Heroes and Villains - Angela Carter

 Angela Carter has been an inspiration to me, from her radio plays to her arcane fairy tales and her novels, some of which I have reviewed on this blog.   The Bloody Chamber and Nights at the Circus must have been read before I started the blog.   Thankfully Carter managed a significant output before her early death.

Heroes and Villains was published in 1969, which would place it about midway in her truncated career.   She seems to have been in full possession of all her powers.   I found it a masterful piece of writing, beguiling and shocking in equal measure.   As always in her best work, it centres on a young woman discovering her sexuality.

The setting is Britain post apocalypse.   The survivors have grouped into three known clusters, the Professors, the Barbarians and the Out People.   The Professors are the remnants of civilisation who now literally occupy ivory towers.   Barbarians descend from gypsies and travellers.   The Out People occupy the fallen cities and because they hunkered out the blast are often hideously mutated.   The three peoples attack and loot one another.

Marianne is the daughter of a Professor.   As a young child she watched her brother die during a Barbarian raid.   At sixteen she leaves her sanctuary and is promptly captured by the Barbarian Jewel Lee Bradley, the same Barbarian who cut down Marianne's brother, who carries her off to his camp.   As a Bradley Jewel is Barbarian aristocracy, along with his numerous brothers.   Their foster mother Mrs Green was also once a Professor's daughter.   Another Professor who has crossed over is the shaman Donally, who has tutored Jewel.   Donally is so decadent that he keeps his son chained up and beats him.   He fancies himself the last remaining artist and has tattooed the story of Adam accepting the apple from Eve on Jewel's back.

Jewel casually takes Marianne's virginity as a gesture of ownership.   Marriage then becomes inevitable.   Neither much wants it, despite being mutually attracted.   But they come to terms - which is really what the book is about: the accommodations we all make in order to move forward in life.

It is beautifully done.  Carter conjures up an English arcadia re-growing from the blasted ruins.   Her characters are vivid, perverse, compelling.   Her proses sizzles.   Her masterstroke is to leave the story halfway through.   By which I mean, there is a decisive climax, but so many strands cry out for resolution.   We are desperate to find out what happens next.   Our minds inevitably run on - and only the very best of books let that happen.

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K Le Guin

The Left Hand of Darkness was Le Guin's breakthrough novel in 1969. I suppose it could be argued that her theme chimed with the emergent feminist wave - and the book is often cited as the first feminist sci fi - but I believe it is good enough to have been a success in any period.


The book is famous for the line "the king was pregnant", which doesn't actually appear in the text in those exact words and which comes long after we have understood that the inhabitants of the winter-world Gethen are ambi-sexual, alternating between male and female and coming together in periods of kemmer. The Ekumenian envoy, Genly Ai, is Terran and fixedly male. His contact and protector is Estraven, the prime minister of Karhide. But the king's ambitious cousin overthrows Estraven and Ai loses favour soon after. Both end up in exile, slaves and captives, until they come together and return to Karhide after a mammoth trek across the vast ice cap.


The Left Hand of Darkness is set in Le Guin's Hainish universe. There is clearly mythos carried forward from earlier novels, but this does not prevent new readers becoming immersed because the main story is interspersed with legends from the Winter World. As you read, you get a sense of being part of something much bigger, something building to a bigger, more decisive climax. Really the novel is about people of different cultures coming together, recognising and respecting their differences, and finding success through cooperation. It is a philosophical work as much as a science fiction one. Le Guin writes with an elevated tone, almost Homeric yet remarkably fresh. Her sentences vibrate with individuality. Her characters, too, are deeply developed and as a result profoundly involving for the reader.


This edition is from the Gollancz SF Masterworks series. It truly is a classic.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Year of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami

Having discovered Murakami in a roundabout sort of way by happening on the third volume of his magnum opus 1Q84, I was naturally keen to try more.  Tsukuru Tazaki is a more recent (2013), much shorter work. It is equally good.

The story is this: Tsukuru and four other high school students do voluntary work one summer and become the closest of friends for the rest of their secondary education.  The four others, two boys and two girls, happen to have references to colour in their names, hence the 'color' part of the book's title. Tsukuru doesn't; his name means 'builder of things'. As such, he has to go to university in Tokyo because only Tokyo offers a course in his specialism, the building of railway stations.  He comes home for the vacations and, to begin with, everything as it was before he left. His friends are delighted to see him, desperate to hear news of the big city.  But then, for reasons unknown, they cut him dead. They refuse to take his phone calls. When one does finally speak to Tsukuru it is only to tell him that they have all agreed they want nothing more to do with him.

For five months thereafter Tsukuru thinks only of dying.  His life, without his friends, has thus become 'colorless'.  He recovers, graduates, gets the job of his dreams and stays in Tokyo. Sixteen years later he starts dating a woman whom he can at last envisage a future with. She tells him he seems blocked by what happened with his friends.  She convinces him that they only have a future together if he can relieve himself of the burden of his past.  With her help, he tracks down his friends. One of the girls, Shiro, has been murdered.  The other lives with her husband in Finland.  The two boys, Aka and Ao, are still in their home city.

Tsukuru visits them all, even making the trip to Finland to track down Kuru.  They are all pleased to see him.  They all regret having cut him off like they did.  But what else could they do when Shiro told them what Tsukuru had done?  Naturally, I'm not going to reveal what that was.  The important thing is the way Murakami handles the revelation.  Did Tsukuru do it?  Did he later go back and murder Shiro.  If he didn't do either, who did?  And the beauty - the mastery - of his technique is that we never find out.  It's four or five days since I finished the book and the questions are still rattling round in my head.  High art - downright brilliant.

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.

High-Rise - J G Ballard

Reading J G Ballard’s High-Rise (1975) quickly put me in mind of Golding’s Lord of the Flies from 1954.  The resemblance goes beyond mere dystopia.  Both are about civilised man’s predilection to run wild when deprived of his creature comforts.  For both Ballard and Golding, the veneer of social cooperation is tissue-thin.

I don’t want to labour the point because there are obvious differences between the books.  Golding wafts his schoolboys off to a tropical island whereas Ballard maroons his adult male protagonists in a suburban London tower block.  To begin with at least, both locations smack of the paradisiacal.  But, just as Eden had its serpent, so Ballard’s suburbia houses an underlying menace: 

The spectacular view always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape.  Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence....  The cluster of auditorium roofs, curving roadway embankments and rectilinear curtain walling formed an intriguing medley of geometrics - less a habitable architecture, he reflected, than the unconscious diagram of a mysterious psychic event. [Ballard 1975: 34-5]^[1]

For me, massive high-rise developments bring to mind the disastrous social experiments of the 1960s in northern cities like Sheffield and Manchester.  Streets of slums wiped away in favour of jerry-built slums in the sky.  Ballard’s London high-rise is very different.  This new-built development of a thousand apartments is for affluent buyers only; professionals at the very least (Laing, for example, is a lecturer at a medical school), preferably stockbrokers and above.  It remains a social experiment, though.  The size of the apartments, and naturally their cost, increases the higher up you go.  The architect himself, Anthony Royal, occupies the penthouse.  The utopian idea was for the residents at all level to come together in the communal areas like the shopping mall, the swimming pool, and the Royal’s rooftop sculpture garden.  In practice, even as the last of the residents moves in, the middleclass has subdivided itself into three - lower, middle, and upper - and never shall the twentieth floor, let alone the ground floor, aspire to the fortieth.  What was meant to be a single community has become an amalgam of a thousand islands.

These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth century life.  They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed. [Ballard 1975: 46]

Royal has built himself a vertical kingdom, with courtiers and even courtesans.  To be able to be the top of the pile means that someone must be at the bottom, and the lower orders always have the potential to become unruly.

In many ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly ‘free’ psychopathology. [Ballard 1975: 47]

It begins with a fifteen-minute blackout on just three floors.  Residents isolated on the tenth floor concourse stampede.  Some are briefly marooned in the lift between floors.  Somebody, for reasons unknown, drowns a dog in the communal swimming pool.  From that point the veneer cracks, faultlines spreading from the centre like a spider’s web.  Inhibitions slip, the garbage disposal shutes become clogged, people smear dog shit, parties run on for days, a man dies.

Class turns against class, floor against floor.  People defend their territory to the death.  No one leaves the high rise.  No one calls the police.  Their world turns in on itself, becomes self-contained.

The true light of the high-rise was the metallic flash of the polaroid camera, that intermittent radiation which recorded a moment of hoped-for violence for some later voyeuristic pleasure. [Ballard 1975: 133]

A Delicate Truth - John le Carre

John le Carre gets better with age.  A Delicate Truth was published in 2013 when he was 82.  It is his 23rd novel and for my money one of his best.  What keeps him going, I suspect, is disgust with the state,  It used to be the conflicting states of East and West but now it is the controlling, deceitful and above all secretive state of Britain (and, to an extent, our American owners) that gets his goat.  And boy, is le Carre's goat well and truly got.

Three years before the novel's 'present' - that is to say, back in the dying dog days of New Labour - a long serving Foreign Office civil servant is persuaded to go and observe a clandestine op in Gibraltar.  The mission is definitely off the books; even the SAS are acting as a pro tem mercenaries.  'Paul', as he is then known, is acting as the Minister's red telephone.  Officially it's a success.  The dubious international target is captured and taken off to one of America's secret interrogation centres.  But, this being le Carre, that's all spin.  In fact the op was a disaster.  Still, spin covers all that.  The minister leaves parliament for a cushy job in the private sector, the government changes and nobody is any the wiser.

Except. ... the rising star minister was given a rising star private secretary.  The private secretary was excluded from all knowledge of Operation Wildlife and, for his own protection, secretly recorded the discussions.

Now, three years later, everything unravels.

The key point, though, is that the government might have changed but the way it operates hasn't.  The book is full of wonderful vituperation from le Carre, himself of course a former insider, about the spreading web of secrecy, the ever-increasing number of bankers, arms dealers, international arms merchants etc who are granted special access to the corridors of power.  In an ideal world the intelligence services serve the nation, not the government of the day, and the civil service acts as a buffer between ministers and the corrupting world of private finance.  Neither of these things are true in contemporary Whitehall and le Carre has a boundless well of insidious double dealing at his disposal.

A great novel from one of Britain's best.  A classic of the genre.

A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway

Published in 1927, A Farewell to Arms was the novel that made Hemingway.  The first-person narration makes it seem autobiographical, but it's not.  Hemingway was not in these battles and he didn't lose the real nurse in the way described here.  There are autobiographical elements, though.  Hemingway was, of course, a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I, he was badly wounded and decorated for it, he did fall for his nurse and - most disturbingly, his real wife was undergoing the traumatic delivery at the time Hemingway wrote the scenes that end the book.

I have listed the autobiographical elements because are the episodes in the novel that hooked me and kept me reading.  Otherwise, the rather antiseptic, offhand affair between Fred and Catherine alienated me.  Having now read the end sequence, I understand why Hemingway took the risk.  The detachment we feel - which he means us to feel - renders the ending all the more harrowing.  The ending makes the novel stupendous and is well worth waiting for.  In the meantime Fred Henry's wartime adventures, the characters he meets, and the brilliant descriptions of landscape keep us just interested enough.

A Farewell to Arms is one of those novels you have an emotional interaction with.  It's like a love affair in itself - frustrating, occasionally captivated, and when it ends, utterly devastating.  A true classic of world literature.

If Not Now, When? - Primo Levi

I was astonished to learn that this was Levi's only novel written at the end of his career.  I remember him as an iconic writer, in many ways the spokesman for all Holocaust survivors, and had assumed that at least some of his many books were fiction.

Levi was an Italian Jew but his hero here is a Russian Jew.  Mendel has become detached from his unit of the Red Army.  For a year he has been wandering alone through the vast Russian landscape.  Then he is joined by Leonid, a paratrooper who has escaped from the German lager at Smolensk.  Leonid, too, is Jewish, but is keen to hide the fact, a recurring theme of the book.  They decide to wander on together - and wander is the word; they have no plan, no goal.  They meet up with various others in the same predicament, until they come upon the predominantly Jewish partisan troop led by the quixotic Gedaleh.  This becomes their family.  They share the troop's Jewishness and adopt their aim of finding a way to Israel.  Instead of trying to avoid the war, they begin to attack the Germans.

A fascinating and truly moving book, all the more so because the debutante novelist turns out to be a master storyteller.  He doesn't wallow in the horror of the Holocaust but finds green shoots of humanity and hope sprouting from the horror.

It is a disgrace that this is not on the A-level syllabus every year.