Saki (H.H.Munro) - The Best of Saki (Picador)

There’s a lot to like about Saki’s extremely short stories.  They juxtapose buttoned up, conventional Edwardian upper-middle class society with unexpected savagery and brutality.  Amusing hi-jinx and practical jokes abound with varying degrees of success but I think most people would find something at least mildly enjoyable in this collection.

Saki creates credible scenes and characters with incredible economy and was obviously a shrewd and critical observer of the society around him.  Tyrannical aunts, busy-body society housewives and put-upon children are all sketched with ease and elan.

After a while, the stories become a bit formulaic.  A lovely, posh, jolly hockey sticks sort of weekend house party, or situation, is disrupted by a reminder of the savage side of life.  Very often, this is an actual animal.  The more ferocious or exotic the better.   The prim and proper veneer of social convention disappears and chaos duly ensues.  Usually, everything is alright in the end and it transpires that a child has got one over on the adults or that a witty man-child like Clovis has played a hilarious practical joke on the stuffy elders.  It's true that not all the stories have a happy ending and some finish with people dead or dying.  However, orders are inverted and conventions overthrown with such regularity that the impact becomes somewhat diminished.

By the end of the book, in spite of the fact that I was bored and found the stories a bit repetitive, it’s undeniable that the best ones were enjoyable and pleasing.  My favorites were ‘The Stake’, about a young gambler who loses access to ready funds and secretly gambles away the family’s cherished cook, and ‘Fate’ about a billiards player who invents a crisis to avoid finishing a game he is about to lose.  All told, I wasn’t a huge fan of Saki.  I really liked a couple of stories but, in the end, his prose style is a bit prim and proper and even though he is sending up the society he lives in, I feel like he does so in a way that’s a bit twee and formulaic.

Marcus Threscothick - Coming Back To Me

This was an interesting book about the psychological difficulties of a cricket obsessive.  Everything about his upbringing is focused on cricket, with his Dad playing a major part in the local club side and his Mum making the teas.  The pinnacle of happiness for him appears to be making a lot of runs and winning a cricket match, followed by beers with the lads down the club.  Teenage seasons are remembered minutely and anything to do with cricket appears to have been recorded in near photographic detail.  The consequences of this incredible focus have clearly been impressive on a professional level.  However, on a personal level, it at least seems possible that it made life problematic.  The first inkling of this comes when we learn about how he met his wife.  While Trescothick might spend several pages, or even a whole chapter, discussing a match or individual innings, meeting the love of his life is recorded in less than half a page.  At this relatively early stage in the book, I thought perhaps he might be reticent about discussing his private life when it had been under such scrutiny in the past.  

However, as the book progressed I formed an image of Trescothick as someone who isn’t much interested in life outside of cricket.  We learn about how he is unwilling to return home from tour in Pakistan after his father-in-law is seriously injured, leaving his wife distressed.  To his credit, this is recognised as a shocking error of judgment with hindsight and he takes full responsibility for his mistake.  In his defence, as vice-captain standing in for the absent Micheal Vaughan, he may have felt a heightened sense of responsibility.  Nonetheless, the incident could be viewed as evidence of a dangerous cricket myopia.  

This total obsession with cricket seems to have been a mixed blessing for Trescothick.  He gets so good that he plays internationally, which means he is touring for extended periods throughout the year. This is a lifestyle that he doesn’t seem constitutionally suited to, with some of his earliest and most traumatic childhood memories related to being separated from home and family life.  Nonetheless, the excitement and desire to play cricket gets him through the endless hours of traveling and being bored in hotel rooms.  Until they don’t.  

Trescothick talking about his mental problems is undoubtedly the highlight of the book.  He has a breakdown while on tour and needs to return home, but wants to keep it hushed up.  Owing to the mystery surrounding the circumstances of his departure, the press becomes very interested in what’s going on.  The most distressing part of the book is when he returns to the UK.  Given that his psychological issues relate to separation from home and family, it seems sensible that he would go straight home.  However, this isn’t possible because of all the paparazzi at his house, so he has to go into hiding in Devon.  It really rams home to me how being a sportsman in the public eye effectively robs you of a private life.  In fairness, Trescothick and his advisors are themselves somewhat to blame for the situation, for not being more forthcoming about the circumstances of his departure from the tour.  

It seems like Trescothick, as a man who really just wants to play cricket and eat sausages, is deeply confused and worried about what’s happening to him.  He doesn’t want to talk about his problems because they might threaten his international cricket career.  He continually hopes that they’ll be a short term problem and go away with the right therapy or medication.  It’s hard to blame him for this kind of wishful thinking.  In the end, as media speculation reaches fever pitch about the reasons for his absence (including rumours that Vaughan is sleeping with his wife - which he flat out denies), his advisors set up a friendly interview with Sky Sports with pre-planned questions and answers so he can reveal his mental struggles and end all the speculation.  Trescothick botches this and doesn’t say his lines about his psychological issues, rendering the whole thing a waste of time.  I feel this shows just how scared and ashamed Trecothick was of what had happened to him.  

Perhaps because of this horrendous experience, Trescothick is very open about what happened to him in the book.  A cricket dressing room, the place Trescothick lived his entire adult life, is probably not the most understanding environment to talk about difficult psychological issues.  His nickname amongst his teammates after his breakdown is ‘Madfish’.  So it’s clear to me how much he’s had to overcome to get to the point of writing a book about the experience.  One of the most positive aspects of the book was the fact that Trecothick makes many mistakes, admits that he’s made them, learns from them and improves afterwards.

There is some evidence that his cricket career followed some similar stages.  Early in his professional career, he has issues leaving the ball outside off-stump, which Peter Carlstein helps him solve in Australia.  He also has some issues facing spin, which he solves by ‘pressing’ a half step forward at Duncan Fletcher’s request - ‘Duncan’s theory was that, when batting against spinners, if you made a small but positive move onto the front foot before the ball was released, you would put yourself in a better position to go either fully forward or fully back depending on the length of the ball…”if you are going to catch a bus, it is better to arrive at the bus stop early enough to read the the number on the front, rather than at the last moment when you have no choice but to get on and find out later if it is going where you want to go.”’ (p81-82)

Of course, no sporting autobiography would be complete without the obligatory score settling!  Trescothick gets going early by putting a certain Nick Speak (Lancashire batsman) to the sword for saying, ‘this bloke is shit’ (p36) to him as a 17 year old debutant.  Trescothick classifies this as bullying rather than sledging.   Former England captain Nasser Hussain gets a very tepid review.  Trescothick claims he never said anything to him before his England debut until they were in the middle together.  He also tells an unflattering story about him smashing a fridge window in the changing room after he was given out to bad decision.  The most serious allegations are that he put his own batting interests above those of the team during a ODI (p110) and that he was a self-interested captain (p122) - perhaps Trecothick has something of a vendetta against him?  Shane Warne is also slated for writing an article saying he should be dropped from the England team (p143-144).

Alongside these attacks, explicit or veiled, are some more enjoyable titbits.  For instance,  apparently Caddick and Gough used to bicker constantly in the England dressing room.  I also learned that Nathan Astle once went from 101 to 200 runs in 39 deliveries in a test vs England in March, 2002 (p105).  Overall, Astle’s double hundred took 153 balls.  Perhaps most enjoyably we learn that Trescothick is a big Eminem fan and says he was rapping ‘Lose Yourself’ during his test double ton vs SA.  He also gives shout outs to Snoop Dogg and Warren G!

 If Trescothick had never had any of his problems I imagine this would have been a boring read.  Owing to everything that’s happened to him, and the fact he suffered from not being open about it, he’s remarkably candid about his struggles and the mistakes he made trying to manage them.  I also couldn’t help but feel like the professionalization of cricket and the structure of the international game were partially responsible for his issues.  Of course, you could respond, ‘well, he shouldn’t have played then’ but that was never really an option for an obsessive like him.  In my mind, Trescothick’s life might have been a lot more simple and straightforward if he had less talent and was a club cricketer like his Dad without any of the stress that comes with playing for money in the media spotlight.  Whether it was all worth it in the end is anyone’s guess.

Ben Lerner - Leaving Atocha Station

An American poet has received a prestigious scholarship to Madrid for a year.  The book’s opening finds him there, studiously avoiding any contact with the university department he’s supposedly connected to and, instead, smoking lots of hash on the roof of his apartment and going to The Prada to look at a picture for half an hour everyday.  So far so good!  After this daily ritual he writes poetry by copying out bits from Lorca and interpolating them with his own associations.  I really enjoyed his honesty about his professional life and his truthfulness about whether any of it was meaningful.

I became less enamored with the stoner-poet lifestyle when I discovered the poet is also taking unidentified anti-anxiety drugs and suffers from panic attacks.  Smoking a lot of weed seems an odd choice in this context.  He also chooses to multiply his anti-anxiety dose after some negative event or other, to the extent he appears to be losing touch with reality.  I was left with the image of a talented poet, behaving strangely and perhaps unraveling around the edges for unexplained reasons.

The story begins to draw in more characters when the poet makes some friends in Madrid, most prominently a young, fashionable gallery owner and his sister who move in artistic circles and like his poetry.  Or the status his poetry scholarship confers on him.  The poet tells outrageous lies in order to get attention or try to sleep with people –  this was probably my favourite part of the book.  He tells the gallery owner’s sister, who he is perpetually trying to sleep with, that his Mum is dead.  Later, he confesses it is a lie but replaces it with another one about his Dad being a tyrannical fascist.  I loved the way these shady acts are reported without any self-sympathy or attempt to justify his shittiness!  It was also amusing to read in places.

Apart from the central pillar of the Atocha terrorist attacks, the narrative is quotidian and enjoyable.  Visiting the relatives of Spanish friends, going to gallery events, house parties, the odd university conference or symposium and visits to other cities.

The prose was pithy and enjoyable but, perhaps inevitably, given to flights of poetic fancy where the texture of forgiveness or the heart rate of sanctimony are referenced.  Even though I couldn’t find much to enjoy in the less prosaic passages, I was very taken by the fact that the author gives credit to other people’s ideas and phrases in his footnotes.  It seemed like a manifestation of the same instinct towards honesty I found in other parts of the book.  An instinct that is almost entirely contradicted by his reported behaviour during the story!

I thought it was a strange decision to put really small photographs in a paperback edition where the quality would always be poor.  Even to someone who knows Madrid well, in heavily pixelated black and white printed on uncoated paper, the pictures add nothing.  

Towards the end of the book, the poet calls his parents and confesses to lying about them.  He also confesses to his friend, the gallery owner’s sister, who variously performs the role of his tour guide, lover and patron.  She more or less tells him it’s OK for him to lie because he’s a poet.  As someone who doesn't like poetry much, I wasn’t so sure!  But I enjoyed the story as an interesting and entertaining glimpse into the life of a poet.   

Elif Batuman - The Idiot

I loved the prose in this book and found it to be, in some ways, one of the most honest renderings of the feelings of attending an elite university I’ve ever read. I felt the book took a turn for the worse when the focus shifted to Selin’s relationship with Ivan. Once Selin is in Hungary and her wonderfully depicted college life ceases it’s essentially just a repetitive, cack-handed and really frustrating love story that goes absolutely nowhere. I ended the book unreasonably upset that so much energy had been expended by all concerned (Selin, Ivan, Batuman as the writer, me as the reader) to no discernable end.


The title of this book immediately made me think of Dostoevsky and that the author must be pretty cocky to invite comparison with it. After reading it, I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with Dostoevsky’s novel about a man who embodies Christian love and the response he evokes in nineteenth century Russian society. Probably the title refers to the protagonist, a naive freshman at Harvard who doesn’t really know anything.


This character is a success as she seems intellectual, clueless, funny and confused in roughly the correct quantities for a Harvard fresher who’s led a sheltered life with her single mother. Her experience of university life is also very well drawn. It mainly consists of going to classes that seem to have little, if any, practical application or purpose, eating in the cafeteria and hanging out with the one family friend she knows who’s also at Harvard. The feel of all this is a weird sort of stressful suspended animation. All the hard work of applying to, and getting into, an Ivy league school has been done. There’s still a reasonable academic workload but also lots of free time. Very few people have that many close friends but everyone has been convinced that this experience is, variously, everything they have been working for up to this point / the best days of their life / the time when they’ll make their friends forever / the beginning of an amazing career of professional success and personal achievement. The fact that, for many people, the Ivy league experience is none of these things is well depicted.


Less successful is the relationship between Selin and Ivan. It all starts out quirkily and innocently enough with some weird flirting over email, when it has just been invented in the 1990s. The levels of social dyslexia and fumbling that follow quickly become intolerably frustrating. It’s true that the prose is always good and can be laugh-out-loud funny, which is rare for me. It’s also true that a lot of the feelings Selin experiences are relatable. However, the sheer monotony of their botched attempts to express their feelings was my lasting impression of the book. Perhaps the turning point is Selin’s trip to Hungary, Ivan’s homeland. Choosing to spend a vacation volunteering in a friend from university’s home country must be as clear an indication of interest as any man has ever received short of a physical assault. For the character of Selin, who is fresher than the sea breeze in terms of any kind of experience, sexual or otherwise, it’s probably the most salacious advance she’s capable of. Ivan, who is older and allegedly has a girlfriend, has absolutely no excuse for his pathetic behaviour. The story drones on through various fumbled emails, phone calls, physical meetings, meals, trips and stays at Ivan’s parent’s house and still absolutely nothing romantic happens at all! ‘What on earth is going on here?’ I found myself asking, but it wasn’t even that the narrative stretched credulity, it was just so boring! Kiss! Fuck! Hold hands! Anything! In the end, there is some sorry excuse for an explanation of the whole debacle, but by that stage I felt like the damage had been done. I don’t even remember the half-baked justifications Ivan and Selin offer each other for their abject failure but I do remember being highly dissatisfied with the book’s ending. My feelings of vexation were probably exacerbated by the fact that Svetlana, a highly amusing college friend of Selin, is in Paris while Selin goes to Hungary and so is cut from the show. I missed her more and more as the Hungarian misadventure dragged on and on.


Someone mentioned to me that they found Batuman’s depiction of Hungarians to be condescending. I also noticed that the book contains the idea that Hungarian people are of Turkic origin, which is apparently controversial for some. It’s true that the Hungarian characters are not very flattering, but nor are the Turkish ones. I also have the feeling that the English classes that Selin gives were more amusing in America than in Hungary but maybe that’s to do with the context of the general deterioration. So, although I doubt the point of the novel was to make an ethnological point, it did spend a lot of time showing how the languages were similar. I suppose it’s justifiable because Selin speaks Turkish and is learning Hungarian, but it was obscure.


If I were the editor I would have suggested an expansion of the Harvard material and a drastic contraction of the Hungary scenes! The early parts of the book did sort of make me want to read the sequel (‘Either / Or’ released May 2022). Surely, as a sophomore, Selin will get it on with someone, hopefully not Ivan, or at least kiss them?! The risk is that it’s just another few hundred pages of tedious, adolescent muddling is currently providing enough of a counter-incentive.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Gambler

This book had been sitting on my bookshelf and ‘to read’ list for too long.  So, after a few factual tomes, I thought this would be a change of length and pace.  

The book’s basic structure is as follows:  The narrator, Alexei, is the tutor to a rich Russian family’s children, living in a hotel suite abroad in Roulettenburg - a fictitious spa town in Germany.  Alexei is in love with Polina, who is the General’s step-daughter.  She needs money and asks Alexei to gamble for her at the casino, which he does reluctantly.  He wins and gives her the money but she won’t tell him what it's for.  Alexei later learns from another of Polina’s suitors staying at the resort, the Englishman Mr. Astley, that the family has no money.  The General has squandered the family fortune and, furthermore, has taken out many loans against his expected inheritance.  As such he desperately needs his aunt (The Grandmother) to die so he can inherit her estate.  

Alexei professes his love to Polina and promises he will do anything for her.  This prompts her to challenge Alexei to be rude to a baron and baroness of high social standing who are staying in the resort as well.  This leads the General to fire him as the family tutor but he continues to stay at the hotel.  

During this time, the Grandmother is still in Russia.  The family, their suitors and their creditors in Germany are all eagerly awaiting news regarding her ill health and the possibility of her imminent death.   The unctuous French pairing of Des Grieux and Mdme. Blanche both hang around in the hope that she will die, Des Grieux because he has loaned the General money and he wants to be paid back and Mdme. Blanche because she will only marry the General if he has money.  The General sends a telegram every day to Russia enquiring, it’s implied not very subtly, about his aunt’s health.  However, instead of the anticipated news of her death turning up in Roulettenburg, she does instead!  

‘Grandma’ is very grand and dismissive, is presumed to be fabulously wealthy and is treated in style by the hotel’s management.  She mocks the General’s covetousness and tells him to forget about getting any of her money.  She demands to go gambling and says she will only do so with Alexei.  She is initially successful and wins a considerable amount of money. Alexei helps her to begin with but then urges her to stop and refuses to gamble with her anymore as he sees her behaviour become more erratic.  This leaves her at the mercy of some avaricious Poles, who bamboozle her and steal her money.  She gets hopelessly addicted to gambling and loses 10x the sizable amount she had won over the next couple of days.  After these heavy losses, she returns to Russia by train.  

Alexei finds out from Polina that Des Grieux is selling the properties the General mortgaged to him because Grandma is not dead.  However, Des Grieux is going to give the General 50k back for Polina’s benefit.  She says she wishes she had 50k to throw back in his face. She reveals she has been Des Grieux’s mistress but that he won’t marry her now.   Inspired by this thought Alexei rushes to the roulette tables and furiously gambles everything he has in the world.  He goes on a winning streak and becomes a rich man.  He brings the money back to Polina who accuses him of trying to buy her like DG but then seems happy and spends the night in his room, which is thought to be scandalous.  In the morning she asks for 25k and then flings it in Alexei’s face before running off to Mr Astley’s hotel to be with him.  He then leaves for Paris with Mdme. Blanche and lets her spend all his money before the General turns up and marries her.  She still wants a husband with a grand title but doesn’t care if he’s rich anymore because she is already.  Alexei leaves and travels around gambling resorts unemployed trying to make a living or get rich again.  He learns from Mr. Astley that Polina is in Switzerland and is still in love with him.  He resolves to go and find her but eventually stays on to gamble more because he has premonitions of a big win.

There was a lot to enjoy in the book.  The gamblings scenes were a highlight, especially the Grandmother’s headlong charge and Alexei’s big win.  Dostoevsky captures the frenzied unrest of the throng at the tables superbly and accurately depicts the febrile energy, illusions of control, desperation, hope, fury, frustration and dazed exhaustion gambling can produce.  He also produces some reasons why Russians are particularly susceptible to gambling, via Alexei, with his usual Slavic exceptionalism!

The characters of the General and the Grandmother immediately spring vividly to mind and were particular favourites.  The former foppish and pathetic, the latter capricious, formidable and ferocious.  I liked the predatory pairing of the Little Frenchman (des Grieux) and the General’s fiance (Mdme. Blanche) very much.  They play the parts of the civilised guest and fiance in front of the General but I imagine them scheming furiously about their financial futures during their clandestine chats.  The narrative was mainly good too, especially the Grandmother's sudden, unexpected appearance at the resort.  

However, some parts of the novel were a bit overblown.  For example,  Alexei’s infatuation with Polina, where he offers to throw himself off a cliff to prove his love for her and encourages her to dare him to do anything to the same end.  Could the story have done without the Polina love story?  In its favour, it helps the narrative along by providing the reason for Alexei’s dismissal as the family tutor.  It gives Alexei a love interest, which ultimately shows just how deeply he has fallen into his gambling addiction.  It also gives a reason for Alexei to start gambling, although he could just as well have started when the Grandmother arrived.  Alexei’s love for Polina shows him to be obsessive and ultimately gives a good measure of how deeply addicted to gambling he has become by the end of the book.  

Against this, Polina’s situation can be a bit confusing.  She is in love with Alexei, the mistress of des Grieux and being courted by Mr. Astley.  The affair with des Grieux could be thought implausible given his hold over Polina’s step-father but does allow Alexei to indulge in some hilarious digressions on why Russian women are most susceptible to the charms of Frenchmen!  Polina is whimsical in the extreme, vain and barely seems to know what she’s doing most of the time.  She is living in a highly stressful situation, which could explain some of her erratic behaviour.  Eventually, Mr. Astley takes her to Switzerland for her health, which could be interpreted as a nervous breakdown.  Ultimately, it’s hard to separate out Polina’s love stories from the narrative but my sense is that it wasn’t strictly necessary for them to occupy such a central position.  I did like the way Alexei’s passion for Polina ignites his passion for gambling, which it eventually consumed along with everything else.  

The part where Alexei goes with Mdme. Blanche to Paris and allows her to spend all his winnings is a little stretched.  It does demonstrate, in a slightly forced way, how little Alexei cares for the actual objective of gambling - money.  Maybe he is still lovesick over Polina but this plot twist struck me as bordering on farce and maybe it’s supposed to be.

The book’s denouement, where Alexei learns that Polina does love him and is in Switzerland only to have a premonition about a huge gambling win and stay in Hamburg to play roulette, is poignant.  It seems like his love of Polina has been replaced by a love of gambling.

This book has an interesting background and is laced with significance and redolence of Dostoevsky’s own life.  For example, during his first marriage, Doestoevksy also had a mistress called Polina (Suslova) whom he met in Paris in 1862.  She was 20 years his junior and the affair ended when she left him for another man in 1863.  He may have begun to gamble heavily after this, or after the death of  his first wife in 1864.

Dostoevsky himself was a gambling addict for several years as amply demonstrated by these letters to his second wife:

‘I was so confident of a small win. At first I lost a little, but as soon as I began to lose, I wanted to win it back. I lost still more, then I was compelled to continue playing, at least to regain the money necessary for my departure – and I lost everything Anya, I will not implore you to take pity on me, better be dispassionate, but I am terribly afraid of your judgement’

May 1867

Things aren’t much better six months later:

‘Anya, my dear, my precious, I have lost everything, everything, everything! Oh! My angel, don’t be sad, don’t worry. Be confident, a time will come when I shall be worthy of you and I shall stop robbing you like a wretched low thief!’ Nov 1867

However, after having to leave Russia in 1867 to avoid creditors, Doestoevsky eventually returned to Russia in 1871 and managed to give up gambling around the same time.

Another interesting facet of the book’s history relating to gambling is that Dostoevsky seems to have written the book for a bet with a publisher (F.T.Stellovsky), to whom he owed money.  This was in 1865, the same year he wrote ‘Crime and Punishment’ . Dostoevsky bet the rights to ‘The Gambler’ itself and all his future works for 10 years if he couldn’t produce a novel in 30 days.  In order to win his bet, Dostoevsky hired a stenographer for the first time in his career.  She was Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, a woman 25 years his junior, who would later become his wife and an essential contributor to his work.The publisher tried to make himself unavailable to receive the book at the time of the deadline. However, at Anna’s suggestion, Dostoevsky took the manuscript to the police station and had it registered there with the time and date.  

This was a great book with memorable characters and vivid scenes of gambling written by someone who experienced the power of its vagaries first hand.

Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

This was a beautiful little book with a quintessentially Edinburgh feel to it.  Set around the 1930s, most of the narrative takes place at a school for girls.  A group of six are selected by Miss Brodie, a teacher in her prime, to be the creme de la creme of their age group - The Brodie Set.  There are periodic flashes forward to the student’s and teacher’s later lives so the fate of the characters are known.  The book has some narrative anticipation but its charms are not about finding out what happens next.  The joy of the book was more in the ingenious details and effortless touches Spark uses to construct such a vivid world.  The aphorisms of Miss Brodie, the brief but deep characterisations of the members of the set and the sketch of the art master’s home life and marital infidelities.  The prose is also excellent and never clunky.

A group of school friends is a familiar setting and a good way to establish individual identities within a larger collective one.  The Brodie Set is an extreme example of this tendency towards cliques but it’s believable and feels authentic.  The level of pupil-teacher interaction is also unlikely today but could be credible in the 30s.  Miss Brodie instructs the girls in a wide range of subjects outwith the conventional school curriculum with a heavy focus on her own history, travels and life.  With the exception of Sandy,  who’s Miss Brodie’s special confidante and whose character is fleshed in more detail, the characterisation of the other members is largely limited to their future fates or descriptions of what they’re known for as schoolgirls.  Jenny is known for her beauty, Rose is ‘famous for sex’, Eunice is famous for gymnastics and swimming, Monica is known for her mathematical abilities and her temper and Mary is famous for being the scapegoat for everything that goes wrong.  The details are scant but are oft repeated and so well chosen that the overall effect is very successful.

The star of the show is Miss Jean Brodie.  She chooses to dedicate her prime to educating her set in what she deems the original sense of the Latin verb ‘educere’ - to lead out.  This is exactly the kind of maxim that makes Miss Brodie so believable and engaging as a character.  The leading out takes the form of stories about her love life, trips to the theatre and art galleries, studies of the classics and lectures on the benefits of facism.  It all feels perfect for a middle class Edinburgh school teacher.  She carries a self confident feeling of always being in the right and the primary school teacher’s penchant for unequivocal statements.  Nonetheless, there’s also a slightly deranged, even desperate undercurrent to her character that’s never encountered directly.  Instead, it’s hinted at throughout the novel.  Who could disagree with her lofty aims of leading the girls out into adulthood through the means of a practical and well-rounded education?  But in practice, her obsession with Italian facism and the love lives of some of the set seem misguided and inappropriate.  

It’s the same when it comes to her own love life.  She eschews love in favour of her project of educating the girls, which immediately made me wonder what happened to her in the past.  Nonetheless, she falls in love with the art master, who loves her back, but won’t pursue it because he is married.  Instead, she conceives a highly questionable plan that Rose, the most beautiful of the set, should have an affair with him instead.  The singing master is also in love with her and she starts to sleep with him after she has abandoned her romance with the art master.  It’s a rather half-hearted affair on Miss Brodie’s part, with more emphasis on fattening him up than on romantic development, and he eventually marries another teacher.  I felt like there was some unmentioned personal tragedy that perpetually loomed over Miss Brodie.

As a reader, we never enter the inner world of Miss Brodie.  On the outside, she appears steadfast and resolute in her beliefs and actions but their very nature made me wonder where they came from.  In a sense, readers encounter Miss Brodie as her pupils would have.  We see the face that Miss Brodie wants to show to the world but never the true motivations behind the mask or the inner monologue that produces and sustains it.  She makes a big show of the dedication of her prime to the education of her set, but what is her personal stake in this?  The events of the story show it can’t simply be an altruistic love of education.  As Sandy comments after betraying Miss Brodie, in a strikingly similar fashion to the pronouncements of the lady herself,  ‘it’s only possible to betray where loyalty is due’.  Contrary to Miss Brodie’s overtly stated loyalty to the education of the girls, is she really using them and abusing the position of power she holds over them at an impressionable age?  There’s a fevered quality about her dedication to the set, her love of facism and her unusual approach to romance that makes it seem like a retaliation against something horrible in her past, which readers never learn anything about.  

The betrayal of Miss Brodie by Sandy, who she never suspects, is another excellent facet of the plot.  The headmistress, Miss McKay, is suspicious of Miss Brodie’s methods and periodically tries to infiltrate the set to gather intelligence to use against her.  Initially I felt like Sandy’s betrayal was an unnecessarily harsh treatment of a pitiable and well intentioned middle aged woman.  However, without knowing the true reasons for Miss Brodie’s condition and way of life, it became more and more ambiguous, especially when considered in the light of her more hare-brained schemes.  Do Sandy and the rest of the set actually have legitimate grievances for their treatment by Miss Brodie?

For a book of less than 200 pages, it contained so much.  The evocative, yet lightly sketched, characters.  The initial love triangle between the teachers and then the planned, and actual, affairs of members of the set with Mr Lloyd.  The headmistress’s scheming against Miss Brodie and her ultimate betrayal by Sandy.  Above all, it was a fascinating character study of Miss Brodie herself examined through the lens of the six set members.  It was thoroughly enjoyable and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it, especially to any Edinburgh natives!

Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front

 I read this book as part of my WW1&2 reading list and thought it deserved its classic status.  Incidentally, I learned while reading Adam Fergusson’s ‘When Money Dies’ that this book was banned in post WW1 Germany as unpatriotic.  According to George Orwell ‘Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations’ so perhaps something similar applies to war literature.  It was also the case that ‘Death of A Hero’ by Richard Aldington was censored. 

Throughout the book, I was surprised by how poetic it was and how much I enjoyed the prose.  Given that I read an English translation of the original German text, I’m not sure how much of this is down to the original author and how much the translator (A.W.Wheen).  Nonetheless, certain passages, like this one describing taking comfort from the earth, were very moving and well drawn:

“From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us - mostly from the earth.  To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier.  When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; she receives him again and often for ever.

Earth! - Earth! - Earth!” p55

Equally, when writing about observing prisoners of war from a distance when billeted behind the line, the language is both pithy and profound - ”but as it is I perceive behind them only the suffering of the creature, the awful melancholy of life and the pitilessness of men.” (p193)  The prose has a simple and straightforward style but this doesn’t prevent it from being evocative. There were many instances when a phrase or paragraph struck me with particular force.  For example, when writing about the sounds of wounded horses, they are ”wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning.” (p62)

The book gave a pithy and unpretentious account of the experiences and emotions of war and battle.  It also describes the brutal psychological after-effects of the experience and it is a theme that’s constantly recurring in one form or another.  

Even in the boredom of endless waiting that trench warfare entails, there is the unrelenting threat of shelling.  Based on this book and others I have read about WW1, this seems to have been extraordinarily heavy and must have wreaked havoc with the soldiers’ nervous systems as well as inflicting huge amounts of physical damage.  The utter helplessness of those shelled is shocking: 

“The front is a cage in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen.  We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty.  Over us, Chance hovers.  If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all;  we neither know nor can determine where it will fall.” p101

Against this backdrop, it seems like the adrenalin and agency of offensive operations or combat might have come as a relief, however counterintuitive that may seem.  The chance to escape the background danger of shelling for circumstances that are probably even more dangerous but, crucially, feel like they have an element of self-determination appears to have been a welcome change.  Equally, Remarque doesn’t write of fury and anger towards the enemy.  Rather it seems something more like a haze of self-preservation, fighting more against the fear of death than against anything like a clear conception of the enemy.

“We have become wild beasts.  We do not fight, we defend ourselves from annihilation…No longer do we lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and be revenged.” p113

This life of constant threat and suffering, combined with extreme privation from comfort and mind-numbing boredom, seems only to have been endurable in a state of constant stimulation.  Living on one's nerves more than one’s wits.  In one sense, it is incredible testimony to the human ability to adapt to prevailing circumstances.  It would seem more natural if a bunch of late teenagers, ripped from quoutidian German life and thrown into the horrors of war, had simply run away or committed suicide.  I’m sure many did those things, but the majority seem to have endured it until they were killed or returned home injured.  They lived on a mixture of comradery, nervous stimulation and denial.  Even those who survived the horror cannot be said to have escaped unscathed or, perhaps, even to be counted among the lucky.  

“We forget nothing really.  But so long as we have to stay here in the field, the front line days, when they are past, sink down in us like a stone; they are too grievous for us to be able to reflect on them at once.  If we did that, we should have been destroyed long ago.  I soon found out this much: - terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks; - but it kills, if a man thinks about it.” p138

In these extraordinarily strained circumstances, the soldiers seek out and scavenge what little comfort they can.  Mostly, they take it from the fact that others around them are experiencing the same thing.  The solidarity they feel with their peers is described with such intensity, perhaps because of the extremity of their circumstances, perhaps because it is all they have.  As with their ability to adapt and survive in unimaginable conditions, it spoke to me about something fundamentally social in the human condition.  That people can endure so much and place themselves in such danger out of some sense of ‘esprit de corps’.  I found the following passage especially poignant and beautiful:

“These voices, these quiet words, these footsteps in the trench behind me recall me at a bound from the terrible loneliness and fear of death by which I had been almost destroyed.  They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, the most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.

I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness; - I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life, we are nearer than lovers, in a simpler, a harder way; I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.”  p212

The rare moments when the soldiers enjoy something that would be recognisable as pleasurable in civilian life are savoured and remembered with intense relish.  Paul and Kat’s illicit goose roasting is probably the best example (pp 91-97) and it makes a stark juxtaposition with the tone and atmosphere of the rest of the book, as it must have done in the soldiers' lives at the front.  A darker, but equally memorable, example of the men enjoying themselves is the story of how they beat up the officer Himmelstross.  This officer had enjoyed abusing them during their training at the barracks and the men take their revenge lustily when he comes to the front (pp45-50).  These bursts of prohibited pleasure amidst the suffering bind the men even closer together and the memories sustain them through the harsher times.  The feast of two suckling pigs the men have while billeted in a village (Chapter 10) is of a similar type albeit it is interrupted by shelling.  Like the comradery between the men, it seems like their pleasurable experiences are intensified by the horrendous circumstances.

There’s a good deal of acerbic criticism in the book and not just for commanding officers who give the men stupid orders or abuse them.  Their former school teacher Kantorek, who uses nationalist and patriotic arguments to persuade the school leavers to sign up for service, is a prominent symbol of those who encouraged the war and its destruction of youth without personally exposing themselves to its horrors.  Remarque seems to recognise that such feelings were common and even well intended around this time in Germany, but it doesn’t seem to diminish his anger.

“There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced that they were acting for the best - in a way that cost them nothing.” p12

Surprisingly, another group who are criticised are the French women the men meet and sleep with while billeted amongst civilians in chapter 7.  Paul finds the experience almost too much of a contrast with their normal life to bear and describes his “desires as strangely compounded of yearning and misery” (p149).  The adventure leaves him feeling unhappy and he is ultimately angry with his lover when he returns the next night and tells her he may not see her again because he is going on leave.  Initially, he is almost afraid to tell her but when he does he despises her cool response.  “If I were going up to the front, then she would have called me “pauvre garcon”; but merely going on leave - she does not want to hear about that, that is not nearly so interesting”.  May she go to the devil with her chattering talk.” (p153)  Here, I see a mixture of the kind of disgust Paul feels for people like Kantorek alongside his hatred of the fetishisation of war, which he experiences while on leave.  In this instance, he is being fetishised himself - the soldier as an object of sexual desire.  It reminded me of the extremely acerbic treatment women receive in parts of ‘Death of A Hero’.  Aldington rails against the women who give white roses to men of fighting age who they encounter in civilian life to brand them cowards.  This is very similar to Kantorek.  Worse still, these same women, who will never experience the horrors of war themselves, not only encourage men to go but then lust after and lionise those who do.  I think I remember him asking why women want to bear the children of the murderers with the most blood on their hands!  Perhaps this is an overly pessimistic outlook and the women are more impressed by the bravery of men who go to war.  However, I can still follow the logic of the point he’s making.  I suppose the extremities of the soldiers’ experience would create all sorts of resentful emotions, perhaps especially about those who’d managed to avoid their fate but still encouraged it.

Doctors and nurses in general, and perhaps especially during a war, are normally depicted as more or less saintly individuals.  However, in this book, as is probably the case in life, they are a far more mixed bunch.  In chapter 10, when Paul gets hit with shrapnel and goes through the medical system, he tells of sadistic surgeons persuading young soldiers into unnecessary operations which leave them crippled and nuns who keep the convalescents awake with noisy prayers!  This helped me form a more realistic picture of the variety of characters involved in the war and not just to see them all as the ‘war heroes’ nationalist nostalgia wants us to believe they were. 

A theme which is familiar from ‘Death of A Hero’ is the feeling of no longer fitting in when back on leave.  It’s as if the experience of the front has changed or broken the men so irrevocably that they can no longer function in civilian society.  They walk through worlds they used to know, enjoy and love in a kind of daze of half comprehension.  The scenes and people are recognisable from their past but they no longer understand them and even dislike them.  It’s as if the war has opened up a gulf between them and the civilian world that they can look across but cannot traverse.

“But now I see that I have been crushed without knowing it.  I find I do not belong here anymore, it is a foreign world.  Some of these people ask questions, some ask no questions, but one can see that the latter are proud of themselves for their silence; they often say with a wise air that these things cannot be talked about.  They plume themselves on it.

I prefer to be alone, so that no one troubles me.  For they all come back to the same thing, how badly it goes and how well it goes; one thinks it is this way, another that; and yet they are always absorbed in the things that go to make up their existence.  Formerly I lived in just the same way myself, but now I feel no contact here.

They talk too much for me.  They have worries, aims, desires, that I cannot comprehend.  I often sit with one of them in the little beer garden and try to explain to him that this is really the only thing: just to sit quietly, like this.  They understand of course, they agree, they may even feel it so too, but only with words, only with words, yes that is it - they feel it, but always with only half of themselves, the rest of their being is taken up with other things, they are so divided in themselves that none feels it with his whole essence; I cannot even say myself exactly what I mean.” p168-169

One way of interpreting this dazed detachment is as a form of psychological self-preservation.  The ordeal of the war is too brutal to be considered or understood in a civilian context, or perhaps in any context at all.  The men must avoid what might be too damaging to confront head on.  But like the French girls who indirectly glorify the suffering and senselessness of war, Remarque points out how offensive this can be to those who have lived through it.  Of course, during a war, the war itself is certain to be a major topic of conversation in the civilian world.  However, for a returning soldier this could amount to a near constant reminder of everything he’s trying to forget.  Yet people focus on it continually in a way he finds impossible to bear or comprehend:

 

“My mother is the only one who asks no questions.  Not so my father.  He wants me to tell him about the front; he is curious in a way that I find stupid and distressing; I no longer have any real contact with him.  There is nothing he likes more than just hearing about it.  I realise he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words.  I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them.  What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?” p165

Another major theme of the book was a depiction of war as the thief of youth.  The men enrol in their late teens and early twenties with all the enthusiasm for life, hopes and dreams normally associated with that age.  The experience of war crushes their youthful idealism and leaves them cynical:

“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow.  I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.  I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring.  And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me.  What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account?  What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing; - it was our first calling in life.  Our knowledge of life is limited to death.  What will happen afterwards?  And what shall come out of us?” p263-4

In a way which is redolent of Paul’s experience of not fitting into civilian life when back on leave, the men also talk about how the war has left them mistrustful of the world.  There is a sense in which they long to return to it but, because the changes the war has brought about are so profound, are no longer able.  War has ruined them, their lives and their ability to enjoy them.  It is all the more tragic because they are so young.  In this moving passage, Paul chats with Albert about their hope and fears for ‘peace-time’:

 

“When I think about it, Albert,” I say after a while rolling over on my back, “when I hear the word ‘peace-time’, it goes to my head: and if it really came, I think I would do some unimaginable thing - something, you know, that it’s worth having lain here in the muck for.  But I can’t even imagine anything.  All I do know is that this business about professions and studies and salaries and so on - it makes me sick, it is and always was disgusting.  I don’t see anything at all, Albert.”

All at once everything seems to me confused and hopeless…. 

Albert expresses it: “The war has ruined us for everything.”

He is right. We are not youth any longer.  We don’t want to take the world by storm.  We are fleeing.  We fly from ourselves.  From our life.” p87

In a more general sense, the war is also portrayed as a laying bare of man’s fundamental cruel and violent nature.  It may be that this plays a major part in robbing the men of their youth.  Such cynicism usually takes longer to set in during life.  However, the war forces them to face the plain fact of man’s most brutal and destructive instincts, removing the thin veneer that usually masks them in society.

 

“For instance, if you train a dog to eat potatoes and then afterwards put a piece of meat in front of him, he’ll snap at it, it’s his nature.  And if you give a man a little bit of authority he behaves just the same way, he snaps at it too.  The things are precisely the same.  In himself man is essentially a beast , only he butters it over like a slice of bread with a little decorum.” p43-44

Paul’s experiences after his injury also have a profound effect on him and he struggles to comprehend how it can be permitted.  The contrast between normal society and war is hard to reconcile.  How can the brutality of war be tolerated, and even encouraged, by a society whose stated ideals are at such odds with it?  This seems to play a part in the moral and psychological confusion the book portrays so vividly.

“A man cannot realise that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round.  And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia.  How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible.  It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture chambers in their hundreds of thousands.  A hospital alone shows what war is.” p263

I really enjoyed reading this book and felt it was very well written and constructed.  The narrative and characters are believable and there’s no attempt to overplay the narrative.  The prose was clear and matter of fact with some beautiful, poetic passages.  I would thoroughly recommend it as a moving, accessible account of the war.  This is probably why it’s a classic!

Jonathan Franzen - Crossroads

This was chosen by a book club I’m a member of, but I would’ve also happily read it of my own accord.  I think I’ve read ‘The Corrections’ and ‘Freedom’ by this author, but don’t seem to have made any notes.  What little I can remember is of vivid characters and flowing prose with a tendency towards loquaciousness and a pretentious habit of using long words.  At its best, it can be totally enthralling and easy to consume in large quantities, with the exception of some clunky vocab.  I would say this book outperformed these positive half-remembrances for the first few hundred pages and then drastically underperformed them later on.  

The book isn’t chronological and we flit back and forth from the past to the ‘present’ day, which plays out over a few years in the early 1970s.  The prose has largely lost Franzen’s former florid vocabulary and is highly readable.  In a way, it’s hypnotic and soothing.  There’s rarely a clunky sentence, with the exception of sex scenes that are littered with references to ‘nether parts’ and other atrocities.  As such, it’s easy to gobble down quickly; albeit in a way that half lulls you to sleep.  When I managed to stay more awake, I realised it is full of more or less unnecessary stuff, like a couple of pages on how Christianity spread around Europe or a couple of pages on good carsalemanship.  It also struck me as a different form of showing off; as opposed to using vocabulary, he uses mansplaining subjects to the reader regardless of whether they’re relevant to the story or not. 

I also felt this way about certain parts of the narrative that seemed to have been thrown in incongruently. Taken individually, it doesn’t seem to matter but taken cumulatively it feels indulgent and was probably one of the reasons I felt the book was too long.  I think this book could have used some severe editing. Maybe Franzen’s editors feel like he is such a big deal now it’s hard to cut stuff from his drafts or criticise his ideas.   At the end of this review there’s a brief precis that attempts to detail the main narratives of the book. It leaves a few things out but not much and looking back I am staggered to think that this story took more than 600 pages to describe.

 

The characters were engaging and I also liked the depiction of small town 60/70s America and found it believable.  The main themes I could detect were, first, an assessment of Christianity as a very strong motivating force in America during this time.  Franzen seems to paint it in mixed colours as it is often the motivation for people to do good things but also seems to be the cause of a lot of suffering and bad decisions.  Adultery and sexual desire are also fairly readily identifiable themes, which are treated in an even handed and credible way.  These positives aside, I found it quite hard to get really excited about the book.  It draws you along as a reader, largely on the early strength of the characters, the readable prose and the believable depiction of the world it describes.  However, just when you’re really enjoying it and empathising with the characters, the plot turns into something from a soap opera.  This is especially the case in the second half, where hysterical and hyperbolic moments abound.  

The more action there was in the book, the less I liked it.  Nothing much really dramatic happens in the first third or half of the book, although there are references back to Marion’s extremely dramatic past.  It was during this part of the book I felt really engaged with the characters, Russ and Perry especially, and I felt they were really well drawn.  Once the story shifts to Arizona, things seem to get overblown and out of control.  There’s too much action and the story takes on a rushed feeling, like the author can’t wait to finish or is trying to cram as many ideas and plot lines into it as possible.  The end of the book is less frantic but has a similarly rushed feeling of tying up loose ends with minimal effort.  After the narrative orgy of Arizona, we dash through a brief summary of the lives of each of the main protagonists.  It makes for quite a jarring juxtaposition with the more placid pacing of earlier chapters and their quotidian feel.  Overall, it gave the book a highly uneven feeling and I didn’t care for the second half at all.  

Delusions of grandeur abound in this book’s conception.  It was originally a humbly entitled “super novel” of three parts, each 25 years apart.  However, the author decided that would be of insufficient scale to encapsulate the scope of his vision and expanded it into a trilogy!  To make matters worse, he also chose to name the trilogy “The Key To All Mythologies”, a reference to the Rev Casaubon’s doomed magnum opus from George Eliot’s “Middlemarch”.  In fairness to Franzen, he says it's a joke about starting such a long project in his 60s but I think it takes a lot of self belief to draw comparisons between yourself and a book like ‘Middlemarch’.  

Each time I read ‘Middlemarch’, I feel like it’s a masterpiece and contains a timeless, lucid depiction of humanity.  On finishing this, I felt like I had just binge watched an average soap opera.  For this reason, I think inviting comparison with such an amazing novel is a dangerous game for Franzen and one he can only lose from!  Reading Eliot is like having a guided tour around humanity by someone who’s mastered its mysterious complexity.  Reading Franzen is like the unedited notes of someone who’s good at describing scenes and characters and has mastered the art of suspenseful narratives to link them together.  Occasionally, he lights on something great but the approach is so long-winded and hit-or-miss that the overall effect falls far short of the profundity of Eliot.  Franzen’s plots are more overblown and less emotionally astute as well.

In the end, I found a promising start deteriorated into a disappointing ending.  I’m not sure I would recommend this book or read any more of the trilogy but it certainly had some strong points.

NARRATIVE SUMMARY

A man, Russ, grows up in a weird, insular Mennonnite community.  He is excused from military service in WW2 because of his religious beliefs and goes to work on tribal reservation in Arizona with the Army.  Here, he forms a bond with some Native Americans and decides he won’t go back to his family.  After military service he moves to a city, joins a slightly more normal church and meets a young, fervently Christian woman (Marion) among the congregation.  They fall in love and get married, have four children and the husband pursues a career as a priest while the wife looks after the home and children in small town Illinois.  

What he doesn’t know is that his fervently Christian wife has a dark past, including a father who committed suicide and a mother who disowned her in the aftermath. Following the disintegration of her family, she moves to LA to become an actress, which fails, and then has an adulterous relationship with a car salesman who gets her pregnant.  As if that wasn’t enough, her obsession with the car salesman makes her mentally unstable. She loses her job and then is taken advantage of by a skeevy landlord who drugs and sexually abuses her in exchange for an abortion.  Finally she ends up in a mental hospital after being picked up by the police, while drugged, deranged and walking the streets. She meets Russ while living with her uncle after rehab.

We join the story in the early 1970s as the family begins to fray around the edges and then tear apart.  Russ is working as an assistant minister, warring with the hip, young leader of the church youth group, Rick, and lusting after a young widow in his congregation.  Marion is upset about her weight, secretly in therapy and about to revisit the extreme trauma of her youth.  

Child 1, Clem, is away at university and has a girlfriend for the first time.  He is having sex, also for the first time, and he will go on to rebel against his father and his pacificist principles by quitting university and trying to enroll in military service to go to Vietnam.  

In the past, Clem had been close to Child 2, Becky, but they eventually fall out over Becky’s choice of boyfriend.  Becky is a pretty, popular cheerleader but also a bit of a god botherer and muddles along between these two paths before getting a semi-god bothering, musician boyfriend, having a child, moving out and rejecting her parents over their infatuation with Child 3.  

Child 3, Perry, is painted as a precocious and naughty boy for drinking and taking drugs.  He gets hooked on coke and burns down a farm building on a church youth group trip to Arizona, back where Russ first met the Indians and continues to go for annual church buildathons.  This incident lands Perry in juvie / a rehab that his parents can scarcely afford.  It also turns out he has been stealing money from his siblings to fund his drug habit.  This prompts the parents to use the money Child 2  inherited from her dead aunt, Marion’s sister, and is one of the reasons why Becky resents Perry, as she feels he is overindulged.  

Counterintuitively, Perry’s misdemeanours rekindle the parents' love.  They continue as a couple in spite of the fact that Russ admits to sleeping with the young widow in Arizona, which represents the geographical hot spot where most of the storylines climax.  Child 4, Judson, is pretty young during all this and doesn’t play a major role.  We leave the family with Clem having failed to get into the army but still estranged from his parents.  Becky is living with her partner and child but rejecting her parents.  

Richard Aldington - Death Of A Hero

I chose this book as part of my WWI and WWII reading list and knew absolutely nothing about it before reading it except that it was about one of the world wars!  I think I must have got some of the reading list from another book.  I suspect it was Edward Thorp’s ‘A Man For All Markets’.

The early tone of the book is so acerbic and mocking it takes a while to get used to.  The hero, George Winterbourne, is immediately presented as a rather unflattering suicide in WW2 and I initially thought the title might be in some way sarcastic.  His family history, childhood and adolescence are then recounted by an unnamed narrator, a fellow WW2 soldier with whom George had seemingly discussed these events.  These episodes are filled with such scorn and derision I began to wonder if there was going to be anything the narrator didn’t dislike and treat with disdain.  The prose’s main characteristic is anger and its objects of attack are Imperial Britain, the public school system, the ‘kicked back side of the empire’, society and its strange habits.  This constitutes the first book.

The second book is about George’s attempts to be an artist in London and his love affairs while he is living there.  Sexually it is quite a liberated book and I somehow hadn’t placed Freudian inspired open relationships in pre-WW1 England.  The narrator is critical of conventional attitudes to relationships and sex.  This aspect is probably semi-autobiographical and, like many of the scenes and experiences, could be from the author's life.

The language and style are quite alien and it feels dated to read.  There are lots of strange phrases like ‘toadying’ and an assumed fluency in Classical Mythology, French, Latin and all sorts of other things that don’t feature so heavily in the modern consciousness but seemingly did amongst certain classes in the early 20th Century.  A positive interpretation of this could be that the book is historically accurate.  Unscientific though it is, the book had a feel of authenticity about its scenes, characters, internal monologues and goings-on.  

The third book is where the prose really loses its angry, acerbic tone and changes to one of gravity as it relates scenes of heartbreaking exhaustion and deprivation.  As well as the many harrowing descriptions of violent and bloody trench warfare, perhaps equally distressing is George’s return on leave to London.  The contrast between before and after the war is stark.  It is a distressingly bleak and unresolvable picture of a broken man.  Discombobulated and unable to function in a society that simultaneously glorifies and wants to forget about the war, he wanders the embankment emptied of homelessness by the war and wonders how a government can find £5m a day to fight the Germans during war but couldn’t find any money to help the homeless during peace.  Unaccustomed to anything but snatches of sleep during shelling and material discomfort he struggles to adapt to the world he left behind, seemingly changed, or broken, irrevocably. I found the poem at the end very moving after the emotional battering I had taken in Book 3!

“Eleven years after the fall of Troy 

We, the old men - some of us nearly forty -

Met and talked on the sunny rampart

Over our wine, while the lizards scuttled 

In dusty grass, and the crickets chirred.

Some bared their wounds;

Some spoke of the thirst, dry in the throat,

And the heart-beat, in the din of battle;

Some spoke of intolerable sufferings,

The brightness gone from their eyes

And the grey already thick in their hair.

And I sat apart 

From the garrulous talk and old memories,

And I heard a boy of twenty

Say petulantly to a girl, seizing her arm:

“Oh, come away; why do you stand there 

Listening open-mouthed to the talk of old men?

Haven’t you heard enough of Troy and Achilles?

Why should they bore us for ever

With an old quarrel and the names of dead men

We never knew, and dull forgotten battles?”

And he drew her away,

And she looked back and laughed

As he spoke more contempt of us,

Being now out of hearing.

And I thought of the graves of the desolate Troy

And the beauty of many young men now dust,

And the long agony, and how useless it all was.

And the talk still clashed about me

Like the meeting of blade and blade.

And as they two moved further away 

He put an arm about her, and kissed her;

And afterwards I heard their gay distant laughter.

And I looked at the hollow cheeks 

And the weary eyes and the grey-streaked heads

Of the old men - nearly forty - about me;

And I too walked away

In an agony of helpless grief and pity.”

I started out thinking this was an average and overblown book but by the end I thought it was both beautiful and insightful.  It was a heartbreaking description of the chaos that war can wreak on a single human life.  Its brutality seems so at odds with the sentient humanity of an individual like George, it was unbelievably sad to read about his psychological demise and suicide.  In the end the angry, sardonic tone of the first two books seems more understandable given the kind of trauma the narrator must have endured.  He too knew George, and countless others, and would have experienced first hand what a senseless destruction of life it all was.