The Riverside Villas Murder by Kingsley Amis, 1973
The Riverside Villas Murder was written in the 1970’s, is set in the 1930’s, and is infused with the dominant social attitudes of the 1950s. Which all adds up to an uncomfortable mix. The story is told principally through the eyes of 14-year-old schoolboy Peter Furneaux. He is a typical 14 year-old, unable to go more than a few minutes at a time without thinking about sex. The mystery element of the story begins with a burglary at a local museum, where a mummified body and some Roman coins are stolen. Later, at a village dance, one of the Riverside Villas residents, a Mr Inman, provokes his neighbours by suggesting he has damaging information about them. During the dance, Mrs Trevelyan, a bored housewife, dances with Peter. Later she invites him to tea at her home, where she ‘seduces’ him. In the 1970’s this may have seemed comical, but fifty years on the scene is quite shocking in many ways. While it is Peter’s first sexual experience, Amis treats it as slapstick comedy: “What he had imagined so often and so long, and what actually happened on Mrs Trevelyan’s bed, resembled each other about as much as a fox-terrier and a rhinoceros.”
A few days later, Inman is murdered. He staggers into the Furneaux home, soaking wet from having fallen into a nearby river and bleeding from a head wound. Peter calls Mrs Trevelyan for help, but Inman dies shortly after. The rest of the novel comprises the police investigation, led by a cast of policemen who I think we are supposed to find comic but to me were one-dimensional and unconvincing and whose investigation is chaotic.
As a murder-mystery the novel is dull – the explanation as to whodunnit, when it is finally revealed, manages to be both predictable, because it follows the traditions of the genre, and at the same time impossible to deduce, given that the murder weapon turns out to be an improbable Heath-Robinson contraption that no-one could possibly have foreseen. The murderer’s motives are also transparently thin.
But there is a much more serious problem with the novel. Amis clearly set out to write a traditional detective novel, with the central character being a young teenage boy. It follows all the tropes of the genre quite carefully, as if the novel were an exercise in nostalgia. The 1930’s setting – Amis was born in 1922, so would have been a teenager himself in the thirties and therefore very familiar with the popular culture reference which litter the novel – allows him to wallow in nostalgia for an England where murderers are executed, housewives are almost invisible unless they are sexual predators and gay men are the object of scorn and disgust. The novel also contains a scattering of casual uses of the n-word and gay slurs, which, when placed in the mouths of old-fashioned men such as Peter’s father or the police provide the excuse of authenticity but at the same time allow Amis to break social taboos. In other words the novel is pointedly offensive. This isn’t social observation, it is autobiography.
Which poses two questions: why read a book with such objectionable ideas, and why review it? I loved Lucky Jim, and while I have developed a much better understanding of some of its problematic aspects, I still have a fondness for it. Amis can craft a striking phrase – the fox-terrier/rhinoceros quote above for example – and he did go on to win the Booker Prize. So it is hard to dismiss him as an author, and I still read him occasionally to see if he could ever recapture the brightness and humour of Lucky Jim. So far there have only been glimpses. As to the question of why one would review a book that deserves to go out of print and remain so, that’s more straightforward. These are not recommendations but posts noting what books I have read. No more no less. I don’t post about every single book I read (although I should according to my self-imposed rules) but I try to miss as few as possible. And if I have saved anyone the experience of reading the Riverside Villas Murder then it will have been worth it.
The Road is a pretty traumatic read – if books came with trigger warnings, this would have lots of them. It is set in the nearish future after an environmental or some other disaster that has wiped out almost all plant and animal life on earth. The sun is blocked by clouds and ash covers everything. The landscape is hellish, blasted and burnt. The few human survivors hunt one another for food.
The story is told through the eyes of ‘the man’ and his son, survivors in an unremittingly bleak and hostile landscape. The only other survivors they meet want to kill them and eat them, or are enslaved and due to meet the same fate. At one point they see from a hiding point
“An army in tennis shoes, tramping. Carrying three foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings. Lanyards at the wrist. Some of the pipes were threaded through with lengths of chain fitted at their ends with every manner of bludgeon…The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasselled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of trucksprings in some crude forge upcountry…Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each.”
The son was born just after the end of the world. Initially his mother was with them for some time, but in one of the novel’s many disturbing scenes the man remembers his final conversation with her where she confirms her decision to take her own life:
“Sooner or later they will catch us and kill us. They will rape me. They’ll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you won’t face it. You would rather wait for it to happen. But I can’t. I can’t.”
The novel is a dystopian version of the classic journey/quest story, its title ironically referencing Kerouac’s On the Road. While Kerouac’s characters travelled freely through a sunny, prosperous American landscape, the man and his son are on foot, hunted and starving. They travel south looking for a warmer climate, with the vague destination of the coast, when they can go no further, and an equally vague hope that they might meet a community of non-cannibals willing to take them in and help them. They carry their small amount of food and possessions in a shopping trolley, which explains the need to stay on the road rather than heading across country. The road is largely deserted but also very dangerous – it is where they are most likely to meet other, equally hungry and desperate people.
The boy – he is around ten years old – constantly asks his father questions, principally to seek reasurance and comfort. He believes his father when told that they will find food, somewhere warm, and people to help them, even though every day proves how profoundly unlikely this seems. As all plant life is dead, the only food left is tinned and this is obviously in very short supply. All the other necessities of life, including shelter, clothes and clean water, are equally hard to come by. At several points they come close to starvation; at many others they are nearly captured or killed. After every step they get colder, hungrier, thirstier. The world they live in is so vividly realised that the reader shares in the feeling of trauma. Hellish doesn’t begin to describe it. The only thing that keeps them going is one another, and the small, unspoken hope that somewhere there is a place of refuge. Extraordinarily, at one point they find just such a place, an emergency bunker full of food and other resources, but the man refuses to stay, refusing to believe they will be safe, even though the road is a much more dangerous environment.
Despite everything, the boy preserves a core of integrity. He wants to help people they encounter, and cannot accept the hard decisions his father has to constantly make. He is the voice of compassion, the conscience of a lost world he knows only through the memories of his father, which in hindsight seems a paradise:
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
I enjoy dystopian fiction, and will watch just about anything involving zombies or end of the world catastrophes. Usually these involve a suspension of disbelief – the characters often survive for long periods without any obvious sign of food or water, for example, or find weapons in abundance just when they are needed. The Road offers no such false comforts. This is a terrifying world in which death seems an attractive alternative to the hardships of daily life. I read The Road compulsively in just over a day, all the time anticipating the end which I thought was inevitable – this novel was not going to have a happy ending. I am going to avoid spoilers and let you decide what you think about the ending, but whatever you do don’t read The Road unless you are feeling quite psychologically strong. Keep telling yourself it is only a story.
I started Anna Funder’s Wifedom, her 2023 book about George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, with a considerable sense of unease. I had read reviews of the book when it came out which raised some concerns about the methodology used and the conclusions reached; the book’s blurb heightened the sense that I was likely to be reading a hit-job on one of my favourite authors. At the same time I wanted to try and keep an open mind – after all I knew that Orwell was hardly a saint, and if the author had something new to say about his life, his relationships and his work, then I wanted to learn.
The first puzzle to unpick was – what kind of book is this? It’s not a biography – it seemed obvious to me that Funder had originally been working on a conventional biography of Eileen, but that her fox had been thoroughly shot by the publication in 2020 of Sylvia Topp’s Eileen – the Making of George Orwell.Wifedom is also not a novel, although at one point Funder claims she considered making it one. It’s not a memoir, but there are several points at which the author discusses her own personal circumstances, her memories, her status as a wife and mother and her dissatisfaction with the sharing of household tasks within her marriage. In fact the book is all of the above, and more. Helpfully Funder uses the term ‘counterfiction’ to describe the text. The internet defines counterfiction as “a story or narrative that challenges dominant views, mainstream beliefs, or official accounts by presenting an alternative, often marginalized, perspective, aiming to disrupt established realities or norms through fictionalized elements”. This concept was key to me understanding what Funder was trying to achieve. The fictionalised elements in Wifedom are Funder’s attempts to ventriloquise her subject, creating diary entries for Eileen as she drafts the letters to Norah Myles that serve as the author’s inspiration for this account.
Initially this approach – essentially ‘making things up’ – only served to exacerbate my unease. But I quickly realised that was the point – the author wants to challenge the reader and the recreated internal monologues, the streams of consciousness that record Eileen’s private thoughts and ideas as she goes about her day and writes her letters are acts of imagination, attempts to construct Eileen and George’s married life in the absence of more direct, first-hand evidence. As long as the reader remembers that – this is just Funder’s best efforts at imagining what Eileen might have thought – then the intention is successfully achieved. A conventional biography would rarely be so bold as to creatively reconstruct a subject’s thoughts and feelings, but Funder is not constrained by such conventionalities. If these exercises help us see the hidden Eileen more clearly, then the job is done.
The question then is whether this is the case – whether the Eileen and George created by the author here is plausible and convincing? There is of course plenty of evidence that tells us about this couple’s married life. Letters, diaries, and a whole catalogue of personal memoirs by the people who knew them. These accounts are fairly unanimous – this was an unconventional but surprisingly happy marriage. Both George and Eileen said as much over and over again and despite various infidelities, suspected and actual, there is no suggestion they ever considered separation – and of course they adopted a baby in 1944, a signal of the strength of their bond.
Funder presents a very different account of their marriage. Her evidence rests heavily on two primary sources – the accounts of Eileen’s friend, Lydia Jackson, who it would be fair to say never looked kindly on Orwell (she once told an interviewer “I was always sorry that Orwell married Eileen”) and the ‘Norah’ letters. These six letters written from Eileen to a university friend, Norah Myles, who so far as I can tell never met Orwell, and whose replies did not survive, were not “newly discovered” as claimed in the paperback edition of the book’s blurb (I recognise that the author almost certainly did not write the blurb, and may not even have approved the text, but they are part of the book nonetheless.) In fact these letters were ‘discovered’ in 2005, almost 20 years before Wifedom was published, and appear in Peter Davison’s supplement to his collected works, The Lost Orwell. As a number of critical reviews have pointed out, Funder notices every time the passive voice is used to erase Eileen’s contribution to Orwell’s work, but uses it here to imply or suggest that the discovery of Eileen’s letters was by herself. At one point she actually uses the phrase “I found the letters” – from the context the reader will be unclear whether this is the original discovery or whether she simply means “I came across…”.
But to return to the question I posed earlier, is Funder’s recreation of Eileen’s life and marriage plausible and convincing? To consider that question let’s look at the first letter to Norah, written during a visit to Orwell’s parent’s home in Southwold, a rather lovely coastal town in Suffolk, six months after the couple married in 1936. In it appears the following now rather famous line:
“I lost my habit of punctual correspondence during the first few weeks of marriage because we quarrelled so continuously and really bitterly that I thought I’d save time and just write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished”.(My emphasis)
Most critics take that comment to be a joke. To me that’s so obvious as to not need stating. It’s a pointed joke, of course, but unquestionably an attempt at humour. In her biography of Eileen, Sylvia Topp calls it ‘banter’. Richard Blair, George and Eileen’s adopted son, thought it was “obviously tongue in cheek”. Funder is not so sure – for her this comment is to be taken seriously, a sign of the immense distress Eileen must have been experiencing, her letter a cry for help. And as a result the version of Eileen Funder imagines regrets her decision to marry, resents the burden of domestic work, and is constantly irritated by George. I think the reader can decide for themself which is the more plausible interpretation.
Funder’s overall thesis, summed up in the book’s subtitle, Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, is that Eileen’s contribution to Orwell’s life and work has been erased by the patriarchy and in particular by Orwell himself and his cabal of all-male biographers. Her task therefore is to bring Eileen back into the light and if some imaginative reconstruction of what probably happened is required to achieve that result, then so be it.
As an example of this erasure, the “wicked magic trick” by which Eileen has been made to disappear, Funder takes a careful look through Orwell’s memoir of his time in Spain during the Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. She starts with the surprising statement that
“I had read Homage twice and never registered that Eileen was in Spain. No-one I have ever asked remembers her.”
To which the only possible response to this confession is “Really!!??” Given the centrality of Eileen’s role in the key events of Homage (she even visited him at the front, an event captured on camera (see below)) and the multiple references to ‘my wife’ throughout the text, this is surprising. If Orwell was genuinely trying to avoid letting people know that Eileen was in Barcelona for most of the time that he was in Spain, he did a poor job of doing so. Granted, he does not refer to her by name, for reasons that could be as banal as it being conventional not to do so, or the more serious security reasons some suggest, but as Eileen typed the manuscript (and according to Funder, and others, contributed extensive editorial suggestions) it would have been a job of moments to have added or reinserted her name. Later, attempting to explain why she never noticed Eileen was in Spain, Funder claims (with traces of bitterness?) that the word “wife” is a “job description” (181) rather than a way of describing a relationship. Eileen is “in this story only in a way no one will ever see, like scaffolding, or a skeleton, something disappeared or covered over in the end result”. It reflects poorly on Funder as an Orwell scholar and more broadly as a reader that she did not notice (on either reading) the multiple references to Eileen in Homage – the scene when her hotel room is being searched and she hides documents under her bed, avoiding them being found because the Spanish soldiers were being overly polite towards her, is tragically comic, and one of many very memorable scenes from the book.
The phenomenon of women’s erasure from history is undeniable and there is a convincing case to be made that Eileen suffered from just such an experience. She has been a shadowy, lightly-sketched figure in many Orwell biographies. Sylvia Topp’s work was an important start at correcting that failure. But was the erasure of Eileen a mass conspiracy instigated by Orwell and supported by his biographers and the patriarchy? Perhaps Eileen is not a clear example of this phenomenon, or perhaps Funder’s counter-fictional approach is not the best way of revealing Eileen’s role in Orwell’s life and work.
As an aside, I found the author’s use of unnumbered endnotes, referenced only by page number, really frustrating, particularly when they were used for important content such as her thoughts on the Topp biography. An endnote is simply a list of additional notes on the text, mainly sources, listed by page number. When reading Wifedom you cannot tell whether the author has included a source or comment on the text without constantly checking the endnotes, which of course you quickly stop doing. Why she chose this approach I found baffling.
After finishing Wifedom, but before putting pen to paper to record my thoughts, I read some reviews of the book online. Most of the reviews in the broadsheets were broadly positive. The Guardian called it “a brilliant reckoning with George Orwell to change the way you read”. The review on the Orwell Society website asks more serious questions. But then I came across (‘discovered’) Matthew Clayfield’s cleverly titled ‘She Can’t Tell Norah That’ which makes a compelling case that Funder’s methodology and central thesis is flawed. He argues that the ‘recently discovered’ letters to university friend Norah, although relied on by Funder as a springboard for the text’s speculative counterfiction episodes, do not support any of her conclusions. Funder’s explanation for this is that the letters have to be read creatively, looking for the things Eileen wanted to say but could not. In other words, she could not ‘tell Norah that’. The obvious alternative explanation is that she doesn’t tell Norah things in these otherwise frank and revealing letters is because she didn’t believe them or they didn’t happen. I commend this analysis to anyone interested in reading more about the issues with Wifedom. It is so comprehensive that I was tempted to abdicate any attempt to review the book and just leave the link here, but I don’t think in all honesty I can do that. Crucially, this article also contains in postscripts details of emails from the son of Georges Kopp (Orwell’s commander in Spain, a long term friend of the couple, and according to many biographers, Eileen’s lover) and from Richard Blair himself (George and Eileen’s adopted son) expressing serious concerns about the accuracy and intentions of the author (Funder). Richard writes to Clayfield about Funder’s “(deliberate) misplaced understanding of the dynamic between Eileen and George.”
Another finely detailed critical review can be found here.
Why the hostility towards Wifedom from this group of reviewers? I think the answer is simple, and no it is not ‘the patriarchy’! It is that the Orwell Funder presents us is never given the benefit of the doubt. If there is any explanation of his behaviour offered, any interpretation of his work or his actions, it is always the most critical, the most damning. Orwell emerges as a crude monster, an attempted rapist who abuses his wife, constantly and callously betrays her, takes her ideas and contributions to his work without giving her any credit, contributes if not causes her early death, and avoids every responsibility in their marriage. He is totally unrecognisable from the man that emerges from his novels, letters, essays and journalism. At every turn Funder sits in judgment waiting for Orwell to do something horrible or unthinking. Any love or affection in their marriage is ignored. Rather than the complex, flawed man many of us respect and admire, we are left with a travesty which not only diminishes Orwell but also Eileen as well.
Or to quote one final review which again makes the point far more cogently that I ever could:
“Wifedom is more intent on condemnation than comprehension. With no interest in Eileen’s life before Orwell, the book focuses on Eileen solely as an example of “how a woman can be buried first by domesticity and then by history.” Funder enlists her to buttress her assertion that there “is not one place on the planet where women as a group have the same power, freedom, leisure or money as their male partners.” That may well be true, but the uniqueness of Eileen O’Shaughnessy Blair disappears amid the abstraction of “wifedom.” Appropriating her merely as an exhibit in a polemic against patriarchy is the same as erasing her.”
I have a theory: I suspect that early drafts of The Long Shoe were planned as a sequel to The Satsuma Complex (2022) and The Hotel Avocado (2024) – in all probability with a fruit-based title. But this plan had to be abandoned, because The Long Shoe‘s plot needed the central female character, Harriet (Emily in the first two novels) to have a job that runs the risk of her being kidnapped, and Mortimer just couldn’t make the plot work within the constraints of her ‘legacy’ occupation.
So a new context and setting was required. Apart from the change of occupation the novels are strikingly similar, with the protagonist Matt (Gary) a rather feckless character drifting through life (he is a recently unemployed bathroom salesman) living in a London suburb, taking walks in the park, drinking coffee, talking to his pet cat/pigeon/quirky animal of choice, and enjoying a casual relationship with his girlfriend while taking her commitment for granted. The novels’ themes are also similar – mysteries involving organised crime, a violent villain who is physically menacing and a bit disturbed, and a climax in which Gary confronts the bad guys in a clumsy, endearing manner.
This theory would also explain the irrelevance of the novel’s title. The long shoe referred to here is a comically long wooden model of a shoe, purchased from a market stall specialising in quirky conversation pieces. It could have easily been swapped into the novel on a find and replace basis for a whimsical fruit-based object of a similar scale.
Having said all that, it really doesn’t matter if this theory is right or not. The Long Shoe works well enough as a standalone novel, just one that will feel very familiar if you have read the author’s previous two. The premise is simple, if familiar: Matt’s relationship with Harriet is in trouble, as she questions whether they have a long-term future together. She leaves him for a short break to consider her feelings. While she is away Matt is offered out of the blue a caretaking job. which comes with the benefit of a heavily discounted flat in Satsuma Heights, (a little nod to novel one, of course). The new job and flat are all the more welcome as they were having to leave their existing flat in a few weeks. Harriet’s farewell note is ambiguous and Matt is not sure if she has left him for good, or is just taking some time out. Improbably she has also neglected to tell her employer, the Crown Prosecution Service, that she is taking leave, and she stops answering her phone. Instead of reporting her absence to the police, Matt tries to track her down.
The novel’s minor characters include Carol, a deeply unpleasant neighbour who has designs on Matt, Hot Dog, one of Matt’s new neighbours in Satsuma Heights, and a very underwritten waitress who never really emerges as a distinctive character at all (in my alternative version of this novel this character has a more fleshed out role but with all the old plot elements stripped from her she is left hollowed out(.
Around halfway through the novel we discover that Harriet has been kidnapped and over the course of the rest of the novel her predicament is revealed and her rescue effected. The mystery – who has kidnapped her, and why – is well-managed, and the novel’s rather violent climax is genuinely exciting. The novel’s humour is more whimsical than laugh out loud – with Bob I think much of the charm of his humour is in the performance, so on the page the jokes are wryly amusing rather than belly laughs. So overall this novel is amusing and a pleasant enough read, but will not linger long in the mind.
I have read approximately 30 books this year. That’s poor by most definitions, although par for me in recent years (I read a post recently from someone saying they ‘had only’ read 250 books this year, having chosen to prioritise quality over quantity!) My most popular post of those published this year was The Last Devil to Die, the 4th in Richard Osman’s cosy crime series, The ThursdayMurder Club. Puzzlingly the short supplementary post I wrote on Clothing in Jane Eyre remains my most popular post of all time.
2026
I still enjoy writing about books and find the discipline of ordering my thoughts about what I have read a useful one, so for now I plan to continue this blog, going into what I think will be year 14. One of my annual traditions at this time is the choice of Dickens novel for the coming year. I have only five left to read: Barnaby Rudge, Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend (or six if you include the incomplete Mystery of Edwin Drood). This year the choice is an easy one, as I recently read Peter Ackroyd’s The Great Fire Of London which is based on, or inspired by, Little Dorrit. Other than this year’s Dickens and working my way through the extensive pile of Christmas and birthday presents, both of which I look forward to very much, my reading plans for 2026 are vague. I have shelved, for now, my attempt to read all the Booker Prize winners, despite there being only seven novels, including this year’s winner, Flesh, to go. I say every year I might go back to that challenge but realistically I am not sure I have the appetite for The Bone People or Sacred Hunger. To read more, to read more systematically and to include more women and international authors in my selections are all resolutions I could have made any of the last fourteen years but will continue to be aspirations. If you have read any of my posts, thank you. Comments are always welcome and an important part of the whole process. Guest posts are also very welcome – if you have read something interesting and would like somewhere to publish your thoughts on it let me know.
Aiding and Abetting was Muriel Spark’s penultimate novel. It is a retelling of the notorious case of ‘Lucky’ Lucan, a British aristocrat who in the 1970’s murdered his children’s nanny, battered his wife almost to death (she having been his original target) and then went on the run, never to face justice. He is the recurring subject of tabloid stories, being ‘discovered’ living in the Australian outback or South Africa every few years.
Spark tells this story through the unusual lens of Dr Hildegard Wolf, a fake-psychiatrist ‘practising’ in Paris, who is consulted by two men, both of whom claim to be Lucan. They have discovered that she, like them, has a secret – in a previous incarnation she was Beate Pappenheim, a ‘fake stigmatic’ – someone who claimed to experience the wounds Christ suffered on the cross, wounds which mysteriously heal and reappear periodically. Using this story Beate/Hildegard took charitable donations from the faithful and the gullible, and when her fraud (she used period blood to simulate her wounds) was uncovered, fled the country. assuming a new identity.
It’s never clear whether the Lucan claimants are intending to blackmail Wolf – they need the money, their supporters who have kept them secure from the law for decades finally beginning to run out – or whether they enjoy the experience of being able to tell their story free from any risk of exposure. Wolf quickly works out that the men are working together, one being the real Lucan and the other a decoy, helping collect donations of support while leading the police and others astray. But this is all largely a framework within to tell or retell the notorious story of Lucan’s murder of Sandra Rivett, the Lucans’ nanny, and attempted murder of his wife. Lucan sees this as a Shakespearean tragedy instigated by his wife’s legal battle for custody of their children (they were divorcing), made worse by his constant gambling losses. He is the victim in his version of the story. The protection he is offered by friends in escaping justice is his god-given right.
When reading Aiding and Abetting I was left with the impression that it was poorly written, with a lot of repetition and sub-plots that peter out. Poorly written by Spark’s standards that is – she is normally a very intelligent writer with intricate plots, well developed characters and deft control of her material, none of which could be found here. I went back to the text several times to try and find evidence for this impression, but came up empty-handed. Perhaps I was looking for something that wasn’t there? As a reader you have to both trust and challenge your instincts – trust them as first impressions, but nevertheless check them just in case they are prejudices bobbing to the surface. Always give the author the benefit of the doubt (OK- not always; there are some authors who just don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. E L James comes to mind, as do Jeffrey Archer and Dan Brown. But that’s just about it). If you are left with an impression, try and work out why. Well, for a start in Aiding and Abetting Spark doesn’t really have anything new or interesting to say about the Lucan case. She uses it as the structure for her story, but ends up leaning against it lazily. Spark claimed the novel’s theme was ‘blood’ and while there is plenty of blood in the novel, multiple references don’t add up to a theme. None of the novel’s characters are engaging – some are pretty forgettable – and the story doesn’t do justice to the real victim, the children’s nanny, who remains a largely one-dimensional and voiceless figure. (As part of my background reading for this review I was pleased to note that more recently, in 2019, Jill Dawson wrote The Language of Birds which tells the events of the Lucan murder from the point of view of the victim). If I felt ambivalent about the novel, the appallingly predictable and unfunny ending, a tribute of sorts to Evelyn Waugh but with none of the wit and about seventy years too late, left me in no doubt that this was a bit of a dud.
I really hesitate to suggest that Spark, in her early 80’s when this was written, was running out of steam, but I can’t find any other reason why an author usually so careful in her construction and characterisation would not live up to those standards. Perhaps I should read her final novel, The Finishing School, to see if that hypothesis stands up?
This novella is a comic pastiche of James Joyce’s Ulysses. That makes it sound more substantial than it actually is. Lodge was flexing his literary muscles as a professor of English literature here, and he did so by inserting throughout the novel a series of literary references. Ten distinct sections of the novel are written in the style of a range of authors including Conrad, Woolf and Kafka. I would argue that these actually add little to the novel overall. In other words there’s an element of showing off here, where the reader might be vaguely aware that the novel’s style has shifted and that they should be getting the joke, (the Kafka and the Joyce sections are unmissable; the others less so) but uncomfortably aware that they are failing the test being set by the much cleverer than them author.
Strip away the contrived literary references and this is simply a straightforward mid-sixties comic novel on that most sixties of themes, sex. Adam Appleby, a father of three and a student of English literature spends a single day failing to do any work at the British Museum (not) researching his thesis “The Structure of Long Sentences in Three Modern English Novels”. Instead he gets into a series of what it is hard to avoid calling ‘scrapes’ familiar to anyone who watched British sitcoms (especially those, ironically, from the 1970s) – he accidentally calls the fire brigade out to a non-existent fire at the museum, he is the subject of an attempted seduction by a frustrated seventeen year-old virgin (a common experience for the male subjects of English post-war comic novels), he gets drunk at a cocktail party, and his scooter bursts into flames. The scene where he tries to buy some condoms but can’t do so because his priest enters the medical appliances shop at precisely the wrong moment is appallingly cliched. Throughout the novel Appleby, a thinly disguised avatar for the author, is haunted by the fear that his wife is pregnant with their fourth child, because being Roman Catholics and this being before the widespread availability of the pill, they are forbidden from using any but the most unreliable methods of contraception. This leaves Appleby permanently frustrated and at the same time petrified that their personal complicated game of Vatican Roulette has been lost once again.
As well as the explicit references to other authors, there are some strong echoes of Kingsley Amis here. The ‘seduction’ scenes is an obvious example. Appleby’s persistent worries about money and the way these are resolved by the intervention of a wealthy American at the end of the novel was strongly reminiscent of the way Amis concludes Lucky Jim. The getting inappropriately drunk at a party scene, the ‘seduction’ scene, and the many petty minor frustrations of academic life, all echo the earlier Amis novel. So yes, in a nutshell, this is heavily derivative, so much so that by the end their is no attempt to disguise Lodge’s borrowing, and it is simply chalked up as pastiche.
In many ways this is a very typical mid-Sixties comic novel, but what sets it apart are Lodge’s literary pretentions. And in case you were wondering, no, the title doesn’t make sense – Lodge explains in an afterword written for a 1980 reprinting that he had originally wanted to call the novel “The British Museum Had Lost Its Charm” but as this is a quote from a Gershwin song and he couldn’t get permission to use it, the alternative title had to be used. There is a clearly late addition to the text to explain the alternative title he ended up using, with its reference to London Bridge, which Lodge may have got away with if he hadn’t written about the original title in the afterword.
I really enjoyed reading Birnam Wood, until the end, when I didn’t, which retrospectively spoiled the whole novel for me. Don’t you hate it when that happens?
First. just to get one thing out of the way, this novel has nothing to do with Macbeth. You could work hard at trying to find some parallels, but they won’t work. Which is just one of those minor disappointments that could have easily have been overlooked if the novel’s ending worked, which it didn’t, as I may have mentioned.
The author invites us to believe that a New Zealand community gardening project, with the mildly amusing name of Birnam Wood, is covertly a much more subversive, radical project threatening the status quo – or so some of its members believe (others just like gardening). For wildly complex and improbably reasons, this group gets involved with Robert Lemoine, an American billionaire, who decides to sponsor and support the group. He’s a psychopath, so the reasons he gives for sponsoring BW are nonsensical, but we are invited to accept them anyway because billionaires spend their money on whimsical projects as the fancy takes them. don’t they.
“I know how easy it was,’ said Lemoine. Mira didn’t follow. How easy what was?’ All of it,’ he said, shrugging. Getting rich. Staying rich. Winning. It was all so easy. I just took what I wanted, and it was mine. I said what I wanted, and people got it for me. I did what I wanted, and nobody stopped me. So simple. And if it was easy for me, then it could be easy for anybody, and that’s a very frightening thought. Apart from anything else, it would be untenable, Everyone can’t be on top, or it wouldn’t be the top any more, would it? That’s just a fact. And I’ve been in the citadels of power,’ he added. I’ve eaten at the high tables; I’ve seen behind the doors that never open. Everyone’s the same. You reach a certain level and it’s all exactly the same: it’s all just luck and loopholes and being in the right place at the right time, and compound growth taking care of the rest. That’s why we’re all building barricades. It’s in case the rest of you ever figure out how incredibly easy it was for us to get to where we are.
Lemoine invites the group to start gardening in the grounds of an estate he is considering buying and of course they accept, the whole deal sweetened by the promise of much more money to come once the garden is established and he gets to know them better. No, that doesn’t make any sense, does it? Obviously I have summarised the ‘logic’ behind his investment unfairly, because I am irritated by the fact that a central plot point in the novel makes no sense, but it gets worse. Because secretly this one-dimensional evil genius is drilling for rare earth minerals in the national park around the home he is about to buy and having a group of hippies on site is just what any illegal covert mining operation needs.
Despite all of the above, I enjoyed at least three quarters of the novel. It was well-paced, the non-billionaire characters were well-sketched, and I was interested to find out what happened to everyone. As the remaining pages dwindled and the multitude of plot lines remained stubbornly unresolved, I wondered how the author was going to bring everything together. At one point I genuinely thought we were going to be set up for a sequel, there was so much left incomplete. Instead, Catton totally blows the ending. She uses a crude device to bring to a sudden halt some of the plot lines, and leaves a few dangling uncertainly. One central character, Shelley, seems to be forgotten entirely. The climax is rushed, unconvincing, and the reader is left to sketch in most of what happens themselves, with little to go on. Most of the dramatic events happen off-screen (as it were) with the reader left to join the dots from scattered clues. Imagine Hamlet from Fortinbras’s perspective and you get a rough idea of how the potential drama of the climax is thrown away.
Birnam Wood aspires to being a thoughtful novel of ideas, and there are prolonged sections in which characters discuss the decline of late stage capitalism, mostly in a millennial argot in which the word ‘like’ is sprinkled through the speeches every other sentence, in a redundant attempt at authenticity.
“Shelley said “I was just thinking about it. Like, no one ever actually knows that the right thing to do is. I mean, you can think that you know what’s right, and you can tell yourself that you know, but at the point that you make your choice, like, in the moment, you’re never really certain. Yu just hope. You just act and you hope for the best…But, like, the wrong thing to do, that’s often much clearer. Wrong is, like, easier to se than right, a lot of the time. It’s more definite – like, this is the line I know I will not cross. “
I get it that some people do speak like that and I understand that it is just the twenty-first century equivalent of um’s and er’s, but on the page it is wearisome. The ideas being discussed never really come into focus and are quickly forgotten when the action sequences in the novel kick in.
In a promotional interview the author said that she aspired to write a twenty-first century equivalent of Jane Austen’s Emma. I don’t think I have ever read a more absurd comparison in a very long time. It’s like Dan Brown comparing the Da Vinci Code to Middlemarch. Austen is the most precise, careful writer – Birnam Wood is ultimately a soggy mess. Which proves one thing – that thrillers are not as easy to write as you might think.
Enlightenment is very recognisably a Sarah Perry novel. It contains many of the same elements and themes of her earlier novels, The Essex Serpentand Melmoth* although it is probably her most autobiographical novel to date.
It opens in the winter of 1997 in the Essex town of Aldleigh, a thinly disguised version of Chelmsford where Perry grew up. Thomas Hart writes a column for the local newspaper and attends Bethesda, a strict Calvinist church of the kind that somehow survives into the present day in small pockets of Essex. Hart is gay but keeps his private life private, knowing it would be frowned upon by the unforgiving people of Bethesda. When his sexuality is eventually ‘exposed’ he is told that he is “an affront to God” and effectively expelled from the congregation.
The chapel is next to Lowlands House, a crumbling stately home and park, slowly being restored by the local museum. Potters Field, an area of scrub and wasteland is also adjacent to the chapel and provides a metaphorical counterpoint to its order and structure.
One day James Bower, curator of the local museum, writes to Thomas about some correspondence that has been found during the renovations of Lowlands House. James thinks the letters might be a clue to the local legend of the Ghost of Lowlands, who he identifies as Maria Vaduva, an elusive nineteenth-century resident of Lowlands. The pursuit for the mysterious Maria and the truth about what she discovered in the night’s sky forms the central narrative of the novel.
Thomas is also an amateur astronomer and the link he shares with Maria drives him to discover her story, scattered as it is through the novel in the form of long-lost letters, some hidden in the fabric of Lowlands, others in private papers in the museum. The other main character in the novel is Grace Macauley, the pastor’s daughter, who when the novel opens is about to turn 18. Thomas feels paternal towards Grace and one thing keeping him in Bethesda and Aldleigh is his determination to watch over her. Grace starts a romantic relationship with Nathan, a local lad not associated with the church, but Thomas sabotages their friendship, an act for which he is never fully forgiven.
Enlightenment is slow-paced and luxurious and at times almost Dickensian. The sense of place is vivid, no doubt in part due to the autobiographical elements of the story.
“Monday: late winter, bad weather. The River Alder, fattened by continuous rain, went in spate through Aldleigh and beyond it, taking carp and pike and pages torn from pornographic magazines past war memorials and pubs and new industrial estates, down to the mouth of the Blackwater and on in due course to the sea. Toppled shopping trolleys glistened on the riverbank; so also did unwanted wedding rings, and beer cans, and coins struck by empires in the years of their decline. Herons paced like whitecoated orderlies in the muddy reeds; and at half past four a fisherman caught a cup untouched since the ink was wet on The Battle of Maldon, spat twice, and threw it back.
Late winter, bad weather: the town oppressed by cloud as low as a coffin lid. A place spoken of in passing, if at all: neither Boudicca nor Wat Tyler had given it a second glance when they took their vengeances to London; and war had reached it only as an afterthought, when a solitary Junkers discharged the last of its ordnance and extinguished four souls without notice.”
The novel clearly owes a significant debt to A S Byatt’s Possession, but I didn’t find that at all problematic. Some novels are like other novels, and draw inspiration from one another, but that doesn’t mean they are derivative.
Many book bloggers structure their posts around categories such as publication data, information about the author, a plot summary and so on. I’ve never been organised enough to do this, but if I were ever to do so one category I would include would be “How easy was the novel/text to read?” Authors can make their texts easier to read in lots of ways: very short chapters and a large font is the approach adopted by writers such as Richard Osman for example. But of course the reader can make things difficult for themselves – reading late at night, leaving large gaps between each reading session so remembering what is happening gets tricky, and so on. I found Enlightenment a little hard to read. The narrative progression is slow and the events that do happen are often predictable. Some plot devices, such as the finding of very old letters in the fabric of Lowlands House, are a bit too convenient. We were never not going to find out what happens to Maria. Thomas is not a compelling character – he is very introspective and reserved – and while Grace is a more interesting character her life proves aimless until she is able to be reunited, temporarily, with Nathan.
I enjoyed Enlightenment but I can’t resist the feeling that the author’s best novel is still to come.
*Perry also wrote After Me Comes the Flood (2014) which I have yet to read.
Any reader of Dombey and Son is presented with a puzzle – why isn’t it any good? I knew before I started it that the novel was one of Dickens’ ‘lesser’ works: not lesser in length, unfortunately – it runs to nearly 1000 pages – but poorly thought of, by both critics and general readers alike. It is not widely read any more (it has 1,000 reviews on Goodreads, but Great Expectations has 22,000!) doesn’t appear on many academic reading lists, and has never been filmed. Even Andrew Davies abandoned an attempt to turn it into a television series despite having made successes of less obvious material. So as I read I was looking out for the flaws or weaknesses that would explain this lack of popularity. I didn’t have to look far.
(Incidentally, I am aware that this might seem a very negative way of reading any novel. Surely it would be better to be positive, to look for the novel’s strength and good points? Of course. But I’d make two points about this: a) I can’t unknow what I know about the novel and b) I am simply being honest about my mindset – this blog is not about presenting myself as some kind of idealised reader, burning their way through the classics, but an honest description of the books I read and what I think about them. I did look for the positives in Dombey and Son – nothing would have given me more pleasure than to have discovered an overlooked Dickens masterpiece, but that isn’t what happened. Because it isn’t.)
The plot is very limited despite the novel’s length. Not much happens, and the small number of events that do occur are heavily telegraphed. For example: Walter, an office boy sent to work overseas by his company (Dombey and Son) goes missing when his ship capsizes in a storm. There can’t have been a reader on the planet who did not expect Walter to re-emerge – the only surprise was just how long it took Dickens to bring him back. Similarly when Walter first meets the novel’s proto-heroine, Florence, his uncle Sol and his uncle’s friend Captain Cuttle both predict what will happen – that one day Walter and Florence will marry. And guess what?
Everything you expect to find in a typical Dickens novel is present. A huge cast of characters (over 50), long rambling plot lines that are sewn together conveniently at the end, comic scenes of extreme behaviour, all set in a foggy London that is undergoing rapid change due to the arrival of the railways. In fact the parts of the novel describing the arrival of the railways are some of the most interesting in the book:
“The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene. Boiling water hissed and heaved within dilapidated walls; whence, also, the glare and roar of flames came issuing forth; and mounds of ashes blocked up rights of way, and wholly changed the law and custom of the neighbourhood.
In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement.”
This is Dickens giving it both barrels, over-writing to the extreme, but just about getting away with it. Despite this characterisation of the railway as a destructive phenomenon, later descriptions show the positive benefits of the coming of rail – in particular the Toodles family prosper from its construction. Later still the railway is to have a decisive role in the fate of the novel’s principal villain, Mr Carker.
The plot centres on the hubris of the industrialist, financier and merchant Paul Dombey. Dombey wants a son to continue the family name and business. He is obsessed with this ambition and as a result neglects his daughter simply because her sex, particularly once his second child, a son, is born. However Paul junior is a weak and sickly child who eventually dies a characteristically Dickensian death, fading away slowly but inevitably. Having lost his wife in Paul’s birth Dombey disastrously remarries. His second wife, Edith, is effectively sold by her mother on the marriage market, and can’t stand her new husband, and refuses to make any pretence at doing so. We can safely assume their marriage is loveless and unconsummated. He uses Carker to act as a go-between between himself and his new wife, to disastrous effect. As a villain, Carker is a failure. He plots and schemes and positions himself at the heart of Dombey’s business, but then has no real plan other than adultery, and that fails miserably. If he is driven by passion rather than a Machiavellian cunning then there is no sign of it.
Dombey is a deeply unpleasant character, proud and arrogant, and devoid of any love or affection. He doesn’t have a convincing redemption story – he is eventually reconciled with his daughter, and is shown being affectionate towards his grandchildren, but for the reader this is far too little too late. His second wife, Edith, is equally proud and unrelenting, and her (step)maternal bond with Florence is all too brief. Both characters are brought low by their pride.
The novel’s principal sub-plot tells the story of Walter Gay and his uncle Solomon Gills, owner of a profoundly unsuccessful nautical instruments shop, and Sol’s friend, an old seaman named Captain Cuttle. Walter and family act largely as a counterpoint to the emotionally sterile Dombey household, but also provide most of the comedic scenes of the novel. There is another, lightly sketched and under-developed sub-plot involving Mr Carker’s older brother, his sister, and one of Carker junior’s former lovers. This sub-plot fizzles out with a resolution, of sort, but not one the reader feels in any way invested in. It is clearly intended as a counterpoint to the main Dombey/Edith storyline, but fails to do anything other than simply echo it.
Were there any redeeming features in the novel, anything to recommend it? The minor characters are entertaining, including those already mentioned, to which I would add the endearing Mr Toots and the indefatigable Susan Nipper, who almost alone amongst the novel’s characters is prepare to give Mr Dombey a piece of her mind. The railway descriptions are interesting records of the first flourishes of the age of steam. But that’s pretty much it. There are unquestionably many better Dickens’ novels and I can really only recommend Dombey for completists. Its reputation is unfortunately justified.
The Reading Bug 
