the last book I read

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin.

David is an American in Paris in the 1950s, just mooching around doing not very much, and with no apparent need to earn a living thanks to occasional handouts from his father. His girlfriend Hella, a feisty modern liberated type of girl, has headed off to Spain on her own to do some exploring and plans to return to Paris in a few weeks, whereupon she and David have some vague plans culminating in probably returning to the USA, getting married, squeezing out a few babies, the usual stuff.

Having borrowed some money from his friend Jacques (who is older, clearly gay, and clearly has some designs on David which David is dimly aware of and not above exploiting) David agrees to accompany him to a bar run by Jacques' friend Guillaume. Here David meets handsome Italian barman Giovanni and experiences some troubling turmoil, you know, down there.

But actually we already know some of this, and also that something catastrophic has occurred since which has resulted in Giovanni being under sentence of death by guillotine. We know this because of the framing device, written from David's perspective some time later as he stays in a hotel somewhere outside Paris; this framing device also makes reference to some formative homosexual experiences in David's teenage years where some harmless boyish rough-and-tumble and play-fighting high-jinks and a brisk shower and rub-down afterwards led inexorably to some furious cock-gobbling, all subsequently shrugged off and forgotten about.

So there is a general sense that David's sexuality might be a bit fluid and ill-defined, even (perhaps especially) to himself. It's not surprising, therefore, when after a night at the bar, some more drinking elsewhere and a group excursion to Les Halles (this is back when it was still a market) for a breakfast of white wine and oysters, David and Giovanni end the night by heading off to Giovanni's place for a portion of Italian salami. 

And so a relationship is established, mainly conducted in various bars (including Guillaume's) and in Giovanni's room in a house near Place de la Nation. Giovanni's initial twinkly Italian charm has morphed into some slightly needy clinginess, and David is trying to maintain some arm's-length detachment in the knowledge that Hella will return at some indeterminate date in the nearish future, at which point the merde will presumably hit the ventilateur. But, armed with some newly-acquired self-knowledge, are David's previous plans with Hella for a future life together what he really wants any more anyway?

Hella eventually returns, David heads down to the railway station to meet her (without telling Giovanni where he's going, of course), and they resume their previous life of swanning round Paris together and having nice God-fearing vanilla heterosexual sex. Eventually the inevitable happens and they run into Jacques and Giovanni in a bookshop. Rather surprisingly, given Giovanni's theatrical relief at David's reappearance and dismay at his having abandoned him and not told him where he was going, and Jacques' furious eyebrow-raising and Kenneth Williams noises, Hella shrugs the whole thing off as a disagreement between friends and Giovanni being stereotypically Italian and demonstrative, rather than as evidence of something rum going on. 

David subsequently returns to Giovanni's room to see him and explain to him that they can't have a future together; even in relatively bohemian 1950s Paris any official public acknowledgement of a gay relationship would be impossible. Later, while David is back with Hella, news comes through that Guillaume has been murdered and that Giovanni is the prime suspect. After a brief period on the run Giovanni is captured and sentenced to death. Hella is sympathetic to David's dismay at this, believing that the two were nothing more than close friends, but eventually David decides he can't live a lie any more and must embrace his true identity, which he does by going to nearby Nice and hooking up with a whole battalion of sailors; while winding down with a refreshing drink after a gruelling session of being recreationally spit-roasted by the entire crew of the French Ark Royal (L'Arche Royale, if you must), who should walk into the bar but Hella, and the jig is up. She has always known, it seems, on some level at least. 

And so the collapse of David's life is complete: Hella returns to America, and sentence of death is carried out on Giovanni.

This was James Baldwin's second novel, published in 1956, and differs from his first, Go Tell It On The Mountain, in that all the major characters are white. Baldwin's stated reason for doing this was that he specifically wanted to write a novel about sexuality and didn't want another axis of oppression and struggle getting in the way. Obviously there's no reason why you have to centre black characters if you, the author, are black (as Baldwin was), any more than you can only write about gay characters if you are yourself gay (as Baldwin was). Equally there's no reason why a straight person (me, for instance) of whatever skin colour living in the early 21st century can't enjoy a book about gay life in 1950s Paris - which, as it happens, I did. Some of this stuff is universal even if some of it is also quite specific, and it is in any case possible to imagine yourself living a different life to the one you actually have; that, arguably, is the whole point of fiction. 

Anyway, Giovanni's Room is widely acknowledged as a classic of gay literature and I wouldn't disagree with that assessment; other books on this list to have featured gay relationships as a central plot point include A Stone Boat, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Days Without End and not many others that I can see on a quick scan through the archives.

One thought you might have on reading the bits in the framing sections about Giovanni's impending execution is: wait a minute, surely they weren't still guillotining people in the 1950s? It turns out they very much still were: the last person to be executed by guillotine in France (or anywhere else for that matter, if we're talking about state-sanctioned judicial killings) was Hamida Djandoubi as recently as September 1977, and the last person to be executed publicly in this way was Eugen Weidmann in June 1939, recently enough for the event to be filmed and, needless to say, available on YouTube (that video isn't particularly graphic, but does feature someone's head being cut off, so caution is advised). Execution by the literal detaching of someone's head from their body does seem more visceral and startling than, say, shooting someone, but is almost certainly quicker and more painless (albeit a bit more messy) than some of the methods still used today, mainly in the USA, like electrocution, gassing and lethal injection.

the last book I read

The Red Queen by Matt Ridley. 

Subtitled Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, this is a book primarily concerned with *checks notes* sex, and the evolution of human nature. "Sex" is a slightly problematic term here for several reasons, not least because it refers to two separate but related things - the binary separation of the human species into male and female (I can sense you shifting nervously in your chair, but we'll come back to that later), but also the physical act of love, coitus, jiggy jiggy. etc. 

The whole business of combining two sets of chromosomal material - zipping each one in half, sticking them together again, ensuring all the bits line up - is quite an overhead, though, and that's before you get into the overhead of taking a lady out to dinner, maybe a movie, some dimmed lights, scented candles etc., to get her in the mood for little bit of chromosomal combining, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Compare this with just splitting yourself in half and ending up with two genetically identical clones (as some species have done perfectly happily for a gajillion years) - possibly slightly painful, but quick, efficient and no-one has to argue over who picks up the taxi fare or has to sleep in the wet patch. 

I'm being slightly flippant here, obviously, but the point is that it really is a major overhead in energy terms and would clearly be selected against by evolution were it not for the benefit that it must confer. But what is that benefit? Essentially the first half(ish) of the book addresses that question, and the second half(again, ish) explores some of the sometimes counter-intuitive ramifications of choosing to do things this way. Some of the first half of the book covers similar themes to those covered (in more detail) in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, specifically all the stuff about the gene being the principal unit of selection and reproduction, and therefore responsible for some behaviour that would otherwise seem inexplicable, like altruism in favour of close relatives (who carry a similar set of genetic material). In the interests of full disclosure I should add that I read somewhere between a third and a half of The Selfish Gene, probably 20+ years ago, but never finished it, not because it wasn't an interesting read but more than likely because some shiny and tempting volume of fiction hove into view and distracted me. 

The main benefit of sexual reproduction, it seems, in large and complex organisms in particular, is that the regular mixing of genetic material into new and unique patterns provides a means of flushing out undesirable genetic mutations, and also staying one step ahead of the massed ranks of crazed and homicidal micro-organisms (viruses, parasites, etc.) that are out to invade our bodies, kill us and then feast on our rancid liquefied remains. It's more difficult for them to get into your house, steal your stuff and shit on the carpet if you keep changing the locks.

Hoary old phrases like "survival of the fittest" encourage the assumption that it's the organisms with the "best" genetic material that get first dibs on reproducing and populating future generations, and there is a very basic sense in which this is true - those with really disastrous genetic mutations are highly likely to die before they can reproduce. But this disregards sexual selection, i.e. how organisms decide which organisms of the opposite sex to mate and reproduce with. To put it another way, how would they know who had the "best" genetic material without running extensive genetic tests as part of the courtship process? One answer is for the candidates (and it's almost always the males, it being the females doing the selecting for the obvious reason that they carry the young) to display some physical adornment that advertises the good health and vigour necessary to produce, say, absurdly long or decorative tail feathers, but also the strength to overcome the physical handicap imposed by such things and survive to robust adulthood. Indeed, the more absurd and cumbersome the decoration, the more impressive the individual's achievement in thriving despite it, and so a sort of escalating feedback loop is created. 

So in fact the organisms that do best at passing their genes on to the next generation are those who are the most successful at attracting mates, not necessarily those with the "best" genetic material, assuming that term even means anything.

That's all very well for peacocks, you'll be saying, but I don't have a massive multi-coloured fan sticking out of my arse to attract the ladies. What have I got going for me? Well, in addition to all the obvious stuff like being fairly tall, reasonably symmetrical features, relative youth, solvency, good prospects, there is a theory that part of the reason humans evolved these gargantuan brains is as a result of sexual selection. This is in conflict with the usual explanations around needing the big brains for things like tool use and most obviously language and its uses for constructing large-scale societies, situation comedies and complex hire purchase agreements. What if the large brain and its function as a generator of charm, wit and poetry was itself a sort of virtual peacock's tail? That would explain its being larger than even dealing with language would seem to require, a sort of runaway feedback mechanism limited only by the female body's capacity to give birth to large-headed babies without needing impractically large hips, and as a consequence impractically expensive trousers.

I'm not sure I completely buy that theory, but it's an interesting idea. The difficulty with all this is avoiding the charge of concocting plausible-sounding just-so stories that fit the data without hard evidence that these supposed mechanisms actually exist. To pre-empt this charge Ridley does offer a blizzard of citations in the 30-page bibliography at the end, although I have no way of distinguishing between Professor George Eminent of the University of Science and A. Dimwit from the Academy of Dubious Claims, or at least not without doing a lot of legwork I'm not prepared to do.

It's interesting while reading a science-y book like this written by someone with an obvious regard for data and evidence and try to tease out their own biases - in Ridley's case the clearest one is a general dislike for anyone who leans (in his view) too far towards the nurture side of the nature/nurture argument, in particular the pioneers of social science such as Émile Durkheim, but also some more regular science-y people like BF Skinner and the behaviourists. I'm fairly sympathetic to Ridley's views here but it is interesting to note that in the 30-odd years since The Red Queen's publication in 1993 the "everything is culture" school of thought seems to have become more prevalent.

I couldn't say whether this is a view inherently linked to what you might (inaccurately) call the "everything is genetics" viewpoint, but the other thing you occasionally get a whiff of when Ridley strays into more general non-sciencey musings about society is a slightly unpalatable right-leaning free-market libertarianism. The relevance of this is to Ridley's ill-fated tenure as chairman of Northern Rock during its time as an early victim (in late 2007) of what's become known as the 2008 financial crisis. It's highly debatable how much Ridley's own role as non-executive chairman allowed him to dictate policy but it's certainly true that statements like this (from this 2007 George Monbiot article in the Guardian and therefore second-hand, so I have to trust that it's genuine) have a bum-clenchingly Ayn Rand-ish sound to them:

Bureaucracy, he argued, is "a self-seeking flea on the backs of the more productive people of this world ... governments do not run countries, they parasitise them".

The elephant in the room that I have failed to acknowledge thus far is that the unstated premise of the whole book - i.e. that biological sex exists, is a highly-robust genetic mechanism and results in two sub-categories of Homo sapiens which have identifiably different physical bodies and attributes, some of which extend to behaviour - is now controversial in some quarters. This is a problem not solved by substituting the word "gender" for the word "sex", although Ridley does this to solve the different problem of confusion between the two different meanings of the word "sex" as mentioned above.

There was a time not that long ago when doing this (i.e. conflating "sex" and "gender") would have got you scolded/abused/cancelled, the idea being that "gender" was more about your self-presentation and even self-identification, in some individuals (i.e. transgender people) differing from your biological sex. More recently there has been a move towards the scolding/abuse/cancellation stuff switching to being directed at those who insist that they're different things (and maybe even that "gender" is just a slightly woolly and artificial sub-category of the more general group of things which could be called "what you're like"), and towards the ideologically pure position being that they're the same thing. 

Expressing any sort of a dissenting opinion about this stuff is liable to have you dismissed as basically Hitler, or, worse, JK Rowling, but for what it's worth I can see, from a strictly ideological/political standpoint, why people might do this (i.e. insist that they're the same thing and both equally social constructs - "everything is culture" again, I guess), since acknowledging that biological sex exists opens the way for the establishment of female-only categories in, for example, sports, and female-only spaces elsewhere, e.g. rape crisis centres. I do think denial of clearly demonstrable reality is unhelpful and unlikely to be sustainable, though.

Anyway, back to the book - not much more to say except it was an enjoyable and thought-provoking read, and of course significant in the context of this blog in that it represents my first blog foray into the non-fiction genre. I'm pretty happy with the decision, overall, though I'm not going to continue with the practice of trailing in advance what genre my next book is from; you'll have to wait and see. 

the last book I read

Lost Man's River by Peter Matthiessen.

We're back in Florida. Not this guy, but instead the south-easternmost state of the USA, dangling pendulously into the north-eastern reaches of the Gulf of Mexico like, well, a dangly pendulous thing. In particular we're back in the south-western corner of the state where the events of Killing Mister Watson took place, events that included, as you'll know if you were paying attention at the time or are capable of reading the book's title, the killing of Edgar "EJ" Watson by a ragged posse of his fellow dwellers in the loose gaggle of islands at the outflow where most of the water in the Everglades - which is really just a sixty-mile-wide, shallow, slow-moving river - meets the sea and where there is a complex and ever-changing landscape. 

But why did they shoot him? Well, part of the answer to that question is: go and read the first book. But many questions remain, and by the time the narrative here starts at least four decades have passed - it's never completely clear what date this all happens, but the best bet seems to be late 1940s or early 1950s. Many people have found their subsequent lives defined and haunted by the events of 1910 (i.e. the murder of EJ Watson), especially those who were there on the day and who may or may not have fired some of the shots that took Watson down, but also Watson's own children, of whom there were at least ten by at least five different women.

Our principal business here is with Lucius Watson, youngest child of Watson's second wife Jane, and around twenty-one when Watson was killed. He's been various things over the years, from a fisherman to a respected academic historian, and is now back in the area stirring up unwelcome memories. This is partly for research purposes for a book he's preparing about the Watson murder (in the hope of rehabilitating his father's murderous reputation), partly because it's come to his attention that the National Parks organisation that now oversees the Everglades is considering knocking down The Watson Place, his father's old house at Chatham Bend in the islands, and partly because his long-lost older brother Rob Watson has reappeared after many years, somewhat the worse for many years of drink and gnawing guilt about his association with some of his father's murkier deeds. 

Hardly surprisingly, most of the natives of the area who have any knowledge about the events of 1910 are a bit cagey about coughing it up, particularly to the son of the murder victim who might have his own motives for getting a clear picture of who was at the dock and the order of who shot whom and when. And the order is obviously important here, since the early shots will have been the ones that did the damage; anyone who shot later would have basically been pumping lead into a corpse - somewhat less culpable, morally speaking. Moreover, Lucius' evident desire to include a visit to The Watson Place in his trip makes certain individuals nervous, the house now being used for other slightly shady purposes that those individuals don't want him, still less the Park authorities or the police, knowing about.

Lucius is a cautious and circumspect type, but the same cannot be said of his brother Rob, and after some unwise shooting his mouth off and some actual shooting of firearms (thankfully not resulting in any casualties) he is kidnapped by some of the locals now making use of The Watson Place for nefarious purposes, including, slightly awkwardly, the father of Lucius' research assistant and very occasional lover Sally Brown. 

Lucius, Sally, local man Andy House (whose father may or may not have been one of EJ Watson's executioners) and Sally's intermittently estranged husband Whidden Harden take a boat out into the Ten Thousand Islands archipelago to visit The Watson Place and try to rescue Rob. Lucius has come into possession of a letter from Rob which appears to be a confession of his involvement, at his father's instigation, in the murders of Wally and Bet Tucker in 1901, and an explanation for the restless and tormented life he has led since, and appears also to have been written as a final confession in the expectation of his own imminent death.

Lucius and his party head for the Watson Place, where there is a showdown with some of the smugglers who have been using it and the place eventually burns down with Rob inside, partly at his own instigation. Returning to the mainland, Lucius learns that his old friend Henry Short, one of the few black men in the area in the early twentieth century, is in hospital and not expected to survive. Their brief deathbed conversation seems to resolve the vexed question of who shot first (it would have been Watson had his damp shotgun not misfired, and then Henry shot him) and answer most of Lucius' questions. His plan of restoring his father's reputation having been scuppered by Rob's letter and its depiction of cold-blooded murder, Lucius abandons his project. 

This is the second book in the Watson trilogy - the third, Bone By Bone, offers the events of the first book from Watson's own perspective in a Rashomon/Alexandria Quartet/Gilead style. The trilogy was later reworked into a single book, Shadow Country, which won the National Book Award in 2008 (Lost Man's River was originally published in 1997). Much of the eventual trimming that was required to whittle the original trilogy down to single-book length apparently came from Lost Man's River, and it's easy to see why - there's a lot of talking here with various extended family members, including reminiscences of who was cousin to whom and the like (much of which prompts keeping a finger in the family tree section at the front of the book just to keep track of who's who) that doesn't have any direct bearing on the murder of EJ Watson and, while interesting in its own right, doesn't really drive the narrative along with any urgency. 

There is a sense, though, in which that's not really what the book (and the trilogy as a whole) is about; instead it's about the place in which the story happens, its remoteness and desolation and the sense of everything being temporary at best and subject to being rearranged or obliterated by one good cathartic hurricane. Although Matthiessen primarily thought of himself as a novelist, he published many books about travel and nature and those concerns evidently bled through into his fiction writing. 

So while it has much to commend it it's probably not as good as the first book, and it's quite slow and therefore probably not for everyone. It's a blunt tool as it ignores outside influences that may have affected my reading opportunities, but the fact that it's taken me two months almost to the day to read it tells its own story. 

the last book I read

Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban.

William G. (not this guy, just to be clear) is a quiet unassuming type of guy; lives alone in a flat in a shared house, works in a bookshop, keeps himself to himself. We learn that he was previously married, or at least in a relationship that lasted long enough to produce two daughters, who we gather he doesn't get to see any more for reasons that are never elaborated on.

Neaera H. (I would go with something like knee-airer pronunciation-wise) is an author of children's books, most notably the ones featuring cute anthropomorphic character Gillian Vole, and is nervously contemplating a move to writing books for an adult audience. 

Both of these two solitary people randomly end up at London Zoo at separate times, and moreover both end up gazing at a tank of sea turtles, contemplating the clarity and precision of their lifecycle in the wild (swim thousands of miles round the world's oceans, return to a specific beach to lay and bury eggs, philosophically accept that most of the hatchlings will get eaten before they ever reach the sea), comparing that with the aimlessness and stagnation of their own lives and considering the crazy idea of stealing the turtles, taking them to the sea and freeing them.

William and Neaera eventually meet and realise that they've been having the same thoughts about the turtles, and gradually hatch a plan, with the help of George Fairbairn, the surprisingly amenable guy at the zoo who takes care of the turtles. And so they build some makeshift turtle crates, hire a van, spirit away the turtles - no small feat as the adults weigh more than an adult human and you can't just walk them out of the zoo on a lead - drive to Polperro and release them into the sea there. 

And so, the turtles liberated and the two protagonists' quest fulfilled, the book ends, right? Well, no, actually - it turns out that while the turtular quest was both exciting and satisfying, and gruelling and frustrating, it hasn't been an instant fix for all the deep-seated problems in the two main characters' lives. That said, maybe some of the turtles' relentless and instinctive sense of purpose has rubbed off after all - Neaera finds herself having a relationship with George the turtle guy, and William has a brief fling (which doesn't last) with his fellow bookshop employee Harriet and then finds himself resolving some domestic disputes with house-mate Sandor with some uncharacteristic physical violence. Bizarrely, this seems to thaw William and Sandor's previously wary relationship and they start to become friends, and just as well, as they soon have to help deal with another in-house domestic situation - their quiet house-mate Miss Neap has hanged herself. 

This is the seventh Russell Hoban book to appear on this list, the others occupying a period of roughly six years between Kleinzeit in August 2010 and Pilgermann in December 2016. Those six books cover a pretty wide range of subject matter but all have in common a sort of ineffable strangeness, and Turtle Diary (one of Hoban's earlier works of adult fiction, published in 1975) is no different, despite the relative prosaicness of the subject matter and lack of supernatural elements. Is it actually about two people rescuing turtles? Well, sort of, but not exclusively: it's also about middle age, coming to terms with who you are and being comfortable with that, even if that means consciously limiting how much interaction with other people you do (with Miss Neap's suicide presumably intended to illustrate the consequences of never quite coming to terms with all that stuff). The turtles, as well as being actual turtles, act as a sort of metaphor for freedom and adventure and purpose. Neaera's career arc going from author of anthropomorphic animal tales for kids to adult fiction is of course a mirror of Hoban's own. 

My favourite Hobans are probably the early-1980s pair of Riddley Walker and Pilgermann, both set outside the contemporary London setting of most of his other novels (Turtle Diary included) in both space and time. But they're all good, very readable, fairly short and recognisably the product of a singular style and vision. The seven Hoban novels that feature here equals the number of books by William Boyd on the list, joint second only to Iain (M) Banks with eleven. 

Turtle Diary was made into a film in 1985 starring Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley (the whole thing seems to be available here). That makes it (as far as I know) the second book on this list whose film adaptation stars Ben Kingsley, the other being House Of Sand And Fog. It's also (again, as far as I know) the second book on this list whose film adaptation was written by Harold Pinter, the other being The French Lieutenant's Woman. The cover art of my Penguin Modern Classics edition is by Eduardo Paolozzi, who also got a mention here. 

the last book I read

A Question Of Upbringing by Anthony Powell.

Ah, schooldays. It doesn't take much for one's mind to be cast back there: the endless Latin verbs, trying to find one's best tails for evening prep, fagging for Blenkinsop major and getting a good thrashing if his crumpets weren't toasted to perfection, trying to grind various future Prime Ministers into a wall in the name of recreation, all the usual stuff.

Hmmm, well actually perhaps not everyone's schooldays were exactly like this, but those of our narrator here (who we eventually discover is called Nick Jenkins) definitely were. Cast back by a wafer-thin framing device (a page and a half or so at the start of chapter one) into a reverie of his schooldays, at an unnamed school which we're clearly meant to infer is Eton, he recalls friendships with his old chums and room-mates Stringham and Templer, various hilarious scrapes involving their po-faced housemaster Le Bas - including the arguably less hilarious prank of making an anonymous phone call which resulted in Le Bas' arrest - and some out-of-school socialising during the holidays including meeting Stringham and Templer's respective families and navigating complex hierarchies of relative wealth and social class, as well as some more primal stuff involving the first stirrings of feelings, you know, Down There. Nick decides, for instance, that he is in love with Templer's sister Jean based on no more then a couple of mumbly teenage conversations.

Nick also encounters another schoolmate, Widmerpool, during a holiday in France. Previously something of a figure of fun and target for derision, Nick starts to see Widmerpool in a new light after he brokers a truce between two of the other residents of the house they are staying in, a Swede and a Norwegian who have been refusing to speak to each other after a disagreement over a game of tennis, a girl, or possibly both.

And so, schooldays over, it is time to put away childish things and proceed to university, seemingly without having to do anything as tiresomely proletarian as pass exams or undergo any form of entrance selection process. Again, the university is coyly unnamed but is clearly Oxford. Nick is re-acquainted with Stringham, and also encounters Sillery, one of the dons, who seems to have a limited interest in his students' academic progress but instead focuses on establishing political connections, easing his various protégés into influential positions in politics and business. These protégés include Stringham, who, with some behind-the scenes string-pulling (no pun intended) from Sillery, lands a plum (if somewhat ill-defined) job with a prominent industrialist. Templer, who has skipped going to university, pops in to visit with a couple of his London friends, and Nick's sense that his school friendships are gradually unravelling is reinforced when Templer drives a tightly-packed car (Templer, his mates, Nick, Stringham and a couple of random girls they've picked up) off the road and into a ditch, thankfully without seriously injuring anyone. 

Nick, recognising that a fresh start is required, heads off into London to meet his Uncle Giles, the slightly murky black sheep of the family. Will Uncle Giles be able to help him redirect his life?

Well, the answer to that specific question is a shrug and a "dunno", because the book ends at this point. That will be no surprise to anyone vaguely-acquainted with 20th-century literature and Powell's work in particular, as A Question Of Upbringing is the first book of the twelve-volume sequence A Dance To The Music Of Time. In other words if you want to find out what happens next, check out book two (which is called A Buyer's Market). I'm not conclusively ruling out ever doing this, but if you view A Question Of Upbringing as a stand-alone novel in its own right you'd have to say that not a lot of note actually happens. And fair enough, it's not that sort of novel, and if you want explosions, freaky sex and zombie Hitler that stuff is all available elsewhere. It's dryly witty, and there are some sly observations about wealth and class here, and just a sense that our narrator is slightly less rich and posh than some of his schoolmates, although these are just inferences since we never get to meet any of his family. For all that, there is also the sense that Nick is somewhat blind to his own privilege, drifting from Eton to Oxford, and probably subsequently into a nice job somewhere, nice and comfortably without having to sweat too much or wonder where his next meal is coming from. Whether he is deliberately written that way or whether these blind spots are just inadvertent reflections of Powell's own blind spots (he too went to Eton and Oxford) I couldn't say, at least without reading another eleven novels to find out. Beyond this it would be hard to say we actually know anything much about Nick at the end of the book, something noted by John Crace in his Digested Reads column. 

A bit like The Alexandria Quartet, the A Dance To The Music Of Time sequence, whose publication dates range from 1951 (this book) to 1975, has faded a bit in critical regard over the years, though it was still well-regarded enough in 1997 for a four-part (i.e. three whole novels crammed into each episode) TV adaptation to be made. While the general theme here of oblivious posh people going about their daily lives, borne safely aloft on a cushion of unexamined privilege, raises my lefty hackles a bit, it is very readable and pretty short at a whisker over 200 pages. I'd always thought of it as a sort of upper-class English condensed (or perhaps summarised) version of Proust, and maybe it is, although I am ill-qualified to comment, since although I own a copy of the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (in an English translation, obviously) I have never read any of it. Maybe this year? Well, maybe. Having now, after just over 19 years of this blog, cracked part one of A Dance To The Music Of Time, will I now plough on and finish all twelve? Check back in 228 years to find out!

the last book I read

Staying On by Paul Scott.

It's the early 1970s, pretty nearly a full quarter of a century after Indian independence and the end of colonial rule. Lots of British people involved in the old system of colonial rule have packed up and gone home, there being no need for them to stick around among a population less inclined to consent to being subjugated and abused. I mean, where's the fun in that? Honestly, if you can't even find a decent punkah wallah to keep you cool while you're sipping a pink gin then you may as well be in Swindon.

Some have stayed, though, and will have a variety of reasons for doing so - maybe they have business interests in India, maybe they've married into Indian society, maybe they just like it there. For some it's more about having been in India for so long that they wouldn't feel comfortable in British society any more, and maybe because the cost of living over there is higher, plus the cost of getting there in the first place, plus perhaps a bit of laziness about uprooting oneself from a reasonably comfortable life and sailing off into the unknown. 

This latter category of people definitely includes Tusker and Lucy Smalley, eking out a just-about-comfortable existence, mainly facilitated by Tusker's military pension, living in the lodge attached to a fairly dilapidated old hotel in the small-ish town of Pankot. The hotel is run by the comically rapacious (money, food, sex, you name it) Mrs. Bhoolabhoy and her somewhat downtrodden husband; Mr. Bhoolabhoy maintains cordial relations with the Smalleys and occasionally enjoys a few drinks with Tusker, but Mrs. Bhoolabhoy regards them generally as an inconvenience and a potential problem should she wish to sell the hotel, something she has considered doing as profits have diminished since the building of a newer, swankier hotel just down the road.

Obviously during the Raj the social structure was nice and clear: the British are in charge and the natives do their bidding or expect a damn good thrashing. But 25 years later it's considerably less clear - some residual deference remains, and some residual expectation of deference remains in people like the Smalleys, both in their early seventies and fairly set in their ways. But for younger Indians in particular there's less of a sense that they should do as they're told by a bunch of elderly foreigners: after all, why should they?

The Smalleys' financial position is in a state of constant precariousness, not helped by Tusker's past unwise business dealings, some gambling problems and ongoing fondness for a drink or two. As befits people born in the early years of the twentieth century it's been Tusker who has held the financial reins with Lucy - objectively the more sensible and responsible of the pair - having precious little to do with it, and in a position of knowing very little about the details, including what her position would be if Tusker were to die, something that's been on her mind since he had a mild heart attack a while back. 

The Smalleys (mainly Lucy) maintain some correspondence with Britain, mainly people they knew from India who've now returned, or in some cases their children, and via this route Lucy learns that a vague acquaintance of an acquaintance, Mr. Turner, is visiting India and wants to pop in to say hello. This prompts a frenzy of excitement about what stuff they can get him to bring from home - with some it'd be Marmite, for Lucy it's a particular brand of blue rinse hair dye - and how they're going to make him welcome when he arrives, resources for lavish banqueting and the like being a bit thin. 

Meanwhile Mrs. Bhoolabhoy has seen the writing on the wall regarding the future of the hotel and has decided to sell up. This means that someone is going to have to write a letter to the Smalleys telling them that their tenure of their little lodge at preferential rates is at an end, and they'll have to find somewhere else to live, and that someone is Mr. Bhoolabhoy. And it turns out that it is the receipt and reading of this letter which is the thing that finally finishes Tusker off, his body being found later that day after suffering a massive heart attack, his hand still clutching the letter.

Paul Scott is of course most famous for the Raj Quartet, which is in turn best known for its 1984 TV adaptation, The Jewel In The Crown. Staying On is a sort of footnote to this series of much chunkier books, and the Smalleys feature as minor characters in the later novels in that series. I didn't know this when I bought my second-hand copy a few years ago and I can tell you that you have no particular need to plough through the quartet to appreciate this, unless you want to, of course, in which case have at it. Staying On, despite being written later, was actually adapted for TV first, in 1980, and the whole thing appears to be available on YouTube. It stars Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, more famous from Brief Encounter, as the Smalleys.

None of the great sweep of history that I imagine (possibly wrongly) features in the Raj Quartet here, just two fairly unexceptional people eking out the last few years of their lives (the last few days, in Tusker's case). No suggestion that Tusker was a particularly good soldier, despite eventually rising to the rank of colonel, nor a particularly effective businessman, nor even a particularly attentive husband, though he clearly does love Lucy in his own gruff and inarticulate way. There's an odd mix of comedy and pathos here with the two sometimes clashing with each other a bit, but you do feel a pang of sympathy for the Smalleys, desperately hanging on to the only life they've ever known while the country reinvents itself under their feet. I do agree with this Guardian review that Mrs. Bhoolabhoy is something of a grotesque caricature, but overall I enjoyed it; the 1977 Booker panel evidently felt the same way. Scott was unable to attend the presentation as he was already ill with the cancer that was to kill him a year later; he was also apparently a chronic alcoholic which probably didn't do much for his general health.

Previous Booker Prize winners on this list are: G. (1972), The Siege Of Krishnapur (1973), The Conservationist (1974), Midnight's Children (1981), Hotel Du Lac (1984), The Remains Of The Day (1989), Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), The God Of Small Things (1997), The Sea (2005), The Gathering (2007), Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up The Bodies (2012). The Siege Of Krishnapur, Midnight's Children and The God Of Small Things also feature in the list of books set primarily in India, a list that I would have expected to also include a few others off this blog, but the only one I can think of is A New Dominion; novels that tangentially feature India would include The Marriage Plot and Around The World In Eighty Days. 

the last book I read

Grass by Sheri S Tepper.

It is the distant future, a galaxy far far away, yadda yadda yadda. And is mankind living in some kind of shiny techno-utopia with its every whim fulfilled? Not a bit of it. I mean, yes, we've done all the stuff that enables science fiction novels to take place in locations other than Swansea, i.e. invent faster-than-light travel and all that jazz, but there's still this outbreak of flesh-rotting plague to deal with that may be the cause of the actual end of humanity if left to spread unchecked. 

The actual end of humanity being an unpalatable prospect to those nominally in charge of humanity and its welfare, a cure is a priority. And so a keen interest is being taken in the planet of Grass, pretty much the only location in the known universe which seems to be free of the plague and the limb-rottage and associated unpleasantness. Grass? Pretty strange name for a planet, if you ask me. Well, I would ask you to note that a) nobody asked you and b) perhaps give some consideration to the name of the planet you're currently sitting on. 

Anyway, a party is rounded up from those still free of the plague on Terra, i.e. Earth, still very much Humanity Central in this particular future, albeit ecologically ravaged. The party basically consists of some high-ranking officials, largely chosen because they are horse-riding types and it is understood from the limited interaction the Grassians have with the outside world that they conduct some form of largely ritualistic activity akin to fox-hunting which the party may be able to join in with to ingratiate themselves into Grassian society. 

And so Rodrigo ("Rigo") and Marjorie Yrarier, their two children and a retinue of flunkeys (plus a whole stableful of horses) find themselves on Grass. They don't exactly get a warm welcome from the fox-hunting fraternity. though: these guys, the "bons", who consider themselves the aristocracy, are unhelpful, snobbish and weirdly twitchy and tight-lipped about anything that goes on outside the boundaries of their country estates ("estancias"), in particular any details of what happens on the hunts. By contrast, the horny-handed proles who inhabit the planet's only major town (and spaceport) are considerably more friendly, helpful and more generally knowledgeable about the planet and in particular its non-human life.

Most of the preconceptions that the Yrariers (and the reader) have about the hunts are blown away when they are (probably reluctantly) invited to witness one - not only are the "hounds" not really hounds but great slavering beasts the size of a small horse, but the "mounts" are also great slavering beasts the size of, erm, a freakin' massive horse, with deadly neck barbs that require the rider to stay out of their way or be impaled. Those humans who participate seem to enter a weird kind of trance where they remember little of what happens during the many hours they're out in the high grass which covers most of the planet, and there seems to be a kind of willed blindness among the bons to the fact that people occasionally arrive back minus limbs, or occasionally don't arrive back at all. Those who don't arrive back at all seem to include a disproportionate number of teenage girls, including, very recently, Dimity bon Damfels, a member of the family hosting the hunt when the Yrariers arrive.

Marjorie Yrarier, a bright and resourceful woman freed by her remoteness from the strict religious society that exists on Terra and stifles opportunities for women, makes enquiries in the town and starts to piece together a picture of Grassian society and wildlife, some of it wilder than she expected. Basically 90% of the planet (the grass-covered bit) is off-limits to humans and anyone venturing more than a small distance into it can expect never to be seen again. The town seems to be safe because it is located on a rocky ridge surrounded by a swampy forest and whatever lethal dangers exist elsewhere can't seem to get through.

Marjorie also discovers that there is a small sect of monks based in another grass-free location on the planet, mainly concerned with investigating the remains of a previous civilisation, the Arbai, who lived on Grass long anough to leave plenty of buildings and artefacts behind but who seem to have mostly died off in an abrupt and unspeakably violent fashion a long time ago.

Marjorie investigates further, being in the unique position of being able to hob-nob (to some extent, anyway) with the bons, talk to the townspeople and have enough resources at her disposal to have representatives of the monk fraternity brought to her. She also goes out riding on her horses, far in excess of the range deemed safe by most sensible people, and observes some of the ritual and lifecycle of the Grassian fauna. In particular she observes the hounds and the "mounts", known as Hippae, and determines that they are different developmental stages of the same organism. The Hippae are also clearly highly intelligent and able to exert some kind of telepathic hold on creatures in their vicinity, not least their human riders.

The time for careful investigation comes to an end, though, as Rigo and teenage daughter Stella participate (after much intensive riding training) in a hunt and, inevitably, Stella fails to return. Marjorie decides that the time for action has arrived and gets a posse together comprising her, various religious types and Sylvan bon Damfels - seemingly the one member of his family concerned by his sister's disappearance - and saddles up for a trip into the grass to find out what's going on. This is highly dangerous, as you might imagine, and the group is soon menaced by a group of Hippae, but manages to escape into the swamp where the Hippae do not generally venture. But why not?

Clues are provided when the party reaches an island in the swamp which houses a complex deserted treetop village, evidently an Arbai outpost, and also a group of "foxen", in their infant form the apparent target of the hunts, but in their adult form great giant cat-like creatures with even more well-developed mind-control capabilities than the Hippae. Marjorie strikes up a relationship with their seeming leader, whom she calls First, and learns more of the planet's history. Very briefly: the foxen are themselves the culmination of the hound-Hippae lifecycle, but the Hippae have evolved, as well as a destructive streak towards strangers, the ability to bypass the foxen stage of their complex lifecycle, and, the foxen being generally peace-loving and well-intentioned creatures, have decided to wipe them out with the largely unwitting help of the bons (i.e. hence the whole performative Hunt rigmarole). Not only that, but it was the Hippae who wiped out the Arbai, and not only that but it's the Hippae who were the source of the plague, using infected bats as a vector and the teenage girls as a delivery mechanism, their minds being seemingly just at the right delicate stage for wiping and re-programming, though the actual process is hand-waved somewhat, and probably just as well as there seems to be some slightly queasy sexual element to it.

There's a lot to process here, but precious little time to do it as it becomes apparent that the Hippae's merciless sweep of the planet is going to be extended to include the town, an extension of hostilities more than likely provoked by the Yrariers' presence and activities, and that a climactic battle is going to ensue. And so it does - the Hippae have managed to construct tunnels under the swamp to facilitate an invasion of the town with the inevitable savagery and killing, but are partly thwarted by a somewhat Dalek-like distaste for stairs (enabling the townspeople not ripped apart by the initial onslaught to take refuge on higher floors), and properly thwarted by eventual involvement from the foxen, once Marjorie has persuaded them that a cerebral distaste for killing must sometimes be overridden by a pragmatic view of the greater good.

While all this is going on the Grassian scientists have come up with an explanation of, and a cure for, the plague - some hand-wavey stuff involving right- and left-handed protein isomers which also accounts for the Grassian fauna's immunity - all they have to do now is avoid being sliced into tiny pieces by the Hippae or thwarted by religious fundamentalists and the universe is saved.

As with The Anubis Gates there's a tremendous amount going on here, and there really isn't room in an already quite long post to include it all. The book itself suffers from the same problem; as this review astutely notes it's got a beginning where all the world-building happens (and which is clearly the best bit) and an end where it all Kicks Off and much excitement happens, but arguably no middle, presumably just in an attempt to avoid it being 800 pages long (it's a pretty beefy 500 already). The observation that the sciencey bit of the plague stuff reads like something Tepper read in New Scientist the week before is spot-on as well, and the last-minute cooking of up some ancient (but miraculously still working) Arbai Stargate-esque teleportation portal as a beefed-up delivery mechanism is all a bit convenient, as if Tepper realised that naked teenage girls sneaking dead bats onto spaceships didn't really work very well on its own. 

None of that particularly matters, though, as this is tremendous stuff, and in any case as with much speculative fiction what it's ostensibly about is only partly what it's actually about: there's a strong feminist slant here with Marjorie clearly being the most intelligent and dynamic individual character, held back by notions like tradition and religious observance on her home planet. Commendably this doesn't mean that Rigo is portrayed as completely useless or an irredeemable bastard; yes, he has mistresses and a bit of a short temper but he is a fine and courageous horseman, offs a couple of Hippae in spendid fashion at the bon Damfels' estancia, and recognises Marjorie's newly-developed authority during the climactic battle. The feminist slant is quite reminiscent of Ursula K Le Guin, though it must be said that the one novel of hers I've read, The Dispossessed, still featured a male protagonist.

There is also much being said about organised religion, xenophobia, race and class struggle and the messy business of what happens when high-minded philosophical principles (like, for instance, thou shalt not kill) meet reality (like, for instance, Hitler), and action is required without, perhaps, the time to analyse all the possible courses of that action to determine with complete certainty which one is best.

There is also a really good usage of a classic narrative trope which I see I have cited here a few times before, usually using what in my mind is the canonical example, William Golding's The Inheritors (Rashomon would be the filmic equivalent I suppose): a second viewpoint of the same scene or sequence of events throwing a completely new light on it. We are offered a description of the hunt from Dimity bon Damfels' perspective early on which certainly hints at Something Not Quite Right going on but is very sketchy about the details (as befits everyone's addled mind-state), and it's only when we get the Yrariers' un-addled perspective that we get a glimpse of the full terrifying reality of what's going on: drugged-up riders unwittingly doing the malevolent bidding of a bunch of freakin' velociraptors. 

The other canonical example of a narrative trope which I would have assumed I'd mentioned here but don't seem to have done (although I've mentioned its parent book a couple of times) is Cowslip's warren from Watership Down: a society which functions OK as long as no-one mentions The Thing which occasionally claims one of its number and which even then we look the other way and Don't Talk About. Speaking of what would generally be considered a children's book, Tepper started off as a writer of children's fiction - other writers on this list to have taken that route include Penelope Lively and Russell Hoban. 

Anyway, it's really good, but, for all that, the news that it's the first of a loosely-connected trilogy doesn't fill me with an immediate desire to go and read the others. I'm sure they're all fine, though. 

the last book I read

The Beginning Of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald.

Frank Reid has a lot on his plate right now. Firstly there's Reid's, the family printing firm founded in Moscow by his father that he now runs, with the associated admin headaches - managing the staff with all their personal foibles, managing the occasional state suspicion of a foreign-run printing operation with its inbuilt potential to print Unsuitable Material, the associated need to occasionally grease the wheels of officialdom with some judicious bribery - but Frank has lived in Moscow most of his life and views this as mundane day-to-day business, although the current febrile political situation in Europe (it's 1913) makes everything a bit more difficult. Of more specific and immediate concern is the letter he's just received from his wife Nellie telling him that she has left him, taking their three children with her. No hard feelings, look after yourself, yours etc., Nellie.

There's no immediate indication where Nellie has headed off to, although everyone's assumption is that she's caught a train heading westwards to head back to Europe and perhaps ultimately her family's home in the south London suburb of Norbury. This theory is proven to be correct in an unexpected way when the three children turn up back at the Moscow railway station, having been put on a train back at Mozhaisk. No sign of Nellie, who apparently had continued in the opposite direction, presumably heading for Berlin.

So Frank is reunited with his kids, Dolly, Ben and little Annushka, which is great but does now pose another problem: who's going to look after them? After a couple of meetings with his eccentric business associate Kuriatin and the wife of the local Anglican chaplain fail to yield anyone who Frank feels is suitable, he is persuaded by his accountant Selwyn Crane to take on Lisa, a young woman of his acquaintance currently unhappily employed at a local department store.

So Frank can return to work at Reid's, but even here is immediately beset by other problems: Selwyn has persuaded him to do a small run of a book of his own poems and is taking a minute interest in the details, the chief print-setter is a man of almost mystical skill, somewhat temperamental and sensitive to upcoming developments in automated print-setting technology which will likely make his job obsolete, and lastly while checking up on the printing premises late at night Frank is confronted by a young student, Volodya, who attempts to shoot him (and misses) and then describes some vague scheme to get Reid's to facilitate the printing of some political leaflets. Frank lets him go and uses some of his skill and influence to persuade the police not to investigate.

Further complication is provided by the arrival of Charlie, Nellie's brother, who Frank had accepted an offer of a visit from on the assumption that he would have some information regarding Nellie, or maybe even have seen her. No such luck, however, and Charlie, an engaging enough doofus, just bumbles around having a nice holiday and entertaining the kids. 

The plot-thickening that happens comes from an unexpected direction and mainly involves Lisa - firstly Volodya reappears and confesses to Frank that the political leaflet thing was a red herring and he took a pot-shot at him because he is in love with Lisa, despite barely knowing her. This is vexing to Frank because he himself has decided that he is in love with Lisa. Finally Selwyn confesses to Frank that he, Selwyn, was in love with Nellie and that they had made tentative plans to run away together, plans which he, Selwyn, then scuppered by having an attack of conscience about betraying Frank. Nellie has apparently been staying at a Tolstoyan commune in England, at Selwyn's suggestion, but has found it not to her taste and left for an unknown destination.

Lisa, as it happens, is currently away at the Reids' ramshackle dacha with the children having a brief holiday, though one which includes a slightly bizarre late-night encounter in the forest between Lisa, Dolly and some mysterious wordless people who seem to emerge from the trees. Whatever that was all about, the eventual outcome is another call to Frank requesting that he collect his children from the railway station, Lisa having seemingly taken the opportunity to flee the country. 

A lot for Frank to take in here, to be fair, and just to cap it off, while the house shutters are being opened for the springtime thaw, Nellie returns.

The first thing to say here is that there's a lot of slyly-observed interpersonal stuff that I've skipped over in the synopsis above, which seems remarkable in a book of only 188 pages. This is the trick that Penelope Fitzgerald regularly pulls, though; you'll recall I said something very similar about The Gate Of Angels which was even shorter. Frank Reid is a level-headed and unflappable sort of chap who provides a contrast with the more eccentric characters who revolve around him, particularly the two main female protagonists, Nellie and Lisa, both of whose motivation are somewhat opaque. Lisa in particular is a bit of a mystery; she exerts a strange hold over Selwyn, Volodya and Frank and seems to be in control of the weird encounter in the forest with Dolly. Is she some sort of revolutionary agitator? Probably, but who knows? And what are we to make of Nellie's return? A change of heart, or a pragmatic realisation that this is her best option after running away (with or without Selwyn) didn't work out? It seems likely that with the Reids' reputation tarnished by the Lisa situation and with both war and revolution in the offing that the Reids' best option is going to be to sell the printing business and move back to England, which is probably what Nellie really wants anyway.

I think this is the fourth Penelope Fitzgerald book I've read, and they really are unlike just about anything else: short, but rich and dense and slightly mysterious. They're all good but this one and The Gate Of Angels are probably the best two. The Russian setting features in a few other books on this list, most obviously Winter Garden by Fitzgerald's rough contemporary (and writer of superficially similar novels) Beryl Bainbridge, but also more tangentially in Pattern Recognition and Love Is Blind and quite possibly a few others. The eve-of-World-War-I setting is also familiar from Waiting For Sunrise and both of the Isabel Colegate books on this list, Statues In A Garden and The Shooting Party. 

The Beginning Of Spring was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1988, just as The Gate Of Angels was two years later; she was nominated four times in total and won with Offshore in 1979. Peter Carey won in 1988 with Oscar and Lucinda, which I have read but, as I've said elsewhere, found a bit of a slog. Utz and Nice Work are the other two I've read from that year. 

the last book I read

Day by A.L. Kennedy.

Alfie Day has had a better war than some; still alive, for one thing, and moreover with all of his limbs and most of his mental faculties intact, a bit of PTSD aside. This is doubly lucky as his job as the tail gunner on a Lancaster bomber would qualify as one of the more thrillingly high-risk jobs, even within the context of being in the RAF during World War II. 

The book's nominal "now" is a handful of years after the end of the war, with Alfie having decided to take up an offer of being an extra in a film set during the war, for which filming is taking place in some unspecified eastern European country. A somewhat quixotic decision, on the face of it, what with it bringing back memories of his wartime experiences both as part of his bomber crew but also as a prisoner of war after his last bombing mission resulted in the deaths of most of his crew and his having to bail out over enemy territory. Maybe the idea was that re-confronting some of this stuff would bring some sort of closure and enable him to come to terms with things; more importantly of course it provides a narrative backdrop to some flashback action wherein we are dropped back into a set of selected scenes from the war.

These sections are mainly concerned with the series of bombing raids Alfie's crew carries out, with the imminence of potential fiery death at all times, and the associated brittle banter and camaraderie. It's not all getting raked by tracer fire, performing evasive manoeuvres and firebombing Dresden, though, my goodness no. There are occasional bouts of leave wherein the crew get to do some rest and relaxation, get to know each other, and do the obligatory drinking and roistering. Alfie also meets a young lady called Joyce while sheltering from an air-raid and a tentative romance develops, tempered by Joyce's admission that she has a husband, albeit one whom she doesn't really like very much and who is away on military duty from which there's no guarantee he'll ever return. 

The present-day setting isn't purely a narrative device to hang some flashbacks off, though; the motley crew of actors and ex-servicemen that constitutes the film's cast holds some interest, in particular Vasyl, a slightly shady character who may be Ukrainian or may equally possibly be Latvian. Alfie's initial assumption that he was a heroic resistance fighter in one or other of those countries is somewhat undercut by Vasyl's later admission that he was basically a Big Old Nazi and responsible for some eye-watering atrocities during the war that he will now face no consequences for, or not via the standard legal route anyway. Alfie and his mates may have an eye to some less formal vigilante-style justice once filming duties are out of the way, though.

Alfie is briefly tempted by making the most of the opportunities that exist for an exciting life of crime in the lax post-war regime in mainland Europe, but eventually returns to England, perhaps partly persuaded by the idea of rekindling his relationship with Joyce. We are invited to infer that things have simmered down to the occasional exchange of letters after Joyce's husband rather inconveniently returned alive and well from the war, but the latest letters suggest that she may be open to some sort of, hem hem, arrangement.

World War II is a prime subject for fiction, as any novel set here comes pre-loaded with interest, danger, the great sweep of history, and all that stuff, and there are quite a few books on this list that use it as a backdrop, most recently Light Perpetual, Fragrant Harbour and Charlotte Gray (the review of The Reader has a fuller list). Just to illustrate the wide palette of choices available to you as an author, the first two there treat the war as just a brief interlude in the wider timeline of the story, while Charlotte Gray embeds pretty much the entire story in the context of the war. There are also varying degrees of success, and you need to be careful not to draw accusations of just throwing some wartime stuff in there to weigh the story down with a bit of unearned gravitas, something you'll recall I thought Light Perpetual was guilty of.

I don't think that criticism can be made of Day, but it seemed to be, although well-written and involving, slightly unsatisfactory for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on. The framing device of the film shoot is odd, and Alfie's reasons for being there are never explained - as a mildly-traumatised ex-serviceman it seems like the last thing you'd want to do and it invites the suspicion that he did it just because it provided a convenient narrative scaffolding to hang the other stuff off. The most interesting thing that Alfie actually does (or we are strongly invited to infer that he does, anyway) during the various flashbacks, which is to murder his abusive father by pushing him in a canal, is mentioned briefly and then never referred to again. Ursula K Le Guin offers some criticisms here, most of which I find myself in agreement with.

Maybe the answer is to be found by looking at Kennedy's other work - the two novels featured here, So I am Glad and Looking For The Possible Dance, are quirky character-driven things with a fairly narrow domestic setting. Some of the charm of that seems to have been lost here in the attempt to embed Alfie's story within the wider sweep of history, an attempt perhaps made because that's the sort of thing that wins literary awards, and sure enough Day won the Costa Novel Award (formerly the Whitbread Award and defunct since 2022) in 2007. I think Days Without End is the most recent other Costa winner on this list; that review also contains a list of other winners featured on this blog.

the last book I read

The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.

Brendan Doyle is just quietly minding his own business being a professor of English literature when a man comes to him with a modest proposal; join me on an assignment - a well-paid assignment, moreover - wherein your interest and expertise in the works of 19th-century poets will be of immense practical value. 

Well, that all sounds great, but what could the nature of this assignment possibly be that would require the services of an expert in early-19th-century English poetry? Ah, well, I'm glad you asked: I, elderly and eccentric millionaire J. Cochran Darrow, have somehow discovered a series of portals that permit travel between different locations in time and space. The nature of this wavily-defined thing is such that you don't have total control over the when and where, and it just happens that I've found a portal that will shortly (literally in a few hours from now) be accessible from our current location in 1983 Los Angeles and which links for a period of time with 1810 London and will permit a small group of customers, paying lavishly for the privilege, to travel there/then, hear an in-person lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with extra context and biographical detail supplied by you, and then return home again. Pretty cool, huh?

A bit of exposition is offered by Darrow in the course of explaining the assignment to Doyle, and the reader also gets the benefit of a brief prologue set in 1802 wherein a couple of mysterious wielders of sorcery attempt to summon up the ancient Egyptian God Anubis, as you do, and succeed only in inflicting harm upon themselves and opening up a series of rents, "gates" if you will, in space-time radiating out in both directions from 1802 and allowing those possessed of the relevant arcane knowledge to travel between them.

So anyway, Darrow, Doyle, and various millionaire enthusiasts get dolled up in suitable period garb and travel back to 1810 to hear Coleridge speak; all goes pretty smoothly for everyone except Doyle, who is coshed senseless and abducted by mysterious persons who turn out to be, among others, Doctor Romany, one of the magicians associated with the 1802 shenanigans who is keen to understand and contain what's been unleashed. Doyle, having missed the window of opportunity to return to 1983, escapes and flees back into London.

But how to survive in early-19th-century London? Doyle finds his way into a loose guild of beggars and street thieves and is taken under the wing of the slightly Artful Dodger-esque Jacky. Meanwhile he is hatching a plan to make contact with another poet of the time, William Ashbless, whose more obscure oeuvre he has made a special study of, and whose documented movements he is familiar with to the extent of knowing that he'll be in a particular tavern in a day or two's time. 

Lots of plot strands here that we'll just summarise to save time: the mysterious Dog-Face Joe, seemingly able to swap bodies with unsuspecting individuals (who inherit the ruined shell of whatever body he was previously in, usually for a short period ended by its death) and the odd outbreak of seemingly insane short-lived hairy individuals attacking people around London all turn out to be aspects of the same thing, the continued existence of the other 1802 magician, Amenophis Fikee, after the events of that night evicted him from his original body. The first magician, Doctor Romany (the one who briefly abducted Doyle in 1810), is running a pickpocketing and murdering guild of his own, headquartered in some subterranean caverns connected to the sewer system and the Thames, and continuing his attempt to conjure up various Egyptian gods. Finally Darrow, Doyle's mysterious benefactor from 1983, has returned to 1810 and is using his knowledge of stock market performance in the intervening 173 years to make a fortune and negotiating with Dog-Face Joe aka Fikee to make use of his body-swapping knowledge to achieve eternal youth.

Keeping up? Excellent. So Doyle gets to experience first-hand knowledge of some of this when he is forcibly body-swapped in the tavern he'd gone to to meet Ashbless (who didn't show) and wakes up in a different body which has just taken a large dose of strychnine. Luckily Doyle has enough knowledge to be able to vomit up the poison and after a day or two is as right as rain and, moreover, inhabiting a body that's considerably younger and physically more imposing than his old one. Doyle soon realises that in some weird paradoxical time-travel accidentally-becoming-your-own-grandfather way he is actually William Ashbless. He's not sure what the magicians are up to but resolves to thwart them, with some help from some locals who are in the know. This involves a bewildering series of trips including a time-hop to 1684 and a brief trip by sea to Cairo to meet (and subsequently kill) the chief magician. Upon returning to London, Doyle/Ashbless, Jacky and, slightly bizarrely, a laudanum-crazed Samuel Taylor Coleridge are abducted into the subterranean caverns and, after some odd encounters with some of the mysterious creatures who also live down there (remnants of some botched magical experiments) and a couple of telling interventions from the Egyptian gods who the magicians have been bothering (notably the snake-god Apep), Jacky and Doyle/Ashbless are vomited out into the Thames while the magicians and their various minions are consumed by Apep and Ra and various other entities not best pleased at being bothered from their centuries-long slumber.

Doyle is now in the odd philosophical position of being free to live out the rest of his life as Ashbless while knowing, from his 20th-century studies, most of the biographical details up to and including the date and manner of his death (thankfully a few decades off yet). He also knows the name of his future wife and WAIT A MINUTE Jacky reveals to him that she's been a woman disguised as a man all along and her real name is, well, I expect you can join the dots here. Ashbless and the future Mrs. Ashbless link arms and head off to enjoy their future together, with only the small inconvenience of Ashbless already knowing pretty much all of it.

That was quite a long synopsis and you can see I had to skate over some of it - and omit some of it altogether, including the rationale for Jacky actually being an upper-class young woman disguised as a street urchin - lest this become the longest blog post ever. The TL;DR version would be: there's a lot going on here, possibly a bit too much to allow every plot contrivance to be tied up satisfactorily at the end. The nature of how the gates work is hand-waved away and while they're obviously important to the plot (important enough to give the book its title, after all) they're arguably just a contrivance to insert Doyle in 1810 where the rest of the action takes place. 

The important thing is not to worry about any of that too much and just be swept along by the action, and as long as you do that then this is generally a hoot. The committee that awards the annual Philip K Dick Award evidently thought so too, as The Anubis Gates was the winner in 1984. Powers won it again in 1986; his two wins sandwich the only other recipient I've read, William Gibson's Neuromancer. Powers is also known for his 1987 novel On Stranger Tides which was loosely adapted into the fourth Pirates Of The Caribbean film. 

Many echoes of other fictional works here, as you can imagine - here's a few:

• there is an odd parallel with the only other novel in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series to appear on this list, Time And Again, in that both start with our protagonist being approached by someone he doesn't know and offered a large sum of money to make use of some ill-defined time-travel device to travel to the 19th century and carry out an assignment.
• a couple of weird parallels with the work of Douglas Adams: firstly the use of Coleridge as a plot device, with the suggestion that some of his experiences may have bled through (facilitated by his heroic opium intake) into his later poetry, is similar to what happens in The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul, the second Dirk Gently novel [postscript: it was actually the first one, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. In my defence it's a long time since I read either of them]. Secondly both The Anubis Gates and the later novels in the Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy series feature a plot device of the main character having foreknowledge relating to his own death. In Ashbless' case it's the date and circumstances, in Arthur Dent's case it's knowing that he can't die yet because he hasn't visited the nightclub on Stavromula Beta where he carries out one of his multiple accidental murders of the creature Agrajag.
• the idea of a ka as a sort of disembodied vital essence is familiar from the works of Dennis Wheatley, in particular his 1956 novel The Ka Of Gifford Hillary (which I have never read). In the particular context of The Anubis Gates its meaning is extended to a sort of animated copy of a person conjured from the usual blood/hair combo and therefore a bit more like a golem. It was also used (with some further twisting of its original meaning) by Stephen King in the Dark Tower series.
• the body-swapping thing, in particular - as I put it elsewhere - the "unceremonious yeeting" of the body's previous occupant, is a device used in Ancillary Justice and more briefly in Transition.

Tim Powers provides the latest in a shortish series of different authors on this list who share a surname. Here are the ones I've spotted on a brief trawl of the archives, in no particular order:

• Tim Powers and Richard Powers
• Iain (M) Banks and Russell Banks
• Jim Harrison and M John Harrison
• Graham Swift and Jonathan Swift
• Ali Smith, Alexander McCall Smith and Michael Marshall Smith - depending of course how your surname-classification rules work
• F Scott Fitzgerald and Penelope Fitzgerald - as above