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.
While doing some background reading for my review of Graham Swift’s short story collection, Learning to Swim, it occurred to me (and I accept this might be a banal statement of the obvious) that the short story form of writing is by far the most neglected when compared to others such as the novel, poetry, and drama.
It will come as no surprise that the Wikipedia entry for ‘short story’ defines the form primarily by its length, saying that it “can typically be read in a single sitting”. Can you imagine defining any other form of writing in this way? (of course I know sonnets have 14 lines and haiku have 17 syllables, but these are very specific forms within the much wider genre of ‘poetry’.) In terms of content, the entry goes on to say that a short story usually “focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest types of literature and has existed in the form of legends, mythic tales, folk tales, fairy tales, tall tales, fables, and anecdotes in various ancient communities around the world.” This definition is flawed in several respects – Norse sagas were very long compared to other forms of prose, for example – but is probably as good a definition as we are going to get.
Are short stories neglected? Staying with statements of the obvious, the form doesn’t have a special word or term to describe it. Novels, poetry and plays are not ‘long stories’, ‘short stories that often rhyme’, and ‘stories told on stage by actors’. Well, they are, but the point is we have special words for them, whereas with short stories, that’s it. With the possible exception of Katherine Mansfield and Alice Munro there are very few writers who are best known for their short stories. By comparison I guess most people could name half a dozen novelists, poets and playwrights. Few writers specialise in the short story format. Many will have at one point or another written a short story, but there are few for whom it is their preferred format. And yet perversely the short story is probably the most common form of creative writing. The cliché that we all have a novel in us may or may not be true, but if creative writing groups are anything to go by we all have a couple of dozen short stories in us as well!
So why is this? When short stories are the form we are most familiar with from childhood, when many of the greatest stories ever told are short, why is this form of writing considered ‘less’ in so many ways? Is the issue one of length, that longer is better? Certainly with plays and poems that is not the case – Ode to a Nightingale is a better poem that Endymion (a 4000 line epic poem also by Keats and if you have not heard of it that makes my point); Daffodils is better than The Prelude. While plays have a ‘Cinderella’ length – too short and the audience can feel cheated, too long and we get bored and restless, novels can be too long – I would certainly put the nine volumes of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa into that category. So no, longer is not better, and we therefore need to look elsewhere for an explanation for the neglect of this form of story-telling.
It’s possible that short stories are read more often than we think, simply that they are not read in book or collected form. Many short stories are published in magazines and will not feature in any charts or tables of book sales. The role of agents, editors and critics in pressuring writers to move away from the short story format and into novels may play a part in the marginalisation of this format. Lots of authors start out with short stories, finding it easier to have them published in magazines than getting a novel published, subsequently moving on to writing novels and abandoning the short story format.
All literary forms have periods of supremacy. In Shakespeare’s day poetry was consumed by the upper classes and plays were watched by the unwashed. The novel started its long march to ascendancy in the Eighteenth century, and became dominant when Dickens was publishing his works a chapter at a time (there might be a case for arguing that these were all short stories linked by a common set of characters and themes, and certainly the Pickwick Papers would fit that characterisation, but that can’t really be sustained as Dickens’s preferred form of publication was the exception rather than the rule). There was some speculation that the decreasing attention span brought about by social media and the advent of doom-scrolling might see a revival in popularity (and status) of the short story, but this hasn’t materialised. Perhaps short stories of a few thousand words are just too long for the tik-tok generation?
Learning to Swim and other stories by Graham Swift, 1982
I think it is more common than not for a modern short story to conclude without a formal ending. The reader is not told what ‘happens’ to the characters nor how any issues identified have been resolved. When did that start to be the case? Don’t Victorian short stories almost always have a formal ending in which murders are solved, mysteries unravelled and the problems or issues explored in the course of the story resolved? In the early decades of the twentieth century Modernist novelists rejected the idea that novels were just stories, but nonetheless formal endings remained the norm. There are of course always going to be exceptions to generalisations of this kind (there are a few modern novels that simply end, leaving everyone frozen in time and with their story lines unresolved, such as Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore or The Gate of Angels) but these are very much the exception), Look at it this way: would Ulysses have been the same novel if Leopold Bloom’s day ended before he returned home and without Molly’s dreams? The ending of Heart of Darkness may be ambiguous, but there’s no doubting that it is an ending rather than just an end. Nick Carraway leaves West Egg not really understanding the experience he has been through, but Gatsby’s story has ended. And so on.
Whereas with many modern short stories, the opposite is the case. The stories are sketches of a time and place, portraits of characters and situations, but there is no instinct for completion, no need to tell the reader what happens to the people who have been introduced. In many cases the stories simply stop. This is more challenging for the reader more familiar with novels that have formal endings. They may be left with a sense of frustration, wanting to know what happens next.
Which brings me to Graham Swift’s short story collection, Learning to Swim and other stories. These stories were published in various magazines from 1977 to the early 1980’s and predate Swift’s primary career as a novelist. His first novel The Sweet Shop Owner was published in 1980, and while today he is best known as a novelist, not least because his Last Orders won the Booker prize in 1996, he still writes short stories, and had the collection Twelve Post-War Tales published as recently as 2025.
Learning to Swim, named after the final story in the collection, is made up of eleven very varied tales. Some of the stand out stories include:
Seraglio is a portrait of an unhappy, childless marriage. A husband and wife are on holiday in Istanbul. Childless, they have frequent and expensive holidays as some form of compensation. The husband who narrates the story cannot understand his wife’s behaviour and when she tells him she has been assaulted by a hotel employee and wants to go home, he shows a lack of empathy in response. Swift almost taunts the reader wanting to know whether the couple remain together, or to know more about the assault in the hotel, saying “All stories are told, like this one, looking back at painful places which have become silhouettes, or looking forward, before you arrive, at scintillating facades which have yet to reveal their dagger thrusts, their hands in hotel bedrooms… One wants the moment of the story to go on for ever, the poise of parting or arriving to be everlasting. So one doesn’t have to cross to the other continent, doesn’t have to know what really happened, doesn’t have to meet the waiting blade.” The absence of a resolution in other words is the point of the story, rather than an omission.
In The Tunnel a narrator watches some youths digging a tunnel from the playground of a closed school out to wasteland. The tunnel acts a metaphor for pointless employment, the progress of children from school to the wider world, as well as invoking scenes from the first and second World Wars. This is a closely observed story in which every word counts. I wanted to know more about what happened to the narrator, his relationship with his runaway girlfriend, her mysterious uncle who may or may not be leaving her some money, and many other unresolved plot lines.
Hotel is a strange tale. A man recovers from a stay in a psychiatric hospital following his mother’s death. He then decides to run a hotel, which he eventually achieves. But when two guests who may be father and daughter, but the precise nature of their relationship is unclear, arrive, the foundation of his business begins to crumble. The narrator hints at the possibility of abuse or incest, but the story ends without an explanation of the couple’s situation.
The Watch is not really a science fiction story, but it does rest upon an element of the fantastic. A Polish watchmaker creates a pocket-watch which never needs winding and appears to grant eternal life to the owner. As it is passed down the generations to the current owner, the story’s narrator, it appears more of a curse than anything, as its owners all meet grisly fates. This is an almost Victorian horror story reminiscent of something by Edgar Allen Poe. It sits uncomfortably among the other modern sketches in the collection. Chemistry is a very similar, old-fashioned horror story in which the narrator accidentally causes the death of his grandfather. The story also features the ghost of the narrator’s father with other strong echoes of Hamlet (shipwreck, accidental poisoning, resentment of a step-father) thrown in for good measure.
The collection’s title story, Learning to Swim features another unhappy couple on holiday, thereby forming an effective bookend with the opening story, Holiday. While on vacation in Cornwall Mr Singleton is trying to teach his son Paul to swim, watched as he does so with judgment and contempt by his sunbathing wife. This felt as if it may have been an autobiographical story in which learning to swim becomes as symbol of a difficult childhood, in which the narrator finally decides to strike out on his own. The collection therefore ends on a positive note despite all the gloom and darkness that has come before.
Is it possible, just about, to make some generalisations about this collection and identify some overall themes. They all, to a greater or lesser extent, leave the reader with questions. Most of the stories are dark, featuring unhappy people. Infidelity and sexual trauma is hinted at in several of them and while never directly confronted, other stories feature the possibility of incest, bestiality and murder. Despite these topics this is not in any way a lurid collection – this is a sideways, oblique look at these issues.
Learning to Swim is still in print, more I suspect as an early work by someone who went on to write better things rather than in its own right. The 24 reviews of the collection on Goodreads, a tiny number by any measure, barely do it justice. I am not sure whether I am ever going to completely escape the need for a resolution and ending in the stories I read, and until I do I am always going to work hard to find positive things to say about this form. I appreciate that is my problem, not the authors, but I don’t think I am alone in that regard. The weaknesses of the short story format is something I will look at more closely on another day. For now I think I am going to return to the novel for my next read, albeit with a slight sense of guilt.
The Yellow Wallpaper and other selected writings by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Even though you could read The Yellow Wallpaper in not much more time than it takes to drink a cup of coffee, it is widely perceived as both the author’s most significant work and a classic of its genre. The Penguin Classics edition of this story, published with Herland and other selected writings, has The Yellow Wallpaper as the lead text in its title.
The story is written as a collection of journal entries narrated by an unnamed woman whose physician husband has rented a mansion for the summer, to provide her with somewhere to recuperate. He forbids the narrator from working or writing and encourages her to rest. She is suffering from what he calls a “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency”, a vague but common diagnosis in women at the time. As the journal entries continue the narrator slowly becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in her room, convinced that it moves and that something is hiding behind it.
An important part of the context of the women’s physical and mental decline is that she has just given birth. We know little about her pregnancy other than it appears to have been the cause of her decline. Although she believes she is treated with care and consideration, the reader can infer that there is more to her confinement. She describes her room with its torn wallpaper, barred windows, metal rings in the walls, a floor “scratched and gouged and splintered”, a bed bolted to the floor – this is a cell in all but name. It will occur to most readers to wonder whether her husband has used his status and authority as a doctor to have her legally sectioned? I haven’t researched this issue thoroughly but it does appear as if women could be declared mentally ill and a danger to themselves and others simply on the word of their husband. If he happened to be a doctor as well then the chances of anyone questioning his decision were slim to non-existent. This is an interesting article on this topic from Time magazine https://time.com/6074783/psychiatry-history-women-mental-health/
The narrator’s morbid obsession with the wallpaper in the room comes to dominate the text and her thoughts. The wallpaper has a “sickly” color, a “yellow” smell, and a pattern like “an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions”. It leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it. Her mental health rapidly declining, the narrator comes to believe that a woman is trapped behind the pattern in the wallpaper. To free the trapped woman she begins to strip the remaining paper off the wall. When her husband comes home, he finds the narrator rubbing herself against the wallpaper, saying “I’ve got out at last… in spite of you.”
The story is undoubtedly inspired in part by Gilman’s personal experience. When her daughter was born she suffered from postnatal depression. A doctor, considered the leading expert on women’s mental health, prescribed bed rest and forbade her from any form of work including reading, writing, or painting. She found this treatment made her condition worsen. The Yellow Wallpaper is a straightforward autobiographical account of this treatment with the addition of a supernatural component to the story, to provide a dramatic critique of these methods of male control of women’s bodies and lives.
TheYellow Wallpaper has become an important feminist text. The narrator’s attempts to control her environment, her health, and eventually her life by her interpretation of the wallpaper that surrounds her, act as a metaphor for the domestic environment, her body, her mind, and the many other lenses through which the story can be read. At the same time a simple interpretation of the text is elusive – the author scatters hints through the text, but a straightforward key – X = Y – is never provided.
Because of the significance of The Yellow Wallpaper in the canon of feminist literature, the rest of Gilman’s writing is often overlooked, or simply seen as ‘things that might be like, or provide additional information about,’ the primary text. Which is if course both wrong and a pity. Many of the short stories published in the Penguin Classics edition, together with a number available online, are intelligent thought-provoking pieces written from a progressive, feminist perspective. When I was a Witch is a fascinating account of someone being given the power to make wishes that come true, but being unable to use this power for the general improvement of the lives of women. If I were a Man must be the earliest ‘body swap’ story, in which a young woman wishes she were a man and finds herself in her husband’s body. She is fascinated by the different physical experience, and the different, secret attitudes men have towards women – some protective and loving, others base and sexual:
“In the minds of each (man) and all there seemed to be a two-story department, quite apart from the rest of their ideas, a separate place where they kept their thoughts and feelings about women. In the upper half were the tenderest emotions, the most exquisite ideals, the sweetest memories, all lovely sentiments as to ‘home’ and ‘mother,’ all delicate admiring adjectives, a sort of sanctuary, where a veiled statue, blindly adored, shared place with beloved yet commonplace experiences. In the lower half–here that buried consciousness woke to keen distress–they kept quite another assortment of ideas. Here, even in this clean-minded husband of hers, was the memory of stories told at men’s dinners, of worse ones overheard in street or car, of base traditions, coarse epithets, gross experiences–known, though not shared.”
The Giant Wistaria and The Rocking Chair are both conventional, sub-Jamesian ghost stories. While containing traditional gothic elements they are fairly predictable, although The Giant Wistaria still manages to include a feminist portrait of an early American settler woman choosing to commit suicide instead of submitting to an enforced marriage with a cousin. Bee Wise is an early working out of some of the ideas to find expression in Herland, describing a utopian and largely female community established on strongly egalitarian grounds. His Mother and The Vintage are fascinating treatments of social evils affecting the lives of women – the white slave trade and syphilis respectively. His Mother tells the story of a woman tracking down and handing over to the police her son, who has been a key figure in a gang procuring vulnerable young women for prostitution. The Vintage describes in distressing terms the impact untreated syphilis can have down the generations. These were topics that were not widely discussed in ‘polite society’ nor written about outside the pages of medical journals. I find it hard to imagine how brave it would have been for Gilman to have published these stories with their clear and unambiguous treatment of these issues.
Gilman’s personal story is in many ways as fascinating as her writings, and this https://www.neh.gov/article/charlotte-perkins-gilman-did-more-write-one-classic-short-story is a good starting point if you are interested. I agree with the article’s conclusion – Gilman is definitely worth reading beyond The Yellow Wallpaper, although that in itself is a great starting point.
Herland is one of those novel’s that has been on the edges of my consciousness for a long time. I’ve known about it, known broadly what is is about, and always intended at some point to get round to it. Unlike a lot of people who take reading seriously I don’t have a literal ‘to be read’ list, but I do have a vague collection of tests that one day I intend to get round to. And for as long as I have been aware of it, Herland has been on that list. Published in 1915, when the Great War was well underway but America had yet to get involved, Herland begins as a traditional exploration/lost world novel: while on a journey of exploration in an unnamed continent, three American adventurers – Vandyck “Van” Jennings, Terry Nicholson and Jeff Margrave – hear of an isolated community that is peopled by women only, Eventually Van gets round to naming this community the rather reductive name of ‘Herland’ (we later hear that this community has been completely isolated for two thousand years, so how the tribes in the area would have heard of it is left unexplained). The explorers’ curiosity is piqued and they eventually return on a subsequent trip determined to track down this lost world. Authors such as Ryder Haggard or Conan Doyle would have lingered over the details of the
preparation for the trip, the extensive list of equipment needed, the hiring of guides, the journey inland and so on. Perkins Gilman has no interest in this element of the story, and within a few short paragraphs they are approaching Herland. Using a plane (that they have someone managed to bring with them), they surmount the impenetrable mountainous barriers around the country. We are not told where Herland is – the implication is that it is somewhere largely unexplored, and the surrounding countryside is populated by ‘savages’ but the ambiguity as to the country’s location is obviously intended to emphasise its universality. In any event, Van’s narration makes it clear that he has subsequently left Herland and returned to America, having committed to not reveal the location of the lost world.
Of course the arrival of a plane in a society isolated from the rest of the world for centuries is hardly likely to be unnoticed, and the explorers are quickly found by, initially by three young women who watch them from the treetops. Treating the women almost as prey, the men try to catch them, but they are easily outrun and then captured by a large group of women. They try to escape but are overpowered, drugged to stop them struggling, and taken to a nearby community.
From this point the body of the novel is comprised of the men’s captivity and education in the ways of Herland, which the author uses to outline the detail of the all-women society. Each man is assigned a tutor who teaches them their language while at the same time learning English. Van is a careful observer of all aspects of this new society, from the well-designed clothing they use to their agriculture and technology. But his real interest (and clearly, the main interest of the author) is in understanding how a women-only society has evolved and in what ways it is different from his own. In short, Herland is a feminist utopia. Everything is better. Conflict, inequality and criminality are things of the past, to the extent that the very concepts are no longer understood. Society has been finely tuned to allow all women to study and be creative. There are no masters and servants, bosses or slaves. No-one is overburdened with childcare or work. The traditional subservient roles of women in modern society have been forgotten – there is no-one to be subservient to. All of society’s practical problems have been mastered. By contrast the men’s accounts of their own world makes many of the practices of the outside world seem barbaric. Particular horror is shown at the very idea of abortion – a view which some modern critics have used to undermine Herland’s claim to be a feminist text, although surely the point is here about women’s loss of control of their fertility?
What is it about a women-only society that makes it so perfect? Or to put it another way, what is it about men that makes the outside world so damaged? The author suggests some answers to these questions but is surprisingly undidactic – the reader is left to join the dots themselves, even if the exercise isn’t that challenging. Free from the oppression of men and traditional female roles, women have evolved a near-perfect society. Women are respected and valued in this society, free from domestic servitude and male oppression. A key factor is their control over their fertility – the women can reproduce by parthenogenesis but choose to control their community’s population by having only one child each. Motherhood is a form of religion in this society, and children are cared for communally. No-one is worn out by having too many children or burdened by the cost of providing for large families. (This is surprisingly accurate – once women have control of their fertility, combined with lower infant mortality rates, birth rates drop dramatically.) But can this utopia survive the reintroduction of men? The author implies that this might be possible and that only some rather than all men are the problem. Of the three explorers, only one, Terry, finds the changes he faces in this society unbearable.
Over the course of the novel Van gradually finds out more information about the women’s society. He is told that a volcanic eruption 2000 years ago sealed off the only pass out of Herland, the only way of travelling to the outside world. The remaining men, mostly slaves, tried to take over but were killed by the women. Facing the end of their race a miracle occurs – one woman became pregnant without the intervention of a male partner, and went on to have five daughters, who in turn grew up to bear five daughters each. This women only society rapidly evolved strategies to survive their isolation and grew to prosper and flourish. Freed from the myriad the problems of society caused by women’s oppression the society find that many of the most deep-rooted problems such as criminality simply wither away and are forgotten.
Having had no contact with men for 2,000 years, the women have no experience or cultural memory of romantic love or sexual intercourse other than for the purposes of animal reproduction. They understand the mechanical process of mating, but the idea of sex for pleasure is unknown to them. This does not appear to be a society in which lesbian couples have formed – there is no mention or suggestion of this – and while it is never said so explicitly is is strongly suggested that all sexual urges have withered away. Therefore the men’s enthusiasm for marriage and sex (the author is not radical enough to suggest that one could happen without the other) is baffling to them. Although the men eventually form affectionate partnerships with three of the Herland ‘girls’, society appears to see this as an experiment in identifying any benefits from fatherhood rather than romances or expressions of love.
To be fair to the author, she doesn’t turn away from the question of sex, even though her freedom for discussing them directly was obviously limited. It would have been tempting I am sure to just have ignored the whole issue. She uses a wide range of creative euphemisms to discuss sex. Marriage is described by the women as “permanent mated love“. In an attempt to persuade the women to have sex with them, the men describe marital sex thus: “Why, to touch you, to be near you, to come closer and closer, to lose myself in you” and talk about “the sweet intense joy of married lovers“.
The women are puzzled by the concept of sex for pleasure rather than for procreation:
“Do you mean, she asked quite calmly, as if I was not holding her cool form hands in my hot and rather quivering ones “that with you, when people marry, they go on doing this in season and out of season, with no thought of children at all?”
Married love as an experiment in Herland is unsuccessful. After a short honeymoon period, Van’s wife Ellador withdraws from ‘married life’ and declines to have sex with him, explaining “If I thought it was really right and necessary I could perhaps bring myself to it, for your sake dear, but I do not want to, not at all. You would not have a mere submission, would you?”
Van and Jeff try to work these issues out with their wives, with Jeff seemingly accepting long-term celibacy as an option, but the more aggressive, impatient of the three, Terry, is uncompromising in his view of the submissive role of women in the bedroom and the rest of the relationship. When his partner Alima rejects his ‘advances’ he hides in her bedroom and “put into practice his pet conviction that a women loves to be mastered, and by sheer brute force, in all the pride and passion of is intense masculinity, he tried to master this woman“. In other words he tries to rape her. Van’s reaction is chilling: “In our country he would have been with quite within his rights of course….”[Crime]’s a pretty hard word for it. After all, Alima was his wife, you know.” Terry stands trial for his crime and is ordered to leave Herland. Van decides to accompany Terry but they are only allowed to leave Herland once they promise not to reveal its location. The novel ends abruptly at that point, with the subsequent adventures of Van, Terry and Ellador in the outside world told in the novel’s sequel With Her in Outland.
Following its publication Herland was almost completely forgotten and it was not until the re-printing of the author’s short-story, The Yellow Wallpaper in 1973, that readers began to rediscover Herland. For its time, Herland was extremely radical, daring to suggest that many of society’s problems originate with the subjugation of women, and even possibly that the problems originate with men alone. That may have been a step too far in a time when women still did not have the vote in the USA or the UK, but these were to happen very soon and formed part of significant changes to the role of women in society. There’s no reason to believe Herland contributed to these changes, but it is nonetheless one of the clearest descriptions of what a society without men might look like (even if it is told from the perspective of a male narrator rather than one of the society’s citizens). It is a treatise dressed up in novel form, where the story element of the text is minimal – very little happens once the men are captured, apart from a desultory escape attempt. But it has important things to say about the role of women in society and many of these messages remain starkly relevant today.
I realised fairly early on that I had made a mistake in choosing to read this book, despite it having been on my shelves for (literally) several decades. The mistake lay in the fact that the novel is a retelling of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, and Little Dorrit is one of the very few, possibly the only, Dickens novel that I haven’t read. To be fair, a novel called The Great Fire of London (1666) isn’t an obvious retelling of a novel set in Victorian England, but perhaps I am missing something? I was certainly going to miss all of the subtle references to the source material in Ackroyd’s novel, and was therefore faced with the decision – to push on regardless, or wait until I had read the original?
I pushed on. Little Dorrit is now top of my list of Dickens novels to be read and I will surely experience the slightly bizarre sensation of reading a source novel and spotting influences in reverse. I will let you know how it goes of course. But could The Great Fire of London stand on its own as a novel worth reading?
Yes and no. The novel tells the story of a film-maker producing Little Dorrit in the London streets of its original setting, with a varied cast of eccentric characters, many of which almost certainly have Dickensian originals. It is very short – less than 200 pages – which is very unDickensian – and mildly entertaining. The characters were largely unlikeable and didn’t come to life – I didn’t really care what happens to them. We don’t spend enough time with any of them to get to know them properly and they remained essentially caricatures. In any case what happens to them is usually telegraphed well in advance – an abusive affair ends badly, a gay romance fizzles out, the planned film is incomplete due to production problems, and so on – even the Great Fire we were promised in the novel’s title was as predictable as the iceberg in Titanic. And the novel’s title is misleading – this story has nothing to do with the Great Fire of London – and while the story ends of a conflagration of the film set, that simply acts as a convenient climax for the plot rather than anything more symbolic or meaningful.
So far I appreciate I haven’t found much positive to say about the novel. It seemed burdened by its source material rather than inspired by it. There are only glimpses of the author that Ackroyd was to develop into, and I am not surprised the novel is no longer in print. I occasionally pop over to Goodreads to see what other reviewers have thought of things, as a sense check as much as anything. This succinct review stood out: “A pretentious, miserable book about pretentious, miserable people.” Bizarrely the reader gave the novel two stars! Another reviewer claimed the novel is a “Fictionalised account of the great fire of London. Not too bad, but also not really all that good, or so I thought.” which suggests they really didn’t read it at all (or reviewed the wrong book!)
Initially I thought Bliss, Carey’s first novel, might be interesting in the way authors’ early work often is, giving an insight into the author they are going to become. Northanger Abbey for example is in some ways quite an unremarkable novel, but it does show glimpses of the writer who was going to go on and give us Pride and Prejudice. Would it still be in print if it was the only novel written by Austen? Possibly not (although comments in defence of NA are more than welcome!)
But Bliss is much more than just an early novel of an author showing promise. It is a mature, complex work – had I not know it was Carey’s first I would never have been able to tell. There are characteristics of his work in terms of complexity and also thematically, but few signs of immaturity or anything else to show this is a first novel.
All the reviews of Bliss I have been able to find on the internet agree on one thing – this is a darkly comic novel. While that’s a fair observation it is a lot more than that. The novel’s central character is Harry Joy, an Australian advertising executive. At the start of the novel, Harry suffers a near-fatal heart attack and for a few minutes he is technically dead. When revived he becomes convinced that he is still dead and is now in Hell. The world he once knew— his wife Bettina, his children, and his job in the advertising industry— now feels hellish and grotesque. He is convinced that his family and friends are devils acting as part of his torture. This delusion is aggravated when he simultaneously discovers his wife is having an affair with his business partner and his teenage children are having incestuous, exploitative sex. How can that world not be hell? Seen through this new lens Harry re-evaluates his life. He decides to walk away, seeking the ‘bliss’ of the novel’s title with Honey Barbara, a free-spirited hippie and environmentalist who lives in an off the grid community.
Bliss is a not particularly subtle satire of consumer society; at one point Harry agonises over whether to work with petroleum companies knowing their products are harmful – they eventually are revealed to have given his wife cancer. Harry only comes to life when he walks away and moves to the hippie commune. Bliss is both tragic and redemptive. Harry’s quest for spiritual rebirth brings him a form of peace but he loses his family in the process. Can genuine happiness – “bliss”— only be achieved by rejecting the trappings of modern life?
When Bliss was first published, it was hailed as a major breakthrough in Australian fiction. It won the Miles Franklin Award and was adapted into a film and even an opera. It is one of the strongest first novel’s I have read in quite some time and a clear indication of the author’s abilities, a promise fulfilled in novel’s such as the Booker Prize winning The True History of the Kelly Gang.
Conversations with Lord Byron on perversion 163 years after his Lordship’s death by Amanda Prantera, 1987
This novel is very much a curiosity. With only three Goodreads reviews and now out of print, you may struggle to get hold of a copy. The reference to perversion in the title is misleading – there are no discussions about any form of sexual deviancy, unless homosexuality was considered such in 1987, (which it wasn’t) and it feels as if it was included as a cynical effort to increase sales. But the main interest of the novel is its very early but also quite advanced discussion of what we now term Artificial Intelligence.
Lord Byron was an interesting figure. His in part self-created reputation as a legendary seducer of women caused him to be a scandalous figure in early nineteenth century English society. Inoculated to an extent from the full consequences of his actions by his aristocratic status, he nevertheless broke a lot of taboos, and eventually had to leave the country. His poetry was arguably less successful than his seduction technique and his readership nowadays is largely restricted to university syllabuses. But he is an excellent choice for the central character of a novel about AI. Prantera imagines a computer programme in which every known piece of information about Byron’s life and works is entered into a database to create a simulation of his Lordship’s consciousness. The research team set up to develop the program then go on to interrogate it, hoping it will connect its fragments of information in new ways, thereby providing answers to academic puzzles about Byron’s life – particularly his romantic life – such as whether he wrote his love poems “To Thyrza” to his Cambridge friend John Edleston.
Predictably the program develops a consciousness close to Byron’s own, Its interior monologue forms much of the second part of the novel, its voice imitating Byron’s memoirs and letters. His time at Cambridge is the focus of this ‘memory’, and a potential explanation of his enigmatic relationship with Edleston is developed. Edleston is initially presented to the reader as an angelic voiced young chorister, who falls in love with the older (but still young, only 17) more experienced Byron. Tempted, Byron resists any sexual contact with Edleston seemingly repulsed by the idea of homosexual sex. Finally he can resist no longer and it is at this point that the novel’s ‘big’ secret is revealed – like many attractive young men in fiction before him (for example virtually all of Shakespeare’s comedies) Edleston is a young woman disguised as a boy! As the novel hints at several points that Edleston has a secret which would relieve Byron of his homosexual hesitation, this comes as no surprise whatsoever. The opportunity to write about a trans or bisexual character is thrown away – this is simply a disguise used by a privileged aristocrat/minor royal in order to have fun at an all-male university, nothing to do with sexual identity. Byron had no reason to worry about his sexual orientation – he was only attracted to Edleston because (s)he was a girl all along, not because he was in any way sexually confused. This of course does a disservice to same-sex attracted people and in particular to the transgressive Byron himself.
What of the novel’s discussion of artificial intelligence? Surprisingly it was quite accurate in its fundamental concepts – load the computer with as much data as possible and then leave it to start making connections itself. The computer used in the research programme has an algorithm which learns through its interactions with the operators, finding patterns to simulate a characterisation of Byron’s intelligence and personality. The layering of different personality traits and characteristics for the programme is strongly reminiscent of the neural networks used today in AI in which layers of “neurons” are used for complex tasks such as image and speech recognition. It also has a Natural Language Processing facility which allows it to understand and generate human language, very much in the way that chatbots and voice assistants work today. The only dated aspect of this portrait of a very early AI is the fact that every output from the programme needs to be printed out and photocopied in order to be studied by the researchers. But apart from that this was a very interesting insight into how AI was seen in the 1980’s and how little, surprisingly, it has progressed since then, even if it has moved from the pages of fiction into the real world. When compared to the almost unfailing inaccuracy of the typical prediction of the development of technology from this period, which anticipated we would all be travelling in flying cars and eating our meals in pill form, it feels spot on.
I first read John Wain’s Hurry on Down in the early 1980’s, in a rather ragged Penguin edition that I still have. It left a very distinct impression and unlike many of the novels I have read over the years I vividly remember the plot, the set piece scenes and the extended cast of eccentric characters, such as Froulish, the undergraduate who establishes himself as a ‘character’ at the university by “carrying a grey parrot in a cage wherever he went, wearing a bowler hat indoors, standing motionless for hours on end in the exact centre of the quadrangle” (As a side observation, the idea that wearing a hat indoors, albeit a bowler, is on a level with carrying a parrot around everywhere, shows how radically social mores and conventions have changed since the 1950’s.)
When first published in 1953 the novel was widely seen as culturally significant. It marked a change in style from the traditional narrative, often about middle class characters to something much looser, unstructured, even chaotic, but with a lot to say about the world. Even as late as the 1980’s Hurry on Down was still perceived as an important book, a milestone in the development of the post-War phenomenon labelled as the Movement, associated with writers such as Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim, which shares a lot of its DNA with Hurry on Down) and John Osborne (Look Back in Anger, whose Jimmy Porter often sounds a lot like Charles Lumley, Hurry on Down‘s protagonist). Now it is almost completely forgotten. It has no separate Wikipedia entry and only 33 reviews on Goodreads (for comparison, Russell Brand’s self-consciously infantile ‘My Booky Wook’ has over 1600 reviews!).
So what happens, and more importantly, why does it matter? Charles Lumley has just graduated and is taking time to consider his next steps in the world. His family want him to get a job, his girlfriend expects him to marry her, the wider society has expectations about his future. He is even being cross-examined by his landlady as the novel opens. But Charles has no idea what he wants to do. So he rebels, breaks contact with his family and fiance, and rejects the idea of a white collar job, a mortgage and children. Instead he essentially runs away. Initially he makes money to survive by cleaning windows and lives in a dilapidated loft with an former university acquaintance, the afore-mentioned Froulish, an eccentric novelist, and his girlfriend, Betty. Betty supports their bohemian lifestyle with income from a ‘family member’ – but Charles soon finds out she is actually taking money from a lover and is essentially working as a prostitute.
From here Charles spirals downward, taking a breathless series of increasingly menial jobs. In a bar he sees a very attractive young woman, June, and becomes obsessed with her. He accepts a role in a criminal gang smuggling drugs simply so he can have enough money to approach June. Eventually they become lovers, but this doesn’t last long as the gang is exposed. Charles escapes capture because he is in a serious car accident. While recuperating he is informed that June is being kept by her much older ‘sugar daddy’ who poses as her uncle. His world collapses and when he is finally recovered from the accident he starts again with another series of menial jobs – hospital porter, chauffeur and night club bouncer. The novel ends on a cynical note suggesting that Charles was never going to be able to escape the expectations of society, and that surrendering to them might even be the best approach.
Published only eight years after the end of the second world war, the shadow of the war is rarely mentioned, but is there in the fabric of the society Charles tries to escape from. Too young to have served, Charles would still have had to do national service, despite going to university – this is not mentioned. Nor is rationing which was just ending, nor any other impact of the war, even though most older men he meets would have served in one form or another.
Wain was not just a picaresque author writing a series of loosely connected sketches about the world of work, and what it was like to be an aimless young man in the 1950’s. His writing is memorably impressive: “It was heavy and thundery outside; early August and beginning to get that washed-out feeling of high summer, when the freshness has gone from the leaves. Not that there were any leaves in the streets where he was walking, but outside, in the country, the leaves were drying slowly, and they had whispered their message to be heard in the backyards within the smoke-ring of the city. Elsewhere: “He tried a pub near the hospital, but it was dirty and lonely. A few old men sat staring with red-rimmed eyes into their pints, making the beer look like tears they had dripped into their glasses and were saving for some purpose.”
It would be easy to read too much into Lumley’s rejection of the status quo. He is not a revolutionary, and the novel’s ending suggest that all his attempts to escape from the straightjacket of society have been futile.
‘He thought, as he leaned on the parapet of the town’s bridge and watched the tiny brown river drifting beneath it, of all the expensive young men of the thirties who had made, or wished to make, or talked of making, a gesture somewhat similar to his own, turning their backs on the setting that had pampered them; and how they had all failed from the start because their rejection was moved by the desire to enter, and be at one with, a vaguely conceived People, whose minds and lives they could not even begin to imagine, and who would, in any case, had they ever arrived, have made their lives hell. At least, Charles thought with a sense of self-congratulation, he had always been right about them, right to despise them for their idiotic attempt to look through two telescopes at the same time; one fashioned through German psychology and pointed at themselves, the other of Russian economics and directed at the English working class.’
If Hurry on Down was a television programme shown today it would be prefaced with one of those warnings about old-fashioned attitudes that were common in the time the book is set. There is an ugly scene at a party where Charles meets a gay young man who takes a fancy to him and won’t take no for an answer – “a young man in grey suede shoes; Charles caught sight of those shoes and decided that he now knew all he wished to know about one guest at least”. This was at a time when homosexuality was still a criminal offence and social signals such as suede shoes were used as a shorthand for sexual identity. Charles is quite comfortable about threatening violence against this persistent but otherwise inoffensive young man who is interrupting his efforts to talk to June. Later there is an example of the casual use of the n-word. This is used to criticise the imperialist mindset of some unpleasant rugby players he meets at another party: “I don’t want your silly Edwardian notions of an upper-class Herrenvolk thrown up at me either. By ‘letting the side down’ all you mean is that the n-driving sahib oughtn’t to do anything that reveals that he shares a common humanity with the n-s he drives. That idea’s dead everywhere in practice, and it only survives in theory in the minds of people like you” “God!” said Burge, in tones of sincere and utter loathing, “You’re talking just like a bloody Socialist.”
I wasn’t sure if Hurry on Down would be worth re-reading. Many novels age badly, and what was at the time ground-breaking experimentalism appears crass and clumsy. The fact that this novel is now largely forgotten (it doesn’t have its own Wikipedia entry!) would suggest I am in a minority on this but I think it stands up well to the passage of time. It is obviously of its era, but it’s an enjoyable read, the narrative structure works well and progresses the story forward at a fair pace. The improbable coincidences in which Charles always bumps into a former colleague to offer him his next job are forgivable and even become an in-joke which we know is coming. There is much to dislike about Charles – he is pretty amoral – but the point of view narration encourages the reader to see his point of view above others and to accept his rationalisations. Hurry on Down is worth rediscovering.
One of the most tired propositions about novel writing is ‘write about what you know’. In this his first novel, Howard Jacobson, stretched that saying to its limit. Jacobson is a Jewish man from Manchester who studied English at Cambridge, followed by a teaching post in Australia, then came back to teach at Wolverhampton Polytechnic. In this 1983 novel his protagonist is Sefton Goldberg, a Jewish man from Manchester who studied English at Cambridge, taught in Australia, before coming back to teach in England at ‘Wrottesley’ Polytechnic. It is hard not to see this novel therefore as at least in part autobiographical, albeit with lots of dramatic exaggeration. The novel’s title is a fairly crude pun – it opens with a scene of Sefton having sex with a student in his office, something he seems to think is one of the perks of his job. But he is not enjoying himself – he can’t stop wondering whether he has properly locked his office door, recalling a similar incident when he taught in Australia – obviously a common occurence.
Jacobson came late to the ‘campus novel’ genre – arguably Kingsley Amis kicked this off in the 1950’s with Lucky Jim, followed by Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man in 1975, and the same year David Lodge’s Changing Places. Academia in all these novels is not portrayed as a privileged place of learning but instead as a wholly depressing experience. These fictional universities are staffed by grumpy, largely male, amoral lecturers overwhelmed by the non-academic requirements of academia.
The novel has very little of what could be called a plot. Sefton is divorcing his wife, but she never appears. His colleagues and students are all lightly sketched, one-dimensional characters with amusing idiosyncrasies such as the professor who specialises in “all the twentieth century poets whose first or last names were Tom or Thomas”. The exception to this beige brigade is the misogynistic portrait of the teacher of creative studies, Cora Peck, defined by her unconventional outfits – blue cowboy boots, white jump suits and black leather jackets. Inevitably Sefton attempts to seduce Cora but surprisingly she rejects him. I say surprisingly because the general rule of thumb in novels written by male novelists of this era is that no matter how clumsy, awkward and unappealing the male protagonists are, they are nevertheless unaccountably irresistible to almost all female characters (see for example pretty much anything ever written by Kingsley Amis.) That rule is broadly followed by Jacobson in this novel, with Cora forming the sole exception. Cora has had a number of her works accepted by a publisher, which gives Sefton another reason to despise her.
An implausible ‘twinning’ deal with the local football club in which some of the departments are going to be moved into the football stadium is introduced as a plot development – but unfortunately it makes no sense, football clubs being notoriously short on classrooms, offices and lecture halls, and is never taken seriously even within the confines of the novel. When he is not having sex with his students Sefton spends his time applying for any and all jobs broadly connected to academia, with the sole objective of getting out of Wrottesley. A Cambridge college invites him for an interview, which provides the opportunity for a set piece college dinner scene in which Sefton feels totally out of place, and where he is inevitably propositioned by the female Director of Studies.
Coming from Behind is the broadest of comedies, more Carry on Teaching than Lucky Jim. There are a series of comic set piece scenes such as when Sefton is confronted by a group of Geography lecturers, outraged that he has parked in their section of the Polytechnic’s awful car park. Throughout Jacobson relentlessly focuses on Sefton’s Jewish identity. Everything he does is seen through this lens. It is mentioned on almost every page, with long meditations on what it means for Sefton to be a Jewish man in education, at Cambridge, making love, discussing sport, walking in the countryside, being ignorant of fishing (“Being Jewish, Sefton didn’t know much about the names or breeds or needs of fish. (p.24)) and so on ad nauseum. At times Sefton specifically resents the fact that he is not being discriminated against because of his Jewish identity! That’s obviously not to say that one’s heritage and religion is not important, but when it is the only defining characteristic of an individual, the only way of looking at and experiencing the world, it gets a bit wearing.
There are moments of bad taste in the novel and language used that was common in the 80’s but today considered offensive. This is just one more barrier to squeezing any pleasure or enjoyment out of this book. I took a quick look at Amazon to see if it is still in print – it is – and while there two reviews jumped out at me. The first was the bizarre “the wife liked it” (!!) but the other was I think on the nose in describing the novel as “spiteful and intellectually snobbish”.
The Reading Bug 