Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton presents an enigma seen from several contrasting, some related standpoints. It seems to deal with the concept of authenticity and its consequences. In general we like things to be authentic. We like the people we meet and the possessions we own to be genuine. But what if they are not? Does it matter? The historical basis upon which Peter Ackroyd hangs the plot of his novel is the life of Thomas Chatterton, the poet who committed suicide at the slight age of eighteen. Wallis’s iconic painting of the death adorns the book’s cover and its creation in the mid-nineteenth century forms a major element of the book’s plot. There’s also an eccentric English lady who has made money from writing and drinks gin incessantly from a teaspoon. There’s an art gallery offering some works by a famous painter. They are declared fakes. 

Charles Wychwood is an ailing, none too successful poet. He has a wonderful relationship with his young son, and a cooler one with his wife who has grown used to supporting her husband’s apparent lack of achievement. One day Charles decides to raise a little capital in a sale-room, but then ends up blowing his money on a painting. It’s a portrait, professedly of a middle-aged Chatterton. So perhaps he faked his own death so he could continue his trade anonymously. The idea captivates Charles because he knows a little of the poet’s background. 

Chatterton was born in the later part of the eighteenth century. He became obsessed with a series of medieval texts and started to copy their style. Thus he became the author of bogus medieval poetry, some of which he managed to publish. Unfortunately, he chose to publish not in his own name but in the name of a lost and forgotten medieval writer, thus passing off his own modern work as “genuine”. Writers, like academics, tend to regard plagiarism as a capital offence. But in Chatterton’s case, it wasn’t plagiarism, was it? He wasn’t trying to pass off another’s work as his own. He was merely adopting a pen name which implied that the material came from a different era. One brings to mind the myriad of pop singers, pianists, opera stars, actors or even television personalities who have adapted new names and apparently different personas in their attempts to open doors. What price a genuine article? 

I recall hawkers parading through Kuta in Bali with their open wooden boxes of watches shouting, “Rolex, Cartier, genuine imitation.” But Chatterton’s mimic status was uncovered. Scandal ensued and he earned no more. Penniless in a London garret he poisoned himself. Wallis painted the scene, albeit more than a generation later, it’s apparent verisimilitude pure fake. We know the picture. The poet’s red hair contrasts with his death pallor. An arm trails on the floor, the open window above suggesting a world beyond. But, of course, the man in the picture is a model, none other than the novelist, George Meredith. He made it into this picture of faked death only because the painter fancied his wife. So if the painterly aspects of the canvas might be genuine, its context is mere reconstruction, perhaps invention. Does this devalue it? 

But what if Chatterton did not die at that young age? What if Charles Wychwood’s painting of Chatterton in middle age is genuine? Did Chatterton fake more than poems? (Even if he did actually write them!) Charles buys the painting and then visits Bristol to uncover some roots. He meets Joynson, an elderly man who speaks only in riddles. A box of the poet’s memorabilia is secured. Is any of it real? Is any of it genuine? And so the novel unfolds. What is authentic is often fake and what is genuine is often impersonated. But if a painting is worth looking at, does it matter too much if it is merely the content of a painter’s imagination? Does it have to possess authenticity, even a pedigree to be an artwork? And so what if Chatterton did, or did not die? If he did, he died accused of being a fake, which he wasn’t, because he did write his poetry. If he did not die, then perhaps he was a fake, because in that case we have no idea what else he did not write! Like all Peter Ackroyd’s writing, Chatterton makes the reader think. And by the way, Chatterton’s characters are themselves creations of the author. They aren’t genuine, are they? View the book on amazon Chatterton (Abacus Books)

Moorish Spain by Richard Fletcher

In Moorish Spain Richard Fletcher achieves a significant feat. In a short book he not only chronicles the bones of nearly a millennium of history, but also offers much that adds to our understanding of the social context, both of his chosen era in particular and of history in general.

Moorish Spain does not aspire to scholarly excellence. Richard Fletcher’s stated aim is to provide a fuller and more accurate account of Islamic rule in the Iberian peninsula than the cursory accounts offered in travel books. He also aspires to a treatment of the subject that is more accurate than the romanticised position of nineteenth century travellers, accounts that served to create and then perpetuate myth.

And paramount in this myth is the received opinion that in Moorish al-Andalus all things social were both sweetness and light and pure harmony. Not so, says Fletcher, as he chronicles power struggles, intrigues and repeated conflict. He describes the different interests that ensured that conflict, both small-scale and local or larger-scale and spread across a wider front, was never very far away. When competing parties felt that they could all benefit from interaction and trade, it was, he suggests, largely pragmatism that kept the peace.

His story begins in the early eighth century when the first invasion of what we now call Spain arrived from Morocco. It ends with the expulsion of the Mozarabes in the sixteenth century. In between, in a quite short and accessible book, he illustrates how shifting alliances and opportunity for short-term gain mix with broader views and humanitarian concerns to present a patchwork of history. And this patchwork is characterised, above all, by our inability to generalise. Throughout, it is the particular that is important.

In contrast he presents a number of generalised overviews and illustrates how none of them is more than partially correct. In a short but telling final chapter he offers a generalisation of his own to illustrate how dominant contemporary ideas can filter history in order to enhance its own credibility. Tellingly, he also reminds us of how much chronicled history relates only to the recorded opinions and lives of a wealthy, sometimes educated elite. How much detail of life in the twentieth century USA could be gleaned half a millennium from now if the only source was a telephone poll of Hollywood celebrities?

Richard Fletcher’s book therefore transcends its own subject matter. It presents a rounded, carefully reconstructed picture of an immense swathe of history. In such a short account, of course, he can only present a relatively small amount of detail, but what is there goes a long way beyond what the average reader might ever discover from a shallow tourist guide. The style is easy but never racy and the content has a feeling of reliability that suggests a second visit would be worthwhile.

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Moorish Spain

The Viceroy Of Ouidah by Bruce Chatwin

Bruce Chatwin’s The Viceroy Of Ouidah masquerades as a small book. In 50,000 words or so, the author presents a fictionalised life that has been embroidered from truth. History, hyper-reality, the supernatural and the surreal and the cocktail that creates the heady mix through which strands of story filter. Overall the experience is much bigger than the slim book suggests. We meet Francisco Manuel da Silva, a Brazilian born in the country’s north-east in the latter part of the eighteenth century. We learn a little of his background and then we follow him to Dahomey in West Africa, the modern Benin. 

He finds a place in society, consorts with kings, encounters amazons and conjoins with local culture. He also becomes a slave trader, making his considerable fortune by moving ship-loads of a cargo whose human identity is denied, as if it were merely the collateral damage of mercantilism. Francisco Manuel survives, prospers and procreates with abandon. He fathers a lineage of varied hue, a small army of males to keep the name alive and further complicate identity, and a near race of females who inherit the anonymity of their gender.  

But The Viceroy of Ouidah is much more than a linear tale of a life. Bruce Chatwin’s vivid prose presents a multiplicity of minutiae, associations, conflicts and concordances. Each pithy paragraph could be a novel in itself if it were not so utterly poetic. A random example will suffice to give a flavour. “Often the Brazilian captains had to wait weeks before the coast was clear but their host spared no expense to entertain them. His dining room was lit with a set of silver candelabra; behind each chair stood a serving girl, naked to the waist, with a white napkin folded on her arm. Sometimes a drunk would shout out, ‘What are these women?’ and Da Silva would glare down the table and say. ‘Our future murderers.’” 

 Within each vivid scene, we experience history, place, culture, and all the emotions, disappointments and achievements of imperfect lives. A jungle vibrates with untamed life around us. Treachery sours and threatens, while disease and passion alike claim their victims. It is a book to be savoured almost line by line. It provides an experience that is moving, technicoloured, but, like all lives, inevitably ephemeral. Like the outlawed trade that endowed riches, it eventually comes to nought, except of course for those who are inadvertently caught up in its net and whose lives were thus utterly changed if, indeed, they survived. 

I read The Viceroy Of Ouidah without a bookmark, always starting a few pages before where I had previously left off. Each time, I read through several pages convinced that it was my first time to see them and then I would reach a particularly striking phrase and realise I had been there before. The extent of the detail and complexity of the images present a rain-forest of detail that is completely absorbing. The Viceroy Of Ouidah is thus surely a book worth reading several times. View the book on amazon The Viceroy of Ouidah (Vintage Classics)

The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier

The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier presents a vivid story. It features two central characters, both women, who inhabit the same places but are separated by four hundred years. The two women discover not only similar experience, but also suffer similar responses, perhaps because they share the same genes. The two women are of the same stock. Ella Turner is an American, a trained but not practising midwife, who has moved to France. Her husband, Rick, has a new overseas posting. 

They seem to get on well, but Rick is very focused on his career and hardly seems to notice how difficult is Ella’s transition to European life. Ella’s surname, Turner, is in fact derived from the French Tournier. There is a recorded immigrant in her family’s past. So life in France is potentially a return to roots of a kind and she decides to take the opportunity to do some research. Luckily, her family used to live in the region where she and Rick have settled. And thus she discovers a family of Hugenots, French Protestant converts who migrate to Calvin’s Switzerland in search of security and tolerance. As Ella carries out her search, her hair, perhaps coincidentally, changes colour. Isabelle de Moulin was the ancestor that Ella discovers.

She found herself moved by a vision of the Virgin Mary in which a blue, a vivid, variable blue of a fabric features memorably. It’s a blue that appears in dreams, is recalled when her sexual maturity beckons experience. And her hair turns red, giving her the nickname, La Rousse. She is soon pregnant. And the father, Etienne Tournier, does the honourable thing, but, as is customary for him and his family, without a great deal of honour. But there is turmoil around. There is a new faith, a protester’s church that the Tourniers espouse. Isabelle’s visions of Virgin Blue cause internal conflict, a conflict that seems to focus in her daughter, Marie. 

Threat of persecution forces flight over the border. Ella, meanwhile, is learning a lot about France, Hugenots and her family’s origins. She visits a library, finds a family bible and meets a librarian called Jean-Paul, perhaps not coincidentally named after a Pope. They share and interest, pursue it and then find more in common. Ella begins to suffer blue visions of her own. And, with her own life in turmoil, she follows her ancestors to Switzerland to uncover more of their history. What she finds shocks her and reveals how a fundamentally female energy has the power to transcend time in order to colour experience. The novel’s denouement is truly surprising and not a little shocking. But what Tracy Chevalier does not do in The Virgin Blue is tie up all the ends or explain all detail. And this is eventually one of the book’s strengths. 

When all of Isabelle’s and Ella’s trials and tribulations have passed by, there are still questions, loose ends and unmade decisions. The Virgin Blue thus presents rounded characters whose vulnerabilities and inconsistencies render them thoroughly credible. There are few writers who present women as complete characters pursuing their own independent, incomplete lives, but Tracy Chevalier is one of them. View the book on amazon The Virgin Blue

Antonio Mari on show at the Sculpture Garden in Alfas del Pi

Sometimes, perhaps rarely, people have a vision. They not only see, they see through or beyond, allowing them to appreciate, often quite suddenly, a bigger space, more powerful than the immediate. Often it’s an artist that prompts such realisation. After all, it’s the artist’s role to help us see and, at the same time, to interpret. But alongside the art it’s sometimes also the setting that helps us to find an experience that lies beyond mere sight. Such a perfect blend of expression and content can be seen at the Jardin Escultorico in Alfas del Pi on Spain’s Costa Blanca, where works by Antonio Mari are on display. 

Toni Mari is a Javea-born artist who sculpts in iron. His work is often highly naturalistic, with bulls, birds, fish and sheep and other farmyard animals featuring. But it is the human form that dominates his work, despite the fact that most of his figures are often more air than substance. His figures often stride like a Bocchioni or dance like a Degas. 

Charging bulls display a life-force. A strangely light iron bird seems ready to take flight. A Good Shepherd strides, superhuman in scale, across his meadow, his joints – characteristically for Mari – twisted tendons of metal. At the hip a lunch satchel swings, no doubt crammed with the cheese of his following sheep, whose delicate fleece is soldered springs. A welded dog eagerly awaits its master’s call. A series of dancers add pure grace, their clothing and costume flowing into ribbons that do no more than punctuate their back-drop of sky. Though welded to their rusted plinths, surely they move, thus claiming their freedom of life. 

But Antonio Mari’s work is also revelatory, an aspect that is only amplified by the setting. This special exhibition sits alongside a permanent sculpture collection, amongst which are other works by the same artist. The whole is set in the beautiful gardens of the Jardin Escultorico in Alfas del Pi, on Spain’s Costa Blanca. 

Established in 1998, the gardens are the vision of Johanna Klein-Schreuder and Johannes Klein. Twelve years ago they bought a plot with some three hundred decrepit orange trees. Their unique vision was to create a sculpture garden, a space to exhibit human and natural creation both to contrast and complement. Now more than a decade into the project, Johanna and Johannes have achieved their goal. 

Their garden is worth a visit in itself. Though formally laid out, its main features are trees, themselves apparently living sculptures presenting a remarkable variety of shape and form, some in flower, some hardly yet in leaf. Interspersed between these natural forms are works of contemporary sculptors, including other works by Toni Mari, including Love Dance and Man On Stilts. In the former, angels dance a round while in the latter a perfectly formed person who has hardly any physical form seems to stride through the garden at tree-top height. 

Ausencia by Jorge Castro Flóres is a reclining figure whose very substance has been torn away. Here the reduction of the human to a kind of essence is as painful as Mari’s use of the same idea is uplifting. Elsie Ringnalda’s On Top Of You features two elongated but anonymous figures. He is lying on his back. She is upright walking towards him along his legs. Thus natural and human creativity mix, the whole producing its own life. The vision of Johanna and Johannes works beautifully with the joint focus of garden and sculpture augmenting and amplifying each other. The Jardin Escultorico is a wonderful place to visit for residents and tourists alike. And it would also repay repeated visits, since the featured exhibitions change regularly and, of course, the trees are never the same, even from one day to the next. You can visit this beautiful place at Cami del Pinar 23, Alfas del Pi. See http://www.klein-schreuder.com for further details and opening times.

The Woman In The Dunes by Kobo Abe

Novels in translation always present at least twice their share of pitfalls for the reviewer, or even the reader. A translated novel has to be approached as a package, experienced as such and reviewed in kind. After reading The Woman In The Dunes by Kobo Abe I am presented with a wholly new dilemma, however. An entomologist disappears while out bug hunting. He finds himself a virtual prisoner in a sand pit, a pit inhabited by a woman with whom he soon finds a predictable solace. He tries to escape, and does not. He dreams of escape, and does not achieve his goal. The characteristics of his new environment seem to contradict all of his assumptions. Nothing helps. The Woman In The Dunes might be described as absurd. Equally, the term nihilistic might be appropriate. It might even be deliberately trivial. As such it presents an intellectual challenge to the reader who, of necessity, must constantly interpolate the banality of the book’s inaction into a sub-text of potentially enormous significance. I say “potentially” enormous significance because I remain unsure, having finished the book, whether any significance at all might apply. But then again, perhaps that’s the point. The Woman In The Dunes has been likened to Kafka’s Trial or the absurdity of Samuel Beckett’s plays. As an experience, however, none of the suspense of the former nor the bald linguistic power of the latter. Perhaps the novel’s rather one-paced prose was a true reflection of the original. If so, then I might suggest that the writer rather over-stated his point. View the book on amazon The Woman in the Dunes (Penguin Classics)

Sir Phoebus’s Ma by Zoë Teale

Zoë Teale’s Sir Phoebus’s Ma is more of a travelogue than a novel. It’s a series of impressionistic reflections, experienced during a year in Japan. The year was spent by a twenty-two-year-old English teacher in a regional northern town, where the students are not as motivated as the stereotypical oriental swot. Teaching methods are traditional, downright boring from the point of view of a recently-qualified practitioner, but they are as unquestionable as they are ingrained. Anna’s supervisor is a traditional Japanese male, at least that’s what Anna thinks. He is called Moriya sensei. There is a suggestion of eccentricity in his habit of translating tombstone inscriptions. There is also a hint of a willingness, nay desire to sample a foreign taste or two, especially when it comes in the shape of a young female teacher subordinate. 

If only our central character, the teacher herself, who is the book’s first person narrator, could have willingly sampled a few of the local tastes for herself… Not that I thought an affair between herself and Mr Moriya was ever likely or desirable, perhaps from either party’s point of view. But without that tension, the book would have been quite plot-less, since the plot was never allowed to intrude on recalled experience. Anna and some other expatriates are keen to experience tradition and the indigenous. They can’t cope with the food, of course. 

Anna herself travels to the other side of the world eager to seek out the authentic, but she refuses to leave her vegetarian preference at home. She compromises on eating fish, but when seriously asked an opinion on whether she would eat whale meat, she seems to have no position, which is strange, which ever way you view the character. In some ways Anna embodies the confusion of Western identity. She is keen to experience the authentic and professes respect, a romanticised, perhaps self-obsessed respect, of course, for its assumed value. But at the same time she is unable to participate in what she encounters and is thus rendered a permanent spectator by the pressure of her own neuroses. She emanates from a culture that is ignorant of itself, but afraid to be anything else. Anna’s Japanese hosts are tolerant. Imagine a Japanese visitor to a rural English town insisting on eating only Japanese rice. How far would she get? 

 But Sir Phoebus’s Ma is still worth reading. We are told snippets of legend, participate in the odd celebration or two and nose our way into a taste of Japanese domestic life. Anna’s trip to Kyoto, though brief, is mildly evocative, despite her difficulties at the Golden Temple. There is a sense of contemplation, a ceremony of tea and a hint of wasabe. But a hint is as far as Anna will go, since the tingle in the mouth seems to repel her. Eventually, we see this as inevitable, given the confused, arm’s length English reserve with which she cloaks all life. View the book on amazon Sir Phoebus's Ma

The Successor by Ismail Kadare.

Things are often not what they seem. Usually when this applies something ostensibly great turns out to be merely mundane. Occasionally, however, we meet an iceberg, an apparently small presence that becomes something vast and consequential. This latter case applies to The Successor by Ismail Kadare. The Successor is apparently a small book. The cover shows a head in silhouette while a hand with a gun points from the left. “Just another predictable little thing in a predictable genre,” were my initial thoughts. The cover illustration is apposite, however, and remains so throughout the book’s short duration. But in fact The Successor then reveals itself as a vast work, despite its obvious brevity. It’s about nothing less than a whole country, its politics, its very identity in a world that is changing around it. The country is Albania and Ismail Karade is clearly born of its very soil. At least that truth is reliable. But how would we describe a successor who does not succeed, a guide who has lost the power of sight, an architect whose plans are ignored and a young woman engaged to be married who is not in love? Things are often not what they seem to be. The Successor has been shot, hence the cover. And yes, The Successor is a whodunnit, but in no way is it predictable. When a whole nation identifies with and is driven by the political choices of its leadership, how can it ever change organically from within? The figurehead has to go, even if he has already gone! And if change was the product of poor judgment, then should history record a suicide? And from whose perspective do we assess success? And who has the right to change history? In his preamble, the author humorously sets the tone by announcing that “any resemblance between characters and circumstances of this tale and real people and events is inevitable.” Thus, in a short book about a feud within an inner circle, Kadare creates a poetic world that mirrors reality, whose delicately-drawn images beautifully construct much larger ideas. The poignancy of a secret door that can only be opened from the outside is an idea that will last for a long time in a reader’s memory. The Successor is a great little book. View the book on amazon The Successor

The Road Home by Rose Tremain

I approached Rose Tremain’s The Road Home expecting a vivid story drawn on a life of struggle, whose central character might grapple with life’s traumas, opportunities, joys and disappointments. I also expected that all of this would be placed in a setting where landscape, physical, social and psychological, but perhaps not political, would both inform and influence the characters’ lives. I was not disappointed, but for the most part I remained less than surprised, apart from the fact that Rose Tremain in The Road Home approached a contemporary political issue. 

The Road Home has modern day economic migration at its core. Lev is Polish. He has worked in a sawmill in his home town, the less than prosperous Baryn. He has a family and he used to be married. But now, as a single parent, despite the assistance of friends and family, he finds there is no future at home, no visible means of support. So he leaves for London on a bus in search, presumably, of streets paved with gold. On that journey he meets Lydia, a compatriot with connections and in some unlikely way or other they manage to stay in contact throughout the book.

Clearly their lives were never meant to intertwine, but circumstance, in The Road Home, is forever a local confinement. It simultaneously restricts and empowers, and then conspires with time to create a bond of friendship between Lev and Lydia that transcends class, interest, geography, expectation and assumption. Rose Tremain’s story takes Lev to different jobs, a kebab shop, two quite different restaurants, an old people’s home and a vegetable form. She has him encounter low life on the street, the high-brow in a concert hall, and also the other-worldly in a theatre. He spots pretence – it might not be that difficult! – but he also appreciated sincerity. He encounters self-obsession, honesty and love, always in unequal measure in every aspect of life. 

Eventually, his travels become both self-revelatory and enriching. He comes to terms with loss and turns the void in his life to personal gain. There is no fairy-tale get-rich-quick ending for Lev. The Road Home is no sugary advertisement for individuality, no attempted apology for market capitalism. This is a personal quest to cope with personal tragedy and unacceptable economic reality. The road does eventually lead home, but only when Lev and his destination have both been transformed. In their own way, neither is the same as they were at the start. 

And, I suppose, that’s the point. Life takes us wherever it goes. As it drags us along, either we learn and survive, or merely survive, or not. The process is given. The result is speculative. Lev survives. And he learns. He is a credible, real character, with a credible, real life. But there were aspects of The Road Home that I found disappointing. The scenario that adopted Lev at his destination was, for me, too isolated. Migrants often rely heavily on networks, but Lev has no contact save for Lydia, whom he met on the bus. He has no relatives to phone, nor friends, nor relatives of friends, nor someone from his home town who knew someone from somewhere else who just happened to be in business in Essex. This I found unlikely.

In a literary sense, this liberated Lev from his background and thus enabled Rose Tremain to layer upon his experience exactly what she wanted. This was convenient. It also rendered Lev’s point of view wholly individual. He apparently experienced everything in the naiveté of complete isolation, the foreignness of British behaviour thus presented as if seen in a laboratory analyst’s test tube. In this context, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Rose Tremain used Lev’s trials and tribulations merely as a vehicle to let off some steam about aspects of contemporary British culture that she finds abhorrent, embarrassing or reprehensible. This, and not Lev’s economic migration, is the rather failed political aspect of the book. Christy, Lev’s Irish live-in landlord, was rather more stereotypical than he needed to be. A plumber with a broken marriage and a drink problem might be plausible, but the last Irish plumber I met in London had so much work he earned a fortune and owned several London houses on which he collected rents. Maybe his name was Christy. Lev’s relationship with the eventually predictable Sophie also seemed unlikely. They worked together in a ground-breaking new restaurant, encountered the pretentiousness of a cutting-edge playwright and together even got involved in some social conscience. 

I would have no criticism here if Lev, throughout all this experience, had seemed more engaged, rather than experiencing everything as if he were merely a recipient. Out of your own context and background, you have the opportunity, even the right, to be super-opinionated, and this is a right that Lev seems to forego. Overall, The Road Home is an excellent read. Its characters are engaging and its events are eventually both credible and poignant. I felt, however, that it lived too much outside its principal figure’s psyche. But then it chose to concentrate on his experience of change, one aspect of which is travel, itself, rather than his responses and judgments. Sometimes travel itself intensifies responses, and it is possible that Lev’s experiences explore this aspect of experience. So when he returns home, as the book’s title requires he does, he is a changed man. But now he is also newly skilled, enriched and motivated. The Road Home does more than a little of that for the reader as well. View the book on amazon The Road Home

City Of Spades by Colin MacInnes

Colin MacInnes wrote City Of Spades over fifty years ago. At the time its depiction of London from an African immigrant’s point of view both shocked and revealed. I wondered whether a contemporary reader might now find its perspective hackneyed, its impact diminished by changes in attitudes towards race that we assume have happened in the intervening years. Half a century ago, the bones of Johnny Fortune’s story might have shocked. Somehow, at least for those anywhere near the issues, I doubt it. 

He arrives in London from Nigeria to study meteorology, an activity that, for a whole host of reasons, he manages singularly to avoid. A newly-appointed welfare officer is charged with the task of easing the exigencies of life for youngsters from the warmer parts of the Commonwealth who come to be weaned by the mother of the Empire. He is appointed to care for Johnny’s file. But before long, while Johnny designs his own curriculum, it is our young civil servant who is receiving the education, an education about the nature of his own society, or at least a side of it that he might previously have been totally and blissfully unaware.

Perhaps paradoxically, Johnny meets people who regularly do things that are less than legal. He encounters substances with their associated informal retail trade, dubious service-sector occupations with their associated facilitators, activities behind closed doors that would be unseemly at the street corner. In short, opportunities in several shapes and sizes appear at almost every step. And then, of course, the police turn up and try to call a halt to the party. Suffice it to say that Johnny Fortune’s fortunes lead to various encounters, some of which are within the law, and some with the law. Invariably, they involve little prosperity and even less formal learning. 

If the plot’s content might have shocked residents of areas outside inner London in the late 1950s, then today it would not. Times certainly have changed. But then shock was not the book’s intent, even fifty years ago. Shock would have encouraged exaggeration which Colin MacInnes only ever suggests to create comedy. What City of Spades tries to do, in my opinion, is question those assumptions we all make about the nature of our society, our identity, our ideas of culture, nationality and history. And the book still manages to achieve this, because those themes, if not their settings, are eternal. I was reminded, on this reading, of The Rake’s Progress. When we follow the exploits of Tom Rakewell, we make allowances that accommodate differences between eighteenth century life and its contemporary manifestation in order to see through to the principles and ideas. We do not, for instance, need to believe that Nick Shadow is actually the embodiment of The Devil, as advertised, to understand the folly of Tom’s decision to seek personal aggrandisement in London rather than a slower-paced but perhaps more sincere provincial predictability. We do, however, have to understand a certain moral landscape in order to interpret the schemes that Tom pursues, despite the fact that they now seem strange and a tad unlikely. It’s in this spirit, I believe, that we should approach City Of Spades in order to identify, experience and understand much in the work that clearly transcends merely historical significance.

Also like The Rake’s Progress, City Of Spades is a highly witty and humorous look at some aspects of its contemporary society. In the latter’s case, it reveals double standards relating to race, class difference and a host of societal characteristics whose existence received middle class sentiment might seek to deny. Nowadays, we might see many of these revelations as highly unremarkable, despite the fact that, for many, they remain not quite mundane. Colin MacInnes’s City Of Spades still retains the ability to make its point in its original, apparently durable terms. In the 1950s, a stereotypical view of Britishness might have included claims to trust, honesty, integrity in public life, a police force that was the toast of the earth and a society that both cared for the vulnerable and had time to love animals. In City Of Spades, Johnny Fortune had drugs planted on him, was beaten up in custody and lived ordinarily in layer of society whose existence the polite either denied or ignored. But then he has African. Times don’t change. But the title might have. View this book on amazon City of Spades

Hotel de Dream by Edmund White

In Hotel de Dream, Edmund White presents a fellow writer, a fellow-countryman called Stephen Crane. Stephen is well connected, but ill-equipped. We are in turn of the century England. That’s old-England, by the way, and we are tuning into the twentieth, not twenty-first century. Henry James drops by occasionally. Conrad sometimes stumbles hereabouts and Arnold Bennett throws in an occasional sentence. 

But Stephen’s social life is hardly hectic. He is ill, tubercular, and in need of treatment. He seeks what might be a last chance, perhaps, to deny or merely postpone the inevitable. A clinic in Germany might be able to offer an answer. If only he had the money. While his carer, Cora, struggles to meet his needs, Stephen recalls a street-waif in New York. Elliott is in his mid-teens. He sells newspapers and does a little thieving on the side. Prostitution fills otherwise unproductive hours. Stephen further recalls the boy’s beauty, his wholly pragmatic approach to securing a livelihood and also his syphilis, a condition for which the writer tries to arrange treatment.

Via the germ of memory, Stephen, despite his own failing health, begins to invent a narrative. He writes from his sick bed, his weakness eventually requiring he dictates to his partner. He tells the story of Elliott’s arrival in New York and his introduction to the ways of the street by an Irish red-head boy who is in need of an accomplice. He describes the petty larceny and the occasional servicing of specific services for casual clients that provide the boy with a living. When Theordore, a middle-aged, unhappily-married family man takes a liking to the boy, everyday life takes a different twist. Elliott and his accomplice have just done for Theodore’s wallet. The older man, however, hardly notices the loss, so taken is he with the lad’s delicate, almost porcelain but ailing beauty. 

Theodore and Elliott the lad become lovers and Theodore’s respectable career as a banker becomes increasingly compromised by the pressure of having to provide with the boy’s needs, his own desires and his family’s respectability. Stephen Crane’s own condition deteriorates. As he heads to the Continent for last-ditch restorative treatment, he has to dictate his writing to his carer, herself a former brothel owner. And so Edmund White skilfully presents parallel narratives relating Stephen’s treatment and decline and Theodore’s self-destructive obsession with Elliott. Together, they proceed towards their perhaps inevitable conclusions. 

All of this happens in around 80,000 words. Hotel de Dream is far from a long book, and yet it manages to pursue both themes adequately. Edmund White’s style is nothing less than beautiful throughout. He is economic with language, but also poetic and in places highly elegant. The book is a real joy to read. But there remains the problem of the subject matter. Edmund White appears to believe that the homosexual, even paedophilic nature of the writer’s fiction is inherently interesting because of its subject matter. Without that, the predictable decline of the writer would be less than interesting. The process was hardly original. After all, Chopin had already trod this path three quarters of a century earlier! And to greater effect! Edmund White does ask some questions about attitudes towards homosexuality, about double standards and also about loveless marriage. But they are questions merely asked. 

There are only cameos of the detailed scenarios that might suggest answers. But at the core of Hotel de Dream is the assertion that Stephen Crane is one of America’s greatest writers. An early death and an interest in risqué subject matter conspired, however, to keep him from the wider public gaze. Though Edmund White’s book works in itself, it fails to convince the reader of this grand assertion about its subject. To make its point, it would need to be weightier, broader and offer much more evidence. Its apparent self-satisfaction with the mere statement of sexual proclivity falls well short of real substance. But then lives may be substantially less than substance. Hotel de Dream is a captivating read and an engaging, often beautiful study. View the book on amazon Hotel De Dream

Leaves From His Life, essays by Leoš Janáček, edited by V and M Tausky

About twenty years ago my wife and I were on a train that came to a halt. It was late afternoon in mid-August. We were on holiday. A weak sun was already casting long shadows from the power-line gantries across the heavy industrial landscape in view. It was a local train with low priority at the signals. The carriage was nearly empty on this service form Kutná Hora to Prague. As we awaited the passing of an express, the only sounds came from steam hissing from vents in the pipe-work of nearby factories.

A young man on a seat opposite started to doze. His head nodded forward. His dark checked shirt opened wider at the neck to reveal white skin which, unlike his head and neck, had remained untouched by the sun while he had worked his day on a construction site. His boots and trousers had streaks of earth and cement that confirmed his trade. The express passed by, slowly, without much noise and then, just seconds later, our train lurched into slow motion. The young man woke up with a start. “Pfui,” he said as he rubbed his palms against his face.

And, for the next few minutes, all I could hear in my head was music replayed from memory. There is a moment in an opera, a Czech opera, where a character awakens from sleep. He not only says this word, but he sings it with exactly the same intonation and stress as my fellow traveller did that August afternoon on a stalled suburban train. I ought to have realised immediately that this was no coincidence. 

In part I did, but I was not prepared for how perfectly the composer had set that strange little word. The music literally came to life. The opera in question is by Leoš Janáček. He spent much of his time listening to and notating the music of everyday sounds and speech. These he used to set the words of his own libretti, all of which are highly naturalistic rather than stereotypically operatic. He repeats very little. There are no set pieces. The people are never counts or kings, princesses or heroes. There is the occasional fox and frog, however, and many chickens. But for the most part, Janáček’s characters are like the slumbering builder on the train, ordinary people, working class, middle class, merchants or labourers, sometimes artists, sometimes prisoners. 

On first hearing his music can sound disjointed, lacking the flowing lines that lyric opera fans might expect. But Janáček’s music is both cubist and yet still wholly naturalistic. People really do speak like that. Of course he stretches the points. It is opera, after all. But it is not only speech that is naturalistic in Janáček, as anyone who reads this beautiful little book, Leaves From His Life by Vilem and Margaret Tausky, will soon realise. Janáček notated the sound of the sea, birdsong, the trickling of water in streams, the wind, coughs and sneezes, and about anything else that took his fancy. 

Above all he notated the sounds of speech, words married to their expression. In one respect, he was the complete impressionist, but in another the complete opposite because he then reassembled these snippets of collected reality to form something wholly original. Some of essays, reminiscences, musical analysis and occasional literary reflections that fill leaves From His Life were written for the composer’s own column in local newspaper in Brno. 

I first read the book over twenty years ago, just before my holiday in then Czechoslovakia, during which I visited Brno to stand in Janáček’s study. Re-reading it now is something of a revelation. If anything it seems fresher now than then, but there again perhaps it’s me that’s mellowed with age in a way that Leoš Janáček never did. If I had another life I would learn Czech to gain a fuller appreciation of the man’s music. It must be worth it! As an example, just imagine the sound of the opening of the Credo from the Glagolitic Mass. In Czech, the word is vĕruju, I believe. Janáček’s setting is three notes with a long stress in the middle. Try saying ‘I believe’ or even worse, ‘credo’ to the same sound. It only works in Czech. Anyone who is the least bit interested in opera and certainly anyone who as listened to Leoš Janáček’s music will love Leaves From His Life. 

The writing style alone is a wonderful insight into his music. The man really did think in those terse little aphorisms. But what shines through his music and his words is his love of and devotion to the experience of ordinary folk, and the occasional bird, furry creature or insect: life, in short. View the book on amazon Janacek: Leaves from His Life

Saint Augustine by Garry Wills – a biography of the early Christian saint.

A young African man with a taste for sex and a highly developed sense of both religion and mission travels across the Mediterranean. He decides to sail. Once in Italy, he communes with the rich and powerful and then, some years later, makes the return journey via the same means of transport, and thereby completes the sum total of his life’s travels.

We know a lot about the man, not only from his own writings which are both extensive and preserved, but also from the accounts of many of those contemporaries who met him, engaged in intellectual and theological debates with him, or merely reported. The Roman Empire had only recently espoused Christianity. It was an era when the young faith was divided by schism. A strength of this biography of Augustine is that it brings home the passion that characterised these differences. A weakness, however, is that the different variants of fourth century Christianity are not clearly delineated. This would, perhaps, be too much to ask in a short account of a life, but there are times when understanding of the text is compromised because of this omission. What does come alive, however, is how recent were the memories of persecution under Diocletian. It was a difference in attitude to some of those who succumbed to denial of their faith under that persecution that created one major schism.

Donatists refused to re-admit those who had renounced their faith under threat and were the main expression of Christianity in North Africa. Our young African man chose to ally himself with the Roman church, thus placing himself in a local minority. Pelagius who was around at the time denied the concept of original sin. Quite often it seems that he didn’t, then he did, and then he didn’t again. It was a heresy, needless to say. But, and I feel it might be an attractive concept even today, the idea that the Church was not full of sinners had its adherents. Arians stressed the humanity, not the divinity of Jesus Christ. This allowed them to avoid at least some of the problematic concept of three deities in one, a holy trinity. The concept has been a confusion and for many outside of Christianity it appears to be a wholly unnecessary complication. Arian thought, however, Gary Mills points out, is only reported by those who opposed them, so an accurate representation of their philosophy is difficult to establish. Manicheans, unlike Christians, saw the universe in black and white, a competition between good and evil. There were aspects of light and dark in everything and everyone, but it was the interplay between the two that determined where an individual might be placed in the overall scheme of things. Manichaeism has largely disappeared from world religion, its only remaining bastion being Hollywood, where it provides the basis of most films aimed at the popular audience.

All of these ideas, heresies and religions were themselves in competition in the homeland of Augustine of Hippo. And through Gary Wells’ book we gain an insight into how an individual thinker and philosopher grappled with the contradictions and tried to make sense of what he regarded as the correct line. The book is a window on Augustine’s thoughts , thoughts that often deal with the base as well as the obviously spiritual. Gary Wills provides real insights into Augustine’s charm, the magnetism of his rhetoric and the logical processes of his thought. And he manages to this in just 150 pages, pages that also include significant and poignant quotes from Augustine’s work. The stained glass analogy on religion applies. If you look at windows from outside, they are merely sold grey. On the inside, they reveal full and splendid colour. There might be many a modern reader who would be confused as to why it matters that a concept is associated with this or that belief. But for a Christian and certainly for someone who sees the windows in full colour it clearly does matter.

Gary Wills’s book brings the debates and issues alive even for the general reader, though it has to be said that sometimes the detail of the theological debate is less than penetrable. This is a book of many surprises. View the book on amazon Saint Augustine (Lives)

Don Quixote de La Mancha

I’d like some advice from other writers. I’ve just finished a book. It’s my fourth time through it. It might be a bit over-written, perhaps over-read. The writer found the manuscript on a stroll through a street market in Toledo, Spain. It was written in Arabic, a language of which the author only know a little, but he could see from page one that there was something special about this text. He translated it into Spanish, and then others rendered it in English. 

The book is a little less than five hundred thousand words. It has no plot, and little obvious characterisation. The style varies, and there are several quite glaring inconsistencies, most of which I just laugh off as inconsequential. There are no intrigues. There may be a few murders, but none within the book’s pages. There are no spacecraft, aliens, plots that threaten the earth, spies, terrorists or dog lovers. There’s not much sex, and what exists is largely imagined from afar and is unconsummated, or is very close at hand and is perpetrated by a hag with excess kilos and few teeth. 

There’s a lot of largely unintelligible games and role-plays, some fantasy, most of which is at the level of fairy-tale, some satire and a lot of innuendo. The main protagonists are rather sexist, racist and, by modern standards, religious bigots. Could anyone suggest a publisher?

On the other hand, I have a novel that contains such familiar scenes that a good proportion of the world’s population would recognise them. It’s accessible, written in an easy prose that makes few demands on the reader, and whose protagonists are just ordinary people, not unlike those who might read it. It features a man who is so obsessed with celebrity and deluded by popular culture that he believes he too can become a star. No-one, of course, in modern society would ever think that. And, incidentally, it’s been a best seller in multiple editions and languages for over four hundred years. Could anyone suggest a publisher?

I have just finished a fourth reading of Cervantes’s classic Don Quixote. I have now read it in two quite different translations, one via Wordsworth Classics and the other Penguin. The book is more like several years of soap opera episodes, series such as the Archers, Coronation Street or Emmerdale and definitely not Dr Kildare, Ironside or Kojak, let alone Dallas. It comes to an end because its author wanted to kill it off, since even in its own time it had become something of a cliché. In some ways it’s a book that’s so ‘modern’ it’s ahead of contemporary fiction. At the same time, its scenarios need footnotes because they are unfamiliar to us. After all, soap opera installments from a month ago are out of date. The ones in this book are four hundred years old. In essence, however, the delusion presented by popular culture is precisely the same.

At its core, we have a middle-aged, in his day perhaps elderly man who is obsessed with popular culture and celebrity. He doesn’t want to be a film star, footballer or pop singer. He wants to be a knight, travelling the countryside, doing good deeds that the role demands. One day he decides that this is the life for him and, to the consternation of his household, he decides he must live this life of fantasy. Unlike his heroes, however, his sports car is a clapped out old banger, his designer clothes are rejected junk from charity shops, and his millionaire’s mansion is the local pub. His contemporaries merely laugh at him, but he remains utterly convinced of his call to stardom. But, and this is the crucial fact, he never loses his wisdom, however false its basis might have been. Neither does he lose his faith, though misplaced, in his own superiority.

No-one else shares these faiths, except perhaps his travelling companion, Sancho Panza. He is a peasant, with a down-to-earth view of life and a thoroughly bucolic interpretation of its challenges. He proves, however, to be as wise as his master, a lord he hardly ever questions. No-one else shares this faith in the master, but then that’s the point. Life is once through. If we dream, it’s as good as any reality. So, after four times through this great novel, I have no more idea what it’s about, or what it says than when I started it for the first time. It’s funny, and in places it’s incomprehensible. It’s absurd. It’s serious. It’s stupid, inane, both intellectually challenging and inconsequential at the same time. I am also a few thousand words from the end of a modern parody of Don Quixote, which I hope is as focussed as its inspiration. Can anyone suggest a publisher?

View the book on amazon Don Quixote (Penguin Classics) Don Quixote (Wordsworth Classics)

Perilous transition – Imaginings Of Sand by André Brink

Imaginings Of Sand by André Brink was a second novel I recently encountered where an old woman, close to death, related a life story. The book’s central character is Ouma Kristina, an unconventional Afrikaner lady, bed-ridden and severely burned after her house was torched by raiders. André Brink has her relate a family history to her near-namesake granddaughter, a modern, independently-minded thirty-something, and in her own time and way also unconventional. She seems to have broken free from her past, perhaps even rejected it, has lived in London and has even joined the African National Congress.

Through her grandmother’s stories, the younger Kristien rediscovers her heritage, her family history and via that her people’s history. It’s a long story and is delivered, eventually, directly from the coffin. While Sebastian Barry’s heroine in Secret Scriptures relates a purely personal tale from her deathbed, André Brink’s Ouma Kristina tells not only her own story, but also that of the family ancestors, and always via a matriarchal lineage. It’s the women that make the history, and that history reflects the story of an entire people, spanning two centuries

 In both books, the scenarios lack credibility, but equally, once suspension of belief has been achieved, both work beautifully as literary mechanisms. In Brink’s novel, however, Ouma Kristina’s project is much bigger than telling her own story and eventually it even begins to illustrate how myth can create history and vice versa. Not bad for an old lady burnt to a cinder! Imaginings Of Sand is also for me a third recent novel examining the fears, hopes and realities surrounding South Africa’s transition to legitimate statehood in the 1990s. Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People dealt mainly with imagined fears alongside valued relationships, whereas J M Coetzee’s Disgrace encountered messy reality.

André Brink’s project in his novel is both more ambitious and more mundane, and it is also more successful. It concentrates on one family and its history, but it’s a history that mirrors that of the Afrikaner people. Young Kristien, newly returned from London where she lived a life that was perfectly inconceivable for her grandmother, her parents and even her own sister, learns much and understands more from her grandmother’s stories. We sense the widening perspective that she sees. We feel the character grow. Of course, the contemporary family also has its current issues. Caspar, husband of Kristien’s elder sister is a rampant Boer, a boer and a boor. He figures significantly in the book’s denouement, acted out as the old woman predictably and eventually expires, South Africa elects a new government and Kristien, herself, makes a decision she would not have thought possible just weeks before.

The subtlety of Imaginings Of Sand lie in how André Brink uses the family dispute as a metaphor for what is feared in the wider society. Suffice it to say that after a period of oppression and exploitation, it is possible that the repressed, guilt-ridden middle ground is the most likely source of over-reaction. The family’s history related by the dying grandmother might occasionally stray into too much detail, and sometimes the fantasy, the myth that André Brink seeks to introduce through their embroidery, might seem a tad false or confused. But then that’s myth, isn’t it? But Imaginings Of Sand is as close to a masterpiece of fiction as anything I have read in many years. Its successes are on many levels, across a multitude of parallel themes. It’s an historical novel. It’s a political novel. It enacts a subtly-constructed psychological drama. It also, ambitiously, sees everything from a female standpoint, thus binding both the reality and the myth of regeneration and reproduction into the fabric of the story.

The book is thus a novel that demands to be read by anyone with an interest in Africa, South Africa in particular, history, politics, psychology, women or merely people. And it you don’t fall into any of these categories, read it anyway! It’s a masterpiece.

View the book on amazon Imaginings of Sand

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

In The Secret Scripture, Sebastian Barry tells a story set in Ireland. As is often the case, this story set in Ireland is very much a story of Ireland, as much describing a nation and a setting as a personal history. But it seems that at least one aspect of the country’s painful relationship with its competing churches has changed in Sacred Scriptures. Gone is the assumption of grace applied unthinkingly by Catholics to their side of the divide. And reason for its removal is the church’s attitude towards women, marriage and motherhood.

In Secret Scriptures these axes of divide intersect to create a story that is effectively a modern virgin birth. It thus creates and presents a Madonna who, in her own way, must be kept above and apart from other women, other people. Late in the book Dr Grene, whose journal forms a large part of the narrative, asks this question: “Is not most history written in a sort of wayward sincerity?” Recollection thus remains sincere, but its waywardness perhaps lies in its selectivity, its particularity. History, after all, is an interpretation of events, not merely a listing, and interpretation always has a point of view. When, however, one’s knowledge of the past is at best patchy and at worst inaccurate, it becomes a new world to be discovered, revealed perhaps by chance, perhaps by design. Dr Grene also writes, “The one thing that is fatal in the reading of an impromptu history is wrongful desire for accuracy.” In the end, it is Dr Grene’s pursuit of such an impromptu history that reveals a stunning truth, a truth that can only be uncovered precisely because of the accuracy, the diligence that others invested in one person’s history. The impromptu history that Dr Grene reads is that of Secret Scripture’s central character, Roseanne McNulty, née Clear.

She is a hundred years old and has, for most of her adult life, been confined within the walls of a mental hospital. Her place of repose is to close and be demolished. Dr Grene is to oversee its demise. Roseanne has decided to write her life story. If Te Secret Scripture has a weakness, then it has a double weakness. Overall, the plot might come too close to the sentimental for some readers. For others, it will be the book’s saving grace. Secondly, Roseanne Clear, frail at a hundred years of age, might be an unlikely figure to write such a succinct, coherent and vivid account of events that happened almost eighty years before. Again we must suspend some belief here, but that is easily done because her recollections are both engaging and credible. They would have been more so if, as impromptu history, they were less concerned with improbable detail. It’s not the events that might be questionable, merely the accuracy of their recollection. But after all, that detail might just be illusory. There was a history in the family, we are told, a history of illness and instability and, perhaps, a history of another, less mentionable, affliction of women.

But in the end none of these are rare. It’s their public acknowledgement or admission that’s unusual. Life and its institutions treat Roseanne Clear badly, but no differently from others identified as afflicted with her condition. She is effectively branded insane by a socially-constructed righteousness that now seems to have lost all of its previously unquestioned authority. She seems to have few regrets, however, except, of course, for a life that may not have been lived. The life in question did, in fact, live, and it became something that reinterpreted Roseanne’s entire existence. Sacred Scripture is a beautiful book. It has its flaws, but the immediacy of its subject and the poignancy of its dénouement make it both enthralling and surprising.

View the book on amazon The Secret Scripture

The Book Of Illusions by Paul Auster

Paul Auster’s The Book Of Illusions offers the reader pretty much what the title promises. It’s a book and there are illusions! By the time we arrive at the end of the tale, however, we perhaps see the two terms as synonyms. Throughout, reality changes to fiction, fantasy becomes fact. An academic’s study of an actor’s comedy leads to an intimate involvement with the subject’s life. That life has itself become a fiction, lived with a declared aim of producing films that no-one will see. In the films, fantasies are enacted which later become real, and by design, thus rendering the original merely rehearsal. Meanwhile, the academic translates a biography so long it seems a lifetime’s work is needed to recreate it afresh.

But who knows what in that memoir might be invention, mere illusion? Hector Mann is a silent movie star. He has an enigmatic style that was never fully exploited in the industry because of interpersonal relationship problems with others in his studio. He would never have made it in talkies anyway because of a thick immigrant’s accent. I have just used a relative term as if it were an absolute. I meant, of course, that Hector Mann was an immigrant to the United States. Hector Mann, incidentally, is also Hector Spelling, amongst others.

Professor Zimmer, a recent victim of family loss via the indisputable finality of an air crash has spent much effort researching the life and career of Hector Mann. He has written a book on the star’s silent movies. The comedy, it seems, is all in the slight movement of the hairline moustache, the actor’s trademark. But there was much more, such as innovation, poetry and inner meaning within Hector Mann’s characters and plots. One day, Professor Zimmer’s wife and kids are no more and, decades earlier, Hector’s tenuous working relationships dissolve to nil via conflict. The learned professor descends into booze and an apparently interminable translation of Chateaubriand’s history. Hector leaves film and wanders elsewhere, soon to make a living out of live pornography. It’s a role he was born for, but his true identity, at least the one he has publicly shared, once discovered, becomes his downfall. He runs away from the revelation of his self.

In the middle of a mid-West backwater, a place out of which Hector created a fiction only later to render it real, an act of heroism brings a couple together. They gel. But the resulting arrangement is complex. An inheritance facilitates a totally private exploration of personal interest and thus imprisoned talent. New films are made, but they are never aired. They are different, even revolutionary, but no-one ever sees them because Hector and his new partner have opted for remote obscurity. Professor Zimmer, having assumed that Hector had died, finds out that he is still alive. There’s a chance that his book is incomplete. Another relationship gels when Alma, the daughter of one of Hector’s collaborators, visits the professor to share a project. Together they travel to New Mexico, where Hector lies close to death. 

There they discover a life’s work that might change the history of cinema, but it’s a life’s work that was created for purely private purposes and carrying its own death warrant. In The Book Of Illusions, Paul Auster seems to juxtapose a reality that seems less than real with fiction that feels immediate. It’s a blurring of experience and invention, with only one reality, itself unreal, definitive. It’s a superb book, brilliantly constructed, utterly credible, but constantly surprising. The characters’ lives turn in circles. They seem only in part control and yet they always retain the option of decision. Their creativity produces a string of illusion, much of it quite real or destined to become so. And be under no illusion, the amount of destiny that we control could depend on how ruthlessly we pursue it.

View the book on amazon The Book of Illusions

The Cleft by Doris Lessing

I often wait a day or two before writing a review. I find that my appreciation of a work often changes on reflection, sometimes magnifying the experience, sometimes diminishing it. In the case of Doris Lessing’s The Cleft, a little distance has considerably enhanced the initial impression, which was less than favourable. 

The Cleft is quite a short novel. It just seems long. The language isn’t difficult, likewise neither are setting or plot. Not that there’s much of either. We begin with a society that’s entirely female and where procreation just happens. When “monsters” appear, babies with ugly extra bits on the front, they are either killed or mutilated. Killing involves leaving the tiny bundles of flesh on a rock for eagles to take. But the cunning birds aren’t always hungry.

A community of squirts - grown-up monsters – begins to thrive and the women find they have to interact. New activities are mutually invented and suddenly all is change. A new race or perhaps merely a new society develops via proto-parents, develops at least twice, in fact. Journeys are made. Promised lands reveal promise. New orders establish themselves.

Meanwhile, we realise that this creation myth is being related by a Roman gentleman who has his own domestic battle of the sexes. At first sight this extra layer of narrative seems redundant. Eventually an elemental force binds the myth to the narrator’s present. The link is tenuous and as a plot device, its impact fails. It does, however, conceptually link the narrator with the related myth. After all, Romans were themselves created, they believed, out of a myth where a pair of lads were nurtured by an animal. 

The military tradition (equals male) by which Rome prospered was founded on the social control of Sparta, not the demos of Athens. Sparta was probably the ultimate macho male society, where the old were revered and women were chattel, though they could own property. Doris Lessing at one point refers to Spartan youth being separated from their families at the age of seven to hone military and combat skills via camaraderie. Such an exile the monsters of The Cleft invent for themselves.

Galling at first reading and later informative were the repeated gender stereotypes that dominate Doris Lessing’s narrative. The repeated use of these bludgeoning concepts had more than an air of artifice. Looking back, I now see that this actually enhanced what emerged as the book’s overarching idea, which is our need for myth and the necessity of reducing it to the level of populist fairy tale. The eagles who nurtured the monsters play god. The way we organise our society demands certain role models, while ceremony, often barbaric, such as genital mutilation, allies us to ideals and ideas we prefer not to question. In the end we have to explain elemental forces beyond our control and myth is our refuge. Stick with The Cleft. It’s a tortuous journey, but it is worth it in the end, an end whose only solace may only be found in myth. 

View this book on amazon The Cleft

Reflecting on a review of A Glance Away by John Edgar Wideman

When reviewing a book I try to keep myself out of the argument. The purpose is to reflect upon the work, to enter its world in its own style. It’s a process that often clarifies issues and prioritises arguments for the reviewer as much as it helps inform the review’s reader. Whether I liked or disliked the book in question is an opinion that’s perhaps less than irrelevant, because it adds a double confusion. You, the reader, don’t know the book, but then you know even less about me, so what price my humble, unexplained, unjustified recommendation?

I used to work on a market stall. Alongside household cleaners and soap powder, the stall also offered kitchenware and fancy goods, items to be considered considerably less often than weekly. Running up to Christmas, we also carried large, high cost toys, such as board games, construction kits and the like. The stall’s owner handled that end of the business, leaving the dealings in shoe polish, soap, bleach and toilet paper to his minions at the other end. The minions, incidentally, were his daughter and me. If a potential customer dithered over a purchase, the vendor’s shock tactic was to offer the reassurance of solidarity. “We’ve used it” or “We have one at home” were the phrases he used. “And we are happy with it” then followed in judgment. Often – more often than not – the punter smiled, purchased and so profit was pocketed. But there was nothing cynical about this process.

The stall-owner came weekly to each pitch. He would take things back if they were broken – but usually not if they were merely disliked. People didn’t bring things back if that was the case, except, of course, to exchange. And, given his household’s general pursuit of novelty, he probably had tried out the products in question, at least for a while. He had, personally, what twenty-first century capitalism calls a brand. He was a trusted face – not a name, because none of his customers knew anything other than his first name – and his recommendations carried the authority of that trust. He did good business and made a good living, his punters’ trust being well-placed.

But as an internet reviewer, what might my opinion be worth to a browsing punter? If a reader regularly follows my opinion, of course, then a pattern might emerge and some conclusion might be drawn. The chances are, however, that you are not that reader, that you have stumbled almost randomly upon my thoughts and thus what I say is potentially worthless. I present a double unknown, an unread book and an untried, untrusted opinion. I am prompted to reflect on the nature of the internet book review because I have just finished A Glance Away by John Edgar Wideman. 

It’s a short book but far from succinct. The style is often sparse, its words deliberated over, even missing for effect, unsaid on behalf of communication. On the fly-sheet it’s a novel at the front and, in a quoted review at the back, an autobiography. I too was confused. But not by the style… There’s a family. There are brothers. With apparent prescience of some stylistic devices used later by Toni Morrison to both define and characterise a specifically black culture that is both part of but also separated from the general, John Edgar Wideman allows the reader into a family’s passion, conflicts and confusion. The brothers live different lives, meet different people and aspire to different ideals. There may be reasons, explanations, but what people think is largely hidden by a profound opacity. Perhaps the characters themselves are confused. Perhaps that’s also the point.

As an experience, A Glance Away is a powerful, sometimes provocative novel. But its detail often reads as obfuscation, demanded by its lack of continuous thread. Perhaps it’s a book to read again, its challenge not met by a punter who was unfamiliar with its brand.

View this book on amazon A Glance Away

New York Days, New York Nights by Stephen Brook

I have just done another tour of New York. It’s a city whose streets I have walked, whose life I have encountered, whose people I have known. But I have never been there. New York, Like Paris and London, is a city where writers switch on their professional noticing and recording. A good proportion of novelists seem to want to live there. It’s a city where journalists apparently never have to travel far for a story and where social commentators uncover endless lines of interest.

And in the early 1980s Stephen Brook, an English visitor, took his turn at plodding the streets, buttonholing the affluent and dabbling with low life in order to generate his book, New York Days, New York Nights. It was a task he took seriously. His mission covered the city’s politics, food, shopping, sexuality, power, social structure, ethnic relations, commerce, crime and apparently every other aspect of its existence, but with only scant regard for its history.

We learn how on Manhattan air space can be traded, how the city’s craving for constant change means that there is little sense of permanence. We visit late night bars and clubs, experience the gay-scene low-life at first hand, then at second hand and eventually at the level of the mutual anonymous grope. We visit jails, courts, police beats and other arresting areas. We talk to mayors, ex-mayors and would-be mayors. We feel debt and wealth in unequal measure. Stephen Brook appears not to want to leave any concrete block unturned.

But though Stephen Brook’s journey through New York’s unique experience is nothing less than encyclopedic, his experience seems to remain that of the outsider, the committed but still detached tourist. As each of the book’s many chapters runs to its close and another opens, we can almost hear the writer begin with, “And here’s another thing…” Well before the end we feel that the author is on a mission to collect in order to exhibit. In the end, we feel we have been on a city tour bus and listened to the commentary, but that we still have to walk the streets to begin the real experience.

But like all impressionistic descriptions of contemporary life, it becomes both less relevant and more interesting as it ages. It becomes irrelevant because its original concept is superseded, rendered mere whimsy by the passing of time. Its intention is to be contemporary, after all, and that quality is soon lost. But twenty-five years on, having been reminded that the city remains eager for constant change, it becomes fascinating to reflect on what has or might have changed.

In 2009, we have a financial crisis, rich man’s crime, an economy laden with unemployment and debt, recession and portent of doom and gloom. We also have celebrity, overt riches and conspicuous consumption alongside poverty, near-destitution, drug addiction and poor man’s crime. So what’s new? One major change is that during Stephen Brook’s journey, the existence of AIDS deserves mention, but little more. During visits to bath houses, the author experiences at first hand the workings, insertions, thrusts and suspended machinations of gay promiscuity – sorry, there is no other word – and the scenes he describes seem better fitted to a fantasy porn movie than any reality. A dimension we don’t feel in all of this is the contrast with attitudes that one would expect to be prevalent in middle America. Surely it is that contrast that illustrates the difference between New York and the rest of the country?

But New York Days, New York nights remains a rich and rewarding trip. (The city’s drug scene, but the way, is such an aspect of daily life that it deserves frequent but only passing comment.) Though the reader may occasionally tire of Stephen Brook’s lengthy trek through the city, it is an account that has endured and that still interests, perhaps because the place itself and its people remain interesting. View this book on amazon New York Days, New York Nights (Picador Books)

My new life as a ghost - 50 of the best by Martin Offiah

Becoming a ghost usually involves major change in one’s life. It doesn’t happen every day. For me the call came in May 2009. A name I recognised appeared in the subject line of an email from a friend. I thought it might be a joke. The more momentous the event, it seems, the more one is tempted to see it lightly, to discount it as unlikely. It’s a form of self-preservation, I suppose. So when I opened the message to find it contained a serious suggestion, I was surprised, to say the least. 

The name in question was that of Martin Offiah. He’s a former rugby league player who has become a bit of a celeb. Actually, describing Martin Offiah as a former rugby league player is about as apposite as saying that Ringo Starr used to be a drummer in a rock band. When he retired, Martin had scored 501 tries in the game, making him the third most prolific scorer in the game’s history. The two above him, Brian Bevan and Billy Boston, played in a different era, that of the 1950s and 1960s.

The game has changed since then. I know because I saw both of them play when I was kid in the West Riding of Yorkshire and a near-permanent feature of Wakefeild Trinity’s Belle Vue home. I am even in the greatest ever film about rugby league. The film, of course, was Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life. It was nominated for two Oscars and provided Richard Harris with his first starring role. Now if you look really carefully, I am the lad in short trousers behind the sticks at the Belle Vue end in one of the crowd sequences. I, along with more than 28000 others, witnessed as extras the filming of some of the play sequences as a curtain raiser to the 1962 third round Rugby League Challenge Cup tie between Wakefield and Wigan. Wakefield won 5-4. Fred Smith scored the game’s only try, diving in at the corner on the Trinity right. Neil Fox missed the conversion, but kicked a penalty in the game. Wigan’s fullback, Griffiths, kicked two penalties. Tries were only three points in those days, by the way.

To be asked to write a book with Martin Offiah was for me the stuff of dreams, even at the age of 57! I have not kept up my passion for rugby league because in 1970 I moved to London and in 1992 I left Britain altogether. Rugby league is hard to connect with from afar. It’s easier now that the internet brings the far to just a click away. The suggestion was that Martin, the consummate try-scorer, should select and describe fifty of the greatest tries ever scored in the game. It was a project at appealed to me, both because of my lifetime interest in the game and because here was a chance to become a ghost and perhaps, just perhaps, invent a new me. Martin and I communicated by phone. I live in Spain and he’s in London. We talked on Skype and I recorded our conversations using shareware that creates mp3 files that can be played a replayed through Realplayer. The 66000 word book appeared from this ether by the end of August and, a few weeks later, there was a website with videos of all the action Martin chose to describe. Have a look at martinoffiah.co.uk and do please read his 50 Of The Best. Imagine the process that produced it. And now, officially, I can call myself a ghost.

View this book on amazon 50 of the Best: Fifty of the Greatest Rugby League Tries of All Time