THE JUPITER EFFECT - John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann
Picked these two up from my local goodwill store yesterday.
'The Jupiter Effect', written in 1974 by two astrophysicists from Cambridge University, predicts a great earthquake which would hit the San Andreas Fault in California on March 10, 1982.
Gribbin and Plagemann, then explain in detail with the aid of charts and graphs, how planetary alignments could interfere with solar flux patterns to precipitate earthquakes.
The main postulate of the book states that a grand planetary alignment on March 10, 1982 will increase the solar wind flux on Earth causing an intensification of westerly winds, which in turn would increase the friction on Earth's easterly rotation by a few milliseconds...leading to strong compressions in the fault line and causing a massive earthquake.
All good plausible science backed up with sound scientific proof.
Fortunately for mankind...nothing 'earth-shattering' happened in 1982.
Jhumpa Lahiri is an American author of Indian extraction, having migrated to the USA with her parents at the age of two. She was in fact born in London, so her relationship to India [specifically Bengal] is fashioned mostly through her family history. In many ways, her writing is more western than Asian for it considers the Indian diaspora from a western perspective – as in her main characters tend to be second generation migrants already attuned to America and its less formal society. Unaccustomed Earth contains eight short stories split into two halves.
The first section features five tales of loss, grief, misplaced love and respect, parental responsibility, displacement and cultural translation. They explore the diasporic identity of the characters and investigate the similarities and differences between the traditional and the modern. Sudden epiphanies, location, misdirection and story compression are all notable aspects of Lahiri’s writings here:
Unaccustomed Earth – Ruma’s widowed father spends a month with her in Seattle; he bonds with his grandson Akash while planting a garden for her; the symbolism of planting new life is clunky; too late Ruma learns he is involved in a romance with a woman.
Hell – Heaven – Pranab enters the lives of Usha’s family, taken in and looked after, even referred to, as an uncle; Usha’s mother falls in love with him, but the affair is unconsummated and undeclared and when Pranab marries Deborah jealousy ensues; the novel ends with the shocking revelation that her mother attempted ritual suicide after Pranab’s perceived ‘betrayal’. The story is better for being told in the first person.
A Choice of Accommodations – is a sexualised tale about miscommunication and an introverted man who lacks confidence; attending the wedding of an old family friend, a husband doubts his wife’s fidelity, gets drunk and makes a fool of himself; they are reconciled through an act of exhibitionism.
Only Goodness – an awkward story about two siblings, Sandu (elder, responsible sister) and Rahul (younger, alcoholic brother), whose lives drift apart due to his waywardness and lack of ambition; reconciled temporarily in London, Rahul backslides and puts his young nephew in danger; the theme of secrecy lays heavy on this story as the inability of the protagonists to communicate and negotiate, preferring clandestineness to intimacy, leads to a crisis.
Nobody’s Business – quotes the Billie Holiday song Ain’t Nobody’s Business But Mine; Paul, a humanities student in New York, develops an unrealised infatuation with his flatmate Sang, an Indian woman who works at the university bookstore; she is involved in a one-sided relationship with the Egyptian Farouk, a controlling domestic abuser; Paul learns of Farouk’s infidelity, but it ruins any hope of friendship with Sang; this reminded me weirdly of Single White Female, Paul’s obsessions are as bizarrely stalker-like as Farouk’s personal demands.
The second [more successful] part takes the form of three interconnected stories and is subtitled Hema and Kaushik. For this story-cycle, Lahiri focusses exclusively on interpretations of grief and an understanding of the difficult pathways of love, both in a modern emotionally confused ‘American’ manner, as well as through formal, reluctant and traditional ‘Indian’ arrangements. What brings the stories vividly to life are the attention to detail during the slow unravelling of information, both of a personal and an intellectual measure. The characters are expressive and believable. The stories are so well intertwined they would work as a standalone 120-page novella.
Once in a Lifetime – the adolescent Hema is disturbed by the arrival of Kaushik, a sixteen year old boy returning to America (the land of his birth) with his parents from India, to which they had migrated back after originally making a life for themselves in Boston; Kaushik is morose and self-involved and eventually reveals that his mother has terminal cancer, a secret both teenagers retain from his parents’ friends and family, bonding them together; beautifully scripted, the tale feels exceptionally genuine and is phenomenally well-observed, of individuals, class and climate.
Year’s End – a few winter’s later Kaushik discovers his father has remarried without any recourse to his son; Kaushik resents the presence of his stepmother and stepsisters; the story is a close examination of Kaushik’s grief and how it manifests itself in a brusque, uncompromising manner; the ending is a little lame, the quietly inquisitive Kaushik suddenly alters almost monstrously and immediately becomes irresponsible, it is never clear if he regrets his actions; once again secrecy plays a great part in the story both in how it leads to and continues after the revelatory event.
Going Ashore – travelling the world, Kaushik has become a well-regarded photo-journalist, 40-years old and living in Rome; he fortuitously meets Hema at a party; she is travelling alone conducting a university study on Etruscan artefacts before her impending arranged marriage; they embark on a rapid and fulfilling affair, but despite falling in love Hema will not break her marriage contract; once more Kaushik’s impetuous and unfeeling actions destroy the happiness he has briefly discovered; a tragedy weeks later during the Asian tsunami leads to a moment of reflection from Hema. The conclusion of the story is particularly affecting.
Lahiri’s people inhabit a hybrid landscape and share cultural personalities that attest to their transient roots. As second generation immigrants, they share an ambivalence towards their heritage – drinking alcohol, not speaking Bengali, irreligious – that removes them culturally from a more classically ‘accustomed’ earth to the ‘unaccustomed’ one of Americana. This depicts in a way, Lahiri’s own life experience [write what you know?] but also draws on the modernist ethos of alienation and separatism, that to understand and highlight the cracks in a society one must be outside of it. Occasionally, Lahiri will distract us with that same disorientating structure of books by Jean Rhys or Hemingway, where an exile’s life in cosmopolitan cities like Berlin, London and Paris, comes forced with political or social pressures. They experience a sense of loss, an existential crisis, but it is not one of diaspora. Lahiri instead creates the concept of a migrant as a mournful figure, absent of an identity and a home, and she allies that with a strong feeling for a contemporary time and space, of how globalisation through travel, media and worldwide connections bring people closer together, however fleetingly, and instinctively they create cultural neighbourhoods, both at home and on the tourist travelogue. It is worth reflecting on what Lahiri’s characters gain and lose through globalisation, through partially rejecting their traditional roots. There is much intergenerational distance featured in the stories that hints constantly at a widening gap between the past and the present, not just because memories of the ‘old country’ are fading but because the need for total immersion, of acceptance, into American society demands it.
Lahiri’s background of privilege however prevents her from investigating entirely the true full diasporic experience. She only deals with what she knows – the elite. Her characters are in the main monied, educated and sophisticated. The stories lack menace and do not present a balanced view of migration and the serious criminal, medical or psychological issues which can arise from it. With one exception, everybody is successful, if not following their dreams certainly well-off and content enough to have them without concern. In fact, the overriding emotion becomes one of claustrophobia, of emotional smothering, a reaction perhaps to an irrational fear born out of ignorance.
It is this sense of oppression that leads both Kaushik and Hema to eventually embark on destructive relationships outside of their culture. Hema has been in an adulterous affair for years, with no hope of Julian leaving his wife; Kaushik longest relationship ended on a note of indifference. They are both unable to express what they truly need until they meet each other again in middle age. Tragedy ensues as surely as night follows day, and death, which first bonded them eventually parts them. Significantly, Lahiri places this story not in America, but in Rome, a place of unfamiliarity, the transient nature of the city – of lovers, of imperial ruins, papal significance, myth, poetry and art – a place not designed to be lived in so much as experienced – feels appropriate to characters who are discovering their true selves perhaps for the first time. Interestingly, despite discovery, Kaushik repeats errors from the past. His attitude to Hema’s unspoken rejection mirrors that of his reaction to his stepsister’s prying, he therefore fails to say the words that would bond Hema too him forever. So it is Navin’s reliability, his traditional deference to responsibility and surface impression, that she chooses when in all other aspects her fiancé is entirely unsuitable. Significantly, when leaving Rome, Hema leaves her gold bracelet, an item of jewellery she has worn since she was ten, as if her first transient life, from her adolescent crushes, through a career and vapid affairs, and finally to Kaushik has at long last ended.
Lahiri’s writing invests much time on the subject of loss – loss of love, loved ones and of identity – and sees these as representations of migration, of losing one’s sense of location and history. Forming those new cultural bonds is awkward for all her characters and the stories resonate with life’s throbbing emptiness only briefly filled by moments of joy and abandon.
HERCULE POIROT AND THE GREENSHORE FOLLY Agatha Christie
Christie was asked to write a short story for a local charity, and this story is what she came up with. However, it was rather longer than was expected and couldn’t be used, so she wrote the similarly titled but completely separate “Greenshaw’s Folly” instead which was an acceptable length. The second story featured Miss Marple rather than Poirot and is easily found, but the first she expanded into the novel “Dead Man’s Folly”. The novella wasn’t published for many years. All this information is within the published story, which has forewords and afterwords by various connected people such as Christie’s grandson and the cover artist who had been painting the covers for her books for some fifty years or more.
The story itself is obviously very similar to “Dead Man’s Folly” which has been made for TV twice, once with Peter Ustinov then again with David Suchet, so is well known. This is a shorter version and there is a fascination for those familiar with both versions to discover the differences while reading. One quick mention there- a character called Peggy Legge is renamed Sally Legge, quite an improvement!
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 31,082Chief of Staff
Apologies for crashing this thread - I do read a lot, but I don’t read quickly 🤣
Anyway…the Agatha Christie estate commissioned Sophie Hannah to write, in the style of Agatha Christie, more Hercule Poirot novels…I’ve no idea how close to her style she is - I’ve never read either author 🤗🫣
But Sophie Hannah will be interviewed by my wife and her co-host on their podcast in the coming weeks…
Yes - this was a blatant plug without mentioning the podcast title 🤣
Sounds interesting, since I've read all of the above books and have commented on at least some of them in this very thread. If you like, please drop me a PM with how to listen in. I'm hoping that Ms Hannah tells us when to expect another book in this series.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 31,082Chief of Staff
Sophie’s interview will be in series seven…and the interview is happening next week…so if you (or anyone else) have further questions you’d like asked?
Series eight will feature Joseph Millson - his second appearance on the podcast, I think his first was in series two - he’s just written a non-autobiographical book. You may recall him as Carter in Casino Royale.
I’m sure she will appreciate it…but it’s really for people that want to publish their book…it’s all about the process…what you need to do, and hits and tips about getting your book written and out into the world…I’d just listen to the Joseph Millson one 🤣
Edit- her new Poirot novel is "The Last Death Of The Year", out soon, so that answers my question.
Here's a nerdy one instead- Will her narrator Edward Catchpool ever be replaced with third person narration, as Dame Agatha herself eventually did with Captain Hastings?
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 31,082Chief of Staff
THE GIRL AT THE LION D’OR – Sebastian Faulks (1989)
French set, this early Faulks novel lacks the intricate detail and emotional complexities of his most famous novels, notably Birdsong. What is gains is an easing of prose and a simplicity of structure that, in creating less delivers more. I enjoyed this novel immensely. It is the second time I have read it in under five years. The characters are intensely genuine, the situations plausible and the outcome, as the protagonists return to their former circumstances, wholly believable.
The novel opens when the twenty-one year old waif-like Anne arrives at the Hotel Lion D’Or and begins to ingratiate herself in the local community of Janvilliers. She particularly takes interest in the married solicitor Charles Hartmann and the two embark on an affair virtually under the nose fo his wife. Faulks skilfully presents Anne’s first painfully faltering footsteps into this illicit world and as her confidence grows, so do her emotions, until she overreaches her passions and faces rejection. For his part, Hartmann is ruled by expectation and loyalty, a morbid devotion to a barren wife and an avoidance of a whispering society.
Faulks builds his characters gently; at first we are not certain which of the local male populace will enchant or ensnare Anne first. Her many suitors include the brusque chef at the hotel, Mattlin a local businessman, Hartmann, his friends the Gilbert Brothers, or even Roland the hotel’s acned plagued apprentice butler who spies on her when she bathes; this last a prelude to the irretrievable fact that eventually everyone is spying on her adulterous behaviour. Anne’s reluctance to divulge her past draws Hartmann to her vulnerability. When asked to defend a deviant government minster whose sexual indiscretions could bring down another poor late 1930s Republic, Hartmann understands entirely the minister’s dilemma, but leads him to consider a grey moral area: “How can such a powerful impulse, such a propulsion as he felt to perform a natural act, how can it be thought of as anything but innocent?” Hartmann recognises the minister’s situation replicating itself for he and Anne, with his marriage as the casualty. This revelation leads him to confront the impossibility of the affair continuing. Shattering thought this is for Anne, she renews her acquaintance with the real world and returns to Paris to start anew – the suggestion Faulks hints that this is not a new situation for Anna at all: “She turned her face to it, the pale cheeks with their handful of freckles, the long-lashed eyes, and felt on her skin the touch of the world in its renewed strangeness.”
Using a real incident of news as a ‘jumping off point’ from which Faulks hangs his characters and their actions, The Girl at the Lion D’Or is erudite and beautifully written, a book to remember and revisit, by an author who went on to bigger although not necessarily better things. Faulks would revisit the setting and the themes [France, the war years, betrayal, illicit love] several times in his career, but seldom with such readiness and satisfaction.
I read this upon ChrisNo1's recommendation of sorts. It's alright. Straight away it does something that previous women novelists I'd read did not do - threw down a gauntlet in the opening pages - in the form of a young tousled academic who visits a small, nondescript New England town and catches the attention of the main protagonist, the teenager Charity who minds the library and years to escape to better things, away from her guardian who adopted her and brought her down from 'the Mountain' where uncivilised ne'er do wells live, out of sight and largely out of mind.
That said, that gauntlet has to carry the interest for much of the novel. The prose is very good, you're in capable hands. We are interested to see if any romance develops between the two, or whether the cultural bridge is too wide. Wharton's narrator seems a tad unreliable, there are also gaps in the timeline, so that despite the detail, one key incident is omitted and comes as a surprise later.
It's only 150 pages or so but it took me weeks to finish it, stymied by a recurrence of Bond movie watching a week or so ago. One expects one's patience to be 'rewarded' by a fairytale ending or a Hardyesque 'tragic' ending but the actual resolution leaves an unexpected bad taste and I didn't know if I should commend the author for coming up with something that's almost propaganda for misery, but then again some fiction is meant to be an escape from reality and this isn't - there's no escape. Call it realism, if you like.
There is a fine passage in which the guardian gives a rousing speech to locals in a town hall about how one can leave your home town, and if things don't work out for you and you feel forced to return, you can still use what you learned in the Big Smoke to your town's advantage, you can still make good. Another describes the nearby town celebrations of US Independence Day, with fireworks on the lake and assorted pageantry, that could be straight out of a Judy Garland film.
I enjoyed Chris No1's review of the book more than the book itself.
Christopher Marlowe’s famous play about temptation and its tragic implications is much shorter than I anticipated. The action feels indecently condensed. One senses Marlowe was interested more in individual scenes than he was in producing a significant narrative. So after a scene setting Chorus, we have black magic dabbler Dr John Faustus calling on his university colleagues and fellow necromancers to enquire how he can call up demons; the result is a visit from Satan’s right hand man Mephistopheles and a blood pact drawn between the two of them whereby for twenty-four years Faustus gains all the riches and notoriety he wishes, but will perish at the end and give his soul to Lucifer. He experiences moments of doubt, but is mostly an accommodating vassal for Marlowe to ironically expose the Seven Deadly Sins in natural forms.
The Pope and his cardinals exhibit Pride. The Holy Roman Emperor and his Knights exhibit Envy. An angry Horse Tradesman embodies Wrath. The corpulent, greedy, orgy obsessed Duke of Vanholt is the picture of Gluttony. An Old Man displays Sloth. Helen of Troy appears as an object of Lechery. Robin and Ralph, Faustus’s Ostlers, steal his magic books, their downfall Covetousness.
Sharp dialogues, abandoning iambic pentameter for free verse, packed full of strong metaphors and much ‘imaginations’, fill the script. Other than Faustus and Mephistopheles nobody else hangs around long enough to be of interest. We all know where it ends, but it is interesting to note how much of an anti-hero Faustus is: he openly embarks on this pact, there is no cajoling or blackmail, Faustus hunts out the Evil Angels, pleads with them, with no care until his last days on earth approach. It’s a bit late by then and Marlowe sensibly confines him to his doom.
Important as a text of power and innovation. The story itself is remarkably simple and the plot is nothing more than a movement through seven stages of time as Faustus confounds and cheats those deadly sinners, proving himself the most sinful of all.
THE LOST ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES Ken Greenwald, Denis Green, Anthony Boucher
There are so many Holmes books with such similar titles that a little explanation might be needed. Most people know that Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce played Holmes and Watson in a series of films from the late 1930s onwards. Lesser known is that they also played those parts in a contemporary radio series, back when radio was king and ubiquitous TV just a glimmer in the advertisers’ eyes. This book was written by Ken Greenwald based on radio scripts by Denis Green and Anthony Boucher.
The stories are not deep, being based on scripts for a half hour show, but they are entertaining and certainly aren’t at the bottom of the huge amount of apocryphal Holmes stories that are available. Recommended for Holmes fans, and a nice hardback copy can be picked up on eBay for less than a fiver (that’s where I got mine).
"Rommel - Germany's flawed champion" by Benoit Lemay
If you don't know from the title what and who this book is about, then this biography probably isn't for you. 😏
It's clear from reading this book that Erwin Rommel was a brilliant military commander, especially in using maneuver warfare. But is reputation among some as an apolitical gentleman commander is questionable. Up until the last months of his life Rommel benefited from a lot of backing from Hitler and Rommel was an admirer of Hitler to the point that he was called "Hitler's general". Rommel was clearly a glory hound and used (and was used by) propaganda to a large extent. Rommel mostly kept his hands clean when it came to crimes against humanity, but this was probably down to luck. There simply weren't any genocides going on in north Africa, If Rommel had been fighting in eastern Europe he would've been knee deep in civilian blood. Some books and movies claim Rommel was a part of the failed assassination and coup in 1944, making him a moral person. this simply isn't true. Members of the failed coup hoped to make him the leader of Germany after Hitler's sudden death and wanted him abroad. He was approached and by that time Rommel knew the war was lost. He wanted Hitler to begin negotiations with the UK and the US, ideally to continue the war against the USSR together. But a coup was never mentioned and absolutely not murdering Hitler. But having Rommel on the team was very important to the conspirators, so one of them gave the impression Rommel was on board. After the coup failed some members of the conspiracy claimed Rommel was in on it to save their own lives. I found the biography interesting and well-written. I haven't read anything specifically on Rommel and the war in north Africa before, so I enjoyed reading it.
The latest from the greatest (quickly adds “IMHO”), this is another in King’s ongoing Holly Gibney series where the engaging detective hunts down serial killers. No spoilers, of course – that’s all in the first chapter – and Holly’s supporting cast turns up as well.
It’s only my opinion but I would like Mr King to put Holly to rest for a while and return to the style more typical of his earlier work. With this adventure I would suggest that the law of diminishing returns has set in. The word is that he’s working on a continuation to some earlier work (no spoilers again, but you can find out easily enough) and that looks very interesting.
None of which is to say that “Never Flinch” is at all bad or not worth reading. On the contrary, the usual King magic casts its spell on the reader very quickly and the book becomes unputdownable as the pages turn faster and faster. The characters are very well drawn and he brings them to life. There is, though, an undeniable sense of something missing or opportunities not taken. If you’re a King fan, or conceivably a Holly fan, then don’t hesitate.
I read somewhere that there was a whole other sub plot and character in Never Flinch which King ended up removing completely from the book during editing. He admitted this affected the flow and feel of the book and even thought of not publishing it for a while.
I hope to start it tomorrow but feel the same way about Holly and her friends, especially Barbara who is almost unrealistically perfect. I like them well enough but I'm also ready for him to go in a different direction. Fingers crossed, that other book will be released sometime next year
HOW TO RAISE AND TRAIN PIGEONS - MERVIN F. ROBERTS
Rummaging through my local goodwill shop today, I came across this little book written by Mervin Roberts.
Well the first question is...what do pigeons have to do with the world of 007?
(Other than the famous pigeon double-take scene in Moonraker, with Sir Roger Moore driving his motorized gondola through Venice in front of an astonished crowd.)
Well as absurd as it may seem, pigeons have been used extensively for relaying secret information from one location to another for the past three thousand years.
The ancient Egyptians would vouch for that.
And so would Pliny the Elder, from the early Roman Empire (AD 24-79) and Emperor Honorius (AD 384-423)...if they were alive today.
Pigeons are quite literally the 007's of birds.
This little book details many of the things you would expect in a book written on pigeons i.e., the various breeds of the bird, dietary habits, diseases, natural enemies etc.
But where it gets interesting is when it discusses the homing capabilities of pigeons.
Pigeons have an uncanny sense of direction and always land back at their nesting locations, no matter wherever you release them. The birds can easily cover 300-600 kilometers in a day, flying at 80-140 kilometer per hour speeds.
Scientists think this might be because of the bird's capabilities with sensing the earth's magnetic field lines.
Now think of a pigeon as a one-way information carrier.
In the past Kings used to travel with thousands of pigeons in their entourage. Once some urgent information had to be sent by the King to some selective part of his Kingdom, pigeons from that domicile were dispatched with scrolls fastened to their legs, as the birds would always fly towards their nesting locations and try to reach them.
In this way critical information was transmitted at very fast speeds to their desired locations.
But how are the birds programmed to accomplish this task?
Well it centers around the natural tendencies of the birds and basic Pavlovian tricks.
The male and female birds form a very strong pair bond and are committed to their offspring.
After rearing a pair of pigeons and feeding them at a particular time of the day for weeks, they are then set free just prior to receiving their meal.
Being creatures of habit, they fly back to their location for food, especially if the female has young ones.
During these initial flights, a few feathers in the birds wings are tied or removed, which limit their flying range.
As these reflexes get deeply ingrained, the birds are then released at 5, 10, 20, 40 and 60 miles distance from their nesting locations and the ones that return back are then trained for longer flights.
And in this way, carrier pigeons are created, which were still in use till World War 2.
Many carrier pigeons were awarded gallantry medals (Criox de guerre and the Dickin Medal) for feats of extraordinary bravery during the World Wars.
This book comes highly recommended by critics, academics and a large proportion of the reading public. As someone who wasn’t over excited about the long, if impressive, gothic romance Jane Eyre, I came to Wide Sargasso Sea with a sense of dread, chiefly because I wasn’t sure about disagreeing with all three sections of the book buying public. Jean Rhys’s famous comeback novel appeared over twenty-five years on from the brilliant and unsettling Good Morning, Midnight. Even her agent thought she was dead. No, she had been working exhaustively on this novel. The book is only subtlety a prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s confirmed masterpiece, ignoring almost all the given names of that cast of characters, leaving the reader slightly confused as to the identities of its protagonists. That may be a legal conundrum or it might be a literary cobweb of the author’s own making. Indeed the Caribbean setting, the plush patois dialogues and the related experiences of the mixed race population hint at Rhys’s own personal history. Antoinette’s drinking has the song of the familiar [many of Rhys’s women are partial to the bottle] and the recurrence of fire as a metaphor haunts the narrative considering what we know of the future for the doomed heroine. Meanwhile the spectre of the obeah [voodoo, to you and I] rears its head in an almost inevitable exploitative Hammer movie weirdness, exemplified by the glistening old crone Christophine, who mixes potions and spouts anti-imperial rhetoric with a cringing knowingness that fails to sing entirely true. The scandalous behaviour of Rochester [here named simply Richard] and his failure to understand or appreciate his wife, so drunk is he on the eeriness of the Dominican landscape, makes him distinctly unpleasant and Rhys’s dialogues don’t help his cause. She as a writer is firmly in the female camp of the abused and misunderstood. The book is tremendously short, yet feels lopsided and unpolished, ideas about native history and the inherent culture clash with the English interlopers are undeveloped. So too the mental breakdown of PTSD victims. It is easier to talk about zombi folk and mad hypersexualised women. The final chapter, gorged in that attic space of Jane Eyre’s imagination is hopelessly overburdened with visual mystique and undefined occurrences. At this point one really must have read Bronte’s novel or the narrative fails on every level. Wide Sargasso Sea is bogged down in its own lagoon, trapped by its past as much as the central characters are trapped by their personal cultural expectations. As with all Rhys’s work, the strength lies in the pinpoint descriptions of places and people, the swiftness of the drama. It is less important than Good Morning, Midnight because it lacks a penetrative first person narrative, brought on no doubt through the historical setting, but not helped by a switching point of view. There is a lack of immediacy and a feeling the book is being written because it can be, not because it needs to be. There is no concerted effort to marry the threads of thought and as such they all sit uneasily beside each other, taunting each analogy until all we are left with is the naked flame of a candlestick to guide us to a time and place we recognise as Bronte’s.
This is a good opportunity to talk about Mark Twain's The Adventure of Tom Sawyer, which I have nearly finished.
Why? Well, in the last year there's been a much-praised book called James by Percival Everett which is an alternate interpretation of Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and I wanted to read that. However, not having read Twain's book - I'd caught a movie of it as a kid - I thought I'd get that from the library first, only to find it was a sequel of sorts to Sawyer, so I held off and ordered that in instead.
It's enjoyable - Twain wrote it as a kids' book but made clear adults would enjoy it too. The age of the kid is hard to call and not specified according to the numerous footnotes but he's a young scamp with a good heart, orphaned and living with his aunt. He gets up to mischief. There is a good piece early on about a trick Sawyer plays to get out of doing an errand and Twain points out the difference between work and play and how it's a matter of perception - work is what you have to do, while play, even if more onerous, is what you choose to do - only he gives some fun illustrations of the fact, and to to update it, I'd explain how ChrisNo1 writes fine book and movie reviews for free on this website but if one of the mods were to offer him £100 a month to carry out the same task, he would likely soon quit in disgust...
Twain is said to be America's first humorist, possibly because until that point it was too new a country to allow mickey taking of itself, possibly because the Puritan zeal upon which it was founded didn't encourage that stuff anyway, I don't know. Many of the adventures are similar to Richmal Crompton's Just William stories; I think she was a bit wittier but Sawyer has a warmer feel, in particular the relationship between Tom and his aunt.
Huckleberry Finn is a kid in this book whom the others look up to because he seems to have no ties to hold him down, he's more freewheeling. I think his book, released some years later, sees him going off down river with slave Joe but I'm not sure, my guess is he was chosen for this adventure because he had no family ties. He seems older and more louche than Tom, sort of Robbie Williams to Sawyer's Gary Barlow so he can go off piste a bit more.
There was a retelling/reinterpreation of Dr No's backstory a few years ago - I read one good review but the pages of blurb touted on Amazon didn't tempt me and I've heard nothing of it since, though I think I did flag it up on this site.
Diana Athill edited Wide Saragossa Sea and it's clear from her memoirs that the author was a handful ie a bit mad, I would recommend Athill's couple of memoirs about her involvement with men in the 60s, not mind-blowing literature but easy to read and interesting. Rosamund PIke should buy the rights to those books because she'd be a good fit for Athilll.
LAST EVENINGS ON EARTH – Robert Bolano (1997 / 2001)
Chile’s chain-smoking poet Robert Bolano was one of the key exponents of the Infrarealismo Movement which sprung up across Central and South American in the 1970s, whose writers desired free expression of thought and emotion through non-linear narratives and introspective dialogues. While the movement itself may have hit a dead end through a lack of clear defined messaging, Bolano continued to have success with the technique, writing a series of stunning and divisive novels whose structures are at once intensely beguiling and impossible to ignore. His novels seem to have no endings and no beginning and his characters inhabit landscapes that shift through both time and place without reason while still attesting to a central theme.
In Last Evenings on Earth, Bolano presents a series of short stories, many featuring the struggling poet B – clearly modelled on himself, exiled as B is to Barcelona having escaped Chile via Mexico – which all reflect gamely on man’s self-interest and his inability to comprehend the concerns of others. They are intimately genuine and soul-searchingly revelatory, the narratives taking the form of essays, explanatory notes and descriptions of past happenings that confuse and contradict. Frequently, Bolano is enthral to other poets – usually but not always lesser than he – and those who are better he disdains. He looks back at days, nights, weeks and years with a loose attention to incidental detail and a clarity of extended hindsight which surprises and illuminates. There is a cheerful off-handedness to the prose that draws the reader into each storyline anew. Lurking behind this flowery curtain however is a solemn darkness, a black spirit of unfulfillment and depression, of a lack of understanding and an innate selfishness that suggests Bolano as an observer is removed from all that occurs around him. At one point he mentions how B’s lover has deserted him, a reference as casual as he might stroke a cat; another time B is filled for years with fury at U, who spurned him at a public meeting, and their relationship doesn’t so much evolve as dissolve for B is so self-absorbed he fails to grasp the extent of U’s mental breakdown; a holiday with his ex-prize fighter father leads B to both predict, pre-empt and then prevaricate violence. Latterly, Bolano chides Neruda for his loveless poetry, listing all the better moments in life that can occur other than reading Twenty Songs of Love…
The stories are skilfully woven and generate an intellectual pull that doesn’t quite subscribe to the tenets of Infrarealismo in that the emotional core feels bleak and often leaves the reader unresponsive. This may be Bolano’s intent – that life in all its gory detail is ultimately a bit of a downer – but it doesn’t leave us anywhere to go in terms of a good few hours reading. As the characters continue to break relationships and build new ones badly, it begins to feel almost too much like real life. A few moments of flowery fiction, those pretty curtains he hides behind, might not have gone amiss.
Mightily accomplished, but heavy weather on the soul, Last Evenings of Earth satisfies by individual story, but struggles as a whole, the repetitive occurrences of the short stories wearing us down. It becomes obvious B and all Bolano’s other [first person] protagonists are one and the same [him] and one wonders why the surreptitious deception has been employed. It fools nobody. For a better introduction to Bolano, try his novella Distant Star, a disguised attack on Chile’s Fascist regime which is horrifying, fascinating and emotionally satisfying. Bolano died in 2003; I often cite him, along with Geoffrey Hill and Ismael Kadare, as writers who should have won the Nobel; but they prefer catch-alls like Bob Dylan these days.
I've just acquired a copy of the novel - see attachment below - having recently caught a screening of the film adaptation at The Prince Charles Cinema (i.e. Joseph Sargent's gripping 1974 film, not Tony Scott's 2009 okayish re-make).
My acquisition is the 1973 London Book Club Associates edition of the book, which tends to be available relatively cheaply. My copy is fine apart from the dust jacket.
If Sargent's film adaptation trades on dated stereotypes and prejudices, reflecting the melting pot of 70s Manhattan, Godey's novel was there first, doing it less humorously.
Sticking with film, and thinking back on Robert Shaw's performances as a villain, it occurs to me that Shaw's take on Grant in FRWL has more in common with his 'Mr Blue' character in 'Pelham 123', Bernard Ryder, than with Ian Fleming's 'Red' Grant on the page: Mr Blue is a British former mercenary and ex-Army officer as much as he is a lunatic, and in FRWL Shaw's English Grant has the same authoritatively menacing vocal style, and bearing of a coldly expert killer (except, ironically, when he's masquerading awkwardly as Captain Nash). Shaw was great casting for 'Pelham 123': Mr Blue is all the more effective as a character for having Grant standing behind him, as it were.
Among Walter Matthau's many funny lines as Garber, the transport cop, we get: “The guy who's talking [Shaw] has got a heavy English accent; he could be a fruitcake.” (Like Mr Blue in the film, the Ryder of the novel has had a career in the military and as a mercenary, but in his case he's an American.)
Sargent's film was part of a new wave of crime films in the 70s, and, in that context, there's more to Mr Blue than shades of Grant, making him even edgier. For example, as part of the mix, there's an echo of 'Dirty Harry''s Scorpio in the following dialogue:
Mr Blue (to Garber, by radio): "If I see a single cop between here and South Ferry, I'll kill a hostage. In fact, any deviation from my instructions and I'll kill a hostage."
Scorpio (on the phone, bouncing Harry Callahan around town): "If I think anyone's following you, the girl dies. If you talk to anyone, even a Pekingise pissing against a lampost, the girl dies [etc.]"
The difference is that, in response, Callahan's seething cynicism is replaced in 'Pelham 123' by Garber's droll, humanising humour - exhorting Mr Blue not to take this the wrong way, pal, but if he, Mr Blue, should make it through this incident, he should really seek psychiatric help!
Matthau's characterisation of the likeable Garber and his moral centrality are the main advantage that the movie has over the novel, making it the more enduring text. (In the novel, Garber is Prescott, playing a less significant role.) The film's forray into casual racism diminishes it, however, positioning it today in historical, 'movie buff' territory, while Scott's serviceable version, the lesser film, is doubtless seen more often now.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
I value the novel as a postcolonial corrective to 'Jane Eyre' and remember enjoying it as such when I read it some years ago.
A lighter footnote to the Brontes is Sarah Gordon's play of last year, 'Underdog: The Other Other Bronte'. The Bronte in question there is Anne, and the play is a comedy about the imagined dynamic and rivalry between the sisters.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
I've been meaning to get around to this classic because it's been recommended a few times in Saturday's Times My Culture section by various subjects, and I hoped to read some more classics by women writers. I got up to page 80 or so of this and stopped. It's not unreadable but it does cement my biased take on women writers that they lack thrust or narrative pull, something I was hoping to overturn. I'm not even sure where it's set, there's a mill and a young girl of 8 or 9 and a cousin or brother 10 years older and it explores their sweet relationship and how she looks up to him and wants to please him, its touching. But it starts with her in the dog house because she forgot to give some rabbits drink as her brother instructed and now they're all dead, it jars a bit really. Also, you get the feeling things aren't going to turn out well - the father's plan is that he should have the rough practicality knocked out of him by having him train to be a lawyer when it's obvious the bookish young girl would be better equipped for a paid-for academic education. On top of this, the book's cover is very grim, it's off putting. It seems the same era as Dickens, the idea is that people are described in a charming, amusing and interesting way but so far that's about it. I'm not saying it's written badly or anything at all - that's big of me isn't it - but there's an element of what's the point.
That said, the other book is one I finished tonight and written by R C Sheriff who did the play Journey's End. It's A Fortnight In September, and it is unusual because it lacks any narrative thrust or actual story, It was recommended in the same section of the Times on Saturday, where they revisit old classics, earlier this year.
The book was a bit hit when it was published in 1930 and almost certainly inspired Ian Fleming's account of James Bond's childhood memories in On Her Majesty's Secret Service where he is told he can't bring back some seashells as they would mess up his trunk. When I say 'almost certainly' I mean, 'not necessarily' and 'almost certainly not'.
If Craig's Bond grew up in Skyfall in Scotland where would he have gone to the seaside?
Anyway, this is an account of a modest Dulwich family going to Bognor for a weekend in September for their holidays, and how it unfolds. Given it's 1 September as I write, I can't see this annual vacation of there's can yield sun tans and beach fun as it is tipping down now and the weather has turned autumnal, I know you can get Indian summers but even so. Maybe the weather was different back then.
Nothing narrative happens, But that's not the point. It simply runs through the small thoughts and fears of the family - a husband and wife, a son and a daughter in late teens and the cusp of adulthood, a younger son around 10 but I'm not sure. It's very well done, very evocative. You keep thinking, at some point the plot is going to kick in... when young Mary visits an elderly neighbour to offload the budgerigar, maybe the door will slam shut and Mary will say: 'I've phoned ma and pa to say I can't go... it's going to be a fortnight with me I'm afraid... and she will strap on a long black leather glove as she proceeds to inflict cruel suffering behind locked doors, the text swiftly banned and later cited in the Brady and Hindley trial.... But nothing like that happens, and in some ways it resembles Tarantino's Once Upon A Time In Hollywood in that everything seems set up for something to go horribly wrong, for fate to intervene, for the plot to start, but nothing bad does happen.
The style of writing is such that is used to set the scene for something dastardly or ominous to unfold, however.
At first I thought it was written post-war so felt the teenagers in the book would be, well, they might be my Dad's age then, he just missed the war but in fact it was 1930 so all of them would be older than him, even the youngest. They get the train from Clapham Junction to Bogner straight down, you can't do that now I don't think. Chocolate vending machines are on the platform back in 1930, though.
Though the young kid gets many mentions what is noticeable is that the kids in their late teens are hardly given any notice for much of the book. Teenagers just had no currency then. It was a case of their value suddenly was what food they could put on the table. Eventually each gets about a chapter but these are the least convincing, in particular the young woman's one reads like cheap romantic fiction. Other than that, their thoughts or feelings aren't indulged at all.
That said, there is more than a whiff of melancholy about the tale, if you can call it that, as they lodge in their familiar guest house 'Seaview' and start to realise its creature comforts and its landlady have not kept up with the times - and this is 1930.
The book made me want to go to Bogner but apparently it's all syringes down there now, my sister and I did head out to Broadstairs and its sandy beach, on the East coast. I did get the map of the South East out and some of the locations of these towns were a surprise; all that time spent on Geography and they don't teach you that stuff... Bognor is of course the final destination for Harold Steptoe in the last ever episode of Steptoe and Son, as he realises his passport is invalid for his holiday abroad with his old man, who goes off without him. Harold then jumps into a sports car with a waiting bird, crying 'Bogner here we come!'
My trip to Broadstairs was inspired by Agatha Christie but it turns out she has nothing to do with the area, I'm not sure where Why Didn't They Ask Evans? was set but it's not there.
It's the home of Charles Dickens though and the whole area feels Dickensian, it has an aura of strange stillness and menace, slightly piratannical too.
It's also the setting for the finale of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, thought it's not used in any of the films.
The main thing about this book, well, I've been mixing with young lads at work and one made the mistake of asking my advice on stuff - universities mainly - and you start thinking, okay, what books would I recommend and would any of them be a good idea anyway? I mean there are pros and cons of introducing someone to James Bond stuff, for instance. The Thirty-Nine Steps would be a safe bet you'd think, maybe start of with Hitchcock's film, then try the book. But you might be wrong because, well, you may recall in the book it's an older man called Skudder who buttonholes Hannay with his fears of foreign spies (in the Hitch film it's an attractive brunette). I was a bit struck to read his account this time round as it's straight out of QAnon stuff, though this is set just before the First World War. 'Away from all the Governments and armies there was a big subterranean movement going on, engineered by very dangerous people... most were educated anarchists who make revolutions but beside that there were the financiers who were playing for money. A clever man can make big profits from a failing market and it suited the book of both classes to set Europe by the ears.' There is talk of a new world order, and then 'the Jew was behind it, and the Jew hated Russia worse than hell.' There's a caveat explaining that the Jews were victims of pogroms for 300 years and this is payback but then: 'The Jew is everywhere but you have to go far down the backstairs to find him...' It sort of turns out this isn't so obviously anti-Semitic as it first appears but it really doesn't read well and you think, hmmm, I don't think it would look good recommending this book to a school leaver. Then again, when this was published the Holocaust hadn't happened and such talk wasn't associated with so much other bad stuff... But it's not really what you associate with the young Robert Donat.
Aside from that, it's a fine romp but deviates from the Hitch version in fascinating ways because it's all there, just not as Eric Morecambe might say, in the right order. Hannay does stay in a Scottish lass's abode where she cleans him and gives him her husband's coat - but this became an entire vignette in the film, with John Laurie and Peggy Ashcroft. Here there is no drama, he doesn't meet the husband. Hannay whistles a snatch of tune - this is made a thing of in the film, as it is the tune that introduced Mr Memory at the Palladium. One character is able to speed read and memorise documents - this is reintegrated into the character of Mr Memory in the film. There are lots of little things that do get used in the film and frankly to far better effect. There are virtually no women in the book whatsoever, it's not so much a Boys Own as Only Boys Adventure, you might say. Hannay's attempt to decode Skudder's notebook isn't cinematic and doesn't get used. The scenes of smooth English manners obscuring skulduggery is a theme of Hitch's film though in the book it's clear the mask slips and we hear them speak German. The final scene set in Broadstairs - I think it's in Stone Bay, a slightly more reserved, less busy stretch of sandy beach north of Viking Bay - isn't quite vivid in real life, I think they've closed it off, but it is markedly similar to Bond's meeting with Rosa Klebb at the end of From Russia With Love (the novel, where Bond has doubts he has the right person), while Hannay's realisation as the mask slips was used to good effect in Mission Impossible when Ethan Hunt pastes his own imagined narrative over that of his boss in their meeting at Liverpool Street Station. None of this got used in any film adaptation of Buchan's novel.
It's highly readable still but it's with a start to realise that A Fortnight in September was written nearly 100 years ago and now my Dad, who was born in 1928, has passed it really feels it, you feel the era has now passed into actual history as when my Dad was my age he'd be saying the same of a book written in the 1870s or so. Of course, The Thirty-Nine Steps is even older though it features trains, planes and automobiles. I didn't know they had mono planes before the First World War but one features here (it's an autogyro in Hitch's film).
Gosh, reviews galore, very informative @Napoleon Plural I also did not understand why The Mill on the Floss is considered such a great novel. The main characters are both very self centred, the story is very slow and the ending too swift and unlikely.
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THE JUPITER EFFECT - John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann
Picked these two up from my local goodwill store yesterday.
'The Jupiter Effect', written in 1974 by two astrophysicists from Cambridge University, predicts a great earthquake which would hit the San Andreas Fault in California on March 10, 1982.
Gribbin and Plagemann, then explain in detail with the aid of charts and graphs, how planetary alignments could interfere with solar flux patterns to precipitate earthquakes.
The main postulate of the book states that a grand planetary alignment on March 10, 1982 will increase the solar wind flux on Earth causing an intensification of westerly winds, which in turn would increase the friction on Earth's easterly rotation by a few milliseconds...leading to strong compressions in the fault line and causing a massive earthquake.
All good plausible science backed up with sound scientific proof.
Fortunately for mankind...nothing 'earth-shattering' happened in 1982.
Other than Micheal Jackson's Thriller.
Fascinating reading never the less.
Casablanca on DVD was a treat.
UNACCUSTOMED EARTH – Jhumpa Lahiri (2008)
Jhumpa Lahiri is an American author of Indian extraction, having migrated to the USA with her parents at the age of two. She was in fact born in London, so her relationship to India [specifically Bengal] is fashioned mostly through her family history. In many ways, her writing is more western than Asian for it considers the Indian diaspora from a western perspective – as in her main characters tend to be second generation migrants already attuned to America and its less formal society. Unaccustomed Earth contains eight short stories split into two halves.
The first section features five tales of loss, grief, misplaced love and respect, parental responsibility, displacement and cultural translation. They explore the diasporic identity of the characters and investigate the similarities and differences between the traditional and the modern. Sudden epiphanies, location, misdirection and story compression are all notable aspects of Lahiri’s writings here:
The second [more successful] part takes the form of three interconnected stories and is subtitled Hema and Kaushik. For this story-cycle, Lahiri focusses exclusively on interpretations of grief and an understanding of the difficult pathways of love, both in a modern emotionally confused ‘American’ manner, as well as through formal, reluctant and traditional ‘Indian’ arrangements. What brings the stories vividly to life are the attention to detail during the slow unravelling of information, both of a personal and an intellectual measure. The characters are expressive and believable. The stories are so well intertwined they would work as a standalone 120-page novella.
Lahiri’s people inhabit a hybrid landscape and share cultural personalities that attest to their transient roots. As second generation immigrants, they share an ambivalence towards their heritage – drinking alcohol, not speaking Bengali, irreligious – that removes them culturally from a more classically ‘accustomed’ earth to the ‘unaccustomed’ one of Americana. This depicts in a way, Lahiri’s own life experience [write what you know?] but also draws on the modernist ethos of alienation and separatism, that to understand and highlight the cracks in a society one must be outside of it. Occasionally, Lahiri will distract us with that same disorientating structure of books by Jean Rhys or Hemingway, where an exile’s life in cosmopolitan cities like Berlin, London and Paris, comes forced with political or social pressures. They experience a sense of loss, an existential crisis, but it is not one of diaspora. Lahiri instead creates the concept of a migrant as a mournful figure, absent of an identity and a home, and she allies that with a strong feeling for a contemporary time and space, of how globalisation through travel, media and worldwide connections bring people closer together, however fleetingly, and instinctively they create cultural neighbourhoods, both at home and on the tourist travelogue. It is worth reflecting on what Lahiri’s characters gain and lose through globalisation, through partially rejecting their traditional roots. There is much intergenerational distance featured in the stories that hints constantly at a widening gap between the past and the present, not just because memories of the ‘old country’ are fading but because the need for total immersion, of acceptance, into American society demands it.
Lahiri’s background of privilege however prevents her from investigating entirely the true full diasporic experience. She only deals with what she knows – the elite. Her characters are in the main monied, educated and sophisticated. The stories lack menace and do not present a balanced view of migration and the serious criminal, medical or psychological issues which can arise from it. With one exception, everybody is successful, if not following their dreams certainly well-off and content enough to have them without concern. In fact, the overriding emotion becomes one of claustrophobia, of emotional smothering, a reaction perhaps to an irrational fear born out of ignorance.
It is this sense of oppression that leads both Kaushik and Hema to eventually embark on destructive relationships outside of their culture. Hema has been in an adulterous affair for years, with no hope of Julian leaving his wife; Kaushik longest relationship ended on a note of indifference. They are both unable to express what they truly need until they meet each other again in middle age. Tragedy ensues as surely as night follows day, and death, which first bonded them eventually parts them. Significantly, Lahiri places this story not in America, but in Rome, a place of unfamiliarity, the transient nature of the city – of lovers, of imperial ruins, papal significance, myth, poetry and art – a place not designed to be lived in so much as experienced – feels appropriate to characters who are discovering their true selves perhaps for the first time. Interestingly, despite discovery, Kaushik repeats errors from the past. His attitude to Hema’s unspoken rejection mirrors that of his reaction to his stepsister’s prying, he therefore fails to say the words that would bond Hema too him forever. So it is Navin’s reliability, his traditional deference to responsibility and surface impression, that she chooses when in all other aspects her fiancé is entirely unsuitable. Significantly, when leaving Rome, Hema leaves her gold bracelet, an item of jewellery she has worn since she was ten, as if her first transient life, from her adolescent crushes, through a career and vapid affairs, and finally to Kaushik has at long last ended.
Lahiri’s writing invests much time on the subject of loss – loss of love, loved ones and of identity – and sees these as representations of migration, of losing one’s sense of location and history. Forming those new cultural bonds is awkward for all her characters and the stories resonate with life’s throbbing emptiness only briefly filled by moments of joy and abandon.
HERCULE POIROT AND THE GREENSHORE FOLLY Agatha Christie
Christie was asked to write a short story for a local charity, and this story is what she came up with. However, it was rather longer than was expected and couldn’t be used, so she wrote the similarly titled but completely separate “Greenshaw’s Folly” instead which was an acceptable length. The second story featured Miss Marple rather than Poirot and is easily found, but the first she expanded into the novel “Dead Man’s Folly”. The novella wasn’t published for many years. All this information is within the published story, which has forewords and afterwords by various connected people such as Christie’s grandson and the cover artist who had been painting the covers for her books for some fifty years or more.
The story itself is obviously very similar to “Dead Man’s Folly” which has been made for TV twice, once with Peter Ustinov then again with David Suchet, so is well known. This is a shorter version and there is a fascination for those familiar with both versions to discover the differences while reading. One quick mention there- a character called Peggy Legge is renamed Sally Legge, quite an improvement!
Apologies for crashing this thread - I do read a lot, but I don’t read quickly 🤣
Anyway…the Agatha Christie estate commissioned Sophie Hannah to write, in the style of Agatha Christie, more Hercule Poirot novels…I’ve no idea how close to her style she is - I’ve never read either author 🤗🫣
But Sophie Hannah will be interviewed by my wife and her co-host on their podcast in the coming weeks…
Yes - this was a blatant plug without mentioning the podcast title 🤣
Sounds interesting, since I've read all of the above books and have commented on at least some of them in this very thread. If you like, please drop me a PM with how to listen in. I'm hoping that Ms Hannah tells us when to expect another book in this series.
This is the podcast 😁
Sophie’s interview will be in series seven…and the interview is happening next week…so if you (or anyone else) have further questions you’d like asked?
Series eight will feature Joseph Millson - his second appearance on the podcast, I think his first was in series two - he’s just written a non-autobiographical book. You may recall him as Carter in Casino Royale.
Thanks for the info @Sir Miles I will listen to your wife’s (and my first ever) podcast!
I’m sure she will appreciate it…but it’s really for people that want to publish their book…it’s all about the process…what you need to do, and hits and tips about getting your book written and out into the world…I’d just listen to the Joseph Millson one 🤣
Thanks, Sir M. 👍
Edit- her new Poirot novel is "The Last Death Of The Year", out soon, so that answers my question.
Here's a nerdy one instead- Will her narrator Edward Catchpool ever be replaced with third person narration, as Dame Agatha herself eventually did with Captain Hastings?
I shall pass that question on…thanks 🙂
THE GIRL AT THE LION D’OR – Sebastian Faulks (1989)
French set, this early Faulks novel lacks the intricate detail and emotional complexities of his most famous novels, notably Birdsong. What is gains is an easing of prose and a simplicity of structure that, in creating less delivers more. I enjoyed this novel immensely. It is the second time I have read it in under five years. The characters are intensely genuine, the situations plausible and the outcome, as the protagonists return to their former circumstances, wholly believable.
The novel opens when the twenty-one year old waif-like Anne arrives at the Hotel Lion D’Or and begins to ingratiate herself in the local community of Janvilliers. She particularly takes interest in the married solicitor Charles Hartmann and the two embark on an affair virtually under the nose fo his wife. Faulks skilfully presents Anne’s first painfully faltering footsteps into this illicit world and as her confidence grows, so do her emotions, until she overreaches her passions and faces rejection. For his part, Hartmann is ruled by expectation and loyalty, a morbid devotion to a barren wife and an avoidance of a whispering society.
Faulks builds his characters gently; at first we are not certain which of the local male populace will enchant or ensnare Anne first. Her many suitors include the brusque chef at the hotel, Mattlin a local businessman, Hartmann, his friends the Gilbert Brothers, or even Roland the hotel’s acned plagued apprentice butler who spies on her when she bathes; this last a prelude to the irretrievable fact that eventually everyone is spying on her adulterous behaviour. Anne’s reluctance to divulge her past draws Hartmann to her vulnerability. When asked to defend a deviant government minster whose sexual indiscretions could bring down another poor late 1930s Republic, Hartmann understands entirely the minister’s dilemma, but leads him to consider a grey moral area: “How can such a powerful impulse, such a propulsion as he felt to perform a natural act, how can it be thought of as anything but innocent?” Hartmann recognises the minister’s situation replicating itself for he and Anne, with his marriage as the casualty. This revelation leads him to confront the impossibility of the affair continuing. Shattering thought this is for Anne, she renews her acquaintance with the real world and returns to Paris to start anew – the suggestion Faulks hints that this is not a new situation for Anna at all: “She turned her face to it, the pale cheeks with their handful of freckles, the long-lashed eyes, and felt on her skin the touch of the world in its renewed strangeness.”
Using a real incident of news as a ‘jumping off point’ from which Faulks hangs his characters and their actions, The Girl at the Lion D’Or is erudite and beautifully written, a book to remember and revisit, by an author who went on to bigger although not necessarily better things. Faulks would revisit the setting and the themes [France, the war years, betrayal, illicit love] several times in his career, but seldom with such readiness and satisfaction.
I read this upon ChrisNo1's recommendation of sorts. It's alright. Straight away it does something that previous women novelists I'd read did not do - threw down a gauntlet in the opening pages - in the form of a young tousled academic who visits a small, nondescript New England town and catches the attention of the main protagonist, the teenager Charity who minds the library and years to escape to better things, away from her guardian who adopted her and brought her down from 'the Mountain' where uncivilised ne'er do wells live, out of sight and largely out of mind.
That said, that gauntlet has to carry the interest for much of the novel. The prose is very good, you're in capable hands. We are interested to see if any romance develops between the two, or whether the cultural bridge is too wide. Wharton's narrator seems a tad unreliable, there are also gaps in the timeline, so that despite the detail, one key incident is omitted and comes as a surprise later.
It's only 150 pages or so but it took me weeks to finish it, stymied by a recurrence of Bond movie watching a week or so ago. One expects one's patience to be 'rewarded' by a fairytale ending or a Hardyesque 'tragic' ending but the actual resolution leaves an unexpected bad taste and I didn't know if I should commend the author for coming up with something that's almost propaganda for misery, but then again some fiction is meant to be an escape from reality and this isn't - there's no escape. Call it realism, if you like.
There is a fine passage in which the guardian gives a rousing speech to locals in a town hall about how one can leave your home town, and if things don't work out for you and you feel forced to return, you can still use what you learned in the Big Smoke to your town's advantage, you can still make good. Another describes the nearby town celebrations of US Independence Day, with fireworks on the lake and assorted pageantry, that could be straight out of a Judy Garland film.
I enjoyed Chris No1's review of the book more than the book itself.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
DR FAUSTUS – Christopher Marlowe (c. 1588)
Christopher Marlowe’s famous play about temptation and its tragic implications is much shorter than I anticipated. The action feels indecently condensed. One senses Marlowe was interested more in individual scenes than he was in producing a significant narrative. So after a scene setting Chorus, we have black magic dabbler Dr John Faustus calling on his university colleagues and fellow necromancers to enquire how he can call up demons; the result is a visit from Satan’s right hand man Mephistopheles and a blood pact drawn between the two of them whereby for twenty-four years Faustus gains all the riches and notoriety he wishes, but will perish at the end and give his soul to Lucifer. He experiences moments of doubt, but is mostly an accommodating vassal for Marlowe to ironically expose the Seven Deadly Sins in natural forms.
The Pope and his cardinals exhibit Pride. The Holy Roman Emperor and his Knights exhibit Envy. An angry Horse Tradesman embodies Wrath. The corpulent, greedy, orgy obsessed Duke of Vanholt is the picture of Gluttony. An Old Man displays Sloth. Helen of Troy appears as an object of Lechery. Robin and Ralph, Faustus’s Ostlers, steal his magic books, their downfall Covetousness.
Sharp dialogues, abandoning iambic pentameter for free verse, packed full of strong metaphors and much ‘imaginations’, fill the script. Other than Faustus and Mephistopheles nobody else hangs around long enough to be of interest. We all know where it ends, but it is interesting to note how much of an anti-hero Faustus is: he openly embarks on this pact, there is no cajoling or blackmail, Faustus hunts out the Evil Angels, pleads with them, with no care until his last days on earth approach. It’s a bit late by then and Marlowe sensibly confines him to his doom.
Important as a text of power and innovation. The story itself is remarkably simple and the plot is nothing more than a movement through seven stages of time as Faustus confounds and cheats those deadly sinners, proving himself the most sinful of all.
Bleak? Yeh, maybe.
THE LOST ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES Ken Greenwald, Denis Green, Anthony Boucher
There are so many Holmes books with such similar titles that a little explanation might be needed. Most people know that Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce played Holmes and Watson in a series of films from the late 1930s onwards. Lesser known is that they also played those parts in a contemporary radio series, back when radio was king and ubiquitous TV just a glimmer in the advertisers’ eyes. This book was written by Ken Greenwald based on radio scripts by Denis Green and Anthony Boucher.
The stories are not deep, being based on scripts for a half hour show, but they are entertaining and certainly aren’t at the bottom of the huge amount of apocryphal Holmes stories that are available. Recommended for Holmes fans, and a nice hardback copy can be picked up on eBay for less than a fiver (that’s where I got mine).
"Rommel - Germany's flawed champion" by Benoit Lemay
If you don't know from the title what and who this book is about, then this biography probably isn't for you. 😏
It's clear from reading this book that Erwin Rommel was a brilliant military commander, especially in using maneuver warfare. But is reputation among some as an apolitical gentleman commander is questionable. Up until the last months of his life Rommel benefited from a lot of backing from Hitler and Rommel was an admirer of Hitler to the point that he was called "Hitler's general". Rommel was clearly a glory hound and used (and was used by) propaganda to a large extent. Rommel mostly kept his hands clean when it came to crimes against humanity, but this was probably down to luck. There simply weren't any genocides going on in north Africa, If Rommel had been fighting in eastern Europe he would've been knee deep in civilian blood. Some books and movies claim Rommel was a part of the failed assassination and coup in 1944, making him a moral person. this simply isn't true. Members of the failed coup hoped to make him the leader of Germany after Hitler's sudden death and wanted him abroad. He was approached and by that time Rommel knew the war was lost. He wanted Hitler to begin negotiations with the UK and the US, ideally to continue the war against the USSR together. But a coup was never mentioned and absolutely not murdering Hitler. But having Rommel on the team was very important to the conspirators, so one of them gave the impression Rommel was on board. After the coup failed some members of the conspiracy claimed Rommel was in on it to save their own lives. I found the biography interesting and well-written. I haven't read anything specifically on Rommel and the war in north Africa before, so I enjoyed reading it.
NEVER FLINCH Stephen King
The latest from the greatest (quickly adds “IMHO”), this is another in King’s ongoing Holly Gibney series where the engaging detective hunts down serial killers. No spoilers, of course – that’s all in the first chapter – and Holly’s supporting cast turns up as well.
It’s only my opinion but I would like Mr King to put Holly to rest for a while and return to the style more typical of his earlier work. With this adventure I would suggest that the law of diminishing returns has set in. The word is that he’s working on a continuation to some earlier work (no spoilers again, but you can find out easily enough) and that looks very interesting.
None of which is to say that “Never Flinch” is at all bad or not worth reading. On the contrary, the usual King magic casts its spell on the reader very quickly and the book becomes unputdownable as the pages turn faster and faster. The characters are very well drawn and he brings them to life. There is, though, an undeniable sense of something missing or opportunities not taken. If you’re a King fan, or conceivably a Holly fan, then don’t hesitate.
I read somewhere that there was a whole other sub plot and character in Never Flinch which King ended up removing completely from the book during editing. He admitted this affected the flow and feel of the book and even thought of not publishing it for a while.
I hope to start it tomorrow but feel the same way about Holly and her friends, especially Barbara who is almost unrealistically perfect. I like them well enough but I'm also ready for him to go in a different direction. Fingers crossed, that other book will be released sometime next year
Next year??? He's slowing down in his old age.
There's an after word which doesn't discuss what you say above, at least not directly, but does say that he .... well, read the book first.
HOW TO RAISE AND TRAIN PIGEONS - MERVIN F. ROBERTS
Rummaging through my local goodwill shop today, I came across this little book written by Mervin Roberts.
Well the first question is...what do pigeons have to do with the world of 007?
(Other than the famous pigeon double-take scene in Moonraker, with Sir Roger Moore driving his motorized gondola through Venice in front of an astonished crowd.)
Well as absurd as it may seem, pigeons have been used extensively for relaying secret information from one location to another for the past three thousand years.
The ancient Egyptians would vouch for that.
And so would Pliny the Elder, from the early Roman Empire (AD 24-79) and Emperor Honorius (AD 384-423)...if they were alive today.
Pigeons are quite literally the 007's of birds.
This little book details many of the things you would expect in a book written on pigeons i.e., the various breeds of the bird, dietary habits, diseases, natural enemies etc.
But where it gets interesting is when it discusses the homing capabilities of pigeons.
Pigeons have an uncanny sense of direction and always land back at their nesting locations, no matter wherever you release them. The birds can easily cover 300-600 kilometers in a day, flying at 80-140 kilometer per hour speeds.
Scientists think this might be because of the bird's capabilities with sensing the earth's magnetic field lines.
Now think of a pigeon as a one-way information carrier.
In the past Kings used to travel with thousands of pigeons in their entourage. Once some urgent information had to be sent by the King to some selective part of his Kingdom, pigeons from that domicile were dispatched with scrolls fastened to their legs, as the birds would always fly towards their nesting locations and try to reach them.
In this way critical information was transmitted at very fast speeds to their desired locations.
But how are the birds programmed to accomplish this task?
Well it centers around the natural tendencies of the birds and basic Pavlovian tricks.
The male and female birds form a very strong pair bond and are committed to their offspring.
After rearing a pair of pigeons and feeding them at a particular time of the day for weeks, they are then set free just prior to receiving their meal.
Being creatures of habit, they fly back to their location for food, especially if the female has young ones.
During these initial flights, a few feathers in the birds wings are tied or removed, which limit their flying range.
As these reflexes get deeply ingrained, the birds are then released at 5, 10, 20, 40 and 60 miles distance from their nesting locations and the ones that return back are then trained for longer flights.
And in this way, carrier pigeons are created, which were still in use till World War 2.
Many carrier pigeons were awarded gallantry medals (Criox de guerre and the Dickin Medal) for feats of extraordinary bravery during the World Wars.
Fascinating stuff.
Good post! (even though I question your use of the word "literally")
@Number24
Thank you for the kind words.
WIDE SARGASSO SEA – Jean Rhys (1966)
This book comes highly recommended by critics, academics and a large proportion of the reading public. As someone who wasn’t over excited about the long, if impressive, gothic romance Jane Eyre, I came to Wide Sargasso Sea with a sense of dread, chiefly because I wasn’t sure about disagreeing with all three sections of the book buying public. Jean Rhys’s famous comeback novel appeared over twenty-five years on from the brilliant and unsettling Good Morning, Midnight. Even her agent thought she was dead. No, she had been working exhaustively on this novel. The book is only subtlety a prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s confirmed masterpiece, ignoring almost all the given names of that cast of characters, leaving the reader slightly confused as to the identities of its protagonists. That may be a legal conundrum or it might be a literary cobweb of the author’s own making. Indeed the Caribbean setting, the plush patois dialogues and the related experiences of the mixed race population hint at Rhys’s own personal history. Antoinette’s drinking has the song of the familiar [many of Rhys’s women are partial to the bottle] and the recurrence of fire as a metaphor haunts the narrative considering what we know of the future for the doomed heroine. Meanwhile the spectre of the obeah [voodoo, to you and I] rears its head in an almost inevitable exploitative Hammer movie weirdness, exemplified by the glistening old crone Christophine, who mixes potions and spouts anti-imperial rhetoric with a cringing knowingness that fails to sing entirely true. The scandalous behaviour of Rochester [here named simply Richard] and his failure to understand or appreciate his wife, so drunk is he on the eeriness of the Dominican landscape, makes him distinctly unpleasant and Rhys’s dialogues don’t help his cause. She as a writer is firmly in the female camp of the abused and misunderstood. The book is tremendously short, yet feels lopsided and unpolished, ideas about native history and the inherent culture clash with the English interlopers are undeveloped. So too the mental breakdown of PTSD victims. It is easier to talk about zombi folk and mad hypersexualised women. The final chapter, gorged in that attic space of Jane Eyre’s imagination is hopelessly overburdened with visual mystique and undefined occurrences. At this point one really must have read Bronte’s novel or the narrative fails on every level. Wide Sargasso Sea is bogged down in its own lagoon, trapped by its past as much as the central characters are trapped by their personal cultural expectations. As with all Rhys’s work, the strength lies in the pinpoint descriptions of places and people, the swiftness of the drama. It is less important than Good Morning, Midnight because it lacks a penetrative first person narrative, brought on no doubt through the historical setting, but not helped by a switching point of view. There is a lack of immediacy and a feeling the book is being written because it can be, not because it needs to be. There is no concerted effort to marry the threads of thought and as such they all sit uneasily beside each other, taunting each analogy until all we are left with is the naked flame of a candlestick to guide us to a time and place we recognise as Bronte’s.
This is a good opportunity to talk about Mark Twain's The Adventure of Tom Sawyer, which I have nearly finished.
Why? Well, in the last year there's been a much-praised book called James by Percival Everett which is an alternate interpretation of Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and I wanted to read that. However, not having read Twain's book - I'd caught a movie of it as a kid - I thought I'd get that from the library first, only to find it was a sequel of sorts to Sawyer, so I held off and ordered that in instead.
It's enjoyable - Twain wrote it as a kids' book but made clear adults would enjoy it too. The age of the kid is hard to call and not specified according to the numerous footnotes but he's a young scamp with a good heart, orphaned and living with his aunt. He gets up to mischief. There is a good piece early on about a trick Sawyer plays to get out of doing an errand and Twain points out the difference between work and play and how it's a matter of perception - work is what you have to do, while play, even if more onerous, is what you choose to do - only he gives some fun illustrations of the fact, and to to update it, I'd explain how ChrisNo1 writes fine book and movie reviews for free on this website but if one of the mods were to offer him £100 a month to carry out the same task, he would likely soon quit in disgust...
Twain is said to be America's first humorist, possibly because until that point it was too new a country to allow mickey taking of itself, possibly because the Puritan zeal upon which it was founded didn't encourage that stuff anyway, I don't know. Many of the adventures are similar to Richmal Crompton's Just William stories; I think she was a bit wittier but Sawyer has a warmer feel, in particular the relationship between Tom and his aunt.
Huckleberry Finn is a kid in this book whom the others look up to because he seems to have no ties to hold him down, he's more freewheeling. I think his book, released some years later, sees him going off down river with slave Joe but I'm not sure, my guess is he was chosen for this adventure because he had no family ties. He seems older and more louche than Tom, sort of Robbie Williams to Sawyer's Gary Barlow so he can go off piste a bit more.
There was a retelling/reinterpreation of Dr No's backstory a few years ago - I read one good review but the pages of blurb touted on Amazon didn't tempt me and I've heard nothing of it since, though I think I did flag it up on this site.
Diana Athill edited Wide Saragossa Sea and it's clear from her memoirs that the author was a handful ie a bit mad, I would recommend Athill's couple of memoirs about her involvement with men in the 60s, not mind-blowing literature but easy to read and interesting. Rosamund PIke should buy the rights to those books because she'd be a good fit for Athilll.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
LAST EVENINGS ON EARTH – Robert Bolano (1997 / 2001)
Chile’s chain-smoking poet Robert Bolano was one of the key exponents of the Infrarealismo Movement which sprung up across Central and South American in the 1970s, whose writers desired free expression of thought and emotion through non-linear narratives and introspective dialogues. While the movement itself may have hit a dead end through a lack of clear defined messaging, Bolano continued to have success with the technique, writing a series of stunning and divisive novels whose structures are at once intensely beguiling and impossible to ignore. His novels seem to have no endings and no beginning and his characters inhabit landscapes that shift through both time and place without reason while still attesting to a central theme.
In Last Evenings on Earth, Bolano presents a series of short stories, many featuring the struggling poet B – clearly modelled on himself, exiled as B is to Barcelona having escaped Chile via Mexico – which all reflect gamely on man’s self-interest and his inability to comprehend the concerns of others. They are intimately genuine and soul-searchingly revelatory, the narratives taking the form of essays, explanatory notes and descriptions of past happenings that confuse and contradict. Frequently, Bolano is enthral to other poets – usually but not always lesser than he – and those who are better he disdains. He looks back at days, nights, weeks and years with a loose attention to incidental detail and a clarity of extended hindsight which surprises and illuminates. There is a cheerful off-handedness to the prose that draws the reader into each storyline anew. Lurking behind this flowery curtain however is a solemn darkness, a black spirit of unfulfillment and depression, of a lack of understanding and an innate selfishness that suggests Bolano as an observer is removed from all that occurs around him. At one point he mentions how B’s lover has deserted him, a reference as casual as he might stroke a cat; another time B is filled for years with fury at U, who spurned him at a public meeting, and their relationship doesn’t so much evolve as dissolve for B is so self-absorbed he fails to grasp the extent of U’s mental breakdown; a holiday with his ex-prize fighter father leads B to both predict, pre-empt and then prevaricate violence. Latterly, Bolano chides Neruda for his loveless poetry, listing all the better moments in life that can occur other than reading Twenty Songs of Love…
The stories are skilfully woven and generate an intellectual pull that doesn’t quite subscribe to the tenets of Infrarealismo in that the emotional core feels bleak and often leaves the reader unresponsive. This may be Bolano’s intent – that life in all its gory detail is ultimately a bit of a downer – but it doesn’t leave us anywhere to go in terms of a good few hours reading. As the characters continue to break relationships and build new ones badly, it begins to feel almost too much like real life. A few moments of flowery fiction, those pretty curtains he hides behind, might not have gone amiss.
Mightily accomplished, but heavy weather on the soul, Last Evenings of Earth satisfies by individual story, but struggles as a whole, the repetitive occurrences of the short stories wearing us down. It becomes obvious B and all Bolano’s other [first person] protagonists are one and the same [him] and one wonders why the surreptitious deception has been employed. It fools nobody. For a better introduction to Bolano, try his novella Distant Star, a disguised attack on Chile’s Fascist regime which is horrifying, fascinating and emotionally satisfying. Bolano died in 2003; I often cite him, along with Geoffrey Hill and Ismael Kadare, as writers who should have won the Nobel; but they prefer catch-alls like Bob Dylan these days.
'The Taking Of Pelham 123' - John Godey
I've just acquired a copy of the novel - see attachment below - having recently caught a screening of the film adaptation at The Prince Charles Cinema (i.e. Joseph Sargent's gripping 1974 film, not Tony Scott's 2009 okayish re-make).
My acquisition is the 1973 London Book Club Associates edition of the book, which tends to be available relatively cheaply. My copy is fine apart from the dust jacket.
If Sargent's film adaptation trades on dated stereotypes and prejudices, reflecting the melting pot of 70s Manhattan, Godey's novel was there first, doing it less humorously.
Sticking with film, and thinking back on Robert Shaw's performances as a villain, it occurs to me that Shaw's take on Grant in FRWL has more in common with his 'Mr Blue' character in 'Pelham 123', Bernard Ryder, than with Ian Fleming's 'Red' Grant on the page: Mr Blue is a British former mercenary and ex-Army officer as much as he is a lunatic, and in FRWL Shaw's English Grant has the same authoritatively menacing vocal style, and bearing of a coldly expert killer (except, ironically, when he's masquerading awkwardly as Captain Nash). Shaw was great casting for 'Pelham 123': Mr Blue is all the more effective as a character for having Grant standing behind him, as it were.
Among Walter Matthau's many funny lines as Garber, the transport cop, we get: “The guy who's talking [Shaw] has got a heavy English accent; he could be a fruitcake.” (Like Mr Blue in the film, the Ryder of the novel has had a career in the military and as a mercenary, but in his case he's an American.)
Sargent's film was part of a new wave of crime films in the 70s, and, in that context, there's more to Mr Blue than shades of Grant, making him even edgier. For example, as part of the mix, there's an echo of 'Dirty Harry''s Scorpio in the following dialogue:
Mr Blue (to Garber, by radio): "If I see a single cop between here and South Ferry, I'll kill a hostage. In fact, any deviation from my instructions and I'll kill a hostage."
Scorpio (on the phone, bouncing Harry Callahan around town): "If I think anyone's following you, the girl dies. If you talk to anyone, even a Pekingise pissing against a lampost, the girl dies [etc.]"
The difference is that, in response, Callahan's seething cynicism is replaced in 'Pelham 123' by Garber's droll, humanising humour - exhorting Mr Blue not to take this the wrong way, pal, but if he, Mr Blue, should make it through this incident, he should really seek psychiatric help!
Matthau's characterisation of the likeable Garber and his moral centrality are the main advantage that the movie has over the novel, making it the more enduring text. (In the novel, Garber is Prescott, playing a less significant role.) The film's forray into casual racism diminishes it, however, positioning it today in historical, 'movie buff' territory, while Scott's serviceable version, the lesser film, is doubtless seen more often now.
I value the novel as a postcolonial corrective to 'Jane Eyre' and remember enjoying it as such when I read it some years ago.
A lighter footnote to the Brontes is Sarah Gordon's play of last year, 'Underdog: The Other Other Bronte'. The Bronte in question there is Anne, and the play is a comedy about the imagined dynamic and rivalry between the sisters.
A trio of classics.
The Mill On The Floss by George Elliot.
I've been meaning to get around to this classic because it's been recommended a few times in Saturday's Times My Culture section by various subjects, and I hoped to read some more classics by women writers. I got up to page 80 or so of this and stopped. It's not unreadable but it does cement my biased take on women writers that they lack thrust or narrative pull, something I was hoping to overturn. I'm not even sure where it's set, there's a mill and a young girl of 8 or 9 and a cousin or brother 10 years older and it explores their sweet relationship and how she looks up to him and wants to please him, its touching. But it starts with her in the dog house because she forgot to give some rabbits drink as her brother instructed and now they're all dead, it jars a bit really. Also, you get the feeling things aren't going to turn out well - the father's plan is that he should have the rough practicality knocked out of him by having him train to be a lawyer when it's obvious the bookish young girl would be better equipped for a paid-for academic education. On top of this, the book's cover is very grim, it's off putting. It seems the same era as Dickens, the idea is that people are described in a charming, amusing and interesting way but so far that's about it. I'm not saying it's written badly or anything at all - that's big of me isn't it - but there's an element of what's the point.
I will try to plug away with it I suppose.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
That said, the other book is one I finished tonight and written by R C Sheriff who did the play Journey's End. It's A Fortnight In September, and it is unusual because it lacks any narrative thrust or actual story, It was recommended in the same section of the Times on Saturday, where they revisit old classics, earlier this year.
The book was a bit hit when it was published in 1930 and almost certainly inspired Ian Fleming's account of James Bond's childhood memories in On Her Majesty's Secret Service where he is told he can't bring back some seashells as they would mess up his trunk. When I say 'almost certainly' I mean, 'not necessarily' and 'almost certainly not'.
If Craig's Bond grew up in Skyfall in Scotland where would he have gone to the seaside?
Anyway, this is an account of a modest Dulwich family going to Bognor for a weekend in September for their holidays, and how it unfolds. Given it's 1 September as I write, I can't see this annual vacation of there's can yield sun tans and beach fun as it is tipping down now and the weather has turned autumnal, I know you can get Indian summers but even so. Maybe the weather was different back then.
Nothing narrative happens, But that's not the point. It simply runs through the small thoughts and fears of the family - a husband and wife, a son and a daughter in late teens and the cusp of adulthood, a younger son around 10 but I'm not sure. It's very well done, very evocative. You keep thinking, at some point the plot is going to kick in... when young Mary visits an elderly neighbour to offload the budgerigar, maybe the door will slam shut and Mary will say: 'I've phoned ma and pa to say I can't go... it's going to be a fortnight with me I'm afraid... and she will strap on a long black leather glove as she proceeds to inflict cruel suffering behind locked doors, the text swiftly banned and later cited in the Brady and Hindley trial.... But nothing like that happens, and in some ways it resembles Tarantino's Once Upon A Time In Hollywood in that everything seems set up for something to go horribly wrong, for fate to intervene, for the plot to start, but nothing bad does happen.
The style of writing is such that is used to set the scene for something dastardly or ominous to unfold, however.
At first I thought it was written post-war so felt the teenagers in the book would be, well, they might be my Dad's age then, he just missed the war but in fact it was 1930 so all of them would be older than him, even the youngest. They get the train from Clapham Junction to Bogner straight down, you can't do that now I don't think. Chocolate vending machines are on the platform back in 1930, though.
Though the young kid gets many mentions what is noticeable is that the kids in their late teens are hardly given any notice for much of the book. Teenagers just had no currency then. It was a case of their value suddenly was what food they could put on the table. Eventually each gets about a chapter but these are the least convincing, in particular the young woman's one reads like cheap romantic fiction. Other than that, their thoughts or feelings aren't indulged at all.
That said, there is more than a whiff of melancholy about the tale, if you can call it that, as they lodge in their familiar guest house 'Seaview' and start to realise its creature comforts and its landlady have not kept up with the times - and this is 1930.
The book made me want to go to Bogner but apparently it's all syringes down there now, my sister and I did head out to Broadstairs and its sandy beach, on the East coast. I did get the map of the South East out and some of the locations of these towns were a surprise; all that time spent on Geography and they don't teach you that stuff... Bognor is of course the final destination for Harold Steptoe in the last ever episode of Steptoe and Son, as he realises his passport is invalid for his holiday abroad with his old man, who goes off without him. Harold then jumps into a sports car with a waiting bird, crying 'Bogner here we come!'
Roger Moore 1927-2017
My trip to Broadstairs was inspired by Agatha Christie but it turns out she has nothing to do with the area, I'm not sure where Why Didn't They Ask Evans? was set but it's not there.
It's the home of Charles Dickens though and the whole area feels Dickensian, it has an aura of strange stillness and menace, slightly piratannical too.
It's also the setting for the finale of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, thought it's not used in any of the films.
The main thing about this book, well, I've been mixing with young lads at work and one made the mistake of asking my advice on stuff - universities mainly - and you start thinking, okay, what books would I recommend and would any of them be a good idea anyway? I mean there are pros and cons of introducing someone to James Bond stuff, for instance. The Thirty-Nine Steps would be a safe bet you'd think, maybe start of with Hitchcock's film, then try the book. But you might be wrong because, well, you may recall in the book it's an older man called Skudder who buttonholes Hannay with his fears of foreign spies (in the Hitch film it's an attractive brunette). I was a bit struck to read his account this time round as it's straight out of QAnon stuff, though this is set just before the First World War. 'Away from all the Governments and armies there was a big subterranean movement going on, engineered by very dangerous people... most were educated anarchists who make revolutions but beside that there were the financiers who were playing for money. A clever man can make big profits from a failing market and it suited the book of both classes to set Europe by the ears.' There is talk of a new world order, and then 'the Jew was behind it, and the Jew hated Russia worse than hell.' There's a caveat explaining that the Jews were victims of pogroms for 300 years and this is payback but then: 'The Jew is everywhere but you have to go far down the backstairs to find him...' It sort of turns out this isn't so obviously anti-Semitic as it first appears but it really doesn't read well and you think, hmmm, I don't think it would look good recommending this book to a school leaver. Then again, when this was published the Holocaust hadn't happened and such talk wasn't associated with so much other bad stuff... But it's not really what you associate with the young Robert Donat.
Aside from that, it's a fine romp but deviates from the Hitch version in fascinating ways because it's all there, just not as Eric Morecambe might say, in the right order. Hannay does stay in a Scottish lass's abode where she cleans him and gives him her husband's coat - but this became an entire vignette in the film, with John Laurie and Peggy Ashcroft. Here there is no drama, he doesn't meet the husband. Hannay whistles a snatch of tune - this is made a thing of in the film, as it is the tune that introduced Mr Memory at the Palladium. One character is able to speed read and memorise documents - this is reintegrated into the character of Mr Memory in the film. There are lots of little things that do get used in the film and frankly to far better effect. There are virtually no women in the book whatsoever, it's not so much a Boys Own as Only Boys Adventure, you might say. Hannay's attempt to decode Skudder's notebook isn't cinematic and doesn't get used. The scenes of smooth English manners obscuring skulduggery is a theme of Hitch's film though in the book it's clear the mask slips and we hear them speak German. The final scene set in Broadstairs - I think it's in Stone Bay, a slightly more reserved, less busy stretch of sandy beach north of Viking Bay - isn't quite vivid in real life, I think they've closed it off, but it is markedly similar to Bond's meeting with Rosa Klebb at the end of From Russia With Love (the novel, where Bond has doubts he has the right person), while Hannay's realisation as the mask slips was used to good effect in Mission Impossible when Ethan Hunt pastes his own imagined narrative over that of his boss in their meeting at Liverpool Street Station. None of this got used in any film adaptation of Buchan's novel.
It's highly readable still but it's with a start to realise that A Fortnight in September was written nearly 100 years ago and now my Dad, who was born in 1928, has passed it really feels it, you feel the era has now passed into actual history as when my Dad was my age he'd be saying the same of a book written in the 1870s or so. Of course, The Thirty-Nine Steps is even older though it features trains, planes and automobiles. I didn't know they had mono planes before the First World War but one features here (it's an autogyro in Hitch's film).
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Gosh, reviews galore, very informative @Napoleon Plural I also did not understand why The Mill on the Floss is considered such a great novel. The main characters are both very self centred, the story is very slow and the ending too swift and unlikely.