Defy the Foul Fiend - John Collier

 I was not up to speed on John Collier.   No wonder, really.   He was noted (never famous) for contributing the screenplays of famous films (The African Queen, I Am A Camera) and short stories for magazines like the New Yorker.   He died in 1980.   His only novels, three of them, appeared in the 1930s and did well but not brilliantly.   In other words he was before my time and long since out of my main sphere of interest.

I forget now how I came across him.   I acquired two of his novels some time ago and they gradually disappeared into my ever-increasing mountain of the waiting-to-be-read.   Then, by chance, I unearthed Defy the Foul Fiend, the last of the three, published in 1934.   It is a comic novel very much in the style of the young Evelyn Waugh.   Time has moved on however, the dark cloud of the Great Depression hangs over the comedy.

Willoughby Corbo, our hero, is the illegitimate son of the aristocratic waster Lord Ollebeare.   When the cook who bore him runs off with her lover, Ollebeare dumps the boy on his brother Ralph, a grim stockbroker who has a wife desperate to be a mother.   The wife dies and Willoughy is left largely to his own devices.   In the fullness of time he has to go out into the world with which he is largely unfamiliar.   Ollebeare manages to get him a post as secretary to Lord Stumber, an elderly campaigning peer who happens to have a very young wife with remarkably compelling breasts which fascinate Willoughby and other young men of his acquaintance.   So Willoughby gets the boot and embarks on his quest for feminine beauty and a meaningful role in life.

He tries all options - a young prostitute, a sultry siren; hawking unnecessary domestic appliances door-to-door on a purely commission basis.   But Willoughby is essentially mule-headed and a bred-in-the-bone Tory.   We all recognise early on that the rather limpid and artistic Lucy is the girl for him and that Willoughby is fated to follow the Corbo inheritance in all its aspects.

I was fascinated with the twist at the end that is strikingly similar to one in Mrs Craddock which I finished immediately before starting reading this.   Defy the Foul Fiend is also let down by a problem which I noted in the post below Maugham never had.   Maugham always knew when to finish.   Collier very much doesn't.   At least a third of this book could have been cut and what remained would have been brilliant.   There are great jokes here, affecting characters, many well-drawn scenes, but there is also waffle, pages I ended up skipping.   Perhaps this is why Collier only contributed to famous screenplays.   He could enliven and amplify but he cannot construct.

The Slaves of Solitude - Patrick Hamilton

 The Slaves of Solitude is one of Hamilton's key novels, alongside Hangover Square and Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky.   Published in 1947, it is set three or four years later, after America has joined the war but before D-Day.   The London Blitz has forced Edna Roache and thousands out of the capital but, in her case, only as far Henley-on-Thames or, as Hamilton calls it, Thames Lockdon.   Always a renter or lodger, she finds refuge Rosamund Tea Rooms, which has become a boarding house for the duration.  There, she shares with the old, the fading, the spinsters like herself.   A former schoolmistress, Roach is currently a publisher's reader, and so long as she commutes daily she is content.   But when her employer says she can work from home, the problems of communal living, the daily grind of despondency, becomes overwhelming.

To start with, things are looking up.   Edna has a friend, the ex-pat German, Vicki Kugelmann.   She even has an admirer, Lieutenant Pike, an American GI.   She also has an enemy of sorts, the bombastic bachelor Mr Thwaites, whose whims and eccentricities dominate at the Tea Rooms.   Then Vicki moves in and slowly takes over.   She charms Mr Thwaites, catches the eye of Lieutenant Pike, slowly but surely excluding Miss Roach.

The title is not only catchy, it is accurate.   War and its retrictions has transformed a whole class of people from active participants in society to passive slaves of solitude.  For such people it is not a case of cheer up and carry on; all they can do is endure.   For Roach everything changes when she challenges the convention and stands up for herself.    Then she is able to escape, returns to London, and comes back to life.   At the end of the day The Slaves of Solitude is a comic novel, and an excellent example of what a comic novel can do.

Where Angels Fear to Tread - E M Forster

 I was put off E M Forster by the fuss surrounding the publication of Maurice in the early Seventies, then all those arch Merchant-Ivory movies that brought in the era of the aristocratic actor.  Not my sort of thing at all.  Nowadays I am more tolerant.  All I want is an author with a voice and style that stands out in the crowd.  Forster certainly has that.   Where Angels Fear to Tread a black comedy that pivots on two tragic deaths but nevertheless manages to maintain an atmosphere of genteel social satire.

The young widow Lilia and her companion Miss Caroline Abbott leave one of the quieter and more rural suburbs of 1904-5 London for a tour of Italy, suggested by the effete pretensions of her mollycoddled brother in law Philip Herriton.  Before long the Herritons receive the ghastly news that Lilia has become engaged to a young Italian - and fellow not only young and Italian but the son of that social anomaly a rustic dentist!  Italianate Philip is despatched to put a stop to this nonsense, only to find Lilia and her Gino are already married.

Worse news follows within the year.  Lilia has not only given birth to Gino's son, she has died doing so.   Her former mother-in-law Mrs Herriton does what any respectable middleclass Englishwoman would.  She sends Philip and his bluestocking sister Harriet to buy the baby from its father and bring it home.   Miss Abbott, meanwhile, feels obliged to involve herself in the enterprise.

Key to the novel's success is its brevity, only 160 pages in this iconic Penguin Modern Classic edition.  It would be difficult to maintain the comic element any longer.  Yet in that narrow space Forster manages to cram deep insight into all his main characters (and plenty into the deftly-drawn supporting cast).  The action romps along and yet all the pre-work, the structure essential to the farce, is in place.  If not quite a masterpiece, Where Angels Fear to Tread is arguably a significent work by a supreme master.

A House for Mr Biswas - V S Naipaul

V S Naipaul considered A House for Mr Biswas his first serious fiction and his best-known.  He wrote it at the end of the Fifties, as he was approaching thirty.  The setting is Naipaul's native Trinidad but Mohun Biswas (called 'Mr' from childhood) is about a decade older than him.  Indeed, Biswas dies in early middle age.

There is a Dickensian element to the structure.  Biswas's lifetime quest is to secure a house of his own and the story is divided into chapters around his housing status through life.  Biswas is a clown and a bit of a blowhard, who rises to a job as staff reporter on a Port of Spain newspaper and an unsecured social worker in a postwar community project.  Naipaul was a professional writer from his student days at Oxford and became a dreadful snob, pompous and opinionated.  Perhaps that came after he wrote Biswas because the 600-page book never becomes boring or didactic.  It is, in short, a traditional English comic novel set entirely in Trinidad.

I had never read Naipaul before Biswas and it may be I never read him again.  But I thoroughly enjoyed this.

The Trouble With Lichen - John Wyndham

The Trouble With Lichen (1960) is a marked departure from Wyndham's usual output. It remains science fiction and as usual is set more or less contemporaneously. But it is a comic novel, hence what would otherwise be a horribly inappropriate cover. Is it funny? Not laugh out loud, certainly. It takes a comically quizzical look at what happens when an age-preventing agent is discovered by scientists. One tries to bury the discovery, though he cannot resist dosing himself and his children; the other sets up an exclusive beauty clinic. Both choices have repercussions. The truth is bound to get out eventually, and it very quickly does.


The writing is good, the idea close to brilliant. The problem is, Wyndham can't handle the God's Eye View. He sees too much, thus there is lots of so-called comic banter between working class types, stereotypical politicians and the popular press insist on getting involved. Wyndham would have done better by sticking to his two scientists, Francis Saxover (scion of a sort of Wedgwood/Darwen dynasty) and his beautiful and brilliant assistant Diana Brackley. I believe that would have forced him to work out his plot better in his celebrated 'logical' technique. As it is, the sending up of real newspapers like the Guardian and the Mail works well; that of obviously fictional papers like the Trumpeter falls flatter than any pancake.


Oddly, though - and very unusually for a science fiction novel - Lichen provides a convincing snapshot of the society for which it was written. It's a slightly qualified thumbs-up from me then.

Click here for a BBC interview with Wyndham the day after Lichen was published.

The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge

The Bottle Factory Outing came out in 1974, towards the end of Bainbridge's early period. It has the hallmarks of being firmly working class, girls dreaming way beyond their station, a touch of the fantastical and more than a touch of the macabre. I have read some of her middle period novels, which are male-centric and historical and which I enjoyed. This is my first of the early period.

Freda and Brenda share a desperately glum bedsit somewhere on the outskirts of London and work together at the Italian wine-bottling factory nearby. Freda is big and blowsy and glam. Brenda is tiny and shy and odd, not unlike the way Bainbridge chose to present herself at the time. The bottle factory is a relic from the Victorian era. All the other members of staff are Italian, save for Patrick, who drives the van.


Freda has set her cap at Vittorio, who will one day inherit the factory. Brenda, meanwhile, has to fend off the attentions - and hands - of the office manager, Rossi.


Freda has decided there must be a factory outing to Windsor, which is where things start to go wrong, ending with a truly macabre problem. Meanwhile Brenda's mother-in-law turns up with a gun, Patrick fixes the toilet cistern, and Freda gets to ride one of the Queen's special funeral horses.


It's a comic novel, though not for me a laugh-out-loud one. The offbeat characters and meandering plot keep us involved and amused. You can sense Bainbridge's talent seething in search of the perfect vehicle. This isn't that vehicle, but it's great fun.

The Loved One - Evelyn Waugh

The Loved One is Waugh's satire on the American Way of Death, dedicated to Nancy Mitford (whose sister Jessica, if memory serves, wrote something similar). Dennis Barlow is a young war poet who has headed to California to try his luck in the movies. He has somewhat let the side down, not only by losing his place at the studio but - far worse - by taking common or garden employment, to whit assistant at the Happier Hunting Ground pet cemetery. Members of the Hollywood Cricket Club, expat writers, actors and general support players, have called to express their disapproval. Sadly, it is not Brown who takes their warning to heart. It is his landlord, Sir Francis Hinsley, celebrated author turned scriptwriter turned publicist turned nobody, who when he loses his last tenuous connection to Megalopolis Pictures, does the decent thing and tops himself.


Dennis has to take charge of making the arrangements. The Club has decided no expense should be spared, which takes our hero to Whispering Glades Memorial Park where he meets the dedicated mortician Aimee, and complications ensue...


The Loved One is a brilliant, beautiful book, 140 pages of magnificently elegant prose, very funny and very dark. I have become a Waugh fan in my later years but this is by some distance the most enjoyable of his fictions I have come across.

Time for a Tiger - Anthony Burgess

Time for a Tiger was Burgess's first novel, the first in his Malayan Trilogy aka The Long Day Wanes. It was published in 1956 while he was still teaching in Malaya. The novel is a thinly disguised version of Burgess's actual experience. Victor Crabbe teaches in Kuala Hantor; Anthony Burgess taught in Kuala Kangsar; both are/were house masters; both have/had deeply unhappy wives and fractious relationships with their respective headmasters, who they loathe.

Crabbe's counterpoint, the six-foot-eight policeman and fledgling alcoholic is Nabby Adams, a man wholly devoted to expatriate life in the failing empire. He it is who always has time for a Tiger, the bottled beer which is his only sustenance. Nabby owes money to everyone. Where Crabbe might seek to enlighten the multi-national, multi-cultural natives, Nabby takes them absolutely as he finds them. He loves them like he loves his scabby dog Cough. Crabbe cares too, but his way is patronising, accidentally elitist. And this, of course, is the time of the Chinese Communist-inspired Malayan insurgency.

It is, however, an English comic novel in a colonial setting, falling somewhere between Kipling and Paul Scott. It is a long way from the experimental Burgess of the Seventies, or even A Clockwork Orange, which was only six years on from Time for a Tiger. It is, nevertheless, a comic novel that is actually funny, with complex characters and the occasional hint of the linguistic fireworks that were to come.

Everyone who reads later Burgess should also read early Burgess. I was lucky, I suppose, in that I first read the Malayan Trilogy just after I read A Clockwork Orange, which was around the time the Kubrick film came out. Me and a couple of mates went to see the movie, in a rare single showing outside London at the height of the controversy. It's appropriately Burgessian, I think, that what may have been the only time the film was shown in a mainstream provincial picture palace was at the Odeon Rugby. I know it happened 'cos I was there.

Rare Earth - Paul Mason

Paul Mason is the celebrated TV journalist, probably the last openly left-wing member of the breed. Rare Earth (2012) is his first and so far only novel.

As you would expect, it is about TV journalism. His hero, David Brough, is a gritty Northerner, difficult to employ because of his old-fashioned yen for a real story. He is part of a team visiting China to provide some colour for a feature on the next economic superpower. Unfortunately he stumbles on pollution, corruption and state manipulation of the market in rare earth (compounds essential for digital hardware).


Fair enough, you might think. An interesting and worthwhile read. But then Mason springs his big surprise. Many of the characters are troubled by ghosts - yes, actual dead people spirits who converse with the living as if they were, well, alive. Then there are fantastically inventive characters like the "private military and security" team of supermodel bikers who rescue Brough from the desert and eighty-four year-old General Guo, who once swam in the Yangtse with Chairman Mao and who now seems to be running everything despite living in a shantytown shed.


It's the inventiveness that keeps you hooked for 300+ pages. That and the pacey style, because Mason writes exactly like he speaks - in superfast epigrams. In the hands of another this would be a worthy but scarcely surprising story (it's not exactly a secret that globalisation is built on poverty and corruption); with Mason we get a kaleidoscope of facts, comedy and fantastical fizz. He should make time to write another.

Ginger, You're Barmy - David Lodge

This is a reissue of Lodge's 1962 novel based on his own National Service. The point, as in fiction by many other reluctant recruits, is that National Service was pointless and boring. Problem is, pointless and boring doesn't make for winning fiction.  Lodge gets round this by cleverly compressing the action into the beginning and end of his avatar Jonathan's two-year stint. Everything between, he implies, is the boring stuff we don't need to bother with.

He freely admits to borrowing the device from Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Indeed, his 1982 afterword is, for once, useful and informative.  By 'for once' I don't mean to slight Lodge but to scorn the practice of publishers who tend to think that they have to add something extra to reissued novels for the benefit, presumably, of the hard of thinking. Anyway, in this instance it does add value.

Rather than make himself the rebellious character - another typical problem of the sub-genre - Lodge's Jonathan is the pragmatic one who gets on with it and makes the best of a bad job.  The rebel here is the ginger Irishman, Mike Brady, who is simply one of nature's nonconformists.  Brady goes completely off the rails when the bullying victim that always exists in any bunch of confined young men, dies.  He attacks the bully and pays the price.  He thus leaves the novel about two-thirds of the way through.  Big problem, we might assume, leaving us with the boring plodder Jonathan Browne.  Even as a fledgling author, however, Lodge had the skills to stave off disaster.  We already know that he is courting Brady's girlfriend - another benefit of the flashback structure - so our interest now centres on how this came to be.  Is he really making his narrator a bit of a shit?  No he isn't, and the courtship is touchingly handled.  Then, towards the end, Brady naturally resurfaces, now a member of a quite different army.

Ginger is, of course, a proper English comic novel.  Which is not say it is funny or - as the guff on the cover seems to suggest, farcical - but simply that it views its world and those who inhabit with good humour and general positivity.  There are smiles rather than laughs.  Lodge is too good at characterisation to waste time on jokes.  The book is lean - two hundred or so pages - yet there is considerable depth and disquisition. Interestingly, it is Lodge's only first-person narration (at least it was in 1982).  He seems to suggest this is a weakness but I consider it a great blessing.  The beauty of a narrator is that you have no choice but to enter his or her world because it's the only one on offer.  You don't have to like him but you can't be allowed to loathe him.  Mike Brady, without Jonathan's explanation of his shortcomings, might be insufferable.  As it is, we share Jonathan's fascination with him.

I have read of lot of Lodge over the years.  On the whole I prefer his early work.  I thoroughly enjoyed this.

King of the Badgers - Philip Hensher

Hensher's defining strength is for building narratives of community, Northern working class in The Northern Clemency and West Country genteel here in King of the Badgers.  Clemency also had the advantage of being set against a background of the Thatcher reign of terror, all of which, naturally, could be viewed from hindsight; Badger on the other hand is set and written at the beginning of the Age of Austerity where the outcome can only be guessed at.  Thus Clemency is driven by what we know is waiting for our characters, Badger has to have a genre device, a missing child, to propel its narrative.

The setting is the picturesque estuary town of Hanmouth in Devon.  In Hanmouth proper the houses are worth £1m apiece, the shops are all craft and there are CCTV cameras everywhere, thanks to Mr Calvin and his influential Neighbourhood Watch.  People here who work for a living do so elsewhere - in London or at Barnstaple's third-rate university.  The daytime, weekday residents are mostly retired. None of them were born in the houses they now live in.

Out beyond the big roundabout there is another, less fragrant Hanmouth, a massive estate of social housing, which is where single 'mom' Heidi O'Connor lives with her brood.  Her second daughter, China, is the one who goes missing.  Because Heidi is telegenic, the national Press Pack descends and goes into overdrive.  Because the Ruskin estate is anything but telegenic, it is old Hanmouth that is overwhelmed.  When direct news dries up the coverage turns speculative.  What if Heidi set up the so-called abduction and her skanky ex, Marcus, is hiding China while Heidi cashes in?  Before we know it, that is the approved version of events and Heidi is remanded, awaiting trial.  Then Marcus is found murdered.  And still there is no sign of China.

The thriller narrative effectively ends there, at the end of Act One, though it is resolved three hundred pages or so later.  Hensher's second theme is the gay community in Hanmouth, which centres on Sam, the artisan cheesemonger, and his husband Harry, aka Lord What-a-Waste.  They belong to a group of bears who meet regularly for food and orgies.  We then move to David in St Albans, who writes purposefully unreadable copy for Chine fashionistas who want to be seen with English novels.  His parents have moved to a flat in Hanmouth, leaving shy, fat, gay David alone.  Then, miraculously, he manages to attract the attention of Mauro, a Soho waiter.  David lends Mauro money.  Mauro agrees to pose as David's boyfriend during a weekend with his parents in Devon.  This happens to be the weekend that Sam and Harry are hosting the bears.  Anarchy, sex and profound unhappiness ensue.

The narrative is complex but expertly interwoven.  The style is traditional English comic, wherein Hensher excels because he has the rare ability to mock himself without overindulgence.  His cast of characters is well-rounded and he holds our attention by gradually peeling off the onion-skin layers of gentle deceit and polite hypocrisy at what always seems like the perfect moment.

Hensher is building a major body of work in which King of the Badgers is a significant milestone.

Ripeness is All - Eric Linklater

Ripeness is All was written in 1934 and published in 1935, by which time Linklater was an established and successful novelist.  He was writing too much and it shows.  The humour here is sometimes forced and the story is not as long as the book.  You sense padding.

Nevertheless, Linklater is a spectacularly talented writer.  The sheer force of his prose keeps you going through the duller bits.  His viewpoint is idiosyncratic.  He takes some unexpected swipes at unusual sacred cows - the blessed state of maternity, for example - and makes no bones about some of his characters being gay and lesbian. Some critics feel his humour is aggressively masculine but I do not find it so.  Here, his male characters are all idiots.  The character he clearly likes best is forty year-old spinster Hilary.

The plot is inventive.  The bachelor John dies and leaves the family fortune to whichever of the progeny of the late Jonathan Gander (his father) has the largest number of legitimate children by a given date.  So begins a comical race to procreate.  The comic twist is that it turns out stern Victorian patriarch Jonathan had a lot more progeny than anyone knew.  I don't think I'm giving too much away by revealing that.  It's set up quite early on.  The problem is, it's never really resolved.  You get the impression Linklater hits the contracted word or page count and then just wraps things up as quickly as he can.

I increasingly enjoy Linklater and enjoyed reading this.  It's not one of his best but it's better than many other comic novels of the period.  It is very English, which is an odd choice for such a proud Highland and Islander.  It is strikingly reminiscent of Linklater's friend and fellow Scottish Nationalist, Compton Mackenzie (who was, of course, English).  Indeed, Ripeness is All is effusively dedicated to 'Monty' Mackenzie.  I wonder if it was meant as a homage.

The Gropes - Tom Sharpe

Not a masterpiece but pretty impressive for an 80 year-old.  Certainly the most amusing Sharpe I've read since 1978's The Throwback (which may well be the funniest book I've ever read).

Sharpe's comedy is unique with its horrendous predatory women and unappealing heroes.  The comic novel is a British specialism with Sharpe at the extreme edge of the farcical range.  He should be celebrated alongside Waugh and Wodehouse, but inexplicably isn't.