Literature

A book should live by itself alone. This is the assumption on which these pieces are written. The critic's role to draw out the ideas inherent in any novel, irrespective of quality.

 
Paul Klee: Zwitscher Maschine

The early pieces capture my reading of that time, and cover the oeuvres of authors such as Rosamond Lehmann, Patrick Hamilton and Joseph Roth.

More recent posts explore the 1940s and 1950s; see in particular my War Words, an ongoing series looking at the impact of the Second World War, whose influence was to profoundly affect the post-war period, when two reactions - the first against the 1940s, the second against this reaction - were to give rise to the counterculture of 1960s, so important for our current times.

Here is a selection of what I regard as the key pieces:

Candide Killing King Reason
Effi Briest Fictions Kill & One Smile was Enough, It was an Earthquake
Hurry On Down A Short Sprint
The Death of Ivan Ilyich A Broken Fairy Tale
Caught Beautiful Collapse
The Heat of the Day Sneaking In...
The Girls of Slender Means Sprezzatura
The Working Class Highbrow


Fragile Times (To Whom She Will)
There are ironies aplenty in this subtle account of a country in transition; where the old customs are changing but its mentalities remain largely intact. Caste tips into class, but new codes have yet to be created to cope with the consequences; the increased social mixing and those radical ideas that result.

A Touch of Tastelessness (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis)
Not just love lost. We eavesdrop an eulogy on the aristocracy. 

Tie the Straps Tight (The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles)
The closer the community the more elaborate the role the outsider must play, as he tries to appear one of the crowd. 

Get Out the Geiger! (Confessions of Zeno)
The sterile artist. What happens to artists if they don’t create?

Headaches at Home (The Right to an Answer)
An expat, more English than the English, returns to Blighty and finds it changed. How he rages! A world has been lost. A man from Ceylon comes to study at Imperial HQ; but finds it an odd, an incomprehensible, an alienating place. It is what happens when you step out of a textbook and walk into the street. Overseas or Brit-born, no matter, neither are happy in this country. 

Touching Distance (A Passage to India)
When enemies think themselves friends.

Colonial Atoms (The Singapore Grip)
Not guns but confidence governs an empire. People must trust their rulers to have the power they proclaim with such ease and eloquence. We must believe that behind the walls of the barracks there are tanks (not rusted watering cans). Raise a hand against the ruling class, and you know that hand will be cut off. But what if it there is nothing behind those walls?

When Truths Play False (School for Love)
Is there is a moment, a flash of recognition, like the first epiphany of love, when you know, when you say to yourself, ‘ah! Now I’m a grown-up person’? If so, we usually get it wrong. Adolescent insight mistaken for full-blown maturity.

A Clerk's Tyranny (Johnnie Sahib)

The army: organisation or tribe? This novel isn’t sure, tacking, as it does, between the charisma of individuals and the impersonal workings of the machine.


A Hero's Sacrifice (The Mark of a Warrior)

In war the greatest battles, especially if a leader, are with one’s self. Swim on the surface of your command, or drown under its weight? How they carry you under! Those kilograms of obligation, expectation, and doubt. Then that kitbag of mad ideas. These far too heavy to bear.


Inner Space (Empire of the Sun)

There are two ways to survive a war. Pretend it’s normal. Here, turn a POW camp into a country estate or civilian hospital. If that performance is too difficult or too much, you escape this world by hiding inside the imagination. 


Weak Officials (The Consul at Sunset)

Increasing number of Soles will visit this land. The empire to be overrun with them. Termites eating at it from the inside. At the height of his victory, the Colonel’s world is falling apart.


The Mind's Leprosy (A Time to Kill)

The quality of this novel resides in the prosaic dullness of the narrator, who is not an uncultured or unintelligent man. A typical low-level official who carries the crude conventional ideas of the well-educated in the knapsack of his mind.


Defrosting the Freezer (Back)

Not analysis but emotional release is what cures him. Henry Green a better psychologist than Sigmund Freud.


Home No More (The Moon and the Bonfire)
The war. The war is here to add colour and drama to life’s theatre; it is the harsh lighting that illuminates centre stage, exposing our hero’s agonies. Exile. The return. And adolescence’s end. War is when our youth dies, never to be resurrected; such a loss resonating more than any army corpse or partisan gun. 

Wanting to Belong (The Path to the Spiders’ Nests)
Calvino appears to have made a curious error in this book. Surely Pin is Kipling’s Kim, not this fictional surrogate for the author himself? It suggests a sentimental weakness; Calvino’s deepest wish to identify with Pin, a character foreign to his whole being. Thus a strange cocktail of aesthetic truth and lies is served up in this novelist’s bar. At some level Calvino knows he is nothing like Pin (or Kipling’s Kim) but he cannot accept this truth; the author still too close to his own adolescence when he wrote this novel….

Territorial Ignorance (Within the Labyrinth)
Few men are bad men. The weakness of these Brits not their corruption but their idealism. 

Word Escape (The Skin)
Lords now servants; ladies kicked into the gutter by barbarians. What does an aristocrat do when his country loses its honour?

Little Pictures (History: A Novel)
We’ve seen life from the army’s side; left the barracks for the bordello, we hitch up with a local woman, and leave her for battles and Blighty. Time we looked at occupation from the houses of the occupied; shared some space with the wives and their kids.

These Kettles are Tanks (There's No Home)
In Catania a new war has started; it is between the sexes, and where for a short time, on the Via dei Martiri, the women win; turning these British soldiers into husbands, subservient to their sex, their words, their domestic government.

Film Star (Prater Violet)
Never underestimate the good sense and cleverness, the cunning, of an English aristocrat. Underneath that affected mask there are enormous reserves of intelligence and tact. Artists of another sort, of power and government, they can manipulate others at will. 

Lethal Minds (The City and the Stars)
Why think outer space will save us when inner space still defeats the human….

Bottle Chucked Away (Titus Alone)
Like many today, Titus believes his identity an individual affair. Away from Gormenghast, he discovers that this is untrue, as he feels its loss; the start of a discovery, the finding of a truth, that much of who we are is embedded in the geomorphology of our childhood, the place of our youth. 

The Bottle Cracks (Gormenghast)
A coming of age novel. A disquisition about art; about the beauty of the past, also its stultification, a huge weight squashing our need for the new, its excitement and adventure. How the young like to smash things up! 

Empty Bottle (Titus Groan)
Our hero is a baby, whose sole substantive action is to throw away the sacred symbols of Gormenghast. Titus the heir to an estate that appears about to fall; only the magic of ritual keeping it intact. 

Bullet-Proof (Angel)
Who is the most disquieting person you’ve met? Not the scariest or the most abusive, or the most violent; our reactions to these less discomfort than fear.

A Seaside Story (The Sleeping Beauty)
Elizabeth Taylor, seeking a world outside the mundane constraints of social life, turns to fairy tale for inspiration; the energy of the fantastic to magically transform the dull dramas of domestic routine. An angry young woman, attacking a repressive society? No. The 1950s as much about escape as rebellion and graft. This novelist knows that the only freedom is transcendence. 

Paradise Woes (Who was Changed and Who was Dead)
For all of its technological miracles the 1950s seems glued to the past, ruled by oldsters who’d forgotten their retirement date.

Mad Monologues (Fowlers End)
The provinces and class angst were a small peninsula on the island that is 1950s fiction, whose citizens travelled all over the place. In Gerald Kersh’s Fowlers End they ended up in suburban bohemia. A Wild West, whose crazy characters are unable to decide if they’re in a movie or at home.

Snakes and Ladders (The Blackmailer)
An extraordinary myth. The most powerful of the 1950s. Though, like Mr Reeves, it has a weakness; it doesn't go all the way, doesn't follow the logic of its own invention, whip a new spanking truth out of the extremities of its fiction.

Free Fun (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning)
Arthur Seaton is a free man, even though he works as a wage slave. He moans about this a lot, even regards himself as a communist, but the truth…ah the truth; the truth is he enjoys his work. Immensely. Wouldn’t change it for the world.

Following the Fashion (Jack would be a Gentleman)
Puffing, farting, shouting, swearing…. Is this how we want the working classes to be? 

Silly Sod (A Kind of Loving)
Poor Vic Brown, educated above his station in life, is forced to play the fatalist. Stan Barstow, A Kind of Loving. Little realities crush big dreams.

Poor Gigolo (The Man on the Rock)
Prostitution is never simple.

Wake Up! Wake Up! (Devil by the Sea)
We need a break from the North, all that class and angst. Let’s pop South for a holiday. See what they do down there.… Jesus! It’s a horror-show! The kids are not safe on the sands. Nina Bawden’s Devil by the Sea. A child’s nightmare: to enter the adult world.

Am-Dram (Room at the Top)
A typical bourgeois gets it wrong. Looking out the window they mistake their own reflection for the world outside. It is why so much lit crit of the 1950s misread these novels. John Braine supplies the evidence. Room at the Top. But no workers live in London: though they appear to be about the working-class, it is the status battles of provincial life that grab the attention.

Art & Class (Flight into Camden)
At first we think it a character study of a working-class woman; but later find that Turgenev’s landed in the North of England, a superfluous man now standing on our terrace doorstep. This a psychological study of an outsider.

Old Clothes in New Times (Take A Girl Like You)
We’re stuck on Kingsley! Another forensic analysis of provincial England; though this province, being in the South, is rather louche. Take a Girl Like You. Pity the Northern lass who finds herself between Kingsley Amis’s fingertips.

Too Much Welsh (That Uncertain Feeling)
Before the rise of Welsh and Scottish nationalism in the Sixties, Wales and Scotland were provinces of England. In the 1950s we thus see the same provincial angst when would-be sophisticates meet the local folk. In That Uncertain Feeling Kingsley Amis gives it his own metropolitan spin.

Wild Orchids in the Garden (Scenes from Provincial Life)
The past is never what it seems. The 1950s is often viewed as the moment the working-class erupted into literary life. It was not so. Apart from a few exceptions literature remained a middle-class game. What was new: a place and a tone. An aggressive provincialism. It began with William Cooper, his Scenes from Provincial Life.  

Mortgaging the Imagination (Image of a Society)
The theme seems obvious enough. A new type of society is arising, replacing one sort of human with another; the clever but unstable Blackledge, the name suggestive of sin and insecurity, once thought destined to run this business, is losing out to Gerson, a mediocre talent who is meticulous, obedient and 100% reliable. He also has a qualification. This book about the rise of the bureaucrat, and behind him the graduate.  

Out of His Depth (Harris's Requiem)
Art is easy, until you try to sell it. Aesthetics becomes politics, and the authoritarian intellect - Il Duce of page and score - turns diplomat: you need tact and charm to win over those with the moneybags. Music alone will not put Thomas Harris into the musical pantheon.

Ugly Stuff Work (Lanark)
Sold the myth of artistic genius, we are told that everybody should aim for the top. We’d do better to recall Icarus: head for the heights and we are certain to fall. The post-war period, though, had a solution: when walking the tightrope make sure there’s a safety net. But do the young listen? Do they heck!

Learning One's Letters (Girl with Green Eyes)
Too young. Not a case of sexual but intellectual abuse. Caithleen Brady lacks the sophistication to love such a cultivated man. 

Strong Words (Kafka)
Is it possible to sum up an author in one short paragraph?

Crocodile Tears (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
We leave. Leaving behind one’s home, the nation, its beliefs and politics. Can I say this enough? We abandon our friends, their ideas, the myths rooting us to this place; scattering the feelings that blossom around us; those thoughts dead leaves in an autumn fall we enjoy treading into mulch. To leave. And sail to a foreign land. The artist like the wind has no care for the seasons. He blows when he wills.

Posh Totty
Literature is a privilege; the hard demands of office life, its boredom and inertia, given up for the intoxicating spirit of art.

We're Flying High (Solaris)
To most thinkers the social realm is some other planet. Not so Stanislaw Lem, who, like all the great writers, is anchored to spaceship earth. In ground station control he stuffs a Marxist coterie inside a rocket, and blasts them into another galaxy, where they’ll confront the metaphysical mysteries behind their beliefs. Solaris.

A Helping Hand (In Another Country)
This novel resonates with loud allegorical tones. Liese is Germany after the war; when the wild passions of a decade were giving way to the cooler relations of the late forties and fifties. Oliver is Britain: nice and sensible; though a bit obtuse and boring, albeit kind and - very important this - safe.

Bad Form
A few years ago Jacqueline Rose and Ted Hughes had a wrestling match. Though a few clapped and cheered it wasn’t pretty; rather nasty in fact, it hurt when his testicles were squeezed. We left the auditorium feeling very sad. We ranted a little. The professionals, we became convinced, shouldn’t pick on amateurs.

The Working Class Highbrow
The working class highbrow. We don’t see many these days. Why is this? A young writer suggests the lack of social housing. Can it be so simple?

A Simple House (The Corner That Held Them)
Bad things happen at Oby. The spire’s collapse; Dame Lilias’ bullying; Magdalen Figg’s murder; the sacking of the priory and Dame Joan’s rape. These are rare events. More common are the simple satisfactions of domestic life...

Petrichor (I Capture the Castle)
Of the novels of the 1940s and 50s this is the only one I’ve have read that directly describes the impact of America upon England. In the majority the influence is implied, usually obliquely, the foreigners European not American. All these novels have an atmosphere. The pervading sense of living in a closed room waiting for the door to open, mostly by some young mad thing...

Quiet Revolutions (A Wreath of Roses)
After the vast barbarities of war we have the diminutive savageries of peace, that are almost too small to see. Luckily there is Elizabeth Taylor, a mistress of the subtle brutalities of ordinary living. Wherever she goes - to the butchers, the chemist, the haberdashers - she takes her microscope; then, after selecting each specimen, she focuses the lens…

Pass the Glue Please
We talk nonsense and call it sense. And the room claps and cheers… Ideology becomes conventional wisdom when the even most absurd statement is accepted as simple fact.Daša Drndić posits a lunatic idea, Amanda Hopkinson quotes it as if she’d said oranges are orange.

Inside Out (The Voices of Time)
But Dr. Francis has committed himself to his idea. An idea, we must remember, vastly more interesting and infinitely more compelling than the small truths of commonplace reality. The doctor will not surrender to the facts of this case - the money running out, the infrastructure rusting away, the public appalled, the politicians nervous - no, he will transcend them with a leap of faith; Dr. Francis to sacrifice himself to an insane concept. 

Sudden End
Three shockers from Natalia Ginzburg, Norman Mailer and A.S. Byatt.

Get Out of Here!
We’ve got another one! Perry Anderson's reassessment of Anthony Powell has upset the professionals.

Bagnold's Beauty (The Loved and Envied)
After the war, its social revolution, and the austerities that followed its success, the British aristocracy seemed certain to die out, New Jerusalem replacing ancient Arcadia as the country’s mythic capital. Enid Bagnold takes us inside the resistance…The Loved and Envied.

Measuring Repute
In one view Naipaul is “our greatest poet of the half-baked and the displaced”; the author himself his own best character, his ideas about politics and the nation state absurd.

Terrible Liberties (The World My Wilderness)
There are natural limits to freedom; fences surround the wilderness: Maurice is killed by the resistance, while Barbary almost dies, when running away from the police. Freedom crosses the lines of safety.

A Peevish Pleb
A major magazine, whose writers are the glitterati of Lit Crit, and whose readers… dare we call ourselves The Quality… Well, such a magazine should, surely, silence a hoi polloi afraid to reveal their lack of talent, their woeful ignorance, their poor literary culture on its public pages.

Who Wants Facts? (Peterley Harvest)
The result is one of the great autobiographies, for The Private Diary of David Peterley is wholly literature; that unwelcome guest, loud, crude, loquacious Mr Fact, having been put in his place, in the outhouse, where he is neither heard nor seen, the servant forgetting to serve him his sherry.

A Gypsy's Joy! (One Fine Day)
Edward is happy with his wife Helen, who seems to complement him perfectly; sensibility not genealogy now the governing value; the academically inclined Edward prepared to extinguish the family name and surrender local rule, for it is the professions, not nobility, that calls him to service, are this age’s heraldic call. A long history is ending; one kind of England dying out.

Sprezzatura (The Girls of Slender Means)
That voice. It strikes us immediately; alerting us, setting us on our guard, creating a distance that invites us all to be sceptical; we are goaded to read the whole book with an arched eyebrow. Trust it, can we?


A Loud Beauty (Moon Tiger)
There is an image, close to the beginning, that serves as this book’s metaphor. Like all good symbols, a thing, singular, concrete, suffused with an atmosphere rich in suggestion, this one has a number of meanings, the most obvious, it is the one emphasised by our too emphatic narrator, hiding another far deeper and mysterious, and quite original: some events do not exist because no-one is quick enough to perceive them. 

Keep Up! (Human Voices)
It is the moment the atmosphere of a place changes; suddenly all is different, our ways of thinking, acting, even believing are transformed; and this is obvious to everyone except the most obtuse. It is a change of air.

Come Back Sweet Time (The Image of a Drawn Sword)
To lace a man up in the armour of youth. The fleshy body held taut, is forced upright, is pulled thin by a corset tight and hard; hardly any breath to breathe.
We blame Henry. Inviting us to join him in this fog-filled park he walks too quickly; is getting too far ahead, skipping along with his little lantern we surmised was our servant. 

Old Dreams and Mad Futures (Trial by Battle)
Ostranenie. Definitions are for dictionaries. To understand this term properly we must experience it for ourselves, read it in novels. Here, Ostranenie is both fact and symbol.

Something Missing (The Small Back Room)
The Oxford series 20th Century Classics is an odd one. Even the connoisseurs of fiction forced to concede, though with shifty glances to side and floor, a nervous twitching of the spectacles, lips silently rehearsing their own pet loves - the aristocratic elbows of Enid Bagnold, the provincial thighs of E.H. Young; the adolescent limbs of Llandudno’s wartime masterpiece: Jampot Smith - to their ignorance of Paul de Vries’ The Mackerel Plaza, A P Herbert’s The Secret Battle or Robert Graves’ Seven Days in New Crete.

A Bad Trip (The Lime Twig)
Beware of friends. Especially when they talk about novels. A friend calls this one a dream. And so we read the book as if in reverie; nodding off now and then we enhance the effect, an oil donkey over a well of words.

Exciting Sights (On the Side of the Angels)
War brings out the best in us. This is almost a truism. We think of the old folks reminiscing; always they return to a few exciting years when life was wild with fun. 1939 to 1945: what a great time that was! lost to them forever, except in anecdotes wrinkled with smiles. 

Painful Time (The End of the Affair)
Out of love comes superstition. Intense emotions make the feelings fragile, and this is made worse by our complete dependence upon the person who generates them, producing a desperate need for security, that increases exponentially when the lovers are separated; Bendrix fraught with anxiety because Sarah lives with her husband.

Sneaking In... (The Heat of the Day)
All are criminals. War does this to people. It stretches the moral order until it breaks. The rituals of peace being lost, the ideas linked to them disappear, freeing the inhabitants to build their own lives out of the rubble that remains. 
At first we don’t see it. Then we do: it is Roe, he is a bore. This is what strikes us most, above everything else, above even…but we will come to that… Above all other things the hero of this book is an exceedingly boring chap.

No No Mr Jones (No Directions)
tour de force about a night in the Blitz is also an allegory about the artist in society; and we, the other residents in this boarding house, who watch Clem and Lena carry a painting up and down the stairs, are more likely to belittle than to understand him; what he does too strange, so bizarre, too eccentric to be easily understood.
George Sand has her say.

A Broken Fairy Tale (The Death of Ivan Ilyich)
A writer of genius borrows the mind of a social scientist. We watch with incredulity as a rich heiress buys her knickers at Primark.

Dangerous Fantasies (Notes from Underground)
We imagine a door. On that door two names are written: Tarabas by Joseph Roth. The door opens. A man walks out, he looks like a character from Dostoevsky. 

A Short Sprint (Hurry On Down)
What’s the best way to snipe at the middle classes?  You stare at the screen. Pick your nose.  And look at my words blankly. The middle classes? I ask again and you scratch your head, and move to click to another website…
New things out of old things.  The artist thinks:
Homage to QWERT YUIOP.  Oh how the memories come back.  I lived with this book for years.  When I did eventually leave off reading it the cover had disintegrated and the pages had fallen out; free at last to float back to that looser wilder world of the newspapers and magazines.  What a book! At least that is how I remember it.
Proust on an old critic.

Roses Amongst Weeds (Effi Briest)
It’s all there in the description.  These facts speak to us, now that we have learned their language. 


More Than A Fiction (Effi Briest)
It is a remarkably fine summary, and yet its conclusions seem rather thin.  This is a writer who has an E-type Jag, and has driven it to Walton-on-the-Naze.


Spirits and Symbols (Effi Briest)
We look through a powerful lens.  Peering down we arrest the quick flow of the reading mind to see meanings invisible to the all too swift and commonsensical eye.  Adjusting the focus we enlarge the significance of a few small details until their corporeality dissolves onto a slide fluid with meaning and metaphor.  


The Dangers of Philosophy (Effi Briest)
It began when he was a student.  I remember it clearly.  It was the day we fellow students chucked him in the lake.  He was sleeping in the library; and we carried him out into the street, wrapped him up in old lecture notes and then rolled him down to the water’s edge, where we bumped him into the boat.


One Smile was Enough, It was an Earthquake (Effi Briest)
He is on a train, he has just killed a man, and he can’t stop thinking about it.  Driven a little crazy before making the decision, he has become even crazier since doing the deed, now that he sees all those great principles he believed he was fighting for evaporating like steam off freshly made tea.  


Fictions Kill (Effi Briest)
Let’s talk about death.  At least for a couple of paragraphs.  I hope you don’t mind.  I guarantee it won’t disturb you.  You might even be entertained.  Although I’d be surprised if you’ll find it funny. 


Get Me Out of Here! (The Slaves of Solitude)
Crammed tight with conventional opinions imagine you have little talent, plain features, and a retiring personality made stultifying by the local environment. 


Wit is Everything (Candide)
Candide a light-hearted warning of what might ensue if philosophical talk floats too far off the ground.  The balloon of speculation, it insists, must be tethered to the earth.


Talk About the Translator! (Candide)
Adapting to realities is not enough!  In an age of barbarisms we have to transcend our local environment if we are to retain even a modicum of civilisation.  We have to fight to be human in a world of plants and animals and uneducated thugs. 


Modern Man (Candide)
Always we judge others by our own judgements that we believe are categorical and just.  To find someone to agree with is like finding a comfortable sofa to sleep on undisturbed.  Zzzzzzzzzzzz….


He Splatters the Girl in the Yellow Frock with My Sentences 
(Candide)
I am always punching people up!  Not today.  Today I need time to recover.  Hit by heavy blows I sit on the ropes, to consider my ideas, as my opponent jabs and jabs away, and jabs again, at my arguments.

Too Rich to Accept the Rags this Shopkeeper Sells? (Candide)
I’ve always had my doubts about Peter Gay’s great work on the Enlightenment; its two big volumestoo schematically structured around a central argument to be altogether convincing.  Is life really so simple as the old against the new; the 18th century merely a punch up between the philosophes and St Thomas Aquinas; Voltaire knocking out the elderly scholastic with a head butt? 

Practical Stupidity (Candide)
Thinkers such as Descartes and Newton need interpreters who can simplify their thought, and thereby give it popular appeal.  Disciples like cleaners tidying up the house after the great man has left.


Neither the Future Nor the Past (Candide)
Here is the essence of this famous parable; its critique of the foolish cleverness of the doctrinaire disciple


Killing King Reason (Candide)
Pangloss was right.  And he can prove it! 


Mad Fools (The Abbess of Crewe)
Those who love and those who hate the powerful are often blind to their absurdity.

Confiscate His Passport (The Book of Revelation)

It is the literary equivalent of globalization, a technique that became prominent in the 1970s, the first decade of cheap air travel, and which has become ubiquitous since.  easyJet and Ryanair disasters for the serious artist, who jumps onto a plane the moment his material becomes intransigent.

Nothing You Can Do (Will Change Him) (Zipper and his Father)

Roth is poking fun at a particular intelligence, the kind that rules Hollywood today, which believes a screenplay must have one immediately identifiable idea that can sell a film on an advertising poster.

The "Click" (Hangover Square)

This is a mean world, full of no-hopers who are resentful at the success of others more talented or luckier than themselves.  It is also a very self-conscious world, whose occupants are more bohemian, that is more self-consciously amoral and extravagant, than the actors and artists they would like, and often pretend, to be.

The Gipsy's Baby (The Gipsy's Baby)

Humans are porous.  They are adaptable, liable to change and growth, and to the influence of outside forces.  So much can affect them, as they in turn can affect it: the simple boundaries of an object vanishes when it is transformed into a living thing; when a Poor Child is turned into Chrissie Wyatt.

Born Differently (Confession of a Murderer)

Magic is almost ubiquitous in Roth’s books; and gives them their eastern European atmosphere; a world that hasn’t quite entered the modern era.  Here he goes further east.  This is his Russian novel, and is a tale of passion and madness; of the noble soul of a bad man; and confession as the safety valve for a troubled conscience.

Silent and Invisible (Growing All the Time) (The Gipsy's Baby)

Rosamond Lehmann is saying something profound here, if only we could stop for a moment and listen.  She is writing about the nature of creativity; an organic process that lives inside us; leisure the soil where it is seeded, hibernates and grows.

Class Divide (Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky)

Michael Holroyd’s introduction to the trilogy is a good one; and he reminds me that Hamilton is a better writer than I remembered...

Poor Choices (The Plains of Cement)

Newspapers.  They are the lazy man’s view of the universe; giving us the illusion of the quick intellectual fix.  Africa explained in a few paragraphs; Lenin reduced to a phrase…  knowledge made into a production line of carefully packaged columns; thrown away almost soon as they are written.

Just One Drink... (The Siege of Pleasure)

How much does the author understand?  In the first book of the trilogy we live inside the narrow mind of the hero, Bob; an ordinary guy, with no special talents; a bit of a bore, if truth be told. 

Such a Nice Girl (The Midnight Bell)

How much can you know of another person?  If Patrick Hamilton is to be believed not very much.  All you can see is surface; which you interpret badly; lead astray by your own desires; misled by the few signs that appear before you. The result?  You create your own paintings with your own colours; all bright and garish, too sweet to be real.

Get Out the Marx! (The Grass is Singing)

A woman who shouldn’t marry, marries a man who cannot afford her.  The marriage is a disaster.  The first night is full of prophecy.  For Dick it is like ploughing obstinate soil; and at the end he is exhausted and full of despair.  His marriage, just like his farm, is to be a failure; and somewhere inside he knows it, of that we are sure.  

A Sea-Grape Tree (The Swan in the Evening and A Sea-Grape Tree)

As I have written before, it seems the very sensitivity of this writer leaves her open to a faith like spiritualism; the crisis of her daughter’s death shifting her focus away from the natural world to her own inner space. 

Little Humans (Job)

We see children as innocent and fragile.  But are they really?  Might they not be tough and cruel, and it is the adults who are actually the sentimentalists, projecting all their innocence onto what are little more than domesticated beasts.

The Same Old Thing (Job)

It is not facts and arguments, those favourite friends of the philosophers and theologians, that account for God’s vitality, for most people are unaware of them.

Dusty Answer (Dusty Answer)

We live surrounded by walls.  Occasionally we try to break through them; their immaculately sealed bricks and cement.  Strange aren’t they?  These walls that we do not see, although they are high and impenetrable.  Indeed, most of our lives we’re unaware that they even exist; some may never see them.  How odd and unsettling… 

New Gods (Hotel Savoy)

This is no ordinary hotel.  You do not stay for a few days, reconnoitre the territory, and go.  This is not a hotel where you rent a room by the hour, and wear yourself out under the local businessmen.  It’s not a place you pose for fancy shots in cheap lingerie; the hotel price the cost of tawdry fame.  People stay so long here they die in its beds.  It is a home for some; a death sentence for others. 

Chameleon (Right and Left)

Money, we find out, in a moment of weakness, when he talks philosophically to his secretary, is dangerous for him, for it creates the institutions that limit his freedom...

The Ballad and the Source (The Ballad and the Source)

The title feels stagy.  The old Virago cover reinforces this feeling: Atkinson Grimshaw’s Ariadne at Naxos; its transparent heroine standing on the edge of a sickly estuary, the far shore set on fire by the declining sun.

A Victory for Law and Order (A Spider's Web)

It is an interesting feature of modern life, and arises naturally out of it: jobs can be created before there is any work for them to do.  Bureaucracy, a modern Prometheus of original employment.  Once created the work naturally flows in.  How odd and interesting.  Does the job create the work?  It seems it often does… 

Literalism (Doctor Faustus)

The mind has an extraordinary gift – it can create perfection.  Although few can attain such heights; and desperate are the scholars who would think themselves the next Newton or Gottfried von Leibniz; these mountains they in fact can never climb.  The temptation, like drugs in sport, is to find a short cut, a magic remedy to rectify one’s deficiencies. 

The Weather in the Streets (The Weather in the Streets)

 It is a world most of us cannot inhabit.  Too strange and odd; it is like having tea with a woman who believes herself the Queen. 

A Short History of Russia (before the revolution)

A few words from Alexander Blok.

A Note in Music (A Note in Music)

The past present with each tap on a keyboard.  We calibrate it so easily, waving goodbye to these odd questions, which dart around like dragonflies over a pond.  The past?  We type it away, each tap reducing thought to our fingertips; tap tap tap to your silly questions.

Strictly Casual

Perhaps he was the artist, I merely the canvas…

Do You Know Me? (The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima)

If you don’t understand your own society you will not understand another.   How much confusion arises from this simple mistake!  Misled by the superficial codes, and the illusions and abstractions, that form the cultural mix of the country in which we are raised, we take them for reality.  

Invitation to the Waltz (Invitation to the Waltz)

There is something about the middle classes that always strikes quite forcefully: the desire to tame the emotions. 

Beautiful Because Strange

Knowledge isn’t necessarily power.  Though intertwined like the trees in a jungle they can, with a little work, be separated out.  And we can, through close attention and sympathy, get through to the clearing on the other side, to see Adelaide Neilson safely ensconced in a Buddhist temple. 

The Echoing Grove (The Echoing Grove)

Rosamond Lehmann.  Roll the name around.  Go on.  Roll it around your mouth, your lips; say it quietly and slowly.   Do you like it?  The first name full, rounded, softly judicious; and the second sharper, harder, with that heavy footstep on its last syllable.  Perfect...

No Shame

Oh no!  But oh yes!  Now we are talking, and there is something interesting to discuss; as well as a new country to discover.  Come on.  Let’s take a look under those exquisite kimonos…

Just Weigh It

Is Dickens better than T.S. Eliot?  Of course, he weighs 120 kilos more!

Nincompoop

Most literary criticism today is written by academics, a number of whom, perhaps the majority, can only appreciate an original work through the thoughts of their predecessors, mostly other critics from the academy.  

Softly He Falls (The Servant)

The author is kind, he wants to save us from the full horror show, and so we watch events at some remove; we glimpse them over the garden fence or through the front windows.  

Faster! Faster! Faster! (Kafka on the Shore)

Thus the holiday read, burning up dozens of surplus hours, when bored on the beach there is nothing else to do.  To achieve this a novel must be both simple and innocuous, like newspapers.  The easiest thing of all is to copy the familiar: thus the clichés, the formulas, and all those facts; many of which you may not know, but can skim over; for they are simply decoration; giving you the feel of a secure world.

Nouvelle Vague (Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises)

When revolutionary politics invades the scene, he is encouraged to talk about his role and about his ideas of film.  Now he recognises the limitations of the camera.  He says, realität ist nicht wahrheit.  Reality is not truth.  The machine cannot feel or think.  We need the human mind to capture the important things; the truth not visible to the eye.

All in the Words? (Madame Bovary)

What are we doing when we write?  Are we simply creating beautiful language patterns; our words like the decorations on Afghan carpets?  Or are we trying to capture a feel of the thing that we want to describe, a sort of atmosphere?

The Boredom (Madame Bovary)

Think of the dullest person you’ve ever met.  Think about them now, and recall how they sent you into a coma…   Now imagine spending every single day with them.  The same stories every evening; and later a whole night in bed together; you only hope they don’t speak; their snores more interesting than their conversation.  

Stung

The mosquito in D.H. Lawrence’s poem is an imp jousting with a man.

Civilisation in a Shed

What do I think he’s like? Quite pompous, a little precious, pious of course, and too satisfied with his own lot; a self-conscious saint. In short I think he’s a well-heeled hippy without the Marijuana.

Brecht and Buddha: 

He is a materialist who believes in transcendence; a poet obviously.   For a moment I thought I saw the Buddha smile, a crack in his castle wall. 

Found You! (The Quest for Christa T.)

Christa T.’s remarks are those of a sensitive individual who does not have the confidence to speak from a solid persona.  She doubts her words, for she is unsure if they have the weight to carry her own self; and her identity to the outside world.

The Conformist (The Quest for Christa T.)

To escape!  Is this what we want, to run away from the household tasks of hard thought and a sensitive conscience?  

Real Artifice (Marcovaldo; If on a winter's night a traveller; Invisible Cities)

Novels are like strangers. We’re a little wary to start with; but are prepared to be polite. A few drinks, a confession or two, we chat for a while, maybe for a whole evening; and we see each other now and then. Sometimes, though, a rather odd one comes along and bang! we’re mates immediately and for life.

Like Road Signs to Oxford

Is this the worst novel in the world?

Lawrence, Were You Listening?

And you buzz and fly when the words skip across the page!

Cartesian Spectacles

Dryden’s notion of the creative process is that of man outside a greenhouse – all of our mind is on view, we just have to go in and pick the ideas we need. It is the belief that our minds are transparent to our consciousness...

She Says, Says She (Bliss and other stories)

The speech is wonderfully demotic, though only a writer could concoct it: the balance of the phrases, its rhythm, is too smooth and artful for real speech.

The Camels of Mystical Aspiration

Are we describing only Western art, while the others play by different rules...

Reasons Galore!

We first absorb a poem, only later do we understand it.

In Pieces (Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter)

A young, poorly educated woman the equal of the great philosopher, who started a cognitive revolution? The question answers itself. No, what Katherine Anne Porter shows is how pervasive is the conflict between the individual and her community, and the doubts that it creates. She shows what once was revolutionary is now an everyday occurrence. That each generation will confront the beliefs of its forebears...

Trapped in a Money Bag

The more you construct, the more you leave behind; yesterday’s things become tomorrow’s antiquity. 

Pasternak Again

Pasternak’s view of the fragility of literature is a true one, which he learnt through experience...

The Triumph of Literary Politics Over Honest Criticism

You don’t have to be an academic to voice intelligent criticism of the arts. But you do need to be informed, and to be at least moderately well read.

A Deliberate Champion of Individualism

‘We were glad to hear the news that Pasternak… has been expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers.’

And The Camps Are Far Away (The Fierce and Beautiful World)

Brezhnev: the corruption, the inefficiencies, the isolated political elite, and the fantasy world of the media feel ever so familiar.