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. 

Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata

 Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, so you have to wonder why he is so little known in the West.  It can't be because he is too Oriental, because Mishima can be equally esoteric.  It might be a translation problem (Edward G Seidensticker, who translated this, was undoubtedly a great scholar but that doesn't necessarily make him a great translator), or it might just be that 120-page novellas are not popular here.

I should perhaps point out that 120 pages took me five sessions to read.   I so enjoyed the poetic quality of Kawabata's sparse writing that I wanted to enjoy every paragraph.  It is a leisurely story, and rightly so, as the protagonist Shimamura is a lazy man taking a lazy holiday in the mountains.

He comes to this particular hot springs resort because Komako is there.  Shimamura and Komako have met before and have had an affair, but now Komako has signed a four-year geisha contract to fund care for a young man who she looks after but who is engaged to another woman, Yoko.  Shimamura has encountered Yoko and the sick young man on the train journey north.   His interest has been piqued in more ways than one.

Shimamura is an urbane city man.   He has inherited enough money not to have to work.   He considers himself something of an intellectual and aesthete.  He has cultivated an interest in Japanese dance and collects Chijimi linen cloth.   Komako is not rich.   To get money she has adopted the archaic profession of a geisha.   She fits in a renewed affair with Shimamura between parties at which she drinks too much and filches cigarettes (she doesn't smoke).  In a sense she is flirting with modernity (the novel was written in 1934), but the two lifestyles are always going to clash.   In any event, the casual love affair is never going anywhere.   Shimamura already has a wife and children, who he seemingly doesn't care much about.  Indeed, he doesn't seem to care much about anything.

The allusive, meandering style is deliberately misleading.  The novel in which very little happens is always leading to a tragic climax.  Old and new Japan come together.  An old traditional barn in the mountain resort is acting as a cinema.  The film jams in the projector, sets on fire and burns the place down.  A shocking death finally jars Shimamura into life and Kawabata ends with the most beautiful paragraph of all.

Siddhartha - Herman Hesse

I may have mentioned before that I am not religious. Religion has no attraction for me although I am interested in the narrative aspects. In any event, it is not reasonable to shun a novel by an undoubted master just because it happens to be about religion.


I clearly am no expert on Buddhism. I had long thought that Siddhartha the 1922 novel was about the Buddha himself. This is not foolishness on my part - Siddhartha Gotama is one of the generally accepted forms of the Buddha's given names - it is novelistic guile on the part of Hesse. His Siddhartha is not a prince like Gotama but a Brahmin, a hereditary Hindu priest. As an adolescent he becomes dissatisfied with organised religion and joins a band of wandering samana (searchers for truth) with his best friend Govinda. After a few years of fasting and begging Siddhartha and Govinda hear about the Enlightened One, Gotama. They visit him and hear him teach. Govinda is converted to Buddhism but Siddhartha, being a conceited young man, feels the Buddha's teaching is not enough. He does not doubt that Buddha is enlightened, but that teaching - even from Buddha's own lips - is not the path to enlightenment. For Siddhartha, each person must find their own path.


From the very start of what is only a hundred-page novella, you sense that Hesse, verging on middle age, is searching for his own take on the meaning of life. The questions and misgivings that Siddhartha explores are the author's own.


I somehow doubt that Hesse ever ended up in the bed of the most famous courtesan in India but Siddhartha does. To win her affection he becomes a merchant and a gambler. He tries to conduct his affairs in a righteous manner but after twenty years or more realises it cannot be done. He abandons his pregnant lover Kamala to resume his search for enlightenment. He meets Govinda, now a Buddhist monk. He meets again the ferryman Vasudeva, who took him across the river to Sansara all those years ago. Through Vasudeva, he eventually finds the clue to enlightenment, which is the subjugation or eradication of the self in order to achieve oneness with everything else. The ending, when his oldest friend Govinda sees all this through Siddhartha's smile, is profoundly beautiful.


I still have no interest in religion but my interest in Hesse is revived and I really must tackle the late, philosophical-cum-transcendental novels that won him the Nobel Prize in 1946.

Cannery Row - John Steinbeck

Cannery Row (1945) is the distillation of Steinbeck. It contains everything he does best, in his best style and in the perfect format. Only 168 pages long in this Penguin paperback, it nevertheless manages to come across as epic in its panoramic view of the lives and aspirations of the denizens of the rundown Californian shanty town that faces onto the sardine canning factories where, from time to time, some of them might work.

This is not the Depression of The Grapes of Wrath - there is plenty of honest work for those who want it, but the residents of Cannery Row would rather not, most of the time. Doc has his own business in among the canning factories, Western Biological, where he pickles and prepares exotic sea creatures for scientific study. Doc is our hero inasmuch as Cannery Row has one. He is involved in everything and the others are ultimately realised in their relationship to him. There's the general merchant Lee Chong, who sells Doc his beer. There's Mack and the boys who live in Lee Chong's former fish meal store, which they have refurbished as the Palace Flophouse; they just want to throw a party for Doc, to celebrate all he has done for the community. The first attempt backfires, but in the end they throw a proper party, fights and all. The girls from Dora's Bear Flag Restaurant, the local cathouse, work shifts in order to attend.


The focus slides from group to group, There is a sense of Steinbeck studying the community the same way Doc studies the life in rockpools. The wondrous descriptions of the latter - especially the baby octopus hunt - are what moved me most. Then there's the opening section which truly sets the tone, when Horace Abbeville, unable to pay his bill at Lee Chong's, settles up by making over the fish meal store to the Chinaman, then goes straight up there and shoots himself. Lee Chong has got himself a storeroom he doesn't really need; in return he makes sure Abbeville's dependents never go hungry.


That is how things work out in Cannery Row.


That is why they gave Steinbeck the Nobel Prize.

It Can't Happen Here - Sinclair Lewis

The other book about Donald Trump was written 80 years ago by Nobel Prize Winner (the first American winner) Sinclair Lewis. And it is both funny and scary.

It's scary because his outsider president, Buzz Windrip, spouts the same meaningless word-association babble that Trump does. Buzz too is known by his first name, which he has made into a brand. He has even sort of written a sort of book, which Lewis gleefully quotes at length (having obviously made it up in the first place). It's scary in that Lewis wrote it in 1934-5, when Hitler and Mussolini seemed poised to take over Europe, if not the world. It is no surprise, then, that Buzz turns out to be an American fascist dictator, who institutes work camps for the poor, local commandants to keep them poor, and uniformed Minute Men to enforce the will of the commandants. And the people love it - because Buzz Windrip has made America Great Again.


It can't happen here? Well it just did. How long, we wonder, before somebody on Fox News mentions Buzz Windrip and The Donald naturally assumes he was a real president, wiped from history by Fake News? His stormtoopers won't be called Minute Men, though, because Trump can't tell the difference between minute (time) and minute (tiny) and he has tny hands and therefore, in his mind, a tiny penis.
Anyway, back to the book. The story concerns Doremus Jessop, the sixty-year-old editor-owner of a local newspaper in Fort Beulah Vermont. He fancies himself a free-thinker, an armchair radical, but the unexpected triumph of President Buzz challenges all his preconceptions. Doremus (magnificent name) is sorely tested, he pays a high price for his beliefs and almost childish acts of sedition. Does he face up to the challenge? Does he answer the call? That's what the book is about and it would be unfair to reveal the answer. Incidentally, the way Lewis ultimately rolls out the answer demonstrates the skills needed to win the Nobel Prize.


There is a certain Augustan tone to the writing, echoes of Swift and Pope which are pitch-perfect for what is, after all, satire. It Can't Happen Here is a triumphant book. Given that Lewis knocked it off in a frenzied burst of activity, it begs the question, how good are his other books? And why the hell have I left it so late to discover him?

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It has to be one of the greatest opening lines in literature: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." Superb - and the quality does not diminish over the next 400 pages.


Ostensibly One Hundred Years of Solitude is the saga of seven generations of the Buendias, first family of Macondo. In many ways it is the same story, lived over again by succeeding generations.


The men are always (Jose) Arcadio or Aureliano. The Arcadios tend to be seekers after truth who end up going mad. The Aurelianos are more adventurous but equally monomaniacal.  Several of the women, notably the first matriarch, Ursula Iguaran, live more than a hundred years. Ultimately it all ends in near incest when Amaranta Ursula gives birth to Aureliano, son of her nephew Aureliano. The role of the matriarchs is to keep the house going. The women are either earth goddesses or professional virgins. The first Amaranta is a professional virgin; Renata Remedios, known as Meme, mother of the semi feral Aureliano who sleeps with his aunt, becomes a nun after the father of her child is crippled. Remedios the Beauty is so beautiful that one day she is simply carried off to Heaven. Her brother Aureliano Segunda searches the whole of Colombia for a woman very nearly as beautiful as Remedios. The high-born Fernanda bears him three children, eventually, but nevertheless likes to think of herself as virginal. Fernanda is the matriarch, especially since her husband a is living with his mistress, but in fact the house is maintained by her mother-in-law the long-suffering Santa Sofia de la Piedad. Aureliano Segunda's whore, Petra Cotes, is not the first immoral woman to become involved with the family. The third generation brothers, Aureliano Jose and Arcadio, both have sons by the local wisewoman Pilar Ternera, who outlives every generation, attaining the incredible age of 140. Colonel Aureliano Buendia - he of the opening line - has seventeen sons, all by different women, all called Aureliano, during his pointless military adventures.


Time, in Macondo, is more of a pool than a line. We are never told exactly when the hundred years begins or when it ends. We know that trains and movies ultimately arrive. There is a period of prosperity when the banana company builds a new town opposite the old, but that ends with four-and-a-half years of ceaseless rain, which is followed by a drought. Then the winds come and blow Macondo away into the swirl of history.


Let us return to Remedios the Beauty, the one who was carried off to Heaven. That is not a euphemism - she really is carried off by supernatural powers. One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the masterpieces of magic realism. Other miracles happen. The gypsies and the carnivals bring real magic to town. The gypsy leader Melquiades dies in the time of the first Jose Arcadio Buendia but keeps visiting the house until the sixth Aureliano finally manages to decipher the sanskrit manuscript Melquiades left behind - the prophecy which foretells the fate of Macondo once its hundred years are up.


Magnificent - indisputably a work of genius. Already I want to read it again.

Silent House - Orhan Pamuk

Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in 2006, so we can take it for granted that he writes like a dream.  Silent House was his second novel, published in 1983 but only translated into English in 2012, which seems frankly bizarre. The book is written in the first person but the twist is, each chapter is in a different voice to the one before as the main characters give their perspective on the events of one long weekend in a holiday town in easy reach of Istanbul.

The main characters are the ninety year old Fatma, long widowed, who lives in the titular house with only the dwarf Recep to attend her.  Recep also happens to be the illegitimate son of Fatma's late husband, conceived - as was his younger brother Ismael - in the housekeeper's hut in the grounds of the mansion. Fatma's son Dogan died - a drunkard and non-achiever like his father - a decade and a half ago.  His wife, Gul, predeceased him.  Their children have come to visit their grandmother as they reluctantly do every summer: Faruk, a third generation drunken failure, the glamorous sister Nilgun, who inclines to the politics of the Left, and younger brother Metin, who plans on making an 80s-style fortune in America but who first hopes to seduce the local beauty Ceylan.

Nilgun and Ismael are not given first-person narratives.  Instead of Ismael, who lives away from the Silent House and only visits right at the end of the book, we hear from his son Hassan, who is between Nilgun and Metin in age and who was allowed to play with them at the mansion as a child.  Like Metin he dreams of great achievements, but whereas Metin is a star student in the big city Hassan is a drop-out in an unimportant little seaside town.  In 1980, as today, Turkey was torn between the rightwing Nationalists and the Leftist intelligentsia who saw Turkey was either the last bastion of Western Europe or the western frontier of the Soviet bloc.  Hassan hangs out with the local Nationalists, who spray slogans on walls and not much else.  Whilst Metin hankers after the lovely Ceylan, Hassan is besotted with Nilgun.  Unfortunately for him, she gives the impression of not knowing who he is.  This leads to the unforeseen climax of the story and is the reason why Nilgun has no chapters of her own but is only seen and appraised by others.

The young folk are immersed in their own problems.  Recep, in many ways the most appealing character, struggles to find positives in his situation, pandering to every whim of the embittered old woman who lamed his brother and may well have stunted Receps growth.  And marooned in her bedroom Fatma goes over and over her long life - a life she has no intention of giving up any time soon.  She came to hate her husband, despised her son and is largely indifferent to her grandchildren.  Her relationship with Recep, the living proof of her late husband's depravity, is the fulcrum on which the novel depends.  She cannot survive without him yet she cannot forgive him his paternity and cannot resist tormenting him.

Silent House is a brilliant book by a master of modern fiction.  Essential reading.

The Night Watch - Patrick Modiano

Our hero is unnamed, although he sometimes claims a name, or a father.  He is known by two codenames, Swing Troubadour and the Princesse de Lamballe, because he is a double or triple agent for opposite factions in occupied Paris - the Khedive and his collaborationist gangsters, and the Lieutenant and his Knights of the Shadow, ex-army men dedicated to resistance.  Our hero, only twenty, is an accomplished hotel thief, and theft of any kind is child's play in a Paris abandoned by anyone with anything worth stealing.  He had built himself a small fortune, commandeered a fine townhouse, and taken in a pseudo family, the blind giant Coco Lacour and the wizened child or girlish old woman Esmerelda.  They might not exist, though.  None of this may be true.  Our hero is a criminal, the putative son of the pre-war fraudster Stavisky.  Lying is his stock in trade.

He has been recruited by the Khedive and Philibert to infiltrate the Knights.  The Lieutenant orders him to infiltrate the Khedive's operation.  The Khedive orders him to lure the Lieutenant into a trap and betray him.  Our hero is torn.  He plays for time.  He tells the Khedive there is someone higher than the Lieutenant, a prize really worth taking.  His name?  The Princesse de Lamballe.

So the circles widen and become enmeshed.  And our hero continues an endless looping tour of nighttime Paris, listing the names of streets and squares and the other bizarre denizens of the demi monde like an incantation.  The colours and sounds and meaningless chatter become hallucinatory.  Perhaps he betrays the Lieutenant, perhaps he doesn't.  In the end...  Well, in the end he tries to break out of the labyrinth he has buried himself in, a final desperate bid for normality.  Does he make it?  Modiano, even in his early twenties, was far too fine a writer to offer us the security of resolution.

Certainly there were creatures like our hero in Occupied France.  He mentions some of them among the flamboyant fabrications.  The criminally-inclined who played both ends against the middle.  But what else was a young man without family or prospects supposed to do in the bizarre situation of a city that looks the same as ever but which is regularly bombed by its allies to Brits?  Life was short, the opportunities varied.

This is the essentially the question that Modiano asks.  His hero might lack a name but he doesn't lack character or, despite his best efforts, common humanity.  A superb book by the 2014 Nobel Prize winner.  Essential reading for anyone interested in modern French fiction.

La Place de L'Etoile - Patrick Modiano

Patrick Modiano won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature.  La Place de L'Etoile is the first novel in his Occupation Trilogy and was also his first novel, published in 1968, when Modiano was only 23.

Though nothing of what happens is specifically in 1968 it is very much a book of 1968.  I can't imagine how readers who don't remember the excitement of '68, when the whole of Western Europe seemed to teeter on the brink of revolution, can come to terms with Place de l'Etoile.  Our hero is Raphael Schlemilovitch, or so he says; his persona is readily changeable.  What doesn't change is his Jewishsness, although he is not practising and is not in any way persecuted.  Instead, in his main persona, he is an incredibly rich young man of Venezuelan origins but born and brought up in Paris. He fancies himself a writer of belle-lettres and amateur philosophy.  His main preoccupation, though, is the Nazi occupation of France, which he is not old enough to remember but re-lives, working backwards from university to college to school and immersing himself - not with the Jews who suffered - but in those who hated them, especially the antisemitic artists who collaborated.

First and foremost amongst these is the novelist Celine.  Celine himself does not appear yet he is everywhere.  His characters become Modiano's characters.  The very first passage of the book is a pastiche of Celine's unique style - short, staccato, semi-sentences and exclamations.

The plot radiates from the central pivot of Raphael and his obsession.  Time is relative.  Every passage is a self-contained prose poem. People appear and disappear only to pop up again years later, or earlier, in another city entirely.  Even the narrative person changes when Raphael falls in lust the Marquise and her passion for sexual role-play.  Yet it all makes sense in a surreal way.  I was enthralled.

It's a very short book, just over 100 pages, but you have to take your time reading it or you will miss some of the nuances.  Just to sum up, I'm pretty sure the Place de L'Etoile has nothing to do with any of it.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion - Yukio Mishima

Mishima's story is based on a real-life incident.  In July 1950 the novice monk Hayashi Yoken burned down the Zen Buddhist temple of Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto.  The temple was rebuilt and Yoken survived his suicide attempt (only to die in 1956, the year the literary world's most spectacular suicide published his fictionalised version).

Mishima changes the Yoken's name to Mizoguchi and ends with his flight into the hills after starting the fire.  The real novice was insane, Mizoguchi is not.  That would be too easy.  Mishima's is an existentialist quest to explain the act of atrocious vandalism.  Mizoguchi's journey turns into a quest for beauty and freedom.

Mishima is one of the greatest 20th century novelists.  His failed coup and ritual suicide in November 1970, when he was only forty-five, has probably eclipsed his literary output.  It certainly meant his achievement was never marked by the Nobel Prize, although he almost won in 1968.  Of course the life of a Buddhist monk is alien to the western reader but Mishima knows that (he had spent time in America) and explains in more detail than I suspect the Japanese reader needs.  In this he is assisted by Ivan Morris's beautifully lucid translation.

The result is a novel of enormous power.  Alien though it is, Mizoguchi's narration draws us in.  His action is appalling, his motives (despite Mishima's efforts) inexplicable save as a form of offensively selfish performance art, and yet we can never hate him because he is so entirely human.

I truly love everything about this book - EXCEPT the trite and patronising introduction by Nancy Wilson Ross, an expert, apparently, on Eastern religion.  This she may well have been, and we have to indulge her because she was writing before literature went truly international.  But the problem is, this is not a novel about religion.  Take my tip and skip the intro.