The Island Pharisees - John Galsworthy

 Galsworthy is best known for his Forsyte Saga.   It is often forgotten that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature and was also a very successful, sometimes controversial dramatist.   The Island Pharisees is a novel from 1904, two years before The Man of Property began the saga.   It is a gentle satire of middle class Edwardian English pride and hypocrisy.   Dick Shelton, a half-hearted, well-off trainee barrister, has become engaged to the beautiful daughter of wealthy landowner Algernon Dennant.   Her mother comes from the aristocracy and Antonia is regarded as a fine catch.

Antonia's parents insist on a period of separation, to make sure the young people really love each other.   During this time Dick knocks about town country, visiting old friends and society contacts.   His journey is dogged by a young French bohemian he meets in Chapter One.   Ferrand is something of an anarchist, on the tramp around Europe.   Dick casually gives him a few pounds to help out.   They keep meeting through the novel.   They correspond and Dick writes to Antonia about his odd acquaintance.   Ultimately, of course, they come together at Holm Oaks near Oxford, the family seat of the Dennants.   Ferrand does his level best to behave but ultimately he has to go.   Antonia recognises that something has changed in Dick since he fell under the influence of Ferrand.   He seems to question the norms of society...

It is beautifully done, Galsworthy showing the better qualities of his characters as well as the worst.   The broadest satire is reserved for the most pompous and opinionated - a bunch of Oxford dons at Shelton's old college.   I was particularly struck by the way the Dennant family are more tolerant of Ferrand, who is of course not one of them, than their neighbouring landowner who is shacked up with a married woman.   Many excellent writers do not win the Nobel Prize.   What makes an excellent writer into a great one, worthy of the Prize, is humanity, which Galsworthy dispenses here in spades. 

Marthe - J K Huysmans

 Marthe is the debut novel of Huysmans, the ultimate novelist of French decadence at the end of the nineteenth century, so bad, so obscene that no British publisher dared issue a translation.   Actually, one publisher, Kegan Paul, did dare, but only the late 'Catholic' novels and only when he was at death's door and it didn't matter any more.

Pompous bluestockings are always on the lookout for something to ban.   The fact is Huysmans was a realist.   He was enthused by Zola's pseudo-scientific theories of experimental realism but he, in practice, led the way with Marthe.   Zola blatantly copies Marthe in Nana but does not dare to go as far as Huysmans.   Zola's heroine starts off in the theatre and rises from there.   Marthe is first seen in the theatre but that is the highpoint of her career.   She is and remains a whore.   Her young lover finds normalcy after leaving her.   Her elderly actor lover ends up on the mortuary table after she dumps him.   Inbetween Marthe is the kept mistress of a married man she cares so little about that his name is never mentioned.

Huysmans had to self-publish Marthe in Belgium.   Imports were banned in France, any copies seized and destroyed as obscene.   The truth is, the characters are immoral but there is no obscenity.   We are given reality, sordid, sad, but ultra real, even down to the details.  The actor beats Marthe, showing off to his drunken mates.   The married man who keeps her wears pink silk tights.

It sounds grubby and depressing.   It might be a shortcoming on my part, but I found it fascinating, thrilling and restorative.   I enjoyed it more than the better known Down There (reviewed here in 2021) because the core subject (unsuitable passion, the degradation of poverty, and indeed debased theatricals) are themes I have encountered and witnessed.   I bought the book for a research project, started reading as a chore, only to be swept away by Huysman's brilliant technique.   I have become a Zola fan over recent years but Huysmans intrigues me more.

Downriver - Iain Sinclair

 I emerge from another protracted read.   Downriver is in some ways future fiction.   Sinclair envisages London dominated by the Widow (obviously Margaret Thatcher), whose rule is absolute and who "accepts the advice" of those who suggest she builds an enormous memorial to her late husband in Docklands.   Sinclair and his mates decide to investigate.   Meanwhile, some of them are pitching a project to the BBC's late night arts programme (under the absolute rule of Yentob) about David Rodinsky, a real-life Whitechapel mystery who was thought at the time to have disappeared, leaving behind a room above the synagogue devoted to his studies in various languages and the Kabbalah.   Sinclair himself had written a book about him with Rachel Lichtenstein, who first uncovered the story.   It later transpired (and is reported in Downriver) that Rodinsky had actually been sectioned in a mental hospital where he died.

The story, such as it ever is with Sinclair, is told in twelve instalments, as Sinclair gets further and further away from his usual East End stamping ground.   The style varies between instalments.   Sinclair is at the centre of each until we come to the last, which he asks his friend the sculptor Joblard to write because he, Sinclair, has somehow lost his voice.   It is still Joblard and Sinclair, however, as they both come to end of the line, the Isle of Sheppey, where the Thames joins the North Sea.

It is all thoroughly enjoyable but I didn't find it as intriguing as Landor's Tower or White Chappell, partly because the Thatcher trope has dated so badly since the novel came out in 1991.   Also, I am really not interested in the wastelands of Essex which I have seen for myself, thanks (I largely share Sinclair's view of it).   Because the two main premises don't grab my interest I found the book too long, though Sinclair is never boring.   As I say, I enjoyed the Rodinsky section and the Joblard switch at the end.

I Was Jack Mortimer - Alexander Lernet-Holenia

 I cannot fathom why the prolific Lernet-Holenia hasn't been translated into English more often.   It seems to me only Baron Blagge (reviewed below), Count Luna and this are available.   He wrote a novel about the Count St Germain - that's obviously of wide interest, so what are we waiting for?

Anyway, I Was Jack Mortimer is very different to Blagge and Luna.   It is a contemporary (1933) satirical take on US gangster thrillers.   In that sense it shares the fantastical tone of Blagge.   Lernet-Holenia gives us a dark farce in which old school mores clash with modern mobsterism.

Cab driver Ferdinand Sponer picks up a fare at the station in Vienna.   The passenger asks to be taken to the Bristol Hotel.   Sponer heads across town.    He hears what he assumes is a truck backfiring.   It occurs to Sponer to ask which Bristol Hotel the man wants, the New Bristol or---   The man doesn't answer.   Because he's been shot dead by someone who must have hopped onto the cab's running board, done the dirty deed, and hopped off again - something only really possible with interwar cars.

Sponer does the decent thing.   He tries to interet the police in the murder, but can't manage to grab their attention.   He therefore decides to dispose of the body and get on with life.   He drives aimlessly around the city, even finds time to pop into a coin-op bar (what happened to those?) and chat up a couple of girls.   Before dropping his passenger into the Danube he has the sense to go through the dead man's papers.   Turns out he's Jack Mortimer, a banker from Chicago.   We subsequently learn more: Mortimer's bank specialises in laundering Mob money; he is or rather was a notorious lady's man.

It occurs to Sponer that he should go on the run, start a more interesting life somewhere else.   Meanwhile, why not make the most of the opportunity to enjoy the high life of Vienna?   He assumes Mortimer's identity and takes Mortimer's room at the right Bristol Hotel.   Also in town are Mortimer's latest conquest and her affronted husband...   The night doesn't turn out anything like Sponer anticipated.

It's all great fun.   The style is certainly modern for the time.   I like the way Sponer's imaginary police interrogations are handled.   I'm not 100% convinced by the translation but I don't speak or read German, so can't really criticise.   The proof reading was astonishingly bad - bloopers on the first page!!?  Get a bloody grip, Pushkin Press!

Of Human Bondage - W Somerset Maugham

 It's been three weeks since my last post, three weeks very well spent as I've been reading Maugham's first indisputable masterpiece, Of Human Bondage, published in 1915 but written on the eve of World War I.   It's a coming of age story written by a man of forty.   It ends with Philip's marriage as he is coming up to thirty; Maugham turned forty in January 1914 and was not yet married, though he was in a relationship with the woman he would marry (Syrie, daughter of Dr Barnardo, no less, and until 1916 still married to the US pharmaceutical millionaire Henry Wellcome); in September 1915 Syrie gave birth to Maugham's daughter, Liza.

Philip Carey is Maugham in all but name.   Orphaned at an early age, he is brought up in Kent by his eldery uncle and aunt.   He is educated at the thinly disguised Canterbury School, and later in Heidelberg.   After a dismal apprenticeship in accountancy he trains as a doctor in London.   There is a period as a would-be artist in Paris which Maugham did not do.   Maugham, however, was born in Paris and spent his first ten years there.   

Maugham, today, is claimed as a forerunner of gay emancipation.   In 1915 England that was totally illegal.   Maugham deals with the tendency in Philip masterfully.   Philip has a crush on boys at school and is reluctant to get involved with women as a young man.   He feels, as Maugham clearly did, that he ought to marry.   The first woman he falls for is a waitress in a teashop called Mildred.   She is pretty but dull.   She only tolerates Philip because he is a gentleman and is willing to spend money on her.   She treats him appallingly and runs off with another man.   She turns up pregnant and abandoned.   Philip takes her in on a platonic basis and bonds with the child, a baby girl.   Then he discovers that Mildred is getting an income as a prostitute.   Later, as a trainee medic at a hospital in one of the poorer parts of Victorian London, Philip diagnoses a terrible disease in Mildred.   He abandons her, loses money on a share deal because of a slump caused by the Boer War, and is reduced to working as a shopwalker until his uncle dies and his small inheritance enables him to complete his medical studies.

So far as we know, none of this happened to Maugham.   The emotional backbone of the novel is entirely him coming into his own as a master of his craft.   The other difference with Philip is that he has a club foot.   Maugham was bullied because he had a bad stammer.   Some critics say that Philip's foot is a metaphor for Maugham's sexuality.   I say that's wishful thinking.   Maugham gives his hero a visible physical defect because reiterating a stammer bad enough to be a serious problem would be tedious to do in a modern novel with lots of dialogue and because most people, then and now, do not appreciate how restrictive a speech problem can be.

Of Human Bondage is a long novel with 600 pages and a hundred-and-something chapters.   It was a transitional work for Maugham and is a transitional novel from Victorian literature to a Modern Englsh form.   It really is a masterpiece, well worth a couple of weeks of anyone's time.

Little Siberia - Antti Tuomainen

 I picked up Palm Beach Finland earlier this year and quite enjoyed it.   So I picked up Little Siberia and found it slightly less enjoyable.   Tuomainen sees himself as a Finnish Hiaissen but he simply hasn't thought it through with this one.

The start is promising.   A meteorite falls to earth on the Finnish border with Russia, smashing through the car roof of an alcoholic ex-rally driver who was aiming to smash into the cliff-face and kill himself.   It turns out to be a meteorite of special interest, its composition unusual.   They say it's worth a million euros.   It will have to be taken to Helsinki, then on to London for further study.   In the meantime it is lodged in the War Museum in Hurmevaara and guarded for the next four days by volunteers from the villagers.

The first night the young pastor is on guard duty when unknown criminal try to steal the meteorite.   Unfortunately they raid the wrong cabinet in the darkness and steal the wrong item, with fatal consequences.

So far, so good, we think.   Cracking premise, nice set-up.   Our protagonist, Joel, is no ordinary pastor.   He is a veteran of the Afghan war in which he was seriously injured.   He has a beautiful, clever wife who he adores.   She tells him she is pregnant.   He should be thrilled - but the pipe bomb he stepped on in Afghanistan left him permanently infertile.   Somehow he hasn't told Krista about his problem - and that's where ther shortcomings of Little Siberia begin.

Joel presents as an honest man.   He doesn't pretend that he believes absolutely in God.   He just wants to use compasssion and his listening skills to help the villagers.  So why would he not tell the wife he adores?   The resolution of this plotline is cursory in the extreme and I didn't believe it for a moment.

Likewise, the cosmic pebble which drops in the stagnant pond that is Hurmevaara is rather mechancially worked out.   A bunch of suspects is put in front of us and eliminated in turn.   A couple of interfering Russian gangsters offer promise but end up going nowhere much.

Little Siberia is pacey but perfunctory.   Worse, it is not as funny as it thinks it us.   I won't be picking up the next Tuomainen I come across.

Three Fires - Denise Mina

 In many ways Three Fires (2023) is the companion piece to Mina's brilliant Rizzio (2021).   Both, obviously, are novellas published by Polygon.   Both take historical incidents and view them through a contemporary lens.   Three Fires is less immediately engaging.   Its hero, the 15th century Florentine mystic dictator Girolamo Savonarola is clearly less appealing than the (probably) innocent French secretary.   Political murder, in the latter case, is more exciting than a renegade preacher ultimately brought down by hubris.  That said, both are compelling reads - Mina couldn't write boring sentence if she tried.   And she manages to drag out every shred of humanity in Savonarola.   He starts off indifferent to God, then personal setbacks lead him to find God.   He genuinely believes God speaks to him, then he begins to doubt, and the doubts quickly lead to his gruesome death.

The novella is the perfect form for Mina's purpose.   Many have tried and failed to spin the Rizzio story into full-length novels.   Such attempts fail because poor old Rizzio was collateral damage in a political powerplay which happened behind closed doors in Tudor times but today are everyday public fare.   In that sense Savonarola plays better because he is definitely responsible for his own rise and fall.   The canvas is bigger, the protagonist centrestage.  

I for one am really enjoying Mina's mid-career experiments.

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

 Achebe and Wole Soyinka were near contemporaries who brought African literature to world notice in 1958, Soyinka with his first stage play, Achebe with this novel.   Soyinka went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and rightly so.    Achebe didn't publish enough - just five novels in almost fifty years.

It's interesting that both men were Nigerian and both finished their education in England.   Solyinka, however, was upper middle class with a Yoruba background whereas Achebe was Igbo and rural.   Things Fall Apart was his first and most important novel.    Broadly speaking it is certainly a novel.   It has a central character, the famous wrestler Okonkwo, and is in three parts: Okonkwo's life as a distinguished resident of his village; exile from his fatherland to his motherland after he accidentally kills a young man; and his return to Umuofia to find that Christian missionaries have established a church and the old ways which Okonkwo fought so hard to live up to are quickly falling apart.   It is this last phase which finally lets us date the story to the end of the nineteenth century, otherwise everything is as it always was.

Whilst Okonkwo is the central character, Achebe explores the ancient traditions, myths and religious practice.   These can be bizarre and brutal on the one hand, beautiful on the other, particularly in terms of the animal stories the mothers tell to their children.   Underlying it all is a discourse on the male and female aspects of life.   Okonkwo is ultra male because his father was an idler and a failure.   Okonkwo barely remembers his mother but when he goes into exile in her home village he is welcomed as a long-lost child.   Okonkwo's eldest son is a failure despite his father's attempts to beat some masculinity into him.   He becomes an early convert to the Christians.   Okonkwo wishes that his daughter Ezinma, by his second wife, could succeed him.   He cannot say this openly, of course.   Such things are not possible.

Things Fall Apart really is a literary masterpiece - complex yet beautifully simple.   It was written in English and first published here by Heinemann.   I am keen to explore more African literature, especially by black authors.   Hitherto the only African literature I have read and seen are the plays of Athol Fugard, who has always been on the right side of the argument but was never one of the oppressed. 

Shoot at the Moon - William F Temple

 A sci-fi semi-classic from the Sixties by a pioneer of the postwar British genre.   William F Temple was never as famous as Arthur C Clarke or as idiosyncratic as Brian Aldiss, but he knew them both and had his own literary characteristics.   I have already reviewed The Four-Sided Triangle, Battle on Venus and (the best title) Fleshpots of Sansato on this blog.   Shoot at the Moon is every bit as good.   As an extra bonus it took me back to the mid-Sixites when the debate among schoolboys was Is it even possible to land on the moon?

Well obviously it was, and Temple, being of a scientific bent, never seems to have doubted it.   He follows Clarke in his advocacy of atomic engines being the best and least damaging way to do it, and they may well have been right.   He then works in Charles Eric Maine's debut trick of murder in space.   Indeed, he doubles down on the device with two murders.   But the Endeavour only has a crew of five to begin with: the proto Musk, Colonel Marley, who has funded the expedition, his schizophrenic daughter Lou, who happens to be a leading scientist, her ex-husband Thompson, the celebrated Johan, Pettigue, who has a reputation of being the only survivor of several expeditions, and our narrator, the jobbing space pilot Franz Brunel.   Well, it can't be him, we assume - that would be taking the unreliable narrator too far.   And it can't really be either of the two victims, certainly not the first.   Temple hints that there are other crews elsewhere on the Moon, so it may be them, especially since the Endeavour is on a literal gold hunt on a forbidden patch of the Dark Side.

I'm not going to reveal the killer.   Just to say, it's a good one when it comes and provides an excellent chase to finish with.   The characters all have their strengths and weaknesses, their motives and guilty secrets.   Shoot at the Moon is Temple on top form.   If retro British sci-fi is your thing, you'll love it.

Man of Straw - Heinrich Mann

 The tricky thing with satire is drawing it out to fill a decent-sized novel.   Heinrich Mann pulls it off with Man of Straw.   Diederich Hessling is the ultimate New Man of turn-of-the-century provincial Germany, obsessed with the Kaiser, with being a Kaiser in his home, work and personal life.   Mann's first achievement is to make Diederich his hero (so many lesser satirists make the object of their dislike a secondary character).   The second is to humanize him.   We see what made Diederich a New Man: his childhood, sickly and frightened of everything; his awkward time at University in Berlin where he ultimately finds his place with the Neo Teutons whom he imagines will take over Germany; his army service, which he loves but which is cut short by ill-health.

In practice it is only Diederich who makes a success of Neo Teutonism.   Other members he encounters in later life are failures, oddballs.   Diedrich returns to Netzig to take over his father's paper factory.   He does the round of the great and good of the town.   Among them is his hero, Herr Buck. a man involved in everything and universally admired.   His is the position Diederich aspires to.   But Buck is a social reformer - a liberal by modern standards - and Diederich a royalist ultra-conservative.   His son, Wolfgang, whom Diederich befriended in Berlin, is ever so slightly decadent.

Diederich's progress is neither easy nor straightfroward.   He calls out Old Buck's son-in-law, Lauer, for derogatory comments about the Kaiser.   This is a criminal offence.   Diederich is the chief witness for the prosecution.   Wolfgang Buck leads the defence.   Diederich panics and tries to wriggle out of the situation.   But he can't.   Mann shows him writhing in the witness box, struggling to find an answer to Wolfgang's cross examination.   And in the pit of despair he finds a crumb of courage and responds.   To his amazement Lauer is convicted and imprisoned.   Deiderich has won.

The business is losing money.   Diederich in his pomp and ambition has overstretched himself.   He tries to cheat his suppliers and finds an unlikely ally in his machinist, the social democrat union man, Napoleon Fischer.   They become partners in fraud and politics.   Diederich joins the town council.    Fishcher ultimately makes it all the way to the Reichstag.

And alongside all this we have Diederich's personal life.   He has let a girl down in Berlin.   He wins the local hieress Guste from Wolfgang by starting a rumour that they are half-brother and sister, which perhaps they are.   He cheats one of his sisters, Magda, of her inheritance, but protects his other sister, Emma, when she is let down.

There are three tremendous episodes of pure farce in Man of Straw which anchor the theme.   The first, at the end of Chapter One, is in 1892 when Diederich is a student in Berlin and comes across a huge crowd of the unemployed protesting in Unter Den Linden.   The Kaiser comes to face them down.   He does not address them, he certainly doesn't give them the bread and work they demand.   He simply appears, on horseback, with his entourage.   He simply shows himself and the protestors are silenced.   Diederich is one of the cheering throng who run after the imperial retinue.   He finds himself in the park, on a bridle path.   He finds himself facing the Kaiser himself.   Diederich falls into a puddle.   The Kaiser laughs.

On honeymoon with Guste in Switzerland, Diederich spots the Kaiser again.   This time he follows him all the way to Rome where he keeps a sort of personal guard outside the Kaiser's hotel.   And finally, after the unveiling of the statue of the first Kaiser, Wilhelm I, in Netzig - Diederich's personal project, which has cost millions to achieve - turns into a total waterlogged disaster, Diedrich turns up at the Buck house and watches from the corridor outside Old Buck's sickroom as his first, fallen hero, the Kaiser of Netzig, dies.

The best and most challenging novel I have read so far in 2024.