All posts tagged Evelyn Waugh

Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers (1927)

‘Pardon my Stevensonian manner.’

‘Begin right at the beginning, if you will, please. I have a very trivial mind. Detail delights me. Ramifications enchant me. Distance no object. No reasonable offer refused…’
(Wimsey’s rambling manner)

‘I sleuth, you know. For a hobby. Harmless outlet for natural inquisitiveness, don’t you see, which might otherwise strike inward and produce introspection an’ suicide. Very natural, healthy pursuit—not too strenuous, not too sedentary; trains and invigorates the mind.’ (Chapter 4)

‘You’re a noticing one, aren’t you?’ said Mrs Cropper. ‘Make a good waiter, you would—not meaning any offence, sir, that’s a real compliment from one who knows.’
(Chapter 10)

Plot summary

This is the third Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L. Sayers. It is a very long, convoluted story about a will which involves understanding a complex family tree which goes back to the late eighteenth century.

It opens with Wimsey and his good friend, Detective Charles Parker, having a meal in a cheap Soho restaurant and arguing about the behaviour of a doctor in a murder case. Their argument prompts a chap dining alone at the next table to introduce himself as a doctor who has had a similar experience and Wimsey promptly asks him to tell his story.

He was physician to an elderly lady dying of cancer who’d had several operations. She was attended by a nurse who he fell in love with and he thought the old girl had months left to live. But then the woman’s great-niece dismissed the nurse, and two servants, replaced her with a new nurse and took over full-time care of her herself. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the old lady died, leaving everything to her great-niece.

The physician was, understandably, suspicious and insisted on a post-mortem and full inquest. However, both found no evidence of foul play and his conscientiousness rebounded on him as the small village community closed ranks to defend the great-niece and accuse him of meddling, throwing in the idea that he had neglected caring for the lady because of his affair with her first nurse. His clients started to drop him and eventually he was forced to sell the practice altogether which is why he finds himself unemployed in a cheap restaurant in Soho.

Wimsey is immediately grabbed by this (to be frank) boring and banal story and won’t let it go. The unnamed physician finishes his story and leaves without introducing himself or giving the names of any of the people in his tale.

So Wimsey gets in touch with a new character, a spinster lady named Miss Alexandra Katharine Climpson, to investigate, by going to Somerset House and searching for deaths which match these circumstances. (It is typical of Wimsey, and Sayers’ sense of humour, that Wimsey pranks his friend Detective Parker by inviting him to come and meet old Miss Climpson in phrases which make it seem as if he has taken a mistress and set her up in a swanky flat, which Parker believes until the door to the flat in question is opened by a sweet little old lady, and he turns to see Wimsey’s face beaming at him.

After a lot of sifting Miss C identifies the participants as follows: the old lady who died was Miss Agatha Dawson; her great-niece is Mary Whittaker; the doctor who talked to them in the restaurant is Dr Edward Carr; the nurse he fell in love with and who was then dismissed is a Miss Philliter; the two servants who were dismissed are Bertha and Evelyn Gotobed. The small town where this all took place is Leahampton in Hampshire.

Wimsey then instructs Miss C to go down to Leahampton, take a room somewhere and make enquiries among the old gossips of the town about the Agatha Dawson affair – which she promptly does, taking a room with Mrs Budge of ‘Fairview’, and attending tea parties with the vicar, Mr Tredgold and his charming wife, and meeting such village luminaries as Miss Murgatroyd, Mrs Peasgood and so on. ‘Gossip’ is the word the characters themselves use.

‘It really is terrible, living in a little town like this,’ went on Miss Findlater, ‘so full of aspidistras, you know, and small gossip. You’ve no idea what a dreadfully gossipy place Leahampton is, Miss Climpson.’ (Chapter 5)

Miss C writes back to Wimsey that there’s no sense of foul play or no more than circulates in any circle of gossipy old ladies. At the same tea party she meets Miss Whittaker and is immediately impressed:

The first impression which Miss Climpson got of Mary Whittaker was that she was totally out of place among the tea-tables of S. Onesimus. With her handsome, strongly-marked features and quiet air of authority, she was of the type that ‘does well’ in City offices. She had a pleasant and self-possessed manner, and was beautifully tailored—not mannishly, and yet with a severe fineness of outline that negatived the appeal of a beautiful figure. (Chapter 5)

Miss C discovers that clever Miss Whittaker has a fan, an acolyte, the devoted Miss Findley who is encouraging her plan to quit Leahampton and set up a chicken farm where they can both live close to the soil (!)

Despite Parker pointing out that there is no evidence of any crime being committed, Wimsey is intrigued and decides to put a ‘fishing’ advert in the press to see what happens. It reads:

Bertha and Evelyn Gotobed, formerly in the service of Miss Agatha Dawson, of ‘The Grove,’ Wellington Avenue, Leahampton, are requested to communicate with J. Murbles, solicitor, of Staple Inn, when they will hear of SOMETHING TO THEIR ADVANTAGE.’

What happens is that a few days later the dead body of Bertha Gotobed turns up in undergrowth in Epping Forest. The local cops think she died of a heart attack since there are no marks on the body, no sign of foul play. But Wimsey is galvanised. He is now convinced that someone murdered Miss Dawson and is now covering their tracks by bumping off any witnesses.

Bertha’s landlady is called in to identify the body and confirms that the other Gotobed sister, Evelyn, got married and moved to Canada with her husband.

In a tree nearby Wimsey finds a very posh ham sandwich wrapped in paper, posher than Bertha’s class, alongside a bottle of Bass beer. And in her handbag a £5 note, again much above her station. In those days you could trace notes and the cops identify this one as one of a series paid out to a Mrs Forrest, living in South Audley Street.

So off Wimsey and Parker go to question her, Wimsey frivolously posing under the pseudonym Mr Templeton. Mrs Forrest is rich and self-possessed and explains that she is in the process of divorcing her husband and has an active lover. Wimsey makes a fuss about fixing drinks for them (behind a fashionable screen) and takes the opportunity of secreting a glass she’s handled out the window in order to retrieve it later and get her fingerprints and see if there are any fingerprints on the beer bottle: there aren’t…

Parker is still puzzled why Wimsey cares so much about the case and Wimsey explains that he has an entire library of books about murders and murderers, but they are only about the ones we know about. What about the thousands and thousands who get away with it because no crime is even suspected? This may be one of those. He is interested in it:

‘Because I believe this is the case I have always been looking for. The case of cases. The murder without discernible means, or motive or clue.’ (Chapter 8)

The plot is long and convoluted and long before the end I was wondering why I was bothering. Suffice to say it is about the old girl’s money, about the will she left, and involves her very extended family in so convoluted a manner that the book requires an extensive and confusing family tree of the Dawson family to help you understand…

Cast

  • Lord Peter Wimsey
  • Mervyn Bunter – his faithful man servant (served under him in the Great War)
  • Detective-Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard – ‘He’s the one who really does the work’, a ‘restraining presence’ on Wimsey’s over-exuberant impetuosity – ‘When he worked with Wimsey on a case, it was an understood thing that anything lengthy, intricate, tedious and soul-destroying was done by Parker’
  • Dr Edward Carr – doctor to Miss Agatha Dawson
  • Agatha Dawson – old lady dying of cancer, had had several operations, was reckoned to last another 6 months or so, but her great-niece dismissed her nurse, and two carers, the Gotobed sisters, and then Miss D suddenly dies
  • Miss Whittaker – the niece
  • Miss Findlater – devoted fan of Miss Whittaker, ‘a slight, fair girl, with a rather sentimental look—plump and prettyish’ – a ‘very gushing and really silly young woman’
  • Nurse Philliter – original nurse and carer for Miss Dawson, fell in love with Dr Carr, became engaged, was then dismissed
  • Miss Katherine Climpson – ‘a thin, middle-aged woman, with a sharp, sallow face and very vivacious manner. She wore a neat, dark coat and skirt, a high-necked blouse and a long gold neck-chain with a variety of small ornaments dangling from it at intervals, and her iron-grey hair was dressed under a net, in the style fashionable in the reign of the late King Edward’
  • Sir Andrew Mackenzie – Chief of Scotland Yard
  • Mr John Murbles – solicitor and friend of Wimsey, featured in ‘Clouds of Witness’, resident at Staples Inn
  • Superintendent Walmsley – officer in charge of the scene of Bertha’s body
  • Dorcas Gulliver – landlady of the murdered Bertha Gotobed
  • John Ironsides – was to have married Miss Bertha, a clerk on the Southern Railway
  • Mrs Forrest, living in South Audley Street – classy lady one of whose five pound notes was found in Bertha’s purse, getting divorced and has a lover yet inexplicably tries to seduce Wimsey
  • Mrs Piggin – landlady of the Fox and Hounds in Crofton
  • Jim Piggin – husband and landlord
  • Ben Cobling – 87, Miss Clara Whittaker’s groom for forty years
  • Mrs Cobling – 85, ‘a delightful old lady, exactly like a dried-up pippin’
  • Mr Probyn – Miss Whittaker’s solicitor and managed all Miss Dawson’s business in Croftover Magna, now retired to the Villa Bianca, Fiesole
  • Bishop Lambert of the Orinoco Mission
  • the Rev. Hallelujah Dawson – ‘an elderly West Indian of… humble and inoffensive… appearance’
  • Esmeralda – Cockney street urchin who protects Wimsey’s parked car for half a crown
  • Mr Towkington of Gray’s Inn – expert on property law – ‘a large, square man with a florid face and a harsh voice’
  • J. F. Trigg – solicitor in Bedford Row
  • Mrs Marion Mead – false name Mary Whittaker gives to the lawyer Trigg when she invites him to the empty house in Hampstead
  • Sir James Lubbock – scientist consulted by Wimsey in the research for his book, ‘The Murderer’s Vade-Mecum, or 101 Ways of Causing Sudden Death’
  • Sir Charles Pillington – Chief Constable of Hampshire
  • Mr Andrews – local photographer roped in to take photos of the body of Vera Findlater
  • local doctor – a ‘tutster’ who examines the body of Vera Findlater
  • Dr Faulkner – sent by Scotland Yard to double check the local man’s verdict, ‘a lean, grey badger of a man, business-like and keen-eyed’
  • Mr Stanniforth – Sacristan of the church of Saint Onesimus
  • Dewsby – head of the fingerprint department at Scotland Yard

Wimsey trivia

Wimsey is 37 (Chapter 15).

In the first book Wimsey very much smoked a pipe. Now he smokes stylish cigarettes, Sobranes. And cigars. Parker smokes a well-worn briar pipe.

Lord Peter paused, in the very act of ringing the bell. His jaw slackened, giving his long, narrow face a faintly foolish and hesitant look, reminiscent of the heroes of Mr P.G. Wodehouse. (Chapter 6)

Wimsey has bought a new car:

‘The new Daimler Twin-Six,’ said Lord Peter, skimming dexterously round a lorry without appearing to look at it. ‘With a racing body.’

Wimsey’s blether

In a characteristically arcane literary reference, Wimsey nicknames his new car ‘Mrs Merdle’ because it is very quiet or ‘makes no row’, and Mrs Merdle, in Charles Dickens’ novel ‘Little Dorrit’, is an arriviste i.e. newly rich, and causes a minor scandal by very noisily taking his seat in the theatre and his wife tells him to stop making a row. To be honest, this reference is so obscure I don’t really understand it…

But that may be part of the point of Wimsey’s countless fleeting cultural references, part of the point is the speed with which he drops them and races on, leaving most of his interlocutors thinking he’s mad.

‘It’s quite all right,’ he said apologetically, ‘I haven’t come to sell you soap or gramophones, or to borrow money or enroll you in the Ancient Froth-blowers or anything charitable. I really am Lord Peter Wimsey—I mean, that really is my title, don’t you know, not a Christian name like Sanger’s Circus or Earl Derr Biggers. I’ve come to ask you some questions, and I’ve no real excuse, I’m afraid, for butting in on you—do you ever read the News of the World?’
Nurse Philliter decided that she was to be asked to go to a mental case, and that the patient had come to fetch her in person. (Chapter 4)

Or else talks in elliptical telegraphese as here when he summarises his theory about Bertha Gotobed’s demise:

Said Wimsey: ‘We suggested shock, you know. Amiable gentleman met at flat of friendly lady suddenly turns funny after dinner and makes undesirable overtures. Virtuous young woman is horribly shocked. Weak heart gives way. Collapse. Exit. Agitation of amiable gentleman and friendly lady, left with corpse on their hands. Happy thought motor-car; Epping Forest; exeunt omnes, singing and washing their hands. Where’s the difficulty?’ (chapter 8)

Or just general-purpose facetiousness, as here when he rings up Dr Carr:

‘Hullo! hullo—ullo! oh, operator, shall I call thee bird or but a wandering voice?… Not at all, I had no intention of being rude, my child, that was a quotation from the poetry of Mr Wordsworth… well, ring him again… thank you, is that Dr Carr?… Lord Peter Wimsey speaking… oh, yes… yes… aha!… not a bit of it… We are about to vindicate you and lead you home, decorated with triumphal wreaths of cinnamon and senna-pods…’

Presumably this is intended to be funny and endearing but well before I was halfway through this novel I’d concluded that Wimsey really is a tiresome berk and to give up reading any more.

‘Be thou as chaste as ice and have a license as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. I am not a dangerous driver. Buck up and get your leave. The snow-white horsepower foams and frets and the blue bonnet—black in this case—is already, in a manner of speaking, over the border.’ (Chapter 11)

‘Sorrow vanquished, labour ended, Jordan passed. Buzz off, my lad. No, Charles, I will not wait while you put on a Burberry. Back and side go bare, go bare, hand and foot go cold, so belly-god send us good ale enough, whether it be new or old.’

He often sounds a bit like the Fool in King Lear i.e. so arcane and scatter-brained as to sound mad.

‘Well, well—we’ll have a spot of lunch and write a letter to Mr Probyn and another to my good friend Bishop Lambert of the Orinoco Mission to get a line on Cousin Hallelujah, Smile, smile, smile. As Ingoldsby says: ‘The breezes are blowing a race, a race! The breezes are blowing—we near the chase!’ Do ye ken John Peel? Likewise, know’st thou the land where blooms the citron-flower? Well, never mind if you don’t—you can always look forward to going there for your honeymoon.’ (Chapter 12).

Or:

‘Well now, as to the medical problem—the means. I must say that up to now that appears completely insoluble. I am baffled, Watson (said he, his hawk-like eyes gleaming angrily from under the half-closed lids). Even I am baffled. But not for long! (he cried, with a magnificent burst of self-confidence). My Honour (capital H) is concerned to track this Human Fiend (capitals) to its hidden source, and nail the whited sepulchre to the mast even though it crush me in the attempt! Loud applause. His chin sank broodingly upon his dressing-gown, and he breathed a few guttural notes into the bass saxophone which was the cherished companion of his solitary hours in the bathroom.’
Parker ostentatiously took up the book which he had laid aside on Wimsey’s entrance.
‘Tell me when you’ve finished,’ he said, caustically.

It’s almost as if he’s brain damaged.

Wimsy’s flippancy

Sayers loses no opportunity to make Wimsey frivolous and flippant. He is given to extended comic fantasias, satirically quoting poems, adverts, newspapers headlines, in youthful high spirits, while his interlocutors have to wait until he’s quite finished before they can get a word in. And the reader, also, has to wait before he gets to the point.

This can get tiresome. Take this reply to Parker who says there’s nothing to the death of this old lady, to which Wimsey is saying that, on the contrary, he suspects there is. But this is how he puts it

‘You’ve got an official mind, Charles,’ replied his friend. ‘Your official passion for evidence is gradually sapping your brilliant intellect and smothering your instincts. You’re over-civilised, that’s your trouble. Compared with you, I am a child of nature. I dwell among the untrodden ways beside the springs of Dove, a maid whom there are (I am shocked to say) few to praise, likewise very few to love, which is perhaps just as well.’ (Chapter 6)

All of which is a humorous misapplication of a famous poem by William Wordsworth, She dwelt among the untrodden ways if, humorous, that is, you find this kind of long-winded, literary byplay humorous. In the same way that the following quote is a humorous reference to Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, ‘The Raven’.

‘I wish you wouldn’t keep on saying the same thing, Charles. It bores me so. It’s like the Raven never flitting which, as the poet observes, still is sitting, still is sitting, inviting one to heave the pallid bust of Pallas at him and have done with it.’ (Chapter 14)

Bookishness

Like Agatha Christie, Sayers has her characters repeatedly make references to books, crime stories, murder mysteries and so on, thus emphasising the artificiality of the entire story.

‘Oh, by one of those native poisons which slay in a split second and defy the skill of the analyst. They are familiar to the meanest writer of mystery stories.’

‘Outlet,’ said Wimsey, energetically, ‘hi! taxi!… outlet—everybody needs an outlet—97A, St. George’s Square—and after all, one can’t really blame people if it’s just that they need an outlet. I mean, why be bitter? They can’t help it. I think it’s much kinder to give them an outlet than to make fun of them in books—and, after all, it isn’t really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.’ (Chapter 3)

‘That’s so. Well, there’s only one thing that could prevent that happening, and that’s—oh, lord! old son. Do you know what it works out at? The old, old story, beloved of novelists—the missing heir!’ (Chapter 11)

‘[She] gets the said minions to polish her off before she can do any mischief.’
‘Yes, but how?’
‘Oh, by one of those native poisons which slay in a split second and defy the skill of the analyst. They are familiar to the meanest writer of mystery stories.’ (Chapter 11)

Or references to specific books:

At intervals the patient Bunter unpacked himself from the back seat and climbed one of these uncommunicative guides to peer at its blank surface with a torch—a process which reminded Parker of Alan Quartermain trying to trace the features of the departed Kings of the Kukuanas under their calcareous shrouds of stalactite. (Chapter 12)

Epigraphs

Of course the most bookish thing about this novel is the epigraphs. Each of the 23 chapters is prefaced by epigraphs from a deliberate and show-off range of sources, including half a dozen or more from Shakespeare, George Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Don Quixote, Samuel Butler, Tennyson, Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, as well as outliers such as Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the popular novelists Gilbert Frankau and Edmund Pearson, the 17th century jurist Sir Edward Coke, the statesman Edmund Burke, 18th century playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

As you can see, this is an ostentatiously eclectic and showy selection.

Sherlock

This bookish referentiality is epitomised by repeated references to Sherlock Holmes, as if invoking his name somehow lays his ghost, whereas it tends to do the opposite and trigger comparisons of the present novel with Conan Doyle’s masterpieces, against which it mightily suffers.

‘Good gracious!’ cried Charles, ‘it’s perfectly obvious—’
‘Shut up, Sherlock,’ said his friend,

‘Anyhow, curious cases are rather a hobby of mine. In fact, I’m not just being the perfect listener. I have deceived you. I have an ulterior motive, said he, throwing off his side-whiskers and disclosing the well-known hollow jaws of Mr Sherlock Holmes.’ (Chapter 2)

‘I told you I’d be turnin’ up again before long,’ said Lord Peter, cheerfully. ‘Sherlock is my name and Holmes is my nature.’ (Chapter 4)

‘I must say that up to now that appears completely insoluble. I am baffled, Watson (said he, his hawk-like eyes gleaming angrily from under the half-closed lids).’
(Chapter 19)

Lesbians?

Delving deeper into the Dawson family, Wimsey and Parker discover that old Agatha lived for many years with Clara Whittaker, a fierce, mannish rider to hounds. Is there any hint that they were lesbians? Or was two unmarried women living together for many years taken at face value a hundred years ago?

Lord Peter and Parker looked with considerable interest at the rather grim old woman sitting so uncompromisingly upright with the reins in her hand. A dour, weather-beaten old face, but certainly handsome still, with its large nose and straight, heavy eyebrows. And beside her, smaller, plumper and more feminine, was the Agatha Dawson whose curious death had led them to this quiet country place. She had a sweet, smiling face—less dominating than that of her redoubtable friend, but full of spirit and character. Without doubt they had been a remarkable pair of old ladies. (Chapter 11)

And here’s her devoted old groom remembering her:

‘Straight as a switch, with a fine, high colour in her cheeks and shiny black hair—just like a beautiful two-year-old filly she was. And very sperrited. Wonnerful sperrited. There was a many gentlemen as would have been glad to hitch up with her, but she was never broke to harness. Like dirt, she treated ’em. Wouldn’t look at ’em, except it might be the grooms and stablehands in a matter of ’osses. And in the way of business, of course. Well, there is some creatures like that…. The Lord makes a few on ’em that way to suit ’Is own purposes, I suppose. There ain’t no arguin’ with females.’

And his wife’s view:

‘Often she used to say to me, ‘Betty,’ she said, ‘I mean to be an old maid and so does Miss Clara, and we’re going to live together and be ever so happy, without any stupid, tiresome gentlemen.’ And so it turned out, sir, as you know…’

And the Chief Constable’s:

He put his hand down behind the cushions of the car and pulled out an American magazine—that monthly collection of mystery and sensational fiction published under the name of The Black Mask.
‘Light reading for the masses,’ said Parker.
‘Brought by the gentleman in the yellow boots, perhaps,’ suggested the Chief Constable.
‘More likely by Miss Findlater,’ said Wimsey.
‘Hardly a lady’s choice,’ said Sir Charles, in a pained tone.
‘Oh, I dunno. From all I hear, Miss Whittaker was dead against sentimentality and roses round the porch, and the other poor girl copied her in everything. They might have a boyish taste in fiction.’

The female perspective

Old spinster Mrs Climpson is given a number of insights or perceptions about the female experience. Early on she has a sad piece of autobiography about the severe limitations placed on women of her generation, which reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s powerful feminist polemic, Three Guineas.

‘A dear old friend of mine used to say that I should have made a very good lawyer,’ said Miss Climpson, complacently, ‘but of course, when I was young, girls didn’t have the education or the opportunities they get nowadays, Mr Parker. I should have liked a good education, but my dear father didn’t believe in it for women. Very old-fashioned, you young people would think him…

‘My dear father would be surprised to find his daughter so business-like. He always said a woman should never need to know anything about money matters, but times have changed so greatly, have they not?’ (Chapter 3)

And other miscellaneous insights from an ageing spinster’s point of view:

With her long and melancholy experience of frustrated womanhood, observed in a dreary succession of cheap boarding-houses, Miss Climpson was able to dismiss one theory which had vaguely formed itself in her mind. This was no passionate nature, cramped by association with an old woman and eager to be free to mate before youth should depart. That look she knew well—she could diagnose it with dreadful accuracy at the first glance, in the tone of a voice saying, ‘How do you do?’ (Chapter 5)

And:

Miss Findlater has evidently quite a ‘pash’ (as we used to call it at school) for Miss Whittaker, and I am afraid none of us are being flattered by such outspoken admiration. I must say, I think it rather unhealthy—you may remember Miss Clemence Dane’s very clever book on the subject?—I have seen so much of that kind of thing in my rather WOMAN-RIDDEN existence! It has such a bad effect, as a rule, upon the weaker character of the two… (Chapter 8)

And:

‘If Mary Whittaker were to marry, she would marry a rabbit.’ (Miss Climpson’s active mind quickly conjured up a picture of the rabbit—fair-haired and a little paunchy, with a habit of saying, ‘I’ll ask the wife.’ Miss Climpson wondered why Providence saw fit to create such men. For Miss Climpson, men were intended to be masterful, even though wicked or foolish. She was a spinster made and not born—a perfectly womanly woman.)

Miss Climpson had little difficulty in reconstructing one of those hateful and passionate “scenes” of slighted jealousy with which a woman-ridden life had made her only too familiar. “I do everything for you—you don’t care a bit for me—you treat me cruelly—you’re simply sick of me, that’s what it is!” And “Don’t be so ridiculous. Really, I can’t stand this. Oh, stop it, Vera! I hate being slobbered over.” Humiliating, degrading, exhausting, beastly scenes. Girls’ school, boarding-house, Bloomsbury-flat scenes. Damnable selfishness wearying of its victim. Silly schwärmerei swamping all decent self-respect. Barren quarrels ending in shame and hatred.

Miss Findlater the feminist

She talks to Miss Findlater who is a feminist:

‘If you only knew what a stupid lot they are! Anyway, I’ve no use for men!’ Miss Findlater tossed her head. ‘They haven’t got any ideas. And they always look on women as sort of pets or playthings. As if a woman like Mary wasn’t worth fifty of them! You should have heard that Markham man the other day—talking politics to Mr Tredgold, so that nobody could get a word in edgeways, and then saying, ‘I’m afraid this is a very dull subject of conversation for you, Miss Whittaker,’ in his condescending way. Mary said in that quiet way of hers, ‘Oh, I think the subject is anything but dull, Mr Markham.’ But he was so stupid, he couldn’t even grasp that and said, ‘One doesn’t expect ladies to be interested in politics, you know. But perhaps you are one of the modern young ladies who want the flapper’s vote.’ Ladies, indeed! Why are men so insufferable when they talk about ladies?’

‘I mean to be an old maid, anyhow,’ retorted Miss Findlater. ‘Mary and I have quite decided that. We’re interested in things, not in men.’

‘Men’s friendships—oh yes! I know one hears a lot about them. But half the time, I don’t believe they’re real friendships at all. Men can go off for years and forget all about their friends. And they don’t really confide in one another. Mary and I tell each other all our thoughts and feelings. Men seem just content to think each other good sorts without ever bothering about their inmost selves.”
Probably that’s why their friendships last so well,’ replied Miss Climpson. ‘They don’t make such demands on one another.’

‘I cannot help feeling that it is more natural—more proper, in a sense—for a man and woman to be all in all to one another than for two persons of the same sex. Er—after all, it is a—a fruitful affection,’ said Miss Climpson, boggling a trifle at this idea, ‘and—and all that, you know, and I am sure that when the right MAN comes along for you—’

‘Bother the right man!’ cried Miss Findlater, crossly. ‘I do hate that kind of talk. It makes one feel dreadful—like a prize cow or something. Surely, we have got beyond that point of view in these days.’

The male view

‘We talked for some time, Inspector, and I will not conceal from you that I found Miss Grant a very interesting personality. She had an almost masculine understanding. I may say I am not the sort of a man who prefers women to be brainless. No, I am rather modern in that respect. If ever I was to take a wife, Inspector, I should wish her to be an intelligent companion.’

Or our boys being more conventionally sexist:

‘When a woman is wicked and unscrupulous,’ said Parker, sententiously, ‘she is the most ruthless criminal in the world—fifty times worse than a man, because she is always so much more single-minded about it.’
‘They’re not troubled with sentimentality, that’s why,’ said Wimsey, ‘and we poor mutts of men stuff ourselves up with the idea that they’re romantic and emotional. All punk, my son. Damn that ’phone!’

Or Mrs Piggin, landlady of The Fox and Hounds in Crofton:

‘They don’t make them like that nowadays. Not but what these modern girls are good goers, many of them, and does a lot of things as would have been thought very fast in the old days,’

Newspapers

Christie mocks newspapers, giving her fictional newspapers satirical names. Mind you, so did lots of comic authors. In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, William Boot works for the ‘The Daily Beast’. Anyway, in this story Detective Parker reads his news in the Daily Yell. Less humorous alternatives are the ‘Evening Views’ and the ‘Evening Banner’.

It girls

Never had he met a woman in whom ‘the great It’, eloquently hymned by Mrs Elinor Glyn, was so completely lacking.

Elinor Glyn was a bestselling author of popular romances which were often a trifle racy. She popularized the concept of the ‘It girl’, and had tremendous influence on early 20th-century popular culture ‘

Credit

‘Unnatural Death’ by Dorothy L. Sayers was published in 1927.

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Posted by Simon on October 31, 2025

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Taken at the Flood by Agatha Christie (1948)

‘I was devoted to Daddy! He was terribly attractive and the greatest fun to live with! But I always knew he was a bad hat.’
(We are in posh world)

What was one to do, thought Adela, with someone who didn’t talk gardening or dogs – those standbyes of rural conversation.
(Country Life)

‘You don’t mean – murder -!’ Her voice was horrified.
(The innocence of dim young Rosaleen)

‘She’s quite harmless, you know.’
‘I wonder,’ said Poirot.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Is anybody – ever – quite harmless?’
(Wisdom of the wise old owl)

Poirot waved a deprecating hand and tried to look modest.
(Poirot is, essentially, a comic character)

Superintendent Spence stared. ‘Chief Inspector Japp,’ he remarked, ‘always said you
have a tortuous mind.’
(Opinion of an old favourite)

‘It’s the human interest that’s getting you?’
‘Yes,’ said Poirot. ‘It is always the human interest.’
(Poirot’s central motivation)

‘What are you doing, M. Poirot?’
‘Talking to people. That is what I do. Just talk to people.’
(The essence of Poirot’s method)

‘Taken at the Flood’ gets poor reviews as one of Christie’s weaker works and so I nearly didn’t read it but I’m glad I did for the sake of its vivid social history. The big reveal at the end is no more preposterous and far-fetched than the conclusions of most of her books.

1. Gordon Cloade

‘Taken at the Flood’ is the story of the extended Cloade family, four brothers and sisters and a few nephews, and their partners, who had all basked in the generosity of their immensely rich Uncle Gordon Cloade. As well as giving them gifts and subsidies throughout their lives, Gordon made it clear that he would leave them each handsome bequests in his will, and so they carry on leading upper-middle-class lifestyles they could ill afford if solely reliant on their own incomes.

Marriage and death

Until disaster strikes, in fact twin disasters. First, on a boat from South America old Gordon meets and falls in love with a blonde young Irish lovely named Rosaleen and all the Cloades are horrified to get telegrams from New York announcing that he has married her.

But then, he’s barely been back in England a few weeks before the house he’s in is a direct hit from a German bomb which kills all the servants. Cloade is pulled alive from the wreckage but dies on the way to hospital.

The legal situation this creates is that, regardless of a lifetime of promises to fund the Cloades, and in the absence of a new will made since his marriage (and there had barely been time to get back to London and unpack), Gordon’s entire fortune goes to his brainless young wife. She would be completely overwhelmed by all this if she didn’t have in tow her brother, the angry young Irishman, David Hunter, who plays Svengali. It is implied that David it was who guided Rosaleen towards the millionaire on the boat, and snared him into marriage.

So that’s the backstory (or one backstory). The novel opens with all the characters living in the little village of Warmsley Vale:

  • Dr Lionel Cloade, Gordon’s elder brother, and his wife, Katherine ‘Aunt Kathie’
  • lawyer Jeremy Cloade, 63, and his wife, Frances
  • Adela Cloade, over 60, who married a Mr Marchamont, now deceased – known as ‘Mums’ to her daughter, Lynn Marchmont, just back from serving as a Wren in the war
  • and Rowley Cloade, son of Gordon’s brother Maurice

With Rosaleen and David ensconced in the big smart new house Gordon had built for himself upon the hill titled Furrowbank. With Christie’s usual brisk efficiency she not only sketches in all these characters but outlines why all four of these households are in dire financial straits and are reduced to more or less begging money from Rosaleen.

While angry Irish brother David exults in these self-satisfied posh people getting their come-uppance.

Social history

And this is my point about social history: all four households have been brought low, among other things, by the collapse in value of their investments, but more by the new Labour government’s extortionate new taxes and extravagant new paperwork. The hapless older generation doesn’t fully understand where all their money has gone. They stand for the old rentier class which lived such feather-bedded lives between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s, only to see their lifestyles collapse during the war, the end of civilised living bemoaned in Evelyn Waugh’s nostalgia-fest Brideshead Revisited.

While angry, sneering, jeering David stands for the new world, the new generation of angry young men, the poor outsiders who have unexpectedly found themselves kings of the new roost and revel in the snobs’ downfall:

‘That’s just what I get a kick out of,’ said David. ‘I like seeing their smug faces eaten up with envy and malice. Don’t grudge me my fun, Rosaleen.’
She said in a low troubled voice: ‘I wish you didn’t feel like that. I don’t like it.’
‘Have some spirit, girl. We’ve been pushed around enough, you and I. The Cloades have lived soft – soft. Lived on big brother Gordon. Little fleas on a big flea. I hate their kind – I always have.’

This, it seems to me, is what the book is about. It is a long lament for the style and class of the old ways and a bitter recrimination of the new socialist government. This may explain why the plot itself feels a bit of an afterthought.

Heath and Vale

This sense of a clash between two worlds, between civilised old world and functional, charmless new world, between class and vulgarity, is embodied in the contrast between the two adjoining settlements Warmsley Heath and Warmsley Vale. As the text tells us right at the start of chapter 1, laying out the dichotomy which will underpin the narrative:

Warmsley Heath consists of a Golf Course, two Hotels, some very expensive modern villas giving on to the Golf Course, a row of what were, before the war, luxury shops, and a railway station. Emerging from the railway station, a main road roars its way to London on your left – to your right a small path across a field is signposted Footpath to Warmsley Vale.

Warmsley Vale, tucked away amongst wooded hills, is as unlike Warmsley Heath as well can be. It is in essence a microscopic old-fashioned market town now degenerated into a village. It has a main street of Georgian houses, several pubs, a few unfashionable shops and a general air of being a hundred and fifty instead of twenty-eight miles from London.

Its occupants one and all unite in despising the mushroom growth of Warmsley Heath.

There you have as pretty a little microcosm of the English class system and its petty snobberies as you could ask for.

2. Robert Underhay

And this is the second backstory I referred to: because in fact, right at the start of the novel, an old club bore tells the story of one Robert Underhay, a district commissioner (imperial official) in British Nigeria, who met and married a pretty little actress, while he was on leave in South Africa. However, once he’d taken her back to his base it turned out she hated being isolated miles from anywhere in the hot tropical jungle and, after giving it a go for a while, they decided to call it a day. Because he was a practicing Roman Catholic, Underhay arranged to go on a trip up-country and pretend to have died there i.e. get his loyal servants to return to the compound and say he’d died, thus freeing the wife of any obligations without the necessity of a divorce. (Can you feel how this whole scenario is creaking a little with plot holes and inconsistencies?) As the Major tells it:

His natives were a trustworthy lot and they came back with a good circumstantial tale and a few last words scrawled in Underhay’s writing saying they’d done all they could for him, and he was afraid he was pegging out…

Anyway, it is this young lady, recently ‘widowed’, who Gordon met and was manoeuvred into falling in love with and marrying. Yes, the current widow sitting atop a huge fortune, Mrs Rosaleen Cloade, is the very same Rosaleen who married Robert Underhay 4 or 5 years earlier before he disappeared into the jungle, presumed dead.

3. Enter Enoch Arden* the blackmailer

It takes 100 pages, the first third of this 300-page novel, to establish this, to explain the two backstories and to paint in the various characters and their fractious relationships (Lynn Marchmont resents her mother’s obeisance to Rosaleen, she is engaged to oafish Rowley the farmer, though neither of them are very excited about it etc).

And then one fine afternoon, a tall bronzed stranger gets off the train at Warmsley Heath and asks the way for Warmsley Vale (asking the puzzled young farmer, Rowley Cloade on the way).

The man was tall, with a bronzed face, a beard, and very blue eyes. He was about forty and not ill-looking in a tough and rather dare-devil style. It was not, perhaps, a wholly pleasant face.

This stranger checks into the local pub, the Stag, giving his name as ‘Enoch Arden’ and sends a note up to the posh house for the attention of David Hunter, who duly comes to meet him in his room that evening.

Here he makes the staggering revelation that Robert Underhay, rich Rosaleen Cloade’s supposedly dead husband, is still alive! Not only this, but he is fully informed of Rosaleen’s situation i.e. she married an old guy who promptly died and inherited his huge fortune, thus disappointing all his relatives who are filled with fury and frustration. If Underhay reveals that he is still alive, Rosaleen’s second marriage becomes null and void, and so does her inheritance of the fortune. At a stroke she will be penniless again, and the terms of Gordon’s old will come into force, redistributing his fortune to the four Cloade households.

Imagine how much they’d pay for this fact to come out!? So the bronzed stranger proceeds to blackmail David Hunter, asking how much he will pay for this ruinous fact not to be made public.

*Explanation of Enoch Arden

This is a reference to a long narrative poem by the English poet Alfred Tennyson. In it Enoch Arden, a sailor, is shipwrecked on a desert island and spends ten years there. Upon his return, he discovers that his wife, Annie Lee, having believed him dead, has remarried and started a new family with a man named Philip. Tragedy: Rather than reveal his return and disrupt his wife’s happiness, Enoch chooses to remain silent, dying of a broken heart.

When he had canvassed the idea of disappearing into the jungle to fake his own death, Underhay had joked that he might ‘do an Enoch Arden’ and one day return to check up on his remarried wife. Well now, no joke, this is exactly what he’s come to do!

Poirot

Remember how I mentioned that Christie has a club bore tell us a lot of the backstory, on the basis that said bore knew Underhay out in Nigeria, and then read the account of Gordon’s death in the papers and connected it with the pretty little actress he knew Underhay married… Well, as he rattles on his eyes fall disapprovingly on one of the figures sitting nearby:

Again Major Porter paused. His eyes had travelled up from the patent leather shoes – striped trousers – black coat – egg-shaped head and colossal moustaches. Foreign, of course! That explained the shoes. ‘Really,’ thought Major Porter, ‘what’s the club coming to? Can’t get away from foreigners even here.’

‘Who could that be’ we ask ourselves. Yes, Hercule Poirot and this is the twenty-third (I think) Poirot novel (there are 33 in total). That scene is followed by another one in which Poirot is paid a surprise visit at home by Mrs Katherine Cloade. She says she has been told to consult him by the figures from the beyond in her seances and ask him whether they could hire him to investigate the claims that Robert Underhay is not dead. He listens in amusement and then says no, leaving Katherine Cloade to go away disappointed.

These two scenes in the prologue are clearly designed to explain how and why Poirot comes to be involved in the case, as he has already 1) heard the backstories from the club bore and 2) been directly approached by one of the Cloade family.

Then everything goes quiet on the Poirot front, until Christie has painted in all the events summarised above and Poirot makes his reappearance on page 172, exactly halfway through the 325-page novel.

The murder

I’d nearly forgotten the murder. Yes, well first an important fact. The conversation at the Stag in Arden’s private room (room 5) when Arden explained to David Hunter that he thought Robert Underhay was still alive and tried to extort money out of him, all this was overheard by the landlady, Beatrice Lippincott, who promptly sends a message (a letter) to Rowley Cloade. When he comes that evening for a drink, she invites him into the office and describes the whole conversation.

Rowley is flabbergasted, realising that this will change the circumstances of the entire family and so walks to the lawyer, Jeremy Cloade’s house. But while waiting in the lawyer’s study for the family to finish dinner, he has second thoughts and leaves.

The following evening, Lynn is walking over the downs when David Hunter comes bursting out of nearby trees, running fast to Warmsley Heath to catch the train. With no further ado, he embraces and kisses her and tells her she belongs to him, not to that oaf Rowley, and rushes off, leaving poor Lynn bewildered.

Next morning ‘Enoch Arden’s body is discovered in his pub bedroom, his head smashed in with fire tongs. So the reader immediately suspects that David Hunter did it rather than pay Arden off, and that’s why he was running from the scene of the crime in such a hurry to catch the train. He’s the obvious suspect. Or could it have been someone else? But who? And why?

Cast

  • Major Porter – old India hand and club bore at the Coronation Club
  • young Mr Mellon – hosting Poirot at the Coronation Club
  • Hercule Poirot – forced to listen to the club bore’s account of Underhay and Gordon Cloade
    • George – Poirot’s manservant
  • old Gordon Cloade – funder of the whole Cloade family, who all relied on his largesse, until he unexpectedly married a young lovely and, weeks later, was killed in the Blitz on London
  • Rosaleen Cloade – 26, Gordon Cloade’s widow, previously married to Robert Underhay staying at Furrowbank
  • David Hunter – Rosaleen’s rude and controlling brother – ‘a thin young man with dark hair and dark eyes. His face was unhappy and defiant and slightly insolent’ – Irish, in the commandos during the war – ‘tall thin bitter-looking young man’
    • Old Mullard – their gardener
  • Dr Lionel Cloade – ‘spare and grey-haired – but he had not the lawyer’s imperturbability. His manner was brusque and impatient… his nervous irritability’
  • Mrs Katherine ‘Aunt Kathie’ Cloade – between 40 and 50 – into spiritualism, in debt to various clairvoyants
  • Jeremy Cloade – Gordon’s elder brother – senior partner in a firm of solicitors, Cloade, Brunskill and Cloade – ‘a spare grey-haired man of sixty-three, with a dry expressionless face’ – has been embezzling money
  • Frances Cloade – 48, ‘one of those lean greyhound women who look well in tweeds. There was a rather arrogant ravaged beauty about her face which had no make-up except a little carelessly applied lipstick’ – the only daughter of Lord Edward Trenton, who had trained his horses in the neighbourhood of Warmsley Heath
    • Edna – 15-year-old servant
  • Antony Cloade – their son, killed on active service
  • Adela Marchmont née Cloade – aka Mums – over 60, never a strong woman, borne down by bills, begs £500 off Rosaleen – lives at the White House with…
  • Lynn Marchmont – her daughter, a far-travelled Wren during the war (Women’s Royal Naval Service, WRNS, part of the Royal Navy)
  • Rowley Cloade – son of deceased Maurice Cloade – ‘a big square young man with a brick-red skin, thoughtful blue eyes and very fair hair. He had a slowness that seemed more purposeful than ingrained’ – farm called Long Willows
  • Johnnie Vavasour – Rowley’s friend and partner on the farm, killed in the war
  • Beatrice Lippincott – barmaid at the Stag pub
  • Gladys – chambermaid at the Stag pub
  • Superintendent Spence – local police
  • Sergeant Graves – his subordinate (tactful enough not to show off his superior French accent)
  • Mr Pebmarsh – coroner at the inquest on Enoch Arden
  • Jenkins – the police surgeon

Poirot’s foreignness

Poirot’s foreignness is always emphasised.

Rowley Cloade was eyeing Poirot rather doubtfully. The flamboyant moustaches, the sartorial elegance, the white spats and the pointed patent leather shoes all filled this insular young man with distinct misgivings.

‘Do you remember old Jeremy mentioning a chap called Hercule Poirot?’
‘Hercule Poirot?’ Lynn frowned. ‘Yes, I do remember something… Well? Lynn demanded impatiently.
‘Fellow has the wrong clothes and all that. French chap – or Belgian. Queer fellow but he’s the goods all right.’

The impoverishment of the rentier class

As discussed above, the book abounds in descriptions of how the privileged rentier and professional classes of between the wars, had fallen on hard times, by the Labour government’s introduction of ruinous taxes and a jungle of forms, and the general decay in quality and standards left by the war.

Tax

Hence the surprising harping on this issue of new high taxes and how they were affecting numerous characters in the story.

Lynn realised with some dismay how their financial position had changed. The small but adequate fixed income which had kept them going comfortably before the war was now almost halved by taxation. Rates, expenses, wages had all gone up. ‘Oh, brave new world,’ thought Lynn grimly…

Dramatically, and with a trembling lip, Mrs Marchmont produced a sheaf of bills. ‘And look at all these,’ she wailed. ‘What am I to do? What on earth am I to do, Lynn? The bank manager wrote me only this morning that I’m overdrawn. I don’t see how I can be. I’ve been so careful. But it seems my investments just aren’t producing what they used to. Increased taxation, he says. And all these yellow things. War Damage Insurance or something – one has to pay them whether one wants to or not…’

ADELA: ‘I’m overdrawn at the bank, and I owe bills – repairs to the house – and the rates haven’t been paid yet. You see, everything’s halved – my income, I mean. I suppose it’s taxation…’

DAVID: ‘Rosaleen can’t touch the capital, you know. Only the income. And she pays about nineteen and six in the pound income tax.’
‘Oh, I know. Taxation‘s dreadful these days.’

ADELA: ‘Everything is so expensive nowadays. And it gets worse and worse.’

Major Porter had the first floor of a small shabby house. They were admitted by a cheerful blowsy-looking woman who took them up. It was a square room with bookshelves round it and some rather bad sporting prints. There were two rugs on the floor – good rugs with lovely dim colour but very worn. Poirot noticed that the centre of the floor was covered with a new heavy varnish whereas the varnish round the edge was old and rubbed. He realised then that there had been other better rugs until recently – rugs that were worth good money in these days. He looked up at the man standing erect by the fireplace in his well-cut shabby suit.

Poirot guessed that for Major Porter, retired Army officer, life was lived very near the bone. Taxation and increased cost of living struck hardest at the old war-horses.

KATHIE CLOADE: ‘But then, when Gordon died like that – well, you know what things are, M. Poirot, nowadays. Taxation and everything. He can’t afford to retire and it’s made him very bitter…’

Plus, after the Second World War Christie herself became the victim of aggressive tax authorities in both the UK and USA, tax problems which were to dog her for the rest of her life. So there’s personal animus, as well, behind these references.

Forms

And the new levels of post-war bureaucracy:

ROWLEY: ‘I’m only just keeping my head above water as it is. And what with not knowing what this damned Government is going to do next – hampered at every turn – snowed under with forms up to midnight trying to fill them in sometimes – it’s too much for one man.’

‘I wonder what Rowley wants?’
Jeremy said wearily:
‘Probably fallen foul of some Government regulation. No farmer understands more than a quarter of these forms they have to fill up.’

‘Come,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t keep that bucolic young man waiting too long. Go and help him to fill up form eleven hundred and ninety-nine, or whatever it is.’

General decay

Shepherd’s Court, Mayfair, was a large block of luxury service flats. Unharmed by the ravages of enemy action, they had nevertheless been unable to keep up quite their pre-war standard of ease. There was service still, although not very good service. Where there had been two uniformed porters there was now only one. The restaurant still served meals, but except for breakfast, meals were not sent up to the apartments.

‘I’ve checked up,’ said Spence. ‘The last time a woman occupied that room was three weeks ago. I know service isn’t up to much nowadays – but I still think they run a mop under the furniture once in three weeks.’

Says the fierce old lady in the Stag’s Residents Only bar, old Mrs Leadbetter:

‘Every year I come and stay in this place. My husband died here sixteen years ago. He’s buried here. I come every year for a month.’
‘A pious pilgrimage,’ said Poirot politely.
‘And every year things get worse and worse. No service! Food uneatable! Vienna steaks indeed! A steak’s either Rump or Fillet steak – not chopped-up horse!’

Everything is going to the dogs:

‘It [the lipstick] was found on the floor of No. 5. It had rolled under the chest of drawers and of course just possibly it might have been there some time. No fingerprints on it. Nowadays, of course, there isn’t the range of lipsticks there used to be – just a few standard makes.’

‘His reason for coming down,’ the Superintendent broke in, ‘was, according to him, to get certain things he’d left behind, letters and papers, a chequebook, and to see if some shirts had come back from the laundry – which, of course, they hadn’t. My word, laundry’s a problem nowadays. Four ruddy weeks since they’ve been to our place – not a clean towel left in our house, and the wife washes all my things herself now.’

After the war

And it’s not just money. There’s a mean spirit abroad after the war. At least that’s how pukka middle-class Lynn sees it.

Lynn thought suddenly, ‘But that’s what’s the matter everywhere. I’ve noticed it ever since I got home. It’s the aftermath war has left. Ill will. Ill feeling. It’s everywhere. On railways and buses and in shops and amongst workers and clerks and even agricultural labourers. And I suppose worse in mines and factories. Ill will.’

After reading a number of passages like this I began to wonder, Is this what the book is about? About the impoverishment of the rentier class and the revenge of the outsider class? Angry Irishman David Hunter gets quite a few opportunities to express his glee at the humbling of the posh Cloades:

‘Gordon Cloade died before he had time to make a will. That’s what’s called the luck of the game. We win, you and I. The others – lose.’

Self-referentiality

All Christie’s books have characters comparing the events or people to events or people in books or detective stories. There is a continual stagey self-awareness to the characters and events, a regular nudge in the ribs that all this is fiction.

‘Perhaps it’s just a feeling of unreality. In books the blackmailer gets slugged. Does he in real life? Apparently the answer is yes. But it seems unnatural.’

‘I’ve no experience, of course, of police cases. And anyway medical evidence isn’t the hard-and-fast, cast-iron business that laymen or novelists seem to think…’

Credit

‘Taken At The Flood’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in November 1948.

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The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie (1943)

Just for a moment I hated Lymstock and its narrow boundaries, and its gossiping whispering women.
(Chapter 2)

‘I hope you find the devil who writes these soon. She murdered my wife as surely as if she’d put a knife into her.’
(Mr Symmington in Chapter 3 – Criminals in Christie are always maniacs, devils or fiends, or a ‘dangerous lunatic’, Chapter 5, or ‘A crafty, determined lunatic killer’, Chapter 7)

Nash nodded sympathetically. ‘Yes, it isn’t very pleasant to look upon these fellow creatures one meets as possible criminal lunatics.’
(Ditto, Chapter 6)

‘What kind of place is this for a man to come to to lie in the sun and heal his wounds? It’s full of festering poison, this place, and it looks as peaceful and as innocent as the Garden of Eden.’
(Jerry Burton appalled by what he is discovering)

‘But people have such evil minds. Yes, alas, such evil minds!’
(Miss Ginch)

‘It’s the first murder we’ve ever had in Lymstock. Excitement is terrific.’
(Hearty Aimée Griffith expressing the comic view which is never far away in Christie)

‘The Moving Finger’ is Agatha Christie’s third Miss Marple novel.

Synopsis

Jerry Burton

It’s a first-person narrative told by Jerry Burton. A fit young man, he was badly injured in a flying accident and, once he’d recovered, his doctor advised going somewhere very quiet for rest and recuperation. So he and his sister Joanna rented a cottage called Little Furze in the village of Lymstock, ‘a little provincial market town’. The charming old Victorian lady who owned it, Miss Emily Barton, moved into rooms in Lymstock.

Small town gossip

Having just finished reading some of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels, I was struck by the similarities, not of tone, style or intent – but of setting. A provincial village with a set of stock characters, even down to the way that morning is the time for everyone to head off to the High Street, bump into each other and have a good gossip.

‘That ought to give you time to pass the time of day with everyone in Lymstock.’
‘I have no doubt,’ I said, ‘that I shall have seen anybody who is anybody by then.’
For morning in the High Street was a kind of rendezvous for shoppers, when news was exchanged.

Just as in Lucia’s Riseholme where the catchphrase is ‘Any news?’ – as Inspector Nash explains about tiny little village communities:

‘Anything’s news in a place like this. You’d be surprised. If the dressmaker’s mother has got a bad corn everybody hears about it!’ (Chapter 5)

And here’s Aimée Griffith’s view:

‘Oh, I dare say you don’t hear all the gossip that goes around. I do! I know what people are saying. Mind you, I don’t for a minute think there’s anything in it – not for a minute! But you know what people are – if they can say something ill-natured, they do!’… Aimée Griffith gave her jolly laugh. ‘You’re shocked, Mr Burton, at hearing what our gossiping little town thinks. I can tell you this – they always think the worst!’

I was struck when I came across Mr Pye using the expression ‘village Parliament’ to describe the daily morning meeting of villages in the high street to exchange gossip:

‘Not joining our village Parliament? We are all agog over the news. Murder! Real Sunday newspaper murder in our midst!’

Because it echoes Benson’s novel, Queen Lucia, in which characters refer half a dozen time to exactly the same morning meeting of villagers on their green as ‘the morning parliament’, ‘the parliament on the green’ and so on. Coincidence of not just concept but precise terminology.

Poison pen letters

As to the plot, first of all we are introduced to the middle class inhabitants of the village and some of their servants, in an enjoyably leisurely way, about 15 named characters in all. Fairly early on Jerry receives an anonymous poison pen letter claiming his sister, Joanna, is not his sister at all and that he’s living in sin with his mistress masquerading as his sister. Jerry shows it to Joanna, they have a laugh and then burn it in the fireplace.

But over the next few chapters they learn that almost everyone in the village has received one of these letters – a type-written envelope containing a message made entirely from words cut out of an old textbook and pasted into paper to make poisonous accusations, nearly all of a sexual nature.

Suicide

So far, so shedding an unexpected light on the dark underside of a small tightly-knit rural community. What drastically changes the narrative is when the querulous wife of the village’s dried-up solicitor, Mrs Symmington, commits suicide. The note she left suggests it was in response to the accusations contained in one of these letters and when the letter she’d scrunched up into a ball is examined, it claims that the second of her two children by the lawyer is not in fact his i.e. that she had an affair.

The cops

So the police, in the form of Superintendent Nash, are called in and Nash requests help from a specialist in these kinds of letters, an Inspector Graves who comes down from London specially. Suddenly all the nice characters we’ve met to date acquire a nimbus of suspicion.

Megan Hunter?

There’s a fairly big red herring or storyline which is that the Symmingtons have a step-daughter – Megan Symmington was Mrs Symmington’s daughter by her first marriage, by a Captain Hunter who was a wrong ‘un and quickly despatched leaving her holding the baby who would grow up to become Megan Symmington, 20-years-old at the time of the narrative. Megan is tall and clumsy, gauche, unhappy and angry because she knows she is simply not wanted in the Symmington household.

Jerry and Joanna feel sorry for her and so, in the aftermath of her mother’s suicide, they step in and offer to look after her, leaving the Symmington household’s governess, the stunningly attractive but commonplace Elsie Holland, to concentrate on looking after the bereaved husband and their two boys.

Earlier in the story, Jerry had bumped into her in the street and they’d walked for a bit and Megan had confessed that she hates everyone, because of her profound sense of alienation and unwantedness. Could the poison pen writer be her?

Miss Barton?

Later Jerry has a slight argument with old Miss Barton who’s rented them the cottage they’re staying in. Remember how in Murder Is Easy, the killer turned out a harmless little old lady, well… Miss Barton tells Jerry that she’s never received one of these horrid letters but later on the police inspector tells Jerry this was a lie…

Miss Ginch?

And then he goes to the estate agents about his rental and discovers that Mr Symmington’s dried-up 40-year-old secretary, Miss Ginch, has quit her job with him to work at the estate agents and seems to take a gleeful delight in the mayhem being caused by the letters. So maybe she wrote them!?

Elsie Holland?

The Symmingtons employ a stunningly beautiful young woman, Elsie Holland, as a governess to their two boys, Colin and Brian.

Dr Griffiths

That nice young but harassed Dr Griffiths. At first Jerry likes him, he is a widely read and interesting young chap, but then comes to realise that he also has more access to people’s secrets than anyone else in the village. And behaves increasingly nervously as if he knows something or has done something…

The second death

So far so entertainingly puzzling and challenging as the reader shares in Jerry’s conversations with all the different characters, picking out throwaway remarks, wondering whodunnit. But the plot thickens considerably when there is a second death and this time it is no accident, this time it is murder!

A maid at Symmington’s house, Agnes Woddell, rings up her former superior and mentor, Partridge, who is housekeeper at Little Furze, in a tizzy and wanting help. Partridge can’t get out of her what the problem is and agrees to meet her but Agnes never turns up. Next day she is found brutally murdered and stuffed into the broom cupboard under the stairs. Jerry and the cops quickly conclude that she must have seen who delivered the fatal letter by hand to the Symmingtons house, which pushed Mrs Symmington over the brink into suicide – she’d come to connect someone she knew walking up the path and delivering something at the letter box (everyone else was out of the house at the time) – and that person – the Poison Pen writer must themselves have realised that Agnes knew and could identify her (everyone thinks it’s a woman), and so snuck back a week later, when the rest of the household was out, and murdered her!

At which point the atmosphere thickens and everyone becomes a suspect, quizzed by the police about their whereabouts at the time of the murder, with Jerry kept informed by the police superintendent of developments, who also asks if Jerry could keep his ear open and quiz villagers, with a view to turning up more evidence.

In other words, following the Hercule Poirot rulebook, which is to get people talking and keep them talking, until they slip up. Combined with that other Poirot technique, which is finding psychological consistency, identifying the kind of person who would write these letters and then go on to kill to protect themselves…

So life goes on in this harmless little village with a new tinge of paranoia, which verges slightly on the realm of horror:

There was a half-scared, half-avid gleam in almost everybody’s eye. Neighbour looked at neighbour… Somewhere, then, in Lymstock, walking down the High Street, shopping, passing the time of day, was a person who had cracked a defenceless girl’s skull and driven a sharp skewer home to her brain. And no one knew who that person was. As I say, the days went on in a kind of dream. I looked at everyone I met in a new light, the light of a possible murderer.

Enter Miss Marple

And it’s only here, on page 180 of this 250-page book, that Miss Marple enters, a guest invited to tea by the vicar, along with jerry, who is introduced to her for the first time… And after a few pages demonstrating her fondness for making analogies to characters in her own village, she drops out of the narrative altogether for the next 30 pages. Only 25 pages or so from the end does she reappear, after the police have arrested the person they think responsible.

And it now, in the final stretches, that Miss Marple, of course, proves everybody wrong, organising an elaborate hoax which the police stake out in order to catch the murderer red-handed.

Miss Marple dazzlingly solves the case, and the novel ends with the baddie caught and arrested, a flurry of engagements, and quite a funny joke in the last line. Very slick and enjoyable entertainment all round.

Cast

  • Jerry Burton – narrator, severe back injury in a flying accident and so ‘an invalid hobbling about on two sticks’
  • Joanna Burton – his sister, suave, independent, fond of brief love affairs, blonde
  • Old Miss Emily Barton – permanently pink and excited like Dresden China
    • Florence Elford – Miss Barton’s faithful parlour-maid, ‘a tall, raw-boned, fierce-looking woman’
    • Partridge – Miss Barton’s maid
    • Beatrice – the daily help
    • Old Adams – the gardener
  • Mr Richard Symmington the lawyer, thin and dry
    • old Miss Ginch – his lady clerk – ‘forty at least, with pince-nez and teeth like a rabbit’ – ‘She had frizzy hair and simpered’
    • Agnes Woddell – maid
    • Rose – the cook, ‘a plump pudding-faced woman of forty’
  • Mrs Mona Symmington – his querulous bridge-playing wife; he is her second husband after she divorced the not-to-be-mentioned Captain Hunter – ‘a small anaemic woman, fadedly pretty, who talked in a thin melancholy voice of servant difficulties and her health’ – ‘That anaemic middle-aged prettiness concealed, I thought, a selfish, grasping nature’
  • Megan Hunter – Symmington’s step-daughter – ‘a tall awkward girl, and although she was actually
    twenty, she looked more like a schoolgirlish sixteen. She had a shock of untidy brown hair, hazel-green eyes, a thin bony face, and an unexpectedly charming one-sided smile. Her clothes were drab and unattractive and she usually had on lisle-thread stockings with holes in them’
  • Elsie Holland – the Symmingtons’ nursery governess – stunningly beautiful
    • Colin and Brian, Symmington’s two young boys
  • Dr Owen Griffith – the dark, melancholy doctor – ‘dark, ungainly, with awkward ways of moving and deft, very gentle hands. He had a jerky way of talking and was rather shy’
  • Aimée Griffith – his sister who was big and hearty – runs the Girl Guides – ‘had all the positive assurance her brother lacked. She was a handsome woman in a masculine weather-beaten way,
    with a deep voice’
  • the Reverend Caleb Dane Calthrop – the vicar – a scholarly absent-minded elderly man, ‘s a being more remote from everyday life than anyone I have ever met. His existence was in his books and in his study’
  • Mrs Maud Dane Calthrop – his erratic eager-faced wife, ‘quite terrifyingly on the spot. Though she seldom gave advice and never interfered, yet she represented to the uneasy consciences of the village the Deity personified’ – ‘her startling resemblance to a greyhound’
  • Mr Pye of Prior’s End – rich dilettante – ‘an extremely ladylike plump little man, devoted to his petit point chairs, his Dresden shepherdesses and his collection of period furniture’ – gay?
    • Prescott – his cook
    • Mrs Prescott – his house parlour-maid
  • Mrs Mudge – the butcher’s wife
  • Jennifer Clark – barmaid at the ‘Three Crowns’
  • young Fred Rendell from the fish shop
  • Sergeant Parkins – village cop
  • Bert Rundle – the village constable
  • Mrs Cleat – the village witch – ‘Likes to show off. Goes out to gather herbs and things at the full of the moon and takes care that everybody in the place knows about it’
  • Colonel Appleby – ‘that awful old bore’
  • Miss Jane Marple – ‘That’s my expert,’ said Mrs Dane Calthrop. ‘Jane Marple. Look at her well. I tell you, that woman knows more about the different kinds of human wickedness than anyone I’ve ever known’

The police

  • Superintendent Nash – ‘I liked him at first sight. He was a top quality criminal investigator. Tall, with a military way, he looked tranquil and objective, besides being very simple’
  • Inspector Graves – an expert on anonymous letter cases, come down from London to help the local police

In London

  • Marcus Kent – Jerry’s doctor, who told him to go to some little place in the country to rest and recover
  • Mirotin – Joanna’s dressmaker – ‘Mirotin is, in the flesh, an unconventional and breezy woman of forty-five, Mary Grey’

Feminism

In most of the Christie books I’ve read to date, her feminist characters are figures of fun. Not here. Aimée Griffith is given some fiercely feminist lines that instantly reminded me of the furious denunciations on Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas.

‘I should have said Megan is at the age when a girl wants to enjoy herself – not to work.’
Aimée flushed and said sharply, ‘You’re like all men – you dislike the idea of women competing. It is incredible to you that women should want a career. It was incredible to my parents. I was anxious to study for a doctor. They would not hear of paying the fees. But they paid them readily for Owen. Yet I should have made a better doctor than my brother.’
‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said. ‘It was tough on you. If one wants to do a thing–’
She went on quickly.
‘Oh, I’ve got over it now. I’ve plenty of willpower. My life is busy and active. I’m one of the happiest people in Lymstock. Plenty to do. But I go up in arms against the silly old-fashioned prejudice that woman’s place is always the home.’
‘I’m sorry if I offended you, I said. I had had no idea that Aimée Griffith could be so vehement.

Theology

Despite having created countless vicars, and dwelling on death at great length, and endlessly invoking the concept of ‘evil’, and despite Christie herself being a Church of England Christian, her books contain surprisingly little theology. That made Jerry Burton’s little outburst stick out the more. Here he is getting cross with old Miss Barton as they discuss the author of the poison pen letters and Miss Barton says maybe they were sent by Providence to punish the villagers.

‘No, no, Mr Burton, you misunderstand me. I’m not talking of the misguided creature who wrote them – someone quite abandoned that must be. I mean that they have been permitted – by Providence! To awaken us to a sense of our shortcomings.’
‘Surely,’ I said, ‘the Almighty could choose a less unsavoury weapon.’
Miss Emily murmured that God moved in a mysterious way.
‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will. I might concede you the Devil. God doesn’t really need to punish us, Miss Barton. We’re so very busy punishing ourselves.’
(Chapter 3)

Class in England

‘I shouldn’t have thought one of these bucolic women down here would have had the brains,’ I said.
Graves coughed. ‘I haven’t made myself plain, I’m afraid. Those letters were written by an educated woman.’
‘What, by a lady?’
The word slipped out involuntarily. I hadn’t used the term ‘lady’ for years. But now it came automatically to my lips, re-echoed from days long ago, and my grandmother’s faint unconsciously arrogant voice saying, ‘Of course, she isn’t a lady, dear.’
Nash understood at once. The word lady still meant something to him.
‘Not necessarily a lady,’ he said. ‘But certainly not a village woman. They’re mostly pretty illiterate down here, can’t spell, and certainly can’t express themselves with fluency.’
(Chapter 3)

The slow impoverishment of the rentier class

Late Victorian and Edwardian fiction is full of posh ladies who live off unearned income deriving from trust funds or investments in government ‘consols’. See the novels of E.M. Forster or my little philippic against the rentier class in my review of Mrs Craddock by Somerset Maugham (1902).

The point is that the Great Depression dealt this whole lifestyle a blow and began the process whereby all those lucrative stocks and shares and annual incomes began to decline and the carefree, arty lifestyle along with it – plus the kicker of higher taxes. Here’s old Miss Emily’s loyal servant, Florence, complaining about it, starting with Joanna Burton saying Miss Barton put her house on the market.

‘Well, Miss Barton wanted to let the house. She put it down at the house agents.’
‘Forced to it,’ said Florence. ‘And she living so frugal and careful. But even then, the government can’t leave her alone! Has to have its pound of flesh just the same.’ [i.e. increased taxes]
I shook my head sadly.
‘Plenty of money there was in the old lady’s time,’ said Florence. ‘And then they all died off one after another, poor dears. Miss Emily nursing of them one after the other. Wore herself out she did, and always so patient and uncomplaining. But it told on her, and then to have worry about money on top of it all! Shares not bringing in what they used to, so she says, and why not, I should like to know? They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Doing down a lady like her who’s got no head for figures and can’t be up to their tricks.’
‘Practically everyone has been hit that way,’ I said, but Florence remained unsoftened.
‘It’s all right for some as can look after themselves, but not for her. She needs looking after, and as long as she’s with me I’m going to see no one imposes on her or upsets her in any way. I’d do anything for Miss Emily.’

This, in a little village mode, is the same process of impoverishment of the old leisured class which Evelyn Waugh laments in Brideshead Revisited.

Mr Symmington, too, was a very clever lawyer, and had helped Miss Barton to get some money back from the Income Tax which she would never have known about.

Incidentally, neither Jerry nor his sister appear to have jobs. They just live a charmed and pleasant life, attended by servants catering to all their needs, without lifting a finger – an amount of pure leisure time we 21st century wage slaves can only dream of.

NB Christie’s lament for the loss of the old leisured life, and her resentment at the postwar Labour government and its introduction of ruinously high taxes, are all given full expression in her 1948 novel, ‘Taken at the Flood’.

Rise of the unconscious

I’ve mentioned many times how I’ve noticed a slow but steady increase in references to Freudian notions of the unconscious and the unconscious mind in Christie’s novels as the 1920s and ’30s progressed, matching the spread of Freudian ideas through the wider culture. More of the same, here:

Somewhere behind my conscious mind, a queer uneasiness was growing. It was connected in some way with the phrase that Joanna had used, ‘a week exactly’. I ought, I dare say, to have put two and two together earlier. Perhaps, unconsciously, my mind was already suspicious. Anyway, the leaven was working now. The uneasiness was growing – coming to a head.

I think that even then, there were pieces of the puzzle floating about in my mind. I believe that if I had given my mind to it, I would have solved the whole thing then and there. Otherwise why did those fragments tag along so persistently?

How much do we know at any time? Much more, or so I believe, than we know we know! But we cannot break through to that subterranean knowledge. It’s there, but we cannot reach it… I lay on my bed, tossing uneasily, and only vague bits of the puzzle came to torture me. There was a pattern, if only I could get hold of it….

Later, Jerry shares some more bucket psychiatry, of the kind you read in magazines in GP waiting rooms.

‘She’s rather ‘queer’ in some ways – a grim spinster – the sort of person who might have religious mania.’
‘This isn’t religious mania – or so you told me Graves said.’
‘Well, sex mania. They’re very closely tied up together, I understand. She’s repressed and respectable, and has been shut up here with a lot of elderly women for years.’

The central idea, which became so popular, that it’s bad to ‘repress’ strong urges because if you try, they come out in other, generally bad, ways.

Later, as it happens, Christie uses the name Freud for, I think, the first time in her oeuvre:

I closed my eyes. I considered the four people, these strangely unlikely people, in turn: Gentle, frail little Emily Barton? What points were there actually against her? A starved life? Dominated and repressed from early childhood? Too many sacrifices asked of her? Her curious horror of discussing anything ‘not quite nice’? Was that actually a sign of inner preoccupation with just these themes? Was I getting too horribly Freudian? (Chapter 6)

Gay

Homosexuality was, of course, illegal, so authors had to find coded ways to refer to gay or lesbian characters. Quite a few mannish women crop up in Christie’s novels who she may have been implying were lesbians. Fewer gay men. Is the following passage about homosexuality? Joanna and Jerry are discussing the gender of the poison pen writer.

‘They are sure it is a woman, aren’t they?’
‘You don’t think it’s a man?’ I exclaimed incredulously.
‘Not – not an ordinary man – but a certain kind of man. I’m thinking, really, of Mr Pye.’
‘So Pye is your selection?’
‘Don’t you feel yourself that he’s a possibility? He’s the sort of person who might be lonely – and unhappy – and spiteful. Everyone, you see, rather laughs at him. Can’t you see him secretly hating all the normal happy people, and taking a queer, perverse, artistic pleasure in what he was doing?’
‘Graves said a middle-aged spinster.’
‘Mr Pye,’ said Joanna, ‘is a middle-aged spinster.’
‘A misfit,’ I said slowly.
‘Very much so. He’s rich, but money doesn’t help. And I do feel he might be unbalanced. He is, really, rather a frightening little man.’
(Chapter 5)

And police inspector Nash’s view:

‘I don’t think men wrote the letters – in fact, I’m sure of it – always excepting our Mr Pye, that is to say, who’s got an abnormally female streak in his character…’

Bookish

In novels, I have noticed, anonymous letters of a foul and disgusting character are never shown, if possible, to women. It is implied that women must at all cost be shielded from the shock it might give their delicate nervous systems. I am sorry to say it never occurred to me not to show the letter to Joanna. I handed it to her at once.

‘She despised them, you know, for not getting married, and yet so arranged their lives that it was practically impossible for them to meet anybody. I believe Emily, or perhaps it was Agnes, did have some kind of affair with a curate. But his family wasn’t good enough and Mamma soon put a stop to that!’
‘It sounds like a novel,’ said Joanna.

Presently Nash said that he was going to interview Rose once more. I asked him, rather diffidently, if I might come too. Rather to my surprise he assented cordially.
‘I’m very glad of your co-operation, Mr Burton, if I may say so.’
‘That sounds suspicious,’ I said. ‘In books when a detective welcomes someone’s assistance, that someone is usually the murderer.’
(Chapter 5)

Slang

‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Some people have lots of looks and absolutely no S.A. That girl hasn’t. It seems such a pity.’

As in previous novels, SA stands for Sex Appeal, a phrase first used in the early 1900s but which became much more common with the spread of moving pictures in the 1920s, as well as the tremendous growth in advertising which, from that day to this, routinely relies on associating a product with youth and vitality and sexiness.

Credit

‘The Moving Finger’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in June 1943.

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Posted by Simon on September 15, 2025

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The Green Hat by Michael Arlen (1924)

‘It might be nice for you to take a house in London for the spring season—I know a dove of a house in Talbot Square you could get, furnished. I mean, living with sane, well-balanced English people.’
She would have gone on to tell him all the old propaganda stories of 1914 if he had not laughed and said:
‘I’ve been reading a book by Michael Arlen and if that’s—’
She ruined Michael Arlen with a wave of her salad spoon.
‘He only writes about degenerates. I mean the worthwhile English.’
(Baby Warren and Dick Diver chatting in ‘Tender Is The Night’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Book 2, chapter 21)

‘Your generation,’ said Hilary thoughtfully, ‘is a mess.’
(The Green Hat, chapter 3)

She suspected they might be thinking she was going to more than powder her nose. They were, she was, who cared?
(chapter 4)

She drove with assurance, that is to say, she drove as though her mind was not in the same world as the steering-wheel.
(chapter 4)

‘The Marches are never let off anything…’
(The sense of doom clinging round twins Iris and Gerald March, a phrase often repeated)

She [Billee Ponthéveque, a cocotte] never saw her parents, she would say, because of a funny idea they had that it was bad for her health to take cocaine on an empty stomach.
(The blasé attitude to sex and drugs which helped make the book notorious; chapter 7)

‘Why is every one so awful these days!’
(poor Venice Pollen, wailing the eternal wail; chapter 7)

I couldn’t help thinking of her as of someone who had strayed into our world from a strange land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who were calmly awaiting their inheritance of our world when we should have annihilated one another in our endless squabbles about honour, morality, nationality.
(One of hundreds of passages where the narrator adulates the protagonist, Iris Storm; chapter 9)

‘The Green Hat’ by Michael Arlen was the publishing sensation of 1924, making its author famous overnight, quickly becoming a touchpoint for the culture, going on to be referenced in contemporary newspapers, magazines and other fictions for the next decade and more, as epitomising the spirit of the day and the year.

It more or less invented the concept of the heedlessly hedonistic bright young things of London. More specifically, it crystallised and defined the idea of the new woman about town, smartly dressed, comfortably off, defying conventions (wearing short skirts, bobbing her hair, smoking!). The heroine in question is Iris Storm, wearer of the green hat in question, fast driver of a Hispano-Suiza motor car and breaker of men’s hearts.

Michael Arlen

The most striking thing about the author of this quintessentially English comedy is that he wasn’t English at all, but a Bulgarian of Armenian descent. He was born Dikran Sarkis Kouyoumdjian in Bulgaria to an Armenian merchant family. In 1892, his family moved to Plovdiv, Bulgaria, after fleeing Turkish persecutions of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. In Plovdiv, Arlen’s father set up an import-export business and a few years later, he moved his family to England. It was here that young Dikran went to school and was raised speaking posh English, before enrolling at Edinburgh University.

During the Great War Dikran was regarded with suspicion as Bulgaria was allied to Germany and Austria. He gravitated to London and fell in with other conscientious objectors and outsiders. He began writing essays and article for the New Age magazine, and took to signing them Michael Arlen to allay the xenophobia his real name aroused.

During the 1920s Arlen rented rooms opposite ‘The Grapes’ public house in Shepherd Market, then a bohemian Mayfair address. He used Shepherd Market as the setting for the novel. Here’s Shepherd Market on Google Maps. In 1920 he became infatuated with one of the leading socialites of her day, the brilliant and charismatic Nancy Cunard, and she is the inspiration for Iris Storm.

It is, then, as you can see, a strongly autobiographical novel, but with the central character exaggerated for sensational effect.

‘The Green Hat’ made Arlen famous and rich. He enjoyed dressing smartly, driving round London in a yellow Rolls Royce (precursor to John Lennon’s white Rolls Royce forty years later), hobnobbing with other celebrities. He regularly travelled to the United States to work on plays and films. He was understandably nervous about writing a follow-up to his big hit and, indeed, none of his subsequent novels were nearly as successful but he was, until his death in 1956, famous for being famous.

Chapter 1. The Green Hat

Introducing the narrator and Iris Storm

It is the summer of 1922. The story is a first-person narrative told in a breezily facetious style by a well-educated, posh but poor man about town. He lives in a crappy flat above a sordid alleyway in Mayfair’s Shepherd’s market and takes us into his confidence with various arch and self-conscious narrative comments, which hark back to Victorian storytelling.

It is late, after midnight, when the tale begins…

He has just got back to his flat after a party when the front doorbell rings. It is a woman wearing a fashionable small green hat pulled down over her eyes, come to visit her brother, Gerald March, who lives in the flat above the narrator.

As he lets her into the ramshackle house, the narrator is dazzled by her beauty and self possession, by her striking car, a big yellow Hispano-Suiza, by the panache of her green hat, by her small face and dancing auburn hair. He notices she is wearing a large green emerald ring on the third finger of her right hand. He comes to notice that she has tiger-tawny hair and a husky voice. Unfortunately, when they get to the door of Gerald’s flat they see that he is blind drunk.

After the first few pages you realise it is going to overflow with infatuated descriptions of the charismatic Iris. Rhapsodies. A love letter.

She stood carelessly, like the women in Georges Barbier’s almanacks, Falbalas et Fanfreluches, who know how to stand carelessly.

About her, it was perfectly obvious, was the aura of many adventures.

The magic of the sea was in her eyes, whipped with salt and winds.

It seemed to me that across her gentleness flamed a bar of fire. She walked, oh, impersonally, in the fires of herself.

One was to find later that she was completely without a sense of property, either her own or other people’s.

She had a great talent for looking at nothing in particular,

She walked, oh, impersonally, in the fires of herself.

She showed you first one side of her and then another, and each side seemed to have no relation with any other, each side might have belonged to a different woman; indeed, since then I have found that each side did belong to a different woman. I have met a hundred pieces of Iris, quite vividly met them, since last I saw her. And sometimes I have thought of her—foolishly, of course, but shall a man be wise about a woman?—as someone who had by a mistake of the higher authorities strayed into our world from a land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who, the perfection of our imperfections, were awaiting their inheritance of this world of ours.

She wasn’t that ghastly thing called ‘Bohemian’, she wasn’t any of the ghastly things called ‘society’, ‘county’, upper, middle, and lower class. She was, you can see, some invention, ghastly or not, of her own. But she was so quiet about it, she didn’t intrude it on you, she was just herself, and that was a very quiet self. You felt she had outlawed herself from somewhere, but where was that somewhere? You felt she was tremendously indifferent as to whether she was outlawed or not.

One was to find later that she was completely without a sense of property, either her own or other people’s.

She looked at me through the smoke of her cigarette. She was grave, intent. But one never knew what about…

Arlen isn’t afraid to deploy shamelessly poetic prose:

White she was, very white, and her painted mouth was purple in the dim light, and her eyes, which seemed set very wide apart, were cool, impersonal, sensible, and they were blazing blue. Even in that light they were blazing blue, like two spoonfuls of the Mediterranean in the early morning of a brilliant day. The sirens had eyes like that, without a doubt, when they sang of better dreams.

She was like a tower of beauty in the morning of the world.

Anyway, they look into Gerald’s room long enough to realise he has passed out drunk again. The narrator explains that his binges go on for three days. Iris introduces herself, Iris Storm, Mrs Storm, and explains that she and Gerald are twins, born within the same hour 29 years ago. They come from a posh landed family, the Marches, which has fallen on hard times.

I could somehow ‘cope with’ my time and generation, while they were of the breed destined to failure. I was of the race that is surviving the England of Horatio Bottomley, the England of lies, vulgarity, and unclean savagery; while they of the imperious nerves had failed, they had died that slow white death which is reserved for privilege in defeat…

Gerald is ‘absurdly shy’, can’t cope with life hence the alcoholism. She spends most of her time abroad, which she explains why she hasn’t seen her brother for ten years. But he’s drunk and after a bit of chat and explaining these facts, they leave the drunken brother, Iris bitterly commenting that ‘the Marches are never let off anything…’ which becomes a refrain through the book.

On the way back down she suddenly drops into his room asking for a glass of water. The narrator is embarrassed because he is moving out of the place next day and his belongings are scattered all over the floor. She picks up various books, we discover that the narrator is (alas) a writer, and they have some literary chat (she thinks D.H. Lawrence is ‘nice’) which seems terribly dated and irrelevant, for example about the quality of ‘vulgarity’. Then they’re talking about ‘the Jews’ and their love of luxury which leads into a consideration of Chesterton, his Catholicism and blowing on about beer and Britain. Very dated, almost at times incomprehensible.

But the conversation is just filler while he observes and studies the woman he has already become besotted by:

The lady of the green hat said nothing, and that was how I knew that for her everything was inevitable. That is an important thing to know about a woman, for you know then that you will never know where you are.

She kept strange, invisible company, this lady. She walked in measureless wastes, making flames rush up from stones, making molehills out of mountains.

She shook her head, staring at me with a mischievous smile. Her childishness did not jar. She was always herself.

Her hair was thick and tawny, and it waved like music, and the night was tangled in the waves of her hair.

More information is revealed, such as Iris has been married two times, both dead. Second husband, Captain Storm, won a Victoria Cross in the Great War but a year later was murdered by Sinn Feiners in Ireland.

There’s a knock at the door and it’s the local policeman on his beat and worried about an unusual car parked in the alley. The narrator reassures him, but when he returns to his flat, discovers Iris has gone into his bedroom and fallen asleep on the bed. He studies her beauty intently, sitting in a chair smoking till dawn. At which point she awakes, puts on some powder and the famous hat, and departs.

Her eyes were full on mine, naked, expressionless. I felt that they were the heads of the nails under which she had nailed herself.

Wow! He is hooked.

Chapter 2. The Cavalier Of Low Creatures

Profiling Iris’s twin brother, [the alcoholic] Gerald March

The book very heavily uses the old thriller trick of saying ‘But one was to learn later…’, ‘As I found out later…’, ‘That was to come much later…’ and most ominously of all, ‘But now I’ll never know what she was thinking’, ‘that faint dry scent whose name I shall now never know…’ and the like, incredibly obviously signalling that something bad is going to happen, that the astonishingly charismatic Iris Storm is doomed to die!

More generally the narrator spends a lot of time telling us what he’s going to tell us later, constantly promising us stuff later: ‘He will have his place, that dead Boy Fenwick. A deep place.’ He fusses about what he’s going to say when.

At some point the narrator began to remind me of the narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s masterpiece, The Good Soldier‘, John Dowell, who comes over as an amateur storyteller, constantly fussing about when to tell us and how to tell us key elements of the plot, continually explaining how he didn’t understand this or that at the time they occurred. ‘It was only later that I realised…’ ‘But one notices those things only later on…’

In this manner the narrator declares that he’s talked the events which make up the narrative he’s going to tell with friends who knew Iris, Hilary Townshend and Guy de Travest, friends of the late Barty March, had known Gerald and Iris since their earliest childhood. Guy de Travest had been Gerald’s colonel in the Grenadiers for some time during the war (‘I had a sort of eye on him in France, and he seemed as sensitive as a violin string’).

This chapter is about Gerald March, twin brother of Iris Storm, six foot two, lean, one time captain in the Grenadier Guards, who’s gone completely to pot after the war. ‘He was, I mean, so afraid of life that he simply couldn’t exist but by pretending to despise it’, ‘the most lovable man I ever met.’,

That was always Gerald’s trouble, he never was given the credit for being shy, he put himself between you and any sympathy with him, he made it clear that he didn’t want your infernal sympathy

The dark eyes haunted with abstraction, the thin hawk’s nose, the fine, twisted, defiant mouth…

If I haven’t mentioned it before, Arlen’s prose style is odd, quirky, eccentric, mannered.

It was on the fifth morning after the coming and going of the green hat that I was on an instant afflicted with an impulse, and did on the same instant act upon it.

There was by ordinary no grinning froth about Gerald.

I thought I heard Guy mutter something between his teeth.

He has an odd way of saying, not that so and so was an x type of person, but that ‘that was an x type of person’.

That was a most deficient man in every other respect

That was a sad lady, most grave… That was a very quiet lady… That was a gallant lady.

That was a conscientious man, Conrad Masters.

That was a fell lady for whom I bought a green hat that day.

Now that was a loquacious lady.

It seems just not quite standard English usage, although maybe it overlaps with American street slang of the same period or a bit later, Damon Runyon characters saying ‘Now that was some swell broad!’ And he’s addicted to reversing standard word order, often sounding like Yoda from Star Wars.

Thoughtful he was always.

But not I to be provoked!

His eyes pierced the pavement the other side of my shoulder, for tall was Gerald.

Dolorous it was, yet phantasm of gaiety lay twined in it.

Dark it was, the curtains drawn.

A boyish voice, a very boyish voice Venice had.

Weighed down I was by the chill of my journey.

Wise those eyes were now, and steady as stars in a cavern.

Too tall was Guy, in that light.

An amiable man, he looked.

Impatient, Iris’s voice was, I thought.

Soft she was now, soft and white and small.

Or both in one sentence:

The Blues, that man knows.

A man given to muttering, that.

I thought of… Mrs Conrad Masters. A dashing lady, that.

Faintly amused those worried eyes looked to be. That was that man’s way.

Why? Maybe he thought it was modish and modern. Throughout the book his style is often just odd;

We would then, at about eleven o’clock, have by ordinary gone towards bed.

Venice was in high looks that day.

The narrator first met Gerald when he turned up at the magazine where the narrator worked, the New Voice edited by the testy Horton. He gruffly declares he has written a novel. It’s big, titled ‘The Savage Device’, concerns a young idealist named Felix Burton who marries the ghastly Ava Foe. Only later does Iris tell the narrator that Ava is based on her and Burton is based on her first husband, the legendary Boy Fenwick.

Back in the present, when the narrator rings Iris’s London home, the woman she rents the place to, Mrs Oden, tells her Iris left that day for Paris. Some days later he gets a git package from Paris. Iris has sent him a pack of beautiful writing paper with his new address printed on it.

Chapter 3. For Purity!

Portrait of family friend Hilary Townshend

Sometimes his prose is so overwrought and baroque as to be almost incomprehensible.

The cavalier of low creatures dies hard; surviving even our gesture, he loiters dangerously in the tail of our eye, he awaits, with piratical calm, the final stroke; and only will he fade and be forever gone, despised, and distraught, before the face of him who bore the magic device For Purity, whose ghost was to be raised by Mr Townshend over dinner on the twelfth night after the coming of the green hat.

At other times, in fact very frequently, he’s suddenly bright and clever.

Hilary was a man of various ages; when nothing was going well with him, he would look no more than forty; when everything was going well with him, he would look about forty-five; when he was crossing a road, that is to say when he was thinking, he looked about fifty. This last was, I believe, his age.

Grey and thoughtful and kind, he stood there in the doorway of his tall sombre house, looking up at the faint stars on the ceiling of Chesterfield Street: his was just that contained air of loneliness that unmarried schoolmasters wear during their holidays.

‘Oh, Naps, such a wonder!’ cried Venice on the instant, and I saw what one is so apt to see after an intimate talk with a woman, that one has only been talking to a mood. (chapter 7)

‘Growing-pains, Masters. One is always growing up, at other people’s expense…’ (chapter 8)

‘Oh, friends and enemies! One relies on what people are in themselves, no matter what circumstances may make them feel.’ (chapter 10)

And funny:

Hilary, like all middle-aged men who detest night-clubs, at once left me to dance with the first acquaintance he saw. (chapter 4)

The faint, slow lilt of the tango, pleasantest of all dances but one that is so seldom danced in London because nobody in London can dance it… which is a pity. (chapter 9)

She [Iris] drove that menacing bonnet ever more furiously along the road to Maidenhead, so that corners perished like midgets before our head-lights and Hugo and Shirley, who sat behind, murmured against her driving, saying that it would be bad for their reputation as a happily-married couple to be found dead on the road to Maidenhead. ‘A friend of mine,’ yelled Hugo, ‘was asked to resign from Buck’s for being found dead on the Maidenhead road…’ (chapter 9)

‘I do wish,” Hugo said violently, ‘that perfect strangers wouldn’t force themselves on us like this. Any one would think we were at a Royal Garden Party!’ (chapter 10)

And has some dazzling phrases:

Napier stared at her—he was sitting now—and it was as though he had put his hand to his mouth and placed a smile there. (chapter 7)

In the still air of Guy’s great, bare dining room those cameo flames never flickered even so much, they might have been flowers of light cut out of the stifling heat. (chapter 10)

Iris smiled, and those very white teeth bit the moment into two pieces with their smile and dropped the pieces into limbo. (chapter 11)

Well, in the days after Iris Storm’s apparition, the narrator goes for dinner with Hilary and we learn a bit more about all the characters. For example that shy alcoholic Gerald is heir to the earldom of Portairly (would become the 19th Earl of Portairley and Axe). That the second husband, Hector Storm V.C., left Iris everything, which explains why she’s loaded and can jaunt off to the continent all the time.

That her first husband was the legendary Boy Fenwick. That his body was found on the courtyard below their bedroom window on the first night of their honeymoon, Hilary thinks Boy threw himself to his death on a matter of purity. In other words, he discovered the love of his life, Iris March, was not a virgin. Iris could have stuck to the hotel’s suggestion that Boy was drunk on champagne and fell out the window by accident. But she is constitutionally incapable of lying and so said he threw himself out the window while she watched and lit a cigarette. Thus damning her reputation for ever.

The stilted, antagonistic dinner with Hilary is often very funny.

‘Seldom,’ said Hilary thoughtfully, ‘have I known a man pull his weight less than you are doing this evening. Hm. I should try some brandy.’

Chapter 4. Aphrodite

At the Loyalty nightclub

Not wanting to go home to bed the narrator invites Hilary to a new nightclub on Pall Mall, the Loyalty, overseen by its directeur du restaurant, the Chevalier Giulio di Risotto, and packed with social luminaries, an embodification of the roaring twenties.

As she danced she stared thoughtfully at the glass dome of the ceiling. She looked bored with boredom.

He had observed that the whole purpose of a “best-seller” is to justify a reasonable amount of adultery in the eyes of suburban matrons.

The best way to keep old friends is not to see them, for then you can at least keep the illusion that they are friends.

There was a group of tall young men at the entrance, maybe waiting for their women from the Cloak-Room, maybe waiting for sirens to come to them from the night, maybe waiting for taxicabs, maybe only waiting for the next minute, as young men will.

The Loyalty is packed with people they know, and it’s maybe in this scene that Arlen created the sense of ‘Mayfair’ and nightclubs full of cynical bright young things dancing to ‘the Blues’.

There’s a buzz of news, people talking about the evening papers. Then suddenly everyone knows: the news is that Gerald was arrested in Hyde Park for bothering a woman, sitting at the same bench and making indecent proposals to a middle aged women who started screaming and the police appeared.

Iris is at this nightclub and comes up to the narrator and asks him to accompany her to his old house (which we saw him packing to move out of) but where Gerald still lives, because the narrator has a key to get in.

So they drive there and the narrator lets himself in, goes up to Gerald’s flat and it is elliptically done, but we slowly realise he discovered Gerald has blown his brains out. Without pausing he goes back down to Iris who’d waited in the hall and tells Iris he found Gerald in the same posture as the other day, i.e. sprawled drunk and insensible.

She thanks him and jumps into her powerful roadster and drives off. Turning back to his old house he discovers Guy who took a taxi there, who smokes thoughtfully and says: ‘Had an idea he might blow his brains out.’

Chapter 5. The Dark Letter

Paris 10 months later

All the preceding happened in June 1922. The narrative suddenly cuts to the last week of January of the year 1923 (although he later says it’s 10 months after Gerald’s death?) – and to the Place Vendôme in Paris and a description of that floating population of a few thousand dressing-tables, sables and Cachets Faivre which, under the lofty title of l’aristocratie internationale; the shops, the tourists, the Americans buying everything.

The narrator is with his sister. He’s spent four months at Cannes where he bumped into her and they drove across France to Paris. The sense of France, and the south of France, as a playground for tourists, reminds me of ‘Tender is The Night’ and perhaps explains why ‘The Green Hat’ is specifically referenced in it: Arlen described this world exactly a decade before Fitzgerald’s (far more profound and moving) account of it was published.

He has several amusing glances at the habitual rudeness of the French, especially French hotel staff, who refuse to help him or his sister, along with a number of comic generalisations (slurs) on the French character.

The French sections evinces a cosmopolitan knowingness epitomised by the dandyish Mr Cherry-Marvel who knows everybody and knows everything about everybody but drones on in endless confidential monologues. In the middle of this endless droning, the narrator drifts off to the present moment, the moment of writing, and tells us how he had, in the 6 months of Iris’s absence, received some long rambling often indecipherable letters from her, and quotes and comments from them at length, hence the title of this chapter.

But somehow, in the middle of his summary of the letters, the narrator describes Guy paying a visit to Iris lying ill in bed, and their conversation (as reported to him later by Guy). This long conversation included stuff about her marriage to Hector which seems to include references to her having gotten pregnant by Hector but Hector being killed before she came to term. This is all very obscure: did Iris have an abortion? Was that so completely illegal and socially stigmatised that Arlen can’t spell it out, even in fiction?

Eventually the narrator manages to interrupt Cherry-Marvel and extract the address of the house where Iris is staying. So he jumps into a taxi, a ‘clever little Citroën taxi’ which takes him on a delirious midnight drive into dark areas of Paris he has never been before, and Arlen gives a wonderfully purple description of the dream Paris of debauchery.

Montparnasse lay somewhere behind, or to the east, or to the west. We were in unknown Paris, silent, ill-lit, fantastic Paris: silent but for a rending crash here, a jarring cry there. Cold as the devil it was now, as though because the prickly warmth of many lamps and shops was withdrawn. Carefully we traversed a broad avenue as yet scarcely paved, beneath the skeleton shapes of great tenement-houses. Ah, Paris, that we should have come to this, you and I! Paris, that we should have come together down to this! In how many moods you and I have passed the time of day and night together, we have sat in strange places and dared the most devilish shadows, we have wandered from the Rotonde to the crowning grubbiness of the Butte, we have raced in the Bois and up the Mont Valérien, we have laughed at painted boys and been reviled by painted women, we have danced, loved, gambled, drunk, and together we have been bored by the unmentionable and terrified by that which makes the eyes bright and the face white as a soiled handkerchief, while Mio Mi Marianne danced a minuet du cœur with a crimson garter and the moon fell across the French-windows of Berneval’s house to be lost in the soft shadows of giant poppies. Paris, that we should now have come down to this, lost together in these nameless darknesses beyond even the low darkness of the Bal Bullier, that glory of another time than ours…

The taxi pulls up in front of the address Cherry-Marvel gave him, a huge dark imposing building which he hallucinates is like a fortress or an asylum.

Chapter 6. The Red Lights

The nursing home where Iris is recovering

Continues straight on from the previous scene: When the narrator rings the bell the door is opened by a nun (who turns out to be a lay sister) and who explains that it is a convent-nursing-home. (‘Perhaps of all the nations in the world the French alone are capable of fixing the loudest possible bell to a nursing-home.’) When she explains:

‘Nous avons ici,’ she was pleased to add, ‘la clientèle européenne la plus chic’. [‘We have here the smartest European clientele]

It really made me think of ‘Tender Is The Night’ with its theme of high living inextricably linked with mental collapse. Except that Fitzgerald’s great achievement is to make everything seem wonderful and romantic and somehow innocent. Even when describing squalid scenes Fitzgerald somehow manages to keep his aura of romantic innocence. Not so Arlen:

Perhaps that was the worst stroke of that day, so far. Iris among a clientèle européenne la plus chic…. One saw the cosmopolitan divorcées, their secret illnesses and guileful pains, their nasty little coquetries and the way they would blackmail their lovers with their sufferings, and one felt the sticky night-club breath of all the silly, common harlotries of England, France, America.

When I read the following sentence it struck me that Arlen is attempting in prose the wild coloration and stylisation of modernist painting.

How afraid one always is of the callous French doctors with their cynical eyes and purple beards….

Silence. Anxieties walked across it arm-in-arm with that lank man’s doubtful heat.

The nun fetches the doctor in charge who turns out to be someone the narrator knows (of course), Dr Conrad Masters, a compulsive bridge player. Masters is a haunted, nervous man and twitchily leaks out to the narrator that Iris has been there for weeks, something to do with ‘septic poisoning’ leading to some kind of nervous collapse, delirium, occasionally waking into lucidity, but not caring. Then Dr Masters goes home in his flash Renault car.

Cut to the narrator that evening taking his (older) sister to the latest Paris nightclub, La Plume de Ma Tante – leaving reader to ask, why didn’t he simply ask to see Iris or force his way to her room? Because the doctor said she needed rest?

Anyway, this Paris nightclub is significantly more debauched than the London one, and reading Arlen’s description of it you realise why the book crystallised an entire era and came to be so widely referenced. Sorry it’s such a long quote but it’s the accumulation that makes its impact.

La Plume de Ma Tante. Bright green walls splashed with vermilion. A platform at one end, whereon five blackamoors perspired. At the other, a naked woman. She was without hips, according to the fashion for women. Her arms were twined above her head, and raised on the tip of her fingers was a bowl of green malachite from which pink water splashed into a white alabaster basin at her feet. Many English people were present. They would be going to the Riviera, then they would be coming back from the Riviera. Colonel Duck was there, with the quality. Colonel Duck was, no doubt, just returned from some notably swift exploits on the Cresta Run. But he never was so talkative about his outdoor activities. Cherry-Marvel was there, with a great big woman and a nice-looking boy with the hands of a housemaid who was a famous boxer. There was the usual group of Argentines, very well dressed indeed. They talked about le polo. All over the room elderly women were dancing with young men of both sexes. Mio Mi Marianne was there, sitting alone, but I might not speak with her because I was with my sister. A demi-mondaine will feel insulted if you speak with her when you are with your sister. Two years before Mio Mi Marianne had one night tied a silk handkerchief round her wrist, and it became the fashion for women to tie silk handkerchiefs round their wrists. Then Mio Mi Marianne tied a silk handkerchief round her throat, and that became the fashion. She thought of these things while smoking opium. She sat alone, staring into a glass of Vichy Water. A young American polo-player called Blister went up to her table, and maybe he asked her to dance, but she just looked at him and he went away again. Her eyes were intent on an opium-dream, and she was very happy in the arms of the infinite. Mio Mi Marianne will be found one day lying on the Aubusson carpet of her drawing-room. There will be a hole in the carpet where her cigarette has died out.

A blackamoor beat a warning roll on his drum, the dancers left the floor, the lights dwindled and awoke again in swaying shadows of blue and carmine. A heavily built young man with the face of a murderer danced a tango with a lovely young girl with short golden curls. Then he threw her on the floor, and picked her up again. Rudolf and Raymonde. He did it beautifully. An American woman called the Duchess of Malvern threw Rudolph a pink carnation. The Baron de Belus said harshly: ‘That is a white carnation really, but it is blushing at the fuss that women make of Dagoes.’

(I comment below on the occasional use of racial terms or slurs in the text which we obviously find unacceptable now, a century later. On the other hand, modish open-mindedness about gender, about ‘dancing with young men of both sexes’ etc.)

Later that night the narrator returns to the nursing home and is surprised to discover young Napier Harpenden there as well, ‘Napier, favourite of the gods, shy, sensitive, fine’, ‘a strange, secret, saintly youth, a favourite of the gods’. He’s passing through Paris on the way to the Riviera with his wife Venice. When we last saw them both, in the nightclub scene at the Loyalty club, they were three days away from getting married. Now it’s ten months later. In Arlen’s characteristic tortured and oblique style, I think we learn from their extended but elliptical conversation, that Napier and Iris had an affair which started on the fateful night that Gerald killed himself. In fact, the narrator realises, he in a way facilitated it because, if he’d told Iris the truth about Gerald she would have reacted, gone home by herself etc, but instead thought everything was normal and so succumbed to the advances of Napier, who had followed her to Gerald’s digs from the club. Complicated.

Also complicated that his wife, Venice, is waiting outside in the car all this time. And Napier has a letter Iris wrote him. Just imagine if Venice saw it! Devastated! End of marriage!

Dr Master emerges and tells them Iris knows they’re there, and asks for Napier. So he takes Napier in to see her, leaving the narrator outside. Is she going to die without ever seeing the narrator again? Is that the drift of all the doom-laded prolepsis in the opening chapter (‘I was never to find out…’).

Back out front of the building Venice is sleeping in the taxi she and Napier came in. The doctor invites the narrator back to his place to join a bridge party. On the way he explains that Iris’s problem is she doesn’t care whether she lives or dies. She bucked up when she saw Napier. And that’s why he – the narrator – must do all he can to prevent Napier travelling on to the South the next morning.

Chapter 7. For Venice!

Venice’s torment that her husband, Napier, doesn’t love her

Next morning the narrator wakes up in his hotel in the Rue de la Paix. When he’s gotten up he phones Venice Harpenden at her hotel and she in that posh darlings loves kind of way compels him to come meet her and buy her lunch.

This lunch is an agonising affair because Venice reveals she is stricken with jealousy by the way Napier (or ‘Naps’, as she calls him) seems obsessed with this Mrs Storm. They had planned to leave Paris this morning and now Naps has changed all their plans. Why? This puts the narrator in the embarrassing position of having to defend Napier and explain away his dogged visits to Iris’s care home as the loyalty of an old friend.

It’s made ten times worse when young innocent Venice confides in the narrator that she cannot have children, and asks him whether that puts a man off a girl, her being infertile; whether it might be enough to drive the man away and into the arms of an old lover (Mrs Storm)?

They’re in the middle of this sticky conversation when Naps himself walks in. The narrator tries to get away but is forced to sit there as the happy-happy conversation of the couple becomes more and more strained until she becomes angry-upset and he momentarily loves his temper. He says Alright then let’s go, let’s go now, let’s go right away to the South. (There’s a detail that Venice had met the narrator’s sister who kindly agreed to loan them her car and its chauffeur to drive them south.)

Only the narrator knows what a sacrifice this is to Naps, not just because he (apparently) loves Iris, but because Dr Masters had specifically said Iris’s recovery rested on Naps visiting her; that only Naps’s presence was giving her any reason to live. And now because of the nagging of his wife, she’s forced him to break his promise and jeopardise Iris’s life (‘a very cruel decision’). Only the narrator realises what this means, as they all get up, shake hands and part with jolly smiles.

And after they’re gone he is left to ponder the infinite capacity of human beings to screw up their loves lives. When he phones Dr Masters to tell him Napier won’t be coming to the nursing home this afternoon, the doctor swears freely. Will I do? asks the narrator. ‘You!’ The doctor says he’ll come and collect him. (If it was lunch he just ate with Venice then this might only be 2 or 3 in the afternoon.)

Chapter 8. Piqure Du Cœur

French for ‘heart sting’, description of very ill Iris in the nursing home

So Dr Masters drives the narrator to the nursing home, they enter a series of courtyards and quadrangles, all appropriately solemn, the narrator led by a gruff unsympathetic nun until he finally comes to the door on a dark corridor. It is opened by a radiantly beautiful nun, Sister Virginie, whose compassion shine forth. She indicates Iris lying in the bed and leaves.

It is dark. All Iris’s curled hair and style has disappeared. She looks small and frail and asleep but the narrator is reassured by her steady breathing. He is turning to go when he realises her great dark eyes are open and staring at him. He is worried she will mistake him for Napier but then sees in her eyes (as people in novels supernaturally can) that she recognised him. She says just one word, ‘Dying’. He goes to the bed to reassure her, takes a comb from the bedside table and gently combs her damp straight hair until she closes her eyes and breathes slowly. Then carefully gets up and leaves and silently closes the door. He is crying.

Sister Virginie accompanies him back to the doctor’s office. Masters tells him off for letting Napier leave. He was doing her some good. The narrator’s visit, not so much. Later, in a phone call Masters tells him not to visit for a while, say ten days.

In the event it’s longer than that, ‘quite a while more.’ Description of his second visit, on 15 February. She talks a lot more this time, telling him off for still being in Paris, so he has an excuse ready, which is that an idea for a story came to him and he wants to stay in Paris to write it. (The idea is about a man who would not dance with his wife. Not a humdinger, is it?)

She’s been told by the doctors to lie perfectly still and not move hear head, not even a finger. She can’t laugh because it hurts. She says nobody wants her, not even a God and makes a joke about having all the paperwork reading, a temperature of 106, getting to the Pearly Gates but being told she is too full of life and rejected by God himself, who tells the archangel Gabriel to escort her back to the world.

She thanks him for bringing Naps to see her, chats some more but then turns querulous and tearful as the really sick do. More clearly than ever it is hinted that her ailment is something to do with pregnancy:

“As for me,” she whispered, “all this effort wasted … no playmate, no nothing. Masters warned me, too…. Dead as dead, the poor darling was….”

So was it a miscarriage? Or did Iris carry the baby to term and it was stillborn? Dr Masters enters and accuses the narrator of making her cry and Iris stands up for him, but it’s time to go.

She tells him she will never return to England.

Chapter 9. Talking Of Hats

London, July 1923: the narrator and Guy see Iris sweep past in a taxi with Napier

Six months later. July that year was swelteringly hot. After dinner at the Café Royal one boiling hot night, the narrator is walking home along Piccadilly with his older friends, Guy de Travest and Hilary. They’re thinking about popping into White’s, the gentlemen’s club, to fetch Napier when they see the very man come bounding down the steps and jump into a tax which roars past them. Both Guy and the narrator see that sitting on the back seat next to him was Iris Storm! Guy invites the narrator back to his house where, incongruously enough, they play squash before bathing and drinking cold drinks.

Guy idly casually says he was thinking of having a dinner party to which he’d invite Venice and Iris so they could finally meet each other. Does the narrator think that would be a good idea?

In fact Iris calls him the next day and insists that he take her shopping and buy her a new green hat. Which he does, and then lunch. She has fully recovered, she looks radiant, she is splendidly imperious.

I couldn’t help thinking of her as of someone who had strayed into our world from a strange land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who were calmly awaiting their inheritance of our world when we should have annihilated one another in our endless squabbles about honour, morality, nationality. Strong were the people of that land, stronger than the gold they despised but used, deterred by not qualm nor fear, strong and undefeatable. And just like that was the white mask of this beautiful woman, strong and undefeatable. It knew not truth nor lying, not honour nor dishonour, not loyalty nor treachery, not good nor evil: it was profoundly itself, a mask of the morning of this world when men needed not to confuse their minds with laws with which to confuse their neighbours, a mask of the evening of this world when men shall have at last made passions their servants and can enter into their full inheritance…

Nietzsche wrote about the Superman. Iris Storm is the Superwoman.

Chapter 10. The Fall Of The Emerald

The skinny-dipping party at Maidenhead

Way back in the first chapter, Iris had told the narrator about the oversized green emerald ring she wears on the third finger of her right hand. It was given her by her second husband, Hector Storm, who told her he intended it a symbol of her inconstancy, which has driven him to despair: ‘my life is darkness without you, I love you so, and it’s a perfect hell with you, I love you so!’

Cut back to the present of the story, in which, after that dinner at Guy’s house, they all pile into cars and drive for Maidenhead to go swimming, they being: Guy, the narrator and Iris, Napier and Venice, and another young pair of newlyweds, Hugo and Shirley Cypress.

Iris drives like a demon. The narrator is amazed that everyone seems to be behaving as if nothing is wildly wrong. For he knows that Iris is planning to run away to Rio de Janeiro off Napier in a few days, and he knows Guy invited Iris solely to show her what she is doing is wrong, to show her the happiness of these young couples – Napier and Venice and Hugo and Shirley – to show Iris that she comes from a different world and must not interfere in and wreck their happiness. And yet no-one, not even Guy, acknowledges the elephant in the room. The narrator marvels at their English nonchalance and wonders at what point it becomes hypocrisy.

So when Guy mentions the notion of driving to Maidenhead to go skinny dipping they all jump at the idea, especially Venice and Shirley who think it’s too super! Guy chivalrously says it was the narrator’s idea and they all mockingly refer to him from that point onwards as the ‘he-man’, obviously the latest phrase from America (a phrase mocked by Gertrude Stein in a story told by Scott Fitzgerald).

While Venice and Shirley were gushing, the narrator lit a cigarette for Venice and his hand momentarily touched hers and he discovered it was cold as ice, and in a flash he realised the toll knowing her husband is in love with Iris has taken, how it has undermined that marriage, how desperate she is.

Anyway – the party drive in two cars from West London to Maidenhead, late at night, going at 70mph, taking bends at crazy speeds, Iris driving like a mad thing. They pull into the courtyard of hotel which is closed and bribe the grumpy owner to lend them towels, then stumble in the intense dark down to the river. The narrator finds Iris leaning on him in the darkness and goes purple:

She leaned on my arm, completely. “Foot hurts.” I wished she wouldn’t. I almost said, “don’t.” Her touch confounded, confused. She was tangible, until she touched you. She was finite, until she touched you. She was a woman, until she touched you. Then she became woman, and you water. She became a breath of womanhood clothed in the soft, delicious mystery of the flesh. Touching her, you touched all desire. She was impersonal and infinite, like all desire. She was indifferent to all but her desire, like all desire. She was a breath carved in flesh, like all desire. She was the flower of the plant of all desire. Desire is the name of the plant that Lilith sowed, and every now and then it puts out the flower that in the choir of flowers is the paramour of the mandrake.

She is also, as we have realised by this stage, poison.

They discover boats moored to a jetty and fuss around a motorboat. Several locals, apparently the hotel owner and a local constable, tell them they can’t, but they make all kinds of witty replies and go ahead anyway. Posh privilege.

I think they strip off – as with the situation around Iris’s pregnancy, Arlen’s style or his entire mentality, is so roundabout that it’s hard to be sure – and swim in the water, all except Iris who lounges among the cushions in the motorboat.

Guy warns of dangerous currents and I felt the hot breath of tragedy on my shoulder – would one of them drown like the young couple in Women in Love? No.

But there is a bad moment when the bantering men realise Iris’s dress is in the boat but no Iris! She must have decided to go in after all. Lots of shouting and they realise they can’t see or hear Iris, or Venice. There’s a mad couple of minutes while they splash and yell and swim off in different directions before they find them and bring them back to the jetty.

In fact Venice insists that she’d gotten into a bit of trouble, called out, and that’s why Iris dived in: to save her. She tells everyone crowded round her in the bottom of the motorboat the Iris saved her life! Which triggers tense and varied responses from the menfolk, who are all aware of the tangled web between Napier, his wife Venice, and his lover Iris.

Iris is cold. The menfolk fuss, Guy and Napier worry, after her illness. She gets dressed but is still cold. They make their way back to the cars and Iris snuggles up next to the narrator. He discovers she’s lost the famous emerald ring. Yes, at the bottom of the Thames, she explains. So after all the heavy symbolism attributed to it, associated with infidelity by husband Hector, it was in saving a rival woman’s life that she lost it, an unambiguously moral act.

Then again, as she falls asleep on the narrator’s arm, she whispers that she thinks Venice got into trouble, half consciously, on purpose. Why? To make her (Iris) like her (Venice). Like her enough to back off from stealing her husband. ‘Will it?’ asks the narrator. ‘No,’ replies Iris.

The Last Chapter: St George For England!

Arlen has his narrator introduce us to his Last Chapter with a heavy sense of impending doom, commenting on his own practice with the airy self-consciousness theorising of an eighteenth century novelist, of a Henry Fielding, or maybe Robert Louis Stevenson at his most chatty.

NOW as I come to that last night of all, a night that was as though set on a stage by a cunning but reckless craftsman of the drama, and as I look every way I may at the happenings that were staged on the platform of that night, I do sincerely thank my stars that it is no novel I have set my hand to, but a faithful chronicle of events. For it would seem that the novelist, so he is an honest man and loves his craft, must work always under a great disadvantage in his earnest wish to tell of life truthfully; since, as the old, old saying is, he never can dare to be so improbable as life. He may, to be sure, be as dingy as life, according to the mode of the day, or he may even achieve the impossible and be more dingy than life, also according to the mode of the day, but to be as improbable as life will be as far beyond the honest novelist’s courage as it must be against the temper of his craft; for should his characters have to “break out,” should the novelist be so far gallant as to concede something to the profligate melodrama of life, his people may only “break out” along lines which the art of their creator has laid out and made inevitable for them; whereas you and I know that living men will do queer things which are desperately alien from what we had thought their possibilities—nay, impossibilities—to be, living men will defy the whole art of characterisation in the twinkling of an eye and destroy every canon of art in a throb of a desire: so that we may make no count or chart of the queer, dark sides of our fellows, nor put any limit, of art, psychology, romance or decency, to the impossibilities which are, within the trembling of a leaf, possible to men and women.

It’s a big chunk of text but not particularly clever. Truth is stranger than fiction, so what. It’s this kind of rambling banter which makes the book approachable and easy company, but by the same token also prevents it being literature. It’s not deep or pioneering or particularly thought-provoking. Indeed at some moments it’s almost gibberish, like the long exchange between the narrator and Iris about why she’s inviting him to come for a drive into the country.

‘We are driving into the country, let me tell you, to meet my fear. And when we meet it I shall not mock, nor tremble, nor quail, but I shall be a very Saint George for steadfastness. That is the programme, so far. And you, will you be my esquire?’
‘You speak of darkness, of sun-dials, of fear, of Sir Maurice Harpenden, whom I do not know, of Saint George of Cappadocia, whom, alas, one sees only too little of these days. I think that you, too, must have dined alone. And you have gone mad. Else why must we drive into the country?’
‘But we go to keep high company to-night, that’s why! Are you afraid of that? The captains and the kings of the countryside are our adversaries. Sweet, you and I shall stand arrayed against the warriors of conduct.’
‘Not I, Iris! I am for conduct.’

There’s piles more like this but, despite the deep purple passages – or maybe because of them – it was wildly popular.

So what happened ‘on that night’ of dark repute? Well, Iris invites the narrator to accompany her as she drives west out of London towards a place called Sutton Marle and the house of Sir Maurice Harpenden, father of Napier, being irritatingly vague and obscure to begin with, and then spouting a lot of stuff to justify running off with Napier and ruining poor Venice’s life. She laments that Venice couldn’t have a child; then everything would be different.

Then in the middle of the countryside, she pulls up by a field with the headlights shining on a tree in a field and delivers a massive burst of backstory. She was brought up alongside her twin brother Gerald, Boy Fenwick and Napier, son of Sir Maurice. Her mother died and her father declined. Sometimes an aunt took her and Napier up to London, for tea at Harrods, which they loved as children because they got gleefully lost in it. And so they nicknamed the tree they played around ‘Harrods’.

Napier and she became very close but his father wanted him to marry rich, not the daughter of a bankrupt family and so forced Napier, when he got old enough to go to university, never to see Iris again.

She reveals that when they met for one last time by the tree they played in as children, she told him she loved him and would never love another man. And she kept her vow. She gave herself to Boy and then to Hector in marriage, but they both realised she didn’t love them. Hector volunteered to go off to Ireland where he was killed, because one night he heard Iris whisper Napier’s name in her sleep.

Now she has come back to beard Sir Maurice and tell him that his ban on their love consigned her to twelve years of hell, to the deaths of two husbands, and to the future misery of Venice Pollard.

She starts the car again and sweeps up the drive to Sir Maurice’s house and comes to a halt in front of the grand steps. Out comes the ancient butler, Truble, to greet them. He starts wittering about how he’s known Iris all his life, held her in his arms when she was a baby, and she declares he is her oldest friend, then he is crying and she tries to comfort him.

The narrator and Iris go round the back of the house and spy through the long windows three men inside playing bridge: Guy de Travest, Hilary Townshend and Sir Maurice. Iris forces the narrator to give a quick moral profile of all three. God this is dragging on. What’s going to happen?

They knock and the men get up from their game and greet them. Iris is, as he first saw her, wearing a green hat. Turns out Sir Maurice invited Iris down. The three men have known and loved Iris since she was a girl which is why they want to confront her about her plan to run away with Napier. There’s a lot of talk but it develops into a confrontation between Iris and Maurice who hate and fear each other. He says:

‘This isn’t badness. Damn it, girl, this is evil! There aren’t any words in English to describe what we think of a woman who comes wantonly between a man and his wife, a man and his career.’

It turns into a long, melodramatic, overwritten confrontation, in which Iris, Maurice, Hilary and Guy all have extended speeches considering every aspect of the issue at inordinate length. I wasn’t very interested in all the fol-de-rol about love and the gods and destiny and whatnot, what interested me was the way Arlen makes it at least in part a clash of the generations. The old men realise that their generation screwed it up; with all their fine talk of honour and decency, they’re the generation which gave the world the Great War, which in fact destroyed all those values. Hilary states it clearly:

‘Maurice, years ago, didn’t realise that in our time we are not our children’s masters. Their ideas are not ours, their ambitions are not ours. And there’s no reason why they should be, since ours have sent all Europe to the devil.’

A point echoed by Guy:

‘I fancy Hilary’s right about this father and child business… after all, our cubs can’t make more of a mess of everything than we and our fathers have done.’

When Maurice states, or implies, that Iris is going to ruin Napier’s career in the Foreign Office, Iris makes the kind of set-piece statement that is quoted in history books about the 1920s generation rebelling against their parents’ bankrupt values:

‘You talk to me of your England. I despise your England, I despise the ‘us’ that is ‘us’. We are shams with patrician faces and peasant minds. We are built of lies, Maurice, and we toil for the rewards of worms.

‘You would have Napier toil for a worm’s reward, you are sorry I have broken Napier’s career in the Foreign Office. Maurice, I am glad. To you, it seems a worthy thing for a good man to make a success in the nasty arena of national strifes and international jealousies.

‘To me, a world which thinks of itself in terms of puny, squalid, bickering little nations and not as one glorious field for the crusade of mankind is a world in which to succeed is the highest indignity that can befall a good man, it is a world in which good men are shut up like gods in a lavatory. Maurice, there are better things, nobler things, cleaner things, than can be found in any career that will glorify a man’s name or nationality.

‘You thought to bully me with our traditions. You are right, they are mine as well as yours. May God forgive you the sins committed in their name! And may He forgive me for ever having believed in them…’

This all feels immensely theatrical, like the last act in a play by George Bernard Shaw, what with its strong independent female protagonist and stirring speeches against the dead hand of the older (male) generation.

It obviously represents a clash of moralities, as well: the older generation condemn people like iris for their selfishness, promiscuity or adultery; whereas people like Iris see themselves as being true to Life unlike the small-minded, parochial and stifling lives of the older generation which – unanswerable argument – led up to the greatest cataclysm in human history.

At the height of the confrontation there suddenly comes a voice from the French windows (it’s always the French windows) and it’s Napier himself! He’s come all this way to rescue Iris. And Venice has come with him, standing behind him. Napier steps forward and it is his father he steps towards. He says he wants to clear Iris’s name, Iris begs him not to confront his father, Maurice says they must part, Hilary says the young people must go now, it’s a very fraught busy scene.

Napier now makes his grand speech, accusing his father of sacrificing his life on the altar of stupid outworn values and traditions:

‘You sacrificed Iris for what you call my future, my career. Weigh Iris on one side and on the other my future, my career, now that I am thirty! You sacrificed my happiness to the ghastly vanity of making our name something in this world. You call that ‘working for my future,’ sir. And I call it the cruel sort of humbug which has dragged God knows how many decent people into a beastly, futile unhappiness. Here I am at thirty, a nothing without even the excuse of being a happy nothing, a nothing liked by other nothings and successful among other nothings, a nothing wrapped round by the putrefying little rules of the gentlemanly tradition. And, my God, they are putrefying, and I bless the England that has at last found us out.’

Then becomes clear one of the most striking things in this madly extended and over-the-top finale, which is that Venice has come round to Iris’s point of view. She is ready to give her husband to her because she has come to appreciate how truly and deeply Iris loves him.

Napier’s anger has been intensified because when he happened to walk in Sir Maurice was yet again throwing the fact of Boy Fenwick’s suicide in her face, and this goads Napier beyond endurance. After a lot more ranting and raging he finally spits out why this is so unfair. Iris deliberately let people believe it was something in her that triggered Fenwick’s suicide, allegedly ‘for purity’. Now Napier reveals that Fenwick had syphilis when he married Iris, and killed himself when he realised he had given it to her.

!!!!

Iris is mortified and whispers, very powerfully, that Napier has taken from her the only gracious thing she ever did in her life. And with that they leave, Iris and Napier, through the open French windows.

Venice faints, the older chaps kindly bring her round and are just tending her when… Napier appears back in the French windows and there’s the deafening roar of Iris’s car, starting up, revving up, then roaring off into the night! What!?

Napier walks across the room, looking defeated, and tells Venice that he can’t leave her like that, he is not such a cad. Venice asks what he’s talking about? Napier says Iris tried to conceal it, said she’s promised not to tell, but then tells him that Venice is pregnant, with his child! So that’s why he came back. He’s not a perfect cad. He’ll stand by her.

Except it’s a lie! Venice screams that it’s a lie! She is not pregnant. Iris lied to him to send him back! Chaos, pendemonium, all manner of recriminations and explanations!

But above it all Sir Maurice confronts the narrator about the unnatural loudness of Iris’s car. Suddenly panic grips everyone. Is she going to do something stupid? And so they jump into Sir Maurice’s car and go hurtling off down the drive, then out into the country lanes, chasing Iris’s headlights which they can see in the night.

As the chase reaches its climax, they watch Iris’s car leave the road and race towards the talismanic tree named ‘Harrods’, the place she was happy as a child, race towards it and crash into it with a huge crash and flare of flame.

The others slow their car and park and run towards the wreck. The narrator’s foot touches something soft and he picks up her green hat, the green hat.

Thoughts

Goodness me, what a ridiculously over-extended and over-excited farrago it turned into at the end!

I’ve read so much about ‘The Green Hat’ that it’s a great relief to finally read it. I can see why it was such a hit, crystallising the frenetic partying of the era which everyone, at the same time, felt was so ill-omened and fated. It certainly portrays its little set of high society hedonists with imaginative force and humour, and combines a gossip column view of Paris and London, with tear-jerking scenes in the nursing home, naughty high jinks in Maidenhead, and then a Bernard Shaw moral confrontation followed by a fireball climax. No wonder it was immediately made into a play and soon afterwards into a movie.

At numerous points it has subtlety, acute observations and sharp writing. But a lot of it is obscure, oblique, written in an elliptical style which makes such a fetish of avoiding the point, as to make plenty of passages puzzling and some bits of it almost incomprehensible.

And the final chapter with its torrent of revelations feels as if it has been hammered onto the rest of the narrative with six inch nails. All the revelations of her happy childhood, the tragic blocking of her love for Napier imposed by Sir Maurice, 12 years of hell, all this makes you fall right out of love with the book and then left reeling by the melodramatic ending.

I can see why it is on no-one’s academic reading list and is not even currently in print. Shame. A properly edited edition by, say, the Oxford University Press, would be worth reading for the historical footnotes and explanations alone.

Arlen was soon to be outdone. All around were other gifted writers describing the same sort of thing, but with much more restraint, balance, style and depth. Pure posh dimwit comedy was done better by P.G. Wodehouse; more thoughtful satire was being done by Aldous Huxley; far more stylish bright young comedy was to be done by Evelyn Waugh a few years later; Catholic guilt (if that’s what partly drives Iris) was to be patented by Graham Greene a few years later; while the psychological costs of all this frivolity was brilliantly captured by Noel Coward and, a bit later, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Even D.H. Lawrence wrote some stories depicting the fast cars and partying of the younger generation (The Virgin and the Gypsy) – to name just a few.

On each of those individual terrains, Arlen compares badly but, at that moment, in 1924, Arlen combined them all to create a smash hit and he lived off its reputation for the rest of his life. Kudos.

Cast

London

Unnamed narrator

Gerald March

Iris March / Fenwick / Storm

Boy Fenwick – apostle of purity, killed himself on his wedding night to Iris when he learned she wasn’t a virgin (?)

Hector Storm – Iris’s second husband, hero in the war, came to realise she was incurably promiscuous, ironically gave her emerald ring, shot dead by nationalists in Ireland

Hilary Townshend – older friend of the narrator and friend of the March family, knew Iris as a girl – amusingly says ‘hm’ every other sentence

Guy de Travest – older friend of the narrator

The London nightclub

  • The Chevalier Giulio di Risotto, directeur du restaurant of the Loyalty Club
  • Mr Trehawke Tush, the popular novelist, who knows all the tricks of success
  • Hugo Cypress
  • Colonel Duck
  • Mrs Angela Ammon
  • Lady Cornelia Pynte

Paris

Venice Pollen, fragrant daughter of Nathaniel Pollen who owns half the newspapers in England, engaged then married to…

Napier Harpenden – ‘Napier, favourite of the gods, shy, sensitive, fine’, ‘a strange, secret, saintly youth, a favourite of the gods who never once relied on the favouritism of gods or men’ – says what at the end of every other sentence

  • Mr Cherry-Marvel – master of gossip
  • Dr Conrad Masters – treats Iris
  • Eugene Martel-Bonnard, the surgeon who owns the nursing home where Iris is treated
    Donna Anna Estella Guelãra who Martel-Bonnard nearly killed with his treatment

Names of background characters in hotels and bars to create a sense of being in the swim of cosmopolitan fast set:

  • Lady Tekkleham
  • The Baron de Belus
  • Fay Avalon

The climax

Sir Maurice Napier – handsome, cunning old soldier, Iris’s sworn enemy for 12 years

Mr Truble – Sir Maurice’s fat old butler and Iris’s ‘only friend’

The roaring 20s

Direct description

By halfway through I realised the novel’s success, almost regardless of the ‘plot’, was at least in part because of its vivid picture of the world of the rich cosmopolitan fast set of London and Paris. This rises to a peak in the two nightclub scenes, the one at the Loyalty Club in London (chapter 4), one in La Plume de Ma Tante (chapter 6). They have the same kind of appeal as celebrity gossip columns do to this day, although with the added value of literary references or artfulness. (Compare the nightclub scenes in chapters 15 and 16 of Aldous Huxley’s 1923 novel Antic Hay.)

The narrator’s worldliness

The image of bright young things is supposedly embodied in Iris Storm but really it resides in the tone of voice and tremendous worldliness evinced by the narrator. He knows everyone but, deeper than that, he has had experiences, many experiences. In every situation he remembers other times when… and lots of dark and troubled experiences are attributed to him. Oooh. Conveyed in almost every sentence, sometimes rising to a Noel Coward level of blasé worldly cynicism:

‘There is a new dance place open. I heard about it from a friend of mine, Mr Cherry-Marvel. You will meet him, he is charming. This new place is called La Plume de Ma Tante. It has only been open three nights, so it will be very modish for another two.’

Casual racism

Part of the breezy cynical dismissal of everything and everyone associated with these posh affluent characters, is a breezy cynical use of what we, a hundred years later, consider racist slurs and stereotypes, in particular of Jews and people of colour.

When the narrator is describing the new Paris nightclub La Plume de Ma Tante to his sister, and mentions it has a caged nightingale to sing, he goes on:

‘There is probably baser music to supplement this nightingale. There are, in fact, five lovely niggers.’

This is the only use of the n word, so it is not a major or even minor theme, just a throwaway remark, although soon afterwards:

La Plume de Ma Tante. Bright green walls splashed with vermilion. A platform at one end, whereon five blackamoors perspired. At the other, a naked woman. She was without hips, according to the fashion for women. Her arms were twined above her head, and raised on the tip of her fingers was a bowl of green malachite from which pink water splashed into a white alabaster basin at her feet…

Any slur on people of colour is clearly just a detail in the general mockery of the whole scene and the entire milieu of international debauchery, but still…

Slightly less throwaway is the unpleasant references to ‘the wrong sort of Jewess’. In the nightclub scene, chapter 4, the narrator is emphasising how the Loyalty club is full of all sorts of colourful people, and:

There was a Jewess of the wrong sort in the wrong sort of green. She looked like a fat asparagus whose head had been dipped in dressing and then put in a warm place to dry. She dried in patches. A caravan of pearls crawled upwards from her bosom to her throat, and she said to Mr Trehawke Tush, the novelist: ‘The only decent cocktails you can get in Paris are at the Ritz Bar…’

He goes on to be just as rude about Mr Trehawke Tush, and then Venice Pollen, and pretty much all the other characters at the nightclub, in fact both remarks come amid a welter of descriptions of other aspects of nightclub life which the narrator clearly finds risible. The point is it is a satire on all these posh pretentious people and frenetic 1920s nightclub culture. But still…

Sex

How much literature is about the incredible difficulties human beings have finding and keeping a mate? Half of all world literature? More?

I sat there in that deep armchair, subdued by the thought of the awful helplessness of men and women to understand one another, and of the terrible thing it would be for some of them if ever they did understand one another, and how many opportunities the devil is always being given of making plunder out of decent people.

Such a simple task. So completely beyond the powers of people in most novels or plays, operas and poems.

P.S.

Mrs Forrest, a fabulously fashionable young woman in Dorothy L. Sayers’s 1927 novel ‘Unnatural Death’, proclaims that she ‘adores Michael Arlen’ and asks Lord Peter Wimsey whether he’s read his latest novel, ‘Young Men in Love’ yet.

Credit

‘The Green Hat’ by Michael Arlen was published in 1924 by William Collins. I read it online.

Related link

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‘Certainly, he once wrote a novel, but who does not once write a novel?’ (the narrator about Gerald March, chapter 2)

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Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl (1984)

Born in 1916, Roald Dahl had his first short text (an account of crashing his RAF plane in the desert) published in 1942 i.e. aged 26.

As we all know, this marked the start of a long and stunningly successful career during which he wrote over 60 (increasingly macabre and gruesome) short stories, brought together in a series of collections for adults, most successfully under the brand name ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ to tie in with the 1970s TV adaptations – but more famously, from 1961 onwards, a series of books for children which made him one of the best selling and best known authors in the world.

Forty-two years after that first published piece, at the age of 68, Dahl published this, the first part of his autobiography. Except it isn’t a continuous and comprehensive autobiography at all. Instead it is, as he carefully explains in the preface, a series of memorable incidents and events which have stuck with him since boyhood. It is more like a series of episodes, hence the subtitle ‘Tales of Childhood’.

Boy follows a chronological order and is divided into sections mostly named after the teaching institutions he progressed through:

  1. Family background
  2. Kindergarten
  3. Llandaff Cathedral School, 1923 to 1925 (age 7 to 9)
  4. St Peter’s, 1925 to 1929 (age 9 to 13)
  5. Repton and Shell, 1929 to 1936 (age 13 to 20)

The first sentence sets the tone:

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.

So this, also, is a book for children, pitched to, what age group would you say? 7? 11?

Taken in the way it is intended, it is a brilliant read. Why? For its wide-eyed, childlike candour. For his tremendous excitement about everything he describes. Everything is the best, everything is vivid with excitement and enthusiasm. Everything overflows with child-like glee.

Looking a bit more closely, every sentence says something interesting. There’s no padding or fat. People and places are summed up with skill and economy. This gives the narrative tremendous pace because things are always moving on, stuff is always being discovered and described, and all with the winning enthusiasm of boyhood.

1. Family background

When his father, Harald, was 14 he fell off the roof while fixing some tiles and broke his arm. A drunk doctor injured it further and it had to be amputated.

His father and brother, Oscar, decided they had to leave the small Norwegian town they’d grown up in so they left for France. Uncle Oscar ended up in La Rochelle, a fishing port, where he ended up owning the biggest fishing fleet and canning factory.

Harald moved to Paris and set up a shipbroking company. The main fuel for shipping was coal. Where was the biggest coal port in the world, Cardiff, so Harald moved there with his young wife, Marie. Here Harald’s business thrived and he bought a big house at Llandaff, just outside Cardiff. Marie bore him two children but died soon after giving birth to the second. Heartbroken, Harald went back to Norway and found a second wife, Sofie, who bore him 4 children, one of whom was Roald.

Business boomed and in 1918, when he was 2, the family moved to a grand house in the village of Radyr. It had a small farm attached and was full of servants. Harald led a vigorous life, mountaineering and was an expert wood carver.

In 1920, when Roald was 3, his sister Astri died from appendicitis, aged 7. She was his father’s favourite and when Harald went down with pneumonia he didn’t put up much of a fight and died.

This left Sofie without a husband and provider and father to the remaining five children, and pregnant again. She could have sold up and gone back to Norway, where her father, mother and unmarried sisters would have helped out.

2. Kindergarten

Instead she sold the big house, bought a smaller one and, a few years, later, sent Roald, aged 6, to his first school, a kindergarten run by two old ladies. He remembers vividly the excitement of travelling there in his brand new tricycle!

3. Llandaff Cathedral School, 1923 to 1925 (age 7 to 9)

Two memories: one is of seeing an older boy cycle past him, taking his hands off the handlebars and crossing them on his chest. Oh how he wanted to be that boy!

Second memory is the sweetshop where he and his friends bought sherbet suckers and liquorice bootlaces, gobstoppers and tonsil ticklers. Unfortunately this sweetshop is kept by Mrs Pratchett who is ‘a skinny old hag’ with a moustache on her top lip and a terrible temper.

The Great Mouse Plot

He and his friends discover a dead mouse and conceive the wicked idea of slipping it into one of Mrs Pratchett’s big sweetjars. And that’s what they do, while his friend Thwaites distracts her, Roald lifts the lid of the gobstopper jar and drops the dead mouse into it, quietly replacing the lid. What an achievement!

Mr Coombes

Next day they walk past the sweetshop to discover it closed. At school the headmaster calls the boys to an identity parade where, to their horror, Mrs Pratchett identifies them.

Mrs Pratchett’s revenge

Mr Coombes then canes them while Mrs Pratchett looks on approvingly. Worth quoting in full:

As the first stroke landed and the pistol-crack sounded, I was thrown forward so violently that if my fingers hadn’t been touching the carpet, I think I would have fallen flat on my face. As it was, I was able to catch myself on the palms of my hands and keep my balance. At first I heard only the crack and felt absolutely nothing at all, but a fraction of a second later the burning sting that flooded across my buttocks was so terrific that all I could do was gasp. I gave a great gushing gasp
that emptied my lungs of every breath of air that was in them.

It felt, I promise you, as though someone had laid a red-hot poker against my flesh and was pressing down on it hard.

The second stroke was worse than the first and this was probably because Mr Coombes was well practised and had a splendid aim. He was able, so it seemed, to land the second one almost exactly across the narrow line where the first one had struck. It is bad enough when the cane lands on fresh skin, but when it comes down on bruised and wounded flesh, the agony is unbelievable.

The third one seemed even worse than the second. Whether or not the wily Mr Coombes had chalked the cane beforehand and had thus made an aiming mark on my grey flannel shorts after the first stroke, I do not know. I am inclined to doubt it because he must have known that this was a practice much frowned upon by Headmasters in general in those days. It was not only regarded as unsporting, it was also an admission that you were not an expert at the job.

By the time the fourth stroke was delivered, my entire backside seemed to be going up in flames. (p.50)

Roald’s mother discovered the welt marks at that evening’s bath time and went straight round to the school to complain. Roald stayed till the end of that term but then his mother took him out of the school.

Going to Norway

From 1920 to 1932, from the ages of 4 to 17, the family spent every summer holiday in Norway. The many islands and the freedom and innocence remind of Tove Jansson’s memoirs.

Roald gives an exciting account of the complexities of packing all the baggage and travelling first to London, then by train to Newcastle, then by boat to Oslo where his grandparents lived.

He loved his Bestepapa and Bestemama, they always hosted a celebration feast when he and his family arrived, which features ‘a mountain of ice cream’. See what I mean by the way everything sounds brilliant, the sweets, the food the family, the journey, everything!

The magic island

Day after the feast the Dahl family caught a steamer to the magic island. Like everything, it is the bestest of the best!

Late in the afternoon, we would come finally to the end of the journey, the island of Tjöme. This was where our mother always took us. Heaven knows how she found it, but to us it was the greatest place on earth. (p.61)

And:

Breakfast was the best meal of the day in our hotel, and it was all laid out on a huge table in the middle of the dining-room from which you helped yourself. There were maybe fifty different dishes to choose from on that table. There were large jugs of milk, which all Norwegian children drink at every meal. There were plates of cold beef, veal, ham and pork. There was cold boiled mackerel submerged in aspic. There were spiced and pickled herring fillets, sardines, smoked eels and cod’s roe. There was a large bowl piled high with hot boiled eggs. There were cold omelettes with chopped ham in them, and cold chicken and hot coffee for the grown-ups, and hot crisp rolls baked in the hotel kitchen, which we ate with butter and cranberry jam. There were stewed apricots and five or six different cheeses including of course the ever-present gjetost, that tall brown rather sweet Norwegian goat’s cheese which you find on just about every table in the land.

Yummy! Then they’d take the small boat and go exploring the islands, hundreds of them, looking for ones with a little sandy back when he and his sisters were small, later on rocky ones which they could jump off into the sea. In the evenings they went fishing for mackerel and cooked them fresh.

I tell you, my friends, those were the days. (67)

A visit to the doctor

When he was 8, a gruesome trip to a local doctor who takes out his adenoids with no anaesthetic, slashing inside his mouth and extracting great clumps of flesh covered in blood. The child-focused nature of the text is made explicit:

That was in 1924, and taking out a child’s adenoids, and often the tonsils as well, without any anaesthetic was common practice in those days. I wonder, though, what you would think if some doctor did that to you today. (p.71)

4. St Peter’s, 1925 to 1929 (age 9 to 13)

First day

This was in Weston-super-Mare, from which you can look across the Bristol Channel and see Wales. Every boy had a Tuck Box containing all his treasures. Boarding schools were money-making machines and fed the boys as little as possible while encouraging them to write to their parents for ‘treats’. The school is long and low sitting in front of its sports pitches and the headmaster is a giant with a grin like a shark.

Writing home

Every Sunday morning every boy had to write a letter home. With Dahl the habit stuck and he wrote his mother at least one letter a week for the next 20 years, from 1925 to 1945, and she kept them all. When she died, in 1957, she left him a huge bundle of his letters, some 600 in total.

The matron

The dormitories are ruled with a rod of steel by the matron who is an ogre. One boy has a bright idea of scattering castor sugar along the corridor so they can hear the crunch-crunch of her arrival. This drives her into a fury and she calls the headmaster who goes red in the face with anger and confiscates all their Tuck Boxes with the result that the boys go hungry for the last 6 weeks of term.

Young Roald is terrified. He sleeps facing the Bristol Channel and therefore his family. It is a great comfort.

A boy called Tweedie snores in his sleep. the matron hears, is disgusted and tips soap shavings into his mouth, so he wakes up blowing bubbles. You can see where all the vicious tyrants in Dahl’s children’s fiction come from.

Homesickness

He is so homesick he decides to fake appendicitis to escape. The matron and headmaster fall for it so he is put on the paddle steamer across the channel to Cardiff, collected by his mother and taken to the family doctor who immediately realises that he’s faking it. He is kind, though, and tells Dahl that it was his (the doctor’s) idea to send him to boarding school. It will toughen him up and get him ready for life.

A drive in the motor-car

Home for the holidays and a hilarious account of a drive in the family’s new car, a De Dion-Bouton, with his eldest step-sister driving, which ends in quite a bad crash, with the glass windscreen half slicing Dahl’s nose off, hanging by ‘a single small thread of skin’ (p.103)! His mother sticks it back in place and they hurry as fast as the unnerved sister can drive, to the doctor’s, Dr Dunbar.

Here he has another operation, this time with a primitive chloroform cotton wool mask to knock him out. The doctor sewed his nose back on and it took. His mother hives him a gold sovereign for being so brave.

Captain Hardcastle

The stock monster teacher, Captain Hardcastle is short and wiry with vermillion hair drenched in brilliantine and parted in the middle. He has a giant orange moustache, teaches Latin and football, and has it in for Roald from day one.

The disaster comes during evening Prep (all the boys sit at desks in the big hall for exactly one hour in complete silence doing whatever task is assigned them) when the nib on Roald’s pen breaks halfway through writing an essay and he incautiously asks his neighbour for a spare. Hardcastle spots this and goes mad.

(This all occurs in 1926, the same year Evelyn Waugh was struggling to be a teacher at a boys preparatory school in Wales, the unfortunate experience which became the basis of his first novel, Decline and Fall.)

Dahl is given a slip to take to the headmaster who, despite all his attempts to explain, gives him six of the best. For the second time he gives a really super-vivid description of the different stages and level of agonising pain which result from caning.

Little Ellis and the boil

Roald is in the sick room with flu when he observes the doctor ‘treating’ the only other boy, young Ellis who has a huge boil on his inner thigh. The doctor throws a towel over Elli’s face and stabs the boil, turning the blade, so that Ellis screams his lungs out. Hardly anybody used anaesthetic on those days, even for dental procedures.

Goat’s tobacco

His eldest half-sister, the one he calls the ancient sister, starts dating an Englishman who accompanies them on their big family holiday. The entire family is irritated by his manly behaviour and poses and way of talking, and particularly by the way that he never removes the manly pipe he smokes from his mouth. So Roald plays a prank. The manly man has just stuffed his perishing pipe when the ancient sister asks him to go for a swim. He does at which Roald, in full sight of the rest of the family, tips the tobacco out and replaces it with goat pellets which he breaks up with his fingers and stuffs in the pipe before putting a thin layer of tobacco back over the top, with, as they say, hilarious consequences.

5. Repton and Shell, 1929 to 1936 (age 13 to 20)

Getting dressed for the big school

By now the family has moved to Bexley in Kent. His mother asks whether he’d rather go to Repton or Marlborough, two grand public schools. He chooses Repton because it’s easier to pronounce. It was September 1929 when, aged 13, he went off to boarding school. The entire chapter is devoted to the ridiculous school uniform he had to wear.

Boazers

Repton slang for ‘prefects’. These big boys could cane the small ones for almost any infringement. Yet again Dahl describes the mechanics of caning and the different techniques of the different ‘boazers’.

The headmaster

Dahl takes malicious pleasure in explaining that the headmaster of Repton, a charmless ‘shoddy bandy-legged person’, was later selected to be Bishop of Chester, and then Bishop of London, and then Archbishop of Canterbury, and it was none other than he who crowned Queen Elizabeth in 1953.

For he was a notorious deliverer of phenomenally painful and sadistic canings. Roald’s best friend, Michael, describes how the victim had to take down his trousers, kneel on the sofa in the head’s study with their head over one end, and then the head delivered ten severe strokes, in between filling his pipe and delivering a rambling lecture about sin and punishment.

On chapel the head maundered on about forgiveness but showed no forgiveness whatsoever when it came to caning young boys’ buttocks so hard that they bled – at which he handed over a basin, sponge and towel and told them to clean up the blood before leaving.

That this man was a vicar, and then a bishop, and then the Archbishop of Canterbury goes a long way to explaining Dahl’s lifelong atheism.

Chocolates

Surprisingly, boys at Repton were used as guinea pigs for new ranges of chocolates by Cadbury. they were sent boxes containing one standard and nine new experiments, and then asked to fill out forms. In a characteristically enthusiastic chapter he recalls this as the basis of his second children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Corkers

There were about thirty or more masters at Repton and most of them were amazingly dull and totally colourless and completely uninterested in boys. But Corkers, an eccentric old bachelor, was neither dull nor colourless. Corkers was a charmer, a vast ungainly man with drooping bloodhound cheeks and filthy clothes. He wore creaseless flannel trousers and a brown tweed jacket with patches all over it and bits of dried food on the lapels. He was meant to teach us mathematics, but in truth he taught us nothing at all and that was the way he meant it to be. His lessons consisted of an endless series of distractions all invented by him so that the subject of mathematics would never have to be discussed. (p.151)

These distractions involved getting the whole class to help him with the Times crossword or bringing in some live snakes to hand round.

Fagging

The humiliations of fagging including being one of the three fags who, every Sunday morning, had to clean Carleton’s study until it was as clean as an operating theatre. And he actually performed the cliché task of sitting on a freezing toilet seat in an outhouse to warm it up ready for a senior boy, Wilberforce, to use. In fact he becomes Wilberforce’s favourite bog seat warmer.

Games…

Dahl turns out to be brilliant at fives, a public school ball game quicker than squash. He becomes captain of fives which entitles him to wear a special colour on his straw hat and braid round his blazer etc. He ought to have been made a prefect or ‘boazer’ on account of this eminence but:

But the authorities did not like me. I was not to be trusted. I did not like rules. I was unpredictable. I was therefore not Boazer material. There was no way they would agree to make me a House Boazer, let alone a School Boazer. Some people are born to wield power and to exercise authority. I was not one of them. I was in full agreement with my Housemaster when he explained this to me. I would have made a rotten Boazer. I would have let down the whole principle of Boazerdom by refusing to beat the Fags. (p.162)

…and photography

Dahl turned out to be a very gifted photographer. He got permission to construct his own dark room and took it very seriously. The sensitive art teacher helped him organise a final year exhibition of his work. When still only 18 he won prizes from the Royal Photographic Society in London.

Goodbye school

He doesn’t want to go to Oxford or Cambridge but to get a job in as remote and magical a distant land as he can. To his own astonishment he gets a job with Shell. He leaves school in July 1933 and starts the new job in September, just as he’s turning 18.

In his last term he’d bought a motorbike, stashed it in a garage up the road from school, and used to go out for wild rides around Derbyshire disguised in helmet and goggles. On the last day he hurtles away from Repton with no regrets.

He goes on a public school outward bound adventure to Newfoundland, which he discovers to be inhospitable and cold, but returns fit and resilient.

Two years as a trainee with Shell in Britain and then several months in head office learning the business. He commuted in from the family home in Bexley. And here he makes some quotable remarks about the appeal of a regular job, salary, predictable commute etc as against the commitment needed to be a fiction writer, worth quoting in its entirety.

The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it. (p.171)

Then Dahl gets his first placement abroad. To the managing director’s amazement Roald turns it down because it is Egypt. Flat and desert and sand and old relics – Dahl wants lions and tigers and excitement! To his surprise the managing director gives into his wish, gives Egypt to another intern, and a week later gets in touch to say Dahl’s posting will be to East Africa. He jumps up and down with excitement.

And that is where this book ends and its sequel, Going Solo begins.

Thoughts

A masterpiece of children’s storytelling, the book is notable for what it leaves out such as:

  • puberty and sex
  • friendships
  • intellectual development, discussion and debate
  • or even the basic central aspect of school, which is the subjects and the exams – none of these make an appearance

Old man blues

All this, you must realize, was in the good old days when the sight of a motor-car on the street was an event, and it was quite safe for tiny children to go tricycling and whopping their way to school in the centre of the highway. (p.23)

You must remember that there was virtually no air travel in the early 1930s. Africa was two weeks away from England by boat and it took you about five weeks to get to China. These were distant and magic lands and nobody went to them just for a holiday. You went there to work. Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours and nothing is fabulous any more. (p.166)

But he’s right, of course. Cars have destroyed childhood and anyone can go anywhere now, often at Ryan Air prices, so that everywhere feels like the same huge shopping mall.

Credit

Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl was published by Jonathan Cape in 1984. References are to the 1986 Penguin paperback edition.

Related link

Roald Dahl reviews

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Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall by Spike Milligan (1978)

I was determined to pursue the matter to its illogical conclusion.
(Spike summarises his methodology in Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall, page 8)

I was getting twitchy, doing nothing positive for so long. I had started talking to myself and I wasn’t satisfied with the answers.
(Spike beginning to lose it, page 60)

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall is the fourth of Spike Milligan’s seven (!) volumes of war memoirs. It covers the period from his regiment’s landing in Salerno, Italy, on 23 September 1943 to the date he was invalided out of the front line with nervous exhaustion in March 1944.

Longer, seriouser

Although covering a period of just under six months, the text, at 288 pages, is longer than the two previous volumes put together. Although the relentless gags and wisecracking are similar, the Hitlergams have, mercifully, ended (actually, he sneaks a few through, e.g. p.139) and there are far fewer visual elements i.e. photos, sketches, cartoons and so on, than in previous volumes.

There are still quite a few photos but they are documentary and factual, in the sense that they show members of his brigade, tanks, lorries crossing Bailey Bridges and so on. Mind you, although of military subjects, Spike still comes up with some funny captions. I laughed at the photo of squaddies working on setting up a Bailey bridge across a river where the caption tells us that ‘the ugly soldiers’ were told to face away from the camera.

But overall the tone is quite a bit more serious than in the previous volumes and quite a few passages are entirely serious in intent such as the description of: air attacks, of devastated Italian villages, of the fury of Allied attacks on German positions, the terrible scenes after a direct hit on a neighbouring battery, and so on. It has a permanent edge, a barely suppressed anger which I didn’t feel in the previous volumes (see final section, below, for examples) all building up to the intense and unhappy final passages of him being wounded and psychologically traumatised, returned to the front too soon, bullied for being a coward and then his final collapse.

Spike is peeved

The more earnest tone is set by the surprisingly cross preface or author’s note preceding the text. Spike had been really nettled by a review by Clive James of one of the previous books which jovially referred to it as ‘an unreliable history of the war’. This upset Spike who, in this preface, goes to great lengths to insist that, on the contrary, the text is very heavily researched and completely factual.

All that I wrote did happen, it happened on the days I mention, the people I mention are real people and the places are real…I wish the reader to know that he is not reading a tissue of lies and fancies, it all really happened…I’ve spent a fortune on beer and dinners interviewing my old Battery mates, and phone calls to those overseas ran into over a hundred pounds…Likewise I included a large number of photographs actually taken in situ…

He goes on to mention 18 former colleagues by name for their help with documents, maps, photos and recollections. There are lots of photos but, as I mentioned, most of them are documentary i.e. factual photos of individuals in his battery or contemporary scenes – the silly Edwardian photos with humorous captions which littered the earlier volumes have disappeared.

He also gives excerpts from Alf Fildes’s diary and regularly includes written anecdotes from his best mate Harry Edgington (e.g. pages 120, 142, 234). In fact he mentions ringing up Harry (who had emigrated to New Zealand) and also calling Ken Carter (p.232), to confirm specific facts and memories.

This irritated preface ends with another (i.e. they also appeared in the previous volumes) tribute to his mates and their ongoing closeness, mentioning their twice-a-year reunions, and the text is sprinkled with references to meeting old comrades at reunions or at other events, decades later. These links to old comrades matters a lot to Spike and their importance comes over with far more urgency, and need, than in the previous volumes.

Day-by-day diary format

As with the previous three, it’s done in diary form. But in line with his irritation Spike’s diary entries are given in capitals and preceded by MY DIARY just to ram home the message that it all actually happened.

So what we read is the daily account of how Spike and the boys lived, day to day, with very little analysis, little overview of the campaigns he took part in, no detachment or distance. Instead this happens, and they take the mickey out of it – then that happens, and they make gags about it – then this happens and they all have a larf about it, and so on, for a surprisingly long 288 pages in the Penguin paperback edition.

Gags

Kidgell looks pensively out towards Italy. ‘I was worried about the landing.’
‘Don’t worry about the landing. I’ll hoover it in the morning.’ (p.9)

‘I thought you were a champion swimmer.’
‘Yes, but you can’t swim in army boots.’
‘You’re right, there isn’t enough room.’ (p.9)

Lunch was a mangled stew, lumps of gristle floating on the surface. Edgington said if you held your ear to it you could hear an old lady calling ‘Helpppp.’ (p.13)

Budden tells us, ‘We’ll walk to HQ and get fresh orders.’
I tell him I don’t need fresh orders. I’m perfectly satisfied with the ones I’ve got. (p.29)

Edgington is speaking heatedly. It’s the only way to keep warm. (p.68)

Ernie Hart was a nice lad with a quiet sense of humour, so quiet no one ever heard it. (p.123)

Outside I rubbed my hands with glee. (I always kept a tin handy.) (p.245)

Incidentally the boys themselves are aware that many of these gags are corny or stretched. He often recalls the bit of repartee then writes ‘(groans)’ afterwards (pages 102, 218).

‘I’m too bloody tired to smoke,’ he said.
‘Try steaming,’ I said. ‘It’s easier.’ (p.253)

They were joking on the battlefield, whistling to keep their spirits up, trying to encourage and cheer each other up and fairly often it seems stretched and contrived. I’ve pointed out in some of my reviews of thrillers that many of the classic thriller writers of the 50s and 60s carried the intense atmosphere of the war, its threat and peril, into civilian life; their protagonists carry it around with them. In the same way, maybe, we can say that Spike carried the rather desperate gagging which kept him and his mates going through the war into his civilian career, to great effect in the Goon Show but with diminishing returns after that.

(Incidentally, more, if very casual, information is thrown on the origin of the term when Spike tells us that it was a common nickname for Gunners like himself to be referred to as Gooners or just Goons. And at one point he parodies someone referred to as Florence Nightingale, saying they were more like Florence Nightingoon, the Lady of the Lump, p.135.)

(A few days after reading Spike I was reading Fitzroy Maclean’s war classic, Eastern Approaches’, and came across references to him and fellow members of the SAS listening to Tommy Handley and It’s That Man Again on the wireless and went to listen to some on YouTube. It’s immediately obvious that Handley’s humour uses the same kind of bad puns and deliberate misunderstandings as Spike – ‘I’ve been taking a walk, and if anybody else wants to take it, they can have it. I’ve finished with it’ – making me realise that Spike was peddling the same kinds of gags into the late 1970s that he’d grown up listening to in the 1930s. A proper appreciation of where he was new or innovative would have to start with a really thorough understanding of the British comedy landscape of the 1930s, something which is way beyond my scope.)

(Deliberately?) bad proofreading

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall is written in a deliberately flaky style. Lots of the sentences contain three or four or five clauses just separated by commas which would be better broken up into shorter sentences by full stops. There are unnecessarily hyphenated words, unnecessarily capitalised words:

  • He stayed for launch, a lovely Stew (p.108)
  • Bentley has diagnosed his own illness as Malaria only to have another doctor diagnose it correctly as Jaundice. (p.136)

Both together:

In the dark night the war went on, being able to sleep peacefully, dry, snug and warm was I suppose, Luxury. (p.144)

There are occasional grammar errors (‘This bloody army were food mad!’, p.98) and erratic typographical gaps or breaks between main text and quotations (from other people’s diaries or letters etc). And regular outbreaks of multiple exclamation or other punctuation marks:

An OP has been established on Monte Croce. Not again! Rain!!! Where does the stuff come from?? (p.104)

The overall effect is of deliberate scrappiness, like a scrapbook, like a kind of student mag or fanzine, as if this adds to the spontaneousness and wackiness of the text, as if breathless sentences and random capitals make it all more wacky and humorous.

Same goes for the misspellings. He talks about ‘the Scotts’ (p.47) or a ‘recoco chair’ (p.67), describes his Major playing the clarionet (although that one’s debatable, p.82), refers to ‘the Bosche’ (p.94), writes ‘Above us the battle was going on full belt’ (p.278). My point being some of these are such egregious errors no professional proofreader would have missed them, so it must have been a conscious editorial choice – all of it, the caps, the misspellings, the bad punctuation, the random caps…

Maybe the manuscript arrived like this from Spike and the editors decided to leave them in to increase the sense of wackiness and improvisation. But then the whole thing was supposedly ‘edited’ by Jack Hobbs, so it was clearly a high-level decision to let it be like this.

Sex

They’re young, fit, healthy men so they think about sex all the time, a great deal of the banter is about sex and, being men, this means rude observations about the size, shape and state of each other’s penises. Any woman – our nurses or Italian civilians – will be mercilessly ogled.

‘Buon giorno, Maria.’
She smiled and blushed, the innocence of Italian country girls was something to see. Something else to see was the top of her stocking tops when she bent over. (p.171)

Travelling on the back of a lorry, the sight of a pretty girl immediately erupted into mass drooling until she was out of sight. (p.194)

There were loads of pretty girls who came under fire from the tailboard. The cries ranged from ‘I can do you a power of good, my dear’ to the less poetic ‘Me give you ten inches of pork sword, darlin”. (p.218)

Not just unacceptable but illegal, these days.

There are the usual half-disguised references to masturbation, which must have been rife (and again I refer the reader to Eric Newby’s mention of men masturbating every night in his prisoner of war camp) (pages 154, 265).

There’s a running joke that Edgington doesn’t join in chatting up every ‘bird’ they see and certainly doesn’t go to the two brothels described in the text; instead he writes long letters to his sweetheart back home, Peg, the joke being that the more he writes the more he remembers having sex with her, the more aroused and frustrated he becomes, for example pages 86 and 87:

At the mention of Peg his eyes went soft and his trousers boiled.

Some of the sex slang was new to me. A simple-minded soldier refers to squeezing liquid mud through the holes in a hessian sack so as to create little worms of mud spaghetti as ‘sexy’. To which:

‘Sexy?’ said Bombardier Fuller. ‘You must be bloody hard up for it if you get the Colin’ watchin’ that.’ (p.130)

‘Get the Colin?’ Later he refers to vaseline by its navy nickname ‘starters’, as in ‘a pot of starters’ and goes on to explain that if the reader doesn’t understand this they should contact Royal Navy PR, as ’70 per cent of the officers are Gay up there’ (p.137). So he is aware of homosexuals, I had been wondering (and p.158).

Race

Spike refers to Indians as wogs (pp. 16, 133) and to Black people using the n word (pages 133, 195) and ‘coon’ (as in ‘Coon-type singing’, p.265) – though not all the time, he also refers to Blacks as ‘negroes’ (p.182) or ‘coloured’. In other words he used (or was depicting) the idiom of the time. It feels done without malice, because (re. ‘wogs’) he was raised in India and liked the culture and people and (re. the n word) he was a massive fan of Black jazz music. Still, the modern woke reader should be warned.

The politically correct would also be incensed by the three or four times the lads do cartoon impersonations of imagined Black servants on a southern plantation from a Hollywood movie (‘Gone with the Wind’ had been released just four years earlier, 1939). Thus, when his mate Edgington turns up at a new billet:

‘Welcome home, young massa,’ I said. ‘De plantation ain’t been de same widout you.’ (p.254)

It’s the idiom of the day and it’s spoofing a popular movie (1943) but it does, admittedly, have an extra edge of satire or sarcasm or needle. Given a choice Spike always prefers the slangy or disrespectful term for anything (the Germans, the army, officers, soldiers as a whole, the Brits, himself, anything if it’ll raise a laugh). It was part of the humour of the day, but double edged. He can never mention Gunner Kidgell without called him ‘short-arse Kidgell’. And he refers to the Italians throughout as ‘Itis’.

Spike is also very aware when people are Jewish and, again, invokes stock stereotypes of Jews i.e. being tight with money or being in the rag trade in the East End (pages 160). I think I remember from the 70s that calling someone a ‘Jew’ was an insult indicating that they were tight (with money). Unacceptable these days, and has been for some time. He mentions someone being Jewish or Jews in general, often emphasising their alleged tightness with money, on pages 160, 193, 198, 202, 223, 258, 271, 274.

At one point an attack by German Messerschmitts forces him and comrades to run naked from showers and jump into nearby slit trenches for protection. But what bothers him is not the risk of getting killed but that he left all his money in his battledress hanging up outside the shower. The second the danger’s over, he goes running back.

Thank God! Money was safe! I just have Jewish blood. (p.258)

Events

The journey aboard ship from North Africa to Italy. Landing on Salerno beach, unopposed because it’s secure, but with the wreckage of fierce fighting all around. Journey up into the hills and then a long slog of positions taken up by his artillery battery, Battery D.

Almost immediately he comes down with sand fly fever and is taken off to hospital for a week long interlude of clean sheets, decent food and pretty nurses. But he starts to go round the bend with boredom and is relieved to be one day collected by a truck and taken back to his mates on the battery. Here, as in every memoir I’ve ever read about war, it’s about friendship, mateship and camaraderie rather than any grand cause.

The new-found seriousness extends as far as an argument he gets into with a northerner who sings the praises of Gracie Fields and George Formby who Spike cordially loathes, explaining that he is a devotee of the Marx Brothers and Bing Crosby (p.54). (Regarding styles of humour, later he hears a broadcast by ITMA and thinks ‘corny bastards’, p.256).

There’s still quite a lot about music, they hear the kind of big band jazz they like on the radio, in an Italian church they discover a piano and play Cole Porter (in fact they perform and sing some Cole Porter but then the Italian priest sings plays and sings some Verdi opera thus trumping them). Othertimes they perform with what they have, including one night they have a little performance with an ocarina, guitar and shaken matchbox, with the others joining in banging mugs (p.138).

He visits the ruins of Pompeii (pages 51 to 53).

Spike’s job

I’d read his descriptions of his duties in volume 2 but it was only in this one that it was made unmistakably clear that Spike’s job was ‘wireless operator’ for an artillery battery (p.46) i.e. laying (or retrieving) phone cables, then using radio sets to co-ordinate with other observation posts to target artillery fire accurately at enemy positions, as described pages 76 to 77.

His battery constantly move to new positions as the front line advances, and enemy planes fly over and occasional shells land nearby but he is repeatedly grateful that he’s not in the poor infantry, sent forward into withering machinegun fire.

The Germans slowly retreat into the mountains which the poor bloody infantry have to storm while Spike’s battery and many others lob shells up into the mountains. The main event is the rain: it rains incessantly, the tents, the men, their uniforms and equipment become sodden. The artillery stands become so sodden that the guns slip backwards or sideways when they fire. All their efforts become devoted to trying to find somewhere dry to shelter and sleep.

Maybe the most vivid scene, possibly the longest lasting all of three pages, is his vivid recreation of a concert he and his mates organised and staged on Christmas Day 1943, giving us the full list of acts, an impressive series of farcical performances and musical interludes.

Just days later they’re given four days’ leave in Amalfi which seems like Disneyland after the muddy farms they’ve been staying in. Memorable evening, standing on the garden terrace watching night fall over the bay, and then onto a cafe kept by a Cockney-speaking Italian momma who lays on an unprecedented feast.

In Amalfi he’s invited into a brothel and initially refuses all offers, preferring to sit relaxed, drink and get pissed, until – according to his account – the lady of the house dragged him into a bedroom and not only screwed him but paid him.

On 5 January they are moved to a new forward position just outside the village of Lauro.

15 January a direct hit on a gun emplacement, exploding munitions and burning four gunners he knows to death, with many other burns casualties. Happens in the middle of the night, Spike is up and running round helping as best he can.

He develops piles (‘the curse of the Milligans’), goes see the medical officer (MO) but there doesn’t seem to be any treatment short of having them operated on and removed. They go from painful to actively bleeding. Normally irrepressibly chirpy, this throws him into a depression (p.271).

The climax, Spike is wounded

On 20 January 1944 Spike is in pain from bleeding piles, depressed, and hasn’t had much sleep for two nights when a lieutenant asks for a volunteer to go and replace a signalman up at Tac HQ, which is near the front lines, also where their commanding officer, now regularly referred to as ‘Looney’ Jenkins, is based. Very reluctantly Spike volunteers and sets in train the sequence of events which will see him wounded and invalided out.

Alf Fildes drives him to Tac HQ which entails crossing the makeshift bridge across the river Garigliano, shrouded in camouflage smoke because the Jerries are throwing over lots of artillery. They pull up outside a cluster of farmhouse buildings which is Tac HQ. All round are dead German bodies no-one’s had time to bury.

the moment Spike arrives Major Jenkins puts him on the headphones and keeps him at it for 17 hours without a break (‘the bastard’), monitoring and sending radio signals, he even has to argue for permission to go for a piss. Machinegun bullets whine over the roof and shells land, some scarily close, shaking the buildings. His piles start to bleed and he feels at the end of his tether.

Then Jenkins orders him and three colleagues to go forward, under fire, to the observation post (OP) carrying batteries and a new 22 wireless set. They cross a field containing a recently hit Sherman tank, scramble up a gully full of cowering infantry and emerge into the open to climb up the hillside, tiered for agriculture, as machine gun bullets and mortars land all around.

They all throw themselves to the ground then Spike remembers lying on his front, then a terrific explosion and he’s lying on his back, regaining consciousness, seeing red, strangely dazed (p.278).

He knows if they stay there they’ll be sitting ducks and turns and scrambles back down the mountain. Next thing he knows he’s talking to Major Jenkins crying his eyes out – the major tells him to get his wound dressed and he realises he’s wounded in the right thigh, couple of inches long quarter of an inch deep, but it’s not the wound, it’s the shaking and the crying – he’s put into an ambulance, given pills, in a gesture of kindness he’ll never forget, comforted by another wounded man – then he’s on a stretcher, loaded into a Red Cross truck – arrives at a camp and tent and bunk…

Next morning he’s woken up by an American band playing reveille – an orderly tells him he’s at camp 144 CS and has been categorised as suffering from Battle Fatigue – bereft of any kit he goes to the American camp where, true to form, the Yanks are fantastically generous, giving him a towel, razor soap etc and Spike starts crying Thanks – it’s not the wound that bothers him it’s the way he can’t stop crying…

He’s taken to see a psychiatrist who’s an army captain who tells him, rather threateningly, that he will get better, understand? He’s given a hot dinner and more tranquilisers –

On 27 January, just a week later, far from rested and recuperated, Spike finds himself back with his battery, still in the same position outside Lauro but he feels broken…

I was not really me any more

The spring that made me Spike Milligan was gone (p.284)

He has stopped crying but can’t stop stammering – Major Jenkins gives him a dressing down for being a coward and he is stripped of his one stripe i.e. demoted from Lance Bombardier back to Gunner. He is taking the pills prescribed him at the hospital which deprive him of his old personality.

I am by now completely demoralised. All the laughing had stopped. (p.284)

In retrospect, Spike thinks that if they’d given him a couple of weeks rest he might have bounced back, but being sent straight back and then shouted at by the martinet Major finished him off. After a couple of days he can’t take it any more and is driven away from the Battery, no longer to serve, never to see his mates again…

I felt as though I were being taken across the river Styx. I’ve never got over that feeling. (p.285)

Psychiatric hospital

10 February 1944. He is sent to a proper hospital, bright, light, clean, airy, miles behind the lines. Psychiatric ward. About 50 patients, most doped to the gills. Silence.

He is seen by a Major Palmer, a tough former boxer who suffers no malingerers but who accepts he is in shock. He is sent to a rehabilitation camp north of Naples.

Final collapse

Cut to a month later, 9 March 1944. Spike is now out of his unit and far from the front. He is taken to a terrible muddy camp outside a suburb of Naples called Afrigola. He is given a job in ‘reception’ i.e. in a tent at the gateway to the camp where he asks the same questions of new arrivals, fills in and files their paperwork. The last paragraph of the book tries to put a brave face on it:

Will Milligan recover? Will he get back to the big time among the Lance-Bombardier set? Above all, will he lose the stammer that makes him take four hours to say good morning? All this and more in Vol. 5, Goodbye Soldier, to be serialised in Gay News. (p.288)

So he ends the narrative by trying restore the cheeky chappy, zany character of the preceding text but, well, it doesn’t work.

(Incidentally the last gag isn’t homophobia, I think, just surrealism. It’s an off-the-cuff gag citing just about the last place the memoirs of girl-mad shagger Milligan were likely to be serialised.)

Shall I read volume 5? Volume 4 is not as funny as its predecessors and, at 288 pages, turned into quite a grind. Plus I always knew it was heading for this sad denouement. According to the blurbs volume 5 is just as long at 280 pages, and devoted to Spike’s personal battle with depression and psychiatric problems… Not a thrilling prospect, is it?

Class animus

Spike really hates their new commanding officer, the over-officious unbending Major Jenkins, ‘Fuck him’ (p.128) and this dislike curdles into outright hatred, citing everyone under Jenkins’ command who gave him the nickname ‘Loony’ for his impenetrably stupid orders.

He enjoys retailing stories of officers making wallies of themselves, like the officer who very grandly swanked into view of the battery, took out a shooting stick, unfolded it, sat squarely on it, and then it sank slowly into the quagmire till he fell on his back in the mud. How they laughed (p.76).

He is also thrilled to bits when the officers’ mess catches fire and gleefully describes how hated Major Jenkins runs into the flames to retrieve his belongings into a pile which some of the men (who all hate him), as soon as his back is turned, promptly throw back into the fire (p.152).

He contrasts Churchill meeting Roosevelt in the warmth and Cairo in some luxury hotel with the plight of him and his mates, living for weeks in soaking tents, wearing sodden clothes which start to fall apart and riddled with lice.

(Anti-officer stories or reflections on pages 164, 165, 202)

Spike doesn’t need to comment when he and a few comrades, who are billeted in farm outbuildings covered in centuries or ordure lay a phone line up to headquarters and open the door to the officers mess to find it a cosy clean billet with a warm fire and the officers all swigging whisky and laughing (p.195). The class resentment bubbles off the page.

Seriouser

I mentioned that, although Spike continues to blitz us with gags, he also shares quite serious opinions, much more so than in the previous three volumes:

We drive through Sparanise, badly shelled and bombed, some buildings still smouldering. The inhabitants are in a state of shock, women and children are crying, men are searching amid the ruins for belongings or worse, their relatives. It was the little children that depressed me the most, that such innocence should be put to such suffering. The adult world should forever hang its head in shame at the terrible, unforgivable things done to the young… (p.80)

This reminded me of the description in ‘SAS: Rogue Heroes’ of a German artillery attack on the Italian town of Termoli which wiped out a civilian family except for the little boy who was running round screaming with his intestines hanging out of a terrible stomach wound, till SAS hard man Reg Seekings grabbed him and shot him dead on the spot.

Any leader who declares war, whether in Congo, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Myanmar, is committing to blowing up little children and should be damned forever.

Half a dozen times he refers to coming from an Irish family and having been raised a Catholic but, in the face of the suffering he’s seen, he has suffered a fairly predictable loss of faith:

A Catholic priest visited us this evening and asked if anyone wanted Confession and Holy Communion. I nearly went but since the war started my belief in God had suffered a reverse. I couldn’t reconcile all the killing by two sides who both claimed to be Christian societies… (p.83)

Undertones of madness

Because I know this is the volume which ends with him getting invalided out with shell shock or PTSD, I noticed the increased number of references to madness littered throughout the text. If he’d been a literary author i.e. one who carefully planned his narrative and effects, I’d say he had carefully seeded the notion, or references to different types of madness, in a cunning preparation for his eventual collapse. In practice, the text is so chaotically assembled I doubt there was that much calculation. Conscious or not, they’re there.

At one point there’s a shortage of fags and Spike goes four days without a puff. The pupils of his eyes dilate and ‘I spoke in a high strained voice on the edge of a scream’ (p.48).

‘There’s a bloke in a truck waiting for you.’
‘Is he wearing a white coat.’ (p.60)

Inside the farm an Italian an Italian baby was crying and the mother was trying to calm it in a hysterical high-pitched shriek. (p.63)

From the distant hill we hear the dreadful sound of Spandaus and Schmeisers that are spraying the early morning with bullets, and I can’t but wonder at the courage of these lads in the Guards brigade going forward into it. What a terrible, unexplainable lunacy. (p.75)

‘How?’ said Gunner White looking down at the brown sea of mud, ‘how can we get out of this before we all go stark ravin’ bloody mad?’ (p.82)

And on pages 200, 204, 228, 229, 265, 272…

‘See?, we’re not the only ones who’ve lost our marbles,’ said Edgington. (p.228)

‘Your power to bend words will one day end you in the nick, nuthouse or graveyard.’ (p.229)

On page 193 the boys discuss the random theory that Hitler was driven mad due to piles. In which case a tube of Anusol would have prevented the whole war.

There are also rumbling references to suicide. They are kept so long at a position on the hill in the endless rain that Milligan wonders if some of the men will commit suicide to escape and, in fact, a soldier at HQ does (p.178).

Part of it is the cognitive dissonance of war. He and his mates enjoy a hot meal, stew and potatoes, huddled round a fire in their freezing dugout. Down in the plain they hear a sudden outbreak of machinegun fire, first theirs, then ours (they can recognise the different makes of machinegun by the sound). Down there, two patrols have clashed and are murdering each other.

I slide another spoonful of dinner in. I really can’t get it all together, us dining, them dying… (p.257)

You can hear the mental strain, the same insanity of war which Kurt Vonnegut struggled to manhandle into the fantastical storyline of Slaughterhouse Five and Joseph Heller transformed into the masterpiece of bureaucratic craziness, Catch-22.

Il Duce

Volume 3 is named after Montgomery who is never actually mentioned in the text (just in one picture caption). Mussolini, by contrast is, I think, mentioned three times, pages 55, 63 and 197.

Evelyn Waugh

Why has he got it in for Evelyn Waugh? There was a fantasy scene depicting Waugh getting drunk and buggering Randolph Churchill in the previous book. In this one he envisions Waugh, pissed off his face, standing up during an air raid in Yugoslavia shouting abuse at Randolph Churchill (p.175). Are they symbols, for Spike of upper class privilege.

Angry or grumpy?

When does justifiable anger against the world morph into sounding like a grumpy old man? At what point do you cross the line from righteous indignation to sounding like a tirade in the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph, homes for people who can’t adapt to a changing world? Spike and this book are a kind of test bed for that question.

Pity the children

One morning after roll-call I was exploring the environs of the camp when I discovered the remains of what had been a big bonfire. The surviving pieces were interesting: Fascist uniforms worn by schoolchildren during indoctrination training, Bambini della Lupa (Children of the Wolf) and along with them were little wooden rifles and kindergarten books praising Mussolini, Il Duce nostra Buona Padre … etc etc. How in God’s name can adults do this to children? To pervert their minds… (p.56)

And the passage quote above, from page 80.

General misanthropy

During the brief R&R in Amalfi they watch fishermen kill octopuses they’ve captured by turning them inside out.

It was obscenely cruel, but then Man is. (p.238)

Reunions

The reunions with his old army pals were obviously important to Spike. He goes out of his way to mention, in his irritated preface, that he and his comrades have not one but two reunions a year ‘something no other British Army unit have’, before spelling out that he’s referring to D Battery, 56th Heavy Regiment, Royal Artillery. And he repeats this again at the very end when he’s spelling out what esprit de corps means, how his mates had it and their hated CO, Major Jenkins, absolutely didn’t (p.285).

He tells us that in December 1976 he organised a reunion at the Medusa Restaurant of those involved in the fighting in and around Steam Roller Farm, 26 February 1943. Strikingly, they invited one of the Germans who’d been fighting opposite them to the meal (p.63).

On a particularly freezing wet night one of the lads. Gunner Trew, asked for a sip of Spike’s tea and ended up draining it.

Now, whenever there’s a reunion, I walk straight up to him and say ‘Gi’s a sip’, take his beer and drain it to the bottom and say ‘Remember Italy’. (p.89)

Vindictiveness

This points to another aspect of the text which feels new, which is that Spike never forgets a grudge. The Trew story is, if you read it briskly, funny – but it chimes with other places which aren’t funny and where resentment smoulders on after 35 years. For example, he doesn’t let up in his criticism of their unbearable commanding officer, Major Evans.

In another, surprising, passage he has it in for his Dad. He says that his Dad’s letters from home become an increasing pain in the arse. This is because his Dad relentlessly nags him to reply to his Mum’s letters. But Spike insists to the reader that he does answer all his Mum’s letters. He goes on to tell us that, after the war, he sent every letter to his Mum registered post and kept the receipts and pasted them into a book and showed his Dad the book – at which he claims his Dad said the book could be a fake! It reveals Spike’s inability to let it go.

And he also emphasises to the reader that it cost him a ‘fortune’ in registered letters, an indication of his own ‘tightness’ with money which, as we’ve seen, he tends to attribute to Jewish people. (Compare the phrase in the preface which emphasises that calling up old comrades who live abroad, to check the facts, ‘ran into over a hundred pounds’. Money was obviously an issue for Spike who never really made it big, not ‘big’ like his frenemy Peter Sellers.)

Post-war sadness

A number of remarks are more redolent of 1970s Britain than 1940s Italy, especially the references to Britain going down the tubes, no longer being ‘Great’ and so on. Daily Mail territory.

…even today the indoctrination goes on. China. Russia. Out own democracies corrupt with pornography and Media Violence… (p.56)

Combined with the sense, which comes over in the references to contemporary reunions, that they will never recover that carefree esprit de corps, they will never be so young or so free again, which takes shape as quiet despair at the dullness of suburban life. For example, they bunk down in an abandoned farmhouse and Spike records the graffitti including ‘The Tebourba Tigers’.

The latter refers to the name they conferred on themselves after a savage action at Tebourba in Tunisia. Where are those tigers now? Watching telly? Washing up?… (p.67)

At moments like this the book reflects the general sense of frustrated malaise widespread across the Britain of the 1970s, see the Reginald Perrin novels, or the exasperated frustration at the start of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or any number of 70s sitcoms like Rising Damp. ‘Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way,’ as Pink Floyd sang in 1973.

And then throw Spike’s own, personal, depression into the mix. It doesn’t explicitly appear that often in this long text, but it’s a strong, depressive tone which flavours the whole thing.

The ugly English

Related to the sense of Britain going down the tubes and the dullness of suburban life goes a passage about the sheer crapness of English ‘cuisine’.

the Anglo-Saxon will devour stale bread, bully beef, hard rolls, food boiled to death and obliterated with artificial seasoning – yet delightfully cooked octopus in garlic? No! You are what you eat, that’s why we all look so bloody ugly. (p.238)

Similarly, tea. I, personally, hate tea but the soldiers lived for mugs of the sweet brown dishwater. But even so:

As I walk I sip the life-giving tea – why do we dote on tea? It tastes bloody awful, it’s only the sugar and milk that make it drinkable. It’s like fags – we’ve got hooked… (p.261)

Emigration

All this explains why he sympathises with the idea of emigrating away from poor old Britain…

His brother Desmond is 17 and has a crappy job. No wonder he emigrated to Australia p.263

The Russian threat

It’s not untrue but Spike’s warnings against Russian threat reminded me of another radical turned grumpy old man, Kingsley Amis, who wrote several novels warning against a Russian conquest of Britain p.249

Other complaints

He complains that in a village they came to, the British were allowing suspect collaborators to be kept packed in the tiny local police station in inhumane conditions.

Why this situation was allowed to exist can only be put down to the wonderful ‘I’m alright, Jack’ attitude of the British. We are not cruel but, by Christ, sometimes we come very close to it. (p.251)

He describes a local woman cook, Portence, who helps out in the cookhouse, working from dawn till one in the morning and then compares her with:

some of the soppy females of today who get a charlady to clean their flat of three rooms while they phone their friends and eat chocolates. (p.252)

These examples go to show, I hope, that although there are still loads and loads of quickfire gags, there is also a lot more moaning and complaining about the modern (1970s) world. That’s what I meant by the way his anger against a world which started a world war and destroyed entire cities and killed so many civilians and good blokes and damaged little kids forever morphs and mutates into general ranting against the modern world, modern women, modern TV and porn and video nasties etc etc, into a general rant.

Some of the rants can be funny. Many are interesting as examples of social history. But between the rants and the grim descriptions of (distant) battles and death, it feels like we have travelled a long way from the relative innocence of the first volume, Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall (1971).

Credit

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall by Spike Milligan was published by Michael Joseph in 1978. References are to the 1978 Penguin paperback edition.

Related reviews

  • Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall (1971)
  • ‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’: A Confrontation in the Desert (1974)
  • Monty: His Part in My Victory (1976)
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by Simon on May 10, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 10, 2024

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Monty: His Part in My Victory by Spike Milligan (1976)

‘Hurry up, shouted Bombardier Fuller, ‘We’re keeping Adolf waiting.’
(Monty: His Part in My Victory, page 118)

In my reviews of the previous volumes of Spike’s war memoirs I’ve pointed out that the humour relies mostly on quickfire gags based on terrible puns and verbal quibbles.

Edgington squeezed in.
‘Anything on the wireless?’ he said.
‘No, the batteries are flat.’
‘I thought they were square,’ he said. (p.14)

In this short 127-page book there are:

  • about 73 photos, usually with facetious and comic captions added
  • Spike’s own cartoons (which I find very poor)
  • some sketches of the scenery
  • photocopies of official documents
  • a copy of the running order at a musical review his jazz band took part in

I.e. a lot of the space is taken up with visuals, so that maybe only half the space is actual text. Here’s a typical photo-plus-comic caption:

‘A British soldier with an incredible weapon’

Then there are the bloody awful Hitlergrams, a potentially great idea which he invented in the first book – spoof conversations involving Hitler which punctuate the text – but which are consistently unfunny:

Hitlergram No. 96133a

HITLER: Mein Gott, zey are smoking our fags! Zat is terrible.
EVA BRAUN: I know. I’ve smoked them.
HITLER: To get our fags to Tunis ve have to go through Allied Air Raids on zer Factories! bombs on zer Railways! zer boats to Africa are torpedoed and zer fags end up being smoked by zat Huddersfield Schit Gunner White!
EVA BRAUN: It’s not right and it’s not fair.
HITLER: Vot isn’t.
EVA BRAUN: Zer left leg of Joe Louis.
HITLER: I don’t vish to know zat, kindly leave the stage. (p.41)

There’s an almost complete absence of the genuinely comic, of entire scenes or comic threads cleverly worked out over an extended length. Comedy is something to do with the overall arc or structure of a narrative: good comic stories build up tension, including details which add to this, before the big comic punchline or reveal. The great comic novels are comic in structure and form as well as details (I’m thinking of the brilliantly humorous war novels of Evelyn Waugh – ironically, as Spike for some reason hated Waugh and singled him out for scathing abuse).

Anyway, there’s almost none of that careful structuring here, no extended comic scenes; instead it’s  a daily diary packed with a rat-a-tat barrage of thin puns and verbal gags.

The cookhouse waggon was missing. ‘I don’t miss it at all,’ said Gunner White. (p.71)

Diary format and sources

The memoirs are based on authentic sources: on the diaries of Spike, some of his friends (notably Driver Alf Fildes), the official war diary of the regiment he served with, and of the specific battery, and letters and journals of some of his mates in the regiment (‘wonderful comrades who made life worthwhile’). These have been compiled into a fairly basic chronological, day-by-day account, enlivened by as many cheap gags as Spike can cram in, with no attempt at perspective or analysis such as you’d get in a proper history. Instead gags gags gags.

I picked up a faint German broadcast of a very corny band playing old Jack Hylton arrangements. The singer, could I ever forget his name! – Ernst Strainz! His vibrato sounded like he was driving a tractor over ploughed fields with weights tied to his scrotum. (p.21)

Its predecessor, the Rommel book, featured short inserted passages utterly bereft of humour, in which Spike the victim of nervous breakdown and mental illness, looks back on those wartimes from the time of writing (i.e. the mid-70s), unhappy, lonely, afflicted by his memories, especially of the men he loved who died. Nothing funny at all about them, sad and lowering. There’s none of those here, but the bad taste lingers.

Here’s a typical Spike cartoon, illustrating the notion that you could identify the men from their distinctive boots. It’s a vaguely OK idea, a sort of OK execution, maybe raises a smile, but…

Timeline

Volume 3 covers from the fall of Tunis until Spike’s regiment embarked for the Salerno landings in Italy, from 7 May 1943 to 22 September 1943 = 5 months. The fighting – described in sometimes hair-raising detail in the Rommel book – is over, and the boys are mostly bored or very bored.

Just a reminder that Spike is a Bombardier in 19 or D Battery, the 56th Heavy Regiment, the Royal Artillery.

As they drive through the new camp Spike and his mates are amazed at the number of Italian and German prisoners of war, often stopping to cadge fags and, on one occasion, whiskey off them.

As in the previous books, the ordinary soldiers are obsessed with getting pissed and getting laid. ‘Plunger’ Bailey (named after his big willy) sets up a shagging scoreboard.

We learn that Spike’s dad was obsessed with Westerns, owned a number of old pistols and liked to kick open doors and duck behind tables as if in a shootout in the movies. One of the two things that made me laugh in the entire book was Spike describing watching from his bedroom window Crystal Palace burn down in a great inferno (30 November 1936) his dad, next to him, watched it through binoculars, eventually putting it down and saying, expressively: ‘Navajo!’

Spike’s Catholic mum sends him packages containing holy medals, rosaries etc. His commanding officer, Major Chater Jack, asks if she can send one of her yummy fruit cakes. When there’s spotted dick for pudding at the canteen, it’s hard to tell the flies from the raisins.

They find a Stuka standing alone in a piece of scrub, one of them accidentally starts the engine and propellor and none of them know how to turn it off.

They take part in army exercises and training. They go into Tunis to try out the bars and brothels. They climb a ruined Roman aqueduct and get stuck half way up (cue a Spike cartoon).

There’s a victory parade in Tunis, with generals galore taking the salute including Eisenhower (cue a couple of photos).

They’re ordered to move to a new camp, at Hammam Lif, a seaside town just outside Tunis. Cue as many excursions for beach swimming as they can manage…

With three mates Spike takes several days to drive into the desert to see the ruins of Carthage, with moderately soulful stuff about sitting out under the stars, boiling tins of rations in a billy over a fire, laughing and joking, it’s all a long way from Bromley. In fact sleeping out under the stars at night, and stopping driving along some coast road to simply strip off and run into the sea and try to stand on each others’ shoulders, you can see why these are lovely, bittersweet memories. ‘We were as free as we’d ever be in our lives…’ (p.62)

They’re ordered to move camp to a place called Ain Abessa (p.71).

2 to 6 June 1943. They drive to the beautiful Kerrata Gorge, camp, explore, spend a day climbing up the mountainside, another going on a fruitless pig hunt, led by local Arabs, notable for their prodigious farting (‘Christ, no wonder the Crusaders lost!’ said Jordy Dawson, p.76), before gorging on sausages and wine by a camp fire. Memorable days. On the last day they go swimming in a mountain stream, giving rise to the typically tinny piece of doggerel:

It’s chilly
On your willy
In the water
At Kerrata

Their CO suggests that Spike’s jazz band, such as it is, plays a concert for the mayor of Setif, a dire occasion held at the Salle de Fête. His mate, Gunner Edgington, ‘called it a Fête worse than death’ (p.82). Thin stuff, eh?

The other thing that made me laugh was when Spike and his band are ordered to play in an ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association) concert at the camp of the 74 Mediums (presumably a regiment) and arrive to be greeted a captain who explains that he’d like them to play in the miggle of the show.

The miggle of the show? He definitely said miggle – so he couldn’t pronounce his d’s. ‘How woulg you like to be announeg?’
I paused. ‘D Battery Dance Duo and Doug on Drums.’ (p.83)

Another member of the troupe is an enormous opera singer, Mlle Beth Villion, with an enormous bust.

We listened spellbound as she sang the Habanera from Carmen, her voice was pure silver. In the war, African night it was an unforgettable experience, with the moon shining down on those lovely white boobs. She stopped the show but then she would have stopped anything. (p.85)

As in the previous two books, it’s music which provides solace and escape, not only from the war and the rough philistine squaddies but even, you suspect, from himself and the demons inside his head. Warmed up by Mlle Villion I also laughed at his description of a dire audition he attended, years earlier, back in Blighty, when he watched in disbelief a series of soldiers trying to impress by: playing the spoons whistling Rhapsody in Blue, walking on their hands, doing cartwheels, somersaults, and one soldier who thought he’d get a slot falling on his back.

‘Is that all?’ said the officer.
‘Yes sir, it takes it out of you.’ (p.87)

It’s amazing that England had any entertainment industry at all, and made me think that even then, most of the best stuff was all imported from America: the jazz Spike loves to pieces is entirely American and his squaddie mates talk only of American movies and their stars.

22 June 1943. They’ve joined a large Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (NAAFI) camp on the beautiful Ziama Bay and have a lovely day swimming, sunbathing and eating but that night a sirocco hits the camp with 100 mph winds blowing sand in everyone’s faces, blowing tents and equipment out to sea, sending the men running to hole up in the cabs of the trucks.

Some of the men are fishing using hand grenades and a dead 7-foot hammerhead shark comes to the surface. Spike is curious and barters a slice of it with Major Chater Jack in exchange for a promise of his mum’s fruitcake. But in the event:

To duplicate the taste of a hammerhead shark, boil old newspapers on Sloan’s Liniment. (p.91)

Their CO, Major Chater Jack, who understood what they’d been through and organised holidays and R&R to keep them out of mischief, is promoted away from the unit. He is replaced by Major Evan Jenkins who Spike loathes, calling ‘a real bastard’ and ‘a mean sod’ (p.91). He insisted on giving cultural lectures, as announced by an officious sergeant:

‘H’eyes front! Today the major will be talking about’ – here he consulted a piece of paper – ‘Keats, and I don’t suppose one of you higgerant bastards knows what a Keat is.’ (p.93)

Everyone hates his officious insistence on the rules. He makes them take their bootlaces out and iron them so they’re nice and flat. The cook gets revenge by mixing goat shit in with potatoes and flour to produce shit rissoles which the Major loves and asks for more. ‘Now he really is full of shit,’ says cook May (p.93).

Spike and his best friend, Edgington, have the bright idea of improving on the idea of a tent by rigging canvas over a wadi, more floor space, well ventilated…until there’s a flash flood in which they discover the dictionary definition of wadi and most of their gear is washed away.

Spike’s band was talent spotted at the ENSA show and is invited to play a bigger concert. He includes a photocopy of the running order or playbill and waxes lyrical about the joy of performing live.

You can’t describe a show, you have to be there at that time with that audience, that’s what makes it come alive and come alive it did… (p.98)

To his surprise his band is ordered to join the concert party on a tour of towns, all along the coast, so there is plenty of swimming during the day. At one place they find in the theatre props room a selection of plaster arms and legs which they take into the sea to fool around with, lots of silliness to impress a party of WRENS (Women’s Royal Naval Service) who are sunbathing nearby. Boys will be boys and puns will be puns:

Carter was a stickler for perfection so it was midnight before we finished. We were all dog tired and barked ourselves to sleep. (p.101)

When his mate gets knocked off a diving board and, as he falls, curls up protectively, he enters the water ‘foetus firstus’ (p.101). They sunbathe and get badly sunburned (I suppose this was before any kind of sun creams existed).

‘Cor, that sun’s hot,’ said Kidgell.
‘Well, you shouldn’t touch it,’ I said. (p.102)

See what I mean by snappy wordplay. Maybe, for the generation which saw Groucho Marx, this was wit:

From out of the sea came the sound of heavy guns.
‘Sounds like a naval engagement.’
‘I hope they’re both very happy,’ I said. (p.103 )

Mind you, Spike refers to the (very British) Crazy Gang in the text. I think you’d have to be familiar with the Crazy Gang and other popular comic acts of the 1930s to really understand the context of Spike’s humour. Read cold, now, 80 years after the event, is, I suppose, unfair. This becomes increasingly obvious as the final 30 or so pages dwell on this travelling revue, describing each night’s performance, analysing improvements, the evolution of the gags and turns, and so on.

Something sets him thinking about Christmas back in Blighty, at Bewhill (does he mean Bexhill? the text is full of typos and dubious punctuation) and the time a nice local lady’s dog ran into a minefield on the cliffs and got blown to smithereens.

The Concert Party that had toured Tunisian seaside towns during July is so popular it is revived for a few last shows in August. But then the good times come to an end and there’s a sudden blizzard of training and route marches. A week on artillery ranges revising their skills, they’re issued with a new type of wireless, taught new signal codes, had to adopt the American phonetics (A for Able instead of Ack, B for Baker instead of Beer etc).

8 September the amazing news that Italy has surrendered. Compare how this affected Eric Newby in his Apennine prisoner of war building and the Italians on Cephallonia in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Next day the Allies landed at Salerno but encountered stiff opposition from the Germans. Apparently it was Churchill’s idea to attack Germany via ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’ and it turned out to be nearly as disastrous as his idea of attacking Germany via Turkey in the previous war (p.120).

Spike makes the point that none of them realised how brutal the fighting at Salerno was; he only really found out when he read General Alexander’s biography in 1973, which was about 30 years too late! (p.117)

Spike and his battery are ordered to load up and proceed in convoy with their guns to an embarkation point back in Tunisia (this was a bit unclear to me; have they been in neighbouring Libya for the last sections?). Anyway, it means driving through the scenes of the brutal fighting back at the start of 1943, when artillery regiments like his suffered heavy losses. Burned out tanks and cemeteries.

They arrive at a vast American base, ranks of vehicles and munitions, outside Bizerta. They are issued Italian money and a booklet on the customs and language of Italy. Finally they realise they’re departing when they see the officers running round like blue-arsed flies, and line up in their vehicles to embark on ‘landing ships, tank’ or LSTs.

And the narrative ends with him lying atop a huge Scammell lorry overnight, with the ship still anchored, smoking fags and laughing with his mates about his last will and testament, joking about the ‘birds’ back home he’ll leave to them, and teeing us up for volume 4.

Monty

Despite being named in the title of the book, I don’t think there’s a single reference to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery (1887 to 1976) anywhere in the actual text. There’s just one photo of him with four Chinese soldiers (?) with a typically ‘humorous’ caption reading: ‘General Montgomery wondering why he is surrounded by Chinese generals – as he neither drinks nor smokes’ (p.111).

Nature

Apart from music, the other thing which lights his soul is nature, which brings out a surprisingly poetic streak in the gag-meister:

22 May 1943. That evening, excited as schoolboys, we drove off along the Tunis-Bezerta road, it was as though the war didn’t exist, eventually we pull up on a sandy beach for the night.
There was no moon but the sky was a pin cushion of stars. Great swathes of astral light blinked at us across space. We made a fire, glowing scarlet in cobalt black darkness, showers of popping sparks jettisoning into the night air. (p.58)

This is so unlike Spike the joker that you wonder how much of these kinds of passages was written by his editor and collaborator Jack Hobbs, although even passages like this have the Spike clumsiness (‘jettisoning’). Or:

The beach was copper coloured, sunlight reflecting from the bottom gave the water a shimmering Caesar’s royal purple colour. (p.88)

Thoughts

Apparently Spike was needled that reviewers of the first in the series, ‘Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall’, thought most of it was made up. This motivated him to emphasise the rock-solid truthfulness of his accounts in all the subsequent books, especially of the actual fighting in the Rommel book. Thus, I would say, over the course of the three books, there’s a tendency to rely more and more on these half dozen diaries, journals and other sources and the net effect of that is … to make it more boring. Despite the blizzard of gags the basic underlying structure is a simple day-to-day diary and this, accurate enough in its own terms, lacks any depth, any sense of a deeper narrative, any sense of the opening of themes at the beginning and their crafted resolution at the end.

Credit

Monty: His Part in My Victory by Spike Milligan was published by Michael Joseph in 1976. References are to the 1978 Penguin paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on May 8, 2024

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Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières (1994)

This is, to begin with, a wonderful, warm, life-affirming and then, as it develops, a thoroughly harrowing and upsetting, and then, at the end, some kind of redemptive and redeeming, novel. But whatever the changing subject matter and mood it overflows with old-fashioned pleasures of narrative, character and plot. It fully deserved the prizes it won and its widespread popularity. To cite the facts of its success: it was on the Times bestseller list for four years, has sold more than 600,000 copies, has been reprinted in paperback more than thirty times, and has been translated into more than 17 languages. It also won the 1995 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book and I’m surprised it didn’t win more.

Overview

It’s set on the Greek island of Cephallonia during the Second World War and its aftermath. The narrative follows a core handful of characters through:

  • the golden days of peace (1939 and 1940)
  • the advent of war i.e. having promised they wouldn’t Italy declares war on Greece (October 1941)
  • the Greco-Italian war (28 October 1940 to 23 April 1941)
  • the island’s lazy, peaceful, comic opera occupation by the Italian army from May 1941 to September 1943, with a token presence of the German army which mostly kept itself to itself
  • the armistice between Italy and the Allies in September 1943 which placed all Italian forces in an ambiguous and confusing position, and triggered the awful massacre by the Germans of every Italian soldier on the island – a total of 1,315 Italians were killed in the resultant, 5,155 were executed, and 3,000 drowned when the German ships taking the survivors to concentration camps were accidentally bombed by the Allies: the mass murder is considered a war crime second only to the Russian massacre of Polish officers at Katyn
  • the period when the island was occupied solely by the German army, hugely more brutal and rapacious than the Italians (September 1943 to October 1944)
  • the troubled period after ‘liberation’ of the Greek Civil War (1946 to 1949) when, in de Bernières’ view, the Communist forces of ELAS (Ellinikós Laïkós Apeleftherotikós Stratós – the Greek People’s Liberation Army) behaved with even greater brutality to anyone they considered traitors, bourgeois or just wanted to loot and rape, than the Nazis

Having got to about page 370 and supped deep of horrors, massacres and mutilations, you’d have thought de Bernières would draw this sorry sage to a conclusion but there’s more.

Central characters

For the first hundred pages or so we are introduced to the central characters of a small village not far from the town of Argostóli, on Cephallonia, being:

  • Dr Iannis, a widower, small, alert, curious wise old bird, who has a gift for healing despite not actually having a medical degree
  • Iannis’s wife died some time ago (of tuberculosis) so he lives alone with his beautiful, 17-year-old daughter, Pelagia, who has picked up much of her father’s medical knowledge and secretly wishes to become a doctor herself
  • dodging around is the 6-year-old girl Lemoni who’s always getting into pickles ‘in her capricious and erratic manner’ (p.175) from which Pelagia rescues her

The first hundred or more pages consists of a slow, relaxed and deeply pleasurable introduction to the peacetime life of a Greek town, with its annual festivals described in great detail along with its charmingly picturesque characters, including:

  • huge local strongman, Velisarios, whose party trick is to pick up mules
  • Father Arsenios, a fat, roly-poly drunken priest, always sweating like a pig and dogged by his failure to live up to his calling
  • Kokolios the cartoon communist
  • Stamatis the cartoon monarchist

This is all hugely enjoyable because it is how we Brits imagine Greek rural life to be. the narrative is peppered with the many sweet and eccentric little incidents in the village and the characters’ reactions to them. Every morning Dr Iannis goes off to the kapheneion to meet up with Kokolios and Stamatis where – being a republican, a monarchist and a communist – they have the same grumpy old arguments, very much like a Greek version of ‘Last of the Summer Wine’.

And behind the individual characters and chapters what comes over is the wonderfully urbane, amused, wise and droll attitude of the ‘implied author’ i.e. the authorial voice created by the text. To put it more simply, de Bernières’ voice. His treatment of his characters, his focus on the eccentric and charming, his immense good humour, radiate through every sentence and make it an immensely warming, lovely read.

A narrative of sorts gets going when, during the feast of the island’s saint, Saint Gerasimos, Velisarios does his party trick of holding an enormous heavy Venetian gun while the local kids stuff it with all the junk and rubbish they can find, then he gets someone to light the fuse and holds it while it goes off, a deed which requires staggering strength.

Anyway, on this particular occasion he fires it at the empty end of the street just as the handsome young fisherman Mandras comes round the corner. He isn’t badly injured but is taken to the house of Dr Iannis where he comes round to find the beautiful face of Pelagia looking down on him and promptly falls in love.

This Mandras proceeds to hang around the doctor’s house, continually bringing them offerings of fish for Pelagia to cook, until one day he’s fooling around in a tree and falls out, landing on an urn below and getting loads of shards of terracotta stuck in his bum, an absurdity which endears him even more to Pelagia.

On one occasion Pelagia goes down to the sea and not only sees Mandras setting out his nets to catch whitebait naked – i.e. sees what a dazzlingly lithe, fit young body he has – but is then astonished to see him whistle to three tame dolphins and allow himself to be pulled out to sea holding their fins.

Mandras’s mother is Drosoula, a strikingly ugly woman whose bad looks everyone forgets after a few moments in her company because of her warm nature. (On one occasion Drosoula tells Pelagia she only secured a husband because he had ‘unusual desires’ which she was prepared to satisfy – sodomy?).

Anyway that gives you a flavour of the charming and gently amusing first 100 pages or so.

A chapter per character

I haven’t yet mentioned the key ‘formal’ aspect of the novel, which is that each chapter represents the point of view and voice of a different character. The chapters are relatively short (5 or 6 pages) and each time you start a new one, you know it will be a new character and a new point of view.

In fact the chapters come in (at least) two flavours. First of all, there are chapters where the narrative is told by a third-person narrator but with a strong leaning towards a specific character’s point of view. The character in question is usually indicated in the first sentence if not in the very first words, making it pretty easy to understand and orient yourself:

  • Dr Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse… (first words of the novel)
  • Father Arsenios ruminated bitterly behind the iconostasis… (p.36)
  • Pelagia returned from the well with a jar upon her shoulder… (p.127)

The second kind of chapters are those told from a first person point of view, which I’ll elaborate below.

Politicians

What this technique allows de Bernières to do with tremendous effectiveness is cut between scenes and settings: it allows him to move the story along without having to set scenes each time; he can just cut away to a new character in a new setting in a very effective, filmic kind of way. Thus although the book is quite long, and very packed with text, it feels relatively light because you can just take it one bite-sized scene at a time.

In the early parts, the most striking use of this technique is when he cuts away from the idyllic island altogether to give us entire chapters devoted to the international statesmen responsible for running affairs in the early 1940s.

Thus we get chapters taking us into the mind of the Greek leader, Ioannis Metaxas, a Greek attempt at the kind of strongman leader typified by Hitler and Mussolini. The chapter devoted to him reveals a man who is browbeaten by international events and defeated by his disreputable daughter, Lulu.

But it’s also in these chapters that we get the first use of the other type of narrative, first-person narratives. The most recurring of these first person narratives is, unexpectedly, by a hulking Italian soldier who is in fact a repressed homosexual, and who, indeed, appears in chapters titled (all the chapters have titles) ‘L’Omosessuale’. Like the third-person chapters and to make it pretty simple and clear, the protagonist of these first-person chapters tends to be introduced in the first sentence:

I, Carlo Piero Guercio, write these words with the intention that they should be found after my death… (p.22)

This touchingly sweet, gentle giant and his inexpressible homosexual yearnings turn out to be a major thread running through the whole narrative.

At the furthest extreme of this spectrum is the sole chapter in which we hear the non-stop speech of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, chapter 2 given as a Joycean monologue. It’s only seven and a half pages long but it is priceless, wonderfully conveying Il Duce’s stream-of-consciousness thinking, his vanity, his posing, combined with his madcap military schemes and would-be clever-clever ruses. He comes over as a dangerous idiot but is brilliantly conveyed and satirised. Just this one chapter could be presented as a hilarious short story or short prose text standing by itself.

Captain Antonio Corelli

So that’s a summary of all the elements of the text, namely ten or so characters on the island of Cephallonia, the Greek Prime Minister, the Italian dictator, an Italian soldier, plus a few other characters, so what happens?

What happens is the novel covers the true historical events leading up to and then during the Greco–Italian War of 28 October 1940 to 23 April 1941; which was followed by the German invasion and conquest of Greece in the summer of 1941, and the occupation of Greek territories by German and Italian forces. We follow our cadre of characters through several years of occupation up till armistice made between the Italian government and the Allies in September 1943, at which point the German army was ordered to regard their erstwhile allies, the Italians, as enemies, with the result that they rounded them up and massacred them.

These are the high-level historical events which provide the backdrop to developments among the characters we’ve slowly got to know on the island of Cephallonia. So who is Captain Corelli?

Well, from a technical point of view it’s interesting that Corelli only turns up on page 157 i.e. a little over a third of the way through the text. Corelli is a handsome, charming, charismatic Italian officer who inspires love and affection in his men and finds himself billeted on Dr Iannis and Pelagia with, as they say, comic and romantic consequences. Oh and he plays the mandolin which he takes everywhere with him (and which he calls ‘Antonia’) because he is a music lover and also to charm the ladies.

Detailed plot summary by chapter

1. Dr Iannis Commences his History and is Frustrated

Introduces us to humane and humorous Dr Iannis as he removes the dry pea lodged in the ear of his friend Stamatis then returns home to carry on composing his ‘New History of Cephallonia’, an ongoing project which allows de Bernières to fill in the backstory of Greek and Cephallonian history. And introduces his humorous, chiding daughter, Pelagia, 17 years old (p.19).

2. The Duce

Rome. The hilarious chapter given as the free-associating, idiotic ranting of Mussolini to secretaries and underlings and introduces his illogical reasons for declaring war on Greece – i.e. it will make Italy look strong, put him up in the same league as Hitler, the war will only last a few weeks etc.

3. The Strongman

Introduces us, first, to Alekos, a goatherd who lives high up on Mount Aenos and who will, from time to time, cast a cold, detached, uninvolved eye on events down n the plains. But the chapter is titled after Megalo Velisarios, the famous strongman. We also meet the cheeky little girl, Lemoni, who’s constantly getting into mischief. And fat waddling Father Arsenios who waddles into the square as Velisarios is entertaining the crowds and who Velisarios picks up and places on a wall to great cheers and Arsenios’s mortification. Velisarios fires the ancient (1739) Turkish culverin and accidentally hits Mandras the fisherman coming round the corner (the wound is caused by an old donkey nail). So Velisarios carries the wounded boy to Dr Iannis’s house where he first meets Pelagia.

4. L’Omosessuale (1)

First person account by the Italian Carlo Piero Guercio, a sensitive man tortured by his homosexuality:

I am exploding with the fire of love and there is no one to accept it or nourish it. (p.23)

He joins the Italian Army to be among men and escape conventional expectations. In a novel full of good things this sensitive portrayal of a vexed homosexual is one of the best.

5. The Man who Said ‘No’

Third person account of authoritarian Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas (1871 to 1941) in which he surveys the course of political events which brought him to power, his motivation for enforcing an authoritarian form of rule, to befriend Hitler and Mussolini and his dawning realisation that they are about to betray him and invade his country (‘Why had his international brothers betrayed him?’ p.29). Interspersed with rueful regrets about his wayward daughter, Lulu. All building up to his decision to say NO to Mussolini’s bullying ultimatum.

6. L’Omosessuale (2)

Guercio describes being a member of the Italian Julia Division sent to fight in Albania.

No civilian can comprehend the joy of being a soldier. (p.31)

The joy of being among young, beautiful, virile comrades. Unfortunately, he learns from bitter experience that the Italian chain of command is an inept joke, led by the idiot Mussolini, with the result that there isn’t enough support, organisation, arms, equipment or winter uniforms. He falls in love with a young married corporal from Genoa named Francesco (p.34) but becomes disgusted by the squalid lies and deceptions imposed on the Army and the public to justify Italy’s invasion of Albania.

The Italian invasion of Albania was a brief military campaign which was launched by the Kingdom of Italy against the Albanian Kingdom April 7 to 12, 1939. The conflict was a result of the imperialistic policies of the Italian prime minister and dictator Benito Mussolini. Albania was rapidly overrun, its ruler King Zog I went into exile in neighbouring Greece, and the country was made a part of the Italian Empire as a protectorate in personal union with the Italian Crown. (Wikipedia)

7. Extreme Remedies

Father Arsenios is at the back of the church and feeling sorry for himself for being a fat, useless, vice-ridden priests when he realises villagers are coming to leave gifts in the main body of the church, to apologise for the indignity he suffered when the strongman, Velarios, picked him up and place him atop a wall to general laughter. There follows a comic scene where Arsenios, dying for a pee, can’t bring himself to exit through the church and be seen by everybody (there is no toilet in the church) so he employs the desperate remedy of drinking one of the bottles of wine brought for him so as to have a receptacle to pee in. He does this several times with the result that he is completely plasters and lying in a pool of his own piss by the time that Velisarios comes to apologise in person.

Velisarios carries the unconscious priest to the house of Dr Iannis who forces him to drink vast amounts of water. Then Iannis is visited by Stamatis, whose ear he unblocked and now comes comically complaining that for the first time in decades he can hear his wife’s endless nagging and asks if the doctor can put the pea back in his ear.

8. A Funny Kind of Cat

Dr Iannis departs for the kapheneion to meet his friends Stamatis and Kokolios the communist for their daily argument. But the little girl Lemoni begs him to come and see the funny kind of cat she’s found deep in a labyrinth of brambles. Undignifiedly crawling on his hands and knees the doctor discovers it is a pine marten caught on wire and carefully detaches it.

Dr Iannis takes it back to his house to treat where, incidentally, Mandras is still laid up with his ‘wound’ and still flirting like mad with Pelagia, who he has just kissed. Iannis contemplates simply snapping the marten’s neck but then is overcome by humane sympathy and instructs his daughter to being straw and dead mice. He’s going to nurse it back to health.

9. August 15, 1940

Dr Iannis returns to the kapheneion encountering Lemoni on the way who is taunting a dog with a stick. She tells him she has decided to call ‘the strange kind of cat’ Psipsina (apparently this is a common Greek word meaning something like ‘puss’, p.374). Back drinking coffee with his mates a good hearty political argument swiftly ensures, with the communist Kokolios telling everyone they’ll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes etc. In casual conversation Iannis delivers what might be the central message of the entire novel:

‘We should care for each other more than we care for ideas, or else we will end up killing each other.’ (p.52)

As usual, the menfolk gather round an old radio set to listen to the BBC news and learn the latest (Churchill has allied with the free French, there’s been another Albanian revolt against Italian occupation).

Pelagia runs in to inform him that Mandras was fooling about in the olive tree in their yard and fell out of it and landed on his bottom on a terracotta pot. His buttocks are packed with shards and bleeding. Iannis has to rush home and spend hours with Mandras lying with his pants down on the kitchen table, while he carefully extracts every fragment (later commenting that Mandras has: ‘the arse of a classical statue, a very fine arse,’ p.69).

When Iannis returns to the kapheneion for the third time it is to find an extraordinary change in atmosphere. Martial music is playing on the radio, both his friends are weeping and the priest is striding up and down declaiming from the Old Testament. They’ve just heard that the Italians have sunk a Greek battleship, the Elli while it was anchored in the harbour at Tinos, participating in the celebrations of the Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos (sinking of the cruiser Elli). Everyone in the café knows this has brought the possibility of war closer.

10. L’Omosessuale (3)

Guercio and Francesco are chosen for a mission by their officer Colonel Rivolta (p.58). They are to dress in Greek uniform and make an attack on an outpost of what they are told are Greeks masquerading as Italians. When they dress up and sneak up to this border post they realise a) the guns they’ve been given don’t work and b) the Italians really are Italians and c) there are many more of them than they were told and they are expecting them. In other words they’ve been conned into doing one of those ‘border incidents’ which cynical leaders throughout the twentieth century used to justify wars.

In the event they arrive early (at midnight not 2am) discover a big drum of kerosene under the tower and set it alight, causing panic in the tower at which point they open fire with a machine gun massacring the men in the tower. It’s only when one of them falls out of the tower and they recognise him as a fellow Italian that the full depth of the deception dawns on them.

11. Pelagia and Mandras

These two beautiful young people fall in love. The chapter contains a slight formal innovation which is that it contains alternating sections describing first Pelagia and then Mandras’s points of view as they: have a poo in the outhouse and worry about menstruating (Pelagia); load nets onto a boat (Mandras); draw water from a well (Pelagia); sings to his tame dolphins (Mandras). Mandras is given a little speech typifying the motivation of so many men to go to war, to prove themselves a man etc.

I know I will never be a man until I’ve done something important, something great, something I can live with, something to be esteemed. That’s why I hope there’s going to be a war. I don’t want bloodshed and glory, I want something to get to grips with. No man is a man until he’s been a soldier. (p.68)

It’s also tied up with marriage. He envisions going down on one knee and proposing to Pelagia. Pelagia thinks adoringly of the way Mandras now arrives every late afternoon with a gift of fish which she cooks and he sits at the table being polite to her father and rubbing her shin with his foot.

12. All the Saint’s Miracles

An extended and wonderful description of the feast of the local saint, St Gerasimos, with stories of his wonderful miracles. the chapter focuses in on inmates from the local lunatic asylum who have been brought to join the crowds watching the procession of the saint’s mummified body, notably Socrates and Mina. Mandras gets drunk and proposes to Pelagia (p.80) before drinking more and passing out. The day continues on into the evening which is a time of wild partying, music and celebration.

13. Delirium

Mandras doesn’t come for two days and Pelagia is reduced to agonies of worry. Lots of stuff about what traditional marriage meant for a Greek woman back then i.e. consigned to a life of endless labour and childbearing but arguably better than the fates of spinsters and widows.

This is why one had to have sons; it was the only insurance against an indigent and terrifying old age. (p.86)

As in the description of the delusions of the madwoman Mina, so throughout his characterisation of Pelagia, de Bernières displays a supernatural level of insight and understanding. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is not only deeply pleasurable to read but deeply instructive, too.

On a typically warm and beautiful evening the doctor and his daughter sit outside looking at the stars, thinking about the future. She is fantasising about married life with Mandras until her father gives her a small pistol, warning that war is coming and in war bad things happen to women i.e. rape. She will use this gun only once, and with deep irony, in chapter 63.

The next day is the day when Pelagia goes down to the seashore and stumbles across Mandras, naked, setting his nets then going frolicking with his tame dolphins and is dazzled by the perfection of his young body (p.89).

14. Grazzi

Despite the picture postcard charm of all these village scenes, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a historical novel and contains descriptions of, and even soliloquies by, real historical figures. After the chapters devoted to Mussolini and Metaxas we have this one, told in the first-person by Emanuele Grazzi, Italian ambassador to Greece during World War II, who was given the shameful job of delivering Benito Mussolini’s ultimatum to Greek prime minister Ioannis Metaxas on 28 October 1940. Grazzi’s account gives a vivid sense of the incompetence, bad faith and lies of the Italian government which told neither its Army Chief of Staff nor ambassador that they were about to go to war with Greece, operating on Mussolini’s idea of taking everyone by surprise – which just ended up covering everyone in shameful dishonour.

15. L’Omosessuale (4)

Guercio and Francesco keep quiet about the farce they were involved in and are sent to train Albanian guerrillas who they discover to be unreliable lying thieving murderers (p.98). Guercio then goes on to give a vivid description of the chaos and mismanagement of the Italian invasion from Albania into northern Greece, the lack of ammunition, transport, air cover, the right equipment or uniforms for the freezing mountain tops, pages 99 to 104.

Incidentally, in among the memoirs he describes himself as he currently is i.e. sunning himself on the peaceful island of Caphallonia and, on page 100, makes the first reference n the novel to Captain Corelli:

a man who, full of mirth, his mind whirling with mandolins, could not be more different from the vanished and beloved Francesco, but whom I love as much.

16. Letters to Mandras at the Front

Italy and Greece are now at war. These are detailed, worried missives from Pelagia, increasingly begging for some kind of response. What she doesn’t know is that Mandras can’t write (p.130). She describes the inhabitants of their village rallying round to support the war effort and how everyone thinks Metaxas is a hero for standing up to the bully Duce. She describes an outbreak of fortune telling because Mandra isn’t the only son who’s been conscripted and sent to the front – hundreds of families have sent their main earners and supports to the war. She describes the beating up of some unfortunate Italians who live among them:

Why are people such animals? (p.107)

Because dear 17-year-old Pelagia, people are in fact animals, just another species of animals among the 1.2 million species so far identified by scientists. Everything your teachers and priests and leaders told you about humans not being part of the natural world, about our special soul given us by a loving God, was lies which left you completely unprepared for the world as it is and human beings as they are, and so asking such soppy, pointless questions.

Food is becoming short so Christmas Day 1940 wasn’t its usual festive celebration. On Christmas Day the Italians bombed Corfu, the bastards. de Bernières only gives us a selection three (fairly long) letters but the last one states that she has written one hundred letters to Mandras and is becoming frustrated and disillusioned at his lack of reply.

17. L’Omosessuale (5)

Continuation of Guercio’s account of the Greco-Italian War, piling detail on detail of Italy’s mind-boggling incompetence and the bravery, ferocity and effectiveness of the Greek counter-attack which drives the Italians right back to their starting points and then further back.

18. The Continuing Literary Travails of Dr Iannis

Pelagia sinks into a deep depression from which the doctor seeks to rescue her by various ruses like rearranging utensils or stealing stuff from the kitchen, anything to provoke anger and get her out of her mood. War is producing a shortage of medical supplies. He soldiers on with his history of Cephallonia, describing the brutality of the Balkans, crossroads between East and West, and the indolent pederasty of Turkish rulers.

19. L’Omosessuale (6)

Another little formal experiment or piece of playfulness. De Bernières gives a description of Francesco’s miserable death (half his face blown off by a mortar) in the form of an interview Guercio has with his beloved’s mother whereby Guercio tells her heroic patriotic lies, and each of his lies is offset by a long passage in parentheses describing what really happened, in those freezing, lice-infected trenches.

It ends by explaining how the Italians had, to all intents and purposes, lost to the Greeks when the Germans intervened, invading from Bulgaria in the East and opening up a second front which the Greeks couldn’t defend, especially since the Germans sent in 1,100 Panzer tanks against the Greeks 200 light tanks (many taken from the useless Italians).

20. The Wild Man of the Ice

One day Pelagia returns from the well to discover a wreck of man, covered in hair and beard, dressed in animal skins with red eyes and sunburned skin, infested with lice, sitting at her table. She is terrified and it takes several pages of scared enquiry before she eventually realises it’s Mandras back from the front in terrible state, having dodged the Germans and walked hundreds of miles.

21. Pelagia’s First Patient

Shrewdly, Pelagia co-opts Mandras’s mother, Drosoula, herself one of the million Greeks who were ethnically cleansed i.e. deported from their ancestral homes in Turkey after the First Word War. Together they strip and set about healing this broken skinny wreck of a man. Long gone is his god-like arse. De Bernières gives a vivid and extensive catalogue of Mandras’s appalling symptoms (worms, parasites, ticks, fleas, ezcema, gangrene) and shows Pelagia treating them all efficiently. Drosoula is impressed.

‘Koritsimou,’ said the gigantic creature, ‘you are astonishing. You are the first woman I have ever known who knows anything. Give me a hug.’ (p.138)

Dr Iannis had been up in the mountains checking Alekos and his herd of goats (who are always in perfect health). Now, upon his return, he is astonished to discover a huge ugly woman sleeping with Pelagia in his bed, and an emaciated malnourished man sleeping in Pelagia’s. When he listens to the detail of her treatment he is extravagantly proud of his daughter.

22. Mandras behind the Veil

A monologue from Mandras who resents how he is ignored in the Iannis house and realises Pelagia is horrified by him. This is a bitter pill since it was only a hallucinatory determination to get back to Cephallonia and see her again which kept him going after his entire unit was wiped out and he set off on the huge treks through ice and snow and mountains and forests and seas to reach her.

His account includes the magnificently mad episode of him coming across a stone hovel and lying down to sleep, only to be woken by an incredibly ugly old crone with only one eye. She feeds him and he starts to recover a bit but on the third night has a sex dream in which he imagines he’s sleeping with Pelagia but wakes up to discover it is the withered old hag writhing under him.

‘Witch, witch,’ I cried, kicking her and she sat up and shielded herself, her dugs falling to her waist and her body seeping with sores to equal mine. She waved her arms and twittered like a bird in the jaws of a cat, and it was at that point that I recognised the madness in us both and in the very manufacture of the world. I threw back my head and laughed. I had lost my virginity to an antique, loveless, solitary crone, and it was all just one small part of the way in which God had turned His face away and consigned us all to the malice and caprices of the dark. (p.144)

I thought this was inspired in its mocking lunacy, and captured the insanity of the war, and of human existence, in one magnificently grotesque image.

I laid back down next to her and we slept together like that until morning. I had realised that we humans are blameless.

Exactly. If there is a God and he claims to love the human race, he’s got a funny way of showing it. Mandras tells us that the disillusionment of his reception by Pelagia has been absolute. Now he just wants to return to the front to fight.

23. April 30, 1941

On 6 April 1941, the German Army, supported by Hungarian and Bulgarian forces, attacked Yugoslavia and Greece. Hitler launched the assault in order to overthrow the recently established pro-Allied government in Yugoslavia and to support the stalling Italian invasion of Greece. By 30 April the Germans had taken Athens and the Greek king and government had fled to Crete.

There is a hiatus on the island as people wait to see what will happen. They prepare for death or rape. The priest curses God for letting this happen. The doctor starts reading up in his ancient medical textbook, ‘The Complete and Concise Home Doctor’, about wounds.

Mandras is mentally disturbed. Back staying with his mother, he withdraws into himself, except for sudden moments of lucid normality, such as when he joins the celebrations on National Day, 31 March, and Easter on 19 April. Other times he rants and raves. he tells the priest his legs are made of glass. He tries to amputate on with a spoon. He shouts at Pelagia. In one scene he makes her read every one of the 100 plus letters she sent him, humiliating her by pointing out how they got slowly shorter and shorter until in the final ones she asked him to call off the betrothal. Pelagia realises with anguish that she now hates Mandras.

At that moment the Italian invasion starts. Planes fly overhead and landing craft beach and disembark thousands of Italian troops. The islanders are surprised at how diffident and polite they are. At the head of the 33rd Regiment of Artillery of the Acqui Division marches Captain Antonio Corelli, the first time we’ve seen him, so to speak, page 157. He confirms everyone’s stereotypes of Italian men by spotting Pelagia and instructing his men to turn eyes right in order to appreciate the ‘bella bambina’. One soldier does a goose-stepping impersonation of Hitler. Another walks like Charlie Chaplin. Dr Iannis tells Pelagia not to laugh, they are the enemy.

24. A Most Ungracious Surrender

Back to the first person narrative of Carlo Piero Guercio who, for some reason, has stopped being referred to as l’omosesualle. He explains how he was posted to the 33rd regiment in May and how Corelli became a kind of saint to him (p.159). Origin of La Scala club, a group of Italian soldiers who all went to the latrine together and covered up their lavatorial sounds by singing opera (p.160). He receives typically whimsical instructions from the head of La Scala, Corelli, for example rule 4 is that all aficionados of Wagner to be shot out of hand.

He tells the story of the ungracious surrender, namely that the Italian CO and officers marched to the Cephallonia town hall and sent in messages demanding a surrender to which the reply was ‘fuck off’. The Greek authorities said they had defeated the Italian army and refused to surrender except to a German officer so one had to be flown in specially from Corfu.

25. Resistance

The islanders’ response to occupation e.g. graffiti, insubordination and jokes (‘Why do Italians wear moustaches? To be reminded of their mothers.’) A quartermaster arrives to tell Iannis and Pelagia an officer is going to be billeted on them. Iannis gruffly agrees so long as the quartermaster can get him medical supplies. The officer turns out to be Corelli who is driven up by Bombardier Guercio. He is charming and humorous from the start but it is a joy to watch him being steadily put in his place by the doctor and Pelagia who confuse and embarrass him, humiliation doubled when the doctor diagnoses him as having hemorrhoids and then assigns him Pelagia’s bedroom (Pelagia will sleep on the kitchen floor) which destroys Corelli’s sense of himself as a gallant gentleman.

Corelli shyly reveals to them that he plays the mandolin. He joined the army when there was no war and it was a way to get paid for lazing around. That night there’s a scream and he comes running from the bedroom because the pine marten routinely sleeps on Pelagia’s bed and bit him.

26. Sharp Edges

The truck Guercio’s driving to collect Corelli breaks down. Walking, Guercio encounters Velisario, two hulking giants of men who cannot communicate but offer each other cigarettes, nod before going their ways. Velisario comes across the broken down truck, gets a friend, steals the wheels and pours petrol in the radiator.

Corelli is his usual charming self and chats merrily with the little girl Lemoni. When Pelagia breaks them up he asks why and it’s Pelagia’s turn to feel unworthy. These little domestic events and their psychological consequences are so wonderfully done, so real and vivid.

Mandras surprises her by appearing silently. Their every meeting is awkward now. He makes a joke which offends her. She gives him the waistcoat she sewed for him but his first comment is that the pattern is asymmetrical (p.177).

Mandras announces he is leaving now to return to the fight. The army is over but there are partisans in the mountains. Pelagia tells him that every time he is about to do something bad, he is to stop, think of her, and not do it. They hug like brother and sister. Their love is over. Then he walks away.

That evening Corelli finds the hand-made waistcoat on the back of a chair, marvels at its craftsmanship and says he will pay Pelagia anything for it but she insists it’s not for sale.

27. A Discourse on Mandolins and a Concert

Next morning Corelli wakens Pelagia by practicing his mandolin in his/her bedroom. She had been dreaming about the afternoon before when Corelli had arrived on a horse and managed to make it caracole. Corelli explains the structure of a mandolin, how to play it and why he switched to it from the violin which he was useless at. His playing enchants her (p.186). That evening Corelli agrees to perform for the doctor but irritates him by merely tapping the instrument till Iannis loses his temper and makes an outburst. Offended, Corelli explains that he’s playing Hummel’s concerto for mandolin and was tapping out the first 45 bars before the mandolin enters. And now he’s made him lose his place!

28. Liberating the Masses (1)

Describes Mandras’s career as an andarte i.e. partisan. By chance he falls in with the ELAS, the communist group. The resistance is being led by British officers parachuted in to organise and direct assaults, in this case a Brigadier Myers (p.190) who warns his superiors that a lot of their arms are going to communists and storing up trouble for the future (i.e. the post-war civil war).

Anyway, by chance Mandras falls in with a troop of ELAS led by pitiless martinet Hector, wearing his trademark red fez. He is broken in by being led to a village where they drag out a harmless old man, make him kneel then brutally beat his back with a knout before shooting him in the head. His crime? Not reporting a British parachute drop of supplies to ELAS, pilfering a bottle of scotch from it and being found unconscious under the parachute.

Hector makes it quite clear they are going to liberate the people by killing a lot of traitors, royalists, bourgeoisie, lackeys, saboteurs and so on. He is fluent in the death speak of Stalinism. It becomes just as clear that de Bernières loathes and despises the communists.

29. Etiquette

Joke chapter in which Corelli, embarrassed by his inability to communicate with the locals asks for basic phrases from the doctor who waggishly tells him phrases to formally greet all the Greeks he meets which, in reality, mean ‘Go fuck yourself’ and ‘Son of a whore’ (p.196).

30. The Good Nazi (1)

Historical background to the two towns of Argostoli and Lixouri, with explanation that the Italians garrisoned the former and the Germans the latter. Hitler didn’t trust the Italians an inch and sent to Cephallonia 3,000 Germans of the 996th Regiment under Colonel Barge, who were to carry out one of the war’s worst crimes.

One of these is young Leutnant Günter Weber, humourless, obedient, only free when he takes his uniform off at the beach. He is there when the Italians roll up in lorries along with a load of whores shipped there from Libya and much preferring relaxed Greece. They merrily strip off and splash about in the sea to the horror of conservative peasants. Weber is 22, a virgin and has never seen a naked woman before.

Correli introduces himself and when he asks whether Weber is any relation to the German Romantic composer Weber doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He is the son of a pastor in the Tyrol and knows nothing about culture. In the event, they get him drunk, the whores flirt with him, they throw him in the sea, and manage to break down his prim reserves. He becomes an honorary member of the La Scala club.

31. A Problem with Eyes

Two months go by and Pelagia does everything she can to discomfit the captain, almost always spilling food on his uniform when she serves it. She prepares a great speech of outrage at being occupied but somehow never finds the moment to deliver it. He leaves his pistol lying around and then catches her red-handed dunking it in a bowl of water to as to render it inoperative.

Infuriated by his unflappable good humour and manners Pelagia slaps him then throws unripe olives from the tree at him. More months go by and he becomes a fixture. She finds herself looking forward to his morning greeting and then becoming a little concerned if he’s later than usual coming back from the barracks.

He spends his time doing vast amounts of paperwork, or writing music and plucking the mandolin and sometimes watching her crochet. They begin to realise they’re looking at each other and eventually having a childish staring competition which Corelli wins with much laughter. Dr Iannis realises his daughter is falling in love with the enemy occupier.

32. Liberating the Masses (2)

These chapters are about the cruel and heartless communist Hector and his indoctrination of the uneducated lost soul, Mandras. Mandras learns to intimidate the peasants to steal from them, which is fine because Hector dismisses them all as Royalists, petit-bourgeois sympathisers, republicans etc.

33. A Problem with Hands

One dark night the doctor, Pelagia and Corelli are all in the living room, the latter composing music on sheet music paper. Pelagia walks over to look and places her hand on his shoulder as if it’s the most natural thing in the world until she realises what she’s doing and is then crippled by self consciousness. Luckily at that moment Psipsina scratches at the door and Pelagia lets her in from the storm outside and the marten promptly sits on Corelli’s lap make it water-soaked. Pelagia laughs and scoops the marten off his lap then starts to wipe it down, but when Corelli looks into her face she realises the sexual overtones of what she’s doing and straightens up with scorn.

This sets him fantasising, for some reason remembering that Vivaldi taught at a convent full of young women and suddenly Corelli is imagining loads of nubile girls pressing up against him and kissing and caressing him. He now has a prominent erection sticking up through his trousers and when Pelagia calls him to help her with her wind her wool he can’t stand up without revealing it so he makes a big performance of pretending to be a dog and going across to her on all fours which, of course, makes her smile, and they flirt and banter some more. The doctor sighs.

34. Liberating the Masses (3)

Hector is summoned to the headquarters of Lieutenant-Colonel Myers to be given a bollocking. Nobody had warned Myers that he would be spending 90% of his time trying to stop the Greeks being at one another’s throats (p.217). He finds Hector double dealing, dishonest and barbarous, meaning given to torturing and killing any peasants who don’t give him what he wants. Myers gives details of how Hector and his group torture peasants, gouge out their eyes and slit their throats. He knows Hector and his like don’t pay the peasants with the money the British give them a) because they’re greedy b) because they’re storing it up to fund the coming revolution.

Mind you, de Bernières is happy to take the mickey out of the Brits, who are routinely portrayed as upper class twits: ‘Top hole explosion, Absolutely ripping!’ Bertie Wooster meets the Greek communist partisans.

35. A Pamphlet Distributed on the Island Entitled with the Fascist Slogan ‘Believe, Fight and Obey’

A satirical pamphlet which takes eight pages to rip the piss out of the intellectual pygmy, liar, coward and rapist, Mussolini. At the very end of the book we learn that it was written by Carlo and Dr Iannis (p.424).

36. Education

Back with Hector and the partisans, showing that most of his group are thoroughly disillusioned: all they do is loot peasants and avoid any attacks on Germans, leaving everyone else to fight the war. This chapter is another exercise in style because it consists of a brilliant pastiche of a speech by a communist saturated with the self-serving rhetoric and justification for every kind of iniquity characteristic of communist ideology. Compare and contrast the revolting cowardly criminal communists described in Evelyn Waugh’s war novel Unconditional Surrender.

37. An Episode Concerning Pelagia’s belief That Men do not Know the Difference Between Bravery and a Lack of Common Sense

Carlo and the doctor come across Corelli reading the pamphlet quoted in chapter 35, leaping up and hurriedly tearing it in two. But this leads into debate about who wrote it, whether it was an Italian or a Greek and Pelagia, clever woman that she is, begins to speculate out loud that it might have been written by a Greek who was fluent in Italian, had access to BBC broadcasts, and someone who cold distribute it around the island when…she notices her father and Carlo both shuffling in embarrassment and concern. My God – it’s them! And her burbling nearly gave it away to Corelli. She goes inside to prepare dinner.

38. The Origin of Pelagia’s March

It’s the morning after Corelli returned to the house disgustingly drunk, declared his love for her, fell over and was sick. Now he has a crushing hangover and is crushed with embarrassment at his behaviour while Pelagia pours him cold water and berates him. His excuse is his battery’s football team won last night, but she says Weber has been by to explain that the Italians cheated.

While she stands there berating him, into Corelli’s head comes the theme and rhythm for a march which he will compose on the mandolin and write down, hence ‘Pelagia’s March’.

39. Arsenios

The war is the making of Father Arsenios. He quits his parish and takes to walking the length and breadth of the island preaching against the invader and iniquity and the fast-coming arrival of God’s wrath. He is cared for by nuns and monks at monasteries where he stops and by the peasants who feed the itinerant monk and the Italian soldiers enjoy his regular visits and obvious sincerity even though none of them can understand a word. For two years he tramps the length and breadth of the island, burning off his obese bulk, becoming thin and wiry and brown as teak.

40. A Problem with Lips

Short chapter in which Pelagia is passing out of the house as Corelli comes in and she finds herself absent-mindedly kissing him on the cheek. it’s only a few paces later that she realises what she’s done and then tries to furiously back peddle, claiming she though Corelli was her father, a mistake Corelli mocks by saying yes, they are both old and small. Then he throws himself on his knees and makes a comic opera declaration of love, before kissing her on the forehead and running off before she can slap him.

41. Snails

The three adults, Iannis, Pelagia and Corelli, go snail hunting led to a particularly rich briar patch by the ever-inquisitive girl Lemoni. Here Pelagia manages to scratch herself on a bramble then get her hair caught and Corelli can only unravel it by leaning in very close. He takes advantage to kiss her cheek. Suddenly Pelagia bursts into tears. When he asks why she says she can’t take it any more, any of it. He agrees and suddenly they are locked in their first embrace of long passionate kisses.

42. How like a Woman is to a Mandolin

For the first time we go inside the mind of Corelli in a first-person chapter devoted to his thoughts which are, predictably enough, all fantasies about Pelagia, some sexual about her breasts and so on, but mostly lovely scenarios or fantasy scenes or thinking of her actions in terms of musical chords, different moods reflected by different chords, which build together to make Pelagia’s March which he is writing.

43. The Great Big Spiky Rustball

The adults are in the fiddly process of preparing the snails for cooking when the never-mischievous Lemoni comes to the house to announce that she has discovered a big rusty ball on the beach. Carlo and Corelli both realise from her description that it’s a mine, the floating kind used for attacking ships, which has washed ashore.

This longish chapter describes their attempts to clear the villagers out of the way and blow it up safely. In this Corelli is hampered by an officious engineer who tells him all his preparations are inadequate. Corelli gets Stamatis and Kokolios to dig a trench in the sand just 50 metres away and the engineer mocks this. In the event the entire town turns out to watch, shooed away to the safety of the clifftops, while Corelli’s bombardiers have rigged up a small explosive charge underneath the mine and wires leading to a detonator in his little trench.

When he detonates it, sure enough, it goes off with a much vaster explosion than anyone had expected, sending a vast amount of sand mixed with shards of red hot metal flying high into the sky and then raining down on the locals lying flat along the clifftop. This is actually really dangerous and the busy little engineer is decapitated by a red hot piece of shrapnel while other locals are more or less badly burned by the rain of hot metal stinging like hornets (p.260).

Concerned for Corelli, Pelagia leads the charge down to the beach but it’s Carlo who finds Corelli’s trench obliterated and takes a moment before he sees the captain, who was seized in the blast, thrown into the air, dumped back down and covered with sand. He’s mostly alright but is deaf for two days afterwards and suffers periodic tinnitus for the rest of his life. The doctor is infuriated when a small army of people covered in sand with black eyes and cuts all over, presents itself at his house.

Corelli is nearly put on a charge by the Italian Commanding Officer, General Gandin, of whom more below. But he is bedbound at Iannis’s for days and revels in the attention he gets from Pelagia, Carlo and even Lemoni. Even friend Weber brings his wind-up gramophone round and tries to teach him German popular songs.

But he’s even more infuriated to discover that his house is completely infested with snails, these being the hundreds of snails Corelli and Pelagia and Lemoni brought back from their snail hunt which have escaped from their buckets and had all day to ooze themselves into every nook of the house. Charming comedy.

44. Theft

Kokolios discovers two Italian soldiers trying to steal his chickens. This bear of a man grabs them, beats and kicks them and drags them along to Dr Iannis’s house where he wakes up the household and presents them to Captain Corelli for discipline. Corelli goes inside and returns with his pistol and for a horrible moment Pelagia thinks he is going to shoot Kokolios. Instead he points it at the soldiers and, to their amazement, tells them to get down on their hands and knees and lick Kokolios’s boots. Which they do, after he’s threatened and kicked and pistol-whipped them.

At which point Kokolios realises he is stark naked (apart from his boots), suddenly covers his privates, and goes running off. Comedy. Two days later Pelagia’s beloved goat, who she has been feeding and grooming, her consolation in many an emotional drama, has gone missing. She is furious with Corelli, blaming his soldiers and he can only hang his head.

45. A Time of Innocence

Corelli and Pelagia become lovers in the old-fashioned sense, they ‘walk out’ together, kiss and cuddle but have nothing like sex. There is no contraception and Pelagia has seen too many girls her age either shamed by single motherhood or dying after botched abortions.

Weber gifts the captain an old Wehrmacht motorcycle which had broken down, in exchange for Italian rations. Corelli turns up on it and amazes Pelagia. They proceed to have mad adventures biking all round the island, specially when he takes corners too fast and ends up wildly going down side tracks, or when she leans the wrong way on corners.

This allows them to motor to places where Pelagia won’t be seen or recognised (death in such a conservative culture) and then they find a disused shepherd’s hit which becomes a safe place for them to lie and canoodle for hours (p.269).

All their talk is fantasies about what wonderful lives they’ll lead ‘after the war’.

46. Bunnios

Up on Mount Aenos the isolated goatherd Alekos hears a plane booming overhead and then watches a white circle fall from the sky. In his simplicity he thinks it is an angel but it is, of course, a British officer being parachuted in. This officer whacks his head on a rock and required a) untangling from his parachute and then b) days of careful feeding and care.

This is one of the comedy posh Brits who crop up throughout the story. ‘What ho’ is his only remark before passing out. When, after a few days, he tries to talk to Alekos the latter doesn’t understand a word and we are only later told that this is because this typical product of a British public school is speaking ancient Greek (p.275). De Bernières very amusingly conveys the impression this has on his Greek listeners by translating it into Chaucerian English:

‘Sire, of your gentilesse, by the leve of yow wol I speke in pryvetee of certayn thyng.’ (p.2174)

The angel has a mechanical box which he turns on and emits squeaks and squawls though he hears words like ‘Roger’ and ‘Wilco’ and so on. It is a radio.

After some thought, Aleko decides to take the angel to see Dr Iannis. This takes four days of travelling down the mountain by night and hiding from patrols during the day. At Iannis’s the angel reveals his identity as Lieutenant Bunny Warren, seconded to the Special Operations Executive from the Kings Dragoon Guards (p.276).

After discussion, they get him a native outfit and he makes his way off into town where he ends up by sheer chutzpah staying in a local house which already has four Italian officers billeted on it. He confounds them by trying to communicate in Eton Latin. Bunny takes to trekking all over the island, regularly going to the isolated shack where he’s hidden his radio and reporting back to Cairo details of all enemy troop movements.

In his journeys he comes across Father Arsenios and takes to walking with him, passing as another religious lunatic. One more oddity in a book full of eccentrics.

47. Dr Iannis Counsels his Daughter

We find the doctor once again writing a section of his history. He’s gone back to the ancient Romans’ occupation of Cephallonia. More importantly he can’t get his pipe to draw any more because of the vile apology for tobacco which is all you can get in wartime. He reflects that his history is more or a personal lament than an objective factual account. I’m sympathetic to the notion that History writing is actually impossible. We can never fully know the past for the blindingly obvious reason that none of us even understands the present. Like newspaper columnists all we can do is play with stereotypes and clichés, slightly more advanced stereotypes and clichés it’s true, but simplifications nonetheless. Because the true history of any event is beyond our abilities to fully understand. We always shape and interpret everything to suit our own purposes. History is no exception, the reverse: it’s distortion and simplification writ large.

Anyway, next time Pelagia comes in he asks her to sit down and have a heart to heart. He says he realises she and Corelli are in love. She blushes scarlet. He proceeds to calmly make the case against their love: 1) The captain is a foreigner and an enemy. If people discover she’s having an affair with the handsome enemy she will be universally decried as a traitor, spat at, stoned in the street. Her social life will end. 2) If she thinks of leaving for Italy she will leave behind forever everything which matters to her. 3) Infatuated love is transient, 6 months a year. After that it settles down to be hard work and you either discover you are two trees whose roots have entwined (like Dr Iannis and his wife did) or discover that you are separate beings. He is worried this is what Pelagia will discover when the dust settles. 4) She is still officially affianced to Mandras and nobody knows whether he’s alive or dead. 5) Sex deferred becomes more and more obsessed over, but lust can only really function within marriage, otherwise the risks are enormous of pregnancy, complete social death, the man abandoning her, or dying from an abortion. 6) If she did have a child and become a single mum no man would marry her and she would end up like most in that situation, becoming a prostitute. 7) Sexually transmitted infections for which there were, in 1943, no cures.

48. La Scala

Weber brings evidence of crooked Italian scams to Corelli. Carlo is there and the doctor. It turns into a debate about morality and ‘science’, giving Weber the opportunity to expound at length the Nazi idea of the New Morality, Strength Through Joy, the fascist perversion of Darwinian evolution.

Although this then morphs into Weber bringing in his wind-up gramophone and playing Lili Marlene on it, which Corelli plays along to, the sound wafting out into the warm Greek night and enchanting listeners. (Compare with the descriptions of hearing Lili Marlene over the radio in Fitzroy Maclean’s war memoir Eastern Approaches.)

Pelagia expresses such joy at the machine that Weber promises he’ll leave it with her when he finally leaves and she calls him a sweet boy and kisses him on the cheek which makes him blush. She must be 19 or so by now and he, maybe 24. They’re all kids.

49. The Doctor Advises the Captain

Dr Iannis and Corelli are sitting quietly chatting while Corelli restrings his mandolin. Iannis gives Corelli the male equivalent of the talking to he gave to Pelagia a few days earlier. He is nettled when Corelli gives a blithe picture of their future together and says he loves Pelagia, as if that will solve all problems. Iannis tries to explain why he thinks Italians and Greeks are profoundly different, with a view to explaining why Pelagia can never leave the island and go with Corelli back to Italy. She would die of homesickness (p.291).

50. A Time of Hiatus

The Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943. According to the very opinionated narrator this amounted to a betrayal of the Greeks, their most loyal allies and, fatefully, allowed the Greek communists a year to arm and prepare for their takeover i.e. the civil war, although in some places the people rebelled against the 25% tax they imposed everywhere.

The Italians on Cephallonia follow the progress of the Allies up Italy and talk aloud about armistice or surrender. The Germans in their small garrison fume at their perceived betrayal. Father Arsenios passes by with tattered dirty Bunny. Corelli tells Pelagia his boys think they should disarm the German garrison while it’s still small.

51. Paralysis

This chapter opens with another experiment in form for de Bernières has developments in Italy narrated as if in the style of Homer. De Bernières gives a day by day timeline of the collapse of Mussolini’s government in July 1943 and the secret negotiations of his replacement, Marshal Badoglio, with the Allies. The La Scala choir doesn’t meet any more. Corelli doesn’t come to the house any more, too busy training with his unit. On 8 September comes the announcement over the radio that all aggressive actions by Italian forces against the Allies will cease at once. Church bells are rung all over the island and neighbouring islands.

The Italian officers are confused: should they surrender to the Germans? sign an armistice with them? attack them? Corelli is crystal clear that they must disarm the Germans or they’re ‘fucked’. Italian warships in the harbour slip anchor and head back to Brindisi thus preventing the evacuation of the 5,000 or so troops on the island. Hard to credit such cowardly betrayal.

Corelli asks the doctor how he can contact the resistance or andartes but the doctor doesn’t know and all Corelli’s efforts fail.

52. Developments

Consisting of 10 short sections giving the points of view of people caught up in the general confusion.

  1. First person Carlo can’t believe their orders to surrender to the Germans.
  2. Conversation between Italian CO General Gandin who tells his German counterpart, Barge, that the Italians are voluntarily giving up positions to show their good faith.
  3. First person Corelli gives his mandolin to Pelagia for safekeeping, She reveals they’ve also taken Carlo’s manuscript and Corelli is surprised to learn the big man is a writer.
  4. Leutnant Weber cleans his gun.
  5. General Gandin uselessly confers with his chaplains and shows an irrational fear of attack by Stukas, unaware of the fact that’ from a military point of view they were one of the most ineffective weapons of war ever devised’ (p.304)
  6. Someone comes to Corelli’s barracks to tell them Italian officers in another place have been shot by the Germans, prompting Corelli to demand a vote.
  7. General Gandin wastes the next day in indecision.
  8. Quote of the short order sent directly from Hitler ordering the complete liquidation of all Italian forces on Cephallonia. Since Italy hasn’t declared war on Germany, the Italians are to be treated as franc-tireurs rather than as prisoners of war.
  9. General Gandin’s conference with senior officers, at which he highlights contradictory orders from Rome. Indecision.
  10. The British decoded the German order to liquidate the Italians but did nothing because it would reveal the fact that they’d cracked their codes. De Bernières has quite a lot satirical disgust at the British attitude and abandonment of their allies.

53. First Blood

The fighting breaks out piecemeal as Italian officers, abandoned by their commanders and their allies, take courage. Planes fly overhead dropping bombs. Italians take on the Panzer tanks parked at strategic points in the towns. Instead of demanding a surrender, Gandin calls only for a truce, effectively handing the initiative to the Germans.

54. Carlo’s Farewell

Carlo writes a love letter to Corelli saying he has loved him as much as Corelli loves Pelagia.

55. Victory

How the Germans promised the Italians safe passage from Corfu them machine gunned them in the water i.e. German mass murder. Stukas dive bomb the Italian barracks. Gandin makes the mistake of calling all Italians from outposts into the town where they are easier targets. Whatever it was this is now a war novel. From his mountaintop Aleko sees the flashes and hears the bangs and knows the war has come to his island. Bunny Warren tries to get Cairo to send reinforcements for the Italians but de Bernières gives a characteristically scathing characterisation of top hole British perfidy:

‘Dreadfully sorry, old boy, can’t be done. Chin-chin.’ (p.316)

In their house Iannis consoles Pelagia who is terrified Corelli is dead. Stamatis and Kolokios come to ask the doctor’s absolution for they are taking their rifles and going off to kill Germans. Meanwhile, Corelli wanders through the rubble of Argostoli which has been seriously bombed. He comes across a little girl, dead, buried in the rubble of a house. Refugees are streaming in from villages razed by the Germans, clogging the streets and making it difficult to move artillery. Meanwhile two more battalions of Germans land. The Germans flatten villages all over the island in fierce fights with the Italians who run out of ammunition and blame the British for abandoning them.

After days of fighting an exhausted Corelli motorbikes to the Iannis house, kisses Pelagia, tells this is the last time she’ll see him alive. She begs him to stay and hide in the house but he explains he has to be with his boys and motors off.

56. The Good Nazi (2)

Cut to Weber arguing with his superior officer that he doesn’t want to carry out the direct order to murder the Italian prisoners. He and his CO argue about the legality of it, which all depends on the prisoners’ status as either POWs (with rights) or franc-tireurs, who it is legal to shoot.

In the lorry taking them to their deaths Corelli and his pals sing the humming chorus from Madam Butterfly. Weber is appalled that these men arrive singing and jump down from the trucks instead of being forced at bayonet point. Corelli recognises Weber and waves to him. Weber goes up to him, they share a cigarette, Weber hesitates and apologises, Corelli is gracious and shakes his hand but Carlo is rude and unforgiving, Weber walks away.

The order to fire is given but the Italians aren’t lined up against a wall but standing or sitting or lying around crying so the Germans have to shoot them where they are. De Bernières singles out for his loathing a sadistic Croatian sergeant who takes thuggish pleasure in emptying his machine gun into the Italians bodies.

And now occurs the most famous incident in the novel. For as the firing starts, huge strong gay giant Carlo Piero Guercio steps smartly in front of Corelli, seizing his wrists in his hands, and stands in front of him like a human shield, receiving bullet after bullet in his body, seeing if he can count to 30 and nearly getting there before a bullet smashes his jawbone and he falls backwards onto Corelli crushing him. Then Weber walks dazed through the abattoir of bodies delivering the coup de grace with his pistol, bends down and looks directly into Corelli’s face, their eyes meet as Weber’s pistol hesitates, then he pulls it back, stands up and walks away.

57. Fire

And now there is an almighty coincidence when Velisarios – remember him? the village strongman? – comes across the killing field and recognises the corpse of Carlo and lifts him up, with difficulty propping him against a wall, and recognised the bloodied body underneath him as the captain who’s been billeted with the doctor. He has multiple bullet wounds and is covered in blood, so much so that Velisarios wonders if it would be kinder to finish him off there, but Corelli whispers ‘Iatro, Pelagia’ so Velisarios picks him up and carries him to Dr Iannis’s.

Meanwhile up on Mount Aenos the goatherd Aleko who, as I said at the start watches all these vents from an Olympian height and with Olympian detachment, sees fires spring up all over the island. With their usual thoroughness the Germans are now burning the bodies, thousands and thousands of Italian men who they’ve murdered in cold blood.

Father Arsenios comes across then largest fire, it is now dark and the German soldiers are exhausting themselves bringing in truckload after load of corpses and throwing them into the flames, some not yet dead. It is a scene from hell and Arsenios shouts his Biblical anathema on all concerned, then starts beating the Germans with his walking staff until eventually a German officer draws a pistol and shoots him through the nape of his neck and they chuck his body onto the enormous pyre.

Eventually the Germans leave and the Greeks come to rescue the bodies they can, in order to give them a decent Orthodox burial. General Gandin is executed along with all his staff officers. It was a massacre of up to 8,000 Italians and a massive war crime.

58. Surgery and Obsequy

Velisario brings Corelli to Dr Iannis’s. Neither Pelagia nor the doctor recognise him but they set to work to treat him. The procedures are described in great detail. After cleaning the blood off they see six bullet wounds but when Iannis starts operating he discovers that they are shallow wounds i.e. haven’t gone clean through the body. Velisario explains how he found the captain, hidden under Carlo, and they are awed at Carlo’s self sacrifice. They ask Velisario to go and fetch Carlo’s body which he does, at some effort, and Iannis digs a grave in the back garden where they sew up his shattered jaw then give him a decent burial. Iannis reads an eloquent eulogy as dawn breaks and the birds begin to sing.

59. The Historical Cachette

The cachette is the hole under the floorboards which has been used to hide rebels and recusants for centuries. This is where they hide Corelli if the Germans are active locally. When he wakes he is in terrible pain. Iannis had to break some of his ribs in order to extract the bullets and wired them together with mandolin wire. This will have to be extracted in further operations. Iannis gives an unflinching prognosis of what Corelli can expect and when the latter jokingly asks him to lie to him, the doctor replies:

‘The truth will make us free. We overcome by looking it in the eyes.’ (p.341)

Fine words but meaningless because – whose truth?

Corelli develops a fever, requires careful bathing, the fever breaks after four days and then he begins to eat. The doctor makes him stand up and walk on the spot. The pain is very bad but it looks like he’ll live.

60. The Beginning of Her Sorrows

Pelagia is now in very poor shape. Her skin is stretched tight and translucent. She is stick thin. She has grey hairs. Her gums bleed and she’s is worried teeth will start to fall out. She’s lost 50% of her body fat and her breasts have shrivelled. Now they start to starve and are reduced to hunting for lizards and snakes. She and her knackered lover, Corelli, lie on the bed together for hours and fantasise about the future. He hopes there’s a God because he wants to believe all his boys are in heaven. She says she hates all Germans but he makes the point that a lot of the German army isn’t German: they recruited from Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Croatia, wherever there are thugs and sadists.

(p.345)

They realise that the longer he stays the more likely he’ll be discovered. So with reluctance they ask Stamatis or Kolokios to contact Bunny Warren who, a few days later, comes knocking at the window in the early hours. Provided with gold sovereigns by London, Bunny has for some time been paying local fisherman to smuggle allies out of Cephallonia. Now he arranges for Corelli to be taken by caique to Sicily the next evening.

61. Every Parting is a Foretaste of Death

Corelli and Pelagia’s last day together, full of soppy sentimental fantasies about the future, squabbles about whether Corelli should rejoin the army to carry on fighting Germans, what they will name their children. Almost casually, Dr Iannis tells them he has given Corelli permission to marry his daughter.

That night Bunny comes scratching at the window, gives detailed instructions for how to sneak past the German coast guards, the walk in silence down to the beach, lights flash, a rowing boat comes inshore, Corelli and Pelagia hug, hold and kiss for the last time, then he clambers into the boat and is rowed off into the darkness.

62. Of the German Occupation

After the light-hearted romantic Italians have all gone, shot down in cold blood and incinerated, the Germans prove to be brutal heartless machines, with only one ideology, naked power, and the conviction of their own ineffable superiority. They go into anyone’s house at any hour, beat the inhabitants and steal all their belongings. Both the doctor and Pelagia are beaten and lovely Psipsina is casually beaten to death with the butt of a rifle. Drousoula has cigarettes stubbed out on her breasts for scowling at a German. Four Germans systematically destroy all the medical equipment Dr Iannis has accumulated over four decades. When the Master Race are ordered to withdraw in November 1944, the destroy as many of the houses of Cephallonia as they can.

63. Liberation (the communists)

The Liberation is no liberation because the Nazis are replaced by the brutes of ELAS, the communists, who elect themselves to all positions of power, impose a tax of 25% on everything and start rounding up Fascists and counter-revolutionaries and bourgeois and everyone who poses any kind of threat and sending them to concentration camps. De Bernières really hates them and enumerates their crimes, including stealing food sent to Athens by the Allies for famine relief, destroyed factories, docks and railways the Germans had left intact, created 100,000 refugees, and mutilated anyone who crossed them, castrating and gouging out the eyes of the recalcitrant.

The doctor is dragged away in the middle of the night and sent to a labour camp for the crime of being bourgeois. They beat Pelagia unconscious with a chair. When Kokolios and Stamatis try to protect the doctor all three are arrested and sent to the docks to travel to a camp on the mainland. The communists invite Bunny Warren to a party and shoot him. Chin-chin.

After she’s beaten up Pelagia goes running to Mandras’s mother, Drousoula who takes her to her (shrivelled) bosom and cares for her like a mother. Within a few days she moves into the doctor’s house which becomes a matriarchy.

Return of Mandras

But just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, they do. Mandras arrives at the doctor’s house and he is now a bloated monster, degraded after years of murdering and raping at will with the communist partisans, gross and disfigured, looking like a toad.

He has come back to claim her as his bride (although he is as disconcerted by the change in his appearance as she is by him). Conversation turns to abuse and he angrily gets out the bundle of letters she wrote him all those years ago and repeats the scene of insisting she read them out loud. This escalates into shouting then he’s accusing her of sleeping with an Italian Fascist, everyone’s told him about it, he starts calling her a whore and when she makes a move to leave, smacks her round the face and when she falls to the floor kicks her in the back, lifts her by the wrists onto the bed and starts to rip off her clothes, as he’s done to so many women over the past three years. (De Bernières gives a horribly convincing psychological insight into the raging joy of rape and then the bitter aftermath, p.366).

Mandras beats her again and again and again till her face is a bloody swollen pulp then hoiks up her skirts but this causes the little derringer pistol her father gave her all those years ago to fall out of the pocket and beside her head. She grabs it and fires, shattering Mandras’s collarbone. He staggers back and at just that moment Drosoula returns, entering the bedroom to encounter this scene.

She rushes over to Pelagia who manages to say through her bloody mouth that Mandras tried to rape her. Outraged, Drosoula produces her own pistol and points it at her son. She formally disowns him, calls him Fascist, Fascist rapist, curses him with traditional curses: may his heart burst in his chest, may he die alone, he is no longer her son, she has no son.

Stumbling outside, Mandras sees the old olive tree, the one he used to fool around in, the one he fell out of onto the pot, the focus of so much love and laughter. Now the whole scene is ashes and emptiness. It’s all been for nothing, all his fighting and suffering and mastering the discourse of revolution, all for nothing. He stumbles along tracks down to the seashore where once he frolicked like a young god, strips off and wades into the sea.

Some time later his body is washed ashore, being nudged and nuzzled by his three tame dolphins. This, the immeasurable degradation of Mandras, more than the killing of Carlo and maiming of Corelli, made me feel really sick and distraught. The charming youth with the arse of a god and a permanent smile had been reduced to a fat, exploiting, bully rapist, symbol of a world degraded to bestial levels.

64. Antonia (the baby)

Someone leaves a newborn baby in a bundle on the step of the house. Drosoula and Pelagia take it in and discover it is a baby girl, to join the matriarchy. Pelagia names it Antonia after Corelli’s name for his mandolin. After so much loss it becomes the focus of their hopes and efforts.

Iannis returns

One of de Bernières’ aims is to flay the communists in the fiercest way possible for their barbaric behaviour. He makes Iannis the vehicle for this, for he has Dr Iannis return, after three long years in communist camps on the mainland, a complete wreck, a broken man. He can’t speak, can barely shuffle, his hands shake, broken by the forced marches without food or water, watching villagers along the way who are slow to feed the people’s army having their eyes gouged out, being castrated or raped, the mouths slit wide. He is haunted by the memory of seeing his two oldest friends, Stamatis and Kolokios, incapable of staggering further, sitting by the road as the column staggered onwards, waiting to be shot as ‘stragglers’. In many ways de Bernières paints the communists as worse than the Nazis.

All the more impressive, then, that he moves back in with the matriarchal household and helps Pelagia who is now the main doctor, healing the sick of the village, despite the deep sense of futility burned into his core (p.371).

She tries to get him interested in his old project, the history of Cephallonia, but the gently whimsical approach to history has been burned out of him. I was recently thinking about Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ towards the end of which Marlowe discovers that the deranged envoy of ‘civilisation’, Mr Kurtz, has scrawled words of nihilistic despair across the bottom of a missionary pamphlet, ‘Exterminate all the brutes’. In much the same spirit, Pelagia discovers that her father has scrawled across the bottom of the last page of his manuscript:

‘In the past we had the barbarians. Now we have only ourselves to blame.’ (p.372)

L’omosessuale

Pelagia finally reads the stash of writings by l’omosessuale, Carlo Piero Guercio, and marvels at the secret sensitivity behind the man’s giant strength, marvels at the depths of his love, for Francesco and Corelli. Thus the strength and virtue and endurance of gay love is one of the book’s central themes.

The house becomes a matriarchy, run by Pelagia and Drosoula, who raise little Antonia as a free spirit. The conservative neighbours call them witches, exacerbated by the obvious emasculation of the once-proud doctor, throw stones or hiss at them in the street, tell their children to avoid them. (This reminds me very much of the way the villagers treat the Englishwoman at the centre of John Buchan’s 1926 melodrama, The Dancing Floor.)

In 1950 they can’t scrape together enough to bribe an official who has discovered that neither Iannis nor Pelagia has a medical degree and so bans them from working. It looks as if they’re going to starve until Fate steps in in the shape of a Canadian poet, one of the millions of bourgeois intellectuals who, in the postwar boom, were seeking out the ‘authenticity’ of ‘primitive’ life among workers and sailors. To their astonishment he is prepared to pay an outrageous rent for the old house by the quay which Drosoula had abandoned to move in with Pelagia, and their finances bounce back to health.

In this figure de Bernières gently satirises the existentialist chic of the post-war years, humorously saying that the poet found himself living a happy and contented life and unable to write the angst-ridden and depressing verse which had made him famous and so he eventually packed up and went back to Montreal, via Paris:

where freedom was in the process of being recognised as a major source of Angst. (p.374)

I think he underestimates the extent to which existentialist thought, although well-established before the war, was a) coloured by the wartime years and b) was a kind of traumatic response to the war, and especially to the occupation. But it was also a fashionable fad, as well.

Almost inevitably the household acquires a cat. Women and cats. We learn for the first time that psipsina is, apparently, Greek for ‘puss’. They had started calling Antonia psipsina as a nickname and there is some of the old light-hearted whimsy in the comic confusion created by calling out psipsina and both the cat and the child misinterpreting it.

The revenant

In 1946 occurs the first of strange phenomena. One day, outside, nursing the baby, she looks up and sees a man dressed in black standing hesitating at exactly the spot where Velisarios hit Mandras with the canon. She is convinced it is her beloved Corelli, puts down the baby and runs down the street but when she turns the corner the figure has vanished, despite her anguished calls. Later a single red rose appears on Carlo’s grave. Is it Corelli’s ghost? Next year, at about the same time, she sees the figure again and another red rose appears. As the years of her spinsterhood progress, Pelagia is comforted by the love from beyond the grave.

65. 1953 (earthquake)

Pelagia stops thinking of herself as Greek. The barbarity of the civil war destroyed any belief that Greek culture was special or superior. Increasingly she thinks of herself as Italian and buys a radio cheap because its tuner is broken and it can only reach Italian radio stations. She sings Italian songs and raises Antonia to speak Italian.

Wars

Despite the tourist whimsy of many passages, this is fundamentally a book about war and wars. In one sentence de Bernières positions the events of this chapter after the Greek Civil War (March 1946 to August 1949), after the end of the Korean War (June 1950 to July 1953) and just as the French were drawing near the disastrous climax of the First Indochina War (December 1946 to July 1954). The Second World War may have ended but it was still a world in flames.

Earthquake

This chapter is a fantastically vivid and almost magical realist depiction of the 1953 Ionian earthquake as experienced by our main characters i.e. weird electrical phenomena, followed by a series of shocks, then the Big One, as they desperately try to escape from the collapsing house.

The most destructive [of the shocks] was the August 12 earthquake. The event measured 6.8 on the moment magnitude scale, raised the whole island of Kefalonia by 60 cm (24 in), and caused widespread damage throughout the islands of Kefalonia and Zakynthos … Between 445 and 800 people were killed. (Wikipedia)

The practical upshot is 1) the doctor’s old house is reduced to ruins 2) the doctor is crushed to death, the peg for another of the book’s countless ironies:

[The ruined house] also contained the disillusioned soul and tired body of the doctor, who had planned his dying words for years, and left them all unsaid. (p.383)

66. Rescue

De Bernière’s attitude to his homeland, Britain:

In those days Great Britain was less wealthy than it is now, but it was also less complacent, and considerably less useless. (p.383)

but remember this was published in 1994 and so written during the chaos at the end of the Thatcher regime, marked by the poll tax riots, and then the Conservative Party’s typically squalid and shambolic sacking of the greatest leader it’s ever had, in November 1990 and hurried replacement by the sad and ludicrous figure of John Major, who depressed all progressive-thinking people by winning the 1992 general election by a landslide. So, yes, from the perspective of 1994, Britain was indeed an unhappy, disgruntled, rather ludicrous country.

But there’s more, de Bernière expresses the standard liberal lament over Britain being America’s poodle:

[Britain] had not yet acquired the schoolboy habit of waiting for months for permission from Washington before it clambered out of its post-imperial bed, put on its boots, made a sugary cup of tea, and ventured through the door. (p.384)

You could argue that the crudeness of this is unworthy of the writer who’s delivered so many luminously subtle moments throughout this wonderful book. Then again, satire is, in general, crude. It prompts a second thought: that de Bernières and the world at large had seen nothing yet, and would be amazed ten years later at the behaviour of Tony Blair who rightly earned the nickname ‘Bush’s poodle’ and sent British forces into Afghanistan and Iraq…

Back to the text: it’s the British who send the most aid and stay the longest to help the inhabitants of the Ionian islands to recover but the chapter then goes onto become an overview of all the rescue attempts and aid sent by various countries, as well as the impacts on the locals, some of whom fell into despair, some intractable guilt at having survived, some set up businesses, unlikely leaders emerged such as Velisarios, the strong man, who took charge in Pelagia’s village. The narrative details his heroic acts (single-handedly cleaning out the village well so that nobody went thirsty) deeds which were remembered and venerated for decades afterwards.

In among the general confusion, an Italian fireman borrows an American jeep and drives out to Pelagia’s village, making his way to the ruins of the old house and identifying the ancient olive tree, split in two by the quake, and then sees the grave of the gentle giant Carlo, which has been opened up. He gets a spade from the jeep to recover the big man but as he does so the earth shakes again and the grave closes of its own volition.

Surely this is Corelli, but the text doesn’t say so.

67. Pelagia’s Lament

First-person lament by Pelagia for everything she’s lost, specifically her upbringing by her wonderful father, fount of fantastical stories, which leads up to her memory of Velisarios digging through the rubble to find her father, so small and limp and empty without his soul, and she realised how beaten and broken he had been but how he was the only man who loved her to the end. This lament made me cry.

68. The Resurrection of History

Pelagia sinks into profound guilt that she panicked and ran out of the house and left her father to die. Drosoula and Antonia sympathise to start with, but become more irritated as Pelagia becomes more morbidly obsessed. Eventually they make up the story that her father has appeared to them in dreams and told them to tell her to complete her father’s history of Cephallonia. After initial scepticism, Pelagi discovers that she can do it, enjoys doing it, starts flexing her intellectual muscles, expresses opinions she never knew she had, writes off to experts in Europe and America for more information and is amazed at the enthusiastic replies she receives. Several publishing houses turn it down but it doesn’t matter. Her father’s project has saved her.

It is 1961. Part of her intellectual exercise is enjoying teasing and contradicting the now teenage Antonia. But the girl dismays her and Drosoula by announcing that 1) she is a communist and 2) she is getting married, at the age of 17 (p.397).

69. Bean by Bean the Sack Fills

Life continues. Pelagia starts to receive postcards from cities round the world with short cryptic messages in Greek. They can’t be from Corelli, he couldn’t speak Greek and what was he doing gallivanting round the world. She decides they’re from the ghost of her father continuing the peregrinations of his youth.

Antonia gets a job serving in a café in Argostoli and is chatted up by short, plump, 32-year-old radical lawyer Alexi (p.399). Despite all her mother’s opposition, Antonia gets married at a happy traditional ceremony.

Time passes. Drosoula sets up a ramshackle taverna in the space down by the quay where her house used to be and becomes a tourist attraction, famed for her slow service but eccentric company. Lemona, now the plump mother of three children, helps out as does Pelagia.

Antonia cries when King Paul dies, comes for comfort when Alexi is locked up by the colonels in 1967 and again in 1973, goes to the mainland to take part in feminist demonstrations. She tells her mother it’s all the fault of the older generation and it’s up to the young people to fix the world. As all young people do. But, as a feminist and a radical, she refuses to have a grandchild for Pelagia to the latter’s sorrow.

Drosoula dies quietly in her chair and is buried next to Dr Iannis and Pelagia suddenly realises she is alone. But in the event Antonia does get pregnant and have a little baby boy. Pelagia dandles it and calls it Iannis so often that that becomes its name. Alexi is a rich bourgeois now, builds an apartment block on the hillside where the old village used to be, rebuilds Drosoula’s taverna, hires a competent chef, takes 50% of the profit.

70. Excavation

Iannis grows to be a beautiful 6-year-old who helps out at the taverna and is cooed over by foreign matrons. Alexi becomes a property tycoon, building evermore apartment blocks with swimming pools and tennis courts. Antonia opens a tourist emporium full of tat in Argostali and then in half a dozen other towns. They become rich.

The boy Iannis engages in competitions to pee as high as possible against the wall at the back of the taverna and his dreams are full of plump tourist matrons pressing him their squishy bosoms.

When he’s ten, Pelagia hires Spiridon, a talented bouzouki player from Corfu, whose dexterity reminds her of the one true love of her life. iannis dreams of becoming a kamakia or ‘harpoon’, slang for the handsome young men who hang about the airport on mopeds and make a living having passionate week-long affairs with single women who’ve flown to Greece looking for ‘romance’ (p.407).

Anyway, Iannis conceives the ambition of playing the bouzouki not least because, by the end of every evening, Spiridon has his arms round the prettiest girls in the restaurant and is being showered with roses. Spiridon says his arms are too short to play it, he should start with a mandolin, so he begs his mum and dad for a mandolin but they keep forgetting to get one on their umpteen trips abroad, so instead he pesters granny Pelagia, who says there’s one buried in the ruins of her old house.

Which is why Iannis is dispatched with Spiridon to dig it up and hence the title of this chapter. In digging through the rubble they discover all kinds of relics which mean something to the reader – a wartime photo of Corelli and Weber, a family photo album starting with Dr Iannis’s wedding, a jar with a shrivelled pea in it (the pea which kick starts the whole narrative).

In the middle of this digging a huge old man appears in the ruined doorway. It is old Velisarios, come to see if they are looters. In his hand he holds a red rose and it’s only now that we learn that it is he who has left a rose on Carlo’s grave every year in October and, it is strongly implied, that he too was gay and recognised and respected a kindred spirit.

Anyway, it’s this huge strong Velisarios who opens up the trapdoor to the historic cachette under the old house where, of course, they find all its treasures perfectly preserved – the manuscripts of Carlo’s letters, Iannis’s history, Weber’s wind-up gramophone with records, the clasp knife she gave her father, the blanket she crocheted throughout Corelli’s stay, and, in side a box inside cloth covers, the most beautiful mandolin Spiridon has ever seen.

71. Antonia Sings Again

Reunited with all these evocative objects, Pelagia cries for weeks, and then shows the photo album in particular to Iannis, boring him with stories of all the old people in them.

And Spiro teaches Iannis how to play the mandolin.

72. An Unexpected Lesson (reappearance of Corelli)

Cut to 1993. Iannis is 15. He likes to go up to the old ruined house to practice the mandolin. One day an old grey-haired man approaches him. It is, of course, Antonio Corelli. He politely points out that the boy is fingering the mandolin in slightly the wrong way which is hampering his technique. When he takes the mandolin to show him how, he suddenly realises it is his old one. Everything comes flooding out and he tells the enthralled teenager how he is the man his mother was going to marry, how he was saved by the giant buried in the back garden and how the four strings missing from the mandolin when they first found it… are in his chest, holding his ribs together, he never had them removed.

73. Restitution (Corelli and Pelagia reunited)

This final chapter opens comically, with Pelagia, confronted by Corelli in the middle of her taverna, going mad with rage, overturning tables, throwing plates and pans at him, then prodding him with the broom handle as she furiously accuses him. All these years she thought he was dead and yet he was alive and living the life of Reilly.

So now we have the Big Reveal, the explanation of the last 50 years of their lives (1943 to 1993). It was Corelli who Pelagia saw at the end of the road in chapter 64, in 1946. He had come back to see her. But what he saw was her nursing a baby and put 2 and 2 together and made 53, wildly assuming that she was married with a child. In his confusion he ran and jumped over a wall so that when she ran after him she saw an empty street.

He came back every year around the same time but always saw her with the baby and made the same mistake. Pelagia asks the obvious question, why did he never meet her and ask her? Because he didn’t want to ruin what he thought was her new, happily married life by stirring up old ghosts. So like a gentleman he did the restrained thing and backed off. Although he did return every year, so her impression of seeing the mysterious dark man was real.

In the meantime he took her parting advice, left the army and became a fireman. Plenty of time to practice and compose and eventually he wrote classical pieces which became a success, three concertos, one of them with Pelagia’s March as its central theme.

He became a successful concert performer and was in demand around the world. Hence the postcards. They were from him. Why in Greek? Because when the full truth of the Fascist regime’s evils came out he was ashamed to be an Italian and emigrated to Greece. He’s been a Greek citizen for 25 years.

Much more chat and memories then he shyly gives her a Walkman and a tape of his 1954 concerto and leaves, to meet up later. She fumbles with the Walkman but once she works out how to work it, is amazed at how immediate and total the musical experience is, right in the centre of her head. And then she hears Pelagia’s March which he used to hum, subject to all kinds of developments, played by different instruments and then makes out the rat-a-tat-tat of machineguns, and the rumbling of drums which embodies the earthquake, my God, the whole narrative is captured in musical form.

That evening he brings her a goat. He went to the trouble of taking a taxi to the top of Mount Aenos where he was swindled by Alekos, and had to pay the taxi driver a double fare to bring it all the way down the mountain. It’s restitution for the one she loved which was stolen in chapter 44. She says she’ll name it Apodosis which is Greek for ‘restitution’. She amusingly humiliates Corelli when he tells her she should get good milk out of it, maybe sell yoghurt in the restaurant and she points between its back legs at the big pink scrotum!

That evening he returns with a modern motorbike and suggests they roar off up into the hills to see if they can find the old shed where they used to hide away and kiss and cuddle, which they called their Casa Nostra. Pelagia says it’s a preposterous idea and agrees. As they roar up into the hills Pelagia is pleased and terrified and holds on tight.

And in the final image of the novel, they are overtaken by a scooter carrying not one but three young woman, wearing skimpy dresses showing their shapely breasts, long hair flowing in the wind, one driving, one doing her eye make-up, one nonchalantly reading a paper. An image of carefree youth and optimism. Corelli thinks that when he comes to map out his next concerto all he will have to do is remember this moment to conjure up the spirit of Greece.

THE END.

The unsaid as a central theme

Writing out the sentence describing Dr Iannis’s death in the Ionian earthquake, and how he had for years prepared some noble and profound last words which, in the event, he had no chance to utter before being crushed to death, made me realise that this is a minor but significant thread in the book – the frustration of the unsaid.

On several occasions Corelli has big speeches ready to deliver to Pelagia, only for her temper or mood to sweep the conversation away.

Similarly, Dr Iannis likes to prepare grand speeches with which he will demolish the communist beliefs of Kokolios or the monarchism of Stamatis, and yet life (and Lemoni) keep interrupting him so that they are never delivered.

Mandras has so much to say to Pelagia on his two returns, from the Albanian front and then from life with the communist partisans, and yet both times his hopes of expressing what he feels are dashed and he ends up attacking her in a raging fury.

But the theme has its best embodiment in the entire life of Carlo Guercio, who overflows with love for Francesco and then for Corelli, which he can never ever, in real life, express.

Related, is the scene of Pelagia and Corelli’s last day together before he takes the illicit boat back to Italy, in which they have plenty of time and yet, somehow, mysteriously, don’t get to express a fraction of their feelings.

And maybe also related is Dr Iannis’s eternal frustration with his History of Cephallonia – no matter how much he writes he somehow never gets to express what he wants to say.

It’s as if it’s a buried moral of the story, that no matter how eloquent the writing and the words, the most important part, somehow, still, is left unexpressed. Something which is expressed nearly at the end of the text when Pelagia shows young Iannis all the photos from her life and he is suddenly struck by how little survives of our lives and loves, thinking:

How can a present not be present? How did it come about that all that remained of so much life was little squares of stained paper with pictures on it? (p.416)

Hummel’s concerto for mandolin

Greek words

  • agapeton – sweetheart
  • iatre – ‘Doctor’
  • koritsimou – my girl
  • kyria – respectful title for a female, ‘kyria Pelagia’
  • mangas – men, chaps
  • papakis – diminutive form of address to a father
  • patir – form of address to a priest, same as ‘Father’

Credit

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières was published by Secker and Warburg in 1994. References are to the 1995 Minerva paperback edition.

Modern Greek reviews

Second World War reviews

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Posted by Simon on April 26, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/04/26/captain-corellis-mandolin-louis-de-bernieres/

Sick Heart River by John Buchan (1941)

‘I need a rest. I’ve been pretty busy all my days and I’m tired.’
(Sir Edward Leithen setting the tone of Sick Heart River, page 2)

‘Every man’s got to skin his own skunk.’
(Wise words from Indian guide Johnny Frizel, p.90)

This is the final one in the series of five novels Buchan wrote featuring the fictional barrister and Tory MP, Sir Edward Leithen. It was also Buchan’s last book, completed only a few days before he died on 11 February 1940 and published posthumously.

Leithen is dying

It opens with a sequence that immediately feels better than anything in the previous four books, with an extended passage showing a tired and ill Leithen winding down his work at his barristers’ chambers and as an MP at the House of Commons. He says goodbye to his faithful clerk of 30 years in the chambers and to the Tory whip in the Commons. Why? He has for some years felt increasingly exhausted, with symptoms like night sweats, waking as tired as he went to bed, and so on. Finally he goes to see the eminent doctor, Acton Croke (Buchan is really bad at making up names, in my opinion – they’re neither plausibly realistic, nor comically exaggerated. They just feel bad.)

Anyway, this Acton Croke tells him he has tuberculosis, probably a long-term consequence of the gassing he experienced in the First World War, and that he has only a year to live, give or take. The passage where he walks back to his old rooms in Down Street W1, letting memories flood back into his consciousness – the winter funeral of Queen Victoria, the hot hectic days of August 1914, his love of the different smells of the different London seasons – all this is worth reading by itself. I thought for a moment that Buchan was going to let his guard down and really let us into a character’s soul, really break through to engage the reader, with real depth and emotion. These ten or fifteen pages suggest what a considerably more powerful writer Buchan might have been if he’d really let down his guard, and shared, instead of being so punctilious and tightly wrapped in all his fiction.

Leithen and ‘society’

Alas, he is not that type of man or writer. Other people intrude into Leithen’s musings and, with their advent the character, and the narrator, close up, button up, seize up, return to being the tightly-wrapped, stiff-upper-lip, impeccably well-mannered Calvinist Scotsman of all the other novels.

Maybe my problem with reading the Leithen novels has been not so much that he’s a snob (though he is) so much as that his consciousness remains so highly socialised, so polite and well mannered, stuck on the level of the high-toned society he moves in. What I’m trying to express is that his characters not only mix in the highest circles but almost entirely function at a highly socialised level: they think about everything in terms of country house parties, hunting, shooting and fishing parties, dinner parties and luncheons, and the matrix of society figures they all meet there. Their conversation is all about each other. None of them has anything to say about ideas, or art or theatre or music. They like the same things their Victorian parents liked, and hate the new Jazz Age of the 1920s with its barbaric music, its over-made up women, and the ridiculous younger generation with its upstart ideas.

Blenkiron’s commission

Anyway, the very affecting first 10 or 15 pages of wistful reminiscence are quickly crushed when Leithen is paid a visit by a wealthy American from his social set, one John S. Blenkiron (a figure who appears in several Buchan novels). He’s heard about Blenkiron chap from two of his best friends, Sandy Arbuthnot and Richard Hannay. (It came as a shock to me to learn that Leithen knows Hannay and Arbuthnot, the two lead characters in his other great series of novels focusing on Hannay. I’m sure this is the first time in the Leithen series that either name has been mentioned.)

This meeting straightaway plunges us back into the world of extended posh families, contacts and connections. Blenkiron thinks Leithen knows his niece, Barbara (he does). Well, he’s come about her younger sister, Felicity.

‘Babs has a sister, Felicity – I guess you don’t know her, but she’s something of a person on our side of the water. Two years younger than Babs, and married to a man you’ve maybe heard of, Francis Galliard, one of old Simon Ravelston’s partners. Young Galliard’s gotten a great name in the city of New York, and Felicity and he looked like being a happy pair.’ (p.14)

In a nutshell, this promising young chap, Francis Galliard, has done a bunk. Left a note for his wife saying he felt unwell, and disappeared without a trace. Been weeks now. Poor Francis is worried sick. Well, Sir Edward, Dick and Sandy sort of suggested that you might be the fellow who can track young Francis down. Willing to give it a shot?

Finding Francis

Leithen says yes. And that’s what the rest of the novel will be about, Sir Edward Leithen on the trail of the mysteriously vanished young man.

Why? Because Leithen had spent some soulful days wondering what a man should do with his last year of life. Travel the world? Go to India, Africa? He thinks about the ill-fated Greek island he visited (an adventure recounted in The Dancing Floor) no, not there. Then into his mind drifts a memory of the time he was trekking in Canada and came across a highland meadow with a stream running through it. It struck him as paradise. And so the key fact about young Francis Galliard, as explained by Blenkiron, is that, although he has become a naturalised American and was living in New York with his wife, he is of Canadian origin, and has almost certainly done a bunk back to his native land.

So the Quest for Francis Galliard immediately solves Leithen’s dilemma: here is somewhere to go for a reason; instead of just mooning around and feeling sorry for himself, he will have a job and not just for money – he doesn’t need money any more – but to help people, to serve, to live a socially useful honourable life right up to the end. As he later explains to Johnny the guide:

‘Is Galliard your best pal?’ ‘I scarcely know him. But I have taken on the job to please a friend, and I must make a success of it. I want to die on my feet, if you see what I mean.’ (p.61)

New York

And that’s what the remaining 170 pages of the novel describe. Leithen flies to New York. He, inevitably, attends a dinner party at which everyone is amazingly eminent and successful (top bankers, world’s leading classical scholar etc etc), hosted by Simon and Mrs Ravelston, formerly US ambassador to Great Britain. He begins to learn about Galliard which, as so often in the Leithen novels, is little about him as a personality, as such, and everything to do with his relationships with others, his place in society: ‘I know he used to go duck-shooting in Minnesota with George Lethaby, and he’s a trustee of Walter Derwent’s Polar Institute’

In a private members club overlooking the East River, he meets with the eminent financier Bronson Jane (see what I mean about terrible names?) who gives him a detailed profile of Galliard and ‘his people’. These turn out to be French Canadian from Quebec, originally spelling their name Gaillard. We learn that Galliard came from a farming background but had a gift for finance, was partner in a bank at 35 and now, aged 43, is one of the top five financiers in America.

At the same club Leithen is introduced to Clifford Savory (‘There were few men alive who were his equals in classical scholarship’) who adds his ha’pennyworth about Galliard and the culture of the French Canadians.

Then he meets the abandoned wife, Felicity Galliard, slim (like all the eligible or admirable women in Buchan), wealthy, urbane, worried sick. She shows him Galliard’s goodbye note:

‘Dearest, I am sick – very sick in mind. I am going away. When I am cured I will come back to you. All my love.’ (p.29)

Leithen begins to have the sense that Galliard felt cabined and confined, that he needed to escape all this perfection and high expectation.Then he is introduced to Walter Derwent, a scientist who runs a Polar Institute. Galliard was his treasurer. (As this series of interviews progressed, it began to feel a bit like a detective novel, with Leithen gently quizzing a whole series of suspects.) Derwent tells him that Francis contacted him a few months back asking if he could recommend a guide to the Canadian wilderness, and Derwent did: a ‘half-breed’ (are we allowed to say that any more? is the correct term ‘mixed race?’) named Lew Frizel (‘His mother was a Cree Indian and his father one of the old-time Hudson’s Bay factors’). The implication is that Francis hired Lew as a guide to the bush, the outback, the wild North of Canada and they’ve headed off somewhere.

Handily, this guide has a brother, Johnny Frizel, and Derwent has already reached out to him to see if he can come back east to help Leithen track down Francis (p.34).

Leithen then goes to the offices of Ravelston’s, the bank where Francis had risen to executive level. Here he interviews Francis’s assistant who tells him the missing man had called for papers about the Glaubstein pulp mill which had recently been built at a place called Chateau-Gaillard which, as the name suggests, is deep in the ancestral land which has belonged to various members of the Gaillard family for centuries. Aha. That’s the place to start, then.

Canada

So it is that Leithen takes a steamer up the East Coast, beyond the American border, along the St Lawrence Waterway and disembarks at the pulp paper town of Chateau-Gaillard, a scrappy, ugly, industrial place. He has hired the guide, Johnny Frizel, brother of Lew (physical description [short] p.42).

They drive out of town, up into the hills to a valley, which a local tells them is called Clairefontaine. Suddenly they come across the very spot, the very same beauty spot whose memory had floated into Leithen’s mind back in London in those early pages of reminiscence. Now, he is horrified to discover that it’s been ruined.

The valley above the township was an ugly sight. The hillsides had been lumbered out and only scrub was left, and the shutes where the logs had been brought down were already tawny with young brushwood. In the bottom was a dam, which had stretched well up the slopes, for the lower scrub was bleached and muddied with water. But the sluices had been opened and the dam had shrunk to a few hundred yards in width, leaving the near hillsides a hideous waste of slime, the colour of a slag-heap. The place was like the environs of a town in the English Black Country. (p.38)

They continue their journey higher into the hills, to the village of Clairefontaine where they are shown hospitality by the kindly Catholic priest. The Gaillard land has been inherited by an uncle of Francis’s who turns out to be a 60-year-old drunk (p.44). Frizel gets put up with the drunk while Leithen stays with hospitable Father Paradis (p.43).

The priest gives him an extended briefing on the ancient Gaillard family which owned all the land hereabouts, the vagaries of various fathers, uncles, errant sons and so on. Buchan’s stories are always very, very heavily conceived around families. They are like his units of meaning, the concepts of ‘families’ and ‘races’ underpin Buchanworld.

Next morning Johnny tells Leithen that the drunk uncle Gaillard told him that (Johnny’s) brother, Lew, had been there recently. Between them they speculate that Francis came here, to the ancestral land, was disappointed by what he found, and for unknown reasons decided to head further north, towards Ghost River.

The chains of race and tradition are ill to undo, and Galliard, in his brilliant advance to success, had loosened, not broken them. Something had happened to tighten them again. The pull of an older world had jerked him out of his niche. But how? And whither? (p.38)

Leithen goes back to Montreal and hires a plane and a pilot, Job Teviot (p.49). They fly over awesome Canadian scenery which is lyrically described, across the Great Slave Lake and ‘the Barrens, then land at Dog-Rib river to spend the night in a tent. Up and flying further north next day, landing at a place called Little Fish, where Johnny finds a white man with two Indians camped a bit further up the river. Leithen goes for a chat.

The white man is a New Yorker, Taverner, who has, of course, visited England, London, sat in the House of Commons visitors gallery and watched Leithen make a speech! It’s a small world, Buchan’s world. Moreover, this chap happens to be a cousin of the financier Bronson Jane and so, when Leithen mentions Francis Galliard, yes, he’s heard of him! Smaller than small world. Microscopic world. His main role in the book is to deliver a long speech criticising his own country, presumably venting some of Buchan’s (negative) opinions:

‘I’m saying nothing against my country. I know it’s the greatest on earth. But my God! I hate the mood it has fallen into. It seems to me there isn’t one section of society that hasn’t got some kind of jitters—big business, little business, politicians, the newspaper men, even the college professors. We can’t talk except too loud. We’re bitten by the exhibitionist bug. We’re all boosters and high-powered salesmen and propagandists, and yet we don’t know what we want to propagand, for we haven’t got any kind of common creed. All we ask is that a thing should be colourful and confident and noisy. Our national industry is really the movies. We’re one big movie show. And just as in the movies we worship languishing Wops and little blonde girls out of the gutter, so we pick the same bogus deities in other walks of life. You remember Emerson speaks about some nations as having guano in their destiny. Well, I sometimes think that we have got celluloid in ours.’ (p.53)

The Quest

Slowly the narrative changes from just looking for some guy into something more driven, into a quest, into a manhunt.

Leithen and Johnny fly down to the Ghost River Delta and camp on the shore. Leithen is appalled by what a vast bleak emptiness it is. He thought the Arctic would be cold and bracing but pure and clean and healing, whereas this is a desolate landscape of mud and gravel, abandoned by the Demiurge who made the world, who gave up and walked away (p.55).

To their surprise there’s a schooner anchored on the muddy shore, with a Danish captain, for conversation and some supplies. They find an Eskimo cemetery and here Johnny recognises the mark of his brother, Lew. Lew had very recently carved his own distinctive version of the Saint Andrew cross onto two crosses made of driftwood which appear to commemorate members of the Gaillard family (p.57). Father Paradis had mentioned that one of Francis’s uncles, named Aristide, had left the meadows behind to go exploring North. Looks like this is where he ended up dying. Still, extraordinary coincidence that in all this vast waste, Leithen and Johnny happen across the tiny cemetery where Aristide happens to be buried AND that Lew has been helpful enough to do a bit of whittling on the grave markers.

So many of Buchan’s plots are like this – they make a sort of sense as you read them through but, if you stop to think for even a moment, they don’t quite hang together, are inexplicable. ‘Contrived’ doesn’t adequately convey their factitiousness (meaning: ‘1. formed by or adapted to an artificial or conventional standard 2. produced by special effort 3. sham.’)

Johnny slowly reveals that his brother Lew is sort of mad, a creature of mad enthusiasms. He asks if Leithen has ever heard of Sick Heart River? It’s a kind of Eldorado or Shangri-la, a fabled territory deep in the mountains which nobody quite knows how to access. Lew saw it once, on some hunting trip ten years ago, and was mesmerised by it and its inaccessibility.

‘Which watershed is it on?’ Leithen asked.
‘That’s what no man knows. Not on the South Nahanni’s. And you can’t get into it from the Yukon side, by the Pelly or the Peel or the Ross or Macmillan – Lew tried ’em all.’ (p.60)

That, with not much evidence, is where Johnny tells Leithen he thinks his brother is heading. Here’s his precise reasoning:

‘I don’t think, but I suspicion. See here, mister. Lew’s a strong character and mighty set on what he wants. He’s also a bit mad, and mad folks have persuasive ways with them. He finds this Galliard man keen to get into the wilds, and the natural thing is that he persuades him to go to his particular wilds, which he hasn’t had out of his mind for ten years.’ (p.60)

So the story started off being about Leithen looking for Galliard but it slowly morphs into being more about mad Lew Frizer, the obsessive backwoods guide.

Fort Bannerman

Weather conditions are getting bad, with fogs and rain. It is several days before they make it to the jumping off point for Sick Heart River, Fort Bannerman on the Mackenzie River (p.62). The inhabitants of this wretched spot are the Hudson’s Bay postmaster, two Oblate Brothers, a fur trader, a trapper in for supplies, and several Indians. It stinks of rotting food.

Johnny sets about buying up the equipment needed for a major expedition, being a thirty-foot boat with an outboard motor and a couple of canoes; clothes consisting of parkas and fur-lined jerkins, leather breeches and lined boots; gloves and flapped caps, blankets and duffel bags; dog packs to carry everything in and a light tent; a couple of shotguns and a couple of rifles and ammunition. Food, consisting of bacon and beans and flour, salt and sugar, tea and coffee, and a fancy assortment of tinned stuffs, plus a folding tin stove to cook it on. And they hire two of the local Hare Indians as porters and guides (p.64).

The plan is to head up the river against the current to find this Sick Heart River area, on the assumption that this is where mad Lew the guide is leading Francis Galliard.

During their stay at the Fort, as is his wont, Leithen discovers links between the people he’s meeting and his network of people and values. Turns out that one of the Oblate Brothers had served in a French battalion which had been on the right of Leithen’s regiment, the Guards, at the Battle of Loos, so they spend time together talking about the Great War. Meanwhile, Father Duplessis was from Picardy and Leithen had once been billeted in the shabby flat-chested chateau near Montreuil where his family had dwelt since the days of Henri Quatre.

In other words, Leithen has this gift for finding something in common with more or less everyone he meets. Or, to put it another way, Buchan can only conceive of his hero being able to really communicate with people who plug into his set of values.

This is vividly demonstrated when Johnny gets chatting about his family and brother, once they’ve embarked on the boat up the river. Turns out that his surname, Frizel, is a corruption of Fraser, and so that his guide has Scottish ancestors. At one point Johnny shows him his ring.

Leithen examined it. The stone bore the three cinquefoils of Fraser. Then he remembered that Frizel had been the name for Fraser in the Border parish where he had spent his youth. He remembered Adam Fraser, the blacksmith, the clang of his smithy on summer mornings, the smell of sizzling hooves and hot iron on summer afternoons. The recollection gave Johnny a new meaning for him; he was no longer a shadowy figure in this fantastic world of weakness; he was linked to the vanished world of real things, and thereby acquired a personality.

People only acquire full personhood for Leithen/Buchan if they can be plugged either 1) into his matrix of social connections i.e. all the bankers and lawyers and whatnot who all went to public school and are all related to each other or 2) into his sense of peoples or ‘races’, which each come complete with ancestries and stereotypes. It’s bigger and deeper than snobbery; it’s an entire existential worldview, a system of values to make sense of the world, and anybody who doesn’t fit into these categories (i.e. most of the population of Britain and the world) don’t really exist, not fully, not with a full personality.

Hares Indians

Anyway they chug up the river, camping on the bank at night, for several days, till they reach the camp of the Hares Indians. This is a squalid dump, stinking of rotten food and poverty, not at all what Leithen wanted from the wilderness.

Leithen sat in the presbytery in a black depression. The smells of the encampment – unclean human flesh, half-dressed skins of animals, gobbets of putrefying food – were bad enough in that mild autumn noon. The stuffy little presbytery was not much better. But the real trouble was that suddenly everything seemed to have become little and common. The mountains were shapeless, mere unfinished bits of earth; the forest of pine and spruce had neither form nor colour; the river, choked with logs and jetsam, had none of the beauty of running water. In coming into the wilderness he had found not the majesty of Nature, but the trivial, the infinitely small – an illiterate half-breed, a rabble of degenerate Indians, a priest with the mind of a child. The pettiness culminated in the chapel, which was as garish as a Noah’s Ark from a cheap toyshop… He felt sick in mind and very sick in body. (p.71)

The Catholic priest of this wretched hole is Father Wentzel and he has news of Lew and Francis, who passed through less than a week previously, so our guys are definitely on the right track. But he also indicates that Lew and Francis are not getting on. Lew was:

‘In a furious haste, as if vengeance followed him, and he did not sleep much. When I rose before dawn he was lying with staring eyes. For his companion, the gentleman, he seemed to have no care – he was pursuing his own private errand. A strong man, but a difficult. When they left me I did not feel happy about the two messieurs.’ (p.72).

Well, this isn’t good news. So Leithen, Johnny and the two Hares Indians leave the squalid camp and push on up the river, the scenery changing to become scenic and beautiful, with varieties of colourful trees, many birds and even bears. Leithen’s spirits lift.

Three long portages took them out of the Big Hare valley to Lone Tree Lake, which, in shape like a scimitar, lay tucked in a mat of forest under the wall of what seemed to be a divide. (p.73)

Picking up the trail

They camp near some woods and Johnny finds tangible evidence of the pair ahead of them: Lew and Francis have cached supplies and their canoe here but Johnny can tell from their tracks that there was a gap of 50 yards between them and the second man was limping. Looks like they’ve quarrelled. Looks like Francis is injured. Worse and worse (p.75).

The trail heads away from the lake and up beside a tributary stream. The other three carry all the supplies but Leithen is feeling increasingly weak and ill and has to stop to rest every hour. Days go by and Johnny gets chatty, praising the high woods and the adventures he’s had there. But he worries more and more about his brother, pointing out that the other man (Francis) is lagging hours behind him and arriving at the bivouacs late, probably not getting enough sleep. Why isn’t Lew waiting for him?

Leithen slips into a daze, one day leaching into another. Johnny has to mash up his bacon and beans till it’s nearly soup before Leithen can eat it. There’s more game, they see ptarmigan and willow grouse, and then moose, huge on the hillsides. At nights they hear the wolves nosing around the woods nearby. Leithen admires the Aurora Borealis flickering like a curtain of delicate lace (p.80).

Buchan and Canada

In 1935 Buchan had been appointed by King George V to become Governor General of Canada, a post he held till his death in 1940. His tenure was distinguished by intensive travel the length and breadth of the country. According to the introduction to this Authorised Edition of the novel, written by his grandson James Buchan, in 1937 Buchan undertook his most extensive tour, of the far North of the country. He and his party travelled by steamer down the Athabasca river, then the Slave River, carrying their gear past rapids and transferring to another steamer for a 1,000 mile journey into the Arctic Circle. At the Great Slave Lake they joined the Mackenzie River, stopping at forts and trading posts along the way where they met Catholic priests and nuns, traders, trappers and Hudson Bay officers, seeing on their left the vast Mackenzie range of mountains before coming out at the vast and barren delta described in the book. At Aklavik they switched to plane and flew over the Great Bear Lake to Coronation Gulf, before flying back by way of Alberta and British Columbia. It was an epic journey and many aspects of it are transferred wholesale into this novel, which contains page after page describing the breath-taking scenery.

Landscape description

Here’s an extended quotation a) to demonstrate what the book feels like to read b) to demonstrate Buchan’s way with description of scenery and c) to demonstrate his handling of the way this huge description gracefully circles back round to the plot (the quest for Galliard) and Leithen’s own plight.

Mountains prematurely snow-covered had been visible from the Hares’ settlement, and Leithen at Lone Tree Camp had seen one sharp white peak in a gap very far off. Ever since then they had been moving among wooded ridges at the most two thousand feet high. But now they suddenly came out on a stony plateau, the trees fell away, and they looked on a new world.

The sedimentary rocks had given place to some kind of igneous formation. In front were cliffs and towers as fantastic as the Dolomites, black and sinister against a background of great snowfields, sweeping upward to ice arêtes and couloirs which reminded Leithen of Dauphiné. In the foreground the land dropped steeply into gorges which seemed to converge in a deep central trough, but they were very unlike the mild glens through which they had been ascending. These were rifts in the black rock, their edges feathered with dwarf pines, and from their inky darkness in the sunlight they must be deep. The rock towers were not white and shining like the gracious pinnacles above Cortina, but as black as if they had been hewn out of coal by a savage Creator.

But it was not the foreground that held the eye, but the immense airy sweep of the snow-fields and ice pinnacles up to a central point, where a tall peak soared into the blue. Leithen had seen many snow mountains in his time, but this was something new to him – new to the world. The icefield was gigantic, the descending glaciers were on the grand scale, the central mountain must compete with the chief summits of the southern Rockies. But unlike the Rockies the scene was composed as if by a great artist – nothing untidy and shapeless, but everything harmonised into an exquisite unity of line and colour.

His eyes dropped from the skyline to the foreground and the middle distance. He shivered. Somewhere down in that labyrinth was Galliard. Somewhere down there he would leave his own bones. (p.81)

This novel is arguably Buchan’s best because he takes us far away from the tiresome world of posh society and pukka families and City bankers and fox hunting, he goes beneath the surface social veneer which dominates the other books. The descriptions of the Canadian wilds are awesome, but what really impresses is the extended descriptions of a dying man confronting his mortality. Every page contains Leithen’s feelings or thoughts as he collapses at the end of another gruelling trek.

Leithen reaches exhaustion

At their next stop Johnny confirms what he’d already suspected, that Lew is pressing on regardless and that his companion, Francis, has fallen behind and then lost the track altogether. Francis is now lost in the wilderness, limping, probably not carrying much. Chances are he’s lying in one of the great wild woods, freezing and starving to death.

The thing is, Leithen is so ill and has been so worn down by the physical challenges of the trek that he doesn’t care any more. Nobody can say he didn’t move heaven and earth to track down this Francis guy, did more than anybody could decently have expected of him. And anyway, before he even left Britain he knew the entire quest was really a way of distracting himself from his coming death.

Oddly enough, Johnny’s news had not made him restless, though it threatened disaster to his journey. He had wanted that journey to succeed, but the mere finding of Galliard would not spell success, or the loss of him failure. Success lay in his own spirit. (p.84)

They find Galliard

Next day Johnny and the Hares go early to scour the surrounding woods to see if they can find Galliard. When the sun comes out Leithen goes for a small walk up into the woods. As he comes back to their little encampment he sees a bear snuffling into his tent. At least he thinks it’s a bear. When he gets closer he realises it’s a man, wearing rags, covered in mud, so exhausted he can’t speak – it is Galliard! (p.86)

Leithen lays him down, washes his face, discovers he has a deep wound in his leg which he tries to clean. A few hours later Johnny returns and, with much more advanced fieldcraft, cleans and dresses the leg wound, cleans Galliard more and makes broth to spoonfeed him with. Galliard can barely speak, mumbling broken phrases about a sacred river, obviously a degraded articulation of his and Lew’s obsession with finding the fabled Sick Heart River. He has undergone what so many characters do in Buchan (cf Vernon Milburn in The Dancing Floor) and regressed back from the state of high civilisation which he enjoyed in New York, back to life in the wilds, and then on backwards into the barely human.

The partner of Ravelstons had suffered a strange transformation. Leithen realised that it would be idle to try to link this man’s memory with his New York life. He had gone back into a very old world, the world of his childhood and his ancestors, and though it might terrify him, it was for the moment his only world. (p.93)

This is a hobby horse of Buchan’s so he repeats it in different words:

Galliard had lost all touch with his recent life. He had reverted to the traditions of his family, and now worshipped at ancestral shrines, and he had been mortally scared by the sight of the goddess. (p.94)

A lot later Leithen joins a hunt for caribou, and:

He was primitive man again who had killed his dinner. (p.176)

Johnny declares that it will take weeks for Galliard to heal in body and who knows how long to heal in him in mind. They can’t risk moving him and winter is coming. So Johnny and the Hares are going to build a cabin against the coming winter.

Leithen feels guilty that he has now concluded his quest and Johnny is being a faithful employee and going to build a log cabin to protect them all and yet is very anxious about the physical and especially mental wellbeing of his brother Lew. So after some thought Liethen announces that he will press on to find Lew himself. Johnny explodes with laughter, given that Leithen is at death’s door. But he insists that, with the help of the bigger and stronger of the two Hares, he can do it.

It is another of those wild improbabilities and yet it is necessary for the Quest-like, fable-like structure of the book, that it is Leithen and not Johnny who finally makes it to the fabled valley.

Sick Heart River

And that is indeed what happens. After three days trekking (p.102), during which the Hare time and time again has to wait for Leithen to catch him up, or to support him, the pair come to an extraordinary chasm, deep, a mile across, with sheer sides, down into a meadow landscape across which flows a wide river – the famous Sick Heart River of the title.

After trekking along the edge of the precipice down into the valley, Leithen persuades a very reluctant Hare to descend a steep shute or landslide, now conveniently covered in snow. All goes well until the last thirty yards or so when the Hare slips on the ice, falls dragging Leithen with him, and they both roll and slide the last distance to the valley floor, Leithen banging his head and passing out (p.108).

When he groggily regains consciousness, the pair make a small camp near the the river and get a full sense of the strange and quiet, unnaturally warm landscape. Slowly they realise there isn’t a living thing in the place. Far from being Shangri-la, the place feels spooky and eerie.

The Hare spots smoke from a camp the other side of the river, presumably Lew! Leithen tells him to hang back while he, Leithen, goes ahead. So Leithen walks toward the camp and is aware of a shot being fired to the left, then one to the right of him – warning shots – but before anything worse can happen he simply he passes out from exhaustion (p.114).

Lew Frizel

Leithen awakes in a cave by a roaring fire with Lew marching up and down. Lew tends to him, introduces himself, the Hare makes his approach – soon all three are settled.

Long story short, Lew came from Presbyterian stock and had for long harboured an image he picked up from the Pilgrims Progress of passing beyond the Holy River, had become obsessed with travelling north to find Sick Heart River (p.120). But he’s been here a few days now and has become terrified, stricken with fear.

‘You’re over Jordan now. The Sick Heart is where you come to when you’re at the end of your road… I had a notion it was the River of the Water of Life, same as in Revelation.’
The man’s eyes seemed to have lost their glitter and become pools of melancholy.
‘Well, it ain’t. It’s the River of the Water of Death. The Indians know that and they only come here to die.’ (p.116)

Instead he calls it ‘a by-road to Hell!’ He gives more detail about how he and Galliard fell in together, both egging on each other’s obsession, how he eventually became so heedless he left Galliard behind in his mad obsession. But just a few days in the valley of death have totally cured him.

‘One thing I know – this is the River of the Water of Death. You can’t live in this valley. There’s no life here. Not a bird or beast, not a squirrel in the woods, not a rabbit in the grass, let alone bear or deer.’
‘There are warm springs,’ Leithen said. ‘There must be duck there.’
‘Devil a duck! I looked to find the sedges full of them, geese and ducks that the Eskimos and Indians had hurt and that couldn’t move south. Devil a feather! And devil a fish in the river! When God made this place He wasn’t figuring on humans taking up lots in it.’ (p.118)

And:

‘I was mad! It was the temptation of the Devil and not a promise of God. The Sick Heart is not the Land-of-Beulah but the Byroad-to-Hell, same as in Bunyan. It don’t rise like a proper river out of little springs – it comes full-born out of the rock and slinks back into it like a ghost. I tell you the place is no’ canny. You’d say it had the best grazing in all America, and yet there’s nothing can live here. There’s a curse on this valley when I thought there was a blessing. So there’s just the one thing to do if we’re to save our souls, and that’s to get out of it though we break our necks in the job.’ (p.121)

So that’s what they do. The Hare and Lew are keeping the fire going and cooking meals while they prepare their gear and pack. Then the next morning they trek for three hours back to the cliff face, to the shute the Hare and Leithen slid down. Now he supervises the reverse process, with him climbing slowly up and cutting footholds into the hard ice with an axe. He climbs with a rope tied round his middle so that when he eventually reaches the lip of the shute and climbs over the edge into snowy flat, he manages to tie the rope around a tree and tug it three times before collapsing (p.125).

Leithen regains consciousness (which is how so many of these chapters start) to find himself in a bowl scooped out of the snow with a fire at the bottom. The other two climbed up, made a camp, lit a fire. Now they have to trek back to the cabin Johnny and the other Hare was building. Leithen tries walking but passes out again and the others rig up a sled to haul him in.

Three days and nights of hard travelling, and holing up in the tent before a big fire every night. Clean air and huge skies. Leithen alternates between physical collapse and moments of religious exhilaration.

He had welcomed the North because it matched his dull stoicism. Here in this iron and icy world man was a pigmy and God was all in all. Like Job, he was abashed by the divine majesty and could put his face in the dust. It was the temper in which he wished to pass out of life. He asked for nothing – “nut in the husk, nor dawn in the dusk, nor life beyond death.” He had already much more than his deserts! and what Omnipotence proposed to do with him was the business of Omnipotence; he was too sick and weary to dream or hope. He lay passive in all-potent hands. (p.132)

All reunited at the cabin

Leithen regains consciousness in the cabin. Everyone is reunited. Here are sick old Leithen, Galliard, the reunited Frizel brothers Lew and Johnny, and the two Hares. There is enough to collect firewood and keep the fires burning, and go hunting and keep food supplied, for a few weeks anyway.

Lew has lost the mad craziness which drove him north and is now totally sane, but he has transferred his obsessive tendencies to making Leithen well again. When Leithen tells him that he, Leithen, is destined to die and asks Lew to make sure the message gets to New York that Galliard is still alive, Lew gets fierce.

‘Well, I’m going out, and it’s for you to finish the job. You must get him down country and back to his friends. I’ve written out the details and left them with Johnny. You must promise, so that I can die with an easy mind.’
For a little Lew did not speak.
‘You’re not going to die,’ he said fiercely.
‘The best authorities in the world have told me that I haven’t the ghost of a chance.’
‘They’re wrong, and by God we’ll prove them wrong!’ (p.134)

Part three

Part one covered the setup, the plane to New York, and Leithen’s interviews with Galliard’s friends and family. Part two covered the trek into Canada up to and including Lew in the fabled Sick Heart River. Part three is the final part and covers their return.

They are all stuck in the cabin through December, January and February. As Leithen comes out of his death-bed weakness and gains strength he realises that Galliard is no longer the shambling wreck he first met, but has fully healed and become a tall, strong lumberjack. Leithen remains very sick. The others take it in turns to fetch firewood or hunt game.

Galliard’s version

Over the course of several interviews Leithen gets the story of Galliard’s life which led him to chuck it all: he was born into an ancient French-Canadian family, fallen on hard times i.e. become hardscrabble farmers. He saw the life his father and brother were living and rebelled against it. He did well at school, went to college, decided to drop the law and study business. Had a big argument with his family who disapproved, then headed off to America, knowing his career would be limited as a Frenchman in Anglophone Canada. He had hard times in New York till he emerged as a successful businessman, got taken on at Ravelston’s bank, rose to become an important financier. Socially, he met Francis and his eyes were opened to society dinner parties, art galleries and so on. And yet deep down – as Buchan would put it, due to ties of ancestry and race – he felt guilty, felt like he had betrayed his father and his family.

‘I came to realise that I had forgotten God,’ he said simply… ‘What I had to recover was the proper touch with the world which I had grown out of and could no more reject than my own skin. Also I had to make restitution. I had betrayed something ancient and noble, and had to do penance for my sins.’ (p.153)

And this guilt ate away at him till one day he snapped, left the note for wife Francis and headed out for the North. Then follows confirmation of what Leithen had guessed about him heading to the ancestral lands, being bitterly disillusioned so heading North looking for some kind of redemption, coming under the influence of Lew’s quest for redemption, and eventually being left to die by the wayside (pages 148 to 153).

He is still not mentally recovered, he is still dazed, he still feels the weight of guilt and the need to atone:

‘I had been faithless to a trust and had to do penance for it. I had forgotten God and had to find Him… We have each of us to travel to his own Sick Heart River.’ (p.147)

Religious convictions

In the snow bowl after they got out of the valley, Leithen has a religious epiphany of sorts:

At night in the pit in the snow with Lew and the Hare he had become suddenly conscious of the mercifulness of things. There was a purpose of pity and tenderness in the iron compulsion of fate. Now this thought was always with him – the mercy as well as the omnipotence of God. (p.139)

This theme of the deep mercy is to be repeated with greater and greater regularity and emphasis in the last 50 pages of the book.

Now there suddenly broke in on him like a sunrise a sense of God’s mercy – deeper than the fore-ordination of things, like a great mercifulness… Out of the cruel North most of the birds had flown south from ancient instinct, and would return to keep the wheel of life moving. Merciful! But some remained, snatching safety by cunning ways from the winter of death. Merciful! Under the fetters of ice and snow there were little animals lying snug in holes, and fish under the frozen streams, and bears asleep in their lie-ups, and moose stamping out their yards, and caribou rooting for their grey moss. Merciful! And human beings, men, women, and children, fending off winter and sustaining life by an instinct old as that of the migrating birds. Lew nursing like a child one whom he had known less than a week – the Hares stolidly doing their jobs, as well fitted as Lew for this harsh world – Johnny tormented by anxiety for his brother, but uncomplainingly sticking to the main road of his duty… Surely, surely, behind the reign of law and the coercion of power there was a deep purpose of mercy. (p.132)

I know what he means. There is something about just being alive which indicates a grand gesture against death. Why is there life anywhere in a universe of death? Someone, somewhere, has made and supports it. All you have to do is sit on a bench out in the spring sunshine and feel the sun warming through your body to feel the real, primal, basic wonderfulness of being alive, and this is a feeling conveyed again and again, as Leithen’s physical wellbeing dips and fails, and then revives in the sun.

Back to the Hares’ camp

Food was running short so Johnny undertakes a trek on snow shoes back to the Hares’ camp and returns a week later. He reports that the Hares have sunk into apathy and despair. Their necromancy tells them they will die out this winter and they’re acting accordingly. After a great deal of discussion over several days, the six men in the cabin decide to return to the Hares camp. During these debates Leithen begins to feel it more and more incumbent on him to do something for the dying Indians. Though physically recovered, Galliard is still mentally weak and is clinging to Leithen hoping for a cure. And Father Duplessis had mentioned him (Leithen).

So they strike camp (leaving provisions and firewood for anyone else who ever comes across the cabin) and set out on the trek back to the Hares’ camp (p.167). After a week they arrive at the Hares’ camp to discover two things. 1) The Hares are sunk deep in suicidal apathy, sitting in their snow-filled huts dying of starvation and despair. 2) Father Duplessis, the Catholic chaplain sent to minister to them, tells our guys that war has broken out in Europe. Its Germany and her allies against Britain and France, again.

On the Hare front, Duplessis tells them he’s done everything he can, services, Masses, but it doesn’t work, something more is needed, someone needs to take command – looking meaningfully at Leithen.

Leithen takes command

Leithen has the latest in his series of religious/spiritual/moral revelations. It’s tied up with the news about a war. He served in the First World War and saw the appalling waste, futility and death. Now he sees it kicking off all over again. He revolts against the dominion of Death and decides he is going to preserve Life, he is going to commit to life, he is going to save the Hares. This is the spirit in which he hears Father Duplessis ringing the bell in the snowbound chapel:

That tinny bell had an explosive effect on Leithen’s mind. This was a place of death, the whole world was full of death—and yet here was one man who stood stubbornly for life. He rang the bell which should have started his flock on their day’s work. Sunk in weakness and despair they would remain torpid, but he had sounded the challenge. Here was one man at any rate who was the champion of life against death. (p.180)

And so he throws himself into plans to revive the dying community. He charges Lew and the Hares with fetching firewood and hunting meat. He orders a big fire to be built in the centre of the camp and be kept roaring as a sign of Life and Spring and Hope. He calls the ancient old leader of the tribe (Zacharias) for an interview and consults how best to revive his people. He sets about visiting every hut and getting to know every Indian and motivating them to stand up against Death.

The bell still tinkled in his ears. The world was at war again. It might be the twilight of the gods, the end of all things. The globe might swim in blood. Death might resume his ancient reign. But, by Heaven, he would strike his blow for life, even a pitiful flicker of it. (p.181)

Lew warns him that he has only just recovered his strength. If he shepherds it he will live a while, maybe years, living carefully and frugally. But Leithen has determined to go out standing up, doing his duty, in one last flare of activity.

There was a plain task before him, to fight with Death. God for His own purpose had unloosed it in the world, ravening over places which had once been rich in innocent life. Here in the North life had always been on sufferance, its pale slender shoots fighting a hard battle against the Elder Ice. But it had maintained its brave defiance. And now one such pathetic slip was on the verge of extinction. This handful of Hares had for generations been a little enclave of life besieged by mortality. Now it was perishing, hurrying to share in the dissolution which was overtaking the world. By God’s help that should not happen – the God who was the God of the living. Through strange circuits he had come to that simple forthright duty for which he had always longed. In that duty he must make his soul. (p.185)

And Leithen inspires Galliard, tells Galliard that this is his Sick Heart River, this is his duty and his calling, and so begins the process of psychological healing which Galliard needs:

‘This is a war and I obey orders. I’ve got my orders. In a world where Death is king we’re going to defy him and save life. The North has closed down on us and we’re going to beat the North. That is to your address, Galliard.’
Galliard was staring at him with bright comprehending eyes.
‘In this fight we have each got his special job. I’m in command, and I hand them out. I’ve taken the one for myself that I believe I can do best. We’re going to win, remember. What does my death matter if we defeat Death?’
Lew sat down again with his head in his hands. He raised it like a frightened animal at Leithen’s next words.
‘This is my Sick Heart River. Galliard’s too, I think. Maybe yours, Lew. Each of us has got to find his river for himself, and it may flow where he least expects it.’ (p.187)

I found all this very moving. The nobility of it transcends all its weakness as literature. Suddenly, in time of war, saving only a few people from a universe of Death, becomes an inspirational moral duty.

He was facing the challenge of Death. Elsewhere in the world the ancient enemy was victorious. If here, against all odds, he could save the tiny germ of life from its maw he would have met that challenge, and done God’s work. (p.190)

This reminded me of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Unconditional Surrender whose protagonist, Guy Crouchback, tries to restore meaning and honour to his little part of the world at the end of the Second World War by saving against the odds a community of Jews threatened by antisemitic Partisans in Yugoslavia. At some point his hero quotes the ancient Talmudic saying: ‘Whoever saves one life saves the world entire’… and, the wise man might have added, saves himself, as Leithen saves not only the Hares, but also restores Galliard’s sense of purpose and will to live, and, finally, saves himself.

As Father Duplessis puts it, in his last weeks, Leithen comes to love the Hares, not as a faceless mass, as a project, as an abstract duty, but for who they are. He becomes, at last, fully humanised.

He had come to love those poor childish folk. Hitherto a lonely man, he had found a clan and a family. (p.203)

And we have seen how family is the most basic unit of meaning in Buchan’s worldview.

The Mounty’s report

The text abruptly cuts away from being by the third-person narrator to give an excerpt from a report by a Mounty i.e. a trooper in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

From a report by Corporal S——, R.C.M.P., Fort Bannerman, to Inspector N——, R.C.M.P., Fort Macleod.

In objective, official terms the corporal describes how Leithen established a hold over the entire tribe and nursed it back to health, so that the entire community was ready to live again as spring arrived, detailing specific such as encouraging them to fish through holes in the ice on the lakes again, to catch fish to feed up their starving dogs who, once restored to health, could pull the sledges required to bring in large amounts of firewood, and so on. But how in organising this and many other activities, Leithen exhausted what little strength he had, passed into a coma and died

Father Duplessis’s diary

A religious take on Leithen’s devotion to duty. How Leithen started out considering the Hares as a faceless mass, as simply a project to be addressed. But how he slowly mastered the details of their culture and beliefs and slowly began to humanise them, in the process I noted above whereby strangers slowly entered Leithen’s set of values to become full human. It meshes perfectly with the increasing number of religious reflections in the final part of the text about the humanising of Leithen’s soul.

He had been abject but without true humility. When had the change begun? At Sick Heart River, when he had a vision of the beauty which might be concealed in the desert? Then, that evening in the snow-pit had come the realisation of the tenderness behind the iron front of Nature, and after that had come thankfulness for plain human affection. The North had not frozen him, but had melted the ice in his heart. God was not only all-mighty but all-loving.

Duplessis devotes several pages to describing how Leithen’s example inspired Galliard to overcome his fear of the North, to face it and master it, to redeem himself in service to the poor Hares.

In L.’s grim fortitude Galliard found something that steadied his nerves. More, he learned from L. the only remedy for his malaise. He must fight the North and not submit to it; once fought and beaten, he could win from it not a curse but a blessing. Therefore he eagerly accepted the task of grappling with the Hares’ problem. Here was a test case. They were defying the North; they were resisting a madness akin to his own. If they won, the North had no more terrors for him – or life either. He would have conquered his ancestral fear. (p.201)

Then Duplessis briefly describes how Leithen attended High Mass at Easter then went steadily downhill until he died in his sleep. But by then his work was done, the Hares restored to life as spring began to warm the earth, and Galliard returned to his former balance and sanity.

Galliard and Francis reunited

The final scene reverts to the third-person narrator to describe Galliard, now utterly restored to health who had returned to New York, been reunited with his wife and colleagues, completely rehabilitated but has now flown back to the idyllic meadow which Leithen remembered right back at the start of the novel, for a three page envoi. He briefly summarise the fight-the-north theme:

‘You see, I have made my peace with the North, faced up to it, defied it, and so won its blessing.’

On a practical front a world war is raging and he knows he is to leave soon to join the army and who knows what his fate will be. Then this sometimes rackety novel ends on some of the most moving words I’ve ever read. We have, in effect, accompanied Leithen on his long journey to religious enlightenment and Galliard caps it beautifully.

The two by a common impulse turned their eyes to the wooden cross on the lawn of turf. Galliard rose.

‘We must hurry, my dear. The road back is none too good.’
She seemed unwilling to go.
‘I feel rather sad, don’t you? You’re leaving your captain behind.’
Galliard turned to his wife, and she saw that in his eyes which made her smile.
‘I can’t feel sad,’ he said. ‘When I think of Leithen I feel triumphant. He fought a good fight, but he hasn’t finished his course. I remember what Father Duplessis said – he knew that he would die; but he knew also that he would live.’ (p.208)

In its simplicity but its profound conviction I think that’s one of the most moving statements of faith I have ever read. It is a really beautiful ending to a book which way before the end had transcended Buchan’s limitations as a writer of popular shockers to morph into something much more deep and profound. It feels, by the end, like a really great book.

The concept of race in the fiction of John Buchan

It’s a central concept. People he meets are defined by family i.e. their place in the matrix of the British upper classes, or by ‘race’.

It doesn’t mean what it does today. Today ‘race’ is a negative word associated with racism. Just the word carries connotations of the colonial era when ‘lesser’ races deserved to be ruled by the white races etc.

It’s interesting to see how, for Buchan, the word is not particularly negative, and is also flexible. Sometimes it refers to the entire French people or Irish people etc, who are thought of as having definable characteristics. Other times it much more specifically refers to a family.

Here’s examples of it describing an entire people:

‘Well, they [the French Canadians] are a remarkable race there. They ought to have made a rather bigger show in the world than they have. Here’s a fine European stock planted out in a new country and toughened by two centuries of hardship and war. They keep their close family life and their religion intact and don’t give a cent for what we call progress. Yet all the time they have a pretty serious fight with nature, so there is nothing soft in them. You would say that boys would come out of those farms of theirs with a real kick in them, for they have always been a race of pioneers.’ (Bronson Jane)

‘I expect he has family in his blood like all his race.’ [of French Canadians]

But Augustin had the fine manners of his race. [French Canadians]

Then you have generalisations about the cross-breeding of these ‘races’:

‘That’s probably due to his race,’ said Leithen. ‘Whenever you get a borderland where Latin and Northman meet, you get this uncanny sensitiveness.’

And then you have something which is closer to ‘family’, such as when Leithen arrives at Galliard’s ancestral homeland:

Only now, when he was entering the cradle of Galliard’s race, did he realise how intricate was the task to which he had set himself.

‘You must know, monsieur, that once the Gaillards were a stirring race. They fought with Frontenac against the Iroquois, and very fiercely against the English. Then, when peace came, they exercised their hardihood in distant ventures.’

As you can see, none of these usages have any reference to the modern concern with ethnicity which has resulted from a mixture of very contemporary obsessions, with mass immigration to formerly white European countries, with the racism that so many of these immigrants face, and with evergrowing embarrassment about the behaviour of the European colonial powers and the rewriting of history to give black and other ethnic groups their rightful history and position.

Buchan was writing before all that was dreamed of and meant something very different, something more teasing and interesting.

Interesting words

  • callant – a young lad, a stripling, a boy
  • couloir – a seam, scar, or fissure, or vertical crevasse in an otherwise solid mountain mass
  • dunnage – the durable padding material used to protect goods during shipping
  • muskeg – a swamp or bog in northern North America
  • selvedge – a zone of altered rock, especially volcanic glass, at the edge of a rock mass

Credit

Sick Heart River by John Buchan was first published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1941. References are to the 2018 Polygon Authorised John Buchan edition.

Related links

John Buchan reviews

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Posted by Simon on February 28, 2024

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An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd (1982)

Nothing today had been remotely how he imagined it would be; nothing in his education or training had prepared him for the utter randomness and total contingency of events.
(Gabriel Cobb reflecting on the chaos of the Battle of Tanga, An Ice-Cream War, page 172)

This is a long, deeply researched and immaculately described historical novel, set during the Great War in British East Africa, filling 383 densely printed Penguin pages.

Boyd is a lovely writer. His style is clear and polite, in a very English way. It’s obviously less funny than ‘A Good Man in Africa’, which is a full-on comedy, but it also feels more formal, somehow more old fashioned, appropriately for its historical setting. There are moments of psychological acuity or observational detail or deft phrasing to give pleasure on every page.

Part 1. Before the war

Chapter 1. 6 June 1914, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa

Introduces us to Temple Smith, ‘a very fat man with a thick black walrus moustache’ (p.310), the American owner of a sisal plantation in the south of British East Africa (what will later become Kenya). Smith has travelled down to Dar es Salaam, which is in the adjoining colony of German East Africa, in order to collect a consignment of coffee plant seedlings. He is ambitious and wants to expand his farm from just growing and processing sisal

Through his eyes we see Dar as it was in 1914 and the arrival of several German ships at the harbour. Smith is greeted by his nearest neighbour from across the border in the German colony, one Erich von Bishop. An efficient crop-haired man, Bishop is here to greet his wife, Liesl, who has been on an extended holiday to her relatives in Europe (where she has put on a lot of weight).

(There’s a bit of backstory, which is that we learn why Smith is in Africa. He was bored being manager of an iron foundry in Sturgis, New Jersey, and had applied to an advertisement to be the manager of a big game hunt to Africa, in this case for the ex-US president Theodor Roosevelt and his son Kermit when they came on a big game safari back in 1909. When he questioned the need to massacre quite such huge numbers of wild game he was sacked but had come to like Africa and decided to stay on and try to make it as a farmer.)

There is an odd, apparently inconsequential episode, when Smith visits a local prostitute in a bordello. She is rake thin, covered in bangles and ointment and smells. When she spits something out the window which lands with a clatter on some nearby roof he chickens out and doesn’t go through with it…

Chapter 2. 8 June 1914, The Northern Railway, German East Africa

Bishop invites Smith to share the train journey from Dar back inland to the nearest station to their farms. We see the long uncomfortable railway journey through the eyes of Liesl von Bishop who is not happy to be back in Africa and, as angry women do, finds both the men pitiful and pathetic. Smith alights at Moshi station where he is met by his native foreman, Saleh.

Chapter 3. 10 June 1914, Taveta, British East Africa

Smith’s farm (which he has named Smithville) with its acres of sisal plants, barns, warehouse to house the massive decorticator machine, some tramlines. His placid wife, Matilda, and two yapping little boys, Glenway and Walker (p.45).

Chapter 4. 24 July 1914, Ashurst, Kent, England

Long chapter introducing us to the Cobb family through the eyes of the spoilt younger son, Felix, who’s just left private school before going up to Oxford next term. Felix has come under the influence of a charismatic boy called Holland, at school, and so fancies himself as a fashionable, progressive intellectual.

Holland’s sway over Felix had been established in their final year at school, and Felix had accepted it with the zeal of a disciple acknowledging the messiah. (p.189)

With the result that Felix finds his family, and everything about the impressive country estate in Kent, unbearable – his father the permanently bad-tempered retired Major Hamish; his sisters Cressida, Yseult and the twins Albertine and Eustacia; his conventional mother and his various male in-laws, namely:

  • Lieutenant Nigel Bathe married to Eustacia
  • Sammy Hinshelwood
  • the honourable Greville Verschoyle married to Albertine
  • Lt Col. Henry Hyam, married to Yseult (who, when war starts, bags a job in the Committee of Imperial Defence)

The only person he likes, adores even, is his older brother, 27-year-old Captain Gabriel Cobb who collected him from the station and with whom he goes for a swim in the old willow pool while filling him in on the latest family gossip. As part of their banter Gabriel chats about his time in the army in India where he hasn’t seen any fighting but he has stuck a few wild pigs. Felix is disgusted and asks whether they squeal. Well, you’d squeal if you were stuck with a spear, laughs Gabriel. This is a characteristically clever piece of prolepsis by Boyd for Gabriel will, himself, be stuck like a pig in the upcoming war (in Part 2, chapter 6).

This grand country pile is, we learn, the reward from a metal company in Wolverhampton which produces items like Felix’s electro-plated nickel-silver cigarette case (pages 52 and 209).

Chapter 5. 25 July 1914, Stackpole, Kent, England

Felix’s jaundiced jealous view of his brother’s marriage to Charis. He is mightily pissed off because at the last minute brother Gabriel told him he was being replaced as best man by Sammy Hinshelwood, Felix being downgraded to chief usher.

Chapter 6. 26 July 1914, Trouville-sur-mer, France

Gabriel and Charis’s honeymoon, filled with details about hotels and seabathing in 1914, but centring on Gabriel’s inability, on two successive nights, to get an erection, despite clambering on top of Charis and sort of rubbing his groin against her (still in his pyjamas) to her complete bewilderment. It’s only on the third night that he bangs his knee, navigating across the bedroom in the dark, she loses her temper and tells him to ‘come and let mummy rub it, you silly boy’ when, to both their surprises, he suckles her like a baby and gets a proper erection, which is a definite improvement, even if he then ejaculates prematurely before he has penetrated her. Sigh. A vivid imagining of the bad old days of total ignorance about almost every aspect of sex.

Next morning he reads a French paper and announces to an astonished Charis that Austria has declared war on Serbia and they must return to Britain immediately, that same day.

Part 2. The war

Chapter 1. 9 August 1914, Smithville, British East Africa

Officious army and customs officer Reggie Wheech-Browning – ‘a ludicrous beanpole of a man’ (p.338) – drops by to tell Smith that war has broken out and to leave his farm immediately. Smith thinks it’s stuff and nonsense and doesn’t budge.

A week later a force of German askaris (African soldiers) led by two German officers marches onto his land and up to his beloved factory. It is von Bishop who he met in the opening chapter. Very politely von Bishop announces he is commandeering Smith’s farm, as his men set fire to his sisal crop and start pulling up the short length of tram track he had lain down. It’s all he can do to prevent von Bishop from vandalising his precious decorticating machine. When asked, von Bishop very politely signs an affadavit itemising all the things he’s burned or is confiscating, but insists he will also be commandeering the farmhouse. Smith has one hour to pack his belongings, wife and two small boys into a mule-drawn buggy, and told to shamble off down the track towards Voi.

On the outskirts he is, ludicrously, fired on by the ramshackle force of askaris led by Wheech-Browning. Once he’s yelled who he is he’s allowed to proceed to Voi where he puts his family up at the government dak, with a view to himself journeying on to Nairobi to establish who’s going to pay him compensation.

Chapter 2. 20 August 1914, Nairobi, British East Africa

Ensconced in snobbish, pretentious, half-built Nairobi, Smith discovers that well-heeled Brits and various foreigners have set up a volunteer defence force while they wait for the relief force to arrive from India but have become disillusioned by two weeks of inactivity. In Voi he’s been greeted by Matilda’s father i.e. his father-in-law the slope-shouldered Reverend Norman Espie.

Smith goes to see his insurance company, the grandly named African Guarantee and Indemnity Company which is in fact a small office above a butcher’s shop on Sixth Avenue run by one immigrant Indian, Goolam Hoossam Essanjee Esquire. Essanjee explains that Smith’s claim of theft of his farm and equipment will have to be confirmed the company’s assessor who is also Goolam Hoossam Essanjee Esquire.

Chapter 3. 30 August 1914 ,Voi, British East Africa

10 days later. Wheech-Browning drives Smith and Essanjee in an early motorbike with sidecar out of Nairobi, past Voi. They stop in the open scrub an hour or so from Smith’s farm when they suddenly come under fire from Germans hiding in a rocky hill 600 yards away. As the reader anticipated, the Indian, Essanjee – the lieutenant dispensable of the situation – is hit twice and dies. Wheech-Browning and Smith bundle his body into the sidecar, and hightail it away from the ambush.

Chapter 4. 26 October 1914, SS Homayun, Indian Ocean

56 days later, and we join Gabriel aboard a tramp steamer sailing from Bombay to British East Africa. He had hung around in Britain waiting for news, then been sent out to India, to Bombay then up to Rawalpindi to join his regiment, the West Kents. But then to his disgust he was separated from them and posted to a subaltern regiment, the 69th Palamcottah Light Infantry, part of Indian Expeditionary Force B, and has to entrain all the way back down to Bombay and then board the smelly old SS Homayun for a hot slow boring voyage across the Indian Ocean.

Everyone is seasick. Incidents including a concert party interrupted by a rainstorm and the flogging of a mutineer. Sammy Hinshelwood distinguishes himself by his coarse stories about sex which, of course, embarrass but also arouse the only recently blooded Gabriel. He becomes friendly with the eccentric, intense Dr Bilderbeck who gives him the best advice for life in the front line: always have a pillow and a basin.

Chapter 5. 2 November 1914, Tanga, German East Africa

Tanga was a major port on the northernmost part of German East Africa, close to the border with British East Africa. Description of Gabriel and his troop loading into a lighter, being towed to the beach, jumping into the neck-high water, making their way to the beach and a little inland. Then the confusing long delay as they wait all through a hot day for instructions, their air of chaos when Gabriel goes up to the ‘red house’ on a hill which is staff headquarters. The constant sound of gunfire from ahead of them. Initial intelligence said the town had been abandoned. Now they realise the Germans have heavily fortified it and are fighting off all attacks.

Chapter 6. 3 November 1914, Tanga, German East Africa

Plausible sounding account of the battle Tanga in that it’s mostly Gabriel stuck in charge of his 70 or so scared Indian soldiers with a cheerfully naive number two, Gleeson. When they are told to go forward they blunder through dense undergrowth, are dispirited by a flight of Indian troops running back from the front, then blunder into an area of bees nest which attack and sting them very severely. At one point in the sequence of events he bumps into Bilderbeck again, who orders the handful of remaining Indian sepoys to advance. When they don’t move Bilderbeck calmly shoots one in the head at point blank range, a spatter of fresh brain landing on his boot.

Eventually it’s just Gabriel and Gleeson left as they make their way forward, are shot at by people with northern accents who they realise are the Lancashire regiment, identify themselves and discover the Lancs are pinned down by a load of Indian soldiers who take shots every time they try to retreat. Gleeson can speak Hindi so he is sent to the side of the house facing the Indians and starts shouting to them that they’re British.

Around then Gabriel sees a German officer emerge from a house a few hundred yards away, leading his men, in plain view and takes the opportunity to fire a shot. It completely misses but triggers an immense fusillade on the house they’re holed up in. When it dies away Gabriel turns to escape the house and comes across Gleeson lying on the floor with his lower jaw show away to reveal the enormous human tongue, glugging down his own blood and still blinking and moving his eyes.

Dazed with horror Gabriel leaps out the back window of the house and runs for the tree cover, telling himself all the time that he’ll come back to rescue Gleeson which we know he won’t. En route back to the beach he stumbles across a troop of German askaris who chase him, (grotesquely enough, through a graveyard), catch up, then slash at him with bayonets, one severing a thigh muscle so that he falls to the ground, taking two other severe stab wounds in the abdomen before he passes out. I assumed he was dead.

Chapter 7. 6 November 1914, Tanga, German East Africa

The Germans win the Battle of Tanga i.e. repulse the British attack. Bilderbeck is the British representative sent to supervise the handing over of British stores to the victorious Germans and ferrying the British wounded back to the ships, liaising with a German officer named Hammerstein, assisted by von Bishop whose eyes we see everything through. After the British had been forced to flee from the beaches, their battleships subjected the town to a heavy barrage. A shell landed near von Bishop giving him loud tinnitus so he asks the German medic Dr Deppe to examine him. Bilderbeck discovers Cobb is still alive though severely injured from the pig sticking he got from the bayonets and has a few words with him, in his hospital bed, before he returns to the beach and thence the British ships.

Chapter 8. 16 March 1915, Oxford, England

Six months later. Cut back to Felix who is now in his second term at Oxford. Things are not well. He continues to copy his hero, Holland, but neither of them make much impact in wartime Oxford. All the able-bodied students have volunteered and gone off to war. Felix has a slight astigmatism, Holland an unspecified ailment. Both are regularly handed white feathers by old Edwardian ladies in the street for being cowards. Felix is horribly embarrassed by this and has taken to wearing an eye patch to visibly excuse himself; Holland, true to his provocative aesthetic attitude, wants to be given white feathers and is jokily jealous because Felix has more than him. It’s that kind of jokey, studentish relationship.

But other things about Oxford are disappointing, too. Felix is at war with his scout, a wizened con-man named Sproat and his mute son, Algy. And his tutor is an ancient decrepit don named Jock Illiffe whose overheated rooms pong of cats. Once Felix read him the same essay that he’d read the previous week and Illiffe, sitting back in his chair with his eyes closed, didn’t even notice. With the result that he’s failed his Moderations or ‘Mods’ in History.

To cap it all he’s developed a cold sore at the corner of his mouth, the size of a sixpence, which refuses to go away, which solidifies into a scab, which breaks when he smiles and bleeds. Very unsightly.

So this chapter is a successfully evocative painting of Oxford in the first year of the Great War. It also gives us a Felix-eye view of the Cobb family. The splenetic Major has pinned up a big map of northern France in the study and forces the entire family and all the servants to attend a daily update on the progress of the war. The family have, of course, taken the news about Gabriel being severely wounded, very badly. There’s also news about the various other brothers-in-law and family hangers-on.

Holland has acquired a mistress in London, an artist’s model named Enid who takes morphine and makes his life hell, so he’s writing some jolly good poetry about it. Felix, very much still the shy virgin, has a crush on Holland’s sister, Amory, who’s at art school, and is invited to a party she’s giving.

Chapter 9. 18 March 1915, Stackpole Manor, Kent

Felix catches the train back to the family home in Kent. Charis is living there, now, in the former servant’s cottage, which was to have been her and Gabriel’s newlyweds home. She keeps bursting into tears about Gabriel. His father is still short and angry, but his flesh hangs off him. He looks like a demented Victorian cleric.

What a horrible old man, Felix thought. (p.199)

The Felix chapters are drily comical, with overtones of Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh. Cyril, the sweary working class man Felix liked, his son now tells him has been killed on the Western Front. Felix is genuinely shocked and upset. Then Charis springs it on him that the family have arranged a birthday party for her on 29 March, he’s invited, in fact everyone’s expecting Felix to ‘squire’ Charis. But it clashes with Amory’s party. Family duty or the (remote) possibility of sex. Decisions decisions for a young man.

Chapter 10. 29 March 1915, Café Royal, London

We meet Felix and Holland in the stylish Café Royal, whence they catch a cab to Cheyne Walk in Chelsea and upstairs to a sordid flat where Amory lives and which is hosting a very bohemian party, packed with artists and models, all smoking and drinking heavily, a girl playing guitar to an adoring coterie etc. Felix is introduced to Pavelienski or ‘Pav’, the east European model Amory models for. Amory herself is a thing chestless woman who almost completely ignored Felix and is irritated when Holland insists he accompanies them to the famed bohemian nightclub, the Golden Calf, as Amory had booked a table for 16 and Felix is supernumary.

(The Cave of the Golden Calf was a real nightclub, a consciously bohemian creation decorated by leading artists of the time – Wyndham Lewis, Charles Ginner and Spencer Gore – praised by Ezra Pound and frequented by Katherine Mansfield, Ford Madox Ford, and Augustus John. Wikipedia)

Anyway, Felix’s attempts to seduce Amory go disastrously awry as she shakes him off and calls him a ‘silly boring little boy’, getting up to go and dance with Pav. Suddenly sober and realising what a fool he’s made of himself, Felix goes wandering through the dark streets of London feeling poetic and soulful till he comes to a baked potato stand, buys one, is propositioned by an old prostitute, taken back to her squalid digs, is fleeced £2 for a horrible experience, unable to get an erection (like his brother Gabriel, in Trouville) so the hooker starts to masturbate him and he climaxes almost immediately (like his brother in Trouville), ejaculating over the sheets, prompting the outraged prossie to tell him to ‘fuck orf out of it’. Felix stumbles into his clothes and down the steep stairs and out into the bleak streets. Sex, eh.

Cut to Felix having taken the milk train back down to Kent and, having been cleaned out by the whore, forced to walk through the dew-drenched countryside to Stackpole. Here he’s surprised to see the light on in the cottage, knocks and is admitted by Charis who is still wearing her gown from the night before, the night of her party, the party Felix rudely missed in order to undergo his series of humiliations in London, as he now ruefully thinks. Sitting in her small front room in front of the fire sipping tea he suddenly feels intimately close to her, his brother’s wife, and tries to stifle the thoughts. The reader wonders whether they’ll end up becoming an item, two damaged ingenues…

Chapter 11. 17 June 1915, Nanda, German East Africa

Three months later. We discover that von Bishop’s wife, Liesl, has been nursing the injured. Kicked out of her house on the border with the British colony, she spent a few months in Dar until, out of boredom, she volunteered to help at the hospital but was then evacuated with all the long-term patients to a hospital far in the south and inland, at a place called Nanda.

A new clutch of patients arrived along with their doctor, Dr Deppe. One is Captain Gabriel Cobb. He is still alive, recovering from severe wounds, learning to walk with crutches. Liesl is a bad-tempered fat woman. So pale and freckled, she sweats continually. Her only pleasure is the brief shower at the end of the day when her maid, Kimi. pours several buckets of water over her head. Then she dries on a frayed towel, slips into casual clothes, eats and goes to bed early. Teutonic joylessness.

Chapter 12. 21 November 1915, Voi, British East Africa

Back to Temple Smith. It’s about a year after he was evicted from his farm. He joined the East African Mounted Rifles but has done nothing except practice drills and acquire more bits of uniform which barely cover his fat frame, while Voi expands into a vast armed camp containing Indian force B, South African coloureds and whites, Kings African Rifle blacks, a huge heterogeneous force.

He’s been called in to meet the head of this force, Brigadier-General Pughe. He’s s short pompous man who turns out to be drunk on brandy and promptly ignores his advice about the lie of the land. Serves the stupid British right.

Talking of which Smith walks back towards the enormous camp, past the fenced areas for donkeys and horses (dying by the dozen due to tsetse fly) to the aerodrome which amounts to a big area of flat, cleared scrubland and a couple of warehouses made out of canvas awning. The entire presence of the Royal Air Force is just two BE2C biplanes.

To Smith’s immense irritation the officious twerp Wheech-Browning is dressed up in flying gear with a reversed cap and flying goggles and about to go for his first flight with flying officer Drewes. it’s a disaster. They bounce along the ‘runway’ but after lifting about 12 feet slowly sink back to the ground. It’s too hot, the air is too thin. But it carries trundling along towards a drainage ditch, pitches head first into it and Drewes is killed. Bystanders rush over to the wreckage to pull his body out but Wheech-Browning, indestructible, emerges as blithe and jolly as ever.

Chapter 13. 10 December 1915, The King’s Arms, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire

Felix and Charis have ended up becoming an item. We find them in bed in a pub 30 miles or so away from Stackpole. They have had eight sexual encounters and are familiar with each other’s body. We watch Charis inset a tiny sponge dabbed in an unnamed solution attached to a fine thread into her vagina, the thread just sticking out. Contraception 1915. They both know the ghost of Gabriel hovers over their couplings but neither has the guts to raise the subject.

Nigel Bathe came back from Mesopotamia where he lost both arms in a bomb-throwing training exercise when one went off in his hand. Christ. The casual horror not of war but the incompetent preparations for it.

A recap of how Charis and Felix became lovers i.e. he repeatedly kissed her and wore down her rejections. In the end she’s lonely want wanted comforting. They devised stories about visiting distant relatives as excuses for meeting up in remote inns for weekends of love.

On the train back from Aylesbury to London Felix admits he feels dreadfully guilty. Charis reassures her that they have created their own bubble of love. But inside she is full of remorse and guilt. Humans and their ridiculous emotions. But then this is a novel. A verbal artifice created with the aim of describing extreme or complex emotions, all for our entertainment.

Chapter 14. 11 March 1916, Salaita Hill, British East Africa

Detailed description of the war in Africa. Temple Smith is obviously going to be our eyes and ears for this. On 12 February the Brits launch a headlong assault on Salaita Hill where 600 South Africans are mown down by German machine gunners. A second attempt finds the hill abandoned, the Germans have withdrawn from the town of Taveta to scrub country and two hills beyond General Smuts from South Africa is put in charge of the campaign. A month later, against Smith’s advice, the Brits insist on trying to storm the two hills. He watches the whole sorry fiasco and watches the obstinate stupid British officer in command, Colonel Youell, shot in the neck and quickly bleed to death.

Smith accompanies his body in a field ambulance back to staff HQ, reports to General Pughe who is completely drunk then, in utter disgust, goes into town, gets his mule-handler to saddle up his mule and heads off towards Smithville, his homestead which he hasn’t seen for 18 months.

First of all, there are no Germans there. After a lot of tense creeping towards the farmhouse in expectation of being shot he discovers that every surface in every single room has been covered in human faeces. Then he encounters Saleh, the old chief servant, Saleh shows him that a) the grave of his dead baby daughter has been opened and the bones scattered everywhere (they collect them together and rebury them) and b) the Germans have taken the decorticator – almost as soon as Smith left, according to Saleh. Smith vows revenge against von Bishop. The tone and intemperance of his vow reminded me fleetingly of Morgan Leafy’s tone of permanent rage in Boyd’s novel, ‘A Good Man in Africa’…

Chapter 15. 24 June 1916, Nanda, German East Africa

Back at the German hospital several things have happened to Gabriel. He has recovered enough to be able to walk around freely. The research base had been converted not only into a hospital but a prisoner of war camp. The British officer in charge had conceived a plan for Gabriel to keep infecting his thigh wound with dirt in order to remain an invalid and therefore outside the prison camp and in the hospital. He also suggested that Gabriel help out with basic nursing activities, for example washing German wounded or holding them as they evacuated their dysenteric bowels – because from this privileged position he was able to a) pilfer supplies and b) find out the latest military situation (which is that the Germans are slowly withdrawing along the railway line in face of solid British advances, towards Dar).

But the chapter starts a few weeks after all the British POWs have been evacuated to the coast. There is no military reason why Gabriel should continue malingering. The truth is he’s fallen in lust with Liesl. She doesn’t give a toss about him, is a big, solid, no-nonsense German Frau who goes about her duties with angry efficiency. but a few weeks previously Gabriel, dropping off some of the cigarettes he’s taken to rolling from local tobacco for both of them, glimpsed her stripped naked having her evening shower – and was seized with raw lust. Now he can barely be in her presence without trembling although she, of course, is completely oblivious to his behaviour.

Chapter 16. 25 June 1916, Stackpole Manor, Kent

Charis is finding the affair unbearable. She’s spent 18 months writing letters to Gabriel and never had a reply. She stops and feels dreadfully guilty, so guilty that she has a second wind and writes Gabriel a long letter explaining that she’s been having an affair and why – but not naming Felix as the lover, and posts it to the Ministry of Defence as usual.

As usual, Felix drops by the cottage late that night. He’s taken to doing this, taking Charis’s sexual availability more and more for granted. After their latest midnight sex and Felix has returned to his room, Charis writes Felix a simple note saying she is going away, she has written Gabriel telling him everything.

Except that she didn’t tell Gabriel everything in her letter to him, she didn’t identify Felix as her lover. I predict the discrepancy between the two letters will cause trouble. I predict Felix will think Charis has written to Gabriel about naming him and be stricken with panic.

Chapter 17. 26 June 1916, Stackpole Manor, Kent

Felix opens Charis’s letter at an otherwise typical family breakfast, reads its few lines, jumps to his feet yelling ‘Jesus Christ!’ and runs down to the cottage to find Charis long gone. Turmoil. Panic. He is of course distraught that she’s told Gabriel everything but something in the tone of the note makes him panic think she’s killed herself so her runs to the ornamental fish ponds they spent so much time mooning beside. Notices the big stone bust of the emperor Vitellius is missing. Leaps into the freezing water and discovers her body. She had tied round her neck with twine then tied it multiple times round the bust and chucked it in. She looks peaceful in submarine death, her hair floating calmly round her face. Well, this is a fine pickle!

Chapter 18. 1 July 1916, Sevenoaks, Kent

There’s an inquest. Felix lies his face off and claims to have lost the letter in the frenzy of searching for Charis, maybe in the pond. Everybody believes this except the local doctor who Charis had been doing refugee work with, Dr Venables. Venables asks him for a drink at a bar in a hotel not far from the magistrates’ court in Sevenoaks where the inquest is held. Here he asks Felix point blank if he was having an affair with Charis. It takes all Felix’s self possession to try and appear calm as he pretends to be outraged and deny it. Venables then asks whether Charis was having an affair with anyone else, which Felix says he doubts. Thoughts are rampaging through his head. The calm reader, used to this sort of thing, realises that Charis was probably pregnant.

Part 3. The Ice-Cream War

Chapter 1. 25 January 1917, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa

It is six months later. Unsurprisingly Felix has enlisted. Equally unsurprisingly, it’s in a regiment which is fighting in Africa and we now meet him on deck the troop ship as it steams into Dar es Salam harbour. He’s with the Fifth Battalion, the Nigerian Brigade, being cobbled together from African conscripts, not at all fashionable. But it is Africa. He is driven by guilt, the need to do something, out of which slowly formed the idea of a quest to find brother Gabriel.

Anyway, long uncomfortable train journey to a station in the middle of nowhere called Mikesse. He’s collected her by a Scot with an impenetrable accent named Gilzean. Five hours bumpy driving to a camp where he’s informed his regiment are the other side of the river Rufiji. Since the British invaded German East (as it’s known) at Kilimanjaro in the campaign Smith had witnessed the scrappy start of, they had driven the Germans steadily south and across the Rufiji river when the rains came and fighting stopped.

From this camp Felix has to continue riding a mule along muddy tracks alongside porters, sometimes through swamps, eventually reaching the wide Rufiji river, across which he is taken by ferry, then into his regimental camp, outside which porters are burning a huge mound of horses and mules which are killed off in epic numbers by tsetse fly. He’s arrived at the dump named Kibongo.

Chapter 2. 15 April 1917, Kibongo, German East Africa

Three months later it has rained every single day, food has run low because the trails to the river on the north side have been flooded and the ferry has been washed away. Felix and his battalion are stuck on the south side and on emergency rations. They’re all wasting away, reduced to eating the few monkeys they can shoot. Some black troops regularly die from eating the corpses of horses or mules. Wretched. Except for the ongoing comedy of Felix’s inability to understand Gilzean’s impenetrable Scottish accent.

Chapter 3. 15 July 1917, Nanda German East Africa

With Gabriel in Nanda. The Germans are losing the campaign. Gabriel is keeping a secret record of everything he hears. Dr Deppe has been moved on and Gabriel has stopped rubbing dirt in his wound to keep it infected. Deppe’s replacement tries to get Gabriel incarcerated with the new contingent of POWs but Liesl insists he is left free to carry on his medical assistance. Ongoing comedy because Liesl appears to have no idea that Gabriel burns with almost uncontrollable lust for her big full-breasted, thunder-thighed body.

The British have landed at Kilwa south of the mouth of the Rufiji so will be fighting their way towards Nanda. Something about the way the narrator keeps reminding us that Gabriel is keeping a secret record of everything he hears begins to make me suspect it will be found and Gabriel will be arrested and shot as a spy. Will he get to kiss Liesl before then or cup her huge breasts in his shaking hands? Doubt it.

Chapter 4. 19 October 1917, Lindi, German East Africa

The British advance, fighting increases, more Germans are taken prisoner, but it is the fate of Felix’s company to do peaceful duties far from the fighting, building latrines or walls, flattening land for airfields, accompanying supplies to supply depots near the front line etc. Felix gets time off from supervising the digging of latrines to go to HQ at Lindi on the coast to see if he can discover anything about Gabriel. Here he bumps into fat Smith and, in a coincidence, it turns out they’re both looking for Bilderbeck. And in an outrageous coincidence the first (unmarked) door Smith opens is to an office occupied by Reggie Wheech-Browning, his nemesis.

Wheech-Browning is able to inform Smith that von Bishop is still alive or that the British Army has no notification of his death (so Smith can continue his quest to kill him for despoiling his farm) and Felix that no news has been received of Gabriel’s death (so Felix can continue his quest to find him).

He tells them about Bildebeck’s end; he was in a siege of some German troop, went up onto the walls to harangue them every night, and one night snapped and charged the German lines shouting how they were preventing him from ‘finding his girl’, one of the many odd obsessions which made Bilderbeck such unnerving company for Gabriel and everyone else on the ship from India.

Chapter 5. 19 November 1917, Nanda German East Africa

Chapters 5 to 10 take place over the course of 6 days and form one continuous episode, the arrest, escape and trek of Gabriel Cobb.

The German army in German East has been commanded by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Now his HQ has arrived at Nanda which is swollen with staff, soldiers and askaris. Liesl and Gabriel discuss the fact that the British are now only 50 miles away. In a few days, chances are, he’ll be liberated. Gabriel is surprised to discover this makes him unhappy. Here in the hospital, as a glorified orderly, he feels safe and secure. He decides to sneak round the back of Liesl’s bungalow for one last surreptitous look at her nakedness but when he sees it packed with German officers realises his folly.

He is caught, lightly interrogated, found guilty of spying but not shot as I expected. Instead he is locked in an old mealie sack shed for several days. On the first night Liesl comes to see him. She says they’re going to take him with them. He almost cries and begs her help. She comes back the next night with a metal hinge. It takes Gabriel ten minutes to dig a channel under one of the loose wooden walls.

He trembles with lust and fear and panic standing so close to that large body, those trembling breasts. Liesl, apparently still unaware of his feelings, gives him a sack containing food and water and tells him not to try to get through the lines to the British but hide somewhere for a couple of days till the Germans have left, then slip back into Nanda and find her.

Chapter 6. 22 November 1917, Nanda German East Africa

To his vast irritation von Bishop is tasked by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, head of the entire East German Army no less, with recovering the escaped prisoner. He says goodbye to Liesl and notices how big and manly she has become. He doesn’t know her any more. He chooses three of the ruga-ruga, natives with filed teeth reputed to be cannibals, and sets off north to find the fugitive.

Chapter 7. 22 November 1917, The Makonde plateau, German East Africa

Day one of Gabriel’s trek north. He is in poor shape generally, worse after three days locked in a shed. It’s hot, the thorn bushes scratch him, his injured leg starts to seize up. Locals in villages he passes notice him, the children throw stones. His plan is to press on across the wide flat plateau till nightfall.

Chapter 8. 22 November 1917, near Nambindinga, German East Africa

Unusually for once Felix’s company is in the vanguard of an advance. Much good it does them as one of his fellow officers, young Loveday with the irritating habit of peppering his conversation with French phrases, is blown in half by a landmine.

Anyway, suddenly arrives Wheech-Browning, that bad penny, ‘that ludicrous bean-pole of a man’, to inform Felix they’ve heard news of Gabriel. Smith was in an advance force which has taken Nanda, discovered the POW camp and some of the soldiers told them Gabriel had been there for years, had been arrested, had escaped just the day before.

Wheech-Browning drives Felix into Nanda, where they come across Smith questioning Liesl who, of course, he met right back at the start of the novel. He wants to know where Bishop is but now, as WB and Felix arrives, informs them of the enormous coincidence that von Bishop (who Smith is after) is chasing Gabriel (who Felix is after).

Felix introduces himself and asks the all-important question: Did his brother ever receive a letter from home? Liesl answers promptly and authoritatively NO, and Felix feels a wonderful sense of sweet relief flood his body. So Gabriel never learned about his affair with Charis. In fact, the reader knows he wouldn’t have in any case, as Charis never mentioned Felix by name. But Felix doesn’t know this.

He needs to go out into the bush to find Gabriel. Smith wants to find Bishop. They both ask WB but the latter says that if, as they claim, it’s a case of security / intelligence well, he’ll jolly well have to come, too. Is there no limit to the man’s irritatingness?

Chapter 9. 24 November 1917, The Makonde plateau, German East Africa

Exciting description of Bishop and the ruga ruga’s pursuit of Cobb across the plateau. They see a fire as dusk falls. They creep up but one trads on a stick, the mule hears and starts hee-hawing, and they see the figure flee. By the time they get there the small base by the fire is deserted, with Cobb’s sack of stuff, bread, a book, abandoned. Bishop sends the three natives to capture Cobb. Why does the book Cobb had belong to von Bishop. Mysteries. He falls asleep, wakes at dawn next morning. After some time the three natives return. One is carrying a sack. As Bishop sits with his rifle, one of them throws severed Cobb’s head into the dirt at his feet.

And that, children, is what you get for peeping at naked women having a shower!

Chapter 10. 25 November 1917, The Makonde plateau, German East Africa

Smith, Felix and Wheech-Browning come across the camp the next day. There’s a small burial mound. Half a mile away a business of vultures and big birds. When they ride over to it they see it’s a body without a head, already half eaten. Going back to the camp they dig into the mound and find Gabriel’s head buried wrapped in a blanket. Felix is convulsed with weeping. Both he and Smith are plain puzzled: who would do a thing like that?

Part 4. After the war

Chapter 1. 15 May 1918, Boma Durio, Portuguese East Africa

Six months later and the German forces have retreated into Portuguese east Africa but are still at large. Felix’s Nigerian regiment is decommissioned, the men sent back to Nigeria, but he wants to stay on and hunt von Bishop, so he takes up Wheech-Browning’s offer of a job in Army Intelligence. But, in the classic style, instead of being anywhere near the fighting he is turned into a supplies officer at a nowhere dump in the middle of rich agricultural land, Boma Durio, where he makes ragged friendships with some of the Portuguese officers

The chapter opens with the arrival of, you’ve guessed it, Intelligence Officer Wheech-Browning. He gets Cobb to give instruction to the Portuguese officers in how to use the (very simple) Stokes mortar. It doesn’t work very well so he goes to pace out the distance and is horrified when he hears the lick and sees a puff of smoke meaning a mortar has been launched. He yells at the Portuguese captain who’s accompanied him to run but the mortar detonates, ripping his clothes off, covering him in bruises and cuts. Dazed he staggers to the crater and realises it was a direct hit on Captain Pintao who has been vaporised.

Then appears Wheech-Browning who apologises profusely and explains that he had the lanyard in his hand when he sneezed. Terribly sorry, old chap. Wheech-Browning, his rise and rise, might, in a funny sort of way, be emerging as the central subject of the entire novel.

Chapter 2. 13 November 1918, Kasama, Rhodesia

Von Bishop is still with the German army commanded by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. After going south into Portuguese, capturing supplies, they’d doubled back north into the German colony then headed west into Rhodesia which is where they now are, having captured a town full of provisions.

Many men and some of the officers are coming down with and quickly dying from the Spanish flu. Von Bishop is still haunted by the horrible killing of Cobb on the plateau. The ruga ruga spoke no English and he didn’t speak their language. They did what they thought would please him (like Pharaoh beheading Pompey for Caesar). Next night the three natives disappeared, leaving von Bishop to rendezvous with von Lettow-Vorbeck’s main force at the river crossing into the Portuguese colony. He lied that they found Cobb’s body dead from exposure and buried it.

Von Bishop is strolling round town when a motorbike courier arrives. He is British so von Bishop informs him he is arrested while the courier gets out his case and hands von Bishop a note announcing that the war is over and hostilities have ceased. At last, he thinks, with huge relief.

Chapter 3. 2 December 1918, Nairobi, British East Africa

Felix is recuperating at a convalescent home for officers in Nairobi. He’s just received a letter from his mother telling him his father has been sent to a sanatorium, and that his friend Holland recently telephoned from Russia to announce that he’s joined a revolution there. Turns out Felix was hit in the occiput by shrapnel from the mortar and it badly affected his sight, which was fragmented but has, mercifully, almost completely recovered as the wound healed. He regrets not writing earlier to inform them of Gabriel’s death.

He had been reading a newspaper when the letter arrived. It had an account of the final surrender of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and his vexatious German Army. They had all been transported to Dar. It listed the 30 or so officers and included von Bishop’s name. At that moment Felix conceived a plan. He was going to travel to Dar, find von Bishop and shoot him dead in revenge for the gruesome murder of his brother.

Chapter 4. 5 December 1918, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa

Description of how von Bishop, along with the other captured officers, surrendered at Abicorn, were shipped up Lake Tanganyika to the port of Kigama and then the long train journey to the coast. Here they are greeted as heroes by the German community and von Bishop is reunited with Liesl who, he immediately notices, has lost a lot of weight, is back to the slim figure she had when he saw her off to Europe in 1913. They go to the small bungalow she is being allowed as a German civilian. The maid gets him a beer and almost immediately Liesl asks what happened to Gabriel.

Von Bishop tells the prepared lie, that he found Gabriel dead of exposure. Liesl apparently believes him. For a second she was going to say something – ‘Erich, I…’ – probably going to admit that she helped Gabriel escape, but Erich doesn’t want to hear it and talks over her. Liesl changes tack and goes on to say that she recognises one of the British men who came after von Bishop, saw him here in Dar just the day before. We know she’s referring to Felix.

Chapter 5. 9 December 1918, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa

The climax of the book. A few nights later Felix sneaks up on the bungalow now inhabited by von Bishop and his wife. He is full of confused moral contradictions like human beings so often are, at least in fictions. He has a great big service revolver. He climbs noisily in through an open window and sees a prone body on the bed and whispers, then pokes, then shouts at the unresponsive German. The door opens a light goes on and von Bishop’s wife tells him Erich is dead. Died three hours ago of Spanish flu.

Felix improvises an excuse for being there, something about wanting to talk to him about his brother’s death. He asks Liesl if Erich told her how Gabriel died and she says ‘Yes’ in a calm manner, so calm that Felix instantly realises she knows nothing about the beheading. Erich must have lied to her. She is ignorant. On the spot, he decides not to tell her. It doesn’t matter any more. Why carry on spreading suffering?

Epilogue

Epilogue. 3 January 1919, Mombasa, British East Africa

Felix and Temple Smith have met up and review the whole story. They’re on the quayside at Mombasa as Felix prepares to get his boat back to England.

Both smile wryly at the flu beating them to the revenge they wanted to wreak on von Bishop. The narrative ends on a comic note for while Felix is still puzzled by Liesl’s complete indifference to her husband’s death, Smith is vexed about the disappearance of his precious decorticator. He’s scoured the farms of the entire region round his homestead and never found it.

They wave him off as he gets the small lighter out to the steamer and he mounts to the railings. Then the decorative canon onshore fire a salute to a battalion of Indian troops preparing to embark on a steamer. The loud noise triggers Felix’s optical problem, the result of the mortar injury, his sight becomes fragmentary and patchy, the sea and sky, the land and the people on it, all reduced to jagged fragments.

Thoughts

English scenes

Of the 18 chapters in the section titled ‘The War’, no fewer than seven are set in England and feature Felix Cobb. Of the total 40 chapters, 10 are set in Britain (or Trouville). My point is there’s a lot of scenes and events set in England for a book supposedly about the war in Africa. Not complaining or criticising, just pointing out that a lot of these scenes are as – if not more – effective than the African ones. I felt I got to know Charis, Felix and Holland better than most of the African characters.

Conveying information

Giles Foden has written five novels set in Africa, each incorporating large chunks of history, including one set in the same region of East Africa during the Great War (‘Mimi and Toutou Go Forth’). So I’m able to do a direct comparison and say Boyd is much better at integrating lots of factual backstory with a complex plot. In Foden it feels like the plot stops while a character clumsily invokes the historical facts. In Boyd the third person narrator tells us everything we need to know then smoothly goes on with the plot. Boyd is a much smoother, more accomplished writer in this technical sense of arranging his plot and integrating factual material. His prose is also much more smooth and finished and not odd and cranky as Foden’s is. He also has a continual dry sense of humour which peeks out at all kinds of moments, unlike Foden who is heavy and humourless throughout. When Foden tries to be amusing, as in ‘Mimi and Toutou Go Forth’, it’s like watching Gordon Brown try to tell a humorous anecdote i.e. you feel embarrassed for him.

Comic coincidences

Stories need coincidence of a kind which don’t happen in real life: old lovers bumping into each other etc. In Foden’s stories the coincidences are unbelievable because he takes them, like everything else, with deadly seriousness. Boyd has a lovely sense of humour which helps you accept his coincidences. Thus, Smith’s life is bedevilled by a tall officious British officer named Wheech-Browning but the way they keep bumping into each other, instead of undermining the story (as it does in Foden), because Boyd plays it for dry laughs, somehow the comedy takes the edge off the improbability and laughs you into believing it. It has (it occurs to me) the same kind of comedy of coincidences Waugh deploys so well in his novels, with the same scapegraces popping up in unlikely places.

Influences and echoes

Isn’t there a scene in D.H. Lawrence where posh people die in the pond of their big posh house? I remember it from the movie version of ‘Women in Love’. The memory of this made me think of the English scenes as a kind of nexus of tropes from Lawrence (for the passion), Huxley (for the social comedy) and Waugh (for the withering satire). Boyd is a very good, very entertaining writer, but maybe the reason he’s never had a breakthrough work and never become a really big name is because what he’s good at is refreshing existing tropes and memes: the comedy of ‘A Good Man in Africa’ contained multiple echoes of English farceurs from Kingsley Amis to Tom Sharpe. I’ve mentioned the English writers who the English scenes in this book bring to mind. Even the war scenes, in their ridiculous futility, remind me of Evelyn Waugh’s (surprisingly numerous) war scenes.

So he’s a very good, very entertaining writer, full of echoes.

Credit

An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd was first published by Hamish Hamilton in 1982. References are to the 1983 Penguin paperback edition.

William Boyd reviews

  • A Good Man in Africa (1981)
  • An Ice-Cream War (1982)

Africa reviews

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by Simon on January 10, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 10, 2024

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