of flicking backwards and forwards between the notes, the text, the glossary and the maps and tables. This was one of the first classical texts printed as a Penguin Classic and frankly it deserves better. It should be available as a deluxe edition in colour with expanded notes side-by side with the text and photographs, maps and so on and contained in the body of the book. Graves' text should be restored. Penguin has published a deluxe edition of the tale of Genji so the idea has been used elsewhere and I’m sure it would work here.

If you are new to the history of imperial Rome, you should avoid this book and instead either try something like Robert Graves I Claudius and Claudius the God for a fictionalised (but very accurate) account of this period or take a contemporary and readable history from the bookshelves. If you are determined to read original source material then Tacitus's Annuls of Imperial Rome is an easier and better laid out read than Suetonius.

If you do give Suetonius a try, then you will find it a lively account of the deeds of the Caesars from Julius to Domitian. A lot of the text comprises quick lists of battles won, important posts held and other achievements. He then moves on to their misdeeds, which I suspect is the main reason for reading him. They make awful but compelling reading but sit out of context with what else was going on or who was agitating politically, so whilst its pretty clear that some rotten stuff was happening its not obvious how much was done to shut down political opposition and how much was simply amoral. Procopius’s Secret History (of Justinian) is an even more salacious read but does provide enough balance to begin to make these kinds of judgments.

This is one for serious students of ancient classics. Others will get more from a sympathetic modern update of the same period.

Can You Forgive Her - Anthony Trollope (46/1400)

Summary
6/10
A chick-lit-rom-com concerning whether it is better to have romance or realism and concluding that they are not necessarily different things. Part one of a six part series. A pleasant read that falls between the stools of taking itself too seriously and not being serious enough.

Published 1865

Review
This would be a far more widely read book today if Trollope had been a woman or published under a woman’s name, because it is pure chick lit and yet has become muddled up with the idea that it concerns politics and therefore is a heavy read. This is partly the fault of politicians (well what is not?) like John Major who have listed Trollope as their favourite author and perhaps partly a marketing failure by the publishers. Women readers lap up Jane Austin and I don’t see very much to choose between her works and this volume as both concern various problem romances leavened with what passes for humour.

Three women are each faced with variations of the same dilemma, which man to marry. Lady Glencora wanted the rascally, romantic and poor Burgo but has been forced to marry the straight laced and undemonstrative Plantagenet Palliser, soon to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. She spends the book plotting to run off with Burgo. Alice Vavasor, in a back story that is necessary but implausible, was engaged to her rotten cousin George Vavasor then switched horses to John Grey who is a Palliser clone but without Palliser’s ambition and then she switches back again. Finally there is Alice and George’s rich and newly widowed aunt Greenow who can have either the wealthy and worthy farmer Cheesacre or the worthless scallywag Captain Bellfield.

The three situations are rough copies of each other but Lady Glencora seeks to undo a choice she has been forced into, Alice to justify the choices she has made and Greenow to please herself as to her choice. In the meantime the men behave like assorted cads and bounders in interesting different flavours, with the exception of John Grey who simply sets out to win Alice’s love.

It’s all jolly stuff spoiled somewhat by Alice’s manouvers being rather implausible because it is necessary for her to reject the perfect John Grey and to take up with Vavasor whom she already knows to be a bad’un. For this to work Trollope makes George appear to be rather a sweetie at first before the mask is ripped away and the dark side of his character is revealed. This is all rather extreme and if Alice has already broken off her engagement once because she knows his character, how can she be going round again? I know these things happen in real life but they don’t make sense there either. The title asks whether you can forgive Alice for vacillating but of course a modern reader doesn’t really care about the breaking of the social taboo against jilting a man and so is left with an emphasis on the reasons for her choice and the men she is choosing between.

It would be obvious if you didn’t already know, that Trollope himself longed to be a politician and most of the male characters are trying to become an MP, eventually try or already are MPs. This background isn’t really necessary to make the novel work but of course the story of Lady Glencora and Palliser continues in the next five books in this series so I was willing to take this as background for the future.

Nothing in here will change your life, nor on this evidence will many readers, John Major apart, decide that Trollope is the finest writer they know but this is a pleasing and entertaining read.

The Go Between - L P Hartley (45/1400)

Summary
9/10
Lovely, lovely, lovely - a superb piece of storytelling concerning the doomed affair between upper-class Marian Maudsley and local farmer Ted Burgess told through the eyes of 12 year old Leo who they enlist as their go between. The story becomes both magical and mysterious as the emotional path of the love affair sucks the Maudsley family and Leo into its destructive vortex. Unputdownable.

Published 1953

Review
A sublime account of a forbidden romance during the long hot summer of 1900 told through the fantastic viewpoint of 12 year old Leo. He arrives to spend his summer at Brandon Hall with the upper class Maudsley family and becomes the messenger between the seductive and amoral Miss Marian Maudsley and Ted Burgess, a rough and hot bloodied tenant farmer, and also between the indelible Lord Trimingham (who intends to marry Miss Maudsley) and Marian. Hartley tells us right from the off that a tragedy is going to be the outcome but he cooks the story beautifully so that the reader is sucked inside the closed world of Brandon Hall and its cast of characters.

There is layer on layer of metaphor and allusion but never done in a difficult or abstruse manner so that there is something of the detective story about the writing where objects, sensations or turns of phrase mentioned on an earlier page come around again in a more sinister, twisted or adult form later on; and Hartley plays with the reader laying a trail of items and people – rifles, poisonous plants, hot headed brothers, duelling ancestors and so on that might feature in the forthcoming tragedy. In the meantime Leo and his friend Marcus check the temperature every day and as the mercury rises so does the heat of the lover’s passions as their story comes to the boil.

Hartley is a superb writer, with the knack that many gay men have of noticing and reciting all the details of a scene and understanding how actions betray sentiments; but Hartley does it without the archness or tomfoolery that turns this art into show business, leaving instead a clear outline of his characters without seeming to have made any effort.

The relationships between Leo and Marian, Leo and Ted and between Marian and her two lovers are hypnotic. Marian is a sensational baddy willing to achieve her objectives at all costs. But unlikely a Hollywood bad guy she does not simply snarl her way through life – although she can do that well enough – she has a Swiss Army Knife of practical and emotional tools she uses to get her way. In particular she causes Leo to fall in love with her and bends him to her will. Leo (and Hartley I suspect) is also in love with the rugged, muscular and athletic Ted – a man of the soil with skin the colour of the corn he grows - and Leo shuttles back and forth between the lovers like a puppy dog. But when Leo realises that he is being used he turns against them and this lets loose the tragedy.

Hartley tops everything that has gone before with the Epilogue where Marian and Leo meet again 50 years later and now Hartley reveals the true extent of Marian’s wickedness and the self delusion that goes hand in hand with it; and one last time she bends the pliant and emotionally starved Leo to act as her Go-Between.

This is a really magical book which is both complex and easy to read, has a driving plot and yet hovers and lingers over the scenes and people that make up its world. The only criticism I can make is that Leo’s character flits between naivety and sophistication in a way that is sometimes hard to take in, but since the 50 year older Leo is narrating I think Hartley gets away with this peculiarity.

Very strongly recommended.

The Monk - Matthew Lewis (44/1400)

Summary
7/10
Mad and bad. Completely bonkers plot about very evil monk is put to bed nicely by tenacious story line and constant action. Enjoyable nonsense.

Published 1796

Review
This is the line between literature and the ludicrous. What should have been a five-minute wonder back in 1796 is still a compelling if silly read today. It’s not especially well written, the plot is unhinged and the characters fanciful but somehow this book makes itself likeable, readable and compelling.

The plot is almost too mad to be bothered with, Ambrosio is a Capuchin Superior delivered into the monastery as a mysterious orphan who has risen to be venerated by all Madrid as the perfect example of religious life, but he has fallen in love with Rosario a young novice who turns out to be a girl called Matilda. Meanwhile the drop dead gorgeous Antonia moves into town and is perused by Lorenzo, a cavalier, whose sister Agnes has sadly joined the nunnery of St Claire thinking that her titled lover the Marquis de las Cisternas (but known to her only as the humble Don Raymond) has abandoned her. If your head is already spinning then be grateful that I have spared you the details of the various sub plots that eventually sort of join together as Matilda draws Ambrosio down into a life of wickedness whilst Lorenzo and Don Raymond plan to rescue Agnes.

Virtue and vice lock horns with continuous revelations as to who is who and who done what to whom on almost every page. There are robbers, ghosts, loyal and disloyal servants, venomous and pure relatives and unlikely coincidences to last a lifetime but there is no doubt that Lewis has some talent for story telling and his broad knowledge of literature and hatred of Roman Catholics give dimension and bite to this Gothic story.

I did enjoy reading this as I expect most people would. Its breathless and fast paced with a wild plot but compelling and delightful at the same time - one for the holiday sun lounger.

Kim - Rudyard Kipling (43/1400)

Summary
8/10
The beautiful and sympathetic road story of the boy Kim and an aged redemption-seeking Lama told through the sights, sounds, characters, social structures and beliefs of British Imperial India, spiced up (unnecessarily, but enjoyably) with a spy yarn - compelling.

Published 1901

Review
Kipling’s devout love of all things Indian is written into every page and episode in this book, which is as much a travelogue as a piece of storytelling. It feels as if his real purpose was to share that devotion with his readers and, to hook them in, he cleverly bolted on a secondary plot about French and Russian spies in the sub-continent. To make these two elements work together Kipling created an unlikely pairing between the Teshoo Lama, abbot of the Himalayan Such-zen monastery who is in search of a miraculous river of redemption, and Kimball (“Kim) O’Hara, the son of a deceased Irish soldier who has pretty much grown up on the streets of Lahore and can pass for a native. Kim becomes the Lama’s Chela (follower and pupil) as the Lama travels through India on his quest and this device enables the two to cover the country and meet the many and varied characters that fill it.

For me, that quest and their journey would have been enough as Kipling superbly captures the feel of India at that time; the heat, the smells, the dust, the food, countryside, railways, pilgrims, quacks, rich and poor are all explored along the way and between Kim’s scampish youth and the Lama’s respected holiness no doors are closed to them. This is a very deferential travelogue that treats India’s cultures with reverence but simultaneously exposes the light and shade of its people. The contrast between the resourceful and down-to-earth Kim and the other worldly Lama makes for gentle comedy along the way. However Kipling obviously thought that a more conventional plot element was needed to draw in his readers and so causes Kim to be discovered by his father’s old army regiment and, with the Lama’s blessing, sent to school to learn to become a Sahib, except in the holidays when he again joins up with the holy man. As a quick-witted and persuasive scallywag, Kim comes to the attention of British Intelligence and is recruited as a junior spy in the Great Game of political intrigue between Britain and Russia played out in India’s northern states.

The spy story is really pure macguffin and draws in a cast of shadowy ne’er do well characters - Mahbub Ali, a famous Pashtun horse trader and spy for the British, Colonel Creighton a British Army officer, ethnologist and spy, Lurgan Sahib a Simla gem trader and master spy and Hurree Chunder Mookherjee (The Babu) a Bengali intelligence operative working for the British and Kim's direct superior. Needless to say Kim manages to foil the bad guys but it’s not all plain sailing emotionally or spiritually and Kipling leaves the reader nicely unsure as to whether his future lies with the Lama or the spies

There are accusations against Kipling that he promoted British imperial rule in India, or at least failed to condemn it in this work. I don’t think he was trying to make a political point either way but simply describing the India he knew and loved, and that’s a place which I very much enjoyed spending time in with this book.

Bel-Ami - Guy de Maupassant (42/1400)

Summary
8/10
A vicious study of a cad climbing his way through 19th century Parisian society, but who has the lower morals, the cad or those around him? Fans of great villains will love this racy and vivid portrait of a social climber and the detritus he swims through.

Published 1885

Review
Maupassant was a student of Flaubert’s but their writing styles are poles apart, whereas Flaubert paints a series of composed and precise still life scenes Maupassant is an impressionist, full of energy and broad sweeps unconcerned whether the details stand up to scrutiny. The result is an enjoyable formula of wonderful set pieces strung together like oversized pearls on a gaudy necklace.

The ironically named Bel-Ami (beautiful friend) of the title is peasant-born cad, Georges Duroy, who starts the book as a lowly railway clerk and sleeps and schemes his way to a fortune and a position in 19th Century Paris society. He is base but not unlikeable with a strange mixture of total self-belief and snivelling cowardice. Duroy is madly jealous of other men’s success and never satisfied with his own position so that he always wants the woman, job, house or influence he hasn’t got, think JR in Dallas and you will be pretty much there.

Although a destroyer of lives he also brings great joy to those around him, he is a marvellous lover arousing tremendous passions in the various women who pass though his hands, even after he has thrown them aside. He has a certain skill as a political journalist, so that he is useful to others, such as his ambitious first wife, his boss M. Walter, and Walter’s crony politicians, who use him as a mouthpiece for their own ends. These characters have the same ambition and limited scruples as Duroy but their better breeding makes them subtler although in some ways less effective operators. Walter, having become fabulously rich by blind sighting Duroy’s political antennae, recognises this when Duroy elopes with Walter’s daughter, spiking plans for her marriage into titled society. Walter muses that, with this demonstration of Duroy’s cunning, maybe he is the better match after all.

There are some lovely set piece scenes and I particularly liked the duel that Duroy finds himself having to fight. His low cowardice and fear is marvellously evoked. His marriage proposal to Madeleine Forestier over the body of her husband, dead moments before, is another delicious slice of wickedness. In between scenes, Maupassant doesn’t worry too much about grinding out the plot. One minute Duroy is taken on as a cub reporter and a paragraph later he is a widely respected news hound, a few pages further on he is head of news. Maupassant isn’t interested in making this realistic, it is the effect of Duroy on those around him that he is following and how someone uglier and meaner than an ugly and mean bunch claws his way to the top – and that is still a very relevant study in today’s world.

This is a fast paced read that neatly combines the feel of a blockbuster with the thoughtfulness and texture of a more conventional classic novel - worth seeking out.

On Holiday

As I only have access to a blackberry at present I will defer further reviews until my return from holiday.

Roughing It - Mark Twain (41/1400)

Summary
8/10
Hilarious, tragic and redeeming – this is a most surprising autobiographical account of Mark Twain’s early life as a gold miner. Full of delightful vignettes, humour and heartbreak it is a superb account of success and failure in building the American Dream,

Published 1872


Review
In Hollywood it is within yourself to be the best and to succeed at anything your heart really wants, but in the rest of the world this is derided as claptrap since it is obvious that everyone cannot be successful at everything and the evidence of failure is all around to be seen. But should we live lives of fulfilled realism or of continually dashed hopes spiced by opportunity? There is no truth in either point of view since both are valid and together represent one of life’s tensions – is it better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all?

Roughing it is Mark Twain’s brilliant and hilarious autobiographical review of this argument seen through America’s 1860 Midwest covering his unlikely and incredible career prior to becoming a successful author. In the process he shows how the American dream is full of the nightmare of failure where for every triumph, including his own, dozens are left behind in despair and living rough.

The book concerns the time Twain spent as a gold and silver prospector prior to success as an author and is partly an autobiography and partly a series of stories about the people he met or learnt about in the American west. This is beautifully and loving written, describing the wide variety of unlikely characters inhabiting this world. Twain delightfully evokes accents and voices creates a completely convincing world where his soft sympathy with the many unfortunate individuals that cross his path is a running theme. Twain’s understated and dry humour makes the book a tour de force.

He retains his feel for the human struggle as fortunes are made and lost by an unpatentable combination of skill, luck and application and Twain manages to recreate his own blackest moments with complete authenticity. He cleverly and soulfully conveys the human experience of fear mingled with hope and comfort in small things with which we are all familiar.

This is a really marvellous piece of prose that I strongly recommend and is the perfect antidote to the High School Musical view that the world is there for your taking, not because it trashes that hypothesis but because it puts it in a real world context. This book is an adult take on the search for success and how it is paid for.

The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories - H G Wells (40/1400)

Summary
6/10
These thoughtful and largely sci-fi themed short stories are literary Marmalade – full of zest and interesting chewy bits, nicely suspended in a well made and rich structure but somewhat old fashioned and strangely masculine. Not everyone will want to take the lid off but recommended for those who enjoy invention.

Published 1911 (As a collection)


Review
I thought this collection of short stories was fantastic when I read it as a young teenager and many of them have stuck in my mind – especially the title piece - so I was really looking forward to a second helping. However, I’m forced to agree with the comment in the introduction that 12 is the perfect age to enjoy this volume, because Well’s power of imagination imposed on a mind of that age is like nothing else experienced. Older readers will be more inclined to regard his ideas as simply amusing diversions, partly because they are not built into the structure of a full blown novel and partly because his science is 100 years old but, in my view, if Wells had turned almost any of them into a novella they would have equalled Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein or his own War of the Worlds. Wells understood the limitation of these stories and makes it clear in his introduction that they are something to be dipped into for between 15 and 50 minutes and nothing more. He certainly wouldn’t have approved of reading this cover-to-cover as I did, and he would be right because rather oddly there is a tendency to become impatient with a very short story in order to get onto the next one, rather than letting go and simply enjoying the piece.

Despite their brevity, Well’s traditionally muscular prose is not diluted and his landscapes and characters are surprisingly fully formed. His creativity and acute observation are used to build each little world and he puts the various characters through a range of emotions from love to loss through fear and detest. In general the lead characters are men and it is difficult to get away from the idea that this is a man’s book – although I am hostile to that concept. Partly this is because most of the stories have a sci-fi angle to them and that tends to be a boyish pre-occupation, and partly because the worlds he conjures up are slightly clubby or tribal. That said, at least three of them have a love story at their heart and moreover they often capture the feeling of their male characters slipping in and out of control that is a feature of the best women's writing.

The range of ideas is fantastic and includes a viperous and decrepit old man who body steals from the fit and young, a dead man who comes back as a moth, a prehistoric tale of love, bravery and primitive technology, a patent medicine that slows down other people’s time, and the terrific Land of the Blind where a sighted traveller seeks and fails to become king, and is left agreeing to surgery so that he can lose the disadvantages of sight. It only becomes clear what fabulous invention Well’s has deployed if you try to plausibly construct such a story in your own mind.

If you are a teenager, or young at heart, and interested in ideas then you will greatly enjoy this book.

The Prisoner of Zenda - Anthony Hope (39/1400)

Summary
7/10
An action adventure story worthy of Dumas, with believable characters, careful plot development, fast unfolding events and poignant love interest. You can't be reading serious novels all the time and this is a light read that is page turningly enjoyable.

Published 1894

Review

Unambitious Gentleman of Leisure Rudolf Rassendyll is descended from the royal house of Elphberg by a scandalous past liaison. On the death of the Elphberg King of Ruritania he travels secretly to that country to view the coronation of Rudolf V but instead becomes embroiled in the plotting of Black Michael against the King. Rassendyll assumes the king's identity being almost identical and the race is on to save the real king from Black Michael's clutches and for Rassendyll to win the heart of the King's bride to be, Princess Flavia.

It's an absurd basis for a plot but Hope manages to make it convincing and plausible as he builds the situation incrementally. He draws the reader into the characters as much as the action and uses Rassendyll's growing relationships in this new country to great effect, especially his warm empathy with Count Fritz, his developing enmity against the wicked but dashing Rupert of Hentzau and the very tender relationship between Rassendyll and Flavia.

There is lots of action - sword fights, narrow escapes, moonlit chases and so on and the two sides display equal cunning and bravery in the struggle so that the ending, whilst not exactly in doubt, is made to seem uncertain and there are surprises and upsets along the way.

Hope has a good turn of phrase and knows when to take his foot off the narrative throttle and when to press on, making this a much more interesting book than the plot summary might suggest. In my view it's on a par with, say, Treasure island - and that's very good indeed.

Effi Briest - Theodor Fontane (38/1400)

Summary
5/10
Madame Bovary without Flaubert’s flair, a stripped down overview of a middle class marriage and affair inside the changing norms of a shifting Prussia. Full of symbolism but devoid of life until, at the end, the participants become fully human.

Published 1895

Review
A disastrous and subsequently adulterous marriage takes place between Geerst von Innstetten a high-flying, middle aged, civil servant and Effi Briest, a 17-year-old pretty and romantic noblewoman. The object is to enhance Innstetten ‘s career and Effi’s fortune, but their adventure crashes into the real earth of what he must be to succeed and what she needs to do to feel alive. When he discovers her infidelity the book takes off as everyone’s world splinters and their actions, reactions and reflections finally become human.

This is a book as if written by Mercedes Benz – a great technical drive, but without the soul and surprise needed in a classic novel. It has much of the sparse and mechanical Novelle style that Germans enjoyed so much and is full of angst rather than joie de vivre, with an overabundance of symbolism at the expense of realism.

The background is Bismarck’s now forgotten emerging Germany and the changes that are happening in society and societal norms as the German nation moves into the 20th Century. Fontane gives a glimpse of Bismarck’s Prussia but does not illuminate it more than necessary for the telling of his tale. He is concerned with the culturally revolutionary changes going on around him at the time but his characters tend to conservatism so that they acknowledge what might be possible – to forgive or ignore the affair and to share the children for example, but aim off towards a narrow and more traditional acceptance of shame and blame. Fontane tries to draw together the strings of tragedy and social change but is not very persuasive.

The novel is stripped down to its essentials almost as if it is a mathematical equation and the sub text – allusions and counterpoints – achieve dominance. The early chapters are frankly dreary in setting up what is to come, not that Fontane does not understand what he is writing about or the pulse of the plot, but because he has none of the exuberance that French or English writers of the same period enjoyed so that characters and places are overridden by the perceived need for pace. In fact the unwillingness to engage with the landscape of the novel has the effect of making it drag rather than, as intended, accelerating the velocity.

Fontane wanted to present an unclothed feel to the action with nothing left to accident, but the book might as easily be a writing recipe rather than a description of real people and events or a way into the reader’s heart, and ends up as pot boiler, but reduced too far.

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (37/1400)

Summary
7/10
Jane Austen may be the most widely read of all the Classic novelists with a massive and highly protective fan base. Her appeal lies in a combination of the delicate meringue of plot coupled with intelligent women at the centre of general absurdity around sharp and witty dialogue. Pride and Prejudice delivers these in a rather uneven way and the confection is more biscuit-like than fans would have you believe.

Published 1813

Review
One of the oddest things about this book is that nothing is given a description except for the grounds of Pemberley – the Derbyshire house of the male lead, Mr Darcy. That portrayal is used as a plot device to throw new light on Darcy’s character as being cultivated but natural instead of the standoffish and proud view that the female hero, Elisabeth Bennett, gives us heretofore. But no other person, setting or mood is afforded the same treatment so that the book proceeds entirely by dialogue. Austen also avoids the convention of stepping in with the author’s voice to ruminate on the plot or emotional situation the characters find themselves in, which is most unusual in novels of this period. The consequence is a sparse work that reads like a film script rather than a conventional novel, and this may explain its contemporary appeal.

The axis of the plot is the meeting of two intelligent, well-bred, well-intentioned people - Darcy and Elisabeth - both supposedly with the same character defects of Pride and Prejudice, so that the title is intended to cut both ways. They repel and interest each other until love blossoms, but Austen ensures that their path to happiness is strewn with a pilgrim’s difficulties. To leaven the mix and provide contrast, Elisabeth’s mother is set the problem of disposing by marriage of five daughters without a meaningful dowry and this background provides comedic and tragic elements to the story as the five sisters have characters ranging from the Leibnizian Jane to the raunchy Lydia. Mr Bennett is Escalus from Romeo and Juliet – trying to keep the peace and bringing sanity to the proceedings but not really influencing events.

The structure and set up are terrific and the game is played for all it is worth. Elisabeth’s mental model of the universe is very proper and well mannered but doesn’t allow for real life, so that her world view of what is correct is undermined as her best friend marries an idiot, sycophant vicar, for safety, and her sister runs off with a ne’er do well adventurer. As episode piles on episode Elisabeth is shown up as a dreadful prig who condemns Darcy and his friends on hearsay. But the construction of the narrative becomes unhinged because Darcy is supposed to mirror Elisabeth’s position, whereas his fault is massive lack of social grace - and it may be that in historical terms that was called pride. The difference is this: Elisabeth makes a series of baseless accusations against Darcy but Darcy’s objections to Elisabeth and Jane are entirely true, if horribly awkward. Darcy is a dirty angel whilst it is Elisabeth who needs to re-examine herself and atone for her sins. Austen makes both the principals change character before they can come together but Elisabeth has the longest journey.

By far the best parts of this work are the interchanges between Elisabeth and Darcy. This is lawyer sharp swordplay between two equal minds of a kind that virtually never occurs in modern conversation. I’m surprised and delighted that present-day readers enjoy this. What’s bad is the mode within which something as uncomplicated as a commonplace rationalization of that state of affairs into which the participants most unsurprisingly find themselves occupied must be distorted into a prolonged syntactic investigation of the circumstances beforehand. In other words Austen uses very long and convoluted language. This is part of her oeuvre and at one level it is distinguished, especially in the sharp dialogue between Darcy and Elisabeth, and at another it is simply Arch. The second problem is the plot drags because the modern reader knows too much and can easily guess where things are headed. So the changes of location and the progress via letters feels clunky and, to that extent, the film version(s) are closer emotionally to the sense of a period reader than the book now is. Indeed I suspect that Austen would have been snapped up by Hollywood as a superb scriptwriter and this is a book designed for the screen way ahead of its time.

At Fault - Kate Chopin (36/1400)

Summary
3/10
A classic potboiler covering a forgotten part of American history with every chapter unleashing new drama. Although written by a careful student of great writers, with an interesting moral theme and strong characterisation, the format doesn't give the characters room to breath and the work is unsatisfying and frustrating - more like a series of short stories than a novel.

Published 1890

Review
Chopin is famous for The Awakening, her only other novel, and her short stories about Creole life in late 19th Century Louisiana. Her claim to a place in Penguin’s Pantheon is the ability to evoke that period with efficacy and her advocacy for strong women. This volume tries but fails on both heads, falling instead between the mortality of an effective book and articulating an engaging short story. This may be the result of having been written as a weekly serial requiring that each of the (very) short chapters brings a new and dramatic component that creates a jerkiness and discontinuity, which splinters the reader’s conviction. The characters fall in and out of love, divorce and marry, are loyal and disloyal, live and die with the caprice of a Dutch weathervane. The peculiar consequence is that the narrative shrivels under the weight of events and the flimsiness of motivation and human empathy.

The action is set in a place and period of American history – French speaking Creole Louisiana - that has been abandoned by mainstream media but Chopin only has time to sketch the distinctive culture here. Two features stand out, the casual old fashioned racism (with ‘Darkies’, ‘Niggers’ and similar on every page) and the placing of a Catholic Creole woman – Therese Lafirme – at the heart of the action. Therese has inherited and manages a substantial plantation and she is treated as an equal or more so by everyone regardless of sex or social position. Whether this reflects the reality of Creole Louisiana or wishful thinking by Chopin I cannot say, but it creates the backbone for a potentially fascinating story as Therese tries to use this power and her influence for good. The upshot is the old saw of the road to Hell being paved with good intentions, and Therese creates an ocean of wretchedness in her saintly attempts to do the right thing. She persuades her new lover, David Hosmet, to remarry his viscous drunk ex-wife, with predictable results, she murderously indulges her tenant Marie Louise in allowing her to live too close to the river, and fatally messes up the life of her nephew, Gregoire. She is indeed ‘At Fault’.

This book would be an interesting case study in a creative writing class because on paper it does all the right things yet in practice it doesn’t deliver. Chopin has pressed the buttons for a classic work and interweaves moral dilemmas with action and social observation. The minor characters reflect back on the major and there is call and holler between everyday incidents and the working through of the book’s ideas on saintliness and what doing the right thing really means. Many readers will find the pace of the book very satisfying and the writing itself is not bad – Chopin was a student of good writing -although she fails to take on an original or brilliant voice. But the rendering of pace at the expense of exploration of the character’s space makes it boring for an interested reader, and that is a strange result. Ultimately this reads like a collection of short stories about the same characters rather than a convincing novel.

The Europeans - Henry James (35/1400)

Summary
5/10
A pleasant enough tale of sophisticated Europeans moving to late 19th century puritan Boston, but with limited bite and grip. Keep your powder dry for James's bigger works.

Published 1878

Review
James’s brother condemned this book as being ‘slight’ and James excluded it from the 1883 collection of his works – perhaps indicating that he agreed with this judgement, as I do. It is of course a well-written and thoroughly readable book with interesting characters and a nicely unstable set up. Unfortunately the wider themes of the novel, such as they are, don’t take off and nor in truth does the plot. This concerns a brother and sister come to Bostonian America from Europe to meet their distant cousins.

The two sides of the family are an easy metaphor representing the literal Europe and America. Felix, the European brother and Eugena, Baroness Munster, are Bohemian, sophisticated, worldly, exotic and alive but also practically penniless and without genuine friends or family. By contrast, the Wentworths - the American cousins - are uptight but tight knit puritans who lead a simple, prosperous life in the countryside of Boston. Their world erupts with the arrival of Felix and Eugina and apparently pre-determined life paths are shaken up. There are neat endings for some of the participants in the drama, so that Felix detaches cousin Gertrude from her suitor Mr Brand and successfully manoeuvres a match for her sister Charlotte; but Eugina spends the novel deciding whether or not to consent to the divorce her noble German husband and to marry the American Robert Acton, who is bewitched by her, and her story ends ambiguously.

What is interesting is the idea that it is Europe that is the progressive, life-affirming side of the Atlantic whereas America here is a straight laced and rather dull, if decent, country. During my lifetime I would rather say that the opposite was the general view of the two regions’ characters although perhaps in the last fifteen or twenty years the roles have reversed and to that extent the novel seems surprisingly up-to-date

Ultimately there is just not enough in the contrast between the two sides and the matchmaking to drive this book forward – some other element of plot and purpose was needed to make it great. There is no need to put this near the top of your Henry James reading list but, if you find yourself with this as the only book to hand, it is a pleasant enough way to pass the time.

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (34/1400)

Summary
10/10
A Roman Emperor reaches from history to present a modern sane and sympathetic philosophy for life in a series of short notes. Essential reading.

Written AD 121 - AD 180



Review
There’s an episode of Dad’s Army where the English Captain Mainwaring turns out to be able to play the bagpipes. He explains his skill by revealing that he spent his two-week honeymoon in Scotland, and that there wasn’t much else to do.

Marcus Aurelius, who as Emperor of Rome was higher up the army ranks than Mainwaring, probably felt the same way about northern Germany, where he spent his time trying to defeat the barbarians. To pass the hours he scribbled down jottings and ideas about how to live a fulfilled life that eventually became Meditations, one of the most wonderful personal philosophies ever written.

The thoughts and ideas here are connected by Aurelius’ interest in the Stoic philosophy, but they are not a narrative so the book can be opened at any page or read in any order as each paragraph is a single idea, observation or point he wished to make. Aurelius comes across as an incredibly sane, warm, open and tolerant individual and although he personally believes in a divine nature, an atheist can happily enjoy his writing.

The Stoics were interested in logic, physics and ethics. These terms didn’t hold their current meanings so Logic meant closely observing the world and thinking carefully and deriving knowledge and opinions about what you have seen. Physics is essentially the idea that the universe has a force of nature running through it and there’s a connectedness between all things. Finally Ethics is how to be happy, which to the stoics meant living in tune with the rest of nature. It all sounds rather new age and vague but Aurelius’ genius is to boil this down to a practical formula for everyday living. It’s rather as if he is in his tent cursing some piece of misfortune and then stops himself, considers his philosophy and how he should handle the problem and writes the solution down. So you might get something like “Never make light of a friend’s rebuke”, or “Never listen to gossip” followed by an explanation of the consequences and disbenefits. More often however a paragraph will be a mini essay on why a certain type of behaviour is good or bad for the individual. Some are very short such as, “Men exist for each other, then either improve them or put up with them” whilst others roll across a page or perhaps a little more.

There is repetition here and there and not everything is a golden nugget of truth but taken as a whole this is a remarkable work, and I don’t believe that anyone would not have greater contentment and less stress if they followed the advice he gives. On the negative side he can sound a bit miserable about the world and give the impression that it is a constant struggle to exist, but I expect when you are fighting off German invaders every morning you begin to get somewhat glum.

This is something to keep by your bedside and dip into every few weeks or months. Highly recommended.

The New Machiavelli - H G Wells (33/1400)

Summary
4/10
HG Wells wrote many classic works but, although beautifully written, this one hasn’t stood the test of time.

Published 1911




Review
Reading H G Wells is like being driven in an old Rolls Royce, it probably isn’t the vehicle you would choose for yourself, but it’s impossible not to be thrilled by the experience. This is an author who can really write, and there is no page in this book without deftly packaged ideas and sentiments. Wells really knows his world and his people and expertly invites the reader inside.

Briefly, this is the story of the rise and disgrace of a politician in early Edwardian Britain (i.e. around 1910). It’s intended as something semi–autobiographical and therefore includes the hidden identity of many of Wells’ friends. Alongside this bit of theatre the plot covers the bigger themes of women’s lib, the placing of the mother at the heart of society and, to cap everything, a scandalous affair involving a Member of Parliament - this must have been a very daring book at the time.

Unfortunately, the issues and passions of the Edwardian political world have long since passed away. As a result Well’s new political frontier doesn’t have the same glamour as it must have done at the time of publication. What is left is an autobiography where the reader isn’t interested in the auto, which is fatal to modern enjoyment of the book. The narrator, Richard Remington, sets out his childhood, his youth, his schooling and university before becoming a politician, and then his career through the political ranks. It’s accurate but frustrating because the extra marital downfall is advertised but ever so many pages away. A modern author with the same material would time shuttle the chapters to keep the suspense up, but H G Wells didn't have a time machine in his writing laboratory.

Wells conjures up life as a prospective and actual MP with delightful verisimilitude, but the passionate nature of politics at the time is completely antique compared to the glorious love story at the heart of the book. The politicians' rants about the Empire, votes for women and similar ancient battles are of interest only to students of the period. What’s left is Remington’s passion for his young research assistant Isabel and the abandonment of his blossoming career for her passion, but this is tremendously well done, so that their separation is an absolute tearjerker.

There is much of interest in this book about politics and people but it is too well set into its contemporary surroundings to speak across the generations. Wells is such a brilliant author that it would be dreadful if anyone were to be put off his work by reading this and so I suggest that you leave this one and pick any of his other works.

Selected Poems - Rudyard Kipling (32/1400)

Summary
(7/10)

Don’t be misled by Kipling’s image as an icon of the British Empire, this is a surprisingly thoughtful, accessible, modern and enjoyable book of poetry, the more mature later works are especially good.

Written 1879 - 1936

Review

Penguin presents this selection in chronological order and it's remarkable how Kipling’s style, intensity and thoughtfulness change as he goes through the experiences of the Boer and First World wars. Initially his poems are simple, jaunty tales of the British Empire and its characters, with an especial fondness for the ordinary soldier. The poems are full of funny accents and excruciating rhymes reading more like something out of music hall than serious introspection, although they often have a nugget of intensity behind them and are frequently funny. My favourite of these early poems is ‘The Betrothed’, which is based on the true story of a man given a 'me or the cigars' ultimatum by his fiancé and who chose the cigars – leading to a court case for breach of promise. Kipling imagines the man turning over the arguments for and against in his mind and mints the famous line, ‘a woman is just a woman but a good cigar is a Smoke.’

When war comes Kipling becomes more serious by degrees. He lashes out against the men in charge who let down the ordinary soldier both in permitting the war to happen and in its woeful execution. He remembers the roles of nurses and other non-combatants who died in the conflict. Later, he worked with the War Graves Commission and some of his finest work consists of four or five verse epitaphs for war memorials and graves. His verse becomes steadily more political - trying to rally America against Germany for example and, after WW1, poems that predict the rise of Hitler and remilitarisation of Germany. It's not all work and no play however and his famous poems 'If' and 'A Smugglers Song' are included in this collection.

If you had an image of Kipling as jingoistic, patronising or even vaguely racist these verses should sweep all of that away. His style is direct and open, by-and-large keeping to everyday language and using easy to follow rhyming patterns and structures. His choice of subject matter remains up to date, the stupidity of politicians for example or the lot of the ordinary man. However the world has moved on a bit over the last nearly 100 years and the explanatory notes at the back are worth reading to get the context of some of the poems.

I was surprised how much there was here that I enjoyed, and I found myself agreeing with and appreciating the neatness of expression of some of Kipling’s sentiments. If you hadn’t considered Kipling before it’s worth giving him a chance.

The Riddle of The Sands - Erskine Childers (31/1400)

Summary
3/10
A crisp writing style, enjoyable character development and believable spy-on-spy interchange don’t make up for oceans of mind numbing detail in this seafaring espionage yarn. More like an internal memo than a novel.

Published 1903


Review
This book was written as a piece of political lobbying to expose the weakness of Britain’s sea defences from a German invasion. It brewed such a storm that the British Admiralty created new East Coast defensive works and prepared a North Sea invasion plan. I’m not surprised that the War Ministry took Childers seriously because he was in the British civil service and knew which buttons to press. The novel is a detailed case against Germany and reads more like an internal memo than a conventional story. This grinding minutiae kills the joy of the underlying spy tale in which two plucky young Brits on a sailing holiday unmask a diabolical plot by the Hun against Blighty.

Carruthers is a bored, rather stuffy and precious, junior official in the civil service who, in late summer, joins his friend Davies on a trip around the German Frisian islands in Davis’s small boat, the Dulcibella. Carruthers and Davies are chalk and cheese, with Davies a superb sailor who lives casually and hates going ashore, whilst Carruthers prefers society and living the high life. They are somewhat frosty to each other, until Davies reveals what he knows of a possible plot by the Germans against the British – knowledge that has nearly cost Davies his life. They agree to try to unravel the mystery and sail the Frisian Coast looking for clues. Childers deftly sketches out the men’s character and their personal development, and nicely evokes the wild and empty Frisian landscape. But, because he wants to prove his point to the War Ministry, their journey and the potential German threat are loaded up to the gunwale on detail, the book could almost be a sailing manual rather than a novel, which slows the pace and is heavy going.

What’s done well is the piecing together of the mystery from tiny clues and leaps of faith – I’m sure this is exactly how real spys operate. When they finally come face to face with the bad guys the subtlety of the interchanges is very believable as each side echo-sounds the other to see how much they know and what new clues can be discovered. The straightforward Davies is out of his depth in these tricky channels, whilst the Foreign Office trained Carruthers tacks and gibes around the verbal reefs and shoals. Childers lays plenty of false trails and there is a bit of love interest but neither the competing theories of what the Germans are up to, nor Davies’s blushes for the girl, can keep the wind in the novel's sails. The denouement eventually comes all of a rush with Caruthers undertaking some derring-do and shanghaiing both Enemy No.1 and his Davies-mooning daughter back to England (as he thinks) with the evidence .

There are things to like in this book, and it is a genuine antique if you are interested in the history of the spy genre, but unless you are a spy or a sailor, the price of the technical discussions of war plans and sailing maneuvers is not worth paying.

Childers, by the way, was a fascinating individual who was executed by a Dublin firing squad for his support of Irish Nationalism, following his arrest in possession of Michael Collin's revolver, and whilst awaiting appeal. He shook hands with each of his executioners and asked if they could come a little closer!

Howards End - E M Forster (30/1400)

Summary
9/10
Simply superb. A cracking story, which follows the entanglements of three families in the early 1900s. Bubbles with life as it explores enduring themes such as the purpose of money, one’s duty to others and the future of society. Filled with exquisite writing and very deftly packaged.

Published 1910

Review
This is a breathtakingly good novel that is not only beautifully and subtly written but has something important to say about how life should be lived. The Howards End of the title is a charming farmhouse on the edge of suburbanising London owned by the dying Mrs Wilcox. The question of who will inherit the house is a metaphor for who will inherit England, as the country goes through social changes that contrast inherited money against both the new industrialists and those who simply live for wages. The book represents the workers through Leonard Bast, a clerk who seeks to better himself, and Jacky his crass wife, old money by the two Utopian Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and business by the unemotional yet practical Wilcox family.

The lives of the three families become emotionally entangled enabling Forster to explore the broad themes of the value of money both in society and to individuals, our duties to each other as human beings and the relative merits of Doing Vs Caring. He is very good at rotating around the arguments using the actions and points of view of each of the characters to show the merits and imperfections of their stance. At the heart of the book is Margaret, who marries the Wilcox patriarch and widower Henry, and who has the humanity and toughness to bridge the practical and emotional worlds that separate the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels. It is she, symbolically, who inherits Howards End. By contrast her susceptible sister tries to help the sinking Basts but in doing so destroys them, albeit in a way that is suggestive of renewal and a different relationship in future between upper and lower classes.

The book is full of life and action so that the plot is moved forward by the themes without any apparent effort. The language and imagery are simply outstanding and complex scenes, emotions, thoughts and cross currents of thought, place and deed are rendered cleverly and simply. It’s a delight to read and shouldn’t be rushed. Forster has an obvious passion and sympathy for all his characters, even the unlovely ones and as a result they become real people. It’s astonishing that he can achieve so much in just 250 pages but he conveys in a few words what other novelists fail to communicate over several chapters.

It’s interesting to compare Howards End with The Rise of Silas Lapham (24/1400), which was written in Boston in 1885 and which has a very similar theme and set up (two families - one old-money and one new-money, a romance between them and a house). Howards End is so much more interesting, subtle, tightly written, broader themed and thoughtful that it blows the earlier book clean away. Howards End is just fantastic and I can’t recommend it enough.

The Woman In White - Wilkie Collins (29/1400)

Summary
5/10
A classic mystery thriller, but Collins’ engaging style can't disguise an unbelievable plot reliant on coincidence. Count and Mrs Fosco are great villains, who deserve a book of their own.

Published 1868



Review
There are two problems with this mystery thriller. First, like Collins’ The Moonstone (18/1400), the story is unfolded by each of the characters in turn, a device that requires scenes for passing information between friend and foe in a way that isn’t credible. The splendidly evil Count Fosco reads saintly Marian Halcombe’s diary adding an entry explaining certain of his dreadful doings, which isn’t very likely. If Collins had used a narrator structure the story would have flowed more naturally.

Secondly, the book hinges on the unlikely coincidence of looks and location between the Woman in White and the lovely heiress Laura Fairlie whose fiancé and later husband, Sir Percival Glyde, is after her money. Sir Percival teams up with the mysterious continental foreigner Count Fosco and his wife to get it. The Foscos are fantastic creations, he is well dressed, well spoken and well educated, always excellent company and perfectly polite. But he is also a brilliant, ruthless and unconscionable schemer. She is quiet and mousey but with claws of steel and completely loyal to the Count, they make a formidable team and it’s touch-and-go as to whether Marian, Laura and their artist friend, Walter Hartright can outfox them. I was hoping that the Foscos would come out on top because they are delicious baddies whereas Marian, Laura and Walter are frankly a bit dull, and Laura is completely wet

The opening chapters have a pounding, blockbuster, feel and dramatically introduce the mysterious Woman in White before setting a nicely unsettled tone at the Yorkshire home of self centred old Mr Fairlie. The grip and pace start to break down as the story progresses because the author seems not to have worked out how he is going to bring it all together (since it was written as a weekly serial). I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the good guys win and Walter gets the girl, but the plot gets awfully convoluted and implausible along the way.

I’ve got a soft spot for Wilkie Collins but objectively this is a bit weak.

Madame Bovary - Gustav Flaubert 28/1400

Summary
6/10
Flaubert looks down his nose at French Petite Bourgeois life in this story of the air headed Emma Bovary, her dull marriage, affairs and suicide. Technically very clever it's a novel that attracts a fan base of academics and professional writers but be warned that you may find it hard work.

Published 1857


Review
Reading Madame Bovary is like drinking fine wine, which has gone a few years past its best. An expert can appreciate the quality of the ingredients; production and structure but the amateur may find the experience lifeless and dull.

I’m guessing that Flaubert was a bit of a snob, as he set out here to write a belittling story about the small lives of small people (the petite bourgeois). Emma is a farmer’s daughter who marries Charles Bovary, a young doctor. She’s a romantic airhead who is always unhappy with her lot. Charles is an untalented, lazy, boorish oaf but totally content and utterly in love with Emma who comes to loath him. She carries on two affairs that lead her into an unaffordable life of pleasure seeking and, when her debts pile up, she takes her own life. Flaubert was challenged by his friends to write a book where nothing happens, which he has interpreted as making it feel like nothing is happening. So, although there is the scandal of the affairs and the suicide and more besides, life in the village of Yonville-l'Abbaye is provincial and the action is a dangerous undercurrent in a slow flowing river.

Flaubert has taken enormous trouble over tone of voice, allusion, symbolism and intercutting and contrasting emotions against actions but, without the foreknowledge of how the story unfolds, this can be baffling or boring or both. Everything – landscapes, settings, and events in passing, minor characters and so on can be read for meaning. This would be easier with some clues as to where the plot was heading, but the complete sense only becomes clear at the end of the novel so that, if you were to read it again, it would be far more interesting and less of a slog. Because of the focus on meaning and tone, the action unfolds very slowly. Three quarters of the book is build up to Emma's affairs and suicide and, unless you can enjoy the machinery of the novel, that ratio may be off putting

Yonville society is small-minded, ill mannered and somewhat grasping. The pompous know-all pharmacist, Homais, desperately wants membership of the Legion of Honour and creates a garden in the shape of the medal. Lheureux the shopkeeper and cunning businessman plots Emma into debt, knowing that he can make a fat profit when he ruins her; wealthy Rodolphe simply plays with Emma, making her fall in love with him, and then dumps her on the day she thinks they will run away together, Leon is the notary's clerk, who becomes Emma’s second lover, and who marries almost before she is in her tomb. Charles is hopeless as a doctor, husband, father and son. Worst of all is Emma herself who is a most unlovely character. Stupid with her head-in-the-clouds dreaming of a different life and never seeing the good things she has – even her daughter. I was so pleased when Emma finally took the arsenic but, in a very long death scene, I was fearful she might recover. Flaubert has fun with his characters but in a snide and nasty way because he regards them as contemptible and gauche. It’s difficult to want to spend time in a book where the author has no love of his own creation, and what is left is a highly proficient and technical writing exercise.

I can see how this novel attracts a fan base of academics and professional writers but be warned that you may find it hard work.

Fantomas - Marcel Allain & Pierre Souvestre (27/1400)

Summary
4/10

Inspector Juve goes on the hunt for the ruthless master criminal, Fantomas in this French blockbuster thriller. It's all plot and no tone, starting well before becoming increasingly absurd with each new chapter.

Published 1911

Review

The brilliant French Detective, Juve, is a master of disguise and I got the giggles thinking of Inspector Clouseau and his inflatable hunchback costume from the Pink Panther films. After that I couldn't really take this novel seriously.

It has all the ingredients for a good blockbuster, simple prose that bowls along, a cliffhanger at the end of each chapter, a brilliant master criminal and plenty of baffling clues along the way. The ending leaves open the possibility of further Fantomas adventures and there are another 30 books available. On the whole this is on a par with Agatha Christie although in Fantomas both the detective and the bad guy are interesting characters. That said, the plot is bonkers and too creaky and old fashioned to bear comparison with the modern equivalent, and so it's strictly for fans of the genre.

Candide - Voltaire (26/1400)

Summary
4/10
18th Century philosophy wrapped up in a tale of fatalism in the face of outrageous fortune. You won’t find enlightenment in this historical curiosity.

Published 1737


Review
Written as part of a philosophical spat between Voltaire and Gottfried Leibniz this is really only of limited historical interest. Leibniz argued that we live in the best of all possible worlds because it was created by a perfect God. Voltaire lampoons this by taking his hero, Candide, through a journey around Europe and South America where a series of increasingly dreadful events happen (wars, earthquakes, hangings, rape, imprisonment, theft etc. etc.) Candide is a student of Dr Pangloss, a Leibnizian, and so at first takes all the misfortune in his stride but eventually he abandons this philosophy and concludes that ‘Man must tend his garden’ (i.e. that if you want a good world you must work hard at it). Since I don’t suppose there is now anyone, except a physicist, who would argue that this is the best of all possible worlds, Voltaire's point is made in the first chapter and the subsequent repetition of it gets a bit wearing.

Voltaire takes a swipe at much else along the way – systems of government, manners, morals, culture and organised Christianity and the Jesuits get a mauling in several places. Many of these targets are no longer relevant so one is left musing about the issues that bothered 18th century philosophers rather than nodding along in agreement or being enraged by Voltaire’s position on a subject.

It’s all done in a very light and breezy style where the heroic cast pick themselves up from each misfortune and proceed straight onto the next one, making whatever philosophical or sarcastic remarks about their situation they see fit. At the time this book did enormous damage to Leibniz, who was as famous as Newton in his day, and it was partly responsible for the fading of his reputation. Now it’s an easy and action packed read but more a historical curiosity than something that will get your philosophical juices flowing.

King Solomon's Mines - H Rider Haggard (25/1400)

Summary
5/10
An undemanding page turner from the ripping yarns school. Stretching it a bit to call it a classic.

Published 1885



Review
This book was written in response to a competition to create a novel as good as Treasure Island. Against that yardstick it is a failure but it is still a pretty good yarn. Three adventurers start on a quest for King Solomon's lost African diamond mines and a missing brother. Along the way they have a series of Indiana Jones style brushes with death and the tiniest amount of love interest all culminating in being locked in the diamond mine with no apparent means of escape. In the end they get the diamonds and the brother but not the girl.

The story doesn't have the neatness of plot or the intense human interaction of Treasure Island. The characters are pretty one dimensional and the narrative structure simply proceeds from scrape to scrape. However it is nicely written with plenty of local colour and enjoyable set pieces and reading it filled a pleasant and untaxing hour or two.

The Rise of Silas Lapham - William Dean Howells (24/1400)

Summary
5/10
A morality and manners tale of new and old money in 19th Century Boston. The kind of thing you are set at school, and which is too slow, too remote and too subtle to be interesting. Has some neat writing and Silas Lapham’s descent from riches to rags is spookily accurate in our credit-crunched world.

Published 1885

Review
This is not a book I can recommend, even though there are many good things in it. Top of that list is the description of the central character’s slide into bankruptcy from riches. In the current credit crunch, a number of business men and women could read this very precise description of the slowness of collapse, the twisting and turning to escape, the denial and the grind of the paperwork and recognise easily their own, sad predicament.

However, although this collapse is said to be what the book is about, it isn’t. In fact it’s a comedy of morals and manners between old money Boston – represented by the Corey Family - and new money Boston – represented by the Laphams. The bridge between the families is 26-year-old Tom Corey who falls for one of the Lapham daughters and goes to work for Colonel Lapham in his paint business.

The social interaction between the two families is very nicely done. The Laphams don’t know how to behave in society but the Coreys are just as embarrassed around the Laphams. There is delightful and heated snobbery on all sides fuelled by a mix up over which Lapham girl Tom is after. The ingredients are here for a splendid trifle, but Howells doesn’t really get the dish to set. His plot elements run parallel and don’t properly interact, except to show the moral characters of the participants. He completely abandons the love story for several chapters to focus on the financial disaster, which comes all in a rush in the final part of the book. The love story therefore has to carry the narrative weight for most of the novel and it’s not a strong enough line to do so. Consequently the first half drags somewhat, being not funny enough to stand as a biting social commentary, nor enthralling enough as a romance.

Howells could have used the sub-plots and minor characters more effectively – for example the mysterious Mrs M that Lapham is keeping and Rogers, his scheming former partner and the wider members of the Corey family. This would have enabled the Lapham/Corey story to be wrapped into a bigger canvass about turn-of-the-century Bostonian life. In the alternative he could have made it more focused, funnier and vicious; but he falls between these two points and ends up a bit flat or, if you want to be kind, self-controlled and subtle.

This is the sort of book set on English courses because it’s a Socially Important Great American Novel. Many students and readers (including me) will get frustrated and even bored by the first part, despite the quality of some of the observations and dialogue, and not feel the more action orientated final third is sufficient reward for patience.

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (23/1400)

Summary
8/10

Love Actually meets Star Wars, with Napoleon playing the part of Darth Vader. A glorious, sprawling, didactic soap.

Published 1869



Review
This is the story of Napoleon's disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia told both as political and military history and through the lives of a giant cast of Russian society.

The novel is divided into four books and an epilogue and doesn't really get going until Book Three, which is 715 pages in. This is the moment when Napoleon, who has been a background figure up to now, moves his troops into Russia. The war and Napoleon's presence at the heart of the action give a backbone and drive to the story that is missing hitherto.

Books One and Two set up the basic scene and introduce the main protagonists - the noble but broke Rostov family, the grand but out-of-society Bolkonsky family and the illegitimate Pierre Bezuhov who inherits his father's fortune. A lot happens in the first two Books but it feels like loading up at a self-service buffet - there is plenty of good stuff on offer, but you leave with your plate overfull and the flavours merge into one.

With Napoleon on the march in Book Three, the lives of the characters cease being simply those of wealthy society Russians, and now are bent and shaped through the war and their relationship to it. Tolstoy entertains the reader with the soap opera staples of births, marriages and deaths as his characters follow the course of the invasion and retreat. He has been clever in selecting his cast, their personalities and their positions in Russian society, because between them they can legitimately interact with the court, the army, society, the peasants, and so on, to give the reader a complete slice through Russia at that time. He uses the women in his story both to show their own lives and place in society and to ruminate on the male characters and their motives and actions.

Rumination on motives and actions is a big part of what Tolstoy is offering in this book. Half of the Epilogue is taken up with analysing why history takes the course it does and the role of free will in history. There are mini lectures on the same theme throughout the novel. Tolstoy was obviously a big thinker but he comes across as a bit shouty and unsubtle, he makes his point loud and clear and admits of no doubts. He has a voice that would dominate at a dinner party and be very entertaining, sharp and accurate, but you wouldn't want dinner with him every day. This is a political book - the title, War and Peace, sets out the two areas of duty of 19th century princes to their subjects - so an understanding of the period is helpful. A reader with no knowledge of Napoleon and the Russian campaign could become disorientated with events in the book, which would be a shame because Tolstoy's descriptions of the war and the battles are some of the very best parts. The reader feels that he is inside the generals' tent as well as on the battlefield with the men.

The soap opera part of the novel is largely about love and Tolstoy seems to have a mental check list to make sure he has covered off all the different forms of love - I think Richard Curtis had 21 types in his movie, Love Actually, but I didn't count them here. There is love for parents and children, brotherly love, romantic love, sexual love, unselfish love, love of self, love of God and of course love for one's country to list only a few of the variants. They are all covered with panache and fluency by Tolstoy although he doesn't weave the emotional highs and lows into the plot quite as deftly as, say, a Jane Austen and they are often accompanied with a little tutorial addressed to the reader. The world Tolstoy's characters inhabit is so far away from ours that I sometimes found it hard to believe in them as real people, but there are moments when Tolstoy does animate them and I had the odd sniffle and wet eye in places.

Finally there is the Epilogue, half of which is an unnecessary catch up on the cast seven years later. This is a dig by Tolstoy at the failure of politicians to use victory over Napoleon to move Russia forward. The second part is an essay on the nature of history, which sets out Tolstoy's views on why political events happen - great for scholars of the book, but optional for the casual reader.

Is this the greatest novel ever written? I can see why people would say so. It's extremely ambitious in its scope and Tolstoy is a heavyweight with things to say and a good eye for the truth as he sees it. For me however it was a bit like the Star Wars films (with Napoleon substituting for Darth Vader) where there is really only one good movie (the original) out of six. And so it is here, with the middle bit of the book being completely gripping and the front and back not cutting the same mustard. Reading War and Peace from Book Three to the end and then jogging back to Book One might make for a more satisfying reading experience, and although you would initially miss out on the back story I don't know if that would really matter.

Silas Marner - George Eliot (22/1400)

Summary
9/10
A beautiful crafted, fable-like, redemption story with real humanity. A mini masterpiece.

Published 1861


Review
What a gem of a novel, it's really a fairy story or myth about loss and redemption, how a working class man falls into the love of gold only to lose everything and find himself again through adopting a baby girl. The ending is a reverse Cinderella where the girl's upper class father tries to take her back and she refuses him.

As a piece of myth making this is a very strong story, but what really makes it special is the brilliance and sophistication of the prose. This is genius at work with an incredibly deft hand. Nothing here is accidental and it feels as though every phrase, reference, name, character and action is linked to the book's wider themes. The people and set pieces are delightfully observed, funny and wise and the rise and fall of emotion is sensuous. I honestly don't know where anyone learns to write like this.

Some readers might say that 'not much happens' or that there are long periods of description. I think this is mistaken, an enormous amount takes place in this book but Eliot is low-key about events and focuses on the feelings of the characters, leaving the descriptions as clever and and funny pen portraits into a way of life that give warp and weft to the story.

This is right up there with my best ever books

The Poems of Catullus - Gaius Valerius Catullus (21/1400)

Summary
8/10

Wise, funny, short and pointed poems from ancient Rome, which could easily describe the life and loves of a modern metropolitan teenager. A great find.

Written c 84 - 54 BC


Review
Catullus is a kind of poetic Banksy, and most of his output is somewhere between graffiti and a Post-it note: short and sharp. But at the same time he manages to unpack the emotional or behavioural point he is making and in so doing neatly illustrates it for the reader. He is also personal, these are not poems about things in general, they are about him, his friends and enemies, and by name.

He writes about the concerns of a young man-about-town in a big city - friendship, romance, sex, infidelity, failure, break-up, loss, hatred, envy and love. Sometimes politics, family and money attract his pen. He writing style is as if he is jotting down the exact emotion passing through him at that moment and, in consquence, he is alternately, moony, passionate, funny, sour, angry and knowing. Catullus is completely explicit about who his poems are directed at, what they have done and how he feels about them. He is unrestrained sexually, and in all directions, but will criticise others whom he regards as two-faced about their sex life.

The translation is very down to earth and natural. By way of sample here is one about girl's dislike of men with BO (body odour):

Do not wonder when the wench declines
your thigh her thigh to place beneath
You cannot buy them with the costliest clothes
or with the extravagance of clearest stones
There's an ugly rumour abroad,
BO under the armpits -
and nobody likes that!
So do not wonder if
a nice girl declines the goat-pit,
either reach for the deodorant,
or cease to wonder why she so declines.

A number of the poems chart the on/off/on-again relationship between the super promiscuous Lesbia (Clodia Metelli) and Catullus. Here is one from their off-phase, that demonstrates Catullus's easy understanding of human nature:

Lesbia is extraordinarily vindictive
about me in front of her husband
who is therefore moved to fatuous laughter -
a man mulishly insensitive, failing to grasp
that a mindless silence (about me) spells safety
while to spit out my name in curses, baring
her white teeth, means she remembers me, and
what is more pungent still, is scratching the wound
ripening herself while she talks.

These poems are a lot of fun and contain some sharp and modern observations on human nature.

First Love - Ivan Turgenev (20/1400)

Summary
7/10
A tiny short story following the first crush of a 16 year old boy who finds that his father is his rival. Accurate, perceptive and nicely twisted but not elegant enough to be a true great. Would be a fantastic teen movie.

Published 1860

Review
The story of a summer romance between the 16 year old middle-class Vladimir Petrovich and the impoverished, bewitching, Princess Zinaida - who moves next door. Vladimir is completely intoxicated with Zinaida who flirts with Vladimir and a circle of half a dozen other, older, boys. But Zinaida also falls in love and Vladimir discovers that it is with his own father.

This is a neat and atmospheric short story that conjures up a summer of intense puppy love for the adolescent Vladimir, exploring his own feelings and using him as a sonar to detect those of Zinaida. What brings life to this otherwise slightly sweet brew is Zinaida's hopeless affair with Vladimir's father which explodes the emotional range of the book's cast and transforms the lives of Vladimir, Zinaidia and the father too.

This would be a very modern tale remade as a movie in (say) high school America - not a million miles from American Beauty. As a book it doesn't quite have the grace or effortlessness of the very best storytellers and it reads more like a fable than the truth.

The Way Of All Flesh - Samuel Butler (19/1400)

Summary
7/10
Not really a novel, more a series of notes and observations on life wrapped up in the story of a boy growing to manhood. Very funny and sharp in places but needs a good edit. Lots here to mine if you are, or intend to be, a writer.

Published 1903


Review
Whatever else this book is, it does not qualify as a novel because the plot is only an excuse for Butler to put out his views on dozens of moral, philosophical, scientific and artistic ideas and topics - The Way of All Flesh suggested by his brilliant choice of title. There were passages at which I laughed out loud, and others that superbly deconstruct some of life's familiar set pieces. Elsewhere Butler simply dissolves into a rant, or strays off the point.

The plot concerns Ernest, born the son of a priggish minister and his weak wife, his childhood at home, his schooling and education at Cambridge. He is ordained, imprisoned, married (to a bigamist drunkard), inherits and finally finds happiness as a writer. It's all too much, and the plot machinery doesn't engage properly in the second half of the book. The device of having the narrator act as a central character does a lot of damage to pace and credibility.

However, the plot is not really important. Instead Butler gives out a stream of witty and thoughtful consciousness. He is very, very good at exposing how the weak prey upon the weaker. Anyone who works in a major corporation, or similar, will recognise instantly the behaviour of Ernest's parents as they try to keep him in his place. And their letters to Ernest could easily be modern internal memos. Butler has a very sharp eye and ear for uncovering and delightfully exposing humbug. Unfortunately, he doesn't always know when enough is enough and a thorough editing would have made the text much sharper. There are pages and pages about various religious differences for example that come down to a rant. It's a bit like talking to a daft old uncle - good fun but not coherent.

Nonetheless, Butler as a writer is well read, thoughtful, knowing and has obvious human empathy. If you are, or have aspirations to be, an author you should read this book - and take copious notes.

The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins (18/1400)

Summary
7/10
Gripping yet creaky detective story that keeps you guessing until the end, when you wonder why you bothered.

Published 1868



Review
This really is a classic, at least in the UK, in the sense that everyone has heard of this book and may well have either read it or seen it adapted for TV.

Wilkie starts with a sensational hook - a stolen, cursed, gigantic, Indian diamond, which is about to become the property of a lovely young English heiress, is inexplicably snatched for a second time. Having strung the bow tight, Collins looses his flights of fancy.

All manner of characters and potential sub-plots are let fly, mostly as red herrings to what has really happened to the diamond - which is the Moonstone of the book's title. There are Indian mummers, a death in the quicksand, two rival male suitors, a Scotland Yard Detective and the strange fate of the village doctor. It's rip-roaring, page-turning stuff.

The book has two flaws however. First, it is written (in turn) by the participants, but each writer is unable to tell the story of the final outcome, which modern readers may find hard to accept. Secondly, what actually happened to the diamond is laughably implausible and (for me) irritating.

Could do better, would be my epitaph for this but I still enjoyed the novel and stayed up to read it through.

Lady Audley's Secret - Mary Elisabeth Braddon (17/1400)

Summary
8/10

This is a tremendous page-turning whodunnit with a fabulous cast of characters set against a richly detailed and authentic 1850's Home Counties backdrop.

Published 1861

Review

This is the book said to have started detective fiction and it's a super piece of work.

Braddon is especially good at contrasting the hero, Robert Audley, against his newly acquired young aunt, Lady Audley. Robert starts the book as a foppish wastrel whilst Lady Audley is a girlish accessory for Lord Audley. Robert's search for the missing George Talboy causes both Robert and Lady Audley to show steel and determination as they lock horns in a mortal conflict. Even though the reader pretty much knows who-dun-what from the start, it's still gripping as Robert strips away the layers of the secret. The action flows thick and fast - the book was written as a weekly serial - with plenty of cliffhangers and false trails.

The supporting cast includes a great smorgasbord of characters, showing all sides of humanity, and in many cases spinning their fate out of their own selfish and unselfish actions. It's not quite Hardy but it's a lot more fun.

The greatest strength of the book is that the characters are fully formed and sympathetic, even when foul deeds are being done they are not incomprehensible in ordinary human terms.

I loved it and I wish someone would write a whole series of Robert Audley books.

The Tale of Genjii - Murasaki Shikibu (16/1400)

Summary
7/10
Soft porn, written by a woman for women, about the gorgeous Genji and his female conquests, done with sensitivity, atmosphere, poetic flare and showing the grain of the consequences for the characters' lives.

Written 1001 AD


Review

This edition has only 12 of the 54 chapters that make up this story so my view of the whole is incomplete. However, what Penguin is offering is a slice of Japanese soft porn written around 1000 AD by a woman for a female readership. The main character, Genji, is god's gift to women - beautiful, rich, the son of an emperor, skilled in poetry and dancing, a seducer and so on. The story is essentially a cataloging of his conquests, which include his rather sour relationship with his wife, the taking of a middle aged lover, the kidnap of a twelve year old girl, the rape of one of the emperor's concubines, the wooing of a country girl and the fathering of a secret child by the emperor's wife.

The book is written from a female perspective so that Genji's clothes, smell and beauty of movement are described in detail especially when he wears nearly transparent or other inappropriate dress. He constantly exchanges lavish and intricate two-line poems with his various lovers and although he is a complete philanderer he really does love the women in his life and always treats them with total courtesy. Cleverly the author has made Genji a commoner notwithstanding that he is the son of an emperor. This means it was possible for any of the target female audience to imagine that they too could have an affair with him. There is a rivalry between Genji and his best friend To No Chujo, who is almost as beautiful and talented as Genji, and who competes in love and other affairs. For good measure there are also some moments of homo-eroticism thrown in.

What raises this above being a saucy romance is that Genji, who is seventeen at the start of the book, has to live with the consequences of his various affairs. By the time we leave him aged 27, he is estranged by circumstances from many of his lovers, whilst others have had their lives ruined by their involvement with him. He himself has suffered a three year banishment from court and everyone is more grown up and sober by the end.

The feel of Japan at the time is very strong and some of the poetry and writing is delightful, and should not be rushed through. It's clear that a lot of tone and meaning has been lost through the process of translation into English, although the footnotes are excellent at trying to get across the intent of the text.

An unusual and refreshing reading experience.

One Percent!

I have now read one percent of the Penguin Classics Series and it has taken 39 days. At that rate the whole series will take twelve and a third years. I suspect it will be more like twenty years.

Knowing that all 1,400 books have to be read creates a wonderful indifference when in the library or bookshop. It doesn't matter in the slightest which Penguin Classic I read next since they all have to be got through. This absence of choice is very therapeutic and means that I don't curse myself for having picked a duff book as I used to do. And there certainly are some duffers in the classics selection. I Have given five out of 14 books - over one third - a mark below six so effectively a recommendation not to read them. However I concede that even the very worst of these had some merit in the writing or structure and were not a waste of time.

I'm not put off any more by the thought of having to wade through a classic. To my mind the gloomy and serious Penguin Classics Covers are discouraging and in many cases just the names of some of these famous works makes one's heart sink. But now, knowing that I have no choice but to get on with it, I simply plough into the volume and see what comes. It's very enabling.

Onward to the remaining 99%.

Where Angels Fear To Tread - E M Forster (15/1400)

Summary
9/10
A delightful book superbly engineered and cunningly observed with plenty of drama. The whole is created with the lightest of touches. Brilliant.



Review
This is a glorious book that gives great pleasure just reading the sentences and paragraphs as they form on the page. The prose is concise, inventive, knowing, sly and pulsing. The first three pages are probably the most brilliant introduction to a novel I have ever read, wherein the entire plot, structure and character are delivered without a single false note.

The story contrasts a middle class English family in early 20th Century London with the norms and values of a contemporary Italian village. It has a soap opera plot of births, marriages and deaths soldered to an upstairs downstairs English hierarchy trailing Commedia dell'Arte.

The writing is citrus sweet and to imagine a 26 year old Forster producing this is simply to fall in love with him. There are snipers and carpers who have (technically proper) criticisms of this work but anyone who simply wants to snuggle down for a really great read will be on cloud nine. Buy it.

Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories - M R James (14/1400)

Summary

4/10

Rather repetitious, old fashioned and twee ghost stories not in the least bit scary but one or two had some quite thoughtful ideas.

Written 1862 - 1936


Review

There isn't a lot of diversity in these early ghost stories. The characters are all male, middle class and usually academics (or antiquarians as they are termed here) like James himself. There is an occasional poor person thrown in to be a victim. The plot lines in general follow a formula wherein the antiquarian discovers an old drawing, whistle, book or other object that turns out to be possessed. There is a bit of haunting and then the object is either destroyed or put away and no more is said about it.

James displays a good knowledge of Latin, ancient myths, the workings of the church and so on that enable him to put up a convincing sounding patina on the plots but his characters are all a bit too mannered to make the reader feel their horror as events unfold. He has a curious habit of bringing the action to a close extremely quickly after the main haunting event so that the reader is left thinking - 'was that it?'

I did like some of the ideas in the book, the haunted room that appears and disappears, and the whistle that calls for the wind for example but I began to get bored with the stories about half way through the book and found the last couple a bit of a drag (even the notes admit that the last story is just a filler).

All-in-all more of historical than literary interest.

The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne (13/1400)

Summary
7/10

An austere and tightly written tale of adultery and revenge in puritan New England. Thoughtful and atmospheric with strong central characters but more of a novella than a full blown work.

Written 1850


Review
From 1850 to 1857 Hawthorne was America's foremost writer (whatever that means) and the Scarlet Letter is held up by Penguin as his masterpiece.

The plot concerns Hesler Prynne, living in a puritan community in New England, who commits adultery with local minister and pillar of the community, Mr Dimmsdale. Her punishment is to wear a scarlet letter A on her tunic at all times. When her hated hunchback husband returns she refuses to identify Dimmsdale to him as her lover. Accordingly the hunchback assumes a new identity as Roger Chillingworth, a Doctor, and promises to find her lover and have his revenge.

I like a bit of venomous revenge in a story and I'm quite pro forelorn love and outcasting from society so the ingredients are here for a good yarn. Hawthorn is a classy writer with an eye for detail and the human condition but he doesn't quite get the plot to take off. Excusing the fact that Hesler and Dimmsdale could have just left the town and resettled somewhere else, Hawthorne teases the reader with the idea of Chillingworth's revenge which never really comes in a satisfying form. Hesler's relationship with Dimmsdale is taken as an established fact but whatever passion stirred them to adultery then lies dormant for seven years so the focus during this period is on the changing relationship between the townsfolk and Hesler and between Hesler and Pearl - her daughter by Dimmsdale. However, the townsfolk are left as rather shadowy figures, with the delicious exception of Mistress Hibbins who, we are told, is later beheaded as a witch. A lot of space is given over to Pearl and the idea that she too is a child of the devil which does create an atmosphere of menace but doesn't in fact lead anywhere.

There are a lot of good things about this story and I enjoyed reading it but I kept feeling there was going to be more in it than turned out to be the case, which is a shame.

Monkey - Wu Ch'eng-En (12/1400)

Summary
5/10
Chopsocky action in one of the five most important books in China. A bit like a firework show, spectacular but hard to make sense of.

Written 1505-1580




Review
Damon Albarn of Gorillaz and Blur has turned this book into an opera so I thought I should read it before I saw the show. The structure is something like the Iliad or Finn McCool so that each chapter is a new adventure but linked together into a wider story. In the case of Monkey the adventures become the road story of bringing the Buddhist scripture from India to China. The central character is the human priest Tripitaka but his three disciples - Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy - are magical beings. Along the way and back to India they face 81 problems, ogres, monsters and so on, with the action flowing fast and furious, but lacking narrative. It's rather like a chinese chopsocky movie with a restless pace and glorious set pieces without much subtlety or character development. It ends up being historically important but not really compelling. Lots of reviewers say the book is funny but that's true only in the sense that Robin Hood is funny; it's not a chuckle fest. Arthur Walsey has done an excellent straight down the line translation but I think I would have preferred a Rosemary Sutcliffe style retelling that might not have been as true to the original but would have brought the story more depth and life.

John Keats The complete Poems/John Keats Selected Poems (10/1400 11/1400)

Summary
0/10
indulgent, unreadable, glossy mush. This is the stuff that puts schoolkids off poetry for life. I never want to read Keats again.

Written 1815 - 1821






Review
A thing of beauty is a joy forever
so reading these poems has been an endeavour
That should pay what is due respect to John Keats
Whereas I am simply a man in the street
Who admits that at school he didn’t like rhyme
whose appetite for it’s diminished with time
Interfering with the meaning of Keats’ words
Iambic pentameter gets on my nerves
Twin As then two Bs and a good pair of Cs
his rhyming in couplets is so very twee
But some of Keats’s pairings are not very bright
Producing a discord but not a sound bite
And often his structure left me disinclined
To sort out the sense from the rhythm and rhymes
So grasping the point he was trying to make
was apt to induce a most filthy head-ache
And where were his phrases to make my heart soar?
I couldn’t find much that I truly fell for
A lot of the time he refers to old Greeks
where to fathom the plotting I had to keep
A book of mythology out on my desk
Which made reading the poems rather grotesque
Since I don’t understand the world he portrays
Which is dreamy, romantic, gooey and fey
It ends up like wallpaper patterned with chintz
And that’s what I think of this Classic imprint