THE MAID OF BUTTERMERE - Book review

 

The Maid of Buttermere is Melvyn Bragg’s twelfth novel and was published in 1987; my copy is a fourth impression, 1988. It’s a fictional account about the historical figures of a shepherdess Mary Robinson, the Maid of the story, and her suitor, Colonel Hope.

Taking place in 1802, the tale is told in the measured language of the period, and the point of view is omniscient.

It is clear early on (even if you haven’t read the giveaway blurb) that the main male character is suspect. He recounts to himself and the empty Morecambe Bay sands his identity: ‘I am Alexander Augustus Hope, Colonel, Member of Parliament for Linlithgowshire and brother to the Earl of Hopetoun’ (p20). Interesting to me, he also states: ‘now Lieutenant Governor of Tynemouth’ (p21) which is just down the road from where I live. Though carrying himself as a gentleman and of high birth, he is not averse to talk with anyone on an equal footing. He meets a fish-woman on the shoreline and tells her, ‘If they bathed you in oils, Anne Tyson, and put you in silk gowns, you’d be as fine a lady as them all’ (p24). In short, he’s a sweet-tongued womaniser. Not long after this conversation, he is having sex al fresco with a local woman Sally, and they depart, he promising to see her on the morrow, but lying.

Hope has a confederate, Newton, who seems to have a peculiarly strong hold over Hope. Their joint intention is for Hope to find and marry a rich heiress and as soon as possible afterwards run off with the loot to America. Newton’s dark presence hovers even when he is absent, like the black dog of depression. It is hinted at that he has committed murder, but I must have missed the actual revelation. A list or real characters is listed at the back; Newton’s name does not appear there, so it is possible he is to all intents and purposes Hope’s conscience.

In Chapter Two we encounter Mary Robinson who is a beautiful shepherdess and helper for her father in the Fish Inn. She has been discovered by poets and artists and her fame has spread and she gained the sobriquets ‘Mary of Buttermere’, the ‘Maid of the Lakes’ and the ‘Beauty of Buttermere’. Yet she has managed to repel all suitors, while attracting customers to her father’s hostelry. A local lad, Richard Harrison, is too tongue-tied to be her suitor, but at their first meeting he realises ‘She was everything they said she was’ (p41).  

While visiting the ancient upright stones of Castlerigg, Hope encounters a group comprising Colonel Moore, his wife and their ward, Miss Amaryllis D’Arcy. The young woman seems the ideal prospect for his purpose.

Mary is not short of friends, one of whom is Kitty, an old woman who lives in the wood, was ‘gypsy brown, the tan so shiny on the mild skin that it was like a fresh varnish. She sat in front of her turfed tepee like a re-located squaw – the mass of brown hair loosely braided and heaped on her head like a parcel carelessly tied with twine, her forget-me-not blue eyes looking at Mary only when she thought she was unobserved…’ (p97). Another friend is Alice, who married Tom, a boy who Mary had rejected.

Hope is referred to in several ways, among them ‘the man who called himself Hope’, John-Augustus, John, and Hope. This may imply that there is a touch of schizophrenia harbouring in the conman Colonel’s psyche. Indeed, Samuel Taylor Coleridge stated: ‘It is not by mere Thought, I can understand this man’ (p291).

Hope also makes the acquaintance of the attorney Mr Crump and his wife who constantly interrupts him, affording us a few humorous scenes: ‘ “We are in fact,” continued her husband, who took no offence at her interruptions, indeed, in these foreign circumstances, counted on them as if his sentences were much improved for being broken into…’ (p149).

Bragg’s descriptions naturally evoke the place, his own beloved Cumbria, as well as the period. ‘It was still damp, a little drizzle now and then, the fells purpling with misty mizzle, the greens of trees drenched greener, their green swan song before the winds and colds of autumn drained them yellow and blew them down’ (p252).

This is a true tragic and notorious story, fictionalised, and inevitably true love does not run smoothly: ‘The future had become impenetrable as any of the large darkening silent fells between which the coach rocked and waddled its way’ (p301).

Bragg has masterfully insinuated himself into all the characters – thanks to the POV he has employed – and given them depth and imbued them all with sympathetic traits and human flaws.

Note: My wife and I have visited the Lake District a number of times. It was fascinating to come across so many familiar places and names, such as Honister Pass, Derwent Water, Cockermouth, Lorton and Grasmere, to name but a few that crop up in the novel. I actually began reading this book for the first time during our latest trip there (18-22 July this year).

Visit to The Lake District, Cumbria

Over the years Jen and I have visited the Lakes several times. On this occasion – Tuesday 18- Saturday 22 July – we attempted to see places we hadn’t seen before. The journey of 95 miles to our hotel took just under two and a half hours and it was rain virtually all the way; almost torrential. We were being optimistic, because the weather forecast predicted rain every day – not surprising, since the District is very green and full of lake waters!

The next day (Wednesday) there was no sign of the promised rain. So we drove into Egremont, a pleasant market town complete with a war memorial statue, the statue of a haematite worker and a number of art galleries and the ruins of a twelfth century castle. 

Haematite worker sculpture

We popped into the Lowes Court in a Grade II Listed building and chatted to the two cheerful staff; up a splendid curved staircase there was an exhibition showing the renovations of the house and the fifty years of the gallery’s existence. We were directed to the Deja Brew for a coffee and cake, a popular watering hole.

We drove on to Ravenglass, a coastal village, but to all intents and purposes it was closed, so we had to look elsewhere for lunch! (We would doubtless return another day to ride on the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway…)

Not far along the road we came to the entrance to Muncaster Castle, which has been the home of the Pennington family for over 800 years. It was deeded to the family on 1 December 1208 by King John, so maybe he was not all Bad. There are three main attractions here: the gardens, the house itself and the hawk and owl centre.

Unfortunately, due to the continued risk of bird flu, the bird displays were cancelled. Interesting to us, there was a Steppe Eagle called Amelia in its enclosure – Jen having recently published a children’s book entitled Amelia and the Witch’s Cat illustrated by her niece Amelia! 

Amelia the Steppe Eagle - and Jen

In 2021 a breeding unit was established here to breed various endangered species of raptor – with the ultimate aim of returning their number to the wild.

The Hub supplies a variety of grilled cheese sandwiches with names like The Italian Job (sun-dried tomato, garlic chutney and cheese blend) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Brie, Stilton, caramelised onion and cheese blend) – very tasty, and washed down with a Lakes Lager for me and a pot of tea for Jen. Cheerful and helpful staff. From here we ventured into the gardens, where there are a good number of intriguing wooden carved items.

Wooden statue

It was a glorious sunny and hot day. Thousands of trees have been planted here since the 1780s. There are over six miles of walks. Rhododendrons thrive here in the acid soil. There’s a profusion of exotic plants and shrubs gathered from around the world by family members in centuries past, interlaced with bright green ferns. Scafell Pike, England’s highest mountain can be viewed from the grounds.

After touring the extensive gardens, we wandered around the house, first entering the Great Hall: here Sir John Pennington entertained Henry VI in 1464 when the defeated king sought sanctuary after the battle of Hexham in the Wars of the Roses. At the time Sir John was an elderly man; he had fought with Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.

A door from the Great Hall leads into the Library, a stunning octagonal room created by John Pennington, First Lord of Muncaster in the 1780s. He was instrumental in the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade and a friend of Wilberforce.

Library of over 9,000 books

Then there is the fine dining room with its embossed leather ‘wallpaper’ and its immense table, cut from a single walnut tree and able to accommodate the seating of up to thirty guests.

Next there is the drawing room – in effect, such rooms were ‘withdrawing rooms’ where ladies would gather after the meal, leaving their menfolk to their cigars, brandy, port and Whitehaven rum! The walls are crammed with portraits – many of family members over the centuries. The room was shortened in the 1860s to provide a staircase at one end and, eventually, in 1885, a billiard room at the other. The walls of the billiard room are covered with wood panelling; the wood over the fireplace was bought in 1838 at the break-up of the Royal Naval ship HMS Temeraire which fought alongside Nelson’s flagship in the Battle of Trafalgar; the ship is immortalised by JMW Turner in his painting of the vessel being towed by a steam tug to the breakers yard.

The red-carpeted staircase is enhanced by three bas-relief marble wall panels of The Dancing Hours, sculpted by the neo-classical Antonio Canova.

Red staircase

    The Dancing Hours

On the landing hangs a full-length portrait of Thomas Skelton whose nickname was Tom Fool, because he dressed up in a chequered motley coat in the Pennington family colours of blue and gold. His motto was ‘all my living is in good strong beer’ which can be vouchsafed by his protruding beer belly. He was wont to act the fool on occasion and perhaps the term ‘tomfoolery’ originated through his antics.

Some of the bedrooms are said to be haunted, though not all.

We covered 85 miles that day.

Typical view

Next day (Thursday) there was still no promised rain. So we went through Crummock, Buttermere (atrocious parking, so didn’t stay), Honister Pass, Borrowdale, Keswick (too busy!), and Grasmere before finding on the road out the Kings Head Inn where we enjoyed excellent sandwiches, coffee, wine and lager. 

The Kings Head Inn

We then stopped in Ambleside and used our parking disc while seeking out the sheepskin shop we’d seen on a previous visit and bought a suitable pelt. Going via Kirkstone Pass, we ended up at Ullswater, and were able to park for free, and watched a school of kayakers paddle to the shore. We bought a ticket for the steamer Lady Dorothy (re-launched in 2001) and toured Ullswater. Here, on 23 July 1955, Donald Campbell set the world water speed record when he piloted his jet-propelled hydroplane Bluebird K7, clocking up a speed of 202.32mph. Campbell went on to break more speed records. On 4 January 1967 he died while attempting to beat his own record on Coniston Water. Near the end of the cruise we witnessed – and heard! – two RAF jets fly over us on their regular training runs.

RAF training flight

A mere 29 miles was covered this day.

Final full day (Friday) we drove into Cockermouth. The last time we’d been here it had been wet and miserable. This day it was warm and sunny. We had intended visiting the Wordsworth House; unfortunately it is shut on Thursdays and Fridays (should have checked!) Instead we took a leisurely stroll across a bouncy bridge and along the Memorial Walk on the banks of River Derwent and saw Jennings Brewery at the confluence of the Rivers Derwent and Cocker. There were dozens of blackbirds. On the other side of the fast-flowing river we saw the ruins of Cockermouth Castle; a portion of it is still inhabited. It was built in 1134 and the Percy family of Northumberland owned it from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The current owners, the Wyndham family took possession in the eighteenth century.

Cockermouth Castle

Back in the town we enjoyed scones and excellent coffee at the Moon and Sixpence café; yes, it’s a reference to one of William Somerset Maugham’s books (1919). There’s a pub called the Fletcher Christian – the notorious sailor and mutineer was born in the village of Eaglesfield near Cockermouth. Here too we saw the plaque showing the high-water mark of the 2009 flooding; it must have been horrendous.

Jen showing the high-water mark of the flood

In the afternoon we drove to Maryport. In 1748 Humphrey Senhouse II started to develop a planned town north of the River Ellen between Castle Hill and the Roman fort. He called the town Maryport after his wife Mary. The Senhouse family had already been collecting Roman artefacts over the years, going back to the 1500s. We therefore visited the Senhouse Roman Museum, which was created in 1985; in effect it took over the Naval Reserve Training Battery buildings. Among other things, it is the home of one of the largest collections of Roman altars; all of them found there over the last 430 or so years. 

A Roman style lookout tower has been reconstructed, affording a view across the Solway Estuary. The fort (which may have been called Alauna) and its surrounding community supplied Hadrian’s Wall with trade-goods, news, food and wine. The most famous tribune at Maryport was Marcus Maenius Agrippa (not to be confused with Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa (died 12BC); Marcus Maenius was host to Hadrian (who was in Britannia to instigate the building of the Wall in 122AD).

Reconstructed Roman lookout tower, Senhouse Museum

There were two other known forts further north overlooking the Solway – Beckfoot and Bowness.

The following day (Saturday) we drove home to Blyth through rain for the entire journey of 110 miles.

Thus ended a pleasant break blessed with three days of surprisingly good weather, despite the forecasts!

DEATH AT BETHESDA FALLS - Press Release

 

DEATH AT BETHESDA FALLS

[Bethesda Falls: 1 of 4]

“… is it open season on women all of a sudden?” 

Jim Thorp had killed plenty of men. They deserved to die. Thorp was a hard man, made so by a bloody Civil War. But he didn’t relish this visit to Bethesda Falls. His old sweetheart Anna worked there as a school-teacher and he was hunting her brother, Clyde, for armed robbery and other more terrible crimes. He didn’t want to hurt Anna but it looked like he would anyway. Clyde, the foreman of the M-bar-W ranch, is due to wed Ellen, the rancher’s daughter. He’s also poisoning the old man to hasten the inheritance. Thorp’s presence in town starts the downward slide to violence, when not only is Ellen’s life in danger, but also that of Anna and Thorp himself. It is destined to end in bloodshed and death.

Amazon UK: https://tinyurl.com/4h7pw7em 

Amazon US: https://tinyurl.com/mv5t7dcc

***

Other books in the Bethesda Falls series (all self-contained stories):

Last Chance Saloon

Blind Justice at Wedlock

Old Guns

***

She flushed again but now steel had entered her eyes and the tone in her voice chilled his bones. “I am a fool. You didn’t come to see me, did you? It’s Clyde you want, is that it?”

Again he nodded and this time he sipped at the coffee; it scalded his throat, but he ignored the sharp discomfort as he really thought that he deserved that little amount of pain at least. Because that was nothing compared to the pain he was going to inflict on Anna.

Sure, she had a right to know, but how do you tell the only woman your heart had room for that you’re here to kill her brother?

*** 

Suddenly, a lariat looped over Anna’s head and it tightened round her chest and the wind was pulled out of her as it was tautened. Roughly, the rope dragged her backwards and she almost lost her balance. She staggered, trying not to fall to the ground.

“Nice ropin’, Ed!” Abe ran up to her.

***

But the rocks beneath the sorrel’s hooves were slimy and slippery and before she could control the critter they tipped over the edge of this pool and plummeted amidst a down-soaring stream of spray that soaked her. Worse, she found it difficult to breathe, taking in chilly water that made her cough and spasm.

Their descent seemed to last an age but must have been mere seconds.

Shockingly cold and hard, the roiling base of the waterfalls engulfed them. Here, it was very deep, where the water had pounded into the rock base for aeons. Even as she kicked herself free of the stirrups, her clothing threatened to drag her down. She was short of breath and terribly frightened because no matter how hard she tried to move her arms to pull herself up to the surface and blessed fresh air, she couldn’t muster the strength. Her corset and bodice were tight, constricting, and her lungs were bursting.

Originally published by Robert Hale 2007 - my first book sale - under the pen-name Ross Morton! Now re-published as a paperback.

THE MANDELBAUM GATE - Book review

 

Muriel Spark’s novel The Mandelbaum Gate was published in 1965; my copy was dated 1985, following five other paperback reprints.

‘The Mandelbaum Gate was hardly a gate at all but a piece of street between Jerusalem and Jerusalem’ – at the time of the story, 1961, it was a crossing point from Jordan to Israel. This was also the first year of the Eichmann trial. 

Freddy Hamilton is a diplomat for the Foreign Office: ‘he hated wearing sunglasses. which made one look so much like a rotten gigolo or spy’ (p54). He is friends with the Ramdez family (father, son and daughter) who work both sides of the border. Abdul Ramdez is a fascinating character: Freddy had asked Abdul about his English schoolmistress (when he was fifteen) who was the daughter of a colonel in the British Army. And asked, did she plant wild-flower seeds in the countryside, (a trait endorsed by some of Freddy’s friends)? Abdul replied: ‘I don’t know. But I planted Arab wild-flower seeds in her. She was my first woman’ (p85).

Abdul knew of the Palestinian refugees massed along the border; ‘he discerned then what a foreigner could not so accurately foresee, that there was a living to be made out of the world by preserving a refugee problem’ (p100).

Freddy made friends with Barbara Vaughan, a tourist. ‘They took her home to lunch, treating her as rather more than a new acquaintance, not only because she was Freddy’s friend, but because one always did, in foreign parts, become friendly with one’s fellow-countrymen more quickly than one did at home’ (p75).

Barbara was visiting the Holy Places and often used a guide, but not always: ‘she was tired of the travel agency guides. They had plenty of good information to offer, but they offered it incessantly. Through the length and breadth of the country the Israelis treated facts like antibiotic shots, injecting them into the visitor like diligent medical officers’ (p22). She’d had a love affair with Harry Clegg who is now on a dig in Jordan: ‘It is impossible to repent of love. The sin of love does not exist. Over at the Dead Sea, she thought, just over there, he is ferreting about in the sand or maybe he has discovered an inkwell used by the Essene scribes or something’ (p48). She intends to interrupt her pilgrimage to cross the border to join him.

There is more than one mystery. A main character suffers memory loss – a blank space for a few days only. The doctor is not happy about resorting to a psychiatrist:  ‘In fact, I haven’t got a great deal of time for them, myself. They all hold different theories. There’s hardly two who would treat a patient in the same way… They’re a lot of bloody robbers…’ (p123). [Having previously read a novel about Jung (The World is Made of Glass), I can see where the doctor – or the author – was coming from!]

To complicate matters, Barbara goes missing! Her pilgrimage becomes a flight, because she is half-Jewish (though converted to Catholicism) and would therefore be persona non grata in Jordan. The Ramdez family is involved, including Abdul’s sexy sister Suzi, and to complicate matters spies are discovered working for the Arabs… And there will be blood spilled – from a surprising angle, too!

The author seems to have captured the febrile times perfectly, treating all nationalities with empathy and humour. Perhaps there is a little too much religion thrown in (Muriel Spark became a Roman Catholic in 1954). Even so, sometimes tongue-in-cheek and droll, there’s a serious aspect to the whole adventure.

Editorial comment:

This is omniscient narrative. Frequently, the thoughts of more than one character are shown in the same scene, and speech of more than one person will be within the same paragraph. Past and present are interwoven – as in real life – through thoughts, yet the reader is never lost or confused.

THE WORLD IS MADE OF GLASS - Book review - ADULT CONTENT

 

Morris West’s novel The World is Made of Glass was published in 1983. I was studying psychology in the early 1980s (Open University) and bought this since it was a fictional account of one of Carl Gustav Jung’s case histories. I’ve only now got round to reading it!

West was inspired by a very brief and incomplete record of a case in Jung’s autobiographical work Memories, Dreams , Reflections. As West states in his Note: ‘every novelist is a myth-maker. He quotes Jung: ‘I can only make direct statements, only “tell stories”, whether or not the stories are “true” is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth”.’ [Maybe Meghan Markle has read this…!]

The story is told from two viewpoints: Magda Liliane Kardross von Gamsfeld, a beautiful, rich and intelligent woman of dubious morals, and Jung, her psychiatrist.

Jung is married to Emma who is thirty at this time and carrying their fifth child. Jung met her when she was sixteen and wanted to marry her. ‘I loved her then; I love her now; but love is a chameleon word and we humans change colour more quickly than the words we speak’ (p70). These guilt-ridden thoughts relate to his attractive assistant, Antonia Wolff (Toni), who happens to be his mistress.

One of Jung’s beliefs was that synchronicity has psychic foundations. ‘… coincidence, synchronicity, things happening at the same moment in time, without causal connection, but still closely related in nature… in the context of psychic experience’ (p90).

Jung is aware that what he practices is not scientific, ‘Because this sciences of ours, this medicine of the mind, is still in its infancy. The methods are tentative. The procedures are incomplete’ (p127). He’s quite honest with himself some of the time: ‘I lie, too, when it serves my purposes; but then we all lie in one fashion or another because we are not scientists always; we are soothsayers – dealing with arcane symbols and the stuff of dreams’ (p104). ‘My real exploration will be in the undiscovered country of the mind’ (p154).

At this time, 1913, Jung and Freud were at loggerheads and quarrelled professionally, notoriously. It is also when Jung was approaching the beginning of a protracted breakdown. ‘I’m like a leaf tossed in the wind. So, I have no choice but to let myself be swept along by these storms of the subconscious and see where, finally, they drive me’ (p127).

Most of the book is reported speech, either Magda or Jung reminiscing on their troubled past: Jung was raped as a young boy by a family friend; Magda was initiated into sex at an early age, notably incestuously with her father.

There is a battle of wills between the pair – and collateral damage is felt by both Emma and Toni. Symbolism of dreams is paramount to much of Jung’s exploration. Gradually, he learns about a terrible truth that Magda had concealed. This Magda is a figment of West’s imagination and conveyed with great empathy and skill. Inevitably, there are revelations of a sexual nature and sexual obsession and also murder and guilt.

The author’s ability to get into the minds of two disparate yet complementary individuals is a remarkable feat.

West first wrote a play about this relationship, and then followed it with this novel.

The book title is from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays: ‘Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Some damning circumstance always transpires.’

THE WANTING SEED - Book review - Adult content

 ADULT CONTENT

Anthony Burgess’s future fictional dystopia The Wanting Seed was published in 1962, the same year as his famous A Clockwork Orange.

In his 1982 Foreword Burgess states: ‘The Wanting Seed tries to show … that the response to the prospect of overcrowding and starvation might well be a culture which favoured sterility by promoting homosexuality and rewarding self-castration. But, my instinct argued, nature might respond to human sterility with sterile patterns of its own, and the solution to the population problem could be more ruthless and more logical… I cannot foresee the highly schematic world of (the book) as ever coming to birth, but I think some aspects of it – the glorification of the homosexual, for instance – are already with us.’

No date is given for the world we enter. Certainly, overpopulation has become a global problem in this world of Burgess’s future. Harry Harrison’s novel Make room! Make room! on the same subject (and filmed as Soylent Green) was published in 1966. Interestingly, Burgess uses a similar phrase on p164: ‘ “No room, no room” fluted a thin donnish person…’

‘…planetary survival dependent on the balance of population and a scientifically calculated minimal food supply; tighten belts; win through; evil things they would be fighting; long live the King’ (p53).

It was ‘a near-vegetarian world, non-smoking, teetotal except for ale’ (p38). Later, there is a revolt against this restrictive life-style: ‘Man is a carnivore, just as man is a breeder. The two are cognate and the two have been suppressed’ (p165).

Religion is side-lined, taboo, even, the Pope’s ‘an old, old man on St Helena’ (p40): ‘We were right to throw God out and install Mr Livedog in his place. God’s a tragic conception’ (p42). They use odd phrases, such as Dognose for ‘God knows’… [This is a darkly comic novel, after all!]

Great Britain as we know it has altered radically: ‘Greater London had eaten further into Northern Province and Western Province; the new northern limit was a line running from Lowestoft to Birmingham… the old designations of Wales and Scotland no longer had any precise significance’ (p8). Their trains are nuclear-propelled (p95) – another reason to stop HS2?

The culinary arts are grim: ‘served him with a cutlet of reconstituted vegetable dehydrate cold… A nut was a ‘nutrition-unit, creation of the Ministry of Synthetic Food’ (p51). Tristram was trying to ‘eat a sort of paper cereal moistened with synthelac and… he found it very difficult to spoon down the wet fibrous horror: it was somehow like having to eat one’s words’ (p57). It isn’t just food that is compliant with the dictates of the authorities: ‘Bless their little cotton-substitute socks, the darlings…’ (p153).

The main protagonists are Beatrice-Joanna, her husband Tristram Foxe and his brother Derek. Recently the State Health Service had sent her dead child to the agriculture department for decomposition – ‘useful to the State as phosphorous’ (p4).

Derek is Beatrice’s secret lover, even though he pretends to be homosexual. Homos get priority for all the prime jobs in the Establishment. Tristram is informed that his expected promotion has been blocked in favour of ‘a castrato, a pretty strong candidate’ (p32). ‘… being homo, do you see, wipes out all other sins…’ (p77).

‘For generations people had lain on their backs in the darkness of their bedrooms, their eyes on  the blue watery square on the ceiling: mechanical stories about good people not having children and bad people having them, homos in love with each other, Origen-like heroes castrating themselves for the sake of global stability’ (p184).

And a new corps has been formed: Population Police; Peppol. Dressed in a black uniform, cap with shiny peak, badge and collar-dogs ashine with bursting bomb, which proved on closer inspection, to be a breaking egg’ (p60). And its first Metropolitan Commissioner is Derek – ‘brother, betrayer, lover’.

Assisting the Peppol were the auxiliaries, greys. There are certain telling scenes that send a chill, bearing in mind the prevalent gender activist issues: ‘ “Mind your own business. Woman,”’ (the grey) added with scorn… Very much a woman, mind her own business, socially and biologically, she shrugged…’ (p65).

Beatrice’s sister is married to Sonny, an outspoken God-fearing man living in the countryside, well away from the Peppol patrols. His wife says of him: ‘He may be sane, but sanity’s a handicap and a disability if you’re living in a mad world’ (p151).

By Part Four, things are not going well. ‘Electricity, like other public utilities seemed to have failed’ (p163). Maybe there is hope, however, as someone observes: ‘When the State withers, humanity flowers’ (p167).

Towards the end of the novel, Tristram is conscripted into the army. Annexe Island B6 was a ‘limited area anchored in the East Atlantic, intended originally to accommodate population overflow, now compactly holding a brigade’ (p227). Burgess’s time in the army seems reflected in many observations here. ‘Nobody sang, though. The fixed bayonets looked like a Birnam Wood of spikes’ (p251).

In conclusion, stating nothing that can’t be found in the book blurb: ‘We in Aylesbury are at least civilised cannibals. It makes all the difference if you get it out of a tin’ (172).  Even if the tins are supplied by China…

In this world there is no social media and no smartphones; they use wrist micro-radios (p44). ‘The new books were full of sex and death, perhaps the only materials for a writer’ (p270). Indeed, there is sex and death in this book – but, despite all, there is hope also.

The book’s title is a play on The Wanton Seed, a refrain from the folk-song of that name; Burgess states that the ambiguity is appropriate.

Editorial comment:

Burgess has a tendency to name-drop, possibly by scanning his book-shelves: there’s Linklater, Wilson (his real surname), Adler, Westcott, Asimov, Heinlein, Evans, Ross, Meldrum – and the playful Ann Onymous! A good number of them were science fiction writers: ‘what the old SF writers called a time-warp’ (p241). He was using the then accepted abbreviation, rather than the trendy sci-fi which superseded ‘SF’.

Leslie Thomas called Burgess a ‘writer’s writer’ and I can see why. Certainly, his vocabulary is vast – and dotted with four or five words I’d never before encountered!

GREEK FIRE - Book review

 

Winston Graham’s Greek Fire was published in1957 and was one of several of his early suspense novels re-issued in the 1970s in response to his success with the Poldark series (my copy is dated 1974).

American Gene Vanbrugh is a post-war publisher visiting Athens, Greece. He has a history of fighting with the partisans during the war. ‘You have sad eyes, M. Vanbrugh – as if they have sen many things they would like to forget. But I think you are a man of honour’ (p58).

In the cellar night club The Little Jockey he is watching several people at their tables, including Anya Stonaris who is accompanied by the politician Manos. Anya is the mistress of politician Georg Lascou. There is an election due soon. Politics is dangerous, and there is the post-war grievances and pressure from Communist outfits.

The cabaret is Spanish: ‘Here was some inner truth from Spain stated in terms of the dance, an allegorical picture of the relationship of the sexes, spiritual more than physical but partly both, a statement of a racial anomaly which had existed for two thousand years’ (p11).

One of Vanbrugh’s contacts is a woman he knew during the war, Mme Lindos: ‘There are certain architectures of forehead and nose and cheek-bone which defy the erosions of age. She had them’ (p20). She will prove useful to Gene as things go awry.

One of the Spanish troupe is the victim of a hit-and-run. The police consider it is an accident but the man’s wife Maria thinks differently and enlists Gene’s help. These Spanish performers seem to be linked in some manner with Lascou.

Gene is not a fan of Lascou. ‘I’ve seen Communism at work. I’ve seen the cold mass slaughter, the children dying, the brutality to women, the absolute ruthless callousness in gaining one set objective. Above all, I’ve seen the lies – so that no words have any meaning any more. Nothing that’s worth living for has any meaning any more…  That’s what I want. Just to stop you.’ (p119).

Strange, how times haven’t changed – the lies and double-speak are still with us, though not merely spouted by avowed communists.

There’s quite a lot of Greek politics of the period, not particularly pertinent now, but that does not detract from a page-turning suspense novel with strong characterisation, a hint of romance and a haunting manhunt:

‘A hunted man is like a man at the centre of a cyclone; there are periods of calm when it’s impossible for him to assess the strength of the storm around him’ (p190).

Recommended.

DANGEROUS DAVIES AND THE LONELY HEART - Book review

 

Leslie Thomas’s fourth Dangerous Davies title Dangerous Davies and the Lonely Heart was published 1999.

Davies is still living in the same boarding house, his estranged wife in a separate room, his lugubrious pal Mod in another. Davies has been retired from the police force and has decided to try his hand at private investigating. His attention is drawn to the multiple murders of women who have answered lonely hearts advertisements. He has also taken on the case of a missing young girl student (Anna Beauchamp) and a psychologist (Carl Swanee) that might involve a secret worth millions of pounds.

Yet again Thomas has peopled his book with droll, witty, outrageous and mysterious characters, including a gypsy, an overweight hairdresser, and a policeman who gets nosebleeds if he goes upstairs. He also displays his gift for short visual description:

‘He always found tombs interesting… It was like walking through a small shut town. There were angels, too, standing more in hope than in help, their wings white with bird droppings, their mouths half-open, everlastingly lost for words’ (p113). And: ‘… her flowered summer dress like a moving rockery’ (p118).

One of the murdered women left a very bright young child, who they called Harold; Davies meets him with a social worker. ‘They sat on some bleak chairs. Harold’s feet did not reach the ground’ (p132). The scenes with young Harold are heartfelt and one wonders if Thomas thought back to his time as a Barnardo’s boy, when he was motherless, when writing these poignant scenes. Confusingly, one of the owners of the lonely hearts agency (Happy Life Bureau) employing him is also called Harold!

Thomas even imbues inanimate things with character: ‘He had always been reluctant to trust, or risk, the old car on a motorway, but now he quickly found himself on the M4, heading west. The Rover seemed to revel in the new responsibility, snorting like a horse which had not had the luxury of a gallop in a long time’ (p189)

His enquiries take him to the coast of Wales. ‘I was the wildest place that Davies had ever seen. Even the sunshine seemed threatening’ (p217)

One of Davies’s contacts is Sestrina, a beautiful woman who happens to have a painting of a ship – The Lonely Heart – on her wall. In typical private eye fashion, there is a rapport between this pair. ‘She crooked her fingertip and beckoned him. He felt himself groan inwardly, the groan of a man who knew he was in trouble, a groan of pleasure’ (p243). There follows a quite erotic seduction scene with an icy edge to it…

This is perhaps the bloodiest Dangerous Davies outing, and none the worse for that. It was a pleasure from beginning to end.

Editorial comment:

‘feet did not reach the ground’ – I think it should be floor, not ground, but it’s a common mistake to make, perhaps: I feel that ground is ‘outside’ while floor is ‘inside’. Maybe I’m being pedantic!

Two characters called Harold?

Two character names beginning with the same letter: Sophia and Sestrina.

Some writers get fixated on numbers (me included; in years gone by I over-used 17 for some unknown reason!). Thomas here has a thing for forties – ‘The door of number forty-three’ (p126); ‘number forty’ (p162) and ‘Top flat, forty-one’ (p181).

HARRY'S GAME - book review

 

Gerald Seymour’s debut novel Harry’s Game (1975) hit the ground running. It’s an accomplished piece of work for a first novel and established him as a top rank thriller writer, and he has yet to disappoint me – though some of his books have a downbeat ending – a reflection of life, of course, though I prefer my fiction to end upbeat.

It’s contemporary – 1974. A British minister is cold-bloodedly shot down in the street in plain view of his children and wife, and the IRA perpetrator gets away. The PM decides that rather than use the regular forces in the mainland and in Northern Ireland, he wants a man-hunter unaffiliated to any official organisation. Of several candidates available, Captain Harry James Brown is selected, flown back from Germany and undergoes three weeks training in Dorset before being sent to Belfast where he is to blend in and attempt to track the shooter and either arrange for his capture or death.

The shooter is Billy Downs. For no good reason Seymour refers to him as ‘the man’ for a considerable chunk of the book. Downs is married with children.

Seymour brings a mass of knowledge and detail concerning the IRA hierarchy, ‘the troubles’, the army in place, and the citizens on both sides of the religious divide. At the time the IRA has suffered several setbacks, with a number of leaders imprisoned, and now rules through fear in order to deter informers. This aspect is conveyed very well indeed.

To a certain extent, Harry views his tracking of Downs similar to a game of chess: some pawns – unsuspecting innocents – might be sacrificed, but the end result is justified. He has no qualms about eliminating a cold-blooded murderer. The danger is real, however: if he is caught by the IRA, he will be tortured and killed – and prove an embarrassment to the British government. Tension builds up to the end of the book.

Cold. Clinical. Thrilling.

DEATH IS A LONELY BUSINESS - book review

 

Ray Bradbury’s non-fantasy novel Death is a Lonely Business was published in 1985.

It might not be fantasy, but it’s pure Bradbury in its style, descriptions, characterisations, humour and pathos and nostalgia. The noir detective story is dedicated to the memory of Chandler, Hammett, Cain and Ross MacDonald, among others.

It’s a first-person narrative by an unnamed struggling fantasy and science-fiction writer in Venice, California, in July, 1949, which seems plagued by fog at this time of year.

‘During the night, the fog thickened and way out in the bay somewhere sunk and lost, a foghorn blew and blew again. It sounded like a great sea beast long dead and heading for its own grave away from shore, mourning along the way, with no one to care or follow’ (p19). This passage alludes to one of Bradbury’s famous short stories, ‘The Fog Horn’. He returns to the fog horn beast later: ‘You are left stranded on a cold dune with an empty typewriter, an abandoned bank account, and a half-warm bed. You expect the submersible beast to rise some night while you sleep. To get rid of him you get up at three AM and write a story about him, but don’t send it out to any magazines for years because you are afraid. Not Death, but Rejection in Venice, is what Thomas Mann should have written about’ (p50).

The story begins late at night when he is travelling on public transport and a passenger breathes on his neck from behind and whispers ‘Death is a lonely business’. He is so scared he doesn’t risk looking at the owner of the voice. And then the man is gone. On his way home, our narrator discovers a dead body in the canal. At the scene he meets detective Elmo Crumley; their paths are going to cross often, in two more books, in fact. Crumley ‘tilted his head now this way to look at me, and then tiled it the other way, like a monkey in the zoo staring out through the bars and wondering what the hell that beast is here outside’ (p54). Crumley’s heart is in the right place and takes a shine to our narrator, happy to compare notes. He says, ‘You know, I wish I could bring all the rot I see every week here and use it for mulch. Boy, what roses I’d grow!’ (p84). At one point Crumley uses the phrase ‘Long after midnight’ during a hypnotising session (p192) – which just happens to be the title of a Bradbury collection of stories. Bradbury named his detective after the crime author James Crumley, in tribute.

Later, the narrator is haunted by that phrase – and decides it will make a good title for a book. To make matters worse, he has caught a cold and his sense of smell has deserted him.

He is drawn to do a little bit of investigating and enters the rooming house of the deceased. Upstairs is the ‘canaries for sale’ lady, seemingly confined to her bed – a modern Miss Havisham, who possessed a ‘tiny yellowed head’: ‘She lay flat and strewn out so delicately I could not believe it was a living creature, but only a fossil undisturbed by eternity’s tread’ (p27).

There is a creeping suspenseful menace about the narrative. More than one person described the sensation of a person waiting outside their bedroom door. ‘… but what if one night whoever it was came into the room?  And brought his lonely business with him?’ (p33).

We meet a number of fascinating and even eccentric characters, including Cora Smith, who called herself Fannie Florianna. Grossly overweight, she is now a retired opera singer of some renown. Then there was the old lady  ‘who spun the pink cotton candy machine and sold illusion that melted in your mouth and left you hungry long before Chinese food’ (p73).  And Mr Shapeshade and Mr A.L. Shrank, a strange ‘shrink’. And Cal, the atrocious demon barber: ‘…cut hair so you looked as if  you’d been blown dry by a Kansas twister and combed by a maniac wheat harvester run amok’ (p109). And Constance Rattigan, the movie idol in her sixties: ‘I guess I have too many producers’ fingerprints on my skin’ (p138). And the matinee idol John Wilkes Hopwood who ‘threw his head back with that merciless grin that flashed sabres and promised steel. He laughed silently, in honour of the old days, before films talked’ (p160).

Bradbury makes many observations that catch the mood or the period: ‘Silence. And the sound that waiting makes on the telephone line’ (p62). Maybe that’s why we started getting plagued with canned music while we waited; silence was too terrible? Here’s another: ‘The car windshield was like a great eye, weeping and drying itself, weeping again, as the wipers shuttled and stopped, shuttled and stopped and squeaked to shuttle again’ (p113).

The narrator has a box beside his typewriter, where he keeps his ideas; ideas that spoke to him, telling him where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do. ‘So my stories got written. Sometimes it was a dog that needed to dig a graveyard. Sometimes it was a time machine that had to go backwards. Sometimes it was a man with green wings who had to fly at night lest he be seen…’ (p118). And he sells a tale to Bizarre Tales about a man ‘who feared the wind that had followed him around the world from the Himalayas and now shook his house late at night, hungry for his soul’ (p120).

There are a number of deaths before the end, most of them poignant and tragic.

As hinted, there is a measure of autobiography here as Bradbury lived in the area described until 1950; and this is where he wrote his early stories which began to establish his fame.

The cover is appropriate.

Two sequels follow: A Graveyard for Lunatics and Let’s All Kill Constance.

This is my review of A Graveyard for Lunatics, which clearly I read out of sequence:

WRITEALOT: Book review - A Graveyard for Lunatics (nik-writealot.blogspot.com)

THE INNOCENT - Book review

 

Harlan Coben’s 2005 thriller is as good as any of the other standalone novels of his I have read. He keeps you turning the pages as the plot twists and characters interact.

It begins with a flashback of Matt Hunter’s. He was involved in a brawl and his opponent died. It might have been an accident; Matt served four years in a penitentiary. When he got out, he joined his brother’s law firm and met the beautiful Olivia and they married. Everything was better than he could have hoped – until he received a mysterious phone call and his life began to spiral out of control.

Besides contending with a local cop who held a grudge, Matt has to cope with the suspicion that Olivia is having an affair with a stranger. And it seems that Matt is of considerable interest to two certain not particularly scrupulous FBI agents…

‘Matt realised that he needed the help of a private detective at the MVD agency. ‘By and large, Matt was not a fan of PIs. In fiction they were cool dudes. In reality they were, at best, retired (emphasis on the ‘tired’) cops, and at worst, guys who couldn’t become cops and thus are that dangerous creation known as the “cop wannabe”. Matt had seen plenty of wannabes working as prison guards. The mixture of failure and imagined testosterone produced volatile and often ugly consequences’ (p69).

However this PI was an exception: ‘the lovely and controversial Ms Cingle Shaker.' He tasked her with finding out about the anonymous phone caller… ‘…she wore a black turtleneck that on some women would be considered clingy but on Cingle could legitimately draw a citation for indecency’ (p70).

The past catches up in ways we hadn’t guessed at in our wildest imaginings. A past that tests his love for his wife.

To comment further would require spoilers. So, in conclusion, this is a complex tale, well told!

If you’ve read Coben already, you know what to expect – twists and surprises; if you haven’t, this is as good a place as any to make your acquaintance with his work.

As book covers go, this is atrocious in my opinion.