A Thief of Time (1988) A Navajo Nation Mystery Tony Hillerman (1925-2008)
Anna Karenina (1877) Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Jean de Florette (1962) & Manon des Sources (1963) Marcel Pagnol (1895 – 1974)
La femme du boulanger (1938) Marcel Pagnol (1895 – 1974)
King Ottokar’s Sceptre (1939 b&w 1947 colour) Hergé Georges Rémi (1907-1983)
Leave it to Psmith (1923) PG Wodehouse (1881-1975)
Out of Africa (1937) Karen Blixen (1885-1962)
Pride and Prejudice (1813) Jane Austen ((1775-1817)
Still William (1928) Richmal Crompton (1890-1969)
That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002) John McGahern (1934-2006)
The Blue Flower ( 1995) Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000)
‘The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown’- The World of Damon Runyon (1880 - 1946)
Waiting for the Mahatma (1955) R K Narayan (1906-2001)
Travels with Charley (1962) John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
The Mahabharata Penguin Classics 2009
Treasure Island (1983) Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) Muriel Spark (1918-2006)
Little Women (1868 & 1869) Louisa May Alcott (1832 – 1888)
The Great Gatsby (1925) F Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
Small Island (2004) Andrea Levy (1956-2019)
The Road Home (2007) Rose Tremain ( 1943- )
India A Sacred Geography (2012) Diana L Eck (1943 - )
A Thief of Time (1988) A Navajo Nation Mystery Tony Hillerman (1925-2008)
Growing up in India, my reading consisted mostly of crime, Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, The Saint, Dr Fu Manchu, Bulldog Drummond, Perry Mason. These books were widely available in India, sufficiently cheap so I was even allowed to buy the occasional paperback, from an AH Wheeler stall, as we set off on a long train journey. Buying books, which could be borrowed from libraries or others, was considered wasteful expenditure in my cash strapped family.
I was an adult and had moved to the UK when, sometime in the 1980’s, I read my first Tony Hillerman Navajo murder mystery novel. I knew immediately this was the kind of crime writing I had been waiting to read for it transcended the mystery genre into novel form. I bought all the published Navajo mysteries and, as the author was still living, waited eagerly for the next one, even bought some in hardback - such wild extravagance - too impatient to wait for the cheaper paperback.
Hillerman’s first Navajo mystery, The Blessing Way (1970) came out when he was forty-five. Before that he had served with distinction with US forces in France in World War II and had worked in various jobs including as a journalist. He enrolled as a mature student at the University of New Mexico and it was at this time he began his Navajo mystery series. He produced roughly one every two years, refusing to be hurried by his publishers, and wrote 18 in all before his death in 2008. Each one is a carefully crafted work of fiction.
Lt Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police was created first followed by Officer Jim Chee in People of Darkness (1980). The two were brought together for the first time in the seventh book Skinwalkers (1986) which was a success. An even greater hit, and Hillerman’s personal favourite, was the next A Thief of Time (1988).
The two protagonists, Leaphorn and Chee, one older and senior, the other younger, are equal in abilities and there is mutual respect between them unlike with other duos such as Holmes and Watson. The two detectives pursue various leads and track the perpetrators of the crime through meticulous police work. Both have an understanding of Navajo culture which allows them to see clues FBI agents miss. Their attitudes to Navajo beliefs differ. Leaphorn respects Navajo traditions but is sceptical about beliefs in witchcraft and the supernatural. Jim Chee is a romantic and an idealist, a modern man built upon traditional Navajo. He trains to become a hatathali, a medicine man. He lives modestly in a caravan by the San Juan river where outside he has set up rocks and a covered frame under which he can have a ritual cleansing sweat bath.
The prose in A Thief of Time, as in all Hillerman’s writing, is unflashy, spare and unadorned. The richness in texture comes from the content. The plot is intricate, complex and defies attempts at summary. It begins with a first chapter of heart-stopping suspense and ends with justice being done and Leaphorn deciding to postpone retirement. The cast of characters is large and varied. There is an archaeologist on the trail of an ancient pot maker, two anthropologists, all researching a long disappeared tribe, the Anasazis, a Christian religious preacher, illicit diggers of artefacts, unscrupulous dealers, a wealthy buyer in New York, and many more. The action ranges across the 27,000 square miles of the Navajo reservation, a vast area in which children can travel 60 miles to get to school. It covers parts of Arizona, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. The territory is rich in natural resources such as gas and provides fertile ground for academics keen to make their mark. The landscape is as much a feature as the humans portrayed. A low sun making slanted shadows from the juniper trees, the rising moon lighting up the top of the cliffs, coyotes calling out in the night, mesas in the distance, massing thunderclouds overhead chased by the wind, ice crystals glittering in the sun high in the sky above, the descriptions are lyrical. Though intimately acquainted with the land, Hillerman went on a trip down the San Juan river – location hunting – to research the site where the climactic action of A Thief of Time takes place stating, with typical modesty, it saved him from having to imagine the place.
Above all the books describe the Navajo way of life which Hillerman respected and admired. In writing the Navajo mysteries the author was motivated by a desire to give readers an insight into the culture of a people he felt deserved to be better understood. Hillerman did a great deal of research into Navajo myths, legends, rituals, customs and beliefs. He watched ceremonials, read extensively, interviewed experts, asked questions, immersed himself in Navajo culture. He distilled the essence of all this and put it into his writing in such a way that the reader is drawn into this world.
The foundation of the Navajo way of life is the concept of living in harmony with the world. The way of life is non-materialistic, owning what one needs, no more. An aspect of the culture that Hillerman found especially appealing was the lack of value attached to vengeance. The concept of retribution, an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, is alien to Navajo beliefs. Thus Leaphorn uses his police powers wisely and humanely. Making the punishment fit the crime does not always lead to justice. Leaphorn is confronted with this dilemma in A Thief of Time and deals with it to his, and the readers, satisfaction the Navajo way. Chee too is faced with a similar predicament in Sacred Clowns (1993) – a personal favourite - and finds a solution to it, Navajo style, that is humane and just.
Thanks to Hillerman a phrase borrowed from Navajo has entered our family vocabulary. If there has been some disruption or upset, say someone has been unwell, afterwards to indicate all is well again we say ‘restored to harmony’.
10 February 2019
Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee Books
The Blessing Way (1970)
Dance Hall of the Dead (1973)
Listening Woman (1978)
People of Darkness (1980)
The Dark Wind (1982)
The Ghostway (1984)
Skinwalkers (1986)
A Thief of Time (1988)
Talking God (1989)
Coyote Waits (1990)
Sacred Clowns (1993)
The Fallen Man (1996)
The First Eagle (1998)
Hunting Badger (1999)
The Wailing Wind (2002)
The Sinister Pig (2003)
Skeleton Man (2004)
The Shape Shifter (2006)
Anna Karenina (1877) Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
(Translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) Penguin 2000
A writer who can lay claims to have written the novel that defines a nation, would merit the title great. To have written two such novels, with the only disagreement among readers and critics being which of the two deserves this title, lifts the author into the realms of genius. Tolstoy, with War and Peace and Anna Karenina, wrote two novels which both deserve the accolade of the great Russian novel. Choosing between them becomes a matter of individual taste, or, in the case of those who have not read both (mea culpa) opting for the one they have read.
To summarise Anna Karenina as the story of the tragic love affair between Anna and Count Alexei Vronsky, is to reduce it to an absurd degree. In the course of its considerable length the novel sets out a portrait of mid-19th century Russia in all its richness and diversity. The land and its peoples, town and country, landed gentry and peasants, the customs of the time, the issues of the day, every aspect of life is portrayed in detail, which is why it can justly lay claims to being the great Russian novel.
The vehicle for conveying this portrait of life in Russia is a core cast of characters, Anna and Vronsky of course, whose tragic affair is the beating heart of the novel. Running parallel with their story is that of another couple, Princess Katerina (Kitty) and Konstantin Levin, whose happy marriage (after her earlier infatuation with Vronsky has passed) contrasts with that of Anna and Vronsky. There is a third couple, Prince Stepan (Stiva) Oblonsky, married to Kitty’s older sister, Darya (Dolly). Stiva’s extra-marital dalliances are the cause of unhappiness in his family and lead to one of the most famous opening lines in literature. The odd one out is Anna’s husband Karenin. There is a large surrounding cast of characters including Konstantin Levin’s two brothers, a study in contrasts. The older, Nikolai, passionate and intemperate, squanders his fortune and dies young, while Sergei Ivanovich, a half-brother, is learned, intellectual, given to pontificate and is lacking in emotion. There is the large Scherebatsky clan whom Levin finds himself engulfed by when he marries Kitty. Levin’s housemaid, Agafaya, and an old servant, Kuzma are important personages in his household.
The discontent in the Oblonsky household is the trigger for Stepan’s sister, Anna, to come from Petersburg to Moscow for a visit, which sets in motion the events of the novel. She travels with Vronsky’s mother and meets him briefly at the station. A death under the train on which she arrives and a comment by a bystander that it is painless and instantaneous, foreshadows Anna’s fate at the end. The scene is set for the events that are to follow.
There are detailed descriptions of events in ordinary life. The cutting of meadows with scythes, in which Levin joins in with the peasants is vivid and cinematic, an extended piece of prose which brings to mind Robert Frost’s poem 'Mowing'. Provincial elections, bureaucratic procedures and intrigues, which are grist to Karenin’s mill and in which he finds himself bested by a rival, are set out. The Russian orthodox marriage service when Levin marries Kitty is movingly described. There is a detailed account of jam-making in the Levin household. All provide a richly embroidered tapestry of Russia. So vivid are the descriptions that one is drawn into the events and feels no temptation to skip any parts as has been suggested readers do for some of the long stretches of war in War and Peace. Tolstoy put a lot of himself into his characters, for example in Pierre Buzovsky in his other masterpiece and Levin is his most complete self-portrait.
While the principal characters take centre stage, attention is also paid to minor characters. A young woman, Varenka, companion to Mme Stahl, whom Kitty meets when she goes to a German spa with her parents, is kind and helpful to everyone, seemingly an archetype of an old maid, but she too has known (and lost) love in the past. Agafaya’s delight at the birth of Kitty and Levin’s son, Mitya, manifests itself as she shouts louder than the infant. Levin’s old servant, Kuzma can’t understand why Levin needs a clean his shirt when he dresses in his wedding suit, and causes a delay. These are deft human touches that lend warmth to the narrative.
What takes the novel beyond mere narration of events is Tolstoy’s ability to get inside the minds of the characters, his ability to describe what they are doing, also their thought processes and the way their minds work to make them act as they do. Karenin, for example, first agrees to grant Anna a divorce then, after coming under the influence of a Countess Lydia Ivanovna, turns against her. An exceptional demonstration of this ability is in the hunting scene when the author takes us inside the mind of Levin’s dog, Laska, as she senses and smells and seeks out the great snipe.
There is little description of Anna Karenina’s beauty after the first ball at the Scherebatsky’s, when Kitty sees Vronsky succumb to it. Thereafter Anna is only shown in her relations with those around her, with Vronsky, Karenin, her son and others. The next time Anna is described is towards the end. Levin goes to meet her and finds her beautiful and graceful, also intelligent, natural and unaffected, a good listener, and he enjoys being in her company and falls under her spell. Anna is brought before the reader more completely than before thus rendering her death even more tragic.
February 2016
Jean de Florette (1962) & Manon des Sources (1963) Marcel Pagnol (1895 – 1974)
Marcel Pagnol’s works spanned both films and literature. A common thread that ran through his most successful and popular works across the genres was his beloved Provence.
Pagnol was born in Aubagne and spent family holidays during his childhood in the hilly countryside. He wrote about these in four autobiographical works, known collectively as Souvenirs d’enfance, the first two about his father and mother respectively, La Gloire de mon Père and Le Chateau de ma Mère. He knew the countryside and its peoples and their way of life intimately, understood what motivated and moved them. A member of the Académie Française, one of the ‘immortels’, he made the simple folk of the Provençal countryside immortal in works which are classics of French, and world, literature.
One story he heard as a boy he made into a film Manon des Sources (1952). It is the story of an elemental struggle for water in an arid landscape. A decade later, he wrote it up in two volumes Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, known together as L’eau des collines. Set in a small village, in the dry, arid hills of southern Provence, the characters embody cruelty and kindness, miserliness and generosity, they represent human life in all its aspects, good and bad. It is the whole world in a grain of sand. A rich vein of humour runs through the books and food of the region is lovingly described. It is a joyous celebration of life in the countryside of the Provence of Pagnol’s childhood.
The setting, Les Bastides blanche, is a village of some 150 residents. The inhabitants regard their village as the best village in Provence, much superior to bigger places nearby, such as Ruissatel. There is, in particular, hostility going back in time, between the villagers of Les Bastides and neighbouring Crespin. An inflexible rule among the Bastidiennes is never, ever, to interfere in the affairs of other persons.
Jean de Florette is actually Jean Cadoret. With just a handful of surnames in the community, to avoid confusion, persons are identified by the mother’s name, hence he is Jean (son) of Florette. Florette, a local beauty, had moved away to Crespin after marrying a farrier there. Jean, a tax-collector, inherits a decrepit farmhouse and land in the hills on the death of his deceased mother’s brother. This uncle had neglected the land, leaving it uncultivated though there was a spring to irrigate it and had lived a primitive existence subsisting largely on poaching. Jean, a hunchback and thus known as le bossu, decides to move there with his wife and ten year old daughter, Manon. He plans to cultivate the land and breed rabbits as a source of income. He wishes to lead a live of bucolic simplicity.
A neighbour, Ugolin, a small farmer, covets this land on which he wants to grow carnations to sell in nearby Aubagne and make him rich. With his scheming uncle, Cesar Soubeyran, known as Papet (grandfather), they block the spring on the grounds before the arrival of anyone else, so the farm will be worth little and be sold cheaply. Jean’s move to take over the land and live off it, frustrates Ugolin’s plans. On Papet’s advice he befriends Jean and his family, to keep an eye on them.
Initially there is rain, the cistern fills up and Jean sets about energetically working on the land. When he rests from his labours, he plays on his harmonica and his wife, a former singer, accompanies him as she goes about her domestic duties, while the little girl dances barefoot on the grass. At night, before the fire, Jean tells his daughter about the history of France, reads poetry to her or acts out scenes from Molière. Baptistine, a Piemontaise who lives nearby, whose woodcutter husband is often away, befriends the little girl, teaches her how to care for animals, to forage for mushrooms and pine nuts, to gather snails, to set traps to snare birds, and instructs her in the lore of the countryside. Manon grows up a child of the Provençal hills.
The rains, as the villagers well know, are unreliable and Jean soon struggles to water his crops. With only a small cistern to collect water, he is forced to make arduous trips for water to a small holding, also part of his inheritance, where there is a spring of fresh water and a primitive dwelling in which live the Italian woodcutter and Baptistine. Several persons in the Bastides know about the presence of the spring on his land but follow the iron rule of not interfering. The villagers have been told the newcomer is from Crespin but not that he is Florette’s son. Jean for his part knows of the hostility between the two places from his mother and he keeps away from the village.
Jean’s struggle to keep his plants watered and the rabbits fed are at the heart of the novel. Throughout his struggles to keep his plants watered and the exhausting trips he makes to the spring, some 2km distant, his daughter, Manon, is by his side. Unable to make an income from the land, Jean’s savings melt away and he is forced to mortgage his property. His neighbour, Ugolin, in fact Papet who has the resources, advances him the money. Without water Jean cannot go on and in an effort to dig a well or at least a bigger cistern, he resorts to the use of dynamite, which proves fatal.
Papet, who till then has kept out of sight, shows himself to the wife and daughter. They decline Ugolin’s offer to stay on in the farmhouse and move to the cottage constructed near the spring, with the now widowed Baptistine, on land that they still own. With the farm, long coveted, now under their ownership, their plan to see off Jean de Florette, having succeeded, albeit at the cost of his life, the two conspirators see the way clear for Ugolin to proceed with his plans. Ugolin and Papet lose no time and they gleefully unblock the spring which will water the farm. As the water once again flows, unbeknownst to them, they are observed by the girl, Manon. A despairing cry from the heart escapes her lips and echoes around the surrounding hills.
The story continues in the second volume.
Manon des Sources
There are two changes in the cast of characters. The old priest retires and is replaced by a man who, having been with the soldiers in Algeria, was rewarded with the Legion d’Honneur, and is outspoken in his criticism of ungodly behaviour. The old schoolmistress retires and leaves to be with her niece. Her replacement is a young man of 25, Bernard Olivier, who comes to the village with his mother, Magali. The teacher is pleased to take up this post in the remote countryside because he has an interest in mineralogy and intends to collect specimens of local rocks for the edification of his pupils. A secular group continue to meet regularly in the bar run by the mayor, Philoxene, a socialist and an anti-cleric.
With the coveted farm, Romarins, in Ugolin’s possession and the spring unblocked, he and his uncle, Papet, lose no time in setting about cultivating carnations. Ugolin’s friend comes from Antibes to advise on the preparations including some expenditure which Papet readily supplies. Within a few years, the flowers begin to bloom and their sales bring Ugolin the riches he craves.
Meanwhile in the Plantier, the modest dwelling they own, live the 3 women, Manon, her mother, Aimée and Baptistine. Manon grows from a little girl into a young woman, long limbed, bronzed by the sun, with blue eyes and a crown of golden hair, at one with the hills which she knows intimately. She spends her days leading her small troupe of goats into the countryside, accompanied by her faithful dog, Bicou, where she lays traps for birds. While the goats roam, she reads from one of the many books her father has left her. Alert to the smallest sounds she is quick to hide when anyone approaches and thus is able to observe others without being seen herself. She is armed with a sling which she deploys with great accuracy when necessary. Intrigued by the schoolmaster’s behaviour as he searches for rocks, she allows him to approach. He finds her well informed about the minerology of the region.
Papet supports his nephew generously for he is the last of the Soubeyrans and his greatest wish is that Ugolin should marry and have children to carry on the family name. He puts forward some names but Ugolin is not interested. One day, straying far above his usual route in pursuit of a hare, Ugolin sees Manon below and creeps up on her unseen. Having bathed and with her clothes drying beside her on a stone, she is completely naked. As he watches she plays on her harmonica and dances in the sun, joined by a playful goat. Manon is a vision of loveliness and beauty in all its youthful innocence. It is a sublime passage which will remain forever imprinted on the reader’s mind. Poor Ugolin is hopelessly smitten.
While she is hiding, Manon one day overhears a conversation between two of the villagers – Pamphile, the carpenter and Cabridan. She learns the Soubeyrans had blocked the spring on her father’s land and there had been a conspiracy of silence among the villagers. Enraged she wants to avenge herself but her attempt to set fire to Ugolin’s house is foiled by rain. One day, a kid goat straying from the herd, plunges through some thick undergrowth into a narrow passage where the faithful Bicou follows and gets trapped. Manon goes to his rescue and finds the passage opens out into a grotto where there is a spring previously unknown to her. Examining the terrain in the grotto, she realises that this is the source of the precious water that flows into the village. To revenge herself on Papet, Ugolin, and the villagers who had conspired with them, she blocks the source so that the water is diverted and flows elsewhere into the hills.
The stoppage of the water causes consternation in the entire village. They cannot live without water and their crops face ruin. An expert sent to examine the problem is unable to find the cause and arranges for water to be brought by tankers. The priest gives a fiery sermon possibly because, in the confessional, he has learnt the truth. Manon, on a visit to her father’s grave in the village, accuses the Soubeyrans and the villagers of their perfidy. Papet refutes her allegations but his lies are exposed when a witness, who had been hiding in the old house lying in wait for game, comes forward. Alone amidst the villagers, Manon finds support in Bernard and his mother.
Manon rejects Ugolin’s proposal of marriage. Even as a child, she had always been suspicious of him. Unable to bear his unrequited love, Ugolin hangs himself tying the rope to metal rings on a tree to which Manon’s father had attached a swing for her. He bequeaths all his property and wealth to her.
The teacher meanwhile suspects Manon’s role in the sudden stoppage of water when he sees her hit her beloved Bicou with an accurately aimed stone to stop him from going towards the hidden grotto. He persuades her, after the death of Ugolin, that it would be best if the water was restored. He accompanies her one moonlit night and helps her undo the blockage. It brings them together and Manon experiences feelings for the young man such as she has not known before.
Towards the end, one person, Delphine, now widowed and blind, returns to the village to live with her nephew, Ange. Papet and she knew each other when they were young and they sit in the village square and reminisce about old times. One evening she confides in him about events which had occurred during his absence in Algeria. The revelation she makes devastates Papet. Already suffering from the suicide of his nephew, it brings home to him the full extent of his wickedness and completes his misery so he loses the will to live.
For Manon there is a happy ending. She regains possession of her father’s farm, there is marriage to a man she loves and the birth of a son. She christens him Jean. Naturellement.
June 2023
La femme du boulanger Marcel Pagnol 1938 Editions de Fallois
La femme du boulanger, a play set in a small village in Provence in the south of France, with a cast of memorable characters, written almost a century ago, retains the ability to entertain and enchant the reader.
Once embarked on the book was seized by a desire to keep reading to find out how events turn out and a reluctance to go too fast, knowing the pleasure of reading the short, barely 200 pages, dramatic piece would come to an end.
A new baker arrives in the village to replace the previous one who had hanged himself. The importance of bread in the villagers’ diet, the staple food of rural France, means the village baker occupies a crucially important role in the lives of the inhabitants of the village. When there is no bread, everyone suffers, men, women and children, the rich maquis and the poorest peasant alike. The newly installed baker’s bread proves satisfactory and meets the villager’s approval. Within days of his arrival however, a crisis is precipitated. The baker’s wife, some twenty years younger than him, is smitten by a handsome young shepherd, an employee of the maquis. She runs away with him in the early hours of one morning on horseback, on a horse he takes from the maquis’ stable. Her husband’s distress quickly becomes everyone’s problem when, distraught by the loss of his beloved wife, the baker announces that henceforth he will stop baking bread. The prospect of having no bread alarms everyone. The whole village comes together in an endeavour to find the baker’s errant wife and, as he wishes, to bring her back to him.
The baker’s predicament, that of a cuckolded husband, provokes the usual mirth and ridicule. There is also sympathy towards him for his obvious distress and suffering. There is, naturally, criticism for the wife’s adulterous behaviour. There is understanding too for the woman, seized by desires she cannot control, struck by amour fou, who runs away with a bronzed, handsome younger man. The errant wife does not suffer a tragic end as so many heroines in her situation do in literature.
There is a rich cast of characters. The search is led by the maquis whose household includes four young women whom he terms his ‘nieces’. There is a young priest and a schoolteacher, also young, who are at odds with one another, the teacher has leftist views and teaches the theory of evolution, while the priest is a creationist and upholder of the moral authority of the church. The villagers are a cussed lot, some in dispute about trees that cast a shadow on another’s vegetable patch, others not on speaking terms because of enmities that have been passed down the generations, the origins of which have long been forgotten. There is the odd simpleton and eccentric as well. All come together in the search for the titular baker’s wife. The women of the village play their parts and the children form an interested gaggle of spectators in this comedie humaine. The ending is of such tenderness as to melt the hardest of hearts. Even in a reader made of stern stuff resistant to displays of emotion, the very last sentence is sure to bring a moistening of the eyes.
The story is told with wit and humour and filled with compassion for the all the characters portrayed. Humour, like the baker’s yeast which leavens the bread, pervades the narrative, lightens the story, and raises a smile on every page. Compassion for each and every character portrayed runs through the telling of the tale. It is filled with understanding for the foolish, flawed, all too human characters they, and we, all are.
The book shows that great works of literature do not have to be lengthy or weighty tomes. A short work, light as a soufflé, can also touch the hearts and the minds of its readers. Pagnol adapted a short story 'Jean le Bleu' by a Provençal writer he admired, Jean Giono, and turned it into a play. It can be compared to Sayajit Ray’s masterpiece Pather Panchali (1955) in which Ray took the Bengali writer Bibuthi Bhusan Bannerji’s novel set in small village in Bengal and translated it on to the screen. Pagnol’s simple tale of peasants in a small corner of Provence has the ability to reach out across time and distance and touch the reader. It is a work that stands the test of time and will endure.
12 June 2018
Books
Souvenirs d’enfance
La Gloire de mon père 1957
Le Château de ma mère 1957
Le Temps des secrets 1960
Le Temps des amours 1977
L’Eau des collines
Jean de Florette 1962
Manon des sources 1963
Films
La femme du boulanger dir Pagnol 1938
Manon des sources dir Pagnol 1952
Jean de Florette dir Claude Berri 1986
Manon des sources dir Claude Berri 1986
La Gloire de mon père dir Yves Robert 1990
Le Château de mon mère dir Yves Robert 1990
King Ottokar’s Sceptre (1939 black and white, 1947 colour) Hergé - Georges Rémi (1907-1983)
The first Tintin book I read was King Ottokar’s Sceptre, in India at the home of kids of rich parents who could afford to buy expensive books from abroad for them. Though I was an adult, in my mid-twenties at the time, I was captivated by the book. Over the years I managed to get hold of and read the other Tintin books. Reading them now, many decades later, in the original French, I still find them fascinating and am better able to appreciate the craft of the writer.
Georges Rémi, who was Belgian, adopted the penname of Hergé, formed by reversing the initials of his name, RG, as pronounced in French. Hergé was both writer and illustrator which puts him in a category of his own. The Asterix comic books, which also achieved worldwide popularity, were written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Uderzo.
The first appearance of Tintin was in 1930 in Tintin in the land of the Soviets. Over the course of the next half century the adventures of Tintin appeared regularly. There were 23 books in all, the last being Tintin and the Picaros. (Hergé was at work on a 24th book Tintin and the Alph Art which remained unfinished.) Adventures in the Congo and America followed the first book. King Ottokar’s Sceptre was the eighth, and by then Hergé had hit his stride, both in terms of narration and illustration.
Tintin is a true boy hero and he remains the same age throughout all the adventures. He is brave, courageous, intrepid and takes on the dastardly villains wherever he goes. Though not yet a man – what age is he? he can drive a motorcycle, even commandeer and fly an aeroplane without a moment’s hesitation.
Snowy his dog (Milou in the original) is his constant companion, one who shares all his adventures. His thoughts and comments enliven the narrative. He is inclined to grumble at being dragged along in Tintin’s wake. While Tintin is single-minded in his pursuit of the task in hand, Snowy can be easily distracted, particularly by the sight of a bone. He gets into scrapes and escapades from which he has to be extracted but he is also a help at crucial moments. In King Ottokar’s Sceptre, he comes running in with the all-important sceptre when he realises Tintin has dropped it. While Tintin is the perfect hero, Snowy has failings with which we can all identify. The two are inseparable and are together in all the adventures. Bianca Castefiore, the soprano of La Scala Milan, makes a brief appearance here. She became one of the regulars as did Captain Haddock, who appears in the following Tintin book The Crab with Golden Claws, and Professor Calculus, who made his appearance mid-way through the series in Red Rackham’s Treasure.
There is a rich vein of humour running through the books, one of the sources for this being the two detectives, Thompson and Thomson (Dupont and Dupond). They are the Laurel and Hardy of the books, slipping on polished floors, falling off the back of a motorbike, forgetting they are on a seaplane and stepping off into the water. They have an endless capacity for getting into one fine mess after another. Life is never dull when they are around and the reader gleefully awaits their next pratfall. They are black-suited and bowler hatted, pompous and self-important, with a greatly exaggerated faith in their ability to solve the case in hand. Would a king needing to have a stolen sceptre restored, one without which he would lose his throne, send for two such incompetent detectives? Never mind. Readers enjoy their appearance and subsequent antics in Syldavia and are not inclined to ask questions.
Tintin’s adventures are never for personal gain. He endures hardships and dangers and pursues enemies all for a noble cause, such as the return of the stolen sceptre. When the king of Syldavia confers on him the nation’s highest honour, the Order of the Golden Pelican, one never before conferred on a foreigner, the modest hero is visibly embarrassed with beads of sweat falling off his brow.
The inventiveness of the writing is nothing short of marvellous. In King Ottokar’s Sceptre, there is not only the fictitious kingdom of Syldavia, we are also given a potted history of the country which Tintin reads on his way there in an aeroplane. The history gives the origins of the royal dynasty, accounts of major battles, and an indication of the language of the country. A particularly inventive touch is that we are given not only the motto on the coat of arms of the royal house, in the Syldavian language of course, but also the story of how this came to be adopted as the motto. While younger readers may skip these pages in their eagerness to get on with the story, the adult reader feels moved to stand up and applaud and shout bravo!
The intricacy and inventiveness of the story is matched by the brilliance of the illustrations. Drawn in colours that are bright but never garish, they are eye-catchingly attractive, be the eyes those of a child or of a grown-up. It is only as one of the latter however, that one can appreciate the artistry and the attention to detail displayed in every single picture, on every page. The stories by themselves would be enough to enthral; when combined with the illustrations they are irresistible. They appeal to readers of all ages and of all nationalities. The ability to both write such fascinating stories and to provide the illustrations for them makes Hergé unique.
16 May 2019
Leave it to Psmith (1923) PG Wodehouse (1881-1975)
For fans of the great master of humorous writing, PG Wodehouse, amongst whose ranks yours truly belongs, just thinking of his stories leads to a raising of the spirits, while to read any of his books is a guarantee of happiness. Fortunately for his fans, Wodehouse’s output was prodigious and there are ninety-plus books to enjoy.
Amongst the many memorable characters he created, Jeeves and Wooster are perhaps the most celebrated, rightly so. For this reader however, a personal favourite is Psmith – the P is silent. He made his first appearance in an early schoolboy novel set in Wrykyn, a fictional representation of Wodehouse’s alma mater, Dulwich College. He moved to London and the world of work in the next two, Psmith in the City (1910) and Psmith Journalist (1915). In the first three books Psmith is merely limbering up. His finest hour comes in the fourth and last novel, Leave it to Psmith. Unlike Bertie Wooster who is a hapless fellow, getting embroiled in predicaments from which he has to be extricated by his cerebral manservant Jeeves, Psmith on the other hand is dashing and resourceful, a man of action. He is the kind of swashbuckling hero who, in the days of yore, would have come riding up on his white charger and rescued the beautiful damsel from the clutches of the dastardly villain holding her captive in his castle.
Leave it to Psmith takes Psmith to Blandings Castle, the idyllic setting for several of Wodehouse’s novels. Blandings Castle with its meadows and shrubbery, velvet lawns and flower beds, its pleasaunces and messauges, along with a lake on which a young man can take a girl rowing in a boat, and where it is always summer, this surely is the original Eden, as Evelyn Waugh commented, from which we have all been exiled.
Psmith goes to the aid of a damsel in distress, Eve Halliday, caught in the rain without an umbrella. He does so in his own inimitable fashion, choosing the best umbrella he can find at his club, another’s, dashes out to hand it to her and returns without waiting to be thanked. He meets Lord Emsworth, who mistakes him for someone else, and accompanies him to Blandings. At the castle, Lord Emsworth is under siege by the Efficient Baxter. Baxter, eyes gleaming behind his spectacles, has been hired by Lady Constance, Lord Emsworth’s sister, to bring order to the happily muddled life which the droopy, fluffy headed, laird leads, overseeing his large garden and arguing with his head gardener, Angus McAllister, a wrongheaded Scotsman. That other passion in Lord Emsworth’s life, the Empress of Blandings, a Shropshire pig, has yet to make an appearance. Wodehouse was working on a Blandings novel, left unfinished, at his death.
At Blandings there is the usual Wodehousian farrago of an expensive necklace, Lady Constance’s, which various persons wish to steal, Psmith among them. There are several imposters, characters who come to the castle pretending to be someone else. All have their own reasons, some honourable, Psmith naturally, others not, for getting their hands on the jewels. The assembled company includes Freddie Threepwood, Lord Emsworth’s younger son, Eve Halliday, hired by the Efficient Baxter to catalogue the library, and a couple of small time American crooks armed, as any self-respecting American lawbreakers would be, with pistols. Psmith, immaculately dressed, monocle in one eye, languid of manner and eloquent of speech, moves through the ensuing complications with aplomb. His quick wits enable him to stay ahead of the game and he springs into action when necessary. His besting of the Efficient Baxter is a comic highlight in the Wodehouse oeuvre. Along the way he woos and wins the hand of the woman he loves, Eve Halliday.
Aye there’s the rub. A happily married Psmith would have his ability to dash about the English countryside like a modern day knight errant, coming to the rescue of his friends and seeing off the likes of the Efficient Baxter, severely curtailed. Wodehouse was careful not to make the same mistake with Bertie Wooster, who gets engaged on numerous occasions, often inadvertently and against his will, but never marries and remains single. Leave it to Psmith was Psmith’s finest hour and, alas, his final appearance in the Wodehouse canon.
There may be other writers with claims to be the greatest writer of humorous prose in English literature. In one aspect PG Wodehouse reigns supreme. His works have brought more happiness to readers than any other writer of comic fiction in the English language.
6 August 2018
Out of Africa (1937) Karen Blixen (1885-1962)
Out of Africa is Karen Blixen’s lyrical account of living in Kenya, in the Ngong hills near Nairobi, where she managed a coffee farm. She spent the years 1914 – 1931 there at a time when Kenya was still a British colony. Her empathy with the land and its peoples shines through the book.
A family concern owned 6000 acres of land in Kenya of which 600 acres was planted with coffee. She went out to Africa, after her marriage to Bror Blixen, a cousin, where she was in charge of the running of the farm. It was an unhappy marriage which soon disintegrated. She deals with her absent and unfaithful husband by omitting him almost entirely, except for one mention, from the book.
She felt an immediate connection with the local tribes: ‘from my first weeks in Africa, I had felt a great affection for the Natives ..that embraced all ages and both sexes. The discovery of the dark races was to me a magnificent enlargement of all my world.’
She got involved with the lives of the various people with whom she came into contact. She had an evening school on the farm, with a Native schoolmaster to teach. She acted as a sort of doctor to the sick, running a clinic most mornings for an hour, at which, knowing little more than first aid, she dispensed some rudimentary medicine. She attended Kyamas, an assembly of the squatters on the farm, authorised by the government to settle local differences amongst the squatters. Most spectacular were the Ngomas, big Native dances, held on level ground near the house, in which as many as fifteen hundred or two thousand persons might participate.
She came into contact with members of several tribes and nationalities. On the vast acres of land owned by the family concern there were squatters, mainly Kikiyu who, in return for living on the land worked on the farm for some days of the year. Another tribe were the Masai who lived on an adjoining reservation. They always walked in single file, a striking image. Her faithful servant, Farah, was a Somali and a devout Muslim. His family included several women and she writes dispassionately and with sympathy of the position of Somali women, which to outsiders seems very restricted. Pooran Singh, the blacksmith on the farm, was an Indian.
Hunting was an essential part of living in Africa in those days. Though she did not participate in safaris to hunt big game, she was called upon to shoot lions which killed animals and people living on her land and she became a reasonable shot. She showed great personal courage at these times, on occasion coming within very close range of these animals. Riding was one of her great pleasures. On the other side of the farm, in the Masai reserve, ‘lay before you a hundred miles’ gallop over grass and open undulating land; there was not a fence nor a ditch, and no road.’ On the rides she would encounter herds of gazelles or eland.
During long solitary evenings at the farm she turned to writing stories (she had done some writing earlier). She wrote at her dining table surrounded by paperwork, including farm accounts. One of her workers, a young man named Kamante, is disbelieving when she tells him she is writing a book. For him books were bound works like those on her shelf, not a mass of papers spread out on the table. She read avidly whatever she could lay her hands on, as the author would have wished the book to be read. On the other hand when a book turned out to be disappointing, her displeasure was heightened.
While in Africa, she met the great love of her life, Denys Finch-Hatton, an English aristocrat, an old Etonian and a free spirit. With no fixed abode, he made her house his home when he returned from various safaris. It was to him she first read her stories. When his light aircraft, in which he had taken her up many times, crashed and he was killed, she was devastated. He was buried on a site he had chosen himself, on a high point in the Ngong hills, with panoramic views of the countryside around. Later she learns that lions visit the grave and notes that Lord Nelson has only stone lions on his monument in Trafalgar Square.
The farm was not a success. The land was too high up for coffee cultivation and she was probably not a good manager. It was sold along with the house, including furniture she had brought from Denmark, which was bought for a library in Nairobi. Today her house is a museum and the furniture has been restored so that it is as it was when she lived in it.
When the coffee farm failed and she left to return to Denmark the natives say to her, not that they will remember her, instead that she will remember them. A white person would say – I cannot forget you. ‘The African says: We do not think of you, that you can ever forget us.
’
Living in Denmark, she recalled the land with its magnificent geography and wildlife and, most of all, the Natives who inhabited this part of the world. ‘The Natives were Africa in flesh and blood.’ She put them down unforgettably in writing in a work that is a classic of world literature.
26 January 2024
Films
Out of Africa (1985) was made into a film with Meryl Streep, giving a polished performance, in the role of Karen Blixen. The film was both popular and critically acclaimed. It fails however to convey the spirit of the book for it places the white community in Kenya centre stage while the Africans, whom the book portrays with such eloquence and sympathy, are relegated to the sidelines. Denys Finch Hatton, the quintessential Englishman, is portrayed as an American, for the star, Robert Redford, was incapable of mastering the necessary English accent.
Better cinematic representations of her work, based on two stories, are European films. Babette’s Feast (1987) directed by Gabriel Axel in which Stephane Audrane plays a noted chef from France, who spends her entire lottery winnings on a magnificent feast she cooks in the Norwegian household of two Puritan sisters. A much later film is Ehrengard (2023) directed by the eminent Danish director, Billie August. The then Queen Margarethe of Denmark was closely involved and gets two mentions in the films credits.
‘Babette’s Feast’ was first published in 1958 in the collection of short stories, Anecdotes of Destiny. ‘Ehrengard’ was published first in the US.
Pride and Prejudice (1813) Jane Austen (1775-1817)
A guaranteed way to destroy a young person’s enjoyment of a book is to teach it in a pedantic way in a school curriculum. Though Pride and Prejudice was a set text at my school, not only did Austen survive the dull teaching, I went on to read all her works among which Pride and Prejudice remains my favourite.
Austen’s reputation rests on 6 novels plus an epistolary work, Lady Susan, a couple of unfinished works and some juvenilia. She referred to Pride and Prejudice, the novel she wrote (though not published) first as ‘her own darling child’. Eliza Bennet was the author’s favourite character ‘as delightful a character as appeared in print’ a verdict with which millions have since agreed.
Pride and Prejudice begins with one of the most famous opening lines in English literature of which the first six words ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’ must rank among the most quoted in the English language. It required great self-control not to begin this piece with those words.
Bingley whose arrival at Netherfield Hall accompanied by his friend Darcy, gives rise to the famous opening lines, sets in motion the events of the novel. In the Bennet family living nearby are five daughters and getting them married, no matter to whom, is Mrs Bennet’s aim in life. Bingley and the eldest Bennet girl, Jane, fall in love and their affair follows the usual pattern in that the course of true love does not run smooth. For Elizabeth, the second Bennet girl, and Darcy, Austen upends the usual convention and it is the process of falling in love which is beset with obstacles. The first impressions – Austen’s original title for the novel - they form of each other are unfavourable. Darcy is haughty and aloof, a man of few words and Elizabeth forms a poor opinion of him. These initial impressions have to be overcome, Darcy’s pride humbled and Eliza’s prejudices removed, before the desired happy ending is achieved.
Among the other arrivals in the neighbourhood is a regiment of militia, much to the delight of the two youngest Bennet girls, Kitty and Lydia. The middle daughter, Mary, is a dull stay at home type. The militia men are joined by a new recruit, Wickham, who turns out to be a former acquaintance of Darcy. Darcy, true to character, is tight-lipped about his relationship with Wickham, while the latter is quick to tell Eliza that he has been wronged by Darcy. Wickham is good-looking, has pleasing manners and Eliza finds herself attracted to him and further prejudiced against Darcy.
Elizabeth is lively and energetic and thinks nothing of walking alone, even across muddy fields, in the countryside. She is intelligent and quick witted, possessed of a spirited nature. Mr Collins on whom, for want of a male heir, the family estate is entailed, comes calling and proposes to Elizabeth, a proposal which she turns down with as much civility as she can muster. Mr Collins is one of English literature’s great comic creations. He is pompous and prolix with an overweening sense of self-importance combined with extreme obsequiousness towards his patroness Lady Catherine de Bourgh. A more surprising proposal comes from Darcy who, attracted by Eliza’s beauty and intelligence, couches his offer of marriage in such insulting words, stressing the lack of status of her family members and the manners of her mother and younger sisters, that she rejects it in a forthright manner.
Darcy’s attitude is markedly different when he meets her by chance at his estate in Pemberley in the company of her aunt and uncle, the Gardiners. Her opinion is softened by his behaviour there, towards her and towards her relatives. It is changed completely after she learns of his role in arranging matters between deceitful Wickham and giddy Lydia, who run away together. Darcy goes to some lengths and intervenes to ensure they are respectably married and his true worth is revealed to Eliza.
An extraneous force however is required to bring the two together. This is provided by the officious, bossy and interfering Lady Catherine de Bourgh who, by forbidding the match - Darcy she declares is meant to marry her daughter – provides the means to bring the two together. Lady Catherine’s bossiness achieves the opposite of what she intended. It clarifies for Eliza her feelings and gives Darcy hope his proposal will not be rejected a second time. Eliza Bennet’s confrontation with Lady Catherine is one of the highlights of the novel. We have all been put upon by persons like Lady Catherine who, given their wealth, position, age or situation feel superior to us and impose on us and interfere in our lives.
Unusually, Jane Austen provides a postscript on the lives of the characters after the various marriages have taken place. Wickham and Lydia continue to live irresponsibly as before. Jane and Bingley settle, at some distance from Mrs Bennet and near Pemberley. Then the two sisters, who have a close relationship (as did Jane Austen and her beloved sister Cassandra) can visit each other frequently, thus making their happiness complete.
The true test of a writer’s genius is not whether he or she is feted during his or her lifetime – literary prizes received, rave reviews, fortunes earned – it is posterity. After the author, and those who lavished praise on it, are long dead and gone, if the books continue to be read by each new generation, then one can with certainty bestow the title of greatness. Jane Austen was virtually unknown during her lifetime. She modestly described her writing to be about ‘2 or 3 families in a country setting’. In this microcosm of English society she captured the essence of human behaviour, ‘the whole world in a grain of sand’ as William Blake put it. In the subsequent years the world has been transformed and social interactions are so different from the genteel ways depicted in Austen’s books they could be from another planet. Yet her writings continue to appeal to generations far removed from her own. A quarter of a century after her death her works continue to be read and enjoyed, and the author herself adored.
31 March 2019
Jane Austen 1775-1817
Novels
Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Mansfield Park (1814)
Emma (1816)
Northanger Abbey (1817)
Persuasion (1818)
Lady Susan (1794)- epistolary novella
Sanditon - unfinished work
The Watsons - unfinished work
Film and Television
There are numerous screen representations of Austen's works.
Pride and Prejudice 1995 BBC TV miniseries 6 episodes.
An outstanding series. The screenplay by Andrew Davies is faithful to the book with lines of dialogue lifted straight from it. The 6 episodes allow the various strands of the story to be brought out. Excellent production and acting.
Still William (1928) Richmal Crompton (1890-1969)
I discovered William at the age of 12 when I was sent to boarding school which had a small library. I borrowed a book of William stories, knowing nothing about it and was immediately captivated. Thereafter as soon as I had finished reading one - we were only allowed to borrow one book at a time – I would immediately go back for another William book, which the librarian, one of the school teachers, would bring out for me with an approving smile. I read eagerly in the little precious free time we were allowed, sitting on a chair by my bed in the girls dormitory. I worked my way steadily through the school library’s stock of the William books. I enjoyed reading them when I was in my early teens and still enjoy them half a century later. There are superlative readings of the stories broadcast from time to time on BBC radio. When the readings are live, such as at literary festivals, the audience is made up of adults, for the stories appeal to all ages.
The first collection of William stories, Just William, appeared in 1922. The William books continued to appear over the next 50 years, a total of 38 books with the last, William the Lawless published posthumously in 1970. Throughout this period William remained 11 years old and the ages of those around him also did not change.
William’s father, Mr Brown, who works in the city, takes a stern view of his youngest son. Mrs Brown, his mother, is the only person whose faith that there is some latent good in William remains unshaken despite all evidence to the contrary. William’s siblings are an older brother Robert, who is besotted by a succession of young women whom he woos unsuccessfully and an older sister Ethel, who is courted by many young men. William regards his older siblings romantic affairs with scorn. Ethel is bossy, makes him wash ‘She objected to William’s hair and to William’s hands and to William’s face’ and ‘Ethel is one of William’s permanent grievances against Life’. Robert bears the brunt of William’s meddling in his affairs. By far the worst things happen when William sets out to be good and help others. Following a talk at the school by an old boy in ‘William turns over a new leaf’ he decides to live a life of self –denial and service to his family. He helps Robert by telling the wrong girl he loves her, says Ethel is ill, with epilepsy and consumption, as an excuse to avoid a social visit, while his attempts to help in the cook’s absence ruins the family’s dinner and leaves the kitchen in a mess. Following a Christmas sermon from the vicar on the need to cast aside all deceit William resolves to tell the truth always . He tells elderly relations he does not like the presents they give him and the ones he gives them are unwanted gifts the family has received, thus horrifying everyone.
William’s friends are his gang of Outlaws, Ginger, Henry and Douglas of whom he is the undisputed leader. He is accompanied by his faithful dog, the aptly named mixture of many breeds, Jumble. The Outlaws usual meeting place is an old barn where their favourite games are Pirates and Red Indians. Joan, dark eyed, dark haired and adorable – was Richmal Crompton herself a brunette? - who lives next door is the only girl he likes and is admitted to the Outlaws games when a female person is required. The Outlaws roam round the village and its environs trespassing in fields and provoking the wrath of the farmers. In woods they climb trees, roll about in fallen piles of leaves and jump over streams, often falling in. As a consequence William generally appears liberally covered with mud and dirt, his hair sticking out and his clothes awry. As befits his position as leader William suggests activities. These include digging for gold in ‘The Haunted House’ overcoming objections from the others -‘how do you know we shan’t find any’. He is also quick to seize any opportunities that fate throws in his way - a bath chair lying temptingly empty in the street in ‘William and Uncle George’ which he commandeers with predictably chaotic consequences. The Outlaws enemies are the enormously fat Hubert Lane, who makes only a brief appearance here, eating of course, and his gang the Laneites.
There was one person who proved William’s nemesis, Violet Elizabeth Bott, 6 years old, angelic in appearance with golden curls and blue eyes and possessed of a childish lisp, all of which mask a ruthless disposition. She was absent in the early books but made her appearance in Still William, when the Hall, a mansion in the village, is rented by the Bott family. Immediately afterwards the Botts became owners of the Hall as Richmal Crompton saw the comic potential of having a nouveau riche family with pretentions to move up in society living in the village. In ‘The Sweet Little Girl in White’ William encounters Violet Elizabeth for the first time and she blackmails William and the Outlaws by her ability to summon up tears at will. This quiet and rather tame threat was refined soon after as she, and the author, replaced it by one more menacing and with a higher decibel count. Violet Elizabeth says she will ‘ thcream and thcream till I am thick’ a threat made more ominous by adding ‘I can’. William has no alternative but to capitulate. After her first appearance Violet Elizabeth stayed on amongst the regular cast of characters, to plague William and to delight readers.
I rediscovered the stories when my son was growing up as I hope will his sons in due course. The stories are timeless. Through them all William’s reluctance to submit to authority, his free spirit remain undaunted. William, forever 11 years old, is a boy of whom, to paraphrase Shakespeare, one can say ‘Age cannot wither him nor custom stale his infinite variety’.
26 September 2018
List of William books
Just William (1922)
More William (1922)
William Again (1923)
William the Fourth (1924)
Still William (1925)
William the Conqueror (1926)
William the Outlaw (1927)
William in Trouble (1927)
William the Good (1928)
William (1929)
William the Bad (1930)
William's Happy Days (1930)
William's Crowded Hours (1931)
William the Pirate (1932)
William the Rebel (1933)
William the Gangster (1934)
William the Detective (1935)
Sweet William (1936)
William the Showman (1937)
William the Dictator (1938)
William and Air Raid Precautions (1939) (also published as William's Bad Resolution)
William and the Evacuees (1940) (also published as William and the Film Star)
William Does His Bit (1941)
William Carries On (1942)
William and the Brains Trust (1945)
Just William's Luck (1948)
William - the Bold (1950)
William and the Tramp (1952)
William and the Moon Rocket (1954)
William and the Space Animal (1956)
William's Television Show (1958)
William the Explorer (1960)
William's Treasure Trove (1962)
William and the Witch (1964)
William and the Pop Singers (1965)
William and the Masked Ranger (1966)
William the Superman (1968)
William the Lawless (1970)
Audiobooks
Just William BBC Radio Collected Stories 1 read by Martin Jarvis
Just William BBC Radio Collected Stories 2 read by Martin Jarvis
That they may face the rising sun (2002) John McGahern (1934-2006)
John McGahern was nominated for the Booker prize, Britain’s highest literary accolade, for Amongst Women (1990), a novel with which is name is invariably linked. While the Booker is an indicator of quality, it does not necessarily mark the author’s best work. McGahern, like his contemporary Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) saved the best for his last novel. John McGahern in his last work of fiction wrote about the present in his native Ireland, close to home. It is a literary masterpiece of the late 20th century.
The book has autobiographical elements. McGahern, whose mother’s dearest wish had been for him to be ordained, abandoned studying for the priesthood. He came back, like Ruttledge, to settle close to where he was born, beside a lake in County Leitrim in an otherwise unremarkable corner of Ireland, not on any tourist trail nor in any guidebooks. After his death he was buried, according to his wishes, in the grave beside his mother.
The title refers to the tradition of placing the bodies in graves with the head pointing west and the feet east, so that when the dead arise on the day of resurrection they would face the rising sun. The narrative is not broken up into chapters. It is a seamless description of the members of a rural community residing around a lake in County Leitrim (the American title of the book is the more prosaic Beside the Lake). It takes us through the lives of the residents as the months pass and the seasons change. Slowly, surely, the reader is drawn into the lives of the various characters in this small corner of Ireland. The book casts a spell so when one nears the end there is a reluctance to finish the book for it means that one has to leave the lake and the people one has got to know so well in its pages. This happened to me the first time I read the book and the same reluctance returned on subsequent readings. The book is a detailed portrait of life in the Irish countryside, in all its beauty and also its harshness and cruelty. It is a lyrical description of life in rural Ireland. McGahern did for the Irish countryside what James Joyce did for the city of Dublin.
The reader is introduced to the many characters. There is Joe Ruttledge, who with his wife Kate, an outsider, runs a small farm and earns money from writing commissions. Bill Evans, a foundling, ill treated all his life, is made to slave in the house above them, ‘Christ hadn’t much worse time on the road to Calvary’. Across the lake live Jamesie and his wife Mary, friends of Ruttledges who help each other out. Jamesie’s brother Johnny, who followed a woman he loved to London and stayed on after she threw him over, comes home every summer. Ruttledge’s uncle, known as the Shah, illiterate, has grown rich running a scrapyard on the site of the old railway station. Among others there are James Quinn a shameless philanderer, Patrick Ryan, a builder who travels all over the country, Jimmy Joe McKiernan, an IRA activist, and the local priest, Father Conroy.
There are detailed descriptions of events that punctate a farming life – the birth of a calf; the selling of lambs, which are slaughtered and skinned immediately before the price paid for them is determined; the big cattle auction with coded signals of the bidders and the rhythmic calls of the auctioneer. The description of haymaking - which has to be done during the dry days of summer with an anxious eye on the weather - the cutting of grass in the meadows, spreading it out to dry, then baling it and stacking it in the shed, is a symphony in prose. Festivals mark the passing of the year. At Christmas the town is lit up, midnight mass is held in the church, visits are made, presents exchanged. At Easter in addition to the Christian rites, there is a ceremony to mark the Easter uprising of 1916. There are wonderful words and expressions in the speech of the characters. A rich person is one with plenty of washers, a foolish one an eejit or an omadhaun, everything in order is said to be alphabetical, a person who turns his coat is one who converts to Catholicism, ‘yous’ is used as the plural of you, conversations are cut short with a curt - that’ll do now.
A book that has chronicled the life of a community ends, fittingly, with a death, that of an unremarkable person, but one mourned by those close to him. People gather to pay their respects. The rituals are observed, the clocks stopped, the body laid out. The grave is dug so that the body will lie in it with the head to the west and the feet pointing east. After the funeral and the period of mourning, the clocks are restarted and life resumes. Change comes in the shape of telephone poles being erected to connect the houses to the outside world. The half-constructed shed in Ruttledge’s garden will finally be finished, or it may not. Life by the lake will go on as before.
The writing is deceptively simple. There is no complicated structure to the narrative, no flashy prose, no references, learned or literary, only one, JM Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, a play in which some of the characters have acted. There is nothing that the people of the community it depicts would not understand. The book is put together in a way that makes it appear effortless. It is the kind of effect which can only be achieved with a great deal of skill and work on the part of the writer.
John McGahern said he was fascinated by the everyday and ordinary and in his last novel he made the ordinary extraordinary. He made the everyday life of rural Ireland a source of wonder for the reader.
4 November 2019
Amongst Women 1990
That they may face the rising sun 2002
Memoir 2005
The Blue Flower ( 1995) Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000)
Penelope Fitzgerald’s career as a writer began late when she was nearly 60. Over the course of the next 20 years she wrote 3 biographies, 9 novels and a collection of short stories, published posthumously. Her talent was immediately evident and she won the UK’s top literary award, the Booker prize, for Offshore (1979) and was nominated for 3 other novels The Bookshop (1978), The Beginning of Spring (1988) and The Gate of Angels (1990). However she saved her best work for the last. Her final novel The Blue Flower (1995) is both her greatest work of fiction and a masterpiece of late 20th century literature.
The Blue Flower tells of the early years of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), before he went on to achieve fame as the Romantic poet Novalis, and of his doomed love for the girl child, Sophie von Kuhn. The reader’s attention is grabbed at the beginning by the book’s unforgettable opening scene in which we are plunged into an alien world, that of 18th century Prussia. Other writers have penned memorable opening sentences - Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Tolstoy to name a few. Penelope Fitzgerald went one better and wrote a memorable opening paragraph, of washday in the Hardenberg household, which remains indelibly etched on the mind of anyone who reads the book.
Each short chapter is densely packed with information relating to the period: religion – the austere practices of the Moravians to which the Hardenbergs belonged; philosophy – the ideas of Fichte whose student Fritz was at Jena; medicine – the treatments advocated by Dr Brown of Edinburgh; living conditions with detailed descriptions of household arrangements in all the houses portrayed; social mores such as the charitable gifts at Christmas to the poor and needy; descriptions of the rolling countryside with its crops of potatoes, turnips and hard white cabbages for pickling; all so effortlessly conveyed that the reader takes it all in almost subconsciously. It is touched on so lightly it does not show, but burnishes the lives of the characters. We follow eagerly the events in which they figure, not noticing the fine detail with which the world they inhabit is set out on the printed page. Penelope Fitzgerald did a great deal of research then buried it deep. In an author’s note she acknowledges studying the five volumes of the collected papers of Friedrich von Hardenberg. There is evidence she read much more. Hardenberg was sent by his father to learn about the administration of mining salt, and Penelope Fitzgerald, according to her contemporary, AS Byatt, read the reports of the salt mines from cover to cover. From the wealth of material she studied, absorbed would be a better word, she picked out just the right details that convey a sense of the past. From the perfectly chosen epigraph 'Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history' - Novalis, there is not a spare word or fact or sentence, everything earns its place in the telling of the tale. ‘As a hopelessly addicted writer of short books, I have to try to see to it that every confrontation and every dialogue has some reference to what I hope will be understood as the heart of the novel,’ Penelope Fitzgerald wrote.
The characters are vividly portrayed, as much in the dialogue as in their actions, so they come to life on the printed page. Fritz’s poetic bent of mind, his mother’s timidity, sister Sidonie’s independence of spirit, the youngest brother, the Bernhard’s, irrepressible spirits, Sophie’s immaturity and Karoline Just’s prosaic character, all these are revealed both in their behaviour and in their speech. Running through the book are flashes of ironic wit, a quintessential Penelope Fitzgerald touch, from which no one, not even the great Goethe, who has a walk on part, is spared. Her writing shows up the absurdity of the human condition which touches us all and from which none of us can escape. She writes with eyebrow metaphorically quizzically raised, as if asking, aren’t we members of the human race just a bit ridiculous? Evelyn Waugh dubbed PG Wodehouse the great master, citing the latter’s ability to conjure up three original similes on a single page. In The Blue Flower it is possible to find on one page all three Penelope Fitzgerald trademark flourishes - a telling period detail, a remark revealing of a person’s character and a flash of sardonic wit.
All this is put together in an elliptical manner that appears deceptively simple and which defies analysis. Fritz arrives home accompanied by his friend, Dietmahler, a medical student. The dramatic circumstances of their first meeting are described much later while the answer to the question put to Dietmahler by Fritz’s father, as to whether his eldest son Friedrich had entangled himself with a young woman of the middle classes, is only revealed some hundred pages afterwards. The writing is clever in a way that cannot be easily categorised, such as a reworking of King Lear or Antigone in a modern setting, nor is it showily clever as is the case with many modern writers. The writing is of a quiet, understated brilliance. Her method is as elusive as the meaning of the blue flower, the more one tries to reach out and grasp it, the more it escapes one’s understanding. The question most often asked of her writing is – how did she do it?
What makes it such a masterpiece? The first time one reads it eagerly, captivated by the characters in the story, eager to know how they will fare. After that one reads it again and again, marvelling at the virtuosity with which the tale is told, discovering something new each time so richly packed is the novel and, on each reading, delighting in it anew.
22 July 2018
Novels
The Golden Child (1977)
The Bookshop (1978)
Offshore (1979)
Human Voices (1980)
At Freddie's (1982)
Innocence (1986)
The Beginning of Spring (1988)
The Gate of Angels (1990)
The Blue Flower (1995)
Short story collection
The Means of Escape (2000)
‘The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown’- The World of Damon Runyon (1880 - 1946)
Damon Runyon’s style is instantly recognisable. He threw out the rules of English grammar and adopted his own unique way of writing. He wrote exclusively in the present tense, whether describing events in the past, the present or the future. This lends the stories a sense of immediacy so the reader is transported alongside the characters and is with them as the events unfold. The style is deceptively simple as any attempt to write even a few sentences in it will quickly demonstrate. In a lesser writer it might have proved an irritating affectation. Damon Runyon does it with wit and flair which renders it charming. There are more than 80 stories with the eternal themes of love and money. This reader, a lifelong fan of novels, was won over by the very first story read.
The stories, which on the surface are simple tales, are in fact carefully crafted. They are recounted by an unnamed narrator who is either present or is told about what happens – ‘I am known to one and all as a guy who is just around’. The narration is full of wit and wisecracks, about the characters and their shenanigans, a rich vein humour pervades the stories and is to be found on every page. A notable feature of the stories is that at the conclusion of each there is a punch line. This gives the events that have unfolded an added oomph and elicits from the reader a satisfied aaahh.
There is tremendous inventiveness in the names of the characters, or rather the nicknames by which they are known – policemen and journalists are exempt - and the reasons these were acquired, among them Angie the Ox, Big False Face, the Humming Bird, the Lemon Drop Kid, Last Card Louie. Some characters, known thereafter only by their monikers, appear in several stories, among them Dave the Dude, Harry the Horse, Big Jule. A policeman, Johnny Brannigan, who appears in several stories, is not unsympathetic to the crooks he pursues, for he grew up in the same poor neighbourhood. The usual place the characters hang out is Mindy’s and the food there is lovingly described, including some gefilte fish, Hungarian goulash, ham hocks and sauerkraut or some cold borscht on a hot day. Around and about are the nightclubs, the Hot Box, Good Time Charley’s, The Three Hundred Club, where the dolls mostly work. These are frequented by all the citizens of New York including those with plenty of money to spend. And into this mix is thrown in the Salvation Army which did move into the area and gave the writer material for one of his best known stories.
The world of Damon Runyon is set mainly in a few square miles of mid-town Manhattan in and around Broadway. The majority of the tales are set in the era of prohibition which lasted from 1920 to 1933 when gambling too was illegal, offering plenty of opportunities for the characters to put together a little scratch money. Carrying firearms is illegal though many do, this is America after all. These small-time crooks are not criminals but law-breakers, given the unreasonableness of the laws against drinking and gambling. Damon Runyon’s sympathy and affection for these petty crooks is evident throughout. There is some killing, by the truly bad characters and some of the stories are very dark. While the setting is Manhattan, characters also come from its environs in Harlem, Brooklyn and Jersey City. They also roam far and wide across the US as Sky Masterson does, going to New Orleans, Chicago and Los Angeles, wherever there is any action. The crooks have their own code of conduct which includes not welshing on gambling debts. They are hopelessly in thrall to the dolls they love and fiercely protective of their own kind. The old cliché of the prostitute with a heart of gold is turned on its head with many of these hoodlums demonstrating solid 24 carat gold hearts.
The language used is colourful with words not to be found in any dictionary, among them phonus bolonus, strictly the old ackamarackus or phedinkus, all synonyms for false but more expressive. It wasn’t only English grammar Runyon took liberties with. Someone rich is one with plenty of potatoes or coconuts, and cash is old fashioned folding money and also black ink. The inventiveness goes on and on and with it the pleasure of reading. Descriptions are wonderfully expressive such as ‘a doll with 100 per cent eyes’ (Miss Sarah Brown) or accurate and funny ‘a very, very beautiful young doll who is about forty percent in and sixty percent out of an evening gown’. Sentimentality is held at bay with humour ‘Little Alfie holds her so close to his chest he ruins four cigars in his vest pocket’.
Several of Runyon’s stories were made into movies. The most successful, first a play (1950), on Broadway fittingly, then a movie Guys and Dolls (1955) put aside all attempts to transfer the story literally to the screen. It captured the joyous spirit of the stories by turning it into a musical. It kept the essence of the central love story between Sky - real name Obadiah, known as Sky because of his willingness to bet as high as the heavens – Masterson and Sarah Brown, a member of the Salvation Army. It brought in characters from other stories – Dave the Dude, Harry the Horse, Big Jule, the cop Johnny Brannigan - and borrowed elements from others, in particular the dice game from ‘Blood Pressure’. Yet, and yet, despite all its entertainment value and even including some lines straight from the printed version, the story itself is better. It ends not with a wedding but with the trademark Damon Runyon killer punch line – aaahh.
After he died, according to his wishes, Runyon’s ashes were scattered from a plane over Manhattan. The city has been transformed in the years since but the world he created in the stories is eternal, to be enjoyed forever.
18 November 2018
Books
On Broadway Picador 1975
From First to Last Picador 1975
These two omnibus collections include all Runyon's stories.
Film
Guys and Dolls Music and Lyrics Frank Loesser dir Joseph L Mankiewicz1955
Waiting for the Mahatma (1955) R K Narayan 1906-2001
RK Narayan wrote about what he knew, the India he lived in and the people who inhabited it. He said he had to only look out of his window to find a story. To him every person had a life that was interesting and he wrote about as many of these characters as he could in his novels and short stories. He built up a portrait of India recognisable to those who lived and grew up there and provided a unique insight into the people of the subcontinent for outsiders. In a long life and a writing career that spanned decades, from pre-independence India to modern times, he provided portraits of characters from all strata of Indian society. He presents a kaleidoscopic, ever changing, fascinating picture of India and its people. To read RK Narayan is to get to know India in all its multifaceted complexity. Graham Greene wrote of Narayan ‘without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian.”
A prolific writer he wrote 14 novels and numerous short stories, all set in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. He was also the author of several works of non-fiction, mainly memoirs and travel books, plus translations of the two epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and of a collection of Hindu myths.
One of RK Narayans’s most popular and successful novels, Waiting for the Mahatma interweaves the personal story of a young couple, Sriram and Bharati with the events leading up to Indian independence. Sriram, having lost both his parents at a young age has been brought up by his grandmother. She saves his father’s army pension – he was killed in Mesopotamia – and with no pressing need to earn a living, he idles away his days. The country is in a ferment with calls for independence from British rule, led by Gandhi, known as the Mahatma, the great soul. Sriram is captivated by a young woman, Bharati, collecting funds for Gandhi’s visit to the town of Malgudi. Wanting to see more of her, he goes to hear the Mahatma speak. Through Bharati he joins Gandhi’s followers and is drawn into the cause for Indian independence.
The portrait of Gandhi is sharply drawn – his iron morality, his espousal of the cause of the poorest including the untouchables, his restless energy, his doing several tasks simultaneously including spinning yarn, dictating letters and meeting people.
After Gandhi leaves, Sriram becomes a foot soldier in the army for independence. He lives in an abandoned shrine outside Malgudi spreading Gandhi’s message to the small villages in the surrounding hills. Bharati provides the link to the movement. He is assigned to paint the slogan Quit India, Gandhi’s clarion cry to the British to leave, in the villages. He finds the villagers concerned with matters of their day to day lives and largely indifferent to the cause. Once he comes face to face with the enemy, a British plantation owner, who invites him in and gently points out to Sriram that he has lived in the country longer than the young man. Gandhi is imprisoned by the British and Bharati tells Sriram he has told all his followers to give themselves up to be jailed. Sriram declares his love for her and says he wants to marry her. She agrees if Gandhi gives his consent.
Sriram stays on at the abandoned shrine. He is visited by Jagdish, a photographer in Malgudi who brings him a radio to be kept hidden in the shrine. Sriram listens to broadcasts by Subhash Chandra Bose, who had fled to Japan and was raising an army to fight the British, and makes copies to be distributed among the population. Led by Jagdish, Sriram becomes involved in terrorist attacks, setting fire to government buildings, exploding crude bombs and derailing trains. He becomes a wanted man with his face on posters offering a reward. Jagdish helps him alter his appearance and arranges for him to meet Bharati in jail. She sends instead a message that he should go to meet his grandmother who is unwell. When he goes to see his grandmother, he finds she is dead. The shopkeeper opposite, who had kept an eye on the old lady, makes arrangements for her funeral. As the pyre is to be lit, she shows signs of life and turns out to be alive after all. In the ensuing commotion the police arrive, arrest Sriram and cart him off to jail.
In the jail, since he is not a political prisoner, Sriram is put in a cell with common criminals. He has a visit from the fund manager who informs him his grandmother has rented out the family home. She has gone to Benares to stay with others like her, bathing in the Ganges, spending her days in prayer and singing devotional songs.
One day, without any forewarning, Sriram is released from prison. He emerges into a newly independent India. With others now occupying his home he takes shelter with Jagdish the photographer. He learns that Bharati has gone to East Bengal to be with Gandhi where he was trying to stop the slaughter between Hindus and Muslims that had followed partition of the country into Pakistan and India. Sriram writes to her and she replies telling him to come to Delhi where Gandhi will be next. They meet and find their feelings for each other unchanged. She takes him to meet Gandhi at Birla House where he is staying. He is busy meeting the nation’s leaders but finds time to give them his blessing then goes outside to conduct a prayer meeting. A man steps in front of him and shoots Gandhi at close range killing him instantly.
The portrait of Gandhi is extremely well drawn. His unwavering moral stance, his personal courage and his ability to inspire people to join the causes he espoused - independence from British rule, religious tolerance, the cause of the poorest including the untouchables - come through clearly. At the other end of the social spectrum he is able to write convincingly about the criminal characters with whom Sriram spends his time in jail. Many books have been written, both historical and fictional about independence, partition and about Gandhi. In this short novel RK Narayan manages to capture both something of the spirit pervading in the country during that time and of the character of one of the great figures of Indian and world history.
July 2023
Novels
Swami and Friends 1935
The Bachelor of Arts 1937
The Dark Room 1938
The English Teacher 1945
Mr Sampath – The Printer of Malgudi 1949
The Financial Expert 1951
Waiting for the Mahatma 1955
The Guide 1958
The Man-Eater of Malgudi 1961
The Vendor of Sweets 1967
The Painter of Signs 1977
A Tiger for Malgudi 1983
Talkative Man 1986
The World of Nagaraj 1990
Short Story Collections
Malgudi Days 1942
An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories 1947
Lawley Road and Other Stories 1956
A Horse and Two Goats 1970
Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories 1985
The Grandmother’s Tale and Selected Stories 1994
Retold Legends
Gods, Demons, and Others 1964
The Ramayana 1973
The Mahabharata 1978
Travels with Charley (1962) John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968)
With great writers, such as Steinbeck, whose oeuvre includes several masterpieces, lesser works receive little critical attention, are often overlooked and are seldom read. This is a pity as even a minor work by a great writer can prove to be a gem.
Travel writers usually go off seeking adventures in far off, exotic and inhospitable places. Steinbeck’s aim in Travels with Charley was a more modest one. He felt he had become disconnected from ordinary Americans - ‘I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and the trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light.’ So he got himself a truck with a home mounted on it, a sort of camper van, named it Rocinante, took along his dog Charley, a large French poodle and set off from his home in Long Island on the east coast – ‘to try to rediscover this monster land.’ His biggest adventure came before he had started his journey when a hurricane hit the east coast. His boat, anchored in the harbour, was in danger of being smashed, so he went out in the full fury of the storm, clambered aboard, took the boat to a place of safety after which, incredibly, he jumped into the sea and clinging to a passing bit of wood drifted to the safety of the shore.
The account of his journey is an honest, clear-eyed account of his land and its peoples. It is written with the skill, honed over a lifetime, of a writer and the wisdom of a man with a wide experience of life. There is no attempt to impress the reader, to be ‘clever’ or to show off. It is hard to think of a successful contemporary writer who would have the confidence to write such a simple narrative. It is noteworthy for the descriptions of the natural beauty of the land and of his encounters with ordinary people. Charley provides company throughout and he also causes his master some anxiety when he develops prostate trouble – both master, Steinbeck was 58, and dog are getting on in years.
The encounters with ordinary people he meets are memorable, whether it is with a group of migrant workers come across the border from Canada for the potato harvest, truck drivers at truckers stops, people who choose to live in trailers rather than built houses, many of whose homes he visits in Maine, a solitary travelling actor in Dakota, or a quarrelling father and son who run a filling station. He reconstructs the conversations he has with these people as if they were characters in his fiction and so brings them vividly to life. Steinbeck’s empathy with the simple, ordinary people he meets shines through. He does not mock them for their lack of learning nor sneer at the meagreness of their worldly wealth, but accepts them on their terms. The warmth of his encounter with the Canadian migrant workers is such one should be able to warm one’s hands in front of the pages on a cold winter’s day. It is by no means all bonhomie and goodwill. Steinbeck also writes clearly about the darker side of American life. Racial hatred against the blacks was on full display in 1960, the year of his travels. He stops in New Orleans where he goes to see the ‘Cheerleaders’, a group of women, egged on by a baying crowd, who gather to shout obscenities at a young black girl being taken to school by state troopers enforcing racial integration. Dramatic and ugly as these scenes there, the prejudice against the black people of America is brought out even more forcefully when Steinbeck offers a lift to a black man. The man’s fear and nervousness, his eagerness to get away from a white man, even one who treats him kindly, speaks volumes of the inhumanity with which the members of his race are used to being treated. Steinbeck’s sagacity and wisdom are in evidence throughout such as, for example, in the way he disarms and then wins over a young man who comes to order the author off his employer’s land on which he has camped beside a lake in Michigan. In parallel with the accounts of the meetings with ordinary Americans, are his descriptions of the natural beauty of America, the hues of the leaves in fall – ‘The climate changed quickly to cold and the trees burst into color, the reds and yellows… There’s a quality of fire in these colors’, the mountains and lakes of Montana, the majestic giant redwoods in his native California, standing beneath which ‘comes silence and awe’. He provides the right mix in his descriptions of the changing landscape he passes through, enough to give an idea of its wonders, but not at such length that the reader is tempted to skip passages.
Suffused with humanism, responsive to the natural beauty of the land, written with the skill of a great writer, it would be hard to find a better book about the ‘monster land’ that is the USA.
28 April 2009
Books
Of Mice and Men (1937)
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Cannery Row (1945)
Sweet Thursday (1954)
Film
The Grapes of Wrath starring Henry Fonda dir John Ford 1940
The Mahabharata Abridged and translated by John D Smith Penguin Classics 2009.
The Mahabharata is one the world’s great classic texts. Together with the Ramayana, it is one of India’s best known and loved epics. The Mahabharata, however, is much more than an epic, for incorporated within it are seminal Hindu teachings, notably the Bhagvad Gita. In the west, the story of the Ramayana is better known because of its association with the festival of Diwali. Diwali celebrations are becoming increasingly popular in western societies, such as Britain, where members of the Indian diaspora live in significant numbers.
The Mahabharata is known throughout India, in cities and villages, among all classes of society. Most know the outline of the core story together with many of the main incidents. The enduring popularity of the Mahabharata in India was illustrated when, in the 1980’s, a TV serialisation that ran to 94 episodes brought the entire country to a virtual halt on Sunday mornings when it was aired.
Penguin’s decision to publish the Mahabharata in its Classics series is to be welcomed. It is a new translation by John D Smith, a Cambridge academic (now retired). The translation is based on the critical edition of the Sanskrit text, put together between1933-1966 by scholars at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona (Pune). The Penguin edition is an abridged version as translating the text in full would have resulted in an unwieldy volume of some 5,000 pages. Even the shortened version runs to some 800 pages. Instead of condensing the entire text, John Smith has followed a system of abridging the major portion of the Mahabharata, combined with translating some sections in full, a method that works well.
The story that lies at the core of the Mahabharata is a simple one. It tells of the enmity between two warring sets of royal cousins, five Pandavas and 100 Kauravas, and the ensuing battle at Kurukshetra in which the Kauravas are killed. There are several reasons why the Mahabharata is a work of such enormous length. First, it is not the work of a single author but has been added to over centuries, from about 400 BC to 400 AD, during which it grew in bulk. Second, in addition to the incidents of the main story, it incorporates a vast amount of additional material – it is a compendium of stories rather than a single narrative. Lastly, contained within it are key Hindu teachings, including the Bhagwad Gita and Bhishma’s sermon, which make up as much as a third of the text.
Naturally, in such a long text, the cast of characters runs to thousands. The principal characters are however small in number and their names, together with their deeds and misdeeds, are generally known. On one side are the five Pandava brothers, Yudhistra, Arjuna, Bhima, the twins Nakul and Sahadev, their joint wife, Draupadi, and their principal ally, the god Krishna. Ranged against them are the hundred Kauravas, the eldest of whom is Duryodhana. The Mahabharata however is not a simple tale of good vs evil for there are many virtuous and noble men on the Kaurava side, notably Bhishma, Drona, Vidura and Karna, who unknown to everyone, is the eldest Pandava brother.
The text can be divided into three sections of roughly equal length. The first part deals with the origins and early history of the various characters. It is the events that occur during this period that are best known from the Mahabharata. It describes the growing up of the princes; their training in the martial arts under Drona; the winning of Draupadi by Arjuna in an archery contest and how she became wife to all five Pandavas; the growing enmity between the two sets of cousins; the gambling match in which Duryodhana cheats Yudhishtra and the Pandavas of their kingdom and sends them into exile in the forest for 12 years with a further year to be spent incognito. The scene is thus set for the great battle that follows. The second third of the text is taken up with the war itself which takes place at Kurukshetra and lasts for 18 days. It is on the eve of battle, as Arjuna, hesitates at the prospect of killing his kith and kin, that Krishna, acting as his charioteer, expounds to him the Bhagvad Gita. The war itself is depicted in stylised terms with heroes using celestial weapons to perform heroic deeds against a background of great carnage. The incidents that stand out are the felling of the great heroes – Bhishma, Drona, and Karna and the means, not always honourable, by which they are defeated. In the third section, after their victory, the Pandavas reclaim their kingdom. The major part of this section is taken up by Bhishma’s dying sermon, which is a key text in Hinduism.
To help the reader with the long text and its complexities, among them the convoluted way in which the story unfolds, is a brilliant, seventy page introduction by John Smith. It is a helpful guide for the reader unlike other introductions to classic texts which are often commentaries. The introduction includes a succinct summary, in three pages, of the story, introduces the main dramatis personae, discusses concepts such as dharma - the right way for a person to live their life, the role in the story of fate, and the use of vows, boons and curses. There is a guide to pronunciation, a map, genealogical tables, a key to names and glossary, as well as a detailed index. Helpful footnotes guide the reader to the relevant chapter and verse as reminders of particular events, incidents and characters. In short, every help is provided for the reader either new to, or not familiar with, the text.
The Penguin Mahabharata makes accessible for the general reader one of the great texts of world literature. As RK Narayan wrote in the introduction to his translation, the Mahabharata ‘is a treasure house of varied interests’. It can be read in its entirety or in parts – some might prefer the stories, others the religious teachings – there is something in it for everyone.
25 November 09
Treasure Island (1883) Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
As a young girl my favourite book, by a long way, was Treasure Island, which I read in a hardback edition with illustrations. Other schoolgirl fare, including Enid Blyton’s stories, interested me but the one I read and reread was Treasure Island. The tale of search for treasure on an island captured my imagination in a way no other book did. To set sail in search of buried treasure in a ship manned by blood thirsty pirates, to thrill to the ever present danger, is to feel young again. The book appeals to the child in all of us.
Stevenson started writing the book while on holiday in Scotland with members of his family, including his wife, Fanny Osbourne and stepson, Sam. Kept indoors by heavy rain he started writing a story to keep the boy entertained. He gave it the title The Sea Cook or Treasure Island with the subtitle A story for boys and drew a map to accompany it. Its sole purpose was to keep the boy entertained and he had no thoughts of publishing it. A friend visiting suggested sending it to a children’s paper Young Folk, in which it was serialised. Stevenson had ambitions to be a serious writer so he adopted a penname, Capt George North, under which the instalments appeared. Despite the popularity of the serialisation, the book languished in a drawer till another friend recommended it to a publisher. Two years after its completion Treasure Island was published as a book, in 1883. It remains one of Stevenson’s most popular books and a childrens’classic.
Stevenson provides a summary of the story in a foreword -‘sailor tales to sailor tunes,/Storm and adventure, heat and cold,/ .. schooners, islands, and maroons,/And buccaneers, and buried gold,/And all the old romance, retold/Exactly in the ancient way’
The tale begins with the arrival of a rough looking sailor to stay at the Admiral Benbow Inn run by young Jim Hawkins’ parents. At the sailor’s sudden death, owing them money, Jim and his mother (his father having died shortly before) search in his trunk. His mother takes the money she is owed and Jim takes a sealed oilskin packet. He takes it to the local squire, Trelawney, where it is found to contain a map of an island indicating where treasure is buried. The Squire, together with Doctor Livesey, with Jim as cabin boy, decide to go in search of the treasure. Squire Trelawney goes to Bristol and acquires a ship, the Hispaniola. One of the first persons he hires is a cook, a one-legged man, Long John Silver, who helps recruit most of the crew. So begins a tale of adventure and betrayal on the high seas.
In a story for boys, oh boy, does young Jim have adventures. He takes the packet from the trunk which contains the map showing where the treasure is buried. After the ship sets sail Jim, hiding in an apple barrel, discovers that most of the crew are former pirates led by Silver. Once the treasure, buried by the notorious pirate Capt Flint, has been found, they intend to kill Jim and the others keep it all for themselves. After they reach the island Jim sneaks ashore with Silver and the pirates, where they drink and sing the shanty that runs like a refrain through the book Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest/ Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. When Jim sees Silver murder a man who refuses to join the pirates in their treachery he runs off into the woods. There he encounters Ben Gunn marooned on the island some years before.
Meanwhile the Squire, Livesey and the captain abandon the ship and occupy an old stockade Flint had built. Jim sneaks out of the stockade, finds the coracle Ben Gunn had made and goes out in it to the Hispaniola. He cuts the boat loose and shoots dead one of the sailors left in charge of it. He returns to the stockade and is surprised to find Silver and the pirates have occupied it. The pirates want to kill Jim but Silver protects the boy. The group set out to dig for the treasure taking Jim along as hostage. When the treasure is not found the pirates turn on Silver. However Livesey and the others who have been following them come to Silver’s aid and Jim’s rescue. Once again Silver switches sides and allies himself with Jim and his friends.
Long John Silver is one of the most memorable characters in children's fiction. One leg cut off at the hip, a parrot perched on his shoulder, a bird that cries incessantly Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!. Silver is strong and able to move with the help of a crutch with remarkable agility both on ship and on land. His physical ability is combined with a sharp intelligence. The relationship between him and Jim Hawkins is at the heart of the book. It is a complicated relationship as Silver wins over the boy and yet turns against him and his companions. He plans to betray them and keep the gold when it is found. He has a pleasant manner and all those who come into contact him are won over and prepared to put their trust in him. He is, however, the most duplicitous of men and switches sides as necessary. Yet, so persuasive is he in his speech we, like Jim Hawkins, cannot help but regard him with both respect and admiration. RLS recognised that good and evil can co-exist in a person, exemplified in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Stevenson’s writings are suffused with empathy for his fellow human beings. He settled in Samoa where he earned the affection of the local populace. The people there gave him a Samoan nickname, Tusitala, a teller of tales. Among writers of fiction, RLS remains a supreme story teller.
17 March 2025
Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes 1879
A Child’s Garden of Verses 1885
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 1886
Kidnapped 1886
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) Muriel Spark (1918-2006)
Muriel Spark was the author of 24 novels, numerous short stories, a collection of poems and non fiction work including biographies of Emily Bronte and Mary Shelley. It is however, with one of her fictional characters, Miss Jean Brodie, that her name is inextricably linked. In Jean Brodie she created one of the most memorable characters in English literature.
A teacher at the Marcia Blaine school for girls in Edinburgh, Jean Brodie, dominates the narrative. Her most important relationships are not with other adults, the teachers in the school, her lovers, but with a group of six young girls whom she favours and are known as the Brodie set. She takes them to the theatre, the art galleries, and invites them to her flat for tea. They were vastly informed on a lot of subjects irrelevant to the set curriculum such as the Italian Renaissance painters, Mussolini, the love lives of Charlotte Bronte (and of Miss Brodie). Even after they graduate to the senior classes, Miss Brodie keeps in touch with them and confides in them about her struggles with the school headmistress.
The Brodie girls ‘were all famous in the school which is to say they were held in suspicion and not much liking’. The six girls were known (or famous) for different things: Monica Douglas for mathematics; Rose Stanley for sex appeal; Eunice Gardner, small and neat, for gymnastics; Sandy Stranger for her small, almost non-existent eyes; Jenny Gray, who was going to be an actress for her beauty; and Mary Mcgregor for being a silent lump and was blamed for everything.
Jean Brodie declares to the girls that she is in her prime ‘it is important to recognise the years of one’s prime’. She saw her task as putting old heads on young shoulders and told them ‘my pupils are the crème de la crème’. All these have become part of commonly recognised phrases in the English language.
Her methods of teaching are unorthodox. She takes her class outside in good weather to sit on benches under the elm in the garden. Instead of following the curriculum she veers off into subjects of her choosing. ‘We ought to be doing history at the moment according to the timetable. Get out your history books and prop them up in your hands.’ She then talks of a completely different subject, a painting by Rossetti of Dante meeting Beatrice on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. She tells the girls about Hugh, to whom she was engaged before the war and who died a week before the Armistice and was buried in Flanders. She is scathing about school values, such as team spirit, regarding individualism and personal loyalties of greater importance. ‘Florence Nightingale knew nothing of the team spirit, her mission was to save life regardless of the team to which it belonged’. She is also an admirer of the fascists. Mussolini, she tells her pupils, put an end to unemployment and removed litter from the streets. She visits Germany where Hitler is Chancellor and pronounces him to be more reliable than Mussolini.
There are two male teachers in the school, one, the arts master, Teddy Lloyd, is good-looking with only one arm, and is married with several children. The other is the music teacher, Gordon Lowther, a wealthy but shy bachelor. Miss Brodie is romantically involved with both of them but being Jean Brodie her relationships with the two are complicated and not in any way straightforward.
Her idiosyncratic methods of teaching brings her into conflict with the head of the school, Miss Mackay, who wishes to be rid of this troublesome schoolmistress. Jean Brodie resists the attempts to have her dismissed with spirit. She rejects suggestions that she should apply for a post at one of the progressive schools which she terms ‘crank’ schools. It is her political views which she influences the girls she teaches that bring about her downfall. One of her set, a Brodie girl, betrays her to the authorities, as a result of which she is forced to take early retirement.
The novel is based on the author’s experiences at the James Gillespie school in Edinburgh. Miss Brodie is based on a teacher in the school, Christina Kay, who favoured the young Muriel and a friend and took them to the theatre and to concerts and to see Anna Pavlova dance. Muriel Spark filtered this individual, and other teachers, and incidents at the school through the lens of her talent as a writer. The result was one of the unforgettable characters in fiction, Miss Jean Brodie, in her prime.
14 May 2025
Novels
Memento Mori (1958)
The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
Loitering with Intent (1981)
A Far Cry from Kensington (1988)
Autobiography
Curriculum Vitae (1992)
Film
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) dir Ronald Neame. Jean Brodie – Maggie Smith
Though screen versions of great novels often disappoint, Maggie Smith, a grande dame of stage and screen, embodied the character of Jean Brodie to perfection in the film version. She deservedly won the Oscar for best actress for her performance.
Little Women (1868 & 1869) Louisa May Alcott (1832 – 1888)
A test of a good book is whether one which enjoyed in youth is still enjoyable as an adult. Though written for a young readership, today it would be termed a YA (young adult) novel, the story of Little Women appeals to all ages, young and old. The book was written in two parts, the first published in 1868 and the second, Good Wives, published the following year.
The novel tells the story of the March family of four girls, their mother Marmee, with the father away serving as a chaplain in the army during a war (though not specified the American Civil war) and their servant Hanna. It is a coming of age story of four girls, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, aged from 16-12, on the cusp of adulthood. Laurie is the rich boy who lives next door with his grandfather, both his parents being dead, and a tutor.
Little Women covers one year starting at Christmas with the famous opening words spoken by Jo ‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without presents’. The family live in straitened circumstances brought about by the father having unwisely helped a relative. In fact père Alcott was not a good manager of money.
The four girls have very different personalities and their individual characters are revealed in the first few pages. Meg and Jo work, Meg as a governess to four young children, Jo as companion to an elderly infirm relative, Aunt March, Beth helps in the house and only the youngest, Amy attends school. Amy gives herself airs and her Malapropisms, - she says Beth is fastidious when she means fascinating, says label instead of libel and Cyclops instead of Centaur in praise of a person’s riding.
Jo, the author’s alter ego, is the liveliest of the sisters. She is a tomboy and unconcerned about her appearance. She loves to read, writes stories and poems. She is inventive – she writes and acts in entertainments at Christmas in which she involves her sisters, she forms the Pickwick Club which meets weekly and produces a family newspaper. It is Jo who befriends Laurie, who is well-off but lonely, and he soon becomes integrated into the March family.
The major incidents in the story are well known and are to be found in the many adaptations of the novel in film. The March family give their Christmas meal to the poor Hummel family, an act of charity witnessed by their rich neighbour who rewards them for it with delicacies from his home; Amy burns Jo’s precious writing and an angry Jo ignores her when she and Laurie go skating so Amy falls through thin ice and nearly drowns; Jo sells her hair to give Marmee money to visit their father when he becomes unwell; Beth falls gravely ill tending to a sick Hummel child.
The first part of the story ends with father March home for Christmas and the eldest Meg, engaged to Laurie’s tutor, Mr Brooke.
The second part begins three years later when the girls are 19 -15. They grow from adolescents into the little women of the title. All four, and Laurie too, find their destinies in their individual ways, though not as they had imagined.
It begins with the marriage of Meg to John Brooke, and she settles into quiet domesticity nearby. Though as a girl she had wished for riches and fine living, she finds happiness in modest circumstances which is completed by the birth of twins. Beth, quiet and shy, never fully recovers from her earlier illness and incurs an early death.
Jo continues to write and earns several amounts of money for her efforts ‘by the magic of her pen’. She ‘would shut herself in her room, put on her scribbling suit and fall into a vortex’. The scribbling suit had a black pinafore on which she could wipe her pen, a reminder that writing then involved pen and ink which could be messy. She goes away to New York to be a tutor to the children of Mrs Kirke, an acquaintance of the family, where she continues to write. She meets an older man Prof Bhaer, a lodger in the house. Though unprepossessing in appearance, she is attracted to him by his intellect particularly when he guides her away from the sensationalist stories she has been writing into more meaningful work. Alcott first wrote potboilers and sensationalist stories herself before turning to the autobiographical work which made her name.
On her return home, Laurie having finished his studies and acquitted himself well, proposes to Jo. She rejects him for he is a friend, like a brother to her. He goes on a trip to Europe with his grandfather. There he encounters Amy whom Aunt Carroll has taken to accompany her, in preference to Jo. They fall in love and become engaged. Prof Bhaer comes to visit and when he proposes Jo accepts him. Aunt March dies and leaves her house, Plumfield, to Jo, who had been her companion for many years. Jo and Fritz (Friedrich) Bhaer set up a school for boys, using fees from rich boys to pay for the education of poor ones. Alcott herself never married and she scotched the notion of a romance between Jo and Laurie.
Though the March family are not well off, their acquaintances and relatives are wealthy, able to afford extended trips to Europe, the only exception being the poor Hummel family. The Alcott family though not rich, knew notable persons such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May kept company with these eminent persons in Boston and Concord where she spent most of her life.
Alcott’s autobiographical novel was an immediate success and remains popular. It has never gone out of print, new film versions are being made, and it continues to be read. Alcott writes of a story by her alter ego Jo March - ‘Jo never knew how it happened, but something got into that story that went straight to the hearts of those who read it’. Little Women did and still does.
4 July 2025
Books
Little Men 1871
Jo’s Boys 1885
Films
Little Women (1933) dir George Cukor Katherine Hepburn as Jo March
Little Women (2019) dir Greta Gerwig Saoirse Ronan as Jo March
The Great Gatsby (1925) F Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
The Great Gatsby ranks among contenders for the great American novel, along with others like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. While Moby Dick is a long sprawling saga, The Great Gatsby stakes its claim in the course of a brief novel of barely 200 pages. Like Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the great white whale, Gatsby’s quest for the woman he loves is of epic proportions. In the process, both Ahab and Gatsby are destroyed, one by the forces of nature, the other by the cruel and pitiless society of his fellow men.
Daisy is a member of the wealthy upper classes of America while Gatsby, real name James Gatz, is from the other end of the social scale. He has been scraping a living best he can and is penniless. America’s entry to the war in Europe in 1917 gives him the opportunity to encounter Daisy. As a young lieutenant, he is stationed at Camp Taylor near her home in Louisville, Kentucky. Whilst cloaked in the anonymity of his army uniform he meets Daisy and falls in love with her. He knows he cannot hope to marry her unless he acquires great wealth himself. The war which enables him to meet her, sends him to Europe and keeps him away. When he returns she is already married, to the rich and boorish Tom Buchanan.
Gatsby is undeterred. He is certain Daisy still loves him and what he needs to do is to become rich and she will be his. Nick, the narrator, who is a cousin of Daisy’s, finds her voice strangely thrilling and Gatsby identifies the quality that makes it so – Her voice is full of money, he tells Nick. Gatsby sets about acquiring riches, without bothering about the legality of the means he employs, helped by Meyer Wolfsheim. He buys a huge mansion on the opposite side of the bay from Daisy’s house and throws extravagant parties hoping to see her. Despite Gatsby’s illegal activities there is a lot that is noble about him. There is his war record in which he distinguished himself and won many medals. His brief sojourn as a student in Oxford, which many throw doubts on, turns out to be true, leading Nick to have ‘one of those renewals of complete faith in him.’ His habit of saying ‘old sport’ is more endearing than ridiculous. What is truly heroic is Gatsby’s love for Daisy.
The narrator, Nick Carroway, tells Gatsby ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.’ The whole damn lot are the rich and wealthy, the principal characters Tom and Daisy Buchanan, their friend, Jordan Baker and all the affluent members of New York society who flock to Jay Gatsby’s lavish parties and who abandon him at the first hint of trouble.
The setting is the rich east coast, Long Island, with huge mansions for the wealthy and within easy reach of New York. There is a reminder of the other side of society in the ash fields, a dumping ground for the detritus of the city, through which they pass to get to and from the city. It is in this industrial wasteland that Wilson has his garage and his wife Myrtle is the woman Tom is having an affair with.
While located on the east coast, it is an American novel. The principal cast of characters are from the mid-west. The key cast of characters is small but the author expertly conjures up the multitudes of the rich who turn up to enjoy Gatsby’s hospitality. He provides the names of the upper classes of American society, giving just enough details to suggest the frivolity of their lives. If the mark of a good actor is to make reading names in a telephone directory interesting, Fitzgerald performs a similar feat on the printed page and the list of names of the rich who flock to Gatsby’s parties is a joy to read.
The story is told with great economy. Tom’s bigotry is revealed in just a few sentences at Nick’s first meeting with him and is reinforced every time he speaks. The sordidness of Tom’s affair with Myrtle Wilson contrasts with Gatsby’s grand passion for Daisy. The writing is poetic prose, cool and composed like a jazz concert. While Fitzgerald’s contemporary, and friend, Ernest Hemingway, was the master of spare English sentences, Fitzgerald’s prose is poetic throughout. After a fraught trip to New York in which Gatsby confronts Tom and tells him that it is he, Jay Gatsby, Daisy loves, they set out on the return journey which seals Gatsby’s fate – ‘So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight’. One reason why cinematic representations of the novel have failed is that it is has proved impossible to transfer that fine, cool, writing to the screen.
Gatsby unhesitatingly says he will say he was driving and will take the blame when Daisy runs over and kills Myrtle Wilson. Afterwards his only concern is for Daisy as he keeps vigil outside her house.
In his pursuit of Moby Dick, Captain Ahab leads all those with him to destruction and only Ishmael survives. In Gatsby’s quest for Daisy’s love he is the main casualty, along with the poor Wilsons, while the rich are unaffected and continue with their lives as before. After Gatsby has been shot, Nick is sure Daisy will get in touch, but she and Tom go away immediately afterwards and there is nothing from her, not even a phone call. Nick’s condemnation of them and all they represent is bitter. ‘They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together…’ Gatsby would have absolved Daisy of any part in such cruel, uncaring behaviour. – Daisy couldn’t come or call because she was prevented old sport, he would have gently reproached Nick.
12 July 2025
Small Island (2004) Andrea Levy (1956-2019)
The voice of the black community in Britain had remained unheard and ignored till Andrea Levy burst on to the literary scene with the success of her fourth novel Small Island. The black community was portrayed in the media as underachievement in economic and academic fields and reports of criminality. The few successes that punctuated these accounts were in sporting activities and in entertainment, mainly in the music, industry.
This contrasted with the positive image of immigrants from another part of the British Empire, the Asian, mainly Indian community. An example of this was the success of the Indians expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin, who established businesses and prospered. On the literary scene superstars such as Salman Rushdie with Midnight’s Children and winners of literary prizes including Arundhati Roy with The God of Small Things made their presence felt. About ordinary black immigrants from the Caribbean almost nothing was known. Andrea Levy was the first to make their voice, hitherto silent, heard.
The story is told through the experiences of two couples, one black one white, Hortense and Gilbert and Queenie and Bernard. The novel spans the period during and after second world war. War brings Gilbert and others from Jamaica as volunteers to serve in the RAF to defend the ‘mother country’. It takes Bernard away to fight in the far east. To escape the bombs in London Queenie goes to stay at the family home in Lincolnshire. There she meets Gilbert, who is stationed nearby, when he brings her lost wandering father-in-law home. On Gilbert’s return to Jamaica at war’s end he finds there is no employment for him there. He comes to England on the Empire Windrush with others from the Caribbean hoping to find work. Hortense, whose dream it has been to live in England, funds his voyage in return for his marrying her. His earlier acquaintance with Queenie means she rents him a room (and some fellow Jamaicans) in her big London house when others will not. Hortense follows some months later to join Gilbert. Andrea Levy’s father came over to Britain on the Windrush and her mother joined him shortly thereafter.
The narrative shifts geographically between Jamaica and England, with an excursion to the Far East, and in time between the period during the war and afterwards.
Jamaican life is vividly and colourfully described. In the warm climate there is an abundance of fruit and vegetables – paw-paws, mangoes, peas and beans. Dangers of hurricanes are ever present. One strikes the school in which Hortense is trapped with the owner. The weather is dramatic – ‘a hurricane can tear trees from the ground. A house can be picked up, its four walls parted, its roof twisted and everything scattered’. Equally shattering for Hortense are the events that day. She discovers her cousin Michael, in whose household she has been brought up and with whom she is in love, has been having an affair with the white headmistress. Michael goes away to fight, goes missing over France and is presumed dead. He makes a reappearance later in England and his brief stay in Queenie’s house is to have momentous consequences for Hortense.
The contrast between Jamaica and drab, dreary, cold England, which moreover is still facing rationing is sharp. Gilbert, shivering in the winter cold, his teeth chattering, thinks longingly of home ‘sun and lazy, hazy heat – curry goat, spice-up chicken, and pepper-pot soup’. English food on the other hand is ‘prepared in a pan of boiling water, the sole purpose of which was to rid it of taste’.
The speech of the people is wonderfully reproduced. There is the Jamaican habit of sucking of teeth and exclamations of chas. Told they would be confined to camp in during their training in the US ‘there was much sucking of teeth and moaning, Cha .. cha..cha…’. Gilbert’s cousin asks ‘Cha, nah, man, you no hear me, nah?’ The narrative is strewn with expressions such as soon come and fool-fool man.
Throughout the narrative, during wartime and after, the members of the black community encounter racism at every level and in every aspect of their lives. When Gilbert looks for a place to rent, doors ‘opened slow and shut quick without even me breath managing to get inside’. Jobs he applies for vanish with just one look at his face. Even a courteous gesture, raising his hat to a neighbour, sends her rushing into the house as if he had exposed himself. Children call out in surprise after him ‘It speaks, Mummy it speaks’. Hortense’s dream of a London home, complete with a front doorbell, is shattered upon her arrival when she finds she has to live in a single room, poorly heated and badly equipped. She is confident she can get a place as a teacher with the letters of recommendation she carries about her teacher training and experience in Jamaica. She is disabused of the notion when, none too politely, she is rejected at the offices of the education authority ‘You can’t teach in this country. You’re not qualified to teach here in England.’
What makes the novel stand out is that it not a miserabilist account of the prejudice faced by the West Indian community. While their experiences are recounted in unflinching detail, the book is shot through with a rich vein of humour which makes the reader smile and the novel a joyful read. Humour evokes sympathy for the characters’ predicament far more effectively than piling on the misery would have done.
Andrea Levy died of breast cancer aged 62. While undergoing treatment, after she learnt it was incurable, a friend asked how she was. – Still dying, she replied cheerfully.
25 July 2025
Novels
Every Light in the House Burnin’ 1994
Never Far from Nowhere 1996
Fruit of the Lemon 1999
Small Island 2004
The Long Song 2010
The Road Home (2007) Rose Tremain (1943-
Lev, 42, from an unnamed East European country, comes to England seeking work. After the expansion of the EU, in 2004, with the addition of ten countries mainly from Eastern Europe, it became legal for citizens of these countries to come and work in the UK.
He leaves his 5-year-old daughter, Maya, in the care of his mother, his wife having died at a young age from cancer. The timber mill in nearby Baryn, where Lev had worked, as had his father before him, shuts down after the supply of wood, from trees cut down and not replaced, dries up. There is no work in Lev’s hometown of Auror and the little money his mother earns from selling jewellery made of tin, is not enough to support them. Lev takes the opportunity offered by the expansion of the EU’s borders. He travels by coach, the cheapest mode of travel, a journey of over 50 hours, to London, carrying a few precious pound notes to help him survive the first few days. His fellow passenger in the seat next to him is an older woman, Lydia, an English teacher, who hopes to work as a translator.
Lev’s best friend, Rudi, stays behind in Auror. Rudi is a force of nature. He buys a ramshackle Chevrolet, a ‘Tchevi’, to run as a taxi unfazed by the fact that he has never driven a car, only a heavy lifting vehicle at the sawmill. ‘Driving is driving’ he tells Lev ‘with American cars you don’t even have to worry about gears. You slam the stick into the “D-for-drive” position and take off.’ In conversations with Lev in London he tells him about the troubles and travails with his ‘Tchevi’, which is a character in its own right.
Lev manages to get by for a few days, then contacts Lydia. She helps him with the small ads in the papers to find work as a washer-up in an upmarket restaurant and lodgings with a man, Christy Slane, a plumber, whose wife has left him.
At first matters go well at the restaurant. Lev gets romantically involved with a young woman, Sophie, who prepares the vegetables, a relationship which brings him happiness. She is promoted to sous-chef and Lev to vegetable prep where he closely observes the chefs and learns from them. Sophie is friends with persons in the art world, a modern artist and a playwright. Lev finds the artist’s work shallow and without merit and he is repelled by a play Sophie takes him to see. Lev feels out of place with Sophie’s arty friends. He sees the pretentiousness of what sometimes passes for art. ‘Bubblewrap’ is a curved panel into which hundreds of lightbulbs have been inserted by two assistants employed by the artist. He tells Sophie angrily ‘You see what is “fashion”, what is “smart”. That’s all that matters to you. Because you don’t know the world.’
His differences with Sophie lead to a break-up of his relationship. As a consequence of this is he is sacked from his job at the restaurant. He goes to work on a farm cutting asparagus with other workers in a field in Suffolk, backbreaking work for little pay. Lev and his fellow workers on the farm live in primitive conditions in ill-equipped caravans and survive on cheap food, baked beans, pot noodles, ravioli, bought in the local supermarket. Throughout Lev sends money home to support his mother and his daughter. He has long conversations on his mobile with his friend Rudi who supports him in language that is as colourful as his character.
Lev’s work at the restaurant has taught him much about food preparation. He has a ‘great idea’ and returns to London to make his dream come true. His ‘great idea’ requires an initial amount of capital and Lev sets out determinedly to acquire this. He finds work in a Greek taverna and then a second job cooking at an old people’s home where Sophie is used to volunteer. His willingness to put in long hours at whatever work is available is characteristic of East Europeans who came to the UK in large numbers after 2004. Lev goes to his country’s Embassy to see if he can apply for funding to set up a business in his country. He is treated with contempt and rudely dismissed. One night while returning home he is set upon by thuggish youths, abused ‘Immigrant fuckin’ scum’, beaten and robbed of his few possessions.
The novel treats its characters, mostly persons in the lower strata of society, with compassion. Lev’s landlord, Christy Lane, with a broken marriage to which he has contributed with his drinking, has a vengeful wife who keeps him away from his daughter. The Arab for whom Lev had distributed leaflets, describes the racial prejudice he suffers ‘they just look at you and think, Shitty Arab, suicide-bomber, Muslim scum.’
Lev perseveres through ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ – his friend Lydia gives him a copy of Hamlet to read – ‘and takes up arms against a sea of troubles’ in pursuit of his dream. He manages to put together the money he needs and takes the road home.
Lev’s achievements through hard work and determination are a small step for mankind. For one individual and others like him who, given the opportunity, left their homes and ventured out into an unwelcoming, and sometimes hostile, world they represent a giant leap.
21 August 2025
Novels
Restoration 1989
The Gustav Sonata 2016
Absolutely and Forever 2023
Short Stories
The American Lover 2014
Memoir
Rosie: Scenes from a Vanished Life 2018
India A Sacred Geography (2012) Diana L Eck (1945- )
This ranks among the best books on Hinduism in the English language. The author states she researched the material for the book for ten years. It is in fact based on a lifetime of research which started when she went to Benares Hindu University as a student in 1965. In addition to years of scholarly research, she joined devotees on many pilgrimages, sharing with them the hardships and privations of travel. The depth of scholarship alone would make this a formidable work. Combined with knowledge gained on the ground in places of pilgrimage among the devotees, lifts it to a plane of excellence few can hope to match.
The book explains the place of Hinduism in the landscape of India and in the hearts of its followers. Hinduism is embedded in the geography of the country. Pilgrimage is an important part of Hindu religious practice and pilgrims have visited its holy places, which stretch across the length and width of the continent for millennia. The pilgrims seek out tirthas, places where the divine manifested itself ‘where the gods are close and the benefits of worship generous’. India is a land of ten thousand tirthas and ‘The entire land of India is a great network of pilgrimage places’. Of importance too are the dhams, divine abodes, places where the sacred takes form and is located. There are four important dhams situated at the four geographical ends of the Indian sub-continent - Badrinath in the north, Puri in the east, Rameshvara in the far south and Dwarka in the extreme west. In many of these sites temples have been constructed. The temples in themselves are not important it is the places in which they are situated lend them their sanctity. The holy places are associated with various deities in their many incarnations. For those bewildered by the multiplicity of Hindu gods the book provides a detailed exposition and explanation. India was unified by the footsteps of pilgrims many centuries before conquests by the Mughals, or the establishment of the British Empire and its claims to have unified the land.
Rivers are sacred none more than the Ganga which is holy all along its course, from its source at Gangotri in the Himalayas to the sea. Hindus bathe everywhere along the Ganga, especially at important tirthas, make offerings of flowers and oil lamps in the river as in a temple and bring the ashes of the dead from all over India to commit ritually to its waters. The confluence of rivers amplify the holiness of the tirtha. The greatest of these is confluence is of the Ganga, the Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati at Prayaga. The author is not blind to the many problems with rivers today. The issues facing the Ganga and other sacred rivers is the crisis of pollution, damming and river degradation. ‘India’s rivers are used, overused, and abused……(this) has created the worst environmental crisis confronting India.’ She does not ignore the problems but sees through them to the underlying faith of the believers.
Melas that take place along India’s rivers are striking forms of Hindu pilgrimage. The gods and demons battled over the pot (kumbha) containing amrita, the nectar of immortality. As the gods whisked the pot away to heaven four drops fell to earth, at Prayaga, Hardvar, Ujjain and Nasik. Melas take place every year. Every year 12 years the Kumbh mela takes place at Prayag and is the world’s largest pilgrimage.
Of central significance is Varanasi (Banaras) which Hindus call Kashi, the City of Light. Here, Shiva who appeared as a fathomless column of light, takes up eternal residence. These shafts of light are spread throughout the entire subcontinent and Shiva’s presence stretches from the Himalayas to the southern seas. This pillar without beginning and end becomes small so that people can see it and worship it and takes the form of the linga. The linga of Shiva has been interpreted by many outsiders as a ‘phallic symbol’. She compares this to ‘an interpretation of the Christian eucharist that saw the rite .. as ritual cannibalism, eating the body and drinking its blood’ (that of Christ). It fails to get beyond a simplistic interpretation to a deeper and more complex understanding of what the linga symbolises.
The author sets out the facts of the plunder and destruction of temples by Muslim invaders and conquerors which began with the sack of Somnath temple by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1026. This was the beginning of a cycle of temple looting and destruction, followed by rebuilding and resistance, followed again by looting and destruction. Devotees, the author points out, do not care about a particular temple’s destructions or reconstructions. For them it is not the temple that is important, it is the place, the power, the manifestation of the divine.
Even in Varanasi, where the central Shiva temple is located, a temple and mosque stand side by side. However, the real linga of light is not contained in any one temple, but in the whole of Kashi. ‘In the city of Shiva, where the very stones are said to be Shiva lingas .. temples have shifted and readjusted their footing century after century’ and any claim to a particular plot of land makes little sense.
A more recent problem is the hijacking of elements of Hinduism to serve political ends. This reached a crescendo in 1992, with the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, built on the site alleged to be the birthplace of Rama. The author sets out a clear, level-headed and scholarly account of the issues involved. There are at least 15-16 mandirs in Ayodhya, which lay claim to be the real birthplace of Rama. This is in the Hindu tradition of multiplicity – a truly important place is duplicated and sited in multiple places. Rama is said to have lived in the Treta Yuga, a period of time in Hindu cosmology well over a million years ago, which makes the search for the ‘historical’ figure of Rama problematic. There is also no archaeological evidence of the existence of a temple at the site. The power of the myth has no need to be bolstered by archaeological or historical records.
I grew up in a Hindu family in which religious practices were followed. My maternal grandmother, Kaki, observed religious rites meticulously – prayers to the gods every day in a state of purity, fasts kept on designated days, particular foods cooked on specified days. The importance of pilgrimages was underlined when family members came from Bombay, to stay during the summer holidays, wherever my father happened to be posted as an officer in the Indian army. They were taken on visits to tourist sites and also to places of pilgrimage within easy travelling distance. There were visits to Vrindavan, Hardvar and Badrinath, among others. Educated in English language schools, I felt disconnected from these practices. My participation was limited to the celebration of festivals, Diwali with the lighting of lamps, fireworks and festive foods, a favourite.
Hindu beliefs and practices were a closed book to me in my youth. Now, late in life, this masterly work puts what was all around me, within the family and in Indian society, into context. It has given me an understanding of the religion I was born into, Hinduism.
10 September 2025
By the same author
Banaras: City of Light 1982