Penguin Classics

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain (143/1400)

2012-01-14T22:59:00.001Z

Summary
8/10

Another outing for Mark Twain’s characters from Tom Sawyer but now focused on the character of Huck Finn. Twain’s road story format is less successful and it’s clear that at times he has struggled with its direction. The book’s anti slavery message gives it a seriousness that Tom Sawyer lacked but overall this is a less compelling work.

Published 1884

Review

Published eight years after Tom Sawyer, this sequel had a difficult birth, with Twain dashing off the first 16 chapters in 1876 almost as soon as Sawyer was published - but he then put the manuscript aside, having lost his creative muse, until the winter of 1897. The join shows as the original tale of Huck Finn helping Joe, the runaway slave, to his freedom by sailing down the Mississippi is overtaken by a second story when the adventurers meet two con men – The Duke and The King – and a series of adventures based around their scams commences. In the third and final section of the book Joe and Huck are reunited with Tom Sawyer and a further story evolves – the original road trip fading away.

There are two ways to look at this novel. As a piece of story telling it is weaker than Tom Sawyer – as already explained it doesn’t have a cohesive narrative and the adventures of the heroes don’t build into a dramatic wider story in the same way as the earlier book. In the alternative view, this is not an aristotelian tale with a beginning, middle and end but one that flows like the Mississippi river that provides the setting. Moreover, it is not a child’s story as was Sawyer but a book dealing with big issues like slavery. At the beginning of this work Tom still want to indulge in childish play whilst Huck has to deal with the real world of his relationship with a drunken father. Huck and Jim’s adventures on the river involve personal danger, sacrifice and adult decision making. Overlaying everything else is the idea that Huck, a white man, is helping a slave to freedom. It is this combination of free flowing narrative, without a structure, and the big themes woven into the story that made the novel an American classic from which many other writers have taken inspiration.

Not to worry though if high falut’n analysis isn’t your thing, the book is full of Twain’s trademark dry comedy, warm observation and high jinks. For myself I preferred the sheer magic and flawless execution of Tom Sawyer, but it’s very much personal taste.

Dr Thorne - Anthony Trollope (142/1400)

2012-01-09T22:58:00.000Z

Summary
8/10

Another solid effort from Trollope, a classically good read with great characters, a strong plot, moral dilemmas, humour and slick writing. It falls short of greatness but not by much.

Published 1858

Review

This is the third in Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire and although one or two characters from the earlier books survive, this is mostly a new cast and familiarity with books one and two isn’t necessary.

Trollope has an easy page-turning writing style and knows how to interest his readers in the action and characters. As with the previous Barsetshire books, the core here is a moral dilemma – or in this case two moral dilemmas. First, should the high-born Frank Gresham save his family by marrying for money or should he marry his childhood sweetheart, the divine but adopted and penniless Mary Thorne. The second part of the dilemma is whether Mary’s guardian, Doctor Thorne, should let on that Mary might inherit an enormous fortune or should he keep quiet in case the inheritance does not happen.

All of the action then centres around these two points and the various actors – Frank’s mother and father, Frank’s noble relations, the de Courcey’s, Frank’s sisters and others all get to have their say and play a part. There are plenty of side plots that throw light on whether it is better to marry for money or love, and the value of breeding versus the value of being well brought up.

Trollope is brilliant at getting inside his characters’ heads and deconstructing their thoughts and subsequent actions; and he manages to spin out the suspense whilst at the same time making it more or less clear that there will be a happy ending. He has a neat trick of stepping outside of the text and admitting that this is just a novel and that he is manipulating the characters, but still making the story believable. He doesn’t go in for the long descriptions and flowery language that Dickens enjoys, and which puts so many people off that author, but he does share Dickens’ very dry sense of humour and there are some neat set pieces including at least one that is a straight dig at Dickens’ character Uriah Heap (Trollope seems to have a go at Dickens in each of his books).

Trollope has the same focus on the niceties of behavior that Jane Austen displays but he is better at moving his plot along and his use of language is more straightforward and natural (he was writing nearly 50 years later, and styles had moved on). On the other hand he doesn’t ever break into really beautiful prose and his writing, whilst engaging, stops short of poetic.

Overall if you like a good read with a decent plot and characters and something to say about society and life this comes highly recommended.

This Side of Paradise - F SCott Fitzgerald (141/1400)

2011-12-28T19:26:00.000Z

Summary
8/10

A breathless run through adolescence and early manhood, centered on the successive loves and relationships of Amory Blaine. Like adolescence itself the book is charming, exciting, unlikely, sexual, intelligent, disjointed, frustrating and inconclusive. But it’s a great read.

Published 1920

Review

I don’t understand why this book isn’t on every teenager’s reading list in the way that ‘The Lost Estate’ or ‘The Magus’ seem to be. It’s an almost perfect reproduction of what it is like to be an intelligent and activated teenager getting through school and university into the world at large. It’s not universal, it deals with that section of society that is engaged with ideas first and emotions second but it is very penetrating.

Amory Blaine is a beautiful boy with high opinions of himself. He moves, though success at sport, from being a social outsider to the centre of a dazzling set at Princeton. His story is told through the relationships he has with five women – Beatrice, Isabel, Clara, Rosalind and Eleanor each of whom represent a different phase of his development and highlight a different part of his character. His mother, his college friends, his mentor Monsignor Darcy and the books he reads are the other elements that go to build Blaine’s character over the course of the novel.

There is not a lot of plot, although there are births marriages and deaths, they don’t really signify much as the driver of the book is Blaine’s own search for himself. This is the key to it’s success since it echoes the angst, self doubt, half baked ideas, sexual awakening, overconfidence, energy and braggadocio typical of interesting male teenagers. Blaine is well worth spending time with but it’s hard to know what he is for – he doesn’t know himself – he could be exceptional, or could be a bum and the reader still doesn’t know at the end of the novel.

The writing style is all over the place, sometimes Blaine narrates, sometimes a god narrator (but one who doesn’t know too much about what is going on). The narrative switches between dialogue and text, poetry, one act plays, rolling thoughts, letters, maxims and reflections. The reality behind this is that Fitzgerald wrote the book based on a series of notes made at different times about different subjects and it shows – sometimes he just lists books that he has has read. But the effect is very much to recreate the crazy world of a teenager – trying out different attitudes and ideas, discarding those that don’t fit and moving on to something new. Some of the poetry is a bit dodgy but much of the prose is breathtaking – ideas tumble across the page and the language is like honey. It’s worth the cover price just to enjoy some of the highly intelligent set piece phrases and scenes that Fitzgerald works through.

This was Fitzgerald’s most successful book commercially but least successful critically and I can absolutely see that. This novel captures an energy and spirit in a fresh and interesting way. It’s by no means as polished and perfect as his later works but no worse for that. If you are under 23 (or think you are) then buy it.

Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain (140/1400)

2011-12-28T18:52:00.000Z

Summary
9/10

A superb piece of story telling, more than just an exciting and funny adventure story, this has a real connection with the characters that makes it and them seem real.

Published 1876

Review
This is one of my all time favourite books and only doesn’t get the full 10/10 because I can’t quite make the argument that it is life changing. It is however, superbly written, has a cracking plot, wonderful characterisations and is tender, knowing and wise – what more can you ask? Oh it’s very funny too.

Based on Twain’s own boyhood, the setting is St Petersburg, a small town somewhere along the banks of the Mississippi in the mid 1800s. Tom Sawyer, a lad of indeterminate age lives with his loving but disapproving aunt Polly and rather too perfect half brother Sid and cousin Mary. Tom, although he has a good heart, is far from perfect but Twain draws him on a big canvass so that his loves, dreams, ambitions, disappointments, fears and agitations, although routed in the everyday adventures and routines of boyhood, are deeply felt and magnified. Tom is a total boy, loyal to his friends, fierce in a fight, desperate for love, eager for adventure and with a wild imagination. He is totally idle except when he takes an interest, he loves his family but is always causing problems and getting into trouble.

Twain sets Tom out on a series of mishaps and circumstances that serve to introduce his wider cast of characters – Huckleberry Finn is an uneducated stray, whom Tom befriends; Becky Harper is the judge’s daughter and Tom’s on-off sweetheart, Injun Joe is the town’s villain around whom the book’s plot settles. These early episodes establish Twain’s characters but give way to a set up where Injun Joe is in mortal opposition to Tom and Huck Finn. Tom gets deeper and deeper into trouble but his fear of Joe prevents him from explaining himself. Eventually he and Becky encounter Joe when they are on the point of death, but (I don’t want to spoil the plot) it turns out heroically for Tom and Huck in the end.

Although it is a children’s story this work has more tension, humanity, thought and heart than many books written for adults. It’s an old fashioned adventure yarn written by a master story teller who can look straight into the souls of each of his characters and recreate their emotions directly in the reader’s mind – impressive.

Mansfield Park - Jane Austen (139/1400)

2011-11-29T22:34:00.000Z

Summary
4/10

In my view this is the weakest of Austen’s novels and can safely be given a miss.

Published 1814

Review
Dull, dull, dull – this surely is the most tedious of Austen’s books; loaded up with backplot instead of moving the story forward, characters wheeled on and off stage like wooden props, the central pair of star crossed lovers as wet as you could wish, and every opportunity to crank up the tension is fluffed or avoided. The writing is as accurate as ever (although there are only so many times in a chapter I want to read about solicitudes and felicities) but here lacking the sense of fun that Austen’s best novels posses.

Basically, this is a Cinderella plot – Fanny Price aged 12 goes to live with her rich aunt and uncle Bertram at Mansfield Park. Everyone is beastly to her except for Sir Bertram’s youngest son Edmund who inevitably she falls in love with. However, he is love with Mary Crawford whilst Mary’s brother Henry is in love with Fanny. Henry and Mary are cads whilst Edmund and Fanny are prim to the point of dreariness. There are the two ugly sisters who come and go and both have a fling with Henry; there’s a splendid wicked stepmother in the form of Fanny’s other aunt Norris – who is the only amusing character in the book – but there in no one to play fairy godmother.

Austen makes all of her characters, except Fanny, rather ambiguous so that the ugly sisters are bad but not really nasty, Mary and Henry Crawford are a bit caddish but have some good in them. Edmund is mostly saintly but has a blind spot for Mary. Although in theory this should make the evolution of the plot more interesting instead it makes for blandness and whilst one wouldn’t wish to convert Austen into Dickens a bit more colour would be welcome. Fanny as the central heroine is arguably a mistake as she is so uninteresting, a complete mouse who is unable to speak much of the time and whose emotional range runs from slight blush to deep blush. She’s very nice but dull and the characters who aren't (so) dull are left on the side.

Another failure is that the various set pieces – Fanny being abandoned in the park, the embarrassment over the necklace chains for example – run into the sand and don’t generate interaction between the characters that either heightens the tension or leads on to consequences. As a result they end up as little episodes that merely illustrate what the reader already knows.

Finally, but this was published in 1814 when the art of the novel was still being developed, the mechanics of the plot are very clunky. It takes ages to get the principal actors on stage; Edmund’s older brother and Sir Bertram have to be disposed of for much of the action; Fanny is absent from Mansfield Park when the action comes to a head so that the plot (as so often with Austen) has to be unfolded through a series of letters (and here Austen gets into a muddle and has to invent reasons why characters don’t know things they should know). Having gone at a snail’s pace for 45 chapters Austen suddenly compresses all the action into the final three and promptly ties it all up with a bow and leaves.

Austen does explore the nature/nuture debate, and whether badun’s can be redeemed but so does Hugo in Les Miserables and he doesn’t miss out on plot or strong characterization.

Moby-Dick (or, The Whale) - Herman Melville (138/1400)

2011-11-18T22:33:00.000Z

Summary
7/10
Melville switches from adventure yarn to encyclopaedia to psychological drama in a structurally flawed offer redeemed by superb and muscular writing and an obvious delight and expertise in the subject of whales and whaling.

Published 1851

Review

The structure and mechanics of this book are most odd, it starts off as an adventure yarn in the first person told by Ishmael, a sailor, of his three year journey in a Nantucket whaling vessel. A vivid cast of characters is put to work in support of this including Queequeg, an African harpooner, Starbuck and Stubbs, the first and second mates and of course Captain Ahab himself. There's the Spouter Inn, with its sign of the crossed harpoons, Bildad and Peleg the greedy owners of Ahab's ship, the Pesquod, Elijah with his dark and mysterious warnings and shadowy figures seen boarding the Pesquod. Everything is set up for this to be a sort of whaling version of Treasure Island.

Butthis structure is abandoned once the Pesquod sets sail, and the book becomes an encyclopaedia on the subject of whales. What types there are, where they are found, what they look like, their habits, physiology, the techniques of whaling and the operation of a whaling vessel. All of these matters take up the vast bulk of this book. Ishmael is abandoned and although he remains notionally the narrator he becomes omniscient rather than a character in the action.

And there is action, although confined to the last few chapters. Ahab is introduced as having an obsession with finding Moby Dick, the White Whale but this is mostly held as background to the actual business of whaling. It slowly comes to the fore as they close on the whale and builds to a gigantic crescendo.

As the nature of the book changes, so too does its literary style, at first somewhat conventional, then breathlessly enthusiastic and finally so keen to get across the action it becomes almost like a play, with stage directions and settings inserted into the text. The language throughout is salty and evocative, like eating a rich fish stew, and the business of whaling, the obsession of Ahab and the fears and relationships of the crew are robustly wrought. This is as far from Jane Austen as it is possible to get.

The story and action are supposed to be a meditation on the state of America in 1850 but that thread is buried too deep for me. I was left feeling that this is one of the strangest books I have ever read, but it is saved from being a peculiarity by fantastic and detailed writing and its genuine feel for the sea, the whales and the whalers.

The call of the Wild - Jack London 137/1400

2011-11-04T23:20:00.000Z

Summary
5/10
Kidnapped dog beats man and wilderness to return to his wolfish roots. Disney before Disney.

Published 1902

Review

Having travelled across Alaska and followed the Gold Trail I can confirm that London is very good at accurately recreating life on the frontier - both the physicality of the environment and the mixed types of characters, from naïve gold bugs to government officials, that inhabited the region. Whether he is so accurate about what goes on in the mind of a dog, I have no idea, but that is the central conceit of this book. If you buy into the idea that London as a third person narrator knows his dog hero, Buck, front-to-back then you will enjoy this book. On the other hand if you like your nature to be less Disneyfied and more uncertain you may wonder what is the point.

Wikipedia says this is London’s best book – it’s reasonable trash and better than many novels pedaled as great literature (I’m thinking Mansfield Park here…).

The Life and Opions of the Tomcat Murr - E T A Hoffmann 136/1400

2011-11-04T22:53:00.000Z

Summary
4/10

A kind of German Alice in Wonderland but more serious (obviously) and unresolved and so therefore frustrating.
Published 1820-22

Review

This is really a very strange book, and fans or imitators of Derek and Clive, The Goons or Monty Python might read it simply as a comedy resource or to understand how love of the absurd did not begin with Spike Milligan. For anyone else however this is one to avoid, first because it is too silly for words, second because its satire about courtly manners must have seemed old fashioned even when it was written in 1820, and thirdly because it is unfinished and unresolved so that the reader is cheated a decent story line.

The idea – it has to be said – is brilliant: Tomcat Murr is a highly intelligent moggie that has taught himself to read and write and sets down his autobiography. However, at the publishers his work is muddled up with the life story of Johannes Kreisler, a court composer. As a result the narrative switches randomly between the two stories, which never quite touch. There’s no doubt that Hoffmann is a skillful writer, and easily and convincingly conjures up the two worlds of Murr the cat and Kreisler the composer. He uses this platform to lambaste and lampoon 19th century German society and its norms of behaviour but unfortunately his target is so far away from our modern world that the subtlety of his approach and the nature of his attack goes straight over a modern reader’s head. What’s left is the tongue in cheek adventures of the cat and the building mystery and love story around Kreisler – which goes nowhere because poor old Hoffmann died before he could finish the story. What a shame that no modern German writer has been able to end the story.

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad, 125/1400

2011-08-06T09:49:00.006+01:00

Summary
A timeless reminder of the evils of big organisations and the gullibility of human beings.

Published 1899
7/10

Review
The inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam war film, Apocalypse Now, this was originally written in 1899 as a commentary on European colonialism and is based on Conrad's own experiences as a steamboat captain on the Congo.

The book's message is the inhumanity of colonialism and how apparently benign structures, in this case a European trading company, can support and tolerate disgusting and ugly practices.

The plot has Marlow, a steamboat captain, take a job on the Congo with a Belgian trading company. He travels up river to supply Kurtz, who is said to be a remarkable man and controls the upper part of the river for the company. His methods of control turn out to be extreme violence, but Marlow is more impressed with Kurtz's intellectual honesty about the situation than the company's pretended good governance (for example the ship's native crew are paid in copper wire with which they are supposed to buy their own food but which in practice is untradeable and so they starve to death). Marlow falls in love with Kurtz in the way that supporters fell for (say) Hitler.

It's pretty strong stuff and one assumes it is meant ironically to point out the ultimate logic of the colonial position.

It's not an easy read, partly because it's not always very well written (unlike, say, Conrad's The Secret Agent) but mainly because the themes and events set out are approached obliquely. Quite what is going on between Kurtz and the Company and between Kurtz and the natives is never spelled out. Nor is it clear why Kutz is widely regarded as a great man, who has attracted a band of devoted followers. This doesn't matter to Conrad's themes, but it's never obvious where the book is going and some of the scenes and interactions are open to any number of interpretations. This is probably the book's attraction and fans of ambiguity will enjoy mulling over the possible meanings. Others will find it frustrating.

The house of Mirth - Edith Wharton (124/1400)

2011-07-24T22:43:00.000+01:00

Summary
Blows Nancy Mitford clean out of the water.
8/10

Review
An enormous best seller when first published, this book made Edith Wharton’s name although it is by far not her finest work.

What the reader gets is some very fine writing, cliffhanger endings to each chapter, well-made characters and a glimpse into top-notch society. Wharton makes an attempt at pathos but it doesn’t quite come off. Nonetheless this is a lovely book that makes for great holiday reading.

Lily Bart is literally a poor little rich girl in a Cinderella plot where she must marry the man of her dreams to endure the wealthy lifestyle that she is used to and longs for. But something in her character gets in the way - an earthy, realistic, element that knows her world of convention is worth nothing. She falls in love with the (slightly) renegade Seldon who shares her worldview.

Why doesn’t it all end happily ever after – because Wharton has created the classic flawed heroin, who undoes herself by her own actions. This is a delicate narrative tightrope because Lily understands all of society’s conventions but her desperate financial circumstances cause her to sufficiently breach them to cast doubt on her character. I was unconvinced that such a savvy individual could make so many social mistakes but a more sympathetic reader might take a different view.

In a way this is Madame Bovary for the upper classes, a woman is bored with convention and seeks escape but doesn’t have the wherewithal to carry out her plan. Like Bovary this novel ends in death, but Wharton is less brutal than Flaubert and leaves the heroine a victim not the manipulator.

This book is at its best when describing the inner thoughts and tensions of the characters – read Wharton’s later books for sublime demonstrations of this skill. It’s at it’s worst when trying to be a comedy of manners and sometimes the mix is ungainly.

Someone Like You - Roald Dahl (123/1400)

2011-07-08T22:17:00.000+01:00

Summary
5/10
Not much evidence of Dahl's genius for writing children's books in this cruel collection of slightly dated tales of the unexpected. As HG Wells said, if you read this kind of short story when you are 11 it will stay with you forever. But I'm not 11....

Review

If you grew up in the 70s you may recall the TV show 'Tales of the Unexpected' which was based on the stories in this book; and they are about as dated in style as 70's Black Forest Gateaux with Liebfraumilch to wash it down.

Much to my surprise, being a fan of Dahl's children's books, he reveals himself here as a slightly second rate wordsmith, good enough to keep you engaged but not someone you would read just for the pleasure of the way words form on the page. What keeps up the interest is the twisted plots he puts together - both in the sense that they are unexpected and that they are rather perverse and twisted. I'm not sure that Dahl can have been altogether a nice person. The man who bets his car against someone's finger for example, or the woman who tops her husband with a frozen joint of lamb and lets the police eat the evidence. These stories remind me a lot of science fiction shorts, which hinge on a big reveal and an unexpected and thought provoking outcome. HG Well's compendium, 'The Country of The Blind' is similar in feel but Wells is a far better writer.

One extraordinary point about these stories is how dated the manners and lifestyles of the actors now appear. More dated than characters from Dickens or Trollope I would say. This must be partly because of the world Dahl inhabited but also I suspect because he uses manners and mannerisms to - as he sees it - set up atmosphere rather than to drive forward the plot, so that the feel of period lies heavily on his work (which you may like). The one oddity in his very upper middle class cast of characters is the dog story at the end, which shows an extraordinary knowledge of working class, country greyhound races and techniques for cheating. Dahl was clearly a complex and interesting person. It's a shame he aimed so low in literary terms but perhaps he kept his genius reserved for kids.

The Periodic Table - Primo Levi (122/1400)

2011-07-08T21:52:00.000+01:00

Summary
7/10
The life story of a gentle and intelligent man, missing out the most important part.

Published 1975

Review
Voted the best science book ever written by the Royal Academy, this isn't a science book at all but an autobiography of Italian chemist and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. Levi is completely defined by these two points in his life, he survived the camp because of his usefulness as a chemist and so he and his subject are bound together. It is fitting then that he chose to tell the story of his life by basing each chapter around one of the elements in the periodic table.

He is a lovely writer, gentle and yet penetrating, able to turn a good phrase and to find an arresting analogy. he is clever in the way he uses quite detailed descriptions of chemical problems and solutions to illustrate turning points in his life and uses both the metamorphosis inherent in chemistry and the reluctance of elements to change and combine to brilliant literary effect. His friendships and career and all neatly described in this way.

However, this is not the (first) volume of his work to read if you want to understand his life, since, with one exception, it misses out his experiences in Auschwitz, which are contained in his masterpiece 'If This is a Man'. There is a second flaw, I would say, in that it does not really lift the curtain on Levi's deepest thoughts and feelings - he is too self analytical and concerned with his theme. So at the end, I could not understand why a man who survived Auschwitz would later take his own life - although he was not the only survivor or surviving author to do so.

In a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust (121/1400)

2011-06-02T23:24:00.000+01:00

Summary
The second volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, but whereas the first was genius here the mask slips and Proust is revealed as a master essayist and observer whilst the great novel that was Volume One slips away.

7/10
Published 1919

Review
There is no doubt that Proust can write, and brilliantly so, but this is the book that punctures the idea of Proust the novelist. In Book one, Swann’s way, Proust constructed the perfect narrative of a three way love story wrapped around perceptions, self-deceit, half-truths and broken memory. This volume takes the same characters (or at least people with the same name) and subjects them to a series of critical essays in which Proust allows himself to disgorge his prejudices, wit, bile and tenderness. His themes are manifold - technology (the telephone and the train), drawing room conversation and convention, the place of flowers in modern life, hotel etiquette, art, the arts, government and social status – all of these attract his laser beam attention and are expertly and daintily dissected without a trace of a sneer but with all the knowing cunning of a mind that is simply superior.

In amongst these epigrams, aphorisms, maxims and reflections there is a plot of sorts as the author grows up sexually through his teenage years doting first on Gilberte and then on Albertine. We assume the writer is Proust himself, although this is never clear, and what a thoroughly ghastly fellow he is – sickly and weedy (when it suits him) so that he can manipulate his parents and grandmother, friends and doctors; sneaky and unscrupulous in manoeuvring others to give him what he wants, capricious in his friendship, highly judgemental (if accurate), base in his amorous objectives, unforgiving when slighted, sly. But somehow – no doubt because of his fierce intellectual honesty and curiosity – he attracts people to him and is liked and respected. Where he comes unstuck however is in dealing with the opposite sex.

Book one saw him give up Gilberte in favour of the idea of Gilberte. Proust has to undertake some rowing back from this so that his young hero (at first about 12 or 13) can once again meet his boyhood crush, interact and mutually fall in love. But the heroes’ acerbic attitude to love soon causes a rift and their affair is spoiled and with it the first half of this book. Proust tries to repeat his trick from book one of matching the progress of Swann’s love for his mistress - now wife - with Proust’s own love for Gilberte – both relationships are nothing but cold ash. This is all fine as far as it goes but the second half of the novel has a whole set of new characters and locations and introduces us to Albertine, the new woman in the narrators’ life. Paris is left behind in favour of the seaside resort of Balbec and everything you knew before is thrown away.

Every page here is worth reading and there is so much to enjoy and indeed marvel upon. But Proust has had to rework almost entirely the characters of Swann and M. Swann so that they are unrecognisable from book one. His own story with Gilberte is reawakened only to die again and his relationship with Albertine is part of a different thread to that of Swann. In Book one Proust held together his thoughts on modern life with the narrative drive of his story, but here the reader can see the joints, with Proust’s various essays being stitched together by the thinnest of plots. It’s wonderful, but it’s not great literature.

Certainly you should read this, but as a magazine, not a novel.

A Harlot High and Low - Honore De Balzac (120/1400)

2011-05-28T00:28:00.000+01:00

Summary
I’m a big fan of Balzac and so it is enormously disappointing that this book is such a Grade A Turkey.
4/10

Published 1839-47

Review
Balzac’s literary object was to describe the Human Comedy that described scenes from French Parisian and provincial life. In this volume his subject is the criminal underworld and he uses the master criminal Jacques Collins, who has first appeared in Balzac’s Old Goriot as the central character. Collin is as cunning and deceitful a person as you will ever come across. Here Collin uses Lucien de Rubempres – previously the handsome poet hero of Balzac’s Lost Illusions, together with Esther Gobeseck – the original harlot with a heart of gold – as tools for his evil plans. Unfortunately this mix is a disaster in plot terms and it is totally unclear as to whether the narrative is following Collin, Lucien or Esther and since each of their stories has a different arc the whole is a complete failure.

There are passages and paragraphs in the narrative which presage Proust in their nobility, but these are few and far between and fairly soon Balzac loses himself in the most fantastically complex plot wherein the poet Lucien is to marry an heiress provided he can prove he is a man of financial substance. The means of providing that proof becomes the sale of Esther by Collin to the fabulously wealthy Baron Nucingen. But this scheme unravels because Esther truly loves Lucien and decides that rather than submit to being Nucingen’s mistress she will commit suicide. This brings the force of the law down on both Collin and Lucien and in the final scenes Collin comes into his own in attempting to escape from the clutches of the law.

There’s nothing wrong with Balzac’s idea but his execution is hopeless. Collin is a pale shadow of a character until the final few chapters and so the narrative is dominated by the love story between Lucien and Esther. Unfortunately the power of their love makes the willingness of this couple to submit to Collin’s plans for them totally implausible since they cannot both be completely in love and have worldly ambitions. This implausibility is made worse by the fact that Lucien is known to the reader through Balzac’s Lost Illusions and, although in that book he was also a weak character and prepared to do bad things, he would never knowingly allow a woman such as Esther to prostitute herself for his financial gain. This implausibility knocks the bottom out of Balzac’s world.

Balzac’s cast is enormous and there are so many characters in this book that I began to lose the plot altogether. In addition many if not all of the characters have more than one name (Collin has five or six) so that the reader is frequently left bewildered as to who is who and what they’re motives are. When the police start to close in instead of one master policeman there are two named Coretin and Contenson and the judge is called Camuset – it’s very hard to follow who is who.

Finally Baron Nucingen is a Polish Jew and Balzac has written the part in cod dialogue that is extremely hard work – at least in translation.

I’d like to say that there is a good book trying to get out from these pages but in truth I think the entire narrative is misguided, poorly plotted, with dubious characterization and with only the occasional piece of purple prose to redeem it. My conclusion is that this is one to avoid.

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (119/1400)

2011-05-12T21:09:00.000+01:00

Summary
9/10
A huge and exciting plot combines manhunt with love story and big politics but the heart of this book is the need to understand the real difference between right and wrong and how we should behave towards those who seek redemption.

Published 1862

Review
At the end of the day this is a story about redemption, but in exploring this theme the work also covers a huge historical sweep from the time of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 to the July Revolution of 1830 and deals with the lives, loves, heroism, villainy, desperation and hopes of a huge cast of interacting characters.

The moral dilemma at the heart of the book hinges on whether Jean Valjean, who as a teenager stole a loaf of bread to keep his brother alive, can take his place against society is a full human being or whether his criminal past permanently taints him. In the mind of the master policeman Javert redemption is impossible but, if Valjean is judged by his actions, he is truly reformed and Javert never comes to terms with this.

Around this central kernel the concepts of right and wrong, forgiveness and revenge are aired and circulated throughout the minor characters. Fantine is a young girl who has been made casually pregnant by a lover long since vanished leaving behind a destitute mother and daughter. But the lost lover’s crime goes unpunished whilst Fantine’s life is destroyed and, in what comes to be a moment of self revelation, Valjean is responsible for her early death. As a result he resolves to look after her daughter Cosette, who has been left in the clutches of the Thénardiers – a family of professional thieves whose miserable scheming is contrasted with the kindness, and bravery of the street urchin Gavroche and their own daughter, Eponine, who falls in love with Marius , the boy who in turn loves Cosette.

All this is set against a background of rising political tension leading to the July Revolution of 1830 and the fall of the Bourbon kings, and the sense amongst Marius and his young student friends that they must pick sides between red and Black – between right and wrong.

It's a complex, exciting and heady cocktail with the plot driving along as Javert closes in on Jean Valjean - who is desperate to keep his criminal past a secret from his adopted daughter and her lover Marius. Hugo uses bold strokes to get across the atmosphere of Paris at the time and, although contemporaries were critical of the accuracy of his descriptions, to a modern reader they appear vivid and alive. If there is a criticism to be made it is that Hugo spends large portions of the book discoursing on matters that are tangential to his themes and to the plot. In this Penguin version some of those have been edited out and others moved to appendices. Nonetheless the book runs to 1200 pages. But in my view it is time well spent not only because of the page turning quality of the story and the excellence of the writing but because of the universality of the book’s themes of the need to understand the real difference between right and wrong and how redemption works to give people a second chance.

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (118/1400)

2011-05-01T22:43:00.001+01:00

Summary
8/10
Waugh’s writing style has totally matured since his first comedic novel and here he explores relationships and religion in an exciting way, although most readers will simply be intoxicated by the atmosphere. His tendency to abandon characters just as they become interesting, and to move the story on through dialogue mean that, for me, he doesn’t quite nail it.

Published 1945

Review
Brideshead Revisited was Evelyn Waugh's sixth novel and curiously has almost exactly the same plot line as his first – Decline and Fall - which is a comedy concerning the involvement of a young middle-class Oxford student with an upper-class family that he attempts (but fails) to marry into.

This later work, whilst following the same general outline, is much more complex, nuanced, thoughtful and is not in any way intended to be funny. It’s the work of a far more serious and mature author. Its theme is the operation of divine grace on the characters it describes and it is therefore a religious work and in particular explores the Catholic faith – which Waugh was received into in 1930. There are within the novel quite long passages touching on some of the moral issues around marriage and sin that are particularly difficult for Catholics; and the slow death of Lord Marchmain at the end of the novel is effectively a soliloquy on how a Catholic should approach death.

Most readers however will find it possible to completely ignore this background and read the book as an evocation of the short period between the First and Second World Wars and how Charles Ryder, the narrator, interacts with the wealthy and privileged Marchmain family. In particular they will follow Ryder’s love affairs firstly with Sebastian, the youngest son of Lord Marchmain and later with Julia his sister. Both affairs end in failure.

Initially, I thought this was going to be a very tedious book, although one which is beautifully and nostalgically written. The meeting and relationship between Charles and Sebastian is simply that of two young and beautiful boys at Oxford. However when Sebastian turns to drink and Charles gives him money against the orders of Sebastian's mother, the novel takes a darker and more interesting path as it starts to explore the relationships between the members of the Marchmain family. At this point Sebastian virtually disappears from the scene and other members of the family move to centre stage.

As with Decline and Fall, Waugh has an odd habit of introducing and then virtually abandoning characters, allowing them to make bit-part appearances later in the book, lest the reader had forgotten all about them. He also cuts right across the modern literary dictum of ‘show don't tell’ by getting characters to explain great chunks of what is going on through dialogue with Charles – although he gets away with this because the writing is so elegant.

This is certainly an engaging book and parts of it have a complexity and honesty that approach the writing of Scott Fitzgerald or Nabokov. For me however the slightly odd plotting and strange form of the novel detract from the elegance and clarity of the writing.

The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy (117/1400)

2011-04-24T22:15:00.003+01:00

Summary
4/10
A one-dimensional story about a stupid man who (only) does stupid things and unsurprisingly finds that life doesn’t go well for him. Atmospheric but unrewarding.

Published 1886

Review
Michael Henchard is the successful Mayor of Casterbridge who starts the story as a hard drinking and impoverished hay baler and who, in a thrilling opening scene, sells his wife to a sailor for five guineas. Years pass by and, having resolved to give up drink, Henchard rises to becomes mayor. But having achieved success his estranged wife returns to him and this starts the process of unravelling the life he has made for himself.

The story is full of episodes involving choices about friendship, love, family, business, morals and money. And potentially these plot devices provide Hardy with an opportunity to describe the ebb and flow of the arc of Henchard’s self-made destruction. Certainly Hardy is good at describing atmosphere and mood, and is especially good when it comes to architecture (he trained as an architect). Unfortunately, there is no complexity whatsoever in the character of Henchard who is quite simply a twit. Whatever choices are put in front of him the reader can be absolutely certain that he will choose the one that is least advantageous to himself and most likely to cause him hardship both immediately and in the future. It would spoil the plot too much to detail each of these choices, which are in effect the backbone of the story but his behaviour stretches the reader's credulity given that he has spent years becoming a success through hard work and honest dealing. He must have undergone a total character transformation at the moment his wife returned to him.

Whilst it is true that tragedy needs to stem from the character flaws and actions of the tragic individuals, here Hardy lays it on with a trowel and the result is a one-dimensional character who becomes tedious during the course of the novel. Whilst the other characters around him are allowed moments of light and dark Henchard is entirely dark and unsympathetic. This ends up as a story about a very stupid person, and although he has a tragic ending it is hard to feel any interest in his story or sadness at his end.

Metamorphoses - Ovid (116/1400)

2011-04-18T21:48:00.001+01:00

Summary
7/10
A Roman poem describing how gods interfere with men’s lives to cause physical transformations. Like an extended fairy story

Written AD 8

Review
Metamorphosis is a compilation of myths and legends from ancient Greece and Rome that have as a common theme the transformation of a person or sometimes an object into something else–hence the title.

Written in the form of 15 books, metamorphosis is a poem told as a series of short stories, many of which are only a couple of pages long. Roman poetry was not required to rhyme but did have a strong metre that is not strictly replicable in English. In this translation therefore David Raeburn has adopted dactylic hexameter (the rhythmical pulse of six stressed syllables per line). This is a somewhat unusual choice, as the work would normally be translated into iambic pentameter–the meter used by Shakespeare and many other English poets. Each reader will be able to make his or her own mind up about which is the more successful approach.

Some of these stories are well known or are variations on well-known episodes. But Ovid gives each of them his own treatment, often amusing, sometimes bloody and violent and at others tender and thoughtful. There is a gradual theme through the book of moving from the creation of the world to Ovid’s own day–at the time of the Emperor Augustus, and some characters roll over from one book to the next as their stories evolve. So that, whilst sometimes the material becomes confusing to a new reader as to who is who, in general it is relatively easy to follow the plot and each individual story. Certainly there is nothing complex or difficult about the language used and this poem is far easier to follow than anything written by (say) Keats using similar classical material.

It is probably a mistake to try to read this cover-to-cover. As the stories become somewhat overwhelming and, because of their similar theme, blend together so that the reader begins to forget which transformation happens to which character. A better approach would be to treat it as a long-term task, keeping it by the bedside and dipping into it from time-to-time when the mood struck.

Letters From a Stoic - Seneca (115/1400)

2011-04-07T22:23:00.000+01:00

Summary
8/10
A beautifully written account of Roman life at the start of the first millennium, has all the guile, extravagance, intelligence and steeliness that made Rome a world power as well as the humanity and tragedy that make it still fascinating today.

written c 65 AD

Review
There must be something about the way Latin is structured that causes it to be easy and straightforward when written down. Seneca's Letters From a Stoic are a case in point and these missives to a young follower are a model of simplicity, clarity and good writing; they are also a master lesson in political and ideological trimming.

Seneca was a follower of the cult of stoicism first put forward by Zeno in 300 BC (Seneca was living nearly 300 years later between 4 BC and 65 AD). Roman stoicism was a three bladed philosophy. The first part was logic, which here essentially means looking at the universe and paying attention to what you see and taking conclusions from it. The second leg was physics, which has nothing to do with our modern concept but was more like the idea of the force in Star Wars - in other words that there is a real force of nature that human beings can make use of in their daily lives. Thirdly, there was ethics, which to the Stoics meant that the prime aim of human life was happiness and that the way of achieving this objective was to live in accordance with nature or the ethical force.

To many Stoics these threefold principles meant living a simple, almost monastic, life. But Seneca was one of the richest men in Rome and, from his position as tutor to the emperor Nero, effectively ran the Roman Empire for a period of some five years. He was thus a real-world politician and there are certainly records of him being complicit in acts and foul deeds that would be difficult to reconcile with a traditional view of the stoic philosophy.

What comes across in these letters is precisely this ambiguity in Seneca's make-up. He is an intelligent man able to reduce complex ideas to simple themes but is also vain it is clear that he intends these letters to be published and that only his side will matter. There is never any mention of the name or any other personal details of his co- respondent.

Seneca knows how to spin an argument his way and he finds it entirely justifiable, for example, that someone should be both rich and stoic, provided that they are not showy about their wealth. But ultimately his spinning is rather too transparent – for example he becomes a vegetarian for many years as a matter of principle but instantly surrenders this when his father warns him that the emperor believes vegetarianism is an act of rebellion against the Empire.

Whilst perhaps Seneca's philosophy is somewhat wonky, the reader is left with a fascinating insight into the Roman way of life, sometimes in minute detail, for example what happens at the Roman baths, and also into the thinking process of a master politician.

Ultimately Seneca’s trimming did him no good and Nero ordered him to commit suicide, which he willingly did.

Apologies

2011-03-27T22:55:00.000+01:00

Sorry about the absence of new postings. Seneca and Hardy ready to roll and Ovid coming soon but extensive traveling prevents me from posting.

Decline and Fall - Evelyn Waugh (114/1400)

2011-03-13T21:51:00.001Z

Summary
Dated, racist, snobbish, cranky, bonkers and incomplete but very funny.

8/10
Published 1928

Review
Decline and fall was Evelyn Waugh’s first novel and covers the social mores of 1920s England. In that respect it is very like the novels of Nancy Mitford who was also concerned with describing how the upper and middle social classes coped with post-war Britain. Like Mitford, Waugh describes a series of eccentric characters with otherworldly attitudes that exist in a social setting that has long since departed. Money is a central part of their motivation as is their understanding of the difference between people who are gentlemen (or ladies) and the rest of society.

Into this world is parachuted the genteel Paul Pennyfeather, a divinity student at Oxford who gets caught up in the antics of the Bollinger club and is sent down for being caught in the quad without his trousers. As a result he loses his inheritance and is compelled to take a job as a teacher in a Welsh boarding school. Here he meets a variety of broken characters each with a pathetic but humorous back-story. Paul falls in love with one of the boy’s parents and takes on a summer tutoring job with her son. What could have been a happy love affair turns to disaster as Paul gets involved in the white slave trade and is sentenced to prison. The plot piles absurdity on difficulty as Paul becomes more and more embroiled in a world he does not understand. Eventually, at the novel’s end, Paul is found back in Oxford as a quiet divinity student and finds happiness.

Waugh has a far better grip on his characters and plotting than Mitford and manages to keep his show on the road in a way that she does not. At the same time he is genuinely funny, often in the small details rather than in a set piece joke, although these are also to be found. He seems to have a real affinity for his strange assortment of characters and they are almost recognizably real however absurd they appear. The nature of the plot means that several key characters are discarded along the way although Waugh does make an attempt to reunite Paul with several of them as his life’s journey progresses, but in the end this is a road movie not an ensemble piece.

It’s almost impossible not to enjoy this book, which although terribly dated (including some uncomfortable racist humour) and somewhat self-indulgent does have a feel good factor that makes it worth reading.

Lost Illusions - Honore de Balzac (113/1400)

2011-03-08T22:40:00.001Z

Summary
8/10
As ever with Balzac, a lot going on in this lengthy work with a huge cast and several entangled plots. Conforms to the stereotype of a classic novel being slightly long winded and detailed but fizzes with energy and has plenty of enjoyable characters and set pieces.

Published 1837

Review
This work has nearly all the ingredients commonly associated with the phrase ‘classic novel’. At nearly 700 pages it is long, furthermore it is translated from the French and written by someone whose very name reads strangely in English. The cast is gigantic and some of them undergo name changes as the novel progresses - which it does through a series of tableau rather than, as in a modern novel, through a flowing narrative. Finally Balzac uses the God narrator device and frequently enters into digressions on the state of society at large or on particular minutiae of his era that strike him as being of general interest. Despite all this however the novel makes for a good yarn if not exactly a right rattling read.

Essentially this is a morality tale against the modern doctrine of who dares wins and Balzac sets out to demonstrate that not everybody is set up for success and some people will be happier and more prosperous settling for home comforts and a modest existence.

The plot follows the fortunes of Lucien Chardon who is a young and beautiful provincial poet trying to make his way in the world. He has various attempts at reaching for the stars, first through a love affair with Madame de Bargeton, then by becoming a novelist and finally and briefly successfully by becoming a journalist. But he is too naïve to cope with the ways of the world and his ambition turns to dust eventually leading him to attempt suicide. In parallel his penniless sister marries his best friend David Suchard who has a genius for invention but is utterly hopeless as a businessman. His father has rooked him into acquiring the family printing business which is so overburdened with debt that is doomed to failure. David’s misguided attempts to support Lucien and at the same time make his fortune through inventing a new paper process suck him and his family into an abyss both of debt and intrigue as rival businessman try to steal his ideas.

Around and about these two central themes there is a cast of villains and ne’er-do-wells scheming for their own ends with only the faintest ray of light brought in by one or two kindhearted souls and as the plot shuttles between Paris and the provinces, there is an equal amount of foul play in both locations.

In the end Balzac shows us that Lucien does not have the moral or mental backbone to make anything of his talent whilst otherworldly David is completely unsuited to the cut and thrust of the business world. This is a useful reminder to us all that the current popular maxim that you can be anything you want to be simply isn’t true and moreover can just as easily be a recipe for misery as happiness and success. To that extent the moral message of this book is probably more relevant today than at the time it was written.

Despite Lucien’s failures his story continues in a second book entitled Splendour and Misery of Courtesans (a Harlot High and Low in Penguin).

Barchester Towers - Anthony Trollope (112/1400)

2011-02-27T19:13:00.001Z

Summary
8/10
Another outing for the cast and crew of Trollope’s ‘The Warden’ but this is much funnier and more rounded than the earlier book, and whilst it doesn’t have any great social pretentions or overarching themes it is a very enjoyable soap opera.

Published 1857

Review
In The Warden, Trollope set up kindly and aging Reverend Harding against John Bold, his own future son in law, in defending his entitlement to the income of the Wardenship of the Barchester hospice. In this sequel Bold is killed off allowing Harding’s thus widowed daughter, Eleanor, to take centre stage as love interest. Trollope introduces a slew of new names including Lord Proudie, the new bishop, his formidable wife and their scheming chaplain, Mr. Slope. Once again the Wardenship becomes the centre of attention as the new bishop seeks to reappoint Mr. Harding to his old post whilst Mrs. Proudie and Slope have other plans for the hospice. Further comedy and plot interest is provided by the arrival from Italy of the bohemian Stanhope family including the crippled femme fatale Signora Madelina Vesey Neroni. Her brother, Bertie Stanhope, Mr. Slope and the shy academic Francis Arabin all set about wooing Eleanor whilst Archdeacon Grantly, Mr. Slope and Mrs. Proudie lock horns over the Wardenship.

Trollope is analytical and ignores the modern doctrine of ‘show don’t tell’. In each scene he deconstructs for the reader the thoughts and emotions of each participant and is particularly good at revealing how misunderstandings and mutual incomprehension arise from tiny shifts of mood and temperament. He also nicely unpicks the machinations of the three lovers and the protagonists in the fight over the Wardenship as well as showing how Mr. Harding and the Bishop are both at sea amongst the political and romantic activity.

He doesn’t quite succeed in making the reader really care about the future of Eleanor and indeed he tells the reader that his Eleanor will not be marrying either Slope or Bertie Stanhope. He is more successful in capturing the machinations of Slope against those of Archdeacon Grantly in trying to capture the Wardenship for their candidates. Grantly is bombastic and unsubtle whilst Slope is oily and self-serving. Neither is able to control events as Reverend Harding, the Bishop and Mrs. Proudie all get in their way and this action is described with the skill of a writer who really understands how organizations, committees and processes work. Some of the set pieces are really very funny.

The reader perhaps has to stretch credulity a bit that so many misunderstanding are allowed to take place without being cleared away but this is a minor gripe in an otherwise very enjoyable work.

The Divine Comedy Part I (The Inferno) - Dante Alighieri (111/1400)

2011-02-18T22:41:00.002Z

Summary
A brilliant modern translation makes this adventure yarn and morality tale come alive. This is the version to read.

8/10

Published 1308/1971

Review

Whether or not you enjoy this poem depends almost entirely on which translation you chose to read. Mark Musa has (wisely) abandoned any attempt at rhyme and has opted for iambic pentameter to reflect Dante’s original meter as best he can in English. These are very wise choices, allowing Musa to produce a translation that is at the same time poetic and intelligible. Musa’s notes to the poem are wonderful. He really cares about what Dante is saying and explores the nuances and meanings of the work with forensic affection. He is absolutely accessible and conversational in his commentary and hugely helpful in enlightening and entertaining the reader. As an experiment I tried a couple of the other translations available including the earlier Penguin Classics versions and, by comparison, they are very hard work. My only criticism of Musa is that the introductory essay is not worth reading until after you have read the poem, being too full of information that only matters to the reader if the poem itself matters.

That's Enough of Musa, what of Dante? There are two elements to this poem – the religious elements, which are the basis of the story as Virgil, the Roman poet, takes Dante on a tour of hell. This is beautifully imagined, with each type of sin having its own special part (or circle) of hell and particular punishment to fit the crime. Secondly there is a political element whereby in each part of hell Dante meets contemporaries of his who committed particular real sins in his own time and are being punished for them. This second aspect must have had a satirical edge at the time of writing but is lost on a modern reader. Still, as he meets in hell people he knew in life, the impression of hell as being a real place is enhanced and magnified.

Although dealing with a grim subject this is not at all a dull or unrelievedly grizzly book. There are plenty of moments of humour, drama, adventure, sadness, empathy, distain and fantasy that amuse and entertain the reader along the way. Indeed, there is a road movie feel to the whole thing as Dante must keep moving through hell to achieve his goal of returning to his own time and world. Dante is very good at convincing the reader that hell is a real place with a proper geography, time and governorship and this solidity ensures that the story doesn’t disintegrate into a spiritual diatribe, but remains human.

Finally, a criticism of Penguin; the poem is written in 100 cantos (verses) divided into three parts of 33 plus one and Penguin has decided that each part should be sold as a separate book priced at £7.99 or a huge £24 for all three. This is a ridiculous rip off and all three parts should be sold in one volume for £7.99 or in a deluxe volume for a little more. The Penguin approach is cynical and old fashioned.

Howl - Allen Ginsberg (110/1400)

2011-02-06T22:35:00.002Z

Summary
Only worth buying if you love Drooker's art (and even then a bit suspect)

5/10
published 1956

Review
This is the first graphic novel to become a Penguin Classic and it is a reprint of Allen Ginsberg’s famous beat poem ‘Howl’ accompanied by illustrations partly from Eric Drooker and partly taken from the film of the poem.

You could, if you wished, download this poem from the Internet for
nothing and so, to some extent, the point of this book is the illustrations or perhaps the combination of the poem with the illustrations. But the graphic work judged on its own merits is rather mixed, partly because some of the pages are clearly original artwork by Drooker and others are actually rather shabby stills that either have come from the movie or were not Drooker’s finest hour and some of the illustrations are really extremely poor (and some of the images of Ginsberg at his typewriter and of his typewriter are excellent and probably not by Drooker at all).

As to the poem itself, it is necessary first of all to understand what the Beat Generation means and how this poem fits into a modern context. Essentially the Beat Generation was a 1950’s precursor to the 1960’s hippies and challenged government and social conventions especially with regard to drugs and homosexuality. This was a movement that was centred on San Francisco and to some extent has formed the basis of that city’s current status as a freethinking environment. The poem is written in free verse and describes a generation growing up and experimenting with views on society, government, drugs, and sexuality and finding the existing American way of life unsatisfactory. Therefore to a large extent this is an historic piece of work representing a rage against 1950s American values. Nonetheless, many of the themes explored such as big government and the military/industrial complex, attitudes to drugs and homosexuality are still issues at the heart of modern American political life and, whilst the language of Howl is hysterical, the point of view it represents is still valid.

This is a great poem in the sense that it touches people at a moment in time and in an emotional way that is absolutely of its period. The illustrations also have a period feel and are evocative of an America long gone. I’m not sure that either the poem or the illustrations are absolutely great art but they are fabulous in representing a moment in time when rebellion was in the air and, moreover, a series of themes which are still not fully resolved.

Kokoro - Natsume Soseki (109/1400)

2011-01-30T22:15:00.002Z

Summary
3/10
This might be a subtle exploration of two friendships done with Japanese finesse, but for my money it’s a rather bland mess.

Published 1914

Review

This work was originally conceived as a letter from a suicide to a friend explaining the reasons for his decision to take his own life. Only later were the sections that now form the first two thirds of the novel added, and this disconnect is immediately evident in the strange structure and change of style of the book. The suicide note is the heart of this work and introduces an entirely new set of characters, motivations, and history. Whilst the earlier sections have presaged that there will be a tragedy and that there is a mystery to be explained there is not really any connection between the story of the suicide and the story of the friends between whom the suicide note is sent. Even the writing style changes perceptibly between the earlier and later sections. The first part of the book being rather dreamy and soft focused whilst the suicide note has a much harder edge to I nor is not necessary to understand the story of the friendship between the narrator and suicide in order to understand the message this book is trying to get across. Overall then this is something of a structural mess. Its arguable that this book is a form of the German Novelle structure where unnamed characters were put into a situation to see what would happen (Goethe’s Elective Affinities for example) in which case the plot doesn’t really matter but there is no such claim made in the introduction so I think it’s just lazy plotting.

Sõseki uses incredibly simple language to describe his world (although of course it’s impossible in translation to know how accurately this style reflects the original). He sets out a situation where a young student becomes good friends with a much older man whom he calls Sensei, meaning teacher. This seems an unlikely pairing in terms of European culture, and even in the book’s own terms doesn’t really make sense since Sensei’s guilty crime has caused him to withdraw from society and he does not seek new friends (this is contradicted by his friendship with a Westerner who appears briefly at the start of the novel). The best that can be said about Sensei is that he is enigmatic but he is certainly not consistent and it’s completely unclear what he gets out of a relationship with a younger man.

The younger man, who is the narrator of the first two thirds of the story, uses Sensei as a role model and part of the unfolding of this book is to discover that this model is corrupt. However we never learn what impact this revelation has on the narrator as the story does not double back after the suicide note has been read through. To that extent this is almost an unfinished work and quite unsatisfactory. Nor do we find out how some of the other themes in the book play through, in particular the narrator’s relationship with his family and dying father which is left completely hanging notwithstanding that a good deal of Sensei’s teaching relates to the death of the father.

Relationships in this story are conducted with difficulty. The protagonists have a series of mannered hang-ups that mean they cannot fully express themselves to each other in a way that would avoid subsequent problems. I can’t tell whether this is a genuine reflection of Japanese society or simply an artifice of the writer in order to have a mechanic for the plot to move forward. It’s certainly true that writers such as Trollope and Jane Austin used a similar combination of manners and misfortune in order to drive their characters forward but here the writer’s touch is extremely light and the reader is left to fill in the gaps between what is actually said, what could be said and what is truly meant. Depending on your point of view this is either subtle and intriguing or frustrating.

It’s clear from the introduction that this work is partly a reflection on the changing circumstances of Japan at the time it was written, and to some extent events in the book mirror actual historical events. However this is in no way a historical novel and the themes of love and loneliness that are explored have only a passing relevance to history. It’s rather more like Hamlet where political events are used as a backdrop to powerful emotions and personal change.

Sõseki is held out as the first modern Japanese author and this book in particular is said to be his masterpiece. It’s not obvious whether this is truly an immensely subtle overview of two friendships or whether there’s something of the emperor’s clothes about the whole work which reveals it to be mechanically imperfect and rather bland.

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess (108/1400)

2011-01-23T22:29:00.000Z

Summary
5/10
Very violent, rather unsubtle, with messages that have been done better elsewhere. The slang dialogue is very good.

Published 1962

Review
Before the film came out only 3,000 copies of this were sold and the reviews were unenthusiastic. They were right.

On the plus side this is written in a made-up slang language that creates vibrancy and interest in the text, which is unexpected. Often the reader knows what is meant without actually having completely decoded the individual bits of slang that make up a sentence or paragraph - and that is an interesting experience.

On the downside is nearly everything else. This is a book that has two messages: first that young men have a natural tendency to violence, which they normally grow out of, and secondly that society is better off giving its citizens real choices rather than trying to force patterns of behaviour. The trouble is that the first message can be better gathered by watching Newsnight (say) and the second is far, far better dealt with by George Orwell’s 1984. Moreover, if you simply read this work as a treatise on violence and its consequences then Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment is better literature. I was left thinking that this is a nasty, violent book that makes its social points extremely crudely.

That said, I can see that it probably made a good film (I haven’t seen the film) because it is short, and unsubtle. With some decent cinematography it would probably scrub up quite well.

Swann's Way - Marcel Proust (107/1400)

2011-01-16T22:40:00.001Z

Summary
8/10
A triple story of unrequited love, told with incredible emotional detail and brilliant evocation of each scene and moment. Extremely convoluted sentence construction and an extraordinary vocabulary make this a work that requires concentration. Read the gorgeous Montcrieff translation or better still read this in French.

Published 1913

Review
Five hundred pages, four chapters, very few paragraphs and only about one full stop per page; this book requires the most intense concentration just to work out where you are in each sentence. Proust starts on one point and then, through sub-clauses, parenthesis, asides, recollections, similes, retrenchments, remembrances and speculations ends up at the punch line of a shaggy dog story or in jerking the plot forward almost exactly when you felt he had forgotten the point altogether. He never pauses for breath, so that this is not a book you can take to bed intending to read to the end of the chapter or next piece of the action because Proust simply rolls on and on, each thought connecting to the next like waves on a shore. It’s perfectly possible to lose your place on a page, or to be distracted away from the text, and for it to make no difference to the connectedness of the narrative. But to skim along would be to miss the point, which is the unbelievable verve, panache, creativity and sheer gold-plated excellence of the writing – it is quite sublime and quite impossible for the lay man to describe accurately. The nearest I can get are the word paintings of the British Victorian art critic John Ruskin, which marvelously and concretely recreate the works of art or scenes Ruskin wished to bring to the reader’s mind. Proust translated Ruskin into French - and may have absorbed his style - but Proust is looser, less stiffly British than Ruskin and brings emotional as well as descriptive colour to his prose.

Famously, Proust is said to be writing about memory and this is true but somewhat unhelpful to the new reader - I suspect that part of the reason people are put off reading Proust is the mystique and misdirection that surrounds his work (“ah, the Madeleine”, you hear people in the know say, without enlightening the uninitiated). So, in brief then the plot concerns two (no, really three) love stories. The central plot is concerned with Charles Swann, a wealthy middle class socialite who falls in love with the courtesan Odette de Crécy. The reader knows her trade, everyone else in the story knows her trade but the story is told entirely from Swann’s point of view and he does not want to know her trade; he is madly, hopelessly and inappropriately in love with Odette and the story follows their relationship. At first she appears to be infatuated with him but as the years pass she moves on and she treats him with contempt and disdain. His love never falters and, but we are not told how or when or what her motives are, he eventually marries her. This story is book-ended by the narrator’s own tale of his love affair as a child with Charles and Odette’s daughter, Gabrielle. This story exactly reflects Swann’s experience of unrequited love but the narrator, instead of marrying Gabrielle to keep his memories of their relationship alive (which would be impossible as they are children), decides instead that it is better to have the memory than the person, so that he and Swann have the same experience but end up in different places. The third love affair is between the narrator as a boy and his mother, who is pulled away from her loving and sensitive son both by household and wifely duty and a sense that he should not be mollycoddled. The boy lives in hope for the slightest sign of affection from her, and so pre-cursing the later love affairs of both Swann and the boy.

It’s no spoiler to have given you the plot outline, because what matters is how the stories unfold, which is entirely through sensation, sense, desire, experience, excitement, hope and disappointment. Proust does all the same things as other novelists, he has a cast of varied characters, he moves the plot through a sequence of key events, he provides moments of light and shade, of humour, anger, social commentary, poetry, ribaldry and sadness but he does it all with such a sensuous and lyrical world view that this is a work quite unlike any other I have read. It’s not an easy read, I’m not even sure it’s an enjoyable read, but it is absolutely remarkable and substantial.

Finally, I suspect that this book only really makes sense in French, because the vocabulary used and the complexity of the way sentences have been constructed must make translation nearly impossible. I read the original Montcrieff translation, which is quite beautiful. There is a newer Penguin Classics translation now entitled ‘The Way of Swann’s” rather than “Swann’s Way”. But the title “Swann’s Way” is a pun, being both the local name of a walk that goes past Swann’s house and referring to Swann’s journey or way through life; so I don’t see how “The Way of Swann’s”, which is virtually meaningless in English, can be a better translation that the original Montcrieff. For that reason I stuck with the old School. (in French it's published as Du côté de chez Swann if you want to try your own translation)

Epitaph For A Spy - Eric Ambler (106/1400)

2011-01-04T10:57:00.002Z

Summary
6/10
mildly page-turning whodunnit with plenty of atmosphere.

Published 1938

Review
Ambler was a former advertising executive and his copy-writing skills are put to good use in creating atmosphere and ensuring that the plot of this short novel is kept bowling along. It’s an old fashioned country house whodunit dressed up as a spy novel. Josef Vadassy, the novel’s hero, is mistakenly arrested as a spy whilst on holiday in the south of France and is allowed free on condition that he helps catch the real spy who is one of the guests at his hotel. The reader’s interest is kept going by trying to guess who amongst the hotel residents the spy could be. As the story evolves, each suspect turns out to have a dirty story to hide but Vadassy becomes more and more confused about who the spy is.

If you are a fan of detective fiction and especially of writers such as Agatha Christie then you will very likely enjoy this book. It is well enough written, atmospheric and an easy page-turner with enough going on to keep the reader’s interest up. The 1930s inter-war setting provides an unsettling background and enables Ambler to cast a wide variety of different hotel inmates and suspects. However, like much of Christie, the plot makes no real sense when deconstructed and it is impossible to believe that real people, let alone professional spies, would behave as stupidly as they do here – enormous suspension of disbelief is required of the reader.

Ambler is claimed to be one of the inspirations for later thriller writers such as John Le Carre so there is some historical interest in reading his works but that apart this is standard sun lounger fare – but perhaps none the worse for that.

The Nibelungenlied (105/1400)

2010-12-26T19:00:00.000Z

Summary
13th Century soap opera that intrigues but fails to satisfy

7/10

Published around 1200

Review
The title means Song of The Nibelungs and, written in 1200 in Germany, this is both an essential part of German culture and an inspiration to many European artists.

Siegfried is heir to the throne and treasure of the Nibelungs (a slightly nebulous people that includes today’s Netherlands and parts of Scandinavia). On his travels around Europe he falls in love and marries Kriemhild who is sister to the three kings of Burgundland (approximately France). Despite becoming brother to those three kings, Siegfied is murdered by one of them – Hagan – and Kriemhild extracts her revenge by destroying all the kings and knights of Burgundland. It’s a dirty and bloody tale, particularly in the last third where Kriemheld sends wave after wave of knights against her brothers and their supporters until finally everyone in the battle lies dead.

I have a soft spot for epic poetry but this one just didn’t quite nail it for me. It’s not, I think, because this version is written in prose – I am quite happy to read the Iliad in that form – and nor is it the quality of the translation, which here relies on using straightforward everyday language. Rather it is the narrative which failed to fully excite and interest me; and that is a rather strange result because it is full of the usual ingredients of such poems and much of it is well and interestingly done. There are great and powerful heroes, both men and women. Wonderful deeds are completed in the pursuit of love and honour. Courage, romance, malice, treachery, sorrow and pageant are all on display in embroidered descriptions of each scene and, of course, there is magic and fortune telling. But, there is a flaw at the centre of the storytelling that I could not get over and it is that the central characters trim their positions so that this is really a story about politicians and politics rather than heroes and heroics – and I can get that kind of stuff any and each day in the newspapers. Specifically the brothers allow Siegfried to be killed by Hagen and for Hagen to be excused the crime. After that they allow Hagen to abuse Kriemhild and marry her off to Etzel in far off Hungary, in the meantime stealing her fortune so that she cannot use it to buy revenge. As a result it is hard to feel any sympathy with the brothers when Kriemhild does for them and although she is extremely cruel, her motives stem from love of Siegfried whereas theirs are routed in base preservation of their status, and so it ends as a rather grubby family fight instead of a principled stand of heroes.

For all that, this is an easy read and I am glad that I now know about this text. There is much to enjoy amongst the battles and wild events of the story but it is not on a par with, say, The liberation of Jerusalem and certainly not the Iliad or odyssey, with which Penguin at least try to make a comparison. The notes at the end are brilliant.

Hamlet - William Shakespeare (104/1400)

2010-12-19T23:24:00.002Z

Summary
9/10
The Bard’s masterpiece and a relatively easy play to read. Worth catching on stage or DVD to add to the reading experience and probably a work that can be read and re-read without becoming boring.

Published approx 1600

Review
It would be absurd to try to write any kind of comprehensive review of a work that has so much scholarship devoted to it by so many experts. So I will confine myself to a few wider remarks.

This is one of the more readable plays of Shakespeare and many of the more beautiful passages deserve greater attention than is possible at the theatre where the actors can’t stop proceedings for the audience to mull over the words. Nonetheless, many of these speeches and dialogues come alive in the mouths of experienced actors in a way that is almost impossible on the page.

Like most of Shakespeare’s plays, this one has plenty of plot holes and ambiguities but here they become useful in allowing different interpretations of what is going on and the motivations of the players. Almost every reader can image what their version of the play might look and feel like and explore different emotional paths for the actors.

Although the play itself is only 120 pages or so it takes a fair time to read properly. I found it necessary to stop frequently, not because I needed to refer to the notes so much, since most of the play is easily readable, but to stop and reflect for a short period, to underline particular phrases or to make notes in the margin. This is one of very few books that I would fish out for a second read and be sure that I would get more out of it.

I left my Penguin Classics copy of this on a flight to Germany and replaced it with the Dover Thrift Edition, which in my opinion has better footnotes and is cheaper.

The Warden - Anthony Trollope (103/1400)

2010-12-15T21:53:00.001Z

Summary
7/10
A more successful attempt to get inside the English legal system than Dickens' Bleak House, this is human and involving but oddly paced in parts.

Published 1855

Review
The Warden is Trollope’s attempt on the same territory as Dickens’ Bleak House – the Victorian civil legal system but whereas Dickens uses the everlasting cast of Jarndyce v Jarndyce as background to his story, Trollope uses his legal dispute as the centerpiece and focuses on the human impact of the case in a much more plausible way.

The plot concerns a legal attack on the use to which the Barchester Bishopric is putting a charitable legacy. Money that was intended to help the poor in a retirement home is being used to provide a generous income to the priestly warden of that home - the gentle and generous Septimus Harding.

The book beautiful explores the impact of the case on all involved. Rev Harding is villified in the press, the inmates of the home rebel against him, the town is split on the issue and the church employs a top legal team to fight off the challenge. Adding spice to this is the fact that Mr Bold, who is love with Harding’s daughter, is leading the case against Harding and that Mr Harding’s son-in-law is leading the defence, being both Archdeacon and the son of the Bishop.

Having been through legal processes myself I can say that Trollope very accurately portrays the momentum that such cases build up, the attitudes of the lawyers, the difficult positions that people find themselves in and the emotional awfulness of it all. He does this much more gently, sympathetically and in an altogether lower key than Dickens and is more successful as a result. He even cheekily has a direct pop at Dickens who appears as Mr. Popular Sentiment and is derided for having overly simplified characters in his stories.

However, whilst the good bits here are very good indeed and get right inside the characters and their emotions and motives, there are two problems. First this has the feel of an unfinished draft since there are some sections that are little more than sketches – the preamble setting the background scene for example reads like a set of notes to be gone back to later by the author for fleshing out and integrating with the story. The final parts of the story feel rushed and incomplete, with parts of the narrative not yet resolved, although there is more to come in the follow up book - Barchester Towers. Second, there are occasional long winded rants on various subjects such as the Press, which although impressive feel overdone and out of place.

If you want to be an insider in a difficult and messy court case this is a good place to start and for the most part very enjoyable.

Bleak House - Charles Dickens (102/1400)

2010-11-27T22:30:00.001Z

Summary
6/10
Stunning set pieces and characterizations aren’t enough to make up for a soggy central theme, misplaced sympathy with a morally ambiguous main character and incredibly slow plotting.

Review
This is a book that is as brilliant as it is frustrating and both immense in scope and baffling in its ambition. There is no doubt that Dickens can write and every sentence and paragraph here is completely surefooted – he puts down on the page precisely the effect he looked for and conjures the images and references so securely that it is almost as if he is writing in stone. Thus he creates the famously distinctive Dickensian style of overblown characters punctuated with very dry humour and pointed observation. It what Brits nowadays call a Marmite formula – something you either love or hate. Personally I find it very enjoyable at a micro level and the clockwork of Dickens’ novels – by which I mean the individual scenes - is something quite unique and, yes, beautiful. But, frankly, this is a book where if you don’t like page one it’s quite safe and far better for you to give up than plough on because it doesn’t get any different – Dickens’ penetrating and overblown description is hooked up to a byzantine and rather wheezy plot and a gigantic interlinked cast of characters.

Where Dickens really works, but here misses the mark, is linking his unique writing style to a plot that both escalates to a fantastic dénouement and highlights some of the social evils of Victorian society. Hard Times for example uses the tragedy of its plot to shatter the world of the hard-nosed businessmen who inhabit its pages. By these criteria Bleak House is well wide of the mark. The social target is the expense and slowness of British civil justice, so that lives and fortunes are wasted taking minor cases through the court system. This is not a bad target – and still would be today – but Dickens quickly realizes that it’s too dry and obtuse to make the foundation of a 1300 page book and he therefore adds in a second plot that has nothing whatever to do with the legal system and moreover which is morally ambiguous. This is the story of the imperious Lady Deadlock who has secretly had a child by a former lover. If you step back from her tale it virtually impossible to give a fig for Lady Deadlock who has led a life of fraud and abandoned those who love her and, in particular, has deceived her saintly if pompous husband. However it is the Deadlock story that Dickens focuses in on but, because it has no heart, this giant soufflé of a novel falls flat.

Within all this there is much to like and to loath. There are some great set pieces and characters, everyone will have their favourites but Tulkinhorne the suspicious lawyer, Smallweed the money lender, and Mrs Flight, the eternal litigant were all characters I thought beautifully crafted. Against this, Dickens gives us the dreadful prig Esther as part narrator of the story. This is a girl who is pure sickly treacle and is loved by everyone, with no faults at all. Supposedly she is the sweet to the sour of the rest of the story but she is such a goody two-shoes I reached for the sick bag whenever she appeared – which is a lot. In addition, Dickens goes for hundreds and hundreds of pages with almost nothing happening in plot terms where more and more characters are introduced (all eventually and rather ham fistedly connected in the end) but without the narrative seeming to move forward. You will need commitment to stay with it. This book was originally serialized in twenty parts in Dickens’ magazine Household Words and I suspect that he kept spinning it out either because he was getting good reviews or for the lack of any other authors contributing material on time. The stitching together of the threads at the end certainly has the feel of being made up on the spot in order to bring everything to a conclusion (and if you really think about some of the loose ends, like whether the murderer will tell the full story of what has happened at the, off stage, murder trial then parts of the plot unravel).

Fans of the book say it exposed huge failings in the legal system and developed the art of the novel through the twin narrator device. Well, maybe, but this is a big commitment of reading time and whilst there is much to be enjoyed here I would rather read three Balzacs or two Dumas or one Tolstoy than Bleak House and those are the real world choices readers have to make.

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley (101/1400)

2010-11-22T13:52:00.001Z

Summary
7/10
A great idea - how would God respond to his own creation is fitted into a suitably melodramatic plot. No wonder it gripped the Victorian imagination.

Review
Everyone knows Frankenstein – the movies, cartoons, take offs, stage plays and nightmares but many fewer have read the book and to do so is to be enlightened as to what the fuss is all about. Because this is a book that has a real horror at its heart, not though individual squeamish scenes – although there are several of those but by asking the very profound question of how a God should react to his own creation.

In this story Frankenstein (who is the creator not the monster) forms a man out of body parts and is so revolted by his creature that he immediately abandons it and in so doing opens the possibility of it doing either good or evil from its own free will. The genius of the novel is that it is never really clear whether the monster is essentially good or entirely evil but with incredible guile so as to appear susceptible to good, or just confused - like the rest of us. This confusion is the true horror of the book and the murders and terror that the monster enacts are simply melodrama to the reflection of our own souls.

It’s not brilliant writing, but bowls along well enough, and the plot gets apace in a Victorian way. There is nothing about this book save its conceit that makes it exceptional – but that conceit is powerful and marvellous. For this theme of what it must be to create life, the responsibilities of the creator and the created, how the created understands itself and its desires and what its creator thinks of his being is marvellous stuff, that I have not come across in any other literature.

The Histories/Xerxes Invades Greece - Herodotus (99/1400 and 100/1400)

2010-11-08T23:09:00.002Z

Summary
9/10
The thrilling story of the battle for control of Europe between Persia and Greece coupled to a magical ride around the ancient Mediterranean world. Beautifully and simply written and loaded with astonishing anecdotes and reports, Herodotus brings history alive.

Published circa 415 BC

Review
If you have seen the 1962 film The 300 Spartans or the 2007 movie 300 (or read the graphic book on which it is based) then you will know the story of how a small group of 300 Spartan soldiers held back the largest army the world has ever seen, led by the Persian king Xerxes at Thermopylae. That battle and the wider war between the independent Greek states and Persia is at the core of this book and it’s an incredible piece of history. The odds are overwhelmingly in favour of Persia which rules the whole of Asia and Xerxes assembles an army said to be four million strong, which he crosses into Europe by the remarkable feat of building two bridges across the Bosporus. Herodotus gives a superb account of the campaign, not just the battles and individual acts of folly and bravery, but reports great speeches and discussion held in the general’s camps and relates the politics, treachery, double-dealing and loyalty between the various factions on both sides. It’s not a spoiler to say that the tiny Greek army wins and in a world dominated by big bullying organizations it’s a great reminder that determination can win out despite the odds.

But there is more to Herodotus than the war between Asia and Europe. Herodotus traveled extensively around the Mediterranean and both saw much and collected stories from others about how the ancient world was organized. Before he comes to the military campaign proper he spends much of the book discoursing on everything he has seen or heard, some of this is fantastic, some delightful, parts gruesome and a great deal very funny.

This is a surprisingly easy book to read. There are occasionally parts where lists of strange names are given but for the most part this is a modern and entertaining script. Partly I suspect that straightforwardness is a characteristic of the ancient Greek language, and partly this was written to be performed orally and it appears to have been conceived of in chunks that would hold the attention of an audience.

If you know absolutely nothing about the ancient world then this book is a great introduction although I suspect that watching 300 would be helpful just to get a little bit of period feel – the film is quite faithful to Herodotus. For a more substantive but still very readable background I suggest Tom Holland’s brilliant Persian Fire, which describes how the Persians came to rule Asia and their succession of great kings. If you only want to read about the Persian invasion then this is available as Xerxes Invades Greece - also in Penguin Classics.

The Good Soldier Svejk - Jaroslav Hasek (98/1400)

2010-11-01T10:53:00.000Z

Summary
6/10
Cervantes style humour from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War 1. Bitter sweet and wry in places but overly long and lacking in structure.

Published 1911- 1923

Review
This reminded me very much of Don Quixote, being a book that started life as a couple of funny short stories and then grew into a 700 page monster (and would have been perhaps 1000 pages if the author hadn’t died. As with Don Quixote, the characters play it straight but the hero of this volume – Svejk – is a clever man acting dumb whereas Don Quixote is a clever man with a dumb weakness. The overall theme in Svejk is the madness and chaos of war – in this case the Austro-Hungarian side of WW1 - and there is a slight plot as Svejk moves through recruitment to the ranks and starts a slow journey to the front although the book ends before he makes it however. Essentially, and as with Don Quixote, this is a series of short comic episodes held very loosely together.

George Monbiot, on the back cover of my version, suggests that this is the funniest book ever written and it is funny but more in a wry smile kind of way than a belly laugh. Svejk manages to get in and out of all kinds of scrapes and in particular infuriates authority by his simpleton approach to life. He appears to be taking the mickey but they can never quite finger him for it. Svejk’s character fills out as the book progresses and he becomes less of a dolt and more wily over time. No doubt, and again as with Cervantes, this occurred as the result of feedback to the author following the success of the early episodes. Quite a lot of the book is based on Hasek’s personal experience and that adds to the humour/horror, and the awfulness and stupidity of war is an important part of the appeal of this book.

This work was a huge hit on publication as a part work but - as Cecil Parrott admits in the introduction – it is quite uneven and he goes as far to suggest that it is possible to detect the episodes written whilst Hasek was drunk. He also points out the great difficulty in achieving a decent English translation from colloquial Czech, although this reads well enough. This is the only unedited English version of this book and to be honest I would recommend one of the shorter editions that will give you the idea and the humour without the unnecessary length, which, since the stories tend to be variations on a few themes, I found made me increasingly impatient as I read on.

The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle (97/1400)

2010-10-24T12:16:00.002+01:00

Summary
6/10
I can't understand why this has become such a popular Holmes story when to my mind it is one of the weakest of Conan Doyle's plots.

Published 1902

Review
Whenever I write a negative review of a well-loved book I get criticism from devoted fans along the lines of ‘have you actually read it?’ Perhaps writing reviews of books I haven’t read would make some kind of artistic statement but it sounds like too much effort for my essentially lazy self.

So then, here is a book that I have read and don’t much care for. I like Sherlock Holmes a lot and Conan Doyle was one of my favourite authors as a kid – in fact I think I’ve read all his books. But this one, despite being many people’s top pick Sherlock Holmes story doesn’t do it for me. It’s written well enough of course, although Conan Doyle is not a great wordsmith like, say, HG Wells with whom his stories have a lot in common, but the material in my view is just a bit thin. In particular there are two aspects of the story that I don’t care for. First Holmes himself disappears for a big chunk of the book so that Watson is left driving the story forward - and he is not an interesting enough character on his own to hold the reader’s interest. Nor can he provide any insight since the purpose of Watson is always to draw the wrong conclusions. Secondly, the bad guy effectively gives himself away and although Holmes works out who and why he need not have bothered because events bring the story to a natural conclusion anyway. What the reader is left with therefore is a jolly romp sort of story rather than a satisfying intellectual unpicking of a devilish plot. Of course this is a must read if you are a devoted fan, but in that case why are you reading this review?

The Good Soldier - Ford Maddox Ford (96/1400)

2010-10-14T22:49:00.002+01:00

Summary
9/10

Clever-clever plotting and smooth writing combined with emotional wrench make this a compulsive read.

Published 1915

Review
This is a real page-turner with great storytelling and wonderful writing. It’s an apparently simple story of a cuckolded husband but Maddox Ford tells and retells the same events from the point of view of each participant so that the reader’s understandings and sympathies are constantly shifting as he begins to comprehend the complexities and motivations of those involved. Characters we thought we liked at the start become obnoxious and those we loathed are redeemed. It’s clever not only because the ground constantly shifts under the reader’s feet but also by the way the story is told – getting one of the characters to explain all the others. This has two effects, first, by avoiding the God narrator it legitimizes the fact that the reader doesn’t understand everything at once, and secondly it makes the whole affair much more intimate and personal because these events are happening to the narrator who is our friend.

The story concerns two upper middle class couples who meet at a German spa at the turn of the 19th century and become good friends over many years. As the story unfolds it becomes clear that beneath their simple outings and picnics, sexual and emotional plate tectonics are at work. More and more is slowly revealed of what has been going on and the final pages are tragic and grim.

Much is made in literary circles of the fact that the narrator is unreliable and frequently contradicts himself or is plain wrong. This is a very neat device that covers up the fact that somehow the narrator has gotten to understand what everyone else in the story was thinking or feeling. His unreliability is really chaff to cover up this unlikely situation. Nonetheless it is well done and makes the tone and structure of the book enjoyable and unusual. In particular the narrator constantly time shifts the story backwards and forwards and fails to tell the reader some facts about events until later so that they appear mysterious and only later can be pieced together. If you enjoy detective fiction you should enjoy this.

At heart this is a desperate story of a group of people who set off in life and make a mess of it. Some are naïve, some manipulative, some loving, some hard-nosed, some living a full life and some just passing through. Which is which and who is whom the reader cannot understand until the end and the slow reveal is delightful, sad and horrific.

Unto This Last and Other Writings - John Ruskin (95/1400)

2010-10-03T11:20:00.003+01:00

Summary
8/10

The writings of a beautiful, brilliant and humane mind outlining a fascinating alternative view of how our society could work in wonderful and exciting prose.

Written 1841 - 1871

Review
Ruskin was one of the great Victorians and it is a shame that his writing does not have wider following or greater modern day recognition. As an art critic he is without parallel and his word paintings describing great European works of art are some of the most brilliant pieces of prose imaginable. This book however is concerned with his writings on social and political structures and in truth I wouldn’t recommend it as an introduction to Ruskin because the beauty of the writing necessarily plays second fiddle to the socio-political points he is trying to make.

The book is a collection of stories, essays, pamphlets and lectures produced by Ruskin between 1841 and 1871. It’s quite hard to pigeonhole in modern terms the stance Ruskin takes. It’s one part communism, one part Christian doctrine and, in his support for free trade for example, one part raw capitalism. It’s a philosophy that in Britain never really got a foothold and became overwhelmed by the arguments of Adam Smith and other economists on the one hand and the socialist movement on the other. The nearest modern European equivalent would something like the Christian Democrats in Germany and the general German distrust of the Anglo Saxon economic approach (given the prosperity in modern Germany who is to say that we would not have been better off had we adopted some of Ruskin’s ideas)?

Ruskin does have a beautiful mind and is superbly learned, eloquent, romantic, fiery, poetic, and wryly funny in putting forward his points. He is totally unlike any modern political or economic speaker or writer. He delightfully mixes up comments about art, architecture, literature, the bible, minerals, anecdotes and observations to make his points. His lecture to the citizens of Tunbridge Wells on Iron, which is not an obviously promising topic, manages to weave in remarks about art, architecture, systems of living, economics and more with astonishing brilliance. I’ve seen actors recreate some of Ruskin’s lectures and he must have been utterly spellbinding. The material is however quite dense and every sentence contains a thought or idea. You need to concentrate to make sure you follow along, there are no PowerPoint slides or sound bites here.

Some of his philosophy appears quaint or odd or impractical. For example he argues that everyone should be paid the same wage (this idea is where the title of the book comes from). And it would be easy to dismiss these essays as simply belonging to another era and of no modern relevance. However, they do provide a glimpse of a philosophical debate about how society works that is echoed in the works of Dickens, Gaskell and others and which ultimately led to the rise of communist states and the shaping of our world. They also provide a glimpse of what our society might have been like had Ruskin won the argument. Finally they are a dramatic change from the speeches of modern politicians whose ability to articulate an overarching philosophy rarely extends beyond a tweak to schools or prison policy and never encompasses anything like the range of ideas and passion articulated here.

Jude The Obscure - Thomas Hardy (94/1400)

2010-09-27T21:20:00.001+01:00

Summary
5/10
Suspend disbelief for the bizarre actions of the characters in this thought experiment exploring the nature of relationships, their permanence and the meaning of divorce and marriage.

Published 1895

Review

This is a thought experiment where Hardy puts his characters into a situation and investigates what happens to them. The nub of the experiment is England’s divorce law at the time of writing (1895) and the idea of living together as an unmarried couple.

Hardy uses the book to explore two unhappy marriages and how impossible it was at the time for that unhappiness to be undone. His characters end the book far more miserably than they start out – beaten by the system and convention, both society’s and their own.

The Jude of the title is a bright boy who thinks it will be possible to become an Oxford scholar through self-learning. This ambition is thwarted and snubbed and so he becomes an obscure stonemason. His dreamt of life never really begins and for this he is forever wistful if not resentful. A teenage pregnancy leads him into an unplanned, unhappy, marriage from which he obtains a divorce and lives with his new found soul mate and fellow divorcee Sue. What should be blissful happiness is ruined because they live in sin, refusing to get married. The world shuns them and they are struck by awful tragedy. This turns Sue’s mind and she comes to believe that God never recognized their respective divorces and she returns to her husband.

To say that this plot is a bit unlikely is putting it too nicely. At all times Jude and Sue have the power of their own salvation in their hands and yet they continually act in a perverse fashion. However that isn’t really the point as the text of this book is a vehicle for exploration of the nature of relationships, and their earthly and heavenly permanence. In our world, with quickie divorce rampant, the discussion seems to come from another planet, but as a piece of social history this novel shows one step on the way to our modern society. The reaction at the time to this novel was so fierce that Hardy never wrote another and switched to poetry fro the rest of his career.

North and South - Elisabeth Gaskell (93/1400)

2010-09-19T18:44:00.000+01:00

Summary
5/10
A social narrative about the merits of industrialisation mixed in with an unlikely love story. The ingredients are there but the plot and characters are a bit wonky and the writing isn’t good enough to paper over those cracks.

Published 1854

Review
This work has unquestionably suffered from being conceived for serialistaion by Charles Dickens in his periodical ‘Household Words’ between 1854 – 1855. It has a chopped and compressed feeling that weakens the storyline and lessens the reader’s interest in the characters. Trails are laid, such as Henry Lennox’s love interest in the hero – Margret Hale, that don’t lead anywhere; characters are introduced late in the novel who become important to its development, like Mr Bell and other characters, like Margaret’s brother Frederick look like they should be important to the plot, and take up a lot of time, but don’t really matter. All in all it’s a bit of a mess.

At the heart of the book however is an unlikely love story between Margaret – southern born daughter of an Anglican vicar - and John Thornton – Northern born self made man. Their story is used as the prop to investigate, not unsympathetically, the social and economic issues surrounding the rise of manufacturing when Margaret and her family are forced by circumstances to move north.

The love story is well done with Margaret and John’s characters reflecting their background. She is unbelievably haughty and standoffish, which passes for good manners in her world. He is a proud and straightforward innocent. They are an odd couple whose romance appears to have no chance and Gaskell nicely captures the various awkward moments they have together and the many bumps in love’s road.

Around this central story there is a strike at the factory and Margaret befriends a family of workers. Conversations with John Thornton and the workers are used to discuss labour relations, economics and the relative merits of agricultural and industrial work. It’s a bit heavy handed when compared to, say, Dicken’s own Hard Times which covers the same territory and the various emotional shifts and personal tragedies of the minor characters, such as Thornton’s airhead sister only half work as reflections back on the wider economic themes. Only Thornton’s mother and Hale’s father – who have totally opposed views of the world – really add to the drama.

Patricia Ingham in her introduction sort of gives the game away by stating emphatically that Gaskell was not an amateur writer. But I think she protests too much and this has too many flaws to be the work of a real professional.

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton (92/1400)

2010-09-11T21:04:00.007+01:00

Summary
9/10

An explosive love story packed into up-tight and tightly knit 19th Century New York. Beautiful and atmospheric prose explores every nuance of the situation and boils the plot up brilliantly for a tear-jerking end.

Published 1920

Review
If you like Jane Austen you should try this and if you don’t like Jane Austen then you may love this. It’s an understated story of upper class New York Society in the late 19th century and, like Austen, uses the moral conventions and manners of society to provide a framework for the action. But whereas Austen colours and perhaps weakens her stories with arch humour, Wharton allows nothing to come between the reader and the devastating love story at the heart of this novel. It’s a far more effective and long lasting formula but nowhere near as comfortable.

A book about enormously wealthy New York socialites does not have any obvious modern appeal and the world that Newland Archer and May Welland inhabit is almost incomprehensible to modern eyes. The nearest analogy would be an American high school prom King and Queen where a certain set of strictly observed behaviour is expected by all present. They are the perfect couple in the perfect society until Cousin Madam Olenska flees from her Polish husband and seeks refuge with her relatives. Her beauty and other worldliness shows Newland what it might be like to break with convention and he falls helplessly in love.

But this is no sleazy and clandestine love affair. Both Newland and Olenska are aware of their duties to others and the tensions between conforming and growing, pleasing yourself and hurting those who care for you are the themes that are explored. It’s beautifully, gently and subtly done, mimicking the society it describes where it rarely necessary for things to be spelt out since the participants instinctively know what is expected. There is a wonderful cast of characters some of whom make the rules and some bend them, but the punishment for breaking them is to be ostracised forever. Whether Newland is going to choose May Welland or Madam Olenska is not clear until the very end and I challenge anyone not to shed a tear for those involved.

This is an atmospheric book that conjures up an alien culture in its own terms and uncovers one of literature’s great romances. A must read.

Don Quixote - Cervantes (91/1400)

2010-09-05T07:23:00.007+01:00

Summary
5/10
A series of short stories rather than a novel, this is funny if you like Candid Camera but the joke of laughing at a madman wears thin pretty quickly. Book 2 is much better with Sancho Panza in particular being given some genuinely funny lines. A marvellous translation.

Published 1604/1605/1615

Review
Conceived long before word processors, it’s easy to see from the structure of this book how Cervantes went about its creation. In the first couple of chapters he creates the absurd figure of Don Quixote – a middle class Spanish Hidalgo who gets into his head that he should become a knight errant (that is a chivalrous knight of the kind found at the court of King Arthur for example). Since Quixote is living in 17th Century Spain he cuts an absurd figure in his shabby armor and on a broken down horse, and is considered to be mad by everyone he meets. They each proceed in one way or another to physically abuse him. Cervantes then adds in another ingredient by giving Don Quixote a peasant farmer squire, by the name of Sancho Panza, and a further round of adventures now proceeds - most famously Don Quixote’s attack on some windmills, which he believes are giants.

In these early stories neither Quixote nor Panza have very defined characters save that Quixote is mad and arguably Panza even madder for following him. All the adventures follow the same pattern where Quixote decides that some ordinary object is something magical or evil and that he must attack it. The result is always that he and Panza get beaten up. If you like Candid Camera then you may think this is funny but if laughing at the disadvantaged is not your thing then it gets very wearing.

Matters improve in Book 2 when it’s obvious that the initial stories have been a publishing success and Cervantes takes into account the public reaction to change style. Now Quixote and Panza become more rounded characters and, whilst Quixote is still mad, he also says many wise and important things about Spanish society and forms of behaviour, whilst Panza’s idiocy becomes the mouthpiece for pearls of common sense wisdom. They are allowed some good fortune and to meet people who like and help them as well as those who seek enjoyment from teasing them. Panza is given a lot of very funny lines and Cervantes sets up a nice double act between him and his master, who acts the straight man.

Cervantes uses parts of the book to have a go at norms of behaviour in Spain at that time, and no doubt the comic form enabled him to get around the censor more easily. His concerns about manners, marriage, the church and morals are all from a different world and so these stabs have no bite today thus leaving the comic elements to dominate in a modern reader’s mind. These are mostly either slapstick or badinage but don’t form part of wider comic sketch so that each episode is a peg on which to hang individual gags but doesn’t itself form a comic story except insofar as the object is to laugh at Don Quixote. To be truly funny the ideas would need to interconnect and ideally for Quixote to get the last laugh on his tormentors once in a while. But this is part of the development of comedy and those ideas would come in later works.

The Nobel Prize committee has said that this is the greatest book of all time but it’s a series of short stories without any great overarching themes or object. At 1000 pages this is a big investment of time and the reader would do just as well dipping into some of the stories rather than reading the whole. In particular Book 2 is much funnier and more interesting than Book 1 (which immediately cuts out 500 pages).

Finally, the Penguin edition is a superb translation by John Rutherford, for which he has won the Premio Valle Inclan prize. He has managed to produce a pithy and direct style full of rich colloquialisms that extract maximum humour from the text. If you are going to read Don Quixote this is the one to buy.

Don Quixote (Penguin Classics)

Waverley - Sir Walter Scott (90/1400)

2010-08-29T23:13:00.004+01:00

Summary
3/10

An obscure part of British History remains un-illuminated in this very slow plotted and rather wooden historical novel which, surprisingly, may be the biggest selling book of all time on some measures.

Published 1814

Review
Adjusted for literacy levels, this may be the biggest selling novel of all time with millions of copies sold around the world on its first publication in 1814. It’s also credited with being the first historical novel, i.e. a work of fiction intended to enlighten the reader about a period of history – in this case the Jacobite Rising of 1745. Unfortunately for modern readers this is a piece of history that is obscure to anyone living outside of Scotland, and hazy even to most Scots, and this robs the work of what must have been it’s subversive and daring gloss in describing relatively recent and dramatic historic events with a romantic slant. The writer now comes across as longwinded, overly rose tinted and obscure.

Briefly, the British threw out their catholic monarch James II (James Stuart) in 1689 in favour of his protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange. James II fled to France where he and later his son, James III (known as the Old Pretender), posed a constant political threat to the British crown. The Brits had to cast around Europe for a monarch again in 1714, this time inviting a German – George I - the Elector of Hanover. James III immediately invaded Britain with French help but was seen off and waited until 1746, when Britain was weakened by overseas wars, to have a second attempt, this time led by his son Charles Edward, the Young Pretender; and it is this second invasion which Scott uses as the basis for his novel.

The attractions of the situation are that the Young Pretender is a dashing Scottish prince with fine manners and good leadership skills, his troops are wild and dangerous Scottish highlanders (the French are only willing to show up if the Scots have some initial success) and the odds are hopeless since the English supporters of the Stuart (Jacobite) cause have long since accepted the status quo. Scott injects into this mix his English hero, Waverley, who is born a supporter of the Hanoverians but brought up by his Jacobite uncle. I’m exhausted explaining this even in shorthand, and the book makes extremely heavy weather of the politics and background, which take up the first 150 pages, but unless you know your history it still makes very little sense.

Finally the plot gets going and Waverley joins the British army only to be ensnared by the Jacobites in a plot to make it look as though he has gone over to their side. He is declared a traitor and, in a fit of pique, takes up the Jacobite cause. This device enables Waverley to be an insider at the key historical events on the Jacobite side whilst remaining an outsider.

Scott shows us something of Scottish society and highland living and takes us into the camp of the Young Pretender and some of the main battles, but not the Jacobite victory at Falkirk or the battle of Culloden where the Young Pretender’s army is routed. Meanwhile love interest is provided by two of the Jacobite women. However, it’s a ramshackle story partly because the modern reader doesn’t know the detail of the history, which makes events seem random, and partly because Waverley’s character is (necessarily) capricious so that he supports first one side and then the other and loves first one woman and then the other. The reader is left with an uninteresting history and an unfathomable hero. On top of this Scott is a somewhat pedestrian writer without either a page turning or poetic quality (although he was a successful poet).

The Young Pretender is defeated at Culloden about 100 pages before the end of the book and the rest is filled with drawing the threads together in a happy ending. I rather suspect that this part is the secret of the book, because there is a kind of Hollywood upbeat feel to the ending that draws a few tears and leaves a feel good factor.

There are four more ‘Waverley’ novels written by Scott about Scottish history but if they are all as badly plotted and ponderous as this I should leave them well alone.

Waverley (Penguin English Library)

Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales from Burns to Buchan (89/1400)

2010-08-15T22:17:00.003+01:00

Summary
1/10
A weak set of stories at a very strong price.

Published - Various

Review
Some mischievous fairy, sprite or goblin has had the last laugh, tricking me into spending £8.99 on this volume, which certainly does not live up to the Penguin Classics slogan, “The Best Books Ever Written.” The stories here are a mixture of traditional Scottish folk tales and stories written by various authors such as Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stephenson and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

I like my folk and fairy tales to have three elements, a choice to be made by the lead character, an attempt to trick or deceive and consequences for each party. Virtually none of the stories here has all three elements and so to my taste they fall rather flat. Some of the traditional tales are hardly even stories; more like fragments and don’t compare in atmosphere, texture, storyline or moral outcome with the best of the European folk tradition. The newer stories are a mixed bag but none especially sparkle or, of the authors I know, represent their finest output.

If you are very interested in the Scottish folk tradition then you might get something out of this but otherwise you may feel short changed. This is a cynical series of copyright free pieces that Penguin has stitched together and for which they should be charging a pound or two, not nine pounds.

Emma - Jane Austen (88/1400)

2010-08-05T00:48:00.001+01:00

Summary
6/10
A conundrum, a well written book that I didn’t enjoy, it’s clever but boring, characterful but soulless, funny but not comic and overall it left me cold.

Published 1816

Review
I don’t enjoy reading Jane Austen’s novels but when I come to deconstruct why I find it very hard to find fault. She was clearly a highly intelligent woman with a tremendous vocabulary and strong voice. Her main characters develop and grow in the course of each novel and the minor ones give colour and provide foils for the various set pieces. There is a subtlety in her work that makes almost every character believable and she is sort of funny, albeit in a wry smile kind of way rather than anything approaching a guffaw. But despite all this I find her books rather tiresome to read and much prefer to see them performed on screen. They are too mannered for my tastes and the stories hold no surprises that a modern reader can’t see coming from a mile off, so that her work feels rather like taking a walk round the park with an elderly relative, not uninteresting, possibly illuminating but undemanding and the route is known in advance.

Emma is a well brought up late teen with an important social position in the village of Highbury, somewhere outside London. Emma is a self regarding snob and flatters herself that she has set up the successful marriage of her governess, Miss Taylor, and Mr. Weston. She decides to undertake further matchmaking for her orphan friend Harriet Smith who has a proposal from Robert Martin a local framer deemed too socially low by Emma - and so is rejected by Harriet. The principal joke of the novel is that Emma’s matchmaking is completely hopeless and she consistently misreads situations and intentions. This failure extends to her reading of other romantic relationships occurring in the village including those that involve her. The reader is in on the joke and is told directly or indirectly most of what is actually going on. Austen makes Emma aware of the truth slowly and cleverly allows Emma’s character to grow up a bit with each revelation, but still leaves enough of her vanity and prejudices so that Emma goes on blundering and embarrassing herself.

Essentially then this is a comedy of manners or correct behaviour. The cast behaves foolishly or unpredictably over their love affairs and Emma’s preconceptions and meddling put her the wrong side of nearly everyone. Fortunately her social position and charm extract her from serious collateral damage and only her very upright and astute friend Mr. Knightly is aware of how close to the wind she is sailing. Knightly has his own agenda however that comes as a further surprise to Emma, but probably not the reader.

There are no deep themes at work here and although lots of academics make claims that Austen is the first feminist writer I can’t see it myself as the women are completely set within the conventional social structure. This is more like a very early sit com and what lifts it out of the ordinary is Austen’s keen observations on how situations play out, a tightness in the plot structure, the quality of her sentences and her sense of humour. Whilst acknowledging all of that I found this work somewhat twee, over mannered and dry. What is a bit strange is that I really enjoy E M Forster who also wrote domestic comedies of manners, however Forster used his comedy to disguise some big and interesting themes and frankly wrote with more zest and used a bigger canvass – more like a brisk hill walk with a jolly and wise uncle.

I suppose I shall dutifully go through the rest of the Austen canon but not really with any great enthusiasm.

A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare (87/1400)

2010-07-25T21:48:00.003+01:00

Summary
7/10
Always funny but not always fresh, this is the slightest of Shakespeare’s works, which is very comical and has some good poetry but not the soul and depth of his greatest output.

Written 1595

Review

I’ve seen this play so many times that I had vowed never to see it again, but since it was this year’s school production it was hard to avoid.

This is a rolling comic fantasy of fairies, lovers, quarrels and mistaken identity. There is plenty of neat farce that can get a lot of laughs if done well and some memorable poetry. All that said, I never get the feeling that this is the sublime work of genius, it’s more like a very well done episode of Frasier. Close readers of the text see deeper cross meanings and that Shakespeare is playing with concept of reality and theatre itself. On the other hand there are websites devoted to secret messages in rock songs played backwards, so you must decide for your self if this is multilayered or just a very good rom-com.

Oberon and Titania, who are king and queen of the fairies, arrive separately in Athens to celebrate the royal wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta. The Fairy monarchs have had a row and Oberon sends his mischievous sidekick, Puck, to get revenge on Titania through use of a magic flower that makes her fall in love with the first thing that she sees. This happens to be a simple minded weaver called Bottom, whom Puck has given the head of an ass. Oberon is delighted with this trick of Pucks, but less pleased when he realizes that Puck has made a mess of his second task, which was to cause Demetrius – an Athenian noble – to fall in love with Helena, who loves him, rather than Hermia, who loves Lysander. Puck keeps getting it wrong so that Both Demetrius and Lysander end up in love with Helena when they started off both in love with Hermia, but it all gets sorted out and Bottom and his men get to perform an excruciating play at the wedding feast.

I’ve never seen a bad production of this play and some have been magnificent; but I can’t see greatness in it and for that reason have grown rather tired of seeing it. When I came to read it the lines are so familiar that I got nothing extra from the script, so that I hardly marked out any lines or passages beyond those that are familiar. No one can not enjoy this work, but it owes a lot of its fame simply to the name of the author.

The Liberation of Jerusalem, Torquato Tasso

2010-07-18T23:35:00.000+01:00

Summary
9/10
The first Crusade told as a poem. This has everything a book needs, a terrific plot with an enormous cast of characters, a desperate struggle between two evenly matched opponents, love, valor, determination, magic, luck, intrigue, cowardice and leadership. All wrapped up in great language and very human understanding for both sides. The fact that this is a poem hardly matters; it’s just a great work of art.

Published 1581

Review
Since I started this quest I have been given many classics as gifts and I was given this work as an Oxford World’s Classics rather than Penguin (it seems that not everyone understands my mission) but, since I was going on a trip to Jordan where much of this book is set, I thought I would give it a go.

First a quick explanation; this is an epic poem and therefore subject to a set of rules that Tasso claimed were that the poem should deal with heroic characters; and the subject should be historical but sufficiently remote to allow the poet some license for invention. Other Epic poems include The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Le Mort D’Artur, The Inferno and Paradise Lost and the custom is to cross refer to other epics and use some of their structure and even parts of their stories. They also tend to be rather long and this one is some 400 pages. All in all then a daunting prospect for the average reader (me for example) who does not have a full grasp of the cross references, isn’t that keen on poetry and isn’t clued up on the relevant period of history – in this case the first Crusade.

Secondly, some technical comments; Tasso was Italian and so naturally wrote in his native tongue and chose a poetic meter known as hendecasyllabic. This volume is a translation into English and uses iambic pentameter as the closest English approximation to the Italian rhythm, and this was the meter that Shakespeare and Milton used. It has ten beats to each line of poetry but alternating between stressed and unstressed beats (deDUM deDUM deDUM deDUM deDUM as Wikipedia explains) so:

Ah, happy death if love is left behind

Becomes

AhHAPP yDEATH ifLOVE isLEFT beHIND

Fortunately the reader can completely ignore this since the rhythm is effectively in the background, rather in the way that percussion provides a backbone to, say, great rock music where normally voice, guitar or keyboard dominate.

The rhyme structure is that each verse has eight lines (ottava rima) and whereas at school each line tended to rhyme with the next one (aa bb cc dd etc), known as rhyming couplets, here the pattern is abacbcdd. Now, one of the things I hate about poetry is the way that sense has to be twisted around to fit the rhyme and that is especially noticeable in rhyming couplets, which is partly why I detested Keats so much. The rhyme pattern here is much more subtle and in fact the reader will hardly notice the rhymes and consequently the meaning of the poem flows much more easily.

Finally this is a fantastic translation by Max Wickert and you would never know that the poem was not originally written in English. He must have the most superb vocabulary and sense of language – I absolutely take my hat off to him.

Right. Having covered the technical stuff, what have we got here? In a nutshell a wonderful driving narrative of the story of the first Crusade to recapture Jerusalem from the Muslims. Tasso of course is Christian so there is never any doubt about which side he is on but, although the Muslims are the bad guys, Tasso is very even handed about such matters as valor and nobility and certainly sees the human strengths and weaknesses on both sides of the conflict.

The year is 1098 and the pious and wise French duke Godfrey de Bouillon has a vision from God calling him to retake Jerusalem. He gathers around him Europe’s finest warrior knights, in particular Rinaldo and Tancred, and a massive army that lays siege to Jerusalem, which is under the kingship of Aladdin (not the one with the lamp) supported by Solyman, Argant and the female warrior Clorinda. The cast of characters is gigantic (there is a glossary in which 61 names alone begin with the letter A) and includes not only knights and warriors but also magicians, hermits, heavenly and diabolic creatures and temptresses for the knights’ favour.

Two great love stories run through the plot, Armida is a Syrian Sorceress who causes great mischief amongst the Crusaders but ends in tormented love with Rinaldo, whilst Erminia is a pagan princess of Arminia who falls in love with Tancred. The knights flip flop between their duty to heaven – to recapture Jerusalem – and their passion for these women.

Around and about these love affairs is the whole gamut of war. Intrigue, both within and between armies, strategy and luck, leadership and cowardice, brutality and delicacy. There are some fantastic battle scenes that outdo anything CGI can provide on modern cinema because Tasso combines explicit and brutal violence with insight into the physical prowess, mental daring and the meaning of the battle for the combatants. His battles are very real and usually the outcome is close and honours even.

But this is not at all a dry account of a campaign, because each side enlists agencies of light and dark respectively to their aid. There is a magic forest that cannot be cut down by the Crusaders, but God supplies them with water during the heat of August when otherwise they would die. There are side plots and adventures aplenty, each one raising new dangers for the Crusaders.

Eventually, but only just, Godfrey wins Jerusalem and becomes its king –historical fact – by that point you will have fallen under the spell of this amazing, exciting, thoughtful and knowing work. It has inspired dozens of artists, writers and composers down the years and, unless you have a heart of stone, it will inspire you.

Now, my confession; as I said at the top, I was given this book and took it to Jordan with me where I read it surrounded by Crusader Castles and in sight of Jerusalem itself. However when I realized how good the translation was I became concerned that my review would be inaccurate for a Penguin reader. On my return therefore I looked for a Penguin version of this book and found that there is none, and so I have read a classic that is not a Penguin. What a shame for Penguin because they really should have this in their cannon, it is absolutely a great work of art. I’m reviewing it but not adding it to my Penguin Classics total to date. On the one hand I’m thinking ‘shucks’, on the other hand I’ve read a truly great book.

Brownbear is away

2010-07-10T12:20:00.002+01:00

The next post will be on 25th July 2010

Aspects of The Novel - E M Forster (86/1400)

2010-06-27T23:44:00.002+01:00

Summary
7/10

This is a book that is itself about reading and reviewing novels, and I only wish I could write as clearly and sensibly as Forster

Review
E M Forster is one of the genius Edwardian writers. He was homosexual in an era when such relationships were near impossible and his writing displays all the intensity and agony of his situation, here, in a brilliant series of essays, he deconstructs the novel into six parts:

The Story
People
The Plot
Fantasy
Prophecy
Pattern & Rhythm

Approximately these are layers of attainment for any book, so a simple story that keeps the reader involved is the minimum necessary, whilst some interesting characters represent the next level up and so on. Prophecy, Pattern and Rhythm are exotic concepts that even Forster’s down-to-earth approach can’t quite work out but which are clearly the difference between a book that is workmanlike and one that is a work of art – at least as far as he is concerned.

To illustrate his thinking, he imagines all the great authors of the world are gathered in one room at one time, so that it is not necessary to think about when something was written or what came before it, but only to look for common threads between writers, whenever they worked. This is a lovely way to think about books and gives Forster huge freedom to roam the world of literature for illustrations in support of his views. He zooms in on few favourite books from across the centuries – Moby Dick, Emma, Moll Flanders and so on – with extensive side-by-side comparisons that illustrate his six points. He focuses mainly on English writers but considers Russia to have provided the truly great books and, except for America, he is almost completely silent about the rest of the world

This collection, originally delivered as the Clark Lectures within a short period in 1927, exactly describes Forster as a person even if it doesn’t exactly describe the Novel. It is delivered in a very accessible and fluid style and he disguises some quite strident views about good and bad writing within a very intelligible formula. If you think Forster is a lightweight comic author then you will hate this work. On the other hand , if you believe that Forster was a subtle genius who chose to wear his learning lightly, then you will very much appreciate it. These essays are nearly 100 years old and so his six points have been fantastically twisted, subverted, reversed, upended and mirrored in cinema, TV and literature since. But, as a starting point for enjoying the deconstruction of the novel this is a wonderful and easily understood jumping off point.

The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad (85/1400)

2010-06-20T22:14:00.002+01:00

Summary

8/10

A deconstruction of the spy genre that looks behind the action to the motives, thoughts and feelings of those involved. Like watching a thriller in slo-mo from inside, this will either fascinate and excite you or leave you cold.

Published 1907

Review
If most modern thrillers are like a boxing glove, showing you the force and direction, sometimes misdirection, of the punch, then this book is the inside of that glove – giving all the thoughts, feelings, assumptions and life choices that went into the punch. It’s an exquisite book that combines the pulse of a good plot with a convincing understanding of what makes people tick.

Mr Verloc is a lazy spy in the pay of the French government in late 19th Century London. His job is to report on anarchists and revolutionaries as the tide of change and worker’s rights sweeps across Europe. England’s tolerant attitudes don’t suit Paris and so Verloc is asked to concoct a bombing atrocity in order to stiffen the backbone of the British Government.

So far so good, but this novel is only superficially, if stylishly, concerned with geopolitics. Conrad’s real concern is driving deep into the motives and methods of Mr and Mrs Verloc and what lies behind their relationship and indeed, behind the mechanics of each of the relationships that is exposed in this novel. It transpires that Mrs Verloc has married to secure the future of her sub-normal brother Stevie, who is the real love in her life. So that in fact, whilst Mr Verloc appears to be the secretive one, his motives are transparent – money – whilst those of Mrs Verloc are deeply under cover, until Stevie is killed in the bombing, when the real action starts. Around all of this are a group of policemen, politicians and anarchists, living in each other’s pockets and both needing and loathing each other.

Each encounter is played both straight, as a means of moving the plot forward, and diagnostically, as a forensic examination of the motives and objects of each participant. The action moves ahead relentlessly but the pace is like a stopped clock with every look, remark and thought chewed over to extract flavour from it. It’s the same technique as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary but whereas that novel seems to stretch on into infinity, here the need to move the action on through the bombing to the police investigation brings tension to the story that makes the slow pacing work with the action not against it.

All that said, this was not a great commercial success on publication, with only a few thousand copies being sold. And anyone being misled by the title to expect a spy adventure story will be very disappointed. If however you want a thriller where the action is slowed down so that why things happen is as clear as what happens, you will greatly enjoy this book.

Maxims and reflections - Johanne Wolfgang Von Goethe (84/1400)

2010-06-13T20:23:00.004+01:00

Summary
5/10
Philosophical tidbits, pithy thoughts and great one-liners give a fractured insight into Goethe’s 19th century world and his personal strengths and limitations. More for dipping into than reading en-bloc.

Published 1827

Review
Goethe had a habit of scribbling down his thoughts whenever they came to him and on whatever scraps of paper fell to hand. This then is the complete collection of those jottings, comprising 1,413 little fragments of thought. As an experiment I spent the couple of days whilst I was reading this volume trying to come up with a maxim or reflection of my own, and whilst I was able to jot down a few, I don’t think anyone would gain great insight from them.

Perhaps practice is needed, and even Goethe didn’t get it right all the time. There are some clangers and duds in this collection as well as many thoughts and ideas that do the great man no credit at all. However you do get a sense of how his mind worked and how he saw the universe. He was, for example, anti the scientific method believing instead that common sense and logical argument could prove the nature of the world; he thought that poetry was nearer a religious experience than an art and that the function of painting and sculpture – the plastic arts as he called them – was to describe nature. He covers a lot of ground here, art, science, ancient philosophers, modern manners, geology, physics, politics and more all condensed into pithy observations or comments mostly of only a very few lines.

I don’t really recommend reading this from cover to cover as it becomes very hard to focus properly on each thought. It’s more a book for dipping into and highlighting thoughts and ideas that strike you as interesting or relevant to today’s world – many are spot on and one or two reminded me very much of people I know or situations I have been in. There isn’t an easy overarching philosophy here, unlike, say Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations but Goethe is an interesting conversationalist and as he says himself makes for an interesting time even when he knows what he is saying is not true.

The Story of My Life - Ciacomo Casanova (83/1400)

2010-06-06T22:47:00.004+01:00

Summary
7/10
An engaging and delightfully written account of a well lived life in 18th century Europe, full of amazing adventures and encounters including many of a sexual nature. Exotic rather than erotic but suffering from being edited highlights and therefore disjointed.

Published 1822

Review
Born the son of actors in Venice in 1725 and destined to become a priest, Casanova managed to insert himself into European society at the very highest level – meeting with the Kings of Prussia, England and Poland and with the Empress of Russia - Catherine the Great, and conversing with Voltaire and other great philosophical and artistic figures. At the same time he was a gambler, spy, diplomat, shyster, benefactor, bankrupt, convict, escapologist, duelist and most famously of all, a womanizer.

He is a fantastically interesting person and writes superbly with the most amazing memory for interesting detail. There is obviously something about him that draws people in and he mixes effortlessly with young and old, rich and poor. Anecodotes and incidents cling to him almost daily and he seeks out new and dangerous experiences and relationships like a hungry wolf. His life is a brilliant performance and probably unique in having been captured on paper for posterity. Of course this is a one sided account and it is clear from the fact that he constantly loses friends and is forced to move from country to country - even imprisoned in Venice and Spain - that there is a dark side to his character, which he chooses to avoid discussing. He is frank enough to admit that he should not have been rude about Voltaire in writing nor about some of his other friends, but this confession comes too late to save those relationships.

It’s a sexy book, he writes very frankly about his various liasons, making no pretence that he was seeking anything except a temporary love affair but also demonstrating that he was a thoughtful and artistic lover in the broadest sense of the word. He was passionate and loyal within the framework that he was not looking for long-term relationships and there seems to have been a societal acceptance that taking a lover was the done thing, at least in certain circles.

Where this book falls down is that it is only the highlights from 12 volumes of autobiography left behind by Casanova. Inevitably then the cast of characters is huge and the story disjointed so that, whilst each exploit is entertaining, they are stand alone episodes rather than the narrative and explanation for a life. At the end of the day it’s hard to know what Casanova was for. He was clearly an entertaining, well-educated and intelligent man but one who failed to put his hand to anything or to leave a mark in politics, science, philosophy or art. Of course his name today is more famous than many who did apply themselves in those fields, so perhaps he has the last laugh.

Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë (82/1400)

2010-05-30T21:54:00.009+01:00

Summary
3/10
This a book that you will either love or hate as people’s lives are destroyed by one man’s great passion. A grim and dark story that depends on the reader believing in redemption, such that an evil man can truly love another unlovely human being, otherwise you will care very little about this work.

Published 1846

Review
Wuthering Heights is said by many to be one of the greatest works in the English language and especially praised for being a first novel. Indeed, this is Emily Brontë’s only novel – she died of tuberculosis before she was able to write a second.

Catherine is the spoilt and arrogant daughter of Mr Earnshaw - a yeoman farmer living on the bleak moorland farm known as Wuthering Heights. Mr Earnshaw finds Heathcliff as an abandoned baby and brings him into his family. It’s a disastrous decision, as Heathcliff is pure poison – fierce and cruel – who sets out to destroy the people around him in revenge for the rough treatment he receives from Catherine’s brother, Hindley.

Heathcliff and Catherine fall in love, and whether or not you think this book is a great work hangs on the credibility of this relationship. Heathcliff has no redeeming features. He is charmless, ruthless, guileful, a bully, physically abusive, godless and immoral. She is spiteful, shallow and capricious. Their great love is undermined by Catherine’s marriage to Edgar Linton, by which she gains social advancement, and by Heathcliff running away for several years to make his fortune. It is mechanically necessary for the plot that Heathcliff should return wealthy and find that Catherine is married and pregnant since this loads the bases for Heathcliff to revenge himself first on Hindley and then on Edgar, which he does ruthlessly and effectively. Both Catherine’s marriage and Heathcliff’s removal can be argued to be sensible things to have done, but this then looks like a practical kind of love affair rather than a romance so powerful everyone else’s lives must be ruined because of it.

None of the characters in this story are likeable, and the emphasis is on their follies, stupidities, weaknesses, manipulations, stubbornness, pride and temper. If they have any good points Brontë quickly covers them over. It’s impossible to know why Catherine loves Heathcliff or vice-versa since only the vilest aspects of their characters are shown to the reader. The effect of this will either be to create a black and exotic – Gothic – mood in the reader, heightened by the bleakness of the moorland setting, or to make him ask why he should care about anything or anyone in this work. Once Heathcliff has achieved his objectives, the plot has nowhere to go – he has won too comprehensive a victory. Heathcliff wills his own death in order to be with his Catherine while young Catherine falls in love with her cousin Hareton, whom she debrutalises after his treatment by Heathcliff. You can either see this as the most romantic of endings or a bit of a cop out.

There are two stylistic aspects of the book that I do not care for. One is to use two different narrators to tell the story rather that the God narrator device that modern authors use. This makes it necessary to have long winded explanations as to why each narrator is present at the relevant scene. Even in 1846 this literary device was past its sell by date. Secondly, there is a strong focus on description rather than action so that a lot of the reader’s time is spent learning about the look of things at the expense of - rather than as a complement to - the story. Indeed I suspect the success of this book has infected this style into a great deal of British literature, which is the worse for it. If I compare Brontë with Balzac or Zola, for example, their use of description is hardly noticeable because it always feels like a natural part of the action.

It is an innovation to write a love story about unlovely people and this book does have a wild and dangerous atmosphere that makes it distinctive. However I found it mechanically tiresome and could never believe in the central romance and so found it hard to be interested in this unlikeable crew.

Brownbear is away

2010-05-20T13:13:00.000+01:00

Apologies - am out of reach of a computer for the time being - other than this one! Normal service will resume on my return.

The Oresteia - Aeschylus (81/1400)

2010-05-09T21:10:00.005+01:00

Summary
A unique three-act play from Ancient Greece dealing with revenge and justice; It’s a little difficult to see where the play is going until the third act when the themes are played out in an interesting way. A pretty good knowledge of poetry, Ancient cultures and mythology are needed to get the best out of this.

Written approx 525 BC
5/10

Review
Of the seventy plays written by Aeschylus only seven survive and parts of these have been pieced together from references in other works. The Oresteia is even more of a rarity since it is the only trilogy that survives from Ancient Greek drama and those in the know regard it as a masterpiece. I doubt very much if the casual reader would agree with such an analysis, and a considerable amount of learning and knowledge about Ancient Greek mythology, rituals, customs and poetry is needed to really appreciate this work. There is however an interesting discussion about justice at the core of the book that shows how Athens develops a system of law to replace the ancient justice of the Furies.

The plot is fairly straightforward and pretty easy to follow. Agamemnon, having led the Greeks to victory over the Trojans, returns home where his wife Clytaemnestra murders him in revenge for the death of her daughter Iphigeneia. Clytaemnestra now marries Agamemnon’s cousin, Aegisthus but in the second act they are both murdered by her son, Orestes, who has returned from exile. Finally in the third act Orsetes is put on trial for killing his own mother. Athena, the Goddess of wisdom, oversees the trial and through this evolves a new system of trial by jury rather than the revenge of the Furies previously invoked for such crimes.

For the most part the language is kept simple and the actions and motivations of the parties are clear to a modern reader but a lot of the texture is lost, and some enjoyment of the piece, if the reader doesn’t have a reasonable knowledge of mythology and ancient customs and a very good understanding of poetic rhyme is needed to appreciate the beat and syntax of the poetic form of the play.

The notes at the back are not bad but it’s frustrating to have to keep flicking back and forth and these would have been better alongside the text. There is a very academic essay about the play at the front that I found very hard going and is best skipped until after reading the text itself.

The Beast Within - Emile Zola (80/1400)

2010-05-01T20:55:00.003+01:00

Summary
A rollicking, easy-reading, blockbuster set amongst France’s newly developing railway industry. As well as being a pacy crime novel and a highly charged love story it’s also an exploration of how new technology impacts on society and individuals . This is a work full of action, love, hate, fear, cunning and idiocy and I loved it.

9/10
Published 1890

Review
The Beast Within is a near perfect blockbuster, combining clear and lucid writing with driving action in an exciting story. Zola’s characters are interesting, complex, human and understandable if often revolting. To cap it all, Zola has things to say about the impact of technology on society and individuals, the nature of psychopaths and the motives for murder. It’s a great page turning mixture.

Jaques Lantier (who is the brother of Etienne Lantier, the Hero of Zola’s Germinal – 77/1400) is a handsome express locomotive driver on the Le Harve – Paris run. Rejecting his old childhood sweetheart, Flora, he takes Séverine Roubard as his lover, in the knowledge that she and her husband have murdered Grandmorin, a director of the railway company, who had previously sexually assaulted Séverine. Jacques keeps their secret but harbours one of his own, that he has a psychopathic desire to murder women. Flora meanwhile plots her revenge on Jacques and his lover whilst her stepfather is slowly administering rat poison to her mother.

All-in-all then, a lot of people in this book are thinking about or committing murder and this allows Zola to work his way very deftly through some of their various motives and, more interestingly, their states of mind before, during and after the act. The various crimes don’t go undetected and the law is shown as being prey to the requirements of politics, business, careers and society. So that evidence is suppressed or ignored to get the right outcome. This is all too believable and closely mirrors miscarriages of justice that occur in our own time.

As with Germinal, Zola uses the world of new technology - in Germinal the mining industry, and here steam trains - as a relevant and useful background to the story. The animal-like characteristics of the trains echo the feelings of the characters, whilst the technology itself is clearly dangerous and exciting. The railway also dislocates people by moving them rapidly from place to place and creates monotonous dehumanizing jobs for the line workers. There are many minor characters involved with the railway and each has their own little story of petty jealously and rage. Put together, this creates an edginess that creates possibilities and sub narratives. Zola asks the reader to think about what technology does to people’s lives and whether it is nature or the railway that has created the murderers.

Best of all this is a right rattling read and it’s possible simply to enjoy the story and want to learn what happens next. Zola keeps the action and sub plots flowing and has several terrific action set pieces as well as moments of sexual passion and personal rage. In amongst all this there is tenderness and affection, human frailty, manipulation and emotional intelligence. This is a very smart book and I recommend it.

The Girls of Slender Means - Muriel Spark (79/1400)

2010-04-26T21:18:00.005+01:00

Summary
As the Second World War come to an end a group of single girls find love and tragedy in a beautifully written, warm, funny and sad look at the dying days of Britain’s glory. A classic piece of storytelling.
9/10

Published 1963

Review
This slim volume has it all – great and thoughtful writing, superb characterisation, a good story, wonderful atmosphere, humour, tragedy and pace. Spark has fitted everything into her 142 pages that Dickens might take four or five times that to cover.

Set in London towards the end of World War 2, the Girls of the title are well bred ladies living in the oddly named May of Teck, which is a boarding house for genteel, hard up, single girls although a few middle aged spinsters also still live there. The girls’ main occupation is men and they fall in and out of love as various young boys pass through their lives and back into the war. One such is Nicholas Farringdon, a would-be poet, who we know at the start of the story is going to die.

The plot revolves around Farringdon’s interaction with three of the girls, Jane Wright who works for the publishing house that Nicholas hopes will take up his poems, Selina Redwood who is the most beautiful and manipulative of the girls, and Joanna Childe the daughter of a church minister who teaches elocution through poetry and psalms to the other girls.

A surprise love story evolves as Farringdon spends the summer sleeping with Selina on the roof of the May Teck club where they are safe from prying eyes - because only the very slimmest girls can wriggle through the window onto the roof (hence the double meaning of the title). There is a mad swirl around them as the war ends and people try to find stability in their lives. The spinsters worry that there is a UXB in the garden, the girls swap their Schiaparelli taffeta evening dress backwards and forwards to social events, there are parties and boys and Joanna’s poetry as well as side plots about Jane’s boss, Selina’s other boyfriend and so on. It’s a delightful comedic mix but as tragedy erupts the girls' lives are changed forever and the world of the May Teck Club comes to an end – reflecting back the demise and changes that the war has made on Britain and the Edwardian way of life.

This is written with great finesse and empathy for the girls and their situation. It’s a shame it is so short but that is a characteristic of all Muriel Spark’s books -and I shall now be seeking them out.

The Black Sheep - Honore de Balzac (78/1400)

2010-04-18T23:38:00.002+01:00

Summary
A wastrel and cad runs rings around his decent relatives to seize the family fortune and rise into high society. An all too true study in the merits of being bad. Great characterisation and human material but not as neatly engineered in plot terms as it could be.

7/10
Published 1842

Review
We all know people who behave badly but seem to get away with it, whilst your own decent behavior passes by unnoticed. It's common in the workplace and perhaps even more so amongst families where Balzac sets his Black Sheep. Philippe and Jospeh Bridau are brothers where Philippe is a dreadful and worthless cad whilst Joseph is a talented but struggling artist who loves their impoverished mother, Agathe.

At first it looks as if Philippe is going to blow himself up emotionally as he destroys his glittering army career and descends into gambling and drink. But when he ruins his own family they are forced to try to ask for help from Agathe's estranged brother, Rouget who is in the sinister grip of his maid Flore and her lover Max. Joseph and Agathe are easily outwitted by this pair of rascals but Philippe sees them off and grabs old Rouget's fortune. He has saved the family - or has he?

This is the story of a thorough bad'un and how his family continue to see good in him despite all the evidence. It's very convincing and, without wanting to spoil the ending, so is the denouement. As ever with Balzac he creates a world of energy and events driving interesting characters not only to move the plot forward but also to explore real aspects of human character - whether it is the awfulness of Philippe, the other worldliness of Joseph or the pathetic doting of Agathe. The minor characters all give the reader a good run for his or her money.

The book slightly disintegrates as it moves from Paris to the provinces, when Balzac has to give a long explanation of Rouget's set up and the pace and action is lost and the proliferation of minor characters is somewhat confusing. Nonetheless it's an enjoyable exploration of how bad men prosper by the indulgence of the rest of us.

Germinal - Emile Zola (77/1400)

2010-04-11T09:00:00.000+01:00

Summary
Great stuff. A powerful and distressing story dealing with the awful lives of a group of coal miners in late 19th century France, and the disasters that lead on from their decision to strike for more pay. Zola manages to combine a pulsing story line with social, political and economic commentary and to keep the reader completely involved in the lives of his giant cast of characters. Brilliant.
9/10
Published 1885

Review
Five hundred pages about a fictional French miner’s strike in 1885 doesn’t sound too promising as entertainment, especially when the miners aren’t even going to win their battle with the bosses. But this is a gripping and breathtaking story drawing in the lives of ordinary mine workers, their immediate bosses, global capitalism, the rise of socialist and anarchist politics, new science and covering the unbelievable engineering mechanics of the workings of a mine. It’s a harrowing tale of grinding poverty and exploitation but there is also tremendous camaraderie, courage, love, tenderness, rage and sadness here, all-in-all a heady mixture.

Zola, like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, was a journalist and so he knows how to tell a social story without making it into a dull documentary. He starts slowly and on a small scale. A solitary man – Étienne Lantier, an unemployed engineer with a hereditary drinking problem, approaches the massive Le Voreux coal mine in Northern France. There is a deep recession on and jobs are scarce but he has the good fortune to be taken on as a miner in a team led by Maheu, an experienced and respected worker, and including his daughter Catherine, whom Étienne is drawn to. Étienne falls in with the hard working Maheu family and becomes their lodger. Times are tough and they are struggling to make ends meet and so, when the mining company tries to cut the worker’s pay, Étienne organises a strike with disastrous consequences for the workers, the company, management and the mine itself.

There is a huge cast of characters, each illustrating a different aspect of life in the mining town. Zola gets right under the skin of the hopeless and grinding lives of the workers who are paid just enough to keep body and soul together, but he also shows the lives and motives of the Bourgeois, M. Hennebeau the mine director and his cuckolding but courageous nephew, Négrel, the Grégoires who live off their huge dividends from the mine, and Deneulin, owner of a rival mine who is to be bankrupted by the strike. Zola manages to cover the economics and politics very deftly and retain his focus on the human story of his various characters and the impact of the strike on them. There is tremendous violence in this book, corporate, institutional, personal, deliberate and casual but there is also a little tenderness, brotherhood, community and family.

The introduction is well worth reading to understand some of the deeper themes and how Zola uses the imagery of the mine, the animals working in it, the landscape and his characters to echo and amplify his social and political ideas. It’s very neatly done.

This book had a tremendous impact in its day. 50,000 mineworkers followed Zola’s coffin at his funeral chanting ‘Germinal’ as a tribute (the title is one of the days of the week in the revolutionary French calendar) and even today it is powerful stuff. The only aspect I have some difficulty with is that the workers are portrayed as constantly having casual sex with each other, even as children. Roger Pearson’s introduction says that there is no contemporary evidence for this and I haven’t read similar things in other books about mining communities, such as D H Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. If this part of the book is exaggerated or untrue then it casts doubt on the rest but I haven’t enough knowledge of the period to draw a conclusion.

Like Balzac, Zola wrote a series of books that vaguely interlink showing the state of France in his day. So there is another volume, La Bête Humaine, about Etienne’s brother who is a pathological killer, and a third, L’Assommoir, about his mother who is a laundry woman in Paris. On this form I shall certainly be seeking them both out.

Macbeth - William Shakespeare (76/1400)

2010-04-03T09:08:00.002+01:00

Summary
Witches, ghosts, power politics and foul deeds are all here in a terrific study of greed for, and abuse of, power. Probably one of the easier Shakespeare plays to get to grips with.

8/10
Written 1603

Review
This is the third Shakespeare play that I have undertaken as part of this Penguin Classics read-a-thon, but this time I saw the play performed prior to reading the text which makes it easy to recall how the actors delivered the lines and speeches from the previous night. This means that following along with the text and in particular the more difficult passages is made hugely simpler, since in your head you can recall how a first class actor delivered the lines. It becomes possible to see parts of the work that were cut in the performance which you may have preferred left in, and to look at passages or encounters where you would have given a different emphasis or interpretation to the lines. In short the whole reading experience comes alive.

Briefly the play is set in 14th Century Scotland at a time of civil war. Duncan holds the throne supported by Macbeth, Banquo and McDuff but opposed by the Thane of Cawdor and a force of mercenary Norwegians. Duncan's forces win the battle.

Leaving the battlefield, Banquo and Macbeth come across three witches or fiends who predict that Macbeth will become Thane of Cawdor and then king of Scotland and that Banquo’s heirs will become kings but not Banquo himself. The two men don't know what to make of this and are astonished later when they arrive at Duncan’s camp to find that Cawdor has been executed and his title bestowed on Macbeth. Almost immediately Macbeth starts to plot as to how to become king. His wife suggests that they murder Duncan who comes to stay that night, and this they do, pinning the blame on Duncan's two sons and his bodyguards.

Now starts some glorious plotting and counterplotting. Macbeth realizes that he must kill Banquo and his son in order to thwart the predictions of the witches but Banquo’s son escapes thus leaving open the possibility that Banquo's line will occupy the throne.

Macbeth’s power base starts to unravel, first Banquo's ghost appears to Macbeth and then McDuff flees to England to join up with Duncan's son Malcolm. As a result Macbeth has Macduff's family murdered causing support for Macbeth in Scotland to fade. He seeks out the witches again who tell him that his kingdom is safe until Birnam wood moves to Dunsinane and moreover that man born of woman can't kill him.

Lady Macbeth begins to descend into madness brought about by the guilt of the murders of Duncan and Banquo. As Malcolm's army reaches Birnam Wood, she kills herself. The invading army uproots the wood as a disguise and marches on Macbeth's castle at Dunsinane. With his support ebbing away he goes onto the field of battle and is killed by MacDuff, who was born by C-Section and therefore not born of woman.

There is a lot to enjoy, The witches and ghosts are suitably dreadful and spooky, but more than this they spin their predictions to sound like one thing and mean another so that they reflect power politics back on the politicians. The lust for high office of the various parties, including those opposed to Macbeth, is most enjoyable, Banquo and Macduff are just as keen on advancement as Macbeth and Banquo relishes the idea that his children will come to rule.

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are sophisticated operators. He weighs up the pros and cons of Duncan's murder and she sees the need to seize the chance whilst Duncan is their guest. Despite moments of horror and remorse at having killed Macbeth understands that he must do what it takes to consolidate power, whilst her madness is subtle - up and down emotionally - as a real madwoman would be.

Parts of the play are thought to be missing as it is much shorter than most of Shakespeare plays. In particular I thought that perhaps Duncan's sons had been plotting the old king's death and hence the ease with which Macbeth pins the blame on them. The irony would be of course that Macbeth could have had the throne without the need for murder.

This is an enjoyable and thought provoking read, but as I have said before best viewed through the mind and interpretation of great actors before being read on the page.

Sons and Lovers, D H Lawrence (75/1400)

2010-03-28T21:54:00.003+01:00

Summary
7/10
Extremely muscular writing uncovers deep emotions in a Nottinghamshire mining community, but Lawrence’s focus on cause and effect comes at the expense of plot and story.

Published 1913

Review
If you draw a line from Jane Austin's controlled thought experiments with a set of characters through E M Forster's political and social commentary using the exploration of self,then you arrive at D H Lawrence’s Son’s and Lovers – an experiment in character explored through politics and societal arrangements. So that Lawrence has much less plot and form but more intensity of emotion and sense of reality. Which you prefer is an entirely personal choice.

Sons and Lovers is a semi autobiographical love triangle, Paul Morel loves his mother, married into the hard edged world of Nottinghamshire coal mining, but as he moves into adulthood he explores his relationships with other women, the intense and compassionate Miriam and the sexual but aloof married woman Clara. Paul is a sensitive artist, a fey boy in a man’s world and the book explores his struggle to find himself between his women.

There is very good writing in this work, and Lawrence really knows his world and these characters, what things look like, how people feel, what they are thinking come across as totally accurate. Paul’s struggle to become a man and love a woman other than his mother is evoked in great and convincing detail as is Paul’s Nottingham and the mining community where he is born. As a study of the limitations of human ambition and the caprice of the heart this is very fine. The emotional ride of the main characters is every bit as satisfying as Jane Austin but much more subtle.

Less successful is the absence of a driving plot line. The first half of the book is back story for Paul. So we get to see his mother’s marriage, the battering of her existence, the way that mining turns his father into a brute, the death of his successful brother and so on. The second half concerns Paul and his three women and now the relationship between his mother and father falls away to be replaced by Paul’s inability to love anyone except mum, and maybe himself. In all of this tone and atmosphere take the place of plot so that the reader is happy to enjoy the ride even though there is no itineraray for the route.

If you are happy to enjoy good writing alone then this is for you. If you would also like some structure and greater plot around your characters then Austin or Forster might be better choices.

Cousin Phillis - Elisabeth Gaskell (74/1400)

2010-03-21T17:19:00.000Z

Summary
7/10
A novella dealing with the impact of change as the railway comes through rural England. The road to hell is paved with good intentions as the young Paul Manning raises the hopes of his cousin Phillis that she is to be married only to find that he and she are mistaken. Elegant, subtle and poignant but somewhat lightweight.

Review
A short novella exploring how change disrupts lives. Paul Manning is a 19 year old apprecntice railway engineer under the tutorage of the widely traveled and worldly Holdsworth. As the line they are building passes close by the village of Heathbridge, Paul goes to visit his 17 year old cousin Phillis Holman, who is the daughter of Ebenezer, a non-conformist minister cum farmer.

Paul is enchanted with the Holman’s simple and wholesome way of life and a great friendship blossoms between Paul and the Holman family. They are isolated from the world but the Minister and Phillis are keen scholars and eager to find out about new developments and to learn new things. To their great delight Paul introduces them to his father, who is a famous engineer and to Holdsworth, who’s stories and knowledge from around the world astonish them.

This then is the crux of the story as the new world of engineering and railways meets the traditional English rural way of life and it’s respect for godliness. The new world ends up smashing the old.

Phillis falls in love with Holdworth who in turn loves her and tells Paul he intends to marry her. But before he mentions anything to her, he called away to Canada for two years to work on a line there. Phillis is devastated but Paul comforts her by telling of Holdsworths love. But Holdsworth isn’t constant and news arrives of his marriage to a Canadian girl.

Now the world of the Holman’s is turned upside down and Paul is forced to confess to the minister what he has done – the rash act of a young man. Nothing in any of their worlds will be the same again.

And there the story ends – slightly surprisingly since everything is set up for a further round of developments in relationships had Holdsworth returned with his bride. It’s not quite clear whether this was as far as Gatskell thought she could take the story or whether it was always intended to go no further. It’s a well told tale and the spirit of the times is beautifully evoked but the love affair at the heart of the story is necessarily rather one sided so that Phillis’s anguish is rooted in a girlish hope rather than a grand passion. There are some great and interesting characters here, especially the minister, and it’s a shame really that Gatskell didn’t want to play with them a bit more.

Selected Poems - Alfred Lord Tennyson (73/1400)

2010-03-14T08:28:00.002Z

Summary
5/10
Veering between ghastly and very good, Tennyson never quite makes it to sublime. A skilled and rhythmic wordsmith who perhaps tries a little too hard and in doing so exchanges emotional resonance for intellectual precision.

Published 1820 -1892

Review
"Don't give me good generals, give me lucky generals," said Napoleon and maybe the same is true of poets. Tennyson had his share of luck, not least being the last man standing amongst the English Romantic poets –Coleridge, Shelly, Byron and Keats were all dead by 1842 when Tennyson published Poems, the collection of work that made his name, and Wordsworth was an old man of 72. So Tennyson filled a market gap with his somewhat sentimental and dreamy approach. At Wordsworth’s death in 1850 the role of Poet Laureate (Britain’s official poet in residence) became vacant and Wordsworth himself had recommended the 41 year-old Tennyson to succeed him. Queen Victoria’s first choice candidate was the elderly Samuel Rogers but when he turned the job down, and with the Brownings in self-exile in Italy, Tennyson gained the role - using it successfully as a platform for self-promotion. He became (it is said) Victoria’s favourite and in 1883 was granted the high honour of a Barony. He died a very old man of 83, a revered part of Victorian culture, and was buried in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner.

For all his contemporary success however, I think it’s impossible not to admit that Tennyson’s output is a bit mixed – perhaps hardly surprising over such a long career. There are some absolute clangers, like Ode on the Death of The Duke of Wellington, which he felt duty bound to produce given his official role. Then there is the highly romantic part of his output such as the Lady of Shallot and the Idylls of the Kings, which are the works that may be familiar from school. I recall my class reading Shallot aloud on a field trip to Tennyson’s house at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. These works are the poetic equivalent of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and many people are huge fans of such art, although for my taste it is too sugary.

The more serious part of Tennyson’s output has two big components (in the sense of length) - In Memorandum, which took seventeen years to write, and Maud.

In Memorandum takes up over 100 pages – a third – of this edition and comprises 131 individual poems of various lengths but all written in the form ABBA (iambic tetrameter quatrains – so there!). The inspiration for these poems was the sudden death of Tennyson’s best friend and prospective brother in law, Arthur Hallam, and the poems were written as a reflection on that friendship and loss. Tennyson weaves in bigger themes such as the meaning of existence, life after death and the nature of God. This last is mixed in with thoughts on some of the new Victorian science (such as fossil records and geology) that was questioning the traditional Bible view of creation. Since the poems were not originally written to be assembled into a whole, they don’t flow from one thought to the next making it hard work for the reader. The experience is somewhat like being with an inconsolable, grieving friend. Their loss is very personal, their thoughts are scattered and nothing you say is going to make any difference. Whether you enjoy In Memorandum depends, I think, on how much empathy you would have for such a friend – Victoria apparently found this poem a great comfort after the death of her husband, Albert.

Maud is wholly different. Described as a monodrama, this is the story of the Narrator and Maud whose fathers agree at their births that they should be married. The plan goes wrong when the fathers quarrel but the Narrator and Maud still have feelings for each other and so the plot develops. Because this is a story it’s a much easier read than In Memorandum and as a consequence Tennyson’s ideas and phrasing fall more naturally to the reader.

For my money, Tennyson had a very high degree of competence generally falling short of real genius. He is very strong on rhythm and his frequent use of blank verse is effective in permitting him to get his thoughts across without letting the need for a rhyme tangle the sentence or line. There are plenty of neat expressions and interesting turns of phrase but he doesn’t always nail it, so that much of the time the reader is left with a feeling that this is an intellectual not emotional exercise. It’s rather like walking round a 19th century art gallery where it’s clear that the artists can convincingly put paint on canvas but the pictures are not immediately revealing or appealing to a modern audience. As with art galleries, the trick is not to try to take in too much at once, and to avoid the dross. An occasional dipping in to Tennyson’s better parts will give long-term rewards for the reader.

The Complete Essays/ The Essays - A Selection - Michel de Montaigne (71/1400 and 72/1400)

2010-03-07T20:53:00.001Z

Summary
7/10
Based on Montaigne’s own life, observations and his readings of the Classics, this is a massive philosophical ramble covering every subject under the sun. Parts of it are great fun and he makes some interesting points but take the shorter volume if you want to stay with it.

Published 1580 - 1592

Review
This book comes in two flavours, ‘The Complete Essays’ at 1,269 pages and ‘The Essays, A selection,’ which is a mere 480 pages. You need to be very enthusiastic to tackle the longer work and the flavour and guts of Montaigne is readily obtainable from the shorter volume.

Written over a twenty-year period between 1572 and 1592, the Essays are a lopping ramble covering Montaigne’s opinions on a vast range of subjects. Chapter headings include ‘On the resemblance of children to their fathers’, ‘On the art of conversation,’ ‘Observations on Julius Caesar’s methods of waging war,’ ‘On sadness,’ ‘On liars,’ ‘On vanity’ and so on. Montaigne happily ignores the chapter heading and allows one idea to lead to another until finally coming back to his point. He had been brought up with Latin as his first language and freely quotes from the classics and antiquity but his wonky memory frequently lets him down so that he mis-quotes and mis-recalls. Nonetheless his use of examples from history to make his points is thrilling against the pedestrian nature of modern soft philosophy books.

Montaigne is an attractive character. He tries not to be vain or arrogant, recognizes his faults of poor memory, unsociability and disinterest in the ordinary run of life. He has retired from the French court to his estates in provincial Gascony in order to write these essays and seems surprised when they are a publishing hit. Not least because he talks mainly about himself, and this would have been unusual at the time. He is an educated and thoughtful man but with a streak of fun and sense of the absurd so that his writing is generally light and easy to read. There is much to be enjoyed here and many of his thoughts and observations are worth spending a moment or two to reflect on.

However, the book is not without several flaws. First, whilst human nature has not altered so much down the centuries, parts of this book are antique and of historical interest only – how to bring up children, for example, is a hoot. Secondly, Montaigne flip-flops around issues so that on the one hand he believes this but on the other hand something else. Partly this was to avoid church censorsorship but largely I felt it reflects a not very decisive mind. Finally, his rambling stops being amusing after a while and instead turns wearisome by the end.

This is not ideal as a book to read cover to cover. It’s probably more fun to dip into at random from time-to-time and take from it what you can. To have 1,269 pages of mixed philosophy winking at you every evening can become a bit of a drag and I certainly enjoyed the first half far more than the second.

Montaigne was an inspiration for a number of other philosophers so worth a go if you are interested in that art. He is also deeply routed in French culture, so it’s quite a practical thing for Francophiles.

Complete Short Fiction - Oscar Wilde (70/1400)

2010-02-28T09:33:00.002Z

Summary
6/10
Short stories written as Wilde tries to become a paid writer, it’s a bit like hearing the Beatles' Cavern tapes; there is a touch of something here but not yet at the top of the game. Some great one-liners and throwaway ideas but only the Happy Prince can be said to be a Masterpiece.

Review
There is one really great piece of work in this collection, which is the Happy Prince; a story I have read many times to my children and which still makes me blub at the end - an absolute classic. The rest are an artist trying to find a voice and whilst it’s all good writing, and individual phrases and ideas quite striking, much of it doesn’t quite come off. I found myself agreeing with the contemporary rejection slip quoted in the introduction that this is good and respectable, pretty and bright but lacking imaginative brilliance. Of course, it’s easier looking back to see the signs of what was to come but these stories are patchy.

The tales are a peculiar mixture of fairy and ghost stories, literary detection, comedies and half poems. There are morality tales as well as straightforward episodes and this potpourri detracts from any feeling of a unified body of work, which of course is right. They are assembled from pieces Wilde managed to get published in various magazines and represent his experimentation to find a commercial formula. One of the interesting things are various jokes and observations his characters make that get recycled into his later more successful works. Stock characters such as Lady Windermere first make an appearance here.

Ian Small in his introduction points out that many of the stories are traditional in format but have a reversal of the expected ending or are in other ways subversive and that there may be sub texts that follow Wilde's own social, sexual and religious beliefs. It’s difficult to say whether Wilde introduced such themes deliberately and subversively, subconsciously - because how he felt inevitably came out in his writing - or commercially, since to sell a story it must contain something new and provoking; maybe a bit of all three.

They are certainly no hardship to read and I jotted down quite a lot of good one-line ideas and juxtapositions for future use (watch this space). The best reason to read these stories is see close up a part of one author’s journey from good to greatness.

The Moon and Sixpence - W Somerset Maughan (69/1400)

2010-02-21T22:17:00.003Z

Summary
5/10
An interesting idea, what makes great art? Based on the true and slightly awful story of Paul Gauguin’s life. Elegantly written, but let down by Edwardian stiffness and an inability to describe art in emotional rather than intellectual terms.

Review
This is based on the true story of the French artist Paul Gauguin, who was a stockbroker until he was in his forties and then struck out on a career to become an artist. I strongly recommend taking a look at Gauguin’s works before reading this book since understanding the art is critical to appreciating the novel.

Maugham sets up a three-way triangle; Charles Strickland is a 40-year-old English stockbroker who leaves his middle-class life and wife to set up in Paris as an artist. The narrator is a successful author and playwright – Maugham himself presumably - and finally there is Dirk Stroeve, a Dutch painter of perfectly executed chocolate box pictures. Dirk is an anti-Strickland, warm hearted, buffoonish and weak; his art stinks but he is commercially successful. Only Stroeve recognizes Strickland’s genius in his lifetime and the interplay between Stroeve and Strickland is good stuff. Strickland is the brilliant but objectionable genius who knows little about artists or artistic technique whilst Stroeve is a beautiful human being who understands art but cannot produce greatness himself. Strickland lampoons Stroeve who forgives him everything because he sees the genius not the man. The Narrator unfortunately adds nothing to this and seems to be a successful hack writer with limited feeling for art or people, perhaps this meant as irony.

Strickland ruins Stoeve’s life, taking his wife, house, studio and appetite for work. Yet Stroeve invites him to come to the Netherlands to live. Strickland declines and at this point moves out of Stroeve’s and the Narrator’s lives and moves to Tahiti (as did Gauguin). All the tension now evaporates from the tale as the Narrator reconstructs the Tahiti years from third party accounts. That would be fine if Strickland were a real person but he’s a fictional monster and with no one except his art as an antagonist he’s a character in search of a use. Nonetheless on Tahiti his work reaches its zenith until, blinded and debilitated by leprosy, Strickland dies.

Essentially this is an exploration of genius and the nature of great art, Maugham is a decent wordsmith who has a point to make and the intellect to make it crisply and write it smartly. But the book lacks real emotional heart and reads like a sympathetic and well-meaning parliamentary report as it transforms the sublime into the sensible. It’s perfect Edwardian literature, well written and thoughtful but it looks down onto the debate from an academic point of view and, in my view, fails to enable the reader to feel the agony and the ecstasy that is great art.

The Sorrows of Young Werther - Johanne Wolfgang von Goethe (68/1400)

2010-02-14T22:33:00.002Z

Summary
9/10
Two true stories woven together so as to provide a tragic love story and a direct insight into Goethe’s mind. Simple, poetic, tragic and thoughtful. A journey alongside genius.

Review
When Napoleon met Goethe he is reported to have said, “There is a Man!” Napoleon was a big fan of Goethe and read this book no less than seven times. Perhaps not surprisingly, because its semi-autobiographical nature makes it an almost direct insight into Goethe’s genius.

The story is based on two separate but related true stories. First Goethe’s own stay in the village of Wetzlar in 1771 when he was 23. He met Charlotte Buff who was engaged to Christian Kestner and seems to have fallen in love with her and possibly her with him, but neither acted on their feelings out of respect and possibly love for Kestner. The second concerns a mutual friend, Wilhelm Jerusalem, who shot himself over his love for Elisabeth Herd, a married woman. Much is known of the actual facts of these two stories and Goethe’s synthesis of himself and Jerusalem into the fictional Werther follows the facts remarkably closely so that it seems when he talks about Werther’s feelings he is describing his own.

Goethe has that clarity and simplicity of thought that defines genius and he has sufficient self-confidence in his own abilities so as not to need to display his cleverness. Instead he plainly and simply sets out the story and his/Werther’s thoughts and emotions about what is happening. He tries to be a fine human being against the tide of his emotions, and there is much to appreciate in his relationships with others and in his observations about the simple pleasures in life. The reader is left with the strong impression that Goethe would have been a good and interesting friend; and the fact of his having a powerful and creative mind would never have interfered with that position.

As Werther falls further in love with Charlotte his situation becomes hopeless and, like Jerusalem, he decides to shoot himself using Albert’s (Christian’s) guns. The ending is gory and ghastly but, in Werther’s mind, glorious because in death he will get to wait for Charlotte who he is certain loves him and not Albert.

The book was a sensation on publication and Werther mania swept Europe, including guided tours of Wetzlar and Jerusalem’s grave. Suicide was said to have become a fashion amongst the young and they adopted Werther’s (Jerusalem’s) trademark dress of blue frock-coat, buff leather waistcoat and breeches.

For modern readers it is a remarkable and poignant love story, but also a chance to spend some hours in the company of a great and gentle mind.

The Red and The Black - Stendhal (67/1400)

2010-02-07T22:04:00.004Z

Summary
6/10
Cocky, good-looking Julian Sorel slimes and sleeps his way to the top of French post-Napoleonic society only to fall back to earth. Full of revolting characters and intended to satirise France at the time, this is told at a rollicking pace so that the pieces don’t quite hang together in a smooth and well-ordered fashion. The historical and social background, that are the subject of the satire, benefit from some reading around.

Published 1830

Review
Here is a book where the hero, Julian Sorel, is sly, self-centred, devious, arrogant, hypocritical and carries a chip on his shoulder (to quote from Roger Gard’s introduction). With the exception of Fouquet, his best friend - who represents the honest ordinary Frenchman - the other characters are unlovely too, each designed to represent an aspect of French society at the time (1830). Julian’s working class carpenter father is money grabbing and disinterested, the provincials in his native Verrieres are scheming and jealous, plotting over prized local appointments. The priests in the seminary Julian attends are vicious, ungodly and petty, the upper class aristocratic Parisians in the Salon of M de La Mole, to whom Julian becomes secretary, are fatuous and empty, scared both of a return to revolution and the rise of a second Napoleon. The wealthy and connected M. de La Mole, who appears to be every bit the gentleman, is a political schemer, whilst the superficially gentle Mme Renal is a hypocritical passenger of her passions.

Julian sets out to rise in the world and despite his manifold character faults he does so, along the way seducing the warm, gentle and married Mme de Renal and the high and mighty Mlle De La Mole, who was destined for a glittering marriage to a Duke. Briefly Sorel is elevated to the position of Sergeant in the Hussars and becomes 'Le Chevalier Julian Sorel de La Vernaye' before crashing to the ground as he is caught between the two women in his life. Perhaps at the end Julian finally discovers what it is to lead a great life, like his hero Napoleon, but that is never really clear.

It’s an intriguing and unusual portrait designed to reflect satirically on French Society after the fall of Napoleon, where the upper classes feared the return of Danton and the revolutionary guillotine and the middle classes plotted for positions and money. It is the perfect atmosphere for a cunning political operator like Julian to succeed, since everyone is suspicious of everyone else. All Julian has to do is be competent and silent to be useful. His female victims fall for his good looks and can project whatever character they wish onto his clumsy provincial manners and aloof silence. The fact that he has a spark of courage and daring gets him into their bedrooms despite everything.

Stendhal’s storytelling proceeds at a brisk and unexpected pace. If the work of (say) a Balzac is like watching professional boxers in a ring, this is more like a catfight, where the protagonists have no rules and finesse is unimportant. Stendhal is more interested in ideas than in being completely convincing about the actions and motives of his players. This is not always straightforward since modern readers who have not studied French history will find the political and religious background baffling and the manners and morals of Paris salon society inscrutable. I found myself not especially wanting to go back to this book and yet captivated each time I started reading. This conundrum arises because each of Julian’s micro adventures is intriguing but making sense of the whole and of the wider themes is hard work. In the end I found it easiest to go with the flow and take the story at face value, leaving thoughts on post-Napoleonic France and what makes a man Great for another time.

The Last of The Mohicans - J Fenimore Cooper (66/1400)

2010-01-31T20:32:00.002Z

Summary
7/10
A cracking adventure story set in the last decades of the Native American way of life, which is not afraid to throw humanity and love into the mix. The atmosphere of the Native Americans is sympathetically evoked, although I can’t vouch for historical accuracy.

Published 1826

Review
If you visit a modern Native American reservation, then likely you will find it either to be a mini Las Vegas (since US gambling laws do not apply) or a sad collection of rather poor houses, beaten up cars and untidy streets, or both. It’s very hard to have any feel at all for the life these people led before the colonization of North America. I don’t know if J Fenimore Cooper had any better idea than me, but in this book he completely convinces the reader that the world he describes is the cross-over point between independence and destruction for the native peoples.

The background is war between the French and British for control of North America. Each side has recruited native tribes to its side, partly as guides and partly to bulk up troop numbers. Battle lines are drawn and a massive French force under General Mountcalm is known to be moving onto Fort William Henry - under the command of British General Munro. Bizarrely, Munro’s two daughters – Cora and Alice – decide to join their father at the fort and travel under the protection of the dashing Major Heyward. Traveling with the party are a psalmist, by the name of David Gamut, and Magua, a Huron guide secretly working for the French. The party is betrayed by Magua but fortunately falls into the company of Hawkeye, a frontier scout, Chingachgook and his son, Uncas, who is the last and most beautiful of the Mohican tribe.

This is essentially a thrilling game of cat and mouse between the Mohicans and the Hurons, with first one side and then the other gaining the upper hand. Fenimore Cooper is brilliant at suggesting the genius of the natives in the skills of guerilla warfare. Errors made by either side result instantly in fatality. The Hurons capture Cora and Alice, with Hawk-eye’s party giving daring chase to effect a rescue. It’s a stated fact that Hayward is in love with Alice, but it only slowly becomes clear that both Magua and Uncas have fallen for Cora, over whom now begins a deadly struggle.

Fenimore Cooper does an excellent job of blending his love story with the action and especially shows tremendous sympathy for the graceful native way of life and customs; although how much of this is accurate and what part fantasy I cannot say. The ending is touching and bittersweet and if, along the way, some of the loose ends of the plot are untidy or confusing this hardly matters. This is an adventure story with real heart, a million miles from today’s cardboard Hollywood shoot-em-ups.

Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe (65/1400)

2010-01-24T10:10:00.006Z

Summary
4/10
This is an extraordinary characterisation of a tough-minded woman making difficult and often flawed choices as she moves through a rags to riches story; unfortunately told as if it were a legal deposition making it overly detailed and dry despite the subject matter. Nonetheless, a remarkable book for its period.

Published 1722

Review
The sub title of the book is "The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Etc. Who was born in Newgate, and during a life of continu'd Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest and died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums." And that’s a pretty good summary of the plot.

Moll Flanders is a composite character who couldn’t possibly have had all of the adventures and experiences that she goes through in the novel. She is based on Defoe’s own experiences at the lower edges of London Society, including two stretches in prison. Moll is born in gaol to a mother who has been convicted of a felony and transported to America. Moll is left behind in London to survive on charity. Learning some social skills she is taken into a middle class family where her teenage good looks bring her to the attention of first one of the sons (Lover No.1 or, in Moll's eye's, Husband No. 1) and then the other (Husband No. 2), whom she marries. So is set the tone of the book, where Moll is set a series of moral dilemmas with limited room for manoeuvre and has to square the alternatives of behaving basely against survival. She remarries when husband No 2 dies only to have No 3 run off. Faced with starvation, she hitches up to No 4 despite now being a bigamist in the eyes of the law. They move to America where she discovers that she has married and had children by her own brother and so she flees back to England where she has another affair (No. 5), and then marries No 6 - a con artist after Moll's money – but they have fooled each other since both are paupers. Despite this they fall in love but agree to separate and Moll marries (No. 7) a bank clerk who dies and leaves her penniless again. She then takes to a life of crime, becoming the most successful petty thief of her day. Eventually the law catches up with her and in prison is reunited with her con-man husband. Both are deported to America where they become rich and successful and Moll meets her son. Phew!

As you see, my count is seven husbands not five as in the introduction, but Moll herself counts her two affairs as marriage whilst Defoe apparently does not - go figure.

This is all described in minute detail and each of her dilemmas is explored and explained by Moll at great length. She is not a moral character and her reasoning is frequently about money or survival – Defoe keeps up a running commentary about how much cash Moll has at any time. She has plenty of opportunities to get back on the straight and narrow but misses them all until in prison she repents of her past deeds. Defoe isn’t trying to be moral but is explaining how difficult it is for poor people to behave well if survival means they need to behave badly. There is no narrator’s voice giving an opinion and the book is written as if it were a legal deposition, micro-analysing each of the scrapes and problems Moll goes through. This slows the pace and makes the work rather dry.

If you are a writer then Moll is an interesting experiment – a strong, early 18th century woman who is determined to survive at any cost. If you are a reader then the book drags somewhat so that this becomes an interesting history lesson but, despite the huge numbers of adventures, ends up a little turgid.

Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell (64/1400)

2010-01-17T09:20:00.002Z

Summary
9/10
An amazing account of Orwell’s year spent in absolute poverty first in Paris and then as a tramp in London. Beautifully and simply written it will change your view of the disposessed. Haunting.

Published 1933

Review
As part of his attempt to become a writer, the Eton educated lower-middle class George Orwell (real name Eric Blair) went to Bohemian Paris in 1929 where he earned a little money teaching English but otherwise lived in relative poverty. This was to become absolute poverty when his teaching work dried up and he and his Russian friend Boris set out to find work of any kind. Orwell gives a tremendous, detailed description of life amongst the very poorest parts of Paris and the daily struggle to get something to eat, and sometimes he and Boris go several days without food. They pawn their clothes and seem to have exhausted every avenue when they obtain jobs in a smart hotel – Orwell as a Plongeur, which is the most menial job in the kitchen. Later friends of Boris open a Restaurant and Orwell becomes Plongeur in its filthy and rat-infested kitchen. This is so awful that he writes to an English friend who sends him £5 and the promise of a job so he returns to London.

He arrives too early for the job however and with only £2 he pawns his clothes and becomes a London Tramp, moving from hostel to hostel, smoking discarded but ends and living on charity, odd jobs and occasional further loans from his friend. He writes with great affection and sympathy of the people he meets on the road and the abuse they receive even from well meaning charities and organizations.

Quite why Orwell puts up with these conditions is unclear since he had relations in Paris who could have lent him money and plenty of friends and relatives in London. Presumably therefore he is deliberately putting himself through this to gather material for his writing. He certainly outdoes the hardships that reality TV stars are prepared to go through and there are a couple of times where his health is really very poor, or he is on the verge of starvation.

He had a famously clear writing style and the book is delightful to read, sympathetic, human, straightforward and engaging. If the test of a good book is whether it changes your life then I admit that I have modified my behavior towards beggars, tramps and charity since reading it, which I think was what Orwell would have wanted to hear.

Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton (63/1400)

2010-01-10T08:50:00.001Z

Summary
5/10
A dark story of a decent but mentally ill young man being tortured by Netta, the girl he loves and yet sets out to kill. Atmospheric and edgy but doesn’t rise to great literature.

Published 1941

Review
George Bone is a decent young man infatuated with Netta, a thoroughly nasty aspiring actress who uses and abuses George. George however is mentally ill and flips between personalities. In his ‘Dead’ moments he sets out to kill Netta.

Set in London’s seedy Earl’s court in the 1930’s this is the story of a group of bad friends united around their infatuation with Netta and alcoholism. George is the fall guy of the group and only hangs on because he is insanely in love. The tension in the story arises from George’s other self and whether or not he will succeed in Killing Netta before good George does as his friends urge and makes a new life for himself. This of course gives the book page turning tension and the contrast between the decent but sick George and the thoroughly nasty set he has fallen into creates a moral ambiguity about George’s murderous side.

Whilst this is an enjoyable read I would not have classified it as a classic. It’s well done, dark, but for my money it’s essentially throwaway fiction. I assume that Penguin have included it in their series in recognition of Hamilton’s stature as a writer at the time – he wrote Rope for example, which Hitchcock made into a film. Professional writers often enjoy writing of this kind where dark forces drive the characters, whereas for me it’s a sort of niche.

The Tempest - William Shakespeare (62/1400)

2010-01-03T08:26:00.004Z

Summary
6/10
A relatively quick and straightforward read but in no way as enjoyable as seeing professionals act it out. Unless you want or need to study the text in detail, or desire to brag that you have read it, then I suggest waiting until it comes round to your local theatre or getting a DVD version.

First Performed 1611

Review
I’ve seen many productions of The Tempest but this is the first time I have read the text. It’s surprisingly readable with the characters and plot being neatly set out in the dramatic opening storm scene and then after in Prospero’s cave. Briefly, Prospero is a magician marooned on an enchanted island with his daughter Miranda and served by Ariel, a spirit and Caliban a monsterous son of a witch. The storm throws Prospero’s Brother Antonio and a party of friends onto the island and Prospero seeks his revenge on them for usurping his kingdom of Milan and setting him and Miranda adrift on the ocean years before.

Essentially there are three threads to the play. Prospero’s revenge and reconciliation with Antonio, Miranda falling in love with Ferdinand, the son of the King of Naples, and the story of Ariel and Caliban and their relationship with Prospero. Between these three Shakespeare can explore a wide range of human experiences. He throws in a bit of comedy too as the wicked Caliban gets drunk with some of Antonio’s men and enlists them against Prospero.

Just occasionally the action gets a bit confusing about who is doing what to whom whereas I’ve never had that problem in a staged version. So that, whilst this is interesting to read, a first class staged performance is so much more enjoyable for a casual Shakespeare reader. If you want to deconstruct the text stanza by stanza then of course you need to work through it on paper. However if your object is to enjoy the story, the action and the magic of the drama then you are far better off in the theatre where professional actors can extract meaning from lines that may otherwise be lost and where the interplay between the characters comes alive. In particular, the supernatural elements of the play can be really spectacular in the hands of a good director. On the other hand it doesn’t take very long to read and as something to follow up or proceed a theatre visit with, a quick run through is interesting.

Love In A Cold Climate - Nancy Mitford (61/1400)

2009-12-27T21:17:00.002Z

Summary
4/10
English Upper Class buffoons try to have proper human relationships with each other and fail in a supposedly comic manner. Basically this is advanced Mills & Boon

Published 1949

Review
Nancy Mitford was born in 1904, the eldest daughter of Lord Redesdale of Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire and here she essentially follows the old dictum of ‘write about what you know’, which was the English upper and upper middle classes between the wars.

I don’t doubt for a moment that she accurately describes this world and all its madness, manners and foibles and nor do I think she has exaggerated for comic effect (for example the uncle who writes enemies names down and puts them in drawers, as a kind of voodoo, sounds horribly plausible). The overall effect is a realistic and detailed account of Mitford’s people.

It’s an alien place of genteel decline related to great wealth, sexual ambiguity against straight laced societal norms, the decline of Britain as a great power combined with total insularity. It’s a fascinating setting with intriguing, if not always attractive, characters. Unfortunately Mitford throws away the chance to produce a heavyweight tale because she has no real thought other than to deliver a stream of gossip about her character’s scandals and intrigues.

If Mitford could keep to the point and the plot she would have a very good novel here, but instead she meanders from character to character giving them all the same weight so it’s impossible to distinguish the rising action from the side stories – which anyway don’t lead anywhere. The overall effect is of listening to a gabbling hairdresser rattling off a series of names, stories and interconnections that have no meaning or context.

Roughly at the story’s centre are the very rich and connected Lord and Lady Montdore and their daughter, Polly, whom they attempt to marry off. Her choice turns out to be their entirely unsuitable, newly widowed, brother-in-law and former lover of Lady Montdore, Boy Dougdale. Boy and Polly disappear to Europe for several chapters, before returning to pick up the action that ends all of a rush, in a partner swap. It’s very much as a society hostess converses, assuming that their audience knows everyone that she does and all that goes with them.

There is a structural failure at the heart of the book since Mitford has created Fanny as a narrator. Fanny is a pointless person who adds nothing to the action and simply weaves in a group of side plots that are unattached to the main action. Mitford would have been far better off with a God narrator since then she could have followed Polly and Boy to Europe rather than have them leave the scene. Of course Fanny is Mitford herself and so, as an amateur writer, she needs to imagine Fanny and her world in order to create the novel at all.

The final chapters, when Cousin Cedric appears and everyone swaps partners, are much better but Mitford rushes through the action without giving the reader time to enjoy it, which is a great shame.

Finally, this is supposed to be very funny but I’m sorry to say that I didn’t laugh once, but that’s probably a poor reflection on me.

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (60/1400)

2009-12-20T22:28:00.003Z

Summary
10/10
Everything you want in a book. A huge theme, crafty plotting and writing at the genius level. It’s not about paedophillia, it’s unexpectedly and dangerously about you. Very funny too.

Published 1955

Review
Wow, what an incredible ride. . This is as close to genius as most of us will ever get to experience. Nabokov has built something amazing inside the pages of this book. A wonderful mystery story, high drama, black comedy, gorgeous, gorgeous language and, sitting right at the novel’s heart, is one of society’s greatest and most unmentionable taboos.

A little background may help out. Nabokov was born in St Petersburg, Russia, in 1899 and fled to England in 1917 to escape the Communist revolution. In 1940 he moved to the US and in 1955 wrote Lolita. By that time he had also lived in Germany and France, become a crossword compiler, was a good chess and tennis player and sufficiently skilled in the study of butterflies to have a part time post at the Museum of Natural History in New York. All of his personality is on display here, since the story crosses cultures, plays games with the reader, throws out clues and most especially understands, uses and abuses both language and cultural norms.

Let me address first the paedophilia at the heart of the novel. European sophisticate Humbert Humbert narrates his story of the seduction of white trash American Lolita from a prison cell. Nabokov never in fact describes any sexual acts between the two and, by telling the story from Humbert’s perspective, and in beautiful language, completely disarms the bookworm who is expecting sordid sensationalism. Nonetheless there is strong stuff here since Humbert describes his fascination with young girls so richly and sympathetically that the reader is almost nodding along in empathy – yes it’s true that young girls are lovely to look at and Humbert manages to take just half a blurry step more than the reader, at least in the first part of the book.

Nabokov does a great thing in setting the novel up as a double mystery story. Having explained the background to Humbert’s general desires for nymphets he now conjures a set-up where Humbert becomes a lodger in the house of Charlotte Haze, whose 12 year old daughter is Dolly - Lolita. For several chapters the reader is played with as to whether and how Humbert will enjoy his nymph. I won’t spoil the plot or undo conventional expectations by revealing what happens and why, but Humbert and Lolita become a dysfunctional couple traveling around the US from motel to hotel. Humbert loves her madly, but she is a child interested in Hollywood and bubblegum not Humbert’s European world of art and culture.

Here starts the second mystery of how she escapes from Humbert, and why and with whom, and this is only solved at the end of the novel although, like any great mystery writer, Nabokov spreads the clues around liberally and even refers to a French mystery novel where the clues are in italics – he really tweaks the reader’s tail. It’s giving nothing away to say that Lolita seeks her rescue from another paedophile who is almost Humbert’s double.

At the end of the novel Lolita is 16, married, and pregnant by a new and conventional workingman having lost all of her childhood and her allure. Even so, Humbert loves her and throws over a relationship with the one adult female soul mate he finds in his life, to try to win Lolita back. Humbert ends the novel in prison for murder, not paedophillia.

There is so much going on in this book that a simple blog cannot begin to get to grips with its themes and motifs, which include the nature of morals, what love really means, how we control others whilst deluding ourselves, Freudian psychotherapy, memory and even the relationship between Europe and the US. What makes it work is the stainless steel quality of the writing and this from a Russian National in his second language – extraordinary. If I could compose one sentence of this calibre I would die a happy man.

Criticism? The tension drops in the middle of the book, between the supports of Humbert getting the girl and getting even. Nabokov resorts to linguistic tricks to keep the reader interested during their road trip across America. So that he delivers long and intricate lists of hotels stayed in, plumbing examined, sights passed by and people avoided. Beautifully done but an impatient reader (and why should you not be) will ask ‘where are we going,’ until Lolita disappears.

But all this is carping - the world is divided into two, those who will read Lolita and those who will not. Make sure you are in the first camp.

A Room With A View - E M Forster (59/1400)

2009-12-13T22:51:00.002Z

Summary
9/10
I love Forster’s world of acid etched characters being made to dance through situations they find increasingly uncomfortable. But he’s more than just a sharp eyed and softly spoken comic, since he has things to say about the way a life should be led that are worth hearing and especially in such an easily digested form as this.

Published 1908

Review
Penetrating and sharp edged but witty and sympathetic, Forster is a subtle and economic writer who paints out his stories in very delicate hues. Essentially his technique is to draft a series of characters with various distinct flaws, wind up a situation and then let them get on with it. Out of this comes tremendous humour as well as a knowing look at human frailty but also tributes to individual courage where it is shown.

The thought experiment being conducted here is that middle class Lucy Honeychurch is set up to marry the pompous and vacuous Cecil Vyse when, on a holiday in Italy, the brash and unacceptable George Emerson stumbles into her life looking for love. The novel returns to England and charts Lucy’s progress as she learns to make up her own mind about her life and to reject the conventions of society.

The story allows Forster to rip open Edwardian England’s value system and to contrast the show and surface of middle class life with genuine passion and honestly expressed desire. In doing so he sets up some wonderfully funny set pieces. I read aloud to my wife the famous scene by the swimming pond and we both had tears rolling down our cheeks. This is a large part of Forster’s genius, that he wraps up his uncomfortable social messages in a very light confection, and I’m sure it’s possible to read this book without giving any consideration to deeper thoughts if you were minded.

My only complaint about this work is that, at 196 pages it’s over too soon. I would happily have stayed inside Forster’s world for five times that length.

The Midwich Cuckoos - John Wyndham (58/1400)

2009-12-06T22:10:00.002Z

Summary
5/10
Aliens are born to English villagers in a discussion of the morality of who has the right to survive and inherit Earth, unusually thoughtful for a sci-fi novel of this era.

Published 1957

Review
At the time of publication this work really got under people’s skin in the way that great horror and sci-fi stories sometimes can. I think it’s the fact that the aliens don’t come toting guns in a Hollywood style blaze of laser canons, but instead are born to ordinary villagers in Midwich. They are indeed cuckoos who intend to consume their surrogate parents’ nest. Because childbirth and children are special totems in our society this corruption of them by foreigners deeply unsettles our value system.

Isaac Asimov, the grand old man of sci-fi, observed that an awful lot of science fiction is based on racism – where a new race comes up against humanity and humanity destroys it. Wyndham is unusual in making this conflict explicit. The aliens in his novel have come to earth knowing that they are superior and in due course they will enslave humanity. Zellaby, the book’s hero, quickly works this out and is allowed by Wyndham to debate the proper moral response to the situation. Should humanity accept that it is at the end of it’s evolutionary time or instead take an immoral stance and attempt to destroy other sentient beings? It is that debate that makes this book worthwhile.

It’s pretty common in sci-fi to find that an author builds his story on one thought provoking idea but has no ability or desire to turn that into something more than a creepy tale. Wyndham falls right into this trap and doesn’t even keep up the eeriness but opts instead for a rather clunky approach of telling the audience what is happening to whom and why instead of telling the story through pictures and actions. He’s a very middling wordsmith and although perfectly readable in a page turning way, there is no great art in this book and I recall the movie being much more atmospheric.

One for a train journey.

The Lonely Londoners - Sam Selvon (57/1400)

2009-11-29T22:25:00.000Z

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)

2009-11-21T09:38:00.001Z

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)

2009-11-14T21:25:00.003Z

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)

2009-11-07T20:47:00.000Z

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)

2009-10-31T20:21:00.006Z

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)

2009-10-24T19:39:00.002+01:00

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)

2009-10-18T14:37:00.005+01:00

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

2009-10-13T23:10:00.002+01:00

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)

2009-10-10T17:08:00.002+01:00

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)

2009-10-05T00:24:00.003+01:00

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)

2009-09-13T22:05:00.006+01:00

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)

2009-09-07T01:04:00.004+01:00

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)

2009-08-29T18:09:00.002+01:00

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)

2009-08-22T15:52:00.003+01:00

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)

2009-08-20T00:25:00.005+01:00

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.