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.

 

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

 Half Blood Blues is a novel by Esi Edugyan. It deals with territory that is rarely successful for the writer, that of music and musicians. They have surely been many successful books about writers, painters, even sculptures. But novels where the composition and performance of music figure large are often rather less than significant and are often, frankly, unsuccessful. Perhaps it has to do with the non-visual, largely abstract and utterly personal nature of the effects of sound and our individual responses to it. It’s hard to avoid cliché when words have to describe music. Time, surely, also plays its part, since for the listener music exists within its own time that can neither be controlled or compressed into a phrase.

After such a preamble, the congratulations to Esi Edugyan for her convincing portrayal of jazz musicians in Half Blood Blues are significant. We are in the late 1930s, long before free expression or even bebop, in a period when Sydney Bechet was still cool and Louis Armstrong was the hot thing, but these characters assembled in prewar Berlin do form a convincing band. In the novel’s pages, we do feel what it might be like to play bass, horn, trumpet or bass. Drummers, perhaps, like guitarists have always been a race apart.

Half Blood Blues focuses on the life of Hiero, a German who happens to be both a jazz musician and black. With his fellow band members, Chip and Sid, he ekes out a living playing clubs in a city where the expression they choose is now seen as degenerate. Just a few years before, American music, even jazz played by black people, had been popular, but times have changed. The musicians sense that change, but Hiero feels it more deeply, because now he is doubly estranged from the country he must call home. Changing times, the onset of war and the threat of violence forces the band to flee to Paris, in the hope they can escape across the Atlantic.

Like stereotypical performers, the bohemians are somewhat scattered in their habits, seek casual sex, use drugs and eat sporadically. Delilah enters their lives. She presents a different approach to life, and almost surreal vision of what the men assume to constitute a woman and she thus seems to possess influence over these men’s lives as they pursue their expression, albeit personal, via the ensemble and its public sound.

The book opens in Paris in 1940 and revisits later. The band of had to flee their home in Germany. It also inhabits Berlin in 1939 to trace the origins of the band’s flight from Nazism and then it revisits the same city in 1992, as a couple of characters trace what might have this might’ve happened as a consequence of actions over 50 years earlier.

By the time they reach Poland in 1992 in an attempt to trace one of their number, they are thoroughly surprised, exonerated, if not actually forgiven. At the heart of the tale the influence of the music, especially the improvisation, is paramount. It’s what you do now at this instant that matters. You might plan, you can reflect, you might even rehearse. But the now is all that matters. Just play on.

Esi Edugyan uses a certain style of language here and there to characterize the protagonists as jazz musicians and in some cases foreigners and in others black. It is not overused and so achieves its intention, so it rarely intrudes between the character and the reader. The intention, however, successfully communicates the characters’ status as outsiders and it’s never over-used.

At the heart of this novel, whose plot is significant and so will not be described here, is an act of betrayal, selfishness and duplicity that lays on the conscience for decades. The victim, once traced, indicates that life went on and reasserts the importance of engaging with the here and now. Which all goes to show, you can contemplate to your heart’s content and even analyse endlessly, but the only real advice is to get on with it and life will create itself. Improvise.

Scriabin’s Divine Poem and Manuel de Falla played by Judith Jauregui is a revelation

Josep Vicent, artistic director, and conductor at ADDA, Alicante, decided to entitle the whole season of concerts ‘Divine Poem’. One must conclude that he really wanted to build this particular work into the orchestra’s repertoire. In last night’s concert, he and the ADDA Orchestra played the Divine Poem, effectively the Symphony No. 3 of Alexander Scriabin and it proved to be nothing less than a triumph.

This is very much a transitional work, or so we are told. Scriabin’s early work was heavily influenced by Chopin and Liszt. Then he discovered Wagner and other extra-musical influences, including Indian mythology, pantheism and the stimulus provided by an ego the size of a universe, and so his style changed, as we are told. The expressive, apparently unpredictable and vivid symbolism of the late piano sonatas seems not to relate to the early works, but a keen listener will, however, find progression, not change.

The Poem of Ecstasy and the Poem of Fire, orchestral works that followed the Divine Poem, were single movement pieces, more like the tone poems than symphonies. The Poem of Fire reflected the composer’s increasing tendency towards the grandiose in that it involves a large orchestra, a piano soloist, a full chorus, an organ, and, if it is done as the composer wished, an auditorium-wide light show and perfumes wafted in using wind machines. Personally, I have attended one such a performance, in London’s Royal Albert Hall in the 1970s. The program notes made Pseud’s Corner in Private Eye.

The projected work to follow these, a work that the composer promised to write but only had time to sketch was his Mysterium, a giant ego-trip in three movements that would have involved building a new concert hall in the Himalayas and mounting a week-long festival whose finale, so the composer thought, would be the end of the world. Death at forty-three from blood-poisoning prevented Alexander Scriabin from completing the project.

In 1972, the year of the centenary of Scriabin’s birth, his music was for a while in the spotlight. I bought John Ogden’s Sonata cycle, a disc of the two late poems and Svetlanov’s Melodiya, recording of the Divine Poem. I now have at least one recording of every work the composer wrote. But the Svetlanov Divine Poem is the only recording I have of this work. It’s not played very often.

Which is a surprise, because on the face of it, it’s a conventional symphony. It sounds like Rachmaninov in places and is very much in a nineteenth century idiom. It’s not as challenging at first hearing as a Mahler symphony, or a Strauss tone poem, for that matter. It’s quite melodic and reaches some amazing dynamic heights. It is certainly memorable.

But on this hearing, I found much more in the Divine Poem, a work I have been listening to for fifty years. Embedded in the second and third movements of the three movement  symphony are all the musical elements, the themes, the harmonies, and the orchestral juxtapositions, that would reappear in Ecstasy and Fire. They are all there! It became nothing less than revelatory to realize that there is nothing new in those later, often described as revolutionary works. It’s all there in the Divine Poem.

Josep Vicent’s reading of the score was, as ever, superb. The rich textures of Scriabin’s orchestration were all interpreted and played to perfection, and one thinks that the trombones and tuba have never worked so hard for a living! The performance was a total success, and I await the other works’ inclusion in future programs. ADDA’s habit of projecting images onto the back of the stage would work well for the Poem of Fire. The orchestra’s encore of the Prelude to act three of Lohengrin was an informed choice, since various passages in the Divine Poem clearly owed much to Wagner, not least the birdsong section in the first movement, we seemed to have flown in directly from Siegfried.

The Divine Poem came after a first half of music by Manuel de Falla. We began the evening with the Jota from El Sombrero de Tres Picos, and then we heard a stunningly beautiful performance of Noches en los Jardines de España, Nights In The Gardens Of Spain with Judith Juregui a soloist. Some of Manuel de Falla’s orchestral textures in the third movement were distinctly Scriabin-esque. Judith Jauregui’s playing of this work, which is a piano concerto in all but name, was exquisite and her encore of music by Mompou was an inspired choice.

Josep Vicent and ADDA keep on presenting concerts which transcend my abilities to write reviews. They are nothing less than memorable, every time!

Billy Budd by Herman Melville

Billy Budd is doubly famous. He is the eponymous principal character of Herman Melville’s novella and, by adoption via E M Forster’s hand, also the eponymous hero a Benjamin Britten’s opera. The contrasting if not contradictory words ‘character’ and ‘hero’ are important in the context of these two masterpieces.

Like all good stories, it cannot be spoiled, because it is in the way the story is told that the real experience lies. Billy Budd is a young man, rather handsome in a simple, lower status, ratings way. He is recruited from a merchant ship called The Rights of Man to HMS indomitable and so joins the King’s Navy as a foretopman. The previous ship’s owner with its explicitly political title is mentioned in the book as owned by someone who sympathises with Thomas Paine and presumably the American and therefore the French Revolutions. This point is merely referenced by Forster and Britten, probably because it might provide an alternative political motive for the antagonism that develops, an antagonism that, in the opera, focuses on sexuality.

The Indomitable embarks on its mission during the Napoleonic Wars under the direction of Captain Vere and is policed by a master-at-arms called Claggart, whom Vere only met on the return part of his last voyage, indicating that exists no personal friendship between them. Melville tells us that Claggart is around thirty-five, an age he generally exceeds by a considerable amount in most productions of Britten’s opera.

Billy Budd is a genial sort of giant. Everyone notices his good looks, his youth, his athletic stature and his obvious strength. But it is also noted that he is naïve, perhaps overly trusting. An old hand tries to warn him that Claggart has taken against him, but Billy insists that he himself has never spoken ill of anyone, so there can be no problem.

Claggart conspires to pin an accusation of recruitment for mutiny on Billy. The name of his previous ship and presumably the political associations of its owner play an important part, as does the impressed status, equals kidnapped, of some crew members. Already I fall into the trap of labelling the ‘bad’ guy with a surname and the foretopman with a forename. But that is the reality. For whatever reason, Claggart is out to get Billy.

Billy has one severe weakness. He stutters. He stutters more when stressed. And when, in the company of Captain Vere, Claggart publicly delivers his accusation against the young man, Billy becomes so incensed that he cannot defend himself verbally. The words will not come and in frustration he strikes Claggart and kills him. Billy is tried, found guilty of striking and killing an officer and is condemned to death. He hangs.

At the trial, Vere presents his version of events in a cold hearted, matter of fact manner that will admit no nuance. In effect, he merely recites the rulebook. In the opera, Vere’s ghost, still troubled by conscience, admits he could have saved Billy Budd, but chose not to. In Melville’s original, things are more complex. Vere must enact the demands of his office and so he behaves as he does. Stability, loyalty to King and country and the rightness of superior social class trump notions of justice, fairness or compassion. The obvious injustice almost creates sufficient reaction amongst the crew to itself provoke a mutiny, but the anger dissipates, defeated by continued enforced subservience.

And, by the way, all of this applies to the opera, as well as the novella. Forster and Britten make more of Vere, paradoxically, than Melville, despite the novella spending much more time on the actual trial than the opera. Vere is torn by conscience, but he is the apparently unwitting possessor of a responsibility that trumps personal judgment. In some ways, Vere is more of an order taker than those whom he orders. And at the end of the opera, Britain illustrates how the aspiring middle classes, those promoted and paid to populate a buffer zone between protest and power, eventually protect the status of their social betters, but cannot salve a collective conscience, a conscience that in any case does not care.

A theme which becomes central but not rarely explicit in the opera is the suggestion that Claggart is homosexually attracted to Billy Budd. The antagonism generated within him towards Billy is thus the result of an inner purging of guilt and self-loathing that the attraction itself generates. There is the mere hint of this in Melville’s words. For obvious reasons, it was a theme that interested Britten deeply.

But the opera’s amplification of the theme is justified. Melville distances himself from anything sexual. The topic clearly exists in the lives of the sailors. But Melville apparently refuses to enter the establishment, let alone the bedroom where implied acts take place. There is a clear reference to Claggart’s attraction, but the author also wrote of the highly ambiguous relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg at the start of Moby Dick. There is evidence enough of the author’s reluctance to enter the bedroom, even when he declares himself explicitly in attendance!

Perhaps the most moving experience in Billy Budd is to read the epilogue, which is a sailor’s poetic retelling of the story. Personally, I find it impossible to read these words without also singing Billy’s almost proud but frank lament from the opera. The story is, undoubtedly, a double masterpiece.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

I did not begin the two hundred thousand words plus of Moby Dick expecting to be surprised. Herman Melville’s book has been on my reading list shelf for years, always an intended read but never opened. Its iconic status has always proved too much of a barrier to its starting. The motivation eventually came, however, from a particularly moving production of Benjamin Brittten’s opera Billy Budd, itself based on a Herman Melville story, that prompted a decision to start Moby Dick, the whale sized book about whaling, and I had a whale of a time. A copy of Billy Budd, incidentally, was not to hand at the time. This must be remedied.

The bare whalebones of Moby Dick are very simply arranged. The story is told by Ishmael, who is seeking work as a sailor. Paradoxically, perhaps, we learn very little about Ishmael. It seems he is cast almost like some detached observer, able to discern the motives of others, but usually unable to declare his own feelings. He is, however, undeniably a character, not a mere vehicle for a writer’s declamation.

In Nantucket, Ishmael befriends Queequeg, a fellow sailor, who is ethnically and religiously different from himself. They soon share a room and even a bed. How the cultural difference and the male camaraderie are described is one of the more memorable aspects of this thought-provoking book. Both men are recruited onto the Pequod, a whaler under the command of the initially anonymous and even mysterious captain Ahab. Ostensibly, they are joining a factory ship on a standard mission to harvest whales for the extraction of profit via oil. The source of the profit and the means of realising it may run counter to our current assumptions, but the capitalist nature of the activity remains central to our contemporary interactions.

Once on board, however, they, along with the rest of the crew, discover that their now revealed captain has been all but destroyed in an encounter with a vast animal called a white whale and that their ship, the Pequod, is embarking upon a mission to extract vengeance. Captain Ahab is intent, nay single-mindedly obsessed with hunting down his attacker and repaying its compliment. A simple irony about Ahab is that having lost his leg in his encounter with Moby Dick, he now supports himself on a false leg made of whalebone, tapered at the base so it locks in a deck socket for stability. Thus anchored, supported by the very material he seeks to destroy, he surveys the sea for evidence of his prey. He does find his goal and pursues it for three days. Ishmael lives to tell the tale. But those particular events are more than one hundred and thirty chapters in the reader’s future after first encountering Ishmael seeking work in Nantucket.

In Moby Dick Herman Melville places us firmly in the middle of the nineteenth century. Modern readers must bear in mind that assumptions will be challenged by what has changed in the intervening decades. This was an age before electricity, before mass travel, before immediate communication over distance. But it was also an age when the industrial exploitation of the earth’s resources, animal as well as mineral, was not just under way, but was seen as an essential and desired end that might provide employment, generate wealth and benefit human life. As readers today, we must therefore attempt, for that is all we can do, to relieve ourselves of our novel positions on the activity the book describes. This was an era when killing whales for extraction of profit was quite normal, if, for most people, still a distant, dangerous, even fabulous activity. Reading a whodunnit does not indicate acceptance of murder, so exposure to Moby Dick does not imply support of whaling. And making this required mental shift will unlock the tremendous power, immediacy and indeed wisdom of this masterpiece.

That whaling happened, that a large industry grew up and was sustained by the activity and that people lived the life that it demanded is indisputable. Like all history, we are never condemned to repeat it, but we are also reminded that, though we remain free to reinterpret it, we are powerless to change it. And this book, almost like no other, is replete with the whaling experience which is now so foreign to us. We do, via Herman Melville’s magnificent narrative, enter into that world, that pursuance of life and death, and the experience is not for the faint hearted.

But what is most surprising about Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is its form, or indeed its lack of it. The effect is strikingly modern, in that the novel is not presented as a linear narrative. Instead, Moby Dick presents facts about whales, descriptions of the whaling process, details of its contemporary setting and, above all, portraits of the characters who populate the Pequod and are pressed into partnering Ahab’s mission. In some ways, Moby Dick presents a total experience of a microcosm, often so focused it does its subject literally to death, but in other ways so lacking in focus that a reader can profitably dig in and out of the book almost at random.

And despite the location of the subject matter in a particular time, some of its themes are also relevant to our contemporary society. For example, through Ishmael’s narrative Herman Melville addresses the question of what kind of animal the whale might be. He is aware of Linnaeus and the modern concept of species. He is aware of the evidence that whales, unlike fish, give birth and suckle their young with mother’s milk. The Bible, however, describes Jonah’s encounter as being definitively with a fish, and so that is that, and thus the question is unarguably answered. The whale has to be a fish, since God may not be contradicted. What more perfect example of fact-ignoring fake news or conspiracy theory could one imagine?

Ahab, certainly, is a tyrant, but he is perhaps not the totalitarian dictator that some interpretations demand. He is driven by a personal mission and recruits others, perhaps by deceit, perhaps by stealth, to further his ends. Now a flawed human being, he uses the able bodies of his recruits to pursue his ends and rise above his own limitations. But though he does conduct his pursuit on his own terms in his own autocratic way, eventually he leads his own chase, his personal vendetta and tunnel vision relieving him of his better judgment, whereas a modern dictator would have the exit strategy ready before any risk might be considered. Essentially, Ahab is the ultimate politician who recruits unquestioning and loyal followers who become part owners of individual drive. And then, like any politician who needs to exert pressure, he calls upon his followers to amplify himself, albeit unsuccessfully. All political careers, we are told, end in failure.

Overall, once the paradigm shift in the reader’s assumption is made, Melville’s Moby Dick presents a thoroughly modern and therefore a thoroughly surprising experience. The subject matter may not be fashionable today, but then it reminds us that today’s preoccupations and assumed values might soon themselves appear both pointless and, indeed, repulsive.

Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf

Between The Acts by Virginia Woolf is the author’s last novel. It is often described as a difficult read. And indeed, difficult it is, not because it is full of shocking scenes, tough language or improbable plot, but because it attempts to present what people think, as they think it, jumbled, processed only by passing experience, often random and disjointed.

The style might be called ‘stream of consciousness’ or ‘internal narrative’, but no stock phrase can sum up or adequately describe the abrupt changes in point of view, the disjointed time, the juxtaposition of sometimes unrelated material, the real with the invented, all imagined and suffused within the feared. One thing that does become clear as the book progresses is that this process is much more akin to poetry than narrative. Its images often flash past in opposite directions, apparently unrelated but thought by the same person, often in contradiction to what we have come to assume is the professed intent of the character.

Ostensibly, this is just a group of people coming together to see a play. They assemble in the open air, in the bucolic landscape of the English shires, on a long light summer evening to witness the performance of a drama conceived by one of their number and acted by their acquaintances. We learn that the proceeds from ticket sales and donations will go towards the installation of electric light in the parish church, probably to replace the now extinguished Light of The World which has now proved to be defunct. Thus, at least on its surface, Between The Acts seems to be a rural English, middle class comedy, where society folk gossip about one another while view while they remain baffled by amateur dramatics. After all, what might one expect from artists?

But that surface is mere illusion. Written in 1939 to 1941, Between The Acts senses war close at hand. There is potential for destruction, for disquiet, for foreboding. In addition, the characters who almost anonymously populate the book, relate their own histories, fears, hopes, prejudices and confusion, any of which might change by the moment. They are all complex in an ordinary and perhaps predictable way and, like all of us, they often think and act tangentially, with one person‘s utterance provoking perhaps unrelated responses in others.

Between The Acts is not a long book. Neither, on its surface, is its language difficult. But its myriad of associations, random shifts and passing associations make it impossible to follow for any reader intend on finding a one-dimensional narrative. It was obviously never Virginia Woolf’s intention to facilitate such an experience.

But any conventional route is not an appropriate way to approach this book. It is a work to be absorbed word by word, phrase by phrase, and then again, with the reader’s own imagination stimulated by the images supplied. In these pages we are presented with the play itself, with all of its non sequiturs and all of its deliberate imitation of well-known drama. But overall, we are amongst people who are as confused about their own identity as anyone, and we live through that confusion apparently as they live at themselves.

A rewarding activity for anyone interested is to read the book and then to work through the free course on the book available via a The Open University’s Open Learn website. What the course admirably achieves is a promotion of reflection on the text, and insistence that writing as dense as this needs a reader’s reflection and an imagination’s participation.

It has to be noted also, however, that the author herself was not in the best of mental health when the book was written. This surely is reflected in the text and, as such, Between The Acts probably offers at least some insight into what it must be like to suffer mental illness. The dividing line between coping with experience and being overwhelmed by it is a fine one, it seems, so narrow that any of these characters and indeed any reader may cross that boundary without really knowing it.