Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse

 

Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse provided the latest foray into the world and mores of the late fifties. It’s yet another novel that resides firmly in northern English working class life. But unlike Alan Sillitoe, John Braine or Stan Bairstow, Billy Liar lives almost entirely in the comic. Until, that is, when it doesn’t.

A problem with nostalgia is that it tends to induce blindness. Shortcomings and limitations disappear when the warm glow of familiarity obscures everything but the positive. Perhaps I became infected with this unmentionable N word when I decided to re-read this book that I doubt I have touched in over fifty years. This may indeed be strange, because Stradhoughton, the fictional Yorkshire backwater where the novel is set could in reality have been close to where I was raised and indeed the city of my birth, Wakefield, is mentioned several times, where it might even be understood to be at some height of cosmopolitan sophistication. Perhaps not…

I had expected Billy Liar to have aged, perhaps grown stale now that its setting would no longer be ideologically either working class or Labour voting. But has anything changed? And if so, has it been for the better?  Might it be that the community in which Billy lived had convinced itself of its status and indispensability only to have come down to earth with a bump when reality intervened?

Billy Liar is a short book. Joyce’s Ulysses is longer. But they both inhabit similar territory in that they follow a principal character through one day’s eventless events. Viewed in this light, Billy Liar becomes potentially much more than a comic romp through northern English quaintness.

Billy is an employee in an undertaker. He spends the first part of his Saturday morning at work, as everyone did in that era. He strolls around town, goes to the pub, meets a girlfriend or two and then comes down to earth. It’s a special day for Billy because he’s convinced himself that he is about to enter the big time as a comedy writer for a name in London. From start to finish, however, Billy is deluding himself.

He and a workmate converse in what sounds like a double act. It’s supposed to be funny – and is. But before long, we are laughing at the two of them, not with them. It’s not original. Billy’s talent, it seems like that of everyone else, is mimicry., a cliched copying of what the mass media are feeding him.

Though he does tell fibs to all, the person he is really lying to is himself., since he has never stepped back from his surroundings to reflect how narrow and confined is his reality. He is not alone. Bad jokes are repeated. Multiple girlfriends believe they too are unique in his life. He is engaged to two of them – or so he thinks. Perhaps they do too.

After fifty years of separation, Billy Liar now seems more significant that it did first time round. Billy is convinced he is about to break out of his small-town straitjacket. He is convinced he is something special because he can mimic the received messages with which he has been fed. His self-delusion seems complete. He thus now becomes a metaphor for the continued subservience and indeed marginalisation of the way of life he represents. It’s comic, but in the end it’s a tragedy.

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe

“Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can’t help being one. You can’t deny that. And it’s best to be a rebel so as to show ‘em it don’t pay to do you down. Factories and labor exchanges and insurance officers keep us alive and kicking – so they say -but they’re booby traps and will suck you under like sinking sands, I you aren’t careful. Factors sweat you to death, labor exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax officers milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you are still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the Army calls you up and you get shot to death. And if you’re clever enough to stay out of the Army you get bombed to death. Ay, by God, it’s a hard life if you don’t weaken, if you don’t stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the mock, though there ain’t much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow the four-eyed clocks to bits.”

Just spoke Arthur Seaton, twenty-one when we first meet him and twenty-four by the time we leave his life. He turns a lathe in a bicycle factory in Nottinghamshire in England’s Midlands. He makes good money – as much as 14 quid a week on piecework. He could work harder to produce more, but if he did the time and motion man would penalize him, lower his piece rate and he would work harder for the same money. Mug’s game. So, despite the above rant about his status in life, he has already learned to do as he’s told, not stick his neck out and collect his pay on a Friday. At least that’s his technique at work. In private, he has less time for convention.

He lives with his mother and pays her rent, or board as we in the north of England call it. It’s a terraced house, in streets that hang around the factory like piglets being suckled by a sow, as he puts it. Much of his spare time is spent in the pub, where he drinks paint after pint of beer and often chases it down with a spirit or two.

Arthur is a big lad. He’s tall, fair, well-built and can look after himself, so he thinks. He’s already seeing Brenda, a woman older than himself and married to a senior colleague at work. She enjoys him and he enjoys her. He often has to leave her house by the front door when her husband comes home from the night shift. He is two-timing Brenda, seeing another married woman called Winnie, when he meets Doreen quite by chance in a pub. Doreen is single.

She likes to go to the pictures, wants to get married and feels on the shelf at nineteen. We are, by the way, at the end of the 1950s in working class England.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe was one of a series of books in that era that dealt with working class life, in all of its brash and uncultured detail. At the time, these works shocked people. They were repeatedly describing life as it was, without the patronizing lens of middle-class judgment or standards, so commonly applied in English writing. Room at the Top, A Kind of Loving and then Alan Sillitoe’s novel stand out because they became famous films. Albert Finney, the actor, made his name playing Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, albeit in monochrome, a quality that might just also have added comment to the one-dimensionality of the lives depicted. He played the part of the over-the-top, heavy-drinking, devil-may-care antihero of Alan Sillitoe’s novel, but he did not overplay it. The character in print is probably brasher, more uncouth than the screenplay might suggest. By the end, Doreen may just have reformed him, at least rendered him conventional, but only after he has been beaten up at the behest of the husbands he was cheating. What happened to the women involved, we are not told. We surely can guess.

The book is written in northern English dialect, not that far north, but certainly working class. For the record, the quote at the start of this review includes the term four-eyed clocks near the end. For the record, in that particular dialect, this means bespectacled faces. The implication, clear to anyone with the right background, is that the people are bookish, middle-class, grammar school types. In some ways, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is like D H Lawrence a few decades on. But where Lawrence claims a certain dignity for the poverty of working-class life, Alain Sillitoe merely lists its characteristics, being primarily consumerism, one-up-manship and materialism. There seems to be no community here, but much competition.

Some seventy years on, the text has dated. The racist assumptions of these people would not be publishable today but may still be prevalent. But, when all is said and done, they welcome Sam, a Ghanaian-origin sergeant in the British army, with open arms, perhaps because he has achieved a rank to which they aspire, or possible they simply dare not oppose him. And he sounds more civilized than his hosts.

But, as with many iconic works that summed up a bygone age and its assumptions, there remains a sense that, almost three quarters of a century after it was written, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning still resonates today. The material goods may have changed, along with the sums of money needed to acquire them. But the conflict of interests, the class and wealth divisions and the underlying assumptions that characterize antagonism are pretty much unchanged, though today they may appear in changed garb.

 

 

Day by A. L. Kennedy is a complex at times perhaps over a complex novel about an individual’s experience of and response to war. It is set in the Second World War and crucially, its aftermath. It is a novel where the reader is presented with time shifts, changes in point of view and altered conscious states so quickly that only a slow, almost forensic progress seems possible. Though there is much to praise about the book’s non-heroic, matter-of-fact but at the same time respectful approach to its subject matter, it occasionally obfuscates rather than clarifies.

Alfred Day is the book’s eponymous principal character. He hails from Staffordshire, in the English Midlands, a place where coal mining meets ceramics factories, all within a recognizable older rural England. Alfred’s accent is working class and is often expressed phonetically, a practice that intends to preserve the sound of his voice, but often hides his complexity of meaning.

Alfred joins the Royal Air Force and becomes a gunner on a Lancaster bomber, the kind of airman who would sit alone in his glass cage trying to shoot down the fighters that came to attack the lumbering bomber. It was not a role that was often pensionable, and the regular deaths of Day’s colleagues are catalogued in all their gruesome reality.

But what is interesting about Alfred Day’s experience of war is his detachment from it. High up in the sky, his job is to defend a payload of bombs which, if the mission is to be a success, will be dumped anonymously by his aimer colleague on Hamburg, or whatever city might be the target today. The bombs are effectively dumped at random, despite their professed aim., all hitting targets that might or might not have been intended. In today’s jargon, this is where collateral damage becomes the objective. It is interesting in our language how carpet bombing is not the bombing of carpets.

Meanwhile, the airmen themselves must find ways of working together. They also must find ways of talking about what they do without ever really recognizing how gruesome or risky it will be. This often leads to a variety of euphemistic language, where expletives reign, but where expression is often lacking. The relationships made were often short-lived of necessity and, though they also had to form a team that could work together, it is generally the distance between the men that defines their fraternity. This aspect of Day is handled sensitively, even vividly throughout.

Alfred Day does find Joyce, a devoted and sincere partner. The presence of the ‘now’ in wartime seems to heighten their relationship. Neither partner seems to dream of life beyond the moment, whilst apparently constantly referring to it. War takes the relationship, as it does many others. It even seems to take the present, because when they were together it was war that dominated their thoughts, though their actions were timeless.

Alfred is eventually shot down but survives and spends time and the prisoner of war camp, where surprisingly he is quite well treated. But after the war, after his own liberation, he takes a position as an extra in a film about wartime prisoner of war experience. This later reconstruction of a reality he has in fact lived is interleaved with real experience, and for this reader, it was this juxtaposition that was the least convincing part of the novel. These different scenarios, before the war with its abusive family life, during the war flying missions and visiting Joyce, after the war on a film set, are often mixed together in a heady brew of complex flavours. Training the sense to discern location and time can be challenging. In one way, this is the book’s charm, but for many readers the experience may prove merely confusing.

Day is a moving book, but a book that does not give up in sensations easily. It is always challenging for the reader and is, nevertheless, fulfilling, though apparently never in a direct, uncomplicated way.

Cakes And Ale by W Somerset Maugham

 

Cakes And Ale by W Somerset Maugham is a profoundly surprising book. Written in 1930, the novel begins its story in the Edwardian age prior to the First World War. It comes, therefore, with the inevitable expectation that it will depict English society as a rather stuffy, perhaps dusty entity, full of flock wallpaper and aspidistras, tired after so many years of Victoria, but not yet woken up to the new world that the war so painfully introduced. But this is precisely where expectations could be wrong. In fact Cakes And Ale takes a rather liberated view of British society’s values, pokes fun at stiff convention and generally offers no moral judgment where other writers would surely lay on the presumption.

Cakes And Ale carries the subtitle The Skeleton In The Cupboard, without being absolutely clear whose skeleton is described, while the book certainly does not list many cupboards. One must presume that what is being referred to is the relationship between the privileged character William Ashenden and Mrs. Rosie Driffield, the wife of a novelist. Their time together begins when Ashenden is a boy, at least in his own eyes, and concludes many years later by which time both characters have reinvented themselves several times. It is a relationship that starts in platonic fascination, graduates to physical adulthood and concludes in seeming admiration at distance.

But overall, this relationship is allowed to blossom without the judgment on might expect it to receive, so skeletons remain hard to justify or identify. Equally, it could be Mrs. Driffield‘s long-standing obsession with a certain Lord George, but eventually this turns out to be sincere and long lasting. Mrs. Driffield certainly liaised with enough men to create several skeletons, but they would not have been in cupboards.

We follow William Ashenden from a self-identified childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. He too wants to become a writer and at least initially it is Mr. Driffield the novelist who interests him. At one stage, Ashenden laments the burden of having to describe his own experience in the first person. All writers, one supposes, love to inhabit that special heaven which allows convenient detachment and can put words into anyone’s mouth and feelings into anyone’s experience. Being merely oneself can be utterly restricting.

We first encounter this life while he is visiting his uncle on the south coast, in Kent to be precise, where Driffield the writer and his wife Rosie have moved in and are in the process of causing quite a local stir. General opinion is that Mrs. Driffield is rather common, a bar maid or of that ilk, and the suggestions are that she does not need classes in anatomy.

The moral indignation of the chattering classes is apparently unanimous. Mrs. Driffield puts herself about, especially in the direction of Lord George who is no lord, and the judgment is that anything in trousers is deemed of interest to her. And the indignation is not related to class, since the servants of the household where Ashenden stays are as vehement in their opinions as the boss, until they meet the sad Rosie, that is, and then their tone changes, for some reason.

Maugham has such a lower-class people drop their aitches and modify their vowels to such an extent that one wonders how they manage to say so many apostrophes. But Rosie Driffield thoroughly captivates the young lad. He becomes infatuated with her though he doesn’t realize it at first. For him, it’s merely growing up.

But the relationship changes from one of curiosity and interest to one of physicality and sex, but never does Somerset Maugham have either Ashington or Rosie regret what they are doing. Guilt seems not to be a destination in the London where they meet. They are merely human beings being human. And this is what is so surprising about the book.

Rosie eventually runs off with Lord George to the United States, where he makes a fortune and she becomes as respectable as she can possibly be first in New York and then in Yonkers, atop a significant fortune, which all goes to show something at least.

Though it is not explicitly stated, the United States is portrayed in the book as a land where moralizing attitudes and gossip have no place. Both Lord George and Rosie have moved there and have lived their lives unaffected by social judgment. Back home in England, where one expects judgment to be available by the stone, physical life continues to be denied, but not in Cakes And Ale. The fact is that Rosie has risen above criticism, but one must assume that she can only continue in that life out of Albion. Perhaps it was her skeleton after all.

 

A Postillion Struck by Lightning by Dirk Bogarde

 

A Postillion Struck by Lightning is the first part of Dirk Bogarde’s seven volume autobiography. First published as long ago as 1977, it has stood the test of time, has been widely read throughout its existence and has been reviewed, probably, hundreds, if not thousands of times. This, therefore, is not a review of the book, but a reflection on a particular aspect of it.

The first volume covers years of childhood, schooling, and finally professional stumbling towards what became a highly successful career in films. It might be said that Dirg Bogarde had three different film carriers, a mass market, Mr. Clean in the Doctor films, the experimenting intellectual in his art house period and finally accomplished and internationally recognized character acting in his Death in Venice phase.

Here we have the idyllic childhood spent in the Sussex cottage or around Hampstead in North London. We have the failed school years where first nothing much interested him and then, during his time in a Glasgow technical school, when nothing at all interested him. He had to live with an aunt and uncle during those years in Scotland, and his only self-protection came by learning a Glaswegian accent.

He was born into a special family. His mother had been an actress, while his father was art critic at The Times. The surname originated in Belgium and his grandfather deliberately lost himself up-river in South America, only to return, old, aged, grumpy and cantankerous.

Dirk Bogarde’s prose is highly expressive and includes moments of vivid colour when events are magnified to significance. On country walks we share the vistas, smells, an occasional hug of an animal, always with something that amplifies the experience. We feel we personally get to know the tortoise. In later pages, he is already on stage, disdainful, he says, of any notion of stardom. He is happy to be doing what he does, and small venues in London, amateur to semiprofessional, will do. But we know what happened next.

But perhaps the most intriguing section in A Postillion Struck by Lightning happens in Glasgow, on a day when he is playing truant from school. In the 21st-century, the victim of sexual assault is granted whatever space is demanded to describe, relive, speculate, question, compensate, or indeed pursue -or indeed any verb that may be applicable – the recalled experience. In 1977 Dirk Bogarde relates his own experience from the 1930s in almost a bland, matter-of-fact way. It comes across almost as if it were a scene from one of his films. The detail of the assault can be experienced by reading the book, and it is essential that it is not described here because it has a theatrical character that itself is grounded in the cinema. It was, nevertheless, a real experience and a terrifying one as well. Now presumably, possibly, the perpetrator of this assault was still alive when this book was published, and yet there appears to be no record of the actor’s having pursued any action against his assailant.

One of the joys of reading is being presented with the surprising or the memorable. When I began A Postillion Struck by Lightning, I never for a moment thought I would be writing this kind of review.

Anglo Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson

This particular reviewer rarely writes a negative review. If it didn’t communicate with me, there’s no need to assume that it will not communicate to you. A positive review has to concentrate on what was communicated, whereas a negative review must live in what was not felt, and that list is infinitely long, so where to start? “I liked it” or indeed “I didn’t like it” say nothing about the work in question, only about the reviewer, and this unknown person, often hiding behind an alias, should never be at the centre of the review.

So when it comes to Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson, why should I begin with “I didn’t like it”? Well at least it gets the opinion out of the way, because in the case of this particular book, it needs to be said. Anglo Saxon Attitudes felt like the longest book I have ever read. It wasn’t, but it did feel that way for most of its duration. But the reason for my opinion is complex and, I suggested earlier, has more to do with me than the work.

Details of the book’s plot are available elsewhere. Suffice it to say that the important element is the fraudulent planting of a pagan erotic sculpture into the grave of a Dark Ages Anglo-Saxon bishop that was excavated decades ago. The apparent authenticity of the find had to be catalogued, described, interpreted. For half a century this practical joke at least influenced thinking, at least amongst interested academics, on the cultural and religious origins of the race that now inhabits the country we now call England. Hence the book’s title, rooted both in the historical relics of the Anglo-Saxons, for whom “England” would have been an unknown label, and for the modern British for whom both the concept of “Anglo-Saxon” and “England” are both reconstructed myths.

Amid the need to keep alive the myth of national identity and culture, a certain person who was involved in the original discovery finds he hast to continue to perpetuate the lie. He has personal and professional reasons. He also might even believe it was true. To some extent he has built his career on the existence of the find and, equally, he built half of his life by shacking up with the girlfriend of the person who played the original practical joke on his father by planting the object in the tomb and then claiming its authenticity. Decades have come and gone. Lives have been lived. Relationships have been severed, remade and broken by death and estrangement. Gerald, who knows the truth about several things, has lived with the deception, but dismissed it as possibly false, gives given the character of the person who admitted carrying it out. Gerald now has decided it is time to come clean and tell the story.

But to whom should he tell it? And how? Reputations are at stake. Water under the bridge won’t flow back the other way. People have moved on. Or have they? Anglo Saxon Attitudes thus inhabits a society with what could be described as a rarefied atmosphere. These people are of a certain social class, attend gentlemen’s clubs, regularly drift into French, for some reason, when English is just not good enough. A single paragraph of the thoughts might refer explicitly but opaquely to five or six of the book’s characters, any of whom might have been encountered during the fifty-year span of these memories. For anyone living outside donnish society of the public school, Oxbridge or academe, these people are barely recognizable as English, as archaeological, perhaps, as something dug up from long, long ago. And yet they are the mouthpieces via which the concepts of contemporary identity and culture are lengthily examined.

A strand that figures vividly in every character’s mind, if not explicitly in the English culture being examined, is sex. The erotic nature of the apparently pagan idol in the Anglo-Saxon tomb places a large ellipsis after every mention of the word sex in the book. We have characters who are openly homosexual in a society that has laws against the practice. We encounter respectable men who put themselves around a bit, and women who express their desires via euphemism. And also some who do not. And there’s a lot more besides. Perhaps too much. Perhaps… For this reader…

Anglo Saxon Attitudes is a complex and ambitious novel. For this reviewer it falls short of all its implied goals because it concentrates too heavily on a narrow, unrepresentative section of the nation, was consistently patronizing to working class attitudes and featured characters who spent most of the time living myths. Perhaps that was the point… Perhaps… Why not read it and see what you think?

Jerusalem The Golden by Margaret Drabble

 

Jerusalem The Golden by Margaret Drabble was published over fifty years ago. Reading it now, for this particular reviewer, is the equivalent of reading Arnold Bennett in the same year that Margaret Drabble’s novel was written. Bennett’s quintessential late Victorian and Edwardian identity was then and remains almost foreign territory to the contemporary reader, but – even given the fifty year time shift – one might expect that the reader who actually experienced the 1960s as a teenager might suffer no culture shock whatsoever in reading Margaret Drabble’s essentially 1960s novel. That assumption, however, would be quite wrong.

The mechanics of Jerusalem The Golden’s plot can be described without spoiling the experience of reading the book. Clara is a lower middle-class girl growing up in Northam, which is clearly not far from Margaret Drabble’s own Sheffield, despite being described as being fifty miles or so further from London than its real-life manifestation. Clara clearly rather despises Northam. In her third person narrative that always feels like it wants to inhabit the first, Margaret Drabble has her principal character regularly refer to the dirt, the lack of sophistication and general ugliness of the place, factors that convince Clara – and no doubt the author herself – that life should transfer to London at the first opportunity.

Clara’s family is far from dysfunctional, but then the jury might be out on this because it hardly displays any function at all. Mrs Maugham, Clara’s mother, seems to live her life at arm’s length behind a wall of collected prejudice and panic if experience gets too close. Clara seems determined not to be like her mother.

Clara is successful at school but ignores received opinion as to what she might study, preferring her own judgment to the conventional pragmatism of offered advice. Before she leaves school, Clara has already shown significant signs of maturity. Not only does she develop an obvious but inwardly not perceived independence and individuality, but she also matures physically, developing an early and fine bosom, which she soon realises can be used as a source of power.

In London, where she attends university, Clara meets the unlikely-named Clelia, whose family turns out to be precisely the kind of befuddled, messy, propertied, sophisticated, if rather unclean lineage that would forever be diametrically opposed to her own Maugham household. One feels that if Clara’s mother were invited to the Highgate pad of the Denham family, her nose would turn up in silence as she reached for a mop to disinfect the floors. Strangely, Clelia is rather similar to Clara, both physically and personally, though we do not appreciate this until late in the book, when consciously or otherwise Clara seems to morph into the very identity of her friend.

Clara is a thoroughly credible 1960s character. This misunderstood decade, for most people, was not about free love, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll or protest. Ideologically, it may have become so, but day to day life was school uniforms, dance halls largely segregated by sex, social conservatism and conformity, allied to a newly won, for most people, glimmer of opportunity for self-betterment. Clara exhibits the values of her age, but also gnaws gently at the edges of the constraints, as the era appeared to expect one ought. She surprises herself on a school trip to Paris, but she does retain total control, a facility she learns to cultivate.

And it is this aspect of Clara’s character – its desire and ability to control, to extract exactly what she wants from life in general and circumstances in particular that comes to the fore. Clara desires, Clara gets. She is always self-deprecating, but she even learns to use this flawed confidence to focus attention and facilitation from others when she needs it. Gradually Clara is revealed as someone who ruthlessly uses her physical, personal and intellectual advantages to achieve precisely what she wants, despite the fact that she often tries to deny any conscious plan.

Margaret Drabble’s style throughout is both complex and backward-looking. Clara could easily be a character from fifty years earlier – an Arnold Bennett society debutante, aware of social niceties, protocols and conventions, but needing to make her own way through life’s challenges. But Clara is always ready to assert her presence in a way a woman from fifty years earlier might not have done and thereby she achieves her ends, often irrespective of any potential damage done to others. Her potentially self-destructive success in achieving her wishes is increasingly quite disturbing. Hers is an individualism that also could easily become self-defeating, as evidenced in the author’s assessment that Clara “thought nothing of” being sick in a Paris toilet when she decided to leave her married lover behind. We are left thinking that there is something unsaid to follow. And, if that were to be the case, perhaps a more general parallel with the 1960s decade is possible, in that it might have felt like a liberation for the individual, but also that it might eventually have threatened something that was both longer lasting and longer term. One feels by the end that Clara is set for some pretty rude awakenings.

Crown of Blood, The Deadly Inheritance of Lady Jane Grey by Nicola Tallis

When they advance, pawns become queens. But to advance, they usually need support from a bishop or a knight from behind the walls of a castle, assuming, of course, that the king, as usual, remains capable of relatively little, but also assuming that he, himself, survives. Without that living male, promotion to queen cannot happen. But by what rules and in which game does a pawn become advanced by such castles, knights and bishops to find herself still a pawn, a queen in name only, and only for long enough to arrange her own decapitation? The King, of course, had not survived, and a queen without a King breaks the rules. Young women called Jane Grey seem to have been particularly vulnerable to this fate.

Crown of Blood by Nicola Tallis is, effectively, a political biography of Queen Jane, the first woman to be named as the occupant of the English throne and the only occupant never to have been crowned. Born of the Tudor line, Jane's claim to the English throne was significant. Her grandmother had been Mary Tudor, youngest daughter of Henry VII and she was thus a full cousin to the King, Edward VI.

In the mid-16th century, England was riven by political difference driven by religious and ideological conflict and was further plunged into confusion by the untimely death of Edward VI, the only son of Henry VIII. But Henry's two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, had by some, including at one stage their own father, been branded as illegitimate, and therefore ineligible to inherit the throne. Confusion still surrounds exactly what Henry VIII, himself, thought of their individual succession rights. After the birth of a son, Edward, the matter was irrelevant, in any case.

Edward, a staunch Protestant, above all else wanted his own version of the Christian faith to prevail. He was a teenager when he started to ail, and his thoughts were turned reluctantly towards his succession and the continuance of the religious revolution he had furthered was uppermost in his prioritied. Thus he nominated Jane Grey as his successor, the move calculated both to promote his Protestantism and to discredit his half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, one because she was a Catholic and the other because her mother had, it was alleged, humiliated his father through acts of infidelity. In his eyes neither was worthy of the crown. Lady Jane Grey, on the other hand, was a pious Protestant, from a good family, of Royal Blood and of serious, even learned disposition. Ostensibly, she even had the support of several nights and even a bishop, plus that of her ambitious family in their castle. These could have been the perfect circumstances to promote her advancement to queen. Amongst her backers, however, it was ambition and self-interest that unfortunately underpinned support for the teenage Lady Jane and, as a woman, she was powerless either to influence or counteract that scheming.

Thus, she was married to one Guildford to make a friendly alliance between powerful families, declared queen and admitted to the tower of London for her own safety. Mary, however, had popular support by virtue of her having been King Henry's first daughter and a military skirmish confirmed her greater and now pragmatic claim to the throne. Jane Grey’s protection in the tower thus became imprisonment under the influence of a victorious Mary. Jane’s supporters largely disowned her, while those who didn't lost their heads and their innards. Jane herself was tried, found guilty of treason and beheaded. Mary showed clemency in deciding not to burn her cousin.

What is so upsetting about this story is its apparent inevitability. Jane's major problem, it seemed, was that she was a woman. She had no rights. She was a mere pawn, moved at will by others and advanced for their own gain. Her story is this is not a tragedy, but a conspiracy. She was party to that conspiracy, but she was also trapped and probably could not have extricated herself from its vice, even if she had tried harder to do so. Like women of her age, she was chattel, so much meat to be haggled over by a bunch of property-owning, self-promoting barrow-boys looking for a profit.

The raw and calculated callousness exhibited by anyone in the position of power or influence over the life or status of Lady Jane Grey is more than merely shocking. Its consequences are genuinely upsetting. Here was a young woman used and then discarded when her attributes did not profit those who backed her. The example this presents reminds us that there were many others, who were not royal, who suffered similar but unrecorded fates.

Crown of Blood by Nicola Tallis examines this history in fine and accurate detail. This is a serious study of the political and legal dimensions of the case. But is also a biography, and the delves as deeply as sources allow into the background, development and character of Lady Jane Grey. The author offers a truly historical account, researching sources and judging their veracity or otherwise. Even in history, it is always easier to make it up, to deliver what current values assume. But that is fiction, not history, and Nicola Tallis’s book always inhabits what can be justified.

Perhaps we should remind ourselves that Lady Jane Grey was also known as Jane Dudley, because that would remind us of the family’s status just a few years later when Robert Dudley became the favourite of Elizabeth I. Indeed, part of the case that was eventually levelled against Robert Dudley referred back to the treasonous activities of the family in relation to Lady Jane’s advancement to queen.

As is often the case in history, the rich and powerful can bathe their hands in blood, knowing that the consequences will never come their way. Reading details of the callous intrigue, the self-promotion and sheer selfishness that surrounded the elevation and then decapitation of this young woman reminds us of how much, or indeed how little, has changed since the sixteenth century.

Scott-King's Modern Europe by Evelyn Waugh

Scott-King's Modern Europe is a short, perhaps over-short novella by Evelyn Waugh. Written in 1946, it visits a fictitious part of Europe largely unknown to its determinedly English protagonist. In 1946 Scott-King had been classical master at Grantchester for twenty-five years, we are told in the tale's first sentence. This locks the book's principal character firmly in his place within the English class system, sketches his likely character, with its staid dedication to what has always been and remains "right", and posits him without doubt in the apolitical conservatism of an ultimately submissive establishment. It's the kind of England that used to believe that fog at Dover meant that Europe was cut off. Thus Waugh presents him to his undoubtedly sympathetic readers.

Out of a non-political blue comes a request from the little-known and less understood and now independent state of Neutralia that Scott-King attend a national celebration of a long-forgotten national poet called Bellorius. The writer died in 1646 and left a fifteen-hundred-line tract, written in Latin hexameters, of unrelenting tedium. It described a journey to an unknown new world island, where there subsisted a virtuous, chaste and reasonable community, Waugh tells us. This utopia was left forgotten and unread, until it appeared in a German edition in the twentieth century, a copy of which Scott-King picked up while on holiday some years ago. Thus the teacher of classics began a relationship with this European obscurity that led to this invitation to visit his homeland.

Scott-King's Modern Europe is so short that any more detail of its plot would undermine its reading. Suffice it to say that the international delegation is not what it seems. Things do not go to plan, or perhaps do, depending on your perspective on Neutralian politics, whose internecine struggles could not be further from anything associated with aloof Britishness, let alone it's higher class relative, Englishness. Life becomes unbearably complicated for the scrupulously fair Scott-King. He may, perish the possibility, suffer such ignominy as not having enough traveller's cheques left to cover his hotel bill!

As the farce develops, the celebration of Bellorius morphs into something decidedly more contemporary, whose limits become ever more blurred. Most of those involved are revealed, in some form or another, as frauds, except of course for the stolid and enduring Englishman of the title, who throughout remains the epitome of the innocent victim. If there is fault in the world, then it's all the fault of foreigners, those who live over there, those who speak the unintelligible languages that aren't English and live in those unbearable climates that have sunshine. They do not play fair in politics, and confuse responsibility with gain, All unthinkable at home, of course...

It all works out in the end, after a fashion. Let it be recorded here only that, true to the values of the English Public School where Scott-King has taught, it is a former pupil, ever loyal, that eventually extracts his former teacher from his troubles. But what is enduringly interesting about this little book is the depth of the metaphor that classical education presents. It is a culture in decline. Its vales are destined not to endure. Inevitably, the values enshrined in the assumption of this enduringly educated state are set themselves to disappear. The English surely are going to become like the untrustworthy, squabbling, divided Neutralians, and all the other foreigners with their unacceptable strange ways, who previously had only ever lived "over there".

Written at the end of the second world war, when perhaps mythically the British had stood alone, the book is perhaps the author's reflection on events that saw the division of Europe into opposing camps. The territorial integrity of the United Kingdom, and essentially England within it, had been maintained. But those "over there" we're still foreign and thankfully they weren’t “over here”. Their values weren't our values, and yet their influence was all-pervading, or at least potentially so. Britain, and the English on the throne within it, we're still alone, still threatened. This is the culture that is suffused throughout Evelyn Waugh's little book and it is the assumption that makes its reading now at least poignant. It might even have been written a week ago, based on anyone's list of presumptions that surrounded the Brexit referendum. Everything that was not an English value is manifest in this non-culture of Neutralia, a nation that needs to invent heroes raised from within the mediocrity of its unrecognized and - even more reprehensible - unrecorded past. How non-English can one get?

Waugh's humour enlivens the story and his unapologetic Englishness almost renders himself as the principal character. It's is short enough to be read in an hour, but it's sentiment and message will resonate very strongly with contemporary readers. In Britain's current political context, Scott-King's Modern Europe is a little book with a big message.  

The Children's Book by AS Byatt

The Children's Book by AS Byatt is a vast, almost rambling novel about several families and multiple lives. It is the kind of novel where a review must concentrate on the context and setting and leave out any detail, for there is far too much of that to do any of it justice. The detail is so extensive that to include anything in particular would elevate it above its relevance in the overall scenario. In the end it all hangs together beautifully and the contrasting, yet similar lives of its characters serve to illustrate the social mores and concerns of its setting. Multiple characters live through more than twenty years of their lives and descriptions of specific events happen on every page. No review could do justice to any part of this veritable tangle of history and stories. And, more than that, it is the detail of these events and interrelationships that form the very currency of this work. What happens, and to whom is happens is important and should not be revealed.

But the setting and the context are important and, since these are part of a history we all share, then there is no reason not to set them out in some detail. It is the context, both cultural and political, that this shared history inhabits that informs what we understand when we read a novel as complex and profound as this.

We begin in the mid-eighteen-nineties. We are generally among the professional upper middle classes and bi-locate between London and Kent, with much more happening out of the city. But it is the then modern Victoria and Albert Museum where the tale begins with the discovery of a lad called Philip camping out in the already dusty cellars, where the already massive collection of objects that cannot be displayed are in storage. Philip seems to have talent, but then he is a working-class lad from the Potteries, so whatever his abilities he is unlikely to be taken seriously. He has run away from a poor home and the bowels of the museum have become a rough home. Until he is discovered. Luckily, he is embraced by people who would like to help.

Many families inhabit this tale, but crucially it is a woman called Olive who repeatedly takes centre stage. She is a writer and regularly invents stories for her children. Ostensibly, these are the children's stories of the title but, as the book progresses, we realise that the meat of the novel is the real-life stories that the young people in this assemblage of families enact. As ever, reality proves to be far more immediate and unpredictable than imagination, which tends to resort to received worlds that can only exist in an abstract or ideal form or reconstruct the real thing via fantasy. And it is fantasy that is so often used to obscure the raw and often inadmissible truth of real lives.

When Olive writes these stories, her imagined worlds fit the fashions of the time. And in the 1890s there is much of human life that is only ever discussed euphemistically, despite its being lived in the flesh. Consequences are all around but admitting their existence in any explicit way is rarely possible. They exist only in allusion, even when reality pokes its nose into the bubble. This particular late Victorian world is that of a liberal middle class, gently socialist of the Fabian variety, but also imbued with the conservatism of their social class and their upbringing. One really does not want to maltreat the lower classes, but really one does get such little opportunity to demonstrate one's true values. One is conscious, of course, of the obvious difference in standards of dress, with our polite society ever conscious of material, colour, accessory, decoration and ensemble. And, of course, it's never dirty... but one must not judge. One must reform.

But this is also a world where women have become hungry for emancipation. At the start of this shared history that spans over twenty years, there are murmurings of desired independence, imaginings of opportunity, dreams of fulfillment outside the home, the bed and the cradle. The link between the latter two would only be made in the imagination, of course. Except in reality, which only rarely obtrudes into discourse, there are skeletons in cupboards, past excesses that have been denied, encounters that perhaps have been intimated only in the imagination. But these people are not prepared for the emotions they feel, nor the natural drives that overtake them. They succumb, knowing they should not, and then invent fiction and euphemism to explain away the reality that just occasionally arrests them.

A greater reality is about to absorb them all, however. By the end of The Children's Story, there have been suffragettes and suffragists, protest, sabotage, imprisonment and death, all in furtherance of a cause soon to be won. Ironically, it was perhaps World War One, which also grinds to its grim conclusion before the end the novel, that brings so much death to the generation of the children at the start of the book, that guarantees these women will receive their emancipation, if only to fill a labor shortage.

The majority of The Children's Book describes what might be termed a family saga involving multiple families either side of an Anglo-German relationship. The book concerns itself with identity, gender politics and roles, denied sexuality and eventually passionate reality. There are helpings of Fabian socialism, arts and crafts and little touches of class difference. There is always sexual repression married to moments of excess, with its physical consequences, both social and personal. These are characters who really do populate the story, and thus make the story in their own terms. None of these people act out events just so that they can be listed in the book's experience.

But at the same time, these people remain distant. They never really let out their feelings, except when they overstate them. Thus, they are of the era that made them. and we become convinced of their reality, their credibility and their dilemmas.

The Children's Book is perhaps a little difficult to start. It introduces many characters and settings in its early chapters. But we do get to know these people and the process is both gradual and convincing. By the end of the work, beyond the end of World War One, their lives have been transformed, though probably not in any way that their safe attitudes at the start might have imagined. The Children's Book is not a historical novel. It is not a family saga. It is not a love story or a tragedy. It aspires to no genre. Neither, it must be stressed, is it general fiction, whatever that might be. It is a novel that takes its reader into a different time, a different environment and a different set of social values. And a truly great novel, because, by the end, we not only feel we have visited different places, but also we have lived in them.  

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

Reviewing books that one has not enjoyed is a pointless activity. Better just to put them on the shelf and forget them. Perhaps a second exposure, some years hence, might reveal what first impressions missed. Likes and dislikes, in any case, are wholly subjective, usually identifying something internal to the reviewer: only rarely do they relate to anything of substance in the object of the review. The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry thus presents a problem. The book came with the strongest of recommendations alongside published reviews that heaped praise. And the book has many positive qualities. It is set in Victorian England and in several ways, it is highly evocative. There is a formality of style, a definite floridity in his language. These people exude politeness and decorum. They even write letters to one another, letters that are reproduced in full between the chapters that bi-locate between London and the Essex coast.

The scenario involves Cora, a recently widowed Londoner, her companion Martha and a child Francis, who, we are told, has significant problems with behaviour. The loss of a husband is felt deeply, and a sojourn by the sea, the Blackwater estuary in Essex being the place chosen, is prescribed. In this small town there are people who live from the sea, people who do rural things, and a vicar, plus his wife and some surviving children. The place also has a secret, though apparently not so secret, myth of a great sea creature, a sea serpent or winged dragon that appears irregularly to wreak havoc on its victims. And it is evidence of this beast that forms the prelude to the tale, evidence that is quietly forgotten for several chapters.

The Essex Serpent also presents aspects of Victorian life as substance in its story. There is disease, with early death, infant mortality and consumption, their combination making a point about the fragility of life. There is the barbarity, by today's standards, of medical treatment. There is violence on the streets of London and severe punishment for those who transgress the law. There is destitution and homelessness, though perhaps not in the direct experience of these characters, but manifest in their enlightened attitudes towards charity. And, within these horizons, relationships develop, characters ail, people disappear in mysterious circumstances and, throughout, there is the expectant foreboding that the Essex serpent casts over anything that cannot be fully explained. One is never in any doubt, however, that everything will eventually be explained.

So where, given the start of this review, are the problems? Let's start at the beginning. Before we meet any of the characters, we are presented with an episode that suggests the book will be primarily concerned with the monster the locals believe inhabits the waters of their Essex estuary. But, given that the power of the serpent's presence is used throughout the text more to signify a threat and create tension than make actual appearance, then this introduction is misplaced.

Secondly, too often the characters appear only when they are needed to drive a plot. The much-discussed behavior problems of the boy Francis hardly seem to figure in his mother's consciousness until the plot requires his action. Then, having exhibited no particular unpredictability thus far, he conveniently delivers when required.

Thirdly, the letters that these characters write to one another seem to be included as plot devices rather than as intended communication. They do not appear, despite the different signatures, to be written in different styles. They contain little small talk and thus do not seem to be letters at all.

Fourth, it appears that these characters are in fact modern people with modern sensibilities, cast in an era where they can highlight cultural and attitudinal differences that might surprise the reader. But the characters, themselves, hardly reflect the assumptions they would be expected to espouse.   No-one is racist, there is no antisemitism and the poor tend to be judged deservingly. These people remark on things about the society that, if they had contemporary Victorian sympathies, they would hardly notice

Fifth, and possibly I am wrong here, there seem to be some factual errors in the book. On a couple of occasions, these people, who give such obvious import to flowers, trees, vegetation and wildlife, make clear errors about what they have seen. At one point a character muses on something they simply cannot have experienced, though the fault here lies in technology, not nature. I could back up these assertions with the detail, but I have no desire to undermine the experience of potential readers of a book with details that some other reader might not notice or choose to ignore. For me, personally, these obvious errors undermined the solidity of the scenario and rendered the characters less than credible.

So for me, this was a very, very difficult read. I did finish the book. It had some things to offer. Please read it and make up your own mind.

Elizabeth – The Forgotten Years by John Guy

Myths are best served exploded, otherwise they can over-inflate and thus hide the substance of any dish. And if that dish be the national consciousness or identity of a nation, then such over-egging must be avoided, lest it become the over-elaborated norm.

In recent times the Tudors have become entertainment currency, and not only in British media. From television series to historical novels to feature films, we have seen a plethora of offerings, mainly stories of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, it has to be said. These often degenerate into costume dramas or whodunits of political intrigue, where accuracy is smoothed out of the history to create the kind of simplistic cliché of plot that mass markets are deemed to demand. “Based on a true story”, that overworked and internally contradictory byline, is now so overworked that it would be better omitted. “Fabricated around historical names” would be better. And though there is nothing wrong with fiction, since it often allows interpretations that challenge received wisdom, there are real difficulties when that fiction is transferred into myth whose acceptance becomes so widespread that it may not be challenged. It could be argued that connotations associated with terms such as Good Queen Bess, Golden Age or even simply Elizabethan are in danger of relying more on fiction than fact. Or perhaps these are nostalgic labels for contemporary ideal states that are thought to be lacking in our own times.

And so what an absolute delight it is to come upon a book such as Elizabeth - The Forgotten Years by John Guy. This is a book that really is based on true stories, since this academic historian of Clare College, Cambridge references and describes any sources that the reader may need to back up any point. Timescales are not stretched, statement is supported by facts and mystery is only allowed to obscure fact when evidence does not exist.

The forgotten years of John Guy’s title refer to the latter part of Elizabeth's reign. The earlier years, before the Armada in 1588 are those that form the backdrop for most of the fictions, with their multiple plots, proposals, match-makings and conspiracies. These later years were characterized by war, economic difficulties and political intrigue. They were perhaps dominated by considerations of succession, since Elizabeth, of course, had no heir. It is worth noting here, however, that John Guy, by virtue of a discursive style that deals with issues rather than a mixture of events arranged chronologically, does offer as context much background material relating to the years before 1588. This picture that is purportedly a selective encounter with the later years of Elizabeth's reign thus contains much rounded and detailed description of her entire reign.

John Guy states several assumptions that must guide our understanding of the period. In the sixteenth century, he says, status did not trump gender. Elizabeth was a woman, and that meant that many of the males at court had little or no respect for her apart from their recognition of her birthright. And, because her mother was Anne Boleyn, whom her father married after his denied divorce, even that was questioned by many, especially those of the old faith, who would also have wanted to do more than merely undermine this Protestant queen. The author, incidentally, is not implying that gender issues are or were different in other centuries. As a professional historian, he is simply defining the scope of relevance that is to be ascribed to his comment. Secondly, because Elizabeth was a single woman, the issue of succession had to dominate her reign. In the earlier years this meant various scrambles to find her a husband in the hope that a male heir might materialize. But later on, in the period that John Guy's book covers, Elizabeth was too old to bear children anyway. Discussion on succession, therefore, shifted from matchmaking into more strategic and political territory.

In Elizabeth - The Forgotten Years, the queen is portrayed as a fundamentally medieval monarch. She saw herself as descended from God, the assured kin of all others who shared this enthroned proximity to the Almighty. Hence, she could not bring herself to sign the death warrant for Mary Queen of Scots, believing that a decision to kill a royal by anyone would legitimize the practice, and who then might be next to get it in the neck? And since this by definition was a direct attack on God, it also carried damnation as a consequence. Hence Elizabeth's duplicity in letting it be known she wanted Mary disposed of whilst at the same time denying any responsibility for the act, thus requiring the person who enacted her wishes to be hauled up for treason. These medieval royals were above reason, it seems, as well as above the law. And messengers, it seems, have always been fair game.

This unwillingness to sign a death warrant was not a weakness that affected Elizabeth very often. It seems that the mere whiff of a plot or conspiracy quickly resulted in all smells being masked by the odor of fresh ink forming her signature on an invitation to the Tower. John Guy’s book regularly takes us to the gallows with these condemned people - usually men, of course - and offers detail of their fate. A particularly memorable sentence, specifically suggested by the queen, had one condemned man hanged for just one swing of the rope, so he could then be cut down and, still alive and still conscious, witness his own guts and beating heart being placed on the ground beside him. In an age that still believed in the resurrection of the mortal body, these treasonous felons had to be dismembered and their parts separated to ensure they would never have their souls saved. It may have been God’s will, but it certainly was that of His reigning representative on earth.

This Good Queen Bess, incidentally, was in the habit of handing down similar fates quite regularly. She also refused to pay salaries to soldiers and sailors who fought for her, dressed herself in finery while her war wounded received no assistance or pension and were forced to sleep rough. She turned two blind eyes to disease and epidemic that ravaged her forces and population. Elizabeth the patriotic hero also and perhaps duplicitously sued for peace with Spain, offering Philip II near surrender terms if she and he could agree to carve up the economic interests between them.

She handed out monopolies to her courtiers and lobbyists in exchange for a cut of the earnings. A real strength of John Guy’s book is the insistence on translating Elizabethan era values into present day terms. The resulting multiplication by a thousand brings into sharp focus the extent to which national finances were carved up by elites. While parsimonious when others were due to receive, Elizabeth for herself demanded only the finest and most expensive treatment. It was, after all, her Right.

Elizabeth also countenanced an English economy that raised theft on the high seas to a strategic goal. And her courtiers treated the expeditions as capitalist enterprises, with ministers and the like taking shares in the ventures in exchange for a share of the swag. And much of this would be stolen before it was declared or as it was being landed by handlers or mere thieves who clearly learned their morals and behavior from the so-called betters. The market was free, apparently, but those who operated it were always at risk of incarceration.

Thus, Elizabeth - The Forgotten Years will be a complete eye-opener for anyone who has absorbed popular culture’s portrayal of this age. John Guy’s book identifies the very human traits displayed by this Godly queen and posits them absurdly alongside the attitude of her contemporaries that she was a mere worthless woman.

There are not many figures in John Guy’s wonderful book who come out unscathed, either in reputation or body. Neither does he set out to destroy anyone’s reputation. As an historian, he presents evidence, assesses it and then offers an informed and balanced opinion. This, however, is healthy, for in the current climate populism is too often allowed to merge its own version of history into its message. It does so to achieve some control of a contemporary agenda via the creation of myth, and Tudor melodramas are not exceptions to this rule. Elizabeth - The Forgotten Years demands we remember our real past accurately in all its folly, and in so doing explode many dangerous myths.

Gainsborough, A Portrait by James Hamilton

Gainsborough, A Portrait by James Hamilton is much, much more than a biography of a painter, though if it were only that it would still be a masterpiece of its genre. Thomas Gainsborough was born in Suffolk in 1727 and died in London in 1788. He spent his early years in Suffolk, was apprenticed in London as an engraver. He moved back to Suffolk and lived again in the family home. He was already painting. He seemed not perfectly suited to the messy, fiddly practices associated with engraving. He gradually amassed commissions, almost by increment from sitters of ever higher rank.

A lengthy stay in Bath was purely for professional reasons, but London and Suffolk were always a draw. By then he was a wealthy and successful painter of portraits, who dabbled in landscapes on the side. That last phrase, incidentally, is apposite since his wife, Margaret, used to pocket all of the fees he charged for portraits. What he received for landscapes he did not disclose to her, only to his own pocket.

If you have ever looked at Gainsborough’s portraits and saw that first, they were rather dark, or second, the forest looks altogether too round it to be true, or third, it seems rather that the feet emerging from the bottom of the dresses appear a tad too small, then you will find your explanations in James Hamilton‘s book. The light is problematic, perhaps, because these pictures were not painted en plein aire, but by candlelight in the studio. A sense of rounding in the trees might result from the fact that he often did not paint real trees, but miniature tabletop settings of coal, twigs and – yes – broccoli. Now that explains quite a lot. Observation number three results from his very businesslike procedures with his sitters. To minimize their discomfort, he concentrated on their faces and heads. After they had left his studio, he would then fill in the rest of the body, often using clothes he kept on dummies, the same dress sometimes appearing in portraits of different women. The mannequins obviously had no feet, so these were probably added with a little imagination, hence the sometimes awkward proportions.

But there is far more in Gainsborough, A Portrait than detail of the artist’s commissions, works and techniques. James Hamilton provide is nothing less than a rounded portrayal of English life in the mid-eighteenth century. In the artist’s letters we soon learn to recognize the euphemisms that are used to disguise the licentiousness that seems to occupy most of these men’s waking hours. In letters, d-mn is not a curse, and the word swords – or other obvious euphemisms - are often underlined, right up to the hilts. Not subtle, but socially acceptable according to the mores of the day, it seems.

The book has is a wonderful portrayal of small town life in Sudbury, Suffolk. We sense the nouveau riche pretensions of Bath and we can almost feel London expanding amid the stories of Gainsborough’s Pall Mall house and Richmond Hill getaway. But what is so wonderful about James Hamilton‘s book is that its erudition, which at times is breathtaking in its detail, is so beautifully embroidered into the narrative that all we received is a rounded, complete insight into the way Gainsborough lived, did business, and related to people, as well as seeing a detailed picture of what he painted and how he worked.

Of particular interest was his and his contemporaries’ touting of business from the rich and famous. Obviously, a commission from the Royals, especially the King, was what really put you on the map and, as ever in Britain, a social pecking order made the achievement of status easier for some than others. Gainsborough was from quite lowly origins and did not attend prestigious institutions to learn his trade, so he had to work for the elite status that eventually came his way. It is worth noting however that he was never knighted, unlike his rival Reynolds, being the journeyman of the trade in the celebrity likeness business. But he did make a good living, which he largely handed over to his wife, who stashed the money away, lest her husband blow it on wine, women or song, or even the expensive musical instruments he bought, but never learn to play.

Gainsborough rubbed shoulders with the elite. He was friends with other artists and with composers, such as Abel and J C Bach. But one feels his feet never really left the ground, even when parking his sword. And as such, he was not given to visionary statements in his art. He clearly liked to paint landscapes but found he could only sell them on the back of his portrait trade. Thus, he devoted his professional time to that which would be better his life, leaving intellectual challenge at least for later.

Interestingly, James Hamilton makes the point that Gainsborough the artist would have found work in any age. His approach would always have found a clientele and his style would have adapted, whilst more visionary artists, despite their massive achievements, could not have pursued their particular visions in a different age. Gainsborough thus becomes a kind of model modern artworld businessman, pragmatic, competent, in demand and commercially aware of the success he achieved. Well, at least his wife was.

A Change of Climate by Hilary Mantel

In A Change Of Climate Hilary Mantel presents what is essentially a family saga, but in settings that add extra dimensions to the expected dilemmas. The family in question is the Eldreds. Ralph and Anna have shared an unusual if not an altogether unconventional married life. They have spent time in Africa as missionaries. They have devoted their time to helping others less advantaged than themselves. Ralph runs a charitable trust in Norfolk in the east of England. But they have also found the time and energy to raise children of their own and experience the day-to-day pressures of any family’s life. But there has been more, more that has not been voiced.

Volunteer missionary work took them to South Africa, to a township called Elim near Johannesburg. It was during the era of toughening Apartheid, a time when new powers threatened whole communities with eviction and resettlement to “tribal homelands”. Ralph and Anna begin to identify with their community and deal with certain people who held particular opinions about the way South African society was being organised. Their activities catch the eye of the local police and, as a consequence of their contact, Ralph and Anna are arrested and imprisoned.

For them there is a way out of jail, and it is a way that is not available, of course, to the others who had been associated with them in Elim, those who have to continue living with the injustice that seems to affect the lives of the Eldreds. Hilary Mantel’s novel, however, doggedly follows the Eldreds to Botswana, where the family apparently gives up thinking about those they have left behind. Known then as Bechuanaland, Botswana provides the family with an opportunity, but they are offered a posting that the previous incumbents did not appear to like. By this time Anna has been through a pregnancy and has been blessed with twins. It seems, however, that the mission’s previous occupants were correct about the undesirability of the posting. Problems ensue for the Eldreds. What happens to the couple in the latter days of their stay in southern Africa is crucial to the plot of the A Change Of Climate. But there are two or three aspects to these events, not just one relating to a child. Perhaps sometimes overlooked is the fate of the others involved with the tragic events at the end of the family’s time in Botswana, a fate that returns to haunt via an almost passing mention towards the end of the book. Guilt, it seems, has many manifestations, mostly ignored.

Back in Britain, the Eldreds devote themselves to assisting those less fortunate than themselves. Thus Melanie appears on the scene. She is young, self-abusing, antisocial and in need. But then all these characters find themselves in need - in need of comfort, reassurance, something that might salve the conscience, replace the loss, turn time around and allow a different path to be taken. Devoted to alleviating the suffering of others, neither Ralph nor Anna can cope with their own traumas. These have to be lived with and relived every day, the guilt they engender colouring most of their lives. Ways out of the impasse of coping are always at hand, however. When Ralph and Anna’s son takes up with the daughter of a local single mum who ekes out a living from standing markets and trading junk, an opportunity burns suddenly bright and new suffering and guilt is wrought in the furnace.

In the end, no matter what life throws at us, we all depend on one another and need the succour of others to survive. This remains the case, even when our ideals lead us blandly towards avoidable tragedy and our ensuing suffering impinges on the lives of others.

Hilary Mantel’s novel invites us to empathise with the suffering and guilt of Ralph and Anna Eldred. But what the book fails to examine in depth is their motives. Given the consequence of some of their actions, whether intended or not, these could surely have come under greater scrutiny.

My latest book, One On One, is a romantic espionage thriller set on an island in the South China Sea